[Hellball] How I got here, where I'm going
Here's a little insight on how I design a game. What follows is, more or less, me brainstorming and designing aloud. If it seems to skip around incoherently at times, it's because I thinking as fast as I can write. At points, I discard ideas as quickly as I invent them.
I start with a concept. In this case, I had the constraint of "focus on athletic competition" and some brainstorming led me to a football game. I researched Mayan blood sport (called by a variety of names including tlachtli, pok-a-tok, and chichén-itzá) and decided that rules more resembling rugby or American-style football would be more exciting than a game like soccer. I remembered a terrible but fun movie, The Blood of Heroes, starring Rutger Hauer. They play a sort of combat football with a few members on each side and very few rules. I briefly considered letting the athletes bring weapons onto the field with them, like in The Blood of Heroes but I want it to be more athletic than combative, to properly focus the game for the Iron Chef ingredients.
Add in another ingredient: character death is not possible. The easiest way to make that happen was to make the characters play their game where they could not die or were already dead. Hell. Hellball. There's the concept for the game. From that, I started toying with the idea of sin and virtue. I stumbled upon the idea that being monstrous in Hell makes one a better hellball player but makes one a lousy person back on earth. A twist and a nudge, and I have my game's premise.
So that's where I am now. Where do I take it?
Well, I need to amp up the Athletic thing. Just having PCs play hellball doesn't make the game focused on athletic conflict. I need mechanical support for that. I need the actual hellball game part of the RPG to be fun and more than just a nod. I'm thinking a tactical wargame on a grid with miniatures. I'm thinking lots of dice rolling and moving and tackling and blocking and passing and catching. I'm thinking that the PCs need traits or abilities that go directly to athleticism. Lots of them!
I'm reading the Intentions in Task-Based Resolution thread on Story Games. Some thread of a thought there has wrapped itself around some of my own thoughts I had while writing the first bits of Twenty. I want this game to use task resolution with lots of small rolls that add up to a scene resolved. I want this game to support players who want immersion. I want to avoid too much meta-talk about what players want and try to get at what they want without them having to say it aloud or even think about it too hard. I think Twenty can do that, with a little tuning.
I'm going to need a lot of traits. You know, lists of skills a la old school games. Excellent. Skill lists make me happy; it's like going shopping with free money. I remember my discussion with Kate about immersion and acting and how she said that method actors use verbs instead of nouns. My skills will be verbs to let the player know that it's something they use to do something. PCs need athletic skills for playing hellball: run, throw, catch, tackle, block, kick, jump. Maybe some martial arts additions: kick (hey, already on the list!), punch, choke, hold, trip. There's ten just for playing hellball -- fantastic! Now for the stuff back on earth, PCs need social skills: bargain, lie, coerce, seduce, boast, beg. I realize those all have negative connotations; is that good or bad? What does it mean for the moral cosmology of Earth vs. Hell? What if they were replaced with, or supplemented with: compromise, avow, convince, befriend, comfort, accept, sacrifice? That's around 20 skills.
Probably want some core attributes, also old school. Core attributes give a game a foundation to build upon. I'm thinking some physical attributes for the athletics and some emotional attributes for back on earth. Then I start doing the body-part thing with traits and forget the emotional stuff. Here's a brainstormed list:
In the meantime, I start thinking about the character sheet. I don't get far before I'm distracted with the idea of putting a blank football helmet and jersey on the top so that players can draw their logo and numbers on them. Cool! Okay, back to design. Focus, Adam. ;)
I need to tie those trait things back into the reward system though. First of all, character generation. It should not only help a player make a character but also reinforce the theme of the game. The list of body parts for core traits start to seem less useful. I should go with Body and Soul and make a player distribute some number of points between them with some minimum Body score (they are pro football players, after all). Fine, I'll do that. The character sheet forms a little more in my head. Body on the left, Soul on the right. Football jersey under Body and helmet under Soul. Line dividing the page in two. List of skills divided into body and soul columns. Room for freeform traits below that. I like freeform traits as much as I like skill lists. I toy with the idea of writing scores inside the jersey and helmet, but the numbers would be different and it wouldn't look like an athlete's "number" any more; I scrap the idea.
