Tabletop RPG Metathread: We Like To Party

Hatchling Cockatrice · January 24, 2011

With Ephesos' blessing, I've created this thread for general discussion of AIMhack. The intent of this thread is to discuss the AIMhack system and how it can be improved without limiting it to the context of any one campaign, but examples of what did and didn't work in specific campaigns are encouraged. I'm going to start things off with a few comments on some issues that have come up in campaigns that I've DMed or played in. This is probably going to be a little disjointed, but bear with me.

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On a fundamental level, is the game doing what we want it to do? Is what the game considers important the same as what we consider important? Do the rules cover everything we want them to cover, and nothing else? For example, would it be desirable for character personality and development to have stronger mechanical backing? Do we want to include a mechanic like Spiritual Attributes from The Riddle of Steel, where players are directly rewarded for having a coherent character concept and playing their character in accordance with it? Or are we happy to let characters be defined simply by their reactions to the situations they find themselves in, and by a one-word "Alignment" description with no mechanical impact?

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Some mechanics aren't standardised yet. Important ones, like "what armour does" or "how much damage you do when you hit somebody". It's not urgent that these mechanics be standardised, since it hasn't been very important for players to know the exact details of how they work in most campaigns so far, but I think it's useful to start a discussion about what behind-the-scenes mechanics work well all the same.

Here's a rough rundown of the damage system I've been using in City of Hope: when an attack by a PC on an enemy succeeds, it does at least 1 damage. When an attack succeeds by a margin of 5 or more above the required roll, it does 2 damage. A natural 20 does 3 damage. Spending a stamina point on an attack will add +1 damage to each of these figures, or turn an attack that failed by a margin of 3 or less into a successful attack for 1 point of damage. Most regular enemies have 2-4 HP, while bosses have 10-20.

The above system is motivated by two factors. First, simplicity of bookkeeping: keeping HP totals low makes it easy to keep track of damage, especially in battles involving large groups of enemies. Second, it directly links the effectiveness of a successful roll to how high the roll was: it sucks for players to roll a 19 to hit and then have it not do much because I rolled minimum damage behind the screen, so I designed a system where I don't have to roll to see how much damage a PC did.

Enemy attacks on PCs do however much damage I feel like, based on the average number of hits I want a PC to be able to survive. As a rule of thumb, weak enemies that appear in large groups will do 1d3 damage, while stronger enemies will do 1d6 or 1d4+2.

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The way skills currently work, character builds that have all their major skills loaded onto one stat (usually Intelligence) are strictly superior under most circumstances to character builds where skills are balanced between two or three stats. It's been suggested before that this problem could be solved by simply dissociating stats from skills (so that no skill receives a bonus from stats), and Nioca's tried implementing that in his currently-stalled mini-campaign -- one session isn't long enough to say how successful it's been. I think there's room for compromise here: perhaps characters with Strength as their highest stat could receive a flat +2 bonus on Strength-based skills, or +1 if Strength is tied for highest with another stat.

Skills aren't distributed evenly between the three stats, either: even counting Magic as a single skill, there are more skills in Intelligence than in Strength and Dexterity put together. I think this is a problem, and it's only partially balanced out by the fact that Strength and Dexterity tend to be better at improving combat survivability.

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Social interaction mechanics are fairly rudimentary, and come down to "roll dice once, maybe twice, hope you roll high". Explicit mechanics for stake-setting and compromise might improve on this; there are published RPGs that have done this and that we can draw inspiration from, like Burning Wheel with its Duel of Wits mechanic.

At the same time, we probably don't want to create a situation where there's one character who's the party face and gets a bunch of spotlight time when social interactions are going on while everyone else stands around, afraid to contribute for fear of their character's terrible social skills making things worse. So if we want social mechanics to be more important, we have to keep in mind one important design principle: if every character will have to spend a significant amount of time doing something, then every character should have some way of doing that thing effectively. This dovetails neatly into the next issue I want to discuss: combat skills.

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The assumption in most campaigns is that combat will occur and that all characters will be involved in it. This means that everyone is expected to be competent at combat, and to become increasingly competent over time. This, in turn, means that other skills tend to fall by the wayside.

Now, the point of skill investment is to differentiate characters from each other. But combat is an area where we don't want characters to be differentiated from each other in terms of effectiveness: since everybody participates in it, everybody should be able to be effective in it, even if they're effective in different ways. Therefore, a bold suggestion: Each character gets one Martial or Magic skill for free, at a base rank of 4 + 1 per experience level, and uses this as their primary combat skill. This skill cannot otherwise be invested in.

I can see a few possible objections to this idea:

* The character's primary combat skill is likely to be their highest skill, and therefore comes to define the character. This happens already under the current system, and to the extent that it doesn't, it doesn't have to happen in the proposed system either.

* Players will try to maximise their character's effectiveness outside of combat by making their primary combat skill something that also has non-combat applications. This also happens already under the current system, to some extent.

* Characters will be most effective if they just use their primary combat skill for combat, rather than trying to use multiple skills in synergy with each other. This, too, already happens under the current system. If it's a problem that needs a solution, then the solution will likely involve some kind of explicit mechanical support for the use of multiple skills in the same task.

* It removes the ability of players to make characters who are particularly good or particularly bad at combat. In a combat-heavy campaign, I'd argue this isn't so much a bug as a feature.

The details of the implementation still need work, but I think the basic idea of everyone having a primary combat skill that gives the whole party an even footing in combat is sound. Alternatively, we could attempt a more radical structural separation of combat skills from non-combat skills.

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AIMhack's original design concept could be stated broadly as "4th edition D&D, but with much less bookkeeping". The game has obviously inherited significant mechanics such as levels and hit points from D&D, while other concepts such as class and alignment have carried over only in vestigial form. In what ways could AIMhack be less like D&D and still function as desired?

I'm thinking in particular of levels and character progression here. One comment I've had from one of the players in City of Hope is that characters have been gaining in power at an unrealistic rate, since they've gained 5 levels in the course of a couple of days. If we assume that a difference of 5 levels is supposed to be a big deal, this seems pretty hard to argue with -- but on the other hand, it's just as true for a campaign that happens over the course of a few weeks as it is for one that happens over the course of a few days. Over either timescale, it's "unrealistic" for characters to turn from a novice into an expert at any difficult skill.

If having characters become more effective over time isn't necessary to maintain plausibility, why have levelups at all? I can think of two reasons:

* Players like to see numbers get bigger, and to have a sense that their character is becoming more powerful.

