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NichG
2013-12-24, 09:13 PM
I've started this thread after totally derailing the 'The Game' thread with a discussion of what I was claiming would be the 'ideal game' for me (at least with my current fascinations).

The basic ideas were:

- Replace the question of 'does my use of this skill succeed/fail' with individual actions that 'always work' but modify the parameters of the scenario in some sort of well-defined way (which never includes outright resolution of the entire scenario)

- Replace the idea that skill levels represent 'how good are you at X' with 'each skill level lets you do a particular set of things/do something at a particular rate or cost'.

- Introduce a pool of points that can temporarily boost a skill/unlock a higher level ability, to allow people to have momentary 'spikes' in competency (essentially replacing the intermediate range in former skill systems where both success and failure are possible with a resource cost mechanic)

Part of this discussion led to a hypothetical 'Heist' game, where the game rules were intended to model the complex planning behind heist stories. The idea being that the execution of a heist has as much potential for tactical depth as the execution of a skirmish battle, but is a good example of something where combat would have limited importance.

The latest bit of the discussion was:

I agree that a separate thread is probably appropriate, but you'll probably want to take some time to codify some stuff first, because I think the discussion has gone about as far as it can go in hypotheticals.

I'm not actually sure that the difference is the genre though - it's absolutely possible to play a heist game with in-fiction powers or a medieval fantasy game with fiction altering powers. You have to decide what you want the players to be able to do, because right now your expectations seem to be all over the board.

I'm not sure I'm completely clear on what you mean by 'fiction altering powers'. I mean, there's stuff like Dramatic Editing where you can say 'this guy is a villain' or 'all of a sudden, someone else decides to try to break into the same casino', but thats not really what I had in mind to do with the Heist skills. Instead, my intent was to abstract out levels of detail that were not relevant to the game; for the Heist example, I wanted a game that was about the overall planning procedure, so I wanted to make sure that things didn't depend too much on individual-level detail that would be hard to communicate to the players during the planning stage.

If I were trying to emulate a different genre, the 'goal' would be different; for instance, the Heist game abstracts away combat because combat isn't really the point, but if I were doing fantasy warfare I'd probably want to have something with more of an individual-action level of detail.

Is the reason you consider the Heist game skills to be 'fiction altering' because they do not specify prerequisites for their use? E.g. you can plant surveilance in a room without having access to the room, and so on? Because I think it would still be consistent with the overall design of that idea to put prerequisites of access into the use of each skill - in fact, that would probably make the overall thing more tactical in play, since you can't just disable the safe, you have to get the Security guy to the safe even though he doesn't have any Stealth.

erikun
2013-12-24, 11:30 PM
- Replace the idea that skill levels represent 'how good are you at X' with 'each skill level lets you do a particular set of things/do something at a particular rate or cost'.
This would be reasonably easy to do. Any point-buy system that doesn't have skill ranks (and a lot of them don't) basically does this already. You'd have your Blacksmith: Novice skill, your Blacksmith: Journeyman skill, and your Blacksmith: Master skill. You can even throw in skills that use specialized knowledge, like Blacksmith: Steel Forger if you want to replicate such knowledge as particularly exotic.

The reason you don't normally see such rankings in point-buy systems is that it is a lot more granular than required. Most systems seem to think that "Blacksmith" is a sufficient skill to cover all the above. You do see such breakdowns in magical skill, though. "Apprentice, Alcolyte, Mage" skills are really common to find, representing access to magic.


- Replace the question of 'does my use of this skill succeed/fail' with individual actions that 'always work' but modify the parameters of the scenario in some sort of well-defined way (which never includes outright resolution of the entire scenario)
Burning Wheel and related systems sort of uses this idea, in the sense that "failing" a dice roll doesn't mean failing at the activity, but rather succeeding with negative consequences. And example would be that sneaking into a dungeon wouldn't mean that you are spotted, but that a guard has noticed someone has passed by. Perhaps some noice was made, or the guard walked by the jail cells and noticed that the keys are gone.


- Introduce a pool of points that can temporarily boost a skill/unlock a higher level ability, to allow people to have momentary 'spikes' in competency (essentially replacing the intermediate range in former skill systems where both success and failure are possible with a resource cost mechanic)
There are several systems that do this, as well. Warrior Cats (http://www.warriorcats.com/games-and-extras/games/adventure-game) is one that comes to mind immediately, using no dice rolls but rather pools of chips for each ability score, which are then spent to boost skills when they aren't enough for a challenge. (Page 27 for the full rules on checks, chips, and it all.) Ability Chips are restored when the characters sit down to take a rest, and chips are lost when a character takes damage - it's a very light system, overall.

NichG
2013-12-25, 12:04 AM
This would be reasonably easy to do. Any point-buy system that doesn't have skill ranks (and a lot of them don't) basically does this already. You'd have your Blacksmith: Novice skill, your Blacksmith: Journeyman skill, and your Blacksmith: Master skill. You can even throw in skills that use specialized knowledge, like Blacksmith: Steel Forger if you want to replicate such knowledge as particularly exotic.

The reason you don't normally see such rankings in point-buy systems is that it is a lot more granular than required. Most systems seem to think that "Blacksmith" is a sufficient skill to cover all the above. You do see such breakdowns in magical skill, though. "Apprentice, Alcolyte, Mage" skills are really common to find, representing access to magic.


To give you a concrete idea of the sort of thing we've discussed here, this is what the Drive skill might look like in such a system (with 5 ranks per skill). I've modified things a bit from the original thread:


Basic function: When involved in a driving scene, every un-answered hindrance to your vehicle results in a 1 point reduction in your Drive score for that scene - for example, damage to your vehicle. If you hit Drive -1, your vehicle is out of control unless you spend enough points to bring your Drive up to 0 every round.

Drive 1: You can drive any vehicle in normal conditions without incident. Outside of normal conditions, the GM can introduce a free Intrusion (as per Numenera GM Intrusions). Normal: With Drive 0, whenever you drive a vehicle, the GM can introduce a free Intrusion.

Drive 2: You can drive a vehicle up to 50% faster than its safe operating velocity without it being considered an abnormal condition. This can even push a vehicle above its mechanical limits. You can also continue to drive a vehicle while taking other complex actions (e.g. lean out the window and shoot at someone as you're driving).

Drive 3: When driving a vehicle, you can cause it to change directions instantly, stop on a dime, etc.

Drive 4: You can perform acrobatic tricks with a vehicle (drive up the walls, jump over or through obstacles, etc).

Drive 5: When anyone aboard your vehicle would be hit by an attack (either from on or off of the vehicle) you can attempt to use the natural motion of the vehicle to intervene defensively and interrupt the attack (details omitted since it would require specifying combat mechanics at this point).

(to explain the GM Intrusion thing, its a mechanic in Numenera where the GM offers a player 2xp - one to keep and one to give to another player of their choice - in order to introduce a complication into some action or scenario. The player can instead spend 1xp to refuse the Intrusion. Natural 1s on die rolls give the GM a 'free' Intrusion.)


So a chase scenario wouldn't just be 'compare Drive scores, see whose is higher' but in principle would involve a specific track with hazards, and people with higher Drive scores could avoid some hazards while people with lower Drive scores would fail to do so. Other skills could also come into play - it wouldn't necessarily be all about Drive.



Burning Wheel and related systems sort of uses this idea, in the sense that "failing" a dice roll doesn't mean failing at the activity, but rather succeeding with negative consequences. And example would be that sneaking into a dungeon wouldn't mean that you are spotted, but that a guard has noticed someone has passed by. Perhaps some noice was made, or the guard walked by the jail cells and noticed that the keys are gone.


Part of the idea here is that we remove dice rolls entirely. Each ability granted by a certain skill rank would succeed absolutely in the specific thing it is intended to do, similarly to how a piece moves in chess. Instead, the uncertain element would be due to the GM intrusion mechanic and aspects of the scenario that the players would be unaware of.

