Rippers Facebook Game

My Facebook account is rarely frequented and pretty much just a mechanism for keeping in touch with a couple of friends who I don’t see a lot of these days. (They introduced me to it)

Recently however, I’ve been drawn into playing Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Rippers Facebook game, which is about Victorian monster-hunting and the “Horror War” against the evil Cabal, and I have to say that as a minor diversion it’s not at all bad. Like most such games, it’s fairly limited and the missions are rather repetitive after a while, but the promise of character advancement has kept me plugging away and overall it seems fairly well thought out.

The Heart mechanics in particular are of interest to me, since they are a minor application of a concept I rather loosely discussed in a post some time ago. Basically, making the character’s resolve/conviction/heart a value that can be eroded, so that physical damage points and thus combat are no longer the only character resource limiting their ability to continue towards their objectives. To my mind this opens up other avenues for challenging the characters i.e. you might have the strength to overcome this obstacle but do you have the mental fortitude? Can I persuade you to desist? Can I intimidate you into withdrawing?

From observation only, the Heart mechanics employed in Rippers work something like this:

• Your Heart is twice your Courage attribute and represents a pool of ‘resolve’ which underpins your actions.
• Heart is consumed when you are daunted/challenged by horrors or failure e.g. “the werewolf strikes terror into your heart (Heart Damage 3)” or “Critical failure (Heart Damage 1)”
• Failing certain skill challenges which you have to overcome in order to advance through the mission is typically more costly e.g. failing to decipher a coded message may lose you a whole bunch of Heart. I’m not sure exactly how this works, perhaps dependant on the extent of your failure?
• Once your Heart reaches zero you are defeated and cannot continue with your mission. For the time being you must withdraw to lick your wounds before returning to fight another day.

These mechanics seem to work fairly well within the limits of the Rippers game, though for application in a tabletop RPG I’d also want to see things like:

• Heart damage from social conflicts e.g. persuasion, intimidation
• Heart tied into stated character “beliefs” or inspirations
• Heart bonuses for following beliefs/inspirations i.e. it is harder to undermine/dissuade characters from performing actions which are in line with their “beliefs”
• A Heart replenishment system based around scenes being devoted to a character’s inspirations (In Rippers Heart merely replenishes over time)

There’s some food for future thought there anyway.

The Perilous Realm – Act One

Since, of late, my current gaming group are struggling to find any mutually convenient evenings and now a certain adorable bundle is keeping her father fully occupied, opportunities for me to roleplay are few and far between at the moment.

Thankfully my extremely understanding other half, Emma, has volunteered to help me with a playtest of Bill White’s The Perilous Realm; which is great because it’s a game I’ve really wanted to try for some time now. Granted the backdrop of continuous baby-care is a somewhat unsuitable arena for this but I felt The Perilous Realm seemed robust enough to handle the kind of piecemeal play dictated by our present circumstances.

The Setting (summarised from Bill’s description here):

The time is the 12th century. The place is the Kingdom of Prester John, great and wise Christian monarch of the Far East, Lord of the Four Indies. Into this world, it has been foretold by the apostle Judas Didymus that, “a star called Wormwood” will fall, unleashing beasts of war, plague, famine and poison to devour the people. Heroes from far off lands will rise to oppose these beasts, at great cost to themselves, and ultimately to little avail, for both they and the kingdom of the Four Indies will perish. This game is the story of that time.

Pleasingly, despite the interruptions, Emma and I have succeeded in completing Act One, which is basically setting the scene by generating a map of the kingdom and creating the protagonists.

Character Creation

Character creation entails rolling on a series of tables to generate elements around which your character is built. I’m a fan of such tools for prompting ones imaginings and certainly, on this occasion, the process worked really well for us.  The resulting ’key words’ provided a very nice basis for developing the protagonists, suitably stimulating our imaginations and encouraging collaboration as we tossed around ideas for how they could be incorporated.

Like all ‘oracular’ type mechanics, there were times when the randomly generated elements positively reverberated with meaning and other times when they were rather less fruitful but without doubt the characters were all the more interesting for being woven around things that we almost certainly wouldn’t have come up with ourselves.

