|
hyphz posted:I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: hyphz posted:Story: "My character does not want to deal collateral damage, but I will use abilities which inevitably deal collateral damage or have a high chance of doing so which cannot be mitigated, even though my character does not want to, because my own objective is to explore how he/she/we deal with that situation." Do you not think it's telling that your big example of this is complete nonsense? Maybe find another example where this is an actual thing that actually exists and we can talk about that because right now you're saying "OK yes THIS man is made of straw but do you not see the fundamental problem that this man represents?" Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Apr 17, 2021 |
#
?
Apr 17, 2021 22:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 08:54 |
|
|
hyphz posted:But in practice if you end up having to say this to a player they're going to feel rubbed extremely the wrong way, and if they've been RPGing for any length of time they might not expect it - remember that the tactical collatoral damage trade-off on Fireball has been a staple of D&D and d20 games almost since they were invented. Is your point that some players can have unreasonable expectations, sometimes because they're used to playing games with a different set of expectations? If so, I agree. Some players can have unreasonable expectations. They should probably make an effort to understand the game they're playing, and/or find games that are more suited to their preferences. I will agree with a small point in general though. It can feel a little bad when the GM doesn't feel like he's holding up his end of the deal. The point of the Nova is that you're going to cause unwanted collateral damage sometimes and that you should feel bad about it. But I think this does come with an obligation on the GM's part to present situations that make the collateral damage worthwhile. If you're using your phenomenal cosmic powers to save thousands of people's lives on a daily basis then occasionally injuring some people is probably fair. But if you pick the Nova, the GM only presents scenarios where the stakes are relatively low, and other people are perfectly capable of dealing with them without your help, then using your messy damaging powers becomes much less justifiable and he's indirectly painting you into playing a character that's recklessly endangering people's lives for the fun of it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2021 23:14
|
|
|
I don’t have any expertise in the system being leveraged here but I do want to point out this feels like a strawman. If a player is never going to be able to find any way mechanically, narratively, or otherwise to resolve this construct that is going back and forth, there are other forces at play other than rules interactions, or the rules themselves are being isolated from the rest of the engine and connectors are missing that makes this thing work. To use a system agnostic example, we can go back to X-men. Cyclops’ main deal is that he has laser beams and the like in terms of mutant powers but that doesn’t make him who he is entirely - he derives his superhero name from it, but it is not because of that power that the rest of his characteristics are what they are. He is a leader, fit, a competent fighter, and able to live a mostly balanced life of relationships helping out other people control their powers because he knows what the penalties of losing control are. He tries to avoid using his power as much as possible up to and exhausting most other options. However, there are situations that are contrived either by people who exploit his weakness or by a trick of fate that he loses control. Those few times that he does are narratively and mechanically interesting to explore for some people. The fallout that occurs also may be interesting but mostly on a narrative level than a mechanical level. Even though setbacks may happen, Cyclops absolutely tries his best with everything, even things he is not good at, like dealing with his old buddy who has different motives, or trying to reconcile his own viewpoints against a persuasive antagonist like Magneto. At this point the only thing discussed is what happens in the boundary of the in character narrative. In some games whether or not they carry the label of storygame, there are situations where people at the table may find it interesting to introduce complications to find out what happens. This generally requires a social contract and understanding that the things that happen at the table are in the service of having fun as a collaborative exercise and to see interesting things and dimensionality with characters. If a player is attempting to leverage rules in a way that is advantageous to them but runs counter to whatever rules text is provided and is not willing to compromise, this is again a player issue. It can be a power that is dangerous to use by design, or it can be a regular power, but maybe it’s not powerful enough. Maybe it is not a super power but something much more realistic, like a gun. “What do you mean, I can’t just take out my gun in a crowded area? I have the mechanical power to take it out, and I’m very good at shooting things accurately, so there is no way I would put anybody in danger! It doesn’t even hurt anybody when it’s out! The safety is on. I