So for the sneaking example, it'd be like: Stealth 3 gives you three 'diversions' such that people who would spot you blame your presence on something else. Once you hit the fourth time you would have been spotted, then the guards simply see you.



There are several systems that do this, as well. Warrior Cats (http://www.warriorcats.com/games-and-extras/games/adventure-game) is one that comes to mind immediately, using no dice rolls but rather pools of chips for each ability score, which are then spent to boost skills when they aren't enough for a challenge. (Page 27 for the full rules on checks, chips, and it all.) Ability Chips are restored when the characters sit down to take a rest, and chips are lost when a character takes damage - it's a very light system, overall.

The bidding pools thing is something I'm seeing more and more these days, and I like it. My current campaign 'Memoir' for example uses a custom system where any 'attack' against you gives you the chance to bid against it to turn it into a miss - attacks that hit are generally very bad news, but sometimes not so much, so you can 'let it hit' to save points for later. Numenera seems to use something sort of like this as well (with its three pools and 'Effort' mechanic). I've never heard of Warrior Cats before though, so I'll take a look.

Edit: Yeah, upon looking at it I'm thinking something very much like the Warrior Cats mechanic. The main addition would be that not only can you spend points to up your skill for the purpose of passing a required threshold of competency, but you could also gain any special abilities granted by that level of the skill temporarily by boosting with points.

So e.g. if at 'Athletics 4' you can move twice a round instead of once, and you have 'Athletics 3', you could spend points not only to pass a Difficulty 4 challenge, but you could just as well spend points to move twice in a round.

Glimbur
2013-12-25, 09:03 AM
The more I read your description, the more I think that Nobilis is a good specific example of what is going on.

Characters in Nobilis are gods. Specifically, for example, I played the God of Banishment. He used to be a seaman named Reginald Kessler. He was selected by an Imperator to be the new Power of Banishment.

Mechanically, he was heavily into the Domain aspect. This meant that he could do a great deal of things with Banishment; he could banish people from his presence, from an area, and I think I even did more exotic things like banishing doubt. Because I invested heavily into this, I could do minor to moderate actions (which are defined with examples in the rules) for free, and I had a deep pool of points to use for major actions.

On the other hand, I had no points in Aspect. Aspect lets you be more than mortal, so it is the go-to ability for running fast, knitting fast, fighting an army, and that sort of thing. Reginald had trouble doing any of that, he had to spend points from his Domain aspect (at a expensive ratio) to do Aspect things.

So, it's a system with ranks but no dice, and you have a pool of points you can spend to get greater effects.

Slipperychicken
2013-12-25, 10:19 AM
Have you tried looking at Dungeon World (http://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/)? It has a degrees-of-success sort of thing, as well as the "different characters have different moves" idea. Most of the time, characters are rolling partial successes and need to choose drawbacks which result from their attempts. Also, combat is quite abstracted, with no concept of turns, players encouraged to describe what happens and simply jump in whenever they please. Additionally, everything uses the same 2d6+Modifier core mechanic, including combat actions.

jindra34
2013-12-25, 11:38 AM
Honestly, I think it might be a good idea in theory. In practice though, its going to get highly complicated to the point of impracticality. Its also likely to quickly get time consuming on every action that takes more than a simple singlular motion.

NichG
2013-12-25, 02:20 PM
Nobilis is actually a very good example of what I'm aiming for. I suppose an Excrucian game is basically a heist game, except instead of stealing money from the vault you're stealing Tomorrow and Daisies and Hope.

I hadn't looked at Dungeon World. It does seem to have that idea that 'everything is a move', though it still retains random resolution, which I want to avoid. There's probably stuff I can nab from there.

Maybe the best example is spells in D&D. They have no inherent failure rate and they each 'do something distinct' to the game state. One could construct a game where each character has access to, say, 7 spell levels worth of D&D spells at will, and has no mechanics outside of that. Of course you'd have to do something about saving throws/attack rolls - perhaps replacing attack rolls with auto-hits for half damage and saving throws with a check against how much hp the target has left, much like the Power Word X spells.

But you could even do the above thing in a system with no combat at all. This person can Fly, that person can Unlock Locked Things, the other person can Turn Invisible, someone else can Create Terrain. These things each can be thought of as modifying the game state in a concrete manner (in the form of the world or the relationship between the world and the characters) which is 'always successful' on the individual action level.

Airk
2013-12-25, 08:04 PM
When I say "fiction altering" skills, I mean giving the players actual agency in the narrative. Instead of:

"You find out all the details about room X" - which might not even exist at that point, depending on how much prep the GM has done for the location, you instead have:

"Fill in some relevant detail about room X"

If the whole point of the game is a heist on a known location "Agent X has hired you to retrieve the Obsidian Ocelot from the National Museum of Shiny Objects." then you may not want to do things this way, because the implication is that the GM will be drawing elaborate maps and spending hours and hours setting this stuff up and the "fiction" is all about "can the players work around the GMs elaborately designed security". On the other hand, if the objective is to tell a heist story, where at game start, the players and the GM don't even know what item it is that will be stolen, these sorts of abilities become pure gold.

I also consider meta-game abilities like "the GM will answer X questions from you" to be fiction altering, albeit somewhat weak ones.

Abilities which are sufficiently abstracted in how they function are also fiction altering - the manipulation skill you listed previously, where you can basically say "NPC X goes into room Y at time Z because I say so" is also a fiction altering ability. It's "implied" that the character is somehow making this happen, but functionally, they are not.

The list of 'abilities' listed for the heist game in the previous post were ALL over the place in terms of meta-vs-fiction-vs-'direct' character action, and I felt they produced a very incoherent feel for what the players are expected to be able to do in the game.

NichG
2013-12-25, 08:43 PM
Then to be concrete, for the Heist game I think 'high-abstraction, but no direct fiction altering abilities' would be the target. The DM creates a scenario - maps, NPCs, etc. That is the context of the Heist. The PCs then use abstract abilities in order to 'solve' that scenario.

I don't agree that 'ask the GM a question' or 'make sure an NPC goes here at this time' are fiction-altering in the sense that you mean. They're just highly abstracted. 'Ask the GM a question' is assumed to be resolved via hacking databases, infiltrating government offices to get floorplans, going to bars and talking with employees, etc. These are the kinds of things that would take a long time to resolve and which the players are likely to not really think of doing or being able to do.

'Make sure an NPC goes here' is basically a bluff mechanic, but instead of 'they believe whatever you say if you pass the check' it allows you to perform a very specific manipulation with 100% success. In some sense, its even less abstracted than, say, Diplomacy checks in D&D which are 'make a check and if you roll high then suddenly they're a fanatical follower'. The player doesn't need to know how to actually program or trick an NPC (which will also be hard on the DM to emulate since the DM subconsciously knows that there is a heist going on, and that the trick is actually a trick). Instead, its resolved via an ability - but the ability is very specific in what it can do in order to prevent one-shotting the scenario.

A Luck skill that lets you introduce an incidental occurrence at just the right place and right time (there happens to be an Italian industrialist present; the mark happens to be lovestruck and is trying to impress someone while the heist is going on; etc) would be directly fiction-altering. I think 'an NPC goes here' is more like 'this combat move shifts an enemy 4 squares backwards'.

Slipperychicken
2013-12-25, 08:51 PM
Then to be concrete, for the Heist game I think 'high-abstraction, but no direct fiction altering abilities' would be the target.

Then I think I'll take back what I said about Dungeon World. It has a lot of that sort of thing.

D-naras
2013-12-25, 09:11 PM
It seems to me that the amount of preparation required for this system will be prohibitive. While the ideas are solid, I feel that they fit a board game more than a TTRPG. Do you feel that you can improvise within this system as a GM without it falling apart? What happens if your players used up all their points to random events that seemed appropriate at the moment and when they come to the important bits, they are out of points to spent?

May I propose an idea? Have ways for players to gather points before going on a mission. Give each player a private pool to use for his character during out of mission events, so that they can play their character without feeling the need to hoard their points for the important mission, and an additional communal pool for the whole party to use during the mission. These points are earned prior to attempting the mission, either through reconnaissance, contacts, bribes, torture, whatever.

