Geez, I hardly know where to start with this thread. I suppose it matters that I'm currently really interested in the range of science fiction in role-playing, and I'm writing up a purely personal set of handouts for a bunch of games I'd like to play. I suppose it'll be a problem that my own thoughts on what is or isn't science fiction are necessarily involved. See The Latest at my website for a little bit more about all that, although that page is still sketchy and not-quite-prime-time too.

The game I’m posting about is The Exchange, by Levi Kornelsen (link below), using the setting and what I consider to be the primary concepts in an older game called Justifiers.

Background: Justifiers was published as a series of small paperbacks in the late 1980s, the first being the core rules. My take on it is 100% in agreement with what I see widespread on-line and in dialogue with other role-players: the setting is widely appreciated and even loved, but the system is horrid. I've played it and again, I agree fully. Here's my first crack at the Justifiers piece, which I gave to the players at the con in very slightly earlier form. Because it's a rough draft, I'm making it available only for discussion here. Please do not distribute it or upload it elsewhere.

What excites me is that I think Levi Kornelsen's game in design, The Exchange, is really well-suited to the setting. His general page is here, but I used the link at the bottom of that page for the 2.0 version. This is important because I think the 2.0 version is much better than the more visually obvious 3.0 he has on his page.

For those who don't know the setting and don't check out my file, then basically, Justifiers is about corporate slavery, a technological ethnic minority, globalization, and colonization. The characters (Betas) are humanoid-animals - not Furries, in my opinion - who on paper might be able to buy off the cost of their own production through service to their parent corporation, through enabling that corporation to exploit new planets. You can find my handouts for all the pre-generated characters here, which also include some important system notes.

For those who don't know The Exchange and don't check out those files, then the one thing you have to know from the start is that the numbered scores do not differ in effectiveness – instead, every ability is worth one die. The numbers indicate the order in which they may be employed in a conflict, and you have to "go up" with every new announced ability.

My plan was to use only the player-characters actively to conduct the mission, in terms of rolls, with the other characters used mainly for Color in those scenes, and to use the NPC mechanics specifically for conflict between them and player-characters. This turned out to be a very, very functional plan.

For the missions or mission overall, I set up "the planet" as a character or foe, with twenty abilities, the maximum allowable for player-characters, so I figured it was a good indicator of fully-developed bad-assery. It's also kind of neat that you only have to prep one thing for the whole mission.

Radium-Animated Goo 1, Spider Furball Biters 1, Abrasive Mist Winds 1, Tangley Swamps 1, Baffling Equipment Readings 1
Goo-Dripping Floaty Orb 2, Confusing Dodger 2, Mob Attracter 2, Rational Pleader 2
Deep Wounder 3, Mind-Altering Insight 3, Isolating Trapper 3
Radium Poisoning 4, Empathic Seeker 4
Radium Conflagration 5
(on reflection, I might consider switching Radium Conflagration and Mind-Altering Insight, but it worked really well as written anyway)

To get what I'm after with this, you also have to understand Injuries in The Exchange, big-time. Injuries are added traits to your opponent, which you can call in during later exchanges with them. Sometimes a conflict can include strung-together exchanges, so this "later" can mean almost immediately or much much later or anything in between. You give them whatever numerical score you want, which is quite fun in application.* And crucially, if you get injuries lined up in a numerical sequence, then they themselves become a pseudo-character which can attack you and - uniquely - knock you out of play.

OK, therefore, defeating an opponent in The Exchange comes in two fashions: either one side has "had enough" at the end of a given exchange, and gives; or that same side has accumulated enough injuries for the injuries to take on the pseudo-character role, which is much more drastic. So! What this means for my prep is that I would simply run conflicts with the above 20-ability character, over and over, and let the players decide when they were ready for the "this is it" conflict that they'd hope would knock it out of play. The planet might lose conflicts, sure, but until it was taken out for real, the mission wouldn't be over. Which is another way of saying they'd be trying to inflict lots of injuries (and define them, and numerically "shape" them) through the earlier conflicts. Note that this also leaves open the possibility for player-characters to accumulate injuries themselves, be knocked out of play, and so on, with the larger possibility that the planet would be able to make them fail the mission.

So I went into the game thinking in terms of two basic dynamics: the mission itself, in however many conflicts the players wanted to go into before really trying to "take it down," and leaving open whatever conflict-goals or tactics they settled on to do that; and (2) the interactions of crew members, and what the players feel in the moment about what they want to do with that. Sort of like Bliss Stage, actually, although including rolls in the "interludes" when needed.

