The Gaming Den

(First post! Woot!)

So. A group of young ladies, including my sister, my ex, another girl I dated briefly and a flatmate of one of the above have approached me with the plaintive cries of players to the GM whom they know full well cannot resist. "Run something steampunk," they say, "we wish to wear petticoats and fly airships and fuck people's post-apocalyptic shit up whilst festooning our hats with brass cogs."

I am, in other words, powerless. A magician might refuse, but a gentleman? Never.

My usual response when people ask for homebrewed games is to put Ars Magica, 7th Sea, Shadowrun and Unisystem in a pile and beat them with a stick until they roughly resemble something playable. Since this one is going to be pretty MTP, I suspect I don't need to get the granularity too precise. Still, system does matter, and I know for a fact that people will squawk really loudly if their Two-Fisted Lady of Science's prized Lightning Cannon doesn't blow fools into chunks quite as effectively as the fluff they came up with has led them to expect.

After speaking to the players, I discovered something odd. They want to be a party of generalists. Instead of a party of hyperfocused specialists, they want to all be able to participate in every minigame. Naturally, they aren't going to make my life easy: they want to all be meaningfully distinct and have equally protected niches too. Cakes are going to be had and damned well eaten too.

So here's my idea regarding social skills: there are no social skills.

Instead, there is an extensive system of skills, any one of which can be used as a social skill when interacting with an NPC who has that skill too. When trying to intimidate a thief, you use your Filching or Blend In skill. When flirting with a handsome captain of dragoons, use your Tactics or Swordplay skill. And so on.

As mentioned, it will be pretty MTP, but if anything that makes it even more vital that you can immediately eyeball the character's talk-fu and work out whether to play the NPC as being Johnny Tightlips or Jimmy the Squealer.

This has the advantage that every character becomes the party's Face sometimes, and so with some hopefully interesting encounter design from me means that everybody gets to play the talking game as well as the stabbing and engineering and exploration games. It also means that there's no munchkinned, uberspecialised diplomancers, which is always pleasant because after playing Exalted I really don't want to see that again.

Does this work? The other option is to steal from Robin D. Laws himself and institute a wheel system like in Dying Earth. Whilst I adore Robin D. Laws, I have never played Dying Earth due to my violent dislike of Jack Vance, so I don't know how the wheel system handles in play.

After speaking to the players, I discovered something odd. They want to be a party of generalists. Instead of a party of hyperfocused specialists, they want to all be able to participate in every minigame. Naturally, they aren't going to make my life easy: they want to all be meaningfully distinct and have equally protected niches too. Cakes are going to be had and damned well eaten too.

Come up with your minigames: Combat, Talkery, Magery and Sneakery, say

Come up with your niches for each minigame:

Combat: Offensive melee, defensive melee, offensive ranged, distracting ranged, and shadowstriking.
Talkery: Intimidate, diplomacy, bluff, sense motive, and low level telepathy/flashes of insight
Sneakery: Picking locks, disabling alarms, stealthy moving, stealthy takedowns and scouting.
Magery: Healing, fire, lightning, teleport, summons.

Use some sort of draw system, then develop skills/abilities around that?

All I can say is...good fucking luck.

Using one of the NPC skills for social stuff can be be interesting to take into account the fact that people will be socially more at ease with linkely-minded people.
It also, as you said, let every party member be the Face, depending on the situation.

But it also has some limitations:
- A good negotiator is someone who'll be able to blend in. He'll get along as well with the thief as with the handsome captain of dragoons.
- Being from the same environment can help in many social situations, especially if there are many different and isolated cultures/tribes/classes/etc but it's not because you're very good at something that you'll be very good at convincing/threatening people from the same culture (unless you're so good you've got a reputation).

So I think it would be better to:
- Keep some "Charisma" attribute or skill that would still be the basis for the social minigame
- Instead of relying on Skills, have each character choose one (or more) "culture/tribe/class" that would have a big impact (positive or negative) in the minigame.

With such a system (if the numbers are good) an excellent diplomat with a high Charisma would be able to get good results with most people, but would never be as good as a decent diplomat belonging to the right culture. And the social aptitude of two people from the same culture would still be based on their actual charisma rather than their ability to do something completely unrelated.

Just keep in mind that such a system implies that the world's population is diverse and doesn't mix. But I think that's pretty good for a Steampunk world.

Blade, Ikeren, thanks very much. I've come up with some ideas based on what you've said.

Blade

I love your idea of dividing the world up into classes / cultures / etc and allowing people different social abilities to do with each. That works really well with Steampunk, especially if you get into the seedy dystopian underbelly of an apparently utopian society. (Me? A Bioshock fan? How did you guess?)

I think I'm going to go with five classes: Aristocrats, White-Collar, Working, Criminal and Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Because names are important, these will be called Admirable, Respectable, Honest, Shunned and Uncivilised. Five is a nice round number and importantly does not precisely match my number of players so it's not going to be absolutely rigidly silo'd.

