So, if you’re curious about how to handle something like Superman’s invulnerability in Fate, go read this – it’s well thought out and quite clever.

The takeaway from it, which I’m chewing on, can be paraphrased as such – Superman’s invulnerability does not prevent “taken out” results, rather, it offloads those consequences onto his environment[1]. This is a fun trick, but what intrigues me about it is that there are many more subtle forms of invulnerability than Superman’s, specifically the narrative invulnerability of named characters from TV[2]. You know they’re going to survive, largely intact, so how can you tie their actions directly to the tension in the story?

This idea of offloading consequences promises to be an interesting path to doing this, but I feel like it requires a next step. When you have only one Superman, it’s not hard to play the offloading by ear, but when the whole team is invulnerable, that can get weird and undifferentiated very quickly, so the question becomes how you make these things distinctive, and it strikes me that the answer is to give players some control over the direction that their offloading goes. It may not be 100% in player hands – situational offloading may also be common – but it can be a great way to differentiate the things that are important to a character.

This also might allow for one of Fred’s favorite ideas to get new legs, since it might also be a way to measure a hero’s scale. Hawkeye’s offloading is smaller and more personal than the Hulk or Thor because they’re larges “scale” heroes.

That said, I’m not yet sure how to create player-directed offloading that is evocative but easily comprehensible. I can think of some broad categories (Peopel around you, home cities, crime stats) but they’re a little bland. More, I need a good way to differentiate them from things that normally go wrong over the course of play. If all these things do is change the uniforms of the thugs I’m fighting then it might feel a little toothless.

So, chewing.

Yeah, I’m excited about Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. This should be news to no one. But I was proofing the bit I’m writing for it and really got to thinking about something.

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Amber DRPG (which LGS largely refined its ruleset from) one of the things you could buy with character points was a personal world (called a personal shadow) and I don’t think I’m spilling any beans to say that LGS allows something similar.

Now, the Amber item & ally rules (which shadows were a part of) were both simple and complex – there were a ton of attributes which you could invest points in to make a thing potent in one fashion or another, which lead to an array of potent and abusable personal artifacts (even before the rules got even crazier with the first supplement). it was a little screwy, but it conformed to a bit of basic math – the more points you put in, the more significant the whosiwhatsit was, as indicated by its power. For magic swords and pet dragons, this worked out ok, but it got a little bit weird with shadows.

See, for 1 point, you could have whatever shadow you wanted. Star wars? Kung Fu Hong Kong? Sword and Sorcery? Done. 1 point. This seemed crazy potent until you realized that you could also do it for free, if you just invested some time in play, but that’s what the extra points were for. Basically, you could spend more points to better protect or isolate your little private world.

And that’s where the disconnect kicked in. More points did not make a shadow more significant to play, ti made it less significant. You were spending points for extra shrink wrap around your idea, to keep it form getting dirtied up by play. Now, this was not totally unreasonable – the ADRPG GM advice was basically “screw your players, screw them hard” so it was not unreasonable to buy out of fear.

But it also introduced a more subtle problem – there was no way to signify – mechanically – that you wanted a shadow to be a part of play. If you didn’t put many points into it, it wasn’t important (as was the case elsewhere in the system) but if you did put points into it, it was untouchable.

Now, LGS handles this a little better. There are mechanical and cosmological tweaks that make personal worlds a lot more interesting, but I still found myself wrestling with it while statting up a character. See, I’d introduced a world in his story which was interesting, and had some knowledge and power that made it a place of note in the multiverse, but it wasn’t a Super Serious Place. Not a superpower, but a mere power, as it were. I spent 2 points on the world, which I think was technically correct, but I had a hard time coming to terms with that. The place was interesting and important to him – shouldn’t I signify that with more points?

Which in turn, revealed the real lesson that I have learned in Amber and other games – don’t get too caught up in communicating via points when the real kind of communication will do you better. It ultimately doesn’t matter how many points I put into a world if no one is interested in it but me. The importance of a world (or any setting element) is based not on my investment in it, but rather, by everyone else’s investment in it.

So take a minute to get out of your own head. If you have something you want to see in your game, think about ways it can make other players awesome and your GMs life easier. Do that, and you’ll have made something that matters, no matter how many points you put into it.

The token based initiative system in Marvel Heroic has held up pretty well for me, and has left me chewing on more physical artifact solutions to pacing problems. In this case, I’m thinking about dealing with asynchronous play. That is, what do you do when the party splits up, but you still want to have a finale that draws in everyone? Few things are as lame as being that character three rooms away from the fight who can’t join in because you have no in character reason to rush over.[1]

Marvel addresses this by largely discarding the notion of time, and just moving from action beat to action beat. This works pretty well, provided you’re in a situation composed entirely of action beats. The problem I run into is in more open ended games where players have a lot of mobility and authority (Amber being the biggest offender) where the beats are a lot broader.

