Building Towards an Endgame

At the beginning of the game, you declare your goal, and tell us about the obstacles in your way. When you work towards your goal, you cast coins. Heads advance your goal, so you take some coins away. Tails mean you encounter a setback, some complication that puts a new obstacle in your way, so you put another coin on the stack. While you can get lucky, this system alone doesn't get you anywhere. You have as much a chance to get heads as tails, so you could sit there forever, the stack of coins fluctuating but never reaching zero.

In the episode of Storyjammers that Mike & I published yesterday, I made the claim that you really want your mechanics to do one of two things:

1. Bring the story closer to its conclusion.
2. Introduce a new twist or complication, or, move the story further from its conclusion.

This fits in nicely if you want to drive a story arc by the rules available at any given moment. At the start, you'll have as many setbacks as successes; later on, you introduce rules that can bias play towards success, so only then will you make any real progress. That gives us some satisfying twists, but as we get to the end of the story, we start to get that satisfying rhythm of tying up more threads than we start up.

I have two ideas on rules that might do that, but I'd like some input about them.

1. Helping. Other characters help you by casting their coins when you cast yours, but instead of counting heads and tails normally, the tails cast by people who help you don't do anything, while each head they cast cancels out one of your tails. Basically, this would mean that helping means more that you watch out for a character's mistakes than really push the agenda forward yourself. Does this really fit? Or should people helping just magnify the effect: all the heads count as successes, and all the tails count as setbacks, so you might get closer to your goal, but you'll have more complications, too? Or (this occurs to me as I write), you count up the sum of all the heads cast, but only the largest number of tails cast by any one person?
2. Setbacks. Keep track of how many of the coins on a goal came from setbacks—perhaps by keeping them in a separate pile. You can use each one once to cancel out a setback. So, the more setbacks you suffered early on, the fewer you suffer now—like learning from your mistakes.

Putting Debt in the Fruitful Void

A lot of Story Games got started with disaffected World of Darkness players. They loved what the "Storyteller" games promised: games about story and character, and all those things. But they didn't really get that. The Storyteller System just provided another game about combat. That disappointment led to some of the first indie games, which began with ideas like "system matters," that stressed designing a game to fulfill a goal.

In that context, the idea that Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker started working towards back in 2005 seemed revolutionary: the Fruitful Void. Ron Edwards said, "Without such 'fruitful voids,' perhaps envisioned as what you get when you show a person seven of the eight corners of a cube, a rules-set is no fun. It's just a full cube; you can look at it, pick it up, mess with it, and nothing happens except it stays a cube." Vincent Baker said, "There's a trick to designing games, which I'm trying to tell. Ron says it's to leave the eighth corner of the cube unmade. I say it's to make a whirlwind."

In short, what you leave out matters just as much as what you put in. Most often, people use Dogs in the Vineyard as the example, I think in part because it does provide an excellent example, and probably in part just because Vincent used it in his post. You'll note that Dogs doesn't have any kind of "Judgment" or "Faith" mechanic. Yet, everything in the game—town creation, stakes, raising and seeing, escalation, fallout—it all points towards that. The game centers on judgment and faith. It doesn't need to address them directly—in fact, it makes the game more strongly focused by not addressing them directly, because everything else in the game already pushes you in that direction.

Yesterday, I worried about what role debt should play in the game, now that it no longer makes sense as a mechanic. Willem Larsen commented, stressing the importance of debt, and saying, "I would rather play archipelago-style and just presence the debt relationship in my story through setting."

I started to wonder how I could point players in that direction without preaching or mechanics—because, without something pointing them in that direction, what would make it come up more often than anything else?

And then I remembered the Fruitful Void.

The Fruitful Void of the Fifth World, the undefined center, should deal with Debt and Obligation.

I talked to Giuli about this earlier, and realized that I had to make the challenges harder, so that you need help. I thought of a new twist: you don't get to reduce obstacles by how many heads you get, but by how many heads you get over the obstacle. So, if you want to try to earn an Achievement with six coins on it, and you get seven heads, you can take one coin off the top. That would make it very hard to get started on an Achievement, but each success makes the next success easier. You might get the final, winning blow by yourself, but you'll know that in the beginning, you needed help.

I thought about a mechanic about people you owe, like if you help someone, they owe you, so you can force them to help you at some point later on. But I hate rules that force you to do something. In fact, I wonder now if this works better by leaving it undefined: if you get a reputation for not helping others in return, maybe they won't help you, which will make it awfully hard to earn the Achievements you want. Just like cooperation in the real world.

I don't know if this whirlwind has really built up enough force, though. Do you have any ideas of how other ideas could push play towards debt and obligation? I'd love to hear them!

Trouble or Obstacles?

I started thinking tonight about the wider implications of my "Causing Trouble" idea. I think it works well as a mechanic, but what does it say about the Fifth World? It seems to present the world as a place filled with trouble, trouble that our heroes must go out and answer. That can work, but it certainly doesn't jive with the pseudo-utopian feel I want to convey. It seems to lead me straight into the trap I've feared most: designing a game that inadvertently undermines the point of the setting.

It seems to me that the twist that separates a utopian setting from a gritty one might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

The rest needn't change that much. Achievements count more, based on how many Obstacles you put in your way. For each coin, you narrate one more obstacle you face, and you can reduce those obstacles just like you might have faced Trouble before: invoke your Name, cast your coins, and reduce by one for each one that comes up heads.

