Favorite PbtA Assist Mechanics?

#21

Whenever discussions like this come up I always want to know: what behavior are you trying to incentivize? Something I find interesting is that to the best of my knowledge there aren’t any games which incentivize something like assistance. In many games there is a slightly improved chance that the action will succeed, but I know of no games which give you (either the character(s) or the team) a resource (xp, Benny, etc.) just for helping out.

Since I had this realization I’ve wondered why nobody has this in a game design. I wonder if it says something about the society we live in. (Or at least the one where the designers of games we see come from.)

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#22

This is exactly why I prefer the straight bonus to the roll–versus the typical aid/interfere moves where you’re taking the spotlight away from the “spotlight player” while the helping player takes time to roll. In the way I use, it’s a brief conversation (not much longer than the helper stating “I’d like to help”) and it avoids the “nesting” you talk about because rather than resolving two moves, you’re still only resolving one–it’s just that the consequences are going to be given to the helper, or maybe both–but there’s none of that “well, this roll was a full success, but this one was a partial success” sort of stuff that makes my brain want to jump out of my head.

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#23

A pretty weak example, but there’s this Bard move in Dungeon World:

A Little Help From My Friends

When you successfully aid someone you take +1 forward as well.

Which is meant, I think, to incentivize the Bard to do more Aiding. And that’s cool!

Related would be the Wizard’s Know It All move (and similar moves in Apocalypse World, like the Savvyhead’s Oftner Right and the Quarantine’s Eager to Know):

Know-It-All

When another player’s character comes to you for advice and you tell them what you think is best , they get +1 forward when following your advice and you mark experience if they do.

But I think your overall point is sound… I can’t think of any games off-hand that directly reward helping out as a matter of course. I feel like I’ve seen some, but if I have, they’re hanging out just outside of my conscious memory.

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#24

Mm, that’s interesting, and something I hadn’t really given conscious thought to. I think there’s usually a baseline assumption that if you’re sharing an objective, your reward for assisting is that you’re bringing you all collectively towards success.

The closest thing to rewarding assists that comes to mind is Masks (again)-- it’s not the team mechanic directly, but when you roll a 10+ on a “Comfort and Support” move (which gives the target exp, clears a condition, or shifts their labels if they open up), you can clear a condition on yourself too, implying that offering empathy to someone can be cathartic in return.

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#25

Oh, man… it’s not PbtA, but you know what game has an awesome “assist” mechanic: The Mountain Witch.

IIRC, every act you set your Trust with each other PC, from 1 to 6 (?). When they help you, they add your Trust with them to your roll. And the probabilities of the game are stacked such that you often need help from your fellow PCs, so you’ve got a strong incentive to pass out Trust.

But! Every PC also has a dark fate, a reason to betray the others. And when they act against you, they add YOUR Trust in THEM to their roll. So the more you Trust me, the more effective my betrayal is.

It’s such a great dynamic–at least for a game that’s all about eventual betrayal!

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#26

This one is great but it imposes a small problem: It only works if it’s used before the roll. If you allow it to be used after, it’ll only be used if the acting PC rolls a total of 6 or 9.

A good variant is, “If you help out, the PC you’re helping changes their total result to 7, but you share in the costs or consequences, if any.”

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#27

For Fourth World, I analyzed the probability of Dungeon World’s aid move, concluded it sucked, and handled it differently. (Fourth World also has a playbook which is all about leveraging the aid move in various ways.)

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#28

Yeah, I’m thoroughly convinced from everyone’s responses and my own experiences that the original AW mechanic isn’t great =P

It’s cool to see everybody’s creative solutions for improving it ^___^

Do you like keeping the Assist as a second roll (I think that’s right from your blog)? It looks like the probability of failing the assist goes way down when you use a stat other than +Hx, but I think I still prefer mechanics that let you just give the assist without slowing things down with another roll.

#29

In the game I am designing, I rejiggered this a little bit. It’s probably not a good enough mechanic yet, because the bonuses it can potentially provide are too big, but the gist is:

There are two circumstances in which you can help someone.

  • When they are about to spend Resolve – which are usually situations in which they are taking ‘damage’ (You can think of Resolve as being similar to Stress in Blades in the Dark)
  • When they are making a roll.

If you are helping someone who is spending Resolve, you spend one Resolve yourself, and they then need to spend less – depending on their Trust towards you.
If you are helping someone who is making a roll, you spend Insight (Which is sortof like a Benny or Fate point) and give them a bonus on their roll based on their Trust towards you.

If you are helping someone who doesn’t Trust you yet, you have to spend more, and give only a baseline benefit, but this automatically increases their Trust towards you (Because you really pitched in to help them out)
If you are helping someone who does Trust you, you have the option of spending MORE Resolve/Insight to increase their trust towards you.

My major worry about this right now is that the boost from spending Insight to help someone who REALLY TRUSTS YOU is… +3. Which is gigantic. It also represents a more-or-less endgame situation, but still. I’ll probably have to adopt the Masks technique and cap total bonuses at +4, which… might have interesting repercussions now that I think about it.

But I THINK this setup has the advantage of making people want to help (because you can increase Trust, which is sortof the point of the game) without taking the spotlight off the help-ee, because there’s no roll involved?

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#30

Another vote for Masks.

Also, Sagas of the Icelanders. The simplicity of accumulating Bonds (a currency) and then spending them to help (or hinder) feels great. Specially so because it’s hard to come by, requiring some pretty genre-apropriated behavior, like giving a valuable gift to someone in proper norse generosity fashion.

