On Systems, and Vocab, and An Experiment

This post is brought to you by two things.

The first is the ongoing drip-drip-drip of "where are the rules for X in V5", where X is dual-wielding or grappling or exactly how many Arms of Ahriman you can summon in a turn - granular, realism-concerned, justice-model stuff that V5 as a system doesn't care about and (I thought) was pretty explicit about not caring about. But I guess gamers gonna game, and bring their assumptions about what a game needs with them.

The second is Olivia Hill being, as per, annoyingly smart and insightful about vocabulary. 

I am pretty hardline on having a clear, readable-at-a-glance indication of how a systemic element works - a flowchart, a boxout, an IF-AND-THEN sort of statement with very clear operators/decision points - because when I'm in the middle of playing I don't want to allocate cognitive effort to parsing rules text. Gotta see it, it's gotta make sense, I've gotta make the call. So I do like a pure-crunch summary of how something works.

But I also like and grok what Olivia is on about. The vocabulary a game uses states what it's about, and that statement needs to carry forward into how it works. A separation between the authorial claim and the played experience is a failure of design. And that got me thinking. How would I write and describe some simple bits of RPG system, and what would that say about how the system worked and what it was for and what it was about?

So I've had a go at some atomic stuff - time measurement and conflict resolution. What do these systems say about what kind of game this might be?

TIME

Time is measured like this.

You have the Moment - that’s what's happening right now. You live in the Moment. Life is a series of Moments. You can be given a Moment, you can take a Moment, you can have a Moment.

Then you have the Sesh. It’s what’s happening to you and your characters today. You’re playing this game, and something decisive should happen while you’re doing it so that your characters accomplish something while you’re playing.

Then you have the Mish. It’s what your characters are currently working toward; the long-term point of things. A Mish usually takes more than one Sesh to sort out. Think about organising a game: that’s a Mish. It takes a Sesh of planning and prepping, a Sesh (or at least a Moment) of furious instant messaging while you try to work out what day everyone’s free, and then a Sesh of actually playing.

AGGRO

Aggro can mean physical combat, intellectual debate, social strife - it’s anything where someone’s acting directly in opposition to someone else.

 

Aggro is always a Moment in its own right.

 

Aggro is all about Knocks. You take your Knocks and you either keep going or you don’t.

 

Take one Knock? That’s fine. You can keep going. You can come back from that.

 

Take two Knocks? That’s a problem. You’re Down. Whatever you’re trying to do will be harder, because you’re on a loser here.

 

Take three Knocks? That’s it. You’re Out. Out of action, out of commission, out of play until the Moment of Aggro is over.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE DOWN

You’ve two choices.

 

Powering Through: If you Power Through, you can ignore the difficulty that comes from being Down. You’ll still be Out if you take another Knock, but you’re doing your best to look and act un-Knockable, and it might work. 

 

BUT: Powering Through takes a lot out of you. You’re borrowing from tomorrow to handle today. If you Power Through a Moment of Aggro, you’ll start your next Moment of Aggro with one Knock to your name already. You can Power Through that one too, but the cost stacks, and you’ll enter your next Moment of Aggro already Down. Power Through that one, and you’re automatically Out next time a Moment of Aggro comes your way. 

 

Calling For Backup: If you Call For Backup, you ask another player to take your Knock instead of you, and they can say yes or no. And you can keep on Calling For Backup, but they can always say no - especially if they’re already Down from taking your Knocks for you. If you Call For Backup too often, you might find all your mates are Out - or just not interested in dealing with your Aggro any more.

GETTING UP AGAIN

If you’re Down, you get back up again once the Moment of Aggro is over. It’s only temporary.

 

If you’re Out, you’ll need a bit more time. You start your next Moment of Aggro with two Knocks - so you're already Down, and one Knock from going Out again - and you can't Power Through that Moment either. If you make it through that Moment of Aggro, you start your next one with one Knock, and you can Power Through if you want to. And you stay that way for the rest of the Sesh. It takes a while to get yourself sorted again. But you start the next Sesh back on form again.