Player Authority
A while ago, I wrote about the difference between power and authority. Basically, power is something you take by threat of force. It doesn’t really pertain to something like a game. Authority is something granted either by a person or a group. So, to be pedantic, my original inclination to call this entry “Player Empowerment” would have been inappropriate.
But who cares about terminology? I don’t want to get bogged in semantics. The point here is giving players some ability to affect the outcome of the roleplaying game. Of course, they’ve always had that ability by making choices. It’s the primary engine upon which an rpg runs.
- GM presents a situation, asks, “what do you do?”
- Player tells GM what he wants to do.
- GM helps resolve outcome.
But what if players had more authority than that? Some games grant that authority to them concerning the story and even the setting. A player might be able to decide something about the world or interject something into the story from outside his character. These are interesting ideas, but for my own tastes, I would want the GM to at least be involved in these kinds of situations. For example, a player, as part of his character creation, says, “I have a contact in Morinville that works as a fence for stolen goods. He can help provide information.” Now the GM may not have prepared any fences in Morinville (in fact, it’s quite unlikely), but given the player’s desire and initiative, the GM agrees that there is one there. Then, she and the player work together to create some details (if needed), the GM making sure that the player knows everything his character would know about the NPC and his operation. (You’ll find that I’m a big proponent of “the GM and the player work together to…” kinds of situations.)
So that’s all great, but there’s also a different kind of authority, and that’s authority over mechanical elements, rather than story elements (although they can be closely tied). Some games do this too, but it’s usually in the form of some kind of “fate point” or “hero point” that sort of allows a player to override game mechanics when he really needs to (often to save the character’s life). Again, I am a fan of these as well. However, what I’m even more interested in is integrating that kind of authority into the mechanics rather than having it override mechanics.
In the game system that I am experimenting with now, each character has a limited resource pool (actually three of them) upon which he can draw to affect the likelihood of an outcome or in some cases the intensity of the outcome. Any outcome. In most (but not all, I know) games, the player is limited by what the dice say and some flat modification based on his character. In most flavors of D&D, for example, for an attack, it’s a d20 roll plus a character’s attack modifier(s). It doesn’t matter if the D&D fighter is swinging his sword at a kobold who was probably going to surrender anyway or the lich king who will end the world with his next action, it works precisely the same.
What I’m interested in experimenting with is different ways for the player, recognizing that those two situations are different, can react to them differently. So, for example, if we call one resource pool “Might” and say that the character can add more damage to the attack by drawing on that resource, we’ve accomplished that. But resource management is interesting, because if “Might” is also what governs your ability to smash down a door, the player that depleted his pool with many, many powerful blows in the big fight with the lich king can’t get out of the villain’s castle when it collapses. Maybe he should have saved a few points for just such an emergency. (Oh well, he can still get lucky with a die roll–or perhaps pull out a larger “authority” mechanic like a hero point to get through the door. I don’t know yet.)
This kind of personal player authority (as opposed to story authority) is interesting because rather than make things harder for the GM, it actually makes things easier. Because much of the time, the GM wants the players to really be able to “pull out all the stops” when it’s important. It gives the GM more freedom and flexibility. In a system without it, by accident a GM can make an encounter too hard and wipe out the party. And while some people like that kind of sandbox play, others don’t. But if you design the system so that one little stat change to an NPC won’t completely throw everything out of whack, both kinds of games are served. And if the players have the ability to manage their resources better, you get exactly that.
Of course, resource management comes with it’s own issues. First off, it’s got to be simple and fun. Not everyone wants to play a Vancian spellcaster, or even a mana point caster. Second, there are issues that, if designed poorly, adversely affect the flow of play. If a character is able to use all of his resource right away, and recovery for the resource is easy, then players will do this every encounter. In other words, there needs to be a reason to manage the resource.
But these are details, and they’re not problems without solutions. There are a few games out there that already take this approach, but not quite in the way that I’m envisioning. In any case, I believe players given authority on a personal level could be a really fun way to play a game.