This would also make for characters with lists of achievements of varying strengths, which reminds me somewhat of Gifts in Ganakagok. Those Achievements should replace Memories, in that case, and their value tells you how many coins you can re-cast when you invoke it.

I started thinking about the ways you might use this, and the versatility made me feel good about the idea. For example:

• Achievement: Slay the ogre! Six obstacles:
  1. In one bitter winter, my desperate uncle ate his child, my cousin.
  2. He became an ogre, a cannibal addicted to human flesh.
  3. Human flesh gives him supernatural strength.
  4. When they discovered his crime, the family tried to kill him.
  5. He got away.
  6. He has lived on his own ever since.
• Achievement: Marry the beautiful maiden. Five obstacles:
  1. Her father hates me.
  2. Her mother doesn't mind me, but she won't stand up to her husband for me.
  3. She loves me, but I can't bear to make her choose between me and her father.
  4. Her father discovered our secret love, and forbade me from seeing her anymore.
  5. Now, her father has started trying to arrange a marriage for her to someone else!
• Achievement: Restore the irradiated lake. Five obstacles:
  1. In ancient days, our ancestors created light from glowing rods.
  2. You cannot see the magic fire in those rods, but it burns forever, and it boils the skin away with a magical disease.
  3. Our ancestors knew how to start those fires, but not how to put them out.
  4. In desperation, they sank those rods in the lake.
  5. Their magic fire continues to burn, though, and it has turned the lake and everything around it into poison.

I think these three quick examples show some of the strengths of this idea. Firstly, it can cover everything from a good old-fashioned monster-slaying quest, to a romance story, to trying to restore an irradiated lake. Secondly, the obstacles can provide so much more context and depth to these challenges.

I can also see different ways of apportioning the value of such achievements. Perhaps you want to get a new Name from it, or perhaps some special effect. Set aside one point for the Name, and one point for the effect. If you had a five-point Achievement, you could turn it into a three-point Achievement, with a Name and an effect.

You could also have an overall "Prestige" score, totaling all of your Achievements and Names. Age should count somehow, as well. I don't know what I might want to do with this yet—perhaps nothing at all. The idea of competing for Prestige occurred to me—you could even give extra Prestige for helping others gain their Achievements, which would make the optimal strategy one of cooperation—but even then, I think that might undermine the tone of the game.

The idea of "Prestige" did remind me of Flow in FreeMarket. I despise transhumanism passionately, but despite that, I can't help but notice that the more basic premise of a utopian setting pushes me into a space somehow both similar and opposite to that game. In FreeMarket, "Flow" essentially means prestige—what the more technologically-intoxicated call things like "social capital." You use Flow to create things, which in turn gives you more Flow. The similarity makes me think I've hit upon something. Despite our almost totally opposite settings, we both face the basic question of how to tell stories in a more-or-less utopian future, and that might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

I try to keep this blog in E-Prime, so writing that title pains me. Yet, that old slogan fits my topic today too perfectly to pass up. It seems to me that one of the primary functions of a rule in any RPG lies in the opportunity to break it. Who can break it, and when, becomes one of the primary means of defining a character.

I considered adding an idea to the playtests at GASPcon, but decided to try the simpler version without it first. I considered making several cards, allowing each player to choose one for his or her character. Each would announce a particular character trait, and with it, a specific rule that the trait allowed the character to break. So, for instance:

• Ungrateful. You can have 12 Debt before you die, instead of just 10.
• Contrary. Using the ritual phrase, "I have never heard of such a thing" costs you no Debt.
• Wistful. Choose a Memory. You can use it twice in this game.
• Famous. You have a bonus Name.

I don't know if it would fit into the poem, and part of me worries about including a list like this. On the other hand, it offers so much more room for people to define unique characters that I keep coming back to the idea.

When combined with an idea like Trouble, it presents even more opportunities. For instance, you could incur one more Debt to attach one of these to a Trouble. So, you take on four Debt. You take three coins of Trouble, and put them on a new Trouble called "Wandering Mercenary," with "Famous" attached to it. The person who eliminates that Trouble becomes "Famous," so he can gain another Name because of that victory.

I don't know if this idea will work, but it seems to open up enough opportunities to warrant playing around with it to see where it might go.

Causing Trouble

Consistently, the playtests so far have revealed a dearth of situation. People complain that they don't know where to take their characters. I included a step in character creation where, after you introduce your character, we go around the table, and each person tells you something that you want from their character, that their character won't give you. I thought this might provide some good opening tension—even if it might wind up pointing play into a player-versus-player mode—but that just didn't happen.

So, I find myself going back to an older idea, and finding a better place for it now than it had when I first conceived of it.

Right now, you start with some amount of Debt, based on your age. This reflects what the Land and the People have provided to you over your life. Older characters have lots of Debt; younger characters, much less. You use your Debt to accomplish things, so young characters may need to get more Debt. Thematically, it seems to make perfect sense that you'd get more Debt by causing Trouble. So, you can take as many coins of Debt as you like, if you put an equal number of coins into Trouble. Older characters, with plenty of Debt already, could get rid of their Debt by settling Trouble. Which also happens to present precisely the dynamic I'd like to see: older characters cleaning up the messes that younger characters start.

