[Air Patrol] Ronnies feedback
Ron Edwards:
Air Patrol by Patrick Gamblin is a Runner-Up, and if there were an award based strictly on a setting's fun color and zappiness, it would win it. And that's saying a lot from me, because I dislike most stuff called steampunk, considering it to be creatively bankrupt and boring. But Air Patrol has something special to it beyond merely pointing to a few batteries and toot-toot steam pipes and claiming cool-ass genre status. I like the integration with history which does not revel in how wonderful it must have been to be non-wog in the Victorian British Empire,* but rather highlights the arbitrary, alienating, and future-defining features of WWI.
However, good as it is, the question is what lies beyond - or perhaps beneath - the colorful flash, such that it translates in play into something actually compelling and forward-driving, rather than merely being fun to read and otherwise a bog-standard investigate-and-fight Chill clone. (And I chose that example carefully, as it's a clone of Call of Cthulhu, hence, clone of a clone.)
So Pat, that's why I think the worst, very worst thing you could do at this point is beef up the setting any more in terms of details. For all those places in the text where you say "I'm gonna add this," I think you shouldn't, or at least, hold off for a good while. Instead, given what you do have, I think your better priority would be to consider the situations and immediate concerns of characters and players, in practice. The current text is very weak in this regard
The core weakness: two manifestations
1. The big situations faced by the Patrol player-characters are crimes, which they must investigate and solve. In the vast majority of games focusing on such situations, the whole thing is not essentially different from a classic dungeon crawl. It might be a little more linear, and there might be a little more in-character posturing along the way, but the clues are bread-crumbs along a trail, and the ending is some kind of fight to bring down some perpetrator. All that most games offer beyond this rather thin gruel is a hell of a lot of setting-based, fanboy-type color summaries of a given genre.
Now, if you want to write Air Patrol this way, I certainly can't stop you. But I'm hoping that you can agree with me that what I'm describing, despite being industry standard, has no real reason to live and that Air Patrol could well take a stronger approach to the whole techno-cops crime-fighting idea. If that agreement is even partially possible, then the first thing to address is:
1. What kind of crimes are we dealing with?
If we were talking about some kind of intense Dust Devils or Nine Worlds approach to that question, then many of the crimes might not be wrong at all, or be so politically situated that they make ordinary moral considerations inadequate. I'm not necessarily calling for that degree of nuance. But I do think it's worth considering what makes a crime (i) important enough in fictional-setting terms to be prognosticated and investigated by the Air Patrol, and (ii) engaging enough in real-person-us-playing terms to match to the color and interest most of the people at the table have invested in their characters.
The text implies, although not in detail or with any examples, that we might be talking about very dangerous and possibly confusing social crimes made possible by new technology. If my reading about that is correct, then great! That'd be enough! That's all I'm looking for - to see something like that more directly articulated and provided with examples. What this means, ultimately, is that the bad guys aren't coming out of left field, and both playing them and interacting with them will be a lot of fun.
2. Does the investigation really matter, and if so, how?
The grim reality is that "investigating" in most role-playing is not investigating at all. That doesn't mean it's always bogus; when I play Call of Cthulhu I know full well that the investigation is a celebration of colorful source material in some modified way, and that's what I'm there to do. But when I'm supposed to think that we are actually investigating and if the GM expects that I personally will experience the deductive and inductive processes that we like to romanticize in fiction ... come the fuck on. It's all roaming around picking up bread-crumbs and being subjected to the GM's sense of pacing, whether we've uncovered the Surprising Thing he wants us to uncover yet, or whether we've futtered around "enough" to move on to a planned next stage, or whether he's enjoyed playing Old Missus Futterbottom enough yet. Genre after genre, system after system, all the same - endless variations on nothing.
