Using first-price sealed-bids as a resolution mechanic

[Heath Robinson]

Is auctioning the right to determine the outcome of an action between the participants likely to be a good default resolution mechanic for a system? As the title indicates I'm planning on using a sealed first-price auction.

In the case of large numbers of mooks, it may be necessary to indicate that they bid a particular quantity of resources against particular kinds of action to speed up resolution, at the cost of strategy depth.

I don't consider deterministic properties to be negative for the source material I'm trying to emulate.

[Josh_Kablack]

Err, maybe.

How about a clue as to what that source material is, what resources will be used in the bidding, number of players, type of game, and other relevant info so we can maybe give useful advice.

[Heath Robinson]

Source material is... crap, it's embarassing to admit it, but mostly modern Shounen and Seinen action anime.

The bidding resource is not currently fixed. I'm considering using a fully regenerative resource (one that regenerates to the full value between action phases), but I'm not averse to using a resource that regenerates by converting other resources (i.e. mana with the option to expend actions to regen). I'm avoiding the use of resources that don't regen between combats as a bidding resource.

However, the outcome of actions will certainly affect such resources. The HP equivalent in the case of attacks. The magnitude of actions is probably going to be tunable within certain limits.

[Username17]

Taking turns telling stories can work just fine. And having some sort of bidding system where people can take the reigns during critical junctures in exchange for other people getting more face time total is certainly possible.

-Username17

[Anguirus]

Is auctioning the right to determine the outcome of an action between the participants likely to be a good default resolution mechanic for a system? As the title indicates I'm planning on using a sealed first-price auction.

In the case of large numbers of mooks, it may be necessary to indicate that they bid a particular quantity of resources against particular kinds of action to speed up resolution, at the cost of strategy depth.

I don't consider deterministic properties to be negative for the source material I'm trying to emulate.

I think that the Marvel Universe RPG does this for the most part. You have a power pool that refreshes at a fixed rate and then you place those points into actions and at no point are dice rolled. In effect you are bidding your points on weather or not you hit with your attack (or how strongly you hit) with how many points you put into your attack vs how many points they put into defense. The nice thing is that it isn't a binary, you don't just succeed or fail based on how strongly you bid, there are degrees of success.

[Heath Robinson]

After a hot bath I've hashed out a more coherent view of the system.

A fully-refreshing resource called Attention is the bidding resource. A declared action that affects one or more other characters means that a sealed-bid containing the Attention amount and action specific values is made by the source, then each of the affected characters can make their bids of just an Attention amount - the affected characters escape the effects of the action if they bid higher than the actor. All bidders pay their bids no matter the actual winner.

I'm aiming for no limitations on the number of actions a character can make during an action phase, and avoiding any particular action order enforcement. You should be able to pre-empt an action by spending Attention (or perhaps a non-renewable resource), though. I don't want any kind of coupling of the action phase to time passing.


I believe that it sets a cost for offense and defense (which can be varied by abilities like 'martial training') and produces a competing set of incentives for acting first and last - in the case of acting first you hope to sap the target so they can't muster an effective response whilst in the case of acting last you're hitting people who've expended their attention and left themselves helpless.

The expectation of reciprocity and sealed bids creates a guessing game which should curtail alpha striking if multitarget attacks are made significantly more costly than single target attacks.


I am, however, amongst the worst people to evaluate the properties of a system due to perceptual biases. That's the reason I'm throwing off an RFC like this.