Fill Your Tags

[Onix]

I had a weird idea for a game system, I'm not entirely sure how it should all work out but I've got a general outline.

The basis is the tags that you get for hunting. When you hunt (In America anyway) you get tags from the government that allow you to harvest an animal. The thing is, there can be multiple types of tags. There's big game tags, small game, trapping tags, etc.

I was thinking of a system that uses this concept. You would have big enemy tags, small enemy tags, and loot tags. If you have a tag that fits your enemy, you can defeat that enemy. If you don't have a tag, the best you can do is chase them off or stop their plots. Loot tags mean you can take something from the enemy and they are driven off or made ineffective for the rest of the game, this could be information or cool stuff, the interpretation of the loot is open to the player.

A player would buy tags at the beginning of a game, they could focus on small enemy tags and get say 10 tags, 10 loot tags or focus on big enemy tags and get say 3. Or the player could buy a general tag with 4 small 4 loot and one big.

What I'm not sure of is how much uncertainty to inject here. If you have a tag, do you automatically defeat the enemy? If you don't use a tag how do you drive the enemy off? I do want it to be harder to beat an enemy and let them escape if you don't have a tag, making using one tempting. Ideally I'd like this to be diceless but I'm not sure I can pull that off. I'm thinking that trying to beat an enemy without a tag usually means you're tied up in the fight for a longer period of time. Maybe the better your stat vs the enemy, the faster you can chase them off. . .

Anydangway, thats what I've got so far. If this keeps gnawing at my brain, maybe I'll figure out more.

What do you think? How should this work?

[Evil Scientist]

They have a similar system in Hungary, hunters are given plastic tags they have to place on the leg of the animals they killed.

I don't think this mechanic could stand as a game (no pun intended) mechanic in itself, sorry, man It definitely has a nice vibe, but you have to come up with a game concept to justify such mechanics. I wouldn't like to see this turning into a simple auxilary "hero point" rule, that's for sure.

What I can imagine... is a LARP resolution system based on the tags.

[Onix]

So are you suggesting that the tags be literal in game? I had that thought and I think I could put it together.

I didn't mean for the tags to stand only on their own, mainly that they would mean the players had narrative freedom over those enemies. It made it seem like it could be an ultra simple resolution system.

[Rubbermancer]

My big problem with this, right off the bat, is that it injects too much abstraction into the narrative. Also, I can see it limiting freedom of choice a bit too much. I mean, the loot is right there, why can't I just pick it up?

[Evil Scientist]

[Onix]

[Evil Scientist]

Hmm, interesting thoughts!

It reminds me of a boardgame me and my cousins used to play when we were kids. I don't remember the name of it. But it was about a bunch of cops (all but one players) chasing the bad guy (the last player) in a city. All kinds of routes were marked on the map (bus, tramway, underground, taxi) and you had to use up tickets to move around (The bad guy had no figure on the map, he was just secretly jotting down which station he was currently at. Every five turns he had to reveal his location).
Now, the twist was that the cops had a limited amount of tickets and if they wanted to use them up, they had to hand it over to the bad guy. So, the cops were essentially running out of tickets, but they could control the movements of the robber to a certain extent by providing him with only a given kind of tickets.

You could do the same - the GM is the "bad guy", when the players use a tag, they hand it over and now the GM can use it against them. Maybe a tag has two sides, one with the player effect (Loot), one with the GM effect (Loss).

[Onix]

The two sided tags sound interesting. I think I'd have them parity most of the time but some would not. So most loot tags would flip to Loss, but some might flip to Harm or Capture. Most Small tags would flip to Harm, but a few would flip to Capture, Loss and a very small number would flip to Kill. Bigs would flip mostly to Harm or Capture but a fifth or so would flip to Kill.

Naturally players would try to not use the more dangerous tags until they felt they couldn't be used against them but it leads to interesting choices.

I was also thinking about not shooting a horse and poaching. Shooting a horse would be akin to using a tag on someone that isn't an enemy. For example, an innocent bystander is mistaken for a goon, the players jump on him and use a Loot tag but he has nothing that the players want. The players just shot a horse instead of a deer. This makes more sense in games where the good guys/bad guys are not clearly delineated. Current wars would be a good example of this. The safest route is to try and get the GM to use a tag on you and counter it.

Poaching would be taking narrative control when you don't have the tags to justify it. Doing so opens your character to open GM narrative control up to and including being removed from the game. You can do it but there's a penalty.

So yeah, ES I guess this would work reasonably well for a LARP, play by forum or just a narratively driven game.

I'll try and think of a setting for this, I have some vague ideas and I'd want to tie the mechanic into the setting.

[Rubbermancer]

(sidenote) ES, I totally had that board game... I seem to recall the city being London, and wasn't the bad guy's name Mr. X or something? (/sidenote)

OK, now that I have a clearer idea of this, this seems really cool indeed. I've always admired mechanics that manage to share narrative control fairly between players, and this looks like it could be one of those mechanics. Keep me posted!

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

My first thought is that some sort of regulated bounty system makes more sense than "look up treasure type D table on page XX". It is also a way to regulate the adventure economy that would otherwise hyper-inflate everything with all the gold coins they find in random creatures and underground caverns - or be a way to keep the rookies in line (May I see your Astral Titan hunting permit please?)

Perhaps these could be used to enforce a cinematic "I am the only one allowed to defeat you" mentality. Or as an alternative reward to XP - if you do the right deeds or complete the right actions, you gain the ability to remove some sort of threat/use a tag.

(Oh, and I know I've seen that game of hunting a criminal across London, I think it is called [url-http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/438/scotland-yard]Scotland Yard[/url])