Weighted RPS

Weighted Rock/Paper/Scissors is the sort of mechanic Dave Sirlin loves, and that I've been thinking about using in an RPG since reading his Yomi concept years ago.

Essentially a trumping circle like RPS becomes interesting when you have a stronger incentive to use one move over another.  If we play RPS for money, and I get $15 if I win with rock, $10 if I win with paper, and $5 if I win with scissors, there's instant depth.  You know that I want to win with rock, so paper seems like a good strategy.  But I know that, so throwing scissors for a lesser win is improved, which in turn you know etc etc.  

Time has repeatedly proved I'm too lazy to actually write an RPG, however.  So I'll describe what it might look like:

You play one character, who has three scores for conflict, rated at 3, 6 and 9, in an RPS relationship.  Let's say Finesse beats Power which beats Subterfuge which beats Finesse.

You have a number of hit points (let's say 20), when you've lost them all you can't contributed to the conflict anymore.

Your team has HP for the conflict (just like Disposition in Burning X), which is by default half the team's total HP (so 40 for a four player group).  When it's all gone, you've lost the conflict, you don't get what you wanted, and the enemy does.  You can bid up the difficulty of the conflict by spending conflict HP, which allows you to get more for winning (eg "We hate these guys, we want them out of the game for good, we're spending 20 HP to kill them all and destroy their empire if we win").

The conflict is turn based, each character (PC and NPC) in turn picks an opponent to contest with.  You choose Finesse, Power or Subterfuge simultaneously, with a draw retested, but you DO know your opponent's rating in each before choosing.  If you win, your opponent loses both personal and conflict (team) HP equal to your rating.   If they win, you lose according to their rating - no safe attacks!

(OMG you don't have to kill everyone to win the conflict!)

Wrinkles are:

- It's level based, and higher levels get you abilities to use to modify attacks.  These have a cooldown (by default one turn, probably they are cards and you tap them).  If they modify ratings they must be used BEFORE throwing RPS (and no character can ever have two equal ratings from any combination of effects).  You will probably see things like "+3 Finesse for this attack", "Use when you have won an attack, do +3 conflict damage but no personal damage", "If you win, lock your opponent's two rightmost abilities for two turns".

Ideally characters should know more abilities than they can actually use, allowing a big PC problem space to master, but NPCs to be competitive with a minimal working set (amongst other benefits).

-  There will be an Exalted-style stunt mechanic, possibly giving personal HP, untaps.

-  There really should be mechanical conditions on the battlefield relevant to the objectives, which can be neutralised or flipped by character action.  Hopefully making things feel less abstract without unnecessary detail (eg "You're fighting inside the senate chamber!  Whoever currently has the favour of the senators does an extra point of conflict damage on a successful attack.  Your foes start with their favour.")  That implies a quick resolution system that's probably needed anyway but doesn't fit :(

The way I'd probably do it is seperate combat and non-combat conflicts, with each character having different ratings for both (but equal...9/6/3 in each field).  Certain powers would allow crossover between realms of conflict.

It certainly needs work, and probably mecha.  I'm not sure if I'll maintain enough interest to apply either...

Anything can be theorycrafted

The Elitist Jerks benefactor's forum has a venerable but lively style thread, where a sartorial master holds court. Crumpled gamer nerds are honed into competent dressers. The hottest sales are heralded with all the import of class nerfs and buffs.

Raiders care about quality. The overlap of budgets and sales is sufficiently random to leverage the same skills that maximise DPS from random loot tables. Naturally they eat it up; even I feel compelled to shop for shoes. Pity I don't have trivial access to Manhattan >_<

Learning to Fight

I am climbing the viciously steep wall between my abysmal execution skills and actually getting to play Street Fighter IV.

Most games I play are very easy - in particular rpgs, where skilled or knowledgeable play actively makes the game easier by giving you a more powerful playing piece. Other games have poor incentives to do things the hard way, and I've never found making my own arbitrary challenges compelling. I don't really PVP.

Hence, my skills are flabby.

