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Resolving Sketch with Previous Discussion: It is important to note that this sketch is incomplete. A few thousand words ago in the "SOCIAL MECHANICS" section we talked about shifts as "Social Effects" - different ways in which a positive Social "Take A Risk" roll could be used to shift the outcome of an action. I intend to keep both the "shift of default" and the "shift of individual action", so clarifying the wording is in order. For now 'Shift' will refer to the permanent change to The Expected Thing that the player selects as they level-up a skill, and 'Effect' will refer to the momentary narrative change from The Expected Thing. Also in the previous discussion we mentioned several other dimensions of social effect such as status, reputation or persuasiveness. The idea is that all of some short list of distinct aspects would be available as Shifts. We also discussed the idea of "performance" and that perhaps Shifts should instead allow the player to select how they are received on a per-scene basis. And again the idea is that this is all to give the player increasing fiat, so perhaps attempting to pass yourself off as a beggar would be At Risk by default (i.e. an automatic Take A Risk), but with points in "Status Shift" the player can by fiat pass themselves off as of different status. However, we will have to be careful not to step on the toes of Social Conflict - if we allow for "performance" it has to be something of a passive thing, and any active challenge should be handled as a Social Conflict. "Persuasiveness" might be a bad idea since "changing someone's mind" could be seen as always adversarial. The Feat list is, as well, just a suggestion. I'm also remembering back to some earlier design ideas discussion where we thought that maybe Feats could be used to give out Cross Skill Actions to provide cross-scene utility. I think I'm going to walk back that idea because I think the existing Cross Skill Action framework of fictional justification achieves what we want. Consider a case of using social skill in combat to "Taunt". We could model this is a Feat - a per-scene power whereby the character uses Social Skill to make combat effects - but then we are back in the land of making feats into optimal mechanical choices to be economized, and we have also codified what "Taunting" means and does. If we leave the act of jeering at a combat opponent up to the "Cross Skill Action" framework, it leaves the act in a space of "try to improvise a character moment at-will".
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Jul 30, 2013 21:31
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SOCIAL SCENES: Back to The Trial Going through this scene has been a slog, but it has raised issues that needed to be addressed and the design will be better for it. We return from this very long aside to The Trial. The entire point of the aside was to set up The Expected Thing with respect to the mechanical effects of Social Skill on abstract goals. We specifically made this aside because we did not want to start attaching extra mechanics to abstractions - i.e. "Social Skill Numbers to be used in a Social Conflict versus an Abstraction" aka "Difficulty Classes". We want to streamline mechanics as much as possible and so we could go right from the fiction to a mechanical expectation rather than inserting an extra translation into a numerical difficulty and then into a Skill Conflict and then into a mechanical expectation. So, what happens when a character addresses a crowd for the purpose of building Stress on an abstract "debate" goal? The player picks a social aspect to appeal to (empathy, trust, etc.). The character's relationship to the audience in this aspect sets the default mechanical effect towards the abstract goal: pre:Relationship | Default Outcome
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Very Bad | two consequences (die of stress on char? opponent gets two social effects?)
Bad | one consequence (die of stress on char? opponent gets one social effect?)
Neutral | no effect
Good | one benefit (CHA die towards goal/other social effect?)
Very Good | two benefits (CHA die towards goal/other social effects?)
Of course the player is not meant to just take the default. After choosing a social aspect to appeal to, the player plays out the character's argument. As with all forms of action, if the player put some effort into the fiction, the GM will grant the character at least a CHA advantage but perhaps other appropriate ability advantages as well depending on the role-play (remember, we always seek to reward good fiction). As with other actions, the GM describes the expected outcome and the player is allowed to Take A Risk and roll d20 to sway the outcome, picking one ability advantage to add to the roll. This is all just our boilerplate mechanics of "Player Acts ... GM rewards good role play with Advantages ... Player chooses to Take A Risk" with "social relationship sets default mechanical outcome" grafted on the front. The recent asides can be summarized as "there are various aspects to social relationship, and they are quantified in the usual range of very-bad to very-good" and "as a character's Social Skill increases they can choose to improve default social relationships in these various aspects". I feel like this characterization of argumentation action towards a goal has kept us in the established mechanical framework and within the desired design goals. We have picked up a bit of cruft in the form of "aspects of social relationships" and have some work to do with regards to ironing these aspects out, but since these aspects can for the most part ride on defaults unless overridden by established fictional relationships they do not seem to be setting up a large improvisational burden for the GM. We have also successfully set up a quantifiable mechanic that we can use to balance The Trial difficulty around as we did for the various Combat encounters. We can compute an expected numbers of effects per action/round and set abstract stress goals that are achievable in our desired scene length.
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Jul 30, 2013 23:08
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial, Concrete Example Scene As we did with the "Ambassador Evil" example of "Undercover Party" let's describe a concrete example of "The Trial" in order to explore how we might construct and resolve a dramatic scene of this type. We will construct this scene as we do all others and with a social flavor: establish a clear social goal, establish conflicting social stakes with friendly NPCs, introduce overlapping action, and balance the scene such that there will likely be at least some consequences by scene end. Let's proceed as we would in an improvisational scene construction. The Trial: Witch Hunt Our 5 player party has returned from adventuring to find the residence of party-friendly Vital NPC beset by an angry mob. The local authorities have intervened to keep order for the moment. Pushing their way to the front of the crowd, the party finds that evidence of Vital NPC's dabbling in unsavory magics (which the party probably knows about already) has come to light and all sorts of accusations and calls for blood are flying. Immediately we start the scene with a hook to propel the scene: the life of a friendly (if flawed) campaign-vital NPC is under threat. This is all taking place in the party's current town of refuge, and the scene is full of party-friendly factions and NPCs - some in the mob, some arriving as onlookers. This is a very public demand for justice that has the authorities on the spot and has the potential to get ugly. The party must intervene but it is clear that violent intervention on their part would be a direct antagonism against friendly NPCs and factions. We have established conflicting social stakes that threaten reputation and relationships. A few specific friendly NPCs will step forward from the crowd to represent the "prosecution" in the scene. Balance wise, they do not need to be a match of the party's Face in terms of Social Skill because we are setting things up such that the crowd's disposition towards "the accused" - Vital NPC - is negative and, as just discussed, this means that The Expected Thing for just about any argument made by anyone is for the prosecution to gain favor with the crowd. This sets up the scene such that the party wants to put their Social specialist front and center to defend Vital NPC, as party members with lower Social Skill will actually hurt the cause by making arguments (remember its not the content of what they say but the skill with which it is delivered that will win the crowd). As The Face and the prosecution trade arguments in front of the crowd, we want to introduce overlapping action that threatens the main goal as well as party relationships. First, we introduce some hecklers in the crowd that give the prosecution advantage. If The Face stops his defense in order to address the hecklers, he loses time on building favor with the crowd, so the party will need to send someone into the crowd to deal with the hecklers. The strategy for dealing with the hecklers will again be a trade-off between a social approach that might be more difficult, or a violent approach that would injure party relationships. As always, we want to pile-on the overlapping social action to ensure that the party is stressed on all sides. The party should notice that members of one of their most valued NPC factions are visibly upset and having a side discussion. Party members will need to be dispatched to play diplomacy to head off damage to that faction relationship. For a final touch of drama, the party will also spot a small detachment of friendly NPCs (with violent intent towards Vital NPC) heading around the back of the residence. Again, if The Face turns attention away from the main argument at the front door, the persecution will move ahead in the race for favor, so other party members must be dispatched to deal with the situation. This side-vignette, being away from the front of the house, will be a high-tension moment with a high risk of violence against friendly NPCs. Witch Hunt: Length and Balance Here is a rough budget for The Trial given our "Witch Hunt" example: Round 1: Party arrives at the house, scene is staged, Opposition starts prosecution, The Face starts defense (2 Actions) Round 2: Case continues, hecklers impede The Face (4 actions) Round 3: Case continues, heckler vignette continues, Friendly Faction vignette begins (6 actions) Round 4: Case continues, friendly faction vignettes continue, vigilante vignette begins (10 actions) Round 5: Scene Resolution (8 actions) This total budget of 32 is a bit higher than the 20 actions that we were thinking for most combat scenarios, but I'm hoping that the less tactical, more free-form flow of the scene would result in player and GM actions leaning more towards 1 minute/action instead of the assumed 2 minutes/action. This would get the scene done in right around 30 minutes. If we presume that The Face has some Shifts that bring his expected ability to appeal to some aspect of the crowd's relationship to the accused up to a +1, and assuming CHA of +2 (d8), then with advantage The Face might have an EV of around +1.5 effects (analysis is the same as that for combat since we are using the same fundamental mechanics) per round and 6.75 Stress towards winning the crowd's favor per round. If we are aiming for about 5 rounds this means that the want a Stress goal of about 33 points on winning the crowd's favor, but let's make it 30 since the hecklers will dock that advantage at first. If The Face does not have advantage we expect them to achieve about 22 points of stress by round 5, so to keep the heat appropriately on, let's say the opposition has the crowd greatly in their favor by default, so +2 effects per round, and a prosecutor of +1 CHA (d6), so that's an EV of 7 per round or 35 by round 5, so we want The Face to makes some OBJECTION!s and use Take A Risk to bring down the prosecution's EV per round to +1.5 (EV of 26 by round 5). The side vignettes need not be managed with abstract stress targets, we can use stress build-up on individual party members to measure how well they are handling their situations, or just handle them informally.
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Aug 1, 2013 16:29
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Just finished reading over this all. Your system has excellent design goals and I commend you for being able to come down firmly on one side of numerous debates that have always sunk my own heartbreaker designs such as whether or not deep combat is a good thing. On the topic of your Trial scene, I'm not seeing the mechanical interaction between social Feats and the race mechanic you have going between the prosecution and defense. I understand your aim is to have various feats or moves influence the mob's perception of the PCs as trustworthy, empathetic, etc but I don't see how that will modify the to-hit numbers (take a risk rolls) or damage (points gained for prosecution or defense in this Scene). If your intent is that these feats should not mechanically impact these numbers, then is there some other lever that such feats tweak? If we model social scenes as an analogue to combat in 3.x / 4e you already have equivalents for weapons, moves and hit points. What you have not modeled (here, or in combat as far as I can tell) are status effects. Trips, combat advantage, burning, poison, etc. This may be intentional as you are prioritizing speed of play with your rules, but status effects would further your stated aim of giving players interesting choices to make by providing alternate routes to victory or at least advantage. If a social feat inflicted a status effect like "mortified" for example, which had no mechanical definition, but was attached to an effect in the fiction -- it forced the NPC to roleplay in a certain way that might solve the issue, but would have the problem of essentially boiling down to GM fiat as to determining its effects, which may or may not be an issue for you, depending on your views. Alternatively, I may be reading this wrong and have just missed where you addressed this.
