Need advice on High School Mechanic Idea

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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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Need advice on High School Mechanic Idea

Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

I have posted here before about running a house ruled AU oMage game for students beginning Grade 11. I want to play a more gritty/realistic low powered kind of game.

The story idea I had was to generally run one adventure/story per week of in game time, but that story won't encompass all of the PC's time for that week. One of the mechanical ideas I had is of allocating Time as a resource that gets allocated to certain things such as:

1.) The "Adventure/Story"
2.) Family
3.) Other Friends
4.) Studying for High School
5.) Sports
6.) Magical Research (how they up their abilities and such)
7.) Hobbies
8.) A Job
9.) Sleep
10.) ??

(The PCs will probably not be trying to do all 9 things, but probably some combination.)

But I also wanted to combine the PCs natural Attributes with how effective the result is from the Time Mechanic. i.e. the Smart Girl PC with Int 4 is going to need less time to study to get A's in her classes than the Jock PC with Int 1. Maybe someone with Charisma 4 needs to spend less time with friends and family to maintain good relationships than someone with a score of 2.

The reason for tracking this as a GM is that I (theoretically) can give accurate life/academic consequences for use of their time, given the goals the PCs have. There really is only so much time to spend and that will affect the PCs life as they get older.


For the group I play with, this level of detail might be fine, but it might be too much. I don't want to come across as an intentional dick to my players though. Thoughts?
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Of course, I don't know your group, but if you explain your rules and the intent behind them up-front I don't see how that could be construed as dickish in any way. Personally I would love to play a game like that, if only for novelty's sake.
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Sun Feb 15, 2015 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Red_Rob
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Post by Red_Rob »

If you are devoting this much attention to a mechanic it almost needs to become the heart of the game. The players should have just a little less time than they need to manage everything, leading to "Oh well I guess I could skip studying this week to focus on my Creo."

Pitfalls to watch out for would be including things with no incentive to spend time on them (what does studying get you when you are learning how to warp reality with your mind? Yeah your characters likes their hobbies but why would a player allocate them over magical research?) or having some options be clearly better than others. Perhaps a diminishing returns mechanic to prevent you from just hardlining magical research every day?

Something I always disliked is how RPG's never simulate slacking off. It's easy for a player to say "my character carries out the mind numbing task without complaint or objection for 12 hours straight every day rather than going out and enjoying themselves". Having something like Focus points or a boredom roll that limits how much serious work you can do before you need to blow off steam might be worthwhile.

Finally if everything is too predictable you might find your players work out the optimum schedule to maximise the benefits and just stick to that. Adding some randomness either in results or time taken might mitigate that.
Last edited by Red_Rob on Sun Feb 15, 2015 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

Red_Rob wrote:If you are devoting this much attention to a mechanic it almost needs to become the heart of the game. The players should have just a little less time than they need to manage everything, leading to "Oh well I guess I could skip studying this week to focus on my Creo."

Pitfalls to watch out for would be including things with no incentive to spend time on them (what does studying get you when you are learning how to warp reality with your mind? Yeah your characters likes their hobbies but why would a player allocate them over magical research?) or having some options be clearly better than others. Perhaps a diminishing returns mechanic to prevent you from just hardlining magical research every day?

Something I always disliked is how RPG's never simulate slacking off. It's easy for a player to say "my character carries out the mind numbing task without complaint or objection for 12 hours straight every day rather than going out and enjoying themselves". Having something like Focus points or a boredom roll that limits how much serious work you can do before you need to blow off steam might be worthwhile.

Finally if everything is too predictable you might find your players work out the optimum schedule to maximise the benefits and just stick to that. Adding some randomness either in results or time taken might mitigate that.
Good points.

1. Re: Study time for magic my thought to restrict this is that they need fairly big chunks of dedicated time, a couple hours on a weeknight just won't cut it, they need to spend most of their day for a full week during summer or winter vacation to get anywhere.

Of course this means there will be really big stretches in between mystical advancement which can be problematic in of itself.

2. Getting bored and goofing off is a great point. oMage has Willpower as a score on the sheet which could be used in some way to determine how long the PC can focus for. I think adding a #10 for R&R is a good idea to maintain mental health.

3. I also like the idea of there just not being enough time in the day for all of the PCs obligations and interests. One of the themes I want to emphasize is the cost of their mystical studies and adventures on the rest of their life.
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Post by Username17 »

HTH wrote:I have posted here before about running a house ruled AU oMage game for students beginning Grade 11. I want to play a more gritty/realistic low powered kind of game.
Fundamentally, this is such a self-contradictory statement that you might as well be writing in Turkish for all the meaning English speakers are able to derive from it. You say you want to do a campaign of oMage... but you want to ditch the setting, the mechanics, the theme, and the magic system. So what I'm hearing is that you don't want to run oMage or anything particularly similar to it on any axis.

You want to run Teenagers From Outer Space, where all the characters happen to be reality manipulation mages. Which isn't that different from the standard TFOS character, so there's that. The big difference here seems to be that tonally you want to play it straight for the most part.

Anyway, I don't think there are any table-top games which have balancing personal life and studying as a major minigame. The closest I can think of is Princess Maker. And that is 1) not a table top game and 2) completely broken in exactly the way you evidently don't want the game to be: encouraging players to ignore fucking everything in order to allot all or almost all of their time to persuing single goals. So there isn't a lot for you to steal from. Essentially you're asking the training system to be a major part of the game, which is a major departure from other games where the training system is good proportionately to how much it stays the fuck out of your way.

