I’ve talked (ad nauseuam¹, I’m sure) about what we did to get Diaspora out there. I’ve talked about why we did that and how it worked out. In light of this piece from an actual vendor about “indie” games and IPR, I’ll talk now about what the effects were in retrospect and why small scale game developers should consider our model when producing their work-of-love-for-small-but-real-profit.

We hooked our cart to FATE. There’s no way to deny that the opportunity to grab the same brand as Spirit of the Century presented to us by the OGL was a big deal. I don’t think we realized what a big deal it was (or more correctly, what a big deal it would become) but there’s no question that we instantly penetrated an existing and forgiving crowd of buyers while at the same time staying on the periphery of it — we changed enough and on our own terms that it was an outsider’s FATE game. In real terms that meant that we actually attracted interest from both folks that knew they already liked FATE and from folks who loved the sort of ideas we had but were leery of FATE for some reason. This was discovered, not intentional. But the bottom line here is that being part of an existing success is an opportunity, and the OGL is an invitation. That boom may already be subsiding, but that’s for history to declare. I know we still have at least one FATE-like game in the pipe.

The more important thing, though, is risk. I read a lot of game design forums. I don’t participate much because frankly I feel like an outsider. They are all really interested in aspects of game design that I’m not all that interested in — for me, design emerges from frank discussion between a small number of smart people who are iterating their ideas over constant play. All those adjectives are important. Some forums try to do this and for people that feel “inside” them, I am certain they work. Anyway, the only reason I brought it up is because inside these forums folks talk about how they intend to publish and, despite their cutting edge ideas in game design, I see constant conservatism regarding methods. And the article above hints at why this conservatism is a kind of doom.

The conservative method I am thinking of is the traditional print publishing method: make a book, print a bunch up, and sell them. The costs involved in this are many: making it includes art, editing, writing, software, yadda yadda yadda. Printing it means short run print jobs (which have very high costs), warehousing, shipping, and, inevitably, third parties (IPR). Selling it means being visible, and a lot of folks take that to mean going to cons. This last works well if you are already going to a con, which is cool for those folks that do that. It feels, however, mandatory when you talk to people that do this. That is, “I go to cons” is sort of an assumption rather than a method. In some ways indie games mostly finance going to cons. At least that’s how my math on it worked out. We bought scotch instead. I am not going to claim that was a better choice.

Here’s the thing, though: working in very small numbers (by publishing standards — say 1000 units in a year as a goal) means that you are necessarily going to operate with high costs. That thins your margin and means you pretty much have to do all your marketing yourself. Now you have a bunch of choices to make this work, but they seem to boil down to: cut your costs or cut your risk.

The vast majority seem keen to select either the former or no choice at all.

There is a popular notion that risk-takers are the big successes in a capitalist system. Actually what happens is that risk-takers succeed big when they succeed and fail big when they fail. Long term success is created by carefully managing and deferring risk in such a way as to still capitalize on it (Nassim Tales tries to tell us about this in The Black Swan but the message is buried under some dreadful writing — he’s still right, though). You want to be attached to that risk taker, but with a good knife for cutting loose if he plummets. That means you won’t see as much profit when he succeeds, but you might get away with small losses along the way. Anyway, we don’t here a lot of talk about risk in the indie design community, which strikes me as bizarre.

Cutting costs, see (sorry, channeling Edward G. there), is the reflex choice. Holy crap, this costs too much, what can I do? I know! Cut costs! Duh! But we rarely think about the choice of cutting costs to zero (or close to it) with the expectation of lower maximum profits. This is risk-cutting, a conservative course that has much higher expected (in the mathematical sense) rewards but much lower maximum rewards. I guess sometimes one can be too focused on the prize and loose track of ones footing in the process.

Again I will stress, what we did was fortuitous, not planned. We didn’t plan to sell 1,500 books in a year. If we were clairvoyant, we’d have done a 1,000 book print run and fronted the cash for it. But (and here’s the kicker) we’re not clairvoyant. We (and you) have zero magical powers. Thinking wistfully about what might have been is bullshit. It’s a waste of energy that could be spent yelling on the interweb.

What we did was adopt no risk. The Lulu model encapsulates all of the bits of publishing that entail risk, from store-front web presence to printing to customer payment, through shipping. They handle it all. And they take a fat chunk of cash for it — they take a very fat printing fee and then they take a kind of commission off your final sale price. And they deserve it! Whatever failings they have, they are eating all the risk on your product. And you still wind up with a pretty good profit margin at the end of the day.

In fact, if you decide to go all trad on the publishing end and print and warehouse and sell everything yourself, you can make twice as much money per unit. But your accessibility is weak — your units sold is low and you are doing all the dumbwork (I’m thinking of fulfillment here mostly). If you’re not doing a lot of it then you aren’t selling a lot of books. If you are doing a lot of it, you suddenly realize why it’s worth paying someone else. And so, pretty fast, you are looking for a third party like IPR to handle that. As soon as you do that you have cut your profit per unit down to about where it would have been with Lulu. Lower, as it turns out. But you’ll get more copy out!

Maybe. Your vendor sales will go up, but the unit profit on them will be very bleak indeed at your printing volumes. Your direct sales will go up over your home shop, but no one will tell you by how much (though they will tell you how much of your profit they will take — this is not a bad thing but it better be part of your decision calculus). No one will promise you anything particular about promotion (where will you be on the web site front page? for how long? will your game be in the IPR boot at Origins? will someone try to sell it? what are you buying here? It’s mostly a secret). But it’s pretty much the only game in town if you’re tired of handling payment and shipping yourself.