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Aug 1, 2013 22:28
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Null Profusion posted:Just finished reading over this all. Your system has excellent design goals and I commend you for being able to come down firmly on one side of numerous debates that have always sunk my own heartbreaker designs such as whether or not deep combat is a good thing. quote:On the topic of your Trial scene, I'm not seeing the mechanical interaction between social Feats and the race mechanic you have going between the prosecution and defense. I understand your aim is to have various feats or moves influence the mob's perception of the PCs as trustworthy, empathetic, etc but I don't see how that will modify the to-hit numbers (take a risk rolls) or damage (points gained for prosecution or defense in this Scene). If your intent is that these feats should not mechanically impact these numbers, then is there some other lever that such feats tweak? Ultimately these Shifts do impact mechanics, but the impact is secondary to the fiction. In the Witch Hunt described above, and here is where an idea needs more refinement, it is the relationship of the crowd to the accused that sets default expectations for the effectiveness of an argument (our mechanical quantization of expectation into "number of effects" in the usual -2 to +2 range). It is from this attitude of crowd-to-defendant that a character's shifts are applied. So, if the crowd has very negative feelings towards the defendant overall, but a character has "Empathetic +3", then that character is so good at connecting with the crowd's emotions that an individual social interaction by that character would evoke somewhat positive response. This can all happen in the ficiton before we even think about die-rolls towards stress targets. Crowd: "Burn that man alive!" Face: "But can you not see that he is but a poor misguided soul who meant well?" Crowd: "Hmmm, I guess he wanted to help..." Only if need be do we take that step from roughly-quantized fiction into mechanics (very negative, 2 effects against, 2d6 towards prosecution ... somewhat positive, 1 effect for, 1 CHA die towards defense). Previously I discussed how concretizing scene goals in mechanics like Stress targets is an optional thing than can be used selectively to build tension - putting fiction before mechanics enables this. If you shift fictional expectations rather than add numbers to die rolls then you can cruise the game along with minimal mechanical resolution. Scenes like The Trial could be run totally free-form with no mechanical goal tracking and just defaults and Take A Risk. It could, but it takes a talented GM to keep the scene feeling tense while maintaining the "magic circle" of genre emulation that makes the players nod and accept dramatic consequences as in-line with the fiction, and hitting a reasonable target for scene length that keeps the scene focused and everyone engaged. The reduction of these iconic scenes to stress targets and action budgets is more meant to help analysis and provide a framework for meant to help our analysis and think about how we might provide scene templates for GMs that are less familiar with improvisational scene construction. quote:If we model social scenes as an analogue to combat in 3.x / 4e you already have equivalents for weapons, moves and hit points. What you have not modeled (here, or in combat as far as I can tell) are status effects. Trips, combat advantage, burning, poison, etc. This may be intentional as you are prioritizing speed of play with your rules, but status effects would further your stated aim of giving players interesting choices to make by providing alternate routes to victory or at least advantage. I definitely want to avoid giving the players potent powers that they drop immediately in every scene as I am much more interested in the game of "try to come up with good fiction on every turn". Even more so, I want to avoid silver-bullet powers that effectively end the scene early or deflate tension. Hard disables and potent debuffs could easily fall into this category and would go against the major design push which is to build dramatic and exciting scenes. We want the players to run towards danger and take risks, with tension building over the course of the scene.
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Aug 2, 2013 05:37
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Paolomania posted:It is from this attitude of crowd-to-defendant that a character's shifts are applied. So, if the crowd has very negative feelings towards the defendant overall, but a character has "Empathetic +3", then that character is so good at connecting with the crowd's emotions that an individual social interaction by that character would evoke somewhat positive response. I think this is a sticking point right here - are our 'Shifts' things that are applied to general attitudes towards a character or things that are applied to expected outcomes of actions that they take (whose expectations might invole attitiudes towards others)? These are clearly different uses of Shifts (i.e. passively shifting all defaults towards a character versus actively shifting individual outcomes of actions by the character). Perhaps Shifts should do both? Either way, Null Profusion has a point - these are concrete mechanical effects, we have just said that they are abstract, coarse, and applied directly to expected outcomes rather than as modifiers to randomized events.
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Aug 2, 2013 16:25
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Throwing out Social Shifts: After further consideration, I think that the concept for Social Shifts as defined in the sketch is starting to run counter to our design goals. At the core of this thought - and the design goals as well - is the presumption that codified difficulties, be they in D20 or FATE, are in the end arbitrarily spotted by the GM anyways in order to achieve some desired risk relative to the PC group skill distribution. At the onset we said that we would use *World style fiction-first gameplay to sidestep forcing the GM to arbitrarily spot mechanical difficulty numbers on-the-fly. Shifts as written, which try to quantify social relationships (even if only coarsely), introduce a side-channel of progression and resolution to our Skill Conflict resolution system. Skill Conflicts are crunchy enough as it is and I don't want to introduce more side-systems that require quantification and extra mechanics (even if couched in descriptive labels). In the end, all the GM really wants to express, in any system, by setting a difficulty, is that certain things are easier for certain characters. We don't need a side system for this. We should just get out of the GM's way and let them directly declare the genre-appropriate fiction that makes that expression without the need for mechanical intervention. We then let fiat, The Expected Thing, and the usual simplified rules run their course. The hitch in "The Trial" came in that we wanted to quantify progress towards goals in terms of Ability Dice. I'm thinking we can say forget mechanics whose sole purpose is to justify the end game-play that the GM wants anyways that also introduce alot more effort in getting to that desired game-play. If the GM wants The Face to get a CHA die by default as The Expected Thing when making arguments, but no-one else, or if the GM wants the opposition to get two CHA dice - or however the GM wants it played out - just let the GM declare it without forcing a versimilitudinous rules justification. Other Advancement Options: That said, I still like the idea of splitting advancement selections into active and passive. I do like the current conception of Feats as per-scene powers that give narrative fiat to introduce new fiction. I'm thinking that we can reformulate something like 'Shifts' into more of a pure narrative, yet still passive, power - i.e. something that still changes expectations and the character's relationship to the fiction, but more like the more passive *World Moves and FATE Stunts rather than "+1 to empathy reactions". I'm thinking something along the lines of "When you are in a crowded space, you can always make the crowd hear your voice."
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Aug 8, 2013 04:56
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In defense of the Fiat: Before we leave the steaming wreckage of "The Trial" design discussion behind us, let us take a moment to review and defend the state that we leave it in: The party works towards the abstract social goal of crowd persuasion (vital to some campaign goal) while managing secondary threats to relationships, reputation and campaign goals. The persuasion task is framed as exclusive (the players cannot just dogpile) either through fictional difficulty (negative EV for non social specialists) or through procedural artifice (informal ability to get the crowds attention or formal court procedure) in order to give The Face (the social specialist) the spotlight for the scene. Overlapping secondary conflicts introduce additional stakes, tension, and opportunity for party-level strategy and character-level dramatic moments. By fiat, the GM gives The Face some number of CHA dice (perhaps 1, perhaps 0 until fictional leverage is created then 1, whatevs) and the opposition some number of CHA dice per turn by default, framing the persuasion of the crowd as a "stress point race" between the two sides, with the first side reaching some target being the one that compels the crowd to a decision. The race is structured such that The Face will lose unless at least Take A Risk is used (and perhaps other secondary actions by the party). This final characterization of The Trial leans heavily on GM fiat: in creating the 'exclusive' restriction on the persuasion goal, in deciding that the situation is 'just difficult enough' for the party to handle, in spotting default dice to each side, and in determining abstract stress goal numbers. We defend this by saying that this is what a GM would do anyways by setting "appropriate" or "balanced" encounter stats in a formal difficulty system. We make no pretense that this game in any way creates an objective window into a fictional world, the GM is tasked with genre emulation and creating dramatic tension and the shortest path to these things is by directly creating "genre appropriate" fiction such that players accept the fiat mechanics, rather than by indirectly working through a "mechanics appropriate" framework to arrive at fiat fiction. Coming up next, we will move on to our final iconic Social Scene, "Council Session", which will involve a similar abstract stress race, but in the context of diplomatic decision making.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:58
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So far in our analysis of constructing rich non-combat encounters we have looked at two iconic Social Scenes: UNDERCOVER PARTY  THE TRIAL  and now we move on to our third and final iconic Social Scene: COUNCIL SESSION 
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Aug 19, 2013 23:09
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session Unlike the other iconic Social Scenes presented so far, "Council Session" is not directly adversarial (in Undercover Party the party is performing some deception, and in The Trial is that the party is arguing against another side). Council Session represents a group decision making process. Council Session is not meant for easily resolved decisions and quick consensus (such low drama events are, as always, handled as a "narrative scene"). By our requirements for dramatic scenes, Council Session must involve creating dramatic tension via high stakes, conflicting goals and overlapping action. Goals: The goal of Council Session is to resolve some group decision-making process. The party may have a specific way they wish to steer the meeting or they may simply wish to mediate tensions. The scene is resolved when the council comes to a decision, whether or not that decision is in line with the party's aims. Methods: Council Session is a Social Scene with friendly (or at least non-enemy) NPCs. The challenges introduced and methods to overcome them will be almost entirely social in nature. Stakes and Tension: In order to have tension, Council Session must involve a number of stake-holders who have different interests, priorities and desired outcomes. The stakes for each party must be high enough that they have a significant investment in the outcome (disinterest is not dramatic). The conflicting interests between the stake holders should be major enough that, if the party totally mishandles the meeting, there is a real risk of a total meltdown of the council and a fracturing of subsequent efforts. Aside from the risk to the major goal of reaching a group decision at-all, as a Social Scene, tension will be created by putting the party's relationships and identity at risk. The conflicting interests between the present factions will force the party to choose sides and potentially alienate allies. A well structured Council Session will give the party interesting choices between arriving at the best strategic decision, minimizing inter-faction conflict, and prioritizing faction relationships. The trade-offs should be clear - perhaps the best decision will alienate the party's closest faction, perhaps minimizing conflict will arrive at a milquetoast course of action, or perhaps favoring a close faction will breed bad-blood in the future. In any case, there should be no perfect solution. Overlapping Action: As with other Social Scenes, the scene spotlight will naturally shine towards the party's social specialist. As usual, we introduce overlapping action and secondary goals that put demands on the rest of the party in facilitating the main scene goal. As "The Face" cannot be everywhere at once, the other party members will be called upon to attend to persuasion and damage control in various side-discussions with other factions. In "social combat" terms, The Face tanks the debate while the rest of the party supports The Face and applies tactical force.
