Doubt

[Grek]

Got to go with Manxome here; every time you use your powers you come closer to having them change and start working in a different way. As a result, trying to figure out how your powers work is fundementally pointless, as the sooner you begin to catch on how they work, the sooner they change.

[violence in the media]

Regarding the constant drain vs. random drain for gunfire, I see Frank's point that randomizing whether or not it drains contributes to the doubt factor. If you have 10 points, and dodging bullets always eats 1, then you get to dodge 10 bullets (whether or not you know your point pool total). The doubt in this case is Dirty Harry style. Did I use 9 power points already, or have I used all 10?

If dodging bullets may cost 0, 1, or 2 points, then you have no real idea of how many bullets you can avoid. The 6th bullet might hit you, or the 16th might miss. Especially if the probabilities of costs are unequal. Like, a d6 roll of 1-4 is 0 cost, 5 is 1, and 6 is 2.

Going back to the Edge points pool idea, would it be workable to have the mojo spent by one player fill the pools of the others in some randomized fashion? So, if Allie and Bob are spending points testing powers or moving the game forward, those points are flowing into the pools of one of the other players? Or maybe the MC has a pool that's part of this randomization as well, and using your powers might give juice to the bad guys?

All this discussion about mechanics and creating doubt and such aside, how do we deal with the issue of player frustration? If the star charts and numerology matricies dictate that Sally's character gets eaten by a Grue, how do we make sure she stays engaged with the game and not feel like the game is capricious and immune to player influence?

[fectin]

I don't think I understand the goal anymore. I made up a list of words to describe some specific potential aspects of this magic. Does this terminology make sense, and if so, which aspects are desirable?

unreliable (may randomly not work)
unpredictable (player can't predict whether it will work)
non-demonstrable (does not work in laboratory conditions)
precious (must be conserved)
double edged (failure hurts player)
capricious (randomly hurts player)
dangerous (lack of skill hurts player)

[Username17]

I don't think I understand the goal anymore.

The goal is to encourage the players to play their characters as if they were not sure whether their powers work without the ham handed approach of telling MC to take a shit all over the PCs if he thinks that the players are "rollplaying".

In short, to make the doubt and paranoia and double guessing about coincidences be as immersive a process as possible.

So these would all be good:

unreliable (may randomly not work)
unpredictable (player can't predict whether it will work)
non-demonstrable (does not work in laboratory conditions)

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Got to go with Manxome here; every time you use your powers you come closer to having them change and start working in a different way. As a result, trying to figure out how your powers work is fundementally pointless, as the sooner you begin to catch on how they work, the sooner they change.

As the simplest solution, whenever you're out of mana you shift to a new magic paradigm and get a random amount of mana back in your pool. Would something like that work?

[Username17]

Got to go with Manxome here; every time you use your powers you come closer to having them change and start working in a different way. As a result, trying to figure out how your powers work is fundementally pointless, as the sooner you begin to catch on how they work, the sooner they change.

As the simplest solution, whenever you're out of mana you shift to a new magic paradigm and get a random amount of mana back in your pool. Would something like that work?

That sounds like it would be a lot of extra accounting for "everything works all the time."

-Username17

[Daiba]

If you could base the ability being available based on a character's need then you avoid the entire argument.

What about having your powers be fueled by "anxiety", or some other value that increases as the episode progresses?

When the you first hear Julie talking about how nice the weather is, but really meaning that she saw her sister get abducted, you get some amount of anxiety. When you find out that her sister was taken by the Villains(TM), you get more anxiety. When you track them to the abandoned warehouse and find a table littered with bloody surgical instruments, you get a lot of anxiety.

This way, having access to powers is basically contingent on being in situations where you absolutely need them and have the least amount of time to dick around.

The strength of your powers can also be proportional to the amount of anxiety you have, in addition to depleting anxiety when used. Thus, frivolous power use is doubly discouraged. Anxiety could also have negative effects, as well, like hallucinations, etc. etc. Haven't really thought too much about that...

[fectin]

Okay. As I see it:
Unreliable sounds like you need an roll to activate, which is not influenced by player attributes or actions. Well, maybe influence is okay, but it has to be well inside the RNG.

As long as players don't know how much edge they have, but do know that it isn't much, it's somewhat unpredictable. It's much more unpredictable if you have a way to silently lose edge, but is undermined by having a reliable way to gain edge (reality quakes that refresh edge are bad for this, quakes that are unpredictable are better).

