Emulating movies and television, Part II

Answering the recent comments first…

Mike: Yeah… if these were easy things to emulate, I wouldn't be writing hundreds of words about my struggle with how they fit in. :) Yes, in any form fiction, the outcome of the scene has been pre-decided, while in roleplaying games, we're usually trying to decide the outcome through action. Though some of the indie games do exactly what TV does… they decide the outcome, and then make you decide how you reach that outcome.

Rob: The Voltron example was in my mind when I wrote that post. I printed out Pace last night, but I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. Okay, strike that. I read most of it while watching Nathan take a bath just now… it's very interesting, and it plays into a lot of what I've been toying with, which I'll talk about more below.

Tim: I've never read HeroQuest, though it shows up a lot in the indie RPG discussion. It's just darn pricey for a game I don't really want to play, but only want to look at the mechanics of. I have to admit to reading on the periphery of the indie scene, but I can't get deep into it. I have trouble with all the terminology, because I don't find that it helps me converse about roleplaying games. As Chad Underkoffler calls it, it's "crazy moon-language." And in some cases, the games they're producing get outside my main goal in roleplaying, which is to play out the story. Not to tell the story, but to create it through character action. Not player action, but character action. Which leads into my main theme for today…

–-

On the stakes and abstract mechanisms. I've been thinking about this a lot, including the abstract "hit points" form. But the more I think about it, the more I find that I'm really attached to direct causation. That is, the story is shaped entirely by actions in the game world, and not so much by meta-rules, unless those rules are fairly invisible… that is, it's not obvious that events in the game world are being warped by unseen forces. The whole Voltron thing is very telling, because it's such a pure and bald-faced form of the Fist-fight Model… the characters do something sub-optimal, and when all is nearly lost, switch to optimal tactics. And everyone keeps asking, "Why do they do that? Why don't they just form Blazing Sword first and get it all over with?" Well, because it'd make for a boring fight, but that's not an in-world reason, it's a cinematic reason. But I find that I don't want strong meta-game mechanisms that leave me asking, "Why doesn't he just pull out his vorpal sword and whack his head off? Why is he spending all this time fighting bare-fisted?" At the same time, I do have desires for cinematic battles… battles that last "long enough" and come out with "good" outcomes.

The Buffy Model works fairly well, because you can tie it into an in-world cause… Buffy has to be able to wear her opponent down or otherwise catch him off-guard to finish him off. And this works in some genres… but it doesn't work so well in others. The Fist-fight Model, on the other hand, doesn't really make so much sense… it's harder to explain why the hero suddenly comes back from the brink of defeat, unless you just decide that that's what heroes do: when all seems lost, they manage to win, just because they never gave up.

For all my thinking about the whole cinematic thing, I'm starting to wonder if all I really need is fudge/hero/drama points. It gives the player the ability to tip the balance when and if he feels it necessary. If conflicts are difficult enough, drama points will regularly be necessary to win, and if they're scarce enough, players may elect to lose a minor conflict in order to have enough of them for the major conflict later. Pace is pretty much pure drama points… success and failure are driven by them. (Very interesting that you gain drama points by intentionally allowing your character to fail. I might be able to use that.)

They can work for both the Buffy Model and the Second-Wind Model. They don't enforce these models, and I'm not really worried about forcing scenes into these patterns, but if a player feels that his character is evenly matched, me may choose to fight without the use of drama points until it's clear that he's going to need them to win. Or if I use a Pace-like form, he takes a beating to build up enough points, but that beating results in more long-term problems (via failure cards or "blots" in Pace). Gives me something to think about.

I always find it funny when I spend so much time thinking about these problems, and then find that tools we already have may address them well.

The big thing is that I've always looked at drama points as a fix for the dice… dice are inherently "broken" because they'll throw you a bad curve when it's not very good for the story. But in this case, I'm looking at drama points not as a patch on the dice problem, but as a necessary element… they're not something you use only when the dice are acting goofy, they're something you may need even when the dice are going your way. This echos Theatrix' "everyone has to spend a Plot Point trying to defeat the villain before he'll go down." Not that I'd play it that way specifically, but I'd balance conflicts so that the characters can't win without drama points.

And then I'd make drama points something the players earn by making their characters do desirable things… those things being involving their characters in subplots and the like. Again, that's Theatrix. There's a reason I've read that book cover-to-cover three or four times, even though I don't actually like to play it. (It's diceless, which is my issue with it. I'm very tempted to play it exactly as written, except with the addition of dice.)

In The Shadow of Yesterday, you'd gain drama points instead of experience points for hitting your Keys, which are a kind of like Flaws or Disadvantages in other games. When your character is faced with a choice that involves one of his Keys, he gets experience for being "true" to his Key. (The problem I've had with these experience-driven mechanics like in TSoY is that my players aren't into experience points… we don't look for lots of character "growth" and most of my players haven't seen experience as a "reward" for years, leaving Champions characters with twenty or thirty unspent experience points even back then.

So I think I've found my direction… I'm going to try incorporating a strong drama-point mechanic into my existing superhero game. I'll still use dice, because I don't like making the small decisions on my own, but drama points will be necessary beyond simply "fixing" bad die rolls. Players will earn drama points by involving their characters in "complications"… sub-plots with their NPCs, maybe even losing a battle at an "appropriate" point in the story.

My players could pipe up here if they like.