At the moment, I'm seeing hints of this approach in the text, specifically the prognosticator, the whispering, and the "tell me what to do next" ability, among other things. I think this is not a good thing. The positive options include what I just mentioned, opening up the process so that we can all enjoy the genre during a pro forma non-consequential investigation sequence that will happen no matter what; or possibly a very different approach in which how the investigation goes (i.e. well or badly) really matters, a lot, in consequences to the setting, to various NPCs, and to the characters. I'll leave aside the really freaky options like InSpectres in which the back-story is not pre-set by a GM at all but rather constructed through player input as play goes along, which I don't think would fit Air Patrol very well.
You do have some neat colorful stuff to work with, specifically the Prognosticator and the whispering. At the moment, it seems only to be a directive method for the GM to say, "Go here, do this" - do you want to talk about some possible alternatives?
"Let me tell you about my character!"
So, Sgt. Wodecki is an Air Patrol officer. He's a big guy in great physical shape with chiseled features and a blond buzzcut with some hair jutting over his forehead. He's not really all that bright, emotionally a bit immature, and tends to be morally simplistic, but he's got a big heart and sometimes naively sees to the heart of things. He's definitely not leader material.
Alertness 3, Athletics 5, Brawling 4, Charm 2, Driving 3, Education 2, Flying 4, Interrogation 2, Resistance 4, Shooting 3, Sneaking 2, Medic 4
Brutal Fighter 2, Won't Go Down 2, Extra Cool Jetpack 1, Lying Eyes 1
Weakness: Bit of a doofus when faced with sophisticated or unfamiliar problems
When I look over a character prepped like this one, two things are most important to me. The first is whether I have a working image of the character, with a sense of "go" to him or her, and whether the numbers and details on the page contribute to this dynamic quality. In this case, I discover that there's an exception to my comments about "no more setting material," because I need a standard personal equipment list for the Air Patrol in order to know what Sgt. Wodecki looks like.
The second important thing is what might happen to all these values on my sheet. I understand that various penalties will get applied and recovered from; that's easy. The big question is whether anything will progressively improve. The text mentions that such rules might be forthcoming, but I want to call into question whether they matter for this game. Not every game needs to have characters get better, or if they do, get better indefinitely. And lots of high-Color, high-Setting, investigate-and-catch-villain guys are hampered by those mechanics, for reasons we can discuss if you want to, Pat.
If you are interested in my thoughts about alternative reward mechanics, i.e., which are not indefinitely focused on on character effectiveness, then we can discuss that too. At the moment, it seems to me that the reward mechanics process may be an opportunity to make Whisper a more useful and central concept in play.
Cool mechanics
I like the way that resolution, out of combat, may well often be handled without rolling, and the dice, when used, exert a modifier to the existing flat numbers comparison. It's really not mathematically different from the standard approach of thinking of the roll first, and the values as modifiers, but it may be experientially different and keep the dice effects where they belong, in circumstances of risks. Or, another way to say this is that you've articulated what a lot of people functionally do with traditional roll + modifier systems, as opposed to the usual situation in which the rules say to do it one way and people have to cobble together a way which makes better sense.
I really like the denouement idea! It beats the crap out of the non-tension of the widely-practiced climactic fight scene, which always comes several sessions of play too late, in which the heroes "might" defeat the bad guy, oh no.
Here's my request for necessary added cool: I humbly beg for some kind of consequential, fun use of those jetpacks, utterly unique in terms of both the fiction (i.e. they do something crucial that cannot be done any other way) and mechanics.
Mechanics suggestions and considerations
1. A lot of games provide two things to modify a basic resolution system. The first is some set of graded difficulty levels for tasks which sets target numbers, and the second is a bunch of difficulty modifiers which reduces one's effectiveness value. I know this is so common as to seem normal, but the fact is, it sucks and always has. Why not just the first set of levels, which is totally sufficient? I'm doing X. How hard is X, right here and now, period? OK, that's the difficulty, here's the target number, go. A game from about ten years ago, Haven: City of Violence, was so absurd in this regard that one routinely faced -10 to -15 modifiers on the most ordinary conflict-situation d20 rolls, i.e., fights. Sure, you might have add an 8 to your roll from your skill, but some difficulty level was set just to shoot your gun, then all sorts of stuff hammered your roll for anything. Even in less extreme designs, the stupid lies in the fact that you're getting hit with a double whammy for no reason.
