Well, y'all may remember that I've posted in the past about creating a "Universalis Lite" or something like that. I finally done gone and did it, and got some poor fools on indie-netgaming to help me test it.

The rules are in considerable flux, but if anyone would like to see what something looks like that lives somewhere in the middle ground between Soap, the Pool, and Universalis, please check it out. :-) It was inspired largely by the tres kewl ongoing Samurai SOAP game that's going on in indie-netgaming.

It's called "Topos," and it's intended to be useful for people playing a GMless, email-based game. Minimum of fuss, bother, math, and the like, and designed so that you can easily add a "turn time limit" rule (i.e. "don't post for 3 days, and you lose your turn") so you won't get stuck because somebody stops posting for a while.

We'll see how it actually works in the next few weeks with the playtesting.

I'm going to give the URL in slightly mangled form because I don't want bots to come and spider poor Travis's server, apologies to all but it's the equivalent of spamguarding an email address --

http://www.lostREMOVEthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/Topos
http://www.lostREMOVEthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/ToposGame

To make this a real URL, remove the word "REMOVE" from the above URL.

Peace...

I was wondering if I'd be seeing this here.

From what I saw, it looks like a sound and workable PBM/PBeM/PBW game format... If you really want to call it a game. I've always been really leery of PBM games beyond turn based strategy, because I can't get my mind around how it works. (don't bother. I've had it explained, and it just doesn't make sense to me.) This makes a certain amount of sense, and it looks like it could be quite entertaining. If I didn't have quite so many irons in the fire, I'd probably have jumped on board myself.

I'll probably be following the story from time to time.. Hope it works out as well as it promises to.

Thanks, Lance!

Part of what I'm working from is a PBEM game I ran about three years ago, which was both excellent and terrible. The system is an attempt to help encourage the excellent and avoid the terrible.

To me the "excellent" parts were:


Certain players contributed immensely and creatively to the game, really unleashing their powers (largely through heavy Director stance).

I was following Chris Kubiasek's "Interactive Toolkit" at the time, and therefore made the game really about the players' characters, not about my own agenda for the campaign.



The "terrible" parts were:


The game was bogged down badly when one of the high-posting people got into an interaction with someone who wouldn't post for a week or more, essentially freezing the game in time.

I found myself eventually quite burned out trying to juggle all the various plot threads and engineer interesting interactions with each other. I felt the best parts of the game were player-contributed, not contributed by me.



Hopefully Topos will help optimize the groovy and minimize the yuck.

Looks good Ed, I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays. I've got lots of questions for you about it, but its because Im impressed by what you've done not because I want to criticise. It reminds me of some of the problems I tried to solve with Theme-Chaser and some other half-finished attempts I made to get a PBEM out of Universalis.

Topoi
Have you considered the possibility of ensuring that you can't earn Points for visiting Topoi that you created yourself? That might provide extra assurance that the players will be playing together rather than simply side by side in the same game.

For example on every turn I could write a new ego-centric paragraph about my fabulous Avatar (I'll call him "Tony Skywalker") and keep revisiting a Topos I've attatched to him (lets call it "Power of the Force"). That way I'm earning 3 points every turn for writing a paragraph about how kewl and strong in the force my character is. I can use all those points to prevent more adult players stepping over and editing my masturbatory works of fiction.

PBEMs are really prone to this, there might be some mechanical way you can encourage "Tony Skywalker" (or "Legolas the Avenger") players to play with what other people have created instead of just playing with themselves ;-) Forcing them to utilise the Topoi of other players is just one possibility.

Bribes
Have you considered the possibility that the bribe mechanic might not be rewarding cooperative players, so much as uncoperative players who are willing to compromise?

For example if I'm a good natured chap who is looking forward to participating in the game then I'm going to take care not to write anything that is going to step on anyone else's toes, I'll probably never receive a bribe as I'll be avoiding the behaviour that earns it. On the other hand if I'm planning on having Legolas the Avenger shooting everyone from the trees with poisoned arrows then there will be lots of bribes coming my way. It kind of looks like I'm receiving points for being a d*ck that's willing to back down. (Whereas genuinely cooperative players don't receive anything) Perhaps some kind of mechanics modification to ensure that neither party entirely benefits from a bribe. Im guessing maybe this is where you originally had dice rolls? I can see how the risk element could ensure that bribing is a situation that neither party would especially want to get involved in, trying to find a mutually acceptable situation instead.

Anyway, looks great Ed, look forward to seeing more.

Tony

Tony --

RE: Bribes --

That's right -- that is where the die rolls lay originally, and that is a potential problem.

