Don’t Lower Your Auctoritas

So of course, when Fred asks for DRYH hacks that don’t use existing IP, that’s all my game design muse wants to give me. Here’s one for Nobilis. Note that I don’t have the new edition yet, so it works off of 2nd edition’s assumptions.

Enchancelment

It’s all over the news. There’s been another bizarre death. There’s been one every day. What the news doesn’t say is, with each one, the city gets a little weirder. Most people haven’t yet noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to get out, but they will. The roads are turning in on themselves. The ties to the rest of the world are slipping away. Somehow, you’re one of the few that have noticed. There’s something behind it all, something far more than human. And it’s watching you. It’s judging you. It’s changing you.

You’ve started to notice that you can do things. Things not human. Things not even superhuman. And with the powers of a god come the trials of one. You’re being challenged. Threats are seeking you out. But nobody will tell you the rules. Your powers grow the more you use them. What are you getting yourself into? What happens if you pass these tests? Even worse, what happens if you fail?

Growing Power

This system serves as a way to play out the Empowerment of Nobilis PCs. It postulates a situation where an Imperator is gradually determining which of the citizens of a new Chancel will be its Powers by slowly extending them capabilities during the 100 day ritual to make the Chancel. If they prove competent, they’ll be awarded soul shards… if they don’t, dementia animus is possibly the best case scenario for a mortal that tasted the powers of creation and then had them taken away.

Players have three types of dice: Competence, Passion, and Miracles.

• Competence is similar to Discipline. Every PC starts with 3 dice in the Competence pool. It represents anything that a pure mortal could do, if only in movies with a very liberal view of physics and other sciences. When Competence dominates:
• The success or failure plays out with the precision and order of the truly skilled.
• The player should make a mark next to Aspect.
• Passion is similar to Exhaustion, but represents the power of the character’s will and soul. It starts at 0 dice, but a player can take on one die of Passion before each roll. As the Passion pool increases, the character becomes increasingly “real” and noticeable, giving all the impression of a colored image against a desaturated background. When Passion dominates:
• The success or failure is strongly influenced by the character’s overwhelming emotions or force of personality. If the result was a success, and any kind of supernatural effect was in play, onlookers will notice a “bubble” around the character, about the diameter of her own height, where her own reality is imposed on the world.
• The player should make a mark next to Spirit and reduce the Passion pool by 2 dice (to a minimum of 0). Passion has no technical cap, but will become increasingly likely to dominate and reduce itself the higher it gets.
• Miracles is similar to Madness, in that it is a fast surge pool where the player can add from 0 to 6 dice on any roll. Adding these dice represents warping local reality to produce a result, and the player should describe what is being attempted. When Miracles dominates:
• The result of the miracle is very obvious, and may cause mortal onlookers to go mad.
• The player should make a mark next to Realm (unless using her Affinity, as described below, in which case make a mark next to Domain).

Players also have a Skill and a Domain.

• Skill represents an area of mortal concern that the character is particularly skilled at. It is mechanically about as broad as an Exhaustion Talent. Whenever using the Skill, the player may choose to turn any or all Competence dice into 6s after rolling (i.e., the player can all but ensure that Competence dominates).
• Affinity is the miraculous concept with which the character is becoming increasingly associated. It is a single word that will eventually become the character’s Domain. Whenever Miracles dominates, if the result is within this affinity, it increases Domain instead of Realm.

GMs roll two types of dice:

• Tribulation dice are rolled when the GM believes that the situation the players are dealing with was engineered by the Imperator to challenge the characters. This might be an overt manifestation of the Imperator’s domains and operatives or may be a situation that was socially engineered (e.g., clues that lead the PCs to a tight spot). Tribulation ranges from a minimum of 1 die (to some extent, everything the characters encounter is being monitored and allowed to happen by the Imperator) up to 10 or more, and should generally increase over the course of the 100 days as the Imperator tests the PCs more thoroughly. When Tribulation dominates:
• The seams of the challenges become obvious: it is metaphorically like a trap suddenly springing shut.
• Mark whether the PC succeeded or failed on such a roll, and record a mark next to Approval or Disappointment for that Imperator’s subsequent dealings with that PC.
• Bane dice are rolled whenever the situation involves dangerous elements that aren’t directly under the Imperator’s control. That is, the PCs are in more danger than just failing their future master’s tests. This can be anything from conflict with citizens of the soon-to-be-Chancel, to environmental difficulties, to the involvement of supernatural elements beyond the Imperator (rival Powers, future Chancel Banes, or even Excrucians). Bane dice range from 0 to 6 based on the severity of the situation. When Bane dominates:
• The PC is injured in some way; if the roll was a success for the player, this injury is superficial, but failure can bring actual life-threatening problems.
• It is up to the GM and players whether death is on the table from too many failed Bane dominations.