don’t even have it loaded right now. What’s the worst that could happen?” As a group of players at a table, this can be a tragedy, comedy, or accurate thought process, or maybe it builds to the point where someone who has significantly less regard for gun safety shows up in the same crowded area and starts opening fire. Then what happens? Or, what if someone rolls poorly and a shot hits an innocent bystander? A piece of terrain that can cause collateral damage? Who makes the call that this situation even happens? It’s the people at the table who make this situation, and any situation discussed to this point happen. Characters do not. Rules do not. Storygames do not. It comes down to human beings who are willing to sit at a table, virtual or otherwise, and attempt to play to find out what happens, regardless of how you attempt to categorize it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 00:13
|
|
|
hyphz posted:I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: What about your "non-story" scenario means that the player doesn't want to engage with the fallout when they decide to use their Captain Collateral power? What about your "story" scenario precludes the player (and character) from carefully considering if the tradeoff is worth it before using their Captain Collateral power rather than just doing it because the player wants to explore the fallout? E: and the biggest question, why is a player, especially a "non-story" player, choosing Captain Collateral out of a list of possible character types if they don't want collateral damage to come up? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Apr 18, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 03:14
|
|
|
hyphz posted:I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: No, hyphz. The issue is the operation of that rule in Masks, because this argument: hyphz posted:Agreed, but the manner in which it's resolved is the key. is not an honest argument. The person making the argument is not sincerely attempting to create a more realistic world or a more believable character. They're trying to get a bonus to a roll at half-off and saying whatever they think will persuade the GM into giving it to them. This is a depressingly common reflex from people used to task-scope resolution systems when they see a rule which only has a story or roleplay cost, such as "you will cause unwanted collateral damage unless you spend another burn". The story or roleplay cost is enforced by the GM, but when a task-scope system instructs the GM it will often tell them that they're not supposed to privilege their preferred story or roleplay outcomes, but instead be a neutral arbiter of task accomplishment in service of some nebulous "reasonable state of affairs". By rhetorically casting a cost as unreasonable a player can, possibly, dissuade the GM from imposing it. But in a story-scope resolution system, the GM is instructed to privilege the story and roleplay outcomes consistent with the genre and ideas the game is about. Lethal collateral damage is not a paralyzing concern for any active comic book hero, because collateral damage in comics is so very rarely lethal that the times when it happens are defining events in a hero's career, or turn out to be frauds not directly caused by the powered individual. If the first time the Nova rolls a 6 the GM decides their power went out of control and detonated a city block, killing hundreds, they're going to get pushback from the players not on the grounds of how reasonable that would be but on how bad it is for the story. Glazius fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Apr 18, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 04:47
|
|
|
Glazius posted:This is a depressingly common reflex from people used to task-scope resolution systems when they see a rule which only has a story or roleplay cost, such as "you will cause unwanted collateral damage unless you spend another burn". The story or roleplay cost is enforced by the GM, but when a task-scope system instructs the GM it will often tell them that they're not supposed to privilege their preferred story or roleplay outcomes, but instead be a neutral arbiter of task accomplishment in service of some nebulous "reasonable state of affairs". By rhetorically casting a cost as unreasonable a player can, possibly, dissuade the GM from imposing it. I think this gets to the core of what I'm trying to say though. Suppose that the explosion of the city block would have been "reasonable" by the first definition, but not because of its effect on the story. (If it would have been "unreasonable", both approaches give the same result.) This means that in the character's mindset, one of two things is true: a) they are acting like they know they are in a story; b) they took an action that could reasonably have killed hundreds of innocent people. a) is not necessarily a bad thing if it disbelief can be suspended, and it's so common in superhero stories it's hardly worth mentioning. But it can be extremely uncomfortable to the player to have to hold those two mindsets at once, or to give up the idea of sharing the mindset of the character.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 16:33
|
|
|