When adding Trouble, you write down something that Troubles the People in a central area, perhaps a sheet of paper in the middle of the play area. You put at least one coin on it. You can put more coins on it, to make that Trouble more troublesome. In play, characters can confront that Trouble. They invoke their Names, which lets them throw coins from their Debt equal to the words in that Name. For each head, they can return that coin, and one coin from the Trouble, to the bowl. So, you can work off your Debt by solving Troubles.

Yet, you can only get more Debt by causing Trouble somewhere else. When you start the game, you get a starting Debt based on your age. I think you should probably introduce some starting Troubles, too, with coins equal to your starting Debt. Since zero Debt makes you ineffective and cut off from the world, you can't really ever solve all the Trouble in the world: you can only solve some Troubles, some of the time, and try to arrange your Troubles in a way you can live with. I think that in itself says something powerful, especially in a pseudo-utopian game.

This has the added benefit of letting players guide the game in a direction they want. Giuli and I have both noticed, with some irritation, that a disproportionate number of our playtests involve cannibals, for instance. It makes sense: they fit so well into the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction. They violate the positive vision of the future that the Fifth World drives towards, though, and that really gets at the heart of the design problem the game needs to solve. We don't want to lecture people about why the Fifth World won't involve short lifespans, raging cannibals, or high infant mortality, but how do you get people to move past those stereotypes otherwise? A Trouble mechanic allows us to define the problems we face. With it, I can introduce my missing brother, who went hunting and never returned, but instead became a wild man (see the part about "Bigfoot" in this blog entry from April). Or we can add the curse sent upon us by Deer, because someone killed a deer violently.

Conflicts between characters lead us into player-versus-player games. Conflicts left to emerge collaboratively may trend towards stereotypes. But letting people establish Troubles may mean that we can guide a game in a specific direction, with the kinds of conflicts that we at the table find interesting and meaningful.

It also has the added benefit that we can actually play a cooperative, GM-less game. Everyone at the table can work together to eliminate the Trouble.

Debt

So, Bill said something pretty smart yesterday (he does that a lot). He said:

...make the mechanics instantiate setting, so that the rules of the game are the rules of the world. Then players will make sure that character behavior reinforces the intended social dynamics of the "setting." Where did we have the conversation about making the mechanics mirror a gift economy? *Do that*; that's awesome.

I can't find that discussion, either, but it sent me back to some of my old notes. In an earlier version, I tried to break everything into relationships, but that became too much book-keeping. But luckily enough, the very defining characteristic of a gift economy lies in not keeping such records. You don't have a quid pro quo arrangement. You just have your generalized debt.

According to Martín Prechtel, the Mayan word for "human" means "person in debt," as in, indebted to the land and your parents and your community and the other-than-human persons who give up their lives so that you can keep on living. In Soul Hunters, Rane Willerslev talks a great deal about the balance of debt that Yukaghir hunters incur when they go hunting, and the attendant fear that if they become too much in debt, someone may come to collect on that—making them or their families sick, or possibly even dying.

I think the gift economy itself could pull in that tension of trust that Ingold wrote about, that I've referred to before. You have to contribute what you can, and just trust that the rest of the world will do its part and give back to you. Nerve-wracking? Absolutely. Which also makes it great for the kind of tension that a fun game comes from.

Debt in this sense has the nice aspect of forcing you to balance. Too much debt, and you risk losing what you hold dear. But without any debt at all, you lose your connection to the rest of the world, your agency. This could bring the game back around to something played with coins (and I do really appreciate the twist of coins representing debt). Players can stack up adversity from a central pool of coins, and it takes that many encounters to resolve that adversity. Those coins go into a different pool, from which players can reward each other for "selling" their issue, like I'd worked out before...

...except that totally does not work with debt. Why do I have more debt from making you look good? Shouldn't you get debt from that? You owe me for making you look good? I "sell" your issue, and you acknowledge it by ... taking some debt for yourself? It all seems terribly backwards.

I thought about making characters spell out what they fear losing. Maybe you have to put "My life" somewhere on the list (and how much you value your life could say a lot about you: two coins? Five?). If you have that much debt, someone can take that many coins away from you by making you lose something at that level. I like keeping the game very simple to play, so I don't know if that adds up to too much book-keeping again.

More importantly, what does debt do for you? Why would you want debt? I guess I've come back around to the question of the resolution mechanic (argh!).

I don't want randomizers because animists don't consider the world a random place. They consider the world full of persons who respond to our pleas and our requests. I wonder if I've hit upon a fundamental contradiction here. On the one hand, if you build that into mechanics, you strip players of any choices they can make. On the other hand, if you leave it entirely up to the players, then your characters have no impact on what happens. I think I've playtested both extremes, and I didn't like either one.

I feel like I've run around in circles here. I think I need to hear other people's ideas to clear my head here. Sometimes the strangest thing, just a little phrase, unplugs something. It's happened often enough with this project! What do you think of this debt concept? Does it prompt any ideas for you?

Doubts

I listened to some interviews from GenCon on some podcasts today: Judd Karlman on Theory From the Closet and John Wick on Bear Swarm! They left me doubting what I should do. Do mechanics focused on what you perceive really tell the kind of story the Fifth World should tell, or have I once again so over-thought and over-analyzed the situation that I've gotten tangled up in a bunch of fancy novel ideas, and lost track of what the game needs to do? Maybe I should just look to an existing ruleset like FATE, and focus my efforts on bringing the setting to life in an evocative way—like James Gurney's Dinotopia, or Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.

