Posts Tagged ‘language choices’

[Edit 10-JAN-13: This is a rough draft of an article that's in the Cortex Plus Hackers Guide (with some side notes). So, if you're wondering what sort of cool stuff inside, here's a sample!]

In Cortex Plus Drama, Stress is how your characters deal with setbacks and defeat. It hits them in the moment when they lose a contest, and it stays as lasting consequences until they get some stress relief. Stress is a key piece of your Lead as you play, since you want to gain Stress in order to get your Growth pool. And because people dealing with Stress are interesting.

(This article also applies to hacking conditions in Lady Blackbird and similar games — in fact, it was in hacking Lady Blackbird last year that I stumbled across this idea.)

The five original Stress Traits—Afraid, Angry, Exhausted, Injured, and Insecure—are perfect for a Drama about young adults finding their way in a world…and they happen to have superpowers. There are a lot of different forms of Stress your Drama game can take, and a few different ways you can change Stress in your game.

A Menu of Stress

Here are over thirty different Stress Traits. The meaning of most of these will be obvious. Some will make you stop and think. But it’s not for me to tell you what Angry or Delusional or Overconfident means. It’s for your Leads to tell us what they mean.

Afraid	Angry	Anxious	Bitter
Blissed	Clumsy	Cold	Controlling
Crippled	Delusional	Depressed	Distracted
Embarrassed	Exhausted	Feral	Hacked
Hateful	Hungry	Hysterical	Injured
Insecure	Intoxicated	Isolated	Overconfident
Quiet	Rash	Shaken	Shell-Shocked
Sloppy	Stubborn	Suspicious	Uncertain

This is far from exhaustive, but it’s a good start to get you thinking.

What’s in a name?

The names you use for your Stress Traits will have a huge impact on your game. Choosing them wisely makes the difference between a good Drama and a fantastic one.

In supernatural horror, it makes sense to have an Afraid Stress Trait. But the word “Afraid” doesn’t sound quite right for a game about mind-shattering knowledge and monsters made of tentacles and ichor. Terrified or Horrified has a much stronger ring to it. It that sort of game, saying you’re dealing with d10 Horrified feels like it has more weight than d10 Afraid, even if it seems like the exact same thing. Those sorts of words are more primal and are in keeping with the genre. Alternatively, using a word that allows for an added taste of competency under horror (for your “operatives against the supernatural” story), try Unnerved. That suggests a different way to play out how your Leads handle the Stress.

Anytime you can see a word your characters would use in the fiction, that’s a signal that it could be a good Stress Trait. In a paramilitary drama, Sloppy might be one you’re interested in adding, but the name sounds comical, downright goofy. If your Leads are meant to be sharp, strong individuals in extraordinary times, another word to use is Undisciplined. You can imagine how the characters in this story would talk, and they would throw that word around at and about each other

Sometimes you need a little extra oomph to set something apart as a Stress Trait. In many settings, Suspicious is fine. But in very conspiratorial Dramas, everyone already is (or had well better be). That would be like having Breathing as Stress. To kick that up a notch for those stories, use Paranoid.

Sometimes the word fits exactly right, but you need to still note down what it means because of your genre. That’s okay, too! Say you’re setting up a Drama set in Louisiana, where humans live in a turbulent peace with other creatures of the night. It would make sense for Leads to have Hungry. As long as everyone is on board with knowing that’s talking about people, not steak, you’re set.

Genre-specific Stress like Hacked might be better served in your game by using in-world slang. Pwned, Trojan'd, or R00t3d are along from our real world. What’s it called in yours?

Die Rating & Granularity

Most people playing Drama have a sense that d6 Afraid doesn’t feel like d12 Afraid. Sometimes, you’ll want to use different words for those different ratings. Do that by adding a little granularity to some of your Stress Traits.

To start with, pick an overall name for that Stress Trait, which you’ll use in rewriting any Distinctions or otherwise referring to it mechanically. Then come up with names for it for the d6, d8, d10, and d12 rating.

For a war drama game about paratroopers in WWII, you might want a bit more detail in Injured:

• d6: Flesh Wound (Injured)
• d8: Bleeding (Injured)
• d10: Crippled (Injured)
• d12: MEDIC! (Injured)

Or for our supernatural horror above, with “Horrified”:

• d6: Unnerved (Horrified)
• d8: Afraid (Horrified)
• d10: Horrified (Horrified)
• d12: Lost in Horror (Horrified)

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter what you call these, at no point does the name of a Stress Rating mean a Lead cannot act. The only time where a Lead cannot act significantly is after being Stressed Out. Your secret operative with d12 MEDIC! and d12 Lost in Horror can still fight the good fight and give it all for humanity.