Ah, so like if I'm explosion-man in the real world, I'm not going to try stop a mugger stealing an old lady's purse because if he points a gun at me, I'm going to have to blow out a wall next to him to save my own skin and then the building might collapse. And obviously it would be better for everyone if I just let the mugger get away and bought the old lady a new pack of Werther's Originals myself. But in the comic book world, blowing up a wall like that won't bring down the building so it's fine. And the game does a good job of modeling the comic book world but the player is still concerned about what it would be like in the real world. That's the worry?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 16:46
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:And the game does a good job of modeling the comic book world but the player is still concerned about what it would be like in the real world. That's the worry? It's not really anything about comparison with the real world, it's to do with comparison with the character's mindset. Does explosion-man know that the wall won't collapse, or is he taking that risk in-character but it just turns out OK?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 16:49
|
|
|
At that point it comes down to a matter of escalation and proactive versus reactive character mindset (in addition to the player who is running the character). It's unlikely unless the character was very familiar with the environment and their powers that they would know what the impact resistance and structural integrity of a given piece of terrain is like (wall, in this case) in the narrative but they may choose to intervene for other decisions - for example, they are a superhero, and can't let something that's a clear injustice slide by their notice. They might eschew using their power in an effort to avoid escalating, but if narrative (GM or player) forces drive them to use their power then regardless of whether the character is aware of those things, they will, instead, end up with a hard decision of using the power at the cost of collateral damage, possibly catastrophic damage, to save a stranger and their belongings. Some tables may again find this to be a very interesting situation and has a dramatic tension applied to it; others may be highly frustrated or no-sold at the situation the character is put into. This is again not the fault of the character or the design of the game and is instead a table-level thing that ought to be discussed and sorted through.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 18:00
|
|
|
hyphz posted:I think this gets to the core of what I'm trying to say though. No, very few characters in a story actually realize they're in a story. Explosion Man isn't worried about bringing a building down when he stops a mugging because he's never brought a building down before. Explosion Man's player is going to have to think in terms of narrative causality rather than physics, sure. And if somebody has fundamental problems with the nature of superhero media, they're not going to have a good time playing a story game about superheroes. But... I think that's more of a feature than a bug, really? If you don't enjoy a genre, why would you expect to have a good time playing a game about it?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 18:58
|
|
|
Glazius posted:No, very few characters in a story actually realize they're in a story. Explosion Man isn't worried about bringing a building down when he stops a mugging because he's never brought a building down before. Explosion Man's player is going to have to think in terms of narrative causality rather than physics, sure. And if somebody has fundamental problems with the nature of superhero media, they're not going to have a good time playing a story game about superheroes. It's more that that media has to make sure that the mindset of the character, or at least the most likely mindset that the reader will project onto the character, is appropriate. Even if we know that Cyclops' lasers might go crazy or Explosion-Man might bring down the building, the story has to avoid leave the reader with the impression that Cyclops or Explosion-Man is being reckless to the point of no longer being a relatable hero, especially in a world where many other supers exist. But in an RPG, you have a force acting on the player much harder than the story acts on the reader - the rules. If the players know that there is nothing Explosion-Man can do to prevent that explosion occurring 1/6 of the time, because it says that in the rulebook, then it's going to be much harder to produce a sequence of events in the game to overcome that knowledge such that Explosion-Man doesn't come across as a recklass rear end in a top hat to the players, and especially not so that Explosion-Man's player doesn't feel like he/she is playing the character as a reckless rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 20:56
|
|
|
Can I ground the Nova discussion with the book's advice and rules on running for a Nova?quote:THE NOVA The move I bolded is I think the key to running the Nova well. The playbook's general design is someone with a great deal of raw power and very little control over it. Their intended arc is learning to treat their awesome power with the responsibility it deserves. I do think the character coming off as a reckless rear end in a top hat is a very real concern of the playbook, and the best way to alleviate that concern is to really play to the fact that there are threats out there that only the Nova can handle and them retiring to a life of quiet meditation isn't necessarily what's best for the world.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 22:15
