![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI put a lot of thought into how to make a game work where there were six players who want a variety of different things. I don't usually recommend that, but I wanted to play with all the support bubble! In particular, I wanted to avoid a system like DnD that defaults to "we kill it". But I also wanted to include some conflict along the lines of combat where you have a particular ability, and you use it, and get the thrill of rolling a dice and being effective.
Map
I predicted this and I was super right, that drawing a map of the area the PCs would go to would be incredibly useful. I got a lot of "ooh, what's that" and "can we go there" which was exactly what I hoped for -- it gave the players a meaningful sense of being familiar with the islands on these specific turtles, and immediately conveyed the general "how big is this" without me having to describe it verbally.
I drew a (very provisional) sketch of the whole turtlepeligo: one big miles-long grandma turtle with the spirit forest on her back, and a dozen young-to-middle-age turtles with villages, pastures, seaweed, etc, etc. And players were immediately invested in "where do I live" "what's the turtle like on my island".
And I drew the three islands the players were likely to visit, so they could rapidly see the status quo and decide where to go. It would have been well worth drawing some of the specific locations too.
It also forced me to realise specifics about layout I might not otherwise have thought of, like "there should always be a few boats drawn up on the beach, right?"
I didn't even expect to use the maps for trying to have people move around, which I think was the right approach. The main focus was giving the PCs handles to interact with the world. Although in a scuffle I might break out a map and PC/NPC standees, not to judge exact distances, but to see "who's fighting who"
Character sheets
Likewise, players often use character sheets as a User Interface for "what things can I do? what can I try? what should I ty to do?", so I wanted the character sheet to reflect the sort of game I wanted the players to have. I think this worked very well!
I avoided pages of numbers that were going to be ignored. Instead I focused on:
* a short three line description of your character
* a list of "character beats", i.e. stereotypes or traits you could play up. The intention here was to guide people into characterising their character by doing in character things. You got cookie-tokens for doing so, though that may or may not have made a difference.
* a list of "abilities": some things you were good at (either deliberate actions like "ship-handling" or narrative constants like "people instinctively like you"), and some special actions you could choose to take by spending a cookie-token.
I tried to spread these out so every player would have abilities and traits useful in different situations, and some that you could easily enact even if you were bad at improv acting, and some that encouraged improvising.
Because I knew everyone so well, I expanded the basic character concepts from our previous game into characters that I could imagine the player enjoying playing. And I think I succeeded, not everyone engaged with everything, but people were enthusiastic about their character. In another game, I might design N pre-gens and let people choose or pick randomly.
If you play multiple times I would definitely let the character beats evolve, possibly along with small personal -development quests, or just with "change it if you're bored of it", but for a first time playing the concept I didn't include that.
ETA: I wasn't sure how much difference the character beats made, but Cookie Mistress said that when I was distracted by GMing tasks, lots of what the players did was directly inspired by acting out a beat, ability or flaw, and she said she could see them grin in satisfaction when they'd checked it off, so I think that counted as a win. Some of the best roleplaying from some of the boldest and also shiest members of the party did come from building directly on a character beat.
ETA: I can share the character sheets if anyone's interested (although they're a bit unfinished atm)
Change one thing about your character sheet
I didn't insist on this too hard, but I told people to change at least one thing on their character sheet, so they wouldn't default to just passively sitting near it, but feel obliged to take ownership of what traits and abilities they *wanted* to have. I think there's more opportunity here but I think it was useful.
Delegating specific roles
Mixed success, but definitely useful. I chose several roles that I thought I might struggle to have time to do along with the rest of the GMing and primed individual players to do them. That was "scribe", i.e. record all specific events, NPC names, etc. Cookie Mistress, i.e. give out cookie-tokens, refresh them at end of scene, etc. And initiative keeper to make sure everyone had a chance to act during combat.
My theory was that having a specific role would help people feel engaged and responsible more of the time, and it wasn't perfect but I think it helped.
Worldbuilding details
Everyone loved the turtles, and got invested in the "demon escaped from the spirit forest" plot. And lots of the smaller details interested people, the sea-goats and hippos; the giant-spirit-flying-fish, the details of the archipelago, the electric pike the fish ate like spicy crackers. And always loves it when I roleplay bees and fish and goats :) Everyone loved befriending the giant fish and making a plan to tame it!
There's other things I can do better, but I love how some of those ideas turn out, of having a throw-away idea in advance and adding it to the "put in for colour" list and then having people get excited about it, is one of the things that I'm really pleased when I do well.
