[The Exchange / Justifiers] Great the second time around too
Ron Edwards:
At the Dice Dojo, I GM'd two sessions of the same combination I described in [The Exchange / Justifiers] The right game with the right setting, of the Justifiers setting (StarBlaze Graphics, late 1980s) plus The Exchange system, 2.0 version, by Levi Kornelson. My explanation of what I'm doing with this combination of setting and system, among other science fiction RPGs, is pretty complex and exhausting, so I ask that you check out that thread's first post or two if you're interested. Tha handouts I used in both games are here. In this thread, I'll launch straight into an account of our game.
Characters and other prep
Everyone in the group was really excited about the politics and imagery,and the table-talk often concerned slavery, civil rights, and the social-justice dilemma the characters faced. I was in the precise mode that I described in the previous thread:
Quote
So I went into the game thinking in terms of two basic dynamics: the mission itself, in however many conflicts the players wanted to go into before really trying to "take it down," and leaving open whatever conflict-goals or tactics they settled on to do that; and (2) the interactions of crew members, and what the players feel in the moment about what they want to do with that.
... and we had a lot more time and focus to spend than in the Forge Midwest game. The players and characters were:
Peter / Edgar Allen the lesser panda
Megan / Shelly the coyote
Sam / Lyle the pangolin (also, Sam's friend Shweta joined us for the second session as vocal spectator)
Timo / Barnabas the raccoon
J.P. / Joanna the Gamma fox
My NPCs therefore became Gavin the bighorn sheep captain, Rogelio the black bear engineer, Hamid the falcon scout, and Darcy the tiger security officer. First observation: which PCs are chosen make for very different GMing experiences. In the previous game, Gavin was played by Ralph, hence ultimate official mission authority was exerted by a player; here, that was me. In the previous game, both most disgruntled characters, Barnabas and Rogelio, were NPCs, hence maximum mission sabotage was my zone; here, one of them was a player-character and as it happened, Megan played Shelly pretty disgruntled too.
Second observation: wow, Joanna is a very interpretable character. In this case, J.P. played her less sympathetically than Faith did, although equally understandably, and really got into her going native. A great deal of the game concerned Shelly and Barnabas trying to convince the rest of the crew to kick butt but to the bare minimum in order to complete the mission with little risk, vs. Joanna and secondarily Darcy trying to convince them to be more sympathetic to the natives and probably cost the company money. Edgar Allen as played by Peter went a totally different route too, becoming something of the captain's right hand man and toughening up considerably to show that he could indeed be a Justifier. I had fun playing Darcy (he'd been a player-character in the previous game), having him really go to town with his idealism. He's a fun mix of pure physical threat and emerging high-mindedness in conflict with his official role.
I used a very different planet this time, primarily because it included straightforward natives, especially in the loaded and imperialistic meaning of the word, at least as far as the Earth corporations see it. I wrote it up as:
Intriguing equipment readings 1, Moisture-sucking atmosphere 1, Poisonous spiny plant 1, Elusive scouting party 1, Big riding lizards 1
Harmful solar effects 2, Sulphur explosion traps 2, Ambush 2, Rocks rolled from above 2
Sexy blue humanoids 3, Confusing tunnels 3, Spear-fighters 3
Philosophical insights 4, Swarming assault 4
Artifact treaty offer 5
On a slightly defensive note, the "sexy blue humanoids" were taken from two sources, a Justifiers supplement and a little-known RPG called Hidden Legacy. They were reptilian, or more accurately mammal-like reptiles so they could have breasts, and they did not spiritually commune with either nature or the planet. I have not even seen that particular movie yet, the one that everyone at the table named as soon as sexy blue humanoids showed up.*
As it happened, during the first session, I was really tired and had not had time to re-read the rules before playing, but again, the culture of play we seemed to developed at the Dice Dojo made this no problem. Peter absorbed the rules in about ten minutes and served as rules-man. The second session, the next week, was easier for me, but it was still handy for at least one other person at the table to know the system really well.
Events of the first session
We started with the characters' vehicle - which is not a spaceship; it's beamed into orbit and makes planetfall, without any space travel - arriving at the planet and going through a bad entry and landing. That gave me the opportunity to inflict much planet-based conflict upon them because they weren't in an area they would have preferred to land in, full of unpleasant geography and plants.
I wish I'd remembered to bring the original rulebooks, because the illustrations and lists do a good job of establishing what sort of technology is available. This isn't Star Trek, there are no "scanners" or other fantasy tech besides the Transmatt. During play, I had to keep reining in people wanting to "scan for life" and stuff like that.
