Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Bidding More Than You Have

Hello hello, and welcome back to an attempt to pull off a Mechanic Monday! Despite being terribly sleepy and having just written a post yesterday! WoooOOOoooOOOooo!

Today I’m going to draw on where I left off; the cousin of ranked-choice voting (and the extrapolated mechanic, 2nd-place prizes), is second-place bids in auctions.  The second-place bid reveals even more of the narrative and the priorities of the bidders of a given lot.  And what the second-place prize is can affect those revelations.

The second-place prize could be:

  • The same as the first-place prize, but in a smaller proportion
  • A generic (from lot to lot) consolation prize
  • A unique (from lot to lot, or entirely unique each time) consolation prize

What does the dance look like if you want the second-place prize even more than you want the first-place prize? What does it look like the further down the line you award (3rd-place, 4th-place, etc)

But what I want to propose for THIS Monday’s Mechanic is: 2nd-place might win, if 1st goes broke.

Bidding More Than You Have

In GREEM, each round is comprised of a series of simultaneous auctions.  Players have a set amount of currency, but may Bid more than they actually have, combined across auctions or even on one Single bid.  Once the round ends, auctions are resolved, starting with the highest winning Bid.  When each winning Bid is announced, that player may Withdraw their Bid, if they are unable or unwilling to pay it.  When a winning Bid is Withdrawn, all the previously losing Bids in that Lot are decreased by 5, and the second-place Bid becomes the new winning Bid.  The process continues until all Lots have been awarded, or until all remaining Lots have no remaining Bids.  The round ends, players count their winnings and their currency, and the next round begins.

I added that “losing bids are all decreased by 5” thing to prevent the possibility that players would just layer astronomically large bids one after the other forever; but I also think it rewards anyone who bids at any point in the auction, and keeps the race for the middlegame of a bidding war interesting.  One possibility is that the winnings of an auction may not be separate from currency; maybe they’re a mix of VP and currency, or VP but VP can be converted to currency (albeit at a lower rate during rounds than between rounds).  You know me, why not both, and throw in Special Abilities as potential winnings as well.  Fuck I love auctions and I love making them weird.

I should do a roundup of my weird auction ideas sometime soon.  That’d be fun, right? It’s midnight almost and I’m so tired.  Til next time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mechanic Monday: Winding Down an Engine Builder

  Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self! Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there. Gradually Shorter Engines In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round. So engine builders (and th...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Campaigning

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday, let's see if I get something written before sleep overtakes me. I'm still on that Channelers kick, but today I want to talk about a possible campaign path: The Magpie Offensive.  I see this as a military campaign where the PCs are conscripted, volunteers, or mercenaries for an army that is marching to quell Spirit threats and unite the region under a protectorate. There should be free RP sections as interludes between missions, and missions should be chosen by the party.  The army ensures loyalty with intangible rewards as well as artifact items. NOTE: This whole thing is being designed with the Rascal article on militarization in ttrpgs in mind. What is the thrust of the campaign? It's fundamentally one of conquest.  How do I encourage characters to question their presence and their complicity? How much interpersonal violence is an acceptable price to pay for environmental justice? How can party composition affect all this from jump? H...
Post a Comment
Read more