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Aug 19, 2013 23:09
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Aside: Recap and Scene Resolution I feel like our guidelines for constructing interesting scenes are coming together rather nicely (and is quite system-independant). A scene is built around a clear goal or stake that is important to the player characters, a relevant mode of action is chosen (Combat, Social, Exploration, Movement, Creative), conflict is added via antagonists to the scene goal, additional tension and conflict is created by adding secondary threats to other stakes (potentially at odds with the scene goal). This construction sets up a scene that has opportunities for a specialist to have some time in the spot light, for the party to make choices as a group about how to prioritize multiple goals, and for the party to make choices as a group about how to allocate effort to tackle overlapping demands. This lends itself to both planned encounters authored by the GM as well as encounters improvised on the spot. Improvising a scene along these guidelines can even begin via shared narrative prompting - i.e. the players choose their next campaign goal and choose how they might to go about achieving it (as occurs very often in less rail-roady campaigns) and the GM improvises an antagonistic encounter in line with the players' approach. All that is needed to start the scene is the goal, the mode and a quickly chosen primary antagonist. As our scene structure as built-in assumptions about using the initial rounds for scene discovery and reality testing, this gives the GM slack time to improvise some twists and surprises to add overlap. With scene construction coming along, the sticking point is now scene resolution, and much of the analysis to this point has been about how to mechanically structure a scene given a certain setup such that its resolution requires dramatic action and risk taking on the part of the players and fits within our desired design parameters of length and difficulty. We have looked at scene-resolution mechanics (as opposed to action-resolution mechanics) that derive inspiration from dealing damage to a monster with hit points: dealing 'stress' to an antagonist up to a stress limit, or dealing 'stress' to an abstraction of a scene goal. These means of scene resolution have the nice property of being quantifiable for analysis of length and difficulty, but run aground in that they start asking for more crunch out of our lightweight skill conflict system (crunch which we want to avoid) and they have the potential to shift too much player attention off the fiction and onto the mechanics. We want to make sure that scene resolution mechanics remain as a tool for building scene tension over time (what are hit points but a scene score-board after all) and don't become the star of the show that drive player choice (beyond being incentives to making character-based choices, taking dramatic action and taking risks). Paolomania fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2013 19:16
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session (cont) Goal Resolution: The primary goal of Council Session is to reach some group decision, so the characters in this scene should be constantly working towards this end. Unlike scenes with a more concrete goal (kill some monster or outwit some socialite), Council Session has many degrees of freedom in its resolution. The possible outcomes for the primary goal are as numerous as the options for the issue at hand and blended with shades of compromise and diplomacy. Of course the scene should be built with an an ever-present possibility of high-stakes failure of the primary goal: no decision being reached leading to dire inaction, or perhaps alliances are fractured. The question now becomes how to (and perhaps whether to) model progress towards a group decision and how to model the threat of a meltdown. Let's consider some options: Free Form: On the mechanics-light side, we have free-form scene resolution driven by GM fiat. Characters act according to our basic mechanical rules of The Expected Thing and Take A Risk to pursue their goals. The drama and tension in the scene are not generated by players looking at mechanics such as Stress Points to judge proximity to failure and success, but by the GM's description of conflicts and tempers in the fiction. Responsibility for keeping scene length and scene difficulty within design goals is on the GM's shoulders. I believe that this form of scene resolution has the most potential for keeping players focused on the fiction, however it leans very heavily on the talent of the GM to simultaneously be an improvisational storyteller and improvisational game designer. Although some GMs might prefer this style, I think that providing mechanical guides to scene resolution mechanics will make things easier for many GMs. Stress on Characters: For a mechanical option that introduces no abstractions, we can represent at least the failure side of the scene as Stress accumulation on individual characters. As disagreements occur, stress builds on the characters involved and when characters reach their stress limit they are "narratively eliminated" - perhaps the NPC storms off and their faction leaves the council, or perhaps a PC is declared out of order and excused from the council. This is fairly straightforward but it does not quite fit into our Skill Conflict system (i.e. a character wants to do minimal 'damage' to the opponent even if they succeed, and high CHA should do less 'damage') and we need to do some analysis to determine appropriate rates of stress accumulation/etc. Stress on Sides of the Decision: The Stress Point race of The Trial all over again. Works whether the decision is made by the group or by a single "decision maker" that heads the council. As with The Trial, secondary goals and consequences can also have stress accumulation attached to them.
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Aug 28, 2013 16:51
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session (cont) Making A Design Choice: Considering the above options, it is time to make a design choice. An important part of justifying Some Heartbreaker is in finding a design space that is not already covered by existing systems. From the beginning we have set the design goal of being a tad crunchier than FATE - we want to maintain old conceits such as Hit Points and damage dice. We have been targeting a complexity somewhere between *World and D&D 4E - extra crunch in terms of our extra Stress Points and various Ability Dice yet tactically simplistic to keep players focused on the fiction. If we are to crunch combat encounter resolution via antagonist Hit Points, then it is appropriate to crunch non-combat encounter resolution via Stress Points of some sort. So let's rule out Free-Form resolution for Dramatic Scenes. I think free-form gameplay can still work well for Narrative Scenes where the story flow is more loose and things are running more on defaults, but here we make the decision that we want to keep Dramatic Scenes tighter and crunchier and things like Hit Points and Stress Points on abstract goals serve this purpose. So that leaves us with "Stress on Characters" versus "Stress on Characters and Goals". If we go with just "Stress on Characters" then we have a way to determine when certain parties reach "narrative elimination" and are excluded from the council session. This representation of a downside is useful, but it does not inform us on how close to an agreement the council is - as we are building a scene of friendly NPCs making them reach "narrative elimination" is not the desired outcome. Instead we need some form of crunch to represent the progress towards scene resolution. I think the representation of scene progress depends largely on the framing of the council's discussion. The Trial had two distinct sides to the argument involved in a "stress race". If Council Session is framed as multiple parties hashing it out over a similarly distinct number of options, then a "stress race" framing such as in The Trial would very much make sense. However, as mentioned in the last post, Council Session might not involve making a clear choice between mutually exclusive options, but rather it might involve some element of compromise and fluidity in reaching an agreement. This informs us as designers that what we want is something that tells us how close we are to an agreement rather than whether we are making one decision to the exclusion of another. If we have some "consensus building" stress goal, that gives a positive place for players to accumulate their Ability Dice. So then the scene becomes a race between the positive goal of reaching consensus against the negative goals of individual council members/factions bowing out. So our conclusion is to use abstract stress goals for Council Session, but in a different fashion than we did in The Trial.
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Sep 6, 2013 19:49
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session (cont) Quick Council Session Recap: Scene Type: Dramatic Social Scene Characters: A group of non-hostile NPCs or faction representatives Goal: The council makes a good decision Methods: Social persuasion and appeal Mechanics: Stress Goal for council decision, Stress as consequences on Characters Goal Stakes: High cost of a bad council decision. Other Stakes: NPC and Faction relationships to the players and to each other. Overlap: Side-discussions Party Decisions: What their desired decision is. Which factions to favor or placate. Which characters address which NPCs. How to persuade the council and individual NPCs. Length and Balance: Once again, our purpose is to establish the scene and create some tension that allows the players to make dramatic character decisions along the way to resolving the scene within about 30 minutes. The action of Council Session will be more fluid than the strict turn-taking that we sometimes use for Combat, so rather than subdividing our length analysis into rounds, let's just use our rough idea of scene 'stages': Early Stage: Establish purpose of the council and present options Mid Stage: Faction interests are exposed and at odds Late Stage: Tempers flare and cracks in the council show Resolution: The session ends, but was a decision reached and at what cost? Although we will also not be running the scene in such a way that every utterance is an 'action', but it is still useful to think about how many "mechanical interventions" there will be (e.g. Take A Risks, stress dice rolled, etc). Because we are using abstract Stress accumulation as our "progress bar" towards reaching consensus and character Stress accumulation as our "progress bar" towards "narrative consequence" we need to have an idea about how many die rolls should be thrown around such that we get the desired scene tension by a "stress race" between the scene goal and individual flare-outs. If we make the assumption that just about every time someone makes a persuasive case, the council moves towards resolution by one Stress roll (perhaps the speaker's CHA die). Of course there will be an exchange around that case, and perhaps someone will support it or shut it down - either way the goal moves forward - however, characters that are on the losing side of the exchange all take Stress (perhaps a standard d6 or something). Also, non-productive argument can be used as a source of character stress that does not move the scene forward. So the main actions of the NPCs will be to make self-interested cases (moving the goal forward but generating stress) and to argue and hurl insults (non-productively causing stress on each other). This puts the party in the position of making sure everyone gets some support (lest they flame out), trying to make their own non-exclusionary (and thus not cause more stress) and making sure that people are not arguing too much. I can think of two ways to run this scene such that it "fails" without player action. One way is that the council is fairly conflict free and will happily make a disastrously bad decision on their own. The players are put in a position where they must challenge the complacent council, necesarily offending them in the process, in order to get to a better outcome. Another way is that the council is inherently contentious and no decision will be reached at all and perhaps new animosities will form if the players do not intervene. Of these two options, I think the second has the most opportunity for drama and tension because in the first case the antagonism is entirely between the players and the NPCs whereas the second case has much more potential for faction fighting. Let's move forward with the second case. Assuming, as in other analysis, that we have an average die size of d8 (E=4.5) and a mechanics frequency of once every 1-2 minutes, and an overall "action budget" of around 20 actions (really 20 mechanical interventions - where each intervention might involve rolling a number of dice for different purposes). We want a balance such that, if the players don't make diplomatic arguments and if the players don't pull NPCs aside to stop arguments, character Stress will accumulate faster than goal Stress and the council will end in a disastrous fracture with most factions leaving the table before a decision is reached and permanent injury to factional alliances. We also want to put the party in a position where they must "Take A Risk" on top of the default "progress dice" in order to reach the scene goal before faction flare-outs. Let's consider the scene where the party acts cautiously (no statistical help from Take A Risk) and does not fight to keep the council in order (lots of unproductive character-stress) - i.e. the case where the council melts-down because the party does not take dramatic action. If the 20 action budget is split fairly evenly between productive persuasion (one die towards goal, maybe some side character stress) and unproductive argument (pure character stress), that means there will be about 10 d8 stress effects (45 stress) on the goal by the end. If there are about N factions at the council, each faction can take about 5 d6 stress effects (18 stress), and we want most of them to melt down by the end, that means we want about N*5 total stress effects generated in those 20 actions. This tells us that we want roughly N*20 (N*5*3.5ish) total character stress