Hi, new here; well, okay, I registered around a year ago and been lurking on and off, but this is my first post. Anyway, let's cut to the chase, ya?

I hate the crap out of pawn stance. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the idea of a player using the character as nothing more than an avatar. It's so very MMO-like, and really, in my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of how things need to be done in an RPG.

I'm not a fan of author stance in general, though, either.

At the same time, though, completely dividing the player from the character can create too much of a disconnect. If the determinants of a character's actions are purely mechanical, then the player can - theoretically - simply make a bunch of rolls in said system and send it to the GM, and never even sit at the table. The character's actions play out regardless of the player's wishes, and so it becomes a lot less like an RPG and more like a movie.

The ideal, I think, would be a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever.

I've had this discussion with some of my co-developers (yes, there is a system being built behind this question, so it's not just a pointless inquiry), and the consensus has been largely against any kind of rules support for a character's beliefs, for whatever reasons... I don't recall them, perfectly. Anyway, the system we concluded our discussion with looks like this...

Basic Idea
A character's beliefs are defined in pairs of opposing ideas. Think Pendragon, sort of, though I'll admit I had some issues wrapping my head around that system. So, for instance, responsibility and freedom are opposed "virtues." If that opposed pair doesn't quite make sense to you, don't worry, there are plenty of concerns of that nature to go around; right now we're working with a rather ill-defined virtue set, some of which don't make much sense.

If you've ever played the Magic CCG, this next part will sound familiar: virtues are divided into five groups, which - for right now - are based on colors. There are eight virtues in each color, four of which oppose a different color (so white, for example, has four virtues that oppose red, and four that oppose black). This is important because a character's beliefs are measured in two ways - once for a general feeling regarding an "ethos," which is the color as a whole, and again for each specific virtue. The sum of a character's strength of belief in a virtue is the ethos value + virtue value. It's possible for this result to be 0 (which is where the scale bottoms out), though I'm not yet sure what that means.

There are then three ways to determine how a character acts, when a virtue set comes into play (exactly what constitutes requiring determining what the character does is another area of contention - any advice there would be rather awesome). As it stands, all three of these methods are valid ways of doing things, and - for the moment - it is presumed that all three co-exist in the system.

(1) Each virtue has a static value assigned to it. Act according to the one that has a higher value.

(2) Each virtue also has some random number generators assigned to it. Roll them; whichever one ends up with a higher value wins. Virtue values can increase in this method (but not in method 1).

(3) Act in accordance to the virtue with a lower static value. That virtue's value goes up drastically more than in the case of rolling - we're trying to represent the character's beliefs changing drastically, here, because the player is simply choosing to act against the character's beliefs. It's like an anarchist suddenly waking up one day and wanting to be a cop, with no rhyme or reason.

The idea of ramifications of choice 3 has been thrown around, and I've met with great resistance on that topic, but making option 3 have negative ramifications elsewhere in the system seems the only way, to me, of at least hobbling the viability of author/pawn stance. The problem becomes that I have no idea how to implement such ramifications, nor what they would be; if it seems like that's the best course of action here, then I can go into more detail regarding the system as it stands, and hopefully a solution can be found.

The more this system pushes towards actor stance, the better, really. I don't know if this does that; I think it might be going towards it, but I'm not sure how much it encourages it.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Questions? I realize that I may need to provide more detail to allow for more reasonable discourse, so feel free to ask.

Hey there,

The way I see it, those three ways of doing things are fairly valid. They encourage the player to play the character as they have made him, and then allow for growth in the right directions if the player changes their mind. I would suggest only that option one have a minimal gain to it. To me this is justified for the following reason:

If players never wanted to play differently than what they have created (which seems to be what you are going for) their virtues will never increase. Compared to the other options, that makes option 1 sub-par. Players are actually encouraged to choose the other two because no gains can be made from option 1. Now, one way to handle this is to decrease ignored virtues instead of increasing the used ones. So, if a player rolls to determine what they do, and it goes against their current virtues, then ignored virtues go down and used virtues go up. If they blatantly ignore a virtue, the change is similar, but more drastic. In this way, the only way to make an actual gain would be option 1, which is playing the character properly.

So I think your best bet is to make the value go up and down with options 2 and 3, and rise only with option 1. This increases player incentive to play the characters the way they design them, but still allows for the character to grow and change over time.

Hope that helps,
--Norm

Hey Gnome,

I understand that you don't like some terminological aspects of play, but what behavior do you want to encourage in the player? What do you want them doing at the table?

Right now, in this system, you are encouraging players to game a numbers system for maximum benefit. Nothing that you've presented encourages a player to take the reins and play out a character's belief.

-L

I want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

However, at the same time, I recognize that there will be a lot of irritation if the system forces that kind of thing, so there also has to be the opportunity to not act according to character.

If I haven't managed to accomplish that, with what I've got here, then I suppose that means that there's something I'm not grokking. Is there a way to do it, reasonably?

GnomeWorks wrote:
I hate the crap out of pawn stance. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the idea of a player using the character as nothing more than an avatar. It's so very MMO-like, and really, in my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of how things need to be done in an RPG.

GnomeWorks wrote:
I want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

However, at the same time, I recognize that there will be a lot of irritation if the system forces that kind of thing, so there also has to be the opportunity to not act according to character.

If I haven't managed to accomplish that, with what I've got here, then I suppose that means that there's something I'm not grokking. Is there a way to do it, reasonably?

Oh my, you're questing for the immersionist Holy Grail.

Okay, work with me. Let's do a small RPG design exercise.

Imagine that there is no character, there's only the player and his behaviors and decisions. Now, given that, try to restate your goal.

Sorry, I should have seen that one coming.

No. Check it out. You want to encourage the player to act as the character would. Okay, I grok that, but I think breaking it out is going to help you. So, the character never "would" do anything. The character doesn't act. The character doesn't exist outside of some notes on a piece of paper. It's nothing more than that sketch. There is no "situation in-game." There's only talking between the players. The player plays an RPG with that piece of paper in front of him, staring at those numbers and notes.

That's a very formalist view of a roleplaying game. I want to use that formalist structure to break your game down so you can tell me what players do at the table with your game. What's your game about? What keeps a player engaged? How does a player act on that engagement? It's not enough to say that you want the player to make difficult moral decisions. Technically, D&D has those mechanics built into alignment. But morality in D&D is a joke, right? Even if you see the in-game situation as your paladin would, it still doesn't ring true. You want something more. You want something that grabs the player's guts and squeezes. To get there, you need to look at your process of play and what types of behaviors it encourages. You've got to not only develop your fictional situations and your supporting mechanics, but you need to think very carefully how to get the player invested in these decisions.

It's freaking hard!

Hope that helps.
-L

I think it depends a good deal on individual personality, but I think extensive morality rules can cause a moral disconnect between character and player.  When you build guidelines like you have and punish the player for not following them you're basically building a morality robot.  The more rules for morality you have the more a character's actions are dictated by those rules and the less they are by the player's image of the character.  Hopefully the two will be fairly close to each other, but they'll never quite be able to represent each other completely.  I think a morality rule-set should be pretty good for encouraging consistent character action, but I think it might actually work against immersion for the players themselves.

I do think that morality rules can help encourage character-player empathy, but I think they need to be mechanics-light.  Their job should be more to force the player to think about their character's beliefs than to mechanically force the player to act them out.  If the player has a good idea of what their character's beliefs are like they'll probably stay accurate to them, mechanics or not.  If they aren't the extra rules won't make them empathize more with the characters, they'll just forcefully dictate moral actions for the character with minimal player input.

This reminds me in a way of something Ron stated some time back about Sorcerer, about the manner in which people would play the pre-gen characters for games at conventions, and how no two players of the same character would ever play the character the same way or make the same decisions.

When Ron would ask a player afterward why they had the character make a particular choice, the answer was always "because that's what the character would have done" and the player would explain exactly how the character's personality, desires, and background as listed on the sheet clearly led to their particular, unique decision for that character.

Your problem seems a lot like that, and your solution as though it is trying to describe how a character WOULD REALLY be played, so you can judge whether or not the character is being "appropriately" played...when the problem may well be that you're trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn't exist--that is: there is no "would really" deterministic model to judge from.

That is, in the above example--despite the unique decisions and methods of playing a specific character by different individuals--no one actually "did it wrong". So, it seems rather that you want people to role-play more, that is to get more into character and make character-centric decisions (and try to avoid OOC thinking). You want to encourage Actor stance.

But I'm not sure your proposed solution will achieve that.

I wonder if this might be more a social contract issue and less a mechanics issue--though I can't discount a using mechanical impetus towards use of Actor stance, either. I say that as, first, I'm not a fan of Actor stance so I've never tried to design such a thing, and second, I design and play games that encourage Pawn and Author stance so I would think it isn't entirely an issue of the behavior at the table (given it isn't in those cases).

Still, I think it is important to any eventual solution for you to separate out "would really" thinking (if indeed that is a part of the issue, as it seems to appear) from the goal of creating more in-depth role-playing/encouraging acting, because I think the one muddles the achievement of the other. Though as noted, I may be wrong about what you're expecting or perceiving, so feel free to ignore this if it isn't germane to working yourself towards a solution.

Luke wrote: So, the character never "would" do anything. The character doesn't act. The character doesn't exist outside of some notes on a piece of paper. It's nothing more than that sketch. There is no "situation in-game." There's only talking between the players. The player plays an RPG with that piece of paper in front of him, staring at those numbers and notes.

What's your game about? What keeps a player engaged? How does a player act on that engagement?

Technically, D&D has those mechanics built into alignment. But morality in D&D is a joke, right? Even if you see the in-game situation as your paladin would, it still doesn't ring true.

