[Within My Clutches] my game can be won, so they played to win it
David Berg:
Within My Clutches (old; still revising current version)
Oops.
This game operates on a structure of pursuing your protagonist's goals, and there are some strategic decisions you make that impact your success at that. Overall, though, it's supposed to be a character exploration game, where the point of the struggle is to examine, experience, celebrate and expand upon the classic flawed super-villain. You go after Goals, getting gradually more taxed by the cost of maintaining the ones you've achieved, until we see what this character does with desire and success and juggling and failure and disappointment, and then the story's over.
That was the intent, anyway.
When I was pitching the game in an attempt to get friends to come playtest it, I said this:
"Can you be the first supervillain to achieve all your goals, or will the burdens you've saddled yourself with drag you down and out of the race?"
And then in my in-person introduction, I described how, when you get all your Goals, you get to declare "Time to wrap it up. Final scenes, everyone."
Like I said, oops.
No one really got into the character psychology of the decisions being made, they just chose according to the aim of achieving the 3 Goals on their sheet.
My intent had simply been to forecast where would be a good place to stop, and to communicate that character success and character failure were both reasonable to expect. "If you lose two Achievements, you crash and burn, and you get an epilogue where you describe how you go out in an epic meltdown," was supposed to be seen as a fun thing to do with your character, but in light of my earlier statements, people just took it as a description of the consolation prize for not winning.
Simply re-setting the endgame to what it originally was -- "play until you feel you've done all you can with this character; if you win all your Goals, keep playing under the burdens that come with those Achievements" -- should do wonders to fix the expectations. I'll highlight that next time: completing your character's stated objectives does not mean you've won the game.
Design issues remain, regarding the interface between in-character decisions and system-manipulating ones, but I think I'll instantly be a lot closer by establishing the proper expectations on this particular front.
(This may seem obvious. All I can say in my defense is that one of my objectives was to test out the math, and playing to win was good for testing that. Required successes are going up from 5 to 6 and starting Moxy is going down from 6 to 3.)
That's all I have to say for now. I hope the title observation is useful to someone out there. I'll be back to discuss the game more once I have an updated document.
Feel free to ask questions or share experiences regarding unintended playing to win in RPGs. Just because I have a plan doesn't mean the issue's conclusively resolved.
Callan S.:
Hi,
Did they define the three goals on their sheet?
Could you give an example of the pursuit of those goals the players made in their narration or such?
I'm not really sure you can have characters doing stuff and not have gotten into the characters psycology? It'd be right there. Unless the players simply weren't interested in it - but it's still right there to be picked up on. It doesn't sound like the game is removing that element?
Sp4m:
How did your different (competing?) villains cooperate to tell a single narrative?
Were they ever at odds with one another's evil plots? Is this game run as a campaign, or during a single session?
What are some examples of the goals these villains are trying to accomplish, and what are some drawbacks?
I'm curious to see how you systemize psychological burden.
In my experience, character development is best when it happens naturally, over time. Trying to squeeze major psyche development (like call of cthulhu's sanity loss) into a single game session makes it feel forced. IE. the character develops when game events have weight, and they only get weight by having a player invested in them.
David Berg:
Hi Callan,
You might be right, I'm not sure.
Much was warped by trying to squeeze 3 hrs of testing into what turned out to be 90 minutes of actual time. So we were in fast-forward mode almost the whole time. We did slow down a bit for Melanie and Dustin. Melanie seemed pretty into her character concept, and did some cool roleplaying, but then when it came time to resolve the scene and choose he path, an extremely lucky dice roll kind of made it no contest. Dustin's turn was a more interesting case.
Dustin was playing Frenzy, a wealthy scientist who gets super-strength from injecting himself with an experimental compound. Kind of the Hulk crossed with Bane. Frenzy's family life was a bit of a disaster, with a cheating wife and a rebellious daughter. His first Goal was to make it in good with the old money, to become respected rather than viewed as an uncouth upstart. We rolled his Attempt dice and he got 2 successes, meaning he'd need to Commit for 3 in order to achieve this Goal. This would in turn saddle him with a 3-point Expectation in future turns; not the greatest way to start off.
I'd been hoping that this moment would be Frenzy's decision about how desperate he really was for respect vs how afraid he was of an entanglement sapping his ability to pursue his family goals. Either some agonizing or a strong statement of priority, or long- vs short-sighted character portrayal. Instead, Dustin simply looked over his resources, looked over the options (1 - don't Commit, wait for next round, hoping for a better die roll, but taking a hit to his Moxy for not pursuing what he's desperate for, or 2 - Commit now and have to deal with a 3-point Expectation eating his dice pool for the rest of the game), calculated that Committing now gave him the best odds of being the first player to achieve all 3 Goals, and thus chose that.
I'd hoped that, rather than being a "best" strategy, there would simply be different strategies invoking different probabilities of different outcomes, to be discovered in play. Some risks would be inevitable, but which risk you take when would be largely a matter of "what would this character do here?" I don't know for sure what sabotaged that -- the hurried circumstances of play, my setting the wrong expectations, or the rules themselves.
I'll post the ruleset shortly, and I'd certainly welcome your analysis!
David Berg:
Hi Spam (or whatever you'd like to be called?),
It's intended for 2-3 sessions. The villains' stories stay separate, but they interact with the same supporting characters, so the "universe" of the story is tied together somewhat. But as far as spotlight on protagonists, it's a turn-taking game.
I'm with you on investment and weight building over time. I generally prefer to gradually build into that stuff too. That said, I have had successful short games of various systems where people got very into their characters' heads very quickly, so it is at least possible.
I hope my reply to Callan addressed your other questions.
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