Over in Indie Design, Ben Lehman is working on a cool idea he’s calling The Tactics Project. He’s described his goals for it like this:

Ben Lehman wrote: The real key is getting the players to understand that they are setting up the challenge for themselves and then trying to take it on. I think of this as "look ma, no hands" Gamism -- the goal is to prove how cool you are by showing what level of difficulty you can take on.

Here’s what I wrote and what he wrote:

I wrote:
This sets up, I think, a situation that is rife with “step on up” opportunities. And I think players will eat it up. I know in my group, we’ve long been in the habit of playing groups of antagonists who are observing and opposed to the PCs. As GM, I’ve seen my players put their characters in a kind of danger that I wouldn’t dare put them in, stuff like having an NPC sniper target their own unwitting character’s head. Then, somehow, they wriggle out of danger, often inadvertently (obviously, inadvertently for the character, but quite intentional on the part of the player).

BL> Interesting. I would love it if you would post more about this social dynamic (either in this thread or in RPG Theory.) These sorts of social situations are a good chunk of what I am trying to engender.

Hi Rich,

Two little neurons went "zap" and I remembered this thread: Getting started, which addresses this or at least a very similar issue, specific to the (then called) Hero Wars rules. If you'll forgive me the rather embarassing first few posts, then the discussion kicks in about halfway down the first page.

Best,
Ron

Thanks for posting this. I'll give a more substantive reply in a few days.

But, wow! Someone else played Street Fighter. My favorite White Wolf game ever. The combat really felt like a Street Fighter video game match to me, which was cool, as I was at the time a reasonably accomplished SF2 player.

yrs--
--Ben

Hi Rich!

You wrote: In our set-up, we each made one new magus, one companion, and one of the ueber-mages, then a few of us sat down and made up bunches of grogs (everybody else). In the process of creating the grogs, we created a few power groups.... And on the night the PC wizards arrived at the covenant, everyone was thrown into action....We cut from group to group, with the players running each group. There were no NPCs, essentially. Much blood was shed on all sides, and no power group came out of the mess untouched.

That’s an interesting thread, Ron--are those some of the early thoughts on IIEE stuff that I see developing in there? (It’s also interesting to me that the thread is a Hero Wars discussion. Even though it will probably be quite a different animal mechanically, I’ve been thinking about Hero Wars bidding mechanics in my responses to Ben’s game design of Tactics.) You know, I see some parallels in the ideas in that thread with things we’ve done in Ars Magica and Street Fighter. The difference is that the discussion in the thread goes further in putting some of the scene cutting choices in the hands of the players. This is something I like, but a possibility that we hadn’t come across at the time of our play.
Which is a good transition to trying to answer Emily’s questions about how we actually used this stuff in our play of Street Fighter. In Street Fighter, we didn’t share much troupe-style character creation stuff like we had in Ars Magica, partially because it just wasn’t an assumption of the game, I think, and partially because of the work involved in statting up more than the most inexperienced of characters.

There was also major split between how we handled antagonist NPCs in “adventure-oriented” sessions and “tournament-oriented” sessions. In adventure-oriented sessions, I created these NPCs as part of my GM-prep and handed them over the players at the point of the first cut scene. These NPCs were identical in game combat stat terms, to save prep time, and I didn't set up their non-combat ability scores. Other than combat, they were usually only differentiated by their names and roles in the enemy group. So for example, I might give one player an index card that reads, “Red Snake, Special Snake Team Leader.” Another might get “Shadow Snake, Special Snake Team Espionage Expert,” etc. The combat stat blocks were on the backs of the cards, or I would type them up once in the computer and print out copies for each player.