There's a moment where I realize that I've reinvented Sorcerer. I suspect every game designer has this moment of doubt and frustration where he realizes that his game design would be more eloquent as a supplement for Sorcerer or Dogs in the Vineyard or FATE. I have that doubt every time. I just try to muddle past it and find the core that makes my game unique. I also realize that I can mine those other games for awesome ideas, understand them better now from a designers' point of view, and use them to build better games.
Okay, I need to think about the reward system again. Essentially, at the highest level, players choose someone to lose, then go into a cycle of hellball games to earn points to get them back. Between games, they heal and try to deal with real life. At the end of the season, they spend points to get loved ones back. I think it's important for the players to invest (mentally) in getting back whomever. By that, I mean that I want the players to care about the plight of the person who will lose their soul if they don't play hellball very well. I immediately see that as a major design problem. If the players each have their own loved-one to rescue, it's hard to craft a "point system" that keeps them in suspense to the end of the season while requiring the athletes to play as a team. If the players share a single loved-one to rescue, such as their coach or adopted grandma figure, the players might not care that much.
I could change the goal of the game to "beat the Devil at his own game." If the athletes win the season, the Devil is humiliated and he has to stop fucking around with people on earth for 666 years. If the Devil wins, he gets to wreck the earth. That's grabby! Play hellball! Save the world! What if there's a Humilation system where players can take extra risks doing crazy stunts in their games and, if they're successful, they earn Humiliation points against the Devil. When the Devil wins, he gets Apocalypse points to destroy the world. Every time the players lose a game, something really bad happens in the world: a tsunami or earthquake, a terrorist attack, a war, an assassination, and so on. Think the players will care now? I do! Okay, what if Coach made the deal with the Devil, and his soul is also at stake. Cool. Best of both worlds.
I stop to wonder, should Coach be a player character? What would such a role entail? The coach is an important part of any football movie. I wonder if there can be some kind of anti-GM role for the players, and he plays the Coach, and the Coach organizes them and gets to use his soul skills in Hell when the other players can't. He's the anchor that keeps the athletes from totally becoming monsters. I'm also worried about the number of characters being too small to be a decent athletic team. On the other hand, a larger team means slower resolution of hellball games with miniatures. What if there's The Devil (GM), the Coach (a player), and Athletes (run by players). The players of The Devil and the Coach don't get to play Athletes. Other players can play one or two Athletes. Playing multiple characters is fun but shouldn't be required. It can ruin immersion. The GM will have to handle a bunch of hellball opponent characters during games; I'll need to simplify their creation and operation.
Back to reward system, which is the "beam" that connects and holds up all of the game (social contract + exploration of system, setting, character, situation, and color + techniques and mechanics). Notice that I have only barely considered dice mechanics at this point. They're important but they're subservient to the larger game design issues, especially the reward system). Oh, and by "reward system," I mean, what makes the game enjoyable for the players. I don't specifically mean experience points or character advancement (though the game may have those). I mean, what the players get out of playing. In Hellball, I'm pushing the "can you be a monster in hell without becoming a monster on earth?" premise thing pretty hard. I should make sure that serves as a "beam" all the way through the rules.
Okay, so character creation should let the player express whether his character is a sinner or a saint at the start. I think distributing a number of points between Body and Soul captures this well. Furthermore, purchasing different skills (kick and choke and block instead of befriend and sacrifice) also says what the player cares most about.
