Continuing our discussion of mechanical timing mechanisms, today brings us to a technique I call seeding effects in resources. This is not something that many games that I am familiar with use, but it is an effective technique for providing randomly timed events at generally predictable points in a game.
There are games that do use this mechanic, but I’m not sure that they are widely enough known to use as examples. So I’m going to construct a hypothetical one.
This game uses regular playing cards for something. It’s not important what. All that matters is that cards are drawn on a regular basis, and they are never shuffled back into the deck. The game uses three separate decks, a new deck replacing each other deck as the last card is drawn. The second of the three decks has a single joker in it somewhere. When the joker is drawn, some effect happens.
This reliably generates the special effect somewhere in the middle of the game. This guarantees time for build up and cool down. While the effect can be generally predicted, it is still randomly triggered.
There are some fairly obvious uses for this sort of mechanism for roleplaying games where you might want to reliably produce certain types of effects at certain points in the story.
How else might you seed events into resources?
Tags: Snippet-post, Theory
Is With Great Power one of the games you were thinking of?
Fred,
Good question, but no. Events in With Great Power are still player-decided. Nothing requires you to move cards into the story-arc. There’s a similar thing going on with Primetime Adventures in which the game needs the producer to manage budget expenditures for pacing. The game isn’t pacing things for you.
Thomas
What about the Shab al-Hiri Roach? Everyone has to draw a card and at some point in time someone (perhaps many someones) will draw the Roach–you can’t ignore the card and it comes with its own special story effects. This seems very close to what you describe.
Actually, Ian, I think that’s pretty different from what I’m talking about. The roach cards are random, but don’t represent a real timing mechanism. You might draw them all at the beginning, or might not draw any until the end.
What I’m talking about here is seeding events so that they happen at a certain time, or at least within some predictable limits.
Thomas
Examples of seeded timing mechanism:
* Somes games apply comulitive die modifiers for effects within the game. For example, if you want to roll low for a major event that’s commonly rolled, but have a +1 modifier everytime you do this, then eventually you’re going to get a really high roll and something will happen. Still governed by player choice, though.
* What if you changed the die type used for your resolution system based on the type of scene, as determined by whoever controls pacing (usually the GM)? Say, at the critical end scenes you’re using d12s and at the low ends you’re using d4s. Or vice versa. It could be player choice, or when certain die results (all 1s?) are rolled.
* Any variation of musical chairs.
* A player bidding system (with cards?) wherein a player must dispense cards at a regular rate until he has no more. Eventually, the special EVENT card will come up. More timing mechanisms could be included if the EVENT card has certain pre-requisite cards or events that must happen first. (A particular combination of event cards for different events?)
Each and every idea I could think of is a way to apply pacing into a game so that everyone is AWARE that the game is pacing by, but doesn’t necessarily give the GM or players CONTROL of the pacing unless extra artificial mechanics are added in to do so.
Your example of the multiple-deck EVENT card, for example. How much of this is really a timing mechanism and how much an outside mechanic influencing the timing mechanism? Why not just say that the GM chooses when to add the card into the deck. Still random, but now influenced by GM or player decision. Imagine a game like this where players can take actions that add the EVENT card to the deck, making it more likely to be drawn.
No timing idea will do what you want until you play with it. And then any timing idea will work. Even musical chairs.
I should mention that its also possible to have a “score” timing system. Say, for example, every scene you have with one particular character gives you a +1 RELATIONSHIP value with that person. When you have 20 or more RELATIONSHIP, whole new aspects of the game open up or are made available. There are countless ways you can tweak this simple idea, pacing everything from the amount of times a SPECIAL ATTACK can be used in combat to determining when we roll to see who finishes the race at the end of the adventure.