Levels of Play

Within the Talinz Project, I wanted to present 3 different ‘Levels of Play’. The idea behind this would be to distribute storytelling around all of the settings within the world that I thought would make cool stories or jumping off points, but to also encourage prospective players and GMs to think outside of the prescribed roles at play. The easiest thing to do would be to present one level of play, with the group working together as World Series Robotics Athletes, for example, but that might not be every group’s bag, and the more I wrote about the world the story takes place in, the more I thought of other stories that could be told. Before or during your character creation session, when moving through the phases of creation, discuss what kind of characters you would all like to play, and what kind of stories you want to explore.

So take the levels of play as inspirations to take wholesale, or as snippets of what is going on in the wider world, to help inform your campaign:

1) The Talinz World Series!

Talinz fighting is big money, and you’re the one reaping all the benefits. Those crates of energy drinks delivered straight to your mansion for that short commercial, that 7 figure paycheck? Monthly? Good times. But there are people that got you where you are. Your pit teams, your sponsors, your fans, your PR guy… Not to mention your robot. Or had you forgotten that when the industrial sponsor offered you a new top-of-the-range frame to promote their new product?

When you go up on screen every Saturday night, millions around the world scream your name. When the spotlights hit your Talinz, covered in adverts from all your sponsors, hundreds of thousands of units shift in response. When you talk to the press, everyone listens. That’s a lot of pressure for a sportsman to be under.  

Talinz has two leagues, solo and team; and both have their own particular fans, loyalists and detractors. Some Talinz pilots move between leagues, but very few compete in both at the same time. Outside of this, promoters are always excited to televise ‘grudge matches’ or additional fights between top standing pilots and their frames, which normally happen on a Wednesday night (and drive pit teams almost universally crazy with the amount of work they then have to do restoring the frame before Saturday).

When creating a group for this level of play, consider whether playing a pilot’s entourage or a group of pilots might be something you enjoy more. When the Talinz Creation step occurs, consider who your promoters might be and what your relationship with them is. Fun themes to explore within this level of play might be greed, loyalty and spin. Discuss whether the game should be more about the Saturday night fight and the soap opera between fighters, or whether you want to explore perhaps more insidious weekday plots, dealing with greedy or pushy corporate sponsors, or public relations nightmares.

   

 2) The Talinz Sunday League

Sunday is a special day. A day reserved for celebrating amateurs; workers and students who can’t get enough of their fix by just watching on a Saturday night. These amateur Sunday leagues can be a great launching point for professional teams, scouts are known to hit local tournaments to check for talent, and quite a few high school national champions have gone on to become major world contenders. Rules tend to be both less and more strict. Due to the budget constraints of the average team, anything operating on a basic Talinz frame tends to be allowed, rather than the sports models that become almost a requirement at higher leagues. It isn’t uncommon for retrofitted industrial frames or even domestic servant Talinz to appear to defend a title. On the other hand, most amateur Talinz arena owners aren’t fond of using the flashier pyrotechnics of the big leagues, owing to clean up and restoration costs, and so explosive weaponry tends to be off the agenda. Some of the more rabid fans of amateur Talinz declare this makes the combat more ‘real’ and ‘visceral’, which is debatable, but what it certainly does do is push most of the monetary constraints onto the teams expected to restore their frame every week.

When creating a group for this level of play, consider whether you want to play a team looking after one Talinz unit, or a team of fighters. Most don’t have a dedicated pit team, but if you have a large enough society, you might do. Think about how your characters get their money for their hobby. Talinz fighting can be expensive, and that can be a great source of drama for the campaign. Are you affiliated to another body, such as a local meeting place, employment, pub or school? What kind of frame was your Talinz unit before you fitted it for the league? Does it revert to that job during the week? Does your team dream of the top? Or do you just love getting your hands dirty every weekend? Are there any professional fighters you idolise? Do you have a group of units, or just one? Do you take turns piloting, or do you have an ace?

