The Forge Archives

(Hey, all.  It's been a while - RL is what it is.  Missed this place, though.)

Okay.  A neat thought just came to me, and I wanted to share it for comment and critique.  It feels like the sort of thing I might, or might not, end up using, but that someone else might go do something incredible with... I hope so, more incredible is always good.

I got to thinking about currency in Nar games (and possibly others, esp. any involving Drama mechanics in general - although Gamist Drama is a combo I can't call to mind offhand), and one implementation came to mind.  This is specifically parsed through a model I'm working with, which downplays character ability tremendously as compared with character desire, and as such wants a set of very loose "this character can..." descriptors which do not overly intrude.  I was reminded of a game I heard discussed here, whose name I do not recall, which was designed to handle the 'heist movie' form.

In that game as I understood it, the characters were defined by things they were excellent at, and fatal flaws; nothing else.  Very much per the Pondsmith precept that if someone is average, do not bother noting it - only comment on the interesting angles.

I've found that the above precept, while powerful, tangles with the precept of prompted character design.  If there is an element of the setting which could use some emphasis, then one powerful tool in our kits is to require input with regards to that element.  For example, in a game with a theological element, religious beliefs should be noted - even if they are not exceptional - because one wants to draw attention to the subject.

Couple this with the fairly Nar-specific idea that a character weakness is a stat in and of itself.  Not a disadvantage (as it would be to a Gamist), but an advantage toward the game's real goals.  HW does a nice job of this, in allowing you to take disadvantages and considering them their own reward.  

Which leads me to the idea of a 'softer' version of the Pondsmith concept, centered on a very Nar-applicable currency.  A currency which does not purchase ability, or advantage; it purchases the right to be uninteresting in some respect.  Say one presents seven fixed categories - martial prowess, social skill, professional ability, etc - and requires an interesting, story-generating, nigh-Kicker-strength response in each area during chargen... save that one has a limited number of 'Pass' responses permitted, or buys them with currency somehow.  Have them pay neither for advantages nor disadvantages - only for areas of disinterest.

As presented, it would certainly want to be countered by an equally important yardstick of verisimilitude, to damp a tendency by even well-meaning players to generate the classic circus assassin character (you know, the one who spent ten years in Tibet after giving up on professional automobile racing, etc etc).  One option would be to make this currency nonoptional - you must pass in three categories, providing answers which are comparatively ordinary.  Another would be to use some kind of group vote methodology with the specific criterion of verisimilitude - say, the least believable character by vote pays one point of currency, the most believable gains one, or some such.

It's a crude stick at present, but could come to something if refined - agreement, disagreement?  The core thought is that in some Nar environments, neither advantage nor disadvantage need to be monitored so closely as disinterest.  Which may be a truism, but it's certainly not how most currency systems operate.

- Eric

It seems like this particular method would be best suited for games where being "normal" is the focus of play right from the start. Or rather, balancing an extraordinary element of a character's day-to-day life with the more mundane elements.

Say you were making a sort of Spider-Man RPG where the heroes aren't so powerful that they don't still have to pay rent or keep a job. The friction between those two conflicting lifestyles are what create the stories, thus making the mundane elements have equal dramatic importance as the superhero-ing.

However, I don't see how much use it would be for more cinematic games, especially those in the swashbuckler/costumed superhero/cosmic deity vein, where I presume players' goals are for pure escapism with little connection to recognizable, mundane realities.

By the way, were you referring to Criminal Element? (My current 'heist movie' RPG project Pull would seem to fall somewhere in between the two ends of this spectrum, but choosing one or the other drastically changes the focus of stories.)

Hi there,

Nice thought - and nicely backed up by the RPG literature.

Here are a few references and notions, pending a more hefty response.

1. Otherkind does a good job of only working with Good Stuff and Bad Stuff. It doesn't match the "non-kewl" approach that you're working with, though.

2. See Pantheon, Once Upon a Time, Bedlam, and The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen for Drama-heavy Gamist play. The degree to which these are "role-playing" is legitimately controversial, but I'm not sure whether the people on the "nay" side are irked with the Drama or with the winning.

Best,
Ron

I was reminded of a game I heard discussed here, whose name I do not recall, which was designed to handle the 'heist movie' form.

I think you're talking about Vincent Baker's http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/chalk.html">Chalk Outlines. But there's also http://www.daftideasinc.esmartbiz.com/spyglass/roleplay.htm">Steal, by Matt Kershaw and Ken Finlayson, http://www.fluidoptics.com/criminalelement.html">Criminal Element, by Michael P. O'Sullivan, and http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8120">Pull, by Daniel Solis.

Paul

Erm, its a matter of perspective. If you have seven areas, and you have to declare three "normal", that's functionally the same as having only four areas that you can call "abnormal".

I don't think that anyone wants so much for their character to be normal in certain areas, as you're pointing out that they want control over where their character is supernormal. That areas of normalcy don't need protecting nearly as much as the abnormal areas need promotion. Or have I missed something.

Mike

P.S. Welcome back. :-)

Hi there,

Mike, at least in my reading, that "protection of the normal" is actually what's being proposed. And it matches well with a topic I'm mulling over a lot lately.

Bearing in mind that we're talking about a very focused approach to play, i.e. "but other people want something different" is acknowledged, so let's not belabor that ...

... I'm thinking that I'd like a game in which the normal, average, unspectacular elements of my character have (a) a major role in what's going on, and (b) are relatively safe from becoming "spectacular" through the events of play.

Which explains why I always thought the Aunt May + Dr. Octopus story was really stupid.

But anyway, the difficulty for Eric's point as I see it, is that numbers' magnitudes don't have to reflect super-human or kewl in-game elements. Especially in Narrativist play. I feel like a broken record in the HeroQuest forum trying to say, over and over, "the ability score reflects the impact of the ability on play, not its 'goodness' or 'bigness' inside the world."

So if we were talking about a game with very mundane sources of conflict and resolution, and if we were using the HeroQuest system, then the "mundanity" or "normality" of the conflicts is actually heightened and given strength by the very high numbers associated with them. It doesn't mean that someone has a "superhuman" relationship with someone else, if the score is 5w2. It means that that relationship has an overriding effect on other abilities' impact. The relationship can be as normal as all get-out and look like any other relationship in the story.

Eric, how does that concept relate to your thinking on the matter?

Best,
Ron

Interestingly.  At first glance it's somewhat orthogonal - linked but takes it in a different direction.  I was concerned more about, as you say, protection of the normal (and of the abnormal), and exploration of the normal as an element of character.

I say orthogonal because although I agree with your HQ comment wholly (and have had to drill the same thing home, regarding TROS Spiritual Attributes - that they do not represent the strength of the emotion, rather its current significance to play), I had not originally been thinking about magnitudes or scores at all - the descriptors I'm looking at are a lot more descriptive and/or binary, giving a can you or can't you result.  So although the decoupling of "high score" with "very skillful" or what have you is interesting, it's not exactly what I was getting at.  On the other hand, parsing things through this filter did inspire something I'm very happy with.

The key lies in refuting Pondsmith's comment, as it applies to games where dramaaaatic is not the (entire) desired result - where normalcy is also to play a strong role in the narrative and thus in the system.  Neglecting the normal is actively detrimental in such a case.  Instead we need to boost up the normal such that it is given comparable system weight to the very good and the very bad, without having it merely be a midpoint devoid of interest.

We can do this.  Let's take my seven spheres of affect (martial, social, etc), and require a descriptor in each one.  This descriptor will sum up whether a character is good or bad in such an area.  In this, it's a lot like the attributes in Sorcerer, with qualitative instead of quantitative scores.  And just as in Sorcerer for "type" descriptors, so in this setup for "score" descriptors, we constrain the list.  Let's do it into three groups.  

There are descriptors which tell us that this sphere is a character strength - currently I'd have them choose among Gifted, Skilled, Augmented (the game has cyber elements but not equipment lists), and Specialized, each of which tells us what we need to know.  Similarly there are descriptors which tell us that this is a weakness - Flawed, Inept, what have you.  So far nothing novel.

But the third category is the kicker here, and needs very careful diction.  The third category tells us that this area grounds the character - roots him in pure human-ness, if you will.  Possible descriptors here are Ordinary, Hopeful, Tentative, Uninspired.  Also Grounded, if the category name changes.  The intent is to make this descriptor set just as interesting as the other two - because it should be - and not feel like a simple "average score".

