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February 25, 2005
Feng Shui Noodling
I'm kicking around ways to adapt Feng Shui to a moralistic game set in the 1950s and centered around pro wrestling. I like the simplicity of Feng Shui and I think the action emphasis lends itself well to pro wrestling. However, I wanted to layer in a bit of personality mechanics without being overly hamhanded and without taking control of the PC away from the player.
Brief summary of Feng Shui mechanics: roll two six siders. One is the negative die and one is the positive die. Subtract the negative die from the positive die, and add the result to your skill. Compare the result to a target number. A fortune die is an extra positive die which gets added to the total.
So: I drop Fortune as an attribute. I add three tracks similar to Pendragon personality mechanics; the ends of each track are opposites. I'm currently thinking Control/Freedom, Peace/Violence, and Lies/Truth. Each track is six boxes long, which divides nicely into three boxes for each end. The default state is balance: no boxes checked off in either direction for any track. At character generation, for each track, you can check off as many boxes as you like in either (but not both) directions. So you could wind up with, say, one notch in Violence and two notches in Truth.
During a session, you can activate a notch by taking a penalty die during any roll in which the opposite of that notch would come into play. (Yes, I'm flailing for words to explain this.) Let's say you have those two notches in Truth; you could activate one of them by taking a penalty die while trying to lie to someone. A penalty die is just like a fortune die, but it gets subtracted from the total.
You can spend one activated notch in a track to get a fortune die on a roll -- again, if whatever you're doing matches the notch. You couldn't spend a Truth notch to get a fortune die while lying to a witness, for example.
The goal here is to provide an opportunity for a player to use his or her PC's personality to provide a mechanical advantage without sacrificing the player's control over the PC's personality. Nobody's ever forced to activate or use notches; it's up to the player whether or not the violent/truthful/whatever side comes out.
Since I'm not thinking about this in terms of a lengthy campaign, I haven't developed rules for personality shifts. Thoughts on that are certainly welcome, though, as are general comments.
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Comments
This sounds a lot like something I used in my 7th Sea game: deliberately take a tumble so that later you can get a boost. It worked pretty well in my game.
Posted by: Mike Gentry at Feb 25, 2005 5:10:32 PM
Hmm, this sounds good. Feng Shui has a lot of buffer before you go down, which maps nicely to wrestling, and the soft but present death spiral also maps well. Open-ended rolls are helpful, too.
I've always loved Pendragon's personality mechanics.
I'm a little hazy on trying to activate a personality trait you're strong in by playing its opposite, though. Is that because it needs contrast? You can't prove that you're truthful without first ineptly lying? In that case, if you actually succeed at lying while you have truthful notches, you should probably start getting chances to degrade your truthful notches and ultimately drift toward getting lie notches. Maybe you automatically lose a truthful notch on success unless you voluntarily give up the success. If you fail or give up the success, you can then activate the truthful notch? That might be a little overcomplicated, but if someone honest tries to lie, then he should definitely be risking his honesty.
Posted by: Gretchen at Feb 25, 2005 6:03:51 PM
What reason is there for taking fewer than three notches in anything? Since using them is optional, the only difference between one and three notches in, say, Violence, is that the guy with one can only use it once, while the guy with three can use it once or twice or thrice.
How about you get to chose, for each set of paired opposites, a string of three consecutive notches? So you could take 1 Violence and 2 Peace, or 0 Violence and 3 Peace.
Posted by: Avram at Feb 26, 2005 3:59:26 AM
Avram: you're right, it's a wholly gamable system. I don't know if that's a problem for internal use (i.e., in my gaming group). It's definitely a problem if I were recommending it to the world. Hm.
Gretchen: clever. I suspect that in practice most people will activate notches by finding places to roll that don't really matter -- which is cool by me -- so you'd probably see people just failing rolls every time. Maybe success doesn't activate the notch and you don't have the option to fail by choice?
Posted by: Bryant at Feb 26, 2005 8:02:53 AM
This is cool, and I like the three axes a lot.
But I'm not crazy about gaining future bonuses by taking penalties on what could be staged and unimportant actions. Like Gretchen says: can I gain Truth notches by running around making inept but inconsequential attempts to lie?
Hmm. What if the notches were gained like notches on Unknown Armies madness meters, only by significant events and actions. So you gain a notch in Violent when you commit violent acts. But unlike UA the notches carry bonuses. Or bonuses and penalties both depending on context.
OR, given our ideas for the game, what if there was some kind of inverse relationship between your Personality Mechanics in the ring and outside the ring? So to earn Honor points or Truth points or Peace points for use outside the ring, you have to be Dishonorable or Untruthful or Violent in the ring. And vice versa. Yeah. I'm not sure quite what the in-game justification for this would be, but it fits with the face/heel thing that initially got us excited about the setting.
Posted by: Rob at Feb 26, 2005 11:46:23 PM
I see Rob's point about "gaining future bonusses by taking penalties on what could be staged and unimportant actions". Giving the players the power to make the decision about when something is important and when it's trivial does, indeed, give them a lot of power. I see the argument for giving the GM oversight. And now I would like to completely disagree with it.
I hate when a decision that important is left up to subjective GM fiat. It disempowers me as a player, and puts me in the position of supplicating the GM to pay off for the good, self-destructive roleplaying that I've just established.
I played a FATE variant where you could get tokens by rolling on your negative traits... but the GM would never let me roll on them. It was all "Wow, that was reckless and stupid... it really got you in trouble! Cool roleplaying! Now after the mission briefing Jesse gets a call..." Meanwhile I'm sitting there with a fist full of dice, looking at the "Not too smart" and "Reckless" traits on my character and getting steamed that I wasn't going to get a damned thing out of putting my character into a pickle, just because the GM didn't feel like letting me roll dice for deliberate (by the player) failure.
I think Task Resolution like Feng Shui is a very bad mix for this sort of dynamic. Because most tasks (lying to someone, for instance) have no measurable in-game consequences (i.e. you don't lose hit points or anything), their value is entirely subjective. How much does it matter that you got caught in a lie? Everyone will have different opinions about that. When the GM thinks it only matters a little (too little for resources) and the player thinks it matters a lot, you have a recipe for social disaster.
The way I figure it, you can either create an objective measure of when it's applicable ("If the choice causes you to take a ten point wound then you get a future bonus") or you can balance it so that nobody will complain when the players themselves decide what is important enough to take a bonus ("You get a trait activated, and the GM gets a 'Bad Consequence' chip to be used against your character, either immediately or later. All wounds must be paid for in Bad Consequence chips.") If you do neither of these things then you're just creating another way for the GM to subjectively reward a certain style of roleplaying.
Posted by: TonyLB at Feb 27, 2005 7:09:33 AM
The great thing about putting mechanics up for discussion is the way the responses teach you about what you enjoy and don't enjoy.
I think Task Resolution like Feng Shui is a very bad mix for this sort of dynamic. Because most tasks (lying to someone, for instance) have no measurable in-game consequences (i.e. you don't lose hit points or anything), their value is entirely subjective.
My immediate reaction to this is "Whoa. But the value of Task Resolution is the manner in which it helps you embody your character. Having an increased chance of failing is a benefit in and of itself, because it de facto increases your ability to depict that character's failings through his or her actions."
I think this is probably not a universal desire, however. :)
What if the notches were gained like notches on Unknown Armies madness meters, only by significant events and actions. So you gain a notch in Violent when you commit violent acts. But unlike UA the notches carry bonuses. Or bonuses and penalties both depending on context.
This I like. In the ring -- that requires spending a lot of time in-ring. But that's OK as long as it's clearly part of the game... say you strip it down a lot, and go back to generic Fortune points. But you earn Fortune points by being a slime in-ring. (Everyone's violent in the ring, after all.)
Posted by: Bryant at Feb 27, 2005 2:40:14 PM
Bryant: Okay... so Task Resolution makes it easy and cost-free to fail at something, right?
Is this relevant to the nature of your objection (above) about getting future bonusses from what could be "staged or unimportant actions"? Perhaps the objection is that people are getting an objective reward that is unbalanced by any objective cost?
If so then I think we're agreeing. But I could certainly be mistaken about that.
Posted by: TonyLB at Feb 28, 2005 8:33:00 AM
Oh, I don't mind getting future bonuses from staged actions. For me, the value of any given action in a roleplaying game lies in the way it illuminates your character's personality. An action which is utterly meaningless to the narrative will be important to me if it says something about my character.
I think we are agreeing, however. Just we're looking for somewhat different things out of the experience.
Posted by: Bryant at Feb 28, 2005 12:37:08 PM
Whoops... I keep looking at the top of the message for who wrote it. So I misattributed. Sorry!
Why do you think that we're looking for somethign different, though? I'm still not seeing your point.
Posted by: TonyLB at Feb 28, 2005 12:50:31 PM
Well, you did say that most tasks have no measurable in-game consequences. I took that as an indication that the consequences I see in every task roll aren't as significant to you. I could be wrong, though.
Posted by: Bryant at Mar 1, 2005 11:55:39 AM
Ah... "measurable" in-game consequences. Important word there.
Specifically: Nobody can really debate what 1000XP is worth. People can (and do) debate what the favor of the local baron is worth.
