RPing systems and mechanics

I've always been of the opinion that roleplaying should never be required or forced by the system. It ends up a lot more stilted than natural scenes progressing from people becoming more comfortable in their roles and characters. What I'd advise over that is rewarding characters for playing to character, rather than requiring it. People tend to be a lot more responsive to rewards than punishments.

That's Hillfolk, and yes the dramatic tension its chargen creates is great.

You need good and creative role players to keep it fresh though. The wants and why-you-can't-have-its need to update fairly regularly, if both players are stubborn and don't budge their character from the initial position it gets stale.

I think some people are leery of roleplay rewards just being GM fiat.

My favourite is Compels in Fate, specifically ones to do with a PC's Trouble. They pick some thing that always gets they're character in trouble and the GM or other players can throw a point at them for it to come up in the current situation. Either in a narrative "your rival shows up" way or a "you get -2 to your roll because your greed distracts you" way.

I've never really understood this argument, because I've never seen a narrative system that I'd say required or forced it. It just provides tools to enable the players and the GM to make use of.

>>This isn't mentioning Scholars, who have the crazy ability to make Predictions, conditions that affect the entire world. Although not useful in a fight, if a Scholar successfully predicts something, the entire setting is bent towards bringing it about as the bonus or penalty applies to every action that could possibly be relevant, which is a level of influence you almost never see put in the hands of PCs. But, Scholar predictions are also slow, costly and difficult, somewhat balancing the sheer scope of influence they can have.

That sounds amazing. Is there a particular version of this I should read?

Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate are basically what we do to communicate, alongside information exchanging.
Compassion (kinda like Good-aligned Bluff that can be used to further your goals, whilst not harming or forwarding the target's goals) and Fellowship (informal diplomacy nurtured through time spent together) work too, but when you need something from the "target", you either Lie, Coerce or Bargain (Bluff, Intimidate, Diplomacy).
The great thing about these three is it's binary outcome, you either are successful or not. Fellowship and Compassion could take time.

Wish I knew debating enough to figure out how you could do "debate combat" where arguments are flung to win over an audience/debater.

About story mechanics, I reward players with backstories extra bennies ingame, like an enchanted item or stat increase or something, and allow spending fate points to change the story, like going "but I'm a long lost bastard child of the King" when meeting the King, and changing the story/NPC reaction.
Backstory-wise, Shadowrun's Karma system can be interesting, where you can take penalties/flaws in the form of old rivals, dependant family you have to take care of, etc. to gain extra power at character creation.

I agree, I don't think roleplaying mechanics make roleplaying worse or restricted. I think there needs to be some mechanic that helps determine how charismatic a character is, for instance. It's not fair to ask a bunch of awkward weirdos to be charming.

But some things, like merits/flaws, can be helpful in determining things about your character you might not have thought of. So you can be flipping through and say "oh yea, I'll have glasses" or "I'll be a good leader" and while those things aren't the whole character (glasses obviously are just fluff) it can help make a character a little more interesting.

Anyway, Some games have systems in place to facilitate roleplaying. Mechanics that encourage a group to chat in character, etc. (attached pdf related, just some quick questions you can ask players to answer to get them thinking.)

>Wish I knew debating enough to figure out how you could do "debate combat" where arguments are flung to win over an audience/debater.

This sounds great. Would love to see this fleshed out.

I actually want to go through this thread when it's run its course and maybe compile all the best mechanics into a sort of open source pdf that can fit other games. Hopefully we can get enough contributions, then we can see if Veeky Forums still gets shit done.

Veeky Forums as a whole never got shit done, it was always one guy/user that did it. Flinging ideas is easy, organizing and writing them down, then chewing them up and spitting out a coherent file/ruleset/game is hard.

I think there are systems with debate combat, where initiative is rolled and there's "Popularity" instead of "Health", and participants can attack arguments and so on.
Google searching message boards gives me: FATE, Mouse Guard (Burning Wheel), and I'll take a wild guess that GURPS has something somewhere. They might be a good start.

Never cared about debates because I don't like IRL debates, they're not honest info exchanges but two parties furthering their own agenda (debates are made to win an audience over, and they won't be pretty or clean).

I think the best social mechanic I've run into to this day is the whole "you get to ask X number of questions on this list and the GM has to be honest and clear about the answers". Even the msot autismal player can ask "What do they want?" and get an actionable answer.

Forgot to add a bit: It always pisses me off when GMs don't fucking read how this is supposed to go and make the answers to the questions fucking vague or confusing. Learn to give your players what they need to roleplay, you twats. While you waffle about keeping details to your chest, the players'll end up making totally wrong assumptions, and knowing the kind of GM that does this, those assumptions are just gonna get stonewalled instead of run with, making for a gigantic waste of time. You can just say "She's lying/not lying." "She's thinking about her dad." You're answering the player, not the PC.

It's the Secret Arts chapter of Legends of the Wulin, possibly the most confusing part of an already confusing book.

Thankfully, Mr Rage did a writeup/clarification of them a while ago, and I've still got the link. Possibly best alongside the book, but it actually explains how things work a lot better.

docs.google.com/document/d/1i_4QX-Y9R6OzZBm-w6jOMpbOA1j6oXnLHjrR-knNvB8/edit

That's kinda the GM's job tho, giving correct and applicable information that players can understand.
I hate the Gazebo story because the GM didn't explain what it was. I think there was a Rogue that attacked a Prince with his entourage because he though the prince was alone and Entourage was a sword or something. If the Player Character might do something stupid (and the PC is very aware that it might be retarded) that the player didn't think about, warn the player and explain the situation further.
Being "smart" with players will just sew distrust and soon they'll just kill everyone on sight and touch every stone tile with a pole.

