Interest Check: Changeling: the Lost

So this happened yesterday....
I'm thinking about running a Changeling: the Lost game. I love the setting and would like to run a very small drama--a handful of Changeling living in a small town, trying to live normal lives in a place where the Hedge is very present. Love, sorrow, and supernatural hi-jinks ensue.

I could use the nWoD rules, but I don't think they add anything to the kind of story I want to tell, but still, if people are interested in the nWoD system, I could make it work. I'm also thinking about maybe a DramaSystem game or just fall back to Fate, which is my usual fallback. :-D

I read through a number of the published Changeling scenarios, and they all read like re-skinned D&D adventures: the party/motley get a quest/mission from a quest-giver to save the kingdom/freehold. They travel from site to site, accomplishing procedural tasks in order to complete the mission. The scenarios are very self-aware. They call the sites "scenes" and they are very excited to tell you "this scene requires talking!" but there isn't any actual drama. All the sites/scenes/tasks are procedural in nature. I don't think I'd be interested in running that kind of game at all.

So, to the questions at hand:
1. Would you be interested in playing in a Changeling: the Lost based drama?
2. Would you still be interested if it wasn't just a re-skinned D&D game but was an actual drama?
3. And since nWoD doesn't have any actual tools to tell that sort of story, would you still be interested if we used DramaSystem or Fate Core?

Also, if it helps, you can see how I run a Fate game here: https://gamersplane.com/forums/4395/
Also also, I tend to update about five times a week and the regular use of Discord is a must.

You know I'm in. I love drama and love Changeling. Dibs on the sexy sheriff to fall in love with. There is a hot sheriff right? Right?

1. Yes!
2. That is the only way I'd be interested.
3. I want to try CtL the system, but I'm down for anything as long as the sheriff is sexy.

I already know I like your GMing so I would generally be interested.
I'm not really into playing White Wolf, so I probably wouldn't join if it's the actual game. I would be more interested if it's a fate conversion or something like that.

To answer the questions:
1. Generally yes
2. That sounds even better to me
3. I would be more interested in that case

I've played CtD, but not yet CtL, so I'd love to give it a go, so
1. Yes
2. Yeah let's not do the 'adventure' style scenario
3. I think the system can support the drama though. If we do Fate I'm assuming you're hoping to use aspects, troubles etc as the primary means to drive the relationships and drama?

You are a great player. I'd love to have you.
I like the way you think. I'm glad you are interested. :-D

I'm positive that many many actually dramatic games have been played using White Wolf, I just don't see anything in the system to help gamify the drama and a whole lot in the system that we won't need. WW has skill/attribute rolls to accomplish procedural social tasks (persuade, seduce, intimidate, etc.), but obviously that's not the same as drama. To be fair, Fate doesn't really either, but, as you say, since you can use Aspects, Stress, and Fractals to gamify anything in Fate, we can easily adapt it.

As for what sort of Fate systems I like for this game, that's a good question. My brain isn't there yet. Off the top of my head I'd probably use a simple Dresden-style checkbox to track something like Wyrd/Glamour/Clarity. You can invoke it anytime you want to use your Changeling "powers" for the necessary Fate Point, but your Wyrd score (the total number of checks) serves as a penalty on your interaction skills with mortals. This box resets when we start a new "session" or goes down when you have normal interactions with mortals (or something like that). I also like having two Aspects set aside to represent your two dramatic poles, so the first thing you see on your sheet is that which makes all of your relationships fraught with drama. We will also use scene framing like DramaSystem. For example....

-I'll ask AJ, "What sort of scene would you like next?"
-She'll say, "I want a scene with the sheriff that I have a crush on."
-"What does your character hope to get out of this scene emotionally, related to your dramatic poles, and why might he deny you that?"
-"I want him to acknowledge me as a real, competent person and not just as some missing girl who turned up without a past, a victim in other words."
-"That's going to be tough for him, because of his dead daughter."
-"Exactly."

Then, as the scene unfolds, I'll make you an offer to roll to accomplish your desires or a Fate Point to have them rejected, etc. This sort of framing keeps the interactions short and to the point and the game on its dramatic rails. No one should go into a dramatic scene not knowing what the goal is. That goes nowhere fast. And since most dramatic scenes on the best-written shoes on TV last less than two minutes, brevity works for us.

We probably won't need any Physical Stress or fighting/shooting skills, but leaving them in won't hurt anything. We may also have a stress track that is social, representing how well you fit into the town. Etc.

Over the next few weeks, I'll start writing some of this up formally and posting it in this thread so that those who are interested and chime in.

Î
All of that sounds amazing! I definitely want to join!

This sounds really fricking cool but I WOULD be needing someone to help me learn whatever system you settle on because I'm new to basically all of them.

