[Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems
David Berg:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 16, 2011, 01:34:25 PM
My reading of many of Callan's posts and points leads me to think he is mainly criticizing play/games in which [information like who's at the top of the stairs -D.B.] does have a specific role to affect existing Currency distribution, but doesn't have any Currency-based way to get into play. Instead, it gets into play just because a designated person says so, all the time, in an unconstructed fashion.
I'd like to discuss this with an example. Let me see if I can concoct one:
The GM narrates a security guard walking the perimeter of the catacomb entrance. The players narrate waiting for him to leave, then sneaking into the catacombs. While down in the catacombs, a player character fires his shotgun. The GM decides that the noise would attract the guard. The GM narrates the guard opening the door, standing atop the stairs, and then leaping down toward a player character with a Flying Elbow Smash.
We roll some dice, which reveal that the guard's move connects! Now we roll damage.
In the rulebook's damage table, it says that Flying Elbow Smash does double damage if executed when leaping from a height.
There was no Currency involved in the guard attaining the height from which to leap. Is that what we're talking about? If so, I'm kinda blanking on how to change that without (a) quantifying every time the player characters walk down some stairs, or (b) reworking the game to be some other game that doesn't care about added damage from heights.
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
There are in fact games which link that kind of thing (in fact, everything) to Currency. Universalis is the perfect example. Your account of the guard would most likely be a piece of narration by the winner of a dice comparison, placing the coin gained by one of the successful dice into the play-space, on a card or otherwise recorded as notes, as "flying elbow smash." Or conceivably it could have been established by spending a coin in a non-combat situation, in the same way, only from one's own coin reserves instead of "earning" a coin through a die roll, and then applied during the combat scene setup narration.
There are some few bits of stated material in Universalis which are free, simply pure Color ... but not much. Not much at all. Everything we ordinarily think of as just talking, in most games, costs money in Universalis. A lot of games have been influenced by it, including Fastlane (an underrated variant) and more recently, Annalise.
My take is that there exists a working middle ground between hard-and-fast paid for and effectively dysfunctional freeform under one person's control. I think my own games are built in that middle ground, especially Sorcerer. It does mean that the talking has to have some kind of understood constraint and scope and content, and although (in that game) the GM and others have different kinds of such limitations and formalizations, they all have something of the kind. My Life with Master is similar but with far more fixed and explicit features of this kind, as are all of Paul's games. Whereas Polaris is situated in a nice equidistant spot between Sorcerer and Universalis regarding such things.
H'mmm. OK:
Universalis ................... Polaris ....... My Life with Master .. Sorcerer ............................ (a long way!) ........ [Shadowrun, Vampire, AD&D2, et cetera]
Put Dust Devils and Dogs in the Vineyard exactly where Sorcerer is. Put Annalise just to the right of Universalis.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
I get your overall point, and my personal taste tends to lie in the middle ground you spoke of, but I'm still confused about Currency in my example. I played Universalis for the first time (only a few hours) last month, and my takeaways were exactly what I suggested as problematic in my last post.
1) Paying for everything slows down the fiction and is a pain in the ass.
2) Even if you paid for (a) the guard and (b) his elbow attack and (c) the fact that the elbow attack does more damage from a height, you still didn't pay for the event (the characters walking down some stairs) that granted him the height advantage.
I'm not trying to prove a point here; instead, I'm hoping to be shown a functional solution so that I can understand how to act on some of the criticisms Callan voices. I have a better grasp on "understood constraints on the talking" than I do on how a perfectly pervasive Currency can coexist with the activity of imagining fiction.
David Berg:
Actually, strike "activity of imagining fiction". I know how that can coexist with pervasive Currency: daydreaming about checkout desk payments when someone lands on your hotel in Monopoly. (I might even say, "Please come again, sir!" at the table.)
What I really meant was, how can Total Currency (that's for you, Dutch soccer fans) coexist with active fiction, in which fictional states and events invoke Currency mechanics?
Passive fiction is always an option, but that'd be a shame if it's the only one.
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
Sorry for missing your post for a few days.
I'm going to stay with the elbow strike. As I remember Universalis, the degree to which you enforced every last little contribution to the fiction was left open to the group. In my games, we were a bit strict about it. Getting the higher ground would indeed have cost a coin. Free input was limited to extremely minor things, so minor that I'm not even remembering examples. Even the color of a character's eyes cost a coin.
Regarding the pain in the ass part, well, yeah. That can be the case.
I do not agree with you that active fiction is Currency-linked at all times, and passive fiction is not. When one first grasps my idea of Currency, they often get really excited and want to make an all-Currency-for-talking, all-the-time game. That's fine. Universalis is actually damned functional, and I like stuff like Annalise and the current alpha idea of Realization Dawning. But Currency exists within an SIS framework, it doesn't itself make that framework.
The framework is actually constructed of talking and listening. That does not mean freeform, which is an abomination. It means good game design means good rules, i.e. dynamics and constraints, for talking and listening, and then good Currency rules inside that for organizing further procedural dynamics and constraints.
Also, if you haven't seen my post to Elizabeth in the They Became Flesh Ronnies thread, about hard and soft rules, check it out. That concept can apply to the talk-and-listen rules and to the Currency rules.
Best, Ron
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