Domain Management: Overview and Sketching Some Thoughts Out

So as I sit in-between games, my mind turns to domain management. Why? Because in about half my games, I seem to have players that would love to spend their time engaging in bureaucratic exercises of running an organization/city-state/nation, and most systems just wing it.

And I hate winging it. System bits that are winged never seems to have the emphasis/importance that they should have when improvised. Improvision is for things not critical/crucial to the plot or the players happiness.

So there are two basic types of management: Domain Management and Organizational Management; while broadly these items could be done in the same system, I think it is wiser to spread them out to emphasize different things.

There are three reasons I see to have domain management, the first is that your players enjoy it; the second is to generate resources, the last is to generate plots and challenges for the players to engage with. I want to keep these in mind when I'm looking at what I'm trying to accomplish.

Broadly speaking Domain Management is about obtaining and usage of land. In my mind, this involves four key components:

1. The land itself - where is it, what features are on it, what can it produce are all key questions that need to be answered.
2. The structures built - what buildings are there on that land.
3. The key people - the who's who running the domain, other than the PCs.
4. Resources - something to manage and spend

Those four items make up the key components of domain management. I want the feeling to allow for the building up from a small manor house to a large county seat of governance. After that point, I think things get a bit too large for what I'd want to have my games to be about. So let us look at each of the areas in some form of depth:

Land

Land can be broken down into two subcategories - major terrain and features. Terrain is fairly obvious, mountainous, hilly, forest, plains, farmland, wasteland, desert, etc. Features would make parts of the land particularly appealing, challenging, or rewarding (or some combination of all three). Features would be things like coast line, major rivers (think like the Nile or Mississippi), major lakes (Great Lakes), ancient ruins, volcanoes  or other terrain that doesn't really fit as a major terrain piece.

My biggest conundrum with land is whether a county has one terrain type or a collection of terrain types. Or perhaps that's how one delineates the size of the domain - the number of terrain types, and just allow for repeated terrain types to be used. Thus the mountainous duchy could have Mountains, Mountains, Mountains, and one of farmland to indicate the grotto that exists.

Features are easily for me to conceptualize - they are one off bits that make that terrain different then the other terrain around it. 

Structures

Now the idea behind this is to assume that there are small villages/hamlets scattered across the terrain, just to ease up on the book keeping. Buildings are something more than that, they are things that generate plots or additional resources. I envision one type of structures being freestanding, not requiring anything other than the base resources to build; and another requiring a more civilized infrastructure.

Anyone who has played any sort of building game, especially board games understand the production aspect of free standing buildings - Sawmill, Quarries, Mines, Plantations and the like. They should add (through either doubling, or just a flat addition) to the efficiency of the the land itself.

The second type of free standing structures would be Villages and Cities, with Cities being an upgrade of the Villages. These would be built to generate income as well, the centers of trade that they are, as allow for the building of more advanced buildings.

The last type of free standing structures would be a series of military - outpost, small fort/manor house, fort, and castle. Storage capacity, military forces, and protection.

So what gets built inside villages and cities? Industry that produces finish goods - textiles, iron works; universities and other places of learning, theater and libraries. Most of the goals of these would be to generate income for the city/players to do things with in the game. Of course, it does mean that money.

People

People are simply that - the faces of the people working in the structures. More importantly, as the game progresses they should help provide plots that entertain the group, as well as providing potential bonuses and penalties.

Resources

Resources are things you either build with, sell, or purchase. I'd want to keep it relatively simple and limit the resources to the following five items: Wealth; Wood; Stone; Ore; and Food. More than five and it gets too complicated; too few and you have quirkier things, and I already can see the game of turning food (nominally sheep/goats) into cloth, and the jokes about my fish head pants.

Villages and Cities would nominally require Food to maintain, with each additional infrastructure item requiring more food. All structures would require some amount of Wealth/Wood/Stone/Ore to be built.

So there's the backbones of what I want to accomplish with domain management, give my players some systematic tools to manage resources, generate revenue and items for themselves, and generate plots for the campaign.

Health Tracks, Revisited

It is easy to kill a player character, so that decision doesn't really interest me. However, a player saying, "This cause right here, this one is worth me dying for," is damn interesting to me as a GM. I enjoy the way that Fate, per Dresden Files, has a stress tracks to determine when a conflict ends, as well as allowing the player to choose to take long term wounds to stay in the fight as well; similarly, Fate bribes the characters to be willing to lose a conflict by gaining Fate Points by conceding before a roll is made.

