Time to Move

Short version: I'm shutting down this blog and moving over to walkingmind.evilhat.com .  I'll leave the site up, but comments will be disabled, and I'll be blogging over there.

Longer Version: Spam comments have become more and more of an issue on this site, to the point where I've gotten more and more hesitant to even log on because I know that there will be a whole lot of spam comments waiting for me to sort out.  That kind of saps the joy out of actually *writing* posts, and as a result I've ended up in other forums (such as g+) for things that would be better served on this blog.

I held out as long as I could, figuring Google would eventually get around to improving their filtering, but that simply hasn't happened, and I don't have a lot of faith that it will.  So I took Fred's standing offer to migrate over to a wordpress install on evilhat.com, and that's where I'll be writing now.  The posts and comments fromt his blog have already been ported over, so the site is fully functional and ready for some actual writing.

To anyone who this move inconveniences, I apologize, and I completely understand your frustration.  I am very lucky to have insightful readers and commenters, and much of my hesitation to move has been out of a desire to not create any such disruption, but the situation forced my hand.  If this means you need to drop the blog, I cannot argue.

In any case, I'll be locking down this blog over the next few days as Walking Mind gets turned up.

Once again, thank you all.


Since this will be the last post here, I will also leave the list of other places to find me online:

Twitter: @rdonoghue
Google Plus:  Rob Donoghue

A Big "Duh"

Being that sort of nerd, I have always tried to find a way that someone who has achieved philosophical mastery of a skill (the iconic example being Musashi and swordsmanship) to be able to reflect how that mastery affects the other things they do.  This is one of those ideas that's either really obvious or makes no sense, depending on how you think about it.

I've spent an unreasonable amount of thought on this, but the other night realized I've made my life too complicated. It's as simpel as this: Make the skill an aspect.  Invocations kick in when you can spin the tale of how the mastery transcends.

Cannot believe it took me this long to see something this obvious. Overthinking is a real threat.

Who Earned The Win?

So, Avengers has been out long enough that I am comfortable spoiling minor bits of it. That said, I recognize that a little warning is in order, so here it is - I’m about to discuss a minor plot twist from The Avengers.

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Ready?

Ok, Loki has a magic stick. If he touches your heart with it, you serve him loyally. Late in the game, Loki and Tony Stark have a fantastic scene which culminates in Loki attempting to use the stick on Stark. This is a good plan on Loki’s part, but it fails because Stark has the arc reactor gizmo over his heart. This isn’t really explained within The Avengers, but anyone who’s seen Iron Man knows this.
In many senses of narrative, this is a HUGE cheat. If this had worked, Loki’s plan would have almost certainly succeeded, and it was dumb luck that it didn’t work.

Success through dumb luck makes for pretty lame narrative, and this bit bugged me at first, but I realized something - it wasn’t about the narrative. That was a moment of satisfaction for the audience. From the very start of that scene, many nerds were already wondering about the interaction of stick and reactor, and even if you weren’t, when it failed, it was a moment that let you, as a member of the audience, get it, and that’s a pretty powerful reward.

This is on my mind because in RPGs, players have elements of both protagonist and audience, but it’s very easy to focus purely on their role as protagonist when thinking about narrative and fiction. Doing so can be very rewarding, but it’s easy to forget that you may get more punch from crossing the fourth wall (so to speak) and violating the rules of narrative in order to deliver a reward directly to your players. Help them feel smart or awesome.

And yes, there are ways to do this within the narrative, but they strain things. Avengers suggests to me that it might sometimes be worth cutting out the middleman and jumping right to your players.

Limited Aspect Sets

Random thought while on the treadmill today that entails a drastic change in how aspects work in Fate, but which reflects a slightly different emphasis. Breaks down as follows:

1. There are only scene aspects. Yes, you have aspects on your character sheet, and those matter (more on that in a second) but you can’t use them the same way. Basically, an aspect must be on the scene to be useful.
2. There is a limit to how many aspects can be on a scene, possibly as low as three[1]. If the scene is full up, then you must remove an aspect to open it up. Removing an aspect is mechanically similar to adding one (and with s sufficient success, you can replace it).[2]
3. You can make a personal aspect into a scene aspect (effectively copying it onto the scene), and if you do, take a +2 bonus to place it AND the difficulty of removing it is +2. However, there are three limits on this. First, each “side” of a conflict can only have one personal aspect in play, and second, this speaks directly to the stakes of the conflict. By bringing in a personal aspect, you are making a statement regarding what the fight is about to you. Third, the bonus applies only the first time you bring an aspect into play.
4. The fight may start with anywhere between 0 and 3 aspects in place. For a duel, this will often be one aspect from each combatant, plus one for the environment or situation.
5. Boosts still work normally, but need to be used by the next time you act, or they go away. No boost stockpiling.

This totally needs testing, but the potential I see in it is that it could drive more back and forth in the fiction centered around changing the factors in play to things that the player can take better advantage of. If the other guy has brought his “strong” aspect to play, then the fact that you can potentially take it off the table (rather than just let him hit it for as long as he has FP) totally intrigues me.

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1. This is even more drastic than it seems, and it reflects a certain sort of cinematic sensibility that only so many factors are in play at any given time, but those factors really, really matter.  ↩

2. This works particularly well with Marvel Heroic style initiative, since it provides a real setup for teamwork, with one player creating an opening for the next.  ↩

Task Reset Without Bankruptcy

I try to maintain a decent level of productivity discipline. I use Getting Things Done as a baseline of operations, but like most every GTD user, I have shamelessly bastardized it to my specific needs, pulling in other ideas from sources ranging from agile to energy mapping to child management to god knows what.

It largely works well. It’s still a bit weak on the self-directed writing projects, where I can’t break it down into word count goals the same way I can with contracted work, but other than that, it generally keeps me moving, with a few caveats.

I tend to suffer from an accumulation of cruft. Tasks that I really intend to do but never get around to. Emails I need to keep track of. Just a backlog of stuff that slows down the system and makes me feel less on top of things[1].

In the past, I’ve dealt with the the cruft through bankruptcy. I archive all my mail, delete all my outstanding tasks, and restart with a fresh capture of what I need to do. This works ok, but it has obvious risks - it’s very easy to drop something on the floor if you haven’t been diligent, and the very nature of the problem makes diligence difficult.

This week I found myself in a similar situation, but I have approached it differently with two tricks.

The first is that I finally broke down and tried the mailbox app. This has been a big help for me, but it’s not necessarily going to be a similar help to everyone. It’s an ok email client for gmail, lacking in a number of features (robust tag support, search and the ability to mark as spam are the big ones) and if it was judged solely by that it would be a real dud. However, while it’s only so good at handling email, it excels at managing email. It uses really clever gestures, but just saying that helps no one, so let me describe it.