Dramatic games are really what I've been wanting to try for a while and I know you are an amazing GM and the current peoples are definitely skilled as well (Hello again, spinach, no there won't be an Elisabeth or some variation of Alice)

This sounds great and I have heard good thins about the GM ;)
5 times per week may be too much for me at the moment. Would that be "negotiable"?

I was expecting a complement for me here too, but you cut me. :P Remember that time I saw you trying to put on your underwear and fell over and I promised I wouldn't tell a soul? I'm rethinking that. Just so you know . . .
Love this. Run it like Hunger in the first iteration of the Vampire Elders game. Start at 1. At each Minor Milestone you can either increase or decrease the Wyrd score by 1. Each point of Wyrd is a penalty to all your social interactions with mortals. You can activate your Changeling powers one per session per point of Wyrd for free (additional uses cost a Fate Point).

You know there's something wrong with you, right? ;-)
Probably. The game will be on the faster side, mostly because we'll have multiple scenes going at once much of the time. Fewer posters in a scene means faster posting....usually. But I think if everyone was posting at least ever other day, that would probably work. (E.g. I post on Monday, you post on Tuesday, I post on Wednesday, etc.).

Also, much of drama is dialogue. There is no drama without dialogue. Players may want to make use of Discord to write their scenes a line of dialogue at a time. Then we can edit and post the whole thing to the thread. (Example IC Example OOC) Since real conversations don't take place in lengthy alternating monologues like most of PbP, it is reasonable to expect everyone to get on Discord most days to continue the conversation with a few sentences. That's what I'm thinking anyway. Reality might be different. :-D

A suggestion for a different game engine (but feel free to ignore it completely): have you considered Urban Shadows? Totally relevant for WoD and Dresden Files type settings, and uses an Apocalypse World engine. Directly applicable for drama using its Debt mechanic, and use of Factions. Even the regular Moves ie Actions, are more useable in relationships rather than in procedurals.

If we're suggesting other system, Smallville/Cortex Plus is made for drama and although it's designed for superheroes, it's flexible enough to be adapted easily to other settings, I would say.

I remember reading some of the CtL books and being intrigued by the premise, so I'd be interested in joining. No real preference here on the system; I've played nWoD and some Fate-adjacent stuff, so I should be able to pick it up regardless.

I do like PbtA games. Ironsworn is the game I've had the most experience with (we played more than a dozen sessions, and I played in one year-long PbP game). I haven't played Urban Shadows beyond a two hour "self inflicted" demo with my group (and none of us had played before or seen the game). I just glanced through the quickstart guide to refresh myself. I can't see how most of it would be all that helpful for a drama that happens to be about Changelings, though every time I read a PbtA game, I am reminded of how much I love love love the "Read a Person" move and all of its variations. Every game should have this! Persuade and the Spirit moves would be a pretty good fit. The rest, not so much. The Fae powers are just reskinned wizard spells and superpowers and a very poor fit I'd guess. Also, I'm not really sure how the Debt mechanic would help gamify the drama. I probably just don't have enough experience with the system to be able to tell. I'll read it all again this weekend and give it a think.
I have played a few sessions of Marvel Heroic, and one session of Supernatural. That's the extent of my knowledge of Cortex/Plus. I liked the games and had a great time, but at the time I didn't think they really added anything system-wise that I was missing in other games. Though, now that I think about it, MH was really great at building a system in which Hawkeye and Thor can fight along side one another against Ultron and both be useful and the story that is being build be plausible. I'll see if I can dig up Smallville from someone this weekend and give it a read as well.
Welcome to the discussion!

I think Smallville is the only cortex plus game that's explicitly designed for drama. I think it's perfect for that with its strong focus on relationships and values.
I can probably send you the pdf if you want, either over discord if that's possible or by email, if you want to have a look.

Don't sweat over it. I'm just talking out loud. Stick to what already works best in your head and we'll go with it. Thanks for even considering it!

So I did a bunch of reading and just confused myself. :-) Then I started over. So now I'm thinking about what sorts of systems I want for the game. Maybe that will help me (and y'all) get some clarity. Here is my starter list.

1. I want some sort of mechanic to track the ebb and flow of the outcomes of dramatic scenes, a reward for choosing one dramatic pole over another or for offering emotional concessions to the people who ask you for them. I'm not super keen on this reward being some sort of XP. I don't really see this as a "leveling up" kind of game, but we might could make XP work.

2. I want a gameable system for resolving procedural non-violent conflicts (mental, social, etc.). I don't like crunchy systems, but I do want some meat on the bone here (more than just say roll a d20 and the GM tells you if you rolled high enough).