The people who joined me were Jamal, Faith, Ralph, and Jeremiah (a Justifiers fan, very enthused about actually seeing it played with a usable system). Jamal chose Shelly, the arguably sanely-self-centered Coyote Beta Pilot; Faith chose Joanna, the gorgeous but embittered Gamma Fox (note, not a Beta) who had basically been shanghaied into Justifying; Ralph chose Gavin, the steady and assimilationist Bighorn Sheep Beta Captain; and Jeremiah chose Darcy, the competent Tiger Beta Security Officer who harbored private doubts about Justifying. That left me, as NPCs, the two disgruntled engineers, the coldly ambitious second-in-command, the gung-ho scout, and the other shanghaied crew member, the former tutor turned doctor. As I saw it, any of the characters could be chosen as player-characters for good session potential, but the really hot ones were Darcy, Joanna, Edgar Allen, and possibly Rogelio, so having two of them as PCs was peachy.

Oh! One other rules-thing: both corporate rank (similar to military rank) and Buyback are hugely important in the Justifiers setting. I had the cunning idea that these would be starting injuries in Exchange terms. The rank idea was that if you outranked someone (in setting terms, not in Exchange numerical terms), you can call in their rank as a die on your side; I enjoyed the idea that your own rank never benefited you directly and couldn’t be called in as an ability in the ordinary way. Buyback would  be similar, and could play a role in determining what policies are exerted toward the character for an upcoming mission, as well as act as the basis for trying to get free of the corporation – effectively you’d have to “kill” your Buyback. Both of these are discussed in some detail in the essay or handout or “piece” or whatever it is we call what I wrote.

Whew! This post is getting long, so I think I'll save the account of the mission itself for a later post. We ran a number of conflicts with the planet, beginning with beaming into nearby space and getting into the atmosphere and landing, then a lot of scouting and some targeted missions like getting specimens of various things. Those were all punctuated by the social/interlude situations, most of which included diced conflicts, all of which brought out the different characters' takes on their Justifying.

To summarize, they did subdue the planet, but at a moral cost which they, or at least some of them, did not feel until it was too late. The fuzzy-spider creatures turned out to be trying to strike a deal with them. Edgar Allen, one of my NPCs, even fought against the rest of the team in the final conflict, and they killed him. And as it turned out, the planet did gain one advantage – the final conflict established an insurgency “injury” which would persist, setting up the nascent colony on the planet for strife.

As far as “interlude” play went, the conflicts that arose were fun and illuminating all the way through. Faith really got into her Gamma character’s situation, but there were some great bits with Lyle, the harshly-intellectual Beta pangolin, and Gavin’s confrontation with the disgruntled engineers, and stuff like that. The social and psychological injuries which accumulated from those scenes all played well into later scenes too.

Now, for a moment there, and well into play, I was beginning to think that I was playing with a bunch of evil-minded colonial fuckers dedicated to the corporate ideology. No one was responding much to the problematic content, or it didn’t seem like it for a while. Ralph played Gavin firmly in the written constraints as utterly committed to the mission, and more surprisingly to me, Jeremiah had Darcy put aside his doubts and also play the mission quite straight. But I was pleasantly wrong. During the final conflict, I could see what I can only describe as a “ripple” of reaction across the table. Phrases like “Now I feel bad!” were delivered in an enthusiastic way, and someone made a darkly-portentous statement about how their character wouldn’t be so gung ho next time. I didn’t realize how deeply these were felt until we ended play and talked about it for a while. (This was one of those finish-play, then rave-about-it sessions.)

I had successfully gone with my plan to have one “advancement” step take place halfway during the session, and I really should have followed up with doing another one at the end, before concluding play. I didn’t though, mainly because I forgot or wasn’t quite keyed into the timing. But in the discussion afterwards, at least a couple of people were really enthusiastic about how they’d “advance” very differently from the way they’d done it during the mission. So my note to self is to do it this way again, but fully as planned.

This was one of the most enjoyable games I've played in a long time, for tons of reasons. First, as plain old gaming experiences go, it was smooth and internally-paced, totally unproblematic in terms of mechanics and more importantly, knowing what to do next based on what just happened. Second, everyone at the table really made the characters their own, just as I tried to emphasize in the handouts. We had no idea which way various characters would jump, and given that, Edgar Allen's moral refusal was very much like plain old role-playing based on events at the table, one of many at the table, rather than a GM-imposed plot device. Third, the overall color and setting issues hummed - I think we were all 100% into the look and feel of things, informing all the decisions and expressed by us in and out of character. Even the humorous table-talk, about Gavin's funky helmet which accomodated his horns, or the potentially-disruptive acknowledgment of the "crazy coyote" stereotype, worked positively into this overall grasp of what we were talking about and what was happening.

