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Grey Paladin
2010-02-20, 05:52 PM
Anyone has any experience with this game? I'm thinking of giving it a shot (if only for the brilliant mechanics).

Piedmon_Sama
2010-02-20, 09:25 PM
An emphatic yes; I've played a solo game set in the Nightmare City and branching out into other (bizarre) dimensions with a friend for several sessions now. The open-endedness of the game and its light mechanics let you throw in just about anything you care to, it's a great exercise in creativity.

It's a fantastic game, and a shame it's not more widely known.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-20, 09:33 PM
Anyone has any experience with this game? I'm thinking of giving it a shot (if only for the brilliant mechanics).
Brilliant mechanics, eh?

Please, say more!

Aik
2010-02-21, 04:55 AM
I have quite a bit of experience with it - it's a great system. Very elegant mechanically, and its theme is baked into the mechanics (and as such, you should be careful just throwing the system into anything - you pretty much inevitably end up with a depressing game about your power killing you. We tried to play a shiny-fairy-tale-fantasy with it and for some reason we were surprised when it turned into a horror story).

Quick rundown of the mechanics:
The GM chooses a number of Pain dice for each conflict. The player rolls all the dice in their Exhaustion dice pool and as many Madness dice as they please. To see if you won, you count the number of 1s, 2s, and 3s and if it's more than the GM's Pain roll, you win the conflict.
However, you also need to see which pool dominates by looking at the pool with the highest number. If Pain dominates, things get bad (GM gets a token of despair), if Exhaustion dominates your character is tired by their actions (and 1 die is added to the Exhaustion pool), if Madness dominates you need to decide between fleeing or fighting as an immediate reaction.

If you have too much Exhaustion, you crash (fall asleep, which basically means death). If Madness dominates too often, you snap - you get permanent madness dice and your character goes somewhat crazy.

So, that's a fairly poor summary - but you should get the idea. You succeed a lot, and can almost always succeed if you really want to (just dump in Madness dice) - but the mechanics make a death spiral in that the more you succeed the more screwed you are and the more powerful you are ... which makes you succeed more and so on.

Grey Paladin
2010-02-21, 08:20 AM
Oracle_Hunter: As an Awakened, you have 3 types of dice at your disposal: Discipline, Exhaustion, and Madness. The DM, playing as the nightmare world that is the Mad City (and the regular one that is merely its reflection) has one tool: Pain.

All Dice are D6s. 1 to 3 are successes, while 4 to 6 are failures.
The DM sets a difficulty for a challenge by saying how many Pain Dice s/he will roll - if the player beats or equals the successes of the taks he succeeds, else he fails.

Beyond winning or losing, however, a certain type of dice Dominates a scene or a moment: the type of Dice that shows the HIGHEST number (if there is a number that equals it, next highest and so on) is said to Dominate a scene and have an effect on it.

Discipline is set at 3 (unless you begin losing it to Madness) and you always roll it. Discipline Dominating lets you, generally, heal up the 'damage' Pain deals, as well as the self-inflicted Exhaustion and Madness. Discipline tends to be the least numereous, however, so unless lucky it will only Dominate easy tasks. When working at a task together a party add up their Discipline (which is the only way to actually raise it above the base of 3).

Exhaustion starts at 0, but can go up to 6 - Each time you roll, you may raise your Exhaustion by 1. (When discipline Dominates, you may lower your Exhaustion by 1). Whenever you roll, you MUST roll a number of Exhaustion dice equal to your Exhaustion (which makes every task easier). If Exhaustion Dominates you add a point to Exhaustion. If you ever hit 6 Exhaustion you, put simply, are most likely doomed and going to die horribly. The higher your Exhaustion is the more effective your Exhaustion power becomes.

Whenever you roll, you may add up to 8 (!) Madness dice. Add enough and you more or less guranteed to win the roll. Rolling Madness also lets you activate your (often psuedo-magical/outright supernatural) Madness talent. The drawback? if Madness Dominates you must use up one of your responses (Fight or Flight) and act according to it. If Madness Dominates while you are out of responses you Snap, and permanently (well, not really - but it'll be a while) replace one of your Discipline dice with a Madness dice. When Discipline Dominates you may regain one of your used up Responses.