If you do this, limit it to one or two Stress Traits rather than all five. That’s a lot of work for everyone to keep track of.

Changing Stress in your Game

Now that you have an idea of how to do different Stress, it’s really easy to change it. Once you’ve got all your Leads made, you have one last step. Come up with what five Stress Traits you’ll use (either the Gamemaster alone or as a group, though as a group is always better).

The Rule of Five

Stick with five Stress Traits. Too few and each one will come up too often. That’ll get boring. Too many and they won’t hit often enough to be interesting. Someone who is, for example, Afraid constantly is a one-note character. Someone who only gets Afraid once never shows us anything interesting about he or she deals with fear. You want Leads that are Afraid sometimes, so they can play that out in different ways at different times.

If you want to break this rule, know that you’ll change how Stress feels.

Reworking Distinctions

Once you have your Stress, look at the Distinctions people have taken. Many key off of increasing or decreasing Stress Traits, either their own or others’. If a Lead has a Distinction that applies to a Stress you aren’t using, work with the group to decide how to rewrite that Distinction (or maybe decide that Distinction doesn’t fit the Drama either).

Different Stress for Different Leads

Once you know how to tweak Stress Traits for your game, it doesn’t take much to realize you can tweak them for each Lead. This can put even more personality into your Leads. You’re already coming up with what they believe in, who matters to them, and the notable things they can do. To say how they’re vulnerable, how they deal with setbacks and defeats, adds even more story mojo to your game.

Your Box of Traits

When coming up with your campaign, you have two choices: Playing with the Big Toy Box or Focusing the Pain.

Playing with the Big Toy Box lets everyone pick from any Stress Traits.  This gives you all sorts of options to come up with interesting characters that you might not expect.

Focusing the Pain means narrow down the list of available Stress Traits down to between eight and twelve.  This allows you to craft a more consistent theme in your game, while still allowing room for flexibility.

Neither one’s better than the other; it’s all about what you and your game need.

Common Ground

Once you know what Stress Traits are available to the Leads, you can come up with each one’s when doing the finishing touches. You have some other choices you can make here: Free for All, Common Stress, and Heritage Stress.

Free for All is simple. From the list of available Stress Traits, pick five that feel right for that Lead, that would be fun to see that Lead have to deal with. This is great if you want a looser drama, where Leads come from many different backgrounds and have very different roles in the story. You might even consider changing these as you play, possibly one per Tag Scene.

Common Stress is a little more involved, as you have to come up with two or three Stress Traits that everyone in the campaign should have, leaving the remaining ones open for a Free for All.  This unification allows for a tighter story about characters that are similar. It’s a great way to explore how such characters still differ in that tight story space. In particular, a “humans versus supernatural menaces” or “military dramas” game will be will-served with a few common Stress Traits.

Heritage Stress is a variation on Common Stress, for specialized character types like different races or species, or characters with very different walks of life—whatever your Drama game decides are Heritages. A game with elves, dwarves, and humans might have all three with their own set of Common Stress Traits (and possibly even having some special Stress Traits the other races can’t take!). Likewise, a game where you have disciplined military or law enforcement personnel alongside untrained civilian scientists could be reflected in two different sets of Heritage Stress.

Stress In Action

Now that we know all sorts of ways to change Stress in our games, let’s take a look a few examples:

The Future Savior of Humanity

You’re a family like any other. You get up, go to school, get home, and fight against killer robots from the future. Your mother has been training you since birth to be a great leader of a future resistance, your “uncle” was sent back in time to aid you both, and your “cousin” a reprogrammed killer robot. Oh, and next week is show and tell!

• All Robots From The Future have the same Stress Traits: Damaged, Hacked, Revealed. (The group decided that Robots should feel very similar and only have three Stress Traits.)
• All Humans have Paranoid and any four other Stress Traits that Robots don’t have.

(Inspiration: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)

No One Knows We Save The World

Back when the Bureau of Unnatural Containment was first formed, the world was in chaos. Germany was marching across the earth with Powers Unknowable. It’s been years since their defeat, both temporal and supernatural, but their dark legacy lives on in secret. The Bureau was shut down a few years ago, but evil continues to discover and wield Nazi magitech. So you and your pistol continue the Bureau’s good work in secret, one kept even from your husband and children.

• Everyone has: Distracted (specifically by the Lead’s home life), Exhausted, Horrified
• Everyone choose two more from: Afraid, Delusional, Depressed, Injured, Intoxicated, Overconfident, Paranoid, Shaken, Sloppy

(Inspiration: Delta Green, a toned down B.P.R.D., various spy flicks and shows)

We Few, We Proud, We Brave Soldiers

Never before has something so grand been attempted by individual men and women. Taking Planet Haxith will be difficult without boots on the ground. Ion cannons will take out large dropships, but you three hundred will drop solo from high orbit in pods too small to be targeted, land, and make our beachhead. Our success depends entirely on you. Welcome to Fall Brigade.

