I've been thinking about new kinds of gameplay for MMORPGs, because I'm not happy with any of the current styles.
I love the feel of the "personal epic" games like Star Wars Galaxies, Star Trek Online, even things like WoW. There's a lot of joy to be had in running around a world in real time. But the combat in these games is always either so clunky it's painful or so action-oriented that you have to be a twelve year old with broadband.
Thinking about alternate combat styles, one with appeal is escalated bidding.
This kind of bidding (found in poker and many tabletop games) basically allows players to judge a situation and decide whether to escalate or end the round. It's easy to balance, compelling, and naturally cinematic.
However, it's turn-based.
It's easy to come up with styles of play that allow for this kind of combat, but the turn-based nature is hard to avoid. And turn-based doesn't mesh well with the epic personal feel I'd like in my imaginary MMORPG.
I was having a hard time coming up with escalated bidding that didn't involve turns, but I think I figured it out: it's just a simple rework of existing mechanics.
For example, you're playing Star Trek. You're wandering into combat with your space ship. What's the "escalated bidding" for this?
Well, it's the same as Star Trek Online currently is... just a few small tweaks.
One critical element is range. Tiered bidding is a great way to escalate. In Poker, that would be the ante, the initial bidding, and the final bidding - but in Star Trek, it might be shields, system, hull. Rather than having distinct rounds, it's based on range.
You start off at long range, taking shield damage. You get closer, your weapons tick over into optimal range... but, at the same time, you now take systems damage from incoming shots. You get even closer, your weapons are guaranteed to deal terrific damage... but now any damage that leaks through your shields will blast away at your hull... and some damage is always going to leak through.
Conversely, if you can stay at long range, your ship is not at risk even if your shields go down. Incoming fire will scratch your hull and temporarily glitch out your systems, but that's damage that can be rapidly and completely repaired.
To be clear: as your weapons enter optimal range, you take a lot more damage. The better you can shoot, the more you get shot.
This range element adds a ton of complexity to conflicts, because your systems-damage range may not be the same as your enemy's systems-damage range. A long-range torpedo boat may be taking hull damage from a small merchant vessel while the small merchant vessel is still taking shield damage! This means the small merchant vessel's shots will squirrel through the torpedo boat's shields, while the torpedo volleys will largely splash off the merchant's shields.
Matching ranges will be a major element of what ships you use, when. Party loadout becomes a really interesting challenge.
In most bidding systems, how much you bid is also critical. But in this case, the "bid" is how close you get, for how long. Starships have position and relative speed: committing to a deep run can net bigger rewards if you come out on top... but huge problems if a lucky hit knocks your torpedoes offline. Ship headings are another, interlocked kind of bid, if each shield quadrant fails independently of the others.
Additional bidding can be done using various one-off powers. This is a classic "cooldown" setup: if you overclock your reactor for ten seconds, you won't be able to do it again for another two minutes, better make use of those ten seconds well.
Unlike current combat systems which look similar to our bidding system, the cooldown skills in our bidding system would exist to gamble on the next few seconds.
You're claiming the next few seconds will be critical, either offensively or defensively. With the range-based tiering system and quadrant-based shields, it makes a lot of sense to focus our skills on being useful shortly before or after changing range tiers - either your own or the enemy's. Fire your torpedoes when the enemy enters into their systems damage range, regardless of your current range. Pump your shields just before you change to systems damage range, since the damage you take in ten seconds will be far worse than the damage you take now.
Offensive firepower should be tiered as well, basically turning it into a set of cooldown skills. A full barrage hits hard, but takes a long time to recharge. Smaller shots recharge faster - fast enough to do more damage overall, but obviously the enemy's shield recharge and maneuvering cancel much of that advantage out. Will you do some small shots as you close, followed by a full barrage when the enemy becomes vulnerable?
This timing-based "bidding" feels more natural than any kind of shared pot or other abstraction. This also plays up the differences between different kinds of enemies with different ranges, and makes engaging multiple enemies or being part of a team a very interesting tactical opportunity. Obviously, various shortcuts also have value: a stealthed warbird decloaking right on top of you doesn't need a magic "decloak and fire" special power. Their special power is that they're right on top of you: you're at hull damage range, and at least some of that firepower is going to leak through the shields.
This combat is extremely similar to the existing Star Trek Online combat engine. The tweaks are very minor: simplified range indicators, slightly different damage model, slightly rebalanced skills. But the actual play is so similar that people probably wouldn't have to think about it very hard: they'd just suddenly be having amazing, epic fights.
This model could also be used for ground combat in the Star Trek universe, since ranged ground combat is the norm. You could just have literally all the same things.
A Klingon with a blade can rush through blaster fire: their max range is quite low, which means their range tiers are tiny. The blaster fire would just burn their armor a bit. Of course, when the Klingon reaches you, they are well within your nastiest damage range, and are guaranteed to put you down in short order.
The same basic mechanic would work for any personal combat system to some degree. A Star Wars combat system could be similar, with the light sabering Jedi naturally being similar to a Klingon. A Force-user could also take medium-range powers like Force Throw or Force Lightning. These would extend their attack range... and also extend their damage tier ranges. Someone specializing in sabers would be able to bull through Force Lightning because it's outside their damage tier range!
Even in tight combat, you could still see variations. A long light saber seems like a great choice... and it is, against anyone with a gun. But against someone with light daggers, your melee range is actually outside their most critical damage tier, meaning they can hold you off without too much danger... but you're not so lucky against them. You'd have to use combat abilities to close the range or disarm them unless you have a lot of time on your hands!
The downside of this is the bidding, since at melee ranges you don't really commit to be at a specific range or a specific angle for particularly long. To counteract that, I'd recommend using "charge" skills which push you into melee combat with a large bonus for a specific amount of time, but then leave you with a big penalty until it recycles. In this way, melee attackers would choose how much to "bid" by choosing a light, moderate, or heavy charge attack. They can also do this while already in melee combat, of course.
A tiny change to a fairly ordinary combat system: your optimal attack range is also the range you take worse damage. From there, a rebalance to existing combat approaches should result in a really interesting, cinematic challenge.
At least, that's the theory!
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Monday, October 31, 2016
A New Sci Fi Game Genre
Games like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic are fantastic games. I've replayed most of them a few times. Each time I do, I get drawn to something that's not quite in the games, something I can almost taste.
Not sensawunda or nostalgia, but a whole missing genre.
Let's design a Mass-Effect-style game with Star-Trek-like ideals.
Old Star Trek was about being a mature civilization in a universe full of amazing marvels. Basically the opposite of a coming-of-age story, Star Trek was about adults finding the universe contains unending wonders. This is not the theme of any RPG I know of, but it could be. We have the power.
Wonders
First let's focus on "wonders". To be honest, we already create wonders for the player in these kinds of games. We just don't play them up enough to have it register.
An example of this is Mass Effect. In this series you'll visit dozens of different hostile environments, hundreds of different classes of ships and space stations and planetary settlements. You'll see caves, plant monsters, psychics, ancient alien hive-minds driven mad by abuse, creatures so old they eat a galaxy of life forms in one bite, artificial intelligences struggling to work out how and if they should live, and so many more things.
Most of these sci fi RPGs and many horror games use the close-third-person camera. This tool is so powerful that I don't even think they know why they chose it. They chose it just because it always worked before... but there's a reason it's evolved to be such a core part of these games. It's the most powerful camera for showing us wonders and immersing us in amazing places.
1) We can see our window character. Both how they look in comparison to the area, and how they interact with the area/are interacted with by the area. Because we can see how our avatar compares, we know how to feel about the area.
2) We are still zoomed in pretty close. This allows us to make out all the details, as well as get a real sense of scale. When your camera zooms out too far, it's hard to feel like you're inside this wondrous place, and you can't make out any details of how other people feel about being there.
3) We can use standard cinematic techniques to draw focus and change mood. Slow pans, zooms, depth-of-field, shaking, tilt, and many more cinematic conventions can be flat-out stolen, and they'll work fine. Moreover, the camera is flexible enough that it can become first-person or bird's-eye as needed, giving us the best of all worlds.
By understanding the advantages the close-third-person camera gets us, we can play those up to create a more powerful and distinct sense of place, scale, and wonder.
For example, if we land on a world full of toxic electrical mists, our main character wears a heavy suit. We know it's a toxic environment because we can see our character plonking around in this heavy suit. Even the dialog has a tinny radio sound, and we can hear the KKkzzsshshhhh of sand blasting against our visor. We can punch it up by making the sound vary depending on the direction you turn, since the wind is blasting in one direction. When the electrical mist gets bad, we can see the flickering purple sparks on the skin of our suit, hear the radio break into static. We can even adjust the camera to a lower, hunched-down angle when the wind picks up.