Questions

In addition to choosing a Skill and an Affinity, each player should answer the following questions for her character:

• What is your name?
• Why is this happening to you?
• Who do you love most and why?
• Who do you hate most and why?
• Why should you have power?
• What just happened to you?

Ennoblement

Once the group is ready to proceed to their characters becoming Powers (everyone agrees that they’ve been sufficiently challenged for the Imperator’s satisfaction or the 100 days run out), convert the characters to Nobilis rules via the following method:

1. Total all marks made across the four scores for each player (e.g., 5 Aspect, 6 Domain, 2 Realm, 7 Spirit is 20 total).
2. Divide the game’s character creation point total by this number to create a multiplier (e.g., in a 30 point game, 20 marks means a 1.5 multiplier).
3. Apply the multiplier to each individual category so the marks turn into character points with as similar a ratio as possible to the original marks (e.g., in the above examples, the player would have 7-8 Aspect, 9 Domain, 3 Realm, and 10-11 Spirit).
4. Spend each category to buy the related trait levels, bonus miracle points, or Gifts related to that category (e.g., 9 Domain points buys 3 levels of the Domain trait, 9 bonus Domain Miracle Points, 9 points worth of Domain-related Gifts, or some combination of the three).

System Review: Nobilis, Conclusion

Nobilis seems to be pretty confusing for most players. It’s a beautiful coffee table book that segues seamlessly between rules and setting description, most of it delivered to at least some degree in-character, detailing a completely fantastical take on the modern world in which players are expected to portray modern godlings that participate in a war for reality via their mastery of metaphorical concepts and skill with semantics. That is, there’s a lot going on.

The system for the game is entirely purpose-built for its task, and, in many ways, must be understood as an integral part of the hard-to-fathom setting. You’d have a hard time running the setting with another system, and you’d have a hard time using the system for any other setting (though I’ve heard tell experiments were made with Justice League-level superheros). Ultimately, the reality of the game world is so completely defined by the system that it’s hard to figure out when an issue with the system isn’t just an issue with the setting itself.

That said, perhaps what is most interesting about Nobilis is that it seemed to ride in ahead of the wave of indie game design that took off over the last decade via the help of the internet. Was it just an early adopter of some of its features, or did it actually inspire some degree of change in how certain things were handled? As mentioned previously, Nobilis is the first system I encountered that suggested rewarding players when their flaws caused the character grief in play, rather than giving an up front bonus that encouraged players to actually take flaws that they hoped wouldn’t ever hurt them. Most systems I’m aware of that were released since Nobilis do it that way. While less completely innovative, the focus on assembling abilities and environment as a form of player and GM collaboration (Nobilis’ Gifts and Chancels) seems to have taken off since its release.

There’s a new edition of Nobilis due out soon, and I’m interested to see whether it will involve more refinement of 2nd edition (the same stuff, only easier to understand and play) or whether it will lay out another series of innovations that will be confusing at first, but gradually come into common use over the next decade.

System Review: Nobilis, Part 3

The thousandth cut is just as negligible as the first…

Nobilis’ combat is designed to model an epic action movie where a character can be covered with superficial wounds and bruises and be no more impeded or closer to dying than at the beginning of the day. However, once the character takes a significant wound, the story shifts to the injury and vulnerability, and new lesser injuries are a threat because the character is no longer at the top of his or her game. Essentially, characters get three different tiers of health levels, at least one of each, and cannot take damage to the easier-to-damage health levels unless the harder-to-damage levels are filled.

Dealing damage is a chart lookup. The amount by which the attack miracle exceeds the defense miracle is compared to the chart to see the maximum wound that can be inflicted by the attack. Characters can buy bonus powers, called Gifts, that make them harder to damage: in particular, the Durant gift is extremely cheap and a common place for players to spend leftover character points, and it shifts the amount needed to deal a major wound to a pretty drastic difference in attack vs. defense. The more expensive gifts make it even harder to deal damage.

