Forces of Good is a superhero RPG in which characters are measured by 20 Forces that cover very broad aspects that are common to comic book superheroes (some example Forces are Cosmic, Psychological and Totemic). These Forces are used to guide a character's concept (as they are determined randomly through a life path like process) and to create Traits in the game. There are no rules to how traits are created that limit the scope of what they can apply to: Immune to Frost and Invincibility are both traits and they both cost the same amount. The game rules say that you expend Forces to create traits that fit within your character concept, which is derived organically from the random Force pools you were given during character creation, and that the goal of play is to emulate the whole long history of a comic book character, through all its various incarnations, and to see how it plays out. So its a comic book simulation with very abstracted above board mechanics.
The problem came up when a character wrote impervious to harm down as a trait and attempted to use the dice from that trait to respond to a villain's giant snake's attempt to grapple him. When told that he couldn't use his immunity to harm which was understood by me (and from what I gathered, by him) as an immunity to physical damage possessed by his character in the game world. Now, the snakes action caused mechanical harm, but not physical harm, so I ruled that the grappling would not be countered by the character's trait, that, as a matter of fact, was why the snake existed. The player was very upset.
Afterward, at the discussion, every one balked that once an ability was created nothing other than the existing narrative determined whether or not rules could be used, even though the GM was as limited in what he could introduce into the narrative on any given turn. I built a snake with constriction with my points, he built immunity to damage with his... mechanically he still took damage when my dice beat his and he could only use dice from traits that applied in the context of the story.
So where does the cheating part come in? Everyone in the group asked the question, why not just make the trait: Do Anything, and I replied thats because it was cheating. The game states the purpose of creating traits is to model the fictional character you created, and that unless you conceived of a character who would logically possess a "do anything trait" it would be cheating to give him one. The players all seemed to think that this was a weak argument?

What are your thoughts on this?

If players don't understand why they shouldn't make a "Do Anything" trait, then clearly they don't understand the purpose of traits. Affording players the freedom to define traits however they want, you should probably afford the GM the power to veto abusive traits. If the players don't like it, well, they're probably playing the wrong game.

That said, superpowers and such freedom are bound to conflict. Superpowers are innately over the top, innately expansive, innately "Sure, I can do that. I'm a super hero," so when you tell your players they can't, after they've experienced such freedom, they get confused. I'm experimenting with incentivizing failure so players are compelled to make traits that are both good and bad, so that Superman's vulnerability to Kryptonite looks attractive from a character optimization aspect as well as a character narrative aspect. So far its worked pretty well, but every group is different. What resources could you entice players with? I've seen/made games that traded critical failures for the sake of the narrative for the power to momentarily control the narrative, or others (such as Dogs in the Vineyard) that traded failure for more traits... which, I'm told, led to many players intentionally failing in order to load up their character with traits that could then be used to overpower their characters.The former worked pretty well in my playtesting, and I assume the latter works pretty well if only due to to the awards DitV won.

Hope that helps!

Its not that they don't understand why you shouldn't, its that they think its bad game design that you can. The purpose of the game is concrete, recreate superhero fiction with an emphasis on how the 'genre' has changed over time, and I think all the players were on the same page with that.
The reason I'm bringing it (the 'rules' dispute) up here is that I disagree with all my play testers, I think the game functions perfectly without those kinds of controls, because it's cheating, literally, to abuse the trait system. But since I don't have any other play testers, and this perceived problem strongly turned them off to the game, I'm left with a quandry and wondering if people feel that, given the design goals, the a change would be necessary or beneficial.
I have addressed what I feel is the secondary problem (a specific player feeling penalized by having his traits get nerfed by the situation). My solution is to make it so the GM has to ask permission to nerf a trait first, i.e. "I think the grappling wouldn't be affected by invulnerability to harm, I mean, Superman could be pinned down by someone strong enough. Is that okay with you?" If the player says yes, they get 2 bonus points, if they say no, the GM can still go ahead with his ruling and the player gets a single bonus point. A player gets three bonus points if he volunteers a trait exemption that the GM okays. This way, players who don't get to shine scene after scene (because they can't use their traits to address the challenge) get a pool of points that they can use in later scenes in order to really dominate the action/save the day.