When Pain dominates, the DM gets a Coin of Despair. S/he may use it to Cast a Shadow - generally ruin the PC's day. Think of it like a Fate Point but it belongs to the DM and messes with rolls directly. Put simply, this is a license for the DM to be outright unfair and up the ante.

However, each time the DM uses a Coin of Despair to Cast a Shadow, the party gains a (communal) Coin of Hope (at the end of the scene where a Shadow was Cast), and may use it to Shed Light (at which point it vanishes). It lets you get rid of Permanent madness, succeed at the impossible, get lucky, and generally pierce the heavens. Think of it like a Fate Point in other systems.

That's about the basics of it. If you liked what you heard I'd advice you to buy the PDF online - its very cheap and (IMO) a worthwhile read even if you are not planning to run it any time soon.

EDIT: I shouldn't post without checking the post for mistakes first.. Fixed.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-21, 03:10 PM
Oh... it's Bliss Stage with more die rolling and tokens :smallfrown:

Ah well, thanks for taking the time to explain it :smallsmile:

EDIT: Though I guess the tokens are helpful for creating a DM/PC antagonism mechanism. Ironically, it may be helpful for the Survival Horror game I was already working on :smalltongue:

Grey Paladin
2010-02-21, 04:36 PM
My impression of the token system is that it serves as a type of a rubber-band - the DM may pull it away from him when he needs to save a major NPC, rule out a solution that will trivialize the adventure through bad lack, or just generally be a $%&* but eventually it WILL snap back at him by the PCs doing the exact opposite: killing the 'invincible' recurring villain, jump across the gap instead of going around, and generally become the big damn heroes.

I'd say it is a bit more positive than Bliss Stage - you are still not likely to get a good ending, but victory IS an option and your skill matters.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-21, 04:57 PM
My impression of the token system is that it serves as a type of a rubber-band - the DM may pull it away from him when he needs to save a major NPC, rule out a solution that will trivialize the adventure through bad lack, or just generally be a $%&* but eventually it WILL snap back at him by the PCs doing the exact opposite: killing the 'invincible' recurring villain, jump across the gap instead of going around, and generally become the big damn heroes.

I'd say it is a bit more positive than Bliss Stage - you are still not likely to get a good ending, but victory IS an option and your skill matters.
Technically, you can get a "good ending" in Bliss Stage - it's just everyone else but you is dead :smalltongue:

The similar mechanics I was referring to is the use of successes to "flavor" the narrated outcome. The "snap back" factor basically gives PCs a freebie win every so often - something I would feel lessens drama. In Bliss Stage, when things start going bad they tend to keep going bad unless the Pilot willingly takes personal risks to "fix" the narrative - and even then, it might not work, since he could roll badly.

Elegance now... I don't know what DRYH is aiming to achieve with this particular mechanic.
The nice thing about Bliss Stage is that the freeform RP is fused seamlessly with the dice-rolling adventure - your decisions while rolling dice can influence your (metagame) choices when doing freeform RP, and the flow of the freeform RP can influence your tactical choices when rolling dice. Here the resolution mechanic seems to be nothing more than a... resolution mechanic - and a highly luck-based one at that. The only choices made are how much Pain the DM is rolling and how much Madness the PC is using - and the only effects are short-term mechanical ones.

In a sense, it is a somewhat more elaborate Degree-of-Success system, with a "safety net" provided by tokens.

Naturally, this is a view made with what has been provided to me; I'm certain there's a lot more in the game than this mechanic. Still, I don't exactly see what is so elegant about it...
Of course, Bliss Stage is (apparently) a much more group-based game than Don't Rest Your Head. The overall story is more important than any individual character's survival, and everyone has a say in the narrative as it progresses. The DRYH mechanic certainly allows for easier plot control by the DM, at any rate.

