Greetings all,

I'm new here on the forums. I've been working on an RPG for about a decade now, and scrapped the rules and the world setting so many times I don't know if its even the same idea any more. Anyway, I've gotten a lot more serious about actually designing the game and the world setting  and actually publishing it lately, and wanted to know: Should I post my answers to the Power 19 as a first measure?

I've answered the questions and have a good idea in my head about how the game will look, but I don't have anything resembling a draft yet. Should I have a draft before posting the questions, or is help at this stage normal? Anyway, nice to meet all of you and thanks for whatever advice you give me. Happy gaming!

--Norm

Hey, Ayyavazi (or do you prefer Norm?), welcome to The Forge.  I'm a newcomer myself.

I'd say go ahead and shoot.  It can't do any harm, and people here might be able to point out things you've overlooked, so it could give you a chance to polish things up a bit before you start writing a draft.  I started designing an RPG only a few weeks ago, but came on here a couple days ago and discovered the Big Three and Power 19, and used those to help myself get an idea of what my RPG was about.  In other words, I found using those questions and getting feedback from others really helped bring into focus what I was trying to do.  Now, I imagine you know all that if you've been working on your project for a decade, but feedback is always helpful, so why not?

Thanks!

I prefer Norm. In retrospect, I should have made it a part of my username. Anyhow, here's my answers to the Big 19. And they helped me too. What was easily a fantasy heartbreaker in progress became something much different (at least to my new and naive eyes).  Here we go! I noted a couple of questions I think I need help with, but given my new-ness, I would appreciate and and all help. If you guys need me to get more specific, just let me know, I'm more than open to doing so. If I should start a new thread for this, would someone please let me know?

1. What is your game about?
This game is about heroes and/or villains striving to survive in or preserve a world that is in the process of breaking apart. These heroes are suffering the same problem the world faces: they are breaking down. Physically, spiritually, mentally, they are all falling apart. Perfection is a far-off dream, for Perfect Things do not break down, they are forever themselves, complete. Whether the protagonists are searching for this perfection personally, or to stabilize the world and thus end all decay, is up to them. The decay isn’t rapid, but it is noticeable. And unfortunately for the player characters, its faster for them than most people. Gaining power will ensure that they have longer to live. But how much longer? No one knows. One kingdom may fall apart in a matter of weeks, another may last for decades. And what happens to the inhabitants?

2. What do the characters do?
The characters will travel throughout the world pursuing their own personal agenda. They will deal with the decay of themselves and everything around them in their own unique way. They will try to gain power, inevitably, since without something to lose, they will waste away to nothing. Better to gain strength and lose it than to die. They will search for ways to gain power, and maybe, finding they like the taste of it, preserve it. They will seek perfection, either for themselves or others, maybe even the whole world.

3. What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
The players will control their characters directly, as well as any minor NPCs from other character’s stories, and design history for their characters and the world. They are expected to drive the plot. Though the game does have a gamemaster, his role is more as arbiter. He has a hand in crafting the statistics behind the challenges the players face, but never without input from the players themselves. So, if the players think it would be a good idea for the main villain to be some weird humanoid insect mutation bent on the destruction of one race, then that’s what he is. If the players think he should have a poisonous bite, he will. Quite simply, the players drive the story. The GM is also there to make sure that the story is in fact moving forward. This is not HIS story, its EVERYONE’s story. He makes sure the players remain focused and keep driving it forward. Think of him as the conductor for the band.

Players will engage in a healthy amount of conflict. In fact, they will use conflict mechanics in almost every scene. They will use conflict mechanics in discussions, physical fights, tests of will, and combinations of those three. They will use meta-game mechanics to create the world and control scene description, and in-game mechanics to control their characters directly.

4. How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
For the purposes of this game, the setting is extremely important. The details of the world provided with the rules are not as important as what the world is going through. Any fantasy world will do, as long the players and game master make an active effort to change it appropriately. It is these changes that really define the setting. Any world that is falling apart will look different than a world that is not. If Middle Earth had been in the process of destruction for twenty years before Frodo began his quest, it would have been significantly different. I suppose it could be argued the world was in a state of decay, but it wasn’t literally falling apart. You wouldn’t wake up and find that your half of the continent was suddenly 50miles from the other half. This controlled chaos within the world, and the way the players deal with, reinforce the key concept behind the game: nothing is stable, everything is falling apart.