in 20 actions, or that we want to be generating about N character stress per action (where N is the number of factions. Well, it just so happens that if N is about 4 then the GM throwing around 1d6 of stress to some NPC for each action will just about work out, with some judicious use of non-productive argument to distribute some of that stress all around, the GM should be able to hit our character stress target. If the council is a bit bigger, say 5 or 6, the GM just needs to make every other action insult two factions, and so on as needed to keep tension high. Now let's consider the case where the party does the thing we want to encourage: risk taking to improve their average progress and sending PCs to deal with argumentative NPCs to reduce unproductive arguments. On one hand the action composition will likely shift to a greater proportion of productive debate, maybe 14 out of 20? Also, some of that debate will be The Face making cases and taking risks to achieve greater effect. Let's say maybe half of those actions are by the PCs. If each action by the PCs is diplomatic (i.e. not alienating someone) and Take A Risk, then the expected outcome (at CHA score +2) is about 2.5 effects towards the goal. So now we have 7*2.5 + 7 or roughly 25 d8 stress effects towards the goal in 20 actions and about N*13 total stress on characters by end of scene. This is a very different outcome! If we set the target stress for the council reaching a decision at a bit less then 25*d8 (let's say 100 total stress) then we have a good number for keeping the pressure on the PCs to work for a resolution before council members flare out. To sum up: The council will quickly be at odds and bickering without player intervention. When any character makes a strong point, the goal moves forward by that character's CHA die, however NPC points will usually be self-interested and at least one NPC opposing that point will gain 1d6 stress. NPCs will also have a tendency to rebuke eachother, not moving the goal forward, but simple causing 1d6 stress to their target. The Face can focus on making more diplomatic points, moving the goal forward without causing other stress. The rest of the party can start side discussions to distract difficult NPCs or provide additional persuasive effort towards the goal. The scene ends when either the goal reaches 100 stress or all dissenting attendees have left the council. The actual decision reached will be a compromise between the positions of the remaining council members as interpreted by the GM.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:26
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Reminder to self: the reason we are doing making these abstract stress goals is to have a tool that helps us resolve non-combat scenes. Even a good group might let an open-ended role-play session run on for too long or go off on a tangent. Having a scene stress-goal gives something of a ticking clock that is always moving towards resolution and lets the players and GM know when to wrap things up. SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session (cont) Mechanics: So far, the discussion of mechanics has been purely about moving towards scene resolution. Characters make their cases and the goal of reaching a decision moves forward by some CHA die. Characters irritate each other and their stress increases by some default die. Players Take A Risk, roll d20 and either move the scene goal forward a few more die, or generate a few dice of stress on some character. This is all good, except it does not harness the Skill system at all. Conflicts: What we have not discussed yet is direct conflicts of personalities. Yes, unproductive argumentation has been characterized as pure stress-generating events, but sometimes the players will be at odds with a faction over an important yes/no issue that has no compromise and the council must decide one way or another. As we always want our rules to push towards resolution we don't want such situations to result in a logjam. Here again we use our conflict resolution system where relative Skill sets default expectations. Once such a direct conflict of interests (with no compromise possible) arises, The Expected Thing follows the conflict system, but with the additional side-effect that by default every faction on the losing side will also build up a die of stress. From this default, of course the player characters can perform the usual narrative intervention (aka "Take A Risk") to attempt to sway the council or mitigate the collateral stress. We can then loosely interpret each 'effect' of the Skill Conflict as swaying the favor of the council by one step or as assuaging one die of resulting stress. (We can also use this characterization of effects as countering stress dice for players using Take A Risk to attempt to mitigate other social stress effects). Once such a conflict has been used to determine an issue the council is decided on that issue. It cannot be revisited. Any attempts to return to the issue will just be considered unproductive stres generating sour grapes. We set such a hard rule to keep the scene moving forward and strictly prevent players from blocking the scene by begging an issue that didn't go their way. The Decision: Once the scene stress goal has reached, the council's decision is made. Up to this point, we have dome some handwaving about what that decision ultimately is, leaving it mostly up to GM discretion to figure out. To be more specific, the final council decision will include the outcomes of any issues decided by conflict resolution or unanimous agreement, and all undecided issues will be compromises at the discretion of the GM. These decisions are final and players cannot further sway this decision. SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session: Avoiding Pitfalls Back in the beginning of the Social Scene section, we mentioned some potential pitfalls that we wanted to avoid in our social scenes, and here we will address how we are avoiding these in a scene that inherently involves negotiation. Protracted Negotiations: Our current design for Council Session avoids protracted negotiation by two methods. First, the scene stress goal sets a hard limit on how long the scene can go on. No matter how the players act, the council will reach a decision in at most around 20 "productive" actions, not to mention character stress eliminating dissenting factions early. If the players spend too much time focusing on one issue, other issues will be unaddressed and left to GM-determined compromise once the scene stress goal is reached. Second, if an issue before the council does become a contentious yes/no, we use our Skill Conflict mechanics to quickly and clearly decide the issue one way or another and move the scene on. Frivolous negotiations: The "scene stress goal" design for Council Session also discourages frivolous negotiations. If players spend too much time haggling over the small details of one issue, there is an opportunity cost as other issues will go unaddressed and left to a GM-determined compromise (which need not be a 'good' decision in the eyes of the party). Social Tanking: We have not fully addressed the issue of social tanking, or perhaps "dog-piling the scene goal". This would involve the players machine-gunning topics before the council to rapidly advance the scene goal and end the scene quickly. One natural deterrent to this is side-stress - namely you cannot make a point without stressing out someone at the table that disagrees with you, so spamming talking points will probably lead to alot of unmitigated side-stress and council dissention. Additionally, I think we need some notion of council protocol and violation thereof. Council members will be naturally pissed off if they feel their voices are being drowned out by a single interest (i.e. the party's) and it would be very appropriate for the GM to levy additional side-stress for violating the "order of the council". Reduction to Combat: I believe that our initial framing of the scene as a gathering of allies with a pressing need to cooperate should be enough to discourage the party from starting physical fights. In addition to this there is the threat of consequences to social relations with each faction. If this is not enough to prevent sociopathic murder-hoboism at the council, then perhaps the Social mode for Dramatic Scenes should be avoided.
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Sep 18, 2013 21:48
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session: Example Council Session: City Defense Idea: A small city on the frontier of an empire has come under threat from an invading army. Many city residents are inclined to hide within the city walls or flee altogether. Our generic fantasy party has been called to attend an emergency meeting of local interests attempting to rally a defense of the city. Motivation: We presume that the party cares about the fate of the city, whether it is because they care about its residents or its survival is vital to some campaign goal. It is of extra benefit if the party cares about their reputation within the city, whether for utility or for esteem. Better yet would be that the party has established relationships with multiple factions within the city that they wish to maintain. Setup: The city has a small outpost of legionnaires who typically fend off bandits, a local government with a garrison of city guards, a unified guild representing tradesmen, an academy of libertarian mages, a widely popular mega-church, a secretive nature cult, and a criminal organization that runs a burgeoning black-market and smuggling operation. If most factions can be convinced to contribute to a unified defense then the city will survive, but if the council melts down then the city will surely be sacked. These groups should all be somewhat friendly to the player party and the interests of these groups should be set up to create lots of conflict and drama. Each faction has something important to offer. The legionnaires, although few, are the most disciplined, best armed and best trained for military operations. The city guard, although not experienced at warfare, are reasonably well armed and are decent fighters. The trades guild has expertise and equipment for building fortifications and armaments. The mages guild can offer close-range incendiary spells and limited long-range fire support. The mega-church holds sway over the majority of local commoners and can persuade them to action as needed by the council. The nature cult can help shape the battlefield through modification of terrain and foliage and perhaps provide other combat support. The criminal organization has a network of smuggling tunnels and hide-outs in the city and surrounding countryside as well as trained fighters and access to useful weapons and contraband. Interests and Conflicts: Each faction has different interests and concerns and if the party cannot find compromises, they might be forced to pick sides and favor one faction over another. The legionnaires are loyal to the empire and are inclined to retreat in order to warn the empire and muster a military defense in a location more suitable for an imperial victory over the invading army. They are also very antagonistic to the criminal organization. The city government is heavily invested in local business and wants to defend the city at all costs. There is some agitation with the empire over local autonomy. There is an informal truce with the criminal element, however if this agreement is made public the government stands to loose serious face with the empire. The trades guild can easily find profit at another chapter within the empire and are inclined to leave for safer employment. The mages guild wants to preserve their sanctuary in this lightly governed frontier town, but is loathe to bow to the authority of the empire or city government. The mega-church is ostensibly not pro-violence and totally disapproves of the immoral criminals and the heretical nature cult. The nature cult is distrustful of hierarchical organizations and just wants to be left alone, but thinks that the invaders are less likely to do that. The criminal organization has a successful operation in the city and would like to maintain the status quo. Not fond of the legionnaires and wants the church off its back. Cast: Each faction has a leader and several aides present (aides will be handy for side-dealing). The legionnaires are represented by The Centurion. The city government is represented by The Governor. The trades guild is represented by The Guild Master. The mages guild is represented by The Archmage. The church is represented by The Bishop. The nature cult is represented by a trio of Cultists. The criminal organization is represented by A Respectable Businessman.
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Sep 19, 2013 17:18