Virtually every "amazing new thing" can be done using similar methods. If we discover a new species, how our avatar physically interacts with them will tell us how to feel about them. We can see how the locals react to us as we wander around in various costumes and deal with places built for creatures of alien proportions. If we find an ancient, damaged space station, we'll watch our avatar duck and crawl through shattered hallways, float across zero grav areas.
This is more work than just using the same walking animation all the time and simply making each level with new arrangements of the same meshes, but I feel like it's worth the price. A lot of the techniques can also be re-used - for example, the wind-blast sound pattern can be reused in the vents of a space station, or during a hull breach, or in a dock when a ship fires retro-thrusters, or even in a humorous way when your admiral is chewing you out for blowing something up.
Basically: if we radically increase the immersion of each new place, we can make each new place feel more amazing and new.
Adults
Those optimizations need to be backed up with some serious changes to how the game lets us interact with the location/have our interactions moderated by the location. This is where the "adults" half of "adults discovering wonders" comes into play.
We can argue over what being mature means, but for the sake of this design, let's say it means appreciating peace and life, and accepting that nothing is perfect. That is at the heart of a lot of my favorite Star Trek episodes, so that's what I'll be using as my measuring stick here.
That doesn't mean having a pacifist game. It might be possible to make one, but for now let's assume the game is still largely like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic: you are fundamentally gonna get in a lot of fights.
How can we make maturity part of the game, despite that?
It's about allowing the player to appreciate the complexities of the places and situations they are in, and taking actions which take place within that complexity rather than just cutting everything apart.
1) Show people living in these places, show their joys and hardships, let them do things besides just sit around and repeat one line. It doesn't have to fit into a large algorithm or anything, it can be pretty basic, but focus on their concerns and their joys. Nearly all dialog, subquests, and exposition can be made part of some NPC's life, so obviously do that.
2) Show that things falling apart is bad. As lumpy as local society might be, anarchy would be worse. Ideally, show it in reaction to the player's choices: if the player takes too heavy a hand, chaos forms in the vacuum they leave. Many of the player's missions might be to try and help in places where this has already happened, which will keep it from being too blunt.
3) Party members. Have several party members along, or even have them comment over the radio. If each party member embodies one particular theme of the game (as is pretty common), they can comment on the things they see and the player will be able to easily understand the context of the comment. Of course, they can also drag the player into the local mess.
4) Recurring NPCs. Other mobile NPCs can visit many places and can bring their own nuanced chaos into the mix. Working with or around these NPCs and their factions can add a solid foundation to build on for the player's own nuanced interactions.
5) Refining choices. This one's a bit complex.
Basically, the first time you encounter a choice, you don't have much complexity to your response. But you keep revisiting the situation, and each time your options get more refined.
For example, a seedy space station has a problem as to whether it's being run by the locals or by the barely-inhabited planet below. When you first arrive, you can choose to side on one side or the other, or neither. You'll learn more as the situation unfolds, and your choices get more nuanced: you can try to put pressure on one side or the other to implement reforms or switch people of power in and out. You can gather intelligence and make surgical strikes or robust defenses. You can choose who gets a captured warship... even who gets to pilot it.
Writing these kinds of nuanced trees can be a little daunting, but there's methods that can help us out. We can lean heavily on either algorithmic or re-usable plot events, especially if we're making an open-world game.
We have to be careful, though: it's easy to end up feeling flat and formulaic if you lean too heavily on those approaches, and that would completely kill the tone we're going for.
In the end, the tone we want is one where the player can go anywhere in our universe, stop, and just enjoy the ambiance. Whether that means their squad of three is hanging out on top of a methane glacier, in the heart of their starship engineering section, or in a bar on any given space station. We want the player to think "this is a place worth protecting".
Or, at least, "it could be worse!"
Summary
There's nothing fundamentally new about these suggestions. Really, I'm just hoping to punch up specific facets that already exist in most sci-fi RPGs.
When those elements get punched up enough, a new genre might emerge. One about existing in a sci fi world, rather than murdering your way through one. But I can't see the end product right now.
I can see making wonders feel wonderful and adults feel mature, though.
I think that'd be a fun start.
Not sensawunda or nostalgia, but a whole missing genre.
Let's design a Mass-Effect-style game with Star-Trek-like ideals.
Old Star Trek was about being a mature civilization in a universe full of amazing marvels. Basically the opposite of a coming-of-age story, Star Trek was about adults finding the universe contains unending wonders. This is not the theme of any RPG I know of, but it could be. We have the power.
Wonders
First let's focus on "wonders". To be honest, we already create wonders for the player in these kinds of games. We just don't play them up enough to have it register.
An example of this is Mass Effect. In this series you'll visit dozens of different hostile environments, hundreds of different classes of ships and space stations and planetary settlements. You'll see caves, plant monsters, psychics, ancient alien hive-minds driven mad by abuse, creatures so old they eat a galaxy of life forms in one bite, artificial intelligences struggling to work out how and if they should live, and so many more things.
Most of these sci fi RPGs and many horror games use the close-third-person camera. This tool is so powerful that I don't even think they know why they chose it. They chose it just because it always worked before... but there's a reason it's evolved to be such a core part of these games. It's the most powerful camera for showing us wonders and immersing us in amazing places.
1) We can see our window character. Both how they look in comparison to the area, and how they interact with the area/are interacted with by the area. Because we can see how our avatar compares, we know how to feel about the area.
2) We are still zoomed in pretty close. This allows us to make out all the details, as well as get a real sense of scale. When your camera zooms out too far, it's hard to feel like you're inside this wondrous place, and you can't make out any details of how other people feel about being there.
3) We can use standard cinematic techniques to draw focus and change mood. Slow pans, zooms, depth-of-field, shaking, tilt, and many more cinematic conventions can be flat-out stolen, and they'll work fine. Moreover, the camera is flexible enough that it can become first-person or bird's-eye as needed, giving us the best of all worlds.
By understanding the advantages the close-third-person camera gets us, we can play those up to create a more powerful and distinct sense of place, scale, and wonder.
For example, if we land on a world full of toxic electrical mists, our main character wears a heavy suit. We know it's a toxic environment because we can see our character plonking around in this heavy suit. Even the dialog has a tinny radio sound, and we can hear the KKkzzsshshhhh of sand blasting against our visor. We can punch it up by making the sound vary depending on the direction you turn, since the wind is blasting in one direction. When the electrical mist gets bad, we can see the flickering purple sparks on the skin of our suit, hear the radio break into static. We can even adjust the camera to a lower, hunched-down angle when the wind picks up.
Virtually every "amazing new thing" can be done using similar methods. If we discover a new species, how our avatar physically interacts with them will tell us how to feel about them. We can see how the locals react to us as we wander around in various costumes and deal with places built for creatures of alien proportions. If we find an ancient, damaged space station, we'll watch our avatar duck and crawl through shattered hallways, float across zero grav areas.
This is more work than just using the same walking animation all the time and simply making each level with new arrangements of the same meshes, but I feel like it's worth the price. A lot of the techniques can also be re-used - for example, the wind-blast sound pattern can be reused in the vents of a space station, or during a hull breach, or in a dock when a ship fires retro-thrusters, or even in a humorous way when your admiral is chewing you out for blowing something up.
Basically: if we radically increase the immersion of each new place, we can make each new place feel more amazing and new.
Adults
Those optimizations need to be backed up with some serious changes to how the game lets us interact with the location/have our interactions moderated by the location. This is where the "adults" half of "adults discovering wonders" comes into play.
We can argue over what being mature means, but for the sake of this design, let's say it means appreciating peace and life, and accepting that nothing is perfect. That is at the heart of a lot of my favorite Star Trek episodes, so that's what I'll be using as my measuring stick here.
That doesn't mean having a pacifist game. It might be possible to make one, but for now let's assume the game is still largely like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic: you are fundamentally gonna get in a lot of fights.
How can we make maturity part of the game, despite that?
It's about allowing the player to appreciate the complexities of the places and situations they are in, and taking actions which take place within that complexity rather than just cutting everything apart.
1) Show people living in these places, show their joys and hardships, let them do things besides just sit around and repeat one line. It doesn't have to fit into a large algorithm or anything, it can be pretty basic, but focus on their concerns and their joys. Nearly all dialog, subquests, and exposition can be made part of some NPC's life, so obviously do that.
2) Show that things falling apart is bad. As lumpy as local society might be, anarchy would be worse. Ideally, show it in reaction to the player's choices: if the player takes too heavy a hand, chaos forms in the vacuum they leave. Many of the player's missions might be to try and help in places where this has already happened, which will keep it from being too blunt.
