Peter's Game Thread

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PeterBB:
I've got a good conversation going at Praxis, but I know that a lot of people probably won't bother to click through, so I'm going to copy over my most recent post, which has a lot of good brainstorming.

~~~

I'm starting to drift away from "culture" as a meaningful concept for my game. It's still "about" culture in some sense, but it's more importantly about the values and styles of action that an individual person uses and respects. When a bunch of people in the same place have more-or-less the same set of values, that's the sort of culture I'm interested in. You're right that the differences are at least as meaningful as the commonalities, though.

This means that, instead of tying the available moves to the current culture, we should tie them to individual people (PCs and NPCs both), though there can be "defaults" for certain locations or professions. I'm currently imagining something like this:

There's a list of values (maybe I'll come up with a better word) that each character has certain relationships with. These relationships essentially detail how important that person considers that value. The list of values and the possible relationships are definitely subject to a lot of change, but as a first thought, the values can be Respectability, Official Authority, Faith, Physical Power, and Honor. The possible relationships can be Respected, Scorned, and Feared.

So, an aristocrat's character sheet might look like:

Respectability: Respected
Official Authority: Respected
Faith: Scorned
Physical Power: Feared
Honor: Scorned

While a monk might have:

Respectability: Scorned
Official Authority: Feared
Faith: Respected
Physical Power: Scorned
Honor: Respected

And a bandit might have:

Respectability: Scorned
Official Authority: Scorned
Faith: Feared
Physical Power: Respected
Honor: Respected

So far, that's a lot of words with no mechanical meat behind it. So let's talk about a possible resolution mechanic.

Each of those five things is also a way that other people can be manipulated. (Or at least, they ought to be. If not, I should change them.) So let's also make them our stats. Assign each one a number from 2 to 6. The lower the number, the more effective you will be in that arena. (These need not line up with the relationships. How good you are at manipulating someone via a value is different from how susceptible you are to appeals to that value.) Each stat will have a move, or possibly a variety of moves. They will look like this:

When you appeal to Official Authority, roll 3d6. Each die that comes up as your stat or higher is a hit. If you have no hits, it backfires. Otherwise, spend a hit to:

[list of options]

These options, however, will have prerequisites. The options will be different against people with different relationships to the values. If you're going up against a prissy aristocrat, appealing to your physical power over him is likely to be quite effective, while appealing to his faith might not be.

I'm not sure that's sufficient yet. There ought to be mechanisms for changing relationships and changing stats.

Also, it seems like tracking reputation might be nice. Part of the reason an aristocrat isn't going to bother with physical power is that he won't be respected any more, so it seems like maybe there should be a disincentive to do certain things, even if they would otherwise be effective? Have to think about that one. Maybe instead of static stats, your target number is determined by something you track? Sounds complicated. I'll think about it.

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