Or do you think this looks more like over-thinking and over-analysis? Maybe I just doubt myself chronically. Maybe I just like to sabotage myself (I think I've seen a bit too much evidence for that one lately, actually). I don't know. I just have a big wad of doubts and confusion tonight. Any ideas?

A Little Close to Home

I started a thread on Story Games asking folks what they'd look for in a game about exploration. I got a lot of good suggestions from that thread, but, at the risk of seeming like I just have an interest in patting the backs of people who follow my blog here and comment after yesterday's post thanking Michael Wenman, I really got a great suggestion there from Bill White. He wrote:

I think there was something powerful in The Fifth World's transformation of a modern landscape into a post-urban one. It's like that old Talking Heads song: "Here was a parking lot; now it's all covered with daisies." Make that a part of play: lay out a roadmap of the place you'd like to see transformed and have one output of play be alterations to the modern landscape. Another output of play then becomes integrating these newly defined zones into the post-urban politico-spiritual economy.

I could've jumped out of my chair when I read that. Yes! That totally captured what I wanted from the game. It captured what had excited me so much when I first saw Michael Green's Afterculture, that consideration of a future where the world has become magical—as Michael Green would put it, "cool"—again. A re-enchanted world, a world once again recognizably more-than-human.

So, now I wonder, what if you had to set every scene in a place you knew? Then, you had to tell us what that place looked like 400 years in the future? It seems like it could fit well with a mechanic built for awareness, where you have to spend points to add details to the scene.

I feel pretty excited about this. What do you think?

Back Around the Color Wheel

Over a year ago, casting about for mechanics, Michael Wenman suggested using two colors of beads, perhaps white for skill and black for difficulty. You place a number of beads into an opaque bag to represent your skill or effort, and the difficulty you face. Then you reach into the bag, pull out a given number of beads, and count up the white ones. If you have enough white beads—"successes"—you succeed. It has a certain resemblance to Jared Sorenson's "Color Wheel" mechanic, as well. It has room for expansion, too: you could, for instance, expand it to four colors associated with the medicine wheel, and now you need to pull enough beads of the correct color.

Since rejecting pretty much all of my work thus far, I've found this idea sticking in my head again. It has a lot of the things that the Prisoner's Dilemma simply didn't. You can represent skill or effort with the number of beads you put in. You can represent the challenge you face in a very clear and direct way; you could use a sort of budget, for instance, to scale up how many beads of different colors you can add to the bag. You can tone difficulty by increasing or decreasing the number of successes you need, and you can tone specific advantages or disadvantages by increasing or decreasing the number of beads you can pull from the bag. In other words, it has lots of knobs you can tune, and that means you have more places where your fearsome warlock can see the story reacting to the fearsomeness of your warlock powers.

I rejected this idea before because it seemed like the same old randomization, telling the same story of a random universe. But now, I think it might fit the game very well, because it doesn't really present a random universe, but an unknown universe. The bag has black and white beads; you hold your success or failure in your hand, in the bag. You just don't know which yet. The tension comes not from an outcome as yet undecided, but an outcome as yet unknown.

But does it fall victim, once again, to setting every story in terms of conflict? I made that contention once, and certainly referring to "successes" does. But do we really have to call them "successes"? Perhaps each bead tells us something we learn. The four directions of the medicine wheel also have four different ways of engaging the world, so maybe those two white beads from the north mean we learned two intellectual things about the situation, and the three black beads from the west mean we learned three physical things about the situation. Maybe each bead demands a detail revealed, and instead of needing three "successes" to "overcome" the "challenge," we really need to know that third intellectual detail about the situation. Cast in those terms, it becomes a mechanic about discovery, rather than conflict. Especially if we actually need to narrate a detail for each bead—that would really seem to promote that descriptive flow I want to create.

Have I just taken the easy way and convinced myself that it works with a bunch of fancy words, or do you think this really works? What do you think of this idea?

Story Beyond Conflict

"Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing."

Ursula LeGuin wrote that. It seems fitting to have such a stark revelation come from one of the great grandmothers of ecotopian fiction, and one of the great inspirations for The Fifth World. Who else would you expect it from, right?

I read this in a thread on Story Games from the beginning of the month, a thread I would have missed entirely had Mike Sugarbaker not posted a quick note at the end.

I have fallen prey to this conflation; I've heard "story is conflict," repeated over and over again, like a mantra. At first, I balked at the suggestion, and thought, "Surely, stories can go beyond that," but eventually gave in to the idea. Now, I look at our recent playtests and what I've started calling the game's "immersion problem," and see it all stemming from this basic mis-step.

Of his own game, Jason Morningstar wrote, "Fiasco, which started out as a very conflict-oriented game, evolved into an outcome-oriented game. Once I made this decision the experience of play improved a lot. It allows scenes where you beat a guy to death with a hammer if that's what is required, but also accommodates pretty subtle, introspective color scenes as well. Not relentlessly 'searching for the conflict' feels pretty good." I've felt that problem in The Fifth World, too. We "search for the conflict." Worse, we rush to the conflict, because the rules all deal with how to handle conflict, because they start from that premise that conflict means story. But that has led me astray; it's given me a game that seems, at best, like a tool for planning a story you might one day write, though frankly, it doesn't even seem like a good tool for that.

As I often do, I find wisdom in Jonathan Walton's words. He suggests:

• Have interesting stuff happen in freeplay too, instead of just where the mechanics are.
• Have the non-conflict stuff have mechanical significance (if there are mechanics).
• Have resolution mechanics that don't frame things as inter-player (or player-GM) conflicts.