Meanwhile, characters have an attribute called Spirit that makes them more difficult to hit at all with miracles (as well as providing a long-term ritual that, at even low levels of the attribute, makes non-miraculous damage negligible). In order to hit the character, the attacker must increase his or her miracle’s level by the character’s Spirit score. For example, against a character with Spirit 3, a 6 point attack becomes a 3 point attack: 3 of the levels of the miracle were allocated to penetrating the defenses. Specifically, this isn’t a reduction of damage, it’s a complete invalidation of the attack. If a character deals a 9 point miracle against a target with Spirit 1, and forgets to allocate for Penetration*, the target will ignore the miracle. There’s no straightforward indication that opponents are aware of a character’s Spirit score without trial-and-error; a savvy opponent will try free attacks with increasing amounts of Penetration until one of them succeeds, then try a big attack.

Ultimately, what this means in play is, in a fight:

1. Characters make no-cost attacks on the target using their highest attribute, testing defenses until they ascertain the target’s Spirit.
2. Characters see if no-cost attacks are sufficient to damage the target; they probably aren’t unless the target is already wounded.
3. Characters unload huge value attacks to hopefully smash through the target’s major wounds (because there aren’t enough miracle points to test the target’s major wound threshold gradually, might as well spend heavy and all but guarantee a hit rather than slowly burning them to figure out the precise number). This is more complicated with some attributes than others (Aspect miracle levels are just an increase in power—level 5 is just a nastier version of level 4—but Domain miracles have prescribed effects at each level: it’s hard to figure out how to hurt someone with a Major Divination, even if that’s the exact level of power needed to hurt him).
4. The target probably runs the hell away as soon as his or her major wounds are gone.

Alternately:

1. The attacker has a min-maxed attack gift that always has maximum Penetration and huge damage, sufficient to down most targets (at one point, I costed out a maximum-Penetration attack with sufficient cost reduction to only cost as many character points as the damage intended to be dealt).

Ultimately, direct combat against a remotely comparably powered opponent is confusing, long, expensive, and unsatisfying. And, in a setting where characters are meant to snipe at one another and engage in long-term, subtle battles for power, this is not necessarily a bad thing: any character with a moment of thought put into defense is someone that you don’t want to engage in a giant anime battle if you can at all get what you want another way.

But when you’re playing a game with demigods as PCs, sometimes you’re in it for the knock-down, earthquake causing, building-destroying giant anime battles. Nobilis can do those, but it’s probably not what the system does best.

So the damage system is, though entirely arguably in line with the desired play experience, ultimately flawed.

* Yes, it’s just as snicker-worthy in play as it reads.

Conclusion

System Review: Nobilis, Part 2

The Miracle Scale is a lot like the Richter Scale

As summarized last week, the core mechanic of Nobilis is, in some ways, not that revolutionary. It could be described in terms of any roll-and-add system: GM sets difficulty, player attempts to meet or exceed difficulty with result + modifier. The difference is that the result is generated by spending points, not by rolling a die. In theory, you could do something similar in d20: +8 vs DC 15? Spend 7 points.

In practice, the Nobilis system has some other interesting things going on beyond replacing dice rolls with resource expenditures.

Firstly, the game’s scale is of sufficient low granularity that points remain relevant to base modifier in a way that can’t easily be replicated by dice: attributes are on a 0-5 point scale, so even the smallest commonly available die, the d4, threatens to overwhelm the trait with randomness. In my experience, only FATE is on a similar low-granularity scale and has to use special Fudge dice to account for it. Even in FATE, a discrepancy of 2 levels can often by overcome by a dice roll; in Nobilis, having a trait two higher than your opponent is a significant, possibly even overwhelming advantage. An attribute of 4 isn’t just twice as good as 2, it’s almost on a Richter Scale degree of improvement: the character with a trait of 2 can maybe pull off a half dozen of the miracles a character with a trait of 4 can do every round forever.