Although only Emma and I are playing (and I’m notionally the GM) we decided to create two principal characters, as we thought it would be more enjoyable that way.

We came up with the following:

From the above elements, which we generated for the first character, we got Urraca Sombra del Alba, an emissary from a sect of Spanish women who work in secret to thwart the pending Apocalypse. Urraca is currently charged with travelling to the Court of Prester John, in the grand and glorious city of Nysse, with a warning from the sect that the end of days is near. The star Wormwood has fallen and agents of the Apocalypse are now in motion.

Combining ideas prompted by the key words associated with her alchemical archetypes we decided that Urraca was going to be a woman with a troubled past. As a young girl she was orphaned when her mother and father were executed for practicing witchcraft. She herself escaped, fleeing from the purusing authorities, staying alive purely through her grit and determination. Eventually she was taken in by a benevolent Sister who initiated her into the secret order of which she is now a part. Throughout that time she has hidden a dangerous potential, for should it ever be discovered that she inherited her mother’s aptitude for the Magical Arts then she would surely be put to death like her parents.

Her traits are:

Determination – life’s a struggle (Sange)
Eldritch potential – witchcraft inherited from her mother (Melanche)

The character also gets a gift associated with one of the key words from her zodiacal aspect, which are death, old age, failure and destruction. For this Emma chose:

The ability to talk to the dead (Melanche)

Her resulting humours are Chole 5, Sange 5, Melanche 3, Pneuma 3

From the second set of elements we came up with Alma Tormenta de Otoño, another emissary from the same sect of women that Urraca Sombra del Alba belongs to. Emma and I liked the idea that both protagonists had been despatched to the Kingdom of Prester John to undertake missions associated with thwarting the Apocalypse. To facilitate this we changed Alma’s Origin to 11: Leon & Castile, the same as Urraca’s. This change has no mechanical effect.

Alma is charged with delivering a second message to the Castle of Gathonolabe, a mountain fortress where a rich and evil sorcerer trains an order of assassins, rewarding them with hedonistic and sybaritic pleasures.

Using key words associated with Alma’s alchemical archetypes we decided that she had trained diligently to achieve mastery of the blade and that she was an exceptional judge of people’s body language. Speak falsely and she will know that you have lied to her.

Her traits are:

Blade mastery – wind of knives (Chole)
Good judge of people - reading body language (Melanche)

Her gift is associated with one of the key words from her zodiacal aspect, which are worldly power, justice and leadership. From this we decided that Alma doesn’t undertake her missions alone. She is the leader of a small team of specialists; a visible envoy who is accompanied by unseen cohorts aiding her covertly from the shadows.

Leader - accompanied by unseen cohorts who aid her covertly from the shadows (Chole)

Her resulting humours are Chole 5, Sange 4, Melanche 5, Pneuma 2

The Kingdom

Finally we generated the following map of the kingdom by drawing cards to form an eight by eight grid and then rolling randomly to determine the locations of the six destinations:

Also rolling randomly, Urraca will start the game at (8,2) and Alma at (1,5)

Note: It took three tries to randomly generate start locations where one or other of the characters wasn’t either adjacent to or collocated with their destination. I don’t know for certain that this is an issue but it seemed to limit play somewhat so we changed it.

Act Two to follow…

Spellbound Kingdoms – Inspirations

Just a quick tip-of-the-hat to Frank Brunner’s Spellbound Kingdoms, which has some really neat stuff in it.

One idea I particularly like is ‘Inspirations’

Characters have inspirations such as “love of Isabella the miller’s daughter”, “fear of rejection” or “loyal to the king”. A relevant inspiration can be used once per scene to add the character’s HEART die as a bonus, or to magnify a roll (i.e. increase the size of the die being used). I won’t go into the details here, as this is pretty similar to various drive and belief mechanics used in other games.

Now the really neat bit in Spellbound Kingdoms is that a character can never be killed while they have an inspiration of 4 or more (3 if it’s a love inspiration). They can plunge over a cliff or be left for dead in a pool of their own blood but when all is said and done they will have miraculously survived. The only way to finish them for good is to harry them and break them, perhaps by forcing them to watch their loved ones die one by one before moving in for the kill.