Further play isn’t possible in this case, which is too bad. Among other things,  I would really like to follow one of the Justifers supplements leads in making the beasts/creatures/beings they encountered into Betas, fellow team members or rather, newly-created and enlisted slaves such as the player-characters themselves.

Best, Ron

* See also Frostfolk and GNS aggravation and [Frostfolk, ] Carrying on for discussions of The Exchange here at the Forge, especially the part in the second thread where Levi explains the injuries mechanics to me.

I'll likely stop by later and dig in a little more on details, but I just wanted to hit this one thing first.

Ron wrote: What excites me is that I think Levi Kornelsen's game in design, The Exchange, is really well-suited to the setting. His general page is here, but I used the link at the bottom of that page for the 2.0 version. This is important because I think the 2.0 version is much better than the more visually obvious 3.0 he has on his page.

Hey, Ron, I'm glad you finally got a chance to get this posted up. I'll chew on it for a bit and add some thoughts of my own.

For now I just want to say I had a blast playing it and I appreciate everyone letting me sit in at the last minute.

Also, quick note: Jahmal was the Justifiers fan. It was completely new to me.

-Jeremiah

Ron wrote: Oh! One other rules-thing: both corporate rank (similar to military rank) and Buyback are hugely important in the Justifiers setting. I had the cunning idea that these would be starting injuries in Exchange terms. The rank idea was that if you outranked someone (in setting terms, not in Exchange numerical terms), you can call in their rank as a die on your side; I enjoyed the idea that your own rank never benefited you directly and couldn’t be called in as an ability in the ordinary way. Buyback would  be similar, and could play a role in determining what policies are exerted toward the character for an upcoming mission, as well as act as the basis for trying to get free of the corporation – effectively you’d have to “kill” your Buyback. Both of these are discussed in some detail in the essay or handout or “piece” or whatever it is we call what I wrote.

I am fascinated to read more of this Actual Play, Ron. The rules for The Exchange are a good read, and after finishing them I hope you'll talk a little more about how Injuries work in play.

In particular, I'm interested in hearing more about when Injuries get significant enough to initiate conflicts of their own (and how those conflicts feel in play - are they dramatically interesting? Repetitive?)

Hi,

Levi, thanks for the reminder about the open-source content. I hope to refine what I've already written and include it with my whole "SF RPG project" document, eventually to be available as a great big free download at my site. In this case, it will be very helpful to include the direct rules text, so again, thanks.

Your suggestion about the Buyback and abilities is interesting, but it doesn't quite jibe with my use of the Exchange rules or with the setting - both of which are emphatically my individual interpretation or use, so I'm not criticizing anything about your suggestion as a general thing. But for clarity's sake, as I mentioned in the handout, I'm broadening the scope of the individual Exchange abilities to a certain extent, compared to the examples in the rules text. So the degree of refined detail in your suggestion doesn't quite fit, I think. Regarding the setting, my take is that the science of creating Betas is pretty crude at the theoretical level and doesn't allow for much specification of abilities. To some extent this interpretation of mine reflects my real-life bias as a basic researcher, vs. engineeing/corporate research. They take the animal embryo and subject it to human DNA/RNA treatment and developmental influences,* and who knows how well it will turn out, or in what particular manifestation of features.

Hi Jeremiah! Please post everything you can remember, anything that struck you as effective or not effective or fun, whatever.

Steve, as I understand it, Injuries become "a character" when the same Injury receives three or more ratings in a numerical sequence. Recall that if you win an exchange, the number of successes you get (I forget what they're called) is the number of injuries you can inflict. So if you win by three, you can literally decide there and then to create an Injury of this kind. If you win by two, you can set up for someone else or yourself to "complete" it later.

Now, all that said, one doesn't always want to create such an injury. It's hard to explain until you've experienced the system yourself, but some injuries are inflicted simply to be what they are, a modifier in later exchanges, without much need or content to demand more. This might be because supplemental available dice, which is what such an injury does, are indeed an excellent thing; and/or because the injury's fictional identity is only interesting or relevant to a limited extent.