Then, in the simplest currency possible, we simply require that each character have at least one descriptor from each category.  At least one strength; at least one weakness; and at least one grounding, or humanizing, characteristic.  I like the number seven for the spheres of affect, given this criteria; it permits someone (like me) who has definite Gamist bones to not feel like it's overly weakening the character, to take more than the 'minimum' of one weakness and one ground - even if it's the kind of character who should rank pretty high overall, who is generally more competent than not, etc.  It increases the dynamic range of representable characters; with five, for instance, one would (coarsely speaking) jump from someone "20% flawed" to "40% flawed" as the minimum increment of tweakage.

I like this a lot.

One of the reasons I like it, mind you, is the way it scales to the rest of my game, which includes significantly nonhuman PCs as well - the setting includes both angels and AIs, among others.  The use of careful diction in descriptor lists, and in the category names themselves, provides us with a very great strength here, because it similarly allows us to change scales and priorities, seamlessly.

For example, a (new-fallen) angel character would not be given the above lists, with their emphasis on skill and understanding and the like.  He might instead be given categories something like this:
Hearkening (to that which he has lost) descriptors - Puissant, Titled, Tasked, Glorious.
Forsaken descriptors - Failed, Refusing, Despairing, Stripped.
Fleshly descriptors - Confused, Learning, Augmented, Immature.

Application of these lists to the same set of seven spheres of affect gets us a wholly altered take on things.

How does 'Glorious' match up against 'Gifted?'  In my case I duck the question, because although they may look like it, these are not magnitudes.  They're areas of narrative interest, and capabilities.  Effective magnitudes are, in this case, provided by another mechanism, having to do with motivation rather than ability.  

In Ron's case, however, the magnitude might be assigned directly (in a game based on his post above), but be completely decoupled from ability.  It represents the influence of that descriptor on the events of the game, not the 'goodness' of what's being described.  In that case, a high Gifted score might triumph over a lower Glorious score, not because a talented human could necessarily best a mighty angel, but because his being talented is considered more relevant to play (presumably by virtue of his having spent more currency on it).  This would really be very tidy.

Ron?  What do you think?  Not only do I like this solution as an approach to emphasizing an element, such as the importance of "average," but it feels like there's a tool here (underpinning the structure I've elucidated) which could help adapt systems toward emphasizing any desired element.  

In fact, in general, if "well-skilled" and "poorly skilled" are not the game emphasis, then the assumption that the magnitudes and game numbers should represent this spectrum is one of those assumptions that should probably be taken up on deck and shot.  Even the "has a large effect on play" and "is irrelevant to play" magnitude scale is merely one alternate spectrum among many.  Imagine a game about shapeshifting, intrigue, and insanity (Zelazny's Courts of Chaos, perhaps?), which used an overall spectrum of "very stable" to "extremely mutable" for all attributes, including physical ones and relationships?  No magnitudes at all, because pitting "better" versus "worse" is not the focus.  

Moreover we get cases like the one I'm discussing for my own game, where we abandon the idea of a numerical score with its implication of only two endpoints, two extremes of interest.  UA's madness meters could, perhaps, be one such example - they're a SAN score "exploded" out into multiple axes, and given more detail.  The detail obviously has an effect in focussing attention, but that's an effect we understand, and it hides what I'm getting at here - that it's not the added detail, it's the added dimensions which gets us, which points play toward not just sanity/insanity but sexuality, horror, callousness, and all the rest of the themes captured therein.  One could have just as much detail, without exploding the axes, and it would not pay off nearly the same.

Very interesting.  It almost gets us a picture of the mutation mechanism for variables in any game.  On one end we have a single descriptor with a score along only one axis.  As we identify other things we'd like to do with this score, new themes to stress, the one axis becomes expanded, getting us the three-way split which in the human example above has "grounded" assuming equal importance with "good" and "bad."  Other N-way splits are obviously possible.  If we renumeralize, now, we find it impossible to map any longer to a single (scalar) score, so we end up with a defacto or explicit division - like a microorganism budding - into two or more variables.  Some games handle this by making the variables implicit, like a colour/number split within a trait where each half means something different, while some games make it explicit, like UA's explosion of a single SAN value into a many-axis grouping.  (Note that "hardenedness to stimulus" and "current temporary stress due to stimulus" are two variables each.)  Budding, definitely.  Not exclusively, though... we're all familiar with instances of fusion instead, and I can easily envision the analogue to sexual reproduction as well.

