Logan Bonner wrote an “active stats” hack for Leverage. Ryan Macklin wrote a critique of the idea, which cashes out, I think, as, in a system like this, players will find a way to shoehorn in their best stat or GMs will trade that for other trouble, possibly social.
Briefly, the “FAQ hack” replaces the six legacy Cortex attributes – a traditionally minded list like Strength, Agility, Vitality etc. – with a triad of “approaches”: Forceful, Analytical and Quick. Ryan Macklin says any gamer worth her pre-painted mini can describe her actions so she can always use Forceful if that’s her highest Approach.
Logan Bonner responded that he liked his particular set of active stats substantially because they don’t require much thought in play; when playing Leverage, he wants to focus his thoughts elsewhere than on which attribute to use. Dan Maruschak identifies the issue as a version of a deep bias in human cognition: our intellects serve especially to make our emotional drives sound pretty. Will Hindmarch does some further “thinking out loud” about the problem.
I played in a one-shot Mage hack that Dave “The Game” Chalker made out of Leverage, using Logan Bonner’s Forceful/Analytical/Quick stat triad. But mostly I’m interested in the conversation because of . . . a thing I did, that will see the light of day in one form at some point, and which I continue to work at for personal and maybe other use. It uses a slightly different, somewhat bigger set of active stats (or “use anywhere” stats as Ryan Macklin calls them), so I already encountered the problem independently. I haven’t solved it yet, though this set of blog posts is giving me ideas.
Within a Cortex Plus context, there are a few better and worse options. Some of them are hammers, and potentially problematic for that reason.
Most simply, and already, there’s already an output channel for tying the nature of the PC’s approach back to the fiction: the Complication system. (In Cortex Plus, a 1 isn’t a fumble, but it generates a thing, rated in die-size, that hangs around and gets in your way later. See “When Harry and Sally Rolled Rapport Versus Resolve,” downblog.) So if you try to intimidate everybody, rolling Forceful into all your social interactions, then when you generate Complications they’ll take the flavor of complications that arise from bullying your way through life. Contrariwise, if you use Analytical, any Complication should flow from that. In certain in-game situations, you’d rather risk an Analytical complication than a Forceful one; e.g. when it’s really important not to make anyone fighting-mad.
This only gets you so far, partly because if you’re always rolling your high die you’ll generate, ceteris paribus, fewer complications. But it’s something.
Another hammer that’s legit by the Leverage rules is the wiggle room the GM has in choosing dice for her opposition roll. By the rules, the GM chooses one die for the “complexity” of the task and one that “reflects an opposing character or situation.” It’s by the book legit, it seems to me, for a GM to decide that per the fiction, a Forceful approach to this thing right now merits a d10 for one of those while a Quick approach merits a d8, or vice verse. Obviously the GM could abuse this latitude, but she could simply use it. But I could see circumstances in which this might feel wrong even where it was right.
A possible hack is also a hammer: vary the value of a starting Complication based on the die-size of the Approach. Any Complication starts as a d6 (unless Rob Donoghue is GMing; then it starts as a d8). In the hack, a Complication generated when you roll your d6 asset is still a d6, but a Complication generated when you roll your d8 asset is a d8, and your d10 gets you d10 Complications. I’m not sure I like this, nor am I sure it moves the decision needle for the player.
Then there’s scope to hack what it means to lose a fight. Leverage‘s extended conflict-resolution mechanic is called Contested Actions, and the corebook particularly concentrates on physical fights. You lose one, you are Taken Down – rendered helpless, incapacitated, messed up. Applying this one loss condition to Contested Actions that aren’t physical fights is actually a weak spot in the rules, but the bright side of this is it leaves us room to play. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that I have a set of active stats that include Force and Grace. And I certainly want you to be able to conduct a physical fight with Grace, but I want it to mean something. In particular, I want it to be a variation from a default “fightin’ stat” of Force. So, go ahead, you Bravosi swordsman, use Grace instead of Force. But Grace won’t let you inflict a Taken Down result against your opponent when you win. It’ll give you, say, Left in the Dust, or Outmaneuvered. This starts to get genuinely crunchy, because you probably have at least as many loss descriptors as you have Approaches.
Or, you can get into maneuvers: I can use Grace when I fight, but you have recourse to actions that take that option away from me. Again, this gets into crunch, which can be good or bad, but probably takes time. (Logan Bonner points out that Leverage sessions involve a lot of solo PC action, so you really don’t want the mechanical resolution of a given scene to drag.)
I don’t know that any of these options are the answer, let alone my answer. But if I’d finished this five minutes earlier, they would’ve been a Monday post . . .
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The FAQ approach made me light up happily, and I suspect it’s for the natural counterpart of the reasons for Ryan’s dissatisfaction: I just don’t care about or use the mechanics that much. I was a natural audience for scene-level and other larger-than-individual-task-scale resolution systems, once I found ones not tangled up in other stuff that’s less fun for me. Even when I’m using task-level mechanics, I’m likely to wave through a lot with rough-and-ready equivalents to taking 10 and taking 20.
So for me, having a stat that’s the thing the character uses most of the time, paired up with a suite of possible companions, suits me fine. This is her thing; it’s what she does; others do other things, so the team complements each other’s emphases. That all works for me precisely because I just plain don’t love rules, even really good ones, the way people like Ryan and Rob do. It carries the load I wish mechanics to carry.
If I understand correctly, the main thrust of Ryan Macklin’s argument is something like: But wait, once stats become entirely story-driven, what stops the underlying dice game from being monotonous?
I think your solutions here are pretty much either to not care that this is a problem — as Bruce Baugh describes, above — or to fix up the dice game.
One quick possible hack (that I haven’t really thought through deeply) besides story and/or mechanical consequences is to incentivize the use of smaller-die stats. Let’s imagine, for example, that rolling the maximum value on a die lets you gain some benefit — in Cortex Plus, perhaps it’s a Plot Point, an Asset, or a value that you can float in a pool to bring in later. If you need to succeed at something now, you’ll want to use a high-die approach. But if you think that there’s some wiggle room, you might try something riskier, which has a higher chance of generating either a Complication or a benefit. This of course echoes Dan Maruschak’s “do well now” vs. “do well later” dichotomy.
That said, I think the underlying question is really, what the heck are we rolling dice for anyway? If your goal is success, sure, roll the higher die. But frankly I long ago became the kind of person who does things in games because they make things more interesting for everyone.
Just now, while shaving, one of those ideas-you-get-while-shaving-or-showering popped into my head: An RPG called In the Streets, where the three “active stats” are Fighting, Racing, and Dancing.
@Amy: it seems to me that if we want to encourage folks to legitimately make a choice based on the kind of consequences they want, then it might make sense to narrow the different ability levels between the three stats.
Alternately… as (I think) Ryan pointed out, the problem extends to games like In a Wicked Age, where there isn’t a lot of incentive to NOT hammer on With Violence if it’s your highest stat, unless the fallout from using violence really does matter substantially.
The solution he proposes for IaWA is to have someone-not-the-player-who’s-rolling decide what stat to use. Kind of like Moves in AW.
What do folks think – would adding that last bit (GM or whoever is in charge of deciding what stat to roll) help?
@Zac: I may be misreading him, but I think my new best friend Ryan Macklin argues somewhere in the massive cross-blog exchange against the GM saying “No you can’t use that.” IMHO, it’s not less legitimate than saying, “No you can’t roll Hitter to ‘bang together’ your daughter’s school project that’s due tomorrow” to say, “No you can’t roll Forceful” to do the same thing. But I do agree that it’s best if the players are (mostly?) freely choosing their stats.
In re IAWA, I know people who had real trouble from the player or GM side decidhing which pair should be rolled. That said, the way the Owe List works in IAWA gives you an incentive to make the sub-optimal choice at least sometime. IAWA also puts the final decision on what dice get rolled in the GM’s hands; or if not IAWA, the “concordance” does (Vincent’s famous Forge thread on “Bad Habits” for that game).
@Avram: I think you just won the next 24-hour RPG competition!
@Amy: That’s an interesting quick hack! (Get a bennie if you roll the max.) And of course, “Decide it’s not a problem” is an option too.
@Bruce: Your reaction is close to what Will Hindmarch says somewhere in his comment thread. Leverage specifically is a team game, and as such, “I want to roll my highest dice where I can” cashes out as this tells us which member of the team should act now. Now, I also like it when PCs do some “fish out of water” activity, for the comedic or dramatic value depending on game tone.
On the other side of that, two things: 1) in re Leverage specifically, I’m not sure how much less “stat pleading” happens with the default attributes. Your Hitter probably has a d10 in Strength and uses that whenever he can. The Thief has a d10 in Agility and will mostly roll that*. 2) For some values and styles, “stat pleading” is a positive contribution to the game, right? IOW, if you are describing vividly how your approach to this fight is Analytical and we’re all carried along by the force of your narration, then that narration has made the game more colorful and stylish, and that may be exactly what we want from you.
* Mechanically, the Leverage system best serves Thieves in re Attribute variety. I can structure a Timed Action for a Thief PC that has him hitting 3 or 4 different Attributes in succession pretty easily; in fact, I’ll feel lame if I don’t. It’s a lot harder to do that for a Mastermind or a Hacker.
@Jim: I have to admit that as a technical person, Timed Actions for Hackers seem easy for me to improvise.
It may help to consider the Hacker to be the Brain Thief.
(Masterminds are of course Brain Hitters.)
You mean Timed Actions for Hackers that don’t, mechanically, come down to several Intelligence + Hacker rolls in a row? Changing up Attributes from beat to beat? Let me state for the record that it’s totally on topic to post examples in this thread! Cause I’d love to see them.
So the thing to do here is to construct a technical labyrinth analogous to one you would create for a Thief. Thieves, for example, have readily apparent security, since it’s physical — big turn-y wheels on doors, scary locks, and so on; they know by your description what they have to do. Since Hackers are way more abstract, you need to give them a “Hacker view” and provide them with the analysis their character would do.
The other thing here is that to meet genre expectations, you need to remove extensive prep time. The USB Switchblade method (i.e., insert USB key, automatically get data, leave quickly) is pretty typical in TV shows and movies nowadays, so to suspend disbelief you’ll need to make sure they don’t have the resources to do this.
Here’s what I’d do with each stat, generally:
Agility + Hacker: Execute something at a very precise time. Coordinate two simultaneous effects. Do delicate hardware work.
Alertness + Hacker: Given a huge amount of data, figure out what data is relevant. Detect outside interference or unanticipated security.
Strength + Hacker: Continue hacking even when physically constrained. (This could also be fast brute-forcing of passwords, but I feel like this might be a bit of a stretch.)
Vitality + Hacker: Continue hacking even when mentally exhausted. Do a repetitive task.
Willpower + Hacker: Overcome software created by another Hacker. Overcome current ongoing counteractions by another Hacker.
So let’s imagine two possible Timed Actions! Let’s make one more computer-y, and the other one more hardware-y.
Timed Action: Get the Data and Go
1. Break through the firewall. (Intelligence + Hacker)
2. Figure out quickly which of the five hundred database servers houses the stuff you need. (Alertness + Hacker)
3. Run a timing exploit that lets you clone an online user’s security token. (Agility + Hacker)
4. Delete surveillance software and log files. (Willpower + Hacker)
And another:
Timed Action: Bring Archaic Security Elevators to the Ground Floor
1. Determine where to wire in a control bypass switch. (Intelligence + Hacker)
2. Actually wire in the control bypass switch. (Agility + Hacker)
3. Tap a button at a very precise frequency to simulate a rotary dial. (Vitality + Hacker)
N. Execute the right commands while security is trying to haul you away. (Strength + Hacker)
Not that I know anything about how elevators work!
This. Is. Awesome.
Thanks!
[...] the comments of Jim’s post about active stats, I offered up some advice about how to challenge Hackers in Leverage in a way that’s not just [...]