It has been noted that we want to have not only legendary party members, but heroic ones as well. This is an attempt to lay down some mechanics that we have/could have to inpire one or both. The awarding of Legend Points is something that awards legendary behaviour, specifically attuned to the archetypes called [Discipline]s. Catagories that give legend points include Acting in Discipline, Danger, (Iinsert the others here, I forget) Heroism is in part encouraged by devotion to the Passions. Each passion extols a virtue, like Valor, Craft, Beauty, Love, Trickery, Succor, etc. Some may debate whether some of these are, in fact, heroic virtues, but those passions who are not mad pretty much suppoer Good Things(tm). This has the slight crimp that (at least as far as we know) you only get to pick one virtue and have to stick with it, and get no bonus for exhibiting other virtues. This also doesn't exist in boston in any imminently recognisable form (correct me if I'm wrong), and one has to be specifically devoted to the Passion, not just to the virtue he represents. The following is a scratch space for ideas on mechanics to help inspire heroism.
Explicit experience awards for heroism (we may already have this, don't remember) Some way of generating "hero points" which can be spent on good things. * should their generation require heroism, or simply be an expenditure (or LP, CP, etc.) * should their use require heroism, or should they just be generally usable? * should being unheroic drain them? Possible ways of defining "heroic" * gm (or group) fiat. Simple to write down, prone to misunderstandings. Not a favorite of mine. * having a universal list of virues. Expessing these virtues is heroic (much like the Q point mechanic, with more options) * having a personal list of virtues for each player. Try to make them well defined, for less GM intensiveness. * have a list of requirements (not necessarily virtues) that must be fulfilled in order for it to be herioc. This may be things like "act of at least 2 of your virtues (general or private) in a situation that involves sacrifice" or things of that nature. What do Hero Points do? * get out of jail free--spend to retro and rerwite reality so you survive intact a situation you wouldn't otherwise (a bit more general that "only a flesh wound") * bonus to actions (probably only heroic actions), like Karma * a more general form of the above two--fudge points. Spend them to fudge reality, like one-shot serendipity/luck or have retroactively spent CP on something plausable. * reduce cost of actions (either in terms of points, time, or IC resources) LP effectinvely do all three for the special skills called [Talents].
Features of Heroism: Must be Pointful (serve some good purpose). If it also results in personal gain, is that a minus? If your only motivation is personal gain, that is a minus, but does it make the deed totally unheroic? Sacrifice a Plus, mostly if it furthers pointfulness. Is danger a plus to heroism in and of itself, or only in that it creates the chance for sacrifice? Does it merely make the heroism legendary? Expressing other vitrues (such as Honor, Bravery, Devotion, Faith, Love, Charity, etc.) a plus.
Two classic hero's dillemas. We should decide for each if both decisions are equally heroic, or is there's an obvious slant (i.e. are there choises orthogonal to heroism or not?). They're dressed up as war stores, to make them flashy, but could be phrased in other situations as well. You are a war hero. In every battle you fight in, you have the choise of saving 1000 people and sacrificing yourself (which means you could fight in no more battles) or saving 500 people and leaving the other 500 to die, but you survive to fight in the next battle. For simplicity's sake, assume there are 1000 people you can effect in any given battles. There are likely to be many battles, though there's always a small chance that this battle may be the last. Which is the more heroic choice? You are a general, and your 1000 man army is stuck, fenced in by the enemy. Looking around, you brilliantl deduce that you have only two good options, all others leave to certian dealth for everyone. You can either take option A, which will kill off half you army, but the other half will definitely make it, or you can take option B, which has equal likelyhood of killing or saving everyone under you command. Your soldiers trust you completely, and will execute whichever you decide with equal fervor--they have no preference. Which is the more heroic choice?