The thing is, though, the points are not really good for anything except story power. I'm not sure what motivation someone would have for engaging in that kind of conduct to accumulate them. If you're going to act in that broken a fashion, why are you playing the game?.... It's not like you can cash in your Points later on for valuable prizes. You can spend them later on to assure that you get your way in later posts, but then other people can engage in the same kind of extortion with you.

RE: reducing the reward for visiting your own Topoi -- couple issues here.

FIrst off, I've been rethinking the whole "you get extra points for your Avatar's topoi" thing. I don't know what I was thinking even putting that in there. Why should it matter? I think that needs to get toasted. Same points for everyone for every Topos.

Second off... I'm not sure it's a bad thing letting people solipsistically revisit their own Topoi. If they're enjoying the story, what's the harm? If it annoys another player they can Remove or Mutate the Topos.

But you're right that it would encourage group play more -- cooperation -- if it was better to Visit others' Topoi than your own..

I think I'd like to start by removing the "more points for your Avatar's topos" rule and maybe save the "less points for Topoi you created" rule for later.

Mike Holmes has suggested on the Yahoo Group that he really likes a "royalty system" for Topoi -- that you get a reward when someone else Visits your Topos. This was proposed by one of my players, as a fix for a rule he'd misunderstood because I hadn't written it clearly. I'm resisting it because I don't want to make people keep track of who created which Topos unless there's a compelling reason to.

But both of those should definitely be considered possibilities -- Royalties, and Less For Visiting Your Own Topos.

BTW, I'll definitely check out Theme-Chaser. Hope I don't like it so much I throw away Topos and play it. :)

Tony, I have a simple solution for Bribes -- the winner only pays to the loser the *difference* between their bribes. Hence, "backing off" does you no good -- you still commit those points.

Thanks for bringing this over here. This is a much better place to discuss this. Can you port over some of the discussion from the Netgaming thread?

Mike

Uh, all of them? Sounds like a lot of work. :)

Here's my last post if you want to riff from there...

Here's an idea: Edits can happen only on the same turn, at any point
during that turn. If you successfully edit a post, anyone who posted
after that has the option of editing their own post too (and if their
posts contradict what's going on, they *must* edit them). Hence,
editing just means "back up a minute to when this happened, and make it
happen differently." No complex contexts between multiple people here.

Editing is resolved by simultaneous secret bid (by whatever means of
"secrecy" are necessary, but the honor system is assumed -- i.e. if you
post your bid on a SecretBids page of the Wiki, the other bidder is
honor bound not to look at that page before he decides his bid), no
haggling. The content of the edit must be specified before the bid.

The winning bidder must pay the loser NOT the full amount of the bid,
but the DIFFERENCE between their bids. In the case of a tie, the
status quo is maintained: there is no edit. This gives the "defender"
an advantage and means that there will always be at least 1 point paid
out for a successful edit.

Remaining issue: what happens to Topoi visited or established during a
Paragraph which has now been Edited?

My previous thought was that they stay the same. I don't know anymore.

OK, using this as a forum to discuss rules systems isn't that useful, cause the main player hacking on my rules (Lxndr) is not a member of this forum.

Suffice it to say though that the whole "editing" thing is becoming very painful for me. What if more than one player wants to edit something? When I edit your paragraph, do I take it over, or do you still own it? what happens when someone edits an edit?

This is getting painful for me. :)

Upon reading up on the Lumpley Principle, I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I may be framing things in the wrong fashion. Talking about editing paragraphs rather than about who gets to decide what happens in the world.

The current structure I have (leaving aside Topoi for the moment, because they are not involved in "resolving what happens next" -- they're Lumpley-neutral, so to speak), is this:

* Anyone can decide what happens next; these decisions happen in chunks called "paragraphs"

* Disagreements about what happens take the form of "edits" to "paragraphs" -- this is different from many RPGs in that usually people sit down and try to figure out what happens, not argue about whether what just happened should have happened (ideally at least). These are resolved by bidding, resulting in a compensatory payoff for the loser.

* There is a special exception for "Avatars," which are the equivalent of PCs. People have total control over the internal state and actions of their Avatars. Not everyone has to have an Avatar.

The advantage of the "edits" system is that you don't have to stop all the time and check whether what you want to happen happens. You assume it happens and let someone contradict it later.

The downside is that writing rules for how to roll back a paragraph is painful. Painful painful.

In SOAP, as in Universalis, if you want to roll back a proposed Sentence/whatever, you have to challenge it immediately.

That's not easy for an email game! The whole challenge of doing an email game is dealing with communication latency. :(

Gah.

Uh, told you so. ;-)

Get Lxndr to sign up here, willya!

One solution would be a more proactive rather than retroactive one. Say that there are no edits at all. Once posted something is permenant. Instead the Points can be used to buy off players to get them to go with your view of how things should go. Essentially you pay them to write things your way before hand.