|
|
|
hyphz posted:It's more that that media has to make sure that the mindset of the character, or at least the most likely mindset that the reader will project onto the character, is appropriate. Even if we know that Cyclops' lasers might go crazy or Explosion-Man might bring down the building, the story has to avoid leave the reader with the impression that Cyclops or Explosion-Man is being reckless to the point of no longer being a relatable hero, especially in a world where many other supers exist. No, hyphz. You're still in task town. In story town, the GM gets to decide what happens when Explosion Man causes collateral damage. The odds that Explosion Man will kill hundreds of people are 0% if the GM doesn't want him to and 100% if the GM wants him to. It's not up to the story alone to convince the reader that Explosion Man isn't being psychopathically reckless. The reader is also responsible. If nobody in the story treats Explosion Man as a reckless psychopath, and the narration doesn't call Explosion Man a reckless psychopath, the reader can still "be convinced" Explosion Man is a reckless psychopath if that's what they want to believe.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 23:19
|
|
|
hyphz posted:But in an RPG, you have a force acting on the player much harder than the story acts on the reader - the rules. If the players know that there is nothing Explosion-Man can do to prevent that explosion occurring 1/6 of the time, because it says that in the rulebook, then it's going to be much harder to produce a sequence of events in the game to overcome that knowledge such that Explosion-Man doesn't come across as a recklass rear end in a top hat to the players, and especially not so that Explosion-Man's player doesn't feel like he/she is playing the character as a reckless rear end in a top hat. But Hyphz, it doesn't say that in the rulebook. It specifically says that the Nova can spend extra burn to avoid the collateral damage. It says that because the ficitonal character "The Nova" exists in a story, or a if you prefer a series of fictional events, within a genre which is generally well-understood (and further defined in the rulebook), and in that genre, the Nova archetype isn't a reckless rear end in a top hat with a power that has a random chance to cause massive damage which they use all the time for shits and giggles. Neither is the Nova some random kid who tries to stop a mugging and accidentally levels a building and kills a thousand people because they lose control of their powers 1/6 of the time no saving throw but chose to do it anyway. The Nova is a kid who knows they can lose control, knows what the consequences of that will be that people they care about get hurt, has tools to prevent that from happening, and will nevertheless find themselves in a situation where they are going face a choice between risking doing that and something worse happening and that causes them deep anxiety. This is not only a genre trope, it's also explicitly laid out in the rulebook, which you really should think about reading. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 18, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2021 23:45
|
|
|
More generally, if you want to be in the position of always using your powers safely then *you shouldn’t be playing a Nova.* (That said I wish the playbook had a little more mechanical support for this - outside of reality storm, there’s not that fundamental tension between “make it safe” and “make it easy” that tends to define the core conflict of Nova-type characters.)
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
Couple things: I would like this thread to not solely be about trying to teach hyphz stuff; and, I believe hyphz intended this to be an example of a split in perception between characters in a "story game" and those in "non-story games" and I think whether or how there is such a split (or is it more of a spectrum) is a more interesting question for this thread, than whether or how hyphz has misunderstood the rules of this specific RPG. I can recall a few times all the way back in the 1980s playing D&D or RIFTS or Paranoia where we at the table just sort of organically decided to take a particular course because "it would make a better story" - maybe not explicitly, but that was the underlying reason - so I'm inclined to think that there's really just a spectrum of whether/how often players do that, vs. I dunno, do what results in the most treasure, or avoids character death, or just "what my character would do" without directly considering whether that'd be "good" or "bad" for "the story." Actually now I think about it, "what would my character do" is often not on my mind while playing. Maybe I'm just not as good at immersive roleplaying, but there's a lot of time where I'm just playing the mechanics part of the game, as a game... like hmm, can I figure out how to use my really good History skill in this situation? Hmm, is there a chance there's a secret door in this room? Hmm, what should we do to defeat the sorcerer, considering he's obviously way more powerful than us... but not "what would my character think we should do" but more like "no seriously what should we, the players at the table, do."