3) Party members. Have several party members along, or even have them comment over the radio. If each party member embodies one particular theme of the game (as is pretty common), they can comment on the things they see and the player will be able to easily understand the context of the comment. Of course, they can also drag the player into the local mess.
4) Recurring NPCs. Other mobile NPCs can visit many places and can bring their own nuanced chaos into the mix. Working with or around these NPCs and their factions can add a solid foundation to build on for the player's own nuanced interactions.
5) Refining choices. This one's a bit complex.
Basically, the first time you encounter a choice, you don't have much complexity to your response. But you keep revisiting the situation, and each time your options get more refined.
For example, a seedy space station has a problem as to whether it's being run by the locals or by the barely-inhabited planet below. When you first arrive, you can choose to side on one side or the other, or neither. You'll learn more as the situation unfolds, and your choices get more nuanced: you can try to put pressure on one side or the other to implement reforms or switch people of power in and out. You can gather intelligence and make surgical strikes or robust defenses. You can choose who gets a captured warship... even who gets to pilot it.
Writing these kinds of nuanced trees can be a little daunting, but there's methods that can help us out. We can lean heavily on either algorithmic or re-usable plot events, especially if we're making an open-world game.
We have to be careful, though: it's easy to end up feeling flat and formulaic if you lean too heavily on those approaches, and that would completely kill the tone we're going for.
In the end, the tone we want is one where the player can go anywhere in our universe, stop, and just enjoy the ambiance. Whether that means their squad of three is hanging out on top of a methane glacier, in the heart of their starship engineering section, or in a bar on any given space station. We want the player to think "this is a place worth protecting".
Or, at least, "it could be worse!"
Summary
There's nothing fundamentally new about these suggestions. Really, I'm just hoping to punch up specific facets that already exist in most sci-fi RPGs.
When those elements get punched up enough, a new genre might emerge. One about existing in a sci fi world, rather than murdering your way through one. But I can't see the end product right now.
I can see making wonders feel wonderful and adults feel mature, though.
I think that'd be a fun start.
Friday, September 19, 2014
Generating Playable Star Trek Plots
I've talked about creating science fiction tabletop games, using the example of Star Trek. One of the things that comes up a lot whenever you do this is how you can create enough MEAT.
Fantasy games have grown a kind of plot progression out of long practice. Fantasy stories you read in books don't have the same pacing at all: a fantasy game features a huge amount of content that would give an editor fits. Dozens of pointless fights, considering which sword to buy, exploring each dungeon room one by one... this is the meat of a fantasy game.
If you've ever tried to run a science fiction game, you probably noticed that it was pretty hard to get enough meat. The plot either felt full of filler, or moved too fast. That's because you were probably using the same structure as a fantasy game. Science fiction plot lines can't really support that - there's no monsters to slay, no real advantage to exploring every room.
Science fiction plot arcs require a different approach. And we haven't really figured it out, because we haven't spent forty years perfecting our craft.
But I do have a guide that might help. Here is my guide for creating science fiction arcs that last 1-3 sessions - "Star Trek" plots that play nicely and have meat.
The Noose
The players always need to be under pressure in a science fiction plot. Players used to a fantasy plot know enough to move the plot forward even with relatively little pressure, but nobody is that used to science fiction plots yet. The noose is a crisp and looming deadline to force them forward.
Nooses should have a concrete time span and failing to deal with them is the lose state. Players might be able to push nooses back, but they can't ever reduce the noose's effect. The noose is all-or-nothing, high-stakes. The situation may also get worse as the noose approaches, but the noose is specifically the looming deadline.
Noose examples include: the disease will kill everyone on the planet in 2 days. The Klingons will declare war in a month if you don't find their lost ship. The vote happens tomorrow and the majority of the senators are planning to vote "no". The space wedgie will cause life support to fail in six hours.
Personal Mire
My planned gameplay revolves around people, and therefore the NPCs need to be the terrain of the game - half like a dungeon map, half like a monster fight. To make this easy for the GM to plan out without needing a ton of advance work, I recommend "constellations" of NPCs - groups of NPCs that are related to each other around a specific topic.
For example, the "impending new order" constellation would feature characters from the old guard and the new order and some conflicted bystanders, and their relationships would be clear. You could leave most of the characters in the wings until you need them, not bothering to create any details until you need them to play a role.
The idea is that any given NPC would belong to two or more of these constellations, and their motivations would intertwine. This adds some complexity to the things the players do, and create some nice terrain for them to be wary of. It also creates a lot of hooks that are easy to turn into complications, twists, and major NPCs.
Complications
Normally, solving the noose is pretty straightforward. If there's a disease, you need to research the cure. If there's a lost ship, you need to track the warp trail. If there's a vote, you need to convince people to vote your way.
Complications are what make the situation a lot more difficult - they are reason that the actions that should solve the situation either can't be performed or produce a bad result.
Complications usually give the noose emotional resonance, and should generally be themed to give a strong, unified feeling.
For example, the disease turns out to be a nasty engineered bioweapon, which makes curing it much more difficult. The next complication might be that the weapon was created by the locals, and they don't want that revealed and certainly don't want to help you fix it. The next complication might be that the creators died of the disease and can't help. These complications are loosely themed - they're about plans going awry, smaller evils blooming into larger ones.
Other Examples: The Klingon ship was kidnapped by a space godling. The senators you need to convince are stranded on an ice planet. The space wedgie is making time judder backwards and forwards randomly.
Twists
A twist simply changes the lose state. It either replaces the noose with a new noose, or it reverses the noose so that your efforts have been working against you, or it makes everything you've done feel very different now that it's over.
Examples: the vote needs to fail to keep their society stable. The "missing" Klingon ship is an ambush. The space wedgie was trying to protect you from a warp core breech.
Twists don't need to be clever. This is not about creating clever plot lines - it's about creating meaty plot lines. The twist either adds more meat, or makes the meat you already ate taste funny.
B-plots
The B-plot is actually an integral part of science fiction plots, although it may not be immediately obvious. See, the function of the B-plot is to create emotional resonance with the primary plot.
Most science fiction primary plots are about something big - a starship, a disease, a political movement. But in the end, the plots are an excuse to show how people live and act in those situations. The B-plot is the easiest way to lure the players into that kind of close emotional connection.
The B-plot is often "unrelated" to the main plot, at least in terms of causality. However, it reflects the human judgments and lives of the main plot. So, your B-plots should shadow your complications and twists. Since your complications and twists should be loosely themed, the B-plot will likely match many of them at the same time, and offer a human window into a world of big things going wrong.
Typically a B-plot is introduced before the first complication - often before the noose. It exists first even though it is an echo or window onto those larger events.
For example, if the vote is being screwed up because the senators are stranded on an ice planet, you'll start off with a B-plot that plays with that. Perhaps it's about planning a vacation, or the life support going on the fritz, or being unable to get off the ship, or having family visiting.
If the twist is that the lost Klingon warbird is actually waiting in ambush, the B-plot might be about your Klingon crewmember being proud of his culture's obsession with honorable combat, or it might be about an officer training test where everyone dies in an ambush: the Koboyashi Maru sequence. B-plots don't have to be clever or hard to connect.
However, B-plots do have to offer some meat. Think of them as a sequence that doesn't require the GM: when the GM is busy with a particular player, this is something the other players gnaw on.
Therefore, the B-plots should be things where the players can spend some time expressing themselves or their characters, and should involve some die rolling or content that A) doesn't require the GM and B) dictates how things go for them.
For example, the Koboyashi Maru B-plot. It isn't just a line you feed them. You say "this is an officer test." You walk them through it once or twice. But there's a table of results - if your leadership is this, this happens in the first segment. Roll weapons fire, check to see what happens in the second segment, and so on.
A concrete reference as to what can happen lets the players compare their performances to each other, and makes it easy for the GM to give various bonuses or penalties according to their efforts without having to spend a lot of time thinking up new things.
In another example, if the B-plot is that someone's family is visiting the ship and being annoying, assign a family member to every other player. Now whoever is free can be an annoying family member to anyone else who's free. Moreover, you can also get incidental synergy - if the same player is playing the goofy father and the lead starship engineer, then the goofy dad and the engineer get along oddly well. That's fine.
The whole point is to offload the content creation to the players. You need to seed it, of course - tables, NPC character sheets, whatever else is needed. But then the players run with it, try it in different permutations and different places. This lets them control the pace of the play rather than dumping it all on you, and is similar to how fantasy players might mull over what powers to buy on next level-up.
B-plot participation should be worth XP and/or in-game resources. The people who do best at Koboyashi Maru get a commendation point, for example.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
Fantasy games have grown a kind of plot progression out of long practice. Fantasy stories you read in books don't have the same pacing at all: a fantasy game features a huge amount of content that would give an editor fits. Dozens of pointless fights, considering which sword to buy, exploring each dungeon room one by one... this is the meat of a fantasy game.
