1. What is your game about?

Mayhem is about the fabric of sentient culture, as expressed through mythology. Normative behavior and mythology evolve together, and influence the course of civilization.

2. What do the characters do?

The characters experience life in their world as mediated through their culture and mythology.

3. What do the players and GM do?

The players replace their own cultural and mythological norms with those of their character. Then, they describe their character's in-game behavior based on these assumptions and beliefs about the world.

The GM facilitates this by generating the myths, cultures, and geography of the game world, and describing these to the players.

4. How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

There are two settings. One is a meta-setting: using tools from comparative mythology, the game provides abstract schema upon which to build plausible myths and corresponding cultures. The other is a specific instance of this schema which I have lovingly handcrafted as an example for GM's. The setting is rich in myth which is shown to interact with the state of each game-world culture. This reinforces the two-way link between myth and behavior that the game seeks to depict.

5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?

Character creation begins with the selection of a game-world era in which to role-play. The player examines available cultures, selects one, and chooses a social role within that culture for his character. On the basis of this role, he generates family status, in-game property, and a personal history. He develops a Personal Narrative based on cultural norms: this is a collection of phrases or paragraphs detailing his relationship to the core myths of his society. He rolls dice to determine what his physical limits are.

This reinforces clear perception of the Myths which drive a culture, at the level of individual behavior and attitudes. Each of us constructs our own personal narrative out of the spectrum of stories available. A culture is not a monadic set of totally consistent myths: there are many threads in each mythology, many of which can be set directly in opposition to each other. A character is a tool for examining the relationship between the story that an individual crafts for himself, the greater space of myths available in his culture, and the effect that this relationship has on behavior.

6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary?)

The game rewards actor stance play. The closer a player comes to immersing themselves in game-world myth and cultural norms, the more they-as-character react to in-game stimuli as plausible inhabitant of the game-world would react, the more they are rewarded.

Meta-gaming is punished.

7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished?

I am unsure. Experience points are awarded for character actions which are consistent with the character's personal and societal myths. These allow the player to improve their character's in-game social standing and abilities. For example, a Druid accumulates XP by performing specific rituals, making use of their oral literature to advise high-status individuals of their culture, and teaching others. After enough XP has been accumulated, the Druid can "unlock" more powerful rituals, such as elaborate sacrificial rites involving an entire community which can have dramatic in-game effects.

8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

Narration takes a back seat to credibility. The Players, if they so wished, could chose to play farmers or villagers. Nothing much would "happen," but they would get a chance to explore, in-depth, the religion, myth, stories, and month-to-month year-to-year folk culture of an alien people. I am about to run a few sessions in exactly this idiom. I will post the results.

Conventionally, players will tend to choose professions and roles that involve travel across the game-world. More stuff "happens" as they interact with different cultures and people, generating a plot, but this is secondary to their exploration of the interfaces between cultures through myth and narrative. Since players like to pick characters from a diverse background, it will often be the case that the party is in an area in which their own culture dominates, with a group of strangers in tow. This is a fascinating tool for exploring the interactions between differing societal myths and narratives.

9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? Why should they care?

The game provides a rich storehouse of myth and history for the players to explore, through characters embedded in the context from which those myths arose. The game is meant to go on through several character generations. The players can watch and participate in the give-and-take between myth and behavior.

10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

I have started a separate thread for this topic. Briefly, I am attempting to integrate task variance, character skill, physical limits, and task difficulty to provide a strong sense of in-game causality.

11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

The resolution mechanic is meant to provide a strong sense of in-game causality. This would reinforce the player's sense of their character as an entity in a consistent world.

12. Do characters in your game advance? if so, how?

Each profession represents a pool of expertise and knowledge developed by the character's culture. A profession is organized into abstract "abilities" which are shown in a tree format. The player spends XP and time to improve themselves professionally, gaining nodes deeper into the tree, which represent greater professional development, altering their personal narrative as it changes their social status and efficacy in the game-world.

13. How does the character advancement reinforce what the game is about?

Implicit in any professional subculture is the narrative of personal improvement and achievement. The advancement shows the character's evolving personal narrative as embedded in their chosen profession(s). This changing personal narrative forces corresponding changes in how the character relates to society's myths as a whole, providing yet another "hook" for the player to feel the dynamic, living nature of the in-game myths and their impact on the individual.

14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?

