Any idea when this might launch? I was planning on running a lore game early next year, but might wait if the release is soon enough.

If your concern is primarily that of balance, then it’s all about that ratio.

Firstly, NT’s are fairly rare. I could probably think of ten of them if I sat down for a day or two. That’s because the positive and negative aspects come form the exact same place. Having DID, for instance, could mean that you have a badass alter ego, but one that takes over in some of the worst situations. If you got rid of the alter ego, you’d lose both the good and the bad.

Thusly, NT’s are very, very particular. You can’t bundle Extra Perceptive with Not so Fit, for instance, because those are two different traits that come from different areas of a character. You might be able to bundle Not so fast with Extra Healthy, on the other hand, but only if a mad doctor takes you to his lab.

Players have to ‘earn’ the right to gain an NT, by having an experience which leads to it. Thusly, an NT will rarely be useful the moment you gain access to it. The rest of the party has to shift in order to accommodate the change, which will likely take a session or two.

And, since NT’s are essentially embodiments of specialization, players will be that much more vulnerable on their own. Though a bit of a cheap trick, it’d be downright RUDE to just let the PC’s win unmolested.

Assuming that the character survives the GM’s assault on his life, he now has the one-time opportunity to pay to get rid of his trait. Then he’s left 2 xp behind the rest of the party (and probably short some health and/or items).

NT’s are guaranteed to be OP large portions of the time. But, they come with enough limitations and flaws that they are better described as a high risk investment.

In one case, a soldier gets the “War Wound” affliction; in another, the soldier gets “Shell Shocked.” Both have the same mechanical and narrative effect: the character is less effective in the future for a time, and the character can no longer exert his goals on the scene.

This works well with the LORE approach of letting players declare what sort of interesting effects events have on their characters.

I like the idea of traits not being completely good or bad. Racial traits in LORE Fantasy are Positive, but come with penalties; instead of being +2 to one thing, they’re usually +2 to two things but -1 to another. That’s probably how I’d handle selling your soul or having a symbiote. You get a benefit (maybe one that would normally be superlative!) but at an awful cost.

I don’t like traits being a perfect balance, though. Such a thing smacks of an optimal but boring strategy; something which is an advantage or a disadvantage is always more interesting than something which is a perfect tradeoff.

At the very least, you’re paying 5XP for the benefit of having this awesome aspect to your character.

Of course, I could be convinced otherwise.

I want a character’s spirit to be something that is slowly built up, then suddenly, recklessly, sloppily, spent during fights that often leave civilian PC’s in a puddles of piss.

Anti-hammerspace is just the coolest thing ever. Cool enough, in fact, that I have no qualms mooching. Since I need merely translate 20d to 2d6 (basically), my work boils down to testing it out and telling everyone which version works.

One last thing. I toyed around with the idea of neutral traits in LORE. These are traits that have both positive and negative affects that roughly balance each other out. Each time a character gains an NT, he pays 1 xp. Each time he surrenders a neutral trait, he pays 1 xp. Both positive and negative aspects are innately related; if you remove the bad, so too goes the good.

I understand that NT’s are basically handled by quirks, and this system does risk adding unnecesary extras, but some traits just don’t seem right handled by anything else. A moral code, for instance. Or being short, or being tall. Or selling your soul for power. Or having a symbiotic bug in your spinal cord.

This could add some meat to the meta game, allow for dramatic (and unhealthy) character development in short periods, generally allow PC’s more control.

NT’s definitely do taunt what LORE is about. And yet, I feel compelled to elect them for entry into the ‘real’ book. Then again, it’s probably treaded ground. At least here, I’ll be able to hear your explanations for/against.

Item tracking would be a cool addition! The fantasy module has a thing where you can carry a certain number of “large” items according to your Body and as many small items as you want, but a more in-depth system would be an awesome option.

More tactical combat for vehicles would be neat, too! I’ve deliberately taken steps away from that in this edition to encourage more unified narrative play, but I also like tactical stuff and would be really interested to see a system written for LORE.

I’m intent on making modules for this, day one. Ha, it’s probably going to be like a Halo launch for ‘normal’ people. Some things I feel like adding:

A spirit ability, working along side Body, Mind, and Charisma. This would be the basis for adding a ‘second health’ to each character which represents their composure/weariness/sanity.

Balanced support for Matt Rundle’s Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker. That, and an acronym for it so that I don’t have two spend 12 syllables saying it.

Super-hardcore space combat rules. 30 second rounds to allow for useful boarding combat;ships commanded by multiple individuals, each of which commands a particular function; systems for computing ship functions (like repairs and fire control); optional 3d rulesets (on a 2d board, with tokens to mark elevation); acceleration-based navigation.

Gameworlds/campaigns/Characters.

Extras, extras, extras. Okay, after this, THEN you can say you have enough swords.

Tweaks, suggestions, and requests.

And, of course, forcing my GM upon my friends.

Now I’m going to consider switching my project from (Xe)LaTeX to ConTeXt. I don’t have heavy layout needs, but ConTeXt’s “modes” feature could help me export to different sizes for print and screen reading.

I think you meant to switch “red” and “blue” above: the two-column box is blue, and the one above it is red.

If I were doing something academic I’d focus on the process of hiring for tenure-track jobs. There people are in direct competition; for a given job, only a certain number of people will be called for the next stage of interviews, and only one person will get it. And face-to-face interviews and schmoozing play a much larger role there than in tenure reviews (which basically involve portfolio reviews of one sort or another). But you could still have hidden cards for things like strength of argument; the less charismatic LARPer might still be able to succeed by pulling out an ace for an unbeatable argument.