Say you have a system whereby you can sacrifice 1000XP for a reroll at some future date. People can have different opinions on whether it's worth it, but they're comparing apples to apples.
Now say you have a system whereby you can offend the local baron in exchange for a reroll at some future date. The discussion gets more complicated because people can have wildly divergent beliefs about the value of offending the baron. You may think it's a great deal, but in a way that benefits the game ("I get drama AND a reroll? Rocking!") I may think it's a bad deal, in a way that benefits the game ("That's going to cause them so much more trouble than on reroll will get them out of"). Someone else may think it's an unfairly low price, in a way that harms the game ("It's not like he's losing any combat capability... that's just cheesy!")
And there's really no good way to talk about it, because it's so hard to establish any objective measure. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Make sense?
Posted by: TonyLB at Mar 1, 2005 6:08:21 PM
Ahhh, OK. Yes, that makes total sense.
But I wasn't trying to determine the value of offending the baron. Like you say, maybe it's valuable, maybe it's not. I don't want to open that can of worms. I was trying to say that there's there's value to the ability to increase the chances of failure at a player-determined roll.
In fact, I would go so far as to generalize that a little:
There is value in the ability to influence the outcome of any task resolution in either direction.
Posted by: Bryant at Mar 1, 2005 7:10:48 PM
Specifically: Nobody can really debate what 1000XP is worth. People can (and do) debate what the favor of the local baron is worth.
I can, and do, argue about both. The value of both is equally subjective, and varies according to all the usual personal preference stuff. "1000 XP" and "The baron hates me" are both just pencil marks on a page, equally meaningless in any extrinsic sense.
I think the thing that you're trying to get at is that what you call "Task Resolution" has an outcome that is entirely at the discretion of the GM. This discretion means that both You failed on your Gather Information check? Too bad -- all you can learn is that the zombies were dressed in red and black, the colors of a local gang. and You made the Gather Information check? Good news -- you manage to dig up that the zombies were dressed in red and black, the colors of a local gang are permitted by most sets of rules.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Mar 1, 2005 7:11:40 PM
Well, yeah, I suppose 1000XP is technically subjective.
But if you're working within the framework of established rules that say what 1000XP represents... well, how do you debate its effect on the game?
Posted by: TonyLB at Mar 3, 2005 10:43:35 AM
It's not a technical point. My judgement, as a player, of whether the experience point rules are doing their job is just as subjective as my judgement as to whether the setting is doing its job.
So here's an example. Me and my friends are playing D&D, and one day, the PCs meet a baron and he talks down to us -- and one of the PCs gets mad and insults him right back.
So I say to his player, "Dude, he's a baron with an army and stuff -- insulting him is obviously suicidal. Is that what your PC would really do?"
And he tells me, "My PC is an 13th level fighter. He could kill the baron and his whole army, so he's the one who should be scared."
And I say, "That's a good point, ruleswise. But the setting we've been using isn't really consistent with that, isn't it? I mean, two months ago game time all our PCs were peasants covered in dung."
He thinks, and says, "That's true. I guess we need to change something, and I see two options. We either change the rules, so that we're all 5th level or something, and getting even 1000 XP is really hard so we never hit the point where we can kill the whole army, or we change the setting, so that the PCs are like Nameless from Hero and the baron is like Shih Huang Di."
What we're debating is precisely the effect of experience on the game. (And what we're not debating is the value of consistency -- some people would be like, "Shut up you two, and just kill the bloody orc, okay?")
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Mar 3, 2005 1:46:23 PM
So what you're saying is that it's subjective because you aren't working within the framework of the rules. The rules are changing, conceivably with every task resolution.
I couldn't and wouldn't play that way, but I think I see what you're saying.
Posted by: TonyLB at Mar 3, 2005 11:11:39 PM
I wouldn't want the rules (or the setting!) to change arbitrarily with each roll, either -- it would be too hard to keep it all straight.
But rules, setting, and all that stuff are tools that we, the players, are deploying to achieve some particular effect, and ultimately it's us that have to decide whether they are doing what we want them to, and to change them how to get what we want.
Usually, when I run a homebrew, I use the following protocol for hacking rules and setting stuff: I run the session, and then at the end of it, make a list of what worked and what didn't. Then, I make one (and only one) change to how the game is run to get rid of something that didn't work. If that change is successful in the next session, then I find something else wrong and repeat. If the change didn't work, I undo it and try something else. The reason for making only a single change at a time is to ensure we can tell whether that particular change helped or not.
Within eight to ten sessions you can end up with a ruleset that works beautifully for your group.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Mar 4, 2005 10:33:18 AM