Hm, that's a problem I've come across myself in trying to work on more freeform elements to games. I haven't found an easy way yet to leave it freeform, but keep people from taking overpowered ones. I never got it to work, myself. It was easier in the end to simply give a list of possible powers people can take, though it reduces the variety of possibilities.

What in your system makes 'do anything' cheating? Is there a specific rule against taking an overpowered power concept, or is it a general idea that players and GMs should stay away from them? Also, who decides if a power idea is overpowered? I would assume the GM, but it could be the playgroup as a whole that can veto a power idea.

Also, from your original post, what is the difference between physical harm and mechanical harm in your game? Not that it is important to the discussion, really, I was just wondering.

Pat

The funny thing about it is that none of the play testers did make "broken" traits. I couldn't imagine any of them even trying to. Its just that they felt it was bad design that it was possible to do so. So much so that even though it never once was a problem during play, the idea of it made them extremely opposed to the game. I disagree to the point that I didn't want to change the game in order to keep playing it with that group of people, but now I have no where to go to test it... so I'm fishing about to see if there's a compromise position and to see if people think kind of thing is actually an issue or if I just don't know the right kind of people for a game like this. Sadly, the game's been a seedling idea of mine for literally years now (maybe as much as a decade) and I thought it was getting a chance to grow, then this happened and it went right back underground...

It's cheating because when the game talks about making it traits it says why you should make traits... to model your character concept. So its cheating if "Do Anything" isn't something that fits in with the concept you brought to the table, and the concept is constrained by (but not defined by) a series of random numbers so its very hard to just pick the most powerful concept you can think of. "Do Anything" in fact, could be a valid trait. The Silver Surfer's "Power Cosmic" would amount to just such an ability, and someone playing the Surfer would be more than welcome to create such a trait.

In the game the Narrator (GM) and the players compete for scene which they can either win or lose, mechanical damage happens whenever anything bad happens to the players that makes it so the bad guy or challenge in the scene gets away or completes its "goal." The more damage a player takes, the less effective he is at helping his side win the scene.

First: that sounds like a really interesting game concept. Good going.

Second: have you considered whether "cheating" is an useful concept for what you're trying to do? It is very easy for a game designer to write things into his game text, but unless he backs those writings up by creating interaction that actually reinforces his writing, it's not going to amount to anything. Writing in your game text that "making your character invincible is cheating because the purpose of this game is to simulate superhero comics" is meaningless unless it's also fun to simulate superhero comics in the game and that simulation is actually done through not making your character invincible. If not making your character invincible is not immediately a good idea, then players will obviously be concerned about that possibility no matter what the game text claims. It's sort of like Whitewolf game design: tell the players that now they should play a highly dramatic game, but do nothing in the game text to actually create the environment and tools for doing that. If game design was just about telling people what to do it wouldn't be very hard, would it?

To solve this issue you need to make a non-omnipotent character a fun and viscerally obvious thing to create in the game. Telling the player not to do it because it's cheating is problematic because you're essentially telling him not to have fun because the purpose of the game is to make non-fun decisions. The better way to go about it is to give a carrot that makes a non-omnipotent character obviously more fun than the omnipotent one.

Without researching your game in detail, there are many ways to go about this sort of thing. One obvious way is to say that losing has some useful resource cycle influence in the game, the lack of which will cripple a character in a short order. So you can make an omnipotent character, but that becomes a bad idea because real effectiveness in the game comes out of being meaningfully balanced so that the character can actually have a struggle in the setting. Thinking of superheroes, the way I might approach this would be to say that only the characters who are in actual danger and conflict are interesting enough to follow in spotlight, while omnipotent guys are like the Silver Surfer - they just skim around in the background and live their essentially immutable lives without anything particularly interesting happening to them, because they're too powerful to really be touched by the rest of the game's setting. Force the player to choose some weaknesses the GM can hit, as otherwise he's dooming his character to cosmic irrelevance.