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 00:32
|
|
|
If that's Hyphz's point, then perhaps he could be asked to engage with the people trying to engage with that point, rather than conjuring tortured examples from games he hasn't read and then but-what-if-it-was-ing when people tell him that that's not how those games work? To reiterate my position on that point: There's no distinction between a character "acting as if it were real" and "acting as if it were a story", because the character is necessarily a character in a story in every way that matters - they are a fictional person embroiled in a series of fictional events. The story ("the fiction", the "verisimilitudinous mileau", whatever, it all means the same thing) is defined partly by the rules of the game, partly by genre conventions, and partly by player consensus. This never changes, although the proportions of those things might. The character never knows they're in a story (outside of a very specific fourth wall breaking sort of game about characters-vs-the-author or similar, but if you're playing that then you've already resolved this discussion to your own satisfaction). The player always knows that the character is in a story, no matter how many levels of separation they try to insert between the person rolling the dice and the fictional person in the story. This is true even if the player has decided to pretend that the story is to be treated as "real" and that the character will "behave as though it were real" - that's just another way to look at that separation, not a whole distinct approach. In the specific example of the Nova in Masks, we must assume that the player is engaging in good faith with the game - that is, they have read and understood the rules, they have a handle on the genre conventions, and they have formed a consensus with the other players about the tone and scope of the fiction. Given that, it's difficult to see where the distinction could lie - the character is a character in a piece of genre fiction, the powers operate as the rules say they do, and the players (including GM) will behave as such. If they don't, they're not engaging in good faith with Masks. So the character doesn't accidentally/randomly blow things up causing an emergent story that was out of the player's control. The player or character may choose to blow up more than they wanted blow up to in order to blow up the thing they were trying to blow up way harder than they could otherwise blow it up. The player might coldly calculate the cost/benefit in this particular instance, or might do it because it sounds cooler than not doing it, or because it fits in with the genre, or because it seems particularly cinematic, or it portrays the character as they have been perceiving it, or because it's an important character development moment. None of that means that the character is any more or less a fictional character embroiled in a series of fictional events - that is, a story. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 19, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 01:19
|
|
|
Right, moving on, potentially, I'd like to explore the science of scaling games for asynchronous play - that is, how to run some kind of play by post operation for more than a single group without going bonkers. This used to be much more common in the earlier wargaming days where people would play by mail - each player controlled a faction of some kind, would fill out an order sheet and send it in by a deadline, and a central processor would run the full simulation and spit out the results back to the players. This worked for those kinds of games, but over time the needs of games changed to a much more personal one which involved singular characters. Play wargames by mail gave way to play tabletop RPGs by email, and then the most recent things would be to play by chat or play by post on a message board. The situation: I have a group of potential players at work that have zero experience with tabletop RPGs and know that. An idea came up where it would be nice if we could figure out some kind of way to get more face time and have fun without necessarily chatting about work between one region and another. Due to time constraints and shyness, a wide variety of people do not have the capacity to join a live game or 'mandatory fun event', but there is interest in building up cross-region relationships. They may have played games over the years like video games and the like, but an unknowable amount of them are actually 'experienced'. Plus, there are 17 people per region, possibly more, and across three major geographical regions that means there are 30 to 40 people as part of the player cohort. As a referee, I want to create a game that meets the following objectives: - Easy to teach, learn and understand. Is scalable for players and also scalable for referees (in case more are added). - Promotes cooperation and is not adversarial. Encourages cross-region communication and planning. The philosophy of the game is rooted in cross-region coop. "To go far, we must go together." - Easy to plan and resolve. Some issues with this: - Most games in the modern era are too complex to scale up gracefully. Consider D&D, and how it breaks down past 5 or 6 players. You wouldn't run a game with 12 or 15 players, much less 30 or 50 players. - Modern games deal with conflict resolution at a tactical level instead of a strategic level. Part of what bogs down play by posts is that each 'update' must go six second round to round instead of something like season to season or year to year of in-game time. As soon as combat breaks out in a tactical game in play by post, for example, it may take weeks to resolve a simple combat. As combat complexity increases given the rules engines available even with theater of the mind, as long as the time scale is moment to moment for conflict resolution, it is not scalable. - Modern games deal with individual resource management only and