When mail arrives, swipe right to archive it, swipe all the way right to delete it. Good start, yes, but the killer app happens when you sweep left - a choice of times pops up (like, later today, this evening, tomorrow morning and so on). You tap one, and the mail message vanishes until the time you selected.

So, if you’re like me, and your email box is full of implicit to dos, you can get them off your immediate radar to come back when convenient. Yes, this totally lets you keep kicking things forward (which I do), but it clears your mind while you do it. I love this function, and it’s pretty much the sole reason I’m excited to use this app. I really hope that other apps (including maybe to do apps) start adopting this technique.[2]

So, that cleaned out my inbox in short order, but that left my to do list, which had gotten pretty sprawly. So I took a tip from a Marc Andreessen post[3] where he suggested maintaining only 3 to do lists, one of things you need to do now (DO), one of things you need to do at some point (REVIEW) and one of things that can wait (HOLD). This simplicity was pretty much exactly what I needed, and I ran through my tasks, dumped them in the right buckets, and carried on quite successfully.

Curiously, the only speed bump was when I chose software. This method seemed simple enough that I figured I’d just use OSX Reminders, since it has iCloud sync to my iDevices. Sadly, iCloud proved frustrating and unreliable, so I tried other things. Lots of good todo apps out there (and I own many of them) but surpisingly few of them worked well for this particular system. I needed syncing and the ability to easily move items from one list to another, and finding that combination was surprisingly elusive. The best match actually looked to be the things app (which I had on my phone), but if I wanted sync, it would have been pretty expensive to get it on desktop and iPad. Given that I had already shelled out for the full Omnifocus suite, I couldn’t really justify that.

Thankfully, I found a solution using Omnifocus (thouse three lists are now my working contexts) and I’ve since been very happy with it. I dunno how long it wil be before complexity creeps back in, but in the short term, this has allowed me to simplify my system without the kind of interruption that bankruptcy tends to entail. That’s a big win. It’s also useful to boil the system down to the smallest possible set from time to time, so that I can be thoughtful about what I add back in.

In any case, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, and your system is offering you no relief, you might want to consider a similar paring down to essenetials. It might be just the thing to break th elogjam without sacrificing your work.

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1. And yes, I know, if I were a better disciplined GTD’er, the weekly review would address a lot of these things, but I’m not. I’m working on it, but I wouldn’t hold your breath  ↩

2. If you live out of email, the Mailbox is not going to be an all in one solution for you. But it might be an effective doorman for when you’re managing your mail on the road.  ↩

3. No link because the service it’s hosted on disapears in about a day.  ↩

Slow Menaces

(I turned on G+ linking, so we'll see how that works with this post)

Dr. Who is has a Cybermen story in the pipe, and I guess maybe Neil Gaiman is behind it or something. I honestly have no idea. It's not that I dislike Dr. Who, but I tend to be about  a year behind whatever current is. Just one of those things.

That said, I saw an image for the cybermen, and it's very nice and polished, with a few Iron Man notes, and it got me thinking about fast cybermen (in the same spirit as fast zombies).  For the unfamiliar, cybermen are a villain cut from the very Dr. Who cloth of "Very terrifying, unless you do something radical, like run away".

It's easy to joke about this (insert a Dalek/stairs reference here) but it gets a little interesting when you think about what drives it.  Basically, this is something that allows for protagonists to not be combat monsters - having enemies who can't practically be fought but can be escaped opens up a lot of leeway for character backgrounds. For a less violent show like Dr. Who, that's very important. Similarly, when a zombie story is really about a mismatched collection of normal folks, it's kind of silly to make them all ex military.  And in both cases, it promotes problem solving outside of combat.

Translated over to an RPG, this is pretty easy to model with high defense, low attack enemies. Build them in such a way that the best a fight can do is break even, and you disincentivize fighting.   Note, that this is very different from making high defense/High offense enemies - in that case, fighting is not only a bad plan, but it's also pretty lethal.  The trick with slow enemies is not that they'll kill you in a round, but rather that if you continue to engage them, it will sooner or later go against you.

Now, is this something that's actually desirable in a game?  Sure, at least sometimes.  Slow menaces are really just disguised pacing and tension engines.  Because they are relentless but escapable, they can be brought to bear any time things slow down without the risk of ending play.  They drive hard choices through their presence, because "not running away" is always a possible downside.[1]  If you think of the menace as a meter that slowly fills, it's easy to see the pacing laid bare.

That is, suppose the zombies have a 3 box meter.  When they show up, check the first box.  You can fight them, and if successful, the box doesn't fill any further, but if you fail (or if you are trying to do something else at the same time), the second box fills. Run the cycle again, and if box #3 is filled, then someone is grabbed and taken down, simple as that.[2]

Now, the advantage of abstracting that is that it suddenly becomes a great way to handle any threat that can be escaped, but not vanquished.  It would, for example, be a great model for being on the receiving end of a manhunt, but it can be more abstract than that too, especially if you substitute in something other than running away as the deferral mechanism. For example, if you eat, rather than run, then it's a model for starvation.

In a round about way, I think this may be coming back towards Skill Challenges and the way very old Fate handled long challenges.  Which mostly suggests I may need to dust off some of that thinking.



1 - Hell, if you ant to do a Talislanta/Apocalypse World hack, it's easy to add "the menace arrives" as an extra option to all success-with-consequences outcomes. 

2 - Yes, technically, that's an insta-kill, but note that that it can be *deferred* by fighting, so the badass can protect the technician's back while he plants the bomb or whatnot.  It changes the role of the fighting dude, but not necessarily in a bad way.

An Idea I Don't Get

There's an idea that I see from time to time in setting design which I don't entirely get the appeal of, and that is the idea of the lethal setting.  That is, there is some element of the setting which will kill or incapacitate characters unless they always do something arbitrarily dictated by the setting.

I'm not talking about merely dangerous settings, like the classic Dark Sun.  I completely understand the appeal of that (dangerous environments are an escalation on existing tensions).   Similarly, I don't mean frequent threats, like radiation in Gamma World. Those have their place, and it's obvious to me.

Rather, I'm thinking about ambient, ever-present dooms, like in the Red Steel setting, or some of the later (or maybe middle) Thoma Covenant books.  The details don't matter a lot, as the underlying idea is the same.  Something inescapable (like sunset or the air) will DO SOMETHING HORRIBLE to you unless you [MACGUFFIN].

The exact details of the macguffin don't really matter.  It might be behavioral (like, you must stay out of the light, or must stand on rocks when the sun rises) or a resource (you must carry a piece of magic rock with you), but whatever the deal, if you break the taboo, the price is basically death.  And, importantly, the macguffin is the only option - there is no way for a character to be clever or tough enough to get around this threat.

I can sort of faintly see why a setting designer might structure things this way.  It provides a constant threat, if a bad one[1] and it nominally introduces another thing to track and threaten (like fuel in a spaceship game), so you can introduce race the clock elements into play by occasionally taking away the macguffin and forcing players to run for it.  

That's all well and good, but what I'm missing is the fun.

I don't ask this in a snarky way - this idea is not a rare one by any stretch, so there's something that that clearly resonates with some people, and I'm curious to know what it is.  Any thoughts?





1 - It's a bad threat the same way the threat of an instakill is bad. Threatening player fun is a poor way to enforce fiction. Plus, any constant threat gets dull with repetition, and such threats are predicated on their predictability.

Crutch Questions

There are a category of questions in RPGS which are both tremendously potent and tremendously annoying to me. I refer to them as "crutch" questions because they are incredibly useful if you haven't considered them before, but are potentially banal and technical if you already have.

 

A great example might be something about a character's essential nature, such as "What would you kill for?". If you don't have a solid purchase on the character, then that can be a really interesting question to chew on to help you understand your character.

 

However, once you know the character, the question changes a bit. It's still interesting, but because you know the character well enough that the answers come easily, but the answer will also probably be more nuanced than it would have been previously. The better you know your character, the more aware you are of the things that make them human, the things that make it very hard for a real question to have a single, simple answer.[1]

 

And that's where the problem comes in - when the question is used initially then they idea is to get a clear answer which you can draw conclusions from. When creating from nothing, it's useful, but once you're past it, it's reductive.

 

This would not be too big deal, except that newer games often hang mechanics off these questions and ideas. And they're right to do so - starting from a blank piece of paper, it's a fast way to get you to something meaningful and toothy, and though it may offer no route any deeper, that's still not a bad bar to hit.

 

Which is why this is far from a clear cut issue. Crutch questions are absolutely a useful tool in the right situation, and if your in the position where they're unwelcome, then you're probably already doing ok, so it's hardly a world-ender of a problem.

 

It's something I have to admit bothers me disproportionately, largely because that space where they're impediments is my *personal* sweet spot, so I can end up chafing in the face of them.

 

Anyway, I made a passing comment about this on Twitter, and realized it really wouldn't make any sense without a longer explanation,

 

 

1 - Unless you really prefer that kind of clarity in a character.

 

Posted with Blogsy

The Choice Triangle

There is a business idea called, among other names, the project management triangle.  Basically, any project has three priorities - speed, quality and cost - and these are the points on the triangle. Ideally you want to quickly deploy high quality products at minimal cost, but in reality, there are usually tradeoffs.  If you want more of one, you usually have to sacrifice one of the others (and sometimes both).  Most anyone in business had encountered some form of this idea. For me, it was most succinctly summed up by David Gerrold in one of his Solomon Short quotes: Good, quick, cheap.  Pick two.

A similar triangle presents itself when it comes time to present players with a choice.  There is a great fondness in game design these days for "hard choices".  This is one of those ideas that people instinctively understand, to a point.  The problem is that a lot of things can  make a choice hard, but hitting any one of them too hard produces something that's out of skew.

The three points on our choice triangle are meaning, clarity and urgency.  As with the project management triangle, we are usually forced by necessity to only hit two of these points, but by understanding these tradeoffs, we can avoid hitting only one of them to our own detriment.

Sidebar: Player Vs Character - One important thing about these three points is that they matter both in and out of fiction, though sometimes in slightly different ways. Thus, when I speak about the player and the character, I'm not using them interchangeably here.  

Meaning is the first thing that people think about when they consider hard choices, as it is both obvious and ephemeral.  That is, the idea that a choice carries a lot of weight is one we gravitate to, but it can take many many forms.  The weight may be emotional or practical, and it most often demands an apples vs oranges kind of comparison. There's a purity to Sophie's choice (You must sacrifice one child, which will it be?) that we dig, but more often these choices are between two different values. "What would you do for a million dollars?" is a choice between values and need.  "Do you save the king or your lover?" is a choice between love and duty.  Examples abound.

The main downside with meaning is that it's rich fare - it is easy to become overwhelmed or desensitized to it when it comes up too often.  A game where every choice is meaningful is going to get melodramatic very quickly.  Of course, if you remove meaning entirely, then choices get hollow.


Ideally, meaning applies equally well to the players as to the character, but that's not always guaranteed.  If a choice is meaningful to the player but not the character then you're probably fine, but if it's meaningful to the character but not the player then the disconnect can be rough.  At best, the player goes along with it, using sympathy or habit to substitute for genuine investment.[1] At worse, it feels like a hollow exercise.  


Clarity means having an understanding and the consequences and outcomes of each possible choice.  It can come from knowledge of setting and fiction, but it will often come from mechanics, which give clarity to potentially muddy situations.  Clarity is especially important in tactical situations, so much so that it's absence has its own terminology (the "fog of war") but that doesn't mean it's not important elsewhere. While clarity is important to the specific choice, it's also important to a player's perspective on the choice - clarity grants confidence.

All the strengths of clarity can become weaknesses with excess, reducing choices to mechanical exercises.   If you've ever read a choose your own adventure with your thumb saving the tough choices, then you'll understand this - you have sacrificed other elements of the choice (excitement, fear and risk - the angels of uncertainty) in favor of a certain understanding.  Implicit in this is one of the real tricks of clarity - there is an idea that if you grasp all the variables, then the best choice will make itself clear.   And if that's true, then choice becomes an exercise in research, which is great in some situations, but not so much for play.  But without clarity, choices become muddled, players grow suspicious and play grinds.

Clarity is most important to the player - it's not really possible for something to be clear to a player and not to a character, unless the GM has failed in her duties to communicate[2].  If something is clear to the player but not the character, this may create some friction, but it's largely a roleplaying opportunity, as it's up to the player to choose how strongly to engage this division.

Urgency depends upon the immediacy of the situation, but can also speak to the immediacy of consequences.  That is, the urgency of a ticking time bomb may be obvious, but if forced to choose between trouble now or trouble later, that is also a matter of urgency.

Urgency is the most dependent upon player engagement.  One strength and weakness of RPGs is that they offer few tools to guarantee pacing - there may be only 3 seconds left on the timer for that bomb, but those three seconds may take an hour to pass, especially if someone is hungry or needs to go to the bathroom.  As such, it's hard to create urgency from scratch.  However, urgency builds on itself, and once you get it started it can be a lot easier to maintain - this is at the heart of most good fight scenes.  Juggling this is a table skill plain and simple, and that makes it very hard to plan for.  Still, without urgency, every choice can become a debate, which is not a prospect I look forward to.

Urgency of consequences are a lot easier to plan for, but they help less. It's just something you need to be aware of - if players are under constant threat anyway, faraway consequences

Sidebar: The Right Choice - Implicit in all of this is the idea that whatever choice the players are being presented with is genuinely open ended.  This is not always the case - there are times when there is (at least according to the GM) a right and wrong choice.  This is not automatically bad, but it does mean that you as the GM need to take some extra steps to make sure you're not being a jerk.  It is very easy fro your idea of the right or obvious choice to differ greatly from player experience, and when you punish players for that disconnect, you're killing everyone's fun on principle.

 Consider that each point on this triangle also reveals a reason why someone might make a "wrong" choice.  Their values might demand that they make a sub-optimal meaningful choice. A lack of clarity may result in a mistake. Urgency may keep someone from making the choice they would if they had time to think about it. These are great things - they make these fictional choices feel human to us, because they're the same reasons we make bad choices in real life.

This is not to say the choices should not have consequences. But there should not be punishments for a choice being wrong.  Wrong decisions are the fuel of play. Treasure them.

Obviously the best solution is to get all three of these together, but that's not always possible (or even desirable), but you can get a lot of juice with simple pairings.

Meaning + Clarity - A choice that is clear and meaningful tends to be one of those big, emotional choices that characters chew on and stress about in fiction.  Because it lacks urgency, it can just hang over a situation, coloring things and providing a powerful backdrop.

Meaning + Urgency - On the other hand, a choice that is urgent and meaningful tends to be very life or death.  Urgency underscores the lack of a clean conversion rate between values, and also prevents compromise, making sure the choice has teeth.  

Clarity + Urgency - Many tactical choices are clear and urgent, since you need to do something to keep that guy from bashing in your face.  Despite the lack of meaning, there are usually consequences to these sort of choices, but they're usually abstract or resource based.  Needing to take action because someone is going to cut your throat is urgent and meaningful, needing to take action because a dagger is about to do 1d4 damage to you is urgent and clear.

Anyway, there's a whole art to offering good, hard choices without being a tool, but hopefully this helps a little.





1 - There are games that depend on this, at least for short term play, and for players who can generate that sympathetic buy in, they can be very satisfying, but that's not a universal state.

2 - Though you need to be wary of that in Gygaxian play - plenty of adventures will kill you with things that would be obvious to your character but which you overlooked as a player.

My Kind of Stunts

I do not take a terribly mechanistic approach to stunts. It’s a taste thing, but by and large I want stunts to be big, sweeping things which say something big and meaningful about the character, not just to serve as a fine gradation between two characters.  With this in mind, I’m going to post up some stunts I’ve written up for another game (an Amber Game)  because they illustrate something important - these stunts were literally created for specific characters to support a specific theme that the player had chose (mechanically called an “Affinity”). 

Technically, this is for a Tempo game, but Tempo and Fate stunts are basically interchangeable, so feel free to think of them as Fate stunts.  That said, there's something important to note about most of these stunts. Let's see if it stands out. 

First, there’s Cassidy, who’s affinity is “Broken Things”

Because Friend's Help

When alone in a scene, Cassidy may spend a Fate point to declare she is getting help from a friend.  That friend has a skill of her choice equal to Cassidy's lore skill, and can help her out in any way reasonable.  The first time a friend is used, they are named, and they accrue one point.  Each subsequent time they are used, they gain another point.  After a friend has accrued enough points to equal Cassidy's scholar bonus (+9) they can no longer be called on, though a new friend may be available with a similar skill. What happens to them is an interesting question

Antici....pation

Cassidy can spend a fate point for a flashback of any time within the past 24 hours, wherein she can be doing anything that she could have done, even if she wouldn't have the knowledge to do it at the time - she is just that prepared.

The Missing Piece

If Cassidy has a substantial piece of something, she can find the rest of it, given time and attention.

Through The Cracks

Cassidy can always find a way out.  Keeping her prisoner is a delay at best.

The Shattering

Cassidy never does more damage than she intends.  She can wield a sledgehammer with the precision of a scalpel.  In addition to more or less guaranteeing that she always has all the tools she needs, it allows her to make impossibly precise called shots without penalty.

Elementary

Cassidy can keep any piece of magic or technology working as long as no one notices.

What is Lovely Cannot Stay

Cassidy spend a fate point to use a broken thing as if it were fully functional provided she has at least a recognizable piece of it.  She may only do this once per thing, and if she does, then she will never be able to fix it (though someone else might). “Thing” in this case is very broadly defined. It applies to objects, certainly, but also to ideas and large scopes.  From the Coliseum, she could give the last order to the Roman Empire, if she saw fit.

State is a State of MInd

If Cassidy spends a fate point and breaks something, she may destroy it utterly, save for piece small enough to carry. So long as there are no witnesses, she may restore the broken thing from its piece. 

Next is Fion, whose affinity is Treachery

The Price of Service

- Fion is a useful ally.  If his offer of service is accepted by someone, he grants them a new aspect (Fion's Service) which they can tap as a normal aspect, but which Fion can also spend fate points through, even when he's not present, representing the long term impacts of his actions.  However, If Fion ever chooses to betray that aspect, he can remove it and more or less declare a consequence.

Ear for Secrets

- In conversation with an NPC, Fion's player can hand the GM a fate point and ask what one thing this person is trying NOT to talk about.  if there's no answer, he gets the fate point back. Otherwise, the GM tells him.

It Takes One to Know One

- Fiona can spot a spy or a snitch with superhuman acuity.  It takes Fion approximately five minutes of conversation with someone to see if they serve a master other than the obvious one. This ability doesn't tell him  who the actual master is, though there may be hints.



Ok, so there they are.  Notice a trend?

These are, by and large, almost entirely system agnostic.  With one or two exceptions, they don't hook into any mechanics in particular (except spending a fate point, which is a pretty portable idea).  This is a result of the kind of thinking that constructs them - I don't think in terms of mechanics, but rather, I think in terms of play.  Specifically, I think about how I would imagine doing this cool thing, then have the stunt reflect that.  If that description doesn't suffice (as in the case of The Price of Service), *that's* when I turn my thoughts to mechanics. 

I also tend skip to the end.  I used to build stunts in trees and stacks with the idea that you could buil dup to cool things, but I've grown tired of that. Instead, I just zoom in on the question fo what a player is REALLY trying to do when they buy three stealth stunts, and try to provide the answer to that.

This approach has some downsides.  It takes exactly zero considerations for balance, but that's not a real problem.  What *is* a problem is that there's so much taste involved in this approach that you risk missing the tone you should be going for.  That is, the success of this model depends on being in tune with what your players like.  This is the reason that it's harder to put this approach in published material and it is to simply implement it at the table. Or, at least that's my usual thought.

I'm less certain of the truth of that these days.  Certainly, such a product would automatically narrow its own audience, but there is a case that ANY mechanical decision can do that too.  And going largely systemless does offer opportunities that other approaches don't have.

So, I'm not sure.  I might be considering sharing more stuff from my table to see if it is more useful to the world at large than I've usually considered.

What's in a Book?

If you have never done so, stop and think about what goes into a good RPG book.  Not the RPG, but the book itself.

There are a lot of challenges a designer faces when it comes time to design the book.  An RPG potentially needs to do 3 things -
1. Teach a game,
2. Provide and engaging read,
3. Serve as a reference

This is the project management triangle of game publishing - at absolutely best you can pick two, but on many days you’ll be lucky to get just one.  If there’s a game that has ever successfully done all 3, I have not seen it.[1]

But it’s not the only choice that needs to get made - completeness is also a spectrum.  To illustrate, look at Evil Hat’s two big games - Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG.  Fate is a fairly lightweight system, but those are *huge* books, because we made the decision to really talk everything through.  They’re iceberg books - the amount that actually comes up in play is much smaller than the body of information presented, but that large body is what supports the tip.

The problem is, this is daunting for many.  The idea that Spirit of the Century is a pick up game seems preposterous if judged purely by page count. So there is an impulse to step away from that level of completeness in order to provide something easier to digest.  Rules that add complexity get trimmed, edge cases get smoothed down, complex sets get standardized, all in favor of striking a balance that serves a different set of priorities.

And this is an important thing - something really critical to understanding Fate and the role of Fate Core - these are not the *right* choices, they are the choices which *best serve* the goal.  The Fate Core book is, effectively, the 101 on Fate.  It covers the basics, teaches you how to use it, and gives an implementation that works very well for a core set of activities. But like most 101’s, it is a foundation that will largely get discarded in detail (though not in spirit) as you proceed along the path of mastery.

We talk a lot about “dials” in the rules, as a way to adjust certain rules to certain effects, but even that is a streamline.  When we say everything in Fate is a dial, we really mean *everything*.  The four outcomes? Dial.  Stress and consequences?  Dial.  The fate point economy? Dial.  I can change every one of those things in substantial ways and still have a game that is recognizably Fate.  And that’s the point.

The secret of Fate Core is that there really is no core, or rather, what core there is is so small that it wouldn’t even cover a piece of paper. Fate is a tool to create and resolve interesting situations and respect what’s important.  But like most such simple premises, it spawns a thousand questions which - if answered - result in some really big books.

Why does this matter?  Because it means that Fate Core is going to be flawed.  Not just because it’s a human endeavor, but because it’s a snapshot of a certain set of priorities, and those priorities are not going to suit every gamer and every game. Hell, many of them do not suit *me*.  But despite that, it is critical that there *be* a baseline, for without that discussion is difficult to pursue and, by no coincidence, if that baseline is accessible, then it is easier to discuss.

So, read Fate Core.  Learn from Fate Core.  And when you reach the point where you want to change things to fix them?  THAT’S where the journey really begins.



1 - If you think a game has, and that game just happens to be your favorite game, then it is possible that you are a tiny bit biased. 

Where I've Been

So, I've run more silent than usual of late, but there's a good reason for it.

Evil Hat kicked off the Fate Core kickstarter a little while back, and it's doing well. Really, really well.  And part of that doing well has resulted in a number of stretch goals which are keeping me busy.  For starters, I've been writing the magic systems for the toolkit.  The target for that was 10,000 words, and as of last edit it's a little north of 17,000. That sounds good until you realize how much stuff I couldn't put in it.  There are five magic systems in there, and I had to leave out several others for reasons of space.  They'll probably see the light of day someday, though.  I've also been doing a lot of random writing of ideas for the rest of the toolkit - interesting things to do with skills, aspects, stunts and other stuff.   I'm also very excited to be working with Clark Valentine to help him produce the Fate Accelerated Edition.

All of which is to say, that most of my wordcount is going down the FATE tunnel for the moment, and will be for a little bit.  I'll be back once that slows down a little, but for the moment that's the big priority, and I thank you for your patience.

User Stories and Adventure Design

Agile project management (and related ideas like Scrum or Kanban) is something that I deal with a lot on a day to day basis. It's too big a topic to fully explain, but in a nutshell, it's a method of doing work in small, achievable chunks that steadily move towards and end goal (in contrast to planning a big project, then building it). It has strengths and weaknesses, and is very well suited to certain types of software development. It also has a strong ethos of programmers having strong influence on what's being done, so it's unsurprisingly popular among programmers.

One of the cornerstone ideas of Agile is the User Story. A story is a structured sentence that explains something that a user can do using your system. It's easy to do these poorly or just treat them as requirements, but done properly they provide a real shape to the work to be done because they're explicitly demonstrable (That's a big deal in agile - producing incomplete things that work as an iterative process). If you have something small and concrete that you can demonstrably do or not to, it becomes a lot easier to ask yourself what work you need to do to accomplish it.

Properly structured, a user story goes something like "As a [KIND OF USER] I want to [DO SOMETHING] so that [REASON]"[1]. For example, "As a student, I want to be able to buy parking passes online so I can park my car at the dorm".

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I would love to use this in campaign planning - specifically, I want to have a "user story" for each PC.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the DO SOMETHING for a REASON pairing can be easily interpreted as a call to action and a pointer at what might happen next. That is to say, as each story gives the GM clear direction regarding where they want to go, and the reason hints at what the next arc goal for the character might be.

Note that this is slightly different (and more useful) than a goal, because it's got an explicit action component to it. There is no question of how this translates into play - it's something the character intends to do.

It also scales well. In agile, a full project can be made of many user stories. In the same way, a larger goal can be composed of many user stories, but only if the player wants to.

Take for example, a character driven by revenge. As KROM THE MIGHTY I want to FIND MY PARENT'S KILLER so that I can AVENGE THEIR MURDER.

That's nicely concrete, and depending on how it's approached, it could be the story for a session or for an entire campaign (and that distinction should be discussed with the player). For a one shot, then it's right there - in the session, Krom must find his parent's killer so he can confront them. For a campaign, this gives something to work back from. How does he find his parent's killer? Does he know who he's looking for? no? Ok, how does he identify them? Snake Symbol? SNAKE SYMBOL! And now, his user story is:

As KROM THE MIGHTY I want to IDENTIFY THIS SNAKE AMULET so that I can FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MY PARENT'S KILLER.

So how many stories should a character have? Obviously, Krom has a lot of stories that build up to his vengeance, so what do we do with them?

Agile has an idea called "The backlog". Basically, all stories go into the backlog as you think of them, and then at the beginning of a sprint (a period of doing work - in game terms, consider is a session or short arc) you pull out the ones you'll be working on for this sprint. PC user stories could work the same way - a PC might have any number of stories at a time, but only one of them is "active" for a given session. Something else comes up, throw it into the backlog - maybe it's next week's story.

The only rule is that play should be pushing stories to done. If a story has to go back into the backlog, that's a bas sign.

Now, the fact that this is based on Agile doesn't mean you need to follow EVERY rule. For example, if you consider a "sprint" to be 3 sessions or so, you may end up staggering the characters, so that they resolve their stories (and pick up a new one) at different times. You also can play fast and loose with resources, since velocity isn't much of an issue (though that might be worth considering another time). If you have one user story per player and possibly a user story or to for the group, then you should always have enough material to drive a session of play in awesome directions.

1 - Agile nerds will point out that this is not the only structure, and that Reason is far from obligatory. And they will be right. But this particular model works for what I'm trying to accomplish here.

The Argument For Rich Dice In One Image

(With Apologies to Atomic Robo. For more info on Rich Dice, check here)

Rich Skills

Sci-fi and Fantasy author Kate Elliot has a fantastic post up today about the skills that her protagonist has and why. While I do not doubt that it's useful stuff from the perspective of writing, it is lightning in a bottle on the topic of skills in game design. You should go read it. I would rather you go read it and skip this post than the reverse. It's that useful.

For those of you ignoring my advice, the short for is this - the emphasis of the post is on the importance of sewing to the protagonist of her novels (which I have not read, but now will on the strength of this post). This protagonist sounds like very standard fantasy hero material - swordsmanship, sharp wits, stuff like that - and sewing is a fairly anomalous skill in a heroic context, yet Elliot makes the case for why it's very important.

The reasons for this translate wonderfully to an RPG context, and I'm going to lay out three bigs ones right here.

1. Every Skill Tells a Story

In Elliot's post, the reason the protagonist knows how to sew is tied tightly to her upbringing and the social and economic situation she was in. It's opens a window on many other elements of her character.

In many RPGs, these hooks are explicitly called out (in the form of things like aspects), but there is no reason that skills can't carry a lot of that weight on their own, so long as someone stops to think about them. It's a little bit more indirect than having the player hang a lantern on the character's background, but it tends to feel very organic and fits the character very well because it's driven by choices that the player has made (with their skills).

How to use this in your game:

The fact that your game doesn't have "indie" mechanics is no reason characters can't have rich backgrounds tied to the setting. Go through a character's skill and use them as a basis for conversation. Find out how and why they learned the skill and perhaps where they learned it and from whom. Look for skills that are particularly high, particularly low, missing or out of place. Even if the player hadn't thought the background elements through when picking skills, this kind of focus questioning can really spark people's creativity.

2. Every Skill is a Social Skill

In Elliot's post, one key element of sewing is that it is a largely social activity, performed in groups and forming the basis of a lot of interaction.

If you stop and think about it, this is true of many groups. Think about your own life and consider how many of your social interactions are driven by "social skills" versus those driven by common interests and practices (which social skills are then layered on top of). True, fandom doesn't map 1:1 to a skill, but the idea is a potent one.

How to use this in your game:

Consider broadening your definition of what skills can do. Take a page from Feng Shui and allow skills to also be used for contacting people within the sphere of that skill. You might even want to more broadly allow skills to be substituted for social skills within their appropriate context, or at least grant bonuses when appealing to the group that the skill represents.

3. Every Skill is Part of the World

As an extension of skills being social is that every skill exists in the context of the larger society. This can be meaningful in a few ways. It might be economic (is this a skill people get rich off of, or which only the rich have time to learn?), cultural (is this a "woman's" skill? What about in a different group?), social (Is there a stigma associated with this skills? Is it associated with a particular group?) or logistic (Are there schools or organizations associated with these skills?). Any skill can be a window into any of these issues or ideas.

How to use this in your game

As GM, stop and consider the skill's context in the setting (and, if possible, take your cues from the player backgrounds). Ask what the "typical" person defined by that skill is like, then ask yourself how that changes from place to place.

Keep these questions in your back pocket for when players travel and you want to convey that things have changed. Describing things as looking different is one thing, but it's much less compelling then changing how the world sees the character. Even if it's just a small thing, it's personal, and that's huge.

Mooks Gone Haywire

This is related to the Smart Everyman thing, but in ways that may not be immediately obvious.

If you haven't seen it, Steven Soderburgh's Haywire is a great movie. As with Mamet's Spartan it's an action movie by a very talented director (and writer, in Mamet's case) who does not normally delve into the action genre. The result is something that feels very different than the standard action flick because it does not proceed fromt he same assumptions.

Now, whether you think that's a good or bad thing is going to hinge on several issues of taste, but if you're as inclined to overanalysis as I am, these views on common things through an unfamiliar lense is utterly compelling.

Numerous elements of Haywire are noteworthy (the chases, in particular, are awesome) but the fights are what really caught my eye from the perspective of gaming. They were great fights, mostly hand to hand, that were brutal, intense and very engaging, but they were also where some of the biggest deviations from the traditional action formula could be observed[1]. Two if them in particular have stuck with me, guns and mooks, and today I'm going to talk about mooks.

In Haywire, there were no mooks. Every fight was dangerous and intense, but even faceless opponents were dangerous. Fights against them were quicker, but still involved several exchanges.

In a standard action game, this would be weird. Feng Shui's mook rules have become a de facto standard for genre[2] emulation, but that becomes a problem when you want to tweak or grow the genre. Removing them from film hilights what removing them from play might suggest - more danger and more attention.

Attention's an interesting one. Mooks do not just emulate genre, they speed gameplay, and it's taken as a given that this is a good thing, but the reality is a bit more complicated. Consider, let's say you think combat's should take a half hour. Mook rules let you squeeze more into that half hour without increasing the time and bookeeping required, and that's a win. However, if you're not pushing for any kind of structure, then mook rules can just mean faster and less interesting fights.

Less interesting fights is a fascinating point to get snagged on, because there's so much implicit assumption in RPGs that fights are (provided they're well run) intrinsically interesting. That is to say, we (usually) do not complain about "too many fights" in D&D because fights are a large part of the expected experience. The fight is supposed to be fun.