Or you can have mission skills, and character skills.

Mission skills are of the definitive kind and applicable only on missions and earned before the mission starts along with the mission points. If a player tries to get information about the area that the mission will take place at and succeeds, he gains the Intel skill at at least 1 rank, or dot or however you choose to name it, for the mission and gives an amount of points to the mission pool. Intel 1 can allow the player to state something about the area, or the GM provides perfect information about a room or something along these lines.

Character skills are skills that differentiate the characters and shape their playstyle. Things like Seduction, or Fight, or Driving. If I want to make a thief, I will pick Stealth, Acrobatics/Athletics/Whatever allows me to climb, Infiltration/Lockpicking and perhaps Electronics to deal with alarms and such. This guy can sneak in the area prior to a mission to scout, figure out the alarms and ductways and even mess with the surveillance.

Basically make characters that apply their talent prior to a mission to increase their chances for success when they attempt the mission. Not characters with set skills that dictate their effectiveness at any mission, otherwise you have a board game and not a RPG.

NichG
2013-12-25, 09:55 PM
It seems to me that the amount of preparation required for this system will be prohibitive. While the ideas are solid, I feel that they fit a board game more than a TTRPG. Do you feel that you can improvise within this system as a GM without it falling apart? What happens if your players used up all their points to random events that seemed appropriate at the moment and when they come to the important bits, they are out of points to spent?


In the general case, I don't see why that'd be the case any more than the amount of planning for a combat in D&D would be prohibitive. In the case of the Heist game, preparation would be very important, but that makes sense because a good portion of the game is about the players planning the heist - which means they need foreknowledge of elements of it.

The key thing I think was revealed on the other thread, which is 'don't make it about choke-points'. The players being out of things to do should be like the wizard being out of spell slots in D&D - most of the time, it shouldn't be that tightly designed. Instead, much like in pretty much every tabletop RPG, you design the scenario so that 95% of the time the PCs win. Then the story is basically about how they win. Even more interesting is if you build in ways for the PCs to make sacrifices in order to push that extra mile - so then the story is not just about how they win, but what the win was worth to them.



May I propose an idea? Have ways for players to gather points before going on a mission. Give each player a private pool to use for his character during out of mission events, so that they can play their character without feeling the need to hoard their points for the important mission, and an additional communal pool for the whole party to use during the mission. These points are earned prior to attempting the mission, either through reconnaissance, contacts, bribes, torture, whatever.

I think the shared pool makes sense for a Heist game, but I'm ambivalent about making people earn the points. The sorts of things you'd do to earn points would be very samey, so it'd get tedious playing out those scenes again and again, and it'd draw focus away from the core of the game. I think per-session or per-mission is fine. Out of mission, the characters might simply not have any points - consider that they're going to have whatever skills they're good at to use when on their own, its not like they suddenly become schmucks.



Or you can have mission skills, and character skills.


I'm not sure what the real difference is here? Is the issue that you basically have 'X number of times during the scenario' type things? Assumedly, if your character went off on their own to do some side burglary, that would actually count as an entirely separate scenario, so they'd be able to use each of their skills the full number of times for that event.

E.g. lets say you have Intel 3 - you're good at finding things out. Today's heist is stealing diamonds from the mansion of a dictator. At the same time, you get wind that your romantic interest is in trouble in the same country. You could ask three questions about the dictator's mansion and three questions about what's going on with your romantic interest, since they're (ostensibly) separate scenarios. If you can find a way to make the scenarios intersect later on, you've just earned yourself 3 free points.



Basically make characters that apply their talent prior to a mission to increase their chances for success when they attempt the mission. Not characters with set skills that dictate their effectiveness at any mission, otherwise you have a board game and not a RPG.

There's a lot of board-game elements I'm trying to bring in here, so thats a fair comment. Basically I'm trying to make non-combat things look a lot more like combat, in the sense of being tactical mini-games. This requires making things more specific - 5ft squares, status conditions, etc - so that things can interact with them in explicit ways.

I don't think the RPG element is going to be in terms of giving the characters individual skills like that. Rather, its going to have to be in the ability of players being clever and actually saying/doing things to have natural consequences alongside the 'abstracted' mechanics. That's certainly something that is a problem in the current idea.

To give an example, if a player goes and actually talks a convincing story to the mark, that conversation should have weight. The system shouldn't say 'thats just talk, so nothing changes about guard alertness or NPC positions'. Instead it should encourage that. One way for that to happen is, if you can explain precisely how you do something, it doesn't require a skill use - but you take the consequences of exactly what you said/did, good and bad.

So if you go and seduce the head of security for the casino, you can get him to leave the floor, but you're probably leaving the floor with him, and he will likely turn on you if he realizes something is going down. Or if you actually manage to, OOC, pull off a con on someone that makes it sound like the best thing to do is to cut you a check for half their wealth, then the NPC responds naturally and you get the check. Similarly, if you see a propane tank beneath the guard station and set it off, it will take out however many guards are there, even if you didn't have that many dots of Attack.

Airk
2013-12-25, 10:44 PM
There's a lot of board-game elements I'm trying to bring in here, so thats a fair comment. Basically I'm trying to make non-combat things look a lot more like combat, in the sense of being tactical mini-games. This requires making things more specific - 5ft squares, status conditions, etc - so that things can interact with them in explicit ways.

I don't think the RPG element is going to be in terms of giving the characters individual skills like that. Rather, its going to have to be in the ability of players being clever and actually saying/doing things to have natural consequences alongside the 'abstracted' mechanics. That's certainly something that is a problem in the current idea.

To give an example, if a player goes and actually talks a convincing story to the mark, that conversation should have weight. The system shouldn't say 'thats just talk, so nothing changes about guard alertness or NPC positions'. Instead it should encourage that. One way for that to happen is, if you can explain precisely how you do something, it doesn't require a skill use - but you take the consequences of exactly what you said/did, good and bad.

I think these are more or less mutually exclusive goals. The closer you get to a hard 'put it on a grid and play tactical games' with it game, the further you get from a 'you can just have a chat with someone and expect that to influence the game' game. I feel like they are opposed designs.


So if you go and seduce the head of security for the casino, you can get him to leave the floor, but you're probably leaving the floor with him, and he will likely turn on you if he realizes something is going down. Or if you actually manage to, OOC, pull off a con on someone that makes it sound like the best thing to do is to cut you a check for half their wealth, then the NPC responds naturally and you get the check. Similarly, if you see a propane tank beneath the guard station and set it off, it will take out however many guards are there, even if you didn't have that many dots of Attack.

But if you have abilities that just DO these things, why would you do it the risky way? And if the answer is "because the abilities are limited" then the question becomes "Won't you screw up the balance you are trying to achieve by just letting people roleplay stuff out?"

I guess fundamentally, I still haven't actually figured out what your design goal IS here, other than "I have this crazy idea for a different game mechanic, so I feel like making a game that uses it without really having a clearly defined goal." which I promise you, basically never ends well.

NichG
2013-12-25, 11:38 PM
I think these are more or less mutually exclusive goals. The closer you get to a hard 'put it on a grid and play tactical games' with it game, the further you get from a 'you can just have a chat with someone and expect that to influence the game' game. I feel like they are opposed designs.

But if you have abilities that just DO these things, why would you do it the risky way? And if the answer is "because the abilities are limited" then the question becomes "Won't you screw up the balance you are trying to achieve by just letting people roleplay stuff out?"


Scenario balance isn't actually a concern for me. If the players manage to 'win' more easily than could have been achieved only using the mechanics, thats okay. This isn't being built to be a competitive game. Balance would still be important in the sense of each ability being meaningful and important, but not in the overall sense of 'the scenario should be precisely this difficult'.



I guess fundamentally, I still haven't actually figured out what your design goal IS here, other than "I have this crazy idea for a different game mechanic, so I feel like making a game that uses it without really having a clearly defined goal." which I promise you, basically never ends well.