I, previously, riffed on an idea by setting stakes overtly in what you were willing to risk. On my Facebook page it received a lot of flak because it broke how people thought it should work - because the principle is that minions should be less likely to risk death. They made a decent point, even with my preference of sacrificing reality for a really good narrative, i.e., modeling fiction, not physics.

So how to deal with health came up again in terms of how to model cinematic damage. And there were a few two ideas there that I wanted to capture:

• The more you get beaten up, the more you demonstrate your determination to fight, the better you fight. Tenra Bansho Zero, an Japanese Fantasy game, flat out has two stats: Vitality, which once lost, you are knocked out, and Wounds, which give you a bonus to fighting instead of losing vitality.
• There is no real death spiral in cinematic fighting, ala Savage Worlds, there's a shaken/stunned, maybe an injured, incapacitated/taken out, and dead. And the last is rare for the hero.

So how do I combine these? To do something vaguely White Wolf inspired (i.e., rating of 1-5) not unusual, I'd envision the track looking something like this (and remember, my young toddler probably has more artistic skills than I do):

The principle is the same, bad stuff happens to you, you mark off Body or Spirit tracks depending on the nature of the bad stuff. If you don't want to mark off the bad stuff, you mark off a point of Grit, get a die bonus - with more and more grit showing how bad you want to risk it.

Then the question is, how you do recovery Grit? The first way that comes to mind is through time, you slowly regain more and more Grit. In the short term, you might take long term penalties, i.e., wounds to regain the Grit.

I'm not entirely sure how to make it work, as I don't really have any other bits to hang off it, but it was an interesting enough concept I wanted to record it, so in six months when I get bored at work and want to play around, I can think about how to incorporate this into a more holistic system.

Stake Setting and Deadliness

Random idea - as inspired by Honor+Intrigue and a thread on RPG.Net regarding the deadliness of systems, also probably some Dogs in the Vineyard as well, from what I recall.

Basically, everything comes down to the fact that, for me as a GM, killing a player's character isn't particularly interesting. If I want to kill a PC, it is going to happen. Unless they do their best not to engage with the world and plot, and then there's still always the "random mail bomb" if the game is modern, or "rocks fall, everybody dies". So what's the point?

Now, if I can get the players to the point of choosing to risk death, of making an active, positive affirmation that "this is worth dying for", then THAT I find most interesting.

What if the stake setting was based on how much the players were willing to risk and make it a decision that could be made. Basically, the design would consider of three tracks for the level of risk you were willing to accept - loss of your goal (Defeat), loss of your health (Injury), loss of your life (Death) - I quickly sketched out a diagram (Note: I'm NOT a graphic designer, or all that visual a person when it comes to graphics, so my apologies).

Basically, the plan would be for the players to choose how much they are willing to risk if they end up starting to lose. At first, all they are risking is the loss of their goals (usually stop the bad guy at this point); however, if they want to push, they are risking injury, and finally, if it is important enough to them, they are risking death to succeed.

Possible problems I see with this - first, by leaving it in the players' hands, they may never get to kill/defeat the bad guy unless the players start losing. Of course, I could just have the same track for serious opponents who have the will to stick in the fight (which would make for a great demarcation for how tough the opposition is - lightweight minions are only willing to risk defeat, lieutenants are generally only willing to risk up to injury for their goals, and the true evil overlords are willing to risk their life to achieve something great.

A second problem is that this is a very narrative defeat - it requires the players and GM to come up with an answer as to how the defeat (of either side) emerges.

The third major problem that I see relates to the first - if the players are already losing, why should they bother to raise the stakes? Things are already going against them, so there needs to be some sort of mechanic that allows them some sort of bonus to success.

Benefits - I think the key is that it allows for results other than total defeat, loss, and destruction of a side in a conflict. Many games make it hard to retreat, so players learn to not bother, and GMs come up with more and more odd ways for leaders to escape death.  Everyone may still need to come up with some explanation - but at least if everyone accepts the rules, they know this is going to be the end result. (See Problem #2)

I Love Mechanics Mondays: Advantages and Disadvantages

Ryan Macklin got to writing about advantages and disadvantages a little while ago, and basically said everything that I would have said for what I wanted. To reiterate his key points, disadvantages:

1. They should always fucking matter. No such thing as a free lunch.
2. If you tie it to character currency[i.e., build points], whether getting some more or paying some, you’re encouraging uninteresting — no, I’ll go as far as to say bullshit — behavior.
3. The player should not be powerless to incorporate them, especially if they are tied to a reward cycle.
4. And frankly, let’s tie them to reward cycles, whether it’s growth currency (XP) or competence currency (things like Fate points).