-
Interesting approach here. For me the biggest concern I have with anybresource management system (next to flow) is believability. If the resource is too abstract or not tied to what I am actually doing it kind of irks me. But based on what you describe here with “might” the resource seems to reflect something tangible. I like this idea. Because I am pixture my character drawing on his might each time he wants to extert himself in some extreme way and using it to devastating effect (a bit like how a boxer chooses his power shots carefully—the boxer isn’t “metagaming”, he is using his reserve of energy selectively).
-
I hope you’ll follow along as the system develops. Let me know what you think!
-
I will. This definitely has me interested and I like the direction you are going. For me, just as a matter of personal taste, i like resources to come from something tangible my character is kind of aware of. Trying to think of how to phrase this, something like: the explanation precedes the use of the resource rather than the other way around (where I have to retro fit an explanation after its use). Basically, if its a resource my character can understand (like might seems to be) it tends to work for me. There are some exceptions to this though. If the game is shooting for a specific flavor that demands it (say pulp action from Savage Worlds) stuff like bennies or hero points make sense I think (even though they are resources the character isn’t fullu aware of). Again, these are just my preferences. Do whatever it is you have planned and surprise us!
-
-
-
This sounds like the sort of narrative 4E (which I love the shit out of) wanted to develop. When a Fighter went up against the goblin minions, s/he’d rely on at-wills, and then break out the encounter powers for when the worgs showed up. But through all of the fights s/he’d be saving the dailies for when the party goes up against the Goblin King.
Unfortunately 4E didn’t sell the narrative element correctly, and of course dailies and encounter powers simply weren’t powerful enough to give the feeling of pulling out all the stops.-
The other thing missing with the 4e solution is that is pretty much only solves it for combat, for the most part. An argument can be made that that’s a good thing, but it’s something that the game was missing that turned some off. Anyway, Monte: Check out Cubicle7′s The One Ring RPG, if you haven’t. It has Hope points, which are used for a variety of similar things. Might be of interest in comparing specifics.
Also just a really fun game.
-
“Unfortunately 4E didn’t sell the narrative element correctly, and of course dailies and encounter powers simply weren’t powerful enough to give the feeling of pulling out all the stops.”
I would politely beg to differ, but, agree with you at the same time… How’s that for confusing?
The difference between 3.5 & 4E really moved the whole encounter away from “white damage” where the character is swinging their weapon to using at-wills, encounter-powers, & dailies as you mentioned. Since the character isn’t relying as much on their white damage your characters powers become your primary form of damage. Previously, in 3.5 those powers would have been your narrative aspect if that white-damage was still readily available. So, I agree, there was an opportunity that was missed (or purposefully sidelined) to speed up the whole of the encounters to match what new-players would expect from todays games that would certainly increase the narrative aspect as a whole… but I disagree in the sense that if characters were more judicious or used house-rules to merge some of the aspects of 4E with 3.5 they could certainly create instances where those narrative aspects would be available and even desirable.
That being said… my group still plays 3.5, we’re old-fogies, we don’t mind rolling dice and doing a little math.
We actually prefer it.
-
-
I disagree about encounters and dailies not being powerful enough. At least for the Invoker I played, I loved pulling out the Thunder one that pushed enemies away and the Beacon of Light that I could sustain throughout the rest of the encounter. Those two powers saved our bacon more times than I can recall.
-
My concern would be balance. While as a DM, I agree that it’s enjoyable to occasionally see the PCs “pull out all the stops,” in order to do so, you have to challenge them – big time, like players could probably die kind of challenge. With resources like Hero points or “Might” in place, in order to encourage players to go big, things have a tendency to become gratingly hard. The flip-side is that this mechanical player authority can also make things too easy, which isn’t frustrating but rather boring.
I’d like to see more details and clear guidelines for players and DM alike for their use.