Thing is that I never really saw edits being all that common. I think that you really need something else to spend Points on. I mean, they serve only one practical function that I can see, which is jumping on Avatars. Other than that, you can only invest them to get more and more. I see the number of Points going up, but not many leaving the game.

Here's something that might alleviate the "post/paragraph" problem. Say that each paragraph costs one to write. You can make as many as you want in a post, as long as you can pay. What do you think?

Mike

Lxndr is allergic to creating accounts on bulletin board systems, apparently. :)

I never imagined edits would happen that often either, but my first playtest game spawned a gigantic horde of Avatars in the first Round, all of them haughty wizards, and immediately people started posting that their Avatars knew/noticed/divined what other Avatars hoped to keep secret. :)

Not the way I would have played, but a perfectly legitimate and likely way for things to play themselves out, I guess.

The way I conceptualized Points was "story clout." In fact in my first writeup of the game I called it "Clout," not "Points."

You pay them to create a Topos. Creating a Topos is essentially saying "I would like the story to go in this direction, to be about this." People are subsequently rewarded for going in that direction.

You get points for visiting Topoi because in doing so you're playin' the game the way people (possibly including yourself) have indicated they want it played.

You use them for edits because you get to have your way (edits work your way) in exchange for playing other people's way (visiting Topoi).

I keep thinking of ideas which if followed up would merely mutate the game into Universalis. i.e. people pay for Facts, as well as Topoi, and unlike Topoi, Facts are immutable unless Challenged.... Might as well just play Uni at that point!

I think moving from a "you say it and then it happens, but it can be undone" model to a "you say it and then it is somehow determined whether or not it happens" model might be a good one.

Gah. I think I've just determined that my whole system is broken though.

RE: "each paragraph costs a point" -- I don't know that that'd work, since a Paragraph could theoretically be of any length.

That might work if each paragraph were conceptualized as a single Fact for purposes of undoing/editing/vetoing it though... i.e. if you break things up, and thereby pay more for it, it's more cumbersome to challenge you.

But again we're moving towards Uni at that point. :)

OK, writing that post and then driving home for an hour with no radio primed me for thinking, and I think I've figured out the direction that Topos needs to move in.

Gonna be a little radical.

I'll post again later.

Gah. I think I've just determined that my whole system is broken though.

Dude...just disincentivize the stuff you don't like. It costs points for challenges, that's good. Make it cost points for naming an Avatar, and give points when a player disassociates himself from an Avatar. Maybe points for contact with Topoi get stored into an Avatar, unusable, until cashed out when the player disassociates from the Avatar. And somehow give more points for contact with the Topoi of other players. Maybe only half the points in an Avatar from contact with your own Topoi cash out, and all the points from contact with other Topoi do. That way an Avatar maintains some value to the other players when it goes up for grabs. Keep edits to the same scene, but allow Insertions of prior stuff into the narrative for a cost. You'll be rewarding players for making use of the Topoi created by others, and for not playing out the "my cool Avatar" competition.

Paul

Oh, don't worry, Paul -- I just rearranged the whole damn structure of the game, bringing it closer to what was original and unique about it, and removing all the complexity.

Everything's different now... :)

Hope I don't scare my playtesters away!

http://www.lostthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/Topos?version=10

I like the general idea of this game, and the implementation in both the revised and previous version; I agree that trying to keep the structure of the rules simple is a good guiding principle.

I was interested in something that happened in the on-going game: One player tried to establish a scene wherein transpired a clandestine meeting, but then the other players seemed to "dog-pile" on with stealthy observers, causing one player to have a character complain about the publicity! Does that jibe with what you experienced?

It's interesting to try to come up with cost structures that provide incentives for what you want to happen, and disincentives for what you don't--including topical "violations" by other players. I came up with this:

-- You pay to write; maybe 1 pt per 100 words.
-- At the end of your turn, you identify topoi:
-- new ones you've introduced (maybe up to 3)
-- established ones you've visited (any number).
-- emergent ones (i.e., ones that you've seen in other players' turns, but you're articulating it for the first time and visiting it in your post).

You get 0 points for introducing new topoi. The player who introduced an established topos you've visited gets 2 pts (if you introduced it, you only get 1 pt). You get 1 pt for articulating and visiting an emergent topos, and so does the player in whose turn you "saw" the unarticulated topos. Once you've articulated it, any time it gets visited, both you and the other player get 1 pt each. You can't articulate an emergent topos from one of your own previous turns.

After your turn, another player can claim "damages" for topical violations: you give 2 points to any player who can identify a topos they established that your turn violates. Note that this is the only zero-sum point transfer; in all other cases, points are created out of thin air.

This pays less attention to issues of game balance than to trying to make it so that there are incentives to "read into" what other players write, and thus to collaborate more closely. What do you think?