For instance, my favorite minor Injury in our game was "Shockable," inflicted upon Joanna and Darcy, after they (badly) jury-rigged the ATV to deliver shocks to attackers who'd jump on it (again). So in later scenes when they were fighting or dealing with conflict from the ATV, I grabbed "Shockable" as a source of dice, because the system they'd built would backfire on them. This was fun - I lit up Joanna like Wile E. Coyote at one point in a later scene by using it, and if I recall correctly, Darcy was forced off the ATV in order to avoid it. But then or now, I don't see any reason that I'd build upon that injury to make it a "character" - it simply wasn't important enough in terms of raw content.

Best, Ron

* Affecting the morphogenetic field, to show off briefly

Ron wrote: Your suggestion about the Buyback and abilities is interesting, but it doesn't quite jibe with my use of the Exchange rules or with the setting

Ron wrote: Steve, as I understand it, Injuries become "a character" when the same Injury receives three or more ratings in a numerical sequence.

Thanks Ron and Levi,

The impression I'm getting from those answers is that the decision about how to assign and apply Injuries feels pretty intuitive when you're playing. Same for when to initiate conflicts where the Injuries try to harm the characters. Minor question: did you have any healing conflicts in the game (Did someone try to get rid of the 'Shockable' trait, for instance?)

Levi, that's an important clarification about Injuries, that the series has to start at Rank 1. I'd missed that in my read-through.

I'm not sure how to phrase this question, but (to explain where I'm coming from) I'm really interested in systems that 'help' me GM, by giving me guidance or inspiration about what NPCs are going to do next or about what conflicts I can introduce. I find Nine Worlds, Dogs in the Vineyard and Bliss Stage really good for this, and I have this suspicion that The Exchange might be the same. So my question is:

Ron, when you were GMing this game, how obvious was it to you what the next conflict should be, or what an NPC (the planet) should do, or what situation you wanted to set up? How much help did the rules give you with that?

I'll start off by saying that of the 5 or 6 games I tried at Forge Midwest (all new to me), this was probably my favorite. Part of that was the setting, part was the system, and part was the scenario.

I think my favorite thing about the Exchange system is how even though it's really simple & straight-forward at face-value there's some depth there that sneaks up on you. They pyramid structure of traits seems a bit odd at first (at least, it did to me), but then you start to realize that those level 1 traits are your goto traits -- the traits you break out first, sort of like surface traits. But as you go up the pyramid and have less choices at each level, you find that those traits are the things your character is digging deep for, the parts of them that come out under more extreme duress. Ron touched on this a bit during the game and can probably put it to words better than I can if what I said isn't very clear.

Another thing we talked a bit about at the table that I think most of us agreed on is we'd be interested to experiment with different die sizes. Maybe go up to a d8 or d10 and see how the wider range of numbers affected how conflicts played out.

I did like the injury mechanic, but there's a part of me that wishes there might have been more guidance as to what level an injury should be placed at. There were a few times, especially at the beginning with the first few injuries, where we weren't quite sure how to make that decision. Towards the end, once we realized a series of injuries could be considered a separate character in a conflict, we just aimed at that. I guess it sort of comes down to what Ron was talking about: sometimes you want injuries to build up and form a sequence, and sometimes you just want to have an injury there that won't necessarily be part of forming a separate injury character.

As for the scenario itself, I loved how tragic it turned out to be. I forget the exact sequence of events, but at one point Joanna had to make the call that the lifeforms on the planet weren't sentient and she stuck by that call even later when we were starting to become certain that wasn't the case as the indigenous life seemed to be trying to communicate with us. I remember one scene in particular where the creatures (I think they were spider-like?) were making obvious peaceful gestures and we just opened fire on them. That really punched me in the gut a bit, and I think the other players felt the same way, especially be the end of that conflict.

If we can get the same cast of folks at Forge Midwest next year, that would be awesome, and I'd totally be up for seeing how things pan out.

Hi there,

Levi, I may have been working with an earlier draft, but that limitation of starting an Injury at 1 doesn't appear in my copy of 2.0. In fact, there's a short section about being able to set it anywhere. We played around with that particular option during play and I don't see any particular downside. Is there a play-experience you can describe that led you to focus on 1 being the starting point?

Steve, my answer is "all three together" to an extent, but I should emphasize that my primary ambition was to bring out what I perceive as the main strengths of Justifiers. So what to do next in a given scene was very strongly informed by thematic tension considerations, in that I was personally invested in seeing as much personal crisis about the issues-at-hand as possible, and when possible, exacerbated by the dangers of the mission itself. Since the setting is practically nothing but those issues in the context of immediate danger, I found it easy to draw upon simple content and place some aspect of it front and center in every "next go" I had.