3. I want a system that would allow players to easily create their own Changeling powers without having to create new subsystems to adjudicate their use. (i.e. I don't want to have to bother with a "spell list" for each type of Changeling.)

4. I want a system that would allow players to gamify the Changelings' move from Faerie to the mortal world. The more they live their mortal lives, the less Fae they become and vice versa.

5. I want a system that would allow us to track in a gameable way how accepted the Changelings are by the town they live in, independent of the dramatic relationships they have with certain townsfolk.

Since I know you love Fate and will think Fate first, this is an easy hack.

1. Fate Points
2. Fate skills, stress, and consequences
3. Aspect permissions (maybe throw in a little "High Fantasy Magic" for a bit of crunch.
4. You could adapt the "bane" system from Good Neighbors or use the slider box from Loose Threads.
5. Social Stress Track with a few extra rules for how those boxes get cleared.

[Edit] This isn't a vote for Fate BTW. I still want to try C:tL. Just trying to save you some time. ;-)

I think Smallville is well suited for the first three points, while 4 and 5 would have to be homebrewed in somehow.

Fate is probably a good choice for this game. I just like suggesting SV whenever I hear the word drama because I love that system xD

Heh heh heh I love a convert :D

I blame you for making the original post that got me sucked in ;)

I gratefully accept the blame

That’s a tough list of requirements. i don’t know enough systems to be of help :( Genesys is supposedly good for non combat interactions, but i’d consider 6 types of dice with 4 outcomes on the crunchy side.
I’ve never played Fate thought, so that could be something interesting to try...

If you don’t find anything published that satisfies you, allow me to me shamelessly advertise the experimental system me and mr b. are playtesting. I think it may somewhat address all those points 😝

A lot of that starter list reminds me of Mouse Guard, but that would require quite a bit of hacking to work. #4 reminds me of MG's "Nature" skill, which encompasses activities natural to mice. Acting within your nature increases it, and if it gets too high you become too mouselike to belong in the Guard. Tapping your Nature for actions outside of usual mice behavior can tax it, potentially making you too strange to fit in with other mice in general if it gets too low. (This ties into #1, as different roleplaying activities can be rewarded with Persona points that are used to tap Nature for better odds of success).

Similarly, #5 could be modeled on the Circles ability in MG, which is used to find somebody who is willing and able to help the group with a problem. On a failed Circles test the GM can invoke the "Enmity Clause," and instead of finding someone helpful, you find someone antagonistic who may try to undermine the group and is difficult to convince to be helpful in any way.

As I said, though, MG would require a lot of hacking to make work for this game, and it would be no help at all with #3. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of "what could we steal from this and bolt onto another system that is lacking."

Heard really good things about MG! Definitely wanting to try it sometime :)

Does a gameable system for social and mental conflicts encourage or defuse dramatic roleplaying?

Debate at 11.

Yes.

Thank you for coming to the debate.

This game will definitely not be a good fit for anyone who thinks the answer to this question is "defuse."

Well, the counter-argument is that gameable social/mental conflicts can lead to situations of narrative drama being derailed or defused by bad dice rolls or mismatched statistics. If someone gives a dramatic and heart-affecting speech and then rolls like a butt to convince a person or crowd of their point, the act of making that speech is deflated and the dramatic narrative can be derailed.

It can also lead to emotional and motivational dissonance, especially when PCs are affected. If an NPC convinces a PC to do a thing the player thinks the PC doesn't want to do for motivational or emotional reasons via mechanics and dice rolls, it can lead to flat roleplaying at best, and some wonky stuff at worst. Worse yet, if a PC affects another PC in the same way, the feeling of being mind controlled can be pretty alienating. This is especially bad if system mastery results in a player being able to dictate the actions of others, rather than drama, narrative, and emotional appeal.

Now... I'm completely not blanket against systems that have mechanics for social and mental conflicts, but the above points are really important to address in some way - especially because so many systems have systems for social and mental conflicts that are so simple as "Roll dice -> now he is your friend forever." See 3.5 diplomacy. Imagine in a D&D game if the BBEG walked up to your Player Character and rolled a 35 on Diplomacy, so now you had to roleplay that your attitude towards him is "friendly," even though he murdered your beloved Aunt.

The most interesting system on this axis is, imo, Legends of the Wulin, which uses a system of conditions to reflect everything from "your arm's off" to "I am in love with this person." However, the mechanics of the game are very, very closely tied to the narrative structure of Wuxia. Despite my vague frowny face at Powered by the Apocalypse as a system, a similar system of "tags" pointed me towards City of Mist. Both Mouse Guard and its progenitor Burning Wheel, for all I love them, express the latter problem pretty profoundly with their "let it ride" mechanics.