3) AI Crime & Prevention units

Where there is money, there comes crime. And Talinz are big money. It’s been ten years since Avogadro Industrial Frames were put out of business for corruption. The Talinz units sent to serve the police had been hardcoded to destroy any evidence incriminating the corporation. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem, if the board of directors weren’t involved in the largest illegal arms dealing ring since the end of the war.

Ten years since the police stopped using Talinz to assist in their work. Should have made it easier, but being forced to rely on remote, shackled AI operators to crack anything that isn’t a criminal and his legal stooge has made things substantially harder. The criminals know it too. They know the limitations and hide their deeds behind ever more advanced technology.

And the Talinz are getting smarter. Just because they don’t count as people by law, it doesn’t mean they haven’t been caught for premeditated murder. Some in the police departments even think they might have feelings. There are rumblings in interrogation rooms of robotic cults. Advocacy groups. Want to be treated as equals, as people. But the regulations say to scrap them if they look defective. So they do. In the thousands.

When creating a group for this level of play, the main restriction might seem to be the lack of Talinz units, but maybe one player might be interested in taking the role of a remote AI support. These AIs are kept in large facilities, programmed by government officials, and require triplicate permission from different humans in order to perform actions. These kind of things can be handwaved for play (with the player perhaps playing one of the officials outside of crime stopping), but could act as a nice inspiration for aspects. If one player really wants to play a Talinz unit, perhaps they are one of the first of a government funded initiative within the force, their programming heavily monitored in order to make sure the Avogadro scandal does not repeat itself. How do the other characters react to that? What kind of blocks and checks might the Talinz have on their operation? How does the Talinz unit feel about that?

Consider how your character feels about Talinz units and AI in general. Are they suspicious? Do they watch the professional fights at the weekend, or has their job jaded them to the sport? If they have family at home, how does their work affect that personal life?

Last, but not least, discuss the kind of crimes you want to explore. This is related to the themes of the campaign. Discuss those too. Is corporate and industrial intrigue more your thing? Maybe organised criminals are getting their hands on some advanced weaponry or Talinz frames? Maybe you might be assigned to Talinz-related crimes, or investigating the growing liberation movement?

NEXT TIME
Next on the Talinz Project I want to look at exactly what a Talinz unit is, as well as a bit of the history behind them. It will also include the first bit of actual crunch in the project, the Talinz Creation Step.

Theory and Design: Dice Averages

So here is the first post for the other half of the Talinz project. These will cover some nitty gritty mechanical details of things, and some game design hints and tips as I learn them and want to share them. This post is all about dice averages and dice systems.

If you are looking to hack an existing system, or considering writing an RPG or board game from scratch that will use dice, considering the dice system is a key element of this process. The system can evoke a feel of power from the players, and your thresholds will help emulate or detract from the genre you system attempts to interpret.

Below, I will present the three of the most important systems in RPGs (the 2d6, the dice pool and the roll and keep/diminishing returns) in graphical format and proceed to discuss how design around them works.

But why not the d20 system?
This is something I considered myself when writing the blog post. Its arguably the most ubiquitous of the dice systems. It is also, however, very mathematically easy when it comes to the die maths. Imbalance in d20 systems largely creeps in through static modifiers, rather than dice mechanics being poorly designed, which I might talk about later.

The 2d6
It's simple, nice, clean. The dice system you can take home to your mother (Although she mightn't want to know all about last night's Apocalypse World or MonsterHearts session). The 2d6, or indeed any 2dx system runs off a very nice gaussian distribution.

Now, many years ago, this child prodigy called Gauss lived a frantic life packed with Maths and physics. He proved Euclid wrong, scared the life out of the men of his day in doing so, and promptly found the normal distribution to provoke them further.