In my experience, for tabletop games there's 'the combat minigame' and then everything else ends up trying to resolve itself with a single die roll, a single skill use, etc. I like the combat minigame, but I don't always want to run/play stories about combat.

I've been in and run campaigns where the non-combat 'scenario' approached the tactical complexity of the combat minigame. The way this was usually achieved was via homebrew extra abilities and extra things for abilities to interact with. I've been in games where, for example, I had to figure out how to unseal an earth-sized underwater volcano on the Plane of Water; I've run games where the players have had to figure out how to deal with a person who could make any promise perfectly binding, where there was someone whose actions were instantly forgotten by anyone who viewed them, where they had to retrieve artifacts that would cause horrible things to happen to anyone who touched them/looked at them/moved them/etc.

I've also had a lot of experience playing in/constructing 'puzzle fights' - sets of abilities that force the resolution of combat to go through tricky paths. For example, an enemy who requires that everyone move at least 5ft towards it every round; an enemy who can only be damaged an amount up to the amount of damage it has dealt this round; an enemy who reflects all damage done to it to everyone around them.

These scenarios are pretty customized to the game, but the common element is that they represent attempts to force lateral thinking out of the players to deal with situations that their abilities indirectly make contact with, but do not directly 'resolve'. Over time, I've started including more abilities that lend themselves towards lateral thinking outside of combat, and I've been happy with the results in game. But its always been 'salt' on top of some underlying system.

Example 'salt' from various campaigns:
- Played in a campaign where there was a power that let you ask any number of questions but you get answers only if no one in the universe knows the answer. Other powers in this campaign - the ability to 'get a quest' to any goal one wanted, the ability to 'accomplish a heroic deed at personal cost', the ability to 'eat anything and gain power from it', etc.
- Played in a campaign where I could generate NPCs/mundane objects at need.
- Played in a campaign where I was pretty weak mechanically but I could 'activate' various elemental substances and cause them to do things. 'Tin' was one of the best, since you could use it to empower any other material to respond to willpower - basically turned anyone around it into a telekinetic for that one object. Another fun one got cold when you heated it - we threw it into a magma creature.
- Played in a campaign that was heavily focused on doing crazy stuff with spell interactions. We invented a paradox machine and a summoning-based spell perpetual motion engine, figured out how to spontaneously make a 20 mile long iron bridge in the span of a few hours, etc.
- Ran a campaign where characters could author 'songs of power' (could also be paintings, meals, etc) that were very open-ended, but would cause one thing to have a certain effect on people who heard/witnessed it. The same campaign had 'Dance' powers that let you emulate the cultural norms of your surroundings, appear as whatever the person watching most desired, etc; Music powers that changed the relative timing/rate of events; Writing powers that let you control people who 'bought into' your narrative; etc.
- Currently running a campaign where every 5 skill ranks you can buy special 'waza's which do distinctive things. For example, Trickery has a Waza that lets you get a pre-emptive action if you spend some Mind Points on it; Seduction has a Waza that lets you determine something about an NPC's personal taste and what they truly want; Etiquette has a Waza that lets you take back something another PC said in a conversation.

On top of that, outside of tabletop RPGs, when I've played computer games I've always tended to get more out of abilities that do something qualitatively distinct than '+5 to damage' type things. An item that has an unusual area of effect or applies a status condition or lets you move in odd ways is generally far more interesting than something with a numerical buff. In general, horizontal advancement is easier to deal with than vertical advancement as well.

So the thought is to basically build a system from the ground up that uses these design principles. I've played with 'salting' these things into campaigns already and I've liked them in that context, so it seems a reasonable thing to try to build around the idea as a core design principle.

jindra34
2013-12-26, 12:45 AM
NichG part of the reason why a lot of non-combat things come down to a single roll/skill use is because its a relatively static interaction (in comparison to combat at least) and generally involves just one person. Imagine how BORING it would be for a group to sit through 1/4-1/2 of a session just for one player to sneak into a house and open the door for them. Making everything as complex, and time consuming as combat will just slow the game to a crawl, which makes the idea HIGHLY BAD.

And on how your mechanic actually works... well if you have rolls with modifiers those will essentially be skills. And what your calling skills will be abilities. So your really just playing a name shuffle.

NichG
2013-12-26, 01:11 AM
NichG part of the reason why a lot of non-combat things come down to a single roll/skill use is because its a relatively static interaction (in comparison to combat at least) and generally involves just one person. Imagine how BORING it would be for a group to sit through 1/4-1/2 of a session just for one player to sneak into a house and open the door for them.

Thats why you don't make it about a single player doing something alone. Again, look at the heist example - part of the reason I'm abstracting things so heavily is to actually avoid getting caught up for too long on minutiae. Picking a lock is sort of like a single sword blow in a fight.

In general, I would say that 'static interactions' are things you should probably just remove from the adventure entirely. Traps in D&D are a good example of this - if you just stick a trap in a hallway and there's nothing else around, the outcomes are basically: it gets disabled, it kills someone outright, it acts as a 'hitpoint tax'.

Its more interesting when you combine that trap with a fight. Now there are areas that need to be avoided, areas to lure enemies into, areas which you can pass through at a cost if the situation merits it.



Making everything as complex, and time consuming as combat will just slow the game to a crawl, which makes the idea HIGHLY BAD.


Think of it more like, I'm replacing combat with this other thing. In principle, you'd never have anything that would look like a D&D-esque combat in the Heist game. If you run into a bunch of guards, you could pay a few uses of Attack to take them out, pay a use of Disguise to look like you belong there, maybe pay a use of Stealth to avoid notice. But you don't go into a round-by-round, blow-by-blow.



And on how your mechanic actually works... well if you have rolls with modifiers those will essentially be skills. And what your calling skills will be abilities. So your really just playing a name shuffle.

I wasn't planning on having any rolls with modifiers in this system.

jindra34
2013-12-26, 01:29 AM
Thats why you don't make it about a single player doing something alone. Again, look at the heist example - part of the reason I'm abstracting things so heavily is to actually avoid getting caught up for too long on minutiae. Picking a lock is sort of like a single sword blow in a fight.

In general, I would say that 'static interactions' are things you should probably just remove from the adventure entirely. Traps in D&D are a good example of this - if you just stick a trap in a hallway and there's nothing else around, the outcomes are basically: it gets disabled, it kills someone outright, it acts as a 'hitpoint tax'.

Its more interesting when you combine that trap with a fight. Now there are areas that need to be avoided, areas to lure enemies into, areas which you can pass through at a cost if the situation merits it.

Static more as in it won't do anything till you interact with it. Walls to climb over, guards on patrol to be avoid, things needing to be assembled etc. Also classic car chase escape says 'Hi only one player can drive'.

Think of it more like, I'm replacing combat with this other thing. In principle, you'd never have anything that would look like a D&D-esque combat in the Heist game. If you run into a bunch of guards, you could pay a few uses of Attack to take them out, pay a use of Disguise to look like you belong there, maybe pay a use of Stealth to avoid notice. But you don't go into a round-by-round, blow-by-blow.
Which means either its going to end up much shallower than what you seem to be going for, or is still going to run into the issue of it being time consuming. And a Heist is more of an adventure than a combat equivalent (literally in some cases like Shadowrun).

I wasn't planning on having any rolls with modifiers in this system.
So the only differentiation is either roll or not, so a half-blind old man has the same chance of jumping over something when driving a car as a Nascar driver, but a stunt driver could do it everytime and have an even chance of beating the Nascar driver in a race despite never having put any effort into actually getting good at it given your example of driving. That seems rather poorly designed.

NichG
2013-12-26, 01:49 AM
Static more as in it won't do anything till you interact with it. Walls to climb over, guards on patrol to be avoid, things needing to be assembled etc. Also classic car chase escape says 'Hi only one player can drive'.

Yeah, I'm basically suggesting that things which are static are in general not interesting to focus on for the game. If there's a wall that needs to be climbed, rather than asking 'Do you make it this time? No? Take 1d6 damage and roll again', such static things are (in a video-game sense) 'triggers'. If you have abilities that interact with those triggers, then you know automatically you can just do whatever your ability says.

