thread: 2005-05-06 : Brainstorming from the Core
On 2005-05-10, Eric wrote:
Technical cores I'm good at. Lessee...
Checking online for Brazilian gambling pastimes it sounds like it's an endemic problem, but avoids both dice and cards in favour of the ponies and bingo-like systems. Amusingly, from a treatment program:
Further adaptations included replacing references to North American games with culturally compatible options, using proper idiomatic expressions and popular sayings to illustrate cognitive distortions, making analogies between electronic generation of random numbers in gambling machines and dice throwing, actual dice throwing to explain the generation of random number series, and role-playing with fake cash and scratch tickets.
Okay, we can work with this. Focus on the "random number series" thing. Do effectiveness-evolution over time using a "random" number series which is actually an author-stance trick. Call it like this:
Split conflict types up into three or four categories. Somewhat arbitrarily, to focus on the emotional core of the single individual, let's do it by dominant emotion: Hope, Fear, and Anger. Those are our stats, but instead of being represented by single values each one is a list of "lucky numbers", down a long narrow vertical column on the character sheet. At character creation, and indeed throughout, the way you generate these lists is to roll 3dN (d6? not picky), and put one of those values at the bottom of each list. So at a given point in time a character might be statted as Hope [6, 3, 1, 2, 1, 5], Fear [4, 4, 6, 1, 5, 3], Anger [1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 1].
When called upon to roll, you use the topmost number off of the list you consider relevant, cross that off, and then roll 3d6 again and put one of the rolled values at the bottom of each list, as you see fit. [Some trick for pruning the lists not used may or may not be needed here.] The idea is that, PTA-like, you have a foretaste of your effectiveness and can tailor your play to suit. The value you use is a base, supplemented by a positioning mechanism based on the other players - perhaps they can burn values from their own lists, and this is our pruning trick. Against this, the GM (representing here the breakdown in traditional values?) rolls dice more conventionally.
To advance requires that you use each list (Hope, Fear, Anger) substantively, after which perhaps we let you roll 4d6 and throw one away, or perhaps 3d10 instead of 3d6, when adding things to the lists. If we want, we can let the mechanic represent slippage of control and loss of tradition by shortening the list length; not yet sure if this is thematically useful, but it might make a good Zeal/Weariness analogue.
Let's call that a technical core and run with it.
