Tales from the Rocket House
Some basic roleplaying theory is vital to this endeavor, otherwise you’ll have to reinvent the wheel. I won’t discuss it in too much depth, but I will provide a couple of links. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=273695 (rec.games.frp.advocacy’s theory work, the beginning of RPG theory) and http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=232712 (which shows some later work and the confusion that comes from The Forge using most of the same terms as r.g.f.a, but changing them to different meanings. It’s a long story).
Regardless of what you think of RPG theory, when designing a game, you do need to know what you want to do with it. Do you want players to stay deep in character, or to think outside of their characters’ minds (presumably because mechanics have given them some narrative or tactical control)? Do you want to focus on tactical conflict, narrative, or exploration of a self-consistent world? And if more than one of these appeals to you, how will you combine them, and which one will “win out” if (when) they come into conflict?
For example, the “Tarafore System” that has been the general basis of this column is designed to facilitate simulationist and especially immersive play. In English, this means it’s designed for “sandbox” games where what’s going on in the (internally consistent) world is mostly independent of the PCs, and there is no enforced “plot.” Further, it’s designed so the player never has to think “outside” of her character’s mindset. The player never has to “break character” to spend drama points or split dice pools or what have you.
The modifications that my gaming group added to the system in my absence abandoned that intent entirely. A “karma” system gives players “fate” and “karma” for good roleplaying (as decided by the group). Spending “karma” allows players to boost their PC’s performance, and spending “fate” allows players to reduce an opponent’s performance. This, combined with players’ posting their PCs stats, motivations, and histories online, added a strong narrativist/metagame aspect that reminds me a lot of White Wolf’s OWoD style.
And that’s the way it goes with mechanics: a few small changes can transform the feel of the whole game. Personality mechanics are another major sticking point – a small lever than can, to borrow Archimedes’ phrase, “move the entire world.” Last October, I wrote about a Horror Factor mechanic, but the truth is, I’m not going to be using it, because personality mechanics break the heck out of immersion. Even though the player doesn’t have to consciously deal with any metagame-style points or die pools, having a specific number countdown that tells the player how scared his character is just doesn’t work well for immersion.
An immersed player knows exactly what his (or her) character is feeling, better than any mechanic can. No mechanics could have brought on the gloriously self-destructive and incredibly dramatic actions taken by the PCs of immersed players in games I’ve been lucky enough to GM. This isn’t to say that personality mechanics have no place, just that they have no place in a game that wants to facilitate immersion.
Dramatist and narrativist games, on the other hand, usually benefit from players thinking outside of their characters. As a player, my tastes in games tends to run to the extremes – if I have to think outside of my character at all, I want to have serious narrative power, the kind I’d have in Ron Edwards’ Trollbabe or the GM-less game system I described in columns 10 and 12.
Several mechanics come to mind that give players a degree of narrative freedom AND add a certain degree of tactical “crunch.” Some games allow players to split dice pools (Shadowrun’s Combat Pool, for example, or the game I outlined in last month’s column), or hold cards and play them later, for maximum effect (Weapons of the Gods’ “river” mechanic). Others have a sort of “hero point” measure that allows PC’s to perform at much greater levels than usual (WEG’s Star Wars used “force points” for this purpose and White Wolf’s games use Willpower in a similar way).
Most of these mechanics require that the players “drop out of character” in order to use them. It’s hard to internalize how a character could figure out how many combat pool dice to use in a given situation, or weigh the possibility of using his best cards now or saving them for later.
Occasionally, you run across a mechanic that can provide a boost in both tactical play and narrative control, without requiring that the player “break character.” Interestingly enough, West End Games’ Star Wars RPG fell into this category. Since “The Force” was an integral part of the setting, and “trusting in the force” was a conscious decision characters (Luke Skywalker, mainly) took in the movies, deciding to “trust the force” (use a Force Point) felt like something a character could do, and decide.
I outlined a system a few months back that should, if the playtests are any indication, accomplish this as well. So long as the player can internalize “stunting” in certain secondary traits (such as using his superior strength to drive an opponent back and gain an advantage in combat), so that they flow from the character’s mindset (“He looks weaker than me. I’ll use that against him”), it should work.
The thing that all of these mechanics have in common is that they give the players a certain degree of performance-enhancing narrative control while keeping overall narrative authority in the hands of the GM. While they give the players more decisions to make outside of their characters’ mindsets, they do not challenge or change the traditional authority structure of GM and players.
Other games, like Polaris, Shock, and the aforementioned Trollbabe either dispense with the GM altogether or give the players broad narrative powers, to the extent that these games may seem like an entirely different animal compared with more traditional GM-and-players RPGs. In my opinion, this is the way to do narrative roleplaying: jump in with both feet and actually give the players some narrative control beyond just boosting a roll here and there. Otherwise, it can feel like being stuck inside the GM’s story, which in my experience, sucks – even when the GM is a good writer.