For the GM, the game provides source material and tools with which to weave a plausible fabric of myth and culture. I have drawn on anthropology, comparative mythology, and history for this. The rulebook includes a fairly extensive annotated bibliography of the sources I used to construct the meta-setting. I think that many GM's will enjoy this.

The game produces a virtual space with a powerful focus on the interactions between myth and individual and societal behavior. The players should be able to immerse themselves in that space using their characters as vehicles, and think largely in terms of game-world culture, myth, and logic.

15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?

The various ways in which magic is integrated into myth receive extra attention. Each magic based profession has a wildly different style for casting spells, and all mechanics are unified under one "grand universal theory of how the universe works."

The system is programmable. For the Sorcerer (a laborer specialized in magic, and thus found only in city-states and other associated cultures) spells are described by flow-charts, which players can create and arrange to their own ends. The components of the diagrams (boxes and arrows) are given, the players may arrange them in any way they see fit. This system is patterned after the finite state machine in computability theory, and can be sued to express many creative patterns.

Magic is integrated into the culture of the world: in-game entities do not find it frightening or odd, it is simply a part of life.

16. Which part of your game are you most excited or interested in why?

I am interested in the experience of the players and the experience of keeping up a virtual world that responds vividly to player action. Also, I am interested in the meta-issues that come up when we play a role playing game (itself a form of mythmaking and story telling) that focuses on the relationship between society, the mythology, and the individual. Using creative myth to explore the impact of myth on sentient life is appropriate and pretty amusing to me.

17. Where does your game take the players that others can't, don't, or won't?

My game places heavy emphasis on swapping out of game culture for in game culture in the mind of the player. To fully experience the mentality of an in-game entity is the goal of play.

Also, the programmable magic system is totally deterministic. There is great potential for creativity and exploration of system there.

18. What are the publishing goals for your game?

Eventually, I want to make a nice set with a big map and a GM book and a player book and some cards. I will have pdf's for all the books, available for free online. I will print and bind the books and cards at a local copy shop for my own use. After I figure out how to generate high-quality maps with a computer (I can't draw to save my life) I'll have a local copy shop print out a nice one on large, poster-sized paper, and probably get it laminated. There will be no art, as I am too broke to afford that.

19. Who is your target audience?

My target audience is me and my friends. I want the meta-setting available, because I have found that when I run games, I often work with a similar set of assumptions each time about setting culture and mythology, which, upon examination, have proven to be surprisingly general.

The people who play in my games will enjoy the exploration of system and the extra flexibility that the meta-setting will give me in generating setting. I will be able to present a more consistent, vivid picture to my players, quicker. They are also very interested in the new magic system, and in the description of character roles as very strongly embedded in myth and culture. This is essentially how we've been playing for the past couple years or so, but I am now writing a system to support that properly.

So, audience size: 10 - 15 people, plus whoever finds the game on the internet and feels like printing it out.

I just noticed that I posted my power 19 with no specific questions. Shame on me. Here are some questions:

• Are there any already-written games that treat this sort of objective? Maybe I am missing some sources that I could really be learning from.
• Does it help to elaborate, in the rulebook, on the meta-physical idea behind the character generation process? I consider character generation to be one of the few meta-game activities that a player will participate in: generating a "likely character" whose back-story and family tree are then retconned into the game world.
• The power 19 (and my rulebook draft) do not treat game-world power dynamics. A game that tries to model society should have a system for handling how in-game social status works. I am lost on this. I have always been very suspicious of things like "charisma" ratings and using dice to resolve social interactions. Is it enough to include a hearty dollop of expository writing on per-culture power dynamics, and telling people to "just role-play it" or would people enjoy some exploration of system there? Are there any games that handle this in an expressive way that I could examine?
• I need a consistent way to handle knowledge and memory. Currently, I just let characters know things that they should know based on their in-game roles, and when a character attempts to commit something new to memory, their crystallized intelligence limit is used in the resolution roll, along with any domain-specific knowledge skills which could help them remember that particular item. Are there any games that handle knowledge and memory particularly well?

Any other suggestions and comments are welcome. I am sure I will think of some more concerns and questions soon.

