[The Exchange / Justifiers] The right game with the right setting
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
Levi, thanks for the reminder about the open-source content. I hope to refine what I've already written and include it with my whole "SF RPG project" document, eventually to be available as a great big free download at my site. In this case, it will be very helpful to include the direct rules text, so again, thanks.
Your suggestion about the Buyback and abilities is interesting, but it doesn't quite jibe with my use of the Exchange rules or with the setting - both of which are emphatically my individual interpretation or use, so I'm not criticizing anything about your suggestion as a general thing. But for clarity's sake, as I mentioned in the handout, I'm broadening the scope of the individual Exchange abilities to a certain extent, compared to the examples in the rules text. So the degree of refined detail in your suggestion doesn't quite fit, I think. Regarding the setting, my take is that the science of creating Betas is pretty crude at the theoretical level and doesn't allow for much specification of abilities. To some extent this interpretation of mine reflects my real-life bias as a basic researcher, vs. engineeing/corporate research. They take the animal embryo and subject it to human DNA/RNA treatment and developmental influences,* and who knows how well it will turn out, or in what particular manifestation of features.
Hi Jeremiah! Please post everything you can remember, anything that struck you as effective or not effective or fun, whatever.
Steve, as I understand it, Injuries become "a character" when the same Injury receives three or more ratings in a numerical sequence. Recall that if you win an exchange, the number of successes you get (I forget what they're called) is the number of injuries you can inflict. So if you win by three, you can literally decide there and then to create an Injury of this kind. If you win by two, you can set up for someone else or yourself to "complete" it later.
Now, all that said, one doesn't always want to create such an injury. It's hard to explain until you've experienced the system yourself, but some injuries are inflicted simply to be what they are, a modifier in later exchanges, without much need or content to demand more. This might be because supplemental available dice, which is what such an injury does, are indeed an excellent thing; and/or because the injury's fictional identity is only interesting or relevant to a limited extent.
For instance, my favorite minor Injury in our game was "Shockable," inflicted upon Joanna and Darcy, after they (badly) jury-rigged the ATV to deliver shocks to attackers who'd jump on it (again). So in later scenes when they were fighting or dealing with conflict from the ATV, I grabbed "Shockable" as a source of dice, because the system they'd built would backfire on them. This was fun - I lit up Joanna like Wile E. Coyote at one point in a later scene by using it, and if I recall correctly, Darcy was forced off the ATV in order to avoid it. But then or now, I don't see any reason that I'd build upon that injury to make it a "character" - it simply wasn't important enough in terms of raw content.
Best, Ron
* Affecting the morphogenetic field, to show off briefly
Levi Kornelsen:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on April 27, 2010, 07:30:33 AM
Your suggestion about the Buyback and abilities is interesting, but it doesn't quite jibe with my use of the Exchange rules or with the setting
Fair enough; given that the system develops a different micro-tradition of use every time we use it, I can't imagine that would be otherwise for you.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on April 27, 2010, 07:30:33 AM
Steve, as I understand it, Injuries become "a character" when the same Injury receives three or more ratings in a numerical sequence.
I'd like to clarify a bit:
The rule as from the text in 2.0 is "more than three, in a series that starts at rank 1." So, 1, 2, 3, 4, yes. 5, 6, 7, 8, No. These two caveats are present for the following reasons:
Several in a row - you want a substantial number in series, so that traits aren't always jumping into action and doing stuff to the point of monotony. The number required in series that's written (more than three), I picked on feel alone; groups may well want to change it based on how much activity they prefer from such sources.
Starting at Rank 1 - This matters because, in theory, you could make a series going 5, 6, 7, 8 - and going about it that way would give you a big pile of bonus dice when you're going after that injury. A 'high run' is a bonus. A 'low run' gets actions. To build something vaguely like a classical "death spiral", you start by building up your attack a little with high numbers, and then building down to 1 - in order, you might tag someone with 5, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 - and at the end, that's a six-die pool that wants them out of action.
That, however, is only the text. After about two or three significant conflicts, in my experience, groups have enough shared feel to improvise, and the game drifts nicely over to their comfort zone.
hix:
Thanks Ron and Levi,
The impression I'm getting from those answers is that the decision about how to assign and apply Injuries feels pretty intuitive when you're playing. Same for when to initiate conflicts where the Injuries try to harm the characters. Minor question: did you have any healing conflicts in the game (Did someone try to get rid of the 'Shockable' trait, for instance?)
Levi, that's an important clarification about Injuries, that the series has to start at Rank 1. I'd missed that in my read-through.
I'm not sure how to phrase this question, but (to explain where I'm coming from) I'm really interested in systems that 'help' me GM, by giving me guidance or inspiration about what NPCs are going to do next or about what conflicts I can introduce. I find Nine Worlds, Dogs in the Vineyard and Bliss Stage really good for this, and I have this suspicion that The Exchange might be the same. So my question is:
Ron, when you were GMing this game, how obvious was it to you what the next conflict should be, or what an NPC (the planet) should do, or what situation you wanted to set up? How much help did the rules give you with that?
pseudoidiot:
I'll start off by saying that of the 5 or 6 games I tried at Forge Midwest (all new to me), this was probably my favorite. Part of that was the setting, part was the system, and part was the scenario.
I think my favorite thing about the Exchange system is how even though it's really simple & straight-forward at face-value there's some depth there that sneaks up on you. They pyramid structure of traits seems a bit odd at first (at least, it did to me), but then you start to realize that those level 1 traits are your goto traits -- the traits you break out first, sort of like surface traits. But as you go up the pyramid and have less choices at each level, you find that those traits are the things your character is digging deep for, the parts of them that come out under more extreme duress. Ron touched on this a bit during the game and can probably put it to words better than I can if what I said isn't very clear.
Another thing we talked a bit about at the table that I think most of us agreed on is we'd be interested to experiment with different die sizes. Maybe go up to a d8 or d10 and see how the wider range of numbers affected how conflicts played out.
I did like the injury mechanic, but there's a part of me that wishes there might have been more guidance as to what level an injury should be placed at. There were a few times, especially at the beginning with the first few injuries, where we weren't quite sure how to make that decision. Towards the end, once we realized a series of injuries could be considered a separate character in a conflict, we just aimed at that. I guess it sort of comes down to what Ron was talking about: sometimes you want injuries to build up and form a sequence, and sometimes you just want to have an injury there that won't necessarily be part of forming a separate injury character.
As for the scenario itself, I loved how tragic it turned out to be. I forget the exact sequence of events, but at one point Joanna had to make the call that the lifeforms on the planet weren't sentient and she stuck by that call even later when we were starting to become certain that wasn't the case as the indigenous life seemed to be trying to communicate with us. I remember one scene in particular where the creatures (I think they were spider-like?) were making obvious peaceful gestures and we just opened fire on them. That really punched me in the gut a bit, and I think the other players felt the same way, especially be the end of that conflict.
If we can get the same cast of folks at Forge Midwest next year, that would be awesome, and I'd totally be up for seeing how things pan out.
Ron Edwards:
Hi there,
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?
Steve, my answer is "all three together" to an extent, but I should emphasize that my primary ambition was to bring out what I perceive as the main strengths of Justifiers. So what to do next in a given scene was very strongly informed by thematic tension considerations, in that I was personally invested in seeing as much personal crisis about the issues-at-hand as possible, and when possible, exacerbated by the dangers of the mission itself. 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'd be interested in your thoughts about the PDFs I've posted on that page at my website. In each case, I've tried to summarize the parts of the game I find most thematically exciting, especially at the intersection of system and setting. In my experience, when I'm excited about that, and when the other people at the table are as well, through the medium of their characters, then scene-framing and situation-development become hyper-intuitive for me. I hope the handouts even in their rough form can help generate that kind of enthusiasm.
Jeremiah, that punch in the gut was really apparent to me all 'round the table, during that last fight. I don't think anyone really liked seeing Edgar go down either. Wasn't your character one of the guys who shot him, too?
Best, Ron
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