So when vendors are seeing the IPR move as a potential problem for indie titles, this better strike you to your heart, because IPR was already something of a problem for indie titles. I think somewhere people got it in their heads that this was a huge opportunity, but it was almost instantly eclipsed (in fact though not in mindshare) by what Lulu did: print + storefront + shipping. All your costs folded into a per-unit cost rather than an up-front risk or a workload. As soon as that happened it becomes tenuous indeed to pay a third party to do part of that work while you continue to sustain the bulk of the risk. It’s disproportionate. It’s a bad deal.

Now PDF sales are another ball of wax because they are intrinsically risk-free. So here’s where you can really make up some slack because there is a real (though small, by my count, but probably growing) market for them. Sadly, Lulu won’t let you bundle products or anything interesting like that, so your hands are tied there, but you have tons of other options for selling PDFs. Scattering them around is kind of crap, and the fees taken are pretty thick, but it’s all gravy, right? Yeah. In the end it’s a no-brainer though I’m glad we held on to it for as long as we did — it let the physical book get traction and seeing the hardcover was a big deal for a lot of people, judging by my mail. Anyway, I’ve said before that if DriveThruRPG gets their POD act together they have a serious winner in the bag for indie games: zero risk + great publisher account/sales tools will be the Golden Egg for a little guy with a game in his head. If we can wrap our head around dodging the trad publishing risk bullet. Big publishers amortize this risk with diverse titles and tons of market penetration. You won’t do that, but will take the same proportional risk per title (greater actually). That is a crappy deal.

So for the first year we sold directly, using POD exactly as it was intended (print on the demand of the customer, not the publisher — the way it’s often used is as a cheap printer, which misses the whole point). We had good buzz, thanks in no small part to an outrageous review by Fred Hicks which basically told the whole FATE community that it had his stamp of approval and they should go buy it right now. And that was the “hitch your wagon” part. We didn’t intend to be on a bandwagon (as I said before, we’re kind of outsiders — we didn’t know there was a bandwagon) but we wound up there. That’s lucky. We had an existing voice at RPG.Net and we sent reviewer copies to folks like C.W. Richeson, where we were confident the result would be respected, read, and (net) positive. That’s deliberate.

Now, a year on, we’re publishing in a more traditional model in partnership with Evil Hat. But we’re still operating a risk-averse shop, letting Fred and the gang take a chunk of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk. And he’s smart — he knows the risk is low and the profit margin high, and our end of the risk is that if it goes south we don’t get paid. But zero return on zero down is mighty low risk in my books. Most importantly, taking that kind of risk is his business. He’s got a stable of titles, a smart business advisor, connections in the industry…oh my goodness, he’s a publisher.

So, in response to that post from a vendor about IPR, I offer this to the so-called indie community. Ask yourself first if you’re a publisher. If you’re not, watch the POD space closely for opportunities, because they are there. But if you’re not, think hard about printing, warehousing, and shipping books. Because that’s publisher stuff — so why are you doing it?

–BMurray

Okay two things feed this. First is last week’s playtest of Soft Horizon, in which we experimented with a zero refresh for fate points and a central pool that you draw from when you narrate with a scope reference. So basically, when you play to the points you said were interesting about your character, you take a point. This unburdens the ref a bit — your character being your character is no longer my problem. When you do what you said you wanted to do, you pay yourself. I’ll make sure there are times to do that. If you are a HEARTLESS SON OF A BITCH then you can pay yourself when you act that way. I can concentrate on making the universe react amusingly (negatively perhaps) and you can take your chances by playing your character. That strikes me as a more interesting framing (at our table anyway) than the standing Fate compel system, which is unreliable in action (some tables report awesome, some report fizzle, and the causes are not well understood).

The second thing pouring in is Toph’s great actual plays from Hollowpoint with kids. Kids really dig playing the bad guys, and that shines through these crisp little reports. Anyway, what is doing the feeding here is the difficulty with the teamwork pool. And the difficulty is such that I’m thinking of throwing it away altogether. And so I sketched up an alternative.

Okay back to the first. During that Soft Horizon playtest someone produced an awesome little bit of narration and, in total violation of the rules, Bob (who shall not otherwise be named lest his true identity be revealed, which embarrasses him despite the fact that he plays games with AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS) reached into the pool and handed the awesome guy a fate point.

That’s now a rule.

You could do this in Hollowpoint.

I re-invented fan mail. Prime Time Adventures is the most famous for this sort of mechanism and I’ve known about it for ages. But I had to see it happen spontaneously to really get it: players like rewarding each other. I think that as I prefer games with a referee there is a lot of residual baggage I have about who gets to do what, and rewards are traditionally bound to the ref. But there is really no good reason to avoid letting the players do this for each other (assuming you manage this mechanically somehow, and I’ll go there, but you could rely on trust, too, and that is a big deal for us — the Table is Trust).

So in Soft Horizon you can do what Bob did. If someone is awesome, anyone can pay them from the pool. This is self-regulating on a couple of points: there are only so many chips in the pool, and no one wants to look foolish at the table by offering rewards for stupid shit. There is too much trust and respect and naked fear of humiliation.

So maybe in Hollowpoint, teamwork isn’t nearly as important as being awesome. So instead of a convoluted system of ask and accept or reject and stuff, a fixed pool of dice goes in the middle of the table, and whenever someone narrates something awesome, any player can give that awesome player a die. You could get a die from everyone if you are truly amazing. And you can hoard those or spend them as you like (save your awesome for the final scene). Because of the way the dice stats in Hollowpoint work, this even has a nice richochet effect — if you roll a lot of dice, you increase the chance that you will get badly burned by your cockiness (hubris if you are using a serious tone): you will likely get a big fate set and go first, and then have nothing left to follow up with. This is the mechanism behind leaping out from behind cover, guns blazing, only to discover you are out of ammunition and standing alone by the pool, looking at a dozen bad guys with Uzis.