* As players get a clearer sense of their character's role in the party, they may want to change their abilities to focus on areas they'd previously neglected, or vice versa.

I'll address these issues one at a time.

The first point needs further analysis, because in some ways the sense of progression is deceptive -- differences feel bigger than they are. While a 6 in a skill is obviously better than a 3, the magnitude and significance of that difference is defined mechanically (your chance of success at actions involving that skill is 15% higher), but isn't really all that well-defined in setting terms.

When we're talking about characters who differ in chance of success by 15%, we are talking about characters operating in roughly the same league of competence: one character can succeed at most things that the other can succeed at, and fail at most things that the other can fail at. And yet when we're talking about one character who has a skill of 3 and one character who has a skill of 6, there's a sense that the second one should be a lot more competent -- moreover, they do feel more competent in actual play.

I'd argue the reason that the difference between a 3 and a 6 in a skill feels so big, even though it isn't, is that most challenges are rigged so that an average party member will have a roughly 50% chance of success. The difference between succeeding on a roll of 10 and failing on it is a big psychological barrier (and thanks to the taking-10 mechanic, a significant mechanical barrier too).

Ephesos has expressed to me that he wants highly skilled characters to be able to reliably do things that unskilled characters simply can't. A difference of 15% doesn't get you that. Even a difference of 50%, which is about the most you might reasonably see in a character's primary skills between the start and end of a campaign (taking both stat and skill bonuses into account), is just starting to get there. By this metric, the amount of levelling up that characters do in a typical campaign is enough to turn a green novice into a skilled novice, not to turn a novice into an expert. (This is part of the reason why Eph isn't quite getting what he wants in this regard.)

The upshot of all this is that characters don't actually progress as much as they seem to over the course of a campaign, because 5 levels is not as much of a big deal as it looks like. Your character is getting significantly better at doing the same things they started out doing, but things that started out much too hard for them to attempt will remain fairly hard. This seems like a reasonable sort of progression for the kind of short-term, intensive, high-stakes practice of skills that occurs over the course of a typical AIMhack campaign -- it may not be "realistic", but seen from the right perspective it's not so bizarre as to strain credibility, which is what's actually important.

The big exception here is hit points. Characters really do get a lot better at surviving damage between level 1 and level 6, especially if their primary stat is Strength. A simple if somewhat radical solution to this is to get rid of automatic hit point gains with each levelup: your HP is just 10 + twice your Strength or something similar, and to get more HP you have to keep raising your Strength. (This also has the neat effect of meaning that you're no longer encouraged to front-load Strength in order to be most effective: a Strength point is worth the same 2 HP whether you buy it at level 1 or level 10.)

If we decide that we really want to shake up what character progression means beyond the suggestions above, we may have to seriously rethink the core resolution mechanic of "roll d20, add bonuses, compare to target number". I already have some notes prepared on this subject, but I'll save that discussion for another post.

For now, let's move on to the second reason for levelups: reshaping the character's role in the party. Character progression, in the sense of a monotonic increase in competence at all tasks, isn't necessary in order to accomplish this. The same effect could be achieved with a retraining mechanic, where the character's overall nominal effectiveness remains constant but they become more effective in some areas and less effective in others. AIMhack currently doesn't facilitate retraining of skills, in the sense of taking away points in one skill to reinvest in another: should it?

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This post, long as it is, is intended as a jumping-off point for discussion, not as an agenda for debate. If you have a comment on the development of AIMhack that's unrelated to anything in this post, feel free to bring it up.

Ineffable Wingbolt · January 24, 2011

what about the miscellaneous forum? why was it abandoned?

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 24, 2011

Wow. Epic post.

I have a very small thought: rather than bestowing level-ups as often as has been typical so far, I think it would be a nice reward for players / way of powering up characters if Perks were awarded slightly more often. I've noticed Ephesos doing some neat stuff with awarding Perks in the Rumors campaign. What if Characters start out at the equivalent of, say, level 4, allowing them to feel sort of competent and not like total noobs, and then only gain a couple "levels" over the course of a campaign, but gain perhaps three perks? I don't know, I'm just brainstorming. I think perks offer the possibility for really interesting and unique character growth (that kind of specialization and distinctiveness mentioned above) outside of the basic skills system. Of course, there is a disadvantage to just tossing out level-ups: the DM has to actually make up interesting and useful perks.

Just random thoughts.

Edit: Additional random thought. It would be nice for players to have a sense how many skill points really represents mastery verse novice-hood. Is Conjuration 10 a master summoner? Or 20? Is 5 First Aid a novice? Or a professional healer? Is 2 Perception the average observational abilities of an ordinary person, or the level of only a particularly oblivious fellow? Obviously the answers might not be the same for every skill, and I don't think they need to be strictly delineated for every skill either. But I do think that it would help players know how to conceptualize their characters (or at least it would help me) to have some rough ideas of how skilled is actually "skilled."

Well-Actually War Trall · January 24, 2011

Originally Posted By: Lilith

On a fundamental level, is the game doing what we want it to do? Is what the game considers important the same as what we consider important? Do the rules cover everything we want them to cover, and nothing else? For example, would it be desirable for character personality and development to have stronger mechanical backing? Do we want to include a mechanic like Spiritual Attributes from The Riddle of Steel, where players are directly rewarded for having a coherent character concept and playing their character in accordance with it? Or are we happy to let characters be defined simply by their reactions to the situations they find themselves in, and by a one-word "Alignment" description with no mechanical impact?

In general, I'd say players are already doing a fine job of giving their PCs good personality and development. There's no need to encourage this through mechanical bonuses, and making any kind of explicit link between backstory elements and mechanics may actually hurt roleplaying by making some backstories stronger than others.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Here's a rough rundown of the damage system I've been using in City of Hope: when an attack by a PC on an enemy succeeds, it does at least 1 damage. When an attack succeeds by a margin of 5 or more above the required roll, it does 2 damage. A natural 20 does 3 damage. Spending a stamina point on an attack will add +1 damage to each of these figures, or turn an attack that failed by a margin of 3 or less into a successful attack for 1 point of damage. Most regular enemies have 2-4 HP, while bosses have 10-20.

The above system is motivated by two factors. First, simplicity of bookkeeping: keeping HP totals low makes it easy to keep track of damage, especially in battles involving large groups of enemies. Second, it directly links the effectiveness of a successful roll to how high the roll was: it sucks for players to roll a 19 to hit and then have it not do much because I rolled minimum damage behind the screen, so I designed a system where I don't have to roll to see how much damage a PC did.

