RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

FreelanceWizard · **10-06-2014, 03:35 PM**

If we're tossing out different system ideas... Smile

As a totally different approach, you can view these conflicts as a way for people to exert narrative control in a story. Characters that are more naturally suited to be dominant in a situation need their players to exert less influence on the narrative to succeed, while characters whose success would be unexpected need more narrative influence to succeed. To make that sentence more concrete, when the warrior fights the barmaid, it takes less narrative influence and justification for the warrior to win the fight -- but sometimes the barmaid wins because that's where the story needs to go. However, for the barmaid to win, there has to be a lot more narrative influence behind her.

To that end, one system I've been kicking around uses tokens, not dice, and has people describe their characters in one sentence...

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The system
...in terms of 3 assets and 2 optional faults. For instance, the barmaid might be a cheerful(asset 1) barmaid(2) with a heart of gold(3) who's naÃ¯ve(fault 1) and gets in over her head(2). Every player then has 20 expendable "tokens" they can bid to achieve narrative effects. Whenever a conflict about what happens next in the story occurs, the players can bid for free any assets that might apply (the rule being that everyone other than the bidder has to veto an asset for it not apply) and can bid additional tokens along with narration to increase their narrative "value" to resolve the conflict. They can also bid their own flaws to reduce their total but steal tokens from the other player, to be added to their pool after resolution is complete. The players go back and forth, bidding tokens associated with narration until the party whose value is lower gives up, at which point they lose and emote defeat.

The trick is that the tokens you can spend are limited over a certain duration (a day, a scene, a story, or what have you), so people have a strong motivation to take a fall using their faults to build up tokens to use later when they don't have a lot of assets in play, to go along with others' narration when it makes sense to not unnecessarily burn tokens, and people who want their characters to do things they're not good at find themselves with less ability to control the narrative later on.

An example of play, given the warrior (a burly bruiser master of arms who's easily distracted with a hair-trigger) and the barmaid might be:
W: *flips the table over and charges towards the barmaid, trying to bring his giant fists down upon her head* (bid: burly, bruiser = 2)
B: *shrieks and runs towards the door, clearly out of her depth* (bid: gets in over her head = -1, +1 pool from W)
W: *intercepts the barmaid, standing over her* "Bad, bad move there, girl." (no bid)
B: *looks around, then grabs a heavy iron kettle filled with stew and flings it at the warrior* (bid: 4 tokens = 3)
W: *falls to ground howling, his face smeared with hot stew, and utters curses foul enough to make a Lominsan sailor blush* (concede defeat)

An extension to this system, if one wants to add the randomness of dice, is to add a fate die that can be invoked at the cost of one token by either party to the conflict. You roll 1d6 and subtract (if a 1, 2, or 3) or add (if a 4, 5, or 6, with 4 counting as +1, 5 as +2, and 6 and +3) the listed number from your value in that conflict. Either party can invoke the fate die, but it can only be invoked once per conflict.

Relative strength is accounted for in this system by giving more experienced parties more tokens or assets, so they have more narrative influence. The means by which that is determined is left as an exercise of the user of the system.

Static Rolls VS Character Sheets?

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes