Drama Again

This is the end of the discussions of the 1.1 Gaslamp Romance rules set - what to do with Drama Points.

I _think_ the decision to limit the number of Drama Points and reset them in each session is a good one. The players aren't interested in that long term resource management. There are some downstream effects from other decisions we made that mess with Drama Points

By getting rid of as many combat rolls as we have there are fewer rolls for players to make (and remember that players make all the rolls) and therefore fewer places to spend Drama Points. This makes each Drama Point more important in play. That's fine as long as we build for that.

Resetting the drama points every session, plus the low number for the Hero PCs, means we need to provide moments for PCs, especially Hero PCs, to get more Drama Points in play. Jim and I have to be mindful of this - in fact for this next session I wonder about using tokens for them and having 3-5 tokens on my side of the GM screen that I task myself with handing those out before we get to the last hour of play (plus a few more obviously if the players really get into it). That makes sure there's more flow in the drama point economy then we've seen so far. That burden, I think, falls on Jim and I as the GMs.

Next week I'll give a rundown of how these new rules worked in practice.

How to Mook

Mooks, if you aren't familiar with Robin Laws' term from Feng Shui, are nameless combatants who have a bare minimum number of stats - an attack score, a damage amount, a defense score and maybe one or two skills like drive or spot - who are cannon fodder for the PCs to work their way through on their way to the main villains. The big thing about them is they have no Hit Points: if you hit them well enough they fall over and stay down; if you hit them normally they fall over and get back up. This is very common in the Hong Kong cinema world of Feng Shui but it's a useful mechanic anywhere, as Jim and I learned in the Girl Genius game.

The BtVS rules that made up the spine of my original rules set had something like this in that NPCs have only three stats - Brawn, Combat and Mind - that the players roll against but they also have other qualities that need to be tracked (some have Vampire, with comes with other qualities inside it) so it's not as simple as not could be, and they also have full blocks of health points and drama points to boot. In BtVS where part of the games charm is the detailed martial arts fights and whittling down of opposition prior to the coup de grace this makes perfect sense. In Girl Genius, well....

See, in the source material there are some fights that go on and on, and Heroes can suck up a lot of damage. But there's always something else going on in the fights to move the story forward - people talk a lot in their fights - and the actual fighting isn't usually what's holding your attention. And a lot of the time combat is really quick. And BtVS combat usually isn't quick. And tracking health points for multiple opponents when those points run to the 50s and 70s is irritating

I'm still trying (and failing) to get answers from the players as to how they want combat to work at the table: are they avoiding fights because they're afraid combat will be really deadly? because they don't know how badass they are? because they're just not interested in fights? But what I know as the GM is that the current stats for NPCs are too complicated for what I need. Now, the new rules for qualities will help a lot, as I can reduce NPCs to the Brawn, Combat and Mind stats with an additive quality or two as notes and not worry abut the current precisely defined qualities, but I still need a way around the masses of life points.

I'm already dividing all life point and damage numbers by 4 to make the numbers more manageable. I'm acknowledging that weapons can do a lot of damage so combat is more about not getting hit than soaking down an abstract number of hit points, even as the PCs have enough life points to reliably take at least one big hit and still get away. But will that be enough? Can I just reduce the life points for NPCs so they have minimal life points, or do I have to develop Mook rules to reduce bookkeeping even further?

One problem with Mook rules as they exist in Feng Shui is they privilege skill over damage - the Old Master has a lot of skill but (some versions) do little damage per hit, while the Big Bruiser has a low skill but does a ton of damage per hit. By removing damage from the equation the Big Bruiser is at a huge disadvantage over mooks. As my PC is one of the big bruisers in this campaign, and it's also a world of very strong and tough constructs, I don't want that to happen. so for now I think we can just reduce life points, but we'll have to see what happens.

Qualities of Qualties

As I discussed last Friday I'm going to be stripping down the skills, advantages and drawbacks system from my first attempt to a set of qualities that are mostly player defined and, for the major qualities, have large penumbras of what they can be used for in play.

