Criticism

Criticism

Aikanaro 29 Dec 2009 08:58

It's been quite some time since I've used this system and my memory is a little fuzzy. Despite my earlier ravings on it, we ended up deeply dissatisfied with the system. Seeing that you're shouting out for it, I'll try and remember/dredge up our issues.

The big issue is, I think, the tension between resolving conflicts using capabilities and resolving using themes. Themes are a win-button. You've just been fighting an epic battle back-and-forth and it comes to the end - you've lost. So you use a twist and nullify the loss.
Thus, a sufficiently motivated player will never lose. Unless you want to lose, there is no reason why you should. This doesn't work if you consider the player's role as being the character's advocate. I want to fight tooth and nail for my character to achieve their goals. SA lets me to it trivially, and while it's awesome for a while (for the player - not awesome for the GM), eventually you realise that because your character has never seriously been challenged, they haven't had very much opportunity to grow. I had to give up using twists to advocate for my character because it was making the game bland.

In theory, a complication should balance this out. It doesn't. It generally adds a new story element and the player will go on to win whatever issue that brings up in the same manner. Also, the handling time necessary for a player to think up a good complication is rather long.

After a while I figured out what people were talking about themes being 'anti-flags' was about - themes don't help create situations involving what the theme is about - they resolve them. Sure, they resolve it in the manner you're interested in, but using a theme signifies the end of the bit of story that was interesting and generally sucks out the tension from what should be the meat of the story.

Another major point of contention was what happens when you win/lose a social conflict. We ran into a lot of weird outcomes where according to the rules, my character had just been convinced to a viewpoint that was utterly at odds with everything that had previously been established about that character. Social conflicts work really well for the most part, but not when the opposition is pushing for you to (say) betray everything you believe in (and are not controlling your mind with technology) after a fairly low-key conversation. There could especially be a problem here when what's at stake changes as the conflict/discussion goes on.

Conflicts can also go on for way too long. We ended up scrapping double reserve for professions because it dragged out one conflict for forever. Nesting conflicts can sometimes give this effect as well.

There were other issues, but some of them were caused by our rule hacks fixing other issues, so probably outside the scope. We did have to come up with a lot of hacks and just decide on what some of the ambiguous stuff meant (there are way way not enough examples in the rulebook).

The big thing is twists though - it took me a very long time to realise how the fun was being sabotaged by too much success. It's insidious, and I don't think you'd notice it in a short game. Themes are something that we all really liked the concept of … but they just don't do what they should for them to be satisfying.

Re: Criticism

Colin_Fredericks 29 Dec 2009 17:30

Thanks for the feedback. Those are all good things to know.

I had always wanted the PCs to be able to win just about anything, but at a horrific cost if they pile up lots of Complications. It sounds like you're saying the Complications aren't enough to enforce that cost.

There is definitely potential for a social conflict to change your character's opinion on something that's not a Core Value. You said, "been convinced to a viewpoint that was utterly at odds with everything that had previously been established about that character." Were those established things CVs, or were they just part of the story? Either way it's an important thing; perhaps I should expand the Core Value idea to allow people to establish certain things during gameplay instead of at character creation.

Re: Criticism

Aikanaro 30 Dec 2009 03:32

Some of them were core value stuff, although not all. I was under the impression that core values let you resist these sorts of things better, rather than being an outright block on what you can be convinced of (unless you have a 10). Perhaps we got this wrong?
In any case, expanding for stuff established during the game is a good idea.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that changing someone's opinion is something that should regularly be at stake - it's fairly rare for someone to change their opinion as the outcome of a conversation.

Complications are way not enough for that. I think coming up with them yourself is part of the problem - I tend to be pretty comfortable with the stuff I manage to come up with. If you want horrific cost, I think the price needs to be set by someone else (which would also help with the handling time problem) - things within your control aren't horrific. I think we toyed with the idea of Polaris-style 'but only if…' stuff, but didn't implement it. Anyway, that's the fastest fix I can think of, though it doesn't do anything for the 'anti-flag' thing.