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session: Example (cont) City Defense: Mechanical Setup We could do a setup where each faction leader has varying CHA score (i.e. social effect dice) and HP (i.e. stress limit), but to keep things simple, as in our analysis the scene goal of "reaching a decision" has a stress limit of 100, each faction leader has CHA +2 (1d8 effect size) and each faction leader has a stress limit of 18. City Defense: Length and Balance As Council Session is a fairly open-ended scene in terms of discussing and deciding on a course of action, we are going to analyze the mechanical effects and natures of the actions in the scene more than the actual issues and decisions. First we take a look at how the GM might run the scene with minimal player intervention to convince ourselves it will come to disaster in about 20 actions, roughly grouped into the stages discussed earlier. We are going to assume that the GM makes efforts to play the various sides evenly so that stress is distributed. Early Stage (Exposition and Discovery): The players enter the meeting and get a description of the attendees. Factions begin stating options. The Governor calls the meeting to order and states the need for a unified town defense under his orders (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Centurion, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Centurion makes a case questioning The Governor's military expertise and states the need for a retreat to warn the empire and relocate the population to a more defensible city (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Governor, +1d6 stress to A Respectable Businessman). The Bishop suggests holing up the population inside the walled keep of the city and waiting for imperial support (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Centurion, +1d6 stress to The Guild Master). The Cultist counters with the idea of hiding in the nearby wilderness until the invaders have passed (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Governor, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). 4 actions. Expected Stress: Scene 18, Governor 7, Centurion 7, Guild Master 3.5, Bishop 3.5, Cultist 3.5, ARB 3.5 Mid Stage (Opposition and Conflict): Factions protect their interests and unproductive arguments begin. A Respectable Business Man tries to mediate, saying that everyone stands to lose if the invaders sack the city (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). The Bishop fires back that ARB is a criminal that only cares about material profit and not lives (+1d6 stress to ARB). The Centurion blasts The Bishop's plan as trying to defend the city without a proper army will lead to the most likely to death and suffering (+1d6 stress to The Bishop, +1d6 stress to The Governor). The Governor attempts to calm things down saying that the church's help in organizing the people under the authority of the council is vital to the city's defense (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Archmage, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Archmage accuses The Governor and the empire of using the crisis to make an authoritarian power-grab (+1d6 stress to The Governor, +1d6 stress to The Centurion). 5 actions (9 total). Expected Stress: Scene 27, Governor 15, Centurion 11.5, Guild Master 3.5, Archmage 3.5, Bishop 11.5, Cultist 7, ARB 7 Mid Stage (Tension and Fracture): The Centurion blasts the cloth wearers for living in a bubble of safety that is only made possible by the authority and strength of the empire (+1d6 stress to Archmage, +1d6 stress to Cultist, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). The Archmage jabs The Centurion by saying he thinks that people would not be able to eat, poo poo or gently caress without the authority of the empire (+1d6 stress to The Centurion). The governor, seeing that the meeting is near melting down, attempts to placate The Centurion by saying that no-one here questions the laws and authority of the empire (+1d6 stress to The Archmage, +1d6 stress to The Cultist, +1d6 stress to ARB). The Bishop speaks up to say that "those heretics" have no respect for any law (+1d6 stress to The Cultist, The Cultist reaches "narrative consequence"). The Cultist stands and says something snappy about the law of man vs. the laws of nature and exists the council along with aides. 4 actions (13 total). Expected Stress: Scene 27, Governor 15, Centurion 15, Guild Master 3.5, Archmage 11.5, Bishop 15, (A note about narrative elimination: As discussed previously, "narrative consequence" need not mean elimination from the scene - it just means that the respective goal or character has reached a point of being ineffective in the scene and that there will be consequences to follow. With respect to a social scene it could mean an angry outburst or a disruption of the meeting. In any case, the given character will no contribute to scene goals but might hinder the scene by continuing to generate stress and block others. In this case, an unruly outburts might force the party to act and forcibly remove a character from the meeting). Late Stage (The Meltdown): The Governor, seeing the cracks in the council, attempts to reassert the idea that the people cannot abandon the town and appeals to The Centurion to send just one runner to the empire (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to Guild Master, +1d6 stress to The Centurion who reaches narrative consequence). The Centurion states that one runner would not be reliable enough and wishes the council good luck in their vain defense of this backwater town and leaves with subordinates (+1d6 stress to Guild Master). The Guild Master states that the guild does not need this town so badly as some so long as they survive and blames The Governor for running the legionnaires out of the meeting (+1d6 stress to The Governor who reaches narrative consequence). The Governor (now at narrative consequence and not being contained by any players) stands and shouts accusations at The Guild Master that the guild are price gougers and leeches off the fruits of his city and that if they don't need the city then the city doesn't need them. The Governor then throws The Guild Master out of the meeting and invites anyone else who doesn't need the city to leave as well (we'll call this an 'action'). The Archmage is extremely troubled by The Governor's clear abuse of authority and says the mages may need a city, but not one run with an iron fist. The Archmage exits the meeting (we'll call this an 'action' as well). 4 actions (17 total). Expected Stress: Scene 31.5, Governor 18.5, Resolution: The council session, although nowhere near its scene stress goal, now has most dissenting voices kicked out, so we will conclude the scene. The Governor and The Bishop agree to pull most of the populace within the city walls and defend as best they can with city guards and volunteers. A Respectable Business Man, although in outward agreement, plans to leave the city to its doom and retreat the criminal operation to various secret hide-outs. The legionnaires will abandon their outpost and retreat to the nearest imperial fort. The trades guild and mages guild will leave the city for safer locations. The nature cult will flee to the nearby wilderness. With so many factions abandoning the city, a large portion of the common folk will panic and flee as well. We presume that the party has been present for this melt down and thus by association with the city government has lost significant face with the mage's guild, the legionnaires, the nature cult, and the trade guild. If any of the player characters had personal relationships with the leaders of those factions then those relationships have been strained as well. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 23, 2013 |
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Sep 20, 2013 21:15
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Social Scenes: Council Session: Example (cont) City Defense: Player Intervention As we have just seen, the setup for the "City Defense" example of the iconic "Council Session" scene is poised for disaster without player intervention. Mechanically, the players will be attempting to further the singular scene goal of "reach a decision" while mitigating secondary stress. It just so happens that doing these things will involve social role-playing in various ways. Let's look at the options that we have discussed so far: Advance the Scene Goal: PCs advance the scene goal any time they make some case or point before the council. The Expected Thing is that the scene goal advances by the speaker's CHA die and any parties that one would expect to be very upset at the idea gain 1d6 stress. This rewards players for introducing compromises that please all parties as such arguments will advance the scene goal without generating side stress. If the party is hogging the floor or interrupting another speaker, then their ideas will likely generate additional secondary stress as the council members become agitated. Thus the party will find it more productive to spread out into side discussions while The Face works the floor. Side Discussion: PCs that split off to side discussion can take action to mitigate secondary stress as it happens as well as persuade individual factions towards compromise. The Expected Thing in such cases is up to the fiction, but the GM should generally reward well role-played side discussion and a PC harnessing an established character relationship with mitigated stress dice or factions becoming more receptive to compromise. One clear example of such mitigation would be a PC overhearing a faction grumbling about an issue before making an unproductive outburst or insult. By acting quickly, the PC involved in the secondary discussion could move the NPC to stay their insult thus mitigating the extra stress it would cause. These secondary persuasions should not cause factions to totally drop their interests and if a faction cannot or will not compromise on an issue that is vital to their interests then a more confrontational means of resolution might be necessary. Skill Conflicts: If there is an issue must be decided or an idea that must be shot down, or any other kind of argument or confrontation, then PCs can enter into a Social Conflict with another speaker. As usual, The Expected Thing for a Skill Conflict is an outcome in favor of one character or another that is determined by relative Skill. Cross Skill Action: As always, players should be allowed the opportunity to attempt Cross Skill Actions, where they use one skill in place of another in a Skill Conflict. The attempt must be committed to before knowing the outcome and the GM will adjucate according to the fiction and how awesome the description of the action is. If the player establishes awesome (higher standards than 'good') fiction then the GM will allow the use of the other Skill. For instance, a player might attempt to use Combat Skill to dramatically throw a dagger at a specific location on a map while making a point, or a player might attempt to use Creative Skill to cobble together a visual aid for a battle plan out of beer mugs and napkins. Take A Risk: As always, players can deviate from The Expected Thing by choosing to Take A Risk. This might represent forcing an issue or overstepping the bounds of protocol to make an emotional plea. In any case, the rule is the same as always: roll an unmodified d20 to shift from the default, if the player establishes good fiction then the GM awards Advantage and the player adds an appropriate Ability Score to the d20 roll. As fictionally appropriate, negative shifts might create fictional complications, generate an additional die of stress on the player or other characters and positive shifts might be used to further advance the scene goal by one CHA die or mitigate a die of secondary stress. As usual, negative shifts are decided by the GM and positive shifts are decided by the acting player.
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Sep 23, 2013 18:02
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session: Example (cont) City Defense: Cautious Player Scenario Given the above mentioned modes of intervention, let's take a look at what happens when players "play it safe" and do not take advantage of the statistical advantages that we provide to encourage risk-taking ("Take A Risk" i.e. voluntary d20 rolls) and dramatic action (establishing fiction for Advantage and Cross Skill Action as well as usage of per-scene Dramatic Feats). This risk aversion would most likely look like The Face taking the default when arguing before the council (one CHA die towards scene goal) and being non confrontational towards other cases (not entering into Social Conflicts). The rest of a risk-averse party would likely try to mitigate secondary stress in a non-confrontational manner - i.e. through fiction and dialog but without risky mechanical intervention. As always, things are resolved fiction-first so such tactics might be successful or not depending on the GM's judgement (as always, mediating to genre expectations). Some NPC outbursts might be tempered and others might not depending on what is at issue and what the NPC's stake is. Overall, this will look a lot like our previous analysis, but with a few actions per stage taken in a more positive direction by the player party: Early Stage (Exposition and Discovery): The players enter the meeting and get a description of the attendees. Factions begin stating options. The Governor calls the meeting to order and states the need for a unified town defense under his orders (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Centurion, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Party identifies the legionnaires as a vital faction and dispatches "The Brute" (combat expert), who is acquainted with The Centurion, to make a private appeal. Meanwhile The Face presents The Party's vision for using a feigned route to lure the invaders into a kill-zone just outside the city (+1d8 to scene goal). After some discussion with The Brute, The Centurion makes a case that the plan needs military expertise that only he can provide but that the empire must be warned (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to A Respectable Businessman). The Bishop suggests holing up the population inside the walled keep of the city and waiting for imperial support (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Centurion, +1d6 stress to The Guild Master). The Party dispatches "The Tinker" (creative expert) to appeal to The Guild Master. The Cultist counters with the idea of hiding in the nearby wilderness until the invaders have passed (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Governor, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). The Face redirects The Cultist's idea about hiding in the woods back into the feigned route idea. (+1d8 to scene goal) 6 actions. Expected Stress: Scene 27, Governor 3.5, Centurion 7, Guild Master 3.5, Bishop 3.5, Cultist 3.5, ARB 3.5 (TBC) Paolomania fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 04:17
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Aside: Remember that our definition of "action" encompasses not just a mechanical intervention, but a whole chunk of game-play involving meta-game discussion and in-game fiction by both the players and the GM and we still presume that these chunks are about 2 minutes in length. Something that this analysis summarizes as "The Centurion makes a case" will involve much more GM description and player interaction than a single declarative statement. We presume that the GM will be running the actual game-play in a DungeonWorld fashion, describing the action and mentioning secondary responses around the council while giving the players prompts and openings. "The Expected Thing" as manifested in the mechanics (i.e. how effective an argument is or who will get stressed out) should be telegraphed to the players so that they can make informed plans for action and intervention.