Right now, I think you could fairly describe The Fifth World as very heavily inspired by Primetime Adventures. This has me thinking of pulling more from Polaris, perhaps even to the extent of cutting out the Prisoner's Dilemma mechanic in favor of negotiations with ritual phrases, a la Polaris, with a map to drive the arc forward, rather than that game's drive towards a tragic end.

I always come up with ideas like this right before a con, too.

The Storyjammer's Journey (Index)

I've written lately about the experience of storyjamming and how it compares to the "rites of passage" outlined by van Gennep, and the "hero's journey" described by Campbell, inspired by Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Since this involved a number of posts, this provides an index for that mini-series.

1. The Storyjammer's Journey: Introduction
2. Ritual Phrases: Ritual phrases and their use in games
3. Separation
   • Calling the World: Warm-Up Games, Character Creation & Creation Myths
   • Sitting Down to Your Second Game
4. Liminality
   • Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space - "Immersion" as what Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow"
   • Hunting Story - Story as something to pursue, rather than make up
   • Story in the Landscape - Ideas for practical application
5. Re-incorporation
   • Coming Home - The importance of the final phase, and some thoughts on why we so often neglect it
   • Finding Your Way Back - Ideas for practical application

Finding Your Way Back

If I'd had a bit more foresight, or done a bit more planning, I'd have saved "Coming Home" until now, to keep the pattern of "Theory, Application, Next phase." But I didn't, so for the re-incorporation phase, I'll have to refer you back to that article for the theory behind it, since I have little new to add to it just eight days later in terms of theory. Today, in keeping with the pattern so far and wrapping up this discussion of "The Storyjammer's Journey," I want to discuss some of the ways in which we might tackle the problem of using those ideas to design an endgame for the Fifth World.

Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?

Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.

At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.

Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.

In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.

Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.

I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?

The Land of the Three Rivers

Just finished retooling the boon trees for the places in the Land of the Three Rivers. I know that doesn't make much sense with the rules currently available, but it's all part of the v0.5.1 I'm trying to get finished this week. Tomorrow, I'll do the demons (things that grow out of the Underworld, i.e., the soil), and on Thursday, I'll do the angels (things that move about in the Overworld, i.e., the atmosphere, including humans). Instead of the four main pillars of their way of life, I've made the Archangels and Archdemons the "Animal Masters," now that I think I understand them a little better. The four big spirits crucial to daily life are now the Four Winds. Not to worry, though, the Four Winds and the Eight Totems still make up the Twelve Apostles.

I'm rather liking this iteration. I have some early design guidelines for crafting boon trees, and it makes designing spirits a whole lot easier. That's really been the hardest part of this--detailing even a useful fraction of the spirits involved in the land. With this, my job gets a lot easier.

Of course, come February, I'll have a whole new task to worry about: getting enough of the Restless Land together to present at Dreamation!

If you haven't found it yet, I've been keeping much more regular updates on Twitter.

The Gift

I feel pretty good about the "game of trust" model, a lot better than I've felt about any of its predecessors. I have some trusted advisers who've promised me their responses, so I won't say I've settled on it entirely until I've heard what they have to say about the idea, but I have a strong suspicion that something like that will make it through to the end of the game.

Right now, though, the part that bothers me most of all lies with the betting. The mechanic needs some way for relationships to affect it, of course, and to work as a game, it needs to introduce some separation between the character and the player playing the character, but all the same, the notion of forcing a character to trust seems ... wrong.

While turning this over in my head, I realized that the mechanic worked, but the verbal understanding of the mechanic missed the mark. What I had here didn't involve betting to force trust—I had competitive gift exchange.

Marcel Mauss' classic The Gift needs a lot of updating in a lot of ways, but the general idea remains: we give gifts to gain one another's trust. Anthropologists describe the hunter-gatherer economy as reciprocal, but this viewpoint comes from a domesticated viewpoint, where we have dislodged economic activity, often at great effort, from its underlying social foundations. A key point of wild—and by extension, feral—human society points us to the social fabric (and, I would say, the ecological, as perhaps an even better term, in that it extends the social beyond the merely human) as the ultimate basis of everything else that goes on in life. Reciprocity rules their "economy" becomes their economy exists only inside their social network, and gift-giving earns trust.

So, when you bet three beads, you move three beads from your bowl directly into the Other's bowl. You make a gift of three beads. You'll have to describe what kind of gift you've given; since the beads represent "power," or the capacity for change and movement, the gift can take any number of forms. You could offer a gift of praise, a story, or simply attention. The Other can then either accept your gift, and turn over to trust, or he can return your gift. If he simply returns it, the exchange ends there, meaning he did not accept your gift. If he gives you back more beads than you gave him—if he returns four beads, instead of three—then he has made a counter-gift. Now you must either return four beads to him, make an even larger counter-gift, or accept the gift and choose to trust.

We will need to use the beads for other parts of the game to make this interesting, of course (right now, I look at the beads as "potential energy," that a character can use more fluidly, or store more permanently by investing it in a relationship, which may give the player enough reason to want more beads right there).

A Game of Trust

I think I might have it! At first I thought I should make the Fifth World a game of awareness, and then I thought that it should follow a game of movement, but now I think it should follow a game of trust.

