Giving Up the Initiative!

For a while now I've been poking at a new idea for a role-playing game I had that I called Initiative!

I like the concept of the game, and the single play-test session revealed the concept will probably work, but for now I am suspending any further development on the game.

I need to stay focused, and for the foreseeable future that means staying focused on the development of REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS. Since the girls are set in the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND universe, that means developing the universe further is worthwhile, but building a brand-new set of rules for running games here is just not a good use of my time. I've already got three entirely separate rule sets for games in this world, so maybe a fourth just isn't super necessary.

That said, I believe Initiative! is a unique game concept and captures a really fun model for conflict and story-telling. So I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution license, which means you can copy it and do whatever you want with it.

Have fun! And please let me know if you end up using it for anything; I'd love to hear about it.

Initiative! Play-Test the First!

We ran the first-ever Initiative! playtest last night -- a game of giant robots fighting monsters in our hometown of Toronto. Learned a lot, laughed a lot, ready to do it again!

The goal in this first playtest was just to see if this wacky engine would actually work at all -- would the concept of gaining and losing the initiative bring a fresh sense to the table?

The answer is definitely a YES.

People cottoned on to the concept immediately. If you don't have the initiative, you can only react via Cool or Aware, and if you have the initiative you can try to win via Deadly and Compelling. It took a while, though for people to internalize the idea and start working WITH it in order to achieve their goals.

One player whose character was heavily invested in being Deadly lost the initiative in the first round, and never tried to get it back (didn't know that she could, to be fair), and got beaten right out of the fight in a couple of rounds.

So on the one hand, good that things can swing that wildly -- but it wasn't a great time for the player!

As they started to figure it out, however, you could see people trying to set themselves up. Players would deliberately give up the initiative so they could use a Trait that had a higher chance of success. It seemed like the decision-making at each moment offered lots of options, with pretty clear risk levels. So people could think, "Well, if I try to use Deadly here and I fail, I could be in a lot of trouble. But my Reactive Traits aren't very good, and if fail, I'm really going to get pounded. What to do?"

So I'm encouraged that way. It feels like this core mechanic is going to work. But of course there's some real issues to be resolved. The game as it stands is basically unplayable.

Real Issues

Nowhere is Safe

For example, there's no way to "lay low" -- people would try to use their Reactive Traits in order to step back and get a sense of the battle, like someone might play a rogue or a wizard trying for a vantage point, but in the current system, being Reactive is much riskier than being Active, since a failure in Reactive turns straight into damage. So there's no way to model that sort of "pulling back" from the fray to recollect oneself.

Which is kind of part of the design -- in Initiative!, if you're not pressing forward, then you're giving ground to your opponent. But at the least a lot of people are going to come in with an assumption that this system will have to fight against. And perhaps that assumption -- that there's safety in holding back -- is a reasonable one that I have to consider.

What Are We Doing?

Another problem is even more fundamental -- it was really hard in our "social" scene to establish what damage really meant. In my head, dealing damage is associated with advancing towards your objective, but when the "field of battle" is a social situation with a number of characters each of whom may have their own objectives, trying to understand what dealing damage to an NPC actually MEANS is complex.

There may need to be some structure around establishing goals for each scene, or maybe players will choose which NPCs in particular they wish to engage with. Not sure, and more testing is required, but I'm pretty sure something will have to be created around handling objectives.

One thing I really liked about Apocalypse World was the way in which characters could establish true things about the situation through strictly-constrained lists of questions. So you could use whatever the ability was called to learn something, but you had to choose your question from a predefined list. It's possible something of that nature might work here.

Next Steps

I'm not going to make too many changes right away. There were a few outright holes in the rules I have to sort out, but I want to try and run this again just as it is before I start making a lot of changes. There were a few quirks about the way I ran last night's session that definitely threw the results, so mixing things up and seeing how that influences play will be very important.