Action and conflict resolution
It was definitely correct to leave out most of the complicated mechanics from something like DnD, we could barely get through a simple plot with no mechanics in a couple of hours as it is. It would probably have worked equally well to start with simple 1st-level DnD characters and have an experience with a bigger proportion of board-game-y stuff, which would have worked very well for some of the players but less well for others. I may try something like that in future.
The system didn't come up much so I wasn't sure I was going to have much to say, but when I thought about it, it actually worked incredibly well when it did come up.
The system said you could spend cookie-tokens to succeed on a dice roll, and I need to tweak the concept to avoid confusing people, and avoid people being disappointed when you DON'T roll the dice. But it DID do what I hoped, and encourage people NOT to spend a cookie when they thought the random result would be interesting, but encouraged them TO spend a cookie when they wanted to look cool.
For instance, there were a few "do I know this" or "can I talk to them, how do they take it?" type rolls people could have spent cookies on and didn't, with a range of outcomes. And then there was a scuffle with the big spirit flying fish:
* Intermediate result let one player's boat be capsized
* Bad result, he couldn't see the assailant under the water
* Intermediate result from the fire demon let loose a fireball but couldn't hit the target under the water
* Good result (or cookie?) from original player to mount upturned boat and set spear against fish's glide, successfully injuring it
* Fortunate result from character who loves animals, calmed the fish and persuaded it she wasn't hostile, and ended the fight. Everyone got invested in finding it alternative food!
That could all have happened in a more mechanics-focused game, or a narrative "what do you want to happen to your character" game, but I think it the system supported that sort of resolution, in that I designed it so that each roll would USUALLY produce a meaningful, often dramatic, result with the potential to swing the encounter and have meaningful repercussions. And that the encounter could plausibly swing between talking and fighting and back again, not have one always take second place, or have the characters fight about how they would handle every encounter.
It's also a minor point but one that I've wanted to try for a long time, I explicitly tied difficulty of an action to "the GM just adjudicates depending how good you are, but narratively most characters spend most of their time doing things that are routine given their expertise", with only some specific actions during conflict/combat explicitly comparing PC/NPC's competence to each other. That means you can just say, "I'm a master thief", and the GM can handwave the sort of thing a master thief would encounter based on everyone's familiarity with eg heist movies, without having to constantly adjudicate "wait, is that a +5 difficulty or a +10 difficulty" or getting into nonsensical situations where the GM handwaves an appropriate difficulty for the character who usually does the lock-picking, but that gives a nonsensical result for how difficult it is for a non-expert character.
What DIDN'T work coming up next post :)
Map
I predicted this and I was super right, that drawing a map of the area the PCs would go to would be incredibly useful. I got a lot of "ooh, what's that" and "can we go there" which was exactly what I hoped for -- it gave the players a meaningful sense of being familiar with the islands on these specific turtles, and immediately conveyed the general "how big is this" without me having to describe it verbally.
I drew a (very provisional) sketch of the whole turtlepeligo: one big miles-long grandma turtle with the spirit forest on her back, and a dozen young-to-middle-age turtles with villages, pastures, seaweed, etc, etc. And players were immediately invested in "where do I live" "what's the turtle like on my island".
And I drew the three islands the players were likely to visit, so they could rapidly see the status quo and decide where to go. It would have been well worth drawing some of the specific locations too.
It also forced me to realise specifics about layout I might not otherwise have thought of, like "there should always be a few boats drawn up on the beach, right?"
I didn't even expect to use the maps for trying to have people move around, which I think was the right approach. The main focus was giving the PCs handles to interact with the world. Although in a scuffle I might break out a map and PC/NPC standees, not to judge exact distances, but to see "who's fighting who"
Character sheets
Likewise, players often use character sheets as a User Interface for "what things can I do? what can I try? what should I ty to do?", so I wanted the character sheet to reflect the sort of game I wanted the players to have. I think this worked very well!
I avoided pages of numbers that were going to be ignored. Instead I focused on:
* a short three line description of your character
* a list of "character beats", i.e. stereotypes or traits you could play up. The intention here was to guide people into characterising their character by doing in character things. You got cookie-tokens for doing so, though that may or may not have made a difference.
* a list of "abilities": some things you were good at (either deliberate actions like "ship-handling" or narrative constants like "people instinctively like you"), and some special actions you could choose to take by spending a cookie-token.
I tried to spread these out so every player would have abilities and traits useful in different situations, and some that you could easily enact even if you were bad at improv acting, and some that encouraged improvising.
Because I knew everyone so well, I expanded the basic character concepts from our previous game into characters that I could imagine the player enjoying playing. And I think I succeeded, not everyone engaged with everything, but people were enthusiastic about their character. In another game, I might design N pre-gens and let people choose or pick randomly.