The principle reason being is that disadvantages put the work on the GM, generally, to take advantage of them, so they should be few in number. Advantages? Well, the player will WANT to remember to implement those at every opportunity.

Advantages got less attention - I think my favorite implementation, at least conceptually has been Adventure!'s implementation, which effectively added a sixth dot. This supercharged the advantage - You didn't have Resources: 6, you had "Wealth Beyond Avarice"; you didn't have "Contacts: 6" you had "Kingpin" and so on and so forth. The idea of titles and names for these backgrounds traits just caught my imagine, and even years later I have a certain fondness for the concept of playing a Daredevil who's power is buried in the wealth of backgrounds.

I think my ideal would be a four tiered system - something that gave you a minor/moderate/major advantage in a conflict or challenge, with the fourth tier being "overwhelming", and basically if you weren't equally matched in advantages you were going to lose. For something like resources it would be something like $100/$1000/10,000/500,000 of extra spending money or something equally ridiculous. Overwhelming should break the step increases.

I Love Mechanics Mondays: Your Turn to Go!

A friend of mine was posting about the sweet spot of rules for him, a subject on which he and I can disagree all day long as we have some fundamental disagreements, but something he brought up was the tick based initiative from Scion (and 2nd Edition Exalted).

The idea is fairly simple. Instead of combat being broken into rounds, there is only combat. Every action in that round takes a certain amount of time, and you just keep actions. Someone might take three quick actions to your slow two actions, or something might take an amazingly quick action.

Which got me to pondering all the various types of ways to determine who goes when, and what I liked from them.

The simplest is just some version of "Initiative, everyone goes at the same time" chaotic and silly, and gets into trouble when people start trying to interrupt each other. Plus the tactical decisions that this choice brings just does not interest me.

Next simplest is going in order of an attribute or skill. Reign used this one using a "Sense" attribute, or Fate with Alertness. Not one I'm a fan of, but it is simple.

Next up is roll a die, add a modifier. One of the most traditional, it is simple, fast, and effective. Can be incredibly "swingy" from one round to the next (if rolled every round) or one combat to the next (if rolled once per combat) if the die roll is significant larger than the modifier. Only question is whether you go for the simpler version of rolling once per combat or once per round.

One neat system is probably the one introduced to me by 7th Sea. Roll a number of d10 equal to an attribute. Each die tells you which segment (of 10 per round) you go on. Roll 1, 2, 3 you'll go on the 1st, 2nd, and third segments. Roll 1, 7, 12, well those are the segments you'll go on. I liked the back and forth and flurry of actions  - it seemed to suit the swashbuckling mood well.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying has an interesting system: "Choose." Players decide which person goes first for whatever reason (tactical advantage, narrative truth, what have you) and then that person who chooses who goes next - this includes the opposition, so you don't want to leave them towards the end of the round else they'll all go, and then go immediately again the next round for a double whammy. Neat, but very system/setting specific.

Finally, the tick method, where each action has a cost till the next time you go. Some actions are fast, and other actions are slower. I've heard that Feng Shui uses this, by giving a number of beads/counters and each "tick" you remove a bead till you act, and then gain a new number of beads.

So what do I like?

In my heart of hearts, I like the tick based method, for how it emphasizes timing as the critical tactical decision versus location or other decisions. The problem is that it is very hard to balance "right", frequently it becomes a race to the fastest action as quickly as you can, and you need to find a way to put a hard floor in how fast an action can happen. If all actions, generally, run between 3 and 6 ticks, then you are fine; however, if can get people down to 1 or maybe 2 ticks the balance issues change significantly.

Plus, I haven't seen an implementation that a wide variety of people understand easily. And really, that's my goals for rules nowadays, easy, straightforward rules systems that folks get.