Bill

I'm reposting this from a PM to Ed. It crosses a lot of ideas with Bill:


Very nice in general [refers to the new revision]. The part about not getting points for visiting your own topoi is brilliant. That means that there has to be interchange.

I still think that for a true economy to bloom you might need to have someting be pressurizing. In RL you have to eat. If you didn't you could probably get by without a job if you really wanted to (you could live in a cave).

What if the players all just decided to tell five different stories? And didn't establish any Topoi? Or if they did, nobody paid them any attention. Since there's no problem with "running out", players have no automatic incentive to cross-polinate. Not that I think they would ignore each other; just that they can.

So, at the lowest level, have some diminishing commodity (like food). What I'd do is say that each time a player posts it costs a Point. What this does is simply inform the player that they can't exist as an island. They have to "set up shop" and start exploiting each other's Topoi.

Now, other than attracting players to make the kind of story that you want, why make Topoi? There's a strong mechanical incentive against it, namely the cost. In a real economy, there's the concept of "mutual benifit for exchanged goods". Now one can say that players might work on a "rub my back and I'll rub yours" mode, but what's to stop a third party from preying? That is, not setting up their own Topoi, and using yours.

OTOH, why worry when the only thing that's worth fighting over is the story itself, and "preying" players aren't getting much for their Points. So it will work finbe in the end. But there's an opportunity here. Why not give Currency to both the visiting and establishing characters? The Royalties rule. So it people visit not only do they get rewarded, but the player making the Topoi get's rewarded, thus incentivizing players to do it mechanically.

The other advantage to this is that it gives the players an incentive to ensure that the Topoi is really worth visiting. I mean, it already behooves them to do so in terms of the story, of course, but this backs that up mechanically.

That could be inflationary, however. Acutally, I contend that the system already is; for every Point that goes out paying for Topoi, you'll see more Points in the economy after only two visits. The only drain on teh economy is spending to protect avatars. But that seems to me to be too little. First, I'd put in the rule about a turn costing a Point to combat this a little. But you might need even more, especially if you use Royalties.

What I'd do is this. Have the currency that players garner from some end of the process be the formerly discussed "reward currency". Call em reward tokens or something. Basically, the only use of reward tokens is that when a player accumulates 5, they become a Point. Anyhow, allow this currency to be transfered at any time for anything, but not Points which can only be used for the transactions in question (and cannot be converted back into Tokens).

Then you have some of the value of the game being taken out in the conversion. And another way to interact between players as well. As to what "end" of the process to use the reward tokens, perhaps this is the royalty that the player gets.

A more simple way to drain Points from the economy would be to just charge more for turns. In any case, you want the drain on the economy to balance the rate at which you want people to have to visit Topoi. This is the defining pace adjuster of this mechanic.

The idea in all this is to have the mechanics back up the player motives at every step of the way. This double reinforcement will help to ensure that players are informed as to what they're supposed to be doing, and to push these activities mechanically as well. Hopefully making for a more energetic game.

There are probably other ways you can think of.

Mike

(Making public, at Mike Holmes' request, some comments of his and my replies, in private messages.)

Very nice in general. The part about not getting points for visiting your own topoi is brilliant. That means that there has to be interchange.

I still think that for a true economy to bloom you might need to have someting be pressurizing. In RL you have to eat. If you didn't you could probably get by without a job if you really wanted to (you could live in a cave).

What if the players all just decided to tell five different stories? And didn't establish any Topoi? Or if they did, nobody paid them any attention. Since there's no problem with "running out", players have no automatic incentive to cross-polinate. Not that I think they would ignore each other; just that they can.

So, at the lowest level, have some diminishing commodity (like food). What I'd do is say that each time a player posts it costs a Point. What this does is simply inform the player that they can't exist as an island. They have to "set up shop" and start exploiting each other's Topoi.

Now, other than attracting players to make the kind of story that you want, why make Topoi? There's a strong mechanical incentive against it, namely the cost. In a real economy, there's the concept of "mutual benifit for exchanged goods". Now one can say that players might work on a "rub my back and I'll rub yours" mode, but what's to stop a third party from preying? That is, not setting up their own Topoi, and using yours.

OTOH, why worry when the only thing that's worth fighting over is the story itself, and "preying" players aren't getting much for their Points. So it will work finbe in the end. But there's an opportunity here. Why not give Currency to both the visiting and establishing characters? The Royalties rule. So it people visit not only do they get rewarded, but the player making the Topoi get's rewarded, thus incentivizing players to do it mechanically.

The other advantage to this is that it gives the players an incentive to ensure that the Topoi is really worth visiting. I mean, it already behooves them to do so in terms of the story, of course, but this backs that up mechanically.

