TSoY: Keys, Secrets

Burning Wheel: Traits, Lifepaths, Emotional Attributes

Sorcerer: Humanity, Descriptors, Summoning

Dogs has a long bit in the back about different settings and I think it would do CoC better than CoC in showing the slow deterioration of investigators in a Lovecraftian world.

The tinkerable stuff is out there.

Shreyas: Yes!

(Err, yes to what I think you're saying, at least).

I'm one of the people who spent, lord, hundreds of hours tinkering with the crunchy character and vehicle design systems in things like GURPS, Car Wars, Battletech, etc. etc. Now, 99 percent of that never translated into Actual Play with other real live people -- it was "lonely fun," the geek equivalent of crossword puzzles.* But fun it was.

And I also love the new streamlined, all-out, pedal-to-the-floor Story Now, Now, Now -- PTA, Dogs, etc. But, like Shreyas, I sometimes look at the character sheets and go, "y'know, mechanically, all these guys are basically the same, and we're imagining the differences on top, like GM and Oldsmobile putting different bodies over the same chassis and engine."

So how can we put the crunchy, fiddly fun in harness alongside the fast-playing, Story Now fun?

The one thing that really clicks for me, actually, is that little "d4 trait" thing in Dogs.** It's the opposite of the "different description, identical mechanics" problem that bugged me above: Instead, you can have the exact same description and then have it behave differently in the mechanics -- which then feeds back to radically change its meaning in the story.

The only Dogs game I've ever gotten to play (weep for me!), the GM had the town's Steward in a minor social conflict with us, and he had the Steward roll the trait, "Steward - 2d4." And the other player and I went, "He has 'Steward' as a d4 trait! This town is in trouble!"

All from one little number after the "d." Not pages and pages of tables, not tons of feats each one with special cases, not an enormous cross-referenced grid on my character sheet. Just "d4," and it's all we need to know. That's brilliant. I want more of that.

* And when those super crunchy systems did actually get played, they were usually cumbersome and disappointing, but that's just poor design-craft, not an inherent quality of crunch. Let's all assume we're going to be designing GOOD games.

** For people who don't know Dogs, characters' traits are rated both in the number of dice they give you to roll and the TYPE of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10). Lots of small dice may roll the same total in a conflict as a single large die, but the "Fallout" you take (damage, injury, enforced change to your character) depends on the NUMBER of dice rolled, so small dice, and especially d4s, are more likely to get your character chewed up even if s/he wins. I'm totally stealing this system for my own Ronnies entry....

Neato, Matt.

I can't explore and enjoy these systems; there are no knobs to turn, no levers or dials. ... I really, really like mechanics that produce sharp, focused, player-driven action.

Is it possible (and I'm not saying that this is what it is, just that it's a possibility) that sharp, focused, player-driven action is fundamentally simpler than those grandiose and baroque systems with all the fiddly bits? Were all those fiddly bits, and the layer after layer of new fiddly bits, trying to find ways to build things that were too simple for the system to build?

I mean, conflict is: character + desire + obstacle. A level 13 prestige class feat doesn't figure into there at all. Maybe we need things like 7th Sea's Backgrounds, which were all written in terms of what stories they could inspire and create?

Yeah, I like that 'tinker-toy' aspect too. There is a big difference, though, between games where you do it beforehand (D&D, Champions, Burning Wheel), and where you fiddle tihings with during the game (which is what Nine Worlds seems to do).

Shreyas--thought about doing this with those graphical character sheets? Working out ways in which characters can be built with different 'stations' and with different 'paths' between them? That'd be super-neat.

Were all those fiddly bits, and the layer after layer of new fiddly bits, trying to find ways to build things that were too simple for the system to build?

Bluntly, I think this move toward simpler is overcorrection and factionalisation.

I mean, combat is: opponent + stick sharp things in + take their stuff. And yet, it has been made mechanically and descriptively interesting.

We've done baroque and we know that now. We've done simple and we know that now. I would like to believe we're getting over both those phases now, and have the craft to make systematically, elegantly complex systems.

We can make things more complicated: Suppose a game where you can flag any character with "Trusted" or "Distrusted." Suppose that it has some kind of hanfway interesting conflict system, as Dogs or HQ. This gives you a crazy world of mechanical hooks to hang neat idiosyncratic mechanics off.

In the world of fiddly chargen tricks, you can make Trust Intervenes; with this power, someone who you Trust can pre-empt your action in conflict to do something. You can make Trust Restores; when someone you Trust moves to assist you, it replenishes your resource reserves. And so on. Made with craft and attention, this design stuff changes the pattern of choices you get to make mment-to-monent in play, or (as with the mechanics I've described) influences the way others make choices. That's what I want.

Piers, I have thought about that. Eventually I'll come back to it and talk about it.

If your core is focused enough, and the things hanging from it are restricted to control and alter the relationships of items in the core...

For my "Enemies" game, I was considering that in character creation you should have every key to the design of your particular "enemy." If you took a flaw like, "Scared of the dark," your enemy should be "powerful in the dark." If you took a strength like, "Ambidextrous Fighting," your enemy should have multiple attacks/arms. Of course, my "Enemies" game is a closed small-session game where you _can_ directly connect such things. My "hates pink" quirk isn't worth a point unless it comes up in the game, darnit.

Important themes, and powerful stories, probably resist that kind of dissection.

Really, why do you think so?

Parenthetically, I do not care about themes. Until I actually have a clear understanding of what themes are, they are getting in my way. I'm actually much more interested in pacing and structure in a more general sense.

What defines a "good" story is as intangible as your definition of "story".

Which means most people's standards for "good stories" are pretty intangible.

Hey, I'm not saying it's not worth attempting, I just think it would be hard. Still, stories are funky things, and figuring out how they work has far broader implications that role-playing games.

There must be a couple of good books about "how to write," which could be mined for mechanical ideas. Based on some of those books I read in high school, everything in them is a truism--but there's some value in seeing it made explicit.

Huh. I'm trying to do something generally along these lines - crunch that drives the story, but can be fiddled with and tuned - in the Pulse. I have no idea if it's working, yet. We'll see.

I agree with Shreyas - I want a character sheet that slides and moves - locks and spins. I want traits and chains and relationships that slip around and connect and disconnect. A character sheet that comes in six parts that you draw out of a hat and piece together like a puzzle. A character sheet that's two-sided and folds like origami to reveal new mechanics.

Does it take away from 'telling the story'? Not if the character sheet is a literal reflection of the character's journey. Not if it works thematically. How about a Hellraiser game that has character sheets that fold into cubes? And when the cube is finished, so's your character.

Really, all of these things are metaphors - and the system can be just as thematic in how it behaves as the rules that make up the system. There's this idea that a system has to sit very still and be very quiet in a narrative game, or else it'll accidentally tip over the story and smash it on the floor.

If your story your game tells is that fragile, it probably deserved it.

...

To put it another way, Star Wars is a story about a farm boy who goes to war. It's the color that makes all the difference. Color for system instead of color for setting.

I guess I could vaguely define 'what matters' as player choice and its consequence in the imagined space, if we want vague definitions. Then I'd say vaguely that knobs and dials exist to empower or disempower the player/character at any given time, and this has a constraining effect on player choice. Speaking vaguely ;)

and also the least interested in touchy-feely hippie freeform lets-all-get-along stuff.

Hehe. Somewhat true. I do prefer the slightly less touchy, slightly less freeform, "Look, if we get along life will go better for the both of us." Freeform is the same thing as the GR, "don't blame the designer," but in this case it's 'cause he didn't actually do anything.