not co-operative resource management very well in asynchronous play. Given that games resolve conflicts moment by moment, this also means that working together requires coordination at a very granular level which causes a huge amount of slowdown when the entire game state can change based on the outcome of an action, or not. A single action may have zero impact (a miss, for example), and while that's generally acceptable in live play, a given character may be unable to take another action until the next resolution step for several weeks. - The burden of refereeing a play by post game means that action resolution for each character is in long form. This is a big pain point for me. I feel that, for whatever reason, the energy spent of each person to make their post must be reciprocated in some level as a GM, so if four people spend 15 minutes each crafting an essay to describe their course of action, as a GM this means I will need to spend 60 minutes per update attempting to make sense of those things, resolve any conflicts, and then figure out how to logically organize that, in text, as an update. As a result of the above, I think that there are no modern systems out there explicitly designed for running a tabletop RPG at scale. I was writing earlier that one of the core definitions of a tabletop RPG is that it's open ended in the scenarios presented and ultimately puts the judgment to players and referees at the table, rather than the rules engine, but since the rules engine can inform mechanical and narrative actions, I propose the following framework for a scalable play by post game to meet the situation above: - Make character creation and task resolution simple. - Limit the amount of actions a player can take. - Make the actions require co-operation to resolve all but the most simple of tasks. - Players combine resources to resolve tasks. - Allow players cross-region to communicate at any time. - Require that larger scale objectives be completed by working cross-region. - Remove the moment by moment aspect of the game. Players take one action per update from the limited action pool using an order sheet. - Play takes place with one update per month, or possibly every fortnight. Given the above, we can have a simple character creation process that takes five minutes (or possibly even randomly) that assigns a character to a player with basic stats that also reflect their competencies and resource pools in the game world. Players begin segmented, but can join forces and eventually connect and overcome larger obstacles by working together in a more direct way. Eventually, they will need to face an existential threat, which they need to get creative on how to resolve. I don't know if I'm getting particularly hung up on the details but since the capability to process this game as a tabletop RPG depends on referees, the main thing will be to ensure there is a fair distribution of outcome and reward for players that cooperate and work together from a rules aspect to encourage working together. If the rules themselves make apparent that working together is the key to progression and cross-region communication and cooperation is going to be important to get to the next stage of the game, then this should allow for people to play, take a minimum amount of time to execute on actions, then go about their day. Referees then have one or two hours per month to dedicate to processing orders and updating them via some kind of tool that is easy to use for processing. If this seems significantly closer to a domain management type game like Birthright or a resource management boardgame, then, yeah, it is. The key difference between those games and this one though would be that a referee figures out and makes up what happens next based on player context and actions through their order sheets. Since it is not deterministic, then it will depend on the skill of the referee to execute on the actions and then describe to the players what happens. Key considerations: - Is this a fool's errand? - What prior historic games leveraged large scale asynchronous play? - Can asynchronous play be transitioned to live play during a special event? - How is the game kept satisfying while still maintaining its objectives? - What is the reward feedback loop? Minor rewards? Major rewards? - What is considered a decent cadence? (For me, I think one month turns are doable) - Should there be a cutoff time in advance of the next turn counter? How long? - How to encourage players to communicate with one another cross-region asynchronously? I think even a suggestion of framework would be pretty good, like a shared Slack room or something. - Does going through multiple phases of play limit the amount of players who have meaningful actions to take during the course of the game? Should action categories change during the course of the game? - Should the game continue even if the original players and referees step down? - What is the game end state?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 02:53
|
|
|
Weirdly enough I think you can adopt some stuff from Diplomacy here? When you talked about working asynchronously to coordinate objectives it was the first thing that sprang to mind. Maybe borrow "the grind" from Torchbearer to put a timer on a dungeon dive and make it just the old-school city built on top a sprawling dungeon. You'd need to heavily curate things from your end to present an "enemy front" for people to negotiate. Like, you're in a dungeon room with some goblins and an old stone coffin on a platform separated by a moat. Everybody has three action points they can commit to searching the room, fighting the goblins, crossing the moat, et cetera. You get a small bonus by pouring additional actions into doing something, a middling bonus by helping someone else, and a large bonus by helping someone else from a different front. Like, if you get somebody over to the coffin that's a "different place" and they can support fighting the goblins with ranged abilities. The key to asynchronous planning is that multiple people need to be able to make decisions at once. Anything that relies on or, worse, responds to somebody else's action really doesn't work if you can't be around to process immediate interrupts.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 03:53