I'd be interested in your thoughts about the PDFs I've posted on that page at my website. In each case, I've tried to summarize the parts of the game I find most thematically exciting, especially at the intersection of system and setting. In my experience, when I'm excited about that, and when the other people at the table are as well, through the medium of their characters, then scene-framing and situation-development become hyper-intuitive for me. I hope the handouts even in their rough form can help generate that kind of enthusiasm.

Jeremiah, that punch in the gut was really apparent to me all 'round the table, during that last fight. I don't think anyone really liked seeing Edgar go down either. Wasn't your character one of the guys who shot him, too?

Best, Ron

Ron wrote: Levi, I may have been working with an earlier draft, but that limitation of starting an Injury at 1 doesn't appear in my copy of 2.0. In fact, there's a short section about being able to set it anywhere. We played around with that particular option during play and I don't see any particular downside. Is there a play-experience you can describe that led you to focus on 1 being the starting point?

Hiya,

Here's what we did, best understood as what I said we were to do. It's not too much different from the textual way as you've clarified here.

When and if an Injury became rated in three numbers in sequence, it became a "character" who could strike its bearer (can't think of a better word). So we knocked down the threshold by one (three instead of four) and it could be located anywhere in numeric sequence. So if you were ultimately saddled with Bleeding 3-4-5, that would count.

I found this to have fun applications. Having a double-scored single-named injury "waiting" at the higher values played a little differently from having a few of them, all different, down at 1, for instance. But any of them could become a character, and I liked the flexibility and wide variety of consequences that could lead to.

I should also clarify a little bit of how I as GM "played" such "characters." They weren't all the same. Some could attack entirely "on their own" when they (i.e. I) felt like it; others did so only in certain circumstances, such as the Shockable whenever either of the characters in question was dealing with the ATV; or only in conjunction with someone else's conflict with the Injured party. The distinction among those three options depended completely on the nature of the Injury and was non-problematic for me in practice.

Best, Ron

Thanks for those answers - I've been finding this thread fascinating. In fact, it's inspired me to play around with combining The Exchange with Vincent's monster-generation system from Afraid. In a similar way to Ron's 'the planet is the adventure', I've created a few Afraid monsters (which I've given six levels of traits). Doing that's helped me see how you can use that single piece of prep as the basis for a session (and I'm really excited by the results).

I'm looking forward to hearing more from everyone in the session: How you used your prep (the planet as a single character) in play? What triggered the switch between mission and social/interlude scenes (and how did those social scenes play out)? and - from this quote ...

Since the setting is practically nothing but those issues in the context of immediate danger, I found it easy to draw upon simple content and place some aspect of it front and center in every "next go" I had.

Ron wrote: When and if an Injury became rated in three numbers in sequence, it became a "character" who could strike its bearer (can't think of a better word). So we knocked down the threshold by one (three instead of four) and it could be located anywhere in numeric sequence. So if you were ultimately saddled with Bleeding 3-4-5, that would count.

On re-reading this thread, I realized that I never responded to Steve.

I should clarify a little bit about those documents. First, they were authored by me for my own gaming use, to accompany verbal discussions with people I play with regularly. They aren't yet in any kind of shape for general or public use. Second, I printed them for use during Forge Midwest, but did not author them for that use, and in the case of The Exchange in particular, there's a profound disconnect between my pre-con (and I mean totally pre-con, written without any thought to specific upcoming play) "How I'm gonna play it" in the general document, which are not very good anyway, and the practical let's-do-it character handouts for the con in the second. So I strongly recommend not trying to read any of this as a unified, rhetorically sound instruction manual.

To address your points specifically:

... I got your point about the risk of actual play producing a weak, safe answering of the premise. However, at first I didn't see the link between 'genuine danger + exciting situation action' leading to 'social and political decisions grounded in experience. This is what I think you're getting at:

+ Characters have a difficult (but genuine) possibility of achieving buyback
+ That's coupled with them facing genuine danger in the service of a very probably unethical corporation
+ Which leads to characters needing to make real decisions about whether or not to serve the interests of that corporation (and needing to answer bigger questions about how to live their lives).

I'm a little less clear on things from the character creation section on. Buyback at Level 1 seems to be pretty easy to buy your way out of (and I'm not entirely sure where Buyback comes from; I'm guessing it's the two underlined 'species' traits?)