Which is why I keep coming back to 7th Sea's implementation. It allows for multiple actions. It is simple and kinetic (and I do like kinetics in my dice, where every die means something even if it is just a lot of potential you can feel in your hands) and it is easy to keep track of, if dice intensive. Savage Worlds/Deadlands usage of cards is similar, where the players are dealt a number of cards, and go in order from highest card to lowest card, but I find that a touch less elegant as it requires another item to track, and the actions are a bit random due to the die mechanics, at least in Deadlands, first you roll dice, then you figure out how many cards you get. Far more complicated than "Roll x dice, go on those moments", though, the latter doesn't allow for someone to suddenly get a burst of speed, at least not natively in the rule's set at least.

Modeling Conflict: The Role of Will

A little bit ago (as this was supposed to go up last week), Rob Donoghue posted bit on Why Anime Conflict is Hard. And while I responded there, it did get at something I've been looking for in games since I was introduced to the idea that something beyond mere skills and natural abilities might affect a conflict.

The earliest incident that I was introduced to was probably White Wolf's willpower. Where your drive to succeed, you will, could actually make you better at a skill. Heroquest for all that it is a horrible system for what I actually want out of a game, is wonderful in the conceptualization - where Death Ray at 16 is just as useful as Love for my Family at 16. Where what you might feel for a person, place, or thing might be as useful as what you know what to do, or what natural ability you were born with. Unknown Armies had the three passions - Fear, Anger, and Noble. So on and so forth.

But to bring this back to the post - how do you quantify Will? How do quantify someone wanting something more (and it still, maybe not being enough).

White Wolf probably has it best - Willpower gives you more dice to throw, which generally changes the odds. A trick might be to adjudicate how many willpower points you are willing to spend. Normally you can only spend 1 willpower; however, if something you care about (like your life) is threatened you can spend 2 willpower; and ultimately, if it is something that you are willing to die to protect, you can spend 4 willpower. 

Fate allows something similar, where you can always spend a fate point for a +1; but if you have an aspect related, you can get a +2 or a reroll.

The other alternative is "What are you willing to risk?" If a mechanic could somehow push the results up a notch, but let you keep trying to succeed. However, that gets back into conflict resolution on a scene level; where the conflict is resolved and you get to determine how you succeeded. And unfortunately, that's why a lot of books/anime/movies are best resolved at the scene resolution level rather than on a task by task basis, because it is so very hard to come up with a system that can do this sort of thing on a task level.

So what's my ideal? A system that factors in the why as much as the what. That normally, everyday things are just some roll of the dice. However, when things really, truly matter, then you can accomplish amazing feats. However, especially in the nature of fighting anime, I still want someone who is merely rolling base dice, if they are good enough, to be able counteract all that will; it should not be will alone.

White Wolf's Willpower allows for some of that; unfortunately, the pool refreshes too slowly/is to limited for much of what I want. Something to ponder as I continue working on things in my brain. Because yes, of course, I am trying to build the perfect system for me.

I Love Mechanics Monday: Making NPCs Matter

Over on System San Setting Mass Effect 3 is brought up as a way to make NPCs matter - have them grant some sort of in-game effect, i.e., rescuing Baron Gets-Lost-A-Lot grants you access to his cavalry for future endeavors, or Bailing Sir Never-To-Do-All-That-Well out of a tight spot makes his sister, who is married to the king, give you a bonus to all your attempts to convince the King of your plans.

What caused my head to snap was the line "there are few elements of player psychology more powerful than the act of putting something on a character sheet," and I went really? Cause my players are fully capable and have ignored such items. But I think that says more about my players' engagement with the system (there's a reason why that attempt lasted so little time) than anything else.

But assuming you have buy-in, this sort of NPC so-and-so requires a certain amount of gamification of the arcs. Where players know going in what the stakes are "Well if you do this, you'll get this sort of reward," and feeds best into something beyond the straight kill monsters for the glory and safety - where there's a larger meta-game at play of various power groups.

Combat and wargaming are the easy ones because social conflicts are so nebulous to describe and to provide tactical advantage for. It is easy to make the Baron's cavalry more impressive and useful, but how do you quantify boons? (Okay some games, such as Cortex+ where the boon would be an asset to improve the roll it is easy, but there's more than one reason why the Cortex+ line is seducing me with its siren call.)

Eclipse Phase does it with Rep gains, which are basically currency in the post-scarcity age. I could see Fate doing it with an Aspect with a free tag or two to hit to shift a crucial roll.

But I'm sort of stymied at this point. Cortex+'s solution, a persistent asset seems to be the most reasonable one of the bunch; however, it is tied into the system tightly - I come back to "And there needs to be some sort of secondary game where these resources come into play" which brings me back to the system of Reign, which while it did not work for my group, did provide a nifty state actor versus state actor venue to play in.