Another approach is to make a better character generation system. Saying that "anything goes" is seriously weak-ass in my book. For example, one way to go about this would be to state in the rules that for every trait you pick for your character the rest of the group collectively create a threat that is similarly scaled and now part of the setting. Make your character the Aquaman and then the others will create a villainous Atlantean prince to oppose him, for example. Or make your character omnipotent, and then the others create a villain that is also omnipotent, leading to the sort of stories that Marvel did about Thanos in the '90s - there's always a bigger gun out there, or at least an equivalent. The fact that a character is Silver Surfer implies that for him to have a meaningful story his opposition has to be equally cosmic - choosing to play Silver Surfer directly causes your character to be confronted by Mephisto, while choosing to play a blind attorney causes your character to be confronted by steroid-abusing freaks.

Eero,

Wow, that puts so much into perspective. I agree with you that a game needs to support the kind of play you want mechanically, and I didn't really realize that was what WASN'T happening with FoG. When the discussion happened in play test the whole thing boiled to them going "It's a game, people will cheat!" and me reply that I didn't much care, because that wasn't the point for me.

Character creation is very weird, and traits aren't actually made during play. How you create a character is by listing out the 20 Forces (that are more like super hero genre elements than anything, but they also comprise elements of theme) and rolling randomly to see how much of a role that Force plays at a given stage in that character's life. You then use the random numbers as a basis for a paragraph so of written description of a phase in the characters life. Then you do it again until your Forces add up to a large enough amount to make your character seem super. At the end of all that you'll have a big list of stats (Forces) and three to six paragraphs of character chronological character bio.

Traits are purchased in play by moving your Forces into them, so you could have Cosmic and Physical and put 3 points of each in order to get 6d in "Impervious to Harm." Cosmic because it's a "big scale" power and Physical because its a physical one. Or you could move points from Psychological and Fighting into berserker range, or Cosmic, Fighting, Physical and Psychological into an Incredible Hulk like "Rage" trait. Mechanically, these all amount to attack dice pools that you pound on the scene with and/or soak dice pools that you absorb damage with. The fiction dictates when you can and cannot use traits, but you build traits as you go and have a shit ton of points so this isn't suppose to be a major constraint, you can always prep your character for the fight, it'll just take longer if you haven't already introduced the right elements. Also, absolutely anything can be a trait... Lois Lane would definitely be a trait for Superman, if he were a character in the game. There are more rules than that, but, there you are.

I did kind of insert a carrot mechanic, you get more points to purchase scene presence whenever you say yes to the GM deny your traits (he can still force deny them, and you get points for that too, but less points)... but this still doesn't stop the traits from being created in the first place...

Is there a stronger carrot mechanic? Do I need a stick mechanic as well?

Although I don't think your rule's suggestions are right for the game, the different perspective is exactly what I needed (I think) to re-approach my initial design and maybe come up with something more playable.

That character creation system sounds really cool, I have to say.

Do traits have persistence? That is, do they remain with you from scene to scene somehow, or are you always essentially reconstructing them when the occasion arises?

It occurs to me that designers don't usually have the system pay players a compensation when the fiction is used to find out the applicability of traits. One reason not to do this is the counter-intuitive resource loop it causes: you get rewarded when you failed to make sense. Perhaps you should trust GM authority as the arbiter of trait applicability more? It works rather well for many games, as the basic assumption is that the group in total can manage to muster the requisite amount of trust in the GM to allow him to take this role. In most games it's not intended to be a "fuck you all, I'm always right" sort of attitude, either, but rather the GM is just the voice of the community - he says what anybody could say if they weren't busy playing their own characters at the moment, and his voice is unitary not because of authority but because these choices need to be made quickly and without debate for the fiction to retain its feel of reality; dragging issues like whether invulnerability helps against constricting snakes into the field of consensus is quick to make the game feel more like cooperative fiction writing than a fictional environment in which the characters act.