--Marco

mogunus wrote:

• The power 19 (and my rulebook draft) do not treat game-world power dynamics. A game that tries to model society should have a system for handling how in-game social status works. I am lost on this. I have always been very suspicious of things like "charisma" ratings and using dice to resolve social interactions. Is it enough to include a hearty dollop of expository writing on per-culture power dynamics, and telling people to "just role-play it" or would people enjoy some exploration of system there? Are there any games that handle this in an expressive way that I could examine?

The name "Mayhem" doesn't seem to suit your game at all! It seems much more static than that. In fact that is the bit I'm not getting a feeling of at the moment, moving parts. You mentioned the idea of creating a world that responds in a substantial and nuanced way, and this is something I find quite interesting: In developing a setting in some detail I like to create maps of influence, so I know what will happen if they push this person a certain way, or this comes from outside and sets things rolling over there.

It seems like that kind of thing could be a model for how social stuff works in the game; it sets whether or not you have a change influencing someone in the normal course of events, and so tells you who can get to the person you need to influence. You might have no traction with a man of influence in the town but may be able to influence his romantic daughter via common myth influences, and then get her to help you buy this other farmers land. Tell her a story about a ghost in a pond you say he will drain, something like that. Equally, if that man then falls ill, you will feel the effects through the links you have created, or through other links that he has that might come round to you.

Also there is a big gap between "just roleplay it" and dice; if you structure convincing and influencing, with blank prerequisites for success, (like my connections of mark's favours) then you can still have choices. If an argument does become heated, then it could move into some more random mechanic, as the results are more in doubt then. I'm slowly liking "blind bid" more and more as a mechanic, but dice based ones can work very well too.

Heh. The name is more of a working title, I'm unsure what I actually want to call the game.

I like your point about "moving parts." I am developing a "social currency" model, along with the influence diagram you describe. These are very good ideas.

It might not be made clear in the power 19, but there are fairly large, varied trees for character advancement, which include social aspects. This is, on consideration, the chief source of dynamism in the game (changing character's roles in society and the group due to professional/peronal advancement). The other source is the slower change of myth/culture across time. I should really probably fix this. I like the the relationship map idea for that purpose.

So, with social currency, a relationship map, and personal/professional development trees, does that sound like enough moving parts? Can people think of anything else?  I've been concerned with anthropology/myth stuff for so long that I don't think I've adequately thought through the game for individual characters.

The development trees are, unfortunately, in drastically different stage of completion. The druid is the only one that I would really call close to done. I can post that later today for comments.

Question: Is the better to post the druid in a separate thread, or should I just post it in this thread? I don't want to clog "first thoughts" with [mayhem] posts.

--Marco

Up to you really, three threads isn't a flood, but more than that would be a bit heavy. You could post a thread for advancement trees and start it off with the druid. The very fact you didn't mention it much here means were likely not to cover the same ground!

As to whether it's enough parts, perhaps you could think about the rate at which you expect events to occur; if you want to deal with large scale changes over lives of characters, perhaps you want to make the timescale run in weeks or years? In that case people's social changes should be coming back at them at a reasonable rate. But on a daily weakly basis, well it's probably not meant to be a soap opera, so other stuff would have to take it's place!

That's one way to look at it, another is the dimensionality of changes they produce, like an x,y graph: people may be changing stuff in the social arena, but what areas of their life would they have to manage but don't come into that? I say manage because you've said you want it to have choices, so I was trying to think of what people have to make choices about that aren't their relationships to other people, and where like in a social environment their choices can come back to make more choices.

Another thing to bear in mind, if that's not food enough for thought, is that combining the mythological stuff into each of the consequence mechanics. I tried to do that by focusing on the cultural similarities between the farmer and the influential man's daughter, but I'm still a little at a loss to think how to put it into things like farming, fighting or crafting. I suppose it depends where you want the overlap of actions and beliefs to be, whether they will actively affect effectiveness, or whether they will just relate to motivation.

Hi, Marco! Welcome to the Forge.

That's a lot to digest but I'm gonna try. I'd rather do it a piece at a time, starting with #2. Your #1 is fine for now, but think about it as your back cover text. Would you buy that game? Would you even know what it meant if you read it with very little other context? You want to make that a bit clearer. But on to characters:

2. What do the characters do?
The characters experience life in their world as mediated through their culture and mythology.

I have all kinds of things I want to talk about. I won't go point by point in a huge megapost because I think it will be too much for you and me to process. I prefer to go bit by bit, one at a time, till the thing is done.