If you've ever tried to run a science fiction game, you probably noticed that it was pretty hard to get enough meat. The plot either felt full of filler, or moved too fast. That's because you were probably using the same structure as a fantasy game. Science fiction plot lines can't really support that - there's no monsters to slay, no real advantage to exploring every room.
Science fiction plot arcs require a different approach. And we haven't really figured it out, because we haven't spent forty years perfecting our craft.
But I do have a guide that might help. Here is my guide for creating science fiction arcs that last 1-3 sessions - "Star Trek" plots that play nicely and have meat.
The Noose
The players always need to be under pressure in a science fiction plot. Players used to a fantasy plot know enough to move the plot forward even with relatively little pressure, but nobody is that used to science fiction plots yet. The noose is a crisp and looming deadline to force them forward.
Nooses should have a concrete time span and failing to deal with them is the lose state. Players might be able to push nooses back, but they can't ever reduce the noose's effect. The noose is all-or-nothing, high-stakes. The situation may also get worse as the noose approaches, but the noose is specifically the looming deadline.
Noose examples include: the disease will kill everyone on the planet in 2 days. The Klingons will declare war in a month if you don't find their lost ship. The vote happens tomorrow and the majority of the senators are planning to vote "no". The space wedgie will cause life support to fail in six hours.
Personal Mire
My planned gameplay revolves around people, and therefore the NPCs need to be the terrain of the game - half like a dungeon map, half like a monster fight. To make this easy for the GM to plan out without needing a ton of advance work, I recommend "constellations" of NPCs - groups of NPCs that are related to each other around a specific topic.
For example, the "impending new order" constellation would feature characters from the old guard and the new order and some conflicted bystanders, and their relationships would be clear. You could leave most of the characters in the wings until you need them, not bothering to create any details until you need them to play a role.
The idea is that any given NPC would belong to two or more of these constellations, and their motivations would intertwine. This adds some complexity to the things the players do, and create some nice terrain for them to be wary of. It also creates a lot of hooks that are easy to turn into complications, twists, and major NPCs.
Complications
Normally, solving the noose is pretty straightforward. If there's a disease, you need to research the cure. If there's a lost ship, you need to track the warp trail. If there's a vote, you need to convince people to vote your way.
Complications are what make the situation a lot more difficult - they are reason that the actions that should solve the situation either can't be performed or produce a bad result.
Complications usually give the noose emotional resonance, and should generally be themed to give a strong, unified feeling.
For example, the disease turns out to be a nasty engineered bioweapon, which makes curing it much more difficult. The next complication might be that the weapon was created by the locals, and they don't want that revealed and certainly don't want to help you fix it. The next complication might be that the creators died of the disease and can't help. These complications are loosely themed - they're about plans going awry, smaller evils blooming into larger ones.
Other Examples: The Klingon ship was kidnapped by a space godling. The senators you need to convince are stranded on an ice planet. The space wedgie is making time judder backwards and forwards randomly.
Twists
A twist simply changes the lose state. It either replaces the noose with a new noose, or it reverses the noose so that your efforts have been working against you, or it makes everything you've done feel very different now that it's over.
Examples: the vote needs to fail to keep their society stable. The "missing" Klingon ship is an ambush. The space wedgie was trying to protect you from a warp core breech.
Twists don't need to be clever. This is not about creating clever plot lines - it's about creating meaty plot lines. The twist either adds more meat, or makes the meat you already ate taste funny.
B-plots
The B-plot is actually an integral part of science fiction plots, although it may not be immediately obvious. See, the function of the B-plot is to create emotional resonance with the primary plot.
Most science fiction primary plots are about something big - a starship, a disease, a political movement. But in the end, the plots are an excuse to show how people live and act in those situations. The B-plot is the easiest way to lure the players into that kind of close emotional connection.
The B-plot is often "unrelated" to the main plot, at least in terms of causality. However, it reflects the human judgments and lives of the main plot. So, your B-plots should shadow your complications and twists. Since your complications and twists should be loosely themed, the B-plot will likely match many of them at the same time, and offer a human window into a world of big things going wrong.
Typically a B-plot is introduced before the first complication - often before the noose. It exists first even though it is an echo or window onto those larger events.
For example, if the vote is being screwed up because the senators are stranded on an ice planet, you'll start off with a B-plot that plays with that. Perhaps it's about planning a vacation, or the life support going on the fritz, or being unable to get off the ship, or having family visiting.
If the twist is that the lost Klingon warbird is actually waiting in ambush, the B-plot might be about your Klingon crewmember being proud of his culture's obsession with honorable combat, or it might be about an officer training test where everyone dies in an ambush: the Koboyashi Maru sequence. B-plots don't have to be clever or hard to connect.
However, B-plots do have to offer some meat. Think of them as a sequence that doesn't require the GM: when the GM is busy with a particular player, this is something the other players gnaw on.
Therefore, the B-plots should be things where the players can spend some time expressing themselves or their characters, and should involve some die rolling or content that A) doesn't require the GM and B) dictates how things go for them.
For example, the Koboyashi Maru B-plot. It isn't just a line you feed them. You say "this is an officer test." You walk them through it once or twice. But there's a table of results - if your leadership is this, this happens in the first segment. Roll weapons fire, check to see what happens in the second segment, and so on.
A concrete reference as to what can happen lets the players compare their performances to each other, and makes it easy for the GM to give various bonuses or penalties according to their efforts without having to spend a lot of time thinking up new things.
In another example, if the B-plot is that someone's family is visiting the ship and being annoying, assign a family member to every other player. Now whoever is free can be an annoying family member to anyone else who's free. Moreover, you can also get incidental synergy - if the same player is playing the goofy father and the lead starship engineer, then the goofy dad and the engineer get along oddly well. That's fine.
The whole point is to offload the content creation to the players. You need to seed it, of course - tables, NPC character sheets, whatever else is needed. But then the players run with it, try it in different permutations and different places. This lets them control the pace of the play rather than dumping it all on you, and is similar to how fantasy players might mull over what powers to buy on next level-up.
B-plot participation should be worth XP and/or in-game resources. The people who do best at Koboyashi Maru get a commendation point, for example.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Star Trek Tabletop Musings
I wrote a really long essay on mechanics inspired by my last essay, but it was too cumbersome to read. So let's talk about a Star Trek tabletop RPG, and I'll hit the same points with a clear example in mind.
Firstly, there's the concept of "class". Nearly every tabletop RPG has the concept of "class", because it's easy for the players to understand and the devs to balance. The issue is that some classes unlock new types of play: for example, only a magician can use spells, only a hacker can hack computers, etc.
Classes like "mage" and "cleric" are pretty seamlessly integrated into fantasy worlds because their abilities let them participate in the basic gameplay (fighting). A mage really sucks at fighting, but they are capable of throwing artillery fire into the mix.
On the other hand, classes like "hacker" are not integrated into Shadowrun very well at all, to the point of GMs just often just handwaving them as NPC-only classes. This is because the added gameplay - hacking, psychic stuff, and piloting - cannot easily integrate into the basic gameplay. A hacker sucks at fighting and has no easy way to contribute to a fight.
But hacker and pilot could actually be integrated into combat a lot more powerfully, and Shadowrun is slowly drifting that way. Use small combat drones, or perhaps live-tweak an allied cyborg to get every once of performance, or screw up enemy hardware, or create holographic illusions, or program heuristic nets in real time to predict and counter enemy actions.
Anyhow, our very first step is to make sure that all our "classes" can participate in our core gameplay.
...
... Our very zeroeth step is deciding what our core gameplay is.
Star Trek is not about combat. It's about seeing new things and meeting new people, and the conflicts that can arise. It's about finding common ground with aliens, no matter how odd: there is no "other" in Star Trek, no faceless masses to gun down. There are counterexamples, but those are usually from later on, after the series began to seriously decay. In the early days, even aggressive enemies like the Klingons were treated like people who didn't like you, rather than dangerous things you needed to kill.
As mentioned in the last essay, science fiction is about the life of people in the universe rather than about proving your own mettle. Therefore, rather than combat, we need the opposite: unification. Consensus. If D&D is like Pac Man, Star Trek is like Tetris. Rather than our basic action removing pieces from the board, our basic action needs to move pieces into alignment.
This also works well with the original combat of the series: it was u-boat combat. Submarines maneuvering, searching for each other in the dark. Pitched battles were rare and both sides usually came out pretty badly.