It's not enough to say that you want the player to make difficult moral decisions. ... You want something more. You want something that grabs the player's guts and squeezes. To get there, you need to look at your process of play and what types of behaviors it encourages. You've got to not only develop your fictional situations and your supporting mechanics, but you need to think very carefully how to get the player invested in these decisions.

wrote: Their job should be more to force the player to think about their character's beliefs than to mechanically force the player to act them out.  If the player has a good idea of what their character's beliefs are like they'll probably stay accurate to them, mechanics or not.

wrote: Your problem seems a lot like that, and your solution as though it is trying to describe how a character WOULD REALLY be played, so you can judge whether or not the character is being "appropriately" played...when the problem may well be that you're trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn't exist--that is: there is no "would really" deterministic model to judge from.

Hey there Gnome,

Just wondering, but did anything in my post help you at all? It sort of got lost in your discussion about game motives and such. I'm just wondering if what I suggested sounds feasible or not to you, and whether you have any questions about my suggestion.

As for your player being irrelevant, I think thats not a problem at all. however, I think you are trying to aim your game at both simulationsists and at other types. As I understand, a Simulationist will have no problem getting in character and playing that character the way they think it should be played. Their decisions will rarely stray from their character's expected decision unless mechanically coaxed to. What I mean is this: a simulationist playing a paladin D&D has a strong mechanical urge to constantly look the other way while grave robbing and killing take place. If they didn't, their character would suffer and be almost un-playable. However, gamists and narrativists have no automatic loyalty to the way a character thinks, or at least, no to the degree a simulationist does. So, don't  worry about making your game for them. Make your game for simulationists, and state clearly what is expected of the player.

As for being worried about new players not grokking it, Thats where your mechanics should lightly coax them in the right direction, that is, acting as the character would, as they have made it. Again, I think my above suggestion for virtues changing up and down if ignored, and only going up for "accurate character portrayal" lends a stong enough push toward playing the character accurately from the sheet.

hope that helps,

--Norm

Hi GW,

GnomeWorks wrote: I want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

Gnome, forgive me for chuckling as I read your response. You made me smile.

Apparently, I've gone too deep into design speak for you. I apologize. I'm going to push it a bit further, though.

Based on what I'm reading from your posts, you seem to be at odds with your own design.

You indicate your game isn't "about" anything but you laid out a system of contrapuntal virtues and ethos around which the design is centered. If the game isn't about anything, why not just play poker and talk in funny voices? At least there's strategy to engage me there. You even cite Pendragon and then go on to assert you don't understand how games are about anything at all. I disagree. I think you understand what Pendragon is about, otherwise you wouldn't have set it as your baseline. All games are about something, even yours.

Your game lays out virtues like responsibility vs freedom. By definition that's an ethical or moral choice. Yet, you assert that, and I'm paraphrasing here, you're not interested in moral choices.

And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

And how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

If you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas." I think if you marry your impulses, you'll have a stronger design. I think if you remain at odds with yourself here, your design will reflect it.

-Luke

Gnome, I think I undersatdn what you are getting at - and I think you may possibly have a problem in pursuing that in this community, and someone should probably step up and raise that possibility.

It shouldn't have to be said, but I will say it:  Everything that follows is either my impressions, my opinion, or both.  The same is true for everything everyone else says.

Also, the following by its nature is a generalization.  Generalizations aren't bad, they just are summations of populations that do not focus on the outliers.

The Forge isn't just an indie game community.  It's an indie game community with a certain overlapping shared basis of thinking about and coming at game design - or at least the active posters are.  They tend to focus on games that "go after" the players emotionally - they tend to value mechanics that encourage/enforce the player being highly emotionally involved in the process.  This can more times than not lead to games where the (player's) agony of defeat or loss - or the threat of such agony - is one of the main focuses.

Everything else - characters, attributes, alignments, dice, tokens, etc are tools to accomplish the emotional involvement of the player - again usually in a way that is less about enticement and entreaty (the "carrot") and more about the spectre of defeat and loss, and "emotional hostage-taking" (the "stick")

So when you are being asked about your game, it can be said to boil down to this: How do you motivate your players to want to do what you want them to?  How do you manipulate or coerce them to care about the character in the way that you want them to?

This is a basic design question that seems relevant to many Forge-ish game and game discussions that I have expereinced, and is rampantly prevalent as a substrate in most of the kind of design and fundamental approach to gaming here.

Personally, for me the most major warning sign is when they closed down the Theory forum.  Never did hear a good justification for that - just a repudiation of theory for theory's sake - which to me is no different from saying that you are not allowed to vote on issue affecting children unless you have one.  Ridiculous.  But that's my axe to grind.

Just wanted to give you fair warning based on my own experiences. (Actual play, as it were.) In this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

Feel free to PM me - I love game design discussion (why I spent a lot of time on the Theory forum before they shut it down) having been a gamer, GMer, modder and designer myself for over 30 years.

Cheers and good luck.

PS.  You cannot edit a post on the Forge once it has been submitted - if you see any spelling/typing mistakes in my posts, that is why.

Sindyr wrote: In this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

Just trying to help the OP both get where the responses he is getting are coming from (as he seemed to indicated a perceived disconnect between his questions and the answers he is being given) and trying to help the OP have reasonable expectations and an understanding of the origin of the replies he is getting and that he is likely going to get. I knwo that in his position, I would consider myself well served with such a response, addressing the nature of the replies in order to better utilize them.

GnomeWorks wrote:
Or would they? I'm not so sure. I think there would still be players that would buck against what their character would do, no matter how well they understand their character's beliefs.

These are the sort of people that I've been keeping in mind when trying to puzzle through this. That, and potentially new players who have never dealt with a tabletop RPG before; they may not necessarily have the depth of experience to grok how to separate their characters from themselves. We've got to enable that kind of distinction and help make it clear.

The short version: what do you think will make the players care what about how conflicted their characters?

Typical answers: (these are not based on GNS)

The player makes up the character so will care about what the characters goals and experiences are.

The player makes up the conflicts, or the possible outcomes, and so will be interested in what occurs.

The player has many tactical options, and so puts personal rational effort into trying to produce an outcome (be it winning, or drama, or good gambling)

In the end, how do you want to get your players to invest some of themselves in the process so they feel a connection to play? To use the terms already used, why do you think the player will care about whether their character meets the goal of Romance or do they give that up to meet the goal of Feudal Duty? Or whatever the moral conflict du joue is. (See, that was a funny.) The idea that the players will provicde their own reason to be playing is a given, but it doesn't mean you can't address it, massage it, tailor your game to it and so on.

Ayyavazi wrote: Just wondering, but did anything in my post help you at all? It sort of got lost in your discussion about game motives and such. I'm just wondering if what I suggested sounds feasible or not to you, and whether you have any questions about my suggestion.

As for your player being irrelevant, I think thats not a problem at all. however, I think you are trying to aim your game at both simulationsists and at other types. As I understand, a Simulationist will have no problem getting in character and playing that character the way they think it should be played. Their decisions will rarely stray from their character's expected decision unless mechanically coaxed to.

As for being worried about new players not grokking it, Thats where your mechanics should lightly coax them in the right direction, that is, acting as the character would, as they have made it. Again, I think my above suggestion for virtues changing up and down if ignored, and only going up for "accurate character portrayal" lends a stong enough push toward playing the character accurately from the sheet.

Callan wrote: Does the GM decide whether the character would do that/whether it's in character, or does the player?

wrote: Gnome, forgive me for chuckling as I read your response. You made me smile.

Apparently, I've gone too deep into design speak for you. I apologize. I'm going to push it a bit further, though.

Based on what I'm reading from your posts, you seem to be at odds with your own design.

You indicate your game isn't "about" anything but you laid out a system of contrapuntal virtues and ethos around which the design is centered. If the game isn't about anything, why not just play poker and talk in funny voices? At least there's strategy to engage me there. You even cite Pendragon and then go on to assert you don't understand how games are about anything at all. I disagree. I think you understand what Pendragon is about, otherwise you wouldn't have set it as your baseline. All games are about something, even yours.

Your game lays out virtues like responsibility vs freedom. By definition that's an ethical or moral choice. Yet, you assert that, and I'm paraphrasing here, you're not interested in moral choices.

And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

And how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

If you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas." I think if you marry your impulses, you'll have a stronger design. I think if you remain at odds with yourself here, your design will reflect it.

wrote: Just wanted to give you fair warning based on my own experiences. (Actual play, as it were.) In this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

wrote: I guess I have a question for you.  Are you designing this more to encourage accurate character action or accurate character experience?  Is it more important to you that a character acts the way they "really would" during play or that the player experiences the situation through the eyes of the character?

chance.t wrote: To use the terms already used, why do you think the player will care about whether their character meets the goal of Romance or do they give that up to meet the goal of Feudal Duty?

The idea that the players will provicde their own reason to be playing is a given, but it doesn't mean you can't address it, massage it, tailor your game to it and so on.

Gnome,

I think people in this thread are trying to get you to see something about the play process that you're not seeing.  I know what they're getting at and I can see you're not seeing it.  I don't think I can help you see it so I'm going to try to help you from a different approach.  Consider this:

I play role-playing games to socially create a narrative that addresses real-world human issues that engage my personal emotions.  Without that, I don't want to play.  I've been in games where we just kind of socialized "in character" and they bored me.  Role-playing my character is not enough.  I have to be role-playing a character to a specific creative end.

Now that's just me.  If that isn't your thing, awesome.  I don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.  Now given the fact that *to me* a character is a bundle of emotionally charged fictional issues ready to be confronted by an equally emotionally charged fictional situation that resolves with thematic weight, I can comfortably say I've never made an "out of character" decision in my life.  Every time I've had my character do something, it's because it's what I believed he "would" do given the circumstances.  Most of my out-of-character decisions come in setting up the character and positioning him in a given situation but once that starting point is set (sometimes scene-by-scene in a given game) and the "Go" button is hit, I role-play him in the most believable manner possible.

In your post you talk about the characters in very Pavlovian terms.  The idea that given enough information about the character there exists a probabilistic curve of behaviors given a certain stimuli.  Okay, let's go with that.  I believe that is what you want and, again, I don't want to change your mind about that.  But this is my question: In play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

Let me get more specific.  I'm sitting at your table.  I have my character takes action.  Who is the final arbiter of whether my character's action is "on the curve" given the situation?  Can the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"  Can the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"  In other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

Because here's the thing: Likely given the same information you and I would not objectively agree on the same "shape" for the probability curve.  So, unless, you want a lot of out-of-character arguing at your table over what a given character's probably curve looks like you need some way of communicating it to the players across the group, up to and including simply vesting one person with the right to say "No, not on character's behavior probability curve."  Full stop.

Does that make sense?

Jesse

GnomeWorks wrote:
I'm not interested in the players' concerns about moral choices. I am interested in the characters' concerns about moral choices. A player can have an immediate and strong moral reaction to a situation, while playing a character who would be conflicted; the reverse is also possible. In these situations, the player should act as the character would, their own opinions being irrelevant insofar as the game is concerned.

And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

Luke wrote:
All games are about something, even yours.

And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

And how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

If you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas."

jburneko wrote:
Now that's just me.  If that isn't your thing, awesome.  I don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.

But this is my question: In play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

  In other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

Luke wrote:
And, Gnome, Sindyr, knock it off with the barely-veiled condescension about "the folks around here." I am talking about game design, I'm not trying to induct you into our cult or induce you to design a particular type of game. I'm talking about basic game design: you must motivate these players to make the types of decisions you desire.

GnomeWorks wrote:
And again, I'm not sure if the player's feelings on the matter are relevant.

GnomeWorks wrote: Sure, yep, this is the situation as it is. We want to go from here to some kind of immersion-thing.

Sufficient knowledge and analysis of an individual's personality and past life experience would most likely be able to produce a relatively accurate probabilistic spread of probable actions given certain types of stimuli...we do not understand enough about ourselves, in the real world, to even begin accurately modeling how fictional persons in a fictional setting would react to fictional circumstances...

The player's feelings on the matter are - and should be - irrelevant in the process.

admittedly this is the only thing that I have presented, but the whole is greater than just this.

Generally it will be the player. I can envision a scenario in which a player acts wildly out of character, though, and the GM looks at the player and says, "Let me see your character sheet."

If the players need to be kept on a tight leash, regarding ethics, then the GM would probably check the characters' virtues every session. With more trustworthy and experienced players, that need goes away.

So, I guess the answer is - it's situational.

Long post incoming.

jburneko wrote: I play role-playing games to socially create a narrative that addresses real-world human issues that engage my personal emotions.  Without that, I don't want to play.  I've been in games where we just kind of socialized "in character" and they bored me.  Role-playing my character is not enough.  I have to be role-playing a character to a specific creative end.

I don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.

In play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

Can the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"

Can the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"

In other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

Does that make sense?

wrote: Try to listen to what I'm saying.

You must motivate a player to make decisions. You must induce a player to make decisions desirable and profitable within the context of the game. Insisting that a player will simply do as the character would isn't helpful.

And, disagree or not, choices are fraught with emotion. Logical decision is largely a fallacy. Check out this excellent RadioLab podcast about choice.

wrote: It sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, like your ideal style of play is just creating a world and then staring into it and watching as logical conclusions play out within it.  You construct an artificial reality and then have things happen in it, and do your best to make sure that those things are realistic.

The problem that I have with it is that it just sounds like a way to kill time and that's it.  The world is imaginary, and no matter how hard you try it'll only ever be a shadow of reality so why is it important that it pretends to be realistic?  If you aren't trying to make the players care about the game as anything beyond a way to avoid boredom for a few hours then why should they play your game over any other RPG that's ever been created?  Why is your game more fun that, say, taking a nap?

Err, that sounds accusatory but I don't mean for it to be.  You wouldn't have built the system if you didn't feel like it had something worthwhile about it that would make it more fun to play than just sitting around with friends talking about nothing in particular.  The thing is, nobody can really give you any meaningful advice on how to improve your game until they understand what that thing is.

wrote: I think Luke is trying to point out that you can't truly immerse in something that doesn't exist, ie: there is no "there" to go TO. A character doesn't exist as a separate entity from the player, a character is only ever a series of choices and reactions on the part of the player made in reference to how that player believes an individual with certain defined qualities would react. It isn't its own thing or person, and can't ever be.

I think you indicated that was something you understood in one of your replies above, so we're on the same page there. But I'm not sure if your system reflects the above, or if it tries to lock players into the idea that there is an optimal choice, rather than a set of such?

And no matter how wide or narrow those boundaries are, from my perspective, you can't really encourage immersive role-playing with the system as you are currently proposing it. I say that as the method you've suggested seems (to me) to be creating a game that doesn't encourage immersion but quite the opposite: one that involves people checking character sheets to see what their character would do, rather than engaging in the art of (essentially) improv acting and really getting into character.

This is because, by constantly being forced to ask themselves "What would my character do?" and checking a sheet, more distance is created from the character rather than less. The illusion of the character making its own decisions can still arise from that, but it does not arise through immersion. An immersive solution would help players get into character; otherwise, from my perspective, we're just doing Pawn stance with behavioral attributes instead of the other details or numbers on the sheet.

Assuming you want immersion as your goal, and not just pseudo-accurate character portrayal by whatever means: perhaps one place to start for you would be reading up on various schools and methods of acting, and the various training engaged in to get into and stay in character those various schools utilize, and that might lead to some ideas for how to help players get into their characters and role-play more. Because what you seem to be aiming at is recreating method acting for use in role-playing games.

...then we're looking at Pawn stance based character portrayal: "According to the values listed on my sheet, I think my character would do THIS. So that's what he does."

Unless I am misunderstanding who you are trying to target with these rules (you seem to be wanting one group in some places, and worrying about another group in others)?

However, from what you've said, it seems more like you want something that looks like immersion from the outside, but functions like "check behavior against a virtue" on the inside (or really doesn't matter how it functions, as long as the output looks like immersion), ie: better "role-playing" as that term is sometimes defined. Is that accurate?

Callan wrote: If the GM were to take over at all, it'd be based on opinion only.

So if I choose to lose now, I get a benefit later? That's a decent mechanic, but there still has to be more than that to entice a player to throw a challenge. Especially since risking a roll on a higher valued attribute offers a substantial chance of advancement, which, since the favored ability is already at least 1 higher than the unfavored one, nullifies the benefit of using a losing ability at least once. So using a losing ability is a long term gamble.

Also, just a question, do you think that terms like virtue, ethos, liberty and conformity have meaning to players outside of your game? Would you agree that these are loaded terms?

-L

Oh, okay.  Your anti-pawn rant in the begging made me imagine the rules were a little harsher than they really are.  I think I understand things here a little better.

GnomeWorks wrote:
If characters' actions are determined mechanistically, always, then there is no reason for a player to sit at the table. None whatsoever.

As the GM, I would greatly prefer it if all the things I have to control and deal with were mechanistically determined, or at least mechanically determinable.

However, a player needs to have some amount of control over their character, or else there's no reason to sit down at the table.

These are the conflicting ideals that I'm trying to reconcile.

Luke wrote: So if I choose to lose now, I get a benefit later? That's a decent mechanic, but there still has to be more than that to entice a player to throw a challenge. Especially since risking a roll on a higher valued attribute offers a substantial chance of advancement, which, since the favored ability is already at least 1 higher than the unfavored one, nullifies the benefit of using a losing ability at least once. So using a losing ability is a long term gamble.

Also, just a question, do you think that terms like virtue, ethos, liberty and conformity have meaning to players outside of your game? Would you agree that these are loaded terms?

wrote: Oh, okay.  Your anti-pawn rant in the begging made me imagine the rules were a little harsher than they really are.  I think I understand things here a little better.

I think it could work really well with NPCs, especially if you somehow made the focus of the game related to confronting the virtues of others and changing them to more match your own.  For example, confronting the king who leans too far to conformity and has become totalitarian, and convincing him to take a step towards moderation.  For the king's actions to be completely dice-based would probably be acceptable and possibly even desirable to your target audience.

Like, whenever a character performs an action they really believe in they can wager their virtue on it.  It gives them a bonus to the die roll, representing the confidence and conviction that gives them the extra energy to really excel.  If they succeed there's a small chance it goes up as their faith is reaffirmed, if they fail there's a chance it goes down as their faith is shaken.  Taking the bonus or not should probably be optional, but players will use it a lot because it helps them.

However, if the character acts against their virtues they should probably suffer a penalty to the roll, representing the nagging self-doubt that slows their action and makes them waver.  If they succeed despite the penalty their virtues suffer some amount of upheaval, while if they fail their virtues are reaffirmed.  This is kind of like the way option three works right now, and should probably be automatic.

There's a lot of fiddling you could do with all of what I just said, but the basic idea of it is just that if you reward players with dice for acting the way you want them to they will a) usually act the way you want and b) will be happy because they're getting dice.

Of course, there will be players who still just ignore their motivations and refuse to act in character.  Fuck 'em.  They aren't going to play your game, and if they did they probably wouldn't have fun (since the game runs so contrary to the way they like to play), so you don't need to worry about them.  I think a little nudge from bonuses and penalties is all you'll need to train new players, and your target audience will play the way you want no matter what the rules you set are.

I do like the 5-realms morality idea a lot, actually.  The way the five spheres interact without being black and white could work out really cool.

You should understand, though, that if this part of the game is as sophisticated and as complicated as it is it will be the main focus of play.  Like was said before, if there are a ton of combat rules for a system players will want to get in fights.  If there are a ton of morality rules in the game the players will want to get into morally challenging situations.  I think this game could be really fun if you work with that fact and use it to energize play.

The character can have independent fictional existence, as can the imaginary world in which the character exists.

After a time, however, I would think that the numbers on the sheet would more deeply solidify in the player's mind, and you would stop having to check the sheet.

My interpretation of Pawn is that the player simply acts through the character; the character is basically a glove into the fiction, and the player occupies it. The glove doesn't do things on its own or start the conversation of what to do.