Mind you … I guess if the GM is setting up complications - that isn't something they couldn't just have done anyway. Actually, that's a general problem(?) - anything that is brought about by a complication could have just been done by the GM in normal play, unless the expectation is that the GM will maintain the status quo/resolve the current backlog of issues until a complication comes along and reinfuses the plot with energy (which is actually a pretty good description of how we played…).

Tying complications closer to the mechanics would be a good idea, I think. If you want the players to be overwhelmed by the problems that come about because of their success - DRYH is a good example of that working with mechanical support. You fall deeper down the death spiral when you put more resources into winning.
… But that's thematically appropriate for DRYH. I'm not sure if it is for SA. How does winning at just about anything but at horrific cost tie in with that the game is about?

This post is getting blathery, so I'll try and end it. I think you should consider a different role for themes though - something that doesn't resolve conflicts, but instead focuses on the player introducing new elements in play and the GM riffing off them. Drive the game's content with themes, resolve issues that come up with the character's skills.

Re: Criticism

Colin_Fredericks 30 Dec 2009 16:41

CVs do add to your resistance rather than blocking things outright, but the addition is quite substantial in terms of game mechanics. If your Metatech is 3 and someone else's is 8, a CV of 5 brings you back up to their level for the purposes of resistance.

Winning at horrific cost is for when you try to burn through everything with your Twists, rather than using them sparingly. It's for when someone says, "Ok, I'm going to stop this war. I'll be back." This shows up in the more space-opera end of things. It's not something that I expect to be a regular thing.

Here's a question for you: how can something that introduces new elements not be used to resolve conflicts? That would have to be worded very carefully.

Re: Criticism

Aikanaro 31 Dec 2009 03:08

The most painful example of the CV issue went like this:
My character and a megapowered badass civilisation-ruler guy are having a diplomatic discussion. My character is trying (IIRC) to get him to hand over one of his agents who has been making a mess out of everything. He's trying to extract a great cost for doing it.

The discussion/conflict goes back and forth. Being megapowered as he is, he has metatech reserve to spare, as well as CVs which help him. He makes several different offers, the last one basically being her telling him about the defences of this place where some of her friends keep their Doomweapon hidden and safe. I'm all out of reserve by this point and lose the roll, meaning that he's won. My character is now expected to betray her friends for something that isn't actually that important to her, going by the rules.

(It's important to note that he hasn't been using any technology to control her thoughts here - this is apparently a position that she's been debated around to accepting)

I can't reconcile that happening with this character, especially given that in the not-so-distant past there was a big deal of 'I won't hurt my friends again!' going on. It didn't make any sense. I ended up nullifying the conflict with a twist (which was unsatisfying - might as well not have had the conflict at all…).

It's possible we did something wrong here, but I don't think so. The bad guy won and he gets the outcome he wants, which doesn't follow the established fiction.

You don't need to use twists very often to ruin the game in the way I described. I used twists quite rarely - usually you can win conflicts with your own capabilities, and when you can't you can twist so that you do. If there was horrific cost to using them as a general thing, that might mitigate the win-button problem.

Well, if you don't use them inside a conflict then it's impossible to resolve a conflict with them. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it. … Actually, I'm not sure why it's a problem at all - even if you introduce your love interest swinging in to save you in the middle of the conflict, that doesn't resolve the conflict. Perhaps it would give you a boost of some sort, but you still have to actually end it.

If the player isn't in control of the outcome of the introduced element, then they can't resolve the conflict with it. 'An anvil falls out of the sky!' is fine (if retarded); 'An anvil falls out of the sky and squashes the bad guy' is not fine.

Re: Criticism

Colin_Fredericks 01 Jan 2010 22:43

"Using technology" is inherent in any Metatech exchange, though it might not be things that you consider technology. None of it is thought control, none of it relies on a physical device, but it is definitely heavy-duty social technology developed over the course of hundreds of years.