Take the wall that needs to be climbed, for example. In this system, if there were 10 such wall 'segments' and you could climb one, you could climb them all without a roll. They're just terrain for you. If you don't have the ability to climb one, then you just know 'if I spend 10 points, I can climb them all' and again, its just terrain.

Because of this, I think this system will actually run faster than something like D&D would.



Which means either its going to end up much shallower than what you seem to be going for, or is still going to run into the issue of it being time consuming. And a Heist is more of an adventure than a combat equivalent (literally in some cases like Shadowrun).

This is really the kind of thing that I don't think you'd be able to tell until the playtest stage anyhow. It depends as much on encounter/adventure design as anything else. Its also pretty tweakable.



So the only differentiation is either roll or not, so a half-blind old man has the same chance of jumping over something when driving a car as a Nascar driver, but a stunt driver could do it everytime and have an even chance of beating the Nascar driver in a race despite never having put any effort into actually getting good at it given your example of driving. That seems rather poorly designed.

Huh? I don't get this comment. I'm not having any rolls period. I'm going to go back to the analogy I keep using - everything you do is like moving a chess piece. 'Jumping over an obstacle' is like 'moving the knight'. If you have the ability to do it, then you can do it. If you don't, then you either have to pay points to boost up so that you can do it, or you can't afford the cost.

So the half-blind old man would have Drive 0. He would have to spend 4 Fate Points or whatever to actually be able to jump an obstacle. The average old man is not going to have any Fate Points, so he can't do it.

I assume by your example that the Nascar driver probably has Drive 3, and he's more of a 'heroic' character, so he probably has some Fate Points. That means he could jump an obstacle once or twice in a scenario, but then he'd be low on points and couldn't do it, say, a third time. He might not even want to jump it the second time because the cost isn't worth it.

The stunt driver then has Drive 4 (I'm not sure that a stunt driver should have more than a Nascar driver, but whatever, its just an example). He can jump any number of obstacles all the time at no cost.

Since a race is not based on dice rolls, one cannot say a-priori that the Nascar driver has a better or worse chance against the stunt driver. In order to be interesting, a race would involve a certain track, certain 'easy' or 'difficult' places, and opportunities to interfere with other drivers. That would mean that the deciding factor is not what abilities each side has (though this applies), but how they choose to use them. Consider a race between two 5th level Wizards in D&D, done round by round - what will matter is how each side interferes with the other's movement and buffs their own since both have the same 30ft base move (in principle). What's the best tactic? There's some depth to it, though not much - Expeditious Retreat, Haste, Transposition, Grease, ...

If its just a matter of who has the better time when racing alone on the track, I question whether one should actually bother to try to model it at all with the system, especially for a Heist game. If you really need an answer, compare Drive skills and add bids of points on either side - highest Drive+bid wins, but I think the game should try to focus away from this kind of direct comparison as much as possible - that is, after all, exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid, because it doesn't make for tactically interesting play.

Airk
2013-12-30, 10:16 AM
Based on what you've said here, I think you've got a basic design failure. You've convinced yourself that your solution fits your problem.

Changing how skills work isn't going to make non-combat stuff more 'combatlike'. Because when you think about it, combat is basically just noncombat stuff viewed under a close lens - combat isn't a "minigame". It's a "zoomed in" version of the rest of the game. Combat very rarely actually works DIFFERENTLY, it just has more focus on individual actions. An attack roll in most systems is basically the same as a skill check. But instead of making one "skill check" to "beat my opponent", you have instead reduced it to "make one skill check to make progress towards beating my opponent."

Adding a bunch of "special moves" to non-combat scenarios isn't the answer. The answer is to find interesting non-combat scenarios and then construct them in such a way that they require a large number of skill checks spread across a number of different characters in an interesting way. Giving a character the non-combat-skill equivalent of "I throw a fireball!" is the opposite of the solution I would suggest here, but that's basically what you're doing with "skills as moves." Rather than emulate what I think many people regard as the -worst- part of combat (Fixed special powers that do one thing and one thing only) the trick will be to put other tasks "under the microscope" in an interesting way. Of course, I'd also suggest taking the microscope -away- from combat a bit. The large amount of time spent on fighting relative to other activities, even in games that claim not to be about fighting, has always struck me as odd.

To sum up though: I'm still not convinced that your "clever idea" accomplishes anything useful, other than somehow 4E-ifying noncombat tasks by giving you special "skill powers"

Geostationary
2013-12-30, 04:03 PM
Since you've mentioned Nobilis previously, I'll just leave this (http://nobilis.me/articles:mortal-rules) here as it's a pretty good example of how the mortal rules work, and they seem to be similar to what you're looking to do. It does require a basic understanding of how they're set up though, which I can go into if you're not familiar/interested.

Airk
2013-12-30, 04:13 PM
Take the wall that needs to be climbed, for example. In this system, if there were 10 such wall 'segments' and you could climb one, you could climb them all without a roll. They're just terrain for you. If you don't have the ability to climb one, then you just know 'if I spend 10 points, I can climb them all' and again, its just terrain.

Because of this, I think this system will actually run faster than something like D&D would.


Yeah, except any vaguely narratively influenced game doesn't work like "D&D would" anyway. There are ten wall segments? Make one test. You succeeded? Great. You can climb them all and they are just terrain for you. You failed? Maybe you get tired. Maybe you fall. Maybe you knock out a loose brick and attract the attention of the guardsman below. But you still only make one roll for all ten segments.

You're not actually saving an appreciable amount of time except over most game systems these days, and you are turning an interesting element of decision making into a bland resource management exercise.

NichG
2013-12-30, 08:01 PM
Based on what you've said here, I think you've got a basic design failure. You've convinced yourself that your solution fits your problem.

Changing how skills work isn't going to make non-combat stuff more 'combatlike'. Because when you think about it, combat is basically just noncombat stuff viewed under a close lens - combat isn't a "minigame". It's a "zoomed in" version of the rest of the game. Combat very rarely actually works DIFFERENTLY, it just has more focus on individual actions. An attack roll in most systems is basically the same as a skill check. But instead of making one "skill check" to "beat my opponent", you have instead reduced it to "make one skill check to make progress towards beating my opponent."


This is what 4e did with Skill Tests, and it was awful. Rolling 10 dice to see if you pass is not actually more interesting than rolling 1 die to see if you pass. A combat that is 'two people stand there and trade blows' is very boring.

In my experience, systems in which combat is actually interesting do not rely that much on the rolls - its all in the special abilities. The interesting parts of combats are generally:

- Things that can be used to create barriers to direct comparison of strength. These are things that hold enemies or PCs in place, prevent certain damage types from working on them, reflect damage back at PCs, etc.

- Things that create the impression of danger as a trade-off against action. If you move close to that enemy to make a full attack, he can make a full attack back and he just did half your hitpoints with a single hit earlier. If you move through this area, someone gets an AoO against you that might take you out.

- Back and forth between 'decisive' elements. This is the kind of 'If I do this, they will lose next round unless they find some way to counter it; their counter means I will lose next round unless I find some way to counter it'. Incidentally, you see this a lot in Go - forcing moves which would win the game for a player (or at least cost a ton of points) if not responded to, allowing for an ebb and flow of control over the direction of the conflict.



Adding a bunch of "special moves" to non-combat scenarios isn't the answer. The answer is to find interesting non-combat scenarios and then construct them in such a way that they require a large number of skill checks spread across a number of different characters in an interesting way.

This is already bad adventure design of the 'choke-point' variety. Also, more skill checks does not make things more interesting (again, 4e skill tests were awful).

An example of good design is something like levels in Dishonored, where there are probably 8-10 different ways to proceed forward at most points, using different combinations of abilities. The game is then all about seeing how the abilities (which are simple chunks of 'I can do this') let you pass through an area. Short range teleport = some gaps can now be crossed. Possess a rat = small spaces can now be crossed. Sleep crossbow = places with small numbers of guards can now be crossed.