The system I've presented can sometimes call for the character to make an action that the player is not interested in.

wrote: This made me chuckle as it reminded me of a quote from The Fairly Godparents cartoon that always leaves me rolling: "Those are real fictional people in real fictional danger!" But your second paragraph clears up your meaning, and I don't think it actually disagrees with anything I stated, so it appears we're on the same page.

But, there are forty virtues in your game. I don't know that I could memorize forty variables, or even twenty, and keep them all in mind while playing. Certainly some might stick, and some might be numbers I have to look up all the time.

You know what, you're right. I mixed up Pawn stance with something else (DOH!).

But from where I'm sitting, saying, "Ok, my loyalty is 4, so I immediately rush to the aid of my lord against the orcs" isn't role-playing, either, at least not the kind you're looking for?

But this is interesting, I like what you are trying to do conceptually. My own game, ORX, whose system I wrote with Gamism in mind (and originally Pawn stance, though it can shift around), has the rule: "Your orc is not a paper doll for your ego." And it works according to the principle that before you take an action, you roll the dice. Then you role-play (or rather, narrate) the outcome arising from that roll, not on what you as a player wanted your orc to do or try. If you play using this aspect of the rules, it requires acting chops.

However, I admit I am having great difficulty imagining how your game works, or rather how the virtues and ethos are actually utilized in play. Not how they function mechanically, you've explained that pretty clearly, but how they are actually utilized with real people sitting around a table in the middle of a game with things happening, and then the virtues system fires up because...why?

By which I mean it is all good to say a situation arises where freedom is opposed by conformity so then you do this...but what does that look like in play? Does the GM just say, "OK, make a freedom roll!" In D&D, for example, it is very clear when the combat system kicks into play. What event triggers its use. That's what I'm looking at.

Also, how does it actually work, rather than just being a bunch of numbers on a sheet that can serve as a guideline? And when does that guideline come into play? Because I guess I'm also not seeing how this system actually helps your goals of teaching role-playing or producing it in someone not interested in or unable to grok their character. Right now, I'm kind of looking at it as "alignment, but with numbers" and so about as easily ignorable as such, and not really foundationally wedded to the game.

Is there more to it? Can you help me out and run through a complete account of how this would be used to teach a new role-player to play during the game, or how it would force someone to role-play who isn't interested in doing such (exactly what it would make the character do).

greyorm wrote:
But from where I'm sitting, saying, "Ok, my loyalty is 4, so I immediately rush to the aid of my lord against the orcs" isn't role-playing, either, at least not the kind you're looking for?

I think contracycle provides a great example.

You decide to brawl? Combat system kicks in.
You decide to create something? Crafting system kicks in.
You decide to perform magic? Magic system kicks in.
You decide to argue? Social system kicks in.
You decide to make up your mind? Virtue system kicks in.

Combat, crafting, magic, and social are systems you use when you have already decided what to do. Virtue is the system that you use when doing the deciding itself.

Your lord just died in battle. What do you do? Revenge? Flee? Join him in death? You don't just act on a whim, you consult your character's virtues. For this to work though, you need to know what actions virtues would translate to in that situation. You need a map from virtues to setting.

At least, that's how I imagine it could be working.

Jasper wrote:
I think contracycle provides a great example.

You decide to brawl? Combat system kicks in.
You decide to create something? Crafting system kicks in.
You decide to perform magic? Magic system kicks in.
You decide to argue? Social system kicks in.
You decide to make up your mind? Virtue system kicks in.

Combat, crafting, magic, and social are systems you use when you have already decided what to do. Virtue is the system that you use when doing the deciding itself.

Your lord just died in battle. What do you do? Revenge? Flee? Join him in death? You don't just act on a whim, you consult your character's virtues. For this to work though, you need to know what actions virtues would translate to in that situation. You need a map from virtues to setting.

At least, that's how I imagine it could be working.

Well, this topic sure has been busy in my absence.

There is one thing about my suggestions you aren't grokking, but its because I didn't explain it explicitly. Gamists will possibly play your game. With your current Morality system, they will possibly break your game. Here's the key question: Are your resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks based on your 40 morality stats, or are there seperate stats to govern them?

This is important because if resolution and success or failure is determined based on strictly the morality stats, your game will be broken, and here's how. Lets say I want to raise a morality. In your system, all I have to do is get into a situation where the prevailing morality is prevalent, and then outright deny my character's written impulse. Boom! 2 points in the morality I wanted raised. I can then do this as often as I need, and gradually my character will have very high values in everything.

If your resolution system for tasks and conflicts has nothing to do with your morality, then why make it from 0 to yes in the first place? That just means taking the random option (2) gets harder and harder and requires more dice rolling as the game progresses. Eventually people will need to roll 10 or 15 dice to figure out what they do, and that creates a big handling time, which slows the game down and reduces immersion. If your morality system is linked but not solely responsible for resolution, as in bonus dice, how is it? Do you benefit from being middle of the road more than dedicated? And if so, what kind of impetus would I as a player have for playing the disadvantaged type?

Thats the reason I keep insisting on raising and lowering values. This way, there is no net gain from using your character as an avatar, which is what your game might actually encourage, to a gamist. They won't be trying to break your system. They'll be trying to succeed, and in so doing, use your system in ways it wasn't designed to be. If the only net gain results from accurately playing your character, then people will more often accurately play their character. And so what if that makes it harder to change using the random method? Shouldn't it be harder? The longer something remains a habit, the harder it is to kick. Besides, the player can take the outright denial route and still change their character in the direction they want, and actually get there faster, than if they had rolled, both in game time and in play time (since no rolling is involved). In fact, you may want to consider eliminating option 2 entirely. Why roll in the first place? Is it because the player doesn't know what they want the character to do, or is it because they want to act contrary to their nature but don't want their morality to shift by the greater degree? I don't forsee option 2 as being desireably often enough to warrant its inclusion.

If your morality mechanics are completely divorced from your resolution mechanics, then using the raise and lower method is still a good idea because it keeps numbers manageable, which reduces handle time and the number of dice that have to be rolled. These are all good things.

If anything I've said is unclear, feel free to ask. And as for the system itself, I love how its shaping up. It sounds likle a really interesting system, and it doesn't matter that it originated from MtG. I would be interested in getting a list of the moralities you use, since my own game deals with morality heavily, though in a different way than yours.

Cheers!
--Norm

mjbauer wrote: I really like this idea. The problem is determining how many of these systems your game needs. It could easily become a game system that is full of mini games, each of which has their own rules set. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, it just seems like a lot of work to create and a lot of learning for the players. It seems like this is the reason why most game systems tend to try to create one conflict or task resolution system to accomplish everything.

A wrote: There is one thing about my suggestions you aren't grokking, but its because I didn't explain it explicitly. Gamists will possibly play your game. With your current Morality system, they will possibly break your game. Here's the key question: Are your resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks based on your 40 morality stats, or are there seperate stats to govern them?

If your resolution system for tasks and conflicts has nothing to do with your morality, then why make it from 0 to yes in the first place? That just means taking the random option (2) gets harder and harder and requires more dice rolling as the game progresses. Eventually people will need to roll 10 or 15 dice to figure out what they do, and that creates a big handling time, which slows the game down and reduces immersion.

If your morality system is linked but not solely responsible for resolution, as in bonus dice, how is it? Do you benefit from being middle of the road more than dedicated? And if so, what kind of impetus would I as a player have for playing the disadvantaged type?

And so what if that makes it harder to change using the random method? Shouldn't it be harder? The longer something remains a habit, the harder it is to kick. ... I don't forsee option 2 as being desireably often enough to warrant its inclusion.

If your morality mechanics are completely divorced from your resolution mechanics, then using the raise and lower method is still a good idea because it keeps numbers manageable, which reduces handle time and the number of dice that have to be rolled. These are all good things.

And as for the system itself, I love how its shaping up. It sounds likle a really interesting system, and it doesn't matter that it originated from MtG. I would be interested in getting a list of the moralities you use, since my own game deals with morality heavily, though in a different way than yours.

Hmm, I don't check the forum for a few days and this thread springs up.

Gnome, what you're working on sounds remarkably similar to what I'm doing, with differences of course.  Maybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.  Under my system I imagine the GM presenting some sort of situation to the players ("Your sister has been kidnapped..." "You discover that the king is going to raze this village and kill all the inhabitants..." "One of you owes money to a powerful thieves' guild and has started getting threatening messages...") and the players have to find some way to resolve the situation.  So far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

The other thing I've worked heavily on is a morality system.  In my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.  Now, 0 isn't "perfect," it's merely "balanced," for example if a character was a pacifist then they would range much closer to Peace.  On the other hand, a warrior might tend more toward Violence since he is constantly forced to resolve conflicts through force.  The warrior just wouldn't have the patience to debate with a villain and convince him to not be an evil dastard.  I fully expect each player to diversify their character, which will add a certain level of internal tension and conflict within the group and make things more interesting.