• Everyone has the same six Stress Traits in the game: Afraid, Blissed (due to the combat drugs), Hacked (their jumpsuits & other gear), Injured (using die ratings & granularity), Insecure, Tired.
• The group couldn’t choose which one to drop to make five, so they’re trying all six to see what happens. They’ll see if one should go away after the third session. They had five until someone suggested Blissed and explained it.

(Inspiration: Starship Troopers meets Band of Brothers)

Predators Alongside Prey

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and sorcerers, oh my! The world got a lot weirder a few years back when the vamps outed themselves and try to live among us, but life’s still more or less normal. At least, until that new guy came into town to reclaim his family’s lost estate. They say he’s trying to live “off the vein,” but I fear everything’s about to change.

• Vampires have: Hungry, Injured
• Werewolves have: Feral, Injured
• Ghosts have: Bound, Incorporeal. (They intentionally don’t have Injured.)
• Sorcerers have: Exhausted or Overconfident, Injured
• Normal humans must take: Crippled (They’re much more delicate that everyone else), Enthralled.
• Of the remaining three Stress Traits, the group says “get your emo on!” Choose from: Afraid, Angry, Cold, Depressed, Insecure, Shaken

(Inspiration: True Blood, Anne Rice-type stuff, World of Darkness)

The Mysterious Case Files

There have been thirteen instances of reality deviation in Manhattan in the last month alone. Naturally, this is a cause for concern. The local authorities can’t handle this. This is a case for you, the Luxmas Group. You have the expertise and resources to handle this before we have another Incursion. And Ms. Cranston…we have evidence that suggests your deceased husband is behind all this.

• Everyone has: Distracted (specifically about something from their past), Stumped (in an investigative Drama, this is a fun Stress)
• FBI-trained characters have: Restrained (meaning dealing with bureaucratic red tape)
• Scientist characters have: Obsessed (the Luxmas Group tends to recruit a certain sort of gifted individual)
• The remaining one to three Stress Traits are open.

(Inspiration: Lie to Me meets Fringe)

- Ryan

Cortex Plus is pure elegance in its simplicity, and is currently my go-to when I start thinking about game tinkering. Naturally, I got some heavy duty time in when I was on the Leverage team, but I honestly didn’t get the full awesome of the system until after playing Smallville, playing Leverage with other people, hacking my own variants for Aethertide, my Mage: the Ascension-using-Cortex Plus homebrew, and talking with friends about other Cortex Plus hacks (including some which will be in the upcoming Cortex Plus Hackers Guide[1]).

The magic that I’ve found in playing Cortex Plus — well, part of the magic, and the part I want to talk about — is how an action is formed. When you want to do something in a Cortex Plus game, and I’ll use Smallville & Leverage as examples, you assemble dice by explaining what you’re doing.

Smallville’s decisions are emo. When you do something like, say, saving your best friend’s bride to be from Dr. Freezoman at their wedding where you’re both best man and best superhero, you’re making these decisions

• Value: I’m doing this because “I believe in the power of Love“
• Relationships: I’m doing this for my best friend, Phil
• Power: Oh, and I’m doing this with my Power of Lightning, for I’m Lighting Rod Johnson, super-powered porn star.

I’m force to verbalize what might have been internal — either internal and aware or internal and unaware. I say “Love, because, dude, he’s fucking up my friend’s marriage, so that’s a d10,” “My best friend Phil, who I’m seriously jealous of, but can’t show it. That’s a d8.” and “LIGHTNING, YO! d10.” I justify not just to the GM or table, but to myself in a conscious way, what I’m doing. That’s power.

(Now, in this case I would probably challenge my relationship with Phil, because maybe I’m not as jealous of him as I once was, which is another point of decision in Smallville. Mojo there, too, but not worth unpacking in this post. You should just play it and find out.)

Smallville makes me articulate motivations even more than means. I could choose something else, like:

• Value: I’m doing this because “Villains need to be brought to Justice. Lethal Justice.” (d8)
• Relationships: I’m doing this to my archnemesis, Dr. Freezoman. (d12)
• Power: Still doing it with my Power of Lightning, because I’m a badass. (still a d10)

We see the same thing, my character shooting Dr. Freezoman with my lightning…rod. But we uncover more about who this person I’m playing is. And that’s mojo. Granted, with different dice, there are different little bits of tactical decision making going on, but that allows for context to either try to work in something unexpected for better dice (and have to justify it to keep that die) or to pick something weaker because it’s interesting.