Not much reference to the rules was required, which was great. And it was definitely a free-wheeling sort of game, which is exactly what I'm hoping for. Onwards!

Initiative! Locals

So we've talked about the two main types of Tags: Stunts and Connections. Stunts are things your character has or can do -- talents, items, magical powers, whatever. Connections are ways in which your character relates to or supports other characters in the group. These are the basic character elements in Initiative!

Tags are how you improve your Trait rolls. Every time you make a Trait roll, you can add one of your Tags to it. Simple enough, right?

Well, there's a third type of Tag: the Local Quality.

Local Qualities

Local Qualities are Tags that are connected to a particular location: a crowded tavern or a storm-tossed pirate ship deck or whatever. They are elements in the scene that heroes can use to dramatic or cinematic effect. A Local Quality can be ANYTHING: a physical characteristic of the locale, or a quirk of one of the NPCs, or just a declaration about how the action here is going to manifest.

Once established, any player can choose to apply the Local Quality to any Trait roll. This counts as their Tag for that roll, but there's a little wrinkle to this: Action Points.

Action Points

Of course Initiative! has an Action Points mechanic. Giving players a currency they can choose to apply for advantage at their discretion is a great idea, and works well in lots of games. In Initiative! a player can spend an Action Point to use a second Tag on a given roll, OR to create a Local Quality (and apply it to their roll). Once a Local Quality is created, anyone can use it at its current rank just like any other Tag.

But if they invest an Action Point, they get to increase the rank of the Local Quality (or create it from scratch) AND add it as a second Tag to their roll.

So there's an interesting choice here for a player -- they can use their Action Points to add one of their existing Tags to a roll, but get no ongoing benefit, OR they can invest in something which may not be as potent (all new Tags always begin life at rank "Good"), but which other players can not only make use of but also invest in. And as they invest in the Local Quality, it gets more and more powerful.

Swashbuckling Scenes

Cam Banks started a "swashbuckling" conversation on Google Plus recently, and one of the ideas that came up was the notion of introducing "themes" into battles, whereby for example, "tabletops" are the theme and so any action that involves them gets a bonus. Local Qualities allow for that sort of play -- somebody can establish a Local Quality (say, "Pit of Barbecuing Pigs") and then not only do players make use of it, but they are incented to make it steadily MORE impactful over the course of the scene.

And of course in Initiative! combat and social scenes are handled in exactly the same way, so you can establish Local Qualities in the midst of a delicate negotiation and have the same impact.

The goal of Local Qualities is to give players new options in each scene that they can make use of for their characters' awesomeness. Since Local Qualities evaporate at the end of the scene, they can make an individual fight much more memorable. Initiative! is meant to be a simple, freewheeling game of memorable stories, so the hope is that the combination of Stunts, Connections and Local Qualities allows for exactly that.

Initiative! Teams

I like the "niche protection" ideas of games like Old School Hack and Leverage, where each player fills a clearly-defined role on the team and the roles are all designed so that each hero has abilities that only they can use. Everyone gets their share of "spotlight time," which is a great thing at any table.

But a lot of the games I run don't have those sorts of ready-made niches that you can easily carve out. DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, for example, ends up handling parties made entirely of swashbucklers competing to out-buckle each other's swashes. That's kind of part of the fun.

And niche protection is different from relationships, and relationships are much more interesting to me than niches. I want a game where the relationships between party members can be as important as the skills and abilities of the individuals who make up the party. I found Apocalypse World really interesting this way, and successful at generating interesting and playable relationships between PCs.

Initiative! encourages strong relationships between characters, and using those in play, and investing in them as much as you would your character's abilities. Indeed, those relationships can actually BE a character's abilities. In Initiative! those relationships are called Connections.

Connections

Connections are the second kind of Tag in Initiative! -- the fundamental characteristics that you use to flesh out your character. We talked last time about Stunts, but Connections are a little more complicated. When you create a Connection, you benefit at least TWO characters (you and the character you're connected to), so you each get a benefit at a lower cost than if you'd each invested the same in your own characters. Further investment in that Connection is likewise cost-effective.

