Games for the Mind

I realize that a lot of how I came to game design had to do with thinking about ways to make my 3.x D&D game better.  I did a lot of tinkering with implied social rules more than mechanical ones, though it was definitely the mechanical twiddling that was most obvious to my players.

Which is part of what this announcement of 4e has me thinking about.  What sort of social things can be done that are also mechanical, would I like done to a fantasy-esque game?

One thing is pretty simple: making NPC goals a mechanical feature of the game.  As soon as an NPC becomes more than window dressing, the GM should assign them a goal that relates to the current players’ goals. 

It can be small but specific and pointed toward the story the players’ characters are in.  We can imagine the barkeep in the cliched bar having the simple goal, “I want to help these people by providing them hearty meals” or “I want to get my share of this group’s wealth.” 

There should be rules for how those can change.  One option: a goal can only change when it has been explicitly thwarted or resolved by the players’ actions.  That fuzziness should be deliberate, giving the GM flexibility.

Having more than one goal should be a rare situation for an NPC, only occurring when they become essential to the plot.  Something simple might work again: for every three encounters the players have with the NPC, they get an additional goal based upon the content of those encounters.

Again, flexibility is deliberate.  Also, it makes complexity dependent upon the interactions players have with NPC’s.  It helps cut down on mary sue-ism. 

This becomes more effective if the NPC’s conflict resources are partially dependent on those motives.  Even moreso if the restrictions on acquiring motives is more stringent—maybe new ones only arising when the NPC engages in conflicts with the PC’s.

That option is pretty attractive.  The mysterious all-powerful NPC just can’t happen.  They have to begin as minor characters that get thwarted or get one-up on the players, becoming more potent over the course of those interactions. 

They have to be embedded in the story being told about the PC’s.

It’s happened.  I’m one of them, now.  I have heard of the announcement of the 4th edition of D&D and I haven’t even gone to look at the website yet.  I will, I’m curious, but I’m just not that curious.

Instead, as I showered this morning, I began to think about how I would design a more tactically-minded fantasy game that sounded like fun to me.  I would want something like rounds, but I would want them to be more dynamic, for example. 

Here is the sketch (holes and all) that came to my mind:

Every character has a score called Commitment.  It should increase as the character gets more experience and should fuel the character’s actions. 

Every round would be broken into two phases.  The first would involve the players committing to actions.  They would do this in order of the Commitment they had remaining from the previous round (what about the first round?  I don’t know.  I told you, holes and all).

The person with the highest commitment gets first opportunity, which they may pass on.  If there is no one to pass to, they must commit.  This would go in waves, so that as soon as one player made a commitment, the highest, uncommitted player would again have the option to act.

The second phase would be the resolution of the commitment.  At the beginning of the phase, their commitment would return to its maximum value.  The complexity of it would depend on how much commitment a player was willing to invest. 

A player who invested the lion’s share of their commitment would basically be doing something akin to Bringing Down the Pain, i.e. engaging in several small conflicts relating to their overarching commitment.  Those who spent little commitment, would be doing comparatively less, jus defending or keeping an opponent busy.

I would think, too, that part of the damage mechanic would entail detrimenting Commitment, so that the player was less and less able to continue, helping to keep down extra-long conflicts.  Built in death spiral for good ends!

If every character were defeated, the GM would be forced to use a punishment token.  The tokens would be established at the outset for the arc, so the players would know the risks on the table. 

There might be, for a given arc, a Group Capture, a Shaming, and a Death on the table.  When the players were defeated, the GM would have to use one of them, having the freedom to choose only which one. 

That would take out some of the fiat elements of D&D where all the pc’s are helpless and the GM has to make a call.  Being nice would only go so far.

When all the tokens were exhausted and the team lost, the players would incur mission failure, again pre-established.

I also thought about having very thin, ablative shells around the commitment damage so that players could get into short scuffles without diminishing commitment.

I like the idea of having social and physical conflict failure conditions wired into character creation.  Soemthing like “Stupid Acts,” the sorts of things characters do when they are wit’s end that shows they have failed, things that make everything just a little worse.

Stupid Acts being something you would buy off as you advance, until you left the game, resolving your character arc, when all Stupid Acts were removed.

Maybe, too, allowing one of the Punishment tokens to be something like “new Stupid Act.” 

Stupid Act could also be a way to switch gears from physical to social or vice versa.  Perform Stupid Act (cower) and try to escape absolute failure.  Clearly, need to be at least short term penalties for switching over in desperation.

Anyway, that’s me wasting some time.  I’m off to go look at the hubbub at WotC now .