If Smallville is “gut-punching emo porn,” Leverage is “competence porn.” What it asks me to describe is different. Let’s say I’m trying to get access to a secure vault. I’m all sexy cool thief-y spy person. Here’s what Leverage asks of me:

• Attribute: I’m doing this with my Vitality (d8)
• Role: I’m using my Grifter role (d10)
• Distinction: My “silver tongue” helps me (d8)

I’m describing how I’m endlessly talking my way to the vault by boring the guard to the point where he lets me in because he’s tired of hearing me talk and I seem trustworthy. Leverage is all about how I’m doing something, with a minor twist. Let’s see another way to look at it, if I’m trying to sneak in through the air ducts.

• Attribute: I’m doing this with my Agility (d10)
• Role: I’m using my Thief role (d8)
• Distinction: My “the walls are closing in” hinders me (d4, and a Plot Point for later)

Again, I’m describing what I’m doing, how I’m being competent. Leverage has a place, though, were I can also describe how elements of my character can get in my way — a choice I have with distinctions, as they aren’t set at a specific die rating. They either help for a d8, or hinders for a d4 and a Plot Point to use later. So I describe how I’ve being a badass, and if I have any sort of internal adversity tripping me up.

Same die system, radically different language being generated. That’s why I love hacking Cortex Plus — the die assembling part of the game is about describing what’s important to that game. The elements your characters can grab for dice are about what the game is interested in, which could be about how people feel, or how awesome they are, or their history (as in Lenny’s Highlander hack he’s tinkering with, where you assemble from Values, Bonds and Memories), or whatever.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m not entirely happy with how I’m doing it with Aethertide. And I’ll be revising it soon.

You can see another take on this idea in Wushu – a game that causes you to describe fight scenes essentially as beats, with each beat giving a d6 to your roll (to a maximum of 6):

• I jump out of the way of the shuriken flying toward me (1 die),
• grab the fire hyrdant (1 die),
• throw it at a mook (1 die),
• jump off the railing (1 die),
• duck and roll to pick up my katana (1 die),
• and do a flying kick at the Big Bad (1 die).

I should now that I haven’t yet played Wushu. I wasn’t really interested in it until I started looking more deeply at Cortex Plus, because it didn’t seem to differentiate the characters[2], but I see how the beat descriptions force me to put more on the table than I might have if it wasn’t demanded of me. Maybe because I would feel it over-indulgent to describe that much if it wasn’t necessary for optimal awesome. Maybe because I wouldn’t think of all that because there’s other stuff going on in my head and those questions aren’t asked of me.

But of course I want all the dice I can get. I’m a fucking gamer playing an action-y game. Naturally I’m going to come up with that content. So Wushu does that well, and (again, from what I’ve seen and heard, not yet experiences) it takes the idea of grabbing dice to create an action sequence pretty damned well.

 

In short: having the mechanism of picking up dice cause decisions in and of themselves, and cause language to flow, is bad ass. More games should do that.

- Ryan

[1] My article in there is, in a sense, a whitepaper on how language choices affect setting. I’m looking forward to that coming out.

[2] Which is a thing I used to call “socialized awesome” — whenever everyone is equally and identically awesome, no one is.

I’ve worked on a number of books at this point that take different approaches to game terms. As I start to write Mythender‘s text, people have noticed that I’m inconsistently capitalizing game terms. That’s because I still haven’t made up my mind about this. There are compelling reasons for various ways to go about it.

Today, I ask you for your opinion on the subject, either as a writer or as a reader — and to tell me why you like or dislike a particular method. (Bonus points if you can point out a text you like. Double-bonus if there’s a sample I can read on the Internet, but that’s not always the case.)

Some of the ways I’ve seen:

• Don’t capitalize. Typically, the first time these are encountered as game terms, they’re bolded or otherwise stylized.
• Capitalize every occurrence.
• Stylize, where the font is somehow different — small caps or all caps, colored differently, different font face, etc.

In the case of not capitalizing or stylizing throughout the text, some games will still stylize the first occurrence. Spirit of the Century & Dresden Files RPG don’t capitalize “aspect”, “invoke”, “compel”, “skill”, etc.

When stylizing, I am curious how people make the text flagged to show it’s a different style. I know this is how it is with the Leverage books do examples of game terms, such as with the specific die ratings on Attributes & Roles, the formatting on examples of Distinctions, etc. (I often see that achieved with character styles in Word, so less useful when I’m writing parts of it in Google Docs or in text on my iPad.)

I have suggested all three routes in the past, because I know them to have different effects on the reader — and an RPG text, like all texts, are about target audience. That said, the question:

Which way do you like? As a writer? As a reader?

Very important: Why?

I have a sense of what I’ll do with Mythender. But then, I thought about that several months ago, and changed my mind. *sigh* The trials and tribulations of being a writer.

- Ryan