Below is a graph of one. It shows chances of rolling any particular number on 2d6:
 

And this graph shows the chances of rolling this number or higher on 2d6:

As you approach the central number here, you see, you also approach the point of the balancing roll, and the point of most commonly occuring roll. On 2d6 in particular, it is a 7. On 2d10, it is an 11. If you take the maximum number of one of the dice and add 1, you have the rolling average. Design around it. The Apocalypse World system is the most obvious example of this. Players without a bonus will hit that 7+ 50% of the time. Players with positive stats will hit it substantially more often. This facilitates the 'being awesome, having consequences, +3 is amazing' low power curve of AW really really well, and helps emulate the Post-Apocalyptic genre themes, in which people who aren't much better are still well outside a statistical standard norm.

The dicepool
The dicepool works, for the most part, by rewarding players with additional dice for skills or traits, and you'll find it in stuff like White Wolf games, but it is pretty common elsewhere (Indeed, Ubiquity is a dicepool system, rather ironically.) The rewards of investment in the dicepool system are linear, which is why many of them try for a heirarchy to build the pool (Generally of a broad trait and a more specific skill that is linked to this trait). This linear can make it pretty easy to design around, but also has the potential to make the game pretty swingy. Dicepools, for the most part, work in two ways: Success/failure based (White Wolf, Fudge) or numerical (Over the Edge), and knowing how their graphs work can really help design for them. Below, the graph assumes you are using a 50% chance of dice succeeding, 50% chance of failure, in which the dice does nothing. The graph could be easily modified for numerical systems, or for systems with a greater/lesser chance of success or failure. It would just change the x and y axis, the curve remains the same.



Roll and keep
This variant on the dicepool system has fascinated me for a long time. Roll and Keep is a mechanic utilised most famously by the Legend of Five Rings RPG, and produces very odd curves. A number of dice are rolled, and then the highest dice, or the highest and lowest, or the two lowest, depending on the system, are 'kept', meaning that these are often totalled and compared against a target number. It rewards investment less the more investment is introduced, as you will see below. This means that designing a game using the system hits a hurdle.
Do you reward player specialisation by other additional bonuses(Such as L5R's additional abilities for high levels of skill, and a higher chance of 'exploding' dice, the ability to effectively add an extra kept dice for every ten you roll that you can keep) for having more rolled dice than kept? Or do you reward player diversification by keeping the curve the same?
If you choose to do both things in the same game, it can be very difficult to make all players in a party feel worthwhile and competent. (If, for example, one player is good at 5 things, they may rarely get the chance to shine if the party also contains four individuals who are great at 1 thing). Also worth noting on the graph, though it may seem obvious, is that of course having more kept dice than you roll is statistically useless.
This graph assumes you are using roll and keep with a simple ten sided die, with no chance of explosions. The curve is the same no matter the die size, but the target numbers on the y axis will be affected. The introduction of exploding dice would cause the curve to trend slightly more towards a linear function, like the dicepool.










Granularity
The other important thing to consider when thinking about dice systems and dice averages is a system's granularity. The dice size changes the 'steps' between numbers. For example, the difference between 5 and 6 on a 2d6 system(2.78%) is very different from the difference between 5 and 6 on a 2d10 system(0.01%), despite the overall curve of the plot being the same. In that case, this is a question of how you want those playing your games to set thresholds for success, and how that is important in your game. A percentile system like, say, Dark Heresy, expects players to succeed roughly around a third of the time at its lowest level of power, and this is reflected simply in the system. Balancing around a dice mechanic that isn't percentile based is harder, but consider 'how much do I want players to succeed against appropriate problems' and the answer will start to show itself using the graphical curves. Plot and plan your design around the curve.

But surely I want to roll 7 or more, or 15 or more, or 5 successes or more?
Well, yes. But the graphs above show average rolls. You really want to be balancing around average rolls, and anything higher doesn't really matter. Systems like apocalypse world, again, balance around a +3 modifier for a person who is very good at their stat. And where do the critical successes come in? 10. 10 is 7+3. Any more is really just gravy and kudos.