-
The pool sounds a bit like the system that the Marvel RPG uses, I think it’s a beautiful way to allow players AND the GM to scale their play while keeping it under control for the powergamer or the sadistic GM.
Shameless cut & paste from another blog-site
“The Doom Pool is the main resource that the Watcher has to draw upon and scale things up to keep the heat of the action going. But to make it grow, you depend on the players having some degree of failure (rolling 1’s) on their actions. As in real economics, the Doom Pool flow is highly affected by the laws of supply and demand. To “pay” for those doom dice, the Watcher must use a very valuable currency: Plot Points.
In game terms that means that the more players you have, the more doom dice the Watcher may add to his pool, and he will be more selective when trading PP’s for doom dice. And this alone is responsible for shifting things around and “auto-balancing” the game.”
So, there you’ve got a system of give and take where the GM has the doom pool to pull from and the players have Plot Points to spend. The judicious GM has the ability to scale a sessions play to their players (take a powergamer down a peg or two, or offer more challenge) and the players have more ability to create that truly heroic moment, which we all crave!
Sadly, I’m cursed, my dice hate me… So I’m sure my GM would have no lack of doom-pool points. Thankfully, our GM’s are pretty much the best GM’s to have ever existed and are more concerned about the story so I wouldn’t have to worry about them being too horrendously sadistic with those points.
Great article, I look forward to any follow-ups on the system.
-
I generally don’t like what I call plot coupons but maybe I lean towards the sandbox. “Might” seems to straddle the fence a little as it is at least somewhat related to stamina. I’ll follow along for sure to see what you make.
-
I have been constantly evolving a gaming system that hungers for exactly what your talking about. You opened my eyes to hero/fate type point systems that help to manage those high action/plot moments with my less creative players and give a resource for the more creative members of my group to mull over and manage.
I always want my players to have a lot of “action” options open to them . The players should have something to do , manage, and think about inside and outside of combat ,even the game itself. As a designer the trick is to make it believable so it’s not just “Oh that Wish-like Mechanic” to the players and not so complex that it slows the game and creative thinking of the players down.Your Might example peeked my interest and already inspired a rough concept of my own. Can’t wait to see how you develop it more.
For the Fun!
-
White Wolf’s systems do a good job of this with Willpower points. A character can burn them to gain an automatic success (usually not for an attack roll). However, when you run out, your character becomes temporarily unplayable… in a way that fits the character. There are quite a few ways to get them back, I won’t get into it here.
Sil-Core has an even weirder optional mechanic called Genre Points. These are awarded by the GM to recognize stellar moments of roleplaying. A character going out of his way to save an NPC colleague, or putting together the conspiracy before the final plot is revealed, or a particularly memorable song, quip, etc.. However, these points are never awarded for disruptive behavior. Spending these points allows for sudden moments of awesome. They can be used (effectively) to buy an automatic success and pull off a near-impossible or to conspire with the GM to save a character killed (but come back in the next session, possibly in the nick of time). Once again, these have to fit the general theme of the game, and spending a point on an action prevents a character from gaining a point for said action.
I’m sure there are others, and I’d love to see more games pick up mechanics like these, and the ones mentioned in the blog post. In our games, we view the adventure as collaborative storytelling, and the more the system allows for that, the better it goes over with our group.
-
The system you’re describing reminds me a lot of Robin Laws’s Gumshoe system.
-
Interesting. I love this kind of mechanics, and am all for seeing a different take on it.
-
Pingback: I Like My 20-Sider | Monte Cook
-
For my own game, I’m planning on having stamina and mana resources, the stamina of which would work similar to your proposed ‘might’ points… except stamina works with everything. It doesn’t ‘override’ mechanics, it can be used to make your character better in the short term, or conserved to allow your character to take actions for longer. This way, both spending and -not- spending the points are tactical decisions. Not spending them isn’t just “waiting till I really need those points” it’s the tactical decision to focus on endurance over power.
16 Comments