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Thursday 5 October 2017

Start by forgetting


We're starting a new roleplaying campaign tonight. It's being run by Oliver Johnson, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword, and he always brings a unique blend of innovative story background and palpable atmosphere to his games, so excitement among the players is high.

The player-characters will begin with no memory of who they are. That in itself isn't going to win any prizes for originality. I think I'll be playing in at least one other amnesia-driven game this year alone, and that's even if I can't get my hands on a copy of Alas Vegas, but when added to the GURPS character generation system, amnesia should make for a particularly interesting cocktail.

GURPS encourages you to flesh out the details of your character's backstory -- too much, in my view. I've seen much better (more interesting, more subtle, more convincing) characterization from players developing their characters from the inside, once the game begins. The design-at-start approach is a little too much of an authorial straitjacket. But how about if you begin knowing nothing about your past?

With Oliver's upcoming campaign, which is set in New Mexico in 1862, I originally had it in mind to play a gambler. But then I thought, well, how would I know I was a gambler? I'm dressed like a gambler, maybe. Perhaps I found a deck of cards in my pocket. But what does that prove? What if another player-character is wearing a tin star. He might be a sheriff, but there are other explanations.

Here's how Oliver himself put it:
"The more I sit here reading through the rules, the more I'm convinced that GURPS is the enemy of roleplaying, and only when handled in the lightest way can it aid rather than overwhelm the game. That was why I decided to start everyone as amnesiacs. I want people to interact and make up their stories on the spot and have some good roleplaying, rather than prescribe their characters through these arbitrary skills and advantages and disadvantages and overthought back stories -- which, instead of expanding the character, merely justify the aforesaid self-award of skills, advantages, etc."
If GURPS allowed for a little more uncertainty, there might be some of those discoveries Oliver is talking about. As it is, I still have to know a little bit too much about my character -- those pesky GURPS disadvantages force you to join the authorial dots and end up with the usual cartoonish characterization. But in a different rules system with a little more leeway the amnesia could become a wellspring of creative improvisation.

One option would be to give each player say 80 points to spend on basic attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. Arguably you would know those pretty much right away, memory loss or not. But you don't buy any skills at the start of the game. When called on to use a skill, you roll 3d to set a brevet value X for that one roll only. You then roll in the usual way using X as your skill level for that one roll only. If you succeed, that sets a minimum value for your (still unknown) level in that skill. If you fail, that sets a maximum value.

For example, you attempt a Stealth roll. First you roll 3d to get your brevet value. Let's say you get a 12. So now you attempt the skill roll as if you had a Stealth of 12. Say you roll 9 - okay, that means you know your actual Stealth value cannot be lower than 9. Or say you roll a 14 - that's a failure, which means your Stealth cannot be higher than 13. Over time you'll nest in on values for all the skills you use.

This brevet system for discovering your unknown skill levels is not greatly different from the way James Wallis's Fugue system generates characters' skills in the course of play, as astute readers will have spotted, but I'm looking for something that's compatible with GURPS -- and, because we want to keep playing an open-ended campaign that could last years, we'll need a bit more detail than just having a skill or not having it. Also I confess a slight allergy to RPG systems that co-opt the tarot, simply because so many of them these days do that.

Starting a GURPS game with no memory naturally rules out giving character design points for Allies, Enemies, Reputation, etc. Those are things you'll discover or acquire in play. But that's a much better way to handle them anyway, just as in stories it's better to show than to tell.

23 comments:

  1. I really like the idea of "remembering who your character is"in the course of play... would have saved a lot of anguish, all those times I constructed a really detailed character whose mind- and ability-sets proved to be almost completely incompatible with the actual game the GM had in mind.

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    1. If somebody wants to run a campaign on rails, they really need to tell the players up front what kinds of characters are going to work in it - otherwise that's going to happen a lot. So I'm surprised he/she didn't give you a steer there.

      Of course, amnesia is an interesting set-up once in a while. It'd wear thin pretty quickly, especially when (as so often) it turns into "you're all dead and you didn't know it".

      A halfway house is to run through the character's early life picking up skills as you go. That ensures you end up with a character who fits the setting, but instead of designing the character cold you get to play through those important early life-choices. That's how Tirikelu (see the previous post) does it.

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    2. For my part, I prefer to sketch our of character history/personality at a fairly basic level and fill in details as I play. I don't really want to play an amnesiac, but I certainly don't want to have to build my character's history from just-formed zygote to that afternoon.

      The question of identity has been raised for me by the demo for Steam Highwayman, which uses a modified version of the Fabled Lands games system. It was weird for me to find that system powering a game-book whose themes are somewhat opposite that of the books that birthed it.