Three ideas therefore appeal:

- Have a bonus when dealing with people of the same class as you
- Have a bonus when dealing with people of any class for which you've bought the Talk To People Of Class X ability (which you get free for your own class)
- Have three separate talking abilities: One when talking "up", one when talking "down", and one when talking to people of the same class. This is the most complex and makes it difficult to integrate with the "no social skills" paradigm, but does mean that I can have abilities with names like Condescend and Tug Forelock, which make me happy.

This allows people to play social chameleons and anthropologists (important for setting) and also fits your point about being good at things not being the same thing as getting along with other people who are also good at them (see any Linux or D&D argument for examples).


Ikeren

You're right, I think I need to take a disciplined and structured approach and come up with the minigames in a little more detail. Here are the ones that I can think of.

Minigames:
- Intrusion. You're breaking into a place and trying to bypass obstacles, be they talky or fighty or sneaky or techy or simply speed-of-progress based. Eventually you will find the brass ring and then leave. Some obstacles will require only one character to have the right ability; others will work off the entire party since one asshole setting off an alarm will spoil everyone's day. A broad base of skills will give the party more tactical options, which increases the odds that they have something which the obstacle is weak to. This minigame should play in a constantly pressured way, giving the players the sense that "doing the nearly right thing right now is better than doing the entirely right thing in an hour's time."

- Exploration / Investigative. You're in a place trying to find a thing. That may involve being in a murder scene trying to find a fingerprint, it may involve being in a jungle trying to find a hidden temple, or it may involve being at a party trying to find the person who'll let you bribe them to go to another, bigger party where you can assassinate the archduke. This minigame shouldn't feel time pressured; rather, it should feel like a puzzle-solving game with diminishing resources and punishments for failures. Basically, what 4e D&D tried to do with Skill Challenges, only not broken and without the whole "get the right character to do everything while we sit back and carefully touch nothing" element.

- Airship Combat. You're on an airship. Some people are flying, some people are repairing, some people are tending the engines, some people are firing weapons. If you've played Guns of Icarus Online, you know what I'm going for here. It's a pure attrition fest, trying to make your "stamina bar"(s) run down slower than those of your attackers, and where a character who succeeds in their action for the turn will affect that attrition rate in some respect, either by decreasing the party's or by increasing the opponent's. This minigame could go one of two ways: either everyone heads for their assigned "battle station" and plays a separate minigame until they win, or else everyone swaps stations constantly depending on what the situation is this turn. I don't know which way would be more fun; suggestions?
(This minigame could also stand in for the traditional "you crack the door, I'll hold off the waves of guards" encounter. Or the "you crack the door, I'll fast-talk the guards." Or any stamina-bar style encounter.)

- Boss Battle. They need to happen. There's nothing as satisfying as teasing your players with a villain all game, and then letting them finally knock them down and kick their face in. It's the climax of every arc. Mechanically, it should reward coming with as many advantages as possible which you accumulated over the course of the arc, and thus allowing frequent callbacks to everyone's achievements and victories, making them all feel good and providing a satisfying wrap-up. Everyone needs to take part in this. However, there's no need for it to be a combat challenge; the same system could be used for a satisfying social climax where you humiliate the Ambassador during the press conference and thus ensure the government's downfall, or an engineering-based climax where you use the stolen scientific secrets to sabotage the enemy's Steam-Powered MechaSpider before it destroys the city.



It occurs to me that the ideal piece of design might be to give each character a relatively small number of abilities, and make each ability work in each minigame. For example, your engineer might use their engineering skill to crack locks during the intrusion minigame, to chat up engineers during the investigation minigame, to keep the ship running during airship combat, and to [insert situational thing here] during the climax. That way, everyone gets to play in every minigame, but everyone also has their area of focus.

In that case, it might even be possible to have the abilities be phrased as personality traits, rather than skillsets. For example, you might be rolling your "ferocious" or "duplicitous" or "calm" in each minigame, to do those specific things. That sounds pretty abstract though; I'm not entirely happy with it, since it sounds like it'd lead to too many grey areas and too much negotiation between player and GM.

Thoughts?

The problem I see with the 'talk up/down' solution is that someone from the middle classes will need three skills while characters from the lowest and highest classes will need only two for the same result.

Another solution would be to have a modifier depending on the distance between the classes. An Aristocrat can talk with a White Collar without too much trouble, but it will be more difficult for him to talk with a Criminal.

The idea of "talking up" vs "talking down" could then be used for modifiers in some cases: an Aristocrat in a civilized place will have bonus when giving orders or threatening a Worker, but it will be the other way around in less civilized places.

Consider Leagues of Adventure. (http://www.tripleacegames.com/brands/le ... adventure/)

I mean, homebrew if you prefer, but Leagues has been good fun so far.