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Sep 25, 2013 23:22
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SOCIAL SCENES: Council Session: Example (cont) City Defense: Cautious Player Scenario (cont) Mid Stage (Opposition and Conflict): Factions protect their interests and unproductive arguments begin. A Respectable Business Man tries to mediate, saying that everyone stands to lose if the invaders sack the city (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). The Bishop fires back that ARB is a criminal that only cares about material profit and not lives (+1d6 stress to ARB). The Party dispatches The Scholar (exploration expert) to calm The Bishop. The Face assures the council that everyone is looking for a plan that saves the most lives (+1d8 to scene goal). The Centurion, tempered by The Brute, explains the folly of holing up in the city (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Bishop). The Governor assures The Bishop that the church's help in organizing the people under the authority of the council is vital to the city's defense (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Archmage, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Archmage accuses The Governor and the empire of using the crisis to make an authoritarian power-grab (+1d6 stress to The Governor, +1d6 stress to The Centurion). The party dispatches The Acrobat (movement expert) to assure the Archmage that they will not let a power grab happen. The Face states that if the magi provide fire support for the trap that the invaders can be significantly weakened before they are engaged by infantry (+1d8 to scene goal). 7 actions (13 total). Expected Stress: Scene 49.5, Governor 7, Centurion 10.5, Guild Master 3.5, Bishop 10.5, Archmage 3.5, Cultist 7, ARB 7 Mid Stage (Increasing Tension): The Centurion was stung by The Archmage's comments, but is urged by The Brute to object less venomously and so says that a trap might work, but still at significant loss of life on the front lines (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Bishop, +1d6 stress to The Guild Master). The Face implores the council that it is better for a few to sacrifice their lives to save the city than for all to meet a slow death under siege or in open battle (+1d8 to scene goal). A Respectable Business Man speaks up in defense of The Face's plan, saying it is better than besiegement or open battle (+1d8 to scene goal). The Bishop is loathe to cooperate with ARB, but The Scholar distracts him into venting privately instead of making an outburst. The Centurion remarks that the invaders will not be lured by his small dispatch of legionnaires. The Face proposes that the city guard be added to the legionnaires to give the appearance of a weak defensive army (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Governor). The Governor demands more details about this "trap" before risking the lives of his men. The Face describes some zany plan involving a choke point, manipulating terrain, and various machinations (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to Cultist, +1d6 stress to Guild Master). 5 actions (18 total). Expected Stress: Scene 72, Governor 10.5, Centurion 10.5, Guild Master 10.5, Bishop 14, Archmage 3.5, Cultist 10.5, ARB 7 (TBC)
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Sep 26, 2013 19:52
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Late Stage (Breaking Point): The Cultist scoffs at the zany plan saying that it is a violation of the rightful ways of nature and that the use of pyromancy is foul and unacceptable (+1d6 stress to The Bishop, +1d6 stress to The Archmage). The party reassigns The Scholar to deal with the cultists, The Face asks the Archmage if they can offer some form of non-pyromantic fire support. The Archmage says yes, but other options are less lethal and would not weaken the invaders as much (+1d6 stress to The Centurion, +1d6 stress to The Governor). The Centurion is nervous about the change in plan but is persuaded by The Brute to support it rather than denounce it. Even so, The Centurion proposes that it is a risky operation and he will need to be put in charge of orchestrating it (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to Archmage, +1d6 stress to ARB). Although somewhat stayed by The Acrobat's pleas, The Archmage still strongly objects to being subject to "imperial tyranny" (+1d6 stress to Centurion). The Face intercedes and proposes that The Centurion orchestrate ground forces during the battle, while The Party coordinates with supporting units (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Archmage). 5 actions (22 total). Expected Stress: Scene 81, Governor 14, Centurion 14, Guild Master 10.5, Bishop 17.5, Archmage 14, Cultist 10.5, ARB 10.5 We can see here that we have the desired race between the scene goal and individual character stress - the end of scene is in sight however several factions are one or two actions away from "narrative consequence". This means that The Party will have to decide priorities of factions both by utility to the city's defense and by importance of the party's relationship. Unfortunately, we are not at scene resolution and are already over our length goal. This is largely because, in this "cautious player scenario", the party is mitigating some of the stress that would lead to a quick meltdown, yet not aggressively taking risks to push the council to be as productive as possible. These combine to make the scene grind out more slowly. We could consider changing the balance such that the stress limit on the scene is lower, but is it best to plan the design around the "passive players" case? Resolution: A Respectable Businessman offers his men as scouts and messengers (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Bishop, The Bishop reaches narrative consequence). The Bishop stands and exclaims that he will have no part of a plan that relies on the information of amoral thieves and murderers and demands that if ARB is not expelled from the council then he will be forced to leave. The party makes a quick decision and bids The Bishop keep his followers safe during the battle (The Bishop exits the council). His exit alarms the Guild Master, but The Tinker reassures him, however The Centurion is stressed (+1d6 stress to The Centurion) and exclaims that without a militia to absorb losses, the legionnaires and guards to not stand a chance (+1d6 stress to The Governor). The party reassigns more effort towards ensuring that The Governor and The Centurion support the plan. The Face spins the loss of the militia as making the remaining units more agile, so they can stay mobile while traps and fire support whittle down the enemy (+1d8 to scene goal). The Archmage offers pyromantic demolitions as another trap (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Cultist again objects to the use of foul pyromancy by the blundering mages (+1d6 stress to The Archmage). The party decides to side with The Archmage and The Face implores The Cultist that the city defense needs more firepower (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Cultist). The Guild Master says that if the mages can provide pyromantic demolitions, the guild can provide additional flak to increase their effectiveness (+1d8 to scene goal, +1d6 stress to The Cultist, Cultist reaches narrative consequence). The Cultist stands an exclaims that such gross weaponry that will indiscriminately kill innocent wildlife. The Face interrupts and says something a dramatic about how it must be done for the good of the people (+1d8 to scene goal, council resolution goal reached). The Cultist exits in a huff while the remaining council members agree upon the details of the plan (GM fiat based on discussion during the scene). 6 actions (28 total). Expected Stress: Scene 102.5, Governor 17.5, Centurion 17.5, Guild Master 10.5, And so we have reached scene resolution. By our rough estimation of number of actions it would take around 30-60 minutes to play the scene out in this way. Certainly if it is closer to the upper end of that range then we are well outside of our desired range for scene length. I think erring on the side of caution, lowering the stress needed for the scene goal could be in order. However, we know that when the players are more pro-active the scene will resolve somewhat faster.
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Sep 27, 2013 19:39
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SOCIAL SCENES: Summary We have come a long way since starting this first foray into the design and balance of non-combat encounters via Dramatic Scenes of a Social flavor (over 20K words long). We have considered some design options and made some choices along the way. Let's sum up and review this section on Social Scenes: We began by applying our core mechanics to social situations (whether in a 'dramatic' or 'narrative' scene): - The story progresses by the rule of The Expected Thing (a default as determined by the fiat of the GM who acts as Genre Moderator) - Players may voluntarily attempt to divert an outcome with Take A Risk (a d20 roll that is like a voluntary Defy Danger) - A player that establishes good fictional justification gains Advantage (add a relevant Ability Score to a Take A Risk roll) - When two characters act against each other (aka a Skill Conflict), The Expected Thing is determined by relative skill level As these are all very generic, the application to Social Scenes was immediately evident. We then looked to the well trodden ground of combat encounters for inspiration in design of non-combat scenes: - combat tends to have way more fidelity and depth than one-off skill rolls and one-dimensional skill challenges - antagonist HP can be seen as measuring progress towards a goal - PC HP loss can be seen as measuring progress towards narrative consequence We then concluded that we can use these intuitions from combat to help analyze our non-combat scenes for length and balance. We stated some initial design goals for our Social Scenes based on our broad guidelines for constructing Dramatic Scenes: playable in about 30-minutes (not counting table talk); stakes based on campaign goals, relationships and reputation; tension created by conflicts between friendly NPCs; and overlapping demands created via secondary action and vignettes. We also mentioned a few social-scene traps that we wanted to avoid: protracted negotiations, one-dimensional "social tanking", and reduction to combat. We then began our analysis using three example "Iconic Social Scenes": Under Cover Party, The Trial and Council Session. Undercover Party introduced a social scene involving deception and subterfuge. The Trial introduced a social scene involving a contest of persuasion between two well defined sides. Council Session introduced a social scene built around seeing a cooperative decision making process through to completion. These three scenarios raised a variety of issues ranging from new applications of Stress mechanics to more specific Advantage mechanics, to questions of how Skill Conflicts (and tangentially level progression) will work. We applied our abstract formulation of combat to analyze each of these iconic scenes and argued that a design rolling CHA dice towards stress on characters and scene goals in each case could produce a scene with the desired length and balance properties. Some notes on specific decisions that were made: - we introduced the idea of Shifts as a progression that changes The Expected Thing for a character ("at-will"s, so to speak, but fictional rather than mechanical in nature) - we introduced the idea of Feats as a progression grants per-scene narrative fiats ("per encounter"s, so to speak) - we discarded the idea of a granular mechanical quantification of character relationships, deciding to leave such things for the fiction rather than the mechanics to decide - we committed to the notion of being a "shifting spotlight" game where a different specialist character is allowed to shine in each scene (as opposed to a "shared spotlight" game) This section has been long and arduous, and for those who keep the view count going up: thank you for staying with me. I think that dragging the design through such muck has paid off in focusing the vision for the design and filing some edges off the mechanics. It is now time to leave Social Scenes behind and move onto analysis of our next mode of dramatic scene.
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Oct 1, 2013 06:10
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A bit of a meandering thought here, but let me start by saying I'm stuck in 4e D&D Might it be possible to run something similar to The Trial or The Council scenes, using a loose interpretation of Skill Challenges? I.e. instead of stress, you count successes and failures against the party and/or each faction until they "stress out" You could maybe adjust the DCs up or down depending on your goals or intentions. Like, if you intimidate a faction, the DC to intimidate them further goes down, but the DC for diplomacy goes up. the party can decide which faction they want to smooth-talk and who they want to discredit or bully into walking away. You could improvise using something akin to a cross-skill action; use Religion at a higher DC to impress The Bishop, maybe with a reward of 2 successes for Taking A Risk?
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Oct 1, 2013 06:51
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P.d0t posted:A bit of a meandering thought here, but let me start by saying I'm stuck in 4e D&D That said, the main motivation for developing the Some Heartbreaker mechanics is to support creating such scenes because in reality, existing systems have features that make it much more difficult to create dramatic situations. Considering just Social Scenes, the 3.X line with its charm spells and such actively undercuts attempts at creating such drama without significant nerfs - either through explicit restriction on spells or through restrictions with a modesty-leaf such as magic items that nullify problem spells. 4E is not so bad in that respect, so you should be able to apply the scene designs without hacking in any nerfs to existing powers. I feel like the guidelines for scene design are a natural fit for narrative style games such as FATE and *World. quote:You could maybe adjust the DCs up or down depending on your goals or intentions. Like, if you intimidate a faction, the DC to intimidate them further goes down, but the DC for diplomacy goes up. the party can decide which faction they want to smooth-talk and who they want to discredit or bully into walking away. You could improvise using something akin to a cross-skill action; use Religion at a higher DC to impress The Bishop, maybe with a reward of 2 successes for Taking A Risk?
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Oct 1, 2013 17:05
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Perhaps not, but I was thinking of a simple shift, such as from an Easy to a Moderate DC, for example. Something where guidelines already exist, rather than me attempting to reinvent the wheel with my horrible math skills 
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Oct 2, 2013 00:37
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How does 4E work with NPC attitudes? IIRC 3.X had 5-point steps in DC for its scale of social attitudes. If I were trying to backport SH mechanics onto 4E I'd probably fiat the attitudes and make persuasion attempts out to be CHA saves vs "the expected thing", but that kind of ignores the skill system. Maybe skill could set the DC for the CHA save to divert the narrative.
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Oct 2, 2013 04:31
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The shortest answer/example I could find without looking real hard is that an unfriendly monster gets +5 to defenses vs. Intimidate and a hostile monster gets +10 It's rolled as Intimidate vs. Will or else vs. DC set by DM (I.e. usually Easy, Moderate or Hard DC, which all scale by level)
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Oct 2, 2013 05:02
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EXPLORATION SCENES What is an Exploration Scene? Exploration scenes are dramatic scenes that are primarily about discovery of the game world. For these scenes we are looking to expand upon exploration activities until they are full scenes that stand on their own. For our purposes, exploration encompasses a wide array of interactions with the game world itself. From a d20 perspective, our Exploration encompasses everything from Listen/Spot/Perception to Knowledge and Survival. From a Dungeon World perspective, we are building entire scenes around Discern Realities and Spout Lore. From FATE we are creating opportunities for heavy use of Notice, Investigate, and Lore and the associated stunts. Just as not every fictional punch thrown is a Combat Scene and not every conversation forms a Social Scene, not every exploratory activity warrants an Exploration Scene. Again we note the distinction between Narrative Scenes and Dramatic Scenes. Narrative Scenes are the slow-paced, broad-strokes scenes that we use to find out where the game is going and move it along. Dramatic scenes are the fast-paced, granular scenes where important things are at stake, there is tension and uncertainty around these stakes, and how the players act determines their fate. This distinction helps inform how we characterize a given exploration activity. For instance, searching a house for clues could be either a Narrative or Dramatic scene. If the players are searching the house for clues at a leisurely pace for clues that will be a branching off point for the next story beat, that purpose tells us to use a Narrative Scene. The fact that we are using a Narrative Scene tells us that we are in a low-drama situation and should be trying to move the story along to the next exciting beat. It means that we should not block the game with fine-detail action and lots of mechanics. Perhaps there is a bit of interest and a few surprises to the exploration, but the overall stakes and tension are low. If the players are searching the house for clues that are vital to the fate of something important while under time pressure and in some form of danger, that tells us to use a Dramatic Scene. The fact that we are using a Dramatic Scene tells us that we are in a high-drama situation and that means that the stakes will be high, that there will be important choices to make, and that risks and dramatic actions will be needed to achieve goals. For the GM this means applying our principles for building Dramatic Scenes: finding the things the players value and putting them at risk, introducing overlapping demands to engage everyone, highlighting conflict between goals to create choices, adding twists and surprises that require adaptation, and structuring the scene such that tension ramps up all the way to resolution. When we say "Exploration Scene", we always mean the latter case: a Dramatic Scene built around exploring the environment. The first thing to ask about a Dramatic Scene is always "What is at stake?" For Combat Scenes it was fairly easy to answer "the characters' lives" and for Social Scenes it was fairly easy to answer "the characters' relationships". For Exploration Scenes, the answer is not quite as clear and thus we have more leeway. The players are trying to find things or find things out. There can be danger in the finding - such as traps and environmental hazards. There can also be danger in the finding out - such as unwelcome truths and dire discoveries. In Exploration Scenes we will make use of the shared narrative nature of our game to not just determine whether a thing is discovered, but also to change the nature of exactly what is discovered. Thus we depart from the idea of making a rolling to discover a predefined thing and instead opt for the *World style of rolling to determine whether the found thing is good or bad.