So I'm recommending either to have target number difficulty levels or to have die-reducing difficulty modifiers, but not both. Either one is perfectly adequate by itself for setting how hard a given task might be.
2. I recommend that hit location be chosen before hitting, not afterwards, especially considering the extreme consequences of a vitals or head shot. It strikes me that armor as written isn't much fun - it just makes all rolls less effective, and hence combat gets more drawn out as you slowly grind away at opponents' scores. I guess if you wanted to get really practical and colorful about it, you could assign specific attacks to specific armor, which that sort of armor simply negates in full. That's pretty out there, but something like it would be more fun - it turns armor into a tactical circumstance rather than yet another (and annoying) step and modifier of resolution.
3. I suggest that concrete penalties be acquired only through damage, and that complications should not affect the numbers in play, but only the immediate situation and circumstances. Oh, and that a rolled 6 should get a complication too.
4. There's an epicycle problem with tracking pool vs. It Wasn't Really Me. What I mean is that the two things only exist to revolve around and counter one another; each is annoying when the other isn't involved, but they negate one another when they're both involved. So it's like a spinning propellor on some kid's hat; it spins and spins but doesn't have anything to do with what the kid is doing. I really love the idea of It Wasn't Really Me, but I think this implementation should be reconsidered and redesigned. Maybe every villain has some version of it, and part of the investigative process whittles away at its effectiveness, and you don't find out whether it works until the denouement.
Patrick, this entry was a hell of a lot of fun to read. It's great to see the virtues of more traditional game design brought forward. I know my take on it is not industry standard (same-old bogus investigative model, pages and pages of equipment, pages and pages of historical details, plans for never-ending supplements), so let me know if it makes any sense for you.
Best, Ron
* Pardon me while I spit copiously, preferably upon some feature of said empire. Did I mention that I think this whatever-it-is called steampunk, in nearly every example, is bereft of political sanity, to the point of becoming genuinely grotesque? But that's not a Ronnies issue. We return now to our regularly scheduled feedback.
Devon Oratz:
I like steampunk stuff, so I'm gonna keep an eye on Air Patrol.
Quote
1. A lot of games provide two things to modify a basic resolution system. The first is some set of graded difficulty levels for tasks which sets target numbers, and the second is a bunch of difficulty modifiers which reduces one's effectiveness value. I know this is so common as to seem normal, but the fact is, it sucks and always has. Why not just the first set of levels, which is totally sufficient? I'm doing X. How hard is X, right here and now, period? OK, that's the difficulty, here's the target number, go. A game from about ten years ago, Haven: City of Violence, was so absurd in this regard that one routinely faced -10 to -15 modifiers on the most ordinary conflict-situation d20 rolls, i.e., fights. Sure, you might have add an 8 to your roll from your skill, but some difficulty level was set just to shoot your gun, then all sorts of stuff hammered your roll for anything. Even in less extreme designs, the stupid lies in the fact that you're getting hit with a double whammy for no reason.
So I'm recommending either to have target number difficulty levels or to have die-reducing difficulty modifiers, but not both. Either one is perfectly adequate by itself for setting how hard a given task might be.
This is a really interesting point.
Gryffudd:
Hi Ron. Hi Devon. Sorry to respond so late, but I saw the review post just as I was getting ready to write up a submission for 1KM1KT's movie mashup rpg contest, and I figured I should get that done while the ideas were hot. I'm a little tired and wrung-out at the moment, so this is just a quick response for now. I'll give a much longer and more detailed one in a couple hours after I rest a bit. :)
I'm very happy that you enjoyed the game as much as you did, Ron. I was hoping some of my ideas were heading in the right direction, but I still lack confidence. I am very open to discussing ways to make it better and more interesting. I'll post something more coherent and detailed in about 4 hours or so.