This all wanders around the fact that players get lazy and stop narrating their dice and their use of resources. Or the actual narration slacks a little. The ref can prod for it, but that gets old too, and often the dice game is still fun so it’s not really an issue. But those moments of great narration are the stories we tell about the game after, and the stories we tell after are how we generate enthusiasm in others and keep wanting to play. And get more players. So this fan mail, in two new forms, should serve to encourage sustained narrative input. When you burn a trait (shot in the Thin Black Jeans), if it’s awesome you get paid. And so, in theory, you have a little more motivation to be awesome, a motivation that balances against the inherent laziness we all bring to the table to some extent or another.

Some people say you shouldn’t bribe people to do what they already want to do. I disagree. A lot. Just because someone wants to do something doesn’t mean that they have sufficient motivation to actually do it. Adding further incentive can push them over the edge and turn “okay” to “awesome”. If all that costs is a nifty little player-managed resource juggling, fuck yes, count me in.

–BMurray

I had a bit of a revelation on the weekend. It was one of those sustained flash-bulb moments that you’re sure are profound — even prophetic — but that immediately afterwards you realize that almost everyone already knows about this “new” insight. In fact, when done correctly, you realize that you already knew it too. Maybe you forgot it along the way or something.

Over the past year, with the increasing success of Diaspora (such as that success is — I don’t want anyone, especially the Canadian government, to get the idea that we bought yachts with our proceeds or anything), I have been thinking more and more about game design. We’ve had at least five ideas cross the table for new games and perhaps three of them are getting serious attention in alternation. New stuff is getting written every week. Some weeks, every day.

Amidst all this activity is a sense of confidence. Because we did it once, we (by which I mean I) have the strange idea that we know what we’re doing. With this notion comes a desire to cleverly mechanise everything — if there’s something I want the game to do, then there ought to be a mechanism that does that. Not a hand-wavy “hey if this happens then think about it and maybe do this” but a concrete “if you have seven points then this thing happens which changes your character this way”.

My revelation was this: not every important thing needs a mechanism.

See, I told you it was pedestrian in the light of day. Everyone knows this. But I had been following a path that pointed my head away from this fact, and so when I looked around it was startling.

Oddly, as I apply this new wisdom, I find new mechanism asserts itself. Good mechanism, too, but of a different kind. In particular, we re-discover the stress track. I agree this begs for concrete discussion.

So here’s the issue I was working on when I woke up. In Soft Horizon, there are Duties. Among the Duties a character might have are several that require the player character to change a specific basic statistic of a plane. For example, the Mystic duty requires that the character decrease the Arcana stat of a plane, making magic more occult, mystical, and inaccessible. The problem is that in play there is no mechanism for doing it and, worse, it’s really hard. My hope was that the player with that Duty would exercise a significant effort in driving the narrative towards his interest, but what I discovered is that this is an unfair burden to place on a player in a game with a referee.

There are several reasons for this. First is that there is a referee and so there is an implicit structure to the game that suggests that players ought to follow the ref’s lead if he presents one. That is, when I create a huge visual event with lots of howling and hair-pulling, the players expect me to expect them to investigate it further. And not only is this understandable, it’s also desirable. That’s exactly what you want!

Second, players don’t want to compete against each other in this sort of game. They want to act as a team in a concerted effort to solve problems and make stories about the team. Sure, each wants spotlight time and glory and success, but it’s just plain embarrassing as a player to wind up leading the narration into your guy’s success. When that’s also away from the ref’s preparation, that’s even less comfortable. And so it generally doesn’t happen and when it does it’s less than satisfying.

So I attacked this problem by imaging different mechanisms that would support the Duties without infringing on anyones’ interests. And then the light went on.

This conflict in interests is actually the tool.

Instead of mechanism, I wrote some concrete referee’s advice. It’s basically this: here are a bunch of ways to set up a session so that a specific Duty can be resolved eventually. This has the advantage of being a shortcut for preparing a session (having a simple list of things to prepare beforehand) as well as facilitating the resolution of Duties (the preparation feeds directly into creating scenes that will be about what the Duty-bound character needs). And it’s unmechanized and so it remains free and loose and role-play-ey. And that’s what I want because the game has been stilted so far — the burden of mechanism has created unnatural moments in narration and frustration over meeting goals.

Now that there is a way to resolve a Duty every session, we do need to think about how to keep that from making the plane stats juggle willy-nilly all the time, which feels like it would make players disinvest in them. And so here, as millions have discovered before me, is where the mechanism actually goes: it is inserted to change the pace, to mitigate the results of role-play rather than supplant it. The solution is at least as obvious as my revelation: give each stat a track, and reward the player for changing the track rather than the stat. When the track is exceeded, the stat changes.

And now we know what to do with leftover fate points to (amplify an effect on a track).

Changing a track value (a Trend — Divine Trend, Arcane Trend, Civil Trend) happens by table agreement. When a Trial ends and everyone says “oh yeah, this is a less Arcane place” that’s when the track is altered. It’s tempting to put a mechanism in there — roll some dice — but it is counter-productive. We already know. We don’t need no stinking dice here. Better, because the referee has followed the soft advice, he already knows whether this Trial is a candidate because it’s part of the plan to allow change. Better still, failure may indicate the opposite motion on the Trend and that’s hair-pulling time.

So the key to fixing this whole mechanical issue seems to be stripping out some gears, putting in a gauge, and adding a few thousand words of advice. And even better, this advice is basically to add in the bit that’s been missing in play: cool NPCs that are fun to talk to.

–BMurray

I’ve talked before about compels and how they don’t quite work as described for me. And apparently for a lot of people, actually, judging by fan feedback for Diaspora and other sources. Fact is, at my table they just don’t drive the fate point economy like they are supposed to and I’m not comfortable relying on a mechanism that isn’t actually mechanical — that is, that is really a paint job over the statement “you ought to play this way or it kinda doesn’t work”. I want mechanism to function, every time, or I want no mechanism and a clear statement of intent. I think.