Anyway, first contact with the natives was established, which went sort of badly into a combat situation, and as it turned out, the characters did very well. I quite liked Barnabas being caught out in the firefight and doing his best to be very very small while the big-ass tough-ass tiger, pangolin, falcon, and so on took a piece out of the attackers in classic semi-military style. The players made sure to inflict injuries on the planet like "Not as tough as it looks" and "Intimidated," all of which would serve them well later. But on the other hand, when more negotiatory contact was initiated, the natives turned out to be quite interesting and we were able to focus on more social and slower-paced play.
This sparked exactly the kind of policy crisis among the Justifier team that the setting (if not the original system) seems so richly designed toward. Basically, Joanna and Darcy were pro-native and wanted to negotiate a treaty their owner/employer corporation would hate, acknowledging the natives' ownership and so on. Barnabas wanted nothing more than to earn maximum Buyback without getting killed, so objected strongly. The player actions instantly shifted into into characters running around trying to inflict social injuries effectively to make various other characters either inclined to like them or disadvantaged when disagreeing with them. The most extreme was Joanna sending Lyle dizzy with infatuation, so the ordinarily unflappable, cold-hearted, ambitious scientist was mooning around all over the place, unable to concentrate.
Personality traits as injury
All of that brings up one of the more subtle rules concerns which isn't so much a problem as a feature, but easy to misunderstand unless the group talks it over. It is quite easy to implant a personality trait, state of mind, opinion, or emotion into another character by winning a conflict with them. What does one do with this, and how does it play out? Levi put a lot of thought into this and I think it's one of the more explosive elements of the system, whether positively or negatively depending on how well the group understands certain points.
1. You can run with such an injury and treat it basically like a front-and-center personality trait, because you like it. J.P. really liked the "going native" injury I gave Joanna and effectively made it his character's primary motivation for a while. However, to do this, one must understand that it's still an injury by the mechanics and will probably give opponents bonus dice when it's relevant.
2. If you don't want to behave like the injury says, you don't have to. Just ignore it as a behavioral indicator and let opponents show how it is in fact "in" your character in certain stressful circumstances, for which they'll get more dice. It's important to understand that this is not a situation of "heal it so I don't have to act like this." Sam grappled with this issue for a while with the injury J.P. inflicted on Lyle, "infatuated with Joanna."
3. If in either case above, you want to get rid of the injury because you don't want opponents to get dice from it (and bear in mind that an injury can always be made more mechanically severe by a winning opponent, too), then there's a mechanism in place to do this. We found that it works best when you get some help from another character, and that such scenes are very fun.
4. If you like the content of the injury and would like to use it as a character asset instead, then that's possible by the rules, although it might take a little while. You have to beat the injury and get rid of it as per the normal healing rules, and you have to take a new trait at the next improvement opportunity. The cool thing as we saw it, although no one got around to trying this, is that you actually don't have to do it in that order. The thought of a transitional period during which the same attitude or emotion trait - or rather, the "bad side" and the "good side" of it, probably with different ratings - gives bonus dice both to you and your opponent is quite attractive.
J.P. speculated that if such a trait became an "injury character," then maybe it could be shifted to an asset then, but I think that's fiddly and something of an end-run around the consequences of losing conflicts.
The rules about this need to be discussed because they can run into long-standing habits of thought about the integrity of characters, personality traits on sheets as thespian directions, and various responses to Force can introduce confusion about it.
Improvement
This time, I made sure that we used the improvement rules carefully halfway through as well as after each session, for a total of four times. Especially after the first time, this was an eagerly anticipated step of play. I also belatedly realized the obvious, that I should be doing the same thing, at the same times, with the planet! It has 25 traits, so by the rules I couldn't add without dropping one, but that is only a bit of all the options available. And since after the first session in particular, various aspects of the planet were effectively done with anyway, it wasn't even a noticeable lack.
Here's a comparison of Edgar Allen, before and after Peter applied the improvement mechanics several times.