Secondly, the 1/2/4/8 minimum for expenditures creates some very interesting effects on the game. Not mentioned in the summary, and germane to the damage discussion next week, is that spending 8 points also requires the character to take a major wound. This breakdown essentially means:

• Characters with a 0 attribute cannot use level 9 miracles at all, and have to spend massively (and take damage) to do things that characters with a 5 attribute would consider trivial.
• Characters with a 5 attribute reach a level where they can do level 9 miracle without taking a wound or spending massively, unlike every lower attribute.

Really godlike miracles start happening around level 4 and 5, and truly world-shattering effects are possible at 7+, meaning that a high attribute, coupled with the way the cost minimums work, set definite tiers of magnitude between attribute levels. Higher attribute characters can do things trivially that lower attribute characters have to work for, they can accomplish things with mild effort that require great expenditure from lower attributes, and they have a higher threshold for miracles that are hard but not exhausting.

As an added wrinkle, miracle points are intended to be fairly limited and hard to get back. Most characters start with twenty of them: five for each type of miracle, and a lossy exchange rate between the categories (i.e., a normal, fresh character can probably only bring up to 10 miracle points to bear on a single category before being completely out). By the book, miracle points mostly only come back from being hindered by flaws or some fairly labor intensive rituals (which will often piss off rivals). A miracle point is intended to be a precious resource: you don’t spend them unless you really care about an outcome. Otherwise, you just try to figure out how to get what you want using miracles you can do for free.

Ultimately, a character’s attribute level becomes a bright line that is unusual to cross. In actual play, characters are constantly doing all variety of miracles within the scope of their attributes, and only very rarely going beyond. When a character does start spending miracle points, it’s either a point here and there for important things where the character’s attribute was just shy, or a short series of overwhelmingly flashy miracles attempting to utterly annihilate the challenge.

And the scope of what “annihilating the challenge” means will be covered more next week.

Part 3

System Review: Nobilis, Part 1

Shooting down the sun is no problem, but you’ll piss a lot of people off…

Nobilis is the kind of game that people think is more for looking at than for playing. I’ve had people see me in my Nobilis t-shirt at cons and make a point that they thought the game was unplayable. I wasn’t originally concerned so much about playability as much as how one might actually GM* the thing, until I was able to play in a con game run by someone else. I then ran a very successful game for over a year. The next time I tried to run it, I couldn’t actually come up with a plot that made sense for the characters made. Nobilis is like that: if you can wrap your head around a game session starring a group of dysfunctional modern demigods existing in a world of metaphysical philosophy made concrete, you can, in fact, play the game. If you don’t really have an idea for a session where the multiverse is your dungeon crawl, it’s a lot harder.

Part of what makes Nobilis both amazing and confusing is its game systems. This is not demigods writ with dice pools much larger than mortals and fantastic powers that do up to a dozen well-defined amazing things. Instead, the system is designed from the ground up such that mortal concerns aren’t even on the scale, and the limits of a player’s actions are based entirely around character concept and semantic creativity.

Plus, it totally was the first system I ever saw that paid you when your flaws actually hurt you in play rather than just giving you extra points at character gen. And all the cool kids are doing that these days.

Core Mechanics

Nobilis uses two fairly unique core mechanics: task resolution and damage. Of the two, task resolution is more complicated, but damage has some very interesting effects on the system. I’ll discuss them in detail over the next couple of weeks, but in a nutshell:

Resolution

• Anything you might want to do is rated on a 0-9 point scale within one of four attributes. Whenever you want to do something, simply compare it to the other examples of actions and see approximately what number it fits at. The levels generally vary between “do something fairly impressive for a mortal” and “shoot down the sun” across 10 numbers, so there’s often a pretty clear distinction between whether what you’re trying to do is a 4 or a 5.
• Compare your attribute to that feat. If your attribute meets or exceeds the rating, you can do it for free. You could do that feat literally ever round for effectively forever with no problem. If the difficulty is 4 and you have a 4 attribute, game on. Player characters can have attributes up to 5, so that means there’s generally one type of thing that a character can do on pretty epic levels pretty much all the time.
• If your attribute isn’t high enough, you have to pay the difference from a limited resource pool associated with the attribute. If what you’re attempting is Aspect 5, and your Aspect is only 3, you have to pay 2 Aspect Miracle Points. If you pay the difference you can, again, perform the action without incident; but, since those points are limited, you can only exceed your limits so many times before looking to recover points.
• The difference between your attribute and your difficulty rounds up to the nearest of 1, 2, 4, or 8. If you want to do something that would cost you 3 miracle points, you have to pay 4. If you wanted to do something that should cost 6, it actually costs 8. Once actions get more than slightly out of your comfort zone, they can become very expensive.

