[Air Patrol] Ronnies feedback
Gryffudd:
Quote from: Baxil on February 17, 2011, 11:52:46 AM
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).
Quote from: Baxil on February 17, 2011, 11:52:46 AM
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.
That's certainly something that could be run in it. I don't know if I want to tie in any specific enemy for it, but I would like to put in a bunch of ideas for stuff that could be run. I cringe at the new Galactica, but the idea is neat. ;)
Pat
Gryffudd:
Whups, after that first section about social crime is supposed to be a 'Ah, thanks for the info.'
Pat
Gryffudd:
Bought a copy of Dust Devils and downloaded Nine Worlds. Going to be reading through them at work tonight while I ponder the 14 things that need pondering in the system.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Patrick,
1. Baxil nailed it concerning my intended use of the term social crime. To talk about that, I think it's most useful to let his aliens-example be strictly that, an example, and not go there as a suggestion before you get the chance to think over the term completely on your own.
So - given your setting and the text of the Ronnies entry, and starting completely from scratch, what'd be a social crime that would need an elite police unit to investigate, particularly one with exceptional mobile capabilities?
2. Let's talk about investigations as game processes. More blunt facts: players don't investigate anything, or rather, not when "anything" means a fictional situation. They never do; it's not possible. Investigations may be venues for something else interesting, in which case the "something else" needs to be understood as the point of play. Or they may not, and if not, they're merely transitions and Color in terms of what really matters, which in many cases is what is discovered (and hence guaranteed to be discovered).
I'm sticking with your stated interest in play not being hours of fucking around before the GM throws the bone and we get to have a fight scene. In which case either interesting stuff occurs during the investigation that , or what is discovered (and quickly) is so interesting that it will be the topic for hours of play.
The question is, then, which of this set of if's is best suited to your vision of play?
3. Changes in characters ... boy, the meat of play, in its way. I have seen many, many ways, especially those which have little or nothing to do with simply increasing effectiveness. The one I'd like to recommend for Air Patrol, at least as food for thought, considers the character sheet to be something of a portrait. The beginning sheet is like a sketch - enough to work with, gives strong first impressions, perhaps a sense of motion, but that's it. As play goes on, the sketch turns into a drawing and ultimately into a rendered, nuanced, and striking final piece.
Wait - perhaps I'm not being clear. The artistic wording is intended to be an analogy, not a real drawing et cetera. What I'm saying is that as play goes on, think of session by session time-lapse photography on Sgt. Wodecki's sheet. I'm saying that very, very little of it changes the character in the game-world - the skill numbers don't go up, he doesn't change in rank, et cetera. But you do see much more about him as a person. More psychology, more about his values, all of which have been generated by play. Perhaps a service record of the cases worked in play, including his personal take on them. And of all the things originally on the sheet, perhaps only his Flaw might change every so often.
That sounds like a lot of fun to me.
It also mght be worth considering that one might phase one's character out, when it seems like the portrait is done, with a fun and painless way of bringing a new character in.
Which itself brings up another point - do you really want to make it possible for a player-character to die in the ordinary course of applying system mechanics, in this game? There is no right answer - it's yes or no - but whichever one it is, matters greatly. Way too many games have "no" as the only rational answer but retain mechanics that kill characters anyway, for instance.
4. One thing you aren't seeing in my #3 above is mechanical reward, and that's on purpose. It makes more sense to me in this case to move all such mechanics into a different realm of play - specifically, the Prognosticator and the Whispers. To discuss this, those aspects of play need some clarification in setting terms.
Forgive me if I'm going too far with this - and also, let me know if I'm simply wrong in all I'm about to say - but my current impression is that your notions about the whispers being scary or sinister are very unformed at this time. And even more unformed, perhaps, is the notion that the Air Patrol command itself may not be the ultra-virtuous Boy Scout organization that its propaganda and the idealistic player-characters would indicate. The fact that the founder of the Air Patrol is now a most-wanted terrorist (i.e. disgruntled, probably heroic rebel) seems consistent with this.
I suggest that this whole line of thought may not be productive for this game. Or even if you want it to be, let's at least make sure that the basic, introductory level of play is sound on its own before you go deconstructing it. More specifically, I'm asking whether the sinister quality of the whispers is real or not. And no half-and-half or any of that, it's a yes or a no.
OK - what I'm about to suggest about reward mechanics presupposes that the answer is "no," and the whispery stuff is cool-sinister rather than uh-oh-metaplot-sinister. You may or may not be familiar with the ephemeral but crucial bonus mechanics found in games like Primetime Adventures, The Shadow of Yesterday, and Space Rat. I'll tell you about the PTA one, called Fanmail. Basically, when a player (not the GM) does something that any other player likes, the player who likes it takes a token from a certain reserve on the table and gives to the one who did something. The something can be anything: a turn of phrase, a decision made by the character, a good card draw, whatever. The token can be used to buy a bonus card in later conflicts. It's also important to understand that the reserve that Fanmail tokens are drawn from is derived from previous conflicts, so if you want your group to have lots of fanmail kicking around, (i) get into lots of conflicts, and (ii) do fun things and reward fun things others do. It's a very, very functional mechanic and has been imitated and elaborated upon countless times.