Does this bring us back 'round to the old truth of "make your game variables focus on what the game is about?"  Not quite, I think - because it adds the observation that not only the variable itself, but the direction of its axis (what a high and low score mean), should be adapted to our nefarious ends.  Which itself reveals some hidden assumptions, in my own stuff and elsewhere - discussion for another day.

- Eric

Hi Eric,

I may be inserting enough content into the principle you're describing to suit my ego ...

... but Sorcerer seems to fit the bill. Differences in Cover scores aren't very important to the play of the game; various situational or role-playing bonuses tend to put Cover usage at 4-6 dice for everyone, which also happens to be the typical Sorcerer roll for a "pretty good" anything else. And Cover seems to me to be exactly what you're talking about, in terms of in-game content.

Am I merely feeding my ego here, or making sense?

Best,
Ron

Almost.

But it misses in the one main concept introduced above - the use of language rather than numbers to give "ordinary" a psychological boost, up toward a weight-equivalent with "excellent" and "terrible".  The numbers do achieve this somewhat, as you point out, but nothing's done to make midrange scores specifically summon up imagery in their own right.

This is obviously not fatal, but for the criterion you and I were talking about - where the 'everyday life' elements are important in their own right - it's a trick Sorcerer does not use.

Make sense?

[I suppose alternately you could say that the type descriptors allow for either "excellent" or "ordinary" types of tags, and they do indeed do exactly that - but there's nothing (IIRC) in the Sorcerer text which then shifts the "excellent to terrible" ability-spectrum away from the numerical scores, so highly-able descriptors just won't usually end up coupled to low-end numbers.  Decoupling those per the above, where the score indicates plot relevance and not ability, would work - although I actually think I like it better this way, as ability/excellence is itself pretty important thematically for something like Sorcerer.]

Hmmmm ... are you sure that's a crucial criterion? Some folks on the Forge strongly uphold the idea that verbal descriptors (in terms of "good," "fair," "mediocre," etc) are qualitatively different in play from numbers (-2, -1, 0, +1). I find this idea highly dubious and have never been able to understand why Castle Falkenstein and Fudge are supposed to be enhanced by what I see as verbal labels for numbers.

I don't bring this up as a point of debate, but I do think it's worth considering as an issue for your point. If I'm understanding you at all, that is.

As for Sorcerer, I think the lowest Cover score possible for a viable character is 3 (2-2-6 is an uncommon choice at best), and most are higher. So the differences among scores isn't a big deal. The question is whether Cover descriptors are themselves "kewl," as in, Race Car Champion, or Kremlin Senior Assassin.

It all comes down to the necessary local customizing of the game. If the basic premise for that particular game suggests that Cover scores are supposed to be (in kewlness-terms) dull, then ... well, maybe it's closer to what you envision.

At least, in some games I've played, the normality of Cover descriptors was very important, and they came into play a great deal as "powers" (or "anti-powers" if you like) quite a bit. And one mini-supplement currently in the editing stages is very focused on this idea. I think you'll like it.

Best,
Ron

An interesting dichotomy. On the one hand it's about whenther a character is, say, a Paladin or a Cleric. On the other its about how the paladin rates amoung other Paladins. Is he a better Paladin than other paladins?

Interesting, and I think that one or the other is functional (and has proven functional) but it's a matter of, well, how you wish to do it.

You can chalk another vote for the numbers as words not really adding much. I personally find it's an illusion, really. Some see that and think "wow. This is an RPG that doesn't use numbers" when in reality, it does. (I know this because I was once such a person) It would bother me is the labels didn't have to be translated into numbers again in play. But they do for the most part. Either number of dice or a modifier or what-have-you. The old original TSR Marvel Super Heroes game sidestepped this somewhat, but the scaling was not very intuitive. (Which is higher, Amazing or Incredible?) So it was like learning how to count all over again. So what is gained by this?

Dang.  Lost a reply into Limbo there somewhere.

I agree that "words to numbers" doesn't, in general, do anything for me.  If you have to map it back to numbers, it's a pointless change (and usually increases S&H time).  However, in this case, I think there's an important distinction, which is what I was trying to get at.