That could be inflationary, however. Acutally, I contend that the system already is; for every Point that goes out paying for Topoi, you'll see more Points in the economy after only two visits. The only drain on teh economy is spending to protect avatars. But that seems to me to be too little. First, I'd put in the rule about a turn costing a Point to combat this a little. But you might need even more, especially if you use Royalties.

What I'd do is this. Have the currency that players garner from some end of the process be the formerly discussed "reward currency". Call em reward tokens or something. Basically, the only use of reward tokens is that when a player accumulates 5, they become a Point. Anyhow, allow this currency to be transfered at any time for anything, but not Points which can only be used for the transactions in question (and cannot be converted back into Tokens).

Then you have some of the value of the game being taken out in the conversion. And another way to interact between players as well. As to what "end" of the process to use the reward tokens, perhaps this is the royalty that the player gets.

A more simple way to drain Points from the economy would be to just charge more for turns. In any case, you want the drain on the economy to balance the rate at which you want people to have to visit Topoi. This is the defining pace adjuster of this mechanic.

The idea in all this is to have the mechanics back up the player motives at every step of the way. This double reinforcement will help to ensure that players are informed as to what they're supposed to be doing, and to push these activities mechanically as well. Hopefully making for a more energetic game.

There are probably other ways you can think of.

Mike

All excellent points. I still maintain that by charging at least one Point per paragraph posted, that you'll help to keep the economy under control, and inform the players that they need to interact. Small change, easy to track, and big results. IMO.

Your point about the inflation is well taken, however. In fact the larger expenditures could mirror and highlight the growing tension. Perhaps you could have some pacing mechanic where the first player to offer some amount for a Topoi would trigger some endgame.

Mike

Replying to Bill:

I like the general idea of this game, and the implementation in both the revised and previous version; I agree that trying to keep the structure of the rules simple is a good guiding principle.

I was interested in something that happened in the on-going game: One player tried to establish a scene wherein transpired a clandestine meeting, but then the other players seemed to "dog-pile" on with stealthy observers, causing one player to have a character complain about the publicity! Does that jibe with what you experienced?

It's interesting to try to come up with cost structures that provide incentives for what you want to happen, and disincentives for what you don't--including topical "violations" by other players. I came up with this:

-- You pay to write; maybe 1 pt per 100 words.
-- At the end of your turn, you identify topoi:
-- new ones you've introduced (maybe up to 3)
-- established ones you've visited (any number).
-- emergent ones (i.e., ones that you've seen in other players' turns, but you're articulating it for the first time and visiting it in your post).

You get 0 points for introducing new topoi. The player who introduced an established topos you've visited gets 2 pts (if you introduced it, you only get 1 pt). You get 1 pt for articulating and visiting an emergent topos, and so does the player in whose turn you "saw" the unarticulated topos. Once you've articulated it, any time it gets visited, both you and the other player get 1 pt each. You can't articulate an emergent topos from one of your own previous turns.

After your turn, another player can claim "damages" for topical violations: you give 2 points to any player who can identify a topos they established that your turn violates. Note that this is the only zero-sum point transfer; in all other cases, points are created out of thin air.

This pays less attention to issues of game balance than to trying to make it so that there are incentives to "read into" what other players write, and thus to collaborate more closely. What do you think?

Mike and Bill -- I'll keep the "point per paragraph" thing on the back burner. Of everything that's been proposed it seems like the easiest thing to throw into the game without breaking what I've got established right now. :)

A couple of thoughts:

#1 - The dogpile on the "secret meeting" was bad, but I don't see how the current rules could be used to prevent it... you get points for visiting a Topos, but there's no penalty for violating one. If I established a Topos that there's a secret meeting, then how would other people "visit" it? Having everyone put in "so-and-so does not notice the secret meeting" seems just as bad to me from a standpoint of story flow as having them all notice it.

#2 - I'm not sure if this is a rules problem or a problem with getting used to a new set of rules, but it seems we have at least one Topos which can't be visited: how can anyone visit the "Soren is aloof and often amused" Topos, since no one else is allowed to state anything about Soren's emotional state? I personally set up my Topos for Calbert as "Calbert is known for his cruelty" -- that way, people can relate things they've heard about Calbert to visit the Topos, or make comments about him. They don't have to force an action or emotion on Calbert to visit it.

#3 - Considering that Topos is meant for pbem or pbp play, I'd like to suggest that paragraphs don't necessarily have to be added "at the end". For example, I know I'd like to be able to go back and add paragraphs about the meeting on the balcony back where that meeting is, instead of having to keep returning to it when there may be two or three folks covering other scenes interspersed between.

In our current format, we might not want to do that, because it would make it harder to find the new stuff... but in an email game, where players would likely be quoting a paragraph they're responding to, or in a pbp game, where different folders or topics might be set up for different scenes, it might work well.