Giving a character the non-combat-skill equivalent of "I throw a fireball!" is the opposite of the solution I would suggest here, but that's basically what you're doing with "skills as moves." Rather than emulate what I think many people regard as the -worst- part of combat (Fixed special powers that do one thing and one thing only)

Except that I find this to be the most interesting part of the game. So are you sure you're actually giving me advice that would help me with the game I want to be playing? Perhaps the conclusion here should just be 'we aren't trying to build the same game'.


the trick will be to put other tasks "under the microscope" in an interesting way. Of course, I'd also suggest taking the microscope -away- from combat a bit. The large amount of time spent on fighting relative to other activities, even in games that claim not to be about fighting, has always struck me as odd.


Its because combat inherently has more depth, and that depth is easy for most people to see. Relative positioning, ranges, reaches, posture (standing, prone, etc), cover, damage-type-vs-defenses, etc. Even in games that don't explicitly have these things, we're good at seeing dependencies in a fight - stuff like 'if I pour oil on the ground, it will be harder for people to balance -> it will be easier to fight them if they're standing on oil'. Then suddenly there's an oily area and a non-oily area, and where you stand matters.

My 'thesis' if you like is that the same potential for depth exists for other things, but its harder to see. We're used to thinking about how space and timing matter in a fight, but we're not used to game systems that make 'visible' degrees of freedom in interesting ways in, say, a heist. Or a negotiation. And part of that may be because so many of the true degrees of freedom of those scenarios are buried and are not visible.

When running a combat, everyone gets to see 'the map'. In a negotiation, there isn't a publically visible roster of everyone's emotional states and agendas. In a heist, the PCs can't get an overview of the entire building and where everyone is at all times.

NichG
2013-12-30, 08:26 PM
Since you've mentioned Nobilis previously, I'll just leave this (http://nobilis.me/articles:mortal-rules) here as it's a pretty good example of how the mortal rules work, and they seem to be similar to what you're looking to do. It does require a basic understanding of how they're set up though, which I can go into if you're not familiar/interested.

Hm... I think actual Nobilis-for-Nobles is closer to what I'm aiming to do, but maybe I'm just not understanding the mortals rules.

In Nobilis, if I have, say, 'Pastries' as a Domain then each dot of Domain(+MP expenditure) allows me to do a distinct class of things with Pastries. Its a broad class, but every level is qualitatively different. It goes from 'detecting pastries' to 'enhancing the existing pastry-like aspects of something' to 'lets make some pastries' to 'lets turn things into pastries' to 'I can scry through pastries' all the way to 'I can make the pastry whose consumption ends the world'.

The point is, barring the Greater Creation/Greater Change level of things, none of these abilities directly act to resolve a given situation. They're tools, not means. If I need to get into a bank vault, and all I've got is my pastry-powers, I need to somehow use these abilities to achieve an end in an indirect manner.

Maybe I spend a lot of MP and create a pastry that mind-controls the bank manager into opening the vault, or one that causes hours to pass in seconds to trigger the time-lock. But thats probably too expensive for me to want to bother for a mere bank vault. Instead, I might want to preserve the overly-rich qualities of a pastry that the guard is eating to make him be indisposed for a bit in the bathroom, create a donut with C4 filling, and try to blow the vault. Or something else - its difficult to break into a bank vault with only pastry Domain powers, but thats the fun of it.

So yeah, I think Nobilis is actually really close to what I'm aiming for.

Airk
2013-12-30, 10:03 PM
This is what 4e did with Skill Tests, and it was awful. Rolling 10 dice to see if you pass is not actually more interesting than rolling 1 die to see if you pass. A combat that is 'two people stand there and trade blows' is very boring.

While skill challenges suck, I firmly believe that it's an implementation problem, not a concept problem; They were extremely rigid and left no room for tactical thought and so the challenge always just comes down to 'roll your best skill'. If there were reasons to ever do otherwise, that would be a start.



In my experience, systems in which combat is actually interesting do not rely that much on the rolls - its all in the special abilities. The interesting parts of combats are generally:

I disagree almost 100%; 4E (particularly at low level) feels very bland to me because I have a set of cards in front of me, that is What I Can Do. Boring.



- Things that can be used to create barriers to direct comparison of strength. These are things that hold enemies or PCs in place, prevent certain damage types from working on them, reflect damage back at PCs, etc.

None of which has anything to do with your autosuccess system or your 'special moves' since there's no "damage" to reflect.



- Things that create the impression of danger as a trade-off against action. If you move close to that enemy to make a full attack, he can make a full attack back and he just did half your hitpoints with a single hit earlier. If you move through this area, someone gets an AoO against you that might take you out.

None of which has anything to do with 'special moves'.

And so on.



This is already bad adventure design of the 'choke-point' variety. Also, more skill checks does not make things more interesting (again, 4e skill tests were awful).

No, it's only bad adventure design when you NEED to pass any given skill check to advance. You seem to really struggle with this concept.



An example of good design is something like levels in Dishonored, where there are probably 8-10 different ways to proceed forward at most points, using different combinations of abilities. The game is then all about seeing how the abilities (which are simple chunks of 'I can do this') let you pass through an area. Short range teleport = some gaps can now be crossed. Possess a rat = small spaces can now be crossed. Sleep crossbow = places with small numbers of guards can now be crossed.

Climb a wall, talk past a guard, you're not convincing me here. Adding 'special here's a thing you can do' abilities doesn't broaden roleplay options.



Except that I find this to be the most interesting part of the game. So are you sure you're actually giving me advice that would help me with the game I want to be playing? Perhaps the conclusion here should just be 'we aren't trying to build the same game'.

While there are definitely differences in tastes here, I also think that your methods don't address your stated objectives.



My 'thesis' if you like is that the same potential for depth exists for other things, but its harder to see.

We can agree on that much, it's just your ideas for how to bring it out seem completely irrelevant to your goals.



When running a combat, everyone gets to see 'the map'. In a negotiation, there isn't a publically visible roster of everyone's emotional states and agendas.

Well, unless there is, like in a Burning Wheel duel of wits...



In a heist, the PCs can't get an overview of the entire building and where everyone is at all times.

Why not? It's not like you play combat double blind, do you?

NichG
2013-12-30, 10:50 PM
None of which has anything to do with your autosuccess system or your 'special moves' since there's no "damage" to reflect.

None of which has anything to do with 'special moves'.

And so on.


The key insight is 'specific mechanics that are qualitatively distinct from each-other creates interesting tactics'. 'Qualitatively distinct mechanics' are the 'cards' or 'special abilities' that you dislike so much. Another term that has been used in game design theory to refer to these things is 'incomparables' - you can't directly compare jumping higher to shooting in a parabola or healing when you hit an enemy.

(Of course, you can get interesting tactics in a game where every move and every piece is identical (e.g. Go), but this is hard to achieve, tends towards the abstract, and basically plays against the advantages of tabletop RPGs.)



No, it's only bad adventure design when you NEED to pass any given skill check to advance. You seem to really struggle with this concept.

Climb a wall, talk past a guard, you're not convincing me here. Adding 'special here's a thing you can do' abilities doesn't broaden roleplay options.


Roleplay options don't generally need to be broadened. In a freeform game, you can do anything - you have infinite options basically. But you also have only as much tactical depth as the DM is able to create with 'hidden rules' of logical coherency/consistency.

I'm trying to augment those hidden rules (that will be there for any given DM, regardless of what the system does) with certain explicit rules that can be gamed (in the tactical sense). So you can actually have, say, an objective discussion about whether or not a given plan might work.

Now, I don't want to remove the DM from the picture - the flexibility granted by having a human running the game is not something to be discarded - but I do want to move some of the load off of them and onto a set of abilities. This would have the benefit of making the game more predictable for the players (in the sense of what their own abilities do), while at the same time allowing them to 'move outside of what the rules let you do' whenever they felt inspired to/felt the need to.