|
|
|
So when you first mentioned to me about a play-by-post structure, I thought you were still talking about the traditional 3-5 players and a GM use case; the scalable part throws another wrench in. Lemme see if I understand. Are you thinking that players would interact with one another - roleplaying - throughout the month, without needing a GM to monitor or adjudicate those interactions; and then periodically submit some limited amount of actions, which would then be resolved en masse, kicking off the next turn? I've had in my head some kind of semi-antagonistic game in which players would each run a "house" consisting of a "head of household" plus "family" (which needn't be blood relatives necessarily) and "staff" (which could include blood relatives, but basically - minor characters) and then assets like land, wealth, influence, etc. Such a game could have roleplaying aspects, in which the player is nominally acting as their head-of-household but can also optionally roleplay aspects of their family and staff; but could operate on a scale of "seasons" or something, so that each time-increment the family would attempt to advance their interests or cope with conflicts. As I envisioned it, there would be strategic advantages to cooperation, and there would be NPC Houses acting mostly as antagonists, but such a game could also support intra-player rivalry, and perhaps define limits to that. I had also been thinking of it in the mold of a boardgame with one or more win conditions - perhaps simply surviving a multi-year crisis intact, or perhaps achieving political, financial, influential, etc. goals. To me this sort of structure might support long-turns play because the players have more to do than just have conversations between their characters; automated systems might supplant GM effort (perhaps every season you draw an Event card, may develop up to 5 hexes of your land, may attempt up to one assassination, must attend at least one social event, etc. - and these could be handled via fixed mechanisms that don't require judgement to rule an outcome) while still supporting GM-adjudicated interactions, e.g., those open-ended scenarios you were mentioning are core to a role-playing game, where player and GM creativity needn't be limited by specifics anticipated by boardgame-like rules mechanisms. Of course, you can dispense with the idea of houses and just have lots of characters. The struggle-of-houses idea has the advantage of giving players lots to do every long (in real time) turn. What would individual characters be able to do, not requiring interaction, but remaining interesting, for a month of real-time leisure time? Ultimately I think that's the crux of the matter. Dispensing with tactical combat (or perhaps combat entirely) isn't hard, to my mind. I think the key question is what everyone is able to do... how do they "cooperate" to do things? Are you relying on automated systems everyone can access... and can they handle the inevitable case that some of your players will be able and interested in spending hours daily on it while others will be only able to spend maybe an hour or two monthly? This is aside from a different, perhaps less difficult question, which is "can you design a traditional RPG to work well via Play-by-Post" and some years ago I wrote out some requirements to see if I could do that, and found the requirements themselves so daunting that I decided not to bother. That list of requirements is a post in TG, somewhere in the mists of time and unknown thread, so I don't have it handy, but some of the things I can recall off the top of my head included:
There were probably more items but that's plenty. Maybe some of those will be useful ideas for you too.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
The notes that I currently have relate to having five stats that you distribute character points into, and then all tasks require some amount of point allocation to complete. For ease of understanding, I'm taking five elements to use: - Wood - Water - Earth - Fire - Metal Then, the action table: - Craft - Explore - Challenge - Research Each action for whatever is being done has a complexity: - Easy: requires any 2 resource types - Medium: requires any 3 resource types - Hard: requires any 4 resource types, or 3 specific resource types* - Very Hard: requires all 5 resources, or 4 specific resource types* * TBD As in Diplomacy, Lords of Waterdeep etc. the resource allocation takes place, but since Medium and higher will require more resource types, it is expected that the difficulties will be set in such a way that players will be unable to resolve any action in a given turn unless they work together. I don't intend for there to be immediate interrupts, generally because I do not intend for this to be adversarial at all, plus it would cause the game to grind to a halt after the order sheets have been filed. This would dramatically increase upkeep and back and forth, so just avoid it entirely. Similarly, having the time scale in a dungeon (which would map to Explore or Challenge) map in a room-to-room level is probably something that would also cause too much decision interactivity. What could potentially happen is that conflicts can have multiple stages to clear. A dungeon may require a combination of Explore and Challenge actions, for example, and the difficulty is such that people will need to work together in groups of 3 or more in order to clear those actions. I also don't like the idea of having combat be its own category, so abstracting it to "Challenge" means it can adopt a different semantical meaning. Maybe the challenge itself is not