      The viewpoint character in Fabled Lands is a fairly general purpose "adventurer" whose main "goals" are mostly "seek adventure" and "gain wealth, personal prowess, influence, etc in order to seek even more adventure." There is, however, no real pressure to have the character accomplish any specific goals other than those of his own choosing. "Become wealthy enough to have ships in every port and townhouses in every city" is just as reasonable a goal as that for pursuing any of the in-book quest-lines. There's no push for the character to be a hero and no punishment for the character becoming something of a villain. There are consequences for actions in the Fabled Lands, but no real judgements.

      Things seem quite different in Steam Highwayman. The character is clearly supposed to be a hero and a fairly specific type of hero (Zorro, Robin Hood, etc.) at that. Choices of the book's/demo's beginning define your character's background and initial statistics, belongings and at least a general goal for the character to pursue.

      It's a work that seem to go between the casual Fabled Lands attitude of "here's the world, go make your mark on it if you can" and other gamebooks' idea of "You are Noun. You must save the people of Noun from the terrible evil of Noun."

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    3. The way Mike Cule has described that on his Improvised Radio Theater podcast is "you are an X who does Y". Even that to my mind is a straitjacket to characterisation. My character in Oliver's game tonight is a gambler -- maybe. But as for the Y? I've no idea. Not every character has to have a goal in life. In a movie, yes; in life and roleplaying, no.

      I haven't read much of Steam Highwayman but I got the impression that it does impose a role on your character. In a gamebook that's fair enough. There's no referee to respond to the million choices you might make, so the gamebook author must try to restrict those choices to a smaller set he or she can anticipate. Steam Highwayman differs from Fabled Lands in the degree of freedom, and fair enough. Martin is trying to focus on a specific story, or group of stories. As you say, it's somewhere between FL's open world and Fighting Fantasy's "here is your quest".

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    4. You've actually got a continuum on the open/closed bit. Both the world and the character can be open or closed. A closed character is exemplified by Joe Dever's works. "You are Lone Wolf, last of the Kai Lords. You think the Darklords suck, and here's the latest job you have to do." Fighting Fantasy (and something like The Keep of the Lich Lord) has open characters and a closed world. Whether your see (or build) your character as a cunning thief, tough Warrior, etc, your job is to kick the snot out of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain or whatever in a closed world. You can't just blow the quest off for a bit to head over to Dweomer (unless that's somehow part of the adventure). Fabled Lands is clearly open character, open world. You can plat whatever you want and have (or her) attempt to do whatever you choose.

      Steam Highwayman is the closest I've seen to closed (or at least semi-closed) character, open world. There's a world to explore, but you're going to explore that world as some kind of vehicle-riding person who robs people on the roads AKA a Steam Highwayman (or possibly Steam Highwaywoman). You get one of two sets of stats, items, backstories and general goals assigned to you and you go from there. At that point what you do, how you do it and where you choose to go next is up to you.

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    5. As I said in the recent post about Steam Highwayman, what interested me was that you are given a role but you're free to choose the characterisation.

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    6. The SH Kickstarter is now over, but in case the book goes on sale it's worth recapping what I said in the post:

      "Where Fabled Lands leaves you to define your own character and goals (a degree of absolute freeform that many find too daunting), Steam Highwayman is more like a structured roleplaying campaign in which you are given a pre-defined role. You're not just presented with a world and told, "Go." You're a figure in that world and your choices fill in the character background. Kind of like being given Robin Hood to play, but whether he's a peasant or a dispossessed Saxon nobleman is left up to you. "

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  2. Getting back to the subject of the post, the brevet system can be tweaked if you want more powerful or more customisable characters. You could roll brevet skills on 4d, for instance. Or you could give a bonus to brevet levels for classes of skills for which the character feels he/she has an affinity, or if the player comes up with a particularly impressive description of how the skill is being used.

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    1. This differs from, say, Alas Vegas where another player will give you a scene and you take a skill from that. Eg: "A flashback where you see yourself clinging to a cliffside as a car bursts into flame in the canyon below" - from which you might claim to have Escape or Climb or Acrobatics or whatever.

      The justification of using that in a one-shot narrativist game is that it's how action movies have traditionally shown a character's abilities (or indeed weaknesses). It's called "setting up", the scene that's there to tell the audience that the One Ring is a megaton of trouble, or that Indy doesn't like snakes.

      But you wouldn't want to do it that way in an ongoing RPG campaign because we know that skills aren't actually acquired in one scene. So it's a way of communicating to the audience, but it doesn't deal with the character from the inside. But no need here to get back on that tack about RPGs trying to be like movies, as we covered it in a very recent post.

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  3. What are the limits of the brevet system in terms of skills acquired? It seems like a lucky character could be "Hello, I'm Steve. I'm a computer hacker brain surgeon who flies space shuttles and summons demons in his spare time, what about you?" "Oh, I'm Bob. I can skip rope without tripping myself. Sometimes."

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    1. You will obviously need to agree a system for generating brevet values after the first. For example, the players could have a list of pregenerated values and look down until they come to the next valid value. If you use 3d you will end up with skills fairly closely clustered around 10.5 (more tightly than for a 3d bell curve, I haven't time to do the maths) but given the number of skills in GURPS I'd expect to see some interesting outliers.

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    2. Interesting outliers. That's one reason I really don't like random rolls for abilities in RPGs. I get it. In real life there are some people who are rich, handsome strong and smart while there are other who are poor, ugly, weak and dumb as a sack of hair.

      Dungeon World is a "powered-by-the-Apocalypse" system that emulates AD&D without all the chart nonsense. You pick your stats of Dex, Str, Con, Int, Wis and Cha from a set of the following number 16 (+2 modifier) two 13s (+1 modifier) 11 (no modifier) 9 (no modifier) and 8 (-1 modifier). Figure something like that would work for GURPS. Pick a few high values, a few low values and most of the rest should be 10s and 11s. Maybe make the values randomly placed at the time the skills are rolled.

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    3. Still not going to work in a campaign where you start with no memory, though. The point is not to know what you're good at. You have to not mind being surprised, and to enjoy improv -- otherwise, yes, you're always going to have to author those characters.

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    4. GURPS is 3d6, right? So for your amnesiac characters, let's say they each have a potential slate of 16 skills. At the top end they're rated at 16, 14 and 13. At the bottom end they're 8, 6 and 5. Between them there's 5 skills rated at 11 and five at 10. So one of the characters wants to sneak past some people which is presumably Stealth. First he rolls 3d6 and gets a 16, so his Stealth is set at 13 and that number gets crossed off the list of possibles. If he'd initially rolled a 4, his Stealth would've been a much crappier 6.

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    5. What you're describing is a completely different approach from what I proposed in the post. But you could do it that way too.

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  4. Having now played the first session of the campaign that kicked off this post, I can report that the first thing that happened was each player got handed a darned tarot card. The tarot is now joining "dark Alice in Wonderland" comics/games as the trope whose overuse most irritates me.

    And yet the irritation also contains an element of amusement, or possibly hysteria. Years ago I was told the story of a Balliol don who was in a state of nervous exhaustion. "You have to get right away from these academic pressures," said his doctor; "I'm sending you for a month's rest in the Cyclades. Take nothing that will remind you of work."

    So the chap went off and lazed about on sparkling white beaches drinking retsina. One day he decided to take a stroll along the beach and he noticed a fence in the bushes. He followed the fence for a mile along the shore until he saw a gate with a notice on it. He went closer and saw that it read: "Keep out. Property of Balliol College."

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  5. Quote: "The more I sit here reading through the rules, the more I'm convinced that GURPS is the enemy of roleplaying"

    Why bother with GURPS then? There are countless systems out there that could give you more of what you want, surely?

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    1. I can't speak for Oliver, but I find some advantages to using GURPS. There's plenty of detail for almost any setting, and the core 4e rules are well designed. You just need to exclude the mental disadvantages (all silly) and restrict the rules to just the core 4e books, ie Characters and Campaigns. All the other rulebooks like Perks, Martial Arts, Tactical Shooting, etc, just introduce a hair-pullingly insane number of special cases, all underpriced to delight powergamers. But use only the core of 4e and you've got a good system. Not as good as Tirikelu, mind you :-)

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    2. Understood!

      Never been a GURPS (system) fan but some of their sourcebooks are outstanding. The one which immediately springs to mind is the crime and investigations book (forgotten what it's exact name is) but its chock full of great advice.

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    3. Actually, after pondering your earlier comment I thought that maybe it is time I kicked GURPS to the kerb. I can appreciate the work that's gone into 4e, but the problem is that it leads to freakishly over-designed characters, glacially slow fights, tedious wrangling over rules, and I'm not even sure that the meticulous points system pays for itself. Half the time players conveniently forget the forest of disadvantages that are supposed to affect them, and even with Excel nobody seems capable of accurately totting up their CPs.

      So you know what, Richard, you're right. I'm got going to bother with GURPS anymore. Except for those sourcebooks, obviously. The one you're talking about is GURPS Mysteries, I think. Well worth a look:

      http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/mysteries/

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    4. The GURPS sourcebooks are great. I probably learned more about Voodoo from that sourcebook than from any other source. As for your system search, I've just sent you something that might help.

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    5. Ooh... there's a Voodoo sourcebook? That might be my Christmas present to myself.

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  6. For the record, my house rules to fix GURPS 4e are:

    * The only rulebooks that apply are Characters and Campaigns.
    * There are no points for mental disadvantages.
    * No exotic powers are allowed.
    * You get no points for Quirks.
    * You can take only one disadvantage.
    * Advantages are capped at 25% of starting character points.
    * No roll (Will, Fright, etc) can ever tell a player how his/her character should behave unless they are under mental control of some sort.

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