Unpredictable mostly covers non-demonstrability. If you're using edge and keeping pools low, you might have a cool result once, but it's basically not repeatable. You can support this and the general theme by adding a surcharge that increases with more controlled environments.

Having paradigms could be very good, but swapping them out seems counterproductive. Mechanically, swapping seems like an overly complex way to say "costs are slightly unpredictable" whereas sticking with one paradigm per character encourages progressively more idiosyncratic behavior.

Dalba's mechanic works great generally, but probably not for this style of game. It's fairly predictable, and (I suspect) really hard to balance. Instead, what about having those events screw with your edge reserve (affect it vice directly power it). That gives an in character reason to seek out wierdnesses

[Midnight_v]

I feel positive about this concept but between the brief case with whatever's needed in it and.... you know what never mind.
The fact is unless someone comes along and tells you, that you have this power, how the hell would you ever know. Its the bullets thing that triggered that. I was in the marines and I saw all kinda of weird bullet mishaps, and if my fire team mate jim disappeard at first I'd be like Wtf? Though soon after I'd be like... okay, no one remebers jim, either I'm crazy or Jims been "reassigned" to black ops... either way, neither of those things is going to signifigantly stop my "Marine-ing" and I continue to do so.
Basically, how the fuck do you get characters to DO anything aside from what they're doing? I mean yeah, I definately want to play in Frank's campaign but whats the character motivation when you're NOT normal man. You're just some marine, who's loosing it.
Or some Lucky Cop or Fireman who has had a few supernatural experiences. So what, you just keep on.
Why? Cause even if I've been hanging out with Tyler Durden for the past 4 years, if he HASN'T destroyed my whole life when he vanishes... I button up and go back to work. Right?
Basically, some people say "Crazy people never say, am I crazy" but they totally do, all the time, and they just keep going to work everyday cause really wtf else can you do?
I guess what I'm saying is... need stronger character hooks. I guess a loved one could vanish... THAT tends to piss people off, I guess.
kid, girlfriend, mom...
Still though, if every "doubter" has that "Punisher" trope pulled it gets old quick.

[Manxome]

If dodging bullets may cost 0, 1, or 2 points, then you have no real idea of how many bullets you can avoid. The 6th bullet might hit you, or the 16th might miss. Especially if the probabilities of costs are unequal. Like, a d6 roll of 1-4 is 0 cost, 5 is 1, and 6 is 2.

If you're already rolling to determine the success of your ability, then the fixed cost system doesn't tell you how many you can dodge. You might get hit on the first shot if you roll poorly. Spending points to make up the difference between your roll and the success threshold actually guarantees that you won't get hit until at least the Nth bullet, for N = (power pool) / (max cost).

Even if we assume your success rate is 100% until you run out of juice in either case, the randomized cost doesn't cause you to become uncertain about your survival until you might be completely out of juice and screwed for the rest of the adventure whether you survive the current fight or not. I wouldn't think that would be acceptable as the "typical" situation, so most of the time you're sure you'll survive in either case, one of them just makes you unsure how much juice you'll have left for playing detective afterwards.


It might be worth considering if you should have separate pools for survival and other stuff. Basically HP vs. MP.

As the simplest solution, whenever you're out of mana you shift to a new magic paradigm and get a random amount of mana back in your pool. Would something like that work?

That sounds like it would be a lot of extra accounting for "everything works all the time."

This one is instead of mana being spent to make you automagically succeed (or any other useful effect). So you have a period where you're good at A and bad at B, then after you've used your powers a certain amount you're good at C and bad at D. Your casting is unlimited (but not perfect), and "mana" just determines when you change schools, and thereby neuters systematic testing by making you change faster the more you test.

The goal is to encourage the players to play their characters as if they were not sure whether their powers work without the ham handed approach of telling MC to take a shit all over the PCs if he thinks that the players are "rollplaying".

In short, to make the doubt and paranoia and double guessing about coincidences be as immersive a process as possible.

It seems to me that the most important component of this is actually setting up the "non-magical" mechanics such that it is plausible the PCs succeed without magic - otherwise, magical success turns into proof very quickly, and unreliable magic will get the PCs all killed.

Gunfire has to be sufficiently inaccurate that having all the bullets miss you is a lucky but plausible outcome even for a mook - in whatever scale of fight the PCs are expected to get into.

You should have elaborate (and probably vague) tables for rolling up the contents of random suitcases, and determining them magically should (at least usually) generate a result that is also somewhere on the table, and ideally something that serves your purposes but isn't exactly what you asked for. Ask for a flashlight, get a road flare; ask for water to drink, get a juice box; ask for a sword, get a chainsaw.

I think the question to focus on is: if you've been playing a while and know the system, but your DM secretly decided that none of your magic powers will work this session, how long would it take you to figure that out?

We'd certainly need to make sure that a battery of systematic tests isn't the logical first thing you do, but even if you're "playing normally", you'd need a fairly high chance for magic to fail and a fairly high chance for non-magical success.

[spasheridan]

I'd like to see some sample heroes - how do you envision this working in a modern world?

Like, say, supernatural where all the hunters are also thieves? Do you clean up the loot from the monsters you slay?

Buffy, where you have a watcher who has some cash and a nice place for you to crash if you need it?

In Heroes there was always a conflict between your real job and your super hero job, but all the main characters were super rich anyways (Company man, Senator, Industrialist...)

If the PC's are ordinary joes with jobs at the grocery store AND they have to hunt supernatural evil on their days off, that's one story. If they're homeless drifters off the grid hunting supernatural evil then that's ANOTHER story... if they use their powers to survive (create cash! Level 0 spell) ... now motivation becomes a problem because I would probably wind up just creating cash and spending it on hookers and blow if I had that power.

Not to be annoying with my questions, but I do think this will help define the mechanics we want.

If we go for a world like Heroes, you have people waking up and suddenly having weird powers. Think of Peter Petrelli jumping off the building because he thinks he can fly. Of course in Doubt the powers will be much less obtrusive than this, nothing so gross as flying but maybe getting caught by clotheslines between apartment windows. In this world the players slowly learn that they have actual superpowers of some kind, but they also try and fit in with the real world.

If we aim for something like supernatural where the world is very gritty and the players are alienated and reading the papers for signs of demonic activity in the weather report, and then always having the good luck NOT to die when the vampires jump you. In this world the players think they're lucky (man, good thing people always have jumbo bags of rock salt in their basements so I can throw down a magic circle here) and they hide at the outskirts of society.

Maybe we also want a Cthulu like Sanity score? The more powers you explicitly are aware of and can use in a direct manner you loose your Reality rating, until you are so unreal you go crazy? And Cthullu might be a good inspiration as well.. all sorts of things that man was not meant to know but you can still fill em full of lead if you have to.

[virgil]

If you go that way, why not just go all the way and have a hidden list of spells that go off in a random, but sequential, order?

Not knowing what your magic can do doesn't make you doubt that it exists, it just makes you not trust in it. I have at least one player that would respond to that by ignoring that they have magic. If it requires some kind of active effort to 'cast', another would just go OCD at the first sign of where magic would be useful (did it work? did it work?...)

Since the players are already going to be fighting actual monsters that aren't named Steve, which they know to be there, I don't see the point in making magic so unpredictable. I can get behind a little bit of it, like the reality quakes or something, but it feels like the discussion is pushing it too far.

[Lokathor]

Well then how would you prevent the characters from testing that they have magical influence once they suspect themselves to be magic? Doesn't have to be reality quakes, just has to be something.

[Grek]

Yet another idea: Using your powers has a side effect of any demonstratable proof of your powers having been used "going missing" in the near future. If you go to look for the bullets that missed you, you'll be unable to find them or even proove that they existed. No muggles that saw the scene are able to remember the bullets being fired. If you predict a coin toss, muggles don't remember you doing that after the next reality quake.

[Username17]

but it feels like the discussion is pushing it too far.

It is kind of a tangent. If all else fails, you can just ask players to immerse themselves in the role and act like they don't know their powers are real even though they have read the book and know that they are. That is also a solution to the problem. I'd just prefer to have a set of mechanics that encourage that sort of thing.

So it can certainly be shelved for the moment to talk about other things. So if there's an Agency similar to The Organization from Nowhere Man, are they going to have reality manipulators in them and be a literal substitute for The Technocracy? Or should they be something else entirely and be like a bunch of people getting orders from a computer?

-Username17

[Lokathor]

I think it's preferable that such a group:

(1) Have reality manipulators, but manipulators are in the minority, and mostly just taking orders from Squibs higher up. Perhaps the higher ups even fear loss of control over the shapers that they have working for them, like they're playing with fire.
(2) Want to keep the public world from knowing about manipulations more than they want to eliminate any individual manipulator in their path, giving the PCs an occasional "easy out" if their capture/death would cause too much of a stir at the moment. They're a very patient group on the whole.