I Love Mechanics Monday: Social Conflict

I'm a sucker for social conflict resolution mechanics. I mean really, a "here take my money, I heard this game had an interesting way to resolve social conflict" type sucker.

Diaspora, which I mentioned last week, probably had the most variety on social mechanics; however, while portable to other systems fairly easily, the idea of drawing maps and social boundaries is very much rooted in the base mechanic.

However, over at Division Nihil a while back the idea of describing social conflict as a chase rather than combat came up from another blog. And it is a neat idea - the two parties start somewhere between two boundaries, and depending on which side shifts the weight of the chase to their side "wins".

And really as I write this we get down to the heart of the problem - combat is relatively easy to simulate because we allow ourselves to reduce things down basic tasks (generally) "Do I hit?" "How much damage do I do?" And because of that simplicity, for whatever other stunts come along the way, it makes it easy to adjudicate. Unfortunately, this simplicity allows for some problem areas to come up, such as every fight being a fight to the bitter end because running away isn't generally a successful option.

However, chase mechanics combined with a compromise/concession mechanic allows for a slightly different visualization - instead of it being combat where you are trying to beat down the opposition first, you are instead on a teeter totter trying to move the weight of the argument.

Now, Marshall, has an interesting idea where the stake setting for the chase is dependent on the importance of the conflict to both characters. If one person ("the prey") sets their importance at 2, and another ("the predator") sets their importance to 5, we have a dedicated predator chasing after a prey who doesn't much care. I think Marshall's plan fails due to over complication - too many rules and modifiers.

I'd probably go with something along the lines of "The worst penalty you can take is dependent on what you risk." So the guy who goes all in at a maximum importance is risking his entire ego, while the other guy at a 2 is only risking a little. Sure the hell fire and brimstone chap will be probably win because they have more staying power; but if he does lose, he'll be devastated.

I'm still not "happy" and I'm not sure what will make me happy. I want a relatively impartial die mechanic to resolve my social conflict, the same as I want a relatively impartial die mechanic to resolve my physical conflict, and as one of my favorite quotes on the matter goes,"You can either let the dice decide or let the GM decide, this goes for any type of resolution from social mechanics to hitting with a sword to finding a trap" therefore I need a way that works for my players to resolve them using words and not fists/swords/eldritch hell blasts/explosives to solve their problems, and something that gives narrative weight to the conflict beyond a single roll - we know combat is important because combat frequently gets the screen time; well in my games social conflict frequently gets the screen time, ergo, I need something that'll give me what I want for that conflict.

I'll definitely need to be talking more about this later. Especially, the Weapons of the Gods implementation, which is probably my favorite system for describing "influencing" someone versus convincing them flat-out.

I Love Mechanics Monday: Resources and Wealth

I have a love hate relationship with resource mechanics - I either find them annoying to deal with (mind your coppers and silvers) or they are broad enough they reduce the ability to grant awards - "So how much is he willing to pay us?" "Uhhhh....resources 3."

Kaiju had a two part series on money starting with the an abstract wealth system and moving to more detailed systems used elsewhere. This got me to thinking about wealth systems and what it means to the stories and tales that we tell - and how they are dependent on the mechanics.

In an abstract system, the importance of money is diminished in the game, in my experience. Rarely is the story about whether there'll be enough money to buy bullets, food, or keep the ship in the air, but instead generally about favors and obligations instead. Because generally there's a limit to the amount of things Wealth can do, for example having five dots in Resources means there's no where else for a character to go for money. It makes tales about hard scrabbling difficult, one because there's little granularity in the system, and second because you bump into a case of not really having a good reason to do a job for cash - "well a $500 bucks isn't going to actually boost my resources score, so why am I doing this again?"

In a dollars and cents system, the stories tend to be more about acquisition because there IS no finite limit to the amount of wealth you can have. You can always hit another dragon's lair for more treasure, or raid an arcology for another piece of hot tech for Mr. Johnson, or some other mad money making scheme with your free trader. But it involves a lot of book keeping, especially if you use multiple currency, and also inflation is a problem.

