Odds <-> Stakes and Dramatic regulation

#1

Hello,
I was thinking about dice and cloud, and weak / strong moves, and how they don’t satisfy me.
Dice represent mechanics and numerical values, the board game elements of RPG. Cloud represent fiction. The most important thing about the Dice and Cloud model is that it makes visible the flow from one to the other. I sometimes need the dice to bypass player knowledge (I don’t care about the particulars, only the result of the action), or I can lean on player knowledge and make the Dice follow. That’s how I use Dice anyway.

Weak / strong moves in Belonging outside Belonging are very much like the simplest Dice mechanic ever. You push the odds of character success up or down, only with a time delay between debt and payment. Otherkind Dice (then Devil’s bargain) do the same, only you begin with debt to “prime the pump”. Gain Dice lose some Cloud. Harm rules are the opposite : lose some Dice to shrug Cloud off. Of course, the machine has finer retroactions, but the idea is there. Otherkind dice are genius in that they make circulation between Dice and Cloud a very practical thing. I can “increase odds” (+1 die) at the cost of “increasing (narrative) stakes” (+1 fiction trouble).

When you know this, as players, you want to lose first, increase the stakes, then gather the Dice you gained to increase your odds and “win” in some way. That’s how many tables play, and it works, as the roller coaster it is. Status is earned in the process because high odds and high stakes allow players to mimic competence. The idea of a circulation between odds and stakes is genius. But.

What I lack here is something that is overall left to the players choice : dramatic regulation. It’s simply left to each table to decide when to introduce new material, when to increase/decrease the stakes. It’s like games are pushing for highs, and asking for measure at the same. They mostly are about character spotlight, very little about storyteller spotlight. I don’t see many games regulating that part. Or, rather, games structure this with static measures, like turns, scenes, or GM judgement (clocks, and announcing future badness).
https://jeffschecter.github.io/storygames/storygames/19443

On the other hand, I see the pacing in Lovecraftesque, Star crossed, For the Queen, or Fall of magic. What tools are out there for Dramatic regulation ? What have they got in common ?
What would a token based dramatic regulation look like ? What would it entail ? What problems would it face ?

#2

Good thinking here. I think a good design finds ways to regulate both, and that’s what makes for a successful game. Not an obvious design challenge, in many places! (We were discussing “As the Worm Turns…” elsewhere, and, as I think you know, that game is lacking the latter, although the non-randomness of the finger choices does make up for that somewhat.)

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#3

While I can’t say I have fully formed thoughts on the subject, I would recommend checking out Burning Empires and My Life With Master. Both are games that have a meta-narrative tracker (BE with each “side” in the conflict having abstract XP, and MLWM having very specific encounters that happen in order), which regulate the narrative by giving it much stronger stage direction than most RPGs.

BE might be of particular interest in how it accomplishes this. Part of session 0 is establishing important figures in the world, rolling them up as NPCs with the same rules as PCs, and then in each session one is forced to be a main actor that makes a roll which effects the narrative hp.

It can feel more board-gamey at time because it strictly controls what kind of scenes play out but it makes you tell a specific story that ratchets up for the players even if spying and subterfuge means the characters aren’t aware of it.

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#4

Yes ! MLWM links “gauges” (RPG Patterns) into a "ball clock " to trigger certain scenes. That’s very cool.

A palette of types of scenes. A map / algorithm with various narrative paths. Conditions to unlock certain scenes (MLWM) or make them desirable (Bliss stage).

#5

You might also look at games like Dead of Night, which regulate this quite deliberately and intentionally.

There is also a game - I can’t think of the title just now - which regulates combats dramatically. The way it works is that each character has a list of moves or powers, but you must use the lower level ones before you can use the higher level ones. This means that, as the fight continues, the opponents start pulling out their “big guns”.

What fascinates me, though, is the way we can harness unconscious human story instincts to do the same thing. For instance, in some of storytelling game designs, I found no need at all for mechanics or procedures which produce escalating conflict and climax… sometimes the structure of the game can create that simply by inviting the players to do it, which they will do naturally. That can be very satisfying.

In the case of “As the Worm Turns…”, my hope is that the oracle mechanic would take care of a lot of this, for example, with climactic moments generally turning into dramatic success or utter failure, instead of middle-of-the-road results.