There’s also a wider range of possibilities available there; instead of just an up or down decision you could be up for more desirable job. Do you wind up at Cushy Ivy League U. or at The University of Overwork at Armpit?

For an added fillip you could do something like the British university interviews, where they actually invite all the final candidates to the campus for the last round of interviews and tell the one who got the job before they leave.

This may be more realism than you’re looking for, but I thought it might be worth the feedback. (I’d have about as much interest playing the LARP I’ve described as a veteran with PTSD would have LARPing the war they’d just fought, I guess.)

A few things.

*What if someone refuses a challenge? Is that possible? On one hand you can produce an unrealistic situation where someone can take an insult in front of a crowd and walk away with his reputation intact (good idea for a perk), and on the other hand you can produce an environment where the weaklings are constantly assaulted since they can’t defend themselves.

*I don’t like that no one can be killed. It should simply be that they can’t be killed easily, I think. The easiest solution would be to integrate Paranoia/Assassination (thank you for the link Greg) rules, plus the need to kill them ‘quietly,’ or else in a duel. A neat side effect of this is that some people could choose assassination as their objective. Rather than trying to garner political support for some project, he’s just trying to put someone down. The political maneuvering would probably be little more than a ruse, though it could help to have others on board.

*I don’t like the way that cards simply and concretely win people…stuff. To make a comparison, it feels like it would end up like ‘The Day,’ and victory would be little more than pre-determined. Plus, it feels a little too far off to the side to make performance based off of extremely simple rules. So, a possible solution would be to make the actual words and actions weighty. Good quips would be worth as much as +2 (which helps to give the attacker an edge; something I especially kinda like) and vice versa.

*Maybe you could make certain cards better at certain kinds of actions. For instance, all the clubs could be more effective at situations involving fraud, hearts involving multiple people, etc. It complicates the game a good bit, but it does mean that the underdogs always have a shot.

Is your concern with regard to management the complexities of having side conversations and so on? Is it having a cohesive setting that doesn’t feel like Superfriends or fractured fairy tales? I’m not quite sure I’m understanding your primary worries.

So one character might have starving people back home, and she’s seeking to secure trade deals and technology to feed her citizens. Another might want to build an enormous statue of himself. In either case, they might each need to spend twenty total units of favor to accomplish their goals. Of course, favor also needs to be spent in the course of eliminating social rivals or defending oneself from elimination.

I can easily see (and perhaps the mechanics should encourage) two players deciding to make themselves rivals in each others’ stories. Perhaps they are opposite sides in a cold war, and are racing to spend enough favor to crush the other side.

If a character’s goal is achieved, they might retire and the player create a new character. Alternately, they could make up a new goal, this one more difficult. It could require 25 favor instead, and the next one 30.

A conflict shared by the entire player population would be hard to manage in a GM-light game, I would think. It would either come across as generic or constricting.

I also think (though I admit I don’t particularly care) that this method is not completely effective in realizing you point #7 above. It’s an equalizer, of course: it ensures that a player can author a cheesy line but still “win”, of course, while another player making a great retort could still lose; but in practice I think such results can, in the worst case, be so grating to the ear that they highlight the cheesiness of a given player instead of compensating for it. The corrective use of support cards from audience players makes such a result less likely, of course, but can only do that through re-instating individual player skill as the decisive factor.
To accomplish your #7 point, instead, I’d rather create another “arena of play”, one which would be independent of social skill, and make it a major factor in the game. A resource-management aspect, maybe, or a gambling aspect. Social skill and charisma then become a way to compensate low assets from the other “arena”, but any individual player can do as well by possessing a single strong suit as by being “average” in both fields.

As she says this, Agnes’s player holds out a card. Carlos supports Agnes, so he says, “It’s true! I heard him arranging the whole thing last week!” He also holds out a card. Brian says, “That’s preposterous. You’re just constructing fantasies!” and holds out his card.

The three turn over their cards. If Agnes wins, any uninvested spectators should roleplay disapproval of Brian. Maybe Agnes issues a final quip or Brian confesses and tries to justify himself. Agnes winning just means that she is the winner of this social exchange, and Brian loses status to her.

If Brian wins, he successfully dismisses Agnes’s accusations, and people roleplay accordingly. I see the cards as a way to resolve the difficult question of “who made the better argument?” or “did the insult stick or fall flat?”

I can even imagine it going into more exotic territory. Say two characters have a duel. They may decide who gets shot as a consent-based thing, but a card pull decides who wins the social fight. Maybe David gets shot in the shoulder and Edgar wins the duel, but because David won the social contest Edgar is regarded as a brute and a bully.

Coming from the perspective of a designer who mostly works with video games, I find it interesting to find how to make story emerge from rules. Sculpting a scenario with a set design would certainly scratch my itch for courtly intrigue, but I’m most interested in creating a system which can create many such situations and enable an ongoing game.

Concept 7 above is definitely relevant. In a game without mechanics or stat tracking, a less socially-gifted player will have a less rewarding time and will fare poorer. And while I believe that aesthetics and mechanics are closely wedded, I still think that interesting mechanics can stand on their own.

This all said, I have very little experience with more artsy LARPs. I may be misunderstanding their potential and their strengths.

(He’s even posting on twitter now! We’ll see if Project Wonderful starts producing extravagant revenues.)