Unifying the pieces is a fun thing to consider, but we need to consider how that actually works. The advantage of a combat system as the core mechanic is that the GM can add and remove pieces pretty easily, without drowning in complexity. The plot of the D&D arc typically has very little to do with the combat, aside from maybe determining which pieces are involved.
But if we're unifying a large group of pieces, that means the GM is responsible for coming up with a lot of pieces, and setting them up strategically to offer a challenge.
We're not talking about a puzzle game with an optimal solution, but we're still talking about a game where pieces are related in a much wider variety of ways than "ally/enemy". The wider variety of options means that the GM needs to do a lot more planning.
Let's assist.
Instead of thinking of each individual person as the same thing as a monster in D&D, instead consider specific "constellations" of people.
Adding individually would require something like choosing to add "Renault, the old-guard dignitary", then deciding who he is related to in what ways. Instead, we would have a "government in transition" constellation which would have several people stock - the old-guard dignitary being among them.
There are two keys to this approach.
The first is that a person can be in multiple constellations. Renault might be the old-guard dignitary from the "government in transition" constellation, but he could also be part of the "corrupt medical industry vs the plague" constellation, or "industry vs preservation" constellation. Which roles he plays in those will inextricably link the old guard to those topics, and add a lot of complexity to the situation.
The second key to the approach is that the GM doesn't have to preplan everything. The players don't meet everyone at once, and there's no reason to add them all into the game at once. The GM can use our "constellation" system to roughly plan out a scenario, then introduce characters as they are needed. The GM will always know what characters remain "in the wings", and can pluck out various pieces as needed to make the adventure more interesting.
This sounds a bit dry, perhaps, but it's the same as talking about how GMs might populate a dungeon with monsters. There will also be various setpieces and named characters, but it's a different topic.
...
The stats and classes the player chooses are important. Let's start with stats.
We want to choose stats which create the Star Trek universe's unique flavor. Basically, if people can be good or bad at something (a stat), then that thing is going to be very important to our setting.
"Piloting" wouldn't be a stat, because only a few people pilot at all. Similarly, "strength" is a bad stat because it almost never matters.
"Combat" would be a good stat. Spock and Data have very high combat stats because of their species. Kirk has a high combat stat because of his training and build. Bones has a very low combat stat. This variation in skill creates variation in results - not just winning and losing in combat, but whether combat is a route that can be considered. Even if there is no combat, the act of avoiding combat is gameplay in itself.
"Intellect" is a bad stat, because it's too vague.
"Expertise" and "Theory" are good stats, instead. Expertise covers your ability to work with complex technical systems such as repairing starships. Theory would cover your ability to do things in your head, like math, history, or tactics. Theory would probably cover medical expertise as well: Star Trek considers it almost a humanities job rather than an engineering job. So Bones and Crusher would both have a high theory stat, but a mediocre (Crusher) or abysmal (Bones) expertise stat.
We would need a variety of social stats, because a lot of the challenges will be social.
"Leadership" wouldn't be as limited as in most games, because you have a lot more allies than in other games. The engineering staff follows you. The ally you made by rearranging pieces counts. So leadership could be used to move allied pieces faster, further.
On the other hand, "Negotiation" would be how well you could affect pieces that aren't your allies (or aren't operating in unity at the moment), and visa-versa. So Kirk would have a high leadership, while Picard would have a high negotiation.
Lastly, "privilege" is a good stat for us, reflecting a combination of rank, self-assurance, and backing. People with higher privilege can act much more outlandishly and be forgiven more easily - it's our version of charisma. Even when in trouble, Kirk's high privilege meant he could continue acting like an ass and eventually he'd be back on top. On the other hand, Worf has a very low privilege, and therefore he gets stomped every time he steps even slightly out of his comfort zone.
Privilege is an unusual stat, but it helps to define the universe of Star Trek. It's especially important in NPCs, as much of the behavior of guest stars is dictated by their privilege. It gives the universe that slight "dystopian bureaucracy" aftertaste that it often carries.
We could use these six stats: combat, expertise, theory, leadership, negotiation, and privilege.
With those in mind, we can discuss classes and species.
For example, Vulcans and androids have significant bonuses to combat, expertise, and theory... but they have significant penalties to leadership, negotiation, and privilege. (Vulcans like to negotiate, but they're really not very good at it.)
Betazoids have empathic powers which, among other things, radically increases their negotiation and privilege - perhaps balanced by a loss of theory or expertise.
Klingons have a bonus to combat and leadership, but a penalty to theory and privilege. Their low privilege is their adherence to their own aggressive, weird culture - it doesn't mean they blend in. Their aggressiveness is a fish-out-of-water issue, not a high privilege.
Classes could start simply as the branch you choose. Command-branch characters would obviously focus mostly on leadership and negotiation, while engineering-branch characters would be mostly expertise and theory. Security-branch would be combat, leadership, and expertise, etc. Rather than granting bonuses to these stats, they would instead require those stats for their class abilities, much as a a magician has a high intelligence but being a magician does not increase your intelligence.
But... what's the grist between the stats and the conflict?
...
Every decent RPG has "grist". This is the stuff that lies between the stats you chose at the beginning of the game and the actual die-rolling you do while playing. In D&D, the grist is mostly inventory selection - getting the gear you want, choosing the spells you want, and so on.
Those things are enabled by your stats, and then you use those things in combat. Your direct action is to swing a sword. You have a sword because your strength is high and warriors get weapon feats. But you don't "roll strength" against the enemy, nor do you simply rub the number of weapon feats you start with on them. You choose a specific weapon and a specific feat, and apply them at specific times.
In our Star Trek game, we're the same way. Except that we don't care about inventory at all. Captain Kirk does not have a different phaser than Scotty.
Our grist is made up of interpersonal stuff.
Rather than choosing a sword or an ax, Captain Kirk chooses a threatening or gentle approach. Like choosing a sword, Kirk cannot easily change tactics - it'll screw up his rhythm and make the target think he's unreliable and weird. "Why's he acting friendly/unfriendly all the sudden?"
Rather than choosing four spells from a spellbook, Kirk will choose four techniques he excels at. Some might be based on his authority as captain: the threateningly low orbit, the photon torpedo spread, the surprise teleport. These are things he can use without "owning" the abilities, but the abilities make them fast and effective.
Some of his abilities will be based on Star Fleet authority: offering technical assistance, threatening with regulations, setting up trade agreements, having crimes dismissed, etc.
Some of his abilities will be personal: the two-handed chop, dressing everyone up in local clothes to blend in, seducing the locals, monologuing.
Everyone gets abilities. Some are species-related, like the Betazoid empathic power, the Vulcan mind-meld, or the Klingon berserker pain resistance. Some are job-related, like the time-dilation powers Scotty has or Bones' tendency to put people on sick leave. Some are personal, like Riker's charisma or Geordi's visor. Some are based on cultural or social authority, such as Picard's reputation or Guinan's knowledge of everything everywhere.
And a vast number of them are just personality traits like arrogance, loyalty, racism, etc.
All of these "abilities" are a bit different from abilities in D&D. Rather than being permanent additions to your character, they are more like equipment. The player will switch them out whenever it seems like a good idea.
Similarly, traits like "arrogance" are not just a flat role play guide. There are hundreds of things that could be called "arrogance", just like there are hundreds of variants on "short sword". It's possible to refine your arrogance infinitely, and eventually end up with the Star Trek version of a short sword +3 flaming +5 vs ogres. Something like "arrogance about job (+2) and ship (+3)".
Sometimes your abilities will fail you or vanish - just like a sword can critically miss or you can be disarmed. Some are more permanent, like Geordi's visor. Some are quite malleable, like whether Bones feels argumentative this week.
And, yes, sometimes you'll gear up with specific abilities when going on a mission. Kirk can decide not to bring his arrogance along this time, because it'd make the situation worse. He's still Kirk, he's just trying to be less self-absorbed today. If that doesn't work, then he can spend the next time he's alone for a few hours to reconsider his approach.
That's the key to enjoying this game. Your characters' personalities are not some monolithic obelisk. This is about interacting with other people, understanding them, and working with them. Like in real life, your personality isn't always raging out of control.
...
Mechanically speaking, the game works something like this:
The GM comes up with a scenario intended to last 1-3 sessions. The players participating place their 'business cards' (note cards with their character names) into the center of the table.
The players explore the situation by free role playing, and while that unfolds the GM places business cards for each NPC and unfolding situation they encounter. For example, if you reach a high-tech but non-spacefaring planet where there is a disease raging out of control, the GM will place the disease as a card, as well as the various individuals the players meet, such as the planetary governor, the lead medical researcher, and the man dying of the disease. As time passes, the GM may add the military commander, robot police forces, and an oncoming hurricane.