I'm not suggesting you merely imitate it. For one thing, the "that was cool and fun" basis for Fanmail is intimately tied to the core concept of PTA, which is that we are playing protagonists in an ensemble-style TV series. Whereas here you have a different core concept - and I suggest that you articulate that for yourself and consider any sort of fun little bonus/benny mechanic which rewards doing it - and tie using that bennie to getting a whisper! So the only way the player-characters get whispers is to have this kind of bonus in action.
Which, uh, means you have to have the whispers do something which isn't just the GM bugging you to go to the docks to find the clue that will in turn tell you to go to the warehouse to fight the bad guy. But whatever - make the whispers do something worth all this mechanical effort.
One thing about PTA Fanmail which is sort of atypical, is that it disconnects the bonus from any success or failure result in a current conflict. You can do it that way if you want. But if you don't, then consider that many minor reward mechanics of this sort are based on conflicts' outcomes, falling into two models: success breeds success vs. adversity breeds success. In the former, you get bonus rewards to use later for doing well now; in the latter, you get bonus rewards later for failing now.
5. As for those jetpacks, my suggestion is that they should be unique, or very nearly unique to the Air Patrol. In other words, it's not like the cops have jetpacks because everyone else has jetpacks; it's so this particular set of cops can have a unique advantage that no one else comes close to without significant effort, itself probably illegal in its own right. Clearly this touches upon all sorts of details in the setting.
But whatever it turns out to be, if the jetpacks are merely a standard gear item, I'll be sad. I'd love to see them grant a unique game mechanic that's fun to use.
6. Let's talk about the difficulty levels vs. the modifiers some more. I wrote,
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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.
You wrote,
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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.
Let's stay with your almost-went!! I suggest that you were on the right track, then found yourself somewhere unfamiliar and bolted. Your problem is no problem at all. Brace yourself ...
... you don't need opposed rolls. NPCs do not have to be played by the same rules as PCs, not at all. Give each one a target level of difficulty for offense, meaning what the PC has to roll in order not to be hit by them, and a target level of difficulty for defense, meaning what the PC has to roll in order to hit them. You could use those same values for anything the NPC is doing (i.e. that the PC has to deal with), or you could have one more score which set the level (for the PC to beat) for "everything else."
Seriously. It sounds crazy, yes, but it covers every single situation in play that could ever, ever come up. And adverse circumstances just add one or more levels, done deal.
I'm not saying, by the way, that all games need to be like this. My own game Sorcerer and one of my favorite games ever, Hero Wars (now HeroQuest), are totally traditional in this regard, for instance. But lots of games use it without any trouble and a hell of a lot more ought to. I think Air Patrol is one of them.
7. My reasoning regarding the complication on a 6 is based on my other suggestion that the complications be wholly situational, without imposing dice penalties. So, my thinking there is that a complication is always a good thing for play over and above what the character might think. It solidifies the communication about what is going on and what must be taken into account regarding one's next action, and it provides raw material in a way which often proves very consequential without being pre-planned.
Therefore my thinking about a complication with a 6 is that it would not undercut the success in any way. It merely makes the world a little bit more than merely a punching bag for your skill roll - think of it as a ball going through the basket and then doing something else, sort of an elaboration on the success. And that same logic is still consistent with their current role accompanying failures, I think, because by this logic, when you fail, a complication or worse, two, makes life all that much more adverse.
Whew! That was a lot of Air Patrol and a hell of a lot of RPG concepts packed into one spot. Patrick, I hope it helps or at least makes sense.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Oh - one thing to clarify. I did not recommend either Dust Devils or Nine Worlds to you as settings to emulate for your game. They are in fact two of the best RPGs ever written - and I do not say that lightly - but I brought them up as examples of settings in which crimes were very, very hard to pin down morally, and in which the whole concept of "the law" was either dubious or corrupt or both. I mentioned them only in order to contrast them with the Air Patrol setting.
Looking over the paragraph in which I mentioned them, I find that there's a transitional concept between the sentences which may not have been evident. It was supposed to be present in the short sentence, "I"m not necessarily calling for that degree of nuance." I will present that paragraph again with the transitional sentence made more explicit.
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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, and it is likely that Air Patrol will do better with a more traditional, rule-of-law approach to police work and criminality. But I do think, even then, 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.
Best, Ron
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