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Oct 4, 2013 19:41
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Let's Review the Iconic Exploration Scenes that we will be using to ... explore Exploration Scene design and mechanics. These are all archetypical, discovery-based non-combat scenes that one might find in the types of fiction that we will be trying to emulate. Forensic Investigation  The party has arrived to the scene of some past event and must use their skills of observation and deduction to determine what happened and what it portends for the future. Wilderness Survival  The party is tromping through some dangerous region - perhaps to find something or perhaps just to move through. Not to be confused with a Movement Scene, the key to surviving this scene is using observation and knowledge to survive their surroundings. Library Research  Vital knowledge rests within dusty tomes and it is up to the party to find it. What knowledge they find and what troubles that knowledge reveals and the costs of discovery are malleable things that depend on the actions of the players.
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Oct 4, 2013 22:18
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Maybe this is a question better suited to the DM advice thread, but what's a good way to put things at stake? I find it can often cause tension between the DM and players, if you target someone or something that is important to the PC (such as something in their background). The flip side of that is if you try to introduce NPCs of your own and get the players to care about them, you run the risk of shifting the focus too far away from the players (and even then, they might disregard the characters you introduce). It seems like the obvious answer is to work things out with players beforehand, but in my experience players hate "homework". The other problem is to share the spotlight between often disparate player focuses, or PCs with outright opposed goals (let alone morals). I pose this question not as a derail, but because the objective of making all non-narrative scenes have something at stake (as mentioned in these posts about Exploration scenes) is something I've struggled to accomplish in my current campaign.
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Oct 5, 2013 07:22
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P.d0t posted:Maybe this is a question better suited to the DM advice thread, but what's a good way to put things at stake? quote:I find it can often cause tension between the DM and players, if you target someone or something that is important to the PC (such as something in their background). The flip side of that is if you try to introduce NPCs of your own and get the players to care about them, you run the risk of shifting the focus too far away from the players (and even then, they might disregard the characters you introduce). quote:It seems like the obvious answer is to work things out with players beforehand, but in my experience players hate "homework". The other problem is to share the spotlight between often disparate player focuses, or PCs with outright opposed goals (let alone morals). As for player groups with disparate focuses, at first I would say that juxtaposing opposed goals can be an excellent way to introduce tension and foster discussion in the player group. If the players really want to be playing the game together then at some point one side will concede and the game will move on. If the players can't even reach a base level of cooperation then it sounds like you might have a problem player in the mix.
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Oct 5, 2013 13:52
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EXPLORATION MECHANICS The mechanics of exploration actions remains the same as the core mechanics: by default The Expected Thing (as determined by the GM) happens unless a player chooses to Take A Risk and roll d20, when a player Takes A Risk and establishes good fictional justification (as judged by the GM) they may add an Ability Score to their d20 roll. The outcome of Take A Risk shifts the narrative in a good/bad direction from The Expected Thing (rather than being a concrete success/failure). This application of our action resolution framework to exploration seems to work in broad strokes, but it is still quite vague. How would we actually apply this in a game? What is Exploration? I take the position that the fun of exploration is about information gain - i.e. finding specific answers, uncovering the unknown or expanding knowledge. In the context of the game this means expanding upon the game world and enriching the story that the characters are experiencing. We use this position to inform a view of: when to use mechanics for exploration, how to make the exploration process fun, how to introduce interesting exploration choices, and what exploration acts to consider dramatic. When (and how) to use exploration mechanics As with the systems that we draw inspiration from, many exploration activities are automatic and require no mechanical intervention. As the characters move through the world they sense the obvious things in their environment and if the players are specific about looking in specific places then they make the expected discoveries. When is mechanical intervention called for? Let’s look at some specific cases in the context of Narrative Scenes. Searching Some systems use mechanical tests to determine whether a character succeeds at finding something that is not easily found. The use of a mechanical test in such circumstances is a problem because there is an information leak that there is something to be found. This defeats the purpose of the check because the players now have meta-game knowledge that defeats the purpose of the test. One might argue that the presence of a test builds tension, however it really just serves to deflate tension as the players will use this meta knowledge - perhaps by being extra cautious (bogging the game down) or perhaps by performing intensive search in an area, knowing that something must be there (bogging the game down). As a counter-measure to the information leak problem, the GM may introduce loads of phantom exploration tests, but this only serves to bog the game down even further. There are hacks to the mechanics to break these anti-patters, such as one-and-done rules or “Take 20”, etc - but I say why bother making exceptions to mechanics when you can have no mechanics? In short: we do not use mechanics to determine whether or not someone can find a thing. Another option for searching, is to handle it entirely through fiction. One of our inspiration systems, Dungeon World, is rather explicit that the GM should actively establish details, show signs of danger and point to looming threats. There is no explicit 'search' move as significant things are automatically hinted by the GM. Dungeon World's active exploration moves - such as Spout Lore, Discern Realities and Trap Finding - are more about establishing fiction than a test to see if a specific thing is found. This is much better than a game of exhaustive mechanical searches, but a poorly run game can still yet run into problems of exhaustive fictional searches. It is not fun to force the players to manually search the third drawer of the big cabinet in the fourth room on the second floor of the guest house for a false bottom in order to find the MacGuffin - even if there are no mechanics involved. (Not that DW at all encourages this style of GMing, I’m just making a point that mechanical intervention is not the only potential blockage during exploration.) If both mechanics and fictional needles-in-haystacks can serve to block the game, how to we do searches in non-dramatic scenes? Do we just have the players say “we exhaustively search the house” and the GM respond with a list of finds? Perhaps sometimes this is the right thing - getting to the point so we can continue on to the next, more interesting scene. But sometimes we might want a bit more detail, maybe not a full on dramatic scene, but a narrative side-puzzle. Its the difference between a social narrative scene that is: Player- “I talk to the guy.” GM- “He tells you the thing” versus a social narrative scene that involves the players actually speaking some dialog and interacting with an NPC at some depth, maybe providing opportunities for a few character moments. So a light “search” based exploration scene should involve mostly fiction and a depth of search that is fairly shallow. TBC
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Oct 10, 2013 01:51
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EXPLORATION: Searching (cont) Remembering that Narrative Scenes are not our set-piece encounters, the granularity of narrative search should be enough to allow space for a bit of fictional detail, mood and atmosphere that enriches the game without blocking the flow to the next crunchy scene. This means chunking the search space into no more than a handful of regions, with the action in each region played out through fiction of a summary nature. All obvious and expected discoveries should be automatic in each region. If there are any hidden things to find, there should be hints to such so that they players do not feel obligated to overturn every piece of scenery. The question arises as to how such narrative search interacts with our core mechanics. If players are allowed to Take A Risk at will in order create a narrative shift, and the expected outcome of TAR is positive, haven't we just incentivised players to TAR ad nauseum to gain positive benefits (while in the mean-time blocking the scene)? On one hand, TAR is doing exactly what we want it to do - it is an invitation to enrich the story, a choice to add an unexpected detail - and from this perspective of course we want to incentivise it. We want to make sure that TAR overuse does not bog down the game or let a single player hog narrative influence (even if that influence is random). As we already have (way back in the core mechanics discussion) put a limitation on TAR as "once per character action" in dramatic scenes, We might generalize that to a limitation of "once per character activity" in narrative scenes. Regarding narrative search, this means a limit of once per character per region. Even so, if we have a party of 5 each using TAR in each of 6 or so regions, that is 30 d20 rolls to resolve before we move the game forward, which is far too crunchy for a Narrative Scene. Perhaps we could limit it to just once per region, or perhaps we should leave it up to GM discretion, approving TAR only when there is a risk to be taken - or the player at least justifies it with good fiction - rather than introducing more mechanical limitations? I'm leaning towards the second option because this is in line with our idea that Take A Risk is a way to punctuate a moment of consequence. The actual effect of TAR in a search situation is an influence on the nature of what is discovered. A good outcome creates welcome or beneficial knowledge. A bad outcome creates unwelcome information or introduces complications and dangers that were not there before. For example: a character is rummaging through a treasure chest and the player decides to Take A Risk, trying to pry apart various seams to gain a STR advantage. A good outcome here means that the GM creates something helpful that is found: some beneficial object, a clue to some campaign goal, writings that give information about a future encounter, etc. A bad outcome here will mean that the GM creates something harmful: perhaps the player hurts themself in the effort, perhaps a trap is revealed, perhaps writings introducing a new danger. In either case the TAR event has had a consequential outcome.