Pat
Gryffudd:
Thanks a lot for the review of Air Patrol, Ron. I'm really glad it had some good parts in it. Your review certainly gave me a lot to think about.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
For all those places in the text where you say "I'm gonna add this," I think you shouldn't, or at least, hold off for a good while. Instead, given what you do have, I think your better priority would be to consider the situations and immediate concerns of characters and players, in practice.
Yeah, part of me wanted to just leave it a generic city for people to make up themselves, while the other part of me thought I should make it New York Specifically and work the details of NYC into the writeup. I don’t think I’d figured out which way I was going to go with it, but a more do-it-yourself setting is my personal preference. I agree very much with that last couple of lines. It’s probably the part I have the hardest time with. Learning how to deal with that is one of the reasons I try these contests. There’s a lot I need to learn.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
1. What kind of crimes are we dealing with?
If we were talking about some kind of intense Dust Devils or Nine Worlds approach to that question, then many of the crimes might not be wrong at all, or be so politically situated that they make ordinary moral considerations inadequate. I'm not necessarily calling for that degree of nuance. But I do think it's worth considering what makes a crime (i) important enough in fictional-setting terms to be prognosticated and investigated by the Air Patrol, and (ii) engaging enough in real-person-us-playing terms to match to the color and interest most of the people at the table have invested in their characters.
If I can do something better and more interesting than what has become the standard way of doing this sort of game, I’m certainly open to any suggestions you may have. I’m unaware of Dust Devils and haven’t gotten to read Nine Worlds yet. I’ll see if I can rectify that soon. Initially I was thinking the Air Patrol gets the really weird stuff, the high-tech crime stuff, and anything the regular police can’t handle. I should probably sit down and think of specific sorts of crime or crime trends that the Air Police would be used for. I definitely have to think more on what will engage the players in the game world and the sessions.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
The text implies, although not in detail or with any examples, that we might be talking about very dangerous and possibly confusing social crimes made possible by new technology. If my reading about that is correct, then great! That'd be enough! That's all I'm looking for - to see something like that more directly articulated and provided with examples. What this means, ultimately, is that the bad guys aren't coming out of left field, and both playing them and interacting with them will be a lot of fun.
The term social crime isn’t familiar to me, so I had to look it up. It seems to be an action that is criminalized by the wealthier classes, but not seen as a crime by the poorer classes, such as smuggling or poaching. Or from the other angle in some sci-fi settings you have clones, illegal to own, being owned and used/abused by the rich who can normally ignore the law. Am I understanding it correctly?
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
2. Does the investigation really matter, and if so, how?
The grim reality is that "investigating" in most role-playing is not investigating at all.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
At the moment, I'm seeing hints of this approach in the text, specifically the prognosticator, the whispering, and the "tell me what to do next" ability, among other things. I think this is not a good thing.
I can certainly see that, upon thinking it over. I’ve been trying for a while to come up with a better way to do investigations in games. The closest I came to something ‘new’ (new to me, that is) was in reading, um, I think one of the Gumshoe games, where the author suggested getting rid of alertness checks to find clues and just handing out the clues, since failing to find a clue just stalls the momentum of the game. I liked that idea, but it felt like there should be more. I wasn’t able to come up with anything better, however. Now you mention that really, the investigation is a forgone conclusion, that it must happen, and happen correctly in order to get to the later parts, the dramatic confrontations and such, and I find myself agreeing completely.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
The positive options include what I just mentioned, opening up the process so that we can all enjoy the genre during a pro forma non-consequential investigation sequence that will happen no matter what; or possibly a very different approach in which how the investigation goes (i.e. well or badly) really matters, a lot, in consequences to the setting, to various NPCs, and to the characters.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
You do have some neat colorful stuff to work with, specifically the Prognosticator and the whispering. At the moment, it seems only to be a directive method for the GM to say, "Go here, do this" - do you want to talk about some possible alternatives?