During play, whenever a non-combat related check was called for, the players simply made up the NPCs stats on the spot. Storyteller dice pools are essentially on a scale of 1-10, so the player just decided how many dice to roll, on a scale of 1-10, for the characters. If it was within the character's specialty area, players tended to roll pools of seven or eight dice, I think. Outside the specialty area, four or so. I’m honestly not sure how they estimated it, come to think about it, and I’m sure different people rolled different pools of dice. I didn’t care how many dice they were rolling—I just let them roll and tell me how many successes they’d achieved. They were working against their own characters, after all :-) Major antagonists, on the other hand, I just played. As far as scene cutting and stance were concerned, the players were mostly moving between author and actor stance for their PCs and their controlled NPCs. I did all the scene cutting, and I did all the typical GM Director stance type stuff.

This functioned differently in “Tournament-oriented” sessions. These typically included lots of tournament combats as fighters worked their way up to see who won the tournament, with intermittent character socialization at the bar or investigation of mysterious happenings around the tournament going on. In these sessions, I quickly became aware that the 16 and 32 fighter tournaments we were running could get boring very quickly for players whose characters weren’t fighting at the moment. We were not running teams through tournaments—rather we were running individual matches and the PCs often met and faced each other at some point in the tournaments, and fought to see who would win. We were never satisfied, especially for important tournaments, with me just deciding via GM-fiat the results of tournament clashes between two NPCs, so we began to run all the matches. I’d say, “Ok, Fei Long is slated to take on Ryu in the next bracked of the tournament. Who wants to run Fei Long and who wants Ryu?” And people would volunteer and run the matches. We extended this to PC versus NPC matches very quickly, and to interesting effect. It occurred to me that when players were running NPCs against the characters of other players, they were trying very hard to win. They were not pulling any punches or throwing matches the way I’d been taught I should sometimes do by too many “Golden Rule” speeches in various RPGs. The players were out to win. No quarter was asked or given, and the winning character of the tournament was the one who had won all the battles to that point.

It was instrumental in re-teaching me how to run NPCs in our Street Fighter games.

Eventually, I was not running NPCs in tournament combat any more often than anyone else. I was responsible, for the most part, for the NPC stats, however, and I tried my best to make them very close to the PCs in power level. But I also did my best to create the most challenging characters I could who had similar power levels to those of the characters. Of course, I did this without inventing newer, more powerful special maneuvers or abilities. It was important that the character operated within the same framework of rules and choices as the PCs. I then let the characters loose in the tournaments with the players in charge of actually running them. Occasionally, players would also stat up NPCs in their spare time, and I would introduce them to tournaments as well. This was rarer than I would have liked because it’s a lot of work to make the characters, and because it also lead to some interesting events in play. In a very early game, for example, one of the players created the NPC that eventually knocked his own PC out of the tournament. After the match, his character approached this character and befriended him, and the characters remained allies for the rest of the campaign.

In talking about it with one of my friends who was playing in the game, he did some self-analysis and said that in all these cases, whether running NPC antagonists in adventure-oriented sessions or running NPC fighters in tournament-oriented sessions, he wanted the character he was playing at that moment to win. He was not concerned about whether his core PC, the “hero” of the game, won, as much as he was invested in winning with whatever character he was running at the moment. I can think of no better example that supports the distinction that “Step on Up” operates at the real person, player level.

BTW, Ben, we were (ok, are. are.) also fans of the video games as well as the RPG. We usually met for our RPG sessions early and played one of the Street Fighter video games for a while before starting our RPG play--sometimes we would play the video game for hours before roleplaying. It was a great way to get in the right mood for a game.

Rich

Hey Rich,

As far as scene cutting and stance were concerned, the players were mostly moving between author and actor stance for their PCs and their controlled NPCs. I did all the scene cutting, and I did all the typical GM Director stance type stuff.

Have you read my Chalk Outlines playtest report, how we played Chalk Outlines? The experience taught me that it can be pretty deprotagonizing for a character if the player is both framing scenes (creating the conflict) and narrating the outcomes of those scenes (with maybe Pool-style Monologue of Victory mechanics). So, I guess I'm just recommending you not stray too far from the stance and power formula you've described as you move forward with system development...because what you've got sounds like a blast, and I can imagine it maybe getting messy if you were to include, say, a mechanic that provided occasional player scene framing.

Paul