The setting pretty much does everything it's supposed to. I need to add some details. Earth is set in a big city; let's pick one without a pro football team so I don't get sued by the NFL for using their trademarks. I'll invent a new team. I google "largest US cities" and scan the list for a big one without a team. San Antonio, despite being the 7th largest city in the U.S., doesn't have a team, but I can't come up with a locally-appropriate team name that doesn't suggest crushing defeat (the "Alamos"?). Waitaminute. Los Angeles doesn't have an NFL team. The City of Angels. Perfect. Need a good team name for them... The Angels is already a baseball team, so no good. Let's see. The LA Seraphim. The LA Archangels. The LA Host. The LA Dominions. That one has a nice ring to it, though I like "Host," too. Let's go with Dominions because that sounds tough and mean, even if their function in the hierarchy of angels is pretty dull. Okay, so the athletes are the star players of the Dominions for the City of Angels, and their team is the leader of their particular (unnamed) pro football league. They are considered the best team ever to have played the game. The Devil has challenged the team to a season of hellball and he's explained that if they lose games or don't show up, he's gonna destroy the earth. He's also got dibs on Coach's soul; Coach did some really bad things and he's not repentant. If they win the season, they save Coach from eternal damnation, too. Their earthly life is all fun (it's between seasons). They have advertising deals, get free SUVs, have all the sex they could hope for. They are living la dolce vita. Except it starts to go sour as The Devil starts interfering with their happy lives. Old girlfriends show up to ruin marriages. Jealous family members start publishing embarrassing exposés. Everything starts going to... well, hell. Hell itself is pretty much awful. The players really only ever see the "nice parts," meaning the hellball field and the locker room there. Their opponents are twisted and mangled humans of great size and strength with "modifications" like razors sticking out of their skulls or bone hooks on their elbows. It's all very painful for them but it makes them demonic competition.
Situation comes from two places. In Hell, it's obvious: play a game of hellball and try to win. Back on earth, it's created by The Devil (GM) messing with the lives of the athletes. The GM will try to separate athletes from the team with phone calls, personal visits from bookies, and so on. The GM gets to be the voice of temptation and the sower of discontent. Here, take these steroids; they'll make you meaner on the field (and also make you meaner and enraged when you try to deal with your girlfriend).
Players can explore the game system a bit by tweaking their scores up and down throughout play and seeing if that makes them more effective. There's an element of the game that feels "gamist" but probably isn't, since winning isn't necessarily the goal for everyone.
Color is all the stuff about Hell and all the monstrous transformations the players can describe for their characters during hellball. It's also the freeform traits they use to describe things their characters can do that aren't covered by the skills and Body/Soul traits.
Now down to techniques and mechanics. A lot of the stuff above is a set of techniques for creating characters or exploring some aspect of the game. But I haven't described a way to resolve conflict. I personally believe that conflict resolution systems are not for helping resolve disagreements between players ("Bang! You're dead!" "No I'm not!" "Let's roll!") but rather systems for intensifying the game when players agree that using the system makes play more awesome. That is, it works best when everyone agrees that the outcome should be settled by the system rather than by talkful negotiation. "Roll the dice or say yes" is one expression of this.
I have an ingredient I need to work in: "Resolution requires a single die size (Ex: 'Only d4', or 'Only d12', etc)." So I reach for my handy mental toolbox. The dice mechanic in Verge uses all d6es and does cool stuff with them, but I don't want to lose "Swing Vote" points (Style, Coolness, Innovation) for reusing some old thing I've had around for years. I've been toying with a new mechanic for Twenty though and it is promising. Basically, traits bring in a number of d20's and you take the highest. Because Nd20 converges on an average score of about 18 very quickly (a handful of dice), it is necessary to tweak the mechanic to allow the other side to toss your highest dice away. This drops the average result dramatically and makes the game exciting again. The cost for slamming your opponent's dice pool this way? You take on a temporary negative trait with that die score and the opponent can trigger it later.
So, imagine this. Task resolution -- that is, you're not declaring your higher goals before rolling at all -- getting dice that go into a pool. At any time, you can take dice out of that pool and use them to achieve some kind of victory over The Devil, who can counter it with his own dice pool, which he shares across players (ooh, fun twist). The dice in that pool are like charge in a battery. You charge it up and use it to win stuff. And at any time, you can take some kind of negative trait to remove dice from The Devil's pool.
Example: You're playing hellball. On your turn, you say you want to run down the field. You roll your Body 3d20 + Run 2d20 and get 3 7 10 11 18. You put the highest (18) into your pool. The Devil gets to respond. There's a potential blocker there; the demon rolls Body 4d20 + Block 2d20 and gets 1 6 7 13 14 19 and puts the 19 in his pool. Repeat for the other players. The Devil's pool gets bigger and bigger every time a player goes. Let's say the highest player pool is yours at 18. It's not enough to declare victory yet, so you can't "win" the field goal. (Hrm, there's an implicit goal here!) In fact, The Devil can use the 19 to win the field goal for his side. You decide to get rid of that 19. The Devil gets to write a negative trait on your sheet but you choose which column (Body or Soul) he writes it in. You say Soul. He tells you to write "lecherous 19" under your Soul. That's the 19 from the die, which gets tossed from The Devil's pool. Let's say his next highest is a 17. Your 18 beats it. You get to narrate how your character catches the ball and runs the ball for victory!