Play is set up to revolve around character inspirations rather than direct conflict. Scenes are devoted to raising inspirations or assaulting them. A villain might kidnap and murder a son, torture a friend or set fire to a home; while a player might devote a scene to wooing his love in order to increase his associated inspiration.

You can also:

• Exploit other character’s inspirations
• Impose or suffer inspiration penalties in conflicts as a result of inspirations being mocked or threatened
• Force inspirations upon other characters as a condition of beating them in a contest
• Inflict or suffer mood damage
• Find True love
• Acquire fear inspirations, which are the easiest inspirations to gain but also the easiest for enemies to exploit.

This all looks like really good stuff to me and I’m very interested to see how it works in actual play. Though, given that my home-life is almost entirely focused on baby-care at the moment, it may be some time before I can try it out. 

Anyway, if you like the sound of this I’d recommend you go take a gander. Based on what I’ve read it looks like a good buy. Even more so if a mix of zeppelins, courtesans, feral children, alchemy, sorcery, engineering, politics, dragons and slavering undead appeals to you. The pdf is currently on sale at DriveThruRPG for $7.99

Support for Situation Generation

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been recuperating from having a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (surgery to remove one’s gallbladder) and that’s given me a bit of free time to mull over some roleplaying stuff again.

Not to mention the fact that the operation worked a treat and, though I’ve been feeling a bit tender, I’m finally getting back to my old self. The restricted diet, discomfort and painful, sleepless nights from the last six months are a thing of the past and I’m not missing my gallbladder, even slightly. Yay!

Anyway, a discussion with Bill White over at Consensus Games has led to the following thoughts, which seemed worth posting about here.

Cycle of Situation Generation and Resolution

In practice, a roleplaying game consists of a series of imaginary situations/scenes, each of which players are expected to react to and resolve (in some fashion) before moving on to the next.

Hence games are a repeating cycle of:
Pretty much without exception, RPGs provide extensive support to Situation Resolution, through mechanics that determine success or failure of imagined actions and/or arbitrate conflicts. However, aside from pre-scripted adventure modules and guidelines such as “threaten PC beliefs”, it’s largely down to the participants (typically the GM)  to come up with interesting situations which advance the fiction.

This is usually done through a combination of preparation and improvisation, both of which have their problems; either railroading or the GMs version of writer’s block.
So, given that Situation Generation and Situation Resolution are both fundamental to play, why is all the mechanical support focused on Situation Resolution? And do effective ways to support Situation Generation actually exist?

I have some thoughts on why Situation Resolution gets all the attention but I think I’ll save those for another post as I want to focus on the second question, ”Do effective ways to support Situation Generation exist?”

Well, certainly for me, I’ve realised that a major appeal of Bill White’s oracular approach to RPGs is that the techniques he employs do in fact support situation generation during play. In these games the participants aren’t asked to decide “what happens next?” they’re asked to interpret the cards, which is easier somehow. Switching the focus to reading the cards prompts the imagination, encourages collaboration  and works surprisingly well considering there’s no overall ’architect’ guiding the story. As Bill himself says:

People’s minds naturally want to impute meaning to patterns: random noise plus human perception equals deep significance.

Another approach, which has been employed in some games, is to mechanize aspects of GM play to the point where opposition to the PCs can be played to the hilt (within the limits of the rules) e.g. something like, if a PC blows a certain roll the GM is entitled to threaten the PC’s relationships or property, or to place them at a disadvantage but cannot actual do them any physical harm.

With this technique the players and GM “advocate” for their respective characters and situations are generated as a consequence of the conflicts arising between them. Once again there is a subtle shift of focus as the GM is being asked not “What happens next?” but “What’s your next move?”

For the time being these are the only techniques I have in mind but I’m wondering if there are others? And, if so, how effective they are? I’ll be giving it some more thought and will probably expand on this post at a later time.

Certainly I’ll be continuing to look out for oracular mechanics since, as anyone reading this blog will know, they are of great interest to me. 

Anyway, any thoughts or comments are most welcome. Thanks for dropping by.

