Whatever, I’m busy doing other stuff anyway.
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More thoughts on the role and manipulation of co-operation for BadAss Space Dragons.
##Introducing more risk without losing players early
I have been lobbying to avoid killing characters early in the story arc, and especially avoiding lethal PvP until the final rounds. The point, however, is not that we can’t kill characters. Is that we don’t want to exclude active contributors, which isn’t quite the same thing.
One obvious way to achieve this is to grant every character one free “resurrection”. In the case of BASW, everyone could have been issued two suits.
##This idea could be paired with mission design to driven variation.
Early on, have mission with very high rewards with a very high probability of zeroing out the hit points – of using up that first “life.” The would quickly create a separations between high power / risk seeking characters that now had to be very careful to avoid termination – call them “ssssskippers”, and low power/ risk avoiding characters that still have a “get out of death free card” — call them “Falkayns”.
Presto!, one has specializations and/or factions, with no explicit game mechanic creating extra work for the GM.
And if a lucky character or two gets through that high risk/high return missions without dying – call them “Pedges” – well, that generates an entirely new dynamic, as the game now clearly has a dominant player (or two) that everyone else will have to contend with. Either gang warfare or dictatorship awaits!
##Eliminating co-operation over short horizons.
I claimed earlier: “Non-positive games quite become either king of the hill or candy land – a race to the finish”.
That isn’t a bad idea a portion of the game. During the opening rounds, don’t have missions that benefit from co-operation, and let everyone one grab as much as they can. Even allow duels where the winner gets stuff at the loser’s expense. Say, three rounds, with the understanding that everyone, even those with zero HP, will be reset with max HP at round 4.
More about one way co-operation (mathematically ) breaks down.
As I noted in an earlier post, the mathematical framework that supports my view of cooperation breaks down if the end point is known. Basically, on the last round there is no consequence for breaking co-operation, so all actors know all other actors lack the incentive to cooperate. Thus no co-operation happens in the final round. So what about the penultimate round? Since no-one will cooperate in the next (final) round, the math does not support cooperation in the penultimate round. And so it goes, all the way back to the beginning.
That doesn’t necessarily apply for Bad Ass door games, because we might cross paths elsewhere on BoingBoing or in future Bad Ass door games.
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I think this is a great idea, and depending on the number of rounds there could even be multiple known reset rounds, though with our current format one is probably fine. It would certainly encourage me to take bigger risks, and it avoids people feeling stuck in a rut just scraping by.
With this built into the game, the DM might also want to adjust the mission probabilities to appreciate the fact that it takes a lot of GRIT to choose a mission you are nowhere near guaranteed not to die in. Like, GRIT is now a stat that affects the calculations in a fairly major way, and GRIT may even be awarded before a mission is calculated just for having the potatoes to choose it, which increases the odds of success (GRIT awarded pre-mission would have to depend on the player’s other stats). Fortune favors the bold (and who dares, wins).
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I tried to experiment with this a bit: several missions that were essential to the safety of everyone else had lousy payoffs in comparison. I think @bizmail_public pointed out that the folks fighting the space eels on the swan were instrumental in lowering the risk to everyone else and should be recognized, but I don’t think it altered the fundamental way that players cooperated. I was hoping it would add some tension and resentment between characters. But without any real PvP options for acting on that tension, it looked like business as usual from this side.
Agreed - everyone that played in the original BSD raves about that aspect.
I like the earlier suggestion of stealing/sabotaging equipment with a chance of success, failure that goes unnoticed, or the catastrophic failure of getting caught and suffering repercussions, but I’m always a little gunshy about the possibility of dogpiling a single player.
Playing hot potato with a detrimental or even dangerous item (N% chance it goes boom in any given round) has some delightful implications.
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