I had a chance to test out my game of pirates this week, when my regular Wednesday night session got cancelled due to the absence of a player. I took the opportunity to strongarm my mates into being the first group to test the game. Dead Man's Chest is a game about pirates that tells a shared narrative in the manner of Primetime Adventures.
The underlying idea is that the game relies on one stat, Reputation, which is found by marking a pirate's capacity in three other ares: cunning, bravado & fear (i.e. how much fear they cause in others). Each of thse aspects is measured on a track, with boxes spaced along that track that represent Reputation: in any action, you roll a number of dice equal to the number of special boxes you have marked across all three tracks.
For each action, as well as stating consequences, the players are staking their aspects, e.g. winning a fight gives you bragging rights, so your Bravado increases, but losing it means that others are less afraid of you so you lose Fear.
We skipped most of the discussion of a world setting and creation of traits so we could get right on with playing, filling in whatever details we needed on the fly. Also, one of the players still isn't terribly used to games where he has strong control over the narrative and kept falling into the trap of thinking that he had to roll for every step of what his character was doing.
On the whole, the premise worked: both players soon caught onto the strategic side of picking the right aspects to stake at the right time. One thing that came out of it was that one player was doing very well and had a reputation of 9 at one point, while the other limped along on 4 or less for most of the game. Whether this was due to the limited number of players creating fewer chances for inter-character conflict or something deeper about the game mechanic, I can't say yet.
Feedback I got suggested a couple of things:
1. Make raising Reputation more of an achievment. The special boxes on the aspect tracks should be spaced further apart and there should be fewer of them. This limits how far apart the player's Reputation scores can be, meaning there is less chance of one player having an overwhelming advantage over another, but its still not impossible.
2. Allow players to help or hinder each other. One of the players said he would have liked to be able to influence actions his character wasn't directly involved in, as with the Fan Mail mechanic from PTA. I thought about adding some bonus aspect dice, one each for Cunning, Fear and Bravado; these are held by the player whose score in that aspect is highest and they can add them into either side of a conflict if that aspect effects it.
Planning to playtest this again in 3 or 4 weeks at the MKRPG during its short block with more players and really shake this puppy!
Well this I'll sounds very
Submitted by Joe Murphy on Fri, 21/03/2008 - 15:30.
Well this I'll sounds very interesting.
I'm a big fan of fanmail or gift dice, and I wouldn't limit them based on character traits. They're for the players. Just give everyone a few - enough that could affect, say, a third of the scenes.
Or there's the Covenant and My Life With Master method, where there's a central pool everyone can dip into.
In MLWM, there are dice for three themes - you could certainly have dice in each of Cruelty, Treachery and Ruthlessness. Or Bloody! If another player thinks an action deserves one of these thematic dice, they can assign them to another player.
Score Swing
Submitted by Neil Gow on Fri, 21/03/2008 - 15:50.
It sounds like you have a problem we have found with a couple of games recently and thats score swing.
For example, you have two characters with the same scores - say 5/10 - and when one loses the score drops and when one wins their score rises, both by one.
On the first roll, Player A wins - his score is now 6, Player B's score is now 4. Player A now has a distinct advantage and in pressing home this advantage he makes his advantange even greater.
This is intensified when players can choose which attribute they bring into a conflict. When a conflict exists, both sides wish to win - if they do not wish to win (or not to lose) why is there a conflict? Therefore they will use the tools available to them, and that will tend to be the highest one available.
(I'll give an example - a weak ass old policeman has a gun pulled on him by a thug. He can try to grapple the thug to the ground or shout him down using his experience. He has lots of experience and very little strength. He will use the experience angle because he has a free choice.)
Of course there is always the choice to 'dare to lose' - ie. in the example above, choosing to grapple the thug. However that is you choosing to radically increase the chances of losing the conflict - a conflict that by its own nature you have stated that you want to win/not lose. If you are willing to accept a massive chance of loss for some reason, why not concede the conflict altogether and just narrate away for the hell of it?
So anyway, yes, score swings can quickly drive people towards the extremes of any system. Its a bit like card advantage in CCGs.