I’m averse to a strict scene framing economy (which would technically solve the problem), since I think the scene is a terribly inconsistent unit of currency. I use the word “beat” because it’s intentionally a bit more muddled, but generally means “Something happens” – a beat can be a single gesture or an entire scene, depending on what’s going on.[2] I admit, I like that kind of muddle.

So I’m wondering if it might be possible to do a currency-based initiative for asynchronous play. Give everyone maybe 5 tokens, and just go nuts, making players pay out to act, with “act” defined intentionally loosely, but roughly equivalent to a writing beat[3]. So long as everyone is spending at parity, then everyone can refresh regularly, but if anyone gets too far ahead, the distribution of tokens creates a natural elasticity that brings things back in line.

So far so good, but a good GM can generally juggle this without tokens – it’s basic spotlight management – but the point at which it becomes useful is when one player hits a “fixed point” – a dramatic scene which is going to have consequences and impact. If you “freeze” that player at that point, then each player now has their own units of currency to (if they wish) build a path to the fixed point. That is, if you end up facing down the dark lord and I’ve still got 3 tokens, then I might build three beats/scenes that culminate in my joining the big fight.

Not 100% sure of it – this merits some experimentation, but I really like the idea of elasticity rather than strict progression, so the question is whether this really serves that end. Well, only one way to find out.

The discussion of the core action in cyberpunk yesterday got me thinking about core actions and what it looks like to start from those in designing a game. It’s been interesting, and has cracked open a few old jars.

One of the first things I bumped my nose against is that there seems to be a lot of overlap between this idea and what have historically been held up as classic adventuring structures. The exactly list of these varies, but the dungeon crawl is only one of them (albeit the most prominent). Others include the quest, the escape, the delivery, the investigation and so on. At first, I thought I might be able to mine this list for ideas, but as I started to do so, it revealed that while these are related to core actions, they are at a slightly different layer of operations.

To use a concrete example, let’s look at the quest. It’s one of the most classic models for an arc (whether that arc is a few sessions or a whole campaign), and if you know that this is the model your game is going to follow, you can plan a lot of clever things. But by itself, it is not a lot of great guidance in terms of what the characters will actually be doing in a session. Looking for the grail, yes, but what actual actions does that turn into?[1]

If the character’s know where the object is, then the bulk of adventure is in getting there, and the primary action is just that – going in a straight line and (hopefully) encountering interesting things. Most likely, this ends up following the “New Town, New Trouble” model that is a staple of television shows from The A Team to Avatar: the Last Airbender. So the action is – come to town, encounter an obstacle which (physically, morally or otherwise) will keep you from proceeding, overcome it, and move on.

If the character’s don’t know where the object is (as is more often the case) then it’s more likely to be the “Trail of Breadcrumbs”. You don’t know where the goal is, but you know where the next link in the chain may be. This plays out much like new town, new trouble, but rather than encountering obstacles to progress, there is usually some sort of problem around the breadcrumb (and pointer to the next breadcrumb).

This may seem like a very small difference. And it is – play is going to be pretty similar in both cases. But it becomes important when compared to the third approach, perhaps best described as “Let Them Figure it Out”. This is that awkward point in play where the GM has given a goal, but as players you have no real sense of how to act on it, so you flail about hitting streets or libraries hoping that something shakes loose. This can be fun if it’s the point of the game (Noir is full of these things) but it’s utterly frustrating when it’s a hurdle to actually doing anything. The difference is moving from the idea (The Quest) to the execution (what actions will this require?), and thinking about that transition before play starts.

More to come on this, I’m pretty sure.

Slightly worried that I gave the impression yesterday that there are no real options for Cyberpunk RPGs besides run and gun dungeon crawls. That’s not true, and in fairness, it’s never been quite that bad. From my perspective, the big three cyberpunk games (CP20XX, Shadowrun and Cyberspace) set the tone for most of what I’m discussing, but they all have elements that are better and deeper than I give credit for.

What’s more, there are numerous great cyberpunk games that address specific slices of the concept. Want to fight the man? Try Misspent Youth. Want to explore a seedy, connected world of betrayal an intrigue? Tech Noir is the game for you. Want to change the world? See if you can find a copy of Underground. RPGs have been written about Anime like Serial Experiment Lain, and I haven’t even touched on games like Remember Tomorrow, Eclipse Phase, GURPS: Cyberpunk and several more I’m sure I’m forgetting.