That aside, I might be able to point at an useful design technique here: you should keep your eyes on the play experience and your psychological model of the reward cycle you're shooting for. By this I mean that when thinking about this you should be thinking of the answer to the following question: how do I make the players be more concerned about character fidelity than overpowering obstacles when they define traits for their characters? Your problem with these concerned players seems to me to be that a player faced with the choice of which attributes to give his character in a situation has to make the choice between trying to win and trying to remain true to the character concept. This is not a pleasurable situation to be in, and players rightfully will complain. From their viewpoint it seems like the system is "unbalanced" because "somebody else" might make a superduper character without regard for the fiction; the real issue, however, is fundamentally internal: the player is annoyed that he has to be his own balance, critical of his own instincts and essentially make sure that he is playing fair when he chooses that trait for his character. This is tiring, and not nearly as fun as when you can act without having to balance issues of effectiveness and fictional robustness against each other. No wonder players feel annoyed.

So, how do you transform that trait-generation step of scene play (or does it happen in conflict resolution?) to remove the need for a player to be his own balance? In other games I've found that one simple answer is to simply use the GM: decide that it's up to the GM to crush any attempts at "getting away with shit", let the players know and watch their worry evaporate; it's a bit funny, but people seem to work psychologically such that they'll be happy to regulate themselves if they know that there's somebody watching over them and making sure that everybody's playing fairly; they won't have to worry about optimizing their characters if they know that the GM is watching to make sure everybody does what everybody wants to do anyway, strange as it is. When I feel especially hippy I don't even say that the GM has to "forbid" things, as it seems to be psychologically sufficient for the GM to simply query the player about his choices: "How come your character is now invulnerable?" is often enough to remind a player to respect the fiction, with the added benefit that the player will tell you if it actually makes sense to him in the fiction, providing a rewarding affirmation of fiction.

Another angle would be to ritualize the trait-creation somehow to draw the player's attention away from the immediate conflict into the issue of who and what his character is. Depending on how often new traits are created something that might work would be for the game to go into a short flashback cycle when a trait is introduced for the first time: first the player states the name of the trait and then some funky minigame is processed that outlines the fictional basis for how come the character has this trait. Could resemble those little boxed text old superhero comics used to have at the beginning of the story about the character's origins, for instance - "Because my character is the last survivor of Krypton..." and so on and so forth. Perhaps the players go round-robin to add fictional details or something to involve the entire group's creativity. The important thing would be to make the trait introduction procedure rest on the character identity so strongly as to make it infeasible to introduce something that isn't coherent against what is already known about the character.

Other solutions can be considered as well by consistently remembering that your goal is to transform the player experience of creating his traits. You know much better than I do what goes on in the players' minds when they create traits, so you should be able to pinpoint the place where interference needs to happen to completely blow this worry about game balance off the water, leaving only a focused concentration on the character's nature in the fiction.

Its just that they felt it was bad design that it was possible to do so.

A great deal of the aesthetic power of Simulationist play, as I see it (and I mean that literally), lies in (a) adding to or developing that package, and (b) enjoying its resiliency against potential violation.

Eero, wow, I missed that rather long and elegant post entirely, so let me delve in a little bit and see what you (and everyone else) thinks of the design so far:

Traits can be anything, from powers to allied NPC's and even Villains and conflicts (you introduce negative aspects yourself to control the rate that they come into play, making a villain pretty much uses up the GM's points so he can gang up on you later). Introducing a trait takes a whole turn (which means the player can't use that turn to affect the fiction in other ways). When a trait is introduced, the player allocates his Forces to the Trait, which determines it die value, and then narrates how the Trait is debuted into the scene. So, if you want your character to be able to fly, you have to spend a turn talking about how he's flying around. This is like if we'd never read a Superman comic before, or even heard of him, and the authors show us him soaring around so that later when he uses the flight to overcome his obstacles, we (as readers) understand whats going on. As far as Trait longevity, Traits last for an arc, which is a series of related sessions as long as the player takes the time (a turn) to debut them. Optionally Traits may be introduced on the fly (in the same turn you use them to affect the fiction) but the downside is they have no stickiness, they just go away later (Bat-Shark Repellent, anyone?)

Originally GM oversight was going to be my plan, but the problem that arose was the reason I thought about giving out the bennies for having your Traits shut down, and although there are a lot of rules about who's scene it is (each player gets a scene for there character in turn), I was hoping the bennies would help the players feel less out staged when they don't get a lot of traits in play.