Timmy, Johnny, & Spike - Rules for different types of players

[howandwhy99]

All of these would probably work better in a narrative game. I'm not sure how to smoothly work them in to something crunchier like D&D with combats that usually have tightly defined rules and interactions.

It reads like you heavily prefer narrative story games over more strategic or puzzle games. Your game design, your vocabulary, the ideas you express all reflect it. If someone is going to design for different types of games, so they can satisfy different types of gamers, then I find it works best to change points of view to understand and encourage each. I think your ideas may satisfy Timmy, but not as much for other players types. Try this: how would you incorporate them in a MtG game, while retaining the collecting, deck building, and strategic at-the-table play it revolutionized?

Taking inspiration from Dread I would probably not want to use a literal Jenga tower unless there were some weird metaphysical reason that makes sense in the game, but that growing feeling of unease is really powerful. For example, the player can use some resource to gain a more powerful benefit, but each time he does so future uses of that resource have higher risk/reward. If carefully designed into the game there could be a drive to spend this resource as quick as possible in order to end the fight, while holding onto a reserve so that you can more easily block the enemy's empowered actions. I guess that would mean you could spend early to gain a benefit right away, but it will be harder for you to block your enemy's most powerful abilities later. Eventually in this idea the "tower falls" and someone gets screwed.

I think I'd call that an Endurance Pool, something akin to 4th edition mechanics. Try this: Class level lowers the cost of actions in an ongoing physical test like combat, but only by endurance training can the size of the pool be increased. Rest and recuperation refills the pool over a period of time. Short term physical tests require short rests, while long term physical tests require longer ones.

For example, your PC travels all day through dangerous country. There was one encounter, so the team rested a few minutes afterward. However, choosing to force march further than they would normally go in a day begins to lower the Endurance Pool. A night's rest will only recover the usual day's work/travel. Recovering the Endurance Pool will require more sleep - the long term recovery process. And, if an encounter occurs during the night, then combat effectiveness is lowered because of the already lowered EP.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's probably worth analyzing what you are as a DM, too.

I'm mostly in the Timmy/Johnny camp, depending on how much of a rules wonk I feel like being at the moment. Maybe, Johnny if I have some prep time, Timmy otherwise.

I find myself rewarding that playstyle, too. For instance, Thursday night 4e game, I had an encounter with a whale on an arctic sea. Already, I'm Timmy: I'm going well beyond the rules for an awesome visual. I'm paying attention to solo damage rates and defenses and hps and things to keep it fair, but I'm also like, "Psssh. Battlegrid? That whale comes up below you, plows into your ship, and tries to dump everyone into the sea! ROLL INITIATIVE!"

Then, the party Thief (Essentials character) took a flying leap off the ship, onto the back of the whale. He took a ball of rope, and jammed it into the whale's blowhole in an attempt to kind of suffocate it.

VERY Timmy.

It didn't quite work -- it's a whale, mang, holding breath is what it does, but it did put him in a good position to Backstab the critter on the next round.

Of course, I also put in fights with undead, and later some ice critters, in more traditional styles. But coming up, I've got a big encounter with a crystal dragon that uses light and vision rules in interesting ways, and is done as an abstract combat.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Hrm.

I tend towards a mix of Timmy goals with Johnny sensibilities, with occasional flashes of Spike.

The example is my ancient Bigger and Better Fireballs deck, which was built to generate, ahem, bigger and better direct damage spells. The initial intent was to generate as much mana as possible (including, with Mana Drain, my opponent's, because that was just cool) and hit people with direct damage spells.

Ergo, I needed Mana Flares, for more mana, for bigger spells. Because you can't live by spells alone, and because Mana Burn existed back in the day, I added in Dragon Whelps and Shivan Dragons to flare off excess mana. And lots of land, to make sure I had resources to throw into damage. And I noticed, eventually, that I lived or died by my ability to get cards, thus Howling Mines, and then because land kept piling up in my hand, I added in some Green to the Red/Blue mix and pulled in a Fastbond or two. That also let me pull in a couple of Birds of Paradise, for point-source mana, and a Stream of Life or two, just because it'd be fun to have 100 life. Oh, and a Black Vise, because if my opponent had cards piled up in his hand, I should take advantage of that.

It was about this point that I began to realize that most of the games I won were not because I destroyed someone with a gigantic 60-point DBZesque Disintegrate (though I did get two people that way in an Emperor game, with a Fork...that was cool), but because the environment my deck created was just so chaotic that my opponents wouldn't be able to do anything without hurting themselves, whereas my deck was built to thrive in exactly that kind of environment. By the time I could pull off the massive spell, my opponent had probably died from Mana Burn and Black Vise damage.

Brad

 

[Quickleaf]

How in the world can you make a game that serves all these play styles? Any ideas?

What about 3 level talent system of charCter creation organized like layers of an onion?

The base level is low complexity, a lot like an Essentials style martial class, with a built in risk vs. reward mechanic (akin to the bidding someone mentioned), and robust improvisation rules. Active talents are either at will or have a drama point type recharge. This would be where Timmy would make his PC.

Next is opening up the whole talent tree system, with multiclass options to access trees from other classes. Within a tree there are combat oriented and non-combat talents, and some unusual ones too, but overall these are reliable. Talents recharge according to what makes sense in the story/for the narrative of a particular talent, and might work on an adrenaline mechanic. The improvisation rules above are still available of course. You really create your character rather than choose a character archetype, so this is where Johnny makes his PC.

The outer level adds another layer of complexity with talent synergies and combos, allowing Spike to build a killer PC. Power recharge is firmly based on resource management, whether by spending points, daily spells, per adventure talents, etc. There could even be an emergent play quality to some combos (dividing player info on certain talents from DM info on the same), so you might cast cone of cold only to have the fighter shield bash and shatter the enemy. Having unlocked the combo you can retrain as needed.