Beta Lesser Panda 1, Friendly Demeanor 1, Barely-Suppressed Terror 1, Quick Learner 1
Courteous Speaker 2, Patient Listener 2, Steady Hands 2
Field Doctor 3, Tougher Than He Looks 3
Beta Lesser Panda 4
and
Beta Lesser Panda 1, Friendly Demeanor 1, Desire to Succeed 1, Quick Learner 1, Confident Officer 1, Xenological Researcher 1
Patient Listener 2, Steady Hands 2, Beta Lesser Panda 2
Field Doctor 3, Courteous Speaker 3
Tougher Than He Looks 4
I found that the "alter the name of a trait" option is extremely important. At first glance, it seems like the most lightweight of the options - note that it does not mean "martial arts" to "basket weaving," but would be more like "kickboxer" to "well-rounded martial artist" or something like that, or a shift from "shy" to "suspicious." But it turned out to be very useful and relevant for everyone. I found that switching "Artifact treaty offer" to "Activated artifact" was exactly what I needed as GM, and glory be, there was a mechanic just sitting there for me to use to do it. The Exchange has a really nice way of rewarding the concept of simply utilizing the existing rules rather than troweling on arbitrary material without any structure to do so.
Events of the second session
The first half of play centered around Barnabas and Shelly stealing the aliens' funky artifact, and Lyle inadvertently activating it. Brought in some great imagery ranging from all-out action to some comedy antics to social, dialogue-based drama. The second half battled it out among the characters' social maneuvering, and Joanna finally had to admit they must complete some kind of mission or never get off the damn planet. The climax came when the aliens attacked the crew (the artifact theft wasn't exactly the best idea), and the crew split into camps during the fight. Joanna and Darcy actually fought against the others, and I can't remember ... maybe one of the other player-characters too. As it turned out, the planet was not successfully Justified, which is to say, when the corporation comes to settle and exploit it, there's going to be trouble. Only by one success, though.
Anyway, and with some speed, the characters settled upon a story to tell the corporation, and probably the most interesting thing about it was that they decided to hide the alien artifact entirely, and also to leak the natives' existence to the media, because they'd be protected (or partly protected, like the Betas themselves) by law.
Single-individual characters and the one-big-pyramid situation[/i]
J.P. was interested in the rules options of running characters as full player-character-like pyramids of traits, vs. setting up major complex situations (like a fortress) as characters of their own, with named person-type characters or groups as traits. He had been kind of bummed that the alien chieftainess, who through role-playing had become a well-defined personage, didn't have any game mechanics and couldn't become (for instance) Joanna's ally in terms of a full character load of dice. He acknowledged that she could become a kind of pseudo-character as an injury to the planet or even to another character, but was clearly interested in a more formal way for such things to be managed in play.
As it stands, the GM basically has to decide at the outset how to do it: one big meta-character (the way I'm doing it here), a bunch of player-character like characters, or some combination. My only thinking at the moment is to decide for a given application of The Exchange and be damned sure to stick with it. A whole new pyramid of traits popping into play halfway through would be a major statistics-shifter and not at all fair, as I see it.
Buyback and Rank as injury
I'm still working out just how to do Buyback and Rank. This is a weird project in some ways; I'm almost hacking The Exchange as much as playtesting it, in that my priority is finding out the most satisfying way the system can be focused on the Justifiers setting. To recap, I'm treating both of these as formal Injuries, in that they can add dice to an opponent's pool during a conflict. My idea is that your rank acts against you when in dispute with a senior officer, and amusingly, it never gives you any dice at all - i.e., someone else's lower rank might be good for you, but your own rank has nothing good about it. This continues to work out pretty well, and it seems to me that I might specify that rank is not ever boosted via conflicts into an "injury character" (see the older thread for some discussion of what that is). Buyback is similar in that the owner/employer corporation benefits from it in conflicts; the important thing is, conflicts about what, and whether losing can be productive for play. Regarding "about what," I'm thinking that maybe the number of successes against the planet might be relevant too.
OK, so the rules insights about that were as follows.
1. Rank should be rated at 5 to start, meaning that a conflict could concern all kinds of things, and then someone can pull rank as a late-stage resort. Starting with it is possible but not especially effective. So given this slight tweak, I'm ready to see how it flies.
2. Buyback is a lot trickier. For one thing, the company is obviously very tough, and I wonder whether I should write it up as a 25-trait character just as with the planet/mission. I didn't do that, but I set it as a pretty nasty obstacle-based roll, and no one succeeded except Joanna (which is funny because she was the most subversive, anti-company character). And the unpleasant consequence is that characters racked up grotesque amounts of Buyback as injuries, meaning that my starting, not-too-critical concept for the mechanic is overwhelmingly harsh. So we kicked around some possibilities for fixing that, one of which is that this conflict does not itself increase Buyback, and that would happen only as during-mission events. Another idea is that the characters might team up ("get their story straight") in negotiating their status with the company after a mission, which makes sense, because the players did devote much time to concocting a thoroughly fictitious report at the end of the mission anyway.