If you play multiple times I would definitely let the character beats evolve, possibly along with small personal -development quests, or just with "change it if you're bored of it", but for a first time playing the concept I didn't include that.
ETA: I wasn't sure how much difference the character beats made, but Cookie Mistress said that when I was distracted by GMing tasks, lots of what the players did was directly inspired by acting out a beat, ability or flaw, and she said she could see them grin in satisfaction when they'd checked it off, so I think that counted as a win. Some of the best roleplaying from some of the boldest and also shiest members of the party did come from building directly on a character beat.
ETA: I can share the character sheets if anyone's interested (although they're a bit unfinished atm)
Change one thing about your character sheet
I didn't insist on this too hard, but I told people to change at least one thing on their character sheet, so they wouldn't default to just passively sitting near it, but feel obliged to take ownership of what traits and abilities they *wanted* to have. I think there's more opportunity here but I think it was useful.
Delegating specific roles
Mixed success, but definitely useful. I chose several roles that I thought I might struggle to have time to do along with the rest of the GMing and primed individual players to do them. That was "scribe", i.e. record all specific events, NPC names, etc. Cookie Mistress, i.e. give out cookie-tokens, refresh them at end of scene, etc. And initiative keeper to make sure everyone had a chance to act during combat.
My theory was that having a specific role would help people feel engaged and responsible more of the time, and it wasn't perfect but I think it helped.
Worldbuilding details
Everyone loved the turtles, and got invested in the "demon escaped from the spirit forest" plot. And lots of the smaller details interested people, the sea-goats and hippos; the giant-spirit-flying-fish, the details of the archipelago, the electric pike the fish ate like spicy crackers. And always loves it when I roleplay bees and fish and goats :) Everyone loved befriending the giant fish and making a plan to tame it!
There's other things I can do better, but I love how some of those ideas turn out, of having a throw-away idea in advance and adding it to the "put in for colour" list and then having people get excited about it, is one of the things that I'm really pleased when I do well.
Action and conflict resolution
It was definitely correct to leave out most of the complicated mechanics from something like DnD, we could barely get through a simple plot with no mechanics in a couple of hours as it is. It would probably have worked equally well to start with simple 1st-level DnD characters and have an experience with a bigger proportion of board-game-y stuff, which would have worked very well for some of the players but less well for others. I may try something like that in future.
The system didn't come up much so I wasn't sure I was going to have much to say, but when I thought about it, it actually worked incredibly well when it did come up.
The system said you could spend cookie-tokens to succeed on a dice roll, and I need to tweak the concept to avoid confusing people, and avoid people being disappointed when you DON'T roll the dice. But it DID do what I hoped, and encourage people NOT to spend a cookie when they thought the random result would be interesting, but encouraged them TO spend a cookie when they wanted to look cool.
For instance, there were a few "do I know this" or "can I talk to them, how do they take it?" type rolls people could have spent cookies on and didn't, with a range of outcomes. And then there was a scuffle with the big spirit flying fish:
* Intermediate result let one player's boat be capsized
* Bad result, he couldn't see the assailant under the water
* Intermediate result from the fire demon let loose a fireball but couldn't hit the target under the water
* Good result (or cookie?) from original player to mount upturned boat and set spear against fish's glide, successfully injuring it
* Fortunate result from character who loves animals, calmed the fish and persuaded it she wasn't hostile, and ended the fight. Everyone got invested in finding it alternative food!
That could all have happened in a more mechanics-focused game, or a narrative "what do you want to happen to your character" game, but I think it the system supported that sort of resolution, in that I designed it so that each roll would USUALLY produce a meaningful, often dramatic, result with the potential to swing the encounter and have meaningful repercussions. And that the encounter could plausibly swing between talking and fighting and back again, not have one always take second place, or have the characters fight about how they would handle every encounter.
It's also a minor point but one that I've wanted to try for a long time, I explicitly tied difficulty of an action to "the GM just adjudicates depending how good you are, but narratively most characters spend most of their time doing things that are routine given their expertise", with only some specific actions during conflict/combat explicitly comparing PC/NPC's competence to each other. That means you can just say, "I'm a master thief", and the GM can handwave the sort of thing a master thief would encounter based on everyone's familiarity with eg heist movies, without having to constantly adjudicate "wait, is that a +5 difficulty or a +10 difficulty" or getting into nonsensical situations where the GM handwaves an appropriate difficulty for the character who usually does the lock-picking, but that gives a nonsensical result for how difficult it is for a non-expert character.
What DIDN'T work coming up next post :)