[Legendary Lives] Three games to talk about
Ron Edwards:
Hello!
Larry, that was definitely an aggravating moment about the Spell Points. Since I'd spent all my prepping for Forge Midwest on Justifiers/The Exchange, I hadn't done any thinking about Legendary Lives mechanics for months until we sat down. Especially since I'd run into the same snag about the exact same issue back when we played the game almost two years ago. As a public service: despite the text's use of the term Spell Cost in points, which is not in an of itself a problem once you understand it, the spell-using character in Legendary Lives does not have a pool or bank of "spell points." What the term means is a penalty to that particular magical skill roll which will not go away until the adventure is over. So you propose something to do with your (for instance) Conjure skill at (say) 14, and I as GM say, "That'll cost you 3 Spell Points," and if you choose to go ahead, after this roll at 14, your Conjure skill will be 11. They only go down; you don't get them back until the adventure is over.
At first, this might seem like a death spiral, and it sort is, except for a few details. First, you have at least two and perhaps as many as five magical skills, so racking a couple down isn't so bad even early in the adventure. First-prime, magic skills in Legendary Lives are very, very open-narration in terms of what the player proposes might happen - there are no spell lists, just the skills and whatever the player suggests might happen through their use, at that moment. Second, since all dice rolls in Legendary Lives arrive at a qualitative descriptor ("Mediocre," "Great"), the GM has a pretty good opportunity to make every spellcasting do something, and the basic rubric in this game is for the GM to use failed rolls to turn plot-corners anyway. And third, if you keep using a diminished magical skill, then your chance for Catastrophic results goes up, and hey, what's a little magical catastrophe among friends if (i) it makes neat story-things happen (see the previous point) and (ii) gets you checks to advance the skill? In the game with Chris and Tim and Tim, Chris found himself looking forward to later-stage play rather than dreading it because his character's magic would go all funny, and he'd get advancement checks.
I completely agree with you about the themes and issues of our game. Comedy and extravagantly colorful fantasy work best for me when they riff off something real, and I think we all entered into the real-stuff as a shared punchy-consequence context for whatever we did. Which is another vote in favor of the scary-extreme ethnic stereotyping, in this case.
I was looking forward to the long-term consequences of Gootch screwing up the plans for the machine, but as it turned out, and probably due to the one-shot context of play, events of the game turned faster, more important corners before that had a chance to develop.
Guy, that's a great post, full of stuff to talk about. This is exactly what I was aiming at back in my truncated Color-first character creation endeavor (which was interrupted by the birth of my third kid). To start: I've read both Lost Souls and Khaotic pretty carefully, but haven't played either. Only the authors can tell us for sure, but I think the basic idea is that the GM does in fact have his adventure, period, and the players "run through it," period, and all the life-history stuff is raw color for how you make them talk as they do it. ... Which still strikes me as a bit weird. The lifepath techniques in Legendary Lives, to my eyes, are just crying out to be used as central prep features for unpredictable-outcome scenarios, especially for long-term play. If I get a chance to talk with Joe and Kathleen Williams some day, I'm going to ask whether the texts display a tension between what they'd like to play vs. what they think gamers want to play or are capable of playing.
Regarding Lost Souls, I also find it the least compelling of the three, partly because the contrast between "we're a group, we have individualized powers, we run missions / have adventures" and "we are dead souls, active as ghosts" is an ongoing conundrum for me in role-playing games, to the extent that I simply jettison the former (I've discussed this regarding both Ghost Light and Wraith in the past). Which is weird because again, you'd think that the back-story for each character would be the real meat of any play concerning ghosts. The combination of cartoony and grim-dramatic doesn't gel for me as well as the cartoony + fantasy-rich does in Legendary Lives. In Khaotic, my mental jury is still in deliberation. The characters' back-stories are nicely nuanced, being full of conflict but allowing you a lot of room to round them out, but exactly how that relates to the two settings (either on-mission in the monster body or back-home in your real bodies) is utterly opaque. Especially in combination with this text from the game:
Quote
The first goal of a player is survival. Yes, your character can die during a mission, and a dead character is gone. You cannot play the deceased PC
ever again. There are other goals beyond mere survival. Every mission has its own objective. To “win” you must accomplish the goal of the particular mission. By doing this, you will gain skill points, which may be used to increase your characters’ abilities.