--Travis

efindel wrote: A couple of thoughts:

#1 - The dogpile on the "secret meeting" was bad, but I don't see how the current rules could be used to prevent it... you get points for visiting a Topos, but there's no penalty for violating one. If I established a Topos that there's a secret meeting, then how would other people "visit" it? Having everyone put in "so-and-so does not notice the secret meeting" seems just as bad to me from a standpoint of story flow as having them all notice it.

efindel wrote:
#2 - I'm not sure if this is a rules problem or a problem with getting used to a new set of rules, but it seems we have at least one Topos which can't be visited: how can anyone visit the "Soren is aloof and often amused" Topos, since no one else is allowed to state anything about Soren's emotional state? I personally set up my Topos for Calbert as "Calbert is known for his cruelty" -- that way, people can relate things they've heard about Calbert to visit the Topos, or make comments about him. They don't have to force an action or emotion on Calbert to visit it.

efindel wrote:
#3 - Considering that Topos is meant for pbem or pbp play, I'd like to suggest that paragraphs don't necessarily have to be added "at the end". For example, I know I'd like to be able to go back and add paragraphs about the meeting on the balcony back where that meeting is, instead of having to keep returning to it when there may be two or three folks covering other scenes interspersed between.

In our current format, we might not want to do that, because it would make it harder to find the new stuff... but in an email game, where players would likely be quoting a paragraph they're responding to, or in a pbp game, where different folders or topics might be set up for different scenes, it might work well.

--Travis

In case anyone's curious, I just added a "Contradictions" section to the ruleset on the wiki. I present one wussy way of handling contradictions, and one radical, true-to-the-soul-of-Topos method.

Obviously I prefer the second. But I was afraid to post it alone for fear that the world would end or something.

http://www.lostREMOVETHISthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/Topos

I think you have to go with the second method (competing versions vie for acceptance), because even if you think you're going with the first (contradictions are prohibited), you'll *still* be going with the second.

Think about it: if you say, "contradictions are prohibited" what you're really doing is introducing a new game-mechanic whereby somebody can say in reference to somebody else's turn, "This contradicts what I've already written." The player in question might say, "No it doesn't--both are possible." In cases where there actually is ambiguity, how can you resolve the ambiguity other than by seeing what other people (players) think? That is, by seeing what they do on subsequent turns?

And while some contradictions might be really apparent, in that everyone agrees that they're contradictions, many will be more subtle. So I think you can only have a "no contradictions" rule if you've either got a moderator to decide what counts as a contradiction, or if you allow players to poll the group and see if _everyone_ (perhaps including the player who perhaps mistakenly made it) agrees that no reconciliation of competing truths is possible. That seems more complicated than just saying, "Hey, you truths are just going to have to duke it out amongst yourselves."

Bill

Good points, Bill. That's kind of how I was thinking.

So far, BTW, it looks like far from point inflation, points seem to be a little scarce.

My idea was for there to be Topoi littering the ground, indicating the direction that things should go, but so far there are a couple of little ones by me that are general, and tons of Avatar-specific Topoi. It's like Points are so scarce people don't want to blow them on anything but stuff for their Avatars.

And when everybody's Topoi are about their own Avatar's, and are fairly specific, it's not that easy to Visit them.

Maybe that'll change in a few turns, since topoi are "the gift that keeps on giving" -- put a Topos out there and people can drink from that spigot as long as you keep the water running. So it's worth waiting to see if people amass decent sized point banks so that they can feel free handing out a lot of Topoi.

but right now, it seems like Topoi are too scarce. If it stays this way for another day or two I want to make them cheaper.

Ed wrote:

...but right now, it seems like Topoi are too scarce. If it stays this way for another day or two I want to make them cheaper.

Here's my summary of, and response to, some controversy on the indierpgs list...

OK, what's being questioned is whether Avatars are a good idea.

Reasons given:

1) Because Avatars' wills are off limits, it takes a long time to do things like dialogue with them.

2) You could accomplish the "get offa my brain" function with Punishing Topoi, which Lxndr is calling "anti-topoi" but which I will call "Topoi of Pain" to distinguish them from the already-in-the-rules negative Topoi. Topoi which take points away from people who violate them.

3) Topoi of Pain could be custom-tailored to encourage certain kinds of behavior and discourage others, allowing people to let others do certain things but not others with their characters.

I'd like to address these:

1) This game is about bribery, not coercion. Topoi of Pain violate that. There is absolutely nothing you can accomplish with a Topos of Pain that you can't accomplish with a Negative Topos, except control the story without rewarding your fellow players for allowing you that control. That's not the way it works. If you want control over the story, you pay off the other players for that control. If you're telling them things they can't do, you had better pay them off for toeing your line. Being able to say "you can't do this, you get nada for obeying my command, but I can hurt you if you disobey it" is contrary to the whole spirit of the game. Not to mention that since players get complete control over when Topoi have been successfully visited, a Topos of Pain is a License to Kill. Either that or we'd have to institute a whole *new* set of rules to let other players decide whether enforcement of a Topos was appropriate or not!

2) This stuff about "but I want other people to make my avatars do things but within limits" stuff -- what that is saying to me is that *you don't really want an Avatar.* You want an ordinary character with a bunch of Topoi hung onto it to tell people how to run it, or negative topoi hung onto it to tell people how not to run it. If you want a character who is *yourself* within the game, like a PC in a traditional RPG, then make an Avatar. If you just want a character who you have a lot of control over the style and destiny of, then just use Topoi. Avatars *do* clash badly with the rest of the rules, but that's because they're there to do something very different from the rest of the rules -- to give you a "PC" in a world where everybody's a "GM" so to speak.

3) The "pacing" stuff is already fixed by the Timeout rule. The meaning of the Timeout is that it's the period that everybody considers an acceptable maximum delay between events. If you are finding it problematic, you need to lobby other players for a shorter Timeout.

What I *do* think needs to be changed/clarified is the question of giving up and taking back Avatar status for a character, so I'm gonna add some rules on that. It seems people took Avatars because that was the thing to do and they don't always seem to really want that Avatar status, so I want to make it easy to flip off the avatar switch and let people cruise with the character.

Ed:

Is there a tenet-setting phase to Topos like in Universalis? If not, doesn't the first player to take a turn basically get to define the game that will be played?

For instance, if I get together with a bunch of people to play Topos and they all just saw the Matrix and are geeking out on wanting to play the Matrix Topos, but I go first and post:

"Legolas the Avenger pulls his bloodied arrow out of the skull of an orc. He smiles and muses that, while making his arrows unbreakable isn't the coolest thing he uses that dumb hobbit's ring for, it's certainly up there."

Well, then I've done a real good job of hijacking the whole game without any feedback from the other players, haven't I?

In practice, IIRC, the game they played had the genre decided up front by consensus. Maybe that ought to be written into the text.

Mike

It's been suggested that a pre-paragraph round of Topos Suggestions would be a good way to decide these things. Since Topoi are voluntary to follow, everyone's desires would be out on the table, and there'd be a good source of points for the initial poster (otherwise he gets kinda screwed since there are no topoi to follow), and if topoi came up that don't get used, they can always be cashed in later on.

Just updated the rules again.

http://www.lostthoughts.orgREMOVETHIS/phpwiki/index.php?Topos

Much simplification. Added one complication (delayed granting of Points for Topoi) which had the side effect of letting me eliminate several other rules.

I also completely, completely revamped Avatars. "Avatar Status" is now nothing but a very specialized, unusual Topos.

Hi! I finally got over my distaste of internet bulletin boards that don't have a "guest function" long enough to register. I suppose I should finally chime in here, being that at least two people (Ed, Mike) posted in here specifically saying that I should be here for this.

:D

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that "charging per words" or "charging per paragraph" is a good idea. Honestly, I feel that charging characters per 100 words or something is a much BETTER way to keep paragraph lengths down than just assigining some arbitrary 250 point limit (or did Ed finally get rid of that?). The particular rule change I suggested was exponential:

"Your first 100 words cost you 1 point. Your second 100 words cost you 2 points. Your third 100 words cost you 4 points. Your fourth 100 words cost you 8 points." Thus, people are encouraged to keep things short but are not prohibited from posting by some completely arbitrary upper limit.

I also considered (separate from or in addition to the above mechanic) that, in order to keep scene jumping from happening too often (which happened in the first Topos game), that any scene change should cost points. Specifically, it should cost some points to end a scene as well as start a scene. Thus a person could say "There, I want this scene to be ended!" and pay points to end the scene. If he also wants to start a NEW scene, he'd have to pay MORE points.

But upon reflection, I don't think that'd work after all.

Ed has made it pretty clear that he wants to keep Avatars, but I honestly don't understand why. Although the new "PC" and "GM" Topoi that he emailed me yesterday (but hasn't told the board about yet) are better than any previous offering he has, I feel that the existance of Avatars disrupt the focus of the game, which are topoi, literary themes and conventions. It's turn-based story writing, to be blunt, and putting a claim on characters instead of influencing the story through literary themes just feels... I don't know. Intrusive.

Ed told me once (I'm paraphrasing here) that he wants to keep Avatars in order to make the game just seem more like a standard roleplaying game (since it still has characters). I feel that it's detrimental, since that rule encourages people to claim characters and say "MINE!" Look, once again, at the wiki game and the clusterfuck at the secret meeting - a large part of that seemed to be the players all claiming avatars as soon as the starting pistol went off.

