Progress Tracking of Plans

There's a piece of GM advice I've been told in the past that I find hard to use. It says that one should make a rich world in which players can't manage to do everything, and then you should apply consequences to things they did not achieve. While I believe there should be consequences, I also don't want to drag my players down by making them feel like they'll miss out on cool things. At the same time, though, I want to create a sense of pressure. A sense that things are in motion. The mechanics described below started as a system of tracking the public opinion of three factions and evolved into something rather different: tracking the completion of plans and counter-plans.

I wanted to put an image of some futuristic presentation here, but didn't feel like looking for one too much longer. I kind of like this image more.
Dream War, by Beeple

Tracker

A tracker is a number between 1 and 12 that tracks which of two opposing sides is winning. If the tracker reaches 12 or more, the players have succeeded in their long-term goal. On the contrary, if the tracker reaches 1 or less, the opposing side succeeds in their plan.

Let's say that in Runehack, there's a company called Nexuspace that's developing an MMORPG entirely taking place in VR. Of course, the faction players are members of - Acumen - are suspicious of this endeavor and investigate it. With every successful mission, the tracker increases by 1, and with every failed mission it decreases by 1. This isn't done just by the one group of characters controlled by the players at your table, though, it's a process that's done many times over and over by all Acumen. Since generating them one by one would be a hassle, there's a simple way of abstracting this.

Once every time period (which I haven't decided yet. For now, I'm going with 5 days), the GM rolls a 1d12 for every tracker. The tracker increases or decreases by 1, going closer to the die. However, to make things more interesting, it increases and decreases by 2 whenever a 12 and 1 are rolled respectively.

Acumen are working on three fronts. First is taking out the Nexuspace's new VR MMORPG launch (tracker: 3). Second is a fashion company with some shady trackers put into their runic clothesline (tracker: 7). Third is a Runebot developing company (tracker: 8). The GM makes the rolls for the end of the period to see how the Acumen progressed. First roll is a [2], putting the tracker regarding the VR MMORPG at a 2. The second roll is a [1], decreasing the tracker for the suspicious fashionista down to 5. The third tracker rolls a [10], which means the Runebot developing company's goal has increased up to a 9. 

This provides a self-balancing way of tracking the ebb and flow of the plan's progress and attempts at countering the plan. A very high tracker number means the company is getting too defensive and protective, which makes it harder to increase the number further. On the contrary, the lower the number is, the harder it is to decrease further because Acumen get far more active. What holds the biggest sway here are the actions of the players: will they decide to protect a counterplan that's already almost failed with a tracker at a 3, or do they want to finish off a job that's at 11 just waiting for that final push? Their missions are not incorporated into the roll, instead, their successes and failures are applied directly to the tracker. This also raises the stakes in these extreme scenarios, where one of the parties is very close to reaching their goal. There would be a limit on how much time must pass between the missions to minimize consequences outside of them, which means the players can only be expected to contribute so much to each plan. The plans will all progress, whether the players manage to do something about them or not.

Nexuspace's plan has succeeded. The tracker went down to 0 after a botched mission by another team while the players were busy dealing with the Runebot-developing company, and now the world has been introduced to the world's first VR MMORPG without a controller involved. It requires a special face-worn device that many people now have in their household. The colors in the game grow more vibrant the longer you play it, making the real world seem dull in comparison to all its avid players. The game is filled with subliminal messaging of politics and ideologies in line with those of Nexuspace. And the microtransactions have set an awful new standard for the industry. 

This might be a lost war, but it is not the end of the world. The world just... changed.

What if we want to make things a little more complicated? Let's involve a third faction.

Third Faction

Nothing happens normally when the 1d12 rolled by the GM rolls the tracker's current number. However, if the GM deems it appropriate and wants to complicate things a little, they can introduce a third faction. This could be the rebellion that wants to destroy the power of corporations and reestablish the monarchies of old, a minor religious group that wishes to take the dangerous product and use it for their own gain, or anything else you deem worthy of having their own side. In doing so, a new tracker is created, and both trackers are at spots neighboring the last one (so for a 7, the trackers would be at 6 and 8). When three factions are involved, roll twice, once for each tracker, following the same rules. In the following scenarios, one of the factions loses and drops out of the plan/counterplan scheme until it is resolved.

• If a tracker arrives at a 1 or less, it ceases to be, and Acumen drops out of this tracking. What happens next is entirely between the company and the third party involved.
• If a tracker arrives at 12 or more, it ceases to be, and the Company drops out of this tracking. The conflict persists, but now only between Acumen and the third party.
• If both trackers are on the same spot, one ceases to be, and the third party drops out of the conflict. The status quo is reestablished, with the conflict continuing between the Acumen and the Company.

Extra note: Players' mission moves the higher tracker if it involves the Company. They move the lower tracker if their mission specifically targets the third party in an attempt to take them out of the picture.

In theory, on another roll equal to the tracker, you could introduce a fourth party with a third tracker and a third roll, or even more. I won't entertain that thought, three factions are complicated enough for me.

But Math

At least, that's what I would have written and posted yesterday. The article was finished, I just figured that I'll take a bit longer to mull it over before I publish it. I was feeling kind of bored, and curious about how it would work out in practice, so I wrote a Javascript code for running it. And... well, the numbers turned out to be awful.

Without players' interference, it would take on average about 160 attempts to resolve on its own. At least, that's what my poorly written code said back then. Right now I don't feel like rewriting it back to what it was to see how far off it was. With an assumption of a weekly game and one roll per session, this would take well over three years. That'd get way too tedious, and it would get nowhere. When I included the players' interference in the equation, it improved the odds a lot (nearly cutting the numbers in half!), but... it still didn't feel good.

So I got back to experimenting. Instead of attracting, maybe the dice could repel the trackers? Nope. Maybe the criticals could be ignored, or have a +3 instead of a +2? Nah. Making the ranges for victory and loss bigger? No. Truth is, using a d12 for this was a mistake because the chances of rolling a 12 or a 1 are quite low. Which is why I switched it to a d6. After a couple more alterations, it works well enough.

The tracker starts at a 3 because usually, the company has already started working on a project for it to be known by the Acumen. Every time period, a 1d6 is rolled. The tracker is attracted by 1 space closer to the tracker. The plan or counterplan is completed when the tracker reaches a 1 or 6 respectively. Players' mission applies before the roll. Rolling a 1 or 6 doesn't have any special effects on the tracker. No third factions are gonna get involved, because there's barely any space for two factions.

With this, it takes on average 10.5 rolls to resolve on its own. If the players are involved every time, and their failure can increase or decrease a tracker by 1, this probability shifts. Calculating it with an assumed success rate of 80% (it's probably gonna be more but for now), we see that on average they'd reduce the average number of rolls it takes down to roughly 2.4, which feels a little fast-paced to me, but then again... that's average. Meaning that some plans could be resolved quite quickly, and some could take more time than that.

Lesson learned, sometimes the idea might sound good, but the math won't math.

I've been busy lately. I got involved in a short-term Blades in the Dark campaign, I've played some other games too as part of my New Year's resolution, and I've been busy with stuff other than the Runehack RPG. I should get back to it and give it some more time so that I have at least the initial draft of it finished. Then... it's time to start playtesting. I hoped to begin the playtests once I'm done with the Blades game, but if it cancels again, I think I'll leave the party and focus on my playtests. Seven games to go, ... who knows how many more rules I need to write to my rulebook. I've been pondering thoughts of making YouTube videos more and more lately. Don't ask me when you can expect something though, that will be as much of a surprise to me as it will be for everyone else. So far, this has been a productive year.

Thank you for reading, and have an awesome day!