Games like D&D, WoD, or Shadowrun are just worse if you use the optional training rules. The only thing you can really inform your game from those is to try to avoid making things shitty in those particular ways.
Red Rob wrote:what does studying get you when you are learning how to warp reality with your mind? Yeah your characters likes their hobbies but why would a player allocate them over magical research?
Since HTH is proposing to basically make a magic system from scratch that doesn't particularly look like oMage and is related only in that the magic is thematically skinned as "reality manipulation" the obvious choice here would be to have your knowledge of mundane subjects act as a cap to what you're able to do with your reality controlling powers. The better you know Chemistry, the more transmutations you can do. The better you know Physics, the more you can throw things around telekinetically. And so on.

Even chilling with your friends and playing videogames could be fit into that structure. Socializing more could make you better at mind magic, for example. Slacking off could be the thing that gets you magic insights, which have to be combined with reality knowledge to produce real effects. This would cause optimizers to split their character's time between homework and masturbating.

If your advancement dice were handed out with a log scale, optimizing players would put in at least minimal effort on all their classes. So double the study time gives you one more advancement die, or something like that.

-Username17
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Post by name_here »

Well, for video games there is the Persona series. Unfortunately, the primary mechanical incentive for actually caring about stuff which isn't fighting monsters is the Social Link system, which is tied into the Fusion system, which is stupidly complicated. But the general principle is that the various things which aren't magical research and adventuring should still contribute to what happens when the fight music starts. Ideally in a way such that it's a good idea to devote time to several of them. Diminishing returns is a good way to get that.

Also, there should probably be horrendous penalties for devoting zero time to at least some of the activities, particularly studying and sleep.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

The Persona procedure, roughly:
  1. Advance the "mundane" skills, so you can...
  2. Go on dates with people to improve their social link so...
  3. You get more and better personas, so you can...
  4. Dungeon-crawl better.
Of course, you don't actually go "do all of #1, then all of #2, then...", because you have time pressure.
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

FrankTrollman wrote:
HTH wrote:I have posted here before about running a house ruled AU oMage game for students beginning Grade 11. I want to play a more gritty/realistic low powered kind of game.
Fundamentally, this is such a self-contradictory statement that you might as well be writing in Turkish for all the meaning English speakers are able to derive from it. You say you want to do a campaign of oMage... but you want to ditch the setting, the mechanics, the theme, and the magic system. So what I'm hearing is that you don't want to run oMage or anything particularly similar to it on any axis.

You want to run Teenagers From Outer Space, where all the characters happen to be reality manipulation mages. Which isn't that different from the standard TFOS character, so there's that. The big difference here seems to be that tonally you want to play it straight for the most part.

Anyway, I don't think there are any table-top games which have balancing personal life and studying as a major minigame. The closest I can think of is Princess Maker. And that is 1) not a table top game and 2) completely broken in exactly the way you evidently don't want the game to be: encouraging players to ignore fucking everything in order to allot all or almost all of their time to persuing single goals. So there isn't a lot for you to steal from. Essentially you're asking the training system to be a major part of the game, which is a major departure from other games where the training system is good proportionately to how much it stays the fuck out of your way.

Games like D&D, WoD, or Shadowrun are just worse if you use the optional training rules. The only thing you can really inform your game from those is to try to avoid making things shitty in those particular ways.
Red Rob wrote:what does studying get you when you are learning how to warp reality with your mind? Yeah your characters likes their hobbies but why would a player allocate them over magical research?
Since HTH is proposing to basically make a magic system from scratch that doesn't particularly look like oMage and is related only in that the magic is thematically skinned as "reality manipulation" the obvious choice here would be to have your knowledge of mundane subjects act as a cap to what you're able to do with your reality controlling powers. The better you know Chemistry, the more transmutations you can do. The better you know Physics, the more you can throw things around telekinetically. And so on.

Even chilling with your friends and playing videogames could be fit into that structure. Socializing more could make you better at mind magic, for example. Slacking off could be the thing that gets you magic insights, which have to be combined with reality knowledge to produce real effects. This would cause optimizers to split their character's time between homework and masturbating.

If your advancement dice were handed out with a log scale, optimizing players would put in at least minimal effort on all their classes. So double the study time gives you one more advancement die, or something like that.

-Username17
Frank I've been thinking on your posts for a few months now and last night talked through some of your ideas with my group and the reception was very positive.

I still don't have a full system fleshed out - but they liked the idea of a "balanced" study mechanic that would actually be realistic with being a "real" teenager. The idea that they need to chill out or suffer from burnout, and that learning Spheres could give XP bonuses for learning Associated Abilities, or bonuses to rolls for using associated Abilities and vica versa.

The base of the game is story teller, with most of the Mage spheres... But you're really quite right actually. After reading through the Mage20 pdf that just came out... The kind of game I want to run really isn't "Mage" in many of the ways Phil Brucato writes it... Yet it could still be something really cool. I want to have the PCs explore things previously unseen and have them RP out some of the realizations about the expanded universe rather than have to wade through a 600 page tome. I'm probably going to just use the quickstart guide to get going and explain things as needed.

Anyways - thanks again for the great advice.
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