Originally I thought it would be good enough to simply have the moral gauges as points of reference, and for some people it might be.  But, based on Luke's advice, I decided a modest mechanical incentive can't hurt, as long as it is managed correctly.  At character creation the player can set their moralities to whatever they want, so even at this point I'm assuming that the player will design a character that they can roleplay.  However, I realize that the player and character both might change their minds on certain issues, so I have a system that let's a character's moralities change if they act contrary to them in order to reflect their new moral standing.  More than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Now to the point: you aren't sure when your morality system should kick in, and neither am I.  Here are my thoughts, though.  The players encounter a situation, whether it is presented to them by the GM or whether they encounter it as a result of their actions.  The players then have to make a decision, and the decision is more along the lines of "Do I kill him or do I reason with him?" rather than "Do I hit him with my axe or my sword?"  The decision depends in part on what their characters want to do, based on their moralities, and in part on what they can do, based on their skills and abilities.  Right now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code.  If the pacifist beats up a bum for no reason (morally undesirable event through action), then he should get a morality check, on the other hand there's no reason for a warrior to beat up the same bum (no morally undesirable event from inaction), so no check is required if he doesn't beat up the bum.  However, if a captured bandit knows where his pals took the warrior's kidnapped sister (morally undesirable event through inaction), then the warrior would be encouraged to beat the everloving snot out of the bandit until he talks, and by the same token the pacifist would want to try to convince the bandit to talk through less forceful means.  I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

Now, my system assumes that the players will try and portray a character of some sort, and the character they originally created will adapt to become the character they are portraying.  The players are free to act as they please, but doing so could set them at odds with the other players (who are actually following their moral guidelines).  I'm not designing this system with Gamists in mind, nor do I expect to force Gamists to submit to my system.  I think I'm aiming more for a Narrativist audience, with a dose of Simulationists.  At the end of the day, my moral gauges are nothing more than a reference point, and a lot of ambiguity will be necessary in enforcing them ("Was this a Violent action or not?"  it may not be clear in many situations which moralities apply).  My main hope from the morality system is to get players, GM included, to think about the moral aspect of the game and their actions within the game, the mechanics simply provide a little extra incentive, as well as making sure that the morality system isn't completely ignored.  So I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

In case you're interested, here's a list of my twelve gauges.  They might serve as inspiration.

[table][tr][td]Peace-Justice-Violence
Death-Humanity-Life
Vengeance-Mercy-Naivety
Fear-Courage-Recklessness
Blasphemy-Piety-Fanaticism
Selfishness-Duty-Myrmidon
Deception-Honor-Arrogance
Manipulation-Honesty-Legalism
Passion-Discipline-Coldness
Malice-Charity-Pity
Poverty-Contentment-Greed
Abnegation-Chastity-Indulgence
[/td][td]amount of force used to solve problems
one's value and view of life
how evil is dealt with
how one regards personal safety
how one feels toward religion
loyalty and obedience of authority
one's code of conduct
the importance placed on words
one's measure of self control and emotion
how one deals with the less fortunate
one's value of the material
one's value of worldly pleasures
[/td][/tr][/table]

Anyway, I hope this gives you a few ideas.  Keep in mind that my system hasn't yet been playtested, though I expect to start any time.

Egonblaidd wrote: Gnome, what you're working on sounds remarkably similar to what I'm doing, with differences of course.

Maybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.

So far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

In my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.

More than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Right now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code. ... I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

So I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

GnomeWorks wrote:
But then you punish the player for trying to represent a sudden and drastic change in the character's beliefs, which is something we want to avoid doing too much of.

Can the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"

Can the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"

GnomeWorks wrote:
You can act wildly against character. Basically the GM looking at the sheet would simply be to ensure that the player is modifying the character's virtue and ethos values appropriately.

GnomeWorks wrote:
The ethos subsystem is just that - a subsystem, almost entirely separate from the rest of the system. Your ethos has no impact on how well you swing a sword, sling a spell, or shape a spear (bonus points for alliteration?).

It *may* be tied to the social combat system, but as I mentioned earlier, I really only have an inkling of how that will work. I like the idea, though, and it would seem to resolve some of the issues we had in the social combat system.

GnomeWorks wrote:

Egonblaidd wrote: Maybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.

That is a thing that could be done.

Also, don't confuse this subsystem for the core of what's going on. It's part of the whole, but not the most important part.

So far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

Heh, skills are another thing that we've been completely unable to figure out. We're having massive scope and grouping issues; three times now, we've spent about three nights at our local diner discussing this topic for about six hours each sitting, and we've still got next to nothing done.

In my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.

Your take on this whole thing seems rather different than mine. That sounds similar, but we don't really have a place that we consider "ideal." The character's beliefs are the character's beliefs.

More than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Some of the advice here has started me thinking along these lines, and it does seem like a solid idea.

Right now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code. ... I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

Hmm... that would seem, to me, to encourage a more action-based morality than intention-based. If you only check morality after an "event" is finished that is ethically-relevant, then so long as the end result followed the character's beliefs, they're good to go.

I'm not sure if I like that idea. I like the idea of the virtues as motivators and more intent-based. Action-based ethical modifications should have some place in the system, but I don't know if I want it to be the only thing, or even the primary one.

So I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

How do you know who is going to have an interest in your game?

I am not interested in going out of my way to close off the game from those who don't necessarily share my views on what makes the game good or interesting. There are assumptions made in the system that make it simulationist; hell, most of the assumptions made are simulationist in nature. That doesn't mean we want to go out of our way to preclude gamists or narrativists or new players who have no idea what those terms mean.

The gamer market is already small. Do you really want to go out of your way to tell large segments of the gamer population that your game isn't for you? How are you supposed to reasonabily succeed, as a business model, with that kind of approach in mind?

Vu wrote: Why do you want to avoid this? ... Without a system of reward/punishment, I don't see the value of the numbers at all.

From the other point of view, you indicated earlier in the thread that you wanted players to act according to the inherent morality/virtue combination established for the character. Allowing a player to break their character's outlook on the world without some kind of punishment is just asking for players who go "all-out-chaotic-evil" one scene because it suits their agenda, then "all-out-lawful-good" the next scene because it fits better with the new circumstances, then choosing another virtue path in the next scene because things are different again.

wrote: I sort of think this is a bad idea.  The rules for this are so gigantic and intense that if it doesn't tie into the rest of the game it's going to be more of a bother than a boon.

The mindset and motivation you have in taking part in a difficult action has a pretty real effect on how skillfully you handle it.  This is too hard to interpret into dice for most systems, but if you already have the framework set up you might as well use it.  It shouldn't give a huge bonus or anything, maybe a +1 to +3 bonus to your roll or something similar, depending on how high the virtue is.

Ego wrote: I think I understand where you're coming from here; morality is simply one aspect of the world to be explored in your system, while morality is a core issue in my system.

I hear you there.  I've spent a good deal of time thinking about what skills need to be included and how to group them.  I have skills coming in related groups, typically of three or four but some with as few as two or as many as eight, and as one skill is used the entire group of skills advances slowly.  Needless to say, grouping the skills was a pain, and I'm still not sure about how I've done it.  Some skills I feel should belong in two groups, like Sculpturing should be in both the Stone Working and Visual Art groups.  Anyway, I'd be happy to share my skill list with you if you'd like to look over it for inspiration.  One of my goals with the skill system was to represent every kind of action, from scholarly studies to crafting to combat, so you might find it helpful.

That's fine, there are many ways to do it, and I considered a system similar to the one you're using.  Both our systems have the advantage of being rather gray, since there is no "right" morality, only what the players choose, though I think your system might do a better job of this by having directly opposed virtues.  If "right" morals exist (based probably on religion), then they won't be straight zeros, in fact I think I'll leave it up to each GM to assign a "right" moral code to religion based on their interpretation of my descriptions of that religion, so it will differ between gaming groups, making it impossible for players to simply memorize it.

Actually the reason why I thought moral judgment should take place afterwards is (a) the characters start seeing the consequences of their actions, and therefore can be a better judge of whether or not they were justified, and (b) I don't want players focusing on how certain decisions will affect their morality, I'd rather have them focused on whether or not a certain decision makes sense given the situation, their moral inclination, and their ability to carry out that decision.

I did read a thread where the game was specially designed to judge morality based solely on actions, so you could do "good" things for purely selfish reasons, which kind of created it's own version of "gray" since "good" and "evil" are no longer ethical issues.  An interesting idea, but not what either of us is going for, I think.

The point is, think about who is mostly likely to want to play your game, and then expand your system to include as many other people as you can without alienating your original audience.  Don't sign up to be the Republican candidate and then go all liberal.  You can still make your game appeal to a broad group of people without making it appeal to everyone.  If your game only appeals to a small niche then that's fine too if that's what you want, otherwise you're not doing something right if you want to appeal to a large audience and only appeal to a small group, and it may be that you're trying to overextend your system.

And there are things you can do to reach out to Narrativists and Gamists to include them, but since your game is more heavily Simulationist it would be better not to do something that would exclude the Simulationists.

It's good that you want to target a large audience, but you need to understand who that audience is and what they want in a game, in part so you can design the game to appeal to them and in part so that you can market it to the right people.  A good place to start is with yourself.  Ask yourself why you would want to play your game, and what aspects of the game you enjoy.  Ask your playtesters these same questions.  Once you get enough answers you'll have a much better idea of who the audience is and why they will want to play your game.

I'm still torn, though. Can you reconcile the issue of "player having little to no input regarding character action" with "the player shouldn't be allowed to take actions willy-nilly without taking the character's beliefs into account"?

To add to what contracycle is saying, and to one of the things I said in my last post, I think most people will be roleplaying some type of character.  What I'll probably do, and what might be a good idea for your system as well, is encourage new players of your system to play a character that strongly resembles themselves.  If they give a care about fictional ethical issues, then they should play a character that cares about ethics, if not they should go more for an amoral character.  If they care about min/maxing then they should play some kind of brainiac that's constantly contrasting even the most minute differences between different objects, courses of action, etc. in order to find the most efficient one.  Basically, they should start off with a character that they will roleplay naturally.  The Gamist probably shouldn't start with a paladin, since what is important to a paladin is not important to a Gamist, and vice versa.  Once they get a hang of the system then they can branch out to other personalities.  The paladin could try playing a psychopath, for example.

Someone mentioned, either here or in another thread, that everybody likes to play dark jedi in Star Wars games.  I'll admit, shooting lightning and throwing people off ledges is a blast, and I also enjoy a good dose of GTA and such, but in a game like Knights of the Old Republic I tend to prefer being "good," just because I'd rather be the hero than the villain, the good guy rather than the bad guy, and also probably because it tickles my conscience more than something like GTA.  I may take insane pleasure from torturing my worshipers in Black and White, or vent my frustration in Halo by slaughtering my comrades and killing myself, repeatedly (ah, autosaves), but like in GTA and many other games, they are nameless, generic, impersonal people.  When in a game like KOTOR a woman begs be to find her kidnapped daughter, my first inclination is not to blast her with lightning, but rather to sympathize with her situation and help her.  Here I am interacting with people that have their own, albeit sometimes clichéd or generic, personalities, their own background, even if it is only rather briefly covered, etc.  It feels more like I'm interacting with real people and hence my conscience pushes me a lot more in these kinds of cases to behave as if I really was a jedi and someone was asking for my help.