combat, but a test of wits, or a debate, or a puzzle of some kind to unlock something? The main thing is for players to collaborate and submit their actions and then call their turn done for the month. Aside from a soft requirement to get multiple people to collaborate on complex actions, there can also be a positive reinforcement loop a teamwork bonus as well to complete actions faster. This also opens up strategic-scale thinking. If there are multiple Challenges that need to be cleared in order to get at some kind of regional objective, then how will players organize to handle that? What if it requires coordination with players in another region to do corresponding actions on their end? The idea being, actions happen in-region, but discoveries and outcomes can impact other regions as well, so coordination is required, but it doesn't have to happen in real time. Players can ping each other via chat, voice call, etc. and have a whole month to lay out their plans.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
What stands in opposition to character cooperation? Cooperation is itself an excellent goal, but: if there is nothing but advantage to doing so, then you're actually prejudicing the game against anyone who can't - too busy, social blocks, just not interested - maximize cooperation. Do players have a limited amount of cooperation-resource, and some reason to favor one over another partner? Are you just presenting a large group of people with a puzzle of maximal interpersonal token-exchange to solve every month? (If you do that, someone will volunteer to tell everyone else what to do to maximize the outcome and everyone will either do it, or be resentful of it.) Where does the roleplaying come in? If my character is: gregarious, deceitful, impulsive, and open-minded, how does that help me decide whether to trade 2 wood tokens with another character?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:31
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:Lemme see if I understand. Are you thinking that players would interact with one another - roleplaying - throughout the month, without needing a GM to monitor or adjudicate those interactions; and then periodically submit some limited amount of actions, which would then be resolved en masse, kicking off the next turn? The GM team would be the ones to resolve the outcomes of the actions, but the actions are dictated by the players themselves. Players should have a reasonable expectation of the outcomes of their actions, but also be ready for some surprises when the outcomes cause further things to happen that they might not expect, or exactly what they expect. Turn order would then be as follows: - All players submit order sheets by deadline - Referee processes the order sheets as if they were simultaneous actions (there is no precedence) - All order sheets are considered additive and take the best outcomes of all combined actions. - Referee puts the output and any new fiction, information, etc. out to the players at the update interval - Players have the next month to discuss, roleplay, etc. to handle their next actions and plan accordingly as the world state changes Leperflesh posted:Of course, you can dispense with the idea of houses and just have lots of characters. The struggle-of-houses idea has the advantage of giving players lots to do every long (in real time) turn. What would individual characters be able to do, not requiring interaction, but remaining interesting, for a month of real-time leisure time? I don't personally have a problem with adversarial games but there's an underlying meta-objective here, which is to break down social barriers between cohorts at work that are cross-region without forcing people to do some kind of weird time-shifted morale event like getting up at 7:00 AM local to play Jackbox to a group of shy engineers. So, while an adversarial Diplomacy-esque type game could allow for this in a scalable fashion, you would probably want to include some control measures to keep the game spicy and keep people willing to engage. I would say that Dramasystem's idea of using dramatic tokens for characters engaging with one another means that any amount of interaction that isn't pure exposition can carry potential narrative weight and also gives players a self-regulating push-pull type of thing where their characters may not be willing to concede something, but they have a finite reserve of those dramatic resources, and they have to give in order to keep the narrative moving after a certain point. This can get out of hand really fast at scale, though, and could even generate some really unsavory behavior like outright bullying. I would possibly say that it might be interesting to do with a more muted form of it, but nobody is under a requirement to record any interactions except official order sheets. The above creates an interesting dynamic because there is no requirement for players, particularly newer players who are not invested in roleplaying or even understand what the whole thing is, to engage with the game and with their peers. Even if they are not pretending they are Elf #42069 or whatever, they are still putting their headspace into thinking about the game, which is semantically a form of role playing! Players will naturally divide into a hierarchy based on their level of engagement with the game, but there are opportunities there in order to help keep the game scalable. The experiments that I have been doing with the Mysteries subsystem in the Megastrata project, documented in greater detail in the Megadungeons thread, means that players can get real deep if they want to and drive the conversations, but it's optional. It is on them to make the case to other players and go back and forth with negotiations that have nothing to do with GM or referee intervention. --- Someone did make something called SDL that was designed to be a play by post type thingamabob about 7 or 8 years ago on here, I remember there was a