Khaotic is a team game. You and your friends must work together to solve the challenges presented by the referee. You’ll either win together, or lose together. The fun comes from interacting with the other PCs and the imaginary world of Xenos.
The referee’s goals are different from those of the players. It doesn’t matter if non-player characters die--there are always more where they came from. A referee’s objective is to stay one step ahead of the players, keeping the game running smoothly while making the mission as enjoyable as possible. The referee is not the players’ opponent.
... and in the next section:
Quote
Any action a player tries has a whole range of possible results, giving the referee greater flexibility in deciding what happens and making the game
always unpredictable and exciting.
... which may work for many GMs, but which I find nearly impossible to implement in terms of what I want from role-playing, and what the folks I tend to play with want. It worked really well for us in playing Tunnels & Trolls, but that game is unabashedly Gamist and the GM is goddamned well the players' opponent - which is a play-mode that is explicitly disavowed in the Williams games.
And to follow up in a different but relevant way, I also pulled out my old 1989 Cyberpunk rules (including all the first printing errata - yay!) to review those lifepaths. A few things occurred to me.
1. Most lifepath techniques build the character's skills, literally composing the character's life so far in a "build it as you go" fashion. Legendary Lives doesn't do that - the religion table roll and the five lifeline rolls are carried out independently of all the other details. Also, there isn't a special Draconian lifeline or Priest lifeline or whatever; everyone uses the same ones, which is also the case for the various individual features tables and the personality table.
2. Related to #1, instead of "living" the character's life to date sequentially roll by roll, you put the lifeline events in whatever order you'd like, shaping their details to other aspects of the established character as seems most coherent.
3. There's no rolling involved in terms of carrying on to another roll or in Traveller terms, "mustering out," or whether you do or don't get the benefits of that particular step.
I'm not saying the LL method is automatically better or worse than the method established by Traveller and utilized in many games since (Cyberpunk, Mutant Chronicles), but it is clearly a bit different when you consider all those. And strangely, I think that it works for Legendary Lives but - again, without playing so this is speculative - seems a little unwieldly or not-quite-fitting for both Lost Souls and Khaotic.
Best, Ron
edited to fix a link - RE
Larry L.:
Oh yeah... I'd be interested in hearing Ben's or Willow's version of "what the story was" if they have a chance. I didn't completely put it all together, just caught some interesting parts.
Hi Guy,
I played a whole campaign of Lost Souls! I didn't even realize these games were related until I had the character sheet printed out, and then I was like, "I've played this game before!" Same resolution matrix, same big list of attribute-keyed skills.
In that game, situation did not spring from character as awesomely as it did with LL. I'm not sure if it's actually a difference in the games, or if this system just generally caters to a certain set of GM talents, and if you're the GM who has them, it works. Someone on RPG.net described Lost Souls as "the Beetlejuice RPG," which in hindsight seems like it would have been a helpful creative focus.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hi Ron
I wanted to get back to thank you for the detailed reply, but also to post about my bewilderment at the same comment that had Lance react.
I don't get your point about the skill rating not being relevant to one given roll when using a flat method. I have literally worked on that comment over the last days, tried to wrap my head around it, and... I just don't get it.
It's the craps example that confuses me since there you say that it makes sense to bet on a "7" when rolling 2d6, but not particularly when rolling 1d11+1. To me, that's because a "7" on 2d6 is roughly a 16.7% chance (and other sums are lower) whereas a "7" on a 1d11+1 is a 9.1% chance (and other results are equally probable).
But man, having a 75% rather than a 35% (with a flat & roll-under method) reads to me as to be same feature that makes you bet on a "7" in your craps example rather than a "2", because the chance for a "75 or under" is higher than a "35 or under" even for that single roll. The flatness or the bellness is relevant for how to calculate the probability of an event and other crunchy stuff like mean value and standard deviation, which one should take into account, but once you have the probability of a given event (the "7" in craps, the "75% or under" in the percentile example) then that's that.
A thought that just occurred to me is that Legendary Lives indeed uses a d%, but the result is mapped to a not-so-flat distribution in terms of what is really used ("Cata" to "Awesome"). This actually supports your idea that the way one generates randomness is heavily influenced by how it is factored into the resolution procedure.
Of course, in a game where a critical hit (which really is what you focused on) is only on a "00" on a percentile die, then skill rating is indeed irrelevant for determining critical hits, and it makes a lot of sense to me to point out such a fact given the history of systems where that really shapes combat. However, defining a critical hit to be a "12" on 2d6 could be just as problematic. The problem there seems to me in how the critical tables are evaluated. It's the disproportion of decapitating vs knocking off a few HP that makes combat resolution very unreliable.
So, am I making sense or is there a crucial fact I missed in your point?
Paul T:
Ron,
I wonder if you could expand a little on what you're pointing at here:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on April 05, 2010, 09:07:06 AM
Especially in combination with this text from the game:
Quote
The first goal of a player is survival. Yes, your character can die during a mission, and a dead character is gone. You cannot play the deceased PC
ever again. There are other goals beyond mere survival. Every mission has its own objective. To “win” you must accomplish the goal of the particular mission. By doing this, you will gain skill points, which may be used to increase your characters’ abilities.
Khaotic is a team game. You and your friends must work together to solve the challenges presented by the referee. You’ll either win together, or lose together. The fun comes from interacting with the other PCs and the imaginary world of Xenos.
The referee’s goals are different from those of the players. It doesn’t matter if non-player characters die--there are always more where they came from. A referee’s objective is to stay one step ahead of the players, keeping the game running smoothly while making the mission as enjoyable as possible. The referee is not the players’ opponent.
... and in the next section:
Quote
Any action a player tries has a whole range of possible results, giving the referee greater flexibility in deciding what happens and making the game
always unpredictable and exciting.
... which may work for many GMs, but which I find nearly impossible to implement in terms of what I want from role-playing, and what the folks I tend to play with want. It worked really well for us in playing Tunnels & Trolls, but that game is unabashedly Gamist and the GM is goddamned well the players' opponent - which is a play-mode that is explicitly disavowed in the Williams games.
It seems like a little aside, which you turn to and quickly away from, that is a really important point.
What is the challenge, how is it implemented well by some, and why is it nearly impossible for you?
Best,
Paul
Ron Edwards:
For Christoph only
Think in terms of knowing that you might roll an 11 on 3d6. You are making this roll with a skill of 13, so if you get 13 or less, you succeed. Perhaps this is quite crucial at this moment of play, too. Anyway, although you might roll anything from 3 to 18, 13 or less has a special status (you want it), and 11 falls into that range. What I'm saying applies very well to 11, so let's focus on that. Handy utility: Statistical Tables for Dice Rolling.
For this one roll, you have lots of ways to get an 11. It's not 1/16 (6.25%) out of 16 possibilities. It's actually twice that because the three dice can come together to make an 11 in tons of different ways. Whatever you roll on one of the dice, the other two can come together to make an 11, and even that two-die consideration has many ways to do it too.
You have a higher chance to get that 11 than you do to get any one of the failing values. (In fact, at 14 or less, you have more chance of nailing that 11 than you do of getting all the failing values combined! So 14 is the "done" value for improving rolls for a 3d6 and under system.)
If you rolled a hypothetical 16-sided die marked 3 through 18, that would not be the case. Your chance of nailing that 11, or any successful value, is 6.25% and that's the same as nailing one of the failing values.
Now, this same point can be extended to almost all of the values under 13, with the only exception being an outcome of 3, although the "goodness" of each value does decrease as you go down the scale.
This point has literally nothing to do with the fact that when you compare 13 or less on 3d6 with ~84 or less on d100, you are indeed looking at the same chance to hit across the long-term history of rolling this skill for this character at this ability score. That is indubitably true. But my claim is that you will experience the consistent betterness of 13 or less, on 3d6, as opposed to 8 or less, meaning sooner and more reliably, than you will see it by shooting for 84 or less on d100, as opposed to ~26 or less on d100. Even though, yes indeed, 100 or 1000 or infinite rolls will show that the percentages are the same.
I will return to the actual point I tried to make earlier in the next post.
Best, Ron
edited to fix the link to the probabilities page
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