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#6

I see Tension points in Dead of night are a bit like the DEFCON ladder in Twilight struggle, or the zombie advance in Zombie Cinema. What if Push dice in Technoir did ring a bell every time they changed side ? In a way, they do, but codifying that gives you a neat way of transforming advice into rules. Cool !
If I take the “ball clock” analogy, we’ve got tracks, tug-of-war ladders, narrative fishtanks, and weighing scales.

I am not after large scale dramatic regulation, though. I am looking for a way to micro manage that. Like :
A - And this thing (ding)
B - which is violet (ding)
C - and smells of honey (ding)
D - roars and starts running to get you (ring-a-ding)
And I want to pace the ratio of ring to dings both per player and per table.

But the tools are there, it’s just about making them utlra light, like blue / red chips or flipped cards, or moving a pawn on a circuit.

#7

I haven’t played or read it myself, but there is a game which does exactly what you’re describing, and that’s Universalis.

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#8

Yea but ney. Universalis is a sweet old lady.
I’ve recently found the family of tools I needed, and it’s…
Spotlight!
@Nickwedig pinned it.

If only I could go back in time and read this article: what I really needed without knowing was essentially something that would allow / incite players to inhabit the mesas of dramatic tension. (“dings” as opposed to “rings” in my last message). Giving value to these lows paces the production of highs.

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#9

Since writing that blog post, one of my half-finish game design projects is using spotlights for story pacing. Every character has some ongoing storyline, and to finish the story you need to have had a certain number of spotlights shone onto it. So each story moves along based on how much attention is paid to it. If people are interested, we get to the climax of that story quickly. I think this will be a good way of pacing stories, but I haven’t gotten a chance to playtest stuff yet.

#10

What you describe sounds similar to the way we spontaneously used the stepstones in Baba Yaga to pace each character arc. Many stepstones invited conflict, but not all.

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#11

One game I really like is Space bounty blues. There is a narrative arc that is very well established, even with moves attached to it.

The five sections of gameplay are:

INTRO
Sets the tone of the session, (re)introduces the main characters, and eases everyone into the story.
HEAD
Establishes the new bounty head and gives the crew a chance to coordinate the first leg of their investigation.
SOLOS
Gives each bounty hunter some time in the spotlight so they can move the investigation forward and close in on their target.
HEAD OUT
The crew converges on their target and determines whether they capture their quarry or walk away empty-handed.
TAG
We get a glimpse of everyone’s “new normal” in the aftermath of the day’s events and tie up any loose ends–or save them for another session. Then everyone celebrates the roleplaying of someone else at the table.

I think it’s pretty smart.

There is the Save the Galaxy supplement for Galaxy 2e:

It uses a 3-bear arc, each beat filled with prompts that character must resolve to advance to the next. Really smart too.

#12

It’s a fixed structure. It’s a great fit for genre-works, but it seriously limits narrative form invention, by which I mean the astonishing narrative freedom in the way fiction progresses in GMless games: not like an aquaduct with piers, but like a wild water hose rearing. I like both, but achieving fixed structure is (too) much easier.

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#13

I agree. on the other hand, weaving narratives free of any form is quite daunting. I have been thinking about using SBB’s in a variation that allows an interesting back and forth between sections, much like jamming in music can be.

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#14

The oldy but wacky …in Spaaace by Greg Stolze (sorry, no link. It’s a freebie but the site seems to be down) has something similiar. The GM has a fixed number of tokens, IIRC dependent on number of players and character skill. The GM and players are asked to assign tokens to “scenes” that are expected to happen during the session before the session starts.

Let’s say they have 12 tokens. They could build a schedule like so:

  1. Defeat the Masked Swordsman - 3 tokens
  2. Rescue the Masked Swordsman - 2 tokens
  3. Storm the Castle - 4 tokens
  4. Humiliate the Evil Prince - 3 token

When a scene is played, the tokens are the base difficulty of this scene. The players must at least overcome the number of tokens assigned to the scene. Each player has his own tokens and can use them to change the world or push for success. Used tokens are moved to a pool that can be tapped by the GM in the next scene.

If the order of scenes change, nothing happens. If a scene is scrapped, ie. due to development during play, the players and GM construct a new schedule, using the now available tokens.

There is more to it, but I can’t remember just now. If the site is not coming up soon, get in touch, I’ve got the PDF somewhere. Or go to rpg.net, Greg Stolze is posting there and he is a helpful guy.

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