Grey Paladin
2010-02-21, 05:40 PM
My guess is that the intention was 'Want power? here. Have some. Have it all. There will be consequences'. You can basically push yourself to win every roll, but become too greedy and by the time its too late you cannot stop - Exhaustion and Madness are much like a drug addiction. You have all the power you can dream of at your fingertips and it is as likely to destroy you as the Nightmares that stalk you, but if you are too afraid to use it the beasts will get you and kill you. You must balance the fear of your own power with that of the challenges you face.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-21, 06:06 PM
My guess is that the intention was 'Want power? here. Have some. Have it all. There will be consequences'. You can basically push yourself to win every roll, but become too greedy and by the time its too late you cannot stop - Exhaustion and Madness are much like a drug addiction. You have all the power you can dream of at your fingertips and it is as likely to destroy you as the Nightmares that stalk you, but if you are too afraid to use it the beasts will get you and kill you. You must balance the fear of your own power with that of the challenges you face.
But Exhaustion is just a tracking mechanic - you get more of it the more times you roll dice (presumably at the whim of the DM) and you have to keep from getting so much that it kills you before the adventure is over. The bonus dice is just a way to reduce the number of times you have to roll - presuming you would have to roll at least one more time any time you fail a roll.

Madness has an inherent balancing mechanism, to be sure, but you can rationally decide how much Madness to roll on a given check. I know that my math-ier players in Bliss Stage can accurately calculate how many dice they need to roll in order to overcome a particular check, for example. Of course, in Bliss Stage every time you add to the overall pool of dice, you add another Relationship to defend which cannot be withdrawn without nasty consequences.

I guess the "choices" in this mechanic just don't seem to be that... exciting. Yeah you have to worry about getting too Exhausted, but that's not really under your control. And only n00bs will over-commit Madness dice; everyone else will keep them to 1-2 when rolling 3 Discipline dice. If you need to roll more, it's because the DM designed the adventure that way by selecting "too many" Pain dice.

Or am I missing that "skill" element you mentioned? :smallconfused:

Grey Paladin
2010-02-21, 06:36 PM
All I can answer to that is that playing a game where you could always safely roll is as boring as it sounds :smalltongue: . Madness and Exhaustion are also used to activate abilities, but yeah if you are looking for tactical combat instead of what comes down to a gambling game (with one of the focuses being the player attempting to guess what will happen next so they do not waste too much resources 'early', nor risk too much tactical loses for fear of being strategically weakened) disappointment is probably what you'll get.

Personally I just like 'power at a cost' and 'addiction' mechanics.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-21, 07:12 PM
All I can answer to that is that playing a game where you could always safely roll is as boring as it sounds :smalltongue: . Madness and Exhaustion are also used to activate abilities, but yeah if you are looking for tactical combat instead of what comes down to a gambling game (with one of the focuses being the player attempting to guess what will happen next so they do not waste too much resources 'early', nor risk too much tactical loses for fear of being strategically weakened) disappointment is probably what you'll get.

Personally I just like 'power at a cost' and 'addiction' mechanics.
Fair enough; though truth be told, Bliss Stage does not have "safe" rolls - at least no safer than the DRYH mechanic described. All it takes is a knowledge of probability (easier here, with a 50% of success on any given roll rather than 33%). I guess the "unknown" number of successes needed makes life a little more difficult for the safe bettor, but assuming a 50% success rate and then adjusting by your safety margin shouldn't be too hard.

I am curious about the "addiction to power" comment though. Do you need a certain number of success to activate a power, or will one do? If it just takes one, you roll 2 dice for Madness whenever you want to activate a power.

Question: while my players (Chemists & Programmers) could work out these numbers easily, I find my mathematical ability limited. Anyone want to work this out?

Aik
2010-02-21, 08:46 PM
I don't think you can play like that and not get your character's arse kicked all around the Mad City.


If you need to roll more, it's because the DM designed the adventure that way by selecting "too many" Pain dice.

There is no such thing as 'too many' Pain dice. If you're going up against powerful nightmares, that's going to bring a lot of Pain to the table, and the players have all the resources they need to fight back.