Despairing over how the lack of a core mechanic has kept me from going anywhere with the Fifth World, over lunch today I started to go over again with my wife what we really needed to accomplish with such a dynamic, and I began relating Ingold's take on domestication (1994). The usual gameplay mechanics of overcoming a challenge reflect the "domination" mindset Ingold identified at the heart of domestication. Any mechanic that comes down to counting successes means that you must succeed by domination, by overcoming challenges by force. Even if the game fiction maintains the typical beliefs of, say, a Cree hunter that deer offer themselves and that no violence occurs in the act of hunting, the fact that the hunter took the deer by gaining more successes than the deer says otherwise. It pats our fictional animist on the head condescendingly, while affirming that whatever he might believe, we know how it really happens. That doesn't relate us to an animist lifeworld, that just reinforces our cultural chauvanism.

But Ingold introduces much more nuance than the contrast of "domination vs. trust" might seem to infer. It does not simply demarcate "trust good, domination bad." Trust brings with it a nerve-wracking dependence. The hunter must trust that the deer will offer himself. To trust means making yourself vulnerable, and the fear and trepidation that comes with that. The Other might not reciprocate your trust; they may take advantage of you, or leave you helpless. The game mechanic should follow the challenges that appear in that life: the challenge of approaching the Other, each track drawing you closer, the building tension, and then, finally, the revelation.

As I described it, the moment of revelation hit me. We have a game just like that. Ready-made to become a resolution mechanic. Quick, easy. Other games have already used it. The prisoner's dilemma.

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?

We would want to skew this a bit. Take the example of hunting. Both hunter and prey must trust each other; the hunter must trust that the deer will offer himself, and the deer must trust that the hunter will make proper use of that gift, offering the correct rituals in thanks, sharing with all members of his community, and so on. If the hunter betrays that trust but the deer does not, he can take the deer and keep the meat for himself, or not share it out equally, or not give the proper thanks. If the hunter trusts but the deer does not, the deer lives and the hunter goes hungry. And if neither trusts, then the encounter never really happens at all.

When we had the gambling mechanic, some people said it needed some resolution behind it. What if characters bid to try to turn the other person to trust? You still don't know if they trusted themselves, or if they just want to screw you over. But you could bid your beads, or begin burning through your relationships, to compel that trust when you really need to (think of the energy invested in tracking, to gain greater empathy; or, if you need that moment of mutual trust to convince someone of your argument, the energy you put into persuasion or consensus-building). Then, once all bets come in, you have the dramatic moment of the reveal, when you find out who trusted, who betrayed, and who screwed over who.

At first, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, this encourages betrayal. But you don't play once; as a resolution mechanic, the game requires an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where other players punish betrayers. The same play pattern emerges: you learn (usually the hard way) that you won't get anywhere without trusting each other.

Other games have used this to great effect; Diamant and its English cousin, Inca Gold, rely on the prisoner's dilemma. I got to play Inca Gold earlier this month, and it made for a rollicking good time.

I don't know if this mechanic entirely works just yet, but I have a good feeling about it--something I haven't had for quite some time now. What do you all think? Does it sound like something worth pursuing?

• Ingold, T. (1994). From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society: changing perspectives, eds. A Manning and J Serpell. London: Routledge, pp 1-22.

Four Candidates

Still no set decision on the core mechanic. I think I could really tear through the rest in short order, if only I could settle on an effective, evocative core mechanic. But at least I've narrowed it down to four main candidates. We've had discussions going on in several threads:

• REWILD.info (for the input of trackers, animists and rewilders)
  • [Fifth World] A Game of Awareness
  • Story Games and resuscitating home grown Story!
• The Forge (for the input of independent game designers)
  • [Fifth World] How might you model tracking with beads and a mancala board?
  • [Fifth World] Core mechanic
• Story Games (for the input of Story Games designers)
  • [Fifth World] A Game of Awareness (Warning: Requires membership to view

The Bet

The simplest (and original!) mechanic, this one assumes that each person has:

• Some number of pools, representing different kinds of effort (Possibly Flesh, Breath and Word; possibly the four directions of the medicine wheel)
• Some number of relationships

So, in the straight form of the bet, each person makes a secret wager of some number of beads from the appropriate pool, depending on the nature of the conflict. Then, the reveal. Whoever bet more, wins. The number of beads in the relationship determines how many beads you can recover, the rest you lose. That would model sudden decisions, like, did your arrow hit the target, or did you make that jump? In the iterative version, modeling things where you can escalate like fights or arguments, you could add more beads, and that stops when both sides stop adding beads. Once again, the person with the most beads bet wins; you get to take back a number of beads equal to your relationship, and lose the rest.

My thoughts on this. Does the escalation lead to a back-and-forth of one bead at a time? Does this really make for a game of awareness, or just overcoming an adversary?

The Mancala Mechanic

Andrew posted the best version of this that I've heard yet on the Forge, especially when combined with Daniel's earlier post in that thread. You have a starting configuration, and then, based on the appropriate relationship, you can either:

• Add some number of beads to one of your pits
• Remove some number of beads from one of their pits
• Move some number of beads from one of your pits, to another of your pits

So, let's say you want to hunt a deer. You have 10 beads in your relationship with deer. So, you can add beads to one of your pits, remove beads from one of the deer's pits, or move beads from one of your pits to another of your pits. Let's say you decide to add three beads to one pit. 10-3=7, you have seven moves left. This can conclude in one of two ways:

1. The encounter. The two sides match. Whoever moved last gets to narrate how the encounter unfolds, based on the previous narration. So if the hunter moves last to align the two sides, he would likely narrate that he takes the deer; the deer might narrate that he bolts away at the last moment. So, the encounter occurs, and whoever moves last gets to narrate the encounter unfolding on their own terms. Which means you not only want to reach that alignment, you want to do so on your terms.
2. The escape. One side or the other runs out of moves without any alignment. No encounter occurs. I think madunkieg's suggestion of a "distraction pile" on the Story Games thread might work here: every escape adds beads to the distraction pile, which could hamper you in future encounters (perhaps you don't get your relationship beads to move; you get your relationship beads minus the beads in your distraction pile?)