We already have a split between questors and non-questors. Some char concepts do not mesh well with any one of them. Emphisizing that even more would make people either force people to play out of concept, or further increase the gap between questors and non. A hero being the result of one idea, or driven by one concept is the stuff of mela-drama, not drama. -jss
2002/04/01 22:10 EST (via web):
Some comments: the passions exist equally in Camrish and Boston. They aren't just their ideal, they are conscious personifications of that ideal -- they have thoughts, hopes, actions, just like any other person. Being a Questor is a formal recognition that you believe some emotion (and some Passion) is important, and trying to selflessly further its cause. No matter how much Questors may lie to you in-character -- or how confused some players may be -- no Passion has a monopoly on heroism, or even a strong bias. Not Thystonius, not Garlen, not any of them. As a side note, if any character ever seriously entertains the thought that being a Questor and getting Kewl Powerz or a "bonus" are causality-linked, let me know and set Q=0 (unless you're a Questor of Chorrolis, I suppose). So now that we've settled the Questor-Heroism link (there is none), let's turn to character-specific virtues: I think the idea sucks. Heroism is heroism, it doesn't matter what my character's mindset is. It's possible that the real world is morally relative... the Shadowdawn universe isn't. There is an absolute good, and there is an absolute evil. There is an absolute heroism, and there is an absolute of cowardice. Part of my reluctance to introduce "do something heroic and get a cookie" mechanics beyond the LP award for heroism stems from a feeling that if you're doing it to get a cookie, it isn't heroism (not even if you can come up wtih a heroic reason, Andy). Another, larger part is that it should be possible to exist in the world without being a hero: lots of NPCs do it. Beign a hero, and consistently choosing truth, justice, faith, and compassion despite all temptation, should be **hard**. It should require effort from the character, not be something that's easy to do because it gives you a bonus. --bts
2002/04/01 22:22 EST (via web):
Oh, here's another reason not to make heroism questor-tied: if the character's choosing to be heroic for a cookie, it's not heroic. If the *player* is choosing to make a character be heroic for a player-level cookie, that's more plausibly heroic for the character (even if the player's a craven min-maxer (bow)). On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to just tell everybody to take a 5 pt "Code of Honor: Hero" -- that makes it not a *choice*, which is important. UA's "Noble Impulse" falls into the same category. It works for that genre, but not for {cyber,mana}punk, where heros are rare and flawed. I'm considering some variation on Exalted's method: you have a small handful of "Virtues": Compassion, Conviction, Temperence, and Valor. Certainly a different set for us, since I don't want Garlen, Floranuus, Rashomon, and Thystonius to kick too much ass. :)_ They add to your Will for some things, and subtract from it for others (e.g. roll vs. Will-Compassion *not* to stop to help someone). Each time you exercise a virtue, you get some Karma points or LP or Hero Points or something. Maybe you lose some Madness notches. Each time you resist it, you gain some "Limit marks"... untill eventually you hit your limit and flip out for a bit fulfilling your tragic flaw. Note that this is Exalted's way of doign it, and we'd need to change a bunch. I'm not sure I want to force every player to write a tragic flaw into his character, for example, so Limit/Limit Break doesn't quite apply to us. But maybe something regarding that, so that virtues are things people want to buy for their characters, representing the character working to change himself... Hm. Just like you'd put points into a skill or a Talent or a stat, putting points into "Compassionate" or "Brave". It would curtail behavior, but give a cookie... hm. Maybe the bonus/penalty to Will rolls is enough. --bts
It looks like a lot of attention is being payed to the stuff I put up top, when I really intended it to be more on the questions and bullet points below...I really should be more careful wth things I consider flavor text. On the other hand, I remember being told that things like Legba/St Peter were far to specific and personified to be passions, and that passions werwe more general and abstract. Perhaps this will be a point where character confusion is amply simulated by player confusion. When I came into the discussion over zephyr, the main point seemed to be that being heroic and suviving were often seen as being in direct contrast. Not just being heroic and walking off with the most money, or walking off uninjured, or walking off with one's fair share of (insert whatever you're interested in here), but being heroic and surviving. Death has been established as a very real possibility in both worlds (though I do hope to get better...) and players are undeerstandably a bit reluctant to sacrifice their entire character, especially if we are, as a troupe, necessary to save the world or whatever it is (see the first hero's dilemma...yes, you can do something hugely heroic and have a good chance of death, or you can do something small and not as heroic, but get to do something small and as very heroic again and again). I guess I went a little overboard in looking at all the possibilities--I was trying to lay out a broad range, realizing that there were many ways of doing this. I personally, really like the idea of 'heroism' playing into the madness mechanic somehow (bonus/penalties to will rolls strikes me as a great idea), but the first focus was to help convince people that no, they just won't die by doing the great heroic thing. On another note--although heroism may be absolute (and although I personally think it is) there are many paths to it. Not ever hero is a paragon of compassion, or of temperace, or of duty...sometimes virtues conflict and you have to pick one--I can't think of any heros who successfully embrace all virtues. One of the questions up there is, can heroism be boiled down to a list of virtues to extol, or is it distict from all of them? Is it a function of bravery and wisdom, or of truth , beauty, and order (pulling from Plato again)--of virtues or causes? At any rate, I'm now going to bed.--zebediah
2002/04/02 15:39 EST (via web):
To find a hero who is a paragon of all virtues, we need only look to our beloved President. No, not actually him --- but his hero, as mentioned in several campaign interviews. Compassionate, brave, forgiving, just, merciful... Anyway, I do think that the Madness mechanic is the right tie in for this --- lets put all the psychological mechanics in one place where we can keep a good eye on the things. One virtue per stress seems about appropriate: * Bravery vs. Violence * Hope vs. Helplessness * Compassion vs. Isolation * Conviction vs. Self * and something like Adaptability or Insight vs. Unnatural, though I don't actually know what. The whole Unnatural chapter needs to be revisted, really. I'm not quite sure how to tie them in... I think the several people involved in this fragmented conversation agree that the critical point is:
Player Heroism is not likely to happen. If we want Character Heroism in the campaign, these need to be divorced. Even if the character thinks he's going to get mauled/killed, the player isn't going to risk losing his character.