GMs should be extremely clear when they convey info because they're the player's eyes, ears and everything, and should guess how a PC might feel and tell that, even smoke and mirrors nudge players in the non-retarded direction, such as please don't attack the fucking king, he's surrounded by royal guards.

This. Leave the vague prose to bedside ERP.

I completely agree. GM's trying to fool their players with wordgames is just pointless and dumb, and doing it by accident is just a sign of weak GMing.

Absolutely.

Once I was in this game and our characters were on a sort of dock with guards talking to us. I said I was going to move past them inland, and the dm says "the guard grabs you." no check. He says, well they were blocking the end of the dock and there's no way you could walk by without walking right to them. ...cool, so, my character isn't blind or retarded, not my fault you didn't describe it right.

Good dm would say, "if you do that they'll be able to easily grab you- the dock is kind of narrow. Do you want to try to walk by or not?"

Thanks for the link!

Basically, other players give you XP for doing cool stuff. You can then spend those XP to get big bonuses to your rolls, or to permanently advance your character, but if you go over 108 spent XP (including the XP you spent during character creation to pick your classes/skills/equipment), your character goes insane and becomes an NPC at the end of the session. However, before that happens, though, you either increase the value of one of the emotional ties to things in the world/ideals your character has, or you can reduce your spent XP by eliminating them (with the amount of spent XP removed determined by the value of the emotional tie eliminated).

So, it works well for short-term play, and for long-term play, your character has to be continually evolving, developing and then eliminating emotional ties to things (once every 4-5 sessions, at least).

In Index Card RPG, all checks roll "damage", which is called effort. You need to roll 20 charisma effort to convince this guard. You need to roll 10 strength effort to bust open this old door. You need to roll 20 weapon damage effort to kill this monster.

In Index Card RPG, the entire room has a DC called a Target, instead of 15 different DCs and ACs in one room.

In Index Card RPG, initiative is just "Who goes first?" then you go in clockwise table order.

In Index Card RPG, roll a timer 1d4. Something happen in 1d4 rounds. Keeps the action going without lulls while maintaining suspense.

In Dungeon Crawl Classics (and other systems), you can keep using spells until you fail. Then you forget it for the rest of the day, or it gets harder to cast more spells.

In Far Away Land, you collaboratively create the world map before the first session.

In Dungeon World (and other systems) you roll 2d6 to resolve instead of a d20.
10+: You do it
7-9: You do it, but at a price.
6-: The GM says what happens, mark XP

In Dungeon World's, Bonds creates party character relationships with a fill-in-the-blank part of the character sheet, like "____ killed my brother" or "____ trusted me with a secret". You get experience points when you fulfill or use a bond, and can create more as your character grows.

In OSR games, you gain XP from treasure, not killing things. Sneak past, convince, steal, to get treasure.

In 13th Age you have an escalation die/counter/timer which increases +1 each round, and various game effects and character abilities take this into account. Things get more heated, so the mechanics should reflect that.

In 13th Age, Icons are major background character forces which impact dice rolls having to do with the Icons, plus the story at large. There is also the Background part of your character sheet, which also affects rolls having do do with your history as a character.

In ??? your armor decreases with/in addition to HP, over time.

To add more detail:
The things that define your character are codified as Fates. These Fates are open information to everyone and serve both as roleplaying prompts for yourself and as a tool for others to gauge your roleplaying.

Other players are encouraged to give you Aiki whenever you play to your Fates or are entertaining in general. Aiki can be spent to gain bonuses to rolls or permanent improvements, influence the Emotion Matrix, manipulate Fates, etc. without repercussions. But there is little Aiki to go around.

During an intermission, Aiki turns into Kiai. The stronger your highest Fate, the more Kiai you get. Kiai can be used in much the same ways as Aiki, but every point of Kiai spent increases your Karma. Too much Karma at the end of an Intermission? Your character goes off the deep end.

During an Intermission, you can change or erase your Fates to reduce Karma, with higher Fates giving more reduction. This means you will constantly give up things important to your character and find new interesting directions to take them.

Here's a case for BAD mechanics. oWoD had some very basic and largely unbalanced mechanics. It drove the gamers crazy, but the point was to get the mechanics out of the way and get people to largely not care about them. This drove the focus towards the story.

BARBS

then why not just freeform it?

Just to cite something TRULY obscure that I have GM'd, "The Skeletons" for all its rules lite nature is a truly unique experience and there are some mechanics in there I would be very keen to strip out and use as components for something else in future. I mean, yes some of them I was stressing a very particular interpretation of the written rules but the end result was cool. I swear.

For instance, encounters and players each have a series of unknowns. The specific nature and context of these unknowns is determined by the player's class (such as "the person that the poem inscribed on my bow references is ________" ) and the situation ("the giant is alone because __________" ). Any time you need to act above and beyond your immediate and established means (IE effectively spending a fate point or whatever), you have to go and answer one of these questions and justify your answer with the action. Led to some *great* situations, like the skeleton cleric exorcising a ghostly knight by declaring that it was *his* ghost.

Excellent post thank you. Need more like this just summing up different systems with their neat little mechanics that work with story and rp etc.