You will overcommit to Madness dice if you want to win a difficult conflict - and if your character's child is being held captive by Mother When you damn well do want to win the conflict enough to throw a bucketload of madness at it. And you want your Exhaustion even as you really want to try and get rid of some as well. Playing by only putting in a few madness in the rational way is probably going to end up with everything the character ever cared about being eviscerated in front of their eyes (talking from experience here...).

I guess if you don't actually care about the fiction but just about keeping your character sane, you could work the numbers so that you don't take a mechanical beating. But what's the point? The game isn't designed to work like that - you have to care about the fiction or it would suck pretty hard - same with most games in this vein.

Probably worth noting that the GM doesn't really design an adventure at all - the game is kicked off by the stuff on the character sheets. It's very player/character driven, and you pretty much inevitably end up in Deep **** because of how your character is designed. The game mechanics push towards more and more conflict when either Pain, Exhaustion, or Madness dominate, so you need to use your powers to stay afloat.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-21, 08:54 PM
I guess if you don't actually care about the fiction but just about keeping your character sane, you could work the numbers so that you don't take a mechanical beating. But what's the point? The game isn't designed to work like that - you have to care about the fiction or it would suck pretty hard - same with most games in this vein.

Probably worth noting that the GM doesn't really design an adventure at all - the game is kicked off by the stuff on the character sheets. It's very player/character driven, and you pretty much inevitably end up in Deep **** because of how your character is designed, and the game mechanics push towards more and more conflict when either Pain, Exhaustion, or Madness dominate.
I thought the DM chose how many Pain Dice a given encounter involves? :smallconfused:

Also: how is using more Madness better RP? It sounds like you're saying that you use more Madness when you want to succeed at a particular encounter - which is a purely mechanical decision. Now, if you're saying "I spend 8 Madness dice on a Pain 2 challenge because I'm craaaazy" is good RP then I'll just have to disagree, I guess.

In any case, when someone mentions beautiful mechanics it is fully justified to make a rigorous analysis of said mechanics. Here, I was trying to see if there were any interesting innovations or features in DRYH's mechanics - unfortunately there aren't. Plus, they're a lot more forgiving of PC exuberance than a similar system I already know - which makes sense since the point of Bliss Stage is to die :smalltongue:

I'm not saying that DRYH is a bad game - just that it's mechanics aren't terribly interesting.

Aik
2010-02-22, 02:54 AM
They do, but there are good guidelines for how many Pain dice to give out for a given encounter. They're not just as many as the GM feels like - the amount of Pain reflects the danger/difficulty of the conflict.

I didn't say that using more Madness was better RP. I said that it's almost inevitable that you'll end up rolling lots of it if you're both invested in the game and if the GM is doing their job (driving the game's conflicts towards the things the player signalled they were interested in on their character sheet). It's not a purely mechanical decision - making it on a purely mechanical basis without reference to how you feel about what's going on in the fiction would just end up with the 'optimal' mechanical roll without any meaning behind it.

But I'm certainly not saying this:

Now, if you're saying "I spend 8 Madness dice on a Pain 2 challenge because I'm craaaazy" is good RP then I'll just have to disagree, I guess.

So we don't just have to disagree :) That's an equally pointless way to play as just basing your decisions on what will keep your character from snapping or crashing.

DRYH's mechanics are very interesting :p They're sleek, they make things happen - they drive the story in ways that they wouldn't go otherwise along a certain theme. I don't think a rigorous analysis is going to show you that they're beautiful - look at how they work to drive and shape what happens in play.

Hmm, I can't find many actual play reports to link you to that show what the mechanics do for the game, and I'm too lazy to write one up myself. Here's (http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=6656&page=1#Item_0) the best I can do.

And if your main problem here is that isn't innovative ... what are you comparing it to besides Bliss Stage (which was released after DRYH)? I guess you could compare it to The Pool or something and go 'it's not innovative!' - I'm pretty sure the Pool is the original in terms of using dice pools like this, but DRYH uses that style of mechanics very effectively. If Bliss Stage has taken what DRYH did and built on it - that's cool, but it doesn't diminish what DRYH does.