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Oct 10, 2013 21:08
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EXPLORATION: Searching (cont) If narrative search is to be largely determined by fiction rather than mechanics, then where doe that leave Exploration Skill? When a player puts points into Exploration Skill they are expressing a desire to have more narrative influence in exploration scenes. Our basic inspiration for the mechanics of skills is that they are "class levels" in scene types - abstractions of the "Attack Bonus" into other modes of interaction. However, we have taken steps to minimize mechanical intervention and obligatory skill rolls versus target numbers, so why put points into "class levels in exploration" without some way that the mechanic distinguishes your character? Our basic notion is that points in skills grant two things: elevated defaults and declarative narrative powers. In the discussion of Social Skill we tossed around the idea of "narrative shifts" as the means by which defaults are concretely affected by Skills. We threw out this idea because it started looking like an awkward and cumbersome idea. I am starting to come back around to the idea of using numerical 'difficulties' or 'oppositions' of sorts, although not as targets for obligatory random rolls. We already have some precedent for how to do this in our Skill Conflicts rules: i.e. that skill relative to opposition determines default performance and that and random deviation from this is voluntary. In other skill resolution systems, targets for skill rolls tend to be arbitrarily spotted by the GM (if not in the number then in the arbitrarily chosen task that generates the appropriate number) to provide appropriate challenges to the party, generally in such ranges as to say "this should be doable by all party members" or "this should be done by the specialist", but with an obligatory swingy resolution mechanic (and perhaps hacks around such). I say that if we are to use skill targets, that it is something we introduce as a tool for the GM to highlight the talents of a specific character. This is still a non-random determination of performance. I am very fond of our firewall between the 1-20 scale of default-determining Skills and the 1-5 scale of risk-influencing Abilities. So then our non-random Skill Challenge mechanic becomes: code:This is really a whole lot of words to say that the GM has mechanical justification to say "The Sleuth automatically finds the secret door". Really the motivation here is to keep our non-dramatic exploration scenes moving and give a nod to the Exploration Specialist. Finding the secret door in the non-dramatic scene is not the interesting part. The hidden thing was meant to be found. Being the one to find the thing that was meant to be found is not "narrative influence". The real reward for putting points into Exploration, probably more than other Skills, will come in the form of shared narrative powers (our 'Feats') that give the player license to add elements to the game world, and more mechanical weight in some GUMSHOE-style mechanics that we will be getting to for our dramatic Exploration Scenes. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 17:26
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Really interesting stuff, Paolomania. I wonder though if Exploration is really a weighty enough chunk of the fiction you are aiming to emulate to really deserve having scenes, whether Narrative or Dramatic, mechanics and spotlight time dedicated to them. To illustrate my point, let's take the example of two of the images you used to represent iconic exploration scenes - the first is the fellowship of the ring (or a third of it, anyway) finding clues to discern the fate of their lost friends. In the movies at least, this is something that is done entirely by one character and resolved in the space of approximately a minute and half of screen time. Your third example - Gandalf in the library verifying the identity of the ring is quite similar - the sage uses his Lore skill to find the secret that the plot requires to be found. The whole scene is a quick montage that is filled with jump cuts and music that tries to impart a sense of urgency (IIRC, its been a year or more since I last watched the movies) this seems to me to be the film trying to establish these scenes as important events while also trying to accelerate past them to the next bit of character development and risk taking. In a game like Gumshoe, a police procedural or CoC having a whole scene focussed on exploration might make sense, but only if each subsequent discovery served to increase the tension or foreshadow the threat the players will eventually face. In a fantasy / action movie / heist movie type paradigm the findings are important and maybe showing the difficulty of finding the clue is relevant in order to shine some spotlight on the specialist tracker / sage / survivalist / hacker character's expertise, but devoting a whole scene to sussing out the details is unusual. That said, noticing a vital detail at a crucial moment, finding the right path through a trapped corridor through keen observation or striking at a villain's newly-exposed weak spot are genre conventions that should have some sort of exploration mechanic tied to them, but the exploration aspect is vital but minor compared to the social interaction with the newly-discovered secret / the movement scene with the knowledge of the trap's operation / the combat scene where characters struggle to strike at or expose the weakness. With that in mind, would exploration not work better as a mechanic that influenced or provided narrative shifts to other actions rather than something that fills scenes of its own? In effect the Sleuth / Tracker / Investigator archetype becomes a support class, commanding some lesser degree of spotlight in every scene and enjoying the versatility of being nearly always useful to some extent by aiding other, more specialized characters in their fields of expertise. Looking at the genre fiction, unless you are specifically aiming to emulate detective stories, perceptive characters are usually sidekicks or supporting characters who aid the hero with strategies or timely callouts to danger rather than the ones who are leaping headfirst into conflict and risk-taking. Thoughts?
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Oct 11, 2013 21:23
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Null Profusion posted:Really interesting stuff, Paolomania.  The SW:Ep4 trash compactor scene is the kind of overlapping mayhem and tension that I am aiming for. The stakes may involve physical danger and there are some dangers and challenges faced by the characters in the compactor that might be more 'movement' or 'combat', but the scene hinges on the skills of the "exploration specialist" droids as they collaborate to find a way to shut down the compactor and their compatriots try to find things (exploration!) in their environment to stave off death.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:13
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I think if anything, that kinda reinforces the point that exploration doesn't quite stand on its own 2 feet. i think the question to ask is what's at stake? If the answer is mortal danger, then it's more like a combat encounter you can't win by fighting; if the answer is a damaged relationship, then it's basically a social encounter you can't win by talking. In either case, it's almost coming across as what I call the "Vance's Magical Bullshit" spell, where having the correct Exploration specialist is either the only way to win the encounter, or the best way to short-circuit it. I might be missing some nuance of the system or looking at it in the most negative light possible, but for me it presents cause to pump the brakes a little.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:35
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Null Profusion posted:Really interesting stuff, Paolomania. I wonder though if Exploration is really a weighty enough chunk of the fiction you are aiming to emulate to really deserve having scenes, whether Narrative or Dramatic, mechanics and spotlight time dedicated to them. To illustrate my point, let's take the example of two of the images you used to represent iconic exploration scenes - the first is the fellowship of the ring (or a third of it, anyway) finding clues to discern the fate of their lost friends. In the movies at least, this is something that is done entirely by one character and resolved in the space of approximately a minute and half of screen time. Your third example - Gandalf in the library verifying the identity of the ring is quite similar - the sage uses his Lore skill to find the secret that the plot requires to be found. The whole scene is a quick montage that is filled with jump cuts and music that tries to impart a sense of urgency (IIRC, its been a year or more since I last watched the movies) this seems to me to be the film trying to establish these scenes as important events while also trying to accelerate past them to the next bit of character development and risk taking. Certainly the concrete examples given for our chosen iconic scenes do not qualify as Dramatic Scenes by the properties described above. Those examples are meant more to be evocative than prescriptive - citing precedent that things such as "forensic investigation", "wilderness survival" and "library research" are a part of adventure-fiction and are deserving of a better treatment than combat-focused systems have given them. Yes, Aragorn does the bulk of the work in that "forensic investigation" scene. Yes, Gandalf does all the "library research". I would say that makes them bad examples of dramatic scenes more than that it refutes that such dramatic scenes can be done (thus the reference to the trash compactor scene). Our goal in constructing such scenes for play in a group game is to make it more than a one-off "skill check" or one-dimensional "skill challenge". We will attempt to apply our scene construction principles to create exploration scenes that engage everyone. Seeing if we can achieve this goal is the main the purpose of this exercise in breaking down and analyzing each scene type. If we take just the LOTR investigation example, the main goal and stakes are already there (the fates of their friends) so how do we add overlapping demands? It can be done: we can expand the prior battle to have been larger, requiring more effort to cover in limited time, we can add mild combat or social distractions that need to be fended off to let the investigator do their work, we can place clues in dangerous and hard to reach places that require a movement expert to retrieve for the explorer's analysis. Can we also introduce conflicts and trade-offs, and a need for risk taking? I think so, but let's save the full analysis of "Forensic Investigation" for its time. P.d0t posted:I think if anything, that kinda reinforces the point that exploration doesn't quite stand on its own 2 feet. That said, scenes do not need to be uniform in their modes of action. Back in the social section we referenced a possible need to use physical force in The Trial and in Council Session. Perhaps a Forensic Investigation will be made easier if The Face is giving The Sleuth an undistracted moment by bluffing the police guarding the crime scene. The use of other modes of action for secondary goals does not take away from the fact that the purpose of the scene is to shine a light on a specialist and that the scene places extra weight and attention on the primary mode of action. Null Profusion posted:In a game like Gumshoe, a police procedural or CoC having a whole scene focussed on exploration might make sense, but only if each subsequent discovery served to increase the tension or foreshadow the threat the players will eventually face. In a fantasy / action movie / heist movie type paradigm the findings are important and maybe showing the difficulty of finding the clue is relevant in order to shine some spotlight on the specialist tracker / sage / survivalist / hacker character's expertise, but devoting a whole scene to sussing out the details is unusual. quote:That said, noticing a vital detail at a crucial moment, finding the right path through a trapped corridor through keen observation or striking at a villain's newly-exposed weak spot are genre conventions that should have some sort of exploration mechanic tied to them, but the exploration aspect is vital but minor compared to the social interaction with the newly-discovered secret / the movement scene with the knowledge of the trap's operation / the combat scene where characters struggle to strike at or expose the weakness. quote:With that in mind, would exploration not work better as a mechanic that influenced or provided narrative shifts to other actions rather than something that fills scenes of its own? In effect the Sleuth / Tracker / Investigator archetype becomes a support class, commanding some lesser degree of spotlight in every scene and enjoying the versatility of being nearly always useful to some extent by aiding other, more specialized characters in their fields of expertise. quote:Looking at the genre fiction, unless you are specifically aiming to emulate detective stories, perceptive characters are usually sidekicks or supporting characters who aid the hero with strategies or timely callouts to danger rather than the ones who are leaping headfirst into conflict and risk-taking. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 18:14
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EXPLORATION MECHANICS (cont) Noticing If we use "searching" to mean characters actively looking for things, then we use "noticing" (spot/perception/etc in d20, notice in FATE) as the passive counterpart that is for awareness of elusive, momentary information that is not sitting around waiting to be methodically discovered. As with search, "rolling to notice" leaks information and encourages cautious meta-game behavior and slows the game, and smoke-screening with bogus notice rolls slows the game. We side-step these problems by using our rule of The Expected Thing, defining the default outcome as the non-random answer to what would be expected in the fiction. As introduced in the Search section, the GM can treat a specific notice event as an Exploration Challenge where a character's Exploration Skill is compared to a target number to determine the default outcome. Using a non-random formulation for The Expected Thing allows us to eliminate dice rolling or even awareness on the part of the players that their Exploration Skill is in question, thus bypassing the problem of information leaks and game bogging. In effect, the players proceed through the game with the full expectation that their character will automatically notice everything that they are capable of noticing - thus the players do not bog the game down with overly cautious play and the GM does not bog the game down with a smoke-screen of bogus checks. Can our mechanic for random narrative deviation (aka Take A Risk) come into play when noticing things? As a passive activity, noticing does not seem to match for the current conception: i.e. a character can only Take A Risk when there is a risk to be taken or some moment of consequence. It has been a while since we discussed compulsory risks (i.e. our Saving-Throw/Defy-Danger), but it would make sense to use noticing in a reactive situation. For instance: there is some immediate danger that takes Exploration X to notice. The GM describes the sudden danger, sets each character's default outcome based on their Exploration Skill relative to X (representing how quickly they noticed the danger), and invites each player to either take the default or Take A Risk to shift their outcome (almost exactly a DW Defy Danger). The narrative shift of the TAR role might either increase the severity of the consequence (negative cases) or reduce the severity of the consequence (positive cases). We might even let a specialist whose Exploration Skill exceeds X (i.e. notices so early that there is no damage by default) opt to Take A Risk to attempt to reduce the consequences for others (dive to save a friend?). Another place we might involve Take A Risk is in a shared-narrative fashion, where a character takes a moment to spot/listen/perceive and their roll actually introduces a new help or hindrance to the fiction based on the roll. As mentioned in the Search discussion, especially if this has a positive expected value, we don't want to bog the game down with such rolls. Perhaps the more shared-narrative usage of TAR, where the roll adds to the fiction, should be modeled as Feats in the various individual skills. This would certainly go along with our idea of "character progression as increasing shared-narrative".
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Oct 17, 2013 19:35
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