Example 2: After the game (which you won!), you're back on earth, having a drink with your friends at a bar. The Devil (GM) describes this beautiful woman who is flirting with you and trying to get you to go home with her. If you do that, your wife will probably find out and all hell will break loose. The Devil activates your "lecherous 19" trait. You cross it off and hand the GM a d20 which he puts in his pool with the 19 showing. You need to roll now to avoid temptation. You roll Soul 1d20 + Faithfulness 2d20 + Marriage 3d20 and get 3 6 10 10 17 20. You put the 20 in your pool and use it for a victory. "I appreciate your offer, but no thanks. I'm married," you tell her, and show her your wedding band. Disaster narrowly averted.
Okay, to consider: So is it cool to have the negative trait have nothing to do with the situation that created it? Is it too costly to give The Devil a high die like that for evil uses later? Maybe the player needs the option to eliminate the highest die but take the second highest die from a roll before the die goes into the pool (i.e, The Devil rolls 1 6 7 13 14 19 and immediately you say you'll eliminate the 19; you take a negative trait at 14 instead). Then again, what if you can use the trait yourself before The Devil gets to it? That is, you go do something lecherous and use the 19 in your own pool and you get to reroll the trait and replace it with the roll if you like. So you decide all on your own that you're gonna find a girl and pick her up -- your marriage be damned -- and seduce your teammate's sister. You use the 19 and seduce her, then roll d20 and get 14. You replace the 19 with the 14. And The Devil can still trigger that trait at 14 later, too.
So that's where Hellball is headed. I need to get this stuff written up as actual rules this week. Deadline is Thursday and it's a busy week. I have Java to study; I have an election night party to attend; I have to spend some time with Steph before heading off to MACE for the weekend.
I start with a concept. In this case, I had the constraint of "focus on athletic competition" and some brainstorming led me to a football game. I researched Mayan blood sport (called by a variety of names including tlachtli, pok-a-tok, and chichén-itzá) and decided that rules more resembling rugby or American-style football would be more exciting than a game like soccer. I remembered a terrible but fun movie, The Blood of Heroes, starring Rutger Hauer. They play a sort of combat football with a few members on each side and very few rules. I briefly considered letting the athletes bring weapons onto the field with them, like in The Blood of Heroes but I want it to be more athletic than combative, to properly focus the game for the Iron Chef ingredients.
Add in another ingredient: character death is not possible. The easiest way to make that happen was to make the characters play their game where they could not die or were already dead. Hell. Hellball. There's the concept for the game. From that, I started toying with the idea of sin and virtue. I stumbled upon the idea that being monstrous in Hell makes one a better hellball player but makes one a lousy person back on earth. A twist and a nudge, and I have my game's premise.
So that's where I am now. Where do I take it?
Well, I need to amp up the Athletic thing. Just having PCs play hellball doesn't make the game focused on athletic conflict. I need mechanical support for that. I need the actual hellball game part of the RPG to be fun and more than just a nod. I'm thinking a tactical wargame on a grid with miniatures. I'm thinking lots of dice rolling and moving and tackling and blocking and passing and catching. I'm thinking that the PCs need traits or abilities that go directly to athleticism. Lots of them!
I'm reading the Intentions in Task-Based Resolution thread on Story Games. Some thread of a thought there has wrapped itself around some of my own thoughts I had while writing the first bits of Twenty. I want this game to use task resolution with lots of small rolls that add up to a scene resolved. I want this game to support players who want immersion. I want to avoid too much meta-talk about what players want and try to get at what they want without them having to say it aloud or even think about it too hard. I think Twenty can do that, with a little tuning.