The Advocacy Model

Over at my good friend Tommi Brander’s blog, Cogito, ergo ludo, there’s a really interesting conversation between Tommi and Eero Tuovinen in the comments to this post. It’s about the advocacy model, which  Eero explains as follows:

In a game that is set up for advocacy the idea is basically that while one player might be the GM, the majority of the players run their own characters, often created by them just like in any old roleplaying game. These players have two jobs in the advocacy model: a) to express an interesting, sympathetic character and b) to utilize the rules mechanics to enforce the character’s will on the setting. To say the same thing slightly differently: the player creates a protagonist (a sympathetic viewpoint character) and makes sure that the character strives in the game for his own benefit. The important bit of the advocacy model is that we find two things: the first is that a properly designed game (for this purpose, understand; there are other things you can do with roleplaying) will not require the players to take on any other responsibilities. The second is that the primary source of enjoyment in an advocacy game actually comes from the very fact that the players have no other responsibilities but to advocate for their characters.

The reason for why I’m constantly dragging advocacy up as a concept nowadays is that I’ve been encountering a lot of storytelling games that I haven’t been entirely happy with for the very reasons identified by the advocacy model. An alternative method for creating a highly dramatic game, you see, is to expect the players to take a high degree of responsibility for the dramatic outcomes of the game; this is typical of games that include verbiage about how the players should feel responsible for the fun of the game and thus regulate their characters to not make difficult choices that “ruin” the story. The point of the advocacy model is that we don’t need to make this sacrifice if we want story: it’s possible to both get an exciting story and advocate for your character fully.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Consensus Games Lives!

Consensus Games, Bill White’s roleplaying game design blog, has returned to life after a good few years of silence. I’ve been keeping vigil all that time because I’m a big fan of the kind of oracular techniques that Bill seems to favour for stimulating the imagination during play.

If you don’t know what I mean by this go see Bill’s (and Dave Petroski’s) games Ganakagok, Rune Saga, Technolust and his latest posts on Fourth Age: D&D.

Basically it’s drawing cards, interpreting their meaning and weaving that meaning into the story as part of play. It’s an idea that I first encountered in Jonathan Tweet’s Everway RPG which seems to have been relatively under-utilized since then.

Anyway, I’m very pleased to see that Bill is back posting again and hope he continues with the juicy oracular goodness.

His latest contribution is a really nice quest system that turns D&D into more of a pick-up game (Fourth Age: D&D), the basis of which could easily be modded for use with pretty much any game. It’s well worth checking out.

Vincent Baker’s Otherkind Dice

Here’s another really cool idea for a resolution mechanic I found over at Vincent Baker’s anyway.

Vincent says:

Use these rules when somebody says “my character accomplishes this…” and somebody says “…but it’s not a given.” They can be the same person or different people.

First, identify the accomplishment at stake. If the person said “my character punches him,” ask why. If the person started with the reason, like “my character gets past him, by punching him down,” you’re set!

Second, identify two or more things that the character is risking. It might be helpful to say something like “but the danger is…” For instance, “my character gets past him, by punching him down, but the dangers are that he’ll hurt me, and that Millicent will see me fighting and be mad at me.”

The punch is a given; the character punches the guy successfully. What you’re going to resolve is the other three things: does the character get past him? does he hurt the character in the fight? does Millecent see the fight and get mad?

Third, roll 3d6. After you’ve rolled them, assign one each to the three things.

Assign one of the dice to the accomplishment at stake:
1-2: the character does not accomplish it. The character punches him but doesn’t get past him. Update the circumstances and roll another conflict, or go forward with the accomplishment totally unachieved.
3-4: the character makes progress toward the accomplishment, but doesn’t achieve it outright. Update the circumstances and roll another conflict, or go forward with the accomplishment partly achieved.
5-6: the character accomplishes it!

Assign the two remaining dice to the two dangers:
1-3: the danger comes true.
4-6: the danger doesn’t come true.
If the 1-2/3-4/5-6 scale works for the dangers too, feel free to use it.

So say I roll 1 3 4. How do I assign them? It depends on my priorities, of course. Maybe what matters most to me is Millicent’s regard: I assign 4 to that danger, so it doesn’t come true. Maybe what matters next is getting past the guy, who cares about a black eye: I assign 3 to getting past the guy, we’ll roll again, but pow! he gave me a real shiner.

Say instead I roll 4 6 6. I do the butt dance of victory!