But heavy use of mook rules allow for fights that end up at approximately the same level of engagement as picking a lock. That's not automatically bad, but it requires more work on the GM's part to create extrinsic engagement because it's nto intrinsically rewarding.

However, there's a flipside - if there are no mook rules, every fight can be a potential drag on play, especially lopsided ones. There comes a point in many bad D&D fights where it's clear how its goign to go, but the fight can't end until the party has finished "grinding down" the opponenent's hit points. No one wants to get in that situation either. There are mechanical tweaks that can address that, but more broadly it really depends on the fight having genuine tension, and havign that tension be maintained consistently.

This is a pretty complex topic, and the reality is that it does not have a simple lesson. Mook rules can be super useful, but can also be problematic - there's no one right solution that fits all situations. But it does reveal something critical and fragile - If you rely on fights being intrinsically engaging, then you are walking a very fine line, and it's easy to slip off. If, on the other hand, you are ALSO making sure that fights have some external reason to maintain tension and engagement, the rest of these potential problems tend to evaporate.

In a purely mechanical sense, this idea ended up in the Tempo rules with the idea that a single hit takedown[3] is VERY hard on the intial exchange, but becomes much easier after you have established an advantage. In theory, this allows a highly skilled character to take down an opponent quickly, but usually requires at least a single exchange to establish advantage. Still needs more testing, of course, but I'll be curious if it captures that Haywire kind of feel.

1 - At this point it's also worth calling out that a lot of the fight quality also came from Gina Carano's ability to sell the fights convincingly. She was fantastic.

2 - Super nerdy aside - there are a lot of fine gradations of genre which I am casually ignoring here, but which are actually relevant to the conversation.  Action is a wide umbrella, but the nature of threat and violence actually varies greatly across the range, from the virtually superheroic highs of James Bond and gun ballets to intensely grim, lethal stuff.  Most action movies tend towards the former, but its worth noting that a lot of action-in-context films (which includes a large swath of espionage) are further down the spectrum.  Haywire is nominally a spy movie, so it's no surprise it leans gritty, but that's also no guarantee, since spies also bring us James Bond.

3 - As an aside, if a game has a high stealth component, single hit/mook rules can be applied situationally to relfect that. That is, targets caught unawares are treated as mooks. This is a simple way to capture the feel of certain games like Dishonored or Deus Ex.

Smarter Than The Average Everyman

I think the idea of a smart character may be an essential dividing line between fiction and RPGs and in turn may be informative of a major split within RPGs along similar lines. So based on that let me throw out a few points that I'm hanging this off.

First, most RPG players (at least those over a certain age) were book readers in their youth. This is not a 100% map, especially as you broaden out into those who came in via LARP and later through video games. Still, if someone came into the hobby via D&D or something of its ilk, especially if they were a GM, odds are good they had left a trail of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks in their wake during their formative years.

Second, the ideas of being a reader and being smart are hopelessly entangled in American culture. There are other elements to be found in that snarl about escape, outcasts, isolation and so forth, many fo which also have some resonable in RPGs, but for the moment I just want to focus on the idea of reading being something the smart kids did.

Second and a half, that idea is not just perpetuated by the culture, but also by the books themselves. A huge number of books (especially several schools of sci fi) are really about the struggles of the unappreciated smart people (a group the reader likely identifies himself[1] with) against the masses of idiots or to save the masses of idiots who can't appreciate the real problem. No surprise - "You're smart and everyone else is stupid" is one of the most comforting narratives humanity has ever created.

Third, because of this, there is power in a smart protagonist. I don't mean in the Holmesian vein of smartness-as-superpower (more on that in a second) but rather a protagonist for whom being smart is an essential part of their nature. This is every fictional detective ever, sure, but it goes deeper than that. Go back to your fairy tales and consider how often they are resolved with cleverness - that's how far back this goes. It's no shock - storytelling is an action of thought and word, not muscle and power, and it has always been in the interest of storytellers to create a world where their virtues triumph.

All of which means that excepting when we read for Schaddenfreude, we look for a protagonist who is smart enough. Ideally, one who is just smart enough. If he's too smart, that's a problem because we don't want to feel stupid, so he'll need to be crazily, holmesian smart for us to be comfortable (because at that point comparison is just silly). Most cynically, you want a protagonist who values and presents smarts (as the reader does) but is perhaps fractionally less smart than the reader, but there are a lot of potential variables in that formula.

Now, like all statements about fiction, none of this applies universally. There are a lot of things that make a grippy protagonist. Some of them are unique to the protagonist, some are unique to the situations. Whatever the case, if you map it out, there's definitely a clustering on the line between "Everyman" and "Unique, special snowflake, chosen one" where you find the Smart everyman, and that cluster is full of Military fiction (Jack Ryan is the poster child for this in my mind), Sci Fi and detective stories.

Hopefully, none of this is terribly contentious yet. The books are out there, so it's pretty easy to check. The trick is where this ties in to gaming.

It seems reasonable that clusters of reading trends would be reflected in some way in RPG trends given the overlap between the groups. Even more, its possible that certain book trends will be reflected more strongly in gaming because the transition is easier. An obvious example would be Lord of the Rings vs Anna Karenina - tabletop RPGs have, historically offered many more opportunities for the former than the latter

My sense is that the Smart Everyman segment got pretty well represented, especially early on. The combination of sci fi interests and wargaming casts a very broad net over this audience.

Now, that's a lot of words to come to a point which is pretty much a "no duh" for anyone who has ever attended a convention. The presence of this segment is obvious to see, and make up a large part of the Sharks to the narrative Jets. It's a well known, well stablished divide.

But the reason I took this long route to get here is that common root of fiction. It seems to me that the Smart Everyman player is as much a product of his fiction as anyone else at the table, but everyone goes to great lengths to pretend otherwise, especially the Smart Everyman player himself. He wants the things he knows from his fiction - intelligence, challenge, high stakes and realism - and that's totally at odds with all this mamby pamby story stuff. And the serious dramatic player is ok with that as a point of division because the alternative would be accepting that Tom Clancy gets a seat at the table along with Calvino, Eco, Martin and the Coen brothers.

The problem, of course, is that this is kind of nonsense. Whether you like Tom Clancy or not, there is some serious craft that goes into what he does, and he is as much subject to rules of drama and fiction as any other writer you want to point at. But he absolutely has different priorities, goals and tools.

This intrigues me. I'm a shameless hippie narrative-leaning kind of player, and a lot of this is me struggling with my own blind spots, and the fact that I suspect we have often left a lot of excellent tools on the table because they weren't the right type. If we accept the premise that Tom Clancy style play is just as narrative as anything else, can we proceed forward from there in a way that is satisfying to those players? Can we make the game that gives them the experience they want, and will they welcome it? I have no idea, but it seems like an incredibly fun question.

You can find a lot of people who will tell you what fiction must have: conflicts, rising tension, shifting emotional charges, all that jazz. In fact, if you were to listen to most writing advice, you would think that the creation of great stories is a very nearly mechanical process. In fact, the more money the author stands to make based on you learning his lessons, the more likely it will seem that creating fiction TOTALLY MAKES SENSE.

Which is nonsense. The best advice is not couched in terms of what will work, but rather what might be worth a shot. Those who make compelling fiction can be just a surprised as anyone else at what people lock onto. The overlap between great books and books people read is always smaller than some would like.

But if you're creating or running a game, that's not your problem. You have a table to engage, and that is not bound by the rules of good fiction, that's bound by the rules of what people respond to. And while those are no more concrete than those of creating fiction, we can afford to get our hands muddy with "crap" fiction[2].

And, hell, maybe we owe it to ourselves to do so. In any case, I feel like this is the tip of an iceberg.

1 - I would normally say "him or herself" here, because the reader could just as easily be female, but i couldn't bring myself to for a simple reason. A lot of the fiction I'm talking about here is unapologetically manly. Women may be smart and capable, but only if they are supportive and sexually available, which in turn leads to weirdly screwed up ideas about "strong women". Anyway, not really intending to explore this topic except to say that some science fiction really screwed me up in some ways that it took me a long time to understand.

2 - So, no disrespect to the many talented writers at White Wolf, but the connection between the initial success of Vampire and tapping the crap fiction vein seems pretty obvious in retrospect. I doubt it was intended that way (because, man, that's a SINCERE book) but that doesn't mean it didn't benefit from it.

Metatopia Panels

Just a quick post: The recorded panels from Metatopia are going up here.  Totally worth listening too.

Metatopia 2012 - Overview

It's election night, but early enough that almost all the projections are nonsense, so rather than chew my nails and start at red and blue maps, this seems like I should take the time to write about Metatopia.

Now, I wrote about it last year and you can read that to find out more about the origins of it, but the short version is this - it's a convention for game designers and people looking to design games. It's full of panels, focus groups and playtests, and last year it was completely fantastic, so the question was how the sophomore attempt would go.

The answer is "amazingly". Even with Hurricane-induced complications (which, regrettably, reduced the number of attendees and forced the cancellation of some events) things hung together perfectly, largely as a result of the fantastic Staff making things go. I have greatly curtailed my con-going since the arrival of my son, but my (long suffering) wife completely gets that Metatopia is THAT important, and it gets prioritized.

Explaining why it's amazing is difficult. Sure, there are amazing people, but that's true of many conventions, so it's not that in and of itself. Rather, it's the focus. This is not a gaming convention so much as a convention about games - it's a place for people who are excited by the prospect of if the prospect of discussing differing points of game design theory or which games influenced which games or just hearing Ken Hite tell you why you're wrong.[1]

Even more importantly, I do not know of anywhere else to get this kind of experience. You can get slices of it at bigger cons, or focused pieces of it elsewhere but having it all in one place is simply incomparable. The term 'Critical mass' seems almost a little too on the nose, but I can't think of a better term for it.

But what's crazier still is that we've barely scratched the surface on this. The origins of it are very much Indie (it ultimately was born out of events like the Double Exposure[2] Indie Roundtable) but it's already overflowed those banks. There was plenty of "mainstream" representation there, and there's a strong desire that there be more in the future, but that's still only part of it. Double Exposure has a huge LARP tradition, and that was represented as well. What's more, there was representation for boardgames (including no less than James Ernest) and game retailers. The only gaming segment notably missing was electronic, and I expect that to change too.

This is the ground floor of something fantastic. it's still growing, and I hope that if you're even a little curious, please consider checking it out next year.

Next post will be a breakdown of things that actually happened this year.

1 - That one may just be me

2 - Double Exposure is the umbrella organization that runs Metatopia as well as the Dexcon and Dreamation conventions among others.

Silly Name, Fun Idea

So, the Marvel Heroic RPG has one of the most clever initiative systems I've ever seen. For the unfamiliar, it basically breaks down as follows - someone goes first, and after they're done, they choose who goes next. Repeat this pattern until everyone has gone. This idea (which I call "pass-around initiative") is pretty simple, and while specific implementations need to answer specific questions (like, 'who goes first?', 'how can I interrupt?' and 'how do you reflect faster characters?') the core idea is portable to many other game designs.

This was on my mind when I encountered another very common RPG occurrence - rolling to determine who to do something bad to.

You've seen it before. A monster makes a surprise attack, rocks fall, a god smites - something bad is going to happen and you need to decide which player it's going to happen to. Hell, when everything is going OK, then it can be doubly important to do something nasty to keep things going. The questions is always who to do it to. GM's want to be fair, so they tend to use rules or randomization to make these choices (since just picking someone could be seen as mean) but this can produce uneven results.

So, I was struck by an idea for handling this inspired by pass-around initiative, and thus the doomball[1] was born.

So, at the start of the game, give one player the doomball (Ideally in the form of some physical token). How you decide which player is totally arbtrary, and if you want to use a classic method (like randomization) feel free. My suggestion is to give it to whoever was holding it at the end of last session (or to whoever missed the last session), but there might also be mechanical systems in the game that might help with this too; Amber DRPG has "Bad Stuff" which might be a great way to determine this, for example.

The player holds the doomball until the GM comes to a point where something bad needs to happen to someone. In this case, the GM targets the player holding the doomball, and once she's done, the player passes it to another player. The only rule about the handoff is that no player can get the doomball until everyone else has had the doomball.

How often the doomball gets passed depends a lot on the game. Combat brings up the possibility for a lot of passing, but it shouldn't necessarily be used for every attacks. Enemies often have specific logic by which they determine their attacks - a logical choice doesn't invoke the doomball, but an open choice of targets might.

This can certainly be the end of it - its a simple determinant to resolve issues as they come up - but there can be more to it. It's easy to build mechanical hooks into the system, such as abilities that make you take the doomball or allow you to pass the doomball early. Hell, this may be a more useful way to reflect luck-based effects (like blessings and curses) than the usual bonuses and penalties to attacks because this feels more like luck.

Anyway, it's a slightly silly name, but the idea is pretty usable, so feel free to go nuts with it.


1 - The name was inspired by the tvtrope of the idiot ball