[Vebyast]

Possible answer to the power uncertainty method discussion: use all of them. Just write up ten or fifteen different ways to make players uncertain of their abilities. "Mana pool and all of your abilities rotate when you run out of mana" is one, "Reality Quakes every n minutes" is another, "anxiety meter" is yet another. Then just assign a new uncertainty method to every character every session. If some of them have really, really bad outcomes if you try to test yourself (say, limited uses per session), then you can't test yourself because there's a chance you'll end up without powers.

Of course, you still have to have a way to prevent people from slowly building up knowledge just by keeping notes during normal play, but that's a much easier problem than keeping players from becoming scientists for ten minutes at the start of every session.

[virgil]

Every agent is not unlike #2 from The Prisoner, an operative that gives the impression of being a reality manipulator. Their purpose is information, which the PCs are in a unique position to know because of their 'awareness'. They're possessive of this information, so they'll do cleanings and cover ups above and beyond what even reality quakes and monsters do.

[angelfromanotherpin]

My thought is that when it comes to the enemies, they should each have observable things they do, setting up an aesthetic and a tone. These should generate some specific unanswered questions. Then you have a section on how to answer those questions and what those answers might mean, and some examples for how those would affect gameplay and explain the observable things. Put in at least three example solutions for each.

Then have those answers change with the reality shifts so that the players are never really sure what's going on with them, and accumulating knowledge on them is of sharply limited utility. Hell, not even being sure if any of these organizations are actually malign at any given point could be a whole thing.

[K]

Yet another idea: Using your powers has a side effect of any demonstratable proof of your powers having been used "going missing" in the near future. If you go to look for the bullets that missed you, you'll be unable to find them or even proove that they existed. No muggles that saw the scene are able to remember the bullets being fired. If you predict a coin toss, muggles don't remember you doing that after the next reality quake.

I'd probably go the other direction and have the bullets really being found. I mean, you have moments like in Pulp Fiction where someone shoots at you basically point blank and misses. It's unlikely, but it does happen. Guns are surprisingly inaccurate when fired by people juiced up on adrenaline.

I mean, you really can have a gunfight and the witnesses won't be able to recognize the people doing it. Read a few psych papers on the what happens to witnesses, and you'll find out that the thing in TV shows where a witness has any idea what the attacker looks like is a damned myth. People will literally ID anyone who even looks vaguely like the attacker.... the brain just fills in the blanks the same way that people fill in words when they read.

[Username17]

Possible answer to the power uncertainty method discussion: use all of them. Just write up ten or fifteen different ways to make players uncertain of their abilities.

That could be done. Do it White Wolf style, where the player gets to choose the group they are in that determines the limits of their powers and knowledge. Like a Planck function, and the player gets to choose whether they know about the location or velocity.

-Username17

[For Valor]

Actually, that's a really cool idea. Lots of work on MC's part, but I'd love for every player to get excited when a reality quake happens, "Shit, did that change my powers? Should I test it? What if it's not, and I'm actually running on a mana pool?"

Would be awesome. We should do this.

[Orion]

Don't we run into an Elennsar problem here? I mean, if you *succeed* at making the players unable to detect or verify their powers, don't you of necessity make their powers not very good. If you succeed at making the players unwilling to blithely risk gunfire, then the PCs must eb at real risk from gunfire. And that means, they will eventually get shot.

[fectin]

Don't we run into an Elennsar problem here? I mean, if you *succeed* at making the players unable to detect or verify their powers, don't you of necessity make their powers not very good. If you succeed at making the players unwilling to blithely risk gunfire, then the PCs must eb at real risk from gunfire. And that means, they will eventually get shot.

Simplest answer is don't use guns very often, which also doubles down on "being shot at is stressful," so you get more mileage out of it when it does happen.
Maybe they're so obvious that reality diverges in unpredictable ways to cover them up, maybe the Board of Shadowy Figures has a hard-on for knives. There doesn't even have to be a reason to not give your NPCs guns; MC can just fiat that shit.
Players are already basically expected to stick to swords, as per the setting description.

[For Valor]

.... or maybe the PCs are aware of their powers, but cannot demonstrate to others above a certain threshold (or every witness's memories are rewritten by the Board of Shadow McShadowShadow... or something). Thusly, everyone will constantly know what they're doing and gameplay will not proceed as with Pink Mowhawks, super cautious team, or people testing their powers.

It is the PCs isolated from the rest of their world, fighting together, with powers that only they know about. Maybe a reality quake happens once a session and people need to readjust the party roles or something... but all this second-guessing your own powers just seems like too much work to be productive.

The PCs should second-guess coincidences and should second-guess themselves, but they should always second-guess as a group.