I'm going to need a lot of traits. You know, lists of skills a la old school games. Excellent. Skill lists make me happy; it's like going shopping with free money. I remember my discussion with Kate about immersion and acting and how she said that method actors use verbs instead of nouns. My skills will be verbs to let the player know that it's something they use to do something. PCs need athletic skills for playing hellball: run, throw, catch, tackle, block, kick, jump. Maybe some martial arts additions: kick (hey, already on the list!), punch, choke, hold, trip. There's ten just for playing hellball -- fantastic! Now for the stuff back on earth, PCs need social skills: bargain, lie, coerce, seduce, boast, beg. I realize those all have negative connotations; is that good or bad? What does it mean for the moral cosmology of Earth vs. Hell? What if they were replaced with, or supplemented with: compromise, avow, convince, befriend, comfort, accept, sacrifice? That's around 20 skills.
Probably want some core attributes, also old school. Core attributes give a game a foundation to build upon. I'm thinking some physical attributes for the athletics and some emotional attributes for back on earth. Then I start doing the body-part thing with traits and forget the emotional stuff. Here's a brainstormed list:
- Hands: manual dexterity, fine-motor stuff, catching the ball
- Arm: large-motor stuff, throwing the ball, punching
- Legs: running, jumping, kicking
- Back: physical power and size, tackling, blocking
- Face: looks, charisma
- Head: brains, cleverness, memory
- Eyes: perception, paying attention to the world
- Ears: listening to people, communication
- Heart: ability to reach out to people, to love, to befriend
In the meantime, I start thinking about the character sheet. I don't get far before I'm distracted with the idea of putting a blank football helmet and jersey on the top so that players can draw their logo and numbers on them. Cool! Okay, back to design. Focus, Adam. ;)
I need to tie those trait things back into the reward system though. First of all, character generation. It should not only help a player make a character but also reinforce the theme of the game. The list of body parts for core traits start to seem less useful. I should go with Body and Soul and make a player distribute some number of points between them with some minimum Body score (they are pro football players, after all). Fine, I'll do that. The character sheet forms a little more in my head. Body on the left, Soul on the right. Football jersey under Body and helmet under Soul. Line dividing the page in two. List of skills divided into body and soul columns. Room for freeform traits below that. I like freeform traits as much as I like skill lists. I toy with the idea of writing scores inside the jersey and helmet, but the numbers would be different and it wouldn't look like an athlete's "number" any more; I scrap the idea.
There's a moment where I realize that I've reinvented Sorcerer. I suspect every game designer has this moment of doubt and frustration where he realizes that his game design would be more eloquent as a supplement for Sorcerer or Dogs in the Vineyard or FATE. I have that doubt every time. I just try to muddle past it and find the core that makes my game unique. I also realize that I can mine those other games for awesome ideas, understand them better now from a designers' point of view, and use them to build better games.
Okay, I need to think about the reward system again. Essentially, at the highest level, players choose someone to lose, then go into a cycle of hellball games to earn points to get them back. Between games, they heal and try to deal with real life. At the end of the season, they spend points to get loved ones back. I think it's important for the players to invest (mentally) in getting back whomever. By that, I mean that I want the players to care about the plight of the person who will lose their soul if they don't play hellball very well. I immediately see that as a major design problem. If the players each have their own loved-one to rescue, it's hard to craft a "point system" that keeps them in suspense to the end of the season while requiring the athletes to play as a team. If the players share a single loved-one to rescue, such as their coach or adopted grandma figure, the players might not care that much.
I could change the goal of the game to "beat the Devil at his own game." If the athletes win the season, the Devil is humiliated and he has to stop fucking around with people on earth for 666 years. If the Devil wins, he gets to wreck the earth. That's grabby! Play hellball! Save the world! What if there's a Humilation system where players can take extra risks doing crazy stunts in their games and, if they're successful, they earn Humiliation points against the Devil. When the Devil wins, he gets Apocalypse points to destroy the world. Every time the players lose a game, something really bad happens in the world: a tsunami or earthquake, a terrorist attack, a war, an assassination, and so on. Think the players will care now? I do! Okay, what if Coach made the deal with the Devil, and his soul is also at stake. Cool. Best of both worlds.