Coming up with a solution that works in all situations is a bit of a holy grail - as Marshall noted at Division Nihil, where he says

A wealth system should be able to handle several important story functions. The characters should be able to be stripped of their resources and forced to scrabble to survive. Common, everyday expenses should be able to be easily ignored. (These two goals are very difficult to reconcile.) The players should feel strongly rewarded when they either find a large treasure or get paid a large fee. A character should be able to be designated as "rich" mechanically, with significant bonuses as a result. The economy of the setting should either make sense within the rules, or be abstracted to the point that the characters have relatively little impact on the wider economy.

Diaspora, which is based on Fate, got around some of the problems of the granular system by introducing a "Wealth" stress track, basically large purchases caused damage to the track and and eventually caused the characters to suffer consequences, consequences which then made it subsequently easier to take a character out of a conflict. Yes, being behind on your bills could make it easier to knock you out of a fight. The joys of a narrative system.

As Kaiju noted - Conan d20 got around the inflation point by causing the heroes to spend 50% of their wealth in "high living" -- drinking, wenching, feasting, repair and equipping. Shadowrun did something similar with different standards of living.

I prefer the abstract wealth systems - mostly because it stops me from having to care about figuring out how to separate characters from their wealth. Without some sort of mechanic inherent in a granular system to remove wealth from the players just continues to grow until it reaches preposterous amounts (aka fundamentally the "wealth has ceased to be a motivating factor" issue within abstract systems).

But an abstract system does force the game to be about different things - as a rule hard scrabble existence will not be a driving motivation for the characters. Equipment, outside of special gear, will not be a driving force because the conversation goes along the lines of: "I want to buy this." "Are your resources high enough?" "Ayup." "Done."

So what can you do with abstract systems to make them motivate - there's making buying the next level cheaper. "So what do we get paid for this?" "Enough for me to give you a 1 xp discount on buying the next level of wealth." Yeah, it is a conceit to the system, but it works well enough for me.

There's going to be no holy grail - therefore, I look for the system that lets me tell the story I run - ones where wealth is merely a tool for clearing out common obstacles and let the rest of the problems be ones that money can't solve. Admittedly, this eliminates as a rule the idea that characters shall be "stripped of their resources and forced to scrabble to survive" but I'm okay with that, it isn't a story I want to tell, often, and when I do, I can arrange it so that benefit is unavailable when I do, rarely, run a plotline that calls for wealth to be unavailable.

I Love Mechanics Monday: Grappling Subsystems

Grappling. Is there anything that slows down combat more? (Okay, outside of a Zenith Exalted not knowing their charm set or a wizard not knowing their spells?)

It is infrequently used, it is either drastically over- or under-powered in the system and is almost always too complex because it is trying to model too closely the drama. Over on System Sans Setting, this issue was brought up, and the principle of working from the goal oriented modeling basis was raised - instead of trying to model the process, start with the goals and work backwards from that point.

So what is the goal of grappling someone? In my view there are 4 points, some of which are covered in the above post:

1. Keep the defender from escaping.
2. Limiting or directing a defender's movements.
3. Use the defender as a shield against other opponents.
4. Remove options from their combat arsenal, either by limiting movement, or by removing weapons, whether they are effective attacks or removing actual weapons.

The question though is how to model this?

And every time I try to write something down I find myself getting tied in overly complicated game mechanic knots. So I'm going to try and write something for a Fate based system without looking up the rules.

A grapple is basically a Block combat action. It is a long lasting block that applies against all maneuvers applied against it. As blocks are reduced when bypassed this simulates the guy getting free. Sure there's the oddball case that you could have a highly effective grapple that's easily broken, but that's life within the system.

So what about moving someone (such as throwing/shoving them), using them as a shield, or other items? Well some of those are just attacks or maneuvers, and other parts are stunts (especially the using a grapple victim as a shield).

So let's just see how my 30 second "in my mind" rules set matches up against how the Dresden Files RPG deals with grapples:

1. Grapples are blocks that need an aspect to justify. (Major difference - in my mind, grappling is just another maneuver, here it is a special maneuver that requires justification to be executed.)
2. Roll Might skill. (No real problem there, I never specified the skill needed.)
3. Establishes a Block against all actions that a target takes in a round. (Okay so far so good)
4. On subsequent rounds, you may make a follow-up Block attack and take a -1 penalty for a supplemental action to either attack, move, or maneuver. (No real problem here, a free 1 stress hit isn't too bad; I'd probably use a stunt to enhance this, but that seems a decent compromise to allow a MMA/ground fighter something to demonstrate their skill.)

