[Badass City] how do you design price lists?
Marshall Burns:
Badass City is a Step on Up RPG about a city full of badasses competing to be the most badass. Your life basically consists of competing with badasses in fights and contests of skill and guts, boasting about shit, and making your competition look like jackasses. The game's got loads of ways to do all of those, and it works pretty well.
Your badassitude, as perceived by the population of Badass City as a whole, is measured in Badass Points, which you gain by being badass in various ways: fulfilling your boasts, beating people up, winning contests -- basically, the stuff I just mentioned in the previous paragraph. You also can lose Badass Points by being un-badass: failing to back up your shit, getting beat up, losing contests, etc.
In addition to being a scoring metric, your Badass Score entitles you to certain goods and services. You don't spend them to get stuff; rather, you are granted them for free by virtue of your badassitude. It's the way things in Badass City work. If you want something that you're not entitled to by your current Badass Score, you have to take it by force or bargain for it. (Bargains work like bargains in Poison'd, except that rather than witholding dice from someone who isn't coming through on his end of a bargain, you can damage his reputation or force a confrontation with him on your own terms.)
Coming up with lists of the goods and services you might want is easy. Frex:
Quote
Lodging
Roach motel
Decent hotel
Nice hotel
Fancy hotel
Five-star hotel
Rat-hole apartment
Decent apartment
Nice apartment
Fancy apartment
Penthouse apartment
Rat-hole house
Decent house
Nice house
Fancy house
Mansion
Mansion on MTV Cribs
My problem is assigning the Badass Score requirements to this stuff. This is actually a perennial design issue for me: assigning prices to lists of stuff you might want. I'm completely flummoxed by it, and usually end up bagging it or designing around it (e.g. the money rules in The Rustbelt, which conveniently let me ignore concrete prices while simultaneously being actually kinda cool and appropriate). But I don't see a way to design around it in this particular game.
I'm really lost on this. I don't have a principle here to help me make the design decisions, unlike with everything else in the game. I mean, what's my measuring stick? How do I decide on a measuring stick?
I know that starting characters can gain/lose up to 30 points in a session, being limited to low-risk, low-gain methods like picking barfights and making boasts. After a certain point, when you've got enough to start basically gambling your points on contests, you can be gaining/losing hundreds of points in a session. It's easy to decide that the low-level (so to speak) badasses can only get roach motels, but at what point do you qualify for a mansion on MTV Cribs? More importantly, on what principle do I base that decision?
Regarding the game's design principles in general, it's all about being audacious and gutsy in terms of what you're going to try to accomplish/prove (without actually having any certainty about how hard it will actually be), then manipulating Positioning and Resources to make sure that you actually do accomplish/prove it. All of the rules are about/reflect on that. Maneuvering and setting/manipulating the terms for confrontations is a big deal, as is marshalling your resources. Your starting resources are just a few bits of swag that you brought with you to Badass City; after that, you've got to bargain, seize, or increase your score to get more resources. The resources are also all pretty unstable -- you can gain and lose stuff really quickly. Furthermore, gaining resources is the only advancement* in the game, so it's pretty important, meaning that the rate at which you gain stuff based on your score requires serious good design.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you: "Just assign something that sounds good, then test it to see if it works." Man, that doesn't really help. I need principles to make decisions on; doing stuff randomly then testing it in order to randomly come upon an operating principle is just taking shots in the dark.
What I need is for someone to turn the lights on, or at least point me toward a lightswitch. Anybody else got a game with lists of priced goods and services? How did you decide on prices? Anybody got some insights or relevant musings that might help? I'm completely stuck on this.
* You can also drop out of the scene for a while and return with a totally re-written character sheet, taking a huge cut in Badass Points in the process (since you just weren't around). But that's not an advancement; your overall innate profile is the same, just redistributed.
NOTE: the text that I've linked to is outdated, but the most up-to-date document that I have to show. I've since made several changes regarding probabilities, terminology, and the expression of Effect, but the underlying principles are all the same.
-Marshall
Ron Edwards:
Hey Marshall,
To my way of thinking, the first game that ever got this right was Army Ants. You get equipment for your rank and unit for free. You have Clout, though. It's basically a skill. You roll it, with a difficulty based on whatever it is you want that you are not really supposed to have, or at least aren't automatically provided with. If you succeed, you get it. Clout isn't a resource. You don't use it up. It's an ability that you can increase through use.
Hero Wars did something similar by making the extremely valid point that we aren't really talking about money, but wealth. If you want something, it has a difficulty associated with it. If you can beat the difficulty with your Wealth ability, then you can afford it. Whether you spent coins or goats or whatever is strictly a matter of what your character is like and what sort of situation it is, in other words, special effects. In thinking about what your character "has," all you really need to know is the character's Wealth ability, and the specific possessions and whatever are merely special effects.
If I'm reading you right, then this is the principle you need. You're getting bollixed up only because you're thinking of Badassery as money, when you should be thinking in terms of Clout, an ability (or skill or whatever you want to call it). I am not talking about the Poison'd style bargaining, but about ordinary acquisition for the character, like Wealth in Hero Wars.
There are several ways you could do it, but the question is whether you think this is a useful avenue to consider.
Best, Ron
Marshall Burns:
Huh. I've got Army Ants, but I've only skimmed it. I'm gonna have to look at it in more detail.
I don't have Hero Wars, so I need clarification: from your description, it sounds like the same sort of thing as Resources in The Burning Wheel (which I do have, have read in detail, and played a bit). Is that impression accurate?
For some reason, assigning difficulty modifiers to things feels a lot easier than prices. I don't know why. It's possible that this sort of thing might work. Implementation is gonna bear some thinking about. Since the Badass Score gets into the thousands, using it as an Effective value seems, well, unwieldy. A secondary value could be derived from it (like levels in D&D are derived from EXP). Perhaps it could be graduated into brackets. Like: ok, you've hit 500 points, you're now in Badass Bracket C. You can get anything from Goods Brackets A & B with no problem; you've got such-and-such chance to acquire stuff in Bracket C, and such-and-such chance for stuff in Bracket D, and everything beyond that is still out of grasp. A mansion on MTV Cribs is RIGHT OUT.
Hm. Gotta think about it some more, but that might be workable.
-Marshall
Paul Czege:
Hmm. Alternately, maybe just record the player's current Badass Score next to whatever material good they pull. So, I pull a mansion and record my Badass Score of 372 next to it. It's awesome. But when you pull a mansion and record your Badass Score of 422, we know yours beats the pants off mine.
Paul
Chris_Chinn:
Maybe the way to think of this is like Experience points/levels? I mean, you're talking about Badassitude as being able to access certain things at a certain point, rather like how many games treat XP & powers/skills, or, later D&D does with magic items ("You must have at least this level before this item becomes available to you").
In which case, maybe the way to go about it is to figure out how long in terms of X # of sessions you'd guess you'd want before someone is likely to get to a certain point. Since badassitude can be gambled, it clearly can grow or shrink exponentially, and that makes it trickier.
It's also good to note which things give mechanical benefit vs. bragging rights. A lot of modern videogames from MMO's to "achievement" awarding games make great use of useless, yet bragging rights type items.
You may want to consider which items gain their own "fiction". That is, a +4 sword is neat, but a "Deck of Many Things" holds it's own status for D&D players. Creating things that are unique or special also helps add to the status of it. (Also- maybe some items are unique and the first player to get to the level holds that item until someone else beats/surpasses them? Sets up a nice competitive economy, there.)
Chris
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