[Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems
hix:
Definitely not intentional! After posting last night, I realised I'd forgotten those - and when I thought about it, I also realised that I wasn't sure how to take into account that achieving Ambitions reduces your Ambition score (which I suspect has some interesting consequences on Sucess Rolls ... ah, it makes it easier to go into danger, but harder to act with stealth and deceit).
I'm also pondering whether there are elements of the Cruel Fortunes that should be on there.
I'll mull over your comments for a while and take another crack at redrawing the chart along the lines Ron suggested, with those additions.
lumpley:
A tiny correction! Achieving an ambition gives you the option to increase your ambition, by adding a new one, or to leave it where it is. Abandoning an ambition reduces your ambition.
But I should say that all three - achieving/abandoning ambitions, committing new sins, and suffering new violence - are mere additions, they shouldn't substantially change your chart or your or Ron's analysis so far.
-Vincent
hix:
Ron, I think that all makes sense. Consider all of this post to be me testing out whether I get what you're saying.
Tim, you’re absolutely right that the PCs in the second session were only using Fights and Bargains to achieve their Ambitions. One of the players described the game as feeling a bit ‘one note’, and that was my diagnosis for why that was (*)
(*) Although I’ve had a little bit of email correspondence with
him subsequently, and he thinks there’s a bit more going on.
To draw out Ron’s point: in my previous successful games, I could see a few ‘Ambition cycles’ in action. For instance, Henri the vicious French psychopath fulfilled his ambition to become captain, and then another ambition to have sex with the Governor’s daughter. At the same time Geoffrey Fenton the genteel surgeon struck a bargain with an agent of the King, in order to fulfill his ambition of being pardoned.
Those two strands intersected when both Henri and Geoffrey returned to the Dagger. Geoffrey’s player was repelled by Henri’s actions with the Governor’s daughter (as was Henri’s player, to be fair). This repulsion coupled with Geoffrey’s need to be pardoned led to a really satisfying betrayal and climactic fight between the two characters as the Dagger came under fire from the Resolute’s cannons.
The point is that I think Tim’s right that a successful game needs to follow all three lines out. (And it occurs to me that there’s probably a fourth line that leads out from Ambitions directly to Success Rolls.)
Ron, I’ve revised the system chart along the lines you’ve suggested.
The revised Poison’d systems chart
Doing that has helped me clarify your points, which I’m going to restate here:
To play Poison’d effectively, the characters need to be fully committed to achieving their Ambitions.
A major reward cycle of play consists of characters striving to achieve Ambitions. Characters and the situation change as a result of those attempts, which leads to players revising the list of Ambitions they want their characters to pursue.
You said, “people playing Poison’d should be aware that such transitions are an emergent property of play.” I’m taking ‘emergent to mean that: players are responding to what happens in the fiction; they are caring about their characters; and they are caring about or hating other characters. (Let me know if that’s accurate.)
As an aside, thinking about all of that helps me see that all the different sub-systems in the systems chart basically ‘float’ in a sea of fiction, the moment-to-moment descriptions of scenery and character decisions, and it's the process of creating, enjoying and paying attention to the fiction leads to Poison’d rules being triggered.
Now, I’ve been doing a bit of study about reward systems on Vincent's blog. I'm going to put this next bit into a second post, because I’m not sure if it’s useful to info-dump it all at this point (and I want us to be able to ignore it easily if it’s not)
hix:
I’ve been studying this post (and the ensuing comments) on Vincent’s blog about reward systems. I’m not sure whether it’s useful to bring into the conversation at this point, but I think it's helped me get an insight into part of what’s going on.
This is all taken straight from Vincent’s blog (his words, with contributions from some of the commentators):
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The reward system is just the game system at its largest repeat. From the provisional glossary:
Reward System: (a) The personal and social gratification derived from role-playing, a feature of Creative Agenda. (b) In-game changes, usually to a player-character, a feature of System and Character.
Vincent suggests we read the "in-game" and "usually" as meaningful components of the sentence, not as hedges or filler.
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In a well-designed game you keep doing this thing and it gives you what you're after. (b) facilitates (a). Thus, the largest cycle of the game is rewarding.
