7 Travel Throughout the World

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

When I reviewed Amber, I said that if I had 4 players, I'd have each be the best at one of the four stats. Erick Wujcik read an early draft of the review, and he said that he liked this idea.

When I mentioned this to Stephen Tihor, he said that if he ran an Amber game, all of the PCs, however many there were, would be best at something. The original stats from the book were irrelevant. The players would decide what was important.

mnemex and I were talking about that tonight, and he said that he'd also want players deciding what they didn't want as stats. For example, he wouldn't want to allow "I'm the best fighter." It's boring. "I'm the fastest" or "I'm the strongest" would both be fine. Similarly, no "I'm the best at magic."

I remembered one of my professors talking about the Stith Thompson index of folktale motifs, and one in particular, called, if I recall correctly, "Seven Travel Throughout the World". Basically, the hero, presuming there is a single hero, has a number of companions, each of which is the best at something, and each of the things someone is the best at comes up in some important way in the tale. If something didn't come up, well, no one would be best at it. If someone's best at it, it has to be important to the story.

So, I've got a theoretical start of a game. It has a name: Seven Travel Throughout the World. It has one or two rules. All PCs are best at something. Whatever it is has to matter to the story being told, which means that the players decide what matters and what type of story they want. So far, so good. And, people should decide what they don't like. Cool.

Dunno if mnemex or I will ever get further than this. But, it's a pleasant start.

Back to Beatrice. Lots of material to write up for her, so it's a matter of getting it all down and then editing it. Then, to pry out of our co-gms either explicit permission to break the last links between the larp background and our world or explicit protests against the same. Breaking it still lets us use the accumulated stuff we've built up, but it doesn't bind us to the baggage that comes with some of the names. And, I'm perfectly willing to tell players up front, "Here's the clef to what we've done. We filed the serial numbers off so that you can't tell us this isn't how the real world works, but knowing what we filed off may give you a bit of a guideline for costuming, roleplaying, and so on."

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

I like that approach. It's something I was trying for with the round-robin character design I described in A&E. Each player puts forward stuff they want to see in the game, but not necessarily abilities that they want their character to have.

Having each PC be the best at something important in the game is a good mechanism for niche protection, but it might be difficult in some games to see in advance what stats or abilities are going to be the important ones. HeroQuest and other games with free skill lists get round that problem somewhat by allowing that any ability is as useful as any other, but I think that approach can harm the suspension of disbelief and puts a lot of emphasis on the GM's skill in deciding situational and appropriateness modifiers.

As you say, if someone picks a skill or stat as their "I'm the best at this", then the GM presumably takes that as a flag to indicate that that skill or stat is important to the player and should figure in the game. How would you try to ensure that each of those skills or abilities got (roughly) equal spotlight time?

[mneme]

You can theoretically do a cart-horse reversal -- where one of the mechanics is that you -make- a problem presented be about your quality. This (or mechanics like it, where a (GM's, presumably) reward mechanism included rewards for making problems that are about players who hadn't had an issue in a while) would -force- every picked quality to be important.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Negotiation, basically.

As near as I can figure it, once one groks that gaming is social -- once one Gets the Lumpley Principle -- it may be tempting to try to pin the social down in mechanics. In other words, one may try to come up with some mechanic that ensures that each skill or ability gets equal time.

I am not sure how well this works, or to what degree the mechanics boil down to "Negotiate with each other politely, ladies and gents."

Primetime Adventures' equivalent of this is the issue, right? And spotlight time is built into the mechanics, so that might be another angle to look at.

Dogs takes a different view, where the players figure out how to pull traits into any given conflict.

But the issues, or the Best Ats should be shaping what the story is. So, to that degree, I'm probably thinking more PtA than DitV. Does that help?

[mylescorcoran]

Yes, that's pretty clear. I should say that equal spotlight time isn't necessarily always a good goal. Some players require more or less of it, and some groups work better with an uneven distribution. That's where the negotiation comes in.