All of which is to say that cyberpunk – as an idea – is not poorly served, but there’s a lot of leeway[1] in terms of what shape that service takes. Some of this is just the normal spread of foci within a genre. For example, I’m not hugely interested in the questions of identity that are central to some cyberpunk ideas, but I expect other people are not hugely interested in media manipulation and stock prices (which completely tickle my fancy). This is normal and healthy.

However, I think there’s an underlying structural question which cyberpunk has a difficult time with[2] and that is the question of the default action.

The default action is something that authors don’t usually need to worry about, but RPG setting designers do, as it’s the question that goes “Ok, that’s all interesting and stuff, but what do we do?” For D&D, the default action (go into a dungeon, fight stuff, get treasure) is well established, and D&D settings are full of hooks that provide interesting reasons to do that. It’s not that this is the only thing you can do in the setting, but having a default makes play much easier on many levels.

Few settings have the same clarity as D&D and its ilk, and it’s no great surprise that cyberpunk seized upon it as a default, just replacing caves and dungeons with offices and arcologies. Because without that, there’s a good case to be made that the default action in cyberpunk would be “Watch the author’s vision of the future, then be audience to some world changing event that asks a Big Question about human existence”.

Ok, that’s cynical. If you read other cyberpunk, a perfectly valid answer might be “Drive hovertanks across a heavily patrolled border, like the cyber Duke boys” or “Sneak everywhere then die in a boss fight because all your points are in hacking” and that could be awesome too. But the underlying question remains, and the answer to that is really going to shape what you want out of a cyberpunk game (or any game, really). For me, I want the team of experts, missions based structure, taking steps to try to change the world, and Leverage speaks right to that. But it is FAR from the only way to go about it.

I ran a terrible game last week, or at least it looks that way on paper. I did a whole lot of things which I tend to consider flags of a problem game, including:

• Somewhat railroady plot, which players could interact with, but not really change.
• Few personal stakes, as most of the important stakes belonged to NPCs
• Powerful, proactive NPCs pursuing secret agendas
• Negligible chargen guidance or coordination

Yet despite those things, the actual game went splendidly, and it was a great reminder of the importance of context.

See, the game in question was an impromptu gathering as it turned out that all of the Born to be Kings players[1] were in town for one night only, and we seized the window to get the band back together. As such, there was little time for prep, and the purpose of the game was a little bit different than usual. Since I was going to be running this one, my goal was to call back to and tie into the events of Kings in a way that would let the players feel like they got to see how some of their own threads unravel.

As such, the NPCs which I so grossly misused were, by and large, the PCs and important NPCs of the previous game. I didn’t handle it flawlessly, but I managed to limit things to a single puppet show[2], and was pretty proud of that. I tied up one thread from the old game in a way that tied many old elements together, and in the end, I think it was a pretty satisfying game for all.

But, man, even in the middle of it I was really cognizant of the rules I was violating, enough so to really question whether I was on the right track. But with a clear understanding of my table, my players and the goals of the game, the rules had to take a back seat. If I had done otherwise, it would probably have still been a fun game – that was a world class table of players – but it would not have been the reunion and epilogue we were looking for.

Ok, trying to solve a problem for Amber, and this is the current brainstorm. The problem is that Amber has super-competent protagonists, but at the same time, some of them are EXTRA competent within their field, and this needs to be respected.

Imagining an aspects as approaches system, it’s easy enough to express the idea of a paragon – that’s a +4 aspect, easy peasy. Those are basically unique, and super potent..

I could leave it at that, just allow players to buy one of those, or offer some tradeoff (more points or whatever) if they do not. But there’s also the question of powers. Historically, Amber handled powers on a different axis than stats, so there was no real interplay between them, excepting that they were bought from the same point pool (which NPCs blithely ignored). And since one stat[1] tends to control powers, you get a weird lopsided-ness where some characters are spiked in a stat and a power.

I find this kind of unintuitive, so I want to pull from the same bucket, so to speak, and make power flexibility as much of a signature as an apex skill.

The most obvious solution seems to be buckets. Is you character focused (so he can apex a skill), Flexible (so he can apex a power) or Forceful (so he can apex an attribute)? Maybe there are other potential buckets too, but I like this question since it also partly explains why you could pull this off and others couldn’t (or maybe could, if they’d chosen something else).

But the more I think, the more I believe I’m overcomplicating it. Allow a +4, no problem, and the trick is going to be how the bonus gets built. Aspect-Appoaches assumes two things, theoretically a skill + an aspect/approach, but I wonder if even that is overly constrained. Maybe I go full bore and just say “pick two aspects” and then allow fate point expenditure to bring in more of them.

Huh. That might work.