Enemy attacks on PCs do however much damage I feel like, based on the average number of hits I want a PC to be able to survive. As a rule of thumb, weak enemies that appear in large groups will do 1d3 damage, while stronger enemies will do 1d6 or 1d4+2.

I messed around a lot in Dust Bowl until I found what worked, and I ended on a system basically similar to this. As far as I can tell, the only potential downside is that such a simple system can make fights feel very similar to each other. I wound up trying hard to give each fight a distinct mechanical or tactical element, which kept things interesting but undermined the simplicity and balance of the basic mechanics.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

The way skills currently work, character builds that have all their major skills loaded onto one stat (usually Intelligence) are strictly superior under most circumstances to character builds where skills are balanced between two or three stats.

I'm not entirely sure that this is true. Furthermore, it looks like nobody cares, because there have only been a handful of characters that actually loaded up on one stat. Most people seem more concerned with making their PC interesting than making him or her powerful.

Besides, there is apparently no force in heaven or Earth that will stop a player from attempting an untrained skill check when they feel like it, so specialists seem to spend enough time botching, like, Nature or Composure or what have you to balance out their strengths in other areas.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Skills aren't distributed evenly between the three stats, either: even counting Magic as a single skill, there are more skills in Intelligence than in Strength and Dexterity put together. I think this is a problem, and it's only partially balanced out by the fact that Strength and Dexterity tend to be better at improving combat survivability.

Strength and Dexterity also get a lot more raw stat checks. If we wanted more Str and Dex skills, I guess we could take those raw checks and make skills out of them, like Acrobatics or Endurance or whatever. Now that I think about it, it's kind of silly that we have hardly any mechanical distinction between a gymnast and a pickpocket.

Like I said above, players seem most interested in making their characters unique, and I think if Int-based PCs have an unfair advantage it's in that. There are dozens of different permutations of magic skills, each of which offer an equally diverse permutation of spells that can be changed according to taste between sessions. I think we need to work on finding ways to offer other characters a competitive variety of choices.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

At the same time, we probably don't want to create a situation where there's one character who's the party face and gets a bunch of spotlight time when social interactions are going on while everyone else stands around, afraid to contribute for fear of their character's terrible social skills making things worse.

They will not do this. They will contribute, and make things worse.

The great thing about conversation is that you don't need skills for it. It's entirely possible to make reasonable judgments about how NPCs react to what PCs say without rolling the dice, and I find it a lot more satisfying to base the outcome on the players' decisions than on chance. Composure is occasionally useful, but even that is more than we need, and I don't think we'd gain much by adding to it.

Originally Posted By: Triumph

I have a very small thought: rather than bestowing level-ups as often as has been typical so far, I think it would be a nice reward for players / way of powering up characters if Perks were awarded slightly more often. I've noticed Ephesos doing some neat stuff with awarding Perks in the Rumors campaign. What if Characters start out at the equivalent of, say, level 4, allowing them to feel sort of competent and not like total noobs, and then only gain a couple "levels" over the course of a campaign, but gain perhaps three perks? I don't know, I'm just brainstorming. I think perks offer the possibility for really interesting and unique character growth (that kind of specialization and distinctiveness mentioned above) outside of the basic skills system. Of course, there is a disadvantage to just tossing out level-ups: the DM has to actually make up interesting and useful perks.

Perks are great for specialization, but have some downsides. The first, like you said, is that the DM has to think of interesting ones, which is harder than you might think. The DM also have to keep them balanced, which is tricky when each one is unique, and when he/she is uncertain he/she will tend to err on the side of weakness, meaning that some perks will be pretty underwhelming. Worse, some perks will inevitably be more useful than others, threatening to undo the careful balance of skills we're working on here.

The other problem is that so far perks have been chosen by the DM, and most players like to have control over the direction of their character's growth. If we make perks a more prominent part of the system, we should probably have some or all of them chosen by the player in consultation with the DM. Having the two of them negotiate over just what a perk will do also creates an adversarial system that will hopefully promote balance by making it so that each perk is carefully worked out by two people with different perspectives.

Hatchling Cockatrice · January 24, 2011

Originally Posted By: Triumph

I have a very small thought: rather than bestowing level-ups as often as has been typical so far, I think it would be a nice reward for players / way of powering up characters if Perks were awarded slightly more often. I've noticed Ephesos doing some neat stuff with awarding Perks in the Rumors campaign. What if Characters start out at the equivalent of, say, level 4, allowing them to feel sort of competent and not like total noobs, and then only gain a couple "levels" over the course of a campaign, but gain perhaps three perks? I don't know, I'm just brainstorming. I think perks offer the possibility for really interesting and unique character growth (that kind of specialization and distinctiveness mentioned above) outside of the basic skills system. Of course, there is a disadvantage to just tossing out level-ups: the DM has to actually make up interesting and useful perks.

Just random thoughts.

Strictly speaking, there's no need to start out at level 4 to do this. If you want to say that anyone who's worthy to even be considered a level 1 character is already a competent professional instead of just a random dude, you can just say it. I mean, that's exactly what D&D has always done. There are two situations I can think of where this solution may fall apart:

* when one player wants to play a competent professional and the other wants to play a random dude, at the same level.
* when one player makes a character who's supposed to be very competent at something and another player makes a character with a passing interest in it, but there isn't sufficient mechanical support to establish one of them as much more competent than the other.

The first is a social problem about player expectations; the second is a mechanical problem in need of mechanical solutions. Which brings me to your next point.

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Edit: Additional random thought. It would be nice for players to have a sense how many skill points really represents mastery verse novice-hood. Is Conjuration 10 a master summoner? Or 20? Is 5 First Aid a novice? Or a professional healer? Is 2 Perception the average observational abilities of an ordinary person, or the level of only a particularly oblivious fellow? Obviously the answers might not be the same for every skill, and I don't think they need to be strictly delineated for every skill either. But I do think that it would help players know how to conceptualize their characters (or at least it would help me) to have some rough ideas of how skilled is actually "skilled."

Putting hard numbers on what counts as "sort of good" and what counts as "really, really good" is a tricky exercise, because then you're committed to standing by the implications of those numbers. If you say that 1 in Evocation is as little skill as you can have while still being able to cast spells at all, and 10 in Evocation makes you a world-class master, then you're saying that if the most incompetent apprentice can succeed at a task 25% of the time, then a master can fail at that same task 30% of the time. This is problematic.

Nominally, a skill of 10 or above is epic. In practice, even "epic" effects tend to be fairly small-scale; the epic spells we've seen so far can be dramatic, but their power is generally confined to a single target or a small area. This is related to the fact that so far we've preferred to run what would be considered short, relatively low-power campaigns by D&D standards, so it takes less to be epic by comparison. Even Rumors of my Death is relatively short and low-power by these standards: a high-level D&D party will never need to run for their lives from a forest fire, not just because they'll have the skills to stop it or at least protect themselves from it, but because that's not what high-level D&D is about. There's an interesting point to be made here about how system interacts with setting: the more often high-level characters run from forest fires, the more it's established that Mote is a setting where even relative badasses have to be wary of mundane natural hazards -- and the less appropriate it would be to switch to playing a D&D game set in Mote.

In short: I'm not going to pin down what makes somebody a master right now, but looking at the numbers alone it's gotta be something more than having a rank of 10 in a skill.

Originally Posted By: Sarachim

In general, I'd say players are already doing a fine job of giving their PCs good personality and development. There's no need to encourage this through mechanical bonuses, and making any kind of explicit link between backstory elements and mechanics may actually hurt roleplaying by making some backstories stronger than others.

It's not unlikely that you're right, but I meant that as an example of a broader question: what is it that we like about the system as it is now? What do we enjoy and want to keep as is, what are we indifferent to, and what actively interferes with our fun?

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I messed around a lot in Dust Bowl until I found what worked, and I ended on a system basically similar to this. As far as I can tell, the only potential downside is that such a simple system can make fights feel very similar to each other. I wound up trying hard to give each fight a distinct mechanical or tactical element, which kept things interesting but undermined the simplicity and balance of the basic mechanics.

I've been trying to do the same. The rules are supposed to be simple, though; if we wanted complex rules for combat resolution, we'd be playing D&D instead of AIMhack now.

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I'm not entirely sure that this is true. Furthermore, it looks like nobody cares, because there have only been a handful of characters that actually loaded up on one stat. Most people seem more concerned with making their PC interesting than making him or her powerful.

Yeah, I've crafted a couple of very highly specialised characters at various levels as a design exercise to see how far I can push the system, but I wouldn't actually submit any of them to a campaign that I intended to play in because I feel like doing so would break a social contract. It does help that most players here aren't huge jerks.

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Strength and Dexterity also get a lot more raw stat checks. If we wanted more Str and Dex skills, I guess we could take those raw checks and make skills out of them, like Acrobatics or Endurance or whatever. Now that I think about it, it's kind of silly that we have hardly any mechanical distinction between a gymnast and a pickpocket.

I wouldn't mind having a wider range of Str and Dex skills, but I'm mindful of the risk of going too far in the other direction and having a character who can climb a wall but can't balance on top of it.

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Like I said above, players seem most interested in making their characters unique, and I think if Int-based PCs have an unfair advantage it's in that. There are dozens of different permutations of magic skills, each of which offer an equally diverse permutation of spells that can be changed according to taste between sessions. I think we need to work on finding ways to offer other characters a competitive variety of choices.

This is one of those things I didn't touch on in detail because I was saving it for a later post once I'd put my ideas about it together properly. I'm not 100% satisfied with how our experiments with martial techniques have gone so far; I feel that they're often used as a substitute for description rather than an aid to it.

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The great thing about conversation is that you don't need skills for it. It's entirely possible to make reasonable judgments about how NPCs react to what PCs say without rolling the dice, and I find it a lot more satisfying to base the outcome on the players' decisions than on chance. Composure is occasionally useful, but even that is more than we need, and I don't think we'd gain much by adding to it.

The standard argument in favour of conversation skills is that they let you make a character who's more socially skilled than you are, in the same way that Nature skill lets you make a character who knows more about nature than you do and Magic skill lets you make a character who's a better wizard than you are. For the sake of furthering discussion I'll withhold my opinion on the merits of this argument.

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Perks are great for specialization, but have some downsides. The first, like you said, is that the DM has to think of interesting ones, which is harder than you might think. The DM also have to keep them balanced, which is tricky when each one is unique, and when he/she is uncertain he/she will tend to err on the side of weakness, meaning that some perks will be pretty underwhelming. Worse, some perks will inevitably be more useful than others, threatening to undo the careful balance of skills we're working on here.

I know that I've been deliberately making perks fairly minor and situational in City of Hope. I've been balancing them not only against each other but against perks from other campaigns.

When we talk about usefulness, though, I think there's an important distinction to be drawn between how much a perk benefits the party and how much effect it has on the character. If DMs are going to give out situational perks, then they should make sure those perks incentivize players to put their characters in situations that the DM wants them to be in. I have more to say about this, but I'll wait until City of Hope is over.

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The other problem is that so far perks have been chosen by the DM, and most players like to have control over the direction of their character's growth. If we make perks a more prominent part of the system, we should probably have some or all of them chosen by the player in consultation with the DM. Having the two of them negotiate over just what a perk will do also creates an adversarial system that will hopefully promote balance by making it so that each perk is carefully worked out by two people with different perspectives.

I'm all for more player input in general. A more in-depth discussion on how to achieve this will have to wait for when it's not 4 in the morning, though.

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 24, 2011

I fully (well, maybe only partially) appreciate the difficulty of coming up with and balancing perks. Back in Rowen's two-session epic-level campaign, he had all the players make up a perk for their respective characters. Coming up with something balanced, useful, and flavorful proved to be quite challenging (too challenging for me at the time, in fact). So I definitely have some sense of the problems with increasing perk distribution, but I felt it was worth pointing out their unique role and potential nonetheless.

Well-Actually War Trall · January 24, 2011

Originally Posted By: Lilith

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Like I said above, players seem most interested in making their characters unique, and I think if Int-based PCs have an unfair advantage it's in that. There are dozens of different permutations of magic skills, each of which offer an equally diverse permutation of spells that can be changed according to taste between sessions. I think we need to work on finding ways to offer other characters a competitive variety of choices.

This is one of those things I didn't touch on in detail because I was saving it for a later post once I'd put my ideas about it together properly. I'm not 100% satisfied with how our experiments with martial techniques have gone so far; I feel that they're often used as a substitute for description rather than an aid to it.

I feel the same, and I think that having some Str- and Dex-based skills will work better. Most of the obvious ones are things that, like magic, could be used either in or out of combat, and when used in combat they encourage unique tactics with accompanying unique descriptions.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

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The great thing about conversation is that you don't need skills for it. It's entirely possible to make reasonable judgments about how NPCs react to what PCs say without rolling the dice, and I find it a lot more satisfying to base the outcome on the players' decisions than on chance. Composure is occasionally useful, but even that is more than we need, and I don't think we'd gain much by adding to it.

The standard argument in favour of conversation skills is that they let you make a character who's more socially skilled than you are, in the same way that Nature skill lets you make a character who knows more about nature than you do and Magic skill lets you make a character who's a better wizard than you are. For the sake of furthering discussion I'll withhold my opinion on the merits of this argument.

I am less restrained than you, so here I go: BULLROAR. For one thing, the whole "the PC is better at this than the player" thing falls apart when the player is choosing the PC's words; if the player says something impossibly dumb and succeeds because they roll high, it breaks immersion and makes me wonder why I bother asking the PCs to talk in the first place.

If the player is actually better at conversation than their PC, things get even worse. Trying to do something smart, and then failing because my fictional alter-ego is not as smart as me, is never going to be fun for anybody.

Plus, RPG conversation is a dumbed-down simulation of the real thing that is not difficult to navigate successfully if you make an effort and pay attention. Anybody who wants a socially adept character can have one, no matter how obnoxious they are in real life.

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 24, 2011

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Some mechanics aren't standardised yet. Important ones, like "what armour does" or "how much damage you do when you hit somebody". It's not urgent that these mechanics be standardised, since it hasn't been very important for players to know the exact details of how they work in most campaigns so far, but I think it's useful to start a discussion about what behind-the-scenes mechanics work well all the same.

Here's a rough rundown of the damage system I've been using in City of Hope: when an attack by a PC on an enemy succeeds, it does at least 1 damage. When an attack succeeds by a margin of 5 or more above the required roll, it does 2 damage. A natural 20 does 3 damage. Spending a stamina point on an attack will add +1 damage to each of these figures, or turn an attack that failed by a margin of 3 or less into a successful attack for 1 point of damage. Most regular enemies have 2-4 HP, while bosses have 10-20.

The above system is motivated by two factors. First, simplicity of bookkeeping: keeping HP totals low makes it easy to keep track of damage, especially in battles involving large groups of enemies. Second, it directly links the effectiveness of a successful roll to how high the roll was: it sucks for players to roll a 19 to hit and then have it not do much because I rolled minimum damage behind the screen, so I designed a system where I don't have to roll to see how much damage a PC did.

I like this (current) system -- makes things simpler for both players and DMs. It also makes armour work like a combination of AC-boosting and damage reduction, which I find to be more 'realistic' than just one or just the other.

Quote:

The assumption in most campaigns is that combat will occur and that all characters will be involved in it. This means that everyone is expected to be competent at combat, and to become increasingly competent over time. This, in turn, means that other skills tend to fall by the wayside.

Now, the point of skill investment is to differentiate characters from each other. But combat is an area where we don't want characters to be differentiated from each other in terms of effectiveness: since everybody participates in it, everybody should be able to be effective in it, even if they're effective in different ways. Therefore, a bold suggestion: Each character gets one Martial or Magic skill for free, at a base rank of 4 + 1 per experience level, and uses this as their primary combat skill. This skill cannot otherwise be invested in.

I can see a few possible objections to this idea:

(snip)

* Characters will be most effective if they just use their primary combat skill for combat, rather than trying to use multiple skills in synergy with each other. This, too, already happens under the current system. If it's a problem that needs a solution, then the solution will likely involve some kind of explicit mechanical support for the use of multiple skills in the same task.

(snip)

The details of the implementation still need work, but I think the basic idea of everyone having a primary combat skill that gives the whole party an even footing in combat is sound. Alternatively, we could attempt a more radical structural separation of combat skills from non-combat skills.

A while back, I proposed just segregating combat and non-combat skills, and each level up give m points for combat skills and n points for non-combat skills. This probably isn't the perfect solution, but it's a middle ground between the current system and your proposal, and it has the nice effect of still making 'multi-class' characters a possibility (points in both Martial(Catbert) and Martial(Catbow), say).

Still have more to say, but will do it in later posts. Battery about to die.

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 24, 2011

Gah, and here i was thinking everyone used the 'pull it out' method for damages...

Magnificent Ornk · January 24, 2011

So a while ago I sort of mashed-up my own system of AIMHack, or rather, altered Ephesos core rules in a way I think could be really fun. I haven't really had the time to run a practice or two yet, but some of the points raised above seem relevant to my system, so I'll go ahead and post it here.

Quote:

AntiHack – An AIMHack Experiment

Not everybody wants to save the world – for every band of intrepid heroes, there are countless brigands, bullies and buffoons, all stumbling across the surface of Mote. Of the few that do wish to save the world, only a select few are built of stuff of legends. AntiHack is a game system that steals from AIMHack’s plate whilst it isn’t looking, and uses what it finds to cater to everybody excluded from the narrow, closed, traditional adventuring stereotype.

The system will favour roleplaying over constant dice-rolling – any and all classes will be catered for, from traditional adventuring classes to the buffoons and brigands mentioned previously. Eventually, though, you’re still going to need to roll. Currently, in AIMHack, rolling higher tends to lead to good things, whilst rolling low tends to be viewed as rolling poorly. Whilst the same can be true in AntiHack, it is not necessarily so.

To begin with, here are the basics.

Attributes:

There are six main attributes for characters, as in AIMHack. Typically, as in AIMHack, the higher these are the better. The first three will influence a wide variety of rolls.

- Strength: Hit things hard, endure damage, lift heavy things. Affects your skills in melee combat.

- Dexterity: Hit things from a distance, dodge blows, be a ninja. Affects your skills in ranged combat.

- Intelligence: Hit things with magic, resist illusions, solve puzzles. Affects your magic skills.

The other three attributes don't actually determine rolls, but are still very important.

- Hit points: Health. Run out and you start bleeding out, losing Stamina. Get to 0 HP and 0 Stamina, you die.

- Speed: How fast you can move in one turn. Only really relevant in combat.

- Stamina: Represents fatigue. Spend a point to expend extra effort on something.

Skills

This is where things begin to differ from traditional AIMHack. Players are encouraged to invent skills of their own, preferably paring them to a parent statistic. For instance, “General Ignorance” is a skill that allows a player to wilfully forget important facts or information, whether it be to aid in lying, or because he wants to make a 50-foot leap, and doesn’t want to remember that such things are impossible. This skill will be paired with Intelligence – the higher a player’s intelligence, the better

Some skills will be almost identical to those found in AIMHack, too. Every player is going to want to inflict damage on something, and so the skill “Martial (Fighting Skill/Weapon type)” will probably be the fall-to skill in this situation. Of course, it may be that a particular character uses only telepathy to inflict damage, or shadowboxes, or chooses to cover himself in spikes before hurling himself at characters. In these situations, the player is encouraged to invent a fitting skill.

Finally, Magic will probably work differently in AntiHack. Currently, magic-users must study in a particular school of magic and are locked into learning spells of that specific school. Players are, of course, welcome to use these schools if they wish, but other options are now open to them. A travelling wizard, used to dazzling crowds and turning tricks to pay his way may want to invest some points in “Magic: (Showboating)”, which would allow him to create all manner of wild and wonderful things, and not be trapped in conjuration or evocation. Likewise, a sensible priestess, wishing to spread health and good fortune would perhaps consider taking “Magic (Do-goodery)” to be able to learn any spells that would aid her comrades.

For completeness, the current skill-list available in AIMHack is included below, though again, the player is encouraged to be imaginative when choosing his skills: “Ignorance” may act in a similar way to “Perception”, but it’s much more fun to wilfully ignore a stampeding Howling Lava Demon to focus on another task than it is to spot it approaching with enough time to escape.

Click to reveal..

Sample Character:

BIO:

Name: Carloz De Juan.

Occupation: Performance Artist

Race: Human

Alignment: Matadorable

STATS:

Strength: 3

Dexterity: 3

Intelligence: 3

HP: 10

SKILLS:

Cajones: 4

Ignorance: 2

Martial (Red sheet): 2

Showmanship: 2

Animal Friendship: 1

I mean, this was a couple of hours work. It's not meant to be perfect, and it'll probably really suck in some important areas - the biggest downside I see is that it does away with some of the simplicity of AIMHack, but it will, as Sarachim pointed out, let us have a mechanical difference between a pickpocket and a gymnast (if that's what the player wants ).

Hatchling Cockatrice · January 25, 2011

Originally Posted By: Sarachim

I am less restrained than you, so here I go: BULLROAR. For one thing, the whole "the PC is better at this than the player" thing falls apart when the player is choosing the PC's words; if the player says something impossibly dumb and succeeds because they roll high, it breaks immersion and makes me wonder why I bother asking the PCs to talk in the first place.

If the player is actually better at conversation than their PC, things get even worse. Trying to do something smart, and then failing because my fictional alter-ego is not as smart as me, is never going to be fun for anybody.

Plus, RPG conversation is a dumbed-down simulation of the real thing that is not difficult to navigate successfully if you make an effort and pay attention. Anybody who wants a socially adept character can have one, no matter how obnoxious they are in real life.

Yeah, I don't really have much time for the standard argument either, for pretty much the same reasons as you. If there's a good reason for conversation skills to exist at all, that reason probably involves making conversation less of a "dumbed-down simulation of the real thing", not just a more abstracted simulation. Doing that effectively is hard, though, and it's even harder to do it in a way that still works across different campaigns and different play styles.

Rotghroth Rhapsody · January 25, 2011

These are some truly epic posts. Wow. Aside from that, my only suggestion was to "incrementalize" your numbers, i.e., multiply everything by five or ten. Then damage becomes more interesting because it's harder to be killed by a margin of 1, which is always SO frustrating.

Hatchling Cockatrice · January 25, 2011

Originally Posted By: The Voice of Atalantë

These are some truly epic posts. Wow. Aside from that, my only suggestion was to "incrementalize" your numbers, i.e., multiply everything by five or ten. Then damage becomes more interesting because it's harder to be killed by a margin of 1, which is always SO frustrating.

There are some potential benefits to increased granularity, but I don't think this is really one of them. After all, it makes it harder to survive by a margin of 1 HP as well.

Understated Ur-Drakon · January 25, 2011

Wow. Big posts.

Alright, my two-(hundred-)cents will follow in just a moment. But first, a preface. It doesn't really matter what kinds of changes are made to the system, so long as it remains simple and fun. Labyrinth was awesome fun, and AIMHack was more of an amorphous blob than a semi-solidified system then. And a lot of changes have happened between then and now. The important part is that it stays accessible, flexible, and fun. And thusfar, it's been achieving all three of those rather well.

---

One thing I'm trying out in the aforementioned stalled mini-campaign is a new damage system. Namely, each kind of attack has a Damage Rating. To get damage, one merely adds 0.1*DR for each point the attack beats the opponent's defense by. Different kinds of attacks have a different base DR, like so:

*6 - Two-handed Melee Weapons

*5 - One-handed Melee Weapons, Melee Spells

*4 - Ranged weapons, most spells

*3 - Untrained unarmed combat

More recently, I've modified it so that each point in the appropriate stat increases DR by 1. So someone with 5 STR would get a DR 11 out of a halberd, a DR 10 out of a shortsword, and a DR 8 out of wild fist-flailing. This number can also fluctuate with resistances, blessings, battle techniques, stamina expenditure, so on. This not only has the benefit of making attributes slightly more useful, but also making DEX a bit more important (since Defense is now more valuable).

The upsides to this are that damage scales to your roll (no min damage on a 19), attack power and bonuses are easier to handle, and rolling damage is a thing of the past. The downsides are that it requires a spreadsheet (or at least a calculator), and is a more complicated than the rest of the system. Obviously, it's still in need of tweaking and so forth, but I'm liking what I see out of it thusfar.

The idea I'm going for is to make combat fast and lethal. A lot of time in AIMHack sessions tends to get eaten up in fights, more notable because there usually aren't that many of them. I'm hoping to keep the amount of combat the same, but making it faster, thus leaving more time for skill-oriented challenges and RPing.

---

Another thing I'm testing is building challenges and fights based on the party's level, rather than their skill ranks. This is because, from watching characters level over the previous campaigns, I noticed a pattern. When leveling, your typical player will generally choose to put points in what they perceive they need before they'll put it into what they want or what would better flesh out their character. It's perfectly sensible, and something of evolutionary theory as applied to AIMHack. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that... so long as the players are actually clear on what they need.

To put this in perspective, here's what the top 5 skills look like in RomD right now:

1st - Primary Martial, 27 (The clear winner by far)

2nd - First Aid, 16 (Distant second, but remarkably strong)

3rd - Conjuration, 15 (Including more healing)

4th - Perception, 13 (Useful in more situations than most other skills)

5th - Evocation, 10 (Brought to you by Kurex. Also note, primarily martial)

Looking at this, it's pretty clear what the RomD players think they need: Combat skills and Healing, with a dash of Perception. Everything else can slide. Why?

It's basically the same vicious cycle that I've brought up before. DM raises the bar when it comes to combat. Players realize they need more combat skills, and react accordingly. DM sees the new combat skills, and decides to bump combat difficulty up again... and on we go, ad nauseum. No one's really at fault, yet we've still got an unbridled mess. Furthermore, in a party where there's a gap between the weakest combatants and the strongest, it results in the weaker combatants getting dragged kicking and screaming into perpetually pumping combat, whilst the stronger ones try to maintain their edge.

As a player, I also have a problem with difficulty going up just because I decided to boost a skill. I mean, if having a stronger skill means worse challenges, why invest at all? Why not save every skill point and have 0s across the board, and be awesome at everything? At that point, you might as well throw away skills entirely and just decide everything by roll alone, like the World IMRP.

Splitting off Martial and Magic skills from the rest, giving them their own separate skill points for leveling, would likely solve part of the combat cycle problem, but I still think there would be a problem. The players need to be motivated to raise their non-combat skills. Thusfar, most non-combat skills haven't actually been that useful; investing in one is a hit-and-miss proposition at best, both because of how little they affect your chance at success AND how often any one of the several NC skills actually come up. To that end, I personally endorse having the skills based off of party level, with difficulty going up at a steady rate regardless of how you raise your skills. That doesn't mean there can't be easy or difficult challenges, but it does mean that, should a skill be neglected, the character will start noticing it. And likewise, if there's someone that has an awesome number of points in a skill, that someone will trailblaze through it (at the detriment of other skills).

Obviously, that's something a DM has to decide on, rather than something that can be out-and-out enforced by the rules. But I think it'd solve a lot of problems, and it'd require very little effort on everyone's part.

Either way, one thing I think will help the issue a lot is putting greater emphasis and gravity on skill checks. If these skills were put to use more often, I think we'd see the players treating them more seriously. For example, take a look at how the CoH party is trained. There's a greater emphasis on skills and thinking, and thus a higher concentration of non-combat skills.

---

As for skills and numbers, I pose the suggestion of simply reducing the size of the die. As it is now, someone with 10 points in a skill (a 55 XP investment) can be completely upstaged by someone with 1 point in the same skill (for a measly 1 XP) and a lucky roll. Mind, swings of luck happen, but as it is, for the amount of cost involved, investing in skills doesn't do a whole lot. Reducing the die involved to a D10 would double the value of each skill rank.

For example, take Char A and Char B. Char A has 6 points in Perception. Char B has 1. And it's skill check time to see if they spot something important with a DC10.

With a D20: Char A has a 80% chance of spotting it, and Char B has a 55% chance. A 25% difference, and despite the skill gap, B still has a strong chance of spotting the object. The training isn't really worth it.

With a D10: Char A has a 60% chance of spotting it, and Char B has a 10% chance. A 50% difference, and while Char B still has a chance, Char A is far more likely to spot it. The training pays off.

'Course, this could potentially exacerbate the issue of unchecked combat skill pumping, so measures to stop that would need to be taken.

---

Touching on the HP issue Lilith brought up. What she says makes sense. As it is, the HP system can get a bit wonky. If you don't load up on STR early, you wind up permanently losing out on HP, and at higher levels, it could make creating new characters a rather difficult experience.

'Course, another option is to throw out the current HP system entirely and use the same system as Stamina: a flat 10 HP maximum. It'd drastically simplify combat to do that, since it'd become a simple matter of seeing if an attack connects rather than trying to measure out damage. Easier bookkeeping, too.

---

On a non-statisic based note, one thing I'd really like to NOT see in future campaigns is more jungle. Seriously, peoples, there are other biomes, and failing that, other kinds of forest. Maybe a trek in the desert or an arctic tundra. Or perhaps a coniferous forest. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a jungle, but it's starting to get a bit overused here.

---

There's more stuff, but this post is getting awfully long as it is.

Magnificent Ornk · January 25, 2011

Quote:

Touching on the HP issue Lilith brought up. What he says makes sense.

She.

Dikiyoba doesn't have anything to add, so Dikiyoba will just second the need to keep it simple.

Hatchling Cockatrice · January 26, 2011

I've dug up an interesting checklist known as the Same Page Tool, which can be used to make sure that everyone goes into a campaign with clear expectations of what it may involve. Here it is, if anyone finds it useful:

Click to reveal..

Do you play to win?

a) Yes, you totally play to win! The win conditions are…

Good play isn’t a win/lose kind of thing

Player characters are:

a) expected to work together; conflicts between them are mostly for show

expected to work together; but major conflicts might erupt but you’ll patch them up given some time

c) expected to work together; major conflicts might erupt and never see reconciliation

d) pursuing their own agendas – they might work together, they might work against each other

e) expected to work against each other, alliances are temporary at best

The GM’s role is:

a) The GM preps a set of events – linear or branching; players run their characters through these events. The GM gives hints to provide direction.

The GM preps a map with NPCs and/or monsters. The players have their characters travel anywhere they can reach on the map, according to their own goals.

c) The GM has no plan – the GM simply plays the NPCs and has them act or react based on their motivations

d) There’s no GM. Everyone works together to make the story through freeform.

e) There’s no GM. The rules and the system coordinate it all.

The players’ roles are…

a) …to follow the GM’s lead to fit the story

…to set goals for their characters, and pursue them proactively

c) …to fling their characters into tough situations and make hard, sometimes, unwise choices

Doing the smartest thing for your character’s survival…

a) …is what a good player does.

…sometimes isn’t as important as other choices

c) …isn’t even a concern or focus for this game.

The GM’s relationship to the rules is…

a) …follow them, come what may. (including following house rules)

…ignore them when they conflict with what would be good for the story

c) …ignore them when they conflict with what “should” happen, based either on realism, the setting, or the genre

After many sessions of play, during one session, a player decides to have her character side with an enemy. This is…

a) …something that shouldn’t even happen. This is someone being a jerk.

…where the character becomes an NPC, right away or fairly soon.

c) …something the player and the GM should have set up ahead of time.

d) …only going to last until the other player characters find out and do something about it.

e) …a meaningful moment, powerful and an example of excellent play.

The idea is that for any particular campaign, all players should understand what the answers to these questions are when the campaign begins, so that conflicting expectations don't cause trouble during play.

I think the tool could probably be expanded further to cover other areas where shared expectations are desirable, such as PC death.

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 26, 2011

Interesting. While perhaps not perfectly suited to AIMHack, it DOES help try to clarify player expectations. I thought you did a good job of that with CoH prior to its beginning - everyone went into very well aware that the campaign was going to play up non-combat skills a lot, and everyone built characters (and has leveled their characters since then) accordingly.

Rotghroth Rhapsody · January 26, 2011

Your Same Page Tool Is A Bit Odd, But Then So Is This Post. I Found It To Be Conceivably Helpful, But It Is More Trouble Than It Is Worth.

Easygoing Eyebeast · January 27, 2011

Time for more response:

Quote:

For example, would it be desirable for character personality and development to have stronger mechanical backing? Do we want to include a mechanic like Spiritual Attributes from The Riddle of Steel, where players are directly rewarded for having a coherent character concept and playing their character in accordance with it? Or are we happy to let characters be defined simply by their reactions to the situations they find themselves in, and by a one-word "Alignment" description with no mechanical impact?

(Reads about The Riddle of Steel on Wikipedia.)

Doesn't seem bad, but this will probably just add too much complexity for too little reward. Also see Sarachim's post about backstories causing an imbalance between players. Backstories should be the area in which players min-max the least.

In general, I'm a little cautious about attempts to make alignments/personality traits binding on characters. One aspect of roleplaying is storytelling, and a big part of stories is character development. Many alignment systems implicitly or explicitly hinder characters from developing over the course of a campaign. And of course, there's the problem of many people thinking that your alignment proscribes your actions, rather than the other way around. Alignments, occupations, and the like are useful in that they help others get a general overview of your character, the way saying "I vote Conservative" tells people where you stand on most (but not all!) issues.

(Honk if you think alignment languages from AD&D were the stupidest idea ever.)

Quote:

Therefore, a bold suggestion: Each character gets one Martial or Magic skill for free, at a base rank of 4 + 1 per experience level, and uses this as their primary combat skill. This skill cannot otherwise be invested in.

Just re-read this. Was sort of misunderstanding it before -- you still leave the possibility of investing in another combat skill. Alright, that works. Basically, it's just Base Attack Bonus. Sort of.

Aside: Another simple way to prevent overt min-maxing in any skill is a level cap. Doesn't fix everything, but again, I'm just bringing up the simple fixes here.

Quote:

The big exception here is hit points. Characters really do get a lot better at surviving damage between level 1 and level 6, especially if their primary stat is Strength. A simple if somewhat radical solution to this is to get rid of automatic hit point gains with each levelup: your HP is just 10 + twice your Strength or something similar, and to get more HP you have to keep raising your Strength. (This also has the neat effect of meaning that you're no longer encouraged to front-load Strength in order to be most effective: a Strength point is worth the same 2 HP whether you buy it at level 1 or level 10.)

Well, having more hit points at later levels allows GMs to have fights that are-

Wait. Say that last bit again.

Quote:

(This also has the neat effect of meaning that you're no longer encouraged to front-load Strength in order to be most effective: a Strength point is worth the same 2 HP whether you buy it at level 1 or level 10.)

Under the current rules, why isn't already the case where raising your Strength retroactively increases your hit points? Unless people want to make AIMHack a system where build order is important, this should already be the case.

Quote:

For now, let's move on to the second reason for levelups: reshaping the character's role in the party. Character progression, in the sense of a monotonic increase in competence at all tasks, isn't necessary in order to accomplish this. The same effect could be achieved with a retraining mechanic, where the character's overall nominal effectiveness remains constant but they become more effective in some areas and less effective in others. AIMhack currently doesn't facilitate retraining of skills, in the sense of taking away points in one skill to reinvest in another: should it?

This isn't bad; it's a more flexible version of the way D&D 4E deals with non-combat skills (not the biggest fan of the binary choice between skilled/unskilled there, but to be honest, I was always maxing out in 3.0 anyway). The only potential problem is that there will often be no (apparent) progression made between levels. If all your proposals are used, that means HPs never increase, and most of the time skills are not shuffled around. Some might not view this as a problem, others would (see your first player motivation for level ups).

Quote:

At the same time, we probably don't want to create a situation where there's one character who's the party face and gets a bunch of spotlight time when social interactions are going on while everyone else stands around, afraid to contribute for fear of their character's terrible social skills making things worse.

Quote:

They will not do this. They will contribute, and make things worse.

This is actually the biggest difference I found between tabletop roleplaying and playing over AIM -- the planning and collaboration between players, or lack thereof. I'm not just talking about conversation, but all aspects of non-combat roleplaying.

Around a table outside of combat, the players will converse (in or out of character) and decide what to next. Everyone can see each other, and thus respond to visual and verbal cues. Thus, you don't have people talking over one another, plans are easier to come up with, and PC actions are more unified (of course, a good GM should enforce that players act more independently during combat and other tense situations). You'll often end up with one player taking charger of a situation, or one PC being the face of the party. This can be good or bad, depending.

Conversely, playing over AIM was much more chaotic. There's less planning, and you'll often end up with half the party typing up their discussion of what to do next while the other half just goes and does their own thing. Again, this isn't necessarily good or bad. Players do stupid things more often in AIMHack (this has nothing to do with the people playing it, just the nature of AIM, nothing we can do about it), but thankfully stupidity is often funny. You can often get bogged down in conversations that would take a fraction of the time in meatspace, but conversely PCs will do their own things and act in character more often that PCs in tabletop games, where the inclination is to do whatever the most insistent player wants to do.

Aside: This is one of the reasons why Wybren was so awkward in Dust Bowl. Seriously, the number of times I had an Inspiring Tale action half typed up, only to discard it once the target had already done the action... You can't jump in and get someone's attention on AIM the same way you can around a table. Anyway, it seems Aurora is a better implementation of a support character anyway, so at least we're learning from mistakes.

Gone off on a tangent, so I'll try bring it back. Basically, playing over AIM changes the very nature of roleplaying, and AIMHack should reflect this. Characters need to be more independent, better able to participate on their own, than their tabletop counterparts.