Optionally: Sometimes we negotiate for extra dice up front. The deal seems to be, if you can justify 1 extra die, you get it; to get 2 extra dice, you have to justify very well or really really want it. Sometimes we negotiate for extra dice after the roll but before assigning, but that’s less common and I can’t think what the rules for that are.

Thanks for sharing Vincent.

Player Interpretation of Expectation

Any of you that drop by from time-to-time will have noticed that I haven’t been posting much of late. Other things have been keeping me occupied. You know how it is. On the plus side I’m very happy to say that one of the things that’s been keeping me from posting is the fact that I’m gaming again, so I can’t really complain.

Anyway that’s all by-the-by…

In the little amount of spare time I do have at present I’ve been following a really interesting discussion in the Playtesting forum at the Forge regarding Altaem’s Player Interpretation of Expectation (PIE) system, which is both beautiful in it’s simplicity and a really neat idea. It seemed well worth a post here.

To summarise, as I understand it, resolution in PIE works something like this.

STEP 1: EXPECTATION

Reacting to the unfolding game situation a player describes their intended action, stating their focus and desired outcome in order to agree an expected outcome with the GM (who has the final say) 

e.g.
A master swordsman encounters a lone Ork in the woods. The swordsman is highly skilled and would expect to defeat the Ork with little effort. That is the expectation, a swift engagement in which the Ork is defeated.

STEP 2: INTERPRETATION

The player rolls three different coloured d6 to see what happens. Each d6 represents something different:

Self (Character performance)
Opposition (How well the opposition did)
Environment (Objects or Forces beyond either combatants control)

Both the total and the value of each dice (any 1s and 6s) are important.

The total of the roll is compared to the following table:

Roll       Outcome
16<        Exceptional – much better than expected, many large bonuses
13-15    Remarkable – as expected with large bonus
11-12    Above Average – as expected with small bonus
9-10      Below Average – as expected with small problem
6-8        Poor – worse than expected with large problem
<5         Dismal – much worse than expected, many large problems

Both the overall outcome relative to the expected outcome and any 1s (bad for the character) or 6s (good for the character) on individual dice must be incorporated into the player’s narration of what actually happens

e.g.
Let’s say our swordsman’s roll is Self: 6, Opposition: 3, Environment: 4 for a total of 13. This is a Remarkable result, the swordsman has slain the Ork with a flourish. His Self die (Character performance) was a 6 – so he should describe a deft move. He sidesteps the Ork’s attack, ducks underneath the blow and runs the creature through.

If the swordsman’s roll was Self: 3, Opposition: 1, Environment: 3 for a total of 7, the outcome would have been somewhat different. This is a Poor result with a large problem for the character and the localised 1 for Opposition (How well the opposition did) suggests that it was the performance of the Ork that upset the expectation. In this case the narration might describe how the Ork was tougher than the swordsman expected. It brushed his thrust aside and  struck back, wounding him and putting him on the back foot.

There are various nuances to the system that I haven’t gone into here, so read more at the Forge if you’re interested, but I really do like the simplicity of Altaem’s central resolution mechanic and the fact that from the one roll it provides additional cues for narration.

I’m thinking this fits really well with a results Ladder like the one used in the Fate system:

+6 Legendary
+5 Epic
+4 Superb
+3 Great
+2 Good
+1 Fair
+0 Average
-1 Mediocre
-2 Poor
-3 Terrible
-4 Abysmal

Characters are ranked in skill. A Superb (+4) swordsman fighting a Good (+2) swordsman would expect a Good (+2) result in their favour.

The result of the dice roll modifies the outcome as follows: Exceptional (+3), Remarkable (+2), Above Average (+1), Below Average (-1), Poor (-2) and Dismal (-3)

You roll the dice and get Self: 1, Opposition: 3, Environment: 2, for a total of 6. Ooops That’s a poor result meaning only an Average outcome (+2 expectation -2 for a poor result equals a +0 average result). And the localised 1 on Self suggests that the character cocked up, performing less well than expected e.g. stumbling and allowing the opponent to gain the initiative.

Like I said the core mechanic has got bags of potential. Nice one Altaem! Thanks for sharing your ideas.