Cards that are neighbors long-edge to long-edge are tightly allied (or being watched) and within shouting distance. Cards that are aligned on their short edge are more loosely allied. Note that tight allies chain - a giant stack of tight allies are all allies with each other. But loose allies do not: you can never be loosely allied with more than two people.
This is a player-focused arrangement, so if there is hidden information that only the GM knows, it doesn't have to be reflected in the cards until it is revealed. Of course, since it's player-focused, much of their efforts will be to align these cards to suit their needs.
Sometimes this is easy: if two players want to team up, they just agree to do so. Assuming no NPC or situation interferes, it's just a simple bit of free role play and the players' cards butt up.
Similarly, moving your card out of alignment is easy - going off on your own, breaking an alliance. It's just some free role play and you can move your card. But your erstwhile allies might not take it well, depending on the situation.
The real challenge is when you are trying to align yourself with non-player cards.
Bones wants to check out the disease, so he decides to move himself vertically with the disease. This doesn't mean he's allied with the disease, it just means that he's going to be in the midst of it. To do this, he'll need to explain how he's finding infected people.
One approach would be to talk to the lead medical researcher. Another would be to talk to the man dying of the disease. If they are okay with it in free role play, then Bones can be led to the disease and hook up with it without ever needing to leave free role play.
But there is plenty of strife. The dying man doesn't want to talk, and the researcher says it's too dangerous to expose him to. Now what?
One option is elbow grease. Bones can strike out into the city (perhaps with some friends) to search it manually. This is a shift action (~6 hours), so Bones expects it to take a while.
If Bones can use an ability to help out, this stands a pretty good chance of working. If he has a specific kind of medical scanner ability, that'd be fine. He could also use a less specific ability - such as medical intuition or intent to help everyone. The downside of the broader abilities is that he must have them equipped to use them, which means they can be used against him by the GM later on. It's much harder to use a medical scanner against you.
Bones has to roll against a particular target number on a D10. This number can be higher than 10 or lower than 1, but you may still want to roll, because the amount of failure or success matters.
Each point of success or failure can be spent to reduce the time spent or to increase the result's effect. If Bones succeeds by only a little, it could take him 6 hours! But if he succeeds by a lot, it might take him only a few minutes, or maybe he discovers a massive number of sick folk.
If Bones fails, he'll get in trouble. There's no such thing as "merely failing". If he fails by a small amount, he'll get arrested after 6 hours. But if he fails by a large amount, he might get shot after only a few minutes! Bones chooses how to spend his failure points, and he has to decide whether to fail fast and harmless, or slow and painful. Failing slow is really useful, because that means someone can interrupt his search before he actually gets caught, essentially negating the result at the last second. This requires that person spend "convenience points", but it's better than getting shot.
Anyway, that's if Bones has a suitable ability. If he doesn't have any suitable abilities, he can fall back on pure stats - probably privilege or negotiation. This may or may not succeed, but either way you ALSO fail by the exact same margin. If you roll a 3-margin success, you also have a 3-margin failure. If you roll a 3-margin failure, it's just a failure. This is the punishment for over-reaching.
Let's say Bones doesn't have any suitable abilities, but would prefer not to risk the automatic failure. So he instead chooses to win over one of the people who might be able to help him.
Let's say he chooses the lead researcher to buddy up with. He could also tail them, threaten them, etc, but let's say we're going the friendly route. The goal is to form a loose alliance (short edges of their cards butting up). The lead researcher is pretty antagonistic at the moment, so this might not be easy. How to accomplish it?
"Form a loose alliance" is a specific action, and there is a specific set of approaches to doing it. The negotiation stat is usually the backbone off this approach. Each time step dedicated to it reduces the difficulty - if Bones negotiates for a scene, he gets +0. An hour, +1. A shift, +2. A week, +3. In addition, he'll want to use an ability, or he'll run into the "autofail" problem again.
Well, Bones doesn't have any real negotiation abilities, and his negotiation stat is rock-bottom. So he has to fall back on privilege, which can always be substituted into these kinds of situations if you don't mind a small penalty. By ignoring cultural and situational barriers, Bones can just hang out with this researcher and try to make friends. Bones has a very high privilege - he's a grumpy old luddite weirdo that everyone loves.
Bones decides to hang out with the researcher for a phase to ally with him.
If this seems too hard, Bones can soften the researcher up by de-escalating. Escalating and de-escalating are important tactics to control the situation without directly moving cards. De-escalation is done by focusing on shared elements and ignoring potential thorns. Both Bones and the researcher are medical, and that means they share a job that relies on theory. Bones can use theory (and, hopefully, some ability) to de-escalate, then use privilege to form a loose alliance.
Even if Bones has no abilities to help with this, he can juggle timing to make it work out. He gets smacked with an autofail if he works without abilities, but that's okay. He'll spend all his success points on lowering the time to success, then spend all his fail points on increasing the penalty for failing. Now he has a few hours between his success happening and his failure happening, and in that space he can take advantage of the alliance.
Well, anyway, that's just a very basic set of ideas. I haven't polished it much.
Firstly, there's the concept of "class". Nearly every tabletop RPG has the concept of "class", because it's easy for the players to understand and the devs to balance. The issue is that some classes unlock new types of play: for example, only a magician can use spells, only a hacker can hack computers, etc.
Classes like "mage" and "cleric" are pretty seamlessly integrated into fantasy worlds because their abilities let them participate in the basic gameplay (fighting). A mage really sucks at fighting, but they are capable of throwing artillery fire into the mix.
On the other hand, classes like "hacker" are not integrated into Shadowrun very well at all, to the point of GMs just often just handwaving them as NPC-only classes. This is because the added gameplay - hacking, psychic stuff, and piloting - cannot easily integrate into the basic gameplay. A hacker sucks at fighting and has no easy way to contribute to a fight.
But hacker and pilot could actually be integrated into combat a lot more powerfully, and Shadowrun is slowly drifting that way. Use small combat drones, or perhaps live-tweak an allied cyborg to get every once of performance, or screw up enemy hardware, or create holographic illusions, or program heuristic nets in real time to predict and counter enemy actions.
Anyhow, our very first step is to make sure that all our "classes" can participate in our core gameplay.
...
... Our very zeroeth step is deciding what our core gameplay is.
Star Trek is not about combat. It's about seeing new things and meeting new people, and the conflicts that can arise. It's about finding common ground with aliens, no matter how odd: there is no "other" in Star Trek, no faceless masses to gun down. There are counterexamples, but those are usually from later on, after the series began to seriously decay. In the early days, even aggressive enemies like the Klingons were treated like people who didn't like you, rather than dangerous things you needed to kill.
As mentioned in the last essay, science fiction is about the life of people in the universe rather than about proving your own mettle. Therefore, rather than combat, we need the opposite: unification. Consensus. If D&D is like Pac Man, Star Trek is like Tetris. Rather than our basic action removing pieces from the board, our basic action needs to move pieces into alignment.
This also works well with the original combat of the series: it was u-boat combat. Submarines maneuvering, searching for each other in the dark. Pitched battles were rare and both sides usually came out pretty badly.
Unifying the pieces is a fun thing to consider, but we need to consider how that actually works. The advantage of a combat system as the core mechanic is that the GM can add and remove pieces pretty easily, without drowning in complexity. The plot of the D&D arc typically has very little to do with the combat, aside from maybe determining which pieces are involved.
But if we're unifying a large group of pieces, that means the GM is responsible for coming up with a lot of pieces, and setting them up strategically to offer a challenge.
We're not talking about a puzzle game with an optimal solution, but we're still talking about a game where pieces are related in a much wider variety of ways than "ally/enemy". The wider variety of options means that the GM needs to do a lot more planning.
Let's assist.
Instead of thinking of each individual person as the same thing as a monster in D&D, instead consider specific "constellations" of people.
Adding individually would require something like choosing to add "Renault, the old-guard dignitary", then deciding who he is related to in what ways. Instead, we would have a "government in transition" constellation which would have several people stock - the old-guard dignitary being among them.
There are two keys to this approach.
The first is that a person can be in multiple constellations. Renault might be the old-guard dignitary from the "government in transition" constellation, but he could also be part of the "corrupt medical industry vs the plague" constellation, or "industry vs preservation" constellation. Which roles he plays in those will inextricably link the old guard to those topics, and add a lot of complexity to the situation.
The second key to the approach is that the GM doesn't have to preplan everything. The players don't meet everyone at once, and there's no reason to add them all into the game at once. The GM can use our "constellation" system to roughly plan out a scenario, then introduce characters as they are needed. The GM will always know what characters remain "in the wings", and can pluck out various pieces as needed to make the adventure more interesting.
This sounds a bit dry, perhaps, but it's the same as talking about how GMs might populate a dungeon with monsters. There will also be various setpieces and named characters, but it's a different topic.