GM role
The toughest part of this particular combination of setting and system, and I think it may be a system feature, is that it relies on a certain GM responsibility to wrap it up. Or in other words, the players have a hell of a lot of input concerning their characters' actions and means of getting things done, but not much on the larger tasks of framing conflict itself. I found myself using Trollbabe logic: if someone wanted to start a conflict, then we had a conflict, period, and I was just another "someone" by that rule. The trouble was, the way the scope of actions and traits work, player-called conflicts tended to be quite small-scale and didn't have much influence on moving the larger issue of the planet along. I found myself eventually saying, "OK guys, it's late, you've beaten this kind of round-robin influencing one another into the ground, I'm gonna have the natives attack now and we'll do the big planet-buster final conflict." Which isn't my favorite kind of role as GM; it's Plot Authority in my taxonomy of Authorities, and I prefer Plot Authority to be systemically emergent rather than imposed.
I may be over-psychologizing here ... my thinking is that this is a personality effect on game design. I like Plot Authority to be emergent because I like to be really brutal and uncompromising in the smaller-scale applications of rules and character play - which is to say, I don't like holding back or really, having any play-decision impacted because I have "plans" for what's going to happen next. That kind of play requires me to consider how pleasing my plans are going to turn out to be for everyone else, and I am, how shall I put, distinctly not a pleaser. Based on all my communications with him and observing his dialogues, Levi may simply be (a) better at and (b) more inclined to "please" in this fashion. In which case I'm talking about a feature rather than a bug.
Or maybe I am totally off the beam and instead I'm discovering a design issue Levi'd be interested to know about, who knows.
Best, Ron
* I have, however, seen this.
edited to add the handout link - RE
SamuelRiv:
The setting is fun. The notion of "being a pangolin" seemed too often removed from roleplay, but it's an incredible world to work with - oddly feels a bit like Blake's 7.
I want to comment on The Exchange mechanic. Basically, it works great as far as resolving conflict in a hands-off-enough way to make roleplay key, still slightly discouraging one to use fuzzy logic to "game" the system (like using a trait like "Master Carpenter" to say, in a combat scene, you use it to swing an axe). What I especially enjoy is the level-up system of adding new traits, which may progress a bit slowly, but allows one to really expand a character without really affecting the mechanics of power.
I do have a strong ambivalence, however, to the notion of "injuries" in the game. This is where, upon winning a conflict, one can inflict several negative traits upon the defending character, to be called into effect in later conflicts by any opposing side. My problem with this is centrally the idea that mechanically, one should avoid injuries and try to heal them at all costs. What I observed in play, however, is that injuries are an utterly fundamental part of character development, thus it seems ridiculous that an injury can only be removed by actively trying to remove it.
I seem to get into a heated argument with Peter every time I tried to make this point, so let me be careful. My character (Lyle) was injured by the fox (Joanna) to be "infatuated with her". This quickly became central to Lyle's fleshing out as a character, such that I took on new traits such as "dark and handsome" to harden the point. However, the second I remove that infatuation, my character loses that motivating factor. Granted, the system does not fix one's traits as a limiting set, and one might say that my removal of the injuries is a sense of self-realization and security such that I can still be infatuated, but the infatuation does not control or hinder my actions.
But I also received the injury "sympathetic to the natives". At the climax of the session, all the justifiers had to effectively choose sides - either with the company or with the natives/planet. If I were to decide to support the natives, an attacker can invoke my injury to say something like "a bleeding native falls next to you and your sympathy requires you to stop and help him instead of fighting on". This feels almost counterproductive to the encouragement of character development through traits vs roleplay.
My suggestion, then, was to allow a character to absorb one of his/her injuries, at each level-up, into a tier-1 trait, thus preventing those injuries from being used against them and turning one's weakness into a strength. The reply from others at the table was an insistence that "injuries are bad". I just don't see them that way.
... Actually, upon re-reading the rules, it looks like we made a number of omissions as to how we handled injuries, their effects and their longevity. I stand by my point, however: injuries need not be bad.
Motipha:
I still disagree entirely. There is no Gimme to get out of having an injury: If you as the player want that injury to be a source of strength, then you must actively choose to do that. As well, if you want to get rid of a negative influence on you, you have to do something to take care of it: There's no easy pass to it.