System influences behavior, and it's really, really important to consider how it influences that behavior before you make blanket statements like, "I want gameable social conflict." What does that mean? What does that look like? How does that affect how the game is played and the story is told? Are there limits and what are those limits? What happens when the players lose one of those conflicts?

Point of clarification, GreyGriffin: Are you interested in this game, or did you just drop in on the presumption that we are ignorant of the pros and cons of social conflict mechanics in roleplaying games and need to have them explained to us?

Oh, I'm certainly interested in Changeling. I am a sucker for tragedy, and the story of the Lost is really compelling. I'm just leery of the blanket enthusiasm for rolling dice at my feelings. Especially as someone who's had at least some experience with BW/TB/MG, I just want to be clear what's meant by "gameable social and mental interactions."

I feel like those problems are more caused by systems that weren't developed with a focus on social encounters in mind and that then try to still cover them (like D&D/PF).

To be fair, I don't have much experience with many games that have in-depth social mechanics so it might be an issue for some (or many) of them. But in Cortex, for example, "social combat" (if you want to call it that) never amounts to forcing a character into a certain action. The player can decide to give in or the PC might end up feeling bad or having doubts about their decision but they're not forced to act against their character.

Certainly, social and mental conflict mechanics can have drawbacks, just like combat mechanics can have drawbacks. Both can lead to character actions being reduced to rote mechanical actions, e.g. "I roll to hit," "I roll to persuade." Both can also cause lovingly crafted descriptions to be "wasted" on a failed attempt, as in your example of the dramatic and heartfelt speech that falls flat, or if someone describes a masterful strike from their combat veteran that completely whiffs (though both of those cases can be explained by the fact that targets do not always react as anticipated).

Those mechanics are still useful, though, because they make it easier for players to give up some of their agency over their characters and counter the natural desire to see their characters succeed, or else fail on their own terms, and they make it easier for the other players to accept when one character does something "stupid" that puts them all in a bind. I may be willing to decide my character has an emotional breakdown in a scene with low stakes, but can I be relied upon to do that when the outcome of the story is riding on what my character does? Will the other players accept that choice readily, or will they wonder if I'm falling prey to "it's what my character would do" syndrome? A random element mediates that, just like a hit point counter mediates the decision of when a character falls unconscious and relieves a player of responsibility for the tight spot it puts the rest of the party in.

Edit: All of which is a long way of saying that I'm okay with a mechanical system that might tell me that my character's impassioned plea that I spent an hour crafting fails because the target just can't be bothered to care, or that they are fooled by a smooth-talking con man, or that they find themselves empathizing with and wanting to save the "bad guy" despite everything they've done, or that my character is going to act out because they're fed up with the situation, or that the mental stress is just too much and my character has to effectively shut down in an attempt to process/make it stop.

Combat mechanics are usually more oriented towards moment-to-moment action, and are typically much more dense with mechanical interaction. A bad combat roll is usually one of at least a half dozen in a given combat scene. Social mechanics, and the interactions they represent, tend to either be more reliant on either summary rolls in more dense systems, or on core task resolution mechanics in more generally rules-lite systems. That makes systems that flub their social mechanics tend to flub them hard and fast.

I'd be much less concerned about character agency if I wasn't concerned about good narratives being stonewalled by bad rolls, or bad narratives being pushed forward by good rolls. In drama, empathy with the character is really important for investment, and if the character does things on the back of a bad scene backed up by good rolls, or a character just shrugs off a good, emotional scene just unaffected because of bad rolls, it can make it hard to empathize with the characters taking part.

It's easy to chalk up a bad roll in a physical conflict to a stumble or some environmental circumstance, or bad luck. You can do that to an extent with social and mental conflict, but there's a much more limited and subjective vocabulary to use.

The best social conflict system I've ever seen was Legends of the Wulin, where you got Conditions for everything, from "Peg Leg (-20)" to "Madly in Love (-50)" You either had to act in accordance with your conditions, or incorporate in your description and fiction a way that you were expressing or overcoming your condition, or you'd get the penalty to your action, if it was something that'd affect you in the scene. So, to take an action that would alienate your lover (like, say, stabbing him/her in a kung fu battle), you would have to either weep profusely and justify that it was for the best, or take a huge penalty.

I believe City of Mist has a similar mechanic in its condition tags (You can call on your Tags to help you, opponents can call on your tags to hinder you or help them), but I do not own it, and thus have not read in detail how it works. City of Mist is basically Changeling with the serial numbers filed off and tucked into a Fate-esque PBtA shell, so I think it's worth investigating.

Edit: I'm also really interested in how Genesys would play out in a less pulpy/actioney backdrop with a focus on more social and mental consequences. The dice there are... really interesting, but I'm not super sure how it handles social conflict beyond typical task resolution, I'd have to dig it out...