5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Characters start off about halfway to perfection. That’s because no character is just a commoner recognizing their problem and starting life as an adventurer. They already realized it, probably years ago. They have already begun questing for power, for whatever reason they make up to justify their actions. They have stories, and they are not novices. When your character is created, you know you are powerful. You also know that all the power you have is slipping away from you, slowly but surely. As a character gets closer to perfection, their advancement slows, but the rate at which they decay does not. Starting off powerful seems great at first, until the player realizes that his character simply WILL NOT stay that way.

6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
My game punishes meta-game thinking. That is, if a player uses his knowledge of the game world to his character’s advantage, he is meta-gaming. This is meant to make sure tension remains pertinent to game play, and to ensure the suspension of disbelief is maintained.

As for rewards, the game rewards great scene description, it rewards role-playing, it rewards effort, whether successful or not, and it rewards creative thinking, all backed up by mechanics. It rewards hack’n’slash (so long as the players want to play that way), intrigue, and anything in the middle. It rewards exploration of the game world, exploration of the characters themselves, and the creation of that game world.

7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Meta-Gaming is punished by taking away the key meta-gaming resource: Fate Points. These are used to control scenes and benefit characters at a player’s discretion, from OUTSIDE the game world. Players have a stash of these to use, and if a GM suspects a player of meta-gaming, calls a vote. Then the entire group decides on an adequate number of Fate Points to dock, if any, and gives the player a chance to defend his choices. The group could even vote that the GM loses Fate Points.

Encouragement of conflict is accomplished in a number of ways. Characters earn Essence from conflict, which is used to increase their primary Essence Attributes. This helps stave off decay and death, and so is indeed a strong incentive to engage in conflict. But that isn’t just fighting. Social discussions are conflict, spiritual confrontations are conflict, duels of will are conflict.

Good role-playing is rewarded through the distribution of Fate Points to players. Good scene descriptions, good actions, anything that increases the fun for everyone involved.

Drama is encouraged and rewarded. That is to say, purposely having a character fail in order to enhance the story is rewarded with Fate Points, which can then turn things around later. All Fate Point awards are ultimately decided by group vote. This in itself encourages players to be civil to each other and get along and move toward a more fun experience. If a player insists on hogging the spotlight and its not fun for the group, he will start to run perilously low on Fate Points, and his character’s death will loom ever closer as he fails to be able to control scenes.

The game rewards tactical thinking in terms of ability choice by having advantages and disadvantages to every form of attack. Hopefully, I will be able to avoid people choosing “the best ability from statistics” by closely tying numbers to narration.

Finally, the game doesn’t necessarily reward balanced character design as enforce it. The rules are designed in such a way as to prevent a character from becoming over-specialized.

I may need some help here on encouraging cooperation between the players, in order to reduce overhead in terms of time-management.

**8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
The framing of scenes and situations is largely the purview of the players and the DM. Basically, whoever has a cool idea gets to use it. If there is a conflict about which idea should be used (and they are mutually exclusive in such a way as to prevent both from being done in some sort of succession) then the players can bid using Fate Points to get their particular story. Having designed the overarching story at the beginning, this step should be easy. In fact, it is possible that I might not need a GM at all.

Narration is something to be fought for when it comes to conflicts, and everyone gets a chance thanks to the critical hit mechanics (these aren’t 1:20 occurrences, believe me).

**9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
Ideally, the players have created characters they care about and have a vested interest in. Hopefully they love the story they have designed and are making equally so. The game commands the player’s attention by hopefully giving them a story they want to complete about characters they care about. I obviously need some help here. Holding the player’s attention is mostly done through the Conflict Mechanics. Since almost everything the players do other than free-style roleplay (and even then sometimes!) involves conflict of some sort, the conflict and its rewards will drive the game.