The whole point of an injury is that it is a negative against you. What that negative means in the long run really depends on what the players at the table make of it. The "sympathetic to the natives" injury is not countering to character development, it IS character development: You feel so strongly for them that you put yourself in additional risk in the firefight to protect the natives, or you do something stupid because you feel for the poor guys, whatever. I don't see it as being oppositional to roleplay at all.
As you pointed out, the system encompasses paths by which you can turn a negative in to a positive, but it is something you in fact have to work to do. While the rules do suggest you can give traits (positive and negative) durations, that's an optional rule that I really don't think is needed. But you can always add the positive trait with exactly the same name, and there is the positive character growth you want. Yes, you as the player have to choose to have your character go that way. This I think is good design.
SamuelRiv:
You can attempt as often as the GM allows to fight your injuries to reduce them. This is about as easy a way out as it gets in an RPG. I don't see how waiting until the next level-up and then absorbing the injuries into traits is somehow an easy pass, especially if you have to sacrifice adding a trait of choice at the level-up to choose a perhaps-less-versatile injury trait.
In either case, this is not a system that lends itself easily to a play-to-win approach, which is mostly why I think it felt so seamless in a roleplay-heavy game. And as we know in such games, good roleplay requires viewing negatives and positives as not a goal in themselves, which as a rule itself makes the equality "negative=bad" quite nebulous.
An example: in D&D, as a Barbarian (or orc or something), you can get Bloodlust by getting to some very low HP. It is thus built-in to that class that a character may intentionally get to low HP simply to get that Bloodlust advantage in combat. In The Exchange, a character may be given the trait of "bleeding", but then the character may, upon level-up, take it as a positive trait with some implied relation to bloodlust (GM discretion), thus removing the negatives of bleeding. Granted, in D&D having low HP is still a disadvantage once the Bloodlust ends, and in The Exchange one can similarly invoke the fact that the character is freakin' leaking bodily fluids as a negative trait, regardless of the strength gained from such a thing.
BUT you agree that injuries play a big role in character development. In my suggestion, one sacrifices adding possibly-more-versatile trait to instead absorb an injury trait on level-up, thus acting as an encouragement to make such character development permanent, rather than just treating it as a plain setback to be overcome mechanically. And btw, the rules don't give an optional time limit, but rather allow the injuries to incapacitate a character once the injuries win a conflict as 1-2-3-4-x. This is a great nuance that we missed in play - I'd love to do this system again in a different setting.
I won't post clarification again on this, simply because now I'm interested on how others might weigh in.
Motipha:
I'll attempt to limit the amount of absolutely rules based analysis, but you have some misconceptions. Specifically:
a) There is in fact a stated limit on tries in the rules. If an attempt is made to remove an injury, the margin of failure dictates how soon the healer can try again. Its under the "Removing Injuries" heading.
b) The optional rule for duration is one the page title "more options." This is different than the chance of incapacitation if the margin of victory is high enough.
To more esoteric points: it's an easy pass because you're declining to deal with the injury in fiction. The injury was received as part of a specific thing that happened: The rules as they are mean that you cannot lose the injury without dealing with it in fiction. The method you suggest means that you can simply wait long enough in a session and then remove it without doing anything meaningful fictionally. I don't have a problem with that in all games, but for this one that seems a significant difference. Especially considering that one of the negatives of trying to heal your wounds and failing is that you can NEVER heal the wound, that's a heck of a thing to sidestep.
You seem to be conflating "character development" with "helps my character." That is not what I mean in the slightest. Injuries make your characters life harder, but they are character development. How the character faces adversity informs us as to their nature: what they do, what happens to them, it all plays a part whether it makes them more capable or not.
And once more, to hammer the point: No one has said "negative==bad." What we are saying is "Injury == bad for the character" in that Injury is a description of a type of trait in the game Exchange. You can have any number of traits that may seem negative (misogynist, club-foot, quick-tempered, drooly) but still help the character. All that is being said is that if a character has an Injury (as the term is used in the rules of the Exchange) then it is a thing that works against them.
Let me put it this way: The change you suggest adds nothing to the game that is not already there save for one thing: you don't have to face your injuries to get rid of them. As you have pointed out, the system is relatively forgiving about removing injuries as it is. So why add this to it? Why make it possible to remove an injury in order to gain a benefit in a purely mechanical way, when a path already exists that is mechanical but demands the creation of fiction? Isn't the point of a game like this to encourage people to do meaningful fictional things?
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