Anyway this all gelled in my head (what a mess) on the way to work this morning as I surfed Story Games and my own notes trying to dream up ways to really ignite my playtest session on Thursday night. It has to do with the way people don’t “get” compels, the resistance to paying players to do what they said they wanted to do, and the way the fate point economy stalls unless everyone is in the same headspace as the designer. And sometimes even that’s no solution.

First, playing with people you know are awesome only demonstrates your game will work with awesome people.¹ So will just chatting up a good story over whiskey. A good game needs to deliver that, not just make it possible. It’s always possible with any game, given the perfect people. We need to at least facilitate it and at best generate it. Which is interesting, because in the last session of Soft Horizon we learned that there is “a machine that makes kings” and that’s what I want in my game.

My instinct is that the solution can’t be complicated. Or at least it can’t be revealed by complication. Once we get its head above ground, we may have to construct a more elaborate trap, but here’s my plan to flush it out.

Eliminate the refresh. You heard me, and thanks Paul Beakley for the revelation (though now I can’t find his post). Characters all start with zero fate points. There are no compels in the game.

The refresh at the beginning of a session starts with the referee putting a big stack of fate points in the middle of the table. All players should be looking at this stack and licking their chops.

Whenever a player makes a decision to act based on one of her Scopes (not Aspects directly!) she mentions or points to or otherwise indicates the Scope (I’m kind of partial to a little ritual here, say starting the decision narration with the Scope text) and takes a fate point from the stack. If anyone thinks it’s dumb we expect them to speak up, just like any time narration generates mechanical effect.

That’s it.

Part of what led me to this is the stuff I already pointed at, but also while I was looking over character sheets for cool stuff to compel, I realized first that I didn’t really want to do the compelling and second that the Scopes are really great decision drivers. And loading up Scopes with more power seems like a good idea to make the number of them a relevant trade-off against the number of Aspects (keeping the zero-sum construction we use now). I mean look at these Scopes:

The Hag (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
My Faith
The Lost One (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Asandalos (the god of Death)
Form of a Machine
The Madwoman (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Death Shaman
The Broken Blade
My Reputation
My Ceremonies

As a player, if you were faced with a hard decision and looked down at your character sheet for inspiration, these all pretty much sing to you. And they are containers for Aspects that have a different mechanical use, but also elaborate the context of the Scope. The character sheet becomes a rich place for narrative inspiration for the player and less of a cheat sheet for the referee. And it should be — we spent time and energy and laughter and good liquor in writing those. They should pay us back in play.

So with the compel gone, Aspects are polished to an elegant and glimmering razor’s edge: tag one and get a bonus. That’s it. No whiffling about what you can or can’t demand/request/suggest and no implication that you need to play at a certain minimum correspondence to the authors’ style. Whatever you narrate (though you will want to check out the Hollowpoint section on “Adult Diapers” for a discussion that transcends this) it nets the same benefit, which is the “Can I have a bazooka” effect I talked about earlier. Yes you can.

The only remaining question regarding tagging Aspects (and now there’s only one word for using an Aspect, too, which makes so much more sense to me and will facilitate teaching the game) is who gets paid? So try this on for size: tag yourself and pay the pool; tag any non-agent and pay the pool; tag an agent and pay them.

Tagging an enemy’s Consequence? Pay him.

Tagging a friend’s Aspect? Pay him.

Tagging your own? Pay the pool.

Tagging the zone? Pay the pool.

Now we have a mechanism by which fate points should organically zoom around the table. When you’re low you know how to get more. When you see your friend is low, you know how to recharge him (make him awesome!). When you are rich with them, you spend easily.

I think that this isn’t really Fate any more. We should probably rename Aspects, though I expect we will still say “Aspects” around the table. So I don’t know what to do about that, though our culture will have more momentum than the culture of a table new to the game and playing from scratch. So maybe that’s a non-issue.

Fate sure polishes up nice, don’t it?

–BMurray

So the last time I posted I laid down a kind of formula for getting back into the swing of things after a campaign has lain dormant a while and the enthusiasm for it has eroded. As evidence that my method works, I offer the actual play report from the session that followed.

We certainly hit all the targets we have for the game, Soft Horizon. We got big, big heroic ideas — regicide, becoming king, death magic, and the death of a god’s avatar. We have criticisms (this is playtest after all) but all good ones. None are of the form “this game sucks” but rather of the form “if we did THIS the tension would be better”. Most notably there are practically zero rule revisions but rather only clarifications, so this game is certainly on track. I mean, it’s derived from FATE, so it kind of starts out on track, but I think the changes in Soft Horizon make a better game than “just” FATE for this kind of epic fantasy.

Certainly the dice curve I talked about before is cool and functional, but dice games are really secondary to this design because, I think, part of what made epic fantasy gaming epic when I was younger was the free-form role-playing and single-roll checks and not the big dice-heavy fights. So we’re concentrating on that and even in a big detailed conflict, the emphasis is on making sense of each step in a big dramatic way. That seems to be working.

One insight we had during play that we didn’t expect, however, is that really big heroes need an assistance mechanism that is outside of the causal chain at the table. That’s opaque, I know. What I mean is that we really need to be careful to avoid what I called “chess douchebaggery” in one context — that temptation to say “you already acted, you can’t go back and change that”.

Because heroes are vastly more awesome than I am or you are, we need a way for them to make fewer mistakes. By this I don’t mean just “they should succeed more”, because actually good heroic stories are mostly about failure. But they are about making bad decisions and grieving over impossible moral and ethical choices, and not about missing your skill check because you forgot to prepare before-hand. I mean unless acting without preparation is one of your fatal heroic flaws of course.