10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
My game uses a hybrid approach to its mechanics resolution. For conflicts, damage is rolled every turn, and narration is determined from damage based on advantage. This narration drives the conflict further toward conclusion and the eventual reward. Statistic tests (which are very rare) are percentile rolls against your statistics, with rolls lower than your stat conferring success. The statistics themselves are spend-able resources that can influence these rolls, and the skill rolls, which we are getting to.

Skill resolution is a ranked affair influenced by the key statistic of the skill. A pool of d6s is used, or any even sided die really. If you roll high (that is 4+ for a d6, 5+ for a d8, and so on) you earn one success. Each task that requires a test has a set number of necessary successes, and excess successes are extra degrees of success that grant the right to narration and/or the increasingly beneficial outcome of the action.

Fate Points are used for various controls out-of-game, with the majority of them being scene control, in the sense of who gets to narrate and what facts can be introduced into a scene. This is mostly handled through a bidding process.

**11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Many will agree that when a government begins to break down, independence movements becoming increasingly popular. Likewise, when a person starts to lose everything, they become more desperate and will take more drastic measures to preserve themselves or their way of life. The games focus on constant conflict reinforces that the characters are desperate. They literally have to fight something to stay alive. None of them will live long if they retire to a quiet life on the farm. The only way to get essence is to take it, or the even more difficult, be granted it from some other person or force.

The reinforcement from conflict does not quite end there. After a conflict, players are normally awarded some amount of Essence, which ensures their survival for just a little longer. It gives them time, and time is what they need to accomplish their goals.

I could use some help on tying the player-conflict mechanics regarding scene control into the game’s concept. But it may be that no tie in is necessary.

12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Characters do indeed advance in many of the common ways that other Fantasy RPGs use. They get stronger, better at doing what they do. But that advancement is necessary in my game. Without it, the characters will atrophy and eventually die. An ever present need to buy just enough time by getting stronger pushes the players to advance not just in stats, but in character as well. As the quest for power gets harder and harder, and the characters are saddled with more and more disabilities, whether dementia or physical or social handicaps, their morality may begin to break down. How much are they willing to do to stay alive?

Characters advance by gaining essence Points, which they can then spend on their Essence attributes. Essence is awarded based on a scene’s outcome. “success” in the sense that the characters accomplish some goal is no guarantee that essence is gained. Characters also possess parallel Experience Attributes, and experience is earned based on success and failure. Skills are advanced through the award of Skill Experience. The conflict abilities likewise have their own separate experience gauges, meaning that each of those four key aspects is governed separately. The first things that suffer decay are the essence attributes, which characters need to stay alive. The other statistics do not decrease over time, unless the players want them to. This allows the characters to build a solid base to work from so that their characters are never crippled in a mechanical way that prevents them from gaining essence and staying alive.

13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The character advancement reinforces the struggle to stay alive constantly. The players are losing essence. They need essence to survive. As they get stronger in the essence sense, it becomes harder to gain essence and keep it. They have to get stronger in other ways in order to make up for their failing essence, and ensure they can keep getting more and more essence. Life is a fight to stay alive, and advancement constantly shows that in its nature of uphill struggle.

14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
I want players to learn morality in its most basic forms. The game strives to show life as a struggle, as something difficult, and to show that shortcuts exist, though they require questionable decisions that are increasingly evil, or at least selfish. I want players to come out of the game saying a few things:
• That was a great session/story. I love how so-and-so accomplished such-and-such. Wasn’t it awesome?! Wasn’t it epic?!
• Those were some hard decisions, huh guys? I mean…wouldn’t it be easier if we just slaughtered villagers wholesale and stole their life force like mister Villain? Yes, but then we’d be just like him. What makes that so bad?
• That point of essence was the hardest I ever earned. But was it ever worth it!

15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
The conflict mechanics and all of the abilities associated with them receive the majority of consideration, as well as the decay mechanics inherent in the game. The Conflict mechanics and abilities receive such a large amount of attention for two reasons. First, conflict drives the game forward and keeps player interest. Two, conflict, and in particular, the rewards for conflict tie into the game’s main focus: staving off death through decay by the obtaining of power.