I stop to wonder, should Coach be a player character? What would such a role entail? The coach is an important part of any football movie. I wonder if there can be some kind of anti-GM role for the players, and he plays the Coach, and the Coach organizes them and gets to use his soul skills in Hell when the other players can't. He's the anchor that keeps the athletes from totally becoming monsters. I'm also worried about the number of characters being too small to be a decent athletic team. On the other hand, a larger team means slower resolution of hellball games with miniatures. What if there's The Devil (GM), the Coach (a player), and Athletes (run by players). The players of The Devil and the Coach don't get to play Athletes. Other players can play one or two Athletes. Playing multiple characters is fun but shouldn't be required. It can ruin immersion. The GM will have to handle a bunch of hellball opponent characters during games; I'll need to simplify their creation and operation.
Back to reward system, which is the "beam" that connects and holds up all of the game (social contract + exploration of system, setting, character, situation, and color + techniques and mechanics). Notice that I have only barely considered dice mechanics at this point. They're important but they're subservient to the larger game design issues, especially the reward system). Oh, and by "reward system," I mean, what makes the game enjoyable for the players. I don't specifically mean experience points or character advancement (though the game may have those). I mean, what the players get out of playing. In Hellball, I'm pushing the "can you be a monster in hell without becoming a monster on earth?" premise thing pretty hard. I should make sure that serves as a "beam" all the way through the rules.
Okay, so character creation should let the player express whether his character is a sinner or a saint at the start. I think distributing a number of points between Body and Soul captures this well. Furthermore, purchasing different skills (kick and choke and block instead of befriend and sacrifice) also says what the player cares most about.
The setting pretty much does everything it's supposed to. I need to add some details. Earth is set in a big city; let's pick one without a pro football team so I don't get sued by the NFL for using their trademarks. I'll invent a new team. I google "largest US cities" and scan the list for a big one without a team. San Antonio, despite being the 7th largest city in the U.S., doesn't have a team, but I can't come up with a locally-appropriate team name that doesn't suggest crushing defeat (the "Alamos"?). Waitaminute. Los Angeles doesn't have an NFL team. The City of Angels. Perfect. Need a good team name for them... The Angels is already a baseball team, so no good. Let's see. The LA Seraphim. The LA Archangels. The LA Host. The LA Dominions. That one has a nice ring to it, though I like "Host," too. Let's go with Dominions because that sounds tough and mean, even if their function in the hierarchy of angels is pretty dull. Okay, so the athletes are the star players of the Dominions for the City of Angels, and their team is the leader of their particular (unnamed) pro football league. They are considered the best team ever to have played the game. The Devil has challenged the team to a season of hellball and he's explained that if they lose games or don't show up, he's gonna destroy the earth. He's also got dibs on Coach's soul; Coach did some really bad things and he's not repentant. If they win the season, they save Coach from eternal damnation, too. Their earthly life is all fun (it's between seasons). They have advertising deals, get free SUVs, have all the sex they could hope for. They are living la dolce vita. Except it starts to go sour as The Devil starts interfering with their happy lives. Old girlfriends show up to ruin marriages. Jealous family members start publishing embarrassing exposés. Everything starts going to... well, hell. Hell itself is pretty much awful. The players really only ever see the "nice parts," meaning the hellball field and the locker room there. Their opponents are twisted and mangled humans of great size and strength with "modifications" like razors sticking out of their skulls or bone hooks on their elbows. It's all very painful for them but it makes them demonic competition.
Situation comes from two places. In Hell, it's obvious: play a game of hellball and try to win. Back on earth, it's created by The Devil (GM) messing with the lives of the athletes. The GM will try to separate athletes from the team with phone calls, personal visits from bookies, and so on. The GM gets to be the voice of temptation and the sower of discontent. Here, take these steroids; they'll make you meaner on the field (and also make you meaner and enraged when you try to deal with your girlfriend).
Players can explore the game system a bit by tweaking their scores up and down throughout play and seeing if that makes them more effective. There's an element of the game that feels "gamist" but probably isn't, since winning isn't necessarily the goal for everyone.
Color is all the stuff about Hell and all the monstrous transformations the players can describe for their characters during hellball. It's also the freeform traits they use to describe things their characters can do that aren't covered by the skills and Body/Soul traits.