So the mechanism, if you can really call it one, is to demand that players narrate their heroes with a flexible attitude towards the flow of time. I think we often do this anyway in role-playing games, but in Soft Horizon it’s necessary and so we call it out: when facing a bad roll and looking around for Aspects to tag, it is perfectly reasonable to tag a friend’s Aspect with the narration that she would have helped you prepare before-hand in some fashion. As a side-effect of this news flash, we also get the corollary rule (don’t know if it’s obvious to you, but the chain links are clear in my head): it’s also reasonable to ask the player who is assisting to pay for that tag. Ta dah! Now we have an assistance rule that doesn’t require a whole lot of planning before every skill check.

This is important because simple skill checks (you know where during narration it becomes obvious that we should roll for success — just one roll, it’s not a fight or anything) emerge organically. They aren’t usually planned into play and so you just sort of suddenly know you need one. But you are playing characters that are ready for the shit to go down — they don’t forget they have the powers that define them, but players sometimes do. And, further, even though the need for the skill check is immediate from the table perspective, inside the fiction it may still represent a large chunk of time, in which there is space for preparation and execution. Essentially, the time-flow inside the fiction and at the table are totally different, and it’s just kind of cheap to penalize heroic characters for being in the table’s urgent time space.

So here’s permission to play in what I call “around the heroic now”. You don’t need to play in the now. You can play a little before it and a little after it. It’s perfectly acceptable to say (after a failed roll), “Thankfully, this morning Winsome prepared all of the rites including a script for me to read here. I’m tagging his Ceremonies Aspect, ‘I know the right things to do’. And, being as I’m resurrecting him and so he has little choice here, I’d like him to pay the fate point for the tag.”

We are weak and prone to error but our heroes are rather less so. And so cheap little failings of ours should not be reflexively translated up to our heroes. They should NOT fail because we forgot to prepare. They should fail for far more engaging reasons. And they will, so don’t sweat these little things.

I was going to end there but I realized that there’s something else in here and it might be a sacred cow (well, calf, anyway, because it’s a new idol) and I am killing it. Or at least threatening it with a knife. There’s this excellent idea that you shouldn’t roll if failure is boring or stupid. This is a great heuristic, but like all heuristics it is badly applied as a rule sans inspection. And here’s why: when you fail in a FATE game, you have the opportunity to make it succeed by adding narrative based on circumstances and issues and abilities that you have previously declared are important to you. Things you want to be in the story. And so a roll even for something that is uninteresting in failure can become elaborated through forcing success with tagging. And this elaboration can be marvelous — it’s not really a failure avoided, but rather encouragement to elaborate. You’re not being told, “ahah, you are going to fail at this dumb thing so fix it”, but rather “tell more about how you being awesome makes this suddenly difficult situation resolve”. And this can be fun even if it’s just a locked door you have to get through. And the loss of resources is valuable new tension.

–BMurray

I have talked a bunch about Soft Horizon and I have talked about the |d6 – d6| curve. So, last week, we had a few chances to play with this new curve in a FATE-like ¹ game. Here’s what it does to the game.

The 0-5 range with an EV ² of a little less than 2 has some interesting repercussions. First off, it’s highly predictable. The point at which a success is automatic is the skill itself, so there is less calculation involved in managing the extremes. It also means that the range of fortune in an opposed check is 5 (0 versus 5) instead of the 8 we see in FATE (-4 versus 4). This means that adjustments (aspects and spin) have different effects and we need to consider scaling them.

Because Aspects are only added to your roll (though actually in Soft Horizon we find there will be times when you use them to subtract from your opponent’s roll because this is no longer symmetric and so there’s a tactical choice involved) the scale of effect they have is only interesting if opposing entities have different numbers of Aspects to bring to bear. Generally speaking this is exactly the same problem as in FATE proper, so it’s a non-issue. It didn’t come up as an issue in testing. One thing that did happen, that’s tangential to analysis of the new curve, is that combat compels go away. I think. And that’s good — compelling someone to miss a turn was weak sauce. ³It works, but changing the structure of the conflict scene makes it unnecessary now.

Spin, however, is impacted by the range. Now getting a defensive difference of 3 or more is pretty unlikely and there is also now only one way get a defensive success that does not otherwise have mechanical effect (which inaction is what Spin is intended to offset). So, we fiddled in two ways. You get Spin whenever a defensive roll with no mechanical effect succeeds positively (so a zero result benefits no one, an offensive success has its mechanical effect, and a defensive success grants Spin). And Spin is worth +2 for symmetry, partially to simplify, partially because it’s rarer, and partially because positive bonuses are less interesting in general. Of course now we have to wonder if there’s a way to make spin into a free-taggable scene Aspect, which it has become functionally.

The end result is that Soft Horizon conflict has become very precisely tactical as the effects of fortune are reduced and always positive. When you couple the dice change with the rule that you can’t use the same skill twice in the same turn (and there are three phases and you might defend multiple times in two of them), you get a game that is more about resource management and setting up long term (multiple turn) goals for success. I’m pretty sure I like this — I don’t really like a scene to turn on a die roll unless we come into it with that intent. But it also means there’s a lot of thinking about the game when you play, and unless you are also thinking about how the choices tie to narration, it could be too dry. Personally I find deriving the story from the result to be about as fun as role-playing games get, next to good conversation between interesting characters with no mechanism at all intervening, so I think I’m cool with it. It won’t fly in every venue though.