Here are some general thoughts I have though. I don't want to lose these. Oh, and please interpret my criticism as overwhelming enthusiasm for your project!

A. If your game is about culture and myth, why do you care so much about modeling in detail the physical causality stuff?

B. It seems to me that demonstrating culture within the game is about introducing "new" behavior and properly modeling consequences. This means you really have to think about how the social stuff works. It doesn't have to be social hit points, but you at least need clear guidelines for resolving social conflicts. Most important, these guidelines/rules need to produce play that showcases social consequences.

C. It seems to me that the game is concerned with a very Simulationist kind of play. Let's set up this world and these cultures and these myths, set some characters in it, and -- not see what happens to them -- see that the right things happen to them. Who decides what is right? The easy answer is the GM, but consider that for it to really work, whenever something important happens in the game, every player has to be nodding her head and going, "Yeah, right, that's awesome." That is, I don't think you want the players discovering the world at every turn, though that can be fun, but rather affirming their vision of the world. Of course, your design goal of actor stance and no metagaming is at odds with editorial control of players during play. You can front-load this as much as possible: the players can define these cultural aspects themselves.

D. Consider dice mechanics for figuring out not how people (NPCs, the populace, cultures) react in social challenges, but what their norm is. That is, you can go into certain social challenges without knowing the answer! The player describes what his character does, and then the roll determines if that is indeed how the people expect him to act. This lets the player stay immersed in character and actor stance while creating cultural details in a sort of subconscious director/author stance. Cool, huh?

I agree with Adam about the conceptual disconnect between the causality-focused design and the myth-producing goal. My game Ganakagok pursues the latter with a tarot-like deck of cards for situation generation; Brennan Taylor's "How We Came To Live Here" covers similar ground. Hunt for Jason Godesky's "Fifth World" design diaries if you want to see a designer struggling to make mechanics fit the setting and even generate it. For the sort of detailed, sim-friendly cultural exposition you seem to interested in, check out Luke Crane's "The Burning Wheel" and its offshoots.

I'm pretty interested in the way cultures are expressed in RPGs.  One of the things I often see that stikes me as both unrealistic from an anthropological point of view, and also boring in play, is the idea of cultures as monolithic bodies of practice.  I'm talking about things like:

"The Bongo-Bongo are polygynous, and so the chiefs take multiple wives.  The commoners wear grass skirts, but the chiefs and other nobles wear bark-cloth.  If you kill an animal, you have to say a prayer to the animal's spirit".

All those things are interesting and plausible cultural traits, but they're not how cultures actually work.  The reality is more like this:

"Chief Arthur has three wives, which most people in the village think is fine, except for a couple of the older women, who say he can't support them.  One of his wives is really unhappy with the situation.  Also, one of the elder women of the village has two husbands, which most people think is outrageous, but she's powerful enough to make sure no one complains too much.  The nobles wear bark cloth most of the time, because no one else can afford it.  Unfortunately, Ben the trader imports the bark-cloth, and he likes to wear it himself.  The nobles want to make sure he doesn't sell it to anyone else, but he's a businessman, he'll do what profits him the most.  Most people say a prayer after killing an animal.  Some people say it's to stop the animal spirit haunting you, others say it's to make sure you keep finding more game.  Some of the younger men have stopped saying the prayer at all, and the elders think that they're going to bring disaster on the village.  Some people pay an old beggar to say the prayers for them."

In other words, it's super complex, and varies from person to person.  I wrote a little mechanic for helping to generate this kind of thing.  You can find it at my site, here: http://simoncarryer.googlepages.com/npcgenerator

Feel free to steal that idea, or use it as inspiration.

Cheers,

Simon

Hello all! Thanks very much for your responses. They are of a very high quality, and have given me a lot to think about.

C. It seems to me that the game is concerned with a very Simulationist kind of play. Let's set up this world and these cultures and these myths, set some characters in it, and -- not see what happens to them -- see that the right things happen to them. Who decides what is right? The easy answer is the GM, but consider that for it to really work, whenever something important happens in the game, every player has to be nodding her head and going,

mogunus wrote:
Modeling social consequences is something that I am working very hard on. I will post my system when I am done. I have a system that uses currency for this. It is mostly based on theory from a book called "The Circular Structure of Power" about community, power, identity, and politics. It may even be playable.

I fear I wasn't clear on some points.