Welcome to the Forge Lxndr!

Lxndr wrote: I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that "charging per words" or "charging per paragraph" is a good idea. Honestly, I feel that charging characters per 100 words or something is a much BETTER way to keep paragraph lengths down than just assigining some arbitrary 250 point limit (or did Ed finally get rid of that?). The particular rule change I suggested was exponential:

"Your first 100 words cost you 1 point. Your second 100 words cost you 2 points. Your third 100 words cost you 4 points. Your fourth 100 words cost you 8 points." Thus, people are encouraged to keep things short but are not prohibited from posting by some completely arbitrary upper limit.

I also considered (separate from or in addition to the above mechanic) that, in order to keep scene jumping from happening too often (which happened in the first Topos game), that any scene change should cost points. Specifically, it should cost some points to end a scene as well as start a scene. Thus a person could say "There, I want this scene to be ended!" and pay points to end the scene. If he also wants to start a NEW scene, he'd have to pay MORE points.

But upon reflection, I don't think that'd work after all.

Ed has made it pretty clear that he wants to keep Avatars, but I honestly don't understand why. Although the new "PC" and "GM" Topoi that he emailed me yesterday (but hasn't told the board about yet) are better than any previous offering he has, I feel that the existance of Avatars disrupt the focus of the game, which are topoi, literary themes and conventions. It's turn-based story writing, to be blunt, and putting a claim on characters instead of influencing the story through literary themes just feels... I don't know. Intrusive.

Ed told me once (I'm paraphrasing here) that he wants to keep Avatars in order to make the game just seem more like a standard roleplaying game (since it still has characters). I feel that it's detrimental, since that rule encourages people to claim characters and say "MINE!" Look, once again, at the wiki game and the clusterfuck at the secret meeting - a large part of that seemed to be the players all claiming avatars as soon as the starting pistol went off.

Is the page of rules in the link above updated to account for everything? It seems to still be out of date.

Mike

It's updated now.

interesting game, I take it 3.1 is the latest version, right ?

I'm not sure I have figured out the economics of the story-building, though.

If I propose a topos that is of high interest to everyone (a cool idea, in lay terms), not only am I not rewarded for it, but on the contrary I improve everyone's position relative to mine by paying them everytime they use it. Is that a correct interpretation ?

The idea, I believe (as a playtester and gamebreaker), is that you're rewarded for it because people are using it. You're rewarding others for doing what you want, and your reward is "hey, people are doing what I want."

Ed and I recently had a discussion about rewards to individuals whenver their topoi are successfully used, but nothing formal has happened yet to include it in the rules. In short, I believe this is what was discussed (Ed, feel free to correct or update me):

If the person who posted a Page claims a Topos of yours, and you give them points for it, you get 1 point, period. If the person who posted a Page doesn't claim a Topos of yours, but you feel they addressed it in that Page anyways, you can give them points for it, but you won't get any points for it yourself.

Lxndr wrote: The idea, I believe (as a playtester and gamebreaker), is that you're rewarded for it because people are using it.

What problems are you visualizing, if I might ask?

Could you give an example of what you think might be a problem?

Player A submits topoi that provide good storyhooks (that is, the other players want to play along). Presumably A's cost is low, because he needs less in-game incentives to get reactions from other players, so that's OK.

Player B get points for playing along with A's good ideas and use them to submit topoi that only interest him, and do not really fit the common story. Sure, it costs him more, but since he basically gets a free ride on A's good story (that is, he would have played along anyway), it doesn't really matter.

In the long run, cooperative players will accumulate more points than selfish ones (since they get more points for playing along and spend less), and thus will be able produce more topoi, so I guess the system works as written. Yet, I'm not sure it's totally efficient.

Just did another big rules revision. The goal here was to simplify bookkeeping.

Essentially I gave the value of Topoi a far far coarser granularity.

Topoi are all one point. If you want a topos of greater value, you just get two topoi that duplicate each other, and that's a 2-point topos. or three, or four....

You don't "buy" topoi anymore. You have a certain number available at any time, and you can change or rearrange them as long as you don't buy any more. It's as if you have a certain number of "topos slots" and it doesn't matter what is in them, they slots are constant.

You start with 3 topoi. You start with zero points.

When you accumulate a number of points equal to the number of Topoi you currently have, you can spend them all to add another Topos -- that is, another "slot," so that your total number of Topoi rises by one.

I took out the PC/GM stuff cause the confusion to usability ratio was too high. If I find a way to write it back in more elegantly I might.

Mike has been challenging me to make it less freeform and more of a game. I have explained to him why, up till now, the suggestions to do so have violated some of my design criteria, but he thinks there may be a way to get the game thing in anyway.

We might hack things up a bit.