Heh, not too off, so that means I've either read the book too many times or internalized the system

And here's the issue discussing systems, each system has a purpose built by its creators. Fate is designed, I'd like to think, to simulate the narrative of the action, so this sort of action works. Something like GURPS, on the other hand, tries much harder to simulate 'reality'. Now how about something troublesome like D&D?

In 3/3.5 edition, I'm not sure what I'd do. It has been a long, long time since I've even looked at the rules. The principle would be ensuring that the opponent's actions are limited, so an attack that instead of inflicting damage inflicts a penalty instead would probably be appropriate, but not sure where to go after that.

4th Edition it is a little simpler. They made a grab condition that limits actions and the ability to get away from the attacker, and it looks like, after some research, some Fighter powers and feats to make a brawler possible. So there you go. 

Edited: So it is a bit late, still on a Monday.

I love Mechanics Monday: Player Relationship Structures

In an attempt to post more regularly, I'm going to do my best to have a Monday post about some mechanic I either saw someone linked to, had come up in game in an interesting way, or otherwise caused me to go "Oh, I should write about that."

I don't think anyone who games with me would be shocked by the revelation that I love characters who are connected to world via relationships with people, whether they are enemies or allies, frenemies or dependents, mentors or allies, I like them all.

First of all, they place the PCs in the world, giving them a sense of space, they answer the question "Why don't we just cut our losses and run?" And if the PCs DO choose that options, it says something about them.

The idea of the adventuring band traipsing across the wilderness and defeating evil hasn't appealed to me in many years. I want a community to closely tie my characters to conflicts and give them a reason beyond mere fortune and gold to risk their lives. Risk for your country, your friends, your enemies, risk for a reason beyond avarice, or if avarice is motivation enough, why is it enough to fight and die for? The lone ronin without ties to hearth or family, with no friends holds little interest for me to explore their motivations.

And I understand why players have learned to create such creations, it is too easy to fridge a wife, kidnap a child, and otherwise make them a vulnerability to a character. And many folks play to escape and be strong, not constantly be saving Timmy and the wife from the dastardly deeds, it isn't interesting.

Something to make it interesting is something I saw a while back that Will Hindmarch posted regarding pre-defining character relationships - he was doing a Dragon Age campaign where the players would be playing 3rd, 5th, and 7th level versions of the same character in the same campaign in various adventures.

It is an interesting concept and something some friends and I flirted with doing in Eberron once upon a time, the idea of telling a story at the 7th level, but having to go tell that tale at 3rd level is neat.

However, I'm digressing from the interesting mechanic. What got me was that these weren't predefined NPCs, they were just random faces; however, after going through the six questions that developed friendships, enemies, romance and other details, they had a body to fit into the existing campaign. For even more complication, I could see easily doing this with each player so one person's friend may be another's enemy. Though that might get a bit TOO insane to track, so instead you need to set-up so some questions for the group, and some for the individual - which allows you the interpersonal drama of having a friend whose purpose is against the group as a whole.

The pre-definition at specific levels only works with this sort of pre-set campaign idea, but I could see using it to give me permission. Instead of "Two of these characters are enemies or rivals by 7th level. No matter how you feel about them, they are opposed to you now. Pick them now," you can instead choose to say, "Two of these characters will become enemies or rivals." Don't give a time frame, and thus instead of having a defined story that might be interesting to play out, you instead have a flag of permission - you have "I have chosen to have this happen to my character."

Now my wife may still screech at me for this, but during an Exalted game I ran she had taken the Merit "Heiress" which was when her father died she inherited the family business and fortunes. So yes, during the course of the game her father was killed, albeit brutally, and she was all "You KILLED my father!" To which I had to reply, "But you wanted me to, you only got the benefits of the merit once he died, you gave me permission and told me to kill him!" We still joke about the interchange to this day; as I do my best NOT to destroy people's families unless it is evident that they are on the line.

So if you are trying to tie your characters into a setting (versus the wandering heroes who roll in, clean up/level town and roll on out into the sunset - a perfectly valid playstyle, just not one I'm willing to run) and a bit at a loss of what to do, this sort of idea, taking NPCs that are either formless or established and allowing the players to establish not only current but the intended arc of future relationships. That allows the players some guidance to playing to the intended arc of the story.

Enough for now. At some point in the future I'll probably talk about Smallville's relationships versus Dresden Files versus Weapons of the Gods. But I have a backlog of posts to work through first.