Look at the Metatech results chart on page 80. The result you're describing sounds like somewhere around the +5 level. If he had Meta 8 and you had Meta 3, then him talking you into giving up your friends is exactly how the game should work. If the advantage was not that large, it should have taken him a correspondingly longer time, using the progression on page 81.

It does sound like being able to develop CVs during the game would have helped avoid this sort of thing; you could have used the "I won't hurt my friends again" event to create a CV (perhaps Loyalty) that would have come into play during this conflict.

I agree that Theme effects coming out of nowhere are nonsensical; that's why their descriptors are there, to help guide players to use them at appropriate times. Themes don't work themselves into the game fiction automatically. What Theme did you activate with your Twist? What descriptor did it have?

Re: Criticism

TauCeti 02 Jan 2010 00:01

I’ve talked about complications in the other thread, so I’m going to offer recommendations for CVs.

We have two competing problems. On the one hand, sufficiently powerful PCs should be able to convince NPCs of whatever they need to most of the time. On the other hand, NPCs shouldn’t generally be able to re-write a PC character if it isn’t internally consistent (with plot relevant exceptions).

CVs are supposed to supply that internal consistency. Apparently they aren’t enough as they are?

So, some ideas.

1 - Let multiple CVs stack. You’re trying to convince me to backstab my team? But I have Loyalty 4 and Honor 5. So I now get +9 to my Metatech.
2 - Let CVs have reserve that can be spent to defend them. I don’t really like this idea; just throwing it out there.
3 - Higher CV mutability. If a player realizes that they should have a CV but don’t (and they’ve been RPing the CV), they can add it to their sheet. Even in response to a metatech assault. Role playing should reflect CVs, but CVs should also reflect role playing.
4 - Soften CV restrictions. Normally, a character can’t have more than 4 (or 5, or 3) CVs. Let characters have more CVs at lower levels, if it is appropriate. Perhaps the limit is to CVs over 3, and no character can have more than 6 CVs total. This would be best combined with 1 and 3 above.

When I GM’d, I treated CVs as pretty mutable. One character was re-writing their mind to be more like a Skotadi, so I gave him appropriate CVs and (to match my envisioning of the Skotadi) the ability to change his own CVs at will. Another character did something… really aweful at the end of the campaign. He immediately picked up “Paranoid of Aia” as a CV at 3. When he didn’t show remorse minutes later, I bumped it to 4 to reflect that. Universe-wise, he had the CV for several sessions, but we didn’t notice as players.

Re: Criticism

TauCeti 02 Jan 2010 01:15

After talking to Doug for a bit, I have more…

My campaign (playtest) didn’t have these problems. So, I’d like to go over how I (mostly inadvertently) avoided them. Some of these ideas might be good to work into the rules, some aren’t sufficiently “core SA” and I’ll just keep them as house rules or personal preferences.

First and foremost “can you succeed?” is never a question I ask. I write my plots assuming that the PCs succeed at everything they attempt. That isn’t the point.

My question is “when you can succeed at anything you put your mind to, what do you do?” I throw moral quandaries at my players. I throw convoluted situations where it is unclear what is going on or who is in the right. A brief summary of the main themes, session by session:

_{(small type because this section is long and not terribly interesting)
Regatta - There is no evidence that the T’s prediction of doom could possibly happen. What is going on?
Napoleon - The T’s information is too vague. Which political incident is important?
A Political Incident - A thorny political and social mess. Who’s side are we on?
The Fall - What do you do when you know that society is about to fall apart and you can’t stop it?
Reconstruction - There are twenty worlds in various states of doom. Who do you save?
Tower is Burning - What do you do if you are already too late?
Off Line - A world is sleeping. Do you wake it up and risk a war? What if you really need their help?
And So It Ends - If your last hope is destroyed, what do you do?
Faustian Bargains - Who are you willing to go to for help? What are you willing to sacrifice?
Mephistopheles - How do you handle the fall out from your ‘allies’?
Politics - When four sides preach ‘peace’ and seek war, who’s side are you on?
Cleaning Up - War is hell. Can you trust your enemies? (among several other questions)
Dungeon Crawl - How do you defeat an enemy that out maneuvers you at every turn?
Chaos - How do you prepare for the final encounter?
Insanity - What is really going on? When your foe is at your mercy, what do you do?}

Also, I really didn’t use the conflict resolution system. As the rules are written, it’s the default for most major interactions. I treated a single contested or target number roll as the default, and would only use the conflict resolution system if the PCs did something very time consuming and high-stress.

For example, when a mechanican shot at the PC’s ship, it wasn’t an extended conflict. It was an instant death cutscene. And when they shot back it also wasn’t an extended conflict. It was a single roll, and then the mechanican was replaced with a large crater.

This had the effect that players could spend reserve quickly, since they didn’t need to save any for HP in extended conflicts. It also devalued reserve somewhat, since having more didn’t increase your odds substantially of winning what would otherwise have been an extended conflict.

If Aikanaro’s situation had occurred in my game, I would have resolved it as follows: A single contested roll between Aikanaro’s character and the dictator. If the dictator won, Aikanaro’s character would have been convinced to give up getting the agent. If Aikanaro’s character won, she would get the agent. If I had wanted the dictator to try to convince the character to give up the Doomweapon, I’d have specified that up front and let the conversation take much longer (potentially long enough for another PC to get involved). In that case, I might have used an abbreviated conflict resolution system; one roll per 10 minutes or hour of debate (depending on how long it would take from the Metatech chart).

Worst case, I would have expected Aikanaro to burn an appropriate twist to get out of the situation (if it was bad enough to warrant one).

Also, I would probably have structured the "dictator wins" situation slightly differently. Instead of trying to convince Aikanaro's character to voluntarily devulge the location of the Doomweapon, he'd have brought it up in conversation in a calculated way to cause Aikanaro's character to give away the location involuntarily (the way a good poker player can read a poor one's hand). That lets the dictator win without breaking Aikanaro's character, and if the dictator's metatech is high enough, it is probably faster and easier than convincing her.

Re: Criticism

QHudspeth 05 Jan 2010 14:52

It seems there is a discrepancy between the way we playtesters have been taught the game from the source, and the way lone players are learning the game. Maybe.

In my experience, I have trouble even using my Themes. It is difficult to find places that the Theme descriptor actually fits in and becomes useful. In my limited experience, they're not a game-buster. But I haven't played in an extended campaign for quite some time, so it could just be a statistical thing — I haven't had Aikanaro's problems because I haven't waited long enough.

Also, in my limited experience, themes have been used to solve problems while at the same time creating more drama. For example, in a recent con session (so, short) my Character, Charlie, had the Theme Magnetism: I know a guy (who knows a guy…). During a terrorist threat, I used the theme to have an established drinking-buddy relationship with the threator, allowing Charlie to feign interest in talking to him, and positioning himself in his face. This had the effect of placing Charlie's body in the way of his attempt to throw some sort of nanofoam bomb or something (I vaguely recall) causing the two of them to be stuck together. It stopped him, but took Charlie out of the fight for a short time. But here's the catch — I pulled an Elan to do it. I intentionally worked in the bit where Charlie gets hit too, effectively adding a level 0 Complication, because it was good drama and it was a way to justify using an otherwise social Theme in a fight. It was instinctual to do so, and it made the GM chortle. I hesitate to say the rules should enforce such dramatic use of Themes, but perhaps it could be stressed more in the manual? It seems to me that players reigning in their Theme use could be a solution; however, perhaps needing such a house rule indicates a serious flaw.

One thing that strikes me about the social interaction problem is that perhaps an agreed-stakes rule would be useful. In Aik's example, the stakes changed during play to something unacceptable. Stakes should perhaps be agreed upon when characters go into a social conflict, and if the stakes need to change, there could be some sort of bonus to resist that change. There should definitely be a chance to just walk away from any dealings. I think the current rules support an escape feature, but I'm not sure.