The "reward" system (the game system at its largest repeat), will contain subsystems that aren't rewarding by themselves. It’s the highest-level system gives the subsystems their value.
While I don't understand the first paragraph yet, I think I can see what he's talking about in the second paragraph with Poison’d. A success roll is an okay thing. Multiple success rolls leading to an accumulation of Xs that mean you feel comfortable about going into a Fight (or spending 3 Xs to insta-kill an NPC)? That’d be satisfying.
Vincent’s recommendation (which he’s currently discussing on his blog) is to
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design your games to work functionally over (at least) three timeframes, with interaction and feedback between them. "What do you do right this second, what do you do tonight, and what do you do in the game?" Then if you feel like it, you can retrospectively examine the game, find the little cluster of procedures that creates the said interaction and feedback, and name it "the reward system."
In the case of Poison’d, here’s my first impression of the answers to those three questions:
Right now: Pursue your Ambitions, engaging in Fights, Success Rolls and the accumulation of Xs as necessary.
Tonight: Fulfill an Ambition or two. Choose more Ambitions if desired, and abandon others.
By the end of the game: Have your pirate placed in a position you find satisfying by the time the story is forced to resolve. (I imagine this would be a little like when you’re jostling with My Life with Master’s endgame mechanics to get a satisfying outcome for your minion.)
The duration of a multi-session game of Poison’d is very specifically defined: the game ends the second time a pirate leaves play. Pirates leave play by:
dying and coming to final judgmentretiring from a life of piracyfulfilling or abandoning so many Ambitions that the player doesn’t know what to do with them nextrenouncing all ties to the other piratesbecoming so foul a character that you no longer want to play them
Vincent also says one other thing about reward systems that I thought was worth noting here:
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We're talking here about changes to your character and stuff over time. What's linked to your fulfillment isn't the moment of changing your character, but the whole process of changing your character.
If you ask, "Why should in-game changes, like putting a +1 on my character sheet, be linked to my fulfillment?", the answer is: it shouldn't. +1, -1, nobody cares, doesn't signify. A "Reward system" isn't about the changes themselves, it's about changing over time.
Is any of this stuff useful for moving into the next bit of the conversation?
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
I think you're on track with most of this, with at least one exception I hope to deal with later in this post.
Concepts
1. For maximum clarity: "reward" is a real-person, social, psychological, and creative thing; "reward mechanics" function insofar as they aid that thing to happen. I've been trying to keep the two distinguished in my posting, but I'm pretty sure not everyone notices that. Experience points and levels are reward mechanics, but they are only rewards in the context of playing that particular game in a particular way. (Playing a game for rewards which do not match its reward mechanics is possible, but it's also how people get all bent out of shape about "real role-playing.")
2. Reward cycles are nested.
For example, in late-70s AD&D as I have played it, a fight is a mechanics reward cycle insofar as it represents risk, specific efforts, and outcomes, and it can be seen nested centrally in a larger mechanics reward cycle called "stay alive," and that can be seen as a major mechanics cycle within the biggest, called "advancement." All of which are at the service of a reward cycle which unfortunately was rather piecemeal and fumbling at the time, but probably manifested most as appreciation for however many EPs we got at the moment and to some extent as competition about that. (All of this is more coherent and for me, much more fun when playing Elfs or Tunnels & Trolls, but the "this" is the same.)
In Poison'd, it is crucial to understand that Fights don't fulfill Ambitions!! This is exactly what borked our absolutely disastrous attempt to play Poison'd. Fights exist only as extreme forms of getting X's and carry the risk of Deadly Wounds (that's from memory; correct me if I'm missing something), and the decision of whether to fight or not is rather different from its use/appearance in AD&D. The lesson is, someone must understand what the mini-mechanics-reward cycles do and must tell everyone else. This is really what's meant by "learning the rules," I think. You can blather all day about how to roll to hit, but unless I get how it ties into having fun, it's disorienting.