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#31

I still used the second roll, though I see the argument not to. I like it because it allows for the aid-er to screw up and while the aid-ed succeeds, and vice versa. It’s just that, given the RAW, that outcome is too frequent. Fun if it happens, but shouldn’t be the norm. Helping people should be incentivized.

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#32

I think I prefer fiction-focused assist mechanics to those which grant a simple bonus.

Vedomaya in Night Witches is an example. Take the consequences of someone else’s move onto yourself. Much more interesting than a bonus.

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#33

The thing that makes Mountain Witch assist mechanic so good is it’s math - if I remember right, each player rolls a single d6 and the biggest result wins the conflict. But when you’re assisted, you gain a new d6 from each player assisting you, and add the results. Needless to say, your chances of win skyrockets.

This creates a constant temptation to join forces. BUT as you don’t know each other Dark Fate, there’s always the risk to get betrayed.

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#34

Thinking about it, I’m not convinced that a well-designed game needs a specific helping mechanic. The usual way helping comes up is that someone is doing something, and someone else jumps in and says “ooh, can I help them,” because they want that roll to get a bonus so that it succeeds. But if someone is helping, then they’re doing some specific action, and if that action is an important sort of action in this kind of story, there ought to be a specific move for it. So the helper can either jump in and do their move first to “soften up” the situation, or do theirs afterward to clean up the consequences.

That being said, I have helping mechanics in the two PbtA games I’m designing. In Get Read 2 Rock, you can reveal what you really think of someone to give them advantage or disadvantage. For this I’m directly confronting the issue Jim and Jex were discussing above – the whole point of the mechanic is that you’re switching the focus of the scene to your interpersonal drama with the help-ee.

In Cat-pocalypse World, the helping mechanic is called You Meant To Do That. You roll it after someone fails at something, and it allows you to semi-retcon it to explain how the MC’s hard move was actually a good thing. The goal here is to reflect the fact that cats do this exact thing all the time.

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#35

Mm I see your point about actions that are important deserving their own move/story beat. I feel like that’s a pretty good rule of design for PbtA, generally speaking. On the flip side, I do tend to get particularly hung up about action economy. If it still feels like someone is just sort of adding themselves onto the fiction of someone else’s primary move, I’d like to do that without making an additional roll. The other end would be to make it so that anyone trying to “assist” needs to make an action large enough that a separate roll feels worth spending the time on, if that makes sense.

#36

Further thought: I think the desire for a helping mechanic often comes from an intuition that if two people are working together, they’re more likely to succeed than one person working alone. But I don’t think PbtA is that interested in accurately modeling success probabilities. After all, most PbtA games lack – to the chagrin of many trad-oriented players just coming to the genre – any way of setting difficulty levels. You’re equally likely to Seduce or Manipulate every single character in the game, even though it’s patently obvious that’s not how it works in real life. I personally respond to that mechanical fact as telling me something about what the game’s trying to do, rather than as a glaring design flaw.

IMO moves in PbtA aren’t about modeling the likelihood of success at a task given an established set of circumstances and character skill levels. They’re about giving the dice an opportunity to take the story in a new direction. +1 Hot doesn’t mean “this character has developed skills in seducing someone,” it means “stories about this character tend to involve them seducing people.” So in that light, helping mechanics should be responding for the need for the story to go in different directions when characters do/don’t work together, not simply modeling the fact that many hands make light work.

(The above philosophy is all the result of my own examination, as a player and designer, to see what I think PbtA can do, not any sort of pronouncement about its essence or intention from the Bakers or Avery or anyone.)

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#37

That’s a really interesting observation! I’ll have to think on that when I’m doing the help mechanic in my game (if there even needs to be one, as you point out!)

#38

I agree with your initial premise, but I disagree with your reading of what “+1 Hot” means – while it may mean what you say, it also means what you say it doesn’t mean. Or something close to it. While “+1 Hot” can mean “stories about this character tend to involve them seducing people.” it ALSO means that “this character is less likely to suffer a story complication from seducing someone than someone with -1 Hot” – which in a way is sortof the opposite of what you are implying.

This kinda goes back to a discussion I read a long time ago about “ability scores as flags” and how we should be careful using them that way. A character with a high “fighting skill” might have been given that skill because the player really wants to play out lots of cool fights, or the character might have that skill because the player doesn’t want to have to deal with fights and wants them over as rapidly as possible. By the same token, you could put that +2 in Hot because you’d rather not deal with story complications from that stuff if possible, whereas if you’re really into “how could this go wrong in fun ways” you might as well put the -1 there, y’know?

But to get back to the original point (GO, DIGRESSION!) I think it’s not necessarily true that you don’t need an assist mechanism just because the game “isn’t about” better numbers. Of course, for my game, it’s absolutely crucial that I have one because the game is, on some level, ABOUT working together. But I think that’s a thing – if your game thinks that having someone share in the consequences of someone’s action as a result of helping them, then a +1 isn’t a bad way to encourage it,.

#39

I don’t think we actually disagree that much. “Does this character suffer story complications from this?” is, to me, a very different question than “is this character good at this?”

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#40

Ah, I see what you are saying now. :slight_smile: However, the two are OFTEN tied together in games, because a lack of “story complication” also tends to mean “success” which at least presents the idea that the character is good at that thing.