So the resources you are managing are:

Your skills. Because you use them up for the turn and because there is significant disparity between your skills (you have one at 5, two at 2, and three at 0), you are carefully choosing whether you need to spend your best shot in support (Maneuvering to place and Aspect), in control (gaining battlefield superiority in order to manage who is where), or in combat. And even then, that’s not the end of that story: you may need to defend against a hostile Maneuver or a combat action, and so you may need to preserve your apex skill for defense, intrinsically limiting your ability to act otherwise. And that entails risks too, for reasons I may talk about another time.⁴

Your fate points. This is still a FATE game with fate points, and so your ability to bring Aspects to bear depends a lot about your fate point management. And that is coupled with the fact that there are no strictly mechanical ways to get new fate points when the game is played as a wargame, though it is certainly the case that story-level compels can happen during the fight, and that might be stronger here than in Diaspora.

Your free tags (including Spin). These are the things that change the course of the battle because they can be stacked and they cost nothing, but they are a resource because they either disappear or become regular Aspects (depending on context) once used. And because there is a Maneuver phase every turn, there can be a lot of them piling up. Using them when you are desperate can deny a killing blow to your pal. The sacrifice play becomes informed by many things now, including taking a bad hit in order to lure your opponent into the loose ground that your ally will use to push the enemy over into a fatal fall. Sure, you could use it to avoid injury….

Overall I’m pleased. Obviously a ton more playtesting is in the cards, but this has lots of pretty symmetries and other reasons for me to love it. I am pretty sure that this is the direction of travel from here on out for this game.

–BMurray

What is the FATE system?

This is getting asked all over the place, though most vocally over at RPG.net and on the FATE mailing list. It’s interesting because the current incarnation of FATE is basically a list of exemplar works that declare themselves to be FATE. This is not actually all that helpful because each tries to bring some new ideas to bear (it’s not fun just applying paint to an old game and calling it new — you want to improve it) and file off stuff from other exemplars that doesn’t work for you. And so the resulting definition of FATE is the intersection of all these exemplars and the intersection is both small and shrinking.

So my declaration is this (and it’s typical B.Murray vaguery): until there’s an official document declaring what FATE v3 is, no one knows what FATE v3 is.

Okay, so now I can tell you what I think it is.

First, FATE v3 is a core resolution mechanism that is not unique to it: fixed measure of competence + fortune + narrative benefit versus target value or opposed roll. The common expression of this, or rather the canonical one as in Spirit of the Century, is Skill + Fudge dice + Aspect invoke/tag. I think it’s fair to say that a game that doesn’t do some variation of this is probably not FATE v3. But lots of games do pretty much this and are certainly not FATE games.

So FATE v3 is also characters with Aspects. And so we need to define Aspects. Characters have Aspects if they have one or more descriptive phrases that can confer mechanical benefit (see “narrative benefit” above) at the cost of a narrative currency: the fate point. And so here I will say that the fate point and therefore the existence of a fate point economy (which at a minimum is used for mechanical benefit) is a FATE v3 requirement. I think that we also need to include the Compel as essential: there has to be a way to get as well as spend fate points.

I think that’s it. Everything else can come and go. Consequences are special Aspects. Stress tracks are completely detachable. Stunts are wildly malleable (as we’ve seen) and don’t need to exist at all. But a game where you roll dice and add skills, then narrate in your features and pay for the result is FATE. A game where you are shilling around for more of these points is also FATE.

Well that means that a good canonical statement of what is necessary to be FATE v3 shouldn’t take more than a half-dozen pages or so. And then six hundred pages of stuff you can glue onto it.

The end result of this is that I don’t know if any of the upcoming VSCA games are going to be FATE games now. Let’s look.

Hollowpoint. Dice pools that owe more to ORE than anything else and no points economy at all. Aspects are their own economy, burned when used. Certainly not FATE.

Soft Horizon. Tricky one because we’re just now thinking hard about changes. Certainly it’s FATE-like — the resolution is skill + dice + aspects, but the dice are in flux (could be |d6 – d6| — see the skunkworks). So far it retains a fate point economy as well, so I’ll call this one FATE on my own terms, but it could be debated.

Soulscape. I don’t know. We need to revisit this design before we know what it is. It is imagined as a pretty straightforward FATE v3 game but that was a long time ago and I think it could benefit from something more deliberately addressing its premises.

Chimaera. This game is, unsurprisingly, the most chimaeric. It uses a cool dice pool mechanism that’s distinctly unFATElike, and uses an Aspects-as-economy system not unlike Hollowpoint rather than a strict fate point economy. It also has some very cool dice-as-record-keeping tools that are fun to manipulate and also very much not FATE. I think we’ll call this “partially inspired by” but to be honest it’s more inspired by the play we got from FATE games than by the games themselves.

I guess that as players and designers we are continuously evolving our games and we don’t feel any particular attachment to whatever the core of FATE is, partially because it hasn’t been clearly stated. And I think that, even if it was, now we’d be as happy to say “it’s not FATE really” as “it’s another FATE game!” I mean, I get that there is a kind of built-in audience for FATE games just as with any other generic identity because there’s a community associated with it even though the definition is nebulous.

Maybe that’s at the heart of it — I would like for FATE to remain poorly defined exactly so that the community remains diverse and open to experiments and hacks. Hacking on it is what got me into design in the first place. It made the VSCA exist. I’d hate to lose that spirit in that community and a rich and rigid definition would risk killing it.

So here’s to FATE: skill + dice + aspects to resolve, and a fate point economy in action all through play. Hah, six pages indeed.

–BMurray

So last night we did a playtest session of Soft Horizon. A playtest session usually means that we do a “first session” and then talk about the results and about mechanism and then maybe divide up duties to progress the project. If the last session was a “first session” then it will be a regular session instead and we’ll probably discuss mechanism in the context of our play. We haven’t been together for a Soft Horizon game for a while, so last night was a “first session”.

No, this is not another trick post that appears to be about stunts and then turns out to be about Herman Melville.

