Posted by Jim at September 5th, 2005

So, as mentioned earlier, I’m hoping to run a campaign one of these days. The premise is simply that the players are among the staff of Earth’s embassy to a massive, star-spanning empire. The story will hopefully include psi abilities, archeaology, revenge for past wrongs, and the aftereffects of using power.

If the life of a civilization were likened to a long day at the bar, this campaign would begin just before the bartender begins to kick everyone out and end soon after everyone’s walked out the door.

I’m not interested in game design as much as I am in creating an interesting story. Despite this, I am curious about game design and decided I wanted to use some variation of Dogs conflict resolution system in my next campaign.

There are a couple things I like about the idea.
1. If I use someone else’s system, I don’t have to start from scratch: This is particularly useful when you don’t really know the Forge theory at all, are mildly curious, and are willing to watch things go horribly wrong due to changing what you don’t understand–and I am. Thus I’m taking things, modifying them only if they don’t fit, adding a couple things, and moving on from there.
2. There are some things I just like about the system: Escalation is among them. I’m neither for nor against the idea of fallout, but it works (and even seems necessary) within the system, so I’m not changing that either. The system also gives a lot of emphasis to the major attributes of the character and that fits with this campaign.

Changes and Modifications
The changes and modifications stem from some basic differences in the setting and personal preference. Dogs uses attributes as the base dice for any conflict resolution and traits as additional dice. Thus, if someone wants to shoot somebody, they role the combination of acuity and will. If they want to run after someone, they use a combination of heart and body.

Somewhere along the line though, I decided that I wanted to skip the conventional attributes found in role playing games (all variations on strength, intelligence, willpower, dexterity and endurance) and just have people’s psychic abilities be their attributes. My thoughts are that if they want to be exceptionally intelligent or exceptionally strong, let them take it as a trait.

Thus people’s attributes would be:
Telepathy: The ability to read, communicate with, and attack people directly mind to mind.
Telekinesis: The ability move objects with your mind. This can also include molecules, allowing a person to heat or cool objects
Clairvoyance: The ability to see things happening somewhere else. In this game, someone that can do clairvoyance can also see the past, future, and even obscure the same events for other clairvoyants.
Body: Control of the one’s body. This ranges from increased longevity and healing to the development of physical abilities like strength or eidetic memory.
Teleportation: Hard to do and not particularly dependable in this game, teleportation allows a person to instantaneously move from one point to another.

If I wanted to be consistent with the Dogs’ conflict resolution system, I’d have created a “psi” attribute and had all the psi abilities be traits instead. Because I didn’t, I’ve had to rethink some things.

Dogs uses escalation to create tension. Each conflict has the potential to move from words to hands to handheld weapons to guns. With each level comes a higher level of tension and a greater degree of damage if everything goes wrong. I like the idea. Unfortunately, each level comes with using a specific attribute combination and (for the setting) the progression from hands to guns is totally intuitive.

Since the setting I’ve got has a different style of attributes and a setting that is less intuitive than the Old West, I simply can’t do it that way.

What I’m doing instead is:
The person who starts the conflict chooses the attribute it’s based on by his/her actions. If it’s verbal, that makes it body plus the appropriate traits. If it’s a telepathic attack, that makes it telepathy plus the appropriate traits.

At any point, another person may escalate the situation by bringing in another attribute, forcing everyone to reroll from the beginning only now (for example) the attributes in use are telepathy and telekinesis. Also, the potential for fallout has gone from d4 to d6. Bring in another attribute and it goes up to a d8 and later a d10. By the time 4 attributes are involved, it’s gone up to d10 and no more attributes can be brought in. You’ve no choice but play out the hand or give.

Thus, people continually have to choose between bringing in their best abilities and suffering fallout. By the time any decent number of people are playing, you’ll have most abilities in use and the corresponding results will be unpredictable and potentially disastrous.

An Addition:
I’m adding something to the post conflict portion of things that I call “Bargain with Fate.” Basically, rather than actually take an outrageous amount of fallout, you’ve got the option of suggesting some task or action that pushes forward one of your destinies that you defined in character creation. Suggest something that works with the story so far, set a time limit (within X number of game sessions) and grab some dice out of the common pool for the task. I’m not sure how many dice are in the common pool, but I’m thinking that if you don’t even try to do the task, they disappear forever. If you do at least try, they go back into the pool. If you succeed, you add to them. I don’t know how much though. Still working on that.

Why add this? A couple reasons. Unlike Dogs, the basic unit for this game is a story arc and not an episode. This is a mechanic that may encourage characters to take action on their goals. It may also mean that an episode may be taken over by someone’s need to do something, but that’s okay. I can workaround it.

Another reason is that thematically this game tries to be a starspanning, bomb throwing epic. When you’ve got a few characters with big visions, you’ve got a dynamic between a person’s vision and the effects of that vision on everyone else. Having people grab dice from a common pool means that you can take common property and lose it, add to it, or at minimum make it temporarily unavailable. It makes what’s true on a large level true on a personal one as well. Whether it’s a good idea is still open. Can’t know till I try it…