My thoughts on this. Does a better job of modeling the idea of the encounter, and certainly Daniel's idea of starting configurations drawn out with cave art styles, even to the extent of posters, adds an exciting new element. Opens up the potential to either actively hide, or actively reveal oneself, by either avoiding alignment, or pursuing it. This might offer the best possibility so far. But where does the possibility to burn up your relationship for extra power come in? Maybe after you've exhausted your relationship's normal store for moves, you could begin taking beads straight from the string to buy more moves?

The Necklace

Inspired by Daniel Solis' discussion of gaming with necklaces (may require Story Games membership to view), this model uses different colored beads. These could differentiate between Flesh, Breath and Word, or between the four directions of the medicine wheel. For now, let's use Flesh, Breath, and Word for example's sake, but keep in mind that we could change the colors and dividing lines, too.

For relationships, you still have a string of beads, but now the kinds of beads matter. So, an encounter with a physical coyote would add a Flesh bead to your Coyote relationship; hearing a Coyote story would add a Breath bead; exchanging gifts with Coyote would add a Word bead.

So, you come to a particular encounter where you need Coyote. Let's say you want to coyote around the village perimeter so no one sees you. Now you use your Coyote string almost like prayer beads or a rosary; you make a quick plea to coyote to help you, thumbing off beads in some set pattern as you do. Now, look at the bead you currently have in your finger and thumb. That will give you your result. The third red bead in a row, right before a blue one, would give you 3 Flesh. If the village gets a 2 Flesh from, say, their Hawk relationship, your 3 Flesh wins. If you have a Breath bead, though, it won't help you; you need to coyote fleshly for this, so you have 0 Flesh vs. 2 Flesh. They spot you.

My thoughts on this. I like the free-wheeling dynamic of actually calling on other-than-human persons for help, but I see a lot of potential for abuse. To avoid that, and to keep it functional as a game, we'd need some kind of rules for keeping the exact form of the plea out of the player's direct control, lest every player figure out exactly how many words/syllables/lines/whatever that it will take to get the result they want. This seems to encourage players to specialize with variation. Sure, having all 10 of your beads with Coyote will help if you want to coyote about the woods all the time, but without some Breath or Word beads in there, how will you ever coyote up a clever plan, or coyote someone out of a deal? By the same token, you'd never want something like red, blue, yellow, blue, red, blue, yellow, because everything would have a power of just 1! You'd want red, red, blue, blue, blue, yellow, yellow, so you get the most out of each type. So it seems to me like you'd optimize for runs of 2-4 at a time, before switching over to a different type. Also, this mechanic seems to get us back to the problem of overcoming adversity, rather than approaching the other.

The Color Wheel

This one comes straight from Jared Sorenson, I've just spun it around to the medicine wheel.

So you have the medicine wheel, which gives you four different pools of differently colored beads. All the beads go into an opaque bag. First, you decide the nature of the conflict, whether it comes from the north, east, south or west. Then, you pull a number of beads from your bag equal to the number of beads in the appropriate relationship. For each bead you pull of the appropriate color, you have one success; the player with the most successes, wins.

So, consider an intellectual debate about the next tribe over. The conflict comes from the north, associated with intellect and wisdom. You use your relationship with that tribe, in which you have four beads. So you pull four beads from you bag. You pull two white (north) beads, one black (west) bead, and one red (south) bead. So you have two successes. The other player have six beads with the tribe, and pulls six beads from his pouch, but he pulls one white, three red, and two yellow (east) beads, so he only has one success. You win.

My thoughts on this. The idea of competing numbers of successes certainly fits into the general range of existing RPG mechanics, which puts me on the most solid ground of any of these alternatives. But it also recapitulates the notion of overcoming adversity, rather than approaching the other.

A Game of Awareness

Reading Tim Ingold's The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, has forced me to re-evaluate some of my most basic assumptions about the animist mind. Most relevantly to the Fifth World, I've had to reconsider the atomic act of the animist world. In our world, everything comes down to conflict; beyond simply beating someone up, you fight off a disease, fight for your side of argument, fight the war on drugs, et cetera ad nauseum. But consider these:

• When Tim Bennett & Sally Erickson came to Pittsburgh, we talked about the Fifth World a bit, and we discussed how consensus building might play into it. It defied the normal RPG convention, which the Fifth World still followed at that point, because consensus doesn't mean beating your opponent's skill check, it means aligning your perspective to match each other, so that you come into balance.
• In his book, Ingold talks about the Cree experience of hunting and tracking. Tracking brings them into communion with the animal, but the kill itself takes place very quickly. The deer doesn't try to escape; it offers itself up to the hunter. Hunting does not involve violence. The hunter never tries to overcome the deer; rather, the challenge tests the hunter's awareness and empathy, to notice the gift at the crucial moment that the deer offers it.
• Shapeshifting actually occurs among animist peoples. It does not happen "symbolically" or "metaphorically." Animists experience an actual shape-shifting. Now, we might look on and call it trance or dream, but from the experiential point of view—the only point of view that actually matters—they experience true shapeshifting. But this does not occur by overcoming some magical hurdle, or beating the right Target Number; the difficulty lies in the shape-shifter's attempt to align his or her senses, outlook, and feelings with that of the animal he or she shifts into. The ornaments, dress and mask all help towards that end, but the challenge lies in aligning his own perspective to take on a different perspective.