SFIV is a compelling case for trying to fix that - the learning curve starts out fairly brutal, but it's long - all that improvement goes somewhere, it has utility. It's a very pure form of PVP with a huge and vibrant community. Their jargon has the seductive note of depth, their champions are awe-inspiring (Daigo "The Beast" Umehara's epic parry comeback belongs amongst the great competitive sporting moments). Becoming mediocre at this game is a worthy goal, and has a lot of gaming cultural currency :)

So while I wait for my Hori stick to arrive, dreaming of playing Rose or Sakura with finesse online, I throw Ryu's fireballs at the lowest breed of AIs, hoping to hit seven in ten. And when I fire up a PSP or DS game, I reach for the hardest difficulty, hoping to shed a little flab.

Less is More

Amusingly enough, the more successful I am in WoW (via my guild), the less time I need to put in.

In tBC, as part of a very casual guild, I felt like I needed to work constantly to maintain my raiding edge, farming heroics for badges, having stockpiles of gold in case raid drop crafting recipes hit the AH.

In WotLK, I'm part of a medium-core raiding guild, and I don't really feel I need to play at all outside raids. My gold stockpile from levelling alts isn't depleted, a little AH and rep action is good enough to get alts into Naxxramas, and once you're in there with a competent raid the gear flows freely. My paladin alt has done maybe three or four heroics, but can MT Naxx-10 and competently OT Naxx-25.

Ulduar will be more difficult, but the ramp in will still be highly accessible raiding, more so as we crush Naxx with our ilevel 226+ geared mains for the benefit of alts. Eventually I'll be obliged to make some more money, but even with flask and repair costs relatively little effort translates into a LOT of raiding these days. I can keep my shaman at the top of her game while staying current with console gaming, and it's very nice indeed :)

Orange x4

Mengtzu replaced the last of her pretty blue armour with ugly but more powerful orange gear, bringing to an end the age of the really ugly blue/orange hybrid look. Now we just need to kick Kel'thuzad and Malygos until they cough up everything I want :)

Of course Batwoman is gay

Renee Montoya is a great (and I think popular?) character who is not only gay, but whose sexuality has been used to great narrative effect (Half a Life). Now she's a fairly prominent superhero as the Question, but doesn't have a soap opera space befitting her stature.

Therefore, more gay women will pop up in the DC universe, which is good and healthy (particularly for Renee). It's obviously not the only reason for Kate Kane, but it's a natural fit, and in Rucka's hands seems pretty cool.

(I am a very infrequent comics fan, but I pay attention to Rucka and Morrison every six months or so ^_^)

DnD4: Rewarding players without XP

Last night my D&D players had quite the triumph - they flat-out defeated a large number of monsters in an encounter I'd designed to be a chase.

This was partly because the events of the story took a slightly unexpected turn, and the encounter happened on a platform jutting out over a long drop, rather than the corridor I'd originally planned. The players capitalised and pitched most of the non-minion mobs over the edge in short order.

I don't want to change the XP award for the encounter (which was a standard level 6 encounter, not inflated for the large number of mobs); they ended up taking about the same number of turns and expended the same amount of resources as they would have by escaping. It doesn't feel like they've got any further ahead on the learning curve than I would have expected.

But they did do something cool, and they deserve some bennies for it. Here's what I'm thinking of going with, which essentially describes how I like to reward players above and beyond giving them XP:

1. Early access to magic item loot. I wouldn't want to give out extra items (affecting long term balance), but getting an item earlier greatly impacts the short term, and means a little bit more total value from the item over its lifespan. I'll shift up a treasure parcel or two; it makes sense, they held ground I expected them to abandon, so they can have leisure to find some stuff there. In a D&D context getting gold early is unlikely to be as useful, it doesn't have much application until downtime.

2. Information/Plot. Increase the fiction-layer power of the PCs without increasing their mechanical power <3. This already came into play in this case - they held their ground, and thus could interrogate a dying foe. A related reward would be to give the party even more of what they wanted out of a conflict - increase the setting impact of their victory.

3. Improved NPC reactions. In this case, all their future opponents for this adventure will be further down the cavern, and thus probably saw kobolds hurtling down to their doom. Should be good for intimidation purposes :) Giving extra spotlight time to particular characters is also a good reward of this type, but it's not really possible to give extra time to the whole party, so we'll have the NPCs be even more impressed.