So we got cool characters and places. We have a world that is an enormous living buddha, his lap forming a still ocean and his head crowned with castles. We have a place where the mountains move as slow, slow, giant things lumber across the world. We have a place where winds whistle and flute through the intricate caverns that men now inhabit and where they harness the wind for power — one of these caves crosses the planes, terminating in the buddha’s ear, and is to him the soft whisper of the shakahachi. We have a character who has vowed to never again lead his clockwork armies in war and whom the gods envy. We have a terrible fighter of the monsters at Spyglass, now seeking peace. And we have a diplomat known to everyone who can broker bargains between the very elements but who cannot find for himself a goal worthy of effort.

Big stuff! This game is ostensibly FATE, though there are deep changes, huge elisions, and constant debate over whether Fudge dice are right for it (they still are, for carefully and repeatedly considered reasons). There are skills with a crafted structure that is even more pyramid than the pyramid (that is, even more deliberately designed to guide into the apex skill). And there are aspects, though again with more structure, using the scope concept from Diaspora as a central feature on the character sheet.

There are no stunts.

But maybe there are. See, stunts are so nebulous in definition that this other thing we have, Duty, can easily be called a stunt without confusion.

A stunt is, in its heart, an ancient form of game-design complexity. It has some deep-rooted appeal in human brains. It is permission to break a rule. It has boundaries: you can only break this rule, and you can only do it in this fashion or at this time. When you get “taken out”, if it happens off-screen, you can show up in the next scene, dusting yourself off (under some circumstances, taken out for just means “skip to the next scene” rather than “out of the game”). You can use your Surgery skill for Laser Weapons when fighting the animals you studied for years (probably humans). Once per session you can use your Amazing Thing as though it were any piece of gear (you are not strictly bound by the implicit logic of gear: that a thing does what you think it does and that you only have things you say you have).

I say ancient because I can trivially trace it to chess, where pawns have at least three stunts I can think of (they attack on a different axis than they move, they can kill in passing in very special circumstances, and if they reach certain squares they change into a more powerful piece) and the king-rook pair have one (the formalized dance of castling). But many (most?) games have something like it. Some use it heavily (card exceptions in Monopoly spring to mind, as do instruction squares in Candyland) and some are almost composed of the concept (Magic: The Gathering where every card is a kind of stunt/exception and the basic rules are in manipulating these exceptions).

You could also look at stunts (and all these other examples — I want to keep the mapping) as new and highly specialized rules that have owners. Sometimes the owners are tied to a game artifact (a space on the board or a kind of playing piece) which is a weak version, and sometimes the owners are the players (a card or a character feature) which is a stronger version.

Obviously, looking at them this way and with the eye of a software designer, these look like patchwork kludges glued into the system as it evolved over time as ways to make the rules more finicky, more novel, and more distinct per player/place/time. They are cheap ways to increase the need for mastery, I guess, as they are all special cases you have to know about. However, because they are pervasive, they are no longer this thing because they are also now an expected part of game design. So now we have mechanisms that attempt to undo the mastery requirement: in chess you still need to know about en passant, an obscure rule for novices, but in Magic: The Gathering precise instructions for how to wield your exception are printed right on the playing piece that grants it to you.

Now with that as the core concept of stunt, FATE stunts have two problems that I have danced around before. If you own Diaspora, you already know part of that dance. First, because they are unrelated kludges, they become shopping lists. I don’t like shopping lists in most of my gaming. Second, they lack a deep relationship to the rest of the system.

However, beyond being just kludges and expected, they deliver something useful and are analogous to something interesting (precisely because they are not deeply related to the system): they differentiate the character by giving him something novel even within the rules (because they are exceptions) and they provide a way to make exception/supernatural/magical powers be analogously exceptional in the rules. To analyze this further would require deep wondering about what magic really is in games — to think about why we try to balance it and attach costs to it that are far more onerous than we would apply to mundane skills. Doing that makes us further think hard about the nature of supernature and decide whether it is appropriate to treat magic as an exception. In some settings the answer will be YES! In others NO! I think rarely will the answer be other than all-capped and exclaimed. Well maybe you can damp no.

So in Soft Horizon one of the unspoken conceits is that magic is absolutely, totally, understandably, consistently, real. It is not an exception to natural law. It is part of (if not the basis of — there is no science skill, after all, but there is a sorcery skill) nature. It is therefore not appropriately a stunt in this game. It nonetheless needs constraining because all natural skills have constraints — it’s just that the ones we are actually familiar with have constraints like “physics” which we understand at least intuitively. I can’t use my talent for firearms to conjure a bunny. But, unconstrained, I could probably convincingly narrate puncturing my enemy’s liver with magic.¹ So there’s no intuitive constraint but a constraint is necessary. We solved that with a couple of rules and observations and it’s not what this post is about. I’ll tease though: magic only operates on elements, which are different per plane and the character sheet is drawn such that the place sorcery resides on it implies things about what it does and to who.

So, anyway, we don’t have a strong need for stunts in the usual sense. Here’s what we do have, though: characters in Soft Horizon are propelled through story by their Duty. Duties have three components: an obligation, a punishment for failure, and a power. The obligation is doable but requires deliberate action. The punishment is harsh but negotiable. The power is interesting, engaging the player.

Obligations include things like changing a statistic on a plane: your duty demands that you organize the entropic or return natural dominance to the satanic mills.

Punishments are all of the form: achieve your obligation or be taken out. When taken out you can always negotiate a concession. So when you fail you can retire your character or establish some new complication to her life and her world. But you have to do something, and something big.