...
The stats and classes the player chooses are important. Let's start with stats.
We want to choose stats which create the Star Trek universe's unique flavor. Basically, if people can be good or bad at something (a stat), then that thing is going to be very important to our setting.
"Piloting" wouldn't be a stat, because only a few people pilot at all. Similarly, "strength" is a bad stat because it almost never matters.
"Combat" would be a good stat. Spock and Data have very high combat stats because of their species. Kirk has a high combat stat because of his training and build. Bones has a very low combat stat. This variation in skill creates variation in results - not just winning and losing in combat, but whether combat is a route that can be considered. Even if there is no combat, the act of avoiding combat is gameplay in itself.
"Intellect" is a bad stat, because it's too vague.
"Expertise" and "Theory" are good stats, instead. Expertise covers your ability to work with complex technical systems such as repairing starships. Theory would cover your ability to do things in your head, like math, history, or tactics. Theory would probably cover medical expertise as well: Star Trek considers it almost a humanities job rather than an engineering job. So Bones and Crusher would both have a high theory stat, but a mediocre (Crusher) or abysmal (Bones) expertise stat.
We would need a variety of social stats, because a lot of the challenges will be social.
"Leadership" wouldn't be as limited as in most games, because you have a lot more allies than in other games. The engineering staff follows you. The ally you made by rearranging pieces counts. So leadership could be used to move allied pieces faster, further.
On the other hand, "Negotiation" would be how well you could affect pieces that aren't your allies (or aren't operating in unity at the moment), and visa-versa. So Kirk would have a high leadership, while Picard would have a high negotiation.
Lastly, "privilege" is a good stat for us, reflecting a combination of rank, self-assurance, and backing. People with higher privilege can act much more outlandishly and be forgiven more easily - it's our version of charisma. Even when in trouble, Kirk's high privilege meant he could continue acting like an ass and eventually he'd be back on top. On the other hand, Worf has a very low privilege, and therefore he gets stomped every time he steps even slightly out of his comfort zone.
Privilege is an unusual stat, but it helps to define the universe of Star Trek. It's especially important in NPCs, as much of the behavior of guest stars is dictated by their privilege. It gives the universe that slight "dystopian bureaucracy" aftertaste that it often carries.
We could use these six stats: combat, expertise, theory, leadership, negotiation, and privilege.
With those in mind, we can discuss classes and species.
For example, Vulcans and androids have significant bonuses to combat, expertise, and theory... but they have significant penalties to leadership, negotiation, and privilege. (Vulcans like to negotiate, but they're really not very good at it.)
Betazoids have empathic powers which, among other things, radically increases their negotiation and privilege - perhaps balanced by a loss of theory or expertise.
Klingons have a bonus to combat and leadership, but a penalty to theory and privilege. Their low privilege is their adherence to their own aggressive, weird culture - it doesn't mean they blend in. Their aggressiveness is a fish-out-of-water issue, not a high privilege.
Classes could start simply as the branch you choose. Command-branch characters would obviously focus mostly on leadership and negotiation, while engineering-branch characters would be mostly expertise and theory. Security-branch would be combat, leadership, and expertise, etc. Rather than granting bonuses to these stats, they would instead require those stats for their class abilities, much as a a magician has a high intelligence but being a magician does not increase your intelligence.
But... what's the grist between the stats and the conflict?
...
Every decent RPG has "grist". This is the stuff that lies between the stats you chose at the beginning of the game and the actual die-rolling you do while playing. In D&D, the grist is mostly inventory selection - getting the gear you want, choosing the spells you want, and so on.
Those things are enabled by your stats, and then you use those things in combat. Your direct action is to swing a sword. You have a sword because your strength is high and warriors get weapon feats. But you don't "roll strength" against the enemy, nor do you simply rub the number of weapon feats you start with on them. You choose a specific weapon and a specific feat, and apply them at specific times.
In our Star Trek game, we're the same way. Except that we don't care about inventory at all. Captain Kirk does not have a different phaser than Scotty.
Our grist is made up of interpersonal stuff.
Rather than choosing a sword or an ax, Captain Kirk chooses a threatening or gentle approach. Like choosing a sword, Kirk cannot easily change tactics - it'll screw up his rhythm and make the target think he's unreliable and weird. "Why's he acting friendly/unfriendly all the sudden?"
Rather than choosing four spells from a spellbook, Kirk will choose four techniques he excels at. Some might be based on his authority as captain: the threateningly low orbit, the photon torpedo spread, the surprise teleport. These are things he can use without "owning" the abilities, but the abilities make them fast and effective.
Some of his abilities will be based on Star Fleet authority: offering technical assistance, threatening with regulations, setting up trade agreements, having crimes dismissed, etc.
Some of his abilities will be personal: the two-handed chop, dressing everyone up in local clothes to blend in, seducing the locals, monologuing.
Everyone gets abilities. Some are species-related, like the Betazoid empathic power, the Vulcan mind-meld, or the Klingon berserker pain resistance. Some are job-related, like the time-dilation powers Scotty has or Bones' tendency to put people on sick leave. Some are personal, like Riker's charisma or Geordi's visor. Some are based on cultural or social authority, such as Picard's reputation or Guinan's knowledge of everything everywhere.
And a vast number of them are just personality traits like arrogance, loyalty, racism, etc.
All of these "abilities" are a bit different from abilities in D&D. Rather than being permanent additions to your character, they are more like equipment. The player will switch them out whenever it seems like a good idea.
Similarly, traits like "arrogance" are not just a flat role play guide. There are hundreds of things that could be called "arrogance", just like there are hundreds of variants on "short sword". It's possible to refine your arrogance infinitely, and eventually end up with the Star Trek version of a short sword +3 flaming +5 vs ogres. Something like "arrogance about job (+2) and ship (+3)".
Sometimes your abilities will fail you or vanish - just like a sword can critically miss or you can be disarmed. Some are more permanent, like Geordi's visor. Some are quite malleable, like whether Bones feels argumentative this week.
And, yes, sometimes you'll gear up with specific abilities when going on a mission. Kirk can decide not to bring his arrogance along this time, because it'd make the situation worse. He's still Kirk, he's just trying to be less self-absorbed today. If that doesn't work, then he can spend the next time he's alone for a few hours to reconsider his approach.
That's the key to enjoying this game. Your characters' personalities are not some monolithic obelisk. This is about interacting with other people, understanding them, and working with them. Like in real life, your personality isn't always raging out of control.
...
Mechanically speaking, the game works something like this:
The GM comes up with a scenario intended to last 1-3 sessions. The players participating place their 'business cards' (note cards with their character names) into the center of the table.
The players explore the situation by free role playing, and while that unfolds the GM places business cards for each NPC and unfolding situation they encounter. For example, if you reach a high-tech but non-spacefaring planet where there is a disease raging out of control, the GM will place the disease as a card, as well as the various individuals the players meet, such as the planetary governor, the lead medical researcher, and the man dying of the disease. As time passes, the GM may add the military commander, robot police forces, and an oncoming hurricane.
Cards that are neighbors long-edge to long-edge are tightly allied (or being watched) and within shouting distance. Cards that are aligned on their short edge are more loosely allied. Note that tight allies chain - a giant stack of tight allies are all allies with each other. But loose allies do not: you can never be loosely allied with more than two people.
This is a player-focused arrangement, so if there is hidden information that only the GM knows, it doesn't have to be reflected in the cards until it is revealed. Of course, since it's player-focused, much of their efforts will be to align these cards to suit their needs.
Sometimes this is easy: if two players want to team up, they just agree to do so. Assuming no NPC or situation interferes, it's just a simple bit of free role play and the players' cards butt up.
Similarly, moving your card out of alignment is easy - going off on your own, breaking an alliance. It's just some free role play and you can move your card. But your erstwhile allies might not take it well, depending on the situation.
The real challenge is when you are trying to align yourself with non-player cards.
Bones wants to check out the disease, so he decides to move himself vertically with the disease. This doesn't mean he's allied with the disease, it just means that he's going to be in the midst of it. To do this, he'll need to explain how he's finding infected people.
One approach would be to talk to the lead medical researcher. Another would be to talk to the man dying of the disease. If they are okay with it in free role play, then Bones can be led to the disease and hook up with it without ever needing to leave free role play.
But there is plenty of strife. The dying man doesn't want to talk, and the researcher says it's too dangerous to expose him to. Now what?
One option is elbow grease. Bones can strike out into the city (perhaps with some friends) to search it manually. This is a shift action (~6 hours), so Bones expects it to take a while.