Already it's the case that NPC enemies don't go out of their way to kill unconscious people --- kidnap, mutilate (think Dana), and that sort of thing, sure. But not kill. So any character who's dying is doing so because either they kept fighting until they failed a death roll (without passing out first) or hit an insta-death point. One solution to this is just to remove the insta-death points. I'd actually had some ideas in mind for around Fourth Circle in both universes involving serial reincarnation, so I'm not sure I want to go that far, but it's a thought.
2002/04/02 15:52 EST (via web):
More Things to Do with Hero Points: * Increase both critical ranges by 1 for a roll. * Just fall unconscious instead of dying. * Safe Reload (maybe more than one?): Hey, quit attacking me while I ready my weapon! * Fistfighter (much more than one?): Here, use my preferred combat method! * Rush of Pain: temporary HPT * Second Wind: divide damage taken by 1d+1, and this should cost a chunk. * Refresh: burn hero point(s) instead of fatigue in critical situations, or simply to prevent fatigue from taking effect until afterwards. Or even just to get all fatigue back. My thoughts--trhyne * It is my opinion that there will be characters resistant to the idea of heroism. There is also an occasional fight to see who will get to be the person to valiantly face the problem at hand (to the point where Barton was yelled at for being willing to throw his life away to save the world... not because it was silly, but because two other people wanted to...) As I took Justin's first comment to mean, asking characters to be heroic is in fact going to come more easily to some than others and getting rewarded for it will begin to push some characters ahead of others. My response to this is: so? I've always assumed that while people CAN play accountants, selfish brats, and general pains in the ass, your character better have a weekend hobby of problem-solving or such or you're just not getting it... * A degree of heroism bonus... For an action which is reasonable, in genre, in character, and yet still manages to be bold and/or heroic should have a slightly better chance to succeed. This is perhaps only for bold "I attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat" fell swoops that are going to succeed or fail in a single action. * Again, I worry that this will simply encourage some characters to try to do wild things when a simple action would suffice. As we've vaguely agreed on, doing pointlessly bold actions isn't heroic. Charging so as to be the first person into battle or over the cliff is never as heroic as charging to distract them so your party can get into position. * In short, how to encourage heroism without encouraging idiocy isn't likely to be as easy as it sounds... Especially since we've proven to have very different thresholds. I was not saying asking characters to be heroic was different for different chars... I was saying tying things into the existing passion system even more means that characters must specialize in something from the list of 12, which for some characters is a poor fit. I see at least one of my chars potentials to be a mix of several without any one significantly greater then the other passion ideals. -jss
2002/04/03 11:29 EST (via web):
The Passions are in-universe. Part of the point of this is that heroism *shouldn't* be motivated by in-universe cookies, because at that point it's not heroism, just good sense. So I think we can drop the idea that any heroism-motivating mechanic will be tied to the Passions.
2002/04/03 11:33 EST (via web):
Perhaps I should just acquire a jar of Niceness, and hand out motes of GM Niceness to the player for IC heroism... redeemable, of course, for niceness later. Alternately, I could just hope that everyone gets the K'shrik example: acting heroicly may be dangerous for your character (K'shrik ended up tormented and undead) but will be beneficial for your player (Ariel got more screen time, plot, and some bits of information about how the universe work, plus some killer stories). Being stoopid (i.e. "doing wild things ... pointlessly bold actions... charging so as to be the first person into battle") can still get your character killed and your player unhappy. --bts The only thing there is that (for most players, I thus put forth) as time invested in character rises, desire to "not die" rises. At least two players have chosen to give their characters "undeath" rather than let them die at first (including K'shrik, if I'm not mistaken). I worry that at some level you end up with decreasing heroism as character life increases (I could throw Legends stories in here which back this trend up)... I don't think that a player level bonus to be brought into the next character or something even vaguely similar will correct things. --trhyne I really hope that isn't a response to what's directly above it, Tommy --- the point is that I proposed two options: * I hand out "get out of jail free" tokens when characters act in a heroic fashion, redeemable later that session for a rescue (automatically pass out but not die, for example). * Players recognize that they don't actually risk losing their characters to heroism. Every instance I can think of so far of heroic characters has ended up with the player getting cooler plot and more screen time... sure, it's unpleasant for the character most of the time, but the player gets to have fun. ---bts I was only responding to the last bit, and I obviously was operating under different perceptions, as expected...