When I talk of seeing the "right" things happen in play, I'm not talking about morally right. I'm talking about "right" as the GM and players see it. The opposite is "wrong," as in, "That's wrong! I don't believe it would happen that way." "Right" is when the players are all nodding and agreeing that things would happen that way, even if they had no idea it would happen that way until the GM explained the consequences of their characters' actions.

I think you're unintentionally hedging on the "who decides what is right" thing:

mogunus wrote:
Further: on the "who decides what is right" question, I would be concerned with seeing what is "most likely" in the world tends to happen most often, so that it seems like these cultures are embedded in a world with physical properties like our own. This is why I am concerned about modeling physical causality in depth.

I really can't think of a good answer for #2. In the default meta-setting, characters would spend their time dealing with the community that they live in. They gather and spend social currency to survive.

As of current, I would say that the GM would help reasonable and intelligent people come to an agreement. I am very interested to know what my other options are. Examples or some illustration would be very helpful. Mostly, I think the dice system makes some decisions, and the DM interprets.

If nothing else, make sure that the acquisition, maintenance, and improvement of these mini-game skills and resources require help from the community in which the characters live.

Better yet, tie it into your social stuff. A fighting mini-game and a priesting mini-game and so on could all conceivably use the same resolution mechanics and all be bettered by cultural color. Martial arts draw on rich culture. Priest stuff (which could be traditional leadership and counseling roles, mythic psychopomping, or game-inspired divine spellcasting) is nothing without the culture it lives in.

mogunus wrote:
On the subject of what the characters do: I've done some thinking, and my answer is "confront the Other."

Setting up the rules to support actions can be done in a number of different ways; you can have a general system and produce examples, or you can start with a single form of activity and work out. Those two ways of building correspond in softwear development to the waterfall method and prototype based methods, where you either work down from general feel or try to refactor and combine separate modules of gameplay, or as they are sometimes called in computer game design, vertical slices. Those priest/farmer minigames would almost constitute vertical slices, and they would be complete if you worked out what kind of stuff you expected to be "on top of them" in terms of how they would each interact with the broader themes of the setting. So in other words, if you can make a farmer act in a way that is not only a farmer subsystem but a set of fun interacting mechanics that cover everything you want within the limits of "a farmer", then you have a vertical slice. Conversely you could be building the social system in one go, from general concepts of how they should interact, and one of the ways I approach this stuff is to leave plugs on the outsides of subsystems, and keep track of the things they need from the other systems to work. That way you can have all the different subsystems setting a specification for what the more over-arcing systems should do.

I really like the "confront the other" idea, I like the idea that the player characters are marked as such because they are people on the border between the familiar and the strange. Now in terms of "other", presumably you want it to be iconically foreign, so instead of being pattern A vs Pattern B, you can't quite see if there is a pattern B, because it is so alien. This would suggest that the job of the players is either to destroy the other or accommodate it, both relying on a bit more understanding of what it is. Now if you are prepared for it, this would mean having characters rebuild their mythology and culture in the light of new information, and perhaps they would be torn between two mechanics, one relating to "the other" and your affinity for it, and the other to your culture and it's tenets. Now the point at which they would meet could be the players shifting the beliefs of their characters as they learn new stuff, trying to get to grips with these surprising events, with all the mechanics tying into the changes they make.

If that is too weird language, imagine that the player sits inside a black box with rules all around, and the rules have to squish the core conflict of the game into that box. The questions the rules ask of the player should relate to mythmaking, and the information it gives the players should relate to the conflict between the other and to their own characters cultural background. Then through the rules the mythmaking should influence the conflict, so that the two are pulled together.
Now all this assumes that you only want it to be about "confronting the other". That is what you said, obviously but some of your original post suggests an interest playing out a worldview that is not in significant crisis. It occurs to me that it might be good to have mechanics both to challenge and to reinforce the old way of thinking, whether centred on the land and technique, or in society and fashion. It could be that in the winter a man behaves like one from another tribe, but in the harvest he comes in to help with the grain like any normal member of his own tribe, and even thinks more similarly for that period.

Thinking again, I'm not sure having a patternless other is such a good idea; it's probably better to have a different culture with it's different ideas and ideals, producing their own specialities and skills, so it's not just randomness, but a proper different culture for them to deal with. Even strange events that are not to do with meeting people could be brought in from different belief structures, so meeting the same things the Inuits meet may encourage you towards elements of their culture.