And the powers are cool. In a lot of cases they are pure player-stroking, which I recently discovered is amazingly satisfying in play. You want to make players feel like their characters achieved something really important? Have an NPC that they like tell them that they are awesome. Seriously that’s it. No gold pieces, no experience points, no fate points, no level-ups, no potions, no coins, no dinguses. Have a kid come up to them after a successful mission and exclaim she wants to be just like you when she grows up! You want proof that this works? Fire up World of Warcraft or you XBox or practically any other multi-million dollar gaming property (unlike our austere and therefore comparatively under-explored niche). Now look at achievements. For the most part all they do is announce to others that you’re special. Other players. They codify bragging rights, and they are generally adored. Well, so implies the flow of money, anyway.

So while some powers are mechanical to provide certain niches not appropriate to skills (like Horizonwalker, whose power is the ability to move between planes without using a gate), most are things like “Everyone knows you” or “If you want to talk to a god, the god wants to talk to you”. These are narrative attaboys that constantly apply as well as being story facilitators. In a way they are bits of authority stripped from the referee — a character with the Noble Role is known everywhere — the referee can’t contrive a place where she is unknown unless the player is complicit because the player owns that fact.²

So are Duties stunts? Well, we didn’t call them stunts, so maybe not. But they fill a similar role. They differentiate, certainly. They provide the player with ownership of a piece of the rules (or an exception to them, depending on your viewing angle). So yeah, kinda. Kinda not. But most stunts are kinda and kinda not. They are aggravating little kludges that reek of shitty design. And they rock.

–BMurray

Compels are a problem.

They are also a feature. An awesome feature. But whenever I read about people having trouble — deep trouble, mind you — with the FATE system it seems to come down to compels. And I have to say that I feel their pain. I understand the logic and get why it’s not actually a problem. And yet it continues to be. So the problem must lie somewhere not so accessible to reason. That might go some distance towards explaining why it’s just not a problem for some tables as well.

A compel is a simple thing and it’s a mechanization of something everyone does in every role-playing game ever anyway. It goes like this: the GM looks at the character’s sheet and finds something on it (in the case of FATE an Aspect — a player’s declaration about his character) and thinks, “Hey that could complicate things.” He then mentions the thing and the complication. See how this happens in every game? The characters walk into a swanky restaurant in full armour because they say that’s how they roll. The GM says, “Well, okay, but it’s very unusual. You are in no way inconspicuous. And the rich and powerful people here now think you are crude and boorish louts. Including that guy over there. The mayor. Who you have a meeting with tomorrow.” The players might concede that they are not in full armour here and a generous GM might accept that.

Well in FATE we do exactly that a lot of the time. But sometimes it is mechanized as a compel. The GM spots “Brilliant plate armour” and offers a fate point saying, “That armour is mighty conspicuous and discourteous and this place is filled with influential people.” Exciting! Same thing happens but the player gets paid for the detrimental effect! Or he can pay a fate point and say “Oh I would never wear my armour in here.” The process is encoded in a mechanism that helps power an economy that does all kinds of cool stuff. And it’s functionally the same as above. Even better, the player has a little more agency by turning the crank on a mechanism rather than negotiating with the GM.

And yet players balk at the second even when they would have no issue with the first.

I think this is because they have to pay to get out of it. There is additional pressure to eat the detrimental effect because you need those fate points for stuff. Well, fact is, you don’t always need them all that badly, but because it is a currency and because we are trained to think certain ways about currencies, we are acquisitive and protective of our hoards. We would gladly surrender to the narrative but we resist paying our valuable currency!

This is especially interesting because the instinct to hoard game currency is several layers of abstraction removed from nature. But that’s for a different kind of blog — one that explores how real the brain is prepared to make fictions of fictions of fictions. Money is an amazing invention.

So compels can create resentment and I think it is because you have to pay to deny it. You feel railroaded. You have to deplete your treasure to have things go your way. Yes, we know, the player chose the Aspect and maybe even chose it deliberately to get compels, but right here in the actual situation where she actually cares about actually solving an actual problem in game, it’s not so fun any more. Well not always and not for everyone.

What can we do?

There is a place in Diaspora where this doesn’t happen so much: in the mini-games. In the mini-games you can only use a compel (and anyone can use one, not just the GM, and that might mitigate the pain too) to make someone miss a turn. Obviously the narrative for that is more complex (“You’re pinned by our ‘withering covering fire’” or “You stay where you are because there’s a ‘live grenade’ in that room”) but the essence of it is pure mechanism and that mechanism is familiar. We’ve all landed on a LOSE YOUR TURN spot in a boardgame or nine. And it’s FAIR. We know the price of moving forward is a fate point. No problem. The exchange is formalized, known in advance, and consistent.

There’s another place where we feel less pain: when players offer compels to allied players. I’m not sure why this one is so painless — maybe because there is no assumed authority between players no one feels compelled (LOL) to take this too personally. The other player is not dominating you, he’s just offering that your character could be played more interestingly. I know, it’s EXACTLY THE SAME as with the GM, but we’d be foolish to ignore the fact that the GM has certain kinds of authority and that that might colour her exchanges with players differently than the same exchange between peers.

And finally, the best part of the solution, is consistent with FATE v3 in all its incarnations: the player can solicit the compel. When players do this, the system sings. This is where I would most push the compel mechanism if you are experiencing compel-pain: don’t ask for compels at all as the GM but rather encourage players to offer them. Point out Aspects in play but ignore the pay-or-get-paid offer. See, it’s not actually all that important that the player pay that fate point. There is plenty of opportunity for players to pay. It is important, however, that they get paid for making their Aspects shine, and so that’s the way the offer needs to work.

In future FATE games I make, I am pretty sure I will just drop the “pay to deny” part of compels. It doesn’t do anything useful and it creates this weird authority issue that’s just not fun (for me, IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, etc.)

Go forth and compel, but in a fun way.

–BMurray