Making Connections

In addition to the usual character sheet most role-playing games require, Initiative! also has a GROUP sheet, where all the Connections are noted. Every Connection has three elements: a quick one-line description, a Rank and a list of the characters connected.

The description is how you decide when a Connection is relevant. Stunts have exactly the same thing. So for example, you can create a Connection with another character and call it "To The Emperor!" -- perhaps thinking this is a toast you and the other character always use as a signal between you. So any time that toast (or any other implication of the description) comes into play, you can apply the Connection.

Playing Connections

Applying the Connection allows you to add the bonus associated with the Connection's Rank to your roll. Higher Ranks mean higher bonuses, so it's worthwhile to spend some energy building up your Connections. Connections are even more potent when used to aid one of the connected character's rolls. When you use a Connection that way, its Rank is increased by one for that roll.

All the connected characters share the Connection's Rank, so if any one of you increases it, that's an increase you all get to share in. Being a good team player is its own reward!

There are some limits to all this goodness. A Connection is tied to a Trait, and you can only have one Connection per Trait. In addition, you can only have one Connection per team member. Finally, a single Connection can only connect a maximum of three characters.


The goal is a network of Connections that draw all the group members together, and encourage coordinated action. Of course this needs lots of playtesting, so it will probably undergo lots of change, but I'm hoping the basic idea will get a lot of use in play.

Are there other games with great relationship-building mechanics?

Initiative! Stunts

So when I first started talking about this new system I'm tinkering with, I mentioned that each character was defined by five Traits: Deadly, Compelling, Quick, Cool and Aware. Of course you characters can get more specific than that. The primary way you define your character is through Stunts.

Stunts

A Stunt is like a shtick, or a signature move, or a strength, or anything that gives a bit of colour to HOW your character manifests one of the basic Traits. Is he Deadly because he has Fists of Iron? Is she Cool because she's Single-Minded? Stunts are descriptive notes that you use to improve your character's chances at success -- or even to ensure success when you really need it.

Each Stunt is attached to a Trait. So you have Deadly Stunts, or Aware Stunts, or whatever. When you make a Trait roll, you get to apply one Stunt for that Trait to the roll, so it's good to have Stunts spread across your Traits.

(actually, Stunts are just one category of things you can apply to Trait rolls, but we'll get to that later)

Each Stunt also has a Rank. See, Stunts and Traits are both Qualities -- and Qualities are the building blocks of the Initiative! system. Quality Ranks range from the bottom of Fail to the top of Mythic. Each Rank has a corresponding Modifier and a Target number. When you make a Trait roll, you add the Modifier for the Trait's Rank. If you have a relevant Stunt, you can add its Modifier, too.

Making Stunts

Remember, I want this game to be simple. So there can't be long lists of Stunts to choose from. Instead, you can make up your own Stunts -- a Stunt can be anything you want it to be. The basic guideline, though, is that your Stunts can't just mean MORE of the Trait they apply to. That is, you can't have a Deadly Stunt called "Super Deadly". Stunts describe HOW your character operates in a Deadly fashion.

The rule of thumb is that a good Stunt must have obvious conditions under which it would NOT be useful. If you can't easily come up with a situation in which you're using Deadly but would not be able to use the Stunt, it's probably a bad Stunt.

Playing Stunts

Now I also want this game to be freewheeling. So there's an Action Point mechanic, like in many games. What these points allow you to do is apply more than one Stunt to a given roll. The second Stunt can be from any Trait, although you'll be required to explain its usage here.

The big deal with these Action Points is that you can use them AFTER the roll is made. So if you fail by only a small amount, you can spend an Action Point and draw in another Stunt to ensure that you succeed. So you're having to do some fancy narrating at the table, but you know you're doing it for a win.

I've used this type of mechanic for years with DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, and am convinced that a post-roll opportunity is a great way to encourage in-play creativity.