(I haven't read Bliss Stage and have no real idea what its mechanics are like - it's at the top of my games-to-buy list though)

Oracle_Hunter
2010-02-22, 11:30 AM
And if your main problem here is that isn't innovative ... what are you comparing it to besides Bliss Stage (which was released after DRYH)? I guess you could compare it to The Pool or something and go 'it's not innovative!' - I'm pretty sure the Pool is the original in terms of using dice pools like this, but DRYH uses that style of mechanics very effectively. If Bliss Stage has taken what DRYH did and built on it - that's cool, but it doesn't diminish what DRYH does.
I'll look over that link when I get time - thanks! :smallsmile:

I'm fairly certain Bliss Stage doesn't borrow from DRYH's mechanics - according to the creator, he was mainly inspired by Hentai RPGs :smalltongue:

Anyhoo, I'm not trying to denigrate DRYH specifically, but one thing I've noticed about Indie RPGs is that they don't really have a lot of... scope.
One of my favorite - Mountain Witch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_Witch) - really only works with one "game." The themes of Trust Points and Dark Fates are very "Samurai Cinema" and while I could adapt them to other settings, well, they just don't add anything to the game. I might as well be using d20 Modern or something - or no system at all, to be honest. Compare that to, say, 4e - if I wanted to turn it into a Space Opera Sci-Fi game, I could do it over a weekend and it'd work great!

One reason I'm so up on Bliss Stage is that I have been tinkering with the system to see if I could adapt it for differing game styles. My first attempt - Chrysalis, a Fantasy version - playtested fine, but putting it in a Fantasy setting didn't do the Bliss Stage mechanics any favors. Bliss Stage is an excellent "Neon Genesis Evangelion - the RPG" but without serious changes to the underlying mechanics, every game is going to feel like that.
However, sometimes Indie RPGs have excellent ideas that show up in their mechanics. Bliss Stage uniquely (AFAIK) fused a freeform RP drama into a group-narration dungeon crawler; two halves of a single game that work in harmony. Compare D&D's attempts to reconcile Non-Combat and Combat Encounters - at best, using skills to deal with NPCs is clunky, and at worst the game breaks (i.e. Diplomancy).

So when I heard DRYH had slick mechanics, I wanted to see what was up. And while the game seems to have a well integrated die-rolling system, I'm not certain it is much of an improvement on a simple Degree-of-Success system:
(1) The GM announces a conflict. The PC declares what result they hope to get out of the conflict (ex: kill the monster) and the GM responds (ex: capture the PC)

(2) The GM and the PC each roll a d6. The DM can wager Plot Tokens to add +1 to his roll [every time the PC rolls a 1, the DM gets a Plot Token]

(3) The d6s are compared; whoever has the highest value gets to narrate the outcome. If the PC wins, the Plot Tokens wagered become Hero Tokens; Hero Tokens can be "spent" to change the Degree of Success by 1

The extent of narrative control is then determined by the difference between the dice [e.g. d6(high) - d6(low)]

Degrees of Success
IF 0 - PC decides: either no progress is made, or each side gets a Small Success (ex: PC kills the monster, but is captured by a trap)
IF 1 - Mixed Success: The Winner gets some of what they want, but the Loser gets to narrate how something goes wrong
IF 2 - Small Success: The Winner gets what he wants
IF 3 - Large Success: The Winner gets what he wants and a little more (a Mixed Success without the bad stuff)
IF 4 - Great Success: The Winner gets their original Small Success and another Small Success of their choice
IF 5 - Critical Success: The Winner gets a Great Success and gets a Hero/Plot Chip
The Degree-of-Success system gives you guidelines for resolving scenes and has some competitive die rolling - if you want a tracking mechanism like Exhaustion Dice it wouldn't be hard to add. The DRYH mechanic is a neat little die game but it is completely self-contained - the GM picks Pain dice, the PC picks Madness dice, both roll and the system clicks through a few mechanics. How much player choice is there really?

Also: the best thing I can say about Bliss Stage is that it turns your worst Munchkin into your best RPer :smallbiggrin: