CORE IDEA
Make a roleplaying system expressly designed to work with a PbP environment. No setting, no dice.
THE STATS
Each game begins with defining four stats at the start of character creation. These are the ways that the characters will interact with the world. For example, a standard Fantasy setting might have:
MIGHT
INTELLECT
SWIFTNESS
CHARM
A gritty cyberpunk setting might have:
VIOLENCE
CUNNING
MONEY
TECH
A political game might have:
CONNECTIONS
CHARM
LIE
INTIMIDATE
And BOUND, my own demon-summoning setting, would have:
PAIN
SHADOWS
HEARTS
SECRETS
Rate your stats from one to four. So, to carry on the fantasy setting, we might have Lucas Del Rio, dashing half-elven Bard, with the following stats:
MIGHT 1
INTELLECT 2
SWIFTNESS 3
CHARM 4
THE FACETS
If you want, you can give each of your stats a Facet. They can be items, people, traits, relationships, or anything else you can imagine. This is a representation of part of your power; not the be-all-and-end-all, but something that provides a useful boost. Facets must to created so it is possible to lose them in a single scene when everything goes wrong.
You can RISK your facet in lieu of spending points (see below) to make narrative statements; to do so is free. Every time you RISK your Facet, there is a chance that it is DAMAGED. (Not quite sure how yet, but something to do with the GM spending their points to trigger it) Once a Facet is DAMAGED, it can be LOST. Once a Facet is LOST, it can be DESTROYED.
Facets must be important to the character. “A gun” is not a facet. “Dad’s old service revolver” is a facet.
To carry on with our example, Lucas expands his stats with the following Facets:
MIGHT 1 (Battered stolen city guard half-plate)
INTELLECT 2 (Courting the Bardic College’s assistant Librarian)
SWIFTNESS 3 (Counterfeit Boots of Elvenkind)
CHARM 4 (Signature scarlet cloak)
SET DRESSING
Equipment/contacts/NPCs have one of two functions:
Defines Narrative: It lets a player achieve a certain action. For example, if they were in an ongoing war against the drug lords in the Southern Barrios, an Undercover Cop would let them infiltrate the organisations without coming under danger themselves. In a dark room, a pair of night vision goggles would let them see. In a car chase, a car would let them take part. It offers no bonus past allowing the players to participate in a suitable narrative.
Defines Character: If it defines a character and they draw ongoing strength from it, it’s a Facet as above. Players can upgrade Narrative elements to Facets by spending XP, but not just create them on the fly.
PLAY
Players take turns describing their characters acting in a scene set by the GM. Each post has a word limit to discourage walls-of-text. They can, at any point, introduce DETAILS into the scene. There are three kinds of DETAIL:
POSITIVE DETAILS are ones that help the character.
“I hit my attacker hard in the gut and he doubles over.”
“I search under the bar and find just what I’m looking for – the key to the storeroom!”
“I slide the photographs of the Minister’s affair to him over the table and watch the colour drain from his cheeks.”
To write down a positive detail, the player must spend a point from the governing stat. Points are refreshed by one at the beginning of each scene up to their maximum, or refreshed by other players (see below). Positive details propel characters through a scene and are counteracted by Antagonist actions from the GM.
NEUTRAL DETAILS are details which describe the scene, the NPCs, or just things that the PC is doing.
“I slam open the doors to the bar and shout – “Cold beer for all my friends! We’ve been slaying orcs all day, and we’re thirsty!””
“Of course, back before The Fall, this place was all Chinese hydroponic gardens. Some say there’re still a few groves functioning down there, but my guess is that they’d be guarded pretty heavily.”
“The netrunner we’ve found is a scrawny guy who goes by the name of Gigabyte; he’s really old-fashioned, and still uses a keyboard and mouse. He always says it helps him “feel out” the enemy ICE.”
Each player has a number of refresh points per scene – say, four – which they can give out to other players by tagging Neutral paragraphs of text that they feel make the scene more interesting. A player can put refresh points into whatever stat they like, but they can’t take them above their starting value.
NEGATIVE DETAILS are details that actively work against the player.
“Careful; this part of the hive is controlled by the Arcers. Big guys, welding masks, electric weapons. Emperor’s Teeth, that’s one of them over there! Try to blend in!”
“The minister smiles as I slide the images of his affair over to him. “You stupid bastard,” he says, “that’s my wife.” Now he mentions it, it’s obvious.”
“I raise my gun up to fire, but it clicks dry after two shots. I duck behind my cover as shots ping around me and I really, really hope that they don’t close on me before I can find another clip.”
Negative details generally require at least Positive detail to rescue the player – whether that’s from themselves or another player – but they allow the player to instantly refresh any Stat by one point. Players can only make one Negative detail per scene.
THE GM
The GM has a set of points that represent the challenges presented by the world and environment in any given scene called the Antagonist Pool. This can be used to give Negative details to players, or provide Positive details to NPCs.
Named NPCs will be statted out much like a character.