Definitely. So far the Prognosticator and Whisperers are a fun setting colour bit, but functionally are just a way for the GM to prod players with clues. I did have thoughts of making them a bit more menacing/creepy, but never really got it in there in time. Other than setting colour I’d love a way to make them more interesting and I’d love a better way to handle the investigation angle. Near the end of the writing period I’d come to the conclusion that the game was in a way more about what happens other than the investigation. The dramatic scenes, action, and so forth, rather than the collecting clues and piecing them together. It’s based on the old serials and such, and those are mostly dramatic scenes and action, rather than finding evidence and analyzing clues.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
The second important thing is what might happen to all these values on my sheet. I understand that various penalties will get applied and recovered from; that's easy. The big question is whether anything will progressively improve. The text mentions that such rules might be forthcoming, but I want to call into question whether they matter for this game. Not every game needs to have characters get better, or if they do, get better indefinitely. And lots of high-Color, high-Setting, investigate-and-catch-villain guys are hampered by those mechanics, for reasons we can discuss if you want to, Pat.
I’m certainly open to that as well. When I first started lurking here a year ago, one of the first things that drew me in was a discussion people were having about alternate methods of character advancement. I’ve toyed with the idea of not having characters’ stats/skills advance at all, but it feels to me like there has to be something that improves in some way, whether it’s new abilities to use, or new fun stuff to access. Leverage has something like this, in a way. After you complete a ‘job,’ you write the name of it down on your sheet. In a later session, you can call back to that episode for a bonus during a similar situation (‘Hey, remember that time I…?’). Instead of stats or skills getting higher, the character has more experiences to draw on. That’s not necessarily what I see for Air Patrol, just an example of something I’ve seen that is different from my previous experiences. If the character’s skills aren’t getting better would there be new abilities to learn, connections gained, or similar, or would the character’s sheet be completely unchanging? I’m torn in a few different directions here.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
If you are interested in my thoughts about alternative reward mechanics, i.e., which are not indefinitely focused on on character effectiveness, then we can discuss that too. At the moment, it seems to me that the reward mechanics process may be an opportunity to make Whisper a more useful and central concept in play.
I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Anything that integrates the Whisper theme better would help too.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
I really like the denouement idea! It beats the crap out of the non-tension of the widely-practiced climactic fight scene, which always comes several sessions of play too late, in which the heroes "might" defeat the bad guy, oh no.
Thanks. It just kinda sprung into my mind. I’m not sure what influences brought it into fruition. I think there may be a problem connected to it, though. Or at least something that feels like it could be a problem. The denouement setup depends on the hero point economy (I think I’m using the term right) from earlier parts of the campaign/session. If the points the villain gets and the ones the heroes get are too out of whack, it could make it hard to ever pin the villain down. I’m not sure if it balances out there. I suppose that may be best figured out during playtesting, though. An alternate version might be to have the villains special abilities start out high and get reduced when the PC's successfully stop parts of their grand plan, so the villain may have to confront the heroes before they completely wreck his plans (and drop his villain ability scores too low to be of use). Just a thought, anyway. I like the general idea of 'use the early part of the session/game to build up hero points, so that you have them to use during the denouement,' I'm just not sure it's balanced right.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
I humbly beg for some kind of consequential, fun use of those jetpacks, utterly unique in terms of both the fiction (i.e. they do something crucial that cannot be done any other way) and mechanics.