The decay mechanic receives so much attention because without it, the characters lose their key reason for gaining power in the first place, and unfocused characters make for uninterested players.  Also, if the rules for decay aren’t explicit, it might generate unnecessary arguing that would eat up time better spent on an in-game conflict.

16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
The World Setting. Even though the world itself is not as important as the mechanics to the feel of the game, it is my pet project. I’ve been working on the world setting for years now, almost a full decade. I’ve been writing and rewriting it, and only now as I have started to design the framework that makes the world setting more than just another fantasy world, do I realize how rich it is, and how pivotal it has always been to my idea of a fun game.

17. Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
Hopefully, the game takes players into themselves a bit more. Hopefully it makes them confront their principles and morals in a new and interesting way, and honestly ask the questions many people don’t think about: Is it really better to be good than bad, if bad is so much more practical? And hopefully, due to its resemblance to other Fantasy RPGs it will get players to try something a bit different than the old hack’n’slash. It will hopefully open them up to the idea that players can drive a story just as much, if not more so than the DM. And hopefully it will raise awareness in game design of the rich breadth of options available to a game that will give both players and their characters statistics to use in control of the game.

18. What are your publishing goals for your game?
Hopefully, I’ll be able to publish online as a PDF that can be purchased for a modest sum, somewhere between $5 and $20. Hopefully there will be enough sales generated to sell paper copies, as many as I can (though I’m aiming for 100 copies sold initially). My idea is that many gaming groups will only have one or two copies of a game like this between their four or five players. So, if I sold a hundred copies, that means at least fifty groups are playing my game. If some players are involved in other groups but don’t own the book, hopefully they will buy it and bring it to their other groups. With any luck, I’ll sell a 1000 copies nationwide over time. I think I’ll consider my game a success when its talked about as one of the good ones on the various RPG forums, and when I find and download an illegal copy of it with at most only an hour or so of looking.

19. Who is your target audience?
I’m aiming this game at people who enjoy fantasy role-playing games and/or people who like a nice blend of narration and crunchy mechanics in their games. I’m also hoping to get the fringe group of people that will pick up anything that has moral implications within its text. Basically, anyone who enjoys making and experiencing a good fantasy story with strong hints of moral and physical struggle.

An interesting idea, I like it.  In some ways, it reminds me of my own project, which also focuses on moral issues, though in a different way (for example, is it "better" to commit murder or to stand by and let a village be destroyed?).  Also, the idea that characters get weaker as they progress (even if they initially get stronger), though not a new idea, still defies the norm, setting your game apart from a lot of others.

These are some hard questions, that's for sure, but hopefully by poking your answers on some of them you'll be pushed to come up with better answers, though for the most part they seem pretty good, and I don't think I could have done better myself.  For example, #1 I think I understand what you're saying, but the meaning is lost in the paragraph.  It's a good paragraph that tells you a lot about what you expect to do when designing you game, but it lacks the focus that comes with a one-liner answer to the question.  I'd say your game is about "Survival vs. Morality".  This seems to be the core of what you're getting at, and though, like any kind of one-liner answer, seems a little too generalized, based on the paragraph you wrote it seems you have a good idea on how you what to implement that idea.  That being the case, I'm sure it would help to keep that core idea of Survival vs. Morality in mind when you design setting and situation and mechanics.

This doesn't really address a question so much as the mechanics.  You mention Fate Points, but I think the only use you explicitly mention for them is to bid against another player in order to get control of a scene.  That being the case, I can easily see a player's Fate Points being depleted after one such bidding war, especially if the scene is a very important one.  I think it would be a good idea to give Fate Points some other use (you say that can control scenes AND benefit characters, but you don't elaborate on that latter part), so that players will consider the cost of bonuses or whatever Fate Points provide against the importance of the scene they want to control.  For example, in the Warhammer RPG, each character has so many "Fate Points" that can be spent in order to keep from dying.  A character that loses his head can instead be knocked unconscious and live to fight another day by spending a Fate Point.  That makes them incredibly valuable, more so because they are nigh impossible to get more of.  A use like this in your game would make players think hard before bidding a precious Fate Point on scene control.

