[The Exchange / Justifiers] The right game with the right setting
Levi Kornelsen:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on April 29, 2010, 01:03:53 PM
Levi, I may have been working with an earlier draft, but that limitation of starting an Injury at 1 doesn't appear in my copy of 2.0. In fact, there's a short section about being able to set it anywhere. We played around with that particular option during play and I don't see any particular downside. Is there a play-experience you can describe that led you to focus on 1 being the starting point?
I may not have been totally clear. You don't have to start building injuries there.
It's just: The series only starts taking actions if it goes from one and up.
From the draft you linked, the rule-as-written is:
• Fighting Your Injuries: Once you have an injury trait, or a few very similar ones, that have more than three ratings, in series, starting with a rating of one (1, 2, 3, 4, and any further of numbers afterwards), the injuries themselves take a turn as often as reasonable.
If you're doing something different, and it works, I'm interested! It might be better than as-written. What'cha doin'?
------
And to Steve:
As intended, the engine is written with the assumption that you have a clear vision of the action (and, obviously, Ron does). From there, the engine is supposed to help you hang that vision on mechanics, and execute it. But it doesn't provide that vision. Very much a "toolkit" approach, although I think I mean something different by that than the popular use in RPG circles; hammers and nails, rather than prefabricated pieces to assemble.
Anyway, in this case: It sure looks like it's working as intended.
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Here's what we did, best understood as what I said we were to do. It's not too much different from the textual way as you've clarified here.
When and if an Injury became rated in three numbers in sequence, it became a "character" who could strike its bearer (can't think of a better word). So we knocked down the threshold by one (three instead of four) and it could be located anywhere in numeric sequence. So if you were ultimately saddled with Bleeding 3-4-5, that would count.
I found this to have fun applications. Having a double-scored single-named injury "waiting" at the higher values played a little differently from having a few of them, all different, down at 1, for instance. But any of them could become a character, and I liked the flexibility and wide variety of consequences that could lead to.
I should also clarify a little bit of how I as GM "played" such "characters." They weren't all the same. Some could attack entirely "on their own" when they (i.e. I) felt like it; others did so only in certain circumstances, such as the Shockable whenever either of the characters in question was dealing with the ATV; or only in conjunction with someone else's conflict with the Injured party. The distinction among those three options depended completely on the nature of the Injury and was non-problematic for me in practice.
Best, Ron
hix:
Thanks for those answers - I've been finding this thread fascinating. In fact, it's inspired me to play around with combining The Exchange with Vincent's monster-generation system from Afraid. In a similar way to Ron's 'the planet is the adventure', I've created a few Afraid monsters (which I've given six levels of traits). Doing that's helped me see how you can use that single piece of prep as the basis for a session (and I'm really excited by the results).
I'm looking forward to hearing more from everyone in the session: How you used your prep (the planet as a single character) in play? What triggered the switch between mission and social/interlude scenes (and how did those social scenes play out)? and - from this quote ...
Quote
Since the setting is practically nothing but those issues in the context of immediate danger, I found it easy to draw upon simple content and place some aspect of it front and center in every "next go" I had.
... I'm keen to hear more about how you knew it was your 'go' next.
Also, Ron: The material in the first two pages of the Justifiers doc is great. It clearly identifies the themes of the setting and makes me interested in playing around with them. (I have no prior exposure to Justifiers, but remember being interested in its ads from 1980s mags like Dragon or Traveller's Aid Society.)
The 'How I'm gonna play it' section wasn't entirely clear to me on a first read. I got your point about the risk of actual play producing a weak, safe answering of the premise. However, at first I didn't see the link between 'genuine danger + exciting situation action' leading to 'social and political decisions grounded in experience. This is what I think you're getting at:
+ Characters have a difficult (but genuine) possibility of achieving buyback
+ That's coupled with them facing genuine danger in the service of a very probably unethical corporation
+ Which leads to characters needing to make real decisions about whether or not to serve the interests of that corporation (and needing to answer bigger questions about how to live their lives).
It was around this point that I stopped thinking of this as a prep sheet for a one off, as I realised that the stuff you're talking about concerns player decisions that will start to bear fruit after two or more sessions of play.
I'm a little less clear on things from the character creation section on. Buyback at Level 1 seems to be pretty easy to buy your way out of (and I'm not entirely sure where Buyback comes from; I'm guessing it's the two underlined 'species' traits?)
I'm also pretty interested in the Scope of Play section, and want to hear more about that ...
Levi Kornelsen:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on May 01, 2010, 10:48:07 AM
When and if an Injury became rated in three numbers in sequence, it became a "character" who could strike its bearer (can't think of a better word). So we knocked down the threshold by one (three instead of four) and it could be located anywhere in numeric sequence. So if you were ultimately saddled with Bleeding 3-4-5, that would count.
Huh. It's not a huge drift. It strikes me that it would dial the (already small) safety margin down a little, since you can build an "active" series and a bonus simultaneously. But it also sounds like it would be a bit looser, and a bit faster, which are both good things in context.
So, hey. Noted as a workable way to go. Nice.
Ron Edwards:
On re-reading this thread, I realized that I never responded to Steve.
I should clarify a little bit about those documents. First, they were authored by me for my own gaming use, to accompany verbal discussions with people I play with regularly. They aren't yet in any kind of shape for general or public use. Second, I printed them for use during Forge Midwest, but did not author them for that use, and in the case of The Exchange in particular, there's a profound disconnect between my pre-con (and I mean totally pre-con, written without any thought to specific upcoming play) "How I'm gonna play it" in the general document, which are not very good anyway, and the practical let's-do-it character handouts for the con in the second. So I strongly recommend not trying to read any of this as a unified, rhetorically sound instruction manual.
To address your points specifically:
Quote
... I got your point about the risk of actual play producing a weak, safe answering of the premise. However, at first I didn't see the link between 'genuine danger + exciting situation action' leading to 'social and political decisions grounded in experience. This is what I think you're getting at:
+ Characters have a difficult (but genuine) possibility of achieving buyback
+ That's coupled with them facing genuine danger in the service of a very probably unethical corporation
+ Which leads to characters needing to make real decisions about whether or not to serve the interests of that corporation (and needing to answer bigger questions about how to live their lives).
At the risk of pulling out all that quote for no good reason, my reply is merely "Yes."
Quote
I'm a little less clear on things from the character creation section on. Buyback at Level 1 seems to be pretty easy to buy your way out of (and I'm not entirely sure where Buyback comes from; I'm guessing it's the two underlined 'species' traits?)
There's no connection between the animal values and Buyback. I didn't have any system for coming up with the Buyback values, and still don't. It might be harder to beat than you might think, considering that few if any of the characters' scores can operate in their favor, and the character's rank will be working against them too. I was also thinking, probably without much justification, and certainly with no clarity in the document, that Buyback wouldn't be attacked until it was itself a three-step (or given Levi's clarification, four-step) pseudo-character.
Also, remember that 4 isn't "better" than 1, in The Exchange. The ordering of the values is important, but not in the usual RPG sense of higher is stronger.
My current thinking is to start Buyback with two values, any of 1 through 4, and to run a little bit of playtesting to see whether that needs any refinement through the course of play. Obviously, one of the key kinds of damage to inflict on a character during play is more Buyback, which I certainly should have done in our convention game now that I look back on it.
Best, Ron
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