RPG Theory Journey – Part VII

I’ve been swamped with work over the last couple of months so haven’t been around much but I’m hoping to get back to my RPG theory journey again now. I’m starting with a diagram of play that brings together ideas from my previous two posts - Adding to the Fiction and RPG Theory Journey – Part VI 

RPG Theory Journey – Part VI

Anchors revisited

I’m going to go over my thoughts on ‘anchors’ a bit more, as I feel their role is somewhat fundamental to my evolving model of play. In particular I’m going to try and explain why I see them as non-diegetic, since this has already raised some debate.

‘Shared’ fantasy isn’t really shared

Right, first thing’s first. The basis for a lot of what I’m saying is that, though the idea of shared fantasy is at the heart of roleplaying, the fantasy itself (even the Shared-Imaginary-Space fantasy) isn’t really shared. In reality the imaginings of the individual participants are distinct diegeses existing entirely in their own minds.

Roleplaying succeeds in creating the illusion of shared fantasy through processes of play that align these individual imaginings so that they resemble one another sufficiently for participants to believe that they are interacting inside one shared fantasy (perhaps that should read ‘make-believe that they are interacting inside one shared fantasy’)

Fantasy alignment through ‘anchors’

Alignment of individual fantasies is achieved by establishing/ communicating what has happened or how things appear so that everyone’s imaginings can be made to resemble one another. Each stipulation about the fantasy is an anchor that draws the imaginings of individual participants together along a similar course. The more anchors there are, the closer together the threads of fiction are brought. Also different anchors have different weights of influence, some being more tightly defined and others more open to individual interpretation. ‘A large rock’ for example is a fairly loose description. Additional information is required to establish whether it can be lifted or used to hide behind.

So why are anchors non-diegetic?  

In a nutshell my assertion is that anchors are non-diegetic because the anchor itself and the effect the anchor has on individual participants’ imaginings are quite different things. The anchor is non-diegetic; in fact even the influence the anchor exerts is non-diegetic. Only the consequences of that influence (the imaginings that are created in the diegeses as a result of the anchor being established) are diegetic.

Note that the effect the anchors have on the paths of the two players’ fiction threads  in the diagram above is similar but not the same.

Minotaur or Minosaur?

A few years ago I participated in a game in which one of the characters was Shaaaarghraio, a large and powerful Minotaur; he lumbered around hitting things with his great-axe a lot. These statements about Shaaaarghraio are anchors (stipulations of what he is like that establish how we should imagine him). As a result we are able to build a similar minds-eye picture of him (typically that shown on the left of the diagram below.)

However, when presented with the exact same anchors, the effect of their influence on the imaginings of someone else I know was entirely different. For some reason known only to them their brain conjured up the image that Shaaaarghraio was kind of like a dinosaur and the idea appealed to them so much that it stuck. In their mind that’s what he was.

Anchors are language

Anchors are language. We speak to one another or write things down and they allow us to communicate our thoughts. If I tell you that I am imagining a ’sword’ you understand what I mean by a ’sword’ and you can imagine one also. The image in your mind isn’t an image of the sword I’m imagining as I’m not sending you the image that’s in my mind. Instead I’m using a kind of association shorthand and sending you a symbol (the word ’sword’), which hopefully represents something similar to us both.

When your brain receives that symbol, you interpret it and select a sword (or at least what you understand a ’sword’ to be) from the set of imaginary swords available in your mind. That’s what you imagine. If I so choose I could then provide additional information so you can adjust your imaginary sword to bring our imaginings closer together.

The point being that the sword I’m imagining, the word (symbol) ’sword’ and the sword you’re imagining are all different things. And the relationship between the imaginary swords and the word ’sword’ is the same as the relationship between an anchor and whatever it’s describing in the diegesis. The effect in the diegesis is diegetic but the anchor and the influence it has on the diegesis are external, parts of a non-diegetic mechanism designed to convey information to the diegesis.

Does that make sense? 

So what?

At the moment there isn’t really a ’so what’, I’m merely exploring ways of thinking about what goes on during roleplay. Hopefully at various points along the line this will elicit useful discussion. If not, it will certainly give my simple brain a workout.

As always any comments or observations are most welcome.