If Bones can use an ability to help out, this stands a pretty good chance of working. If he has a specific kind of medical scanner ability, that'd be fine. He could also use a less specific ability - such as medical intuition or intent to help everyone. The downside of the broader abilities is that he must have them equipped to use them, which means they can be used against him by the GM later on. It's much harder to use a medical scanner against you.
Bones has to roll against a particular target number on a D10. This number can be higher than 10 or lower than 1, but you may still want to roll, because the amount of failure or success matters.
Each point of success or failure can be spent to reduce the time spent or to increase the result's effect. If Bones succeeds by only a little, it could take him 6 hours! But if he succeeds by a lot, it might take him only a few minutes, or maybe he discovers a massive number of sick folk.
If Bones fails, he'll get in trouble. There's no such thing as "merely failing". If he fails by a small amount, he'll get arrested after 6 hours. But if he fails by a large amount, he might get shot after only a few minutes! Bones chooses how to spend his failure points, and he has to decide whether to fail fast and harmless, or slow and painful. Failing slow is really useful, because that means someone can interrupt his search before he actually gets caught, essentially negating the result at the last second. This requires that person spend "convenience points", but it's better than getting shot.
Anyway, that's if Bones has a suitable ability. If he doesn't have any suitable abilities, he can fall back on pure stats - probably privilege or negotiation. This may or may not succeed, but either way you ALSO fail by the exact same margin. If you roll a 3-margin success, you also have a 3-margin failure. If you roll a 3-margin failure, it's just a failure. This is the punishment for over-reaching.
Let's say Bones doesn't have any suitable abilities, but would prefer not to risk the automatic failure. So he instead chooses to win over one of the people who might be able to help him.
Let's say he chooses the lead researcher to buddy up with. He could also tail them, threaten them, etc, but let's say we're going the friendly route. The goal is to form a loose alliance (short edges of their cards butting up). The lead researcher is pretty antagonistic at the moment, so this might not be easy. How to accomplish it?
"Form a loose alliance" is a specific action, and there is a specific set of approaches to doing it. The negotiation stat is usually the backbone off this approach. Each time step dedicated to it reduces the difficulty - if Bones negotiates for a scene, he gets +0. An hour, +1. A shift, +2. A week, +3. In addition, he'll want to use an ability, or he'll run into the "autofail" problem again.
Well, Bones doesn't have any real negotiation abilities, and his negotiation stat is rock-bottom. So he has to fall back on privilege, which can always be substituted into these kinds of situations if you don't mind a small penalty. By ignoring cultural and situational barriers, Bones can just hang out with this researcher and try to make friends. Bones has a very high privilege - he's a grumpy old luddite weirdo that everyone loves.
Bones decides to hang out with the researcher for a phase to ally with him.
If this seems too hard, Bones can soften the researcher up by de-escalating. Escalating and de-escalating are important tactics to control the situation without directly moving cards. De-escalation is done by focusing on shared elements and ignoring potential thorns. Both Bones and the researcher are medical, and that means they share a job that relies on theory. Bones can use theory (and, hopefully, some ability) to de-escalate, then use privilege to form a loose alliance.
Even if Bones has no abilities to help with this, he can juggle timing to make it work out. He gets smacked with an autofail if he works without abilities, but that's okay. He'll spend all his success points on lowering the time to success, then spend all his fail points on increasing the penalty for failing. Now he has a few hours between his success happening and his failure happening, and in that space he can take advantage of the alliance.
Well, anyway, that's just a very basic set of ideas. I haven't polished it much.
Monday, July 07, 2014
Utopian Scifi and Families in Star Trek
I recently found a link to a slightly obnoxious Slate/Quora article about shipboard families in Star Trek. Feel free to not read it, I'm not a fan of Slate, Quora, or the specific essay. Link via @derekpost
The essay basically states that Roddenberry's ideas were half-baked and stupid, and that Star Fleet is clearly a military operation. What a thing to say!
At the time, Roddenberry's ideas were amazing. The steady drift of the series from a utopian future to a typical military sci-fi drama makes the ideas seem foolish in hindsight, but that's because the series became military sci-fi.
It didn't start that way, and it should not have drifted that way.
But Hollywood will be Hollywood: never enough guns, never enough explosions.
Families and non-military friendships have always been an important part of the heart of Star Trek. A lot of the unique flavor of Star Trek came from the way it dedicated itself to these relationships, and not to military camaraderie and competition. This was especially true in TNG: just think about how many episodes featured these kinds of nonmilitary relationships. Hell, Data's entire character was about "learning how to have normal social relationships", no matter how they cast it as "getting emotions".
The original series was a bit less obvious about it, but even there it was not militaristic. While the crew was not really friendly with each other, they were more about learning to get along and figuring out how to work together rather than approaching things as soldiers doing their job. It was intended, right from the start, to be about international cooperation. Not shooty-shooty murder.
The universe of Star Trek has become typical military science fiction since then. When we look at the universe, we see it overrun with threats that are met by military force. It is so generic that you can literally run simulations based on the known stats of the various ships. The games make this explicit: every recent Star Trek game is about killing shit more efficiently than shit kills you.
When the Borg were initially introduced, it was to show the hopelessness of military obsession. The borg were the "super-military". No weapons could threaten them. Resistance was futile. If you do try to resist them, they actively pursue you and incorporate you into their whole, turning whatever military strength you managed to obtain against you.
The only thing to do was to band together with everyone and try and find a nonmilitary solution. It was TNG's way to introduce the same impetus TOS had: international cooperation instead of shooty-shooty murder.
But Hollywood couldn't bear to let that stand, and so the Federation's military was upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and now the Federation can win a slugging match against the Borg. The Borg do not incorporate your military strength any more, either, because that doesn't fit into a summer blockbuster narrative. Their incorporation is now a weak point to be exploited, because obviously learning things is a weakness.
That is so wrong and stupid.
Roddenberry's "half-baked" ideas about the future were extremely compelling. In Science Fiction, "The Other" is usually met with force, with murder. That's a bad way to see the world. The idea that you can meet up with something alien and talk it out is much better. The universe is chaotic and confusing, but you can meet it halfway and still have a life, still have a family. That is a world worth living in.
I'm sorry Hollywood's obsession with explosions and murder has degraded Star Trek to the point where people think the original idea is incomprehensible.
The essay basically states that Roddenberry's ideas were half-baked and stupid, and that Star Fleet is clearly a military operation. What a thing to say!
At the time, Roddenberry's ideas were amazing. The steady drift of the series from a utopian future to a typical military sci-fi drama makes the ideas seem foolish in hindsight, but that's because the series became military sci-fi.
It didn't start that way, and it should not have drifted that way.
But Hollywood will be Hollywood: never enough guns, never enough explosions.
Families and non-military friendships have always been an important part of the heart of Star Trek. A lot of the unique flavor of Star Trek came from the way it dedicated itself to these relationships, and not to military camaraderie and competition. This was especially true in TNG: just think about how many episodes featured these kinds of nonmilitary relationships. Hell, Data's entire character was about "learning how to have normal social relationships", no matter how they cast it as "getting emotions".
The original series was a bit less obvious about it, but even there it was not militaristic. While the crew was not really friendly with each other, they were more about learning to get along and figuring out how to work together rather than approaching things as soldiers doing their job. It was intended, right from the start, to be about international cooperation. Not shooty-shooty murder.
The universe of Star Trek has become typical military science fiction since then. When we look at the universe, we see it overrun with threats that are met by military force. It is so generic that you can literally run simulations based on the known stats of the various ships. The games make this explicit: every recent Star Trek game is about killing shit more efficiently than shit kills you.
When the Borg were initially introduced, it was to show the hopelessness of military obsession. The borg were the "super-military". No weapons could threaten them. Resistance was futile. If you do try to resist them, they actively pursue you and incorporate you into their whole, turning whatever military strength you managed to obtain against you.
The only thing to do was to band together with everyone and try and find a nonmilitary solution. It was TNG's way to introduce the same impetus TOS had: international cooperation instead of shooty-shooty murder.
But Hollywood couldn't bear to let that stand, and so the Federation's military was upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and now the Federation can win a slugging match against the Borg. The Borg do not incorporate your military strength any more, either, because that doesn't fit into a summer blockbuster narrative. Their incorporation is now a weak point to be exploited, because obviously learning things is a weakness.
That is so wrong and stupid.
Roddenberry's "half-baked" ideas about the future were extremely compelling. In Science Fiction, "The Other" is usually met with force, with murder. That's a bad way to see the world. The idea that you can meet up with something alien and talk it out is much better. The universe is chaotic and confusing, but you can meet it halfway and still have a life, still have a family. That is a world worth living in.
I'm sorry Hollywood's obsession with explosions and murder has degraded Star Trek to the point where people think the original idea is incomprehensible.
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