Damage

• Characters have three categories of health level, from mortal injuries to flesh wounds.
• Characters cannot take flesh wounds if they have not taken major injuries: a totally healthy character must be seriously injured before being threatened by lesser sources of damage.
• There are many character options to make it very hard to deal a mortal wound to a character.

And I’ll discuss the ramifications of these systems in the coming weeks.

* or HG (Hollyhock God) in system terminology; the game in some ways justifies its accusations of pretension and obtuseness.

Part 2

Serial Numbers Filed Off 3: The Pit

Originally posted September 2007

D&D/Nobilis: Tartarus

Tethys: I know why you’re here, Eos. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why day after day, you sit on the hill facing the sun. You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Eos. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.

Eos: What is Tartarus?

Menoetius: Tartarus is a prison, Eos. That prison is our enemy. But when you’re inside and asleep, you look around, what do you see? Farmers, hunters, innkeepers, adventurers. The very minds of the titans we are trying to save. But until we do, these titans are still a part of that prison and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these titans are not ready to be released. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the prison, that they will fight to protect it.

–

Agent Hephaestus: I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually gods. Every god on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding worshipers but you titans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every available sacrifice is consumed and the only way you can survive is to expand your cult to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. The titans are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

Rule of Agreement and Gaming

Originally posted June 2006

“Offer: A question or statement that gives a player an opportunity to respond. A cardinal rule of improv is to accept any offer. If two players are in a scene that takes place on the Titanic and a third enters and says, “What’s that camel doing out there?” the players should accept the offer and may say, “I didn’t realize we’d drifted so far south. Let’s get on it and ride to safety.” This response incorporates the offer into the scene and allows the action to continue. The players may instead block the offer which means denying the offer by rejecting or ignoring what was given. “That can’t be a camel. We’re near the North Pole,” is a blocking answer and stops the action while throwing the players out of alignment with each other.”
- Playing Along

I’ve never had any actual improv training, even though I’ve heard tons of people explain LARP to outsiders as “a lot like improv.” I read about the rule of agreement earlier in a book I’m reading, and it made me think that maybe LARPs aren’t as much like improv as we tend to believe. But they could be.

Nobilis the RPG offered something similar to the rule, applied only to GMs, in the Monarda Law. As part of the empowerment of PCs inherent in Nobilis, the GM is never supposed to respond to a player’s “Can I…” with “No.” The GM can turn the question back with “How?,” suggest that it may not work out fully with “You can try!,” add consequences with “Yes, but…,” or qualify the actions in terms that fit the story better with “Yes, and…”

“Can I shoot down the sun with an Aspect 9 miracle?”

• “How?”
• “You can try!”
• “Yes, but it would drive most of the world insane and piss off all of your allies and enemies… do you still want to?”
• “Yes, and in doing so you’ll set off the prophecy about an unexpected eclipse and accomplish your goals before the other Nobles can fix it.”

I think that this is a fun rule, and worked well when I was running Nobilis, but I think it could go further. What if the players, when in character, expected to never give an unqualified no?

The rule of agreement in improv is designed to keep scenes moving; you never reject an offer because it stalls out the scene as players readjust their idea of what is going on. Yet, in most games we’re both trying to tell an improvised story and trying to get deeply into the mindset of our characters. Often, the reaction we feel is the correct way to roleplay our characters results in an unqualified no and, as in improv, this stalls out the scene. Fun becomes getting what our character wants whether or not it results in a good story. And, since we have so much wrapped up in the character’s success, if the character loses we’re unhappy even if it resulted in a story that was more interesting or more enjoyable for others.

I wonder if there are some concise guidelines that we could use to make LARPing and tabletopping more similar to improv’s method of accepting all offers. These rules would have to account for:

• Having to interact with other players that we may not fully trust to appreciate our acceptance of offers and reciprocate in kind
• Not having the full level of narrative control that improv players enjoy; you can’t just say, “look, a camel!”
• Being true to a character and genre strictures that should be maintained over many sessions.

Does anyone have ideas for what these rules would be?