I'm a big fan of 'fan mail' style reward systems as well. There seems to be something thematically strong with a pirate throwing booty chips around trying to bribe and cajole all and sundry around him with treasure.
Sounds like the start of a canny little game - please keep posting here about it because it sounds very interesting!
Cheers
Neil
Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/
Joe - MLWM is one of my
Submitted by James Mullen on Sat, 22/03/2008 - 10:21.
Joe - MLWM is one of my favourite games of the moment and was another influence on Dead Man's Chest, along with PTA, Agon and a touch of Cold City. I really like your piratey trait/aspect names as well; once you mention 'Treachery', it seems hard to believe I left this out of the mechanics!
Neil - Funnily enough, score swing was less of an issue in the playtest, simply because the players chose very few conflicts against each other. I'd expect it to follow the course you describe in a game with more players however.
The actual mechanic of each conflict involves 2 Traits: the acting player chooses one and their opposition (whether the GM or another player) selects the other. Traits are divided into 2 classes, the first being Deeds that describe the content of the action, e.g. fighting, seduction, navigation and so on. The second are Manners which are almost purely a tactical choice, since they determine how the results from each conflict are read, e.g. which side loses/gains aspect points and how many. This means that the acting player never has a completely free choice over their action: if they decide what they are doing, and therefore which aspects are staked, they don't control how the results are applied and vice versa.
What if Treachery were a way to separate physical outcomes from narrative ones? A player could choose Treachery as an option so that the winner of the conflict actually lost, e.g. they gain the points in the staked aspect but the outcome of the scene is narrated as if they had lost? Or, again, vice versa? This way, a weak opponent could make a stronger one choose between strengthening their character's statistics or getting the narrative outcome they wanted?
Currently, there are a few special options open to the players that are used as endgame mechanics, one of which is Booty: when you fill your Booty track, your pirate retires from the game. Looking at these more objectively, they do seem like a weak and arbitary mechanic, a blatant copy of the endgame/retirement mechanics from MLWM and Agon. I'm thinking now of tightening these up and using them as part of the reward system instead... this is still a game thats been less than a week in conception & development, so there's a long way to go yet.
You could have a central
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Sat, 22/03/2008 - 13:56.
You could have a central pool of treachery/loyalty like fanmail that players can throw in on either side to sway a conflict, representing the general disposition of the crew. Maybe the pools grow dependant on how much they're used, or what happens in game.
Or maybe booty could be used as a form of fanmail. So the GM might pop a few booty points down (represented by coins, obviously) when he does something, and then the players can share them out in a similar way to fanmail when particularly cool things get done. Pirates could then spend booty to introduce things or sway conflicts.
I like the idea of treachery/cruelty/bloody dice too. I'm looking forward to seeing more about this!
Treachery, Booty & Blood
Submitted by James Mullen on Sat, 22/03/2008 - 17:10.
Having had a few hours to go away and work on it (god, I love bank holiday weekends!) some of the adjusted mechanics looks like this:
Treachery: resembling agendas from Cold City, the pirate has some personal goal or issue. This is used to disconnect the numerical outcomes from the narrative consequences of an action as described above, but can be used either by the acting player in a conflict or their opposition, so they are a double edged sword.
Pieces o' Eight: fan mail. The GM spends it for bringing in powerful NPCs to challenge the pirates or to double the number of dice they roll in opposition for one action. The pirates spend it on extra dice for their rolls or to invoke rum, blood & booty.
Rum: a short list of special effects, e.g. reroll failed dice, double your successes, etc.
Blood: the ability to utterly destroy (i.e. remove from the shared world) a place, person or thing.
Booty: the ability to lay claim to (i.e. gain exclusive narrative rights to) a place, person or thing in the shared world document.
Rum, blood and booty are also retirement/endgame mechanics, so each pirate can only use them a limited number of times. Blood & booty also suspend the usual numerical outcomes in favour of editing treachery & traits positively or negatively, similar to the way in which traits in Cold City are edited in response to conflicts.