I’ve been trying to think of more for that. Initially my setting idea was to have the city flooded or worse, so that flight packs were by far the best way to get around. Or to ramp up the use of dirigibles and aircraft so far that flight packs were the best way to ‘police’ them in a way. Flying towns that are for some reason necessary to visit might help that too. I’m just not entirely sure what way to go and how far to take it. I’ll do more thinking on it, though. So far they're only real use is that they're faster than most forms of ground transport and kinda convenient in not needing a helipad/runway.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
Mechanics suggestions and considerations
1. A lot of games provide two things to modify a basic resolution system. The first is some set of graded difficulty levels for tasks which sets target numbers, and the second is a bunch of difficulty modifiers which reduces one's effectiveness value.
So I'm recommending either to have target number difficulty levels or to have die-reducing difficulty modifiers, but not both. Either one is perfectly adequate by itself for setting how hard a given task might be.
I agree. I almost went with solely using a target number for things. A more difficult situation, due to cover, darkness, distraction, whatever, would simply mean you used a higher difficulty. Give the GM general guidelines and let them come up with the difficulty based on the current situation. The problem that I ran into was opposed rolls. There the difficulty is effectively the opposing roll, and the only way to I can think of to change it to represent specific aspects of the situation is through modifiers. I suppose I could make it situation agnostic (so to speak), make opposed rolls only take the opposing roll into account and not the rest of the situational modifiers, but I’m not sure if that feels right. I’ll keep trying to work something out.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
- it turns armor into a tactical circumstance rather than yet another (and annoying) step and modifier of resolution.
Hm, I’ll give it some thought. I agree armour is probably an unnecessary step. Just something I’ve gotten too used to using in games. I could go with armour simply giving a bonus to rolls to avoid getting hit. It’s another modifier, but it’d be simpler and faster than having it reduce damage. I suppose armour in that day and age was really, really uncommon. It would largely apply to big things like armoured vehicles and large robots. They could just have 'immune to personal weapons/attacks' as a trait and not include personal body armour in the game at all.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
3. I suggest that concrete penalties be acquired only through damage, and that complications should not affect the numbers in play, but only the immediate situation and circumstances. Oh, and that a rolled 6 should get a complication too.
More agreement. Complications originally weren’t going to be able to be used as a penalty to the current roll, I just added that in near the end as I realized I wasn’t going to be able to think up enough ideas by the time I needed to have that section done. I can see adding a complication to the highest result on the die. Mind if I ask what your reasoning was?
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2011, 10:22:37 AM
4. There's an epicycle problem with tracking pool vs. It Wasn't Really Me.
Ugh, I hadn’t even thought of that. I’ll have to come up with a different way to use It wasn’t Really Me.
Thanks muchly for the ideas Ron. Sorry for responding in a big chopped-up post. If you want to split it into subtopics or something I can do that instead.
Pat
Baxil:
Touching on the "social crime", Prognosticators, investigations, and setting -
"Social crime" basically means any action that is criminal primarily because it challenges the social order. There's a large overlap with "victimless crime" but not 100%. Modern examples would be things like drug laws, sodomy laws, sedition, or blasphemy (in more religious states).
Having the Air Patrol deal with social crime could be interesting because it could add a moral dimension - are we enforcing just laws? - but looking into the setting background, I think there's a MUCH more awesome direction to go with it.
You have aliens - suspected to be from within the Solar System - attacking in 1917 and being beaten back. Then we scavenge their technology and they never show up again. 20 years later, and not a peep? Doesn't that seem a little suspicious?
So you've got MIA aliens who know they can't beat Earth in a frontal assault ... at least while Earth's warring nations are united. You've got a police force that's a "dedicated fast response unit tasked with investigating strange occurrences". You've got "Prognosticators" that, in some undefined way, point PCs toward crime.
To me, this all screams "Underground alien subversives!"
Embrace it! Go all Battlestar Galactica on your steampunk! Make prognosticators alien detectors! They're infiltrating society, finding would-be traitors and agitators, and giving them the tools they need to overthrow or destabilize Earth's governments in preparation for a second alien invasion. The Air Patrol's mission is to uphold the thin blue line against people with legitimate grievances and dangerous, diabolical backers.
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