So after boring you with graphs and probabilities for a while, next time I'll be doing some nice fluffy setting work! YAY! Hope you all stay tuned~

THE TALINZ PROJECT: A PITCH AND A HALF

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS!

Do we have a bout of ages for you tonight! In the red corner, the boy from the block, the youngster with a monster, Park Min-jun! With his partner Sanshin, weighing in at 76 kg tonight with his new frame, boy does he look fitted for a scrap! I think we should all take a moment to thank Kulgarv Heavy Industries for this prototype chassis and Callinov Solar Energy for their sponsorship. Buy Callinov, the most efficient panels this side of the Pacific oce…”

Talinz robots are money. Big money. Domestics, industrials, it seems the only place you can go these days and not see a robot is what they were designed for; the military was forced to scrap them years ago, after the war. And in the wake we had all these chassis lying around and nothing to do with them. So we turned our sorrow into sport.

Talinz fighting got popular quickly. The war had left a lot of experienced handlers out of work and they got an easy way to make something from the skills they picked up in the military. Five generations down the line and, while the heavy industry corps that make the Talinz technically make more money from newer servant and manufacturing models, everyone knows that the real key is in advertising. Soft drinks, make up, banks, airlines are all clamouring for that extra exposure. Get plastered on the Talinz of a World Series team and that is up to 3 hours exposure a week to up to 65 million folks worldwide. Most brands would kill for that kind of identity. Some of them have.

Cops are getting overtasked these days, having to deal with that kind of crime. The problem with banning robotic warfare is that criminals don't have to follow the rules. Meanwhile, as the Talinz make more and more money, companies are crying "industrial espionage" the minute they see a chip or part that looks even a little similar to something they have in R&D. Police departments are still stubbornly refusing to recruit any AI assistance beyond remote assistance 'bots, and the men on the street are suffering because of it. Where does a human cop stand when they are put up against rogue Talinz and corps that have their hand in the Government's wallet?

And the Talinz themselves? Bought and sold in the hundreds. The most advanced AI the planet has ever known, complete with personality modules and the potential for ‘real people emulation’. Every home just has to have one. 

But a housewife’s dream is slowly becoming a working man’s nightmare. Cheaper production costs driving down the prices of industrial models have made Talinz an alternate workforce without the need for a wage. Unemployment levels are skyrocketing. Some have motioned for equal rights for these robots, claiming that their artificial intelligence is just as real as any man’s, whether it came from chip or womb, but they are being drowned out in the din of those calling for their restriction or even destruction.

The Talinz have been decommissioned from military service, but maybe their real war is only just beginning…

What is The Talinz Project and why should I care?

So, time for a first blog post. Been planning this for a while, but only now, it seems, have I got round to finally putting my thoughts into action.

In short: the purpose of The Talinz Project is twofold. My goal is to post at least once a week on one of the following topics:

1) to track my thoughts and musings on game design, whilst I come in to learning all sorts of fancy new things about how to do it properly and share them with all of you.
2) to regularly release and potentially track and record the goings on in the world of the TALINZ PROJECT.

But James, I hear you cry, this Talinz Project is your blog, right? SO a blog that tracks the blog seems like recursion!

True enough, but the TALINZ PROJECT is one more thing. A high-action, high-investigation sports cop mecha RPG setting for Fate and Fate Accelerated Edition. Each TALINZ PROJECT post I hope will include a bit more lore about the world, a few more characters (Complete with appropriate stat blocks) and a bit more of the ongoing struggles facing the people of that world. In addition, since I will be constantly nursing this via this blog, I want people running campaigns to get in touch with me, tell them their session rundowns, and make the world move with the players, and around other campaigns.

The TALINZ PROJECT is a pretty ambitious endeavour, but I am hoping it will turn out alright. Expect 2 more posts shortly, one a brief overview of the setting, and one on Dice averages, to give an idea of the stuff I am planning to post later on in this blog's cycle!