My point is, while everyone may jokingly consider plundering the caravan that they are supposed to be protecting, not everyone will actually do it.  There is, I think, a misconception about roleplayers that they are all Gamist and will bend the rules to maximize their abilities.  Certainly there are a lot of people like this, as can be seen in the videogame industry and their desire to "balance" the game, but there are many other people that play games for different reasons (depending on the game, of course).  I came to the conclusion that non-Gamist oriented RPGs don't need to be balanced, per se, because if someone wants to play an elf it will be because they want to play an elf, not because the elf has better stats than the human.  There will be people who play the elf because it is more powerful, and you can't do anything about that except "balance" the elf and human.  But if in your setting the elf is more powerful than the human, then non-Gamists won't be too pleased if the elf and human are balanced.  Of course, you do need some degree of balance.  If it's nigh impossible to play as a thief, then nobody will play thieves, so even if thieves don't fare as well in combat as a warrior the thief still needs to be playable.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's better to trust the player than to try and force the player.  Yes, some people will abuse your system in order to min/max, it can't be helped.  But those aren't the people you're trying to appeal to anyway.  There will always be people who Huskarl-rush in Age of Empires II (curse the Goths and their hyper-infantry production and their arrow-resistant Huskarls!), but that type of play won't appeal to everyone.  As long as you make clear how the players are supposed to conduct themselves there will be some who do so.  Adding a mechanical incentive is a sure way to make sure that people are aware of what your intentions are.  Do you care about the Gamists smirking over your game and how easy it is once you figure out how to min/max?  They aren't your audience, your audience is the people that will want to try different things, different approaches, different characters, in order to experience your world.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject.

You said you were interested in seeing my skill list, well here it is.  I've organized it (alphabetically) into a table and decreased the font size so the post length isn't into next week.  Skill groups (or "Basic Skills" as I term them in my system) are non-indented with their subskills ("Advanced Skills" in my system) underneath the skill group and indented.  The idea is that only the subskills are actually used, but the skill level of the group is added to the subskill level for tests.  Using subskills advances both the subskill and the skill group, thus making all skills in the group more effective, but mostly that particular subskill.
Obviously some of these are setting-specific, like languages or theology, but you can get the general idea without knowing anything about the setting.  For Literacy I opted to do orthographies rather than languages, so for example you only need a skill in Western Script to read or write in Westerspeak, Peridan, Nostr, Slevic, or Achaean, but you have to also know that language in order to understand what you're reading or write something comprehensible.
One issue I'm thinking about is a skill for taking care of equipment, i.e. polishing nicks off swords, oiling swords and armor, etc.  Should I add a skill for that, and if so, where?  Does an existing skill cover that?  Do I even need a skill for that?  Also, I'm thinking maybe I should move Lockpicking to Engineering.  My Law and History subskills are rather generic, too, but they might be fine as is.  As things go on I'll probably think up more issues like this, but my skillset is fairly well filled out right now, I think.  Although I'd take any advice you have on how to improve it.  If you want to comment on how I can improve my skill system, I already have a thread for it here.

Anyway, here it is.  There are currently 34 skill groups and 145 subskills.

[table][tr][td]Acrobatics
  Aerial Motion
  Balance
  Climbing
  Dodge

Agriculture
  Botany
  Cultivation

Athletics
  Conditioning
  Running
  Swimming

Business
  Evaluate
  Haggle
  Management

Ceramics
  Brick Making
  Porcelain
  Pottery

Combat
  Chain Weapons
  Fencing
  Hand to Hand
  Heavy Weapons
  Improvised Weaponry
  Polearms
  Shields
  Short Blades
  Swords

Engineering
  Architecture
  Electricity
  Machines
  Shipbuilding[/td][td]Glass Working
  Glassblowing
  Glass Color

History
  Archeology
  Eastern History
  Middle Eastern History
  Western History

Husbandry
  Animal Handling
  Breeding
  Riding

Law
  Eastern Law
  Hadari Law
  Western Law

Leadership
  Public Speaking
  Rally

Linguistics
  Achaean
  Hadari
  Malahir
  Nostr
  Peridan
  Semptyrian
  Sian
  Slevic
  Westerspeak
  Wildlander Tribal

Literacy
  Hadari Script
  Malahir Script
  Semptyrian Ideography
  Sian Logography
  Western Script[/td][td]Literary Art
  Drama
  Poetry
  Prose

Leatherworking
  Leather Crafting
  Skinning
  Tanning

Medicine
  Disease
  First Aid
  Surgery

Metallurgy
  Gem Cutting
  Mining
  Prospecting
  Refining

Missiles
  Blowguns
  Bows
  Crossbows
  Darts
  Gunpowder
  Siege
  Sling
  Throwing

Music
  Brass
  Composing
  Flute
  Harp
  Keyboard
  Lute
  Pipes
  Violin
  Voice[/td][td]Natural Philosophy
  Alchemy
  Astronomy
  Biology
  Geometry
  Gnosticism
  Mathematics
  Mechanics
  Nature

Perception
  Awareness
  Intuition
  Search

Persuasion
  Bluff
  Charm
  Disguise
  Intimidate

Sailing
  Ship Handling
  Navigation
  Marine Weather

Sleight of Hand
  Cheat/Trick
  Steal

Smithing
  Armor Smithing
  Blacksmithing
  Silver Smithing
  Weapon Smithing

Spiritual Arts
  Arcane Art
  Astral Art
  Black Art
  Holy Art
  Inner Art[/td][td]Stealth
  Hide
  Lockpicking
  Sneak

Stone Working
  Masonry
  Quarrying
  Sculpturing

Survival
  Camp Sites
  Fishing
  Orientation
  Tracking

Textiles
  Braiding
  Knitting
  Ropework
  Weaving

Theology
  Achaean Pantheon
  Astrology
  Nostr Pantheon
  Pantheism
  Semptyrian Pantheon
  The Way
  The Word
  Wildlander Tribal Religions

Visual Art
  Drawing
  Painting
  Printmaking

Woodworking
  Bow Making
  Carpentry
  Carving
  Logging[/td][/tr][/table]

GnomeWorks wrote: I'm fairly certain that we'll hit our primary market - simulationists - square on the head with this one.

I think we'll be able to grab gamists rather easily, because it's got a lot of crunchy bits in the combat and social encounter subsystems, with lots of fiddly bits that can be messed with and all kinds of opportunities to tweak characters and maximize ability to overcome challenges of all kinds.

Ego wrote: I think most people will be roleplaying some type of character.  What I'll probably do, and what might be a good idea for your system as well, is encourage new players of your system to play a character that strongly resembles themselves.

If they care about min/maxing then they should play some kind of brainiac that's constantly contrasting even the most minute differences between different objects, courses of action, etc. in order to find the most efficient one.

Here I am interacting with people that have their own, albeit sometimes clichéd or generic, personalities, their own background, even if it is only rather briefly covered, etc.  It feels more like I'm interacting with real people and hence my conscience pushes me a lot more in these kinds of cases to behave as if I really was a jedi and someone was asking for my help.

My point is, while everyone may jokingly consider plundering the caravan that they are supposed to be protecting, not everyone will actually do it.  There is, I think, a misconception about roleplayers that they are all Gamist and will bend the rules to maximize their abilities.

I came to the conclusion that non-Gamist oriented RPGs don't need to be balanced, per se, because if someone wants to play an elf it will be because they want to play an elf, not because the elf has better stats than the human.

They aren't your audience, your audience is the people that will want to try different things, different approaches, different characters, in order to experience your world.

Anyway, here it is.  There are currently 34 skill groups and 145 subskills.

wrote: Alright, I feel I should try and correct this now before it creates lasting confusion: what KIND of "Simulationists" though? You realize there's more than one type, right? That many Sims won't like a crunchy, character-centric game? Because some Sims are in it for the exploration of some other element of the game, like setting, and the characters are treated/considered as nothing but their eyeballs? That neither "realism" or "complex mechanics" define "Simulationism"?

Crunch and fiddly bits do not Gamism make. Folks are confusing techniques and mechanics with styles/goals-of-play.

Given those issues, I think this thread and your design would be better served if the GNS terminology is simply avoided, as I've noticed the ideas being expressed about what comprises what and what each group does/likes are overly simplified and often just wrong, setting up false dichotomies and categorizations.

(Tangentially: on narrativists: have you ever read a fiction book or watched an entertainment movie and enjoyed the story? Then you understand narrativism! (It honestly isn't rocket science or alien telepathy. Really!))

However, to appease you and perhaps...So can we get off this train of thought? Because I'm getting kind of agitated...

I find it ridiculous that you posit that simulationism and gamism are much more complex than I make them out to be, then say this kind of thing about narrativism.

Did you ever maybe think that it was a failing of the theory, then, that people constantly "misunderstand" it?

Hey there Gnome.

I really wish I knew how to do the quote box thing everyone here is doing. (maybe im just too lazy to look for the way to do it) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.

It seems you are using a rise and fall mechanic so that when one thing is used the other decreases. That is good. As long as the gains are equal to the losses, I see no problems. Then, a flat-out gain really represents something. But, given your thinking on the three options, I better understand why you resist option one developing into an an increase.

As for tying systems together and still making them modular, this is a problem I am running into with one of my games. Making modular systems is easy. Making modular systems that interact, or talk to one another, is another animal entirely. But it is possible. Here's the little bit of thought I've given it so far.