Penumbras are a wonder piece of gaming technology - I first started using them, though no one had a term for them yet - in Villains & Vigilantes, where characters have "Backgrounds" such as "Science" or "Business" that the GM and player are able to interpret. In my case having a relevant background meant that you could or could not make inventing rolls, or that saving throws against your stats to do or know certain things went from d% down to d20, or that you could reach out to contacts in those areas. One player realized how useful these were and had his PC (who was a mish mash of powers) undergo a radiation accident that cost him his powers to be replaced with more logical devices _plus_ a whole bunch of Backgrounds that his 'character based on player' didn't have through highly advanced training. His PC suddenly became the very effective scientist/secret agent of the group.

Anyway, I like moving to this - the freeform element of Penumbras fits the table more. we can interpret things more loosely as befits the genre and there's no looking around on the character sheet for the right skill.

As for disadvantages I limited the players to two and made it clear that some of them are Flags. A disadvantage is a straight up mechanical penalty: "my PC is emotionally insecure and suffers a -2 on interaction rolls under X circumstances". Flags are asking the GM outright to give you spotlight time in these ways, and at this much of a penalty, which as GM is pure gold. It tells me the players want to have these sorts of enemies, these sorts of problems, and will engage with them when they hit the table. There isn't a frequency component (otherwise the lure of more spotlight time would be too great) but the point value is based on how far the player wants to start in the hole - when this happens, how bad is it? How many miracles will I have to work to make it out with everything I started with? I think it will work well.

By limiting the players to two disadvantages some things that were disads before aren't now: Nadia is missing an eye, but the mechanics of having to take her decent Perception stat + her high Notice skill + her Situational Awareness bonus - her Diminished Vision was just clunky. Plus it didn't fit for Nadia, who as the badass spy should be seeing things. So we ditched it as a disad. She's still missing an eye, but now rather than being a mechanical penalty it's the explanation for any failure: If Nadia does miss something it's because it came in through her blind spot. If she doesn't miss an ambush and gets off the first shot it's because she tricked someone to coming in at her blind spot when she saw them coming. The missing eye is now color that explains how her failures and successes are more cool rather than a simple penalty. Again, I think that's a much better construction.

Powers and failing to get it

I commented on this on my Facebook account but I wanted to touch on it here in more detail: Playstation Network is making a TV show of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming's comic Powers. A slightly NSFW trailer is below.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/137990-Playstation-Networks-Superhero-Cop-Show-Powers-Gets-First-Trailer-At-NYCC

The further I get from this the worse a taste it leaves in my mouth, for spoiler-y reasons. So if you don't want me to spoil things for you stop reading.

In the comic Walker has secrets nested inside of secrets: we don't know at the start of the book that he's an ex-super hero who lost his powers. We have to figure that out with Pilgrim over the start of the book. But what Pilgrim doesn't learn is that Walker is relatively sanguine about having lost his powers because he is, more or less, sick of being immortal. He's been defending humanity since there's been a humanity, but his functional memory only goes back about 50 years. He was almost at the point of asking the person who invented the process to shut his powers off prior to the accident that took his powers away. It's not that he wants to die, but he wants to not be immortal any longer. And it's not that he wants to stop defending humanity, since he immediately becomes a cop.

This stance, having Walker be the less experienced cop to Pilgrim (albeit one with an insight into super heroes) inverts their relationship. Bloody hell, look at the names - Walker can't fly any more and Pilgrim is searching for more knowledge, it's not subtle here. That's bad enough, but the sort of thing TV does. But totally failing to get why Walker is kinda OK with not being a superhero, that he's not spending his time ranting about how much is sucks to just be normal, that's failing to get the entire core of the character. It's essentially Hollywood Screenwriters putting the easiest, most one dimensional gloss on the character. He gets flat, irritating and, well, the guy in the trailer.