While there are definitely differences in tastes here, I also think that your methods don't address your stated objectives.


Its pretty clear that the parts that I find to be the most compelling about systems I've played are the parts you find least compelling. Its entirely possible that we just want different games - very little of what you've suggested has actually corresponded to anything I've found 'fun' in a game, ever, and its not like I've simply 'not played those kinds of games before'.

Thats not theorycraft, thats just my own gaming experience.


Why not? It's not like you play combat double blind, do you?

That sort of 'scenario visibility' is why the Heist skills had things that let you know the building layout, ask the GM a question, plant surveilance in various rooms.

But in games I've played in (and run), the default situation when approaching e.g. a building, a dungeon, a scenario, etc, is that you don't know anything about what is within, and then you slowly uncover more and more of the map/contents/etc as you play. I've never been in a campaign where e.g. you know the entire dungeon layout and the position of the various guards/etc before you set foot inside the structure; or for that matter, one where you have dossiers on all the major NPCs you might want to try to convince of things/etc, before you meet with them.

Airk
2013-12-31, 09:43 AM
The key insight is 'specific mechanics that are qualitatively distinct from each-other creates interesting tactics'. 'Qualitatively distinct mechanics' are the 'cards' or 'special abilities' that you dislike so much. Another term that has been used in game design theory to refer to these things is 'incomparables' - you can't directly compare jumping higher to shooting in a parabola or healing when you hit an enemy.

I don't really think the problem is that skills aren't qualitatively different.

Although now that I think about it, basically no one has really written a "heist" game as you seem to be trying to. Maybe that's because it's not actually very interesting to play no matter what you do to it.



Roleplay options don't generally need to be broadened. In a freeform game, you can do anything - you have infinite options basically. But you also have only as much tactical depth as the DM is able to create with 'hidden rules' of logical coherency/consistency.

Creating specific "you can do this" rules tends to shrink the roleplay option space rapidly. Case in point, again, is 4E combat.



Now, I don't want to remove the DM from the picture - the flexibility granted by having a human running the game is not something to be discarded - but I do want to move some of the load off of them and onto a set of abilities. This would have the benefit of making the game more predictable for the players (in the sense of what their own abilities do), while at the same time allowing them to 'move outside of what the rules let you do' whenever they felt inspired to/felt the need to.

What exactly makes you think that saying "Here is a specific thing you can do" encourages people to think OUTSIDE what the rules let them do? Again, 4E combat and it's "well, all I have are these powers" model is a source of great hate from many people for this reason.



Its pretty clear that the parts that I find to be the most compelling about systems I've played are the parts you find least compelling. Its entirely possible that we just want different games - very little of what you've suggested has actually corresponded to anything I've found 'fun' in a game, ever, and its not like I've simply 'not played those kinds of games before'.

So you have an active dislike for coming up with actions that aren't written down in front of you? I'm really not following.


That sort of 'scenario visibility' is why the Heist skills had things that let you know the building layout, ask the GM a question, plant surveilance in various rooms.

Which, frankly, don't sound like much fun. But I think this may actually be a problem with the 'heist' scenario. Even games that have found a way to make this fun did it by focusing on the interplay between characters rather than on the actual acts involved in the heist, which, when you get down to it, are boring.



But in games I've played in (and run), the default situation when approaching e.g. a building, a dungeon, a scenario, etc, is that you don't know anything about what is within, and then you slowly uncover more and more of the map/contents/etc as you play.

Sure, but you approach each encounter with fairly complete tactical information - at least, you're not required to do any special nonsense to get it.



I've never been in a campaign where e.g. you know the entire dungeon layout and the position of the various guards/etc before you set foot inside the structure; or for that matter, one where you have dossiers on all the major NPCs you might want to try to convince of things/etc, before you meet with them.

This doesn't really have anything to do with it. The PCs need enough information to play the game. Requiring them to use a bunch of canned abilities to get that information doesn't make things fun.

NichG
2013-12-31, 10:57 AM
I don't really think the problem is that skills aren't qualitatively different.

Although now that I think about it, basically no one has really written a "heist" game as you seem to be trying to. Maybe that's because it's not actually very interesting to play no matter what you do to it.

Creating specific "you can do this" rules tends to shrink the roleplay option space rapidly. Case in point, again, is 4E combat.


I don't actually mind shrinking the roleplay option space, especially if its only a fallback. A good system inspires people, rather than restricts them. It helps them do things that they do not have the ability to do as players. When someone reads the D&D spell list, for example, they'll likely get a slew of ideas 'I want to try this', 'I want to do that', etc. A line in the book saying 'make up your own spells' is a broader space, but its not really inspiring in the same way (you'll likely get a lot of stuff pulled from Harry Potter or other sources of external inspiration...)

I don't know about you, but most of the people I play with could not plan a heist, put together a realistic con, tell me how to actually pick a lock, or handle realistic political maneuvering (at least without getting so sick of the nature of politics that they want to just fireball everyone) - certainly not on the fly.

So, a game that breaks down these tasks (or one of these tasks - the Heist) into modular pieces of things that you can do, without having to worry about how you can do it, means that it becomes approachable.

My players may not be able to tell me how to break into a casino and steal the money in real life (and for that matter, I couldn't tell me how to do it either), but they can certainly take a bunch of 'powers' and string them together to achieve an intended result.

And if they go 'off-script' and come up with a plan that doesn't rely on their powers, then nothing in the system says the plan has to fail because it doesn't use their listed abilities. If they have a moment of brilliance, then thats time for the system to step aside and let them shine; its when they're struggling that the system will be there to support them.



What exactly makes you think that saying "Here is a specific thing you can do" encourages people to think OUTSIDE what the rules let them do? Again, 4E combat and it's "well, all I have are these powers" model is a source of great hate from many people for this reason.


It isn't meant to encourage it, it just doesn't forbid it. What its meant to do is to to give the players a way to approach tasks they have no idea how to do in RL, but their characters should have some idea how to do in the context of the game.

And, because those abilities interact in non-trivial ways with the game state, it means you can get good at the game without necessarily knowing how to actually rob a bank, just like someone can get good at e.g. building a Wizard in D&D or figuring out the D&D combat system.

I'm not looking for a narrativist system here, I'm looking for a gamist one.



So you have an active dislike for coming up with actions that aren't written down in front of you? I'm really not following.


I've never seen truly improvised combat maneuvers actually make the game better. Using your environment, sure, but saying 'I would like to duck under his blow and stab him in the armpit' or 'I aim for the eye and fire!' doesn't make a better game than 'I hit him with my sword' or 'I shoot him with my gun'.

IME, its hard for DMs to make consistent rulings about minutiae like that. The tendency is to either create an imbalance (so the 'stunt' becomes an always thing) or it ends up being marginal or even worse than doing the 'default action'. If you say 'okay, that requires an extra roll' then its worse than a normal attack, which only has one failure point. If you say 'okay, you can do that and here's a bonus on top of it' then its strictly better than a normal attack, and can basically be used all the time instead of the normal attack.

Having everything involve 'off the cuff' rulings also makes it impossible to plan. If I spill oil on the ground and light it on fire to create dense smoke and burn the enemy, am I going to have them all burning to death and choking on the smoke, unable to act? Or am I going to do 1d4 damage per round and grant partial concealment? I can't plan based on the result, so it diminishes the tactical element.

So yes, in this sense, I don't think 'coming up with actions on the fly in a tactical scenario' is that great of a model for a game. Most rules-light games that try to make rules for stunting end up making the actions generic (+2 for a stunt, no matter what the stunt is), which is also pretty bad.



Which, frankly, don't sound like much fun. But I think this may actually be a problem with the 'heist' scenario. Even games that have found a way to make this fun did it by focusing on the interplay between characters rather than on the actual acts involved in the heist, which, when you get down to it, are boring.


Any game is going to have character interaction. Thats not where game design is needed. The observation that heist scenarios tend to be boring is why its such a perfect topic to write a game about. Its something that the existing methods have failed to crack, while clearly having the depth and needed level of complication to make for an interesting game.