Bonuses. As long as one system talking with another is related to bonuses only, it doesn't matter if you remove a system, since the only thing that happens is you don't get the bonuses generated from that system. The only problem here comes from difficulty curves. If you base difficulties on certain amounts of bonuses being present (using averages and such) then not having them throws off your calculations. You could use a chart to explain how to modify difficulty based on what systems you are using, but that makes it harder to pick and choose which systems to use, and increases handling time. That is the big limiter, as I see it. Although, if you had a rules set that said something like, "For every system you use, difficulties are increased by X," then you could pull it off, so long as no system offered more bonuses than any other, on average. This would result in more calculations to determine a difficulty, but it might be minute enough (assuming only two or three systems talk to each other in a given sub-set) to be done with only an extra half-second of thought.

As for the morality not tying in to the system to a larger degree, I think its a mistake. It seems to me like more than anything else, you want people to use this system. You want players to get "in character" and stay there. And, in character, you want them to change opinions and views, you want them to grow and evolve. And you want this morality system to guide them. That is all well and good. If your game were about morality only, and nothing else, that would be fine. But, your game is about a whole lot more it seems. You have other systems you want to use, and this one is only tangentially connected at best. That means that a player could play your game and never encounter or want to encounter the morality system.

Now, I understand you want to not close off people. Noble goal, one I happen to be doing and support. But at some point, you have to decide which is more important, an engaging, sound system, or the 25 people of roleplaying sub-group x? If morality is as big a part of your game as it seems to be (and if its not, my point is moot) then it has to tie in to everything. Think of it as groundwork. You have to have a basic rules system and resolution mechanic(s). They can work differently in given sub-systems (skills, social encounters, combat, etc.) but the base system that everything ties into has to be there. If you make that the morality system, then everyone deals with it, and make everything else plug-and-play. Now you have a game that is always about morality, but can sometimes also be about combat, crafting, whatever. Whatever it is your game is most about should be the baseline system. It doesn't need to be this way, in the sense that a game will break or fail without it. It just makes things a lot easier, and it snags certain target audiences right away.

As it stands, I would not be interested in your game. It seems to take to much effort to understand how every sub-system works and interacts, and the pros and cons of adding or dropping one. But if it had a morality framework like I am suggesting, I would be much more comfortable throwing out things I didn't want, or even spending the time to figure out how it all works, just because I had something to start with that was interesting to me: morality.

For example, I'll use the system I'm developing, which I started a thread for (and where the star wars comparison was made by another forge-ite).

In my system, you have Body, Heart, and Mind stats. You also have axioms, divided into Virtues and Vices. These are chosen from a preset list of axioms, which are divided as the player chooses to make their character. Generally speaking, Virtues are the things a character values and strives toward, vices are sticking points and hang-ups, things the character is struggling with. Every time any action is attempted, you use Body, Mind or Heart, and any appropriate virtues or vices. Opponents can also use unclaimed virtues and vices against you, and vice-versa.

Of the 4 different types of magic in my system, 3 are tied to my axiom system and cannot function without it. Only 1 is separate, and it is easily the weakest of the three.

Now, my game isn't modular the way you want yours to be. But I could easily make it so. I could easily throw out the magic system entirely (so long as I heavily tweaked the setting), and still have a functioning game. And the axioms would still matter, because there are a million others things you can do, and they all refer back to the three stats and the axioms. Remove physical combat? sure! You can still do everything else, and morality still matters. Even making a sword requires the axioms, because your intent will determine how well you do.

Which ties in to a comment I read above. You asked why morality should tie in to crafting. Think about your job in real life. Do you always agree with it 100%? I doubt you do, unless you are very privileged or lucky. Occasionally you have to do things you disagree with. If not, think of school, or anything in your life that you didn't agree with but had to do. Do you give it your all in those circumstances? Are you not the least but reluctant? Imagine a pacifist being forced to use his metalworking to make a sword he knows will be used by the military to kill people. He will not make it willingly, and if he is true to himself, he won't make it well, whether he wants to or not. It will happen on a sub-conscious level. That is why I think morality in a system should tie in to everything. But not for every system, just yours, mine, and egon's, because we all care about it to one extent or another.

Anyhow, I hope you find this all helpful, and believe me, I am not trying to goad you or upset you. If you like, let me know and I'll stop posting.

Cheers!
--Norm

Ayyavazi wrote: I really wish I knew how to do the quote box thing everyone here is doing. (maybe im just too lazy to look for the way to do it) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.

It seems you are using a rise and fall mechanic so that when one thing is used the other decreases. That is good. As long as the gains are equal to the losses, I see no problems. Then, a flat-out gain really represents something. But, given your thinking on the three options, I better understand why you resist option one developing into an an increase.

As for tying systems together and still making them modular, this is a problem I am running into with one of my games. Making modular systems is easy. Making modular systems that interact, or talk to one another, is another animal entirely. But it is possible. Here's the little bit of thought I've given it so far.

Bonuses. As long as one system talking with another is related to bonuses only, it doesn't matter if you remove a system, since the only thing that happens is you don't get the bonuses generated from that system.

The only problem here comes from difficulty curves.

As for the morality not tying in to the system to a larger degree, I think its a mistake. It seems to me like more than anything else, you want people to use this system. You want players to get "in character" and stay there. ... You have other systems you want to use, and this one is only tangentially connected at best. That means that a player could play your game and never encounter or want to encounter the morality system.

Now, I understand you want to not close off people. Noble goal, one I happen to be doing and support. But at some point, you have to decide which is more important, an engaging, sound system, or the 25 people of roleplaying sub-group x? If morality is as big a part of your game as it seems to be (and if its not, my point is moot) then it has to tie in to everything. ... If you make that the morality system, then everyone deals with it, and make everything else plug-and-play. Now you have a game that is always about morality, but can sometimes also be about combat, crafting, whatever. Whatever it is your game is most about should be the baseline system.

As it stands, I would not be interested in your game. It seems to take to much effort to understand how every sub-system works and interacts, and the pros and cons of adding or dropping one. But if it had a morality framework like I am suggesting, I would be much more comfortable throwing out things I didn't want, or even spending the time to figure out how it all works, just because I had something to start with that was interesting to me: morality.

Now, my game isn't modular the way you want yours to be. But I could easily make it so. I could easily throw out the magic system entirely (so long as I heavily tweaked the setting), and still have a functioning game. And the axioms would still matter, because there are a million others things you can do, and they all refer back to the three stats and the axioms.

Do you give it your all in those circumstances? Are you not the least but reluctant? Imagine a pacifist being forced to use his metalworking to make a sword he knows will be used by the military to kill people. He will not make it willingly, and if he is true to himself, he won't make it well, whether he wants to or not. It will happen on a sub-conscious level. That is why I think morality in a system should tie in to everything.

There is minimal interaction between subsystems, and it's designed to allow you to pick and choose. What more do you need to know about the combat subsystem, other than that it deals with combat? Does it interact with other subsystems - it might (it doesn't, but just for argument's sake, say you don't know). If you know that the system is designed to be modular, to allow you to pick up the pieces you want and ignore the rest - why is it so difficult to get rid of what you don't want?

There is minimal interaction between subsystems, and it's designed to allow you to pick and choose. What more do you need to know about the combat subsystem, other than that it deals with combat? Does it interact with other subsystems - it might (it doesn't, but just for argument's sake, say you don't know). If you know that the system is designed to be modular, to allow you to pick up the pieces you want and ignore the rest - why is it so difficult to get rid of what you don't want?

If something is worth doing, then you do it right.

Gnomeworks,

      I understand that you hate pawn stance; that's a pet peeve of mine too. On the other hand, you don't want the mechanics to force players to play out their characters' personalities. That's a contradiction: to make the players play a certain way without making them  :-S

The only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Dan

Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Basically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do". Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

So if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters. Ones that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

This is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible. It is as hardcore because when someone says, "My guy is going to steal from his neighbour" even though he is supposedly his trusting friend for years, you play all the in character results of this. The game runs remorselessly on, with him beginning to get a reputation for being untrustworthy. Perhaps his neighbour will forgive him, perhaps he will need to understand before he will trust him again. You get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it. If it doesn't, then it will be abundantly clear that their characters are incompatible and they will give up on it, just because they aren't getting what they want. On the other hand, if they work with it they will be playing as they want without the rules playing their character's decisions for them. In other words, you could want a strong reputation/social identity mechanic.

I've also explored rules-influenced characters, via mind control rules or later when considering epic flawed heroes. The idea is that people can challenge the portrayal and turn it into something different, but the advantage that the owner player has over any other is that they can say why they do their thing. It allows them to veto roll-offs for their characters intentions by adding personality traits. In this way the rules are the players weapon to play the way they want to. It works, but not for everything! It can really annoy people who just want to show their character though play and not through description on a sheet. And it can slow down stuff so much if your not careful.

Secondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

You've probably heard enough about how characters are just numbers on a sheet. I disagree, characters are mental and social constructs, which we try to make coherent between different people's imaginations, if not exactly the same. This is that an objective of creating a shared imaginary space, and we use paper, pens and conventions to help us do that, among other things. But nevertheless, the generation method, the process occurs inside a human being, as an extension of the processes that we do when expressing our own personality. You cannot remove the people from it until you invent strong AI !

Is this a bad time to point out that any one persons understanding of another being is also exists in their head, basedf on their interpretation of what they have excperienced relative to said person? So fiction or not, when talking about a third party, the experience can be very much the same if you let it be.

For instance in actual play I have made up characters co-workers and relations, and talked about them in a consistant enough way that players were surprised to discover the characters weren't created by someone else with authorial credibility. In RL we would clal this lying about someone existing I suppose.

My point being that while a ton of personality type stats can help the GM be more true to the given setting, and creative, including by providing results they wouldn't have choosen and thus freeing them from the sensation that they are choosing every little detail of a situation that all the people in a game have to find a way to let the other characters come alive in their minds. You can't force it, but if you can't do it yourself you need to learn the trick that will help you.

I myself use a simple few techniques: my NPCs don't always do the smart thing, know everything, or explain why they did anything. I just drop the signs hinting at why they might have done so. A little silence lets the players fill in the world, and if they want to know more they interact with the NPC to find it out.