3. Rewards are not necessarily good outcomes for one's character, in character-view terms. Reward is about change, not fulfillment, completion, or advantage. Using the above AD&D example, I may not level up this session, but I may have made progress toward it - or perhaps I didn't make as much progress as I might have, and/or have experienced setbacks such as hit point loss, life loss (which is why that game needs resurrection; life loss is no fun as the top cycle), or (god damn it!) level loss. Here's the point: All of that, including a certain productive form of frustration, is reward insofar as my real-person, social, psychological, and creative thing got scratched by playing this game with these people. (Incidentally, all of that excess verbiage is easily covered by the short-hand, "Creative Agenda," as manifested in a specific way with this game, this set of fictional circumstances, and these people.)
I hope my point is clear: although I may want my character to level up, what makes play fun is whether the mechanics reward cycles are contributing to the relevance of leveling up, and whether play is socially validating my efforts - so play can indeed be fun when my character is totally fucked over by events. Getting this right means high mortality-risk Gamist play is fun, and everyone raises a toast to one's fallen character at GenCon, year after year. Getting this wrong - in a variety of ways ranging all the way up from Ephemera through Techniques through Exploration to Social Contract - means fucked-up, aggravating, un-rewarding play.
Related point for Narrativism and genre enthusiasts: actually being a protagonist must suck. One's physical, emotional, and ideological circumstances are placed under the harshest possible pressure, in a way such that this is it, the one time it matters most. All of us talk and think in terms of identifying with protagonists, and I absolutely agree with this in terms of the topics of fictional conflicts, but perhaps overlook that this must include a definite, specific personal safety from actual experiences like his. I've made this point in conversation many times, but I realize now I've never really brought it forward on-line before. It's one of the reasons I spread my hands and give up talking when people get all enthusiastic about "living their stories." No one wants to live a fucking story.
So David, I was pretty sure that you were all on the right track and going great guns, and I was planning on contributing the above points as a means of chatting along with you, until you said ...
The thing which made me grit my teeth
If you are jostling and jockeying for an "advantageous" epilogue when playing My Life with Master, you are mis-playing the game. That's not because strategy is somehow bad in Narrativist play, it's because the highest-level reward cycle in that particular game is about the relationship with the Master, specifically, the subordination of one's own esteem and loves to the service of someone driven by self-involvement. The game's top cycle is all about the question, "How's that working out for you?"
The epilogues are not reward vs. punishment, they are all reward(s), meaning, identifiable consequences for how the Master was conceived, how your character was conceived, and what your character did and did not do, and how much or how fast, during the course of play. Looking across those consequences and the specific arcs across the characters answers the question, for this particular manifestation of dysfunctional relationships as we saw in our particular game.
I have played the game with people trying to strategize their way to specific epilogue outcomes. It. Fucking. Sucks. It always sucks to play with people whose perception of the reward, and how the mechanics reward cycles play into it, differs from one's own. And if it doesn't suck, it's because one has given up on play itself as a source of fun. And in this particular case, I will go so far as to say that no, you can't play My Life with Master "this way" (i.e. seeking an epilogue), because doing so invalidates thematic commitment to things like the Loved NPCs, as a mechanics example, and to the more abstract but crucial component of genuine personal hatred for real people like the Master. I think the actual-play posting backs me up on this.
Therefore my point about not identifying "reward" with in-fiction success for the character is absolutely crucial. In-fiction success or failure - as a unit - for the character is the reward: specifically, the fact that no matter what, the old relationship with the Master is indeed over. Paul and I debated long, long ago about whether the Master had to die - he insisted the Master must die, case closed, and he was right, and that's why.
Interesting example
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Graham's Poison'd character from the Color-first character creation project thread.
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This is, in fact, Filthy Jackie, a Poison'd character.
Position: Surgeon
Sins committed: Adultery x2, Robbery, Murder
Suffered: Arrest, Beating (at the hands of Brimstone Jack), Imprisonment, Lashing (at the hands of Brimstone Jack), Rape
Ambitions: To be captain, to be pardoned, to be revenged upon Admiral Southgate, to fuck Admiral Southgate
Weapons: A fucking huge hatchet; Not a weapon, but she is quick, wiry-strong and vicious.
