Common Sense: The Roleplaying System

September 22, 2008 No comments

This is a rerun. It was originally posted on March 13, 2006.

My life of late hasn’t been conducive to sitting down at a table with friends to do some roleplaying. I also have some friends that live far, far away that I’d love to roleplay with, but distance prohibits that from happening. To rectify this, I’ve started thinking about doing a play-by-post game, either through email, a forum, or on a blog. Then everyone can participate in whatever free time they have, regardless of time of day or time zone.

When I started thinking about the logistics of doing this, I wasn’t near a computer. I couldn’t do any research on what systems and tools other people use, so I started weighing my perceived needs and working up a system of my own. The one play-by-email I’d participated in previously, as a player, informed my design choices. Here’s a rough, un-playtested draft of what I came up with.

Doing play-by-post isn’t as simple as picking an established tabletop roleplaying game and running it. Most games are designed for face-to-face, real-time play. To my knowledge (again, I’m too lazy to Google here and more interested in pitching my own ideas) there hasn’t been a game designed specifically for play-by-post. Using a regular roleplaying system can work, but there are drawbacks.

First, there’s task resolution. You can use an honor system and allow everyone to roll their own dice, you can trust the gamemaster to do all the die rolls, or you can use a number of sites that have randomizers developed for turn-based wargames. I’m not wild about any of those solutions, so a different method of task resolution needs to be developed. I thought about a diceless mine’s-bigger-that-your solution, similar to thar Amber RPG: if I have a 5 and you have 6, you automatically win. That seemed to cut-and-dried to me, but diceless was definitely the way to go. The obvious answer is to go entirely with dramatic editing: my character does this because I put up the points to make it so.

The other flaw is that standard, round-based combat can literally take days or weeks. If you wait for each player to respond in order of initiative to announce their next move, then await the gamemaster’s response and the resolution, a round is only as fast as the last person’s response time. If you’re in different time zones, work weird hours away from a computer, or generally have a life that doesn’t involve 23 hours a day in front of a screen, this isn’t the most efficient method. It doesn’t play to the strengths of the medium, which is writing and description. What needs to happen is something akin to the way combat rounds work in Know Your Role: The WWE RPG: both opponents describe their intended actions, an opposed role is made, and the winner describes what actually happens. In this case, the gamemaster who set the scene and describe the attacker’s means and method (or the general obstacles of a task like hacking a computer, picking a lock, and so on) and the player would respond with his character’s actions and a short description of how they achieve (or intend to achieve) their success.

So let’s look at a purely descriptive game. You write down your character’s history, background, and abilities. Think of the entries in the old DC Who’s Who comics, or the Handbook of the Marvel Universe. You’ve got a few paragraphs either stating or implying what the character has done, can do, or may be able to do. It’s a given that Spider-Man can swing from buildings, Batman has money, Superman can fly, for example. No numbers; this is just the way it is.

The gamemaster describes the scene, and the player writes back with what his or her character is doing. The actions should be in context with the setting and the character. If no one objects, the next player goes on to describe his character’s actions, and so on. The gamemaster will interject by describing supporting cast reactions and other narrative and information. It should flow like a collaborative story. If your character is a badass going up against a dozen cannonfodder lackeys, you just describe the grisley ways you mow them down, and that’s combat.

Not everything will go smoothly, however. The gamemaster will throw obstacles at you or say “not so fast…”. Other players will dispute whether it makes sense that your character could really do that, or point out a continuity error, or just plain disagree with the direction you’re taking the story. That’s where Challenges come in.

A challege is easy to resolve. Each player begins with a certain number of tokens (a word selected at random, probably because I’m reading Iron Heroes at the moment), say 5 tokens each. When you Challenge, you state the number of token you’re putting up and the reason why you’re challenging. “Challenge: 1 token. I don’t buy that driving a landspeeder and shooting wamp rats translates into the ability to hit a small ventilation shaft on the Death Star. It’s too much of a stretch for me”.

The Challenged player has two choices: He can concede the Challenge, and change his action. “You’re right, that was stupid. Instead, he’s going to… [whatever]“. When you concede the Challenge, you get the token. That’s right. The other player put up a token to halt your action, so you get that token. Now you have more tokens to spend later to get your own way on something else.

The other choice is to Raise on a Challenge. You put up more tokens than the other player to keep your action. “I see your Challenge on 1 token and Raise 2 tokens.” If the other player concedes, you keep your action, he keeps his 1 token, but you give your 2 tokens to him. You won this one, but he’s got more tokens to Challenge with or Raise to defend his own actions later. He can also raise again, and players can continue to raise until someone’s out of tokens or concedes. Players can also team up and pool their tokens to Challenge or raise.

This works well for a setting with an ensemble cast. While one player is at work or away from the weekend or too busy to response, or even wrapped up in resolving challenges, another player at a difference scene can be describing what he’s doing. Setting need to be designed to leverage this, of course; if everyone’s in a dungeon crawl, you’re stuck waiting for one straggler, but it one character is searching for the lost artifact in the castle while another is negotiating a treaty and the rest are fighting the dragon, you can hook up and split off as needed.

The major flaw in this un-playtested system is that people may become obsessed with tokens and attempt stupid things just to instigate Challenges. One possible solution to to call for a Veto. All of the players vote, and if the majority consider it frivolous, out of context, or disruptive to the narrative flow, it can be negated without the exchange of tokens. A limit on the maximum number of tokens that can be accrued might also work, or that maximum tokens that can be plunked down for a challenge or raise, or the maximum number of raises.

I need to hack around with this some more, and talk to potential players. If I decide to run it and players bite, I’ll see what some playtesting turn it into. Your thoughts and opinions, gentle reader, are always welcome. What do you think?