JoyWriter wrote:
Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Basically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do".

Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

So if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters.

Ones that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

This is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

You get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it.

Secondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

You cannot remove the people from it until you invent strong AI !

A wrote: You are probably the kind of person is very comfortable reading a heading in a book like yours will be and saying, "Yeah, I don't want combat in my game, so I'll skip reading this section." Or maybe you don't mind reading a lot of stuff and then thinking about how it will work. But not everyone is like that, of course.

They are going to look at your system and either have the strength of will to put it all together, or they are going to say, ...

Now lets say that only half of your systems talk to one other system, so five talking pairs, possibly connected, however little they may be.

If they care enough to have their characters be so in depth that they can work against themselves on a sub-conscious level because of their beliefs. As is, your system doesn't allow this. Sure, it could be easily hacked with players giving their characters penalties based on their morality, but that's a weak solution really, since the system doesn't encourage it through rewards. If your system encourages such a penalty through a reward of some kind, people are more likely to do it.

ShallowT wrote: The only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Jo wrote: This is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

Secondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

GnomeWorks wrote:

ShallowT wrote: The only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Reliance upon the player to do what they're supposed to do is not a thing that I want to do. While most players will not try to game the system, I tend to envision the worst possible group ever conceived when it comes to that sort of thing, and try to envision ways to stop them from doing things "wrong," as it were.

Hi GW,

This threads getting a little frazzled. When I last checked it sounded like that you'd grant that players change character persona, but you just wanted them to adjust the numbers to follow what they change too. I'm assuming either they may spend points, potentially having to save up to change persona, or they can just change the values and this says to you as GM "Yes, I grant I have changed my characters personality, by having changed these numbers. And these numbers help you get how he's changed in personality". Which seemed pretty reasonable and useful. If it is what I thought, good, but the thread seems to have meandered from that? Perhaps start a fresh one based on that? If it wasn't, just making a quick post in case it helped your project :)

Hey Contracycle, I'm not really sure how to do this post-splitting reply business compactly, but I'll give it a go:

contracycle wrote:

JoyWriter wrote:
Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Umm, maybe becuase its not a proper character?

contracycle wrote:

Basically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do".

Why would they do that.  Explain.

Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

Yes; but that leads to a game-breaking conclusion: all PC's are mad.

So if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters.

Worse, from my perspective: ALL players play crazy characters.  Thus actual play devolves to: a day out for the insane asylum.

contracycle wrote:

Ones that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

..which therefore becomes GM constraint.

This is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

It is not more flexible it is crude.  If the player wanted to be "a traitorous bastard", why did they not take that as  a trait at the outset and thus allow th GM to plan accordingly?

You get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it.

And in-characer definition allows the GM to plan for the practical eventualities.  I fail to see how any of this justifies blind-siding the GM.

ShallowThoughts wrote: Player 1: Cool, I get to play a <certain imagining of character>
Mechanics: NO! You're not playing the character correctly.
Player 1: Sure I am, that's what the character sheet says.
Mechanics: No! You're interpreting the numbers wrong. GM, you tell him.

The "worst group possible" that I can envision has already dropped your book and gone to play a different game. What's left is people who aren't the worst group possible, and of these, again, you must hope they come at least half way.

"Callan wrote: When I last checked it sounded like that you'd grant that players change character persona, but you just wanted them to adjust the numbers to follow what they change too. ... Which seemed pretty reasonable and useful. If it is what I thought, good, but the thread seems to have meandered from that?

JoyWriter wrote:
So if that is not the issue, what is? As I understood it GnomeWorks is interested in well rounded characters with proper motivations, and it is characters without proper in-fiction motivations that he specifically wants to ban, preferably by creating guides that help people make better ones.

So if it's all about motivation and character realism, how do you deal with a player who is not participating?

Now both of these are extremes, and I suspect it can be too easy to declare that complex motivations are simply incomprehensible and random. I wouldn't say that the PCs are mad, I've already suggested that a character can be found to be consistent even when a player plays them badly; if your good enough at finding motivation, you can turn the lightswitch paladin into someone who uses it as a cloak for his own ends, or someone who believes themselves to be justified in doing a little evil for their greater good. Then you can create situations to tease out the difference. I used the extreme example because I wanted to show how even severely disruptive play can be handled from an in-fiction perspective.

Do you agree with this, or do you feel that there is something about PCs as characters that can never be explained using only in-fiction tools? Something that makes them inherently mad from an NPC perspective? (feel free to defy the question if you can think of a better one!)

Oh yeah, this is serious GM constraint! That's why I said it was as hardcore as the "roll for motivation" idea. It's a fair point to ask why the player did not define their character from the start as someone who will betray close friends, but to be honest many people just don't think about characters that way, they might just do it without considering the ripple effects in their relationships, and this is supposed to be able to cope with such people, even be useful to them. The idea is that instead of backing up and saying "no, your supposed to be the hero", you take the character as played, and have everyone act towards them appropriately. This creates an in-fiction expression of what was un-heroic about their action.

The trick of such a system is supposed to be that people, as learners, will be able to smell out the feedback loops of the situation, and understand when things aren't working, so instead of automating the very bit that the player is supposed to be learning, you put a context around them that deals with them as if they were doing it intentionally. If constructivist learning theory is correct, when dealing with a system that provides consistent response/action loops, people can actually internalise those patterns and get used to working with them. This is in contrast to learning to copy a dice roll system, which although valuable, may not express the multilayered motivational elements of a single action. And more broadly it's like the difference between learning by rote and learning by experiment.

What you call in-character definition I'm guessing means "on the character sheet" definition, whereas in-character definition as in "through play" definition is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It could make planning difficult, and unpredictable players always do, but it might be eased if you have a social system that already gives you the general parameters of response, perhaps even based on the MtG colour wheel, except as virtues you "exhibit" rather than ones you hold to.

given those objectives, I thought the fit was an external behaviourist/constructivist approach that ignores player motivation and treats the character as a black-box that is revealed through play, and interacts with it purely on revealed information regardless of "author intent".

Hey contracycle, first of all I get the idea of metal stats, such as motivations, relationships or something like the what I call the "moodswing" system from Runeslayers, they're really valuable. The question is how they interact with player choice. Now I like incentive systems that use experience or localised bonuses, they're really cool, but what does it mean to use such stats as cast iron limits on player action? Do you generate the character opinions and reactions from the system, and have the player act them out? This was GnomeWorks first idea, but still produces the problem of interpretation "was that really in his interests given what he is supposedly motivated by in this instant?", which is not conducive to cast iron limits, it's too floppy.
So instead, I suggested that you look at the character from the outside: You say that pawn stance precludes complex motivation, and that might be true if you consider the player and character separately, but what if you just look at the two as a unit?
I mentioned before that players can build a characterisation from their natural actions, and you can then impute a character on them, saying "the world sees you like this" and having NPCs react appropriately. You're right that prevention is better than cure, and that is why I suggested that you have an explicit reaction system; it tells players how their character will be reacted to if he behaves in a certain way, rather than telling him how his character behaves.

Your dead right about the social expectations and crazyness, but not all pawn stance play will be outside of those limits. In fact, if you make those limits explicit; just like fire will burn their character or a wall is impassible, then most players, pawn stance or not, will stay inside them, thus making characters appropriate to the setting.

So just like players can learn the combat system and so fit into combat roles over time, they could learn the social system and avoid the problems of being treated as crazy! Actually you say the same yourself, so looks like we have been in agreement all this time, at least in part.

The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

There is a general problem of insuring that players have information appropriate to the consequences, avoiding a sort of injustice that can occur when people randomly insult a king and get their heads chopped off before they know it! One method is revealing the consequences "the character would know" during resolution, another is adding hints in framing narration, and possibly expecting people to use knowledge skills to scope this stuff out.

One method I have used before, which I probably should have mentioned explicitly, is when the GM sets up conflicts as a way of teaching players the ground rules of the setting, especially useful for those who learn by doing or can't be bothered to read the rule book! This is the kind of soft consequence I meant, and your right, sometimes it's better just to read the rules, but after a few semi-dangerous encounters people quickly understand how things work, providing you make them the right way. I hope the same could apply to character consistency

I can't decide whether such information should be on the character sheet or not; I suspect by analogy with combat systems it should be split between some kind of GM record, and something on the players sheet that relates to change. I can imagine in some games instead of a combat map you would have a relationship map and causing alterations to it is recorded there, whereas the player sheet has some more generalised information about what sort of effect their skills can do in terms of social and physical effects. But in other systems yeah, I can see it all being on the character sheet.

As a general principle, based on taking physical considerations out of gameplay, I prefer it if information that should be publicly available is in the centre of the table, just to stop people having to check each other's character sheets all the time to find out their defences or negative traits excreta. It allows you to work the game with less cooperative players (read under 15s) without the game stalling because someone is being stupid.

So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

GnomeWorks wrote:
Regardless, though, what is perhaps more important is not the worst group possible, but the newest group possible. In addition to the worst group possible, I try to envision how a group of 16-year-olds, with no prior experience with tabletop gaming, sitting down with these rules would handle them.

For them, the point of the virtues is to help solidify the character concept, to establish that the character and the player are two different people.

JoyWriter wrote:
So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

contracycle wrote:

JoyWriter wrote:
So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

Which is something of a straw man argument, because at no point did anyone argue for that; GW's proposition specifically contained the caveat that the player can overule the character.

contracycle wrote:

The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

The difference between the two is that in physical combat you know that you are in a fight, and know this when it begins.  The thing that makes social issues different is that they are pervasive and invisible, and if you don't already know what to expect you may find yourself locked into something before you even knew the issue had arisen.  Thus, it is something that benefits from being articulated as a mechanical system even more than depictions of physical interaction do.   Even if you try to go the laborious-GM-explanation-plus-trial-and-error, there is no guarantee that players will necessarily learn the right rule.  It seems to me more useful, in terms of outcomes, and more fair, in terms of expactations, to make the thing as explicit and functional as possible.