Airk
2014-01-06, 04:02 PM
Resurrecting this thread, not because I have anything to add to the back and forth at this point, but because I realized that your proposal is almost exactly the resolution system used in Golden Sky Stories (http://starlinepublishing.com/our-games/golden-sky-stories/) - with the intention of, essentially, minimizing the amount of "strategy" and "crunch" involved in the game - which, as I understand it, is pretty much the opposite of your design goal.

Basically, in GSS, each character has a few stats (which are global) and several powers (Determined by character 'type') A "check" is basically "Is your stat equal to or greater than N? If not, and you want to succeed, you'll need to spend Feelings to get to N." And using a power is simply "Spend the Power's cost in Wonder." Wonder and Feelings are generated at the start of each scene based on the character's Connections.

It's marvellously uncrunchy, because the game isn't really a "Task resolution" system like the one you are designing.

So yeah. I guess the system does work. I just remain unconvinced that it works for what you seem to think it would be good for.

NichG
2014-01-07, 04:05 AM
What are the powers like in Golden Sky Stories? Thats really the important part of the system I think.

AMFV
2014-01-07, 04:36 AM
Well for it to work the way you'd envision I imagine you'd need a set of skills and counters, if you're simulating a combat-y system then sets of actions and then action counters would be important. For example you could use a climb wall attack or maneuver or whatever against a wall if you had a certain threshold in climb, then the wall (well the DM acting as the wall) could respond with slick, or slippery as a counter, and you'd have to either have an ability to counter that, or you'd fail. Is that sort of what you'd be looking for?

NichG
2014-01-07, 05:15 AM
Counters are one way to do it, but I'd say that its probably best to focus on things that don't 'undo' actions, but instead are exchanges.

So in a combat system, you might have a move that could put someone off balance, denying them their next action. They could not say 'no, you don't get to affect my with your attack' but perhaps they could say 'okay, you can do that, but I get to hit you back' or 'instead of putting me off balance, you give me a wound' or 'you can put me off balance, but you're going to be off balance too'.

A sort of gimmicky example of this might be something like a system where you can move 1 square (including diagonals), change facing, and use one 'special action' each round, where everyone has facing. There is only one directly harmful special action: the 'killing blow', which is an attack that instantly kills the target, but only hits from the square immediately behind the target.

Special actions might let you move a bit more, or lock the target's facing a certain way, or defend yourself from a killing blow this round, or things like that. So (this particular example) wouldn't have direct counters or even direct attacks, but instead it'd be all about maneuvering so that you can get to the square immediately behind someone with your 1-square movement, so you can use your special action for a killing blow.

AMFV
2014-01-07, 05:20 AM
Counters are one way to do it, but I'd say that its probably best to focus on things that don't 'undo' actions, but instead are exchanges.

So in a combat system, you might have a move that could put someone off balance, denying them their next action. They could not say 'no, you don't get to affect my with your attack' but perhaps they could say 'okay, you can do that, but I get to hit you back' or 'instead of putting me off balance, you give me a wound' or 'you can put me off balance, but you're going to be off balance too'.

A sort of gimmicky example of this might be something like a system where you can move 1 square (including diagonals), change facing, and use one 'special action' each round, where everyone has facing. There is only one directly harmful special action: the 'killing blow', which is an attack that instantly kills the target, but only hits from the square immediately behind the target.

Special actions might let you move a bit more, or lock the target's facing a certain way, or defend yourself from a killing blow this round, or things like that. So (this particular example) wouldn't have direct counters or even direct attacks, but instead it'd be all about maneuvering so that you can get to the square immediately behind someone with your 1-square movement, so you can use your special action for a killing blow.

That could work, but basically having something that transfers a penalty to one area is going to require several working areas and possibly some degree of mathmatical abstraction.

For example if you lose your action in a turn due to a maneuver, you could play a maneuver that transfers the penalty, but that's probably still a counter type maneuver because it requires the other maneuver or a similar prior to its use, also it would have to not consume actions.

It's certainly a workable system, but we'd need to have more ideas about the actual game in order to actually develop it any more I think. You could certainly make it work with skills, and social encounters are close to combat already, I think starting by modeling social encounters is a good first step, since most skills systems tend to focus a lot on those things.

Airk
2014-01-07, 09:28 AM
What are the powers like in Golden Sky Stories? Thats really the important part of the system I think.

They're all over the place; Some of them have mechanical effects, like giving Feelings or Wonder to other characters, or increasing your Connections, some of them have strictly 'fiction' effects like changing an object into something else, and some are in-between like "turn invisible and require a check to be seen." The power selection is quite specifically designed to give abilities that are helpful to the sorts of situations that game is designed around (essentially 'everyday problems') and they do this quite effectively, but again, it means that each character has a very defined (read: limited) set of Powers to call upon, though some of them are quite flexible.

If anything, the system is broader in applicability than anything you've laid out so far, because the point system for Powers means that instead of "I can use each of these things once." you can instead use them in any combination as points allows. It doesn't really produce any sort of 'tactical' feeling for problem solving though.

NichG
2014-01-07, 10:49 AM
It does sound like the same sort of thing as I'm talking about. I would guess that whether or not you get a 'tactical feeling' from something like that depends on the tension underlying the scenario (as in, you can do one thing right now - do you do X or Y or Z?).

Even something like combat in D&D is often only as complex as 'pick the right spell for these particular enemies', which isn't too different than 'pick the right power for this situation'. The thing that tends to make it tactical even when the tactics are relatively simple is that you have to pick right the first time.

You could also of course make the problems themselves more complex - things that no single power can resolve, but which require multiple steps/multiple powers. I think that'll give it a 'puzzle feel' rather than a 'tactical feel', but its still something to keep in mind.

Anyhow, it does seem like that system has the right ingredients. The 'turn an object into another object' power for example would open up a ton of object-based puzzles.

Airk
2014-01-07, 11:00 AM
It does sound like the same sort of thing as I'm talking about. I would guess that whether or not you get a 'tactical feeling' from something like that depends on the tension underlying the scenario (as in, you can do one thing right now - do you do X or Y or Z?).

I don't think tactical play is about tension. I don't think I really feel tension in RPGs ever, but I definitely feel that sometimes things are tactical.



Even something like combat in D&D is often only as complex as 'pick the right spell for these particular enemies', which isn't too different than 'pick the right power for this situation'. The thing that tends to make it tactical even when the tactics are relatively simple is that you have to pick right the first time.

No, I disagree again; It's not even the "right spell for these enemies" it's "the right spell for these enemies in this arrangement given what I think I may need later." Which is much more complicated.



You could also of course make the problems themselves more complex - things that no single power can resolve, but which require multiple steps/multiple powers. I think that'll give it a 'puzzle feel' rather than a 'tactical feel', but its still something to keep in mind.

I'm not actually convinced there is a difference between these two 'feels'. I suppose one has an element of time build into it, whereas in the other, time is an optional element?



Anyhow, it does seem like that system has the right ingredients. The 'turn an object into another object' power for example would open up a ton of object-based puzzles.

If the game had anything to do with puzzles, maybe. ;)

It is an unusual game.

NichG
2014-01-07, 11:14 AM
I don't think tactical play is about tension. I don't think I really feel tension in RPGs ever, but I definitely feel that sometimes things are tactical.

No, I disagree again; It's not even the "right spell for these enemies" it's "the right spell for these enemies in this arrangement given what I think I may need later." Which is much more complicated.

I'm not actually convinced there is a difference between these two 'feels'. I suppose one has an element of time build into it, whereas in the other, time is an optional element?


Yeah, what I meant by 'tension' was in some sense 'timing'. In a combat in D&D, if I pick the wrong spell to solve the encounter, I may lose hitpoints or even get killed before my round comes up again and I have another shot at it. The 'tension' is that I can't sit there and try things until something works - so I have to not just eventually make the right choice, but my first choice has to be the right one (or one of my first few).

On the other hand, with a 'puzzle' feel, generally you can keep trying until you solve it.