Devil 4, Soul 4, Brutality 5, Ambition 4, Brinkmanship 5, Profile 4
Outstanding bargains: Drunken Jack swore to back me for Ship's Captain.
The Dagger: It has a grim reputation; It's frightening to see. Profile: 10. Strength: Boarding and repelling boarders
The company of the Dagger: Its members are, by and large, unreprobate murderers; It's well-armed and eager to fight; It's been badly mistreated by Brimstone Jack. Profile: 6
Given the ambition and the bargain, it's not unlikely - although not obliged - that we'd see Filthy Jackie drive hard toward becoming captain fairly soon. Even if immediate circumstances give that ambition a pass for the moment, we'd probably get to see the Brutality and Brinkmanship in action, which as a "moving portrait" could act as a prequel to pursuing the ambition. The most likely other full alternative would be if play somehow brought Admiral Southgate forward immediately, but given that the trigger for play is Captain Brimstone Jack's murder, I don't see it as very likely.
Now, here's something that I planned for that Endeavor which never got done: let's take Jackie through a medium reward cycle, what you're thinking of as a session (for Poison'd) but which could probably occur a bit faster or a bit slower than that and still be OK. We'll go with the possibility, perhaps misleadingly simple, that the captaincy is indeed the focus of play.
So we play! Play, play, play. Drunken Jack probably gets sodomized by someone. More play, play. Maybe someone takes the hatchet in the head. And so on. Let's not get too involved in the minor reward cycles, but clearly Jackie either goes for Ambition without fighting, or gets embroiled in fights along the way - and in either case, accumulates or fails to accumulate X's and/or Deadly Wounds. If we were to discuss this level of play in more detail, I'd want to review the Brinkmanship rules, because of their interesting position in the diagram - but not now, OK?
What does the sheet look like now? First, there are X's and Deadly Wounds to consider. Or to put it another way, at a smaller scale from my earlier use of the phrase, "How's that working out for you?" This clearly tells us whether Jackie's captaincy bid has gone well in terms of risk and advantage, and is not the same as the second thing to consider: the captaincy. Is she captain? Is anyone captain? If not, is anyone trying to be captain? All of these together are going to be involved as well with her formal on-the-sheet Ambitions, whether she's abandoned the drive to become captain, maintains it, or has fulfilled it. And finally, there's the Bargains profile. What's happened to the ones she started with? What new ones are there?
That's a "medium" reward cycle: when the sheet looks different in a way which instantly informs us that play will be different now. Imagine a ton of X's + the captaincy still available + her Ambition to get it still in place, plus a Bargain with the Devil. My response: "Uh oh." Contrast that with no X's, with Deadly Wounds, and having achieved the Ambition to become captain, plus a Bargain with some other pirate who hates Admiral Southgate. "Full speed ahead to wherever that Southgate guy is!" Or finally, no X's, Deadly Wounds, and someone else is captain - in this case, my eyes snap instantly to the Bargains, and possibly toward making more of those toot sweet.
I'm failing to include a crucial thing in any of these circumstances: what's up with everyone else. I can't do that here, but I hope it's clear how important it is. Especially in Poison'd, but in my opinion, it applies for any game, even those in which the characters are not in direct conflict or theoretically, not even in contact. (Now that I think of it, that's what our first couple of sessions of Violence Future were like; it's a relationship-heavy game so our characters hardly ever met but affected one another constantly. And I'm always saying that two utterly-separated trollbabes' adventures affect one another at the raw, thematic, comparative level without any fictional inter-effects at all.)
The interaction of game mechanics and fiction at this time is, in CA-strong, socially-viable play, seamless. There is no "powergame strategizing" in a way which somehow ignores the in-fiction character, and there is no "ignore the rules to focus on your story or outcome." All such talk is meaningless.
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(David, I'd be happy to include the character you invented for that project too, for whatever game you chose, but the character wasn't described in the thread and apparently Vincent didn't make the sheet available on-line. If you're interested, post that information here. It's relevant to the topic.)
Let me know if any of this helped or made sense.
Best, Ron
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