True 20 - Who here has played it, and what was your experience?

[buzz]

Personally, I got tired of deciding when to award conviction for roleplaying*, so I handed over that to the players. If one of the other players deems that something another did is conviction worthy, and someone else seconds it, they get the conviction. It helps that my players are generally mature enough not to abuse this system.

That is some serious coolness, iwatt.

 

[Thomas5251212]

I'm confused; True20's Conviction uses a reward system; you reward Conviction, you never take any away. It is a carrot, not a stick.

Since Conviction is a necessary resource for operating in the game (because of the nature of saves if nothing else), the distinction is largely moot; if you play along with the GM's idea of what your character should be, you get that resource in greater abundance; if you don't, you don't. There's not a lot of meaningful difference between simply giving a flat value that's greater and taking it away if you don't play along.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Wow. Uh, no. Lack of reward does not equal punishment. That's a logical fallacy.

As I said, in this context I simply disagree; the issue is the net availability of the resource; whether its being reduced to Y value because of punishiment or increased to X value makes, in practice, no difference to the effect, or the reaction most people have to it.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Don't forget that True20 has a failsafe for regaining Conviction...

Even if you never bother playing to your Virtues or Vices... Even if the Narrator never gives you a cookie when you do play to your Virtues or Vices...

You always gain one Conviction back every day in-game, regardless of whatever else you do with your character.


I like the way Conviction works. On one hand, it's an "Action Point" system the recovers at its own at speed fast enough so that the players aren't compelled to hoard them, but not so fast that they are meaningless. On the other hand, it also provides a good way to occasionally reward players for playing their character in an appropriate manner, or for coming up with neat idea in-game.


So, to use the analogy above, its more like giving a child a standard weekly allowance, and then offering bonus allowance money in addition to that for doing extra chores.

The problem is that the same person awarding the "bonus" is the person who, effectively, sets up the necessity of expenditure. So either the people getting the bonus are effectively getting more Conviction than they can use (in which case its unlikely to serve its purpose) or the person who's not getting the bonus is finding it insufficient. In practice, I know which way I'd bet on it (even if the GM strives for a happy medium, the person who resists his idea of what is in character is still going to be left holding the bag some of the time).

In the end, the arguement about reward versus punishment is a smokescreen; either way it still comes down to a tug of war between the player's perception of what's in character and the GMs, and anymore I'm very unconvinced the GM should be handed extra tools in that war; he's already got enough.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Personally, I got tired of deciding when to award conviction for roleplaying*, so I handed over that to the players. If one of the other players deems that something another did is conviction worthy, and someone else seconds it, they get the conviction. It helps that my players are generally mature enough not to abuse this system.

I tried this once with Aberrant experience some years ago, and concluded that even with blind voting it politicalized the process immediately, and that was in no way a virtue.

 

[The_Gut]

Personally, I got tired of deciding when to award conviction for roleplaying*, so I handed over that to the players. If one of the other players deems that something another did is conviction worthy, and someone else seconds it, they get the conviction. It helps that my players are generally mature enough not to abuse this system.

* The reason I got tired is that I kept questioning myself if it was warranted, if I wasn't been biased to some and not others, etc.. It distracted me from running the games, specifically at the moments of dramatic tension, were we tend to award conviction in my games.

This sounds similar to what Primetime Adventures does (which I haven't actually seen, just listened to the have games will travel podcast on). The points they award have an ingame use. I'm not, however, sure how well my players would handle awarding their own conviction. They have a tendancy to metagame (I prefer gritty, they prefer heroic, which produces enough tension in our games as it is)

 

[Hjorimir]

Since Conviction is a necessary resource for operating in the game (because of the nature of saves if nothing else), the distinction is largely moot; if you play along with the GM's idea of what your character should be, you get that resource in greater abundance; if you don't, you don't. There's not a lot of meaningful difference between simply giving a flat value that's greater and taking it away if you don't play along.

Where does it saythat it is necessary to have Conviction at any particular moment? Conviction is a bonus, not an assumption, at any given time. Your entire argument is boiling down to the GM deciding when to award a character. Is that any different with treasure? Or levels? The GM is an important part of any game and, yes, they are meant to have control of such things.

 

[Hjorimir]

In the end, the arguement about reward versus punishment is a smokescreen; either way it still comes down to a tug of war between the player's perception of what's in character and the GMs, and anymore I'm very unconvinced the GM should be handed extra tools in that war; he's already got enough.

Please elucidate what other tools are provided to the GM in the 'war of what's in character' for me. I'm pretty familiar with the rules and I'm drawing a blank.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Where does it saythat it is necessary to have Conviction at any particular moment? Conviction is a bonus, not an assumption, at any given time. Your entire argument is boiling down to the GM deciding when to award a character. Is that any different with treasure? Or levels? The GM is an important part of any game and, yes, they are meant to have control of such things.

Unless it works much radically differently than M&M, Convinction is likely an effective necessity given the damage system; the nature of the damage save makes sudden-death combat results too likely without it. And frankly, I have _exactly_ the same issues with individual experience awards, as I mentioned earlier; I don't think they're a good idea for social engineering purposes either. Treasure is normally a non-issue, since who among a group gets treasure is not normally in the GM's bailiwick (though I suppose if he's being cute he can slant things by the treasure he gives). And if I agreed that a GM _should_ control who gets such things, based on how he approves of how a character plays his character, we wouldn't be having this discussion. I don't take it as a given, and the longer I've been in the hobby, the less good an idea I think it is.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Please elucidate what other tools are provided to the GM in the 'war of what's in character' for me. I'm pretty familiar with the rules and I'm drawing a blank.

It has nothing to do with rules for the rest; by the necessity of GMs, he has plenty of capability to punish or help a player in-game if he does or doesn't approve of his characterization just by how he choses to have the NPCs and world react to things. I don't think he needs to have a metagame carrot and club to do so too.