So there you have it! Stunts, part of the core of the Initiative! system -- more details coming soon.

Initiative! The Plan.

Well, the other day I posted a bit of a tease about how this new game system I'm thinking about is going to work. I wanted to lay out some basics, just so you understand where I'm coming from and what I'm trying to achieve with this.

Design decisions only make sense in light of specific constraints or objectives.

Initiative! is meant to be a simple, freewheeling game of teams overcoming evil.

Simple means:

• No long lists of things to remember
• No complex decisions before you have the information you need
• One roll tells you all you need to know
• Negligible DM prep required

Freewheeling implies interesting options at the table, the ability to create new stuff in the story and to combine things in unexpected ways.

It's about teams, because not many games do the team concept really well, and it's something I think deserves more game design impact at the table. I'll get more into how I see that working down the road, but it's a part of the system I'm really excited about.

For right now I don't have a story concept more complex than "overcoming evil." You could use it just as well for overcoming good, I suppose. But while Initiative! is a generic system, it still assumes a story that is about a group or a team that work against opposing forces in order to accomplish their goals.

I'll be posting more detailed outlines of how the system works over the next couple of weeks. Any feedback will be very welcome!

Initiative!

In honour of National Game Development Month, I thought I'd share a new basic mechanic I've been tinkering with. I call it the Initiative system. It has its roots in Fraser Ronald's very fun Sword's Edge system (which powers Kiss My Axe and Sword Noir), but has a much crappier name.

One of the ideas in Sword's Edge is that only players ever make rolls. In combat, you're either on the offensive or on the defensive, and the rolls you make are either to inflict or avoid damage. It's a unique way of thinking about modelling conflict, and it occurred to me that this idea could be expanded to cover ALL situations.

What if the key mechanic in a game system revolved around possession of "initiative"? What if in order to accomplish things you had to acquire and act with that initiative, and failing to get it, or losing it, would force you to try and regain your cool?

We see this all the time in situations that aren't physical confrontations. When one person gets rolling in a debate they can steam-roller their opponent, sway the room to their side. Many of our social institutions contain elaborate rules to try and limit this effect, precisely because it's so powerful. And when you don't have that initiative, when you're stammering and struggling to make a response, always on the defensive, it's very hard to advance your own agenda. So Initiative is meant to try and model that aspect of getting along in life.

Here's how it works:

Traits

You have five Traits. Two are Active Traits -- Deadly and Compelling. Two are Reactive Traits -- Cool and Aware. The fifth Trait is Quick, which is what you'll use to try and gain the initiative.

Success and Failure

At the start of any confrontation, all the players roll their Quick to determine if they have initiative or not. Those who do can use Deadly or Compelling; those who do not can only use Cool or Aware.

In the Initiative system, all results have degrees of success or failure. This comes into play here.

If you're making a Deadly or a Compelling roll, success means you "inflict damage" on your opponent -- essentially, you advance your position while damaging theirs. If you're making a Cool or Aware roll, on a success you resist any efforts to do damage to you.

If you succeed really well on a Cool or Aware roll, you might be able to take the initiative (allowing you to make a Deadly or a Compelling roll next round); likewise, if you fail really badly on a Deadly or Compelling roll you might lose the initiative this round.

That's it!

There's more details, of course, but that's the heart of the system. It's a very different sort of model than most simulationist games, I know, but once I got the hang of the basic idea it really took hold of me. 

When working against natural phenomena, or anything that isn't an independent agent able to respond to the players, the players always have Initiative and can use any Trait they want.

I'm toying with the idea of allowing Quick rolls at all times -- that Quick can be both Active and Reactive (inflicting and resisting damage, basically). I'm worried that will overload Quick and make it the only Trait worth investing in, however.

Am definitely thinking about ways to implement this in new games. I think it suits any game meant to tell high-action stories in which conflict, success and failure form the driving narrative.