My problem is that if you map to a numerical scale, you automatically deemphasize the average or zero-point, making it less interesting to use in play.  Whether you like it or not.  Pondsmith recognized this and ruled that, rather than 'carry' deemphasized stats, one should ignore them.  In this thread, I'm talking about a ruleset which would refuse this deemphasis process; which would, through whatever tools come to hand, promote the normal as a third equivalued category, in addition to the "excellent" and the "terrible."

Instead of mapping (excellent, ordinary, terrible) to the number line, (+1, 0, -1) in whatever form, I'm trying for a mapping you might liken to (+1, Q, -1)... like three sides of a triangle.  Obviously numbers are a poor fit for this.  Words not only do the trick, but through the use of strong, evocative terms for "ordinary," and comparatively weak terms for "excellent" such as Skilled rather than Masterful, etc., I'm trying to use connotations to handle this instead.

It's only because my system is set up to obtain its numerical scores elsewhere that I can get away with a qualitative system which really is simply qualitative, here.  Otherwise, yes, you tend to end up mapping to the number line, largely pointlessly.

Maybe a better example would be this: envision playing a TROS variant where each PC had only one SA, and the SAs had no scores - if applicable, it always added five dice.  Simplistic, but playable.  And it would mean that the actual recorded item would only be the word, the name of the SA - a pure qualitative item with no mapping to numbers.  No one should be saying "Destiny means my PC is better than yours with Conscience."  They should be talking about what those choices do to the direction of the game or of their characters.

I want the same thing here.

- Eric

Hi Eric,

I see your point, and look forward to what you'll make of it.

It reminds me of the way many groups played the early form(s) of Champions - the Dependent Non-Player Characters, Secret Identity, Public Identity, and Hunteds disadvantages, especially.

Both of them were "disadvantages," meaning your character gained extra points. In some games, they were indeed disadvantageous; in others, they were absolutely necessary setting/story/whatever elements, and you essentially "told" the GM to use them by having them in your character's point structure.

They were also associated with quantitative values that were supposed to determine their frequency, but in the games I'm talking about, those were unilaterally ignored and the NPCs in question came into things, in the long run, insofar as everyone at the table wanted to see them.

Oh! And I almost forgot. Hardly anyone seems to remember that a character's "everyday skills" up to and including highly technical ones were neither paid for nor rolled in pre-4th edition Champions. You were a rocket scientist? OK, you know it and you can do it. In the games I am talking about, things like "reporter" and "housewife" were very frequently major aspects of play. (These games informed my design of Covers in Sorcerer.)

Best,
Ron

I think that there's a more telling principle that's missing from this conversation.

Sorcerer, Hero Wars, etc, all these games come from the precedent of games in which statistics are intended, in fact, to be a representation of some in-game reality. Simulations, if you will. Now, one can say that in Hero Quest, and games like it, that the assigned levels means more about how important the issue is, rather than in-game potency. But one thing in these games belies their relationship to prior games. They all increase chances of success. This is why Ron argues about the scores "having little meaning". He's saying that there's no conflict between what effects they do produce in-game, and any metagame motivations for Narrativism.

In certain versions of The Pool, after Ron got at it, success was completely decoupled from the resolution system. No longer, in this case, did resolutions system mean "system by which we determine what happens in game" but instead "system by which we determine who narrates." Universalis has the same property to an extent following on that. Here we see this principle taken to the extreme.

But something that Ralph and I both wanted to keep in but felt that we had to rid the game of, is a simulative value to the stats. We felt that if we didn't state emphatically at some point that Traits weren't directly simulative that the design falls apart. We're lucky that this led us to what is Universalis. But it distracted from an important point that you can have both an in-game and metagame effect simultaneously.

What I'm finding in my play of late is that these stats can represent both an in-game reality and metagame importance at the same time. Ron has this belief that Hero Quest Abilities aren't at all about in-game potence. But I so want that to be what their about. Because, in the genre in particular, power is such an important theme. And I like to play around with the numbers with that assumption.

The question is, does it cause a problem to see things this way? Well, Ron, in wanting to make these things more purely one mode or the other (in order to avoid conflicts that do, I agree, occur with the more complex approach), takes the perspective that if you look at these things as Metagame, then the problems resolve. And they do, except for the tiny detail in these systems that higher ratings mean more success. It's that correlation that keeps your mind going back to the earlier mode of thinking - or at least mine does.

But I wouldn't advocate decoupling success. To me that leads to games like The Pool and Universalis, which are one sort of nifty design, but not what I think Hero Quest can be. The "problem" with Hero Quest, theoretically, is that the Fortune in the Middle resolution seems to some players to only being explainable as it being Metagame. To them, either the rules are about in-game power, or their about metagame control of events.

But why can't they be both? The key to me, seems not in thinking of these things as neccessarily Metagame/In-Game. The key is to look at the simulative method being used. As Ralph identifies it, there are two ways to simulate something. You either look at the inputs and produce an output via algorithm (Fortune at the End), or you produce an output, and then narrate how the end result occured, which is how Fortune at the End does it. Which is to say that given the right perspective on play, there's no conflict between plausibility and metagame. Indeed from one perspective, all rules are metagame, and acceptance of their abstractions can all be seen as "implausible". It's only a mental shift that's required to see FitM as just as plausible as FatE.

Now, while I'll agree that there are players for whom FatE is probably neccessary, I'd argue that this is just a case of tradition in most cases. Given an exposure to FitM methods, I think that this soon erodes. Indeed, as a technique, we've always claimed that no technque is neccessarily fused to one GNS mode. So why should FitM be any different?

I think it's not. I think that players can get plausibility from FitM. And as such, I think that there's no neccessary conflict between the use of it and Simulationism in general. Given that, then all that's required for successful hybrid play is congruence.

The point is that SAs can have scores, be indicative of in-game reality, and still be the Narrativist tools that people think they are. These things don't have to be separated, IMO. I think that it's the context that the abilities are portrayed in, for example the Sorcerer context, that's the most effective tool in making play Narrativist. Not claiming that Abilities are metagame.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I think you're misrepresenting my points.

Remember, I'm the one who supports in-game success/failure based on dice outcomes in The Pool. I won't play it with people who simply use the mechanic as a narration-trading device. Note my comments that octaNe does not particularly, or at all, facilitate Narrativist play.

In-game success/failure, and the inference of relative competence, is a major part of the "spin and bounce" I was driving at in likening System to a ball. A dead ball is no fun.

In Hero Quest, my take is that in-game cause is Explanation A for real-people actual-game impact. Nine times out of ten, and maybe ten out of ten if we're talking about simple abilities like "Strong" or "Axe and Shield," I fully endorse explaining/interpreting high scores by saying the guy is stronger than the other guys, etc.

Explanation B is often necessary, though, for some other features of Hero Quest and for some other games. The impact on play comes first - wow, that Relationship augment sends my primary ability through the roof, I have a great roll now. Does this mean anything in-game? Sure, it can. Play up the relationship dialogue. Watch everyone else get psyched by transferring the numbers-magnitude to emotive attention.

The whole point of a high-score Relationship ability is to "take over" from things which are physically or magically very significant in the game world. But if you have a 5w2 relationship, it kicks ass as such, relative to the other things. It's a 90-degree "this is important, can't ignore it" signal. You can explain this using Explanation A, sure. That guy really really really loves that babe, just like the guy with a high Sword ability is fuckin' great with a sword.

But sometimes Explanation B works better. In that case, the fictional love or whatever represented by the great-high-numbers relationship does not have to be stronger, in-game, then the love represented by a numerically-weaker relationship. If I'm playing a character with a 19 Relationship, I can still say that his love is the most glorious and sincere ever. It won't matter as such until it gets way up there ... but that event, when it happens, realizes what existed already, it doesn't make a weak thing into a strong thing.

Since I consider all role-playing to be real people agreeing about a fictional creation, the only real-reality we can ever perceive is dice clattering on a table, dialogue delivered and responded to, and markings on paper. Sometimes, regarding the in-game causality (plausibility, whatever), we use Explanation A. Sometimes, we use Explanation B.

I happen to think A is a subset or application of B, but that is a very non-traditional and even upsetting suggestion to most role-players. My point in mentioning it here is to state, categorically, that I do not consider A and B to be either/or and this-way/that-way exclusive options for role-playing.

All I've ever said about Hero Quest is that it brings Explanation B out of the closet, and in some cases, practically has to.

Best,
Ron