Now down to techniques and mechanics. A lot of the stuff above is a set of techniques for creating characters or exploring some aspect of the game. But I haven't described a way to resolve conflict. I personally believe that conflict resolution systems are not for helping resolve disagreements between players ("Bang! You're dead!" "No I'm not!" "Let's roll!") but rather systems for intensifying the game when players agree that using the system makes play more awesome. That is, it works best when everyone agrees that the outcome should be settled by the system rather than by talkful negotiation. "Roll the dice or say yes" is one expression of this.
I have an ingredient I need to work in: "Resolution requires a single die size (Ex: 'Only d4', or 'Only d12', etc)." So I reach for my handy mental toolbox. The dice mechanic in Verge uses all d6es and does cool stuff with them, but I don't want to lose "Swing Vote" points (Style, Coolness, Innovation) for reusing some old thing I've had around for years. I've been toying with a new mechanic for Twenty though and it is promising. Basically, traits bring in a number of d20's and you take the highest. Because Nd20 converges on an average score of about 18 very quickly (a handful of dice), it is necessary to tweak the mechanic to allow the other side to toss your highest dice away. This drops the average result dramatically and makes the game exciting again. The cost for slamming your opponent's dice pool this way? You take on a temporary negative trait with that die score and the opponent can trigger it later.
So, imagine this. Task resolution -- that is, you're not declaring your higher goals before rolling at all -- getting dice that go into a pool. At any time, you can take dice out of that pool and use them to achieve some kind of victory over The Devil, who can counter it with his own dice pool, which he shares across players (ooh, fun twist). The dice in that pool are like charge in a battery. You charge it up and use it to win stuff. And at any time, you can take some kind of negative trait to remove dice from The Devil's pool.
Example: You're playing hellball. On your turn, you say you want to run down the field. You roll your Body 3d20 + Run 2d20 and get 3 7 10 11 18. You put the highest (18) into your pool. The Devil gets to respond. There's a potential blocker there; the demon rolls Body 4d20 + Block 2d20 and gets 1 6 7 13 14 19 and puts the 19 in his pool. Repeat for the other players. The Devil's pool gets bigger and bigger every time a player goes. Let's say the highest player pool is yours at 18. It's not enough to declare victory yet, so you can't "win" the field goal. (Hrm, there's an implicit goal here!) In fact, The Devil can use the 19 to win the field goal for his side. You decide to get rid of that 19. The Devil gets to write a negative trait on your sheet but you choose which column (Body or Soul) he writes it in. You say Soul. He tells you to write "lecherous 19" under your Soul. That's the 19 from the die, which gets tossed from The Devil's pool. Let's say his next highest is a 17. Your 18 beats it. You get to narrate how your character catches the ball and runs the ball for victory!
Example 2: After the game (which you won!), you're back on earth, having a drink with your friends at a bar. The Devil (GM) describes this beautiful woman who is flirting with you and trying to get you to go home with her. If you do that, your wife will probably find out and all hell will break loose. The Devil activates your "lecherous 19" trait. You cross it off and hand the GM a d20 which he puts in his pool with the 19 showing. You need to roll now to avoid temptation. You roll Soul 1d20 + Faithfulness 2d20 + Marriage 3d20 and get 3 6 10 10 17 20. You put the 20 in your pool and use it for a victory. "I appreciate your offer, but no thanks. I'm married," you tell her, and show her your wedding band. Disaster narrowly averted.
Okay, to consider: So is it cool to have the negative trait have nothing to do with the situation that created it? Is it too costly to give The Devil a high die like that for evil uses later? Maybe the player needs the option to eliminate the highest die but take the second highest die from a roll before the die goes into the pool (i.e, The Devil rolls 1 6 7 13 14 19 and immediately you say you'll eliminate the 19; you take a negative trait at 14 instead). Then again, what if you can use the trait yourself before The Devil gets to it? That is, you go do something lecherous and use the 19 in your own pool and you get to reroll the trait and replace it with the roll if you like. So you decide all on your own that you're gonna find a girl and pick her up -- your marriage be damned -- and seduce your teammate's sister. You use the 19 and seduce her, then roll d20 and get 14. You replace the 19 with the 14. And The Devil can still trigger that trait at 14 later, too.
So that's where Hellball is headed. I need to get this stuff written up as actual rules this week. Deadline is Thursday and it's a busy week. I have Java to study; I have an election night party to attend; I have to spend some time with Steph before heading off to MACE for the weekend.