THINGS TO DEVELOP
ONE. How do I stop players just saying “Welp, I kill everyone instantly and win” the second they enter a scene? Perhaps discuss the relative value of a Positive detail, in a fantasy game it could be:
Defeat a weak enemy
Stagger an average enemy
Lower a powerful enemy’s defences
So you could team up, say, to lower an Ogre’s defences:
“I throw sand in his eyes and roll out of the way!” (Spend SWIFTNESS)
“In the confusion, I blast him with a Ram spell, knocking him to the ground!” (Spend INTELLECT)
“Then, when he’s down, I bring my clubdown hard on his head and knock him out!” (Spend MIGHT)
TWO. How do I keep the pace of scenes up? What’s to stop the players just meandering around, not sure when a scene’s over?
THREE. What happens if someone introduces a detail that’s bollocks? (“Dragons? No worries, I have LASER EYES THAT KILL DRAGONS IN ONE HIT.”) I guess I could just say “No, don’t do that.” But it would be nice to build this into the system, somehow?
Comments
4 responses to “TALES OF ADVENTURE (Working title) Design Document”
My thoughts on your points to consider, in, for no particular reason, reverse order:
Point the Third: How to stop rubbish details
Perhaps a binding, brief setting description would help here. To go with the four-stat system, why not have the GM describe the setting in four lines or four points – just the essentials, the bare bones that must not the broken (“No-one has ONE HIT KILL LASER EYES”, for instance)? Taking that further, it might be useful to ask for a similarly-structured character background (a four bullet-point summary that’s open to all players, PCs and the GM alike).
Point the Second: Pace and direction
There’s probably a role for the traditional GMly role of director here: at some point, if the game is play-by-post on a board, at least, the GM should probably just announce the scene is ending and ask for last actions. (If this is ever played in a pub, a small bell should be rung for “last actions”.)
If playing by email, the format is important: does everyone email the GM privately for him to publish a scene summary to the group or is everything done by “reply all”? In the former case the GM can again just announce the scene has ended either by sending out a public description made up of all the action the PC group is collectively aware of plus private emails where appropriate, or by publishing the scene and then asking for any final actions before ending it officially.
Pace is a pretty big issue in non-tabletop RPGs for another reason: players can sometimes sit around waiting for a response to a minor action or question from another player who’s forgotten or is unable to answer. Would it be worth considering allowing players a fourth kind of detail per scene (which, hey would keep the patter of 4 going nicely) – which could influence the group in some way? A “Group Detail” or “Influence Detail” might cost a single refresh point (or perhaps a “leadership” point or somesuch – that could be one of the four stats in co-operative settings, or be a separate stat) but would allow one player character to direct the actions of another, provided that this does not immediately endanger the influenced PC, cause him or her to divulge information not already known to the group or require the expenditure of a resource. This would allow a player to set up tactical manoeuvres or describe conversations without waiting days for each line of dialogue or blow in the fight. Of course, that would be a fairly radical mechanic and I’ve no idea how players would feel ceding a degree of control over their characters to the group – I’ve never come across a game which worked this way.
Point the First: Detail power levels
I think you have it, Grant: a “detail power level guide” would probably be a key part of the rulebook for the full system, and if it encourages co-operative play, all the better. I think it would be useful to describe the power level of negative details, too, so players had some idea of how masochistic they needed to be to get precious refresh points.
Interesting! I for one am down with the idea of the Group Actions, but I feel it might rub people up the wrong way if they, for example, came back from a day off to find their character in a weird situation where they weren’t planning to go. But, in other news, I don’t care much for that sort of preciousness, so I might well look into working in a similar detail to that. (The system is, ideally, PbP rather than PbE; I’ve got very limited experience in forum-based roleplay but none at all in email-based stuff, so I’m writing with a messageboard setting in mind.)
First, regarding the discussion at hand about pace, you could just steamroll as GM. If someone has taken downtime, you’d expect to be brought along for the ride.
Now some irrelevant musings.
Having reread your ideas here, I’m not sure that these will tack on, but hopefully it’ll give some ideas for developing diceless games.
I struggle to remove the concept of a challenge target; it’ll be all those armour classes in D&D. So my brain went to stats as bonuses and facets as modifiers, though failure at a task is what risks its destruction. I’m not sure if a facet would grant a static bonus (say, three) or double the stat. Static makes more sense.
For the challenge ratings themselves, I decided to look for arbitrary order. Take any phone number, or a barcode, or even pi, and you’ve a string of random digits. These can be assigned to enemies, encounters, etc. as play continues. (A target could shift based on an enemy’s movement – the dragon takes flight, raising the 7 to a 9, but then crashes down when it lands, dropping it to a 6.)
Of course, especially if there are no dice, it’d be annoying if you kept missing targets by one. I stole an idea I’ve had from a boardgame I’m working on – NOISE. If you need a little extra oomph, you can fudge the task; in doing so you accumulate noise based on how many points you’d have missed by (in this system, I’d keep this track unknown to players). When NOISE hits an arbitrary level, the SHIT hits the FAN. It’d give a conscious choice between messing up and possibly losing facets or attracting even worse attention.
So I’m totally stealing my own ideas back for CONSTITUENTS OF R’LYEH.