Your resolution system sounds like it could also be a little complicated and arbitrary.  You seem to use three different methods depending on the type of resolution it is (e.g. conflict, attribute, skill), and having numbers depend on narration seems as though it could cause problems.  It's much easier to argue with the GM than it is with the dice.  But I don't know any more than one you've said about your resolution system, so it may be that you've thought this all out and taken steps to deal with it.  I like the idea of spending attributes to gain an advantage, it fits perfectly with your design.  Do your attributes decay as well?  So you could essentially "shorten" your life in order to gain a temporary advantage in an important conflict.

I can't think up any other criticisms, so I'll wait for someone else to show up and put in their two cents.  On the whole, it seems like you got a pretty good grasp of what you want to do, but then I'm relatively new to RPG design, so I couldn't say for sure.

Thanks again for your advice.

As for mechanics on Fate Points, they do have a number of uses. One of their most important is cancelling the effect of a critical hit. When a critical hit is scored, the person who scored it can narrate the death (or incapacitation) of the participant that was critically hit. A fate point cancels this automatic death aspect, and critical hits are scored often due to the damage system I have in mind. They are gained by group vote for good description and also whenever a player fells an enemy of reasonable challenge.

The problem I have is that I am constantly revising my ideas for this system. It hasn't perfectly gelled yet, so since I last posted, my answers would be (and are) considerably different. You see, the answers above were partially based on a system that is more Simulationist/Gamist (I only recently learned these distinctions, though I have understood the concept for at least a couple of years.). Also, the game really was still essentially a standard Fantasy Heartbreaker, albeit based on D&D 3.5 and 4.0. Since I last posted, I have changed my design and marketing philosophy considerably.

First, I am going to separate the rules from the world setting for purposes of distribution, but not for design. So, the world setting itself will be free to download. Then, there will be a number of rule sets all designed for the same world setting. The rules will be sold individually. In this way, I have about 10 different systems I can make all off of the same setting, allowing me to reach a larger target audience without sacrificing all the hard work I've done for nearly a decade.

In the early stages, I am designing a crunchy rules-lite game designed for narrativists. Whenever I am struck by the urge I will also work on the Heartbreaker rules, which will be simulationist/gamist. Later I may try to make a Simulationist game and a gamist game, but I'm not sure. I'll also likely make a d20 variant, a Fudge variant, a Pool Variant, and any other open source game system I can find. I love my world setting, and because of that I want it to be usable by the largest amount of people possible.

As for the differing resolution mechanics based on what is being done, I do agree that it is a little confusing and cumbersome. I hadn't found a way to really work that yet, but felt that it would be easier to design different resolution systems than it would be to design one universal system given the stats, skills, their interactions, and the numbers that were going to be coming into play. I know that answer is vague, but I guess the best way to say it is, without way too much complex math, a single resolution system would not work on my game AS IT IS. if I changed it, I could probably manage it.

Thanks again for your feedback.
--Norm

Hey everyone,

Thanks again for your input Egon (is that an alright nickname? If it isn't I'll use your full name).

Anyhow, I'm not using this thread for my power 19. Having explained my premise for distribution above, I have realized I need to develop answers to the questions for each variation I will create, in the order I will create them. I also need to ensure I am devoting my time to at most 2 variations at a time, namely the ones I am most interested in. At the moment that will be a design using the morality vs. survival motif you so aptly named, and a traditional heartbreaker design with my own insights. That second one might end up freely distributed since my creation of it is more to "get it out of my system" than to create something I think I will make any reasonable sum on.

Also, I am unable to post again until possibly monday, which means I wouldn't be able to use much of what anyone says until then. I would still love feedback, but between now and then I expect to have a better set of power 19 questions answered for the two main games I plan to make. I will of course want input on both.

Thanks again everyone. I'll be around here for as long as I'm designing RPGs. Hopefully that will be the rest of my life. This seems an invaluable resource. (this being the site).

--Norm