That's my concept in a walnutshell.

 

[Ainamacar]

It reads like you heavily prefer narrative story games over more strategic or puzzle games. Your game design, your vocabulary, the ideas you express all reflect it. If someone is going to design for different types of games, so they can satisfy different types of gamers, then I find it works best to change points of view to understand and encourage each. I think your ideas may satisfy Timmy, but not as much for other players types. Try this: how would you incorporate them in a MtG game, while retaining the collecting, deck building, and strategic at-the-table play it revolutionized?

On the contrary, my usual preference is for crunchy strategic/tactical games, where a strong narrative is an emergent property. I think the reason I'm having trouble is that I'm trying to spin ideas for the Timmy, and I'm not really one. Here's my tension:
1) It's relatively easy to think of concepts that directly manipulate the drama and narrative, but developing them is difficult for me since that is not my preferred play style. I need an "Aha!" moment to develop the idea mechanically in a way that would satisfy me. Such a thing would be much easier if I were a Timmy.
2) Writing good rules that aren't specifically narrative based but lead to strong emergent narrative outcomes is inherently difficult. (IMHO) I need an "Aha!" idea before it can be developed.
I say all this while eagerly waiting to start a FATE campaign, as you know, so perhaps my tastes are changing. I think it's more likely I just want a little diversity right now.

I think I'd call that an Endurance Pool, something akin to 4th edition mechanics. Try this: Class level lowers the cost of actions in an ongoing physical test like combat, but only by endurance training can the size of the pool be increased. Rest and recuperation refills the pool over a period of time. Short term physical tests require short rests, while long term physical tests require longer ones.

For example, your PC travels all day through dangerous country. There was one encounter, so the team rested a few minutes afterward. However, choosing to force march further than they would normally go in a day begins to lower the Endurance Pool. A night's rest will only recover the usual day's work/travel. Recovering the Endurance Pool will require more sleep - the long term recovery process. And, if an encounter occurs during the night, then combat effectiveness is lowered because of the already lowered EP.

My question for your endurance idea is how it serves the Timmy? It's possible I'm being dense here. Does being low on endurance open up new possibilities for the player? In an earlier thread I suggested a "desperation" concept that might give players a reason to push onward even if the DM was perfectly OK with letting them rest. In short, as PCs run low on resources (say endurance/healing surges/hero points/whatever) using those or other resources actually provides greater benefits than it otherwise would. Maybe even at-will abilities are enhanced. Either way, the party is simultaneously in a more dangerous situation, but are themselves more dangerous, or at least interestingly different. I see this as a more interesting "cure" to the 15-minute adventuring day than relying solely on the DM to push them along, while also avoiding the IMHO uninteresting solution of just making pretty much every resource encounter-based. Many computer strategy games have the "just one more turn" addictive quality. I'd like to encourage a "just one more encounter before we rest" feel. The tactics of earlier encounters and later ones should change, but both need to be fun. That is the largest challenge. In any case, this is on a larger scale than the Timmy choosing to do something awesome in the middle of combat, although the Timmy may be in favor of pressing onward after each battle since it provides greater opportunity to do the most dramatic things later.

In my homebrew game we use a momentum system during encounters (combat or otherwise): the better you're doing at whatever you choose to do, the more momentum you gain to be better in the future. The math of these particular rules introduces an interesting tension: spending momentum quickly generally lets you use more of it over the course of a fight, but you also tend to have less on hand at any given moment, while the biggest effects in the system encourage or require high momentum, but you really have to exercise some restraint to get there. This really works for my style of play, and it could work for the Timmy, but I'm not totally convinced about that.

Thanks for you thoughts.

 

[howandwhy99]

On the contrary, my usual preference is for crunchy strategic/tactical games, where a strong narrative is an emergent property.

Perhaps it's the Timmy archetype, which I take you as reading as someone who likes stories. And that is why I see understood you as preferential to narrative qualities? I'm thinking Timmy is someone who loves Magic: the Gathering because he can focus on some of the difficult to place, but very powerful cards. He's not there to methodically craft a utility deck, like Spike, nor is he there to come up with some cool combination of cards in his deck to show off something no one has seen before, like Johnny. Timmy wants to win every bit as much as the other two, he simply wants to do it with a big splash. He's not seeking high end literature, so much as making decisions to enable his play of big trump cards. Magic: the Gathering isn't a game that is failing him, he simply enjoys a different aspect of it then the others.

My question for your endurance idea is how it serves the Timmy? It's possible I'm being dense here. Does being low on endurance open up new possibilities for the player?

The endurance pool concept was not designed to satisfy a Timmy. It was simply an idea spurred off yours. How could it satisfy a Timmy? I think he could learn through play about affording powerful, but expensive resource actions, if he avoids long term resource spending. This can feed the cooperative aspect of the game when he plans with the rest of the team for distant travel, a potential long term expense. Timmy wouldn't typically go on a forced march as spending his pool for the result isn't his cup of tea. But, through talking with the other players, he can stand up for his preference of stopping as usual. If he's traveling with the group anyways, he's already agreed on setting off for the destination. Each player can voice why or why not arriving early is important. By going over everyone's reasons, Timmy, Johnny and Spike can work out what they will do together in the end. They seek common agreement, though there is often all sorts of give and take during.

I believe any rule is potentially a cooperative one. It's the objective of the game that sets up other players as competitors or allies. By allowing each player to choose their objective, but situated in a world of challenges easier to navigate when all players face up to them together, then cooperative teamwork is rewarded.