Modern RPG's evolved out of wargames, and since we conceive of the universe as constant struggle, those mechanics worked well. You'll even hear, quite often, the mantra that "story is conflict." But what if that just arises, like so many other things we take for granted, from our cultural expectations, and the basic conflict required for our way of life? What if story could also trace relationship, based not on conflict, but on the attempt to synchronize two parties?

In tracking, different modes of awareness mean a great deal. Owl eyes sacrifice focus for breadth, while focus sacrifices breadth. So we already have there an idea of "resource allocation," if you will, where the "resource" simply means your attention. And we have different kinds of awareness: the synaesthetic awareness of the Flesh, the imaginative and intellectual awareness of the wind, our internal awareness expressed as emotions mapped onto the landscape, and so on. I've found this already mapped, quite elegantly, in the medicine wheel.

What if the "character sheet" took the form of a medicine wheel, with concentric circles, that fundamentally mapped your character's current awareness, and the game's mechanics mostly modeled different ways of shifting that awareness? What if, instead of beating a target number, you had to synchronize your awareness with some Other? What if, instead of conflict, this game modeled awareness?

I do not know how to do that yet, so I welcome suggestions.

Rethinking Basic Gameplay, Yet Again

Well, Raccoon Creek had a lot to teach us about herbal medicines this weekend, but had few revelations to offer about the game. I'll accept that as a good weekend, though! I've started to pull together some ideas of basic gameplay, enough perhaps to try some very preliminary playtesting.

1. The genius loci has three bowls of different colored beads, representing Flesh, Breath and Word (we use red beads for Flesh, blue beads for Breath, and green beads for Word, but so far, I see no reason why you couldn't use any distinctive marker you like instead).
2. The other players have three bowls, and several lengths of string. The bowls, as with the genius loci, hold their own pools of Flesh, Breath and Word, which they get from the land; the strings hold the beads for their relationships, each string representing a different relationship.
3. Offerings allow players to move beads from one of their pools to one of their relationships; so, for instance, observing or tracking a coyote represents an offering of Flesh to Coyote, so you can move one Flesh bead from your Flesh pool to your relationship with Coyote; an eloquent prayer to Coyote, on the other hand, constitutes an offering of Breath, and so on.
4. Eating another person allows you to take their Flesh beads for your own; dreaming restores Breath from the land; listening to stories restores Word from the land, etc.
5. So, getting down to the meat of it, how do you determine whether or not an action happens? You'll need to wager the appropriate kind of beads—you can make hidden wagers and escalating wagers.
   • Hidden wagers describe sudden, single actions: can you make that jump? In those situations, the two parties commit their beads secretly, and then reveal. Whoever has committed the most beads, wins. So if the crevice commits 10 Flesh beads, and the person jumping it commits only 8, that means that the jumper underestimated the distance of the crevice, so the crevice beat him.
   • Escalating wagers describe situations where one or the other party can escalate their effort: can you bring down that deer? Can you lift that rock? These begin with a hidden wager, but afterwards, both sides have the opportunity to invest more beads, until one or the other gives in. So, if the rock puts in 10 Flesh beads, and the lifter puts in only 8, he sees he can't lift the rock, so he tries harder—he puts in three more beads, for a total of 11, beating the rock's 10. The rock can't escalate his weight that quickly, so the lifter manages to lift the rock. Or, a hunter trying to bring down a deer wagers 10 Flesh beads on the initial shot, but the deer wagers 12. So, the hunter missed the initial shot, but he increases his wager with three more beads, bringing his total up to 13; the deer uses her last six beads to bring her up to 18. So the hunter chases after the deer, and the deer darts off as quickly as she can. The hunter puts in another six beads, bringing him up to 19. The deer has no more beads, so she begins burning through her relationships. The hunter continues to chase, and the deer becomes desperate. The hunter throws in some more beads, beating out the deer's wager; the deer has nothing more to throw in at this point. So the hunter takes the deer, after running her down.
6. After you've determined the outcome, each player can keep a number of beads equal to the appropriate relationship; all others go back to the genius loci's pools for the land. So, the jumper tried to Hare across the crevice; he has a total of 8 beads in his relationship with Hare, and 3 of those take the shape of Flesh beads. He committed 8 beads to the jump; 8-3=5, so he can take back three beads, and gives five back to the land (of course, he also fell down a crevice, so that may seem like the least of his worries). The lifter Anted up that rock, and he has 6 of his 8 beads with Ant in Flesh, so of the 11 beads he committed, he gets 6 back, and 5 go back to the land. The hunter Wolfed the deer down, and he has 14 of his 22 beads with Wolf as Flesh, so of the 19 beads he committed, he gets 14 back, and 5 go to the land. So basically, your relationships—in quantity and quality—determine how much you can "safely" wager.

We'll try this system out some time this week, and let you know how it goes.