Jim Cambias also pointed out that the guy is spectacularly miscast - Physically Walker is big and broad shouldered, the sort who you can see would once have been a classic super-hero. Emotionally he is earnest and well meaning. Christopher Reeve could pull this off, or anyone else who played Superman. (And again, Walker's hero ID, Diamond, had a big diamond emblem in the middle of his chest - who else has one of those...?) This guy? He lacks the physical presence, and the lies he's being given run against the core of the character.

All told I expect this is another instance of TV spectacularly got getting something that should be really simple.

As the Construct Rules Set Rampages Through the Village….

Everything to this point has been a discussion of the mechanics that Jim and I built for the game before it actually intersected with the players. After four sessions I have a laundry list of things I think we can change to improve play. Tackling these in the same order we have:

Stats, Skills and Qualities:

The six stats work just fine – they’re a pretty standard set, and the Willpower stat has enough going for it that it’s not just a point dump, especially for the Sparks.

Skills and qualities, however, are too complicated. First thing Jim and I found was that the lack of a Stealth Skill just threw us off. Having either acrobatics or crime work for that is a lovely idea but we kept asking for Stealth checks, and with us meeting only monthly none of the players remembered that it wasn’t on the sheet with that name.

Jim wanted broader, player defined skills – to be able to tell people to roll Dex + Soldier to perform field recon, but not allow Solider to work for sneaking into a hotel, for example. This is a much more trust based piece of gaming technology, but I think it works for this table.

The qualities list ended up being much more complicated than we needed. In character creation having Advantage Qualities let you spend some points from the quality pool to add points to the other three pools (stats, skills and drawbacks) just made character creation too difficult. The non bundled advantages generally do a couple of different things, so they feel broad and inclusive, but those things are often small and crunchy so everyone has to remember exactly what they do.

Worse, the GM has to have a working knowledge of all of the qualities, and know how to apply them to the relatively generic NPC stat blocks. That got to be cumbersome in play, especially when combat starts. All told it required more investment in mastering game crunch than we wanted.

My current solution is to break every PC down into their 6 stats and 6 Qualities – two Major, two Additive and two Drawbacks/Flags. Any test is going to be Stat + Relevant Major Quality + Relevant Additive Quality – Relevant Drawback/ Flag. Relevance is determined primarily by the player and GM based on circumstances. Sure it’s a high trust mechanic, but we’re all good with that.

The Qualities are mostly player defined, but to try to keep some balance I’m keeping much of the existing skill list (though I’m adding Stealth, taking out Acrobatics and doing a few other tweaks) and players pick 6 ‘skills’ that the first major quality covers, and 6 skills for the second major quality. Three notes:  

First, any skills that exist in _both_ qualities are Synergies, where one half of the second quality is added to the first quality score for that skill;

Second, the second major quality can add the score to a stat at the cost of 3 skills.

Third, players can define a specialization for each quality to either allow it to apply to something outside its normal purview or gain a +2 bonus

For example: Bella has a Quality of French Pastry Chef which is defined as +5 with all Athletics, Brawling, Cooking, Mechanic, Notice, Profession tests. She has a specialization with Smell tests, so it’s +7. She has a second quality of Spark for a +3 with Cooking, Doctor, Mechanic and Constitution. Spark has the Specialization of applying to Influence rolls when in a Fugue State. Because Cooking and Mechanic are on both Qualities her French Pastry Chef is bumped up by half of her Spark quality (it rounds up to +2) so she has a +7 total.

The Additive Qualities are again player defined, but their main definition is that they can add to stats + skills, but they can also do other things. Bella, for instance has Obsessive Focus +3 (ignore 3 damage from blunt or burn attacks, +3 on rolls vs. fear) and Attractive +3 (Add to any social interactions, or +5 on rolls involving sex appeal).

Disadvantage Qualities give a direct mechanical penalty – Bella has Kitchen Focus, with a -4 on any inventing roll and -2 on any social roll outside the kitchen.

Flag Qualities are asking the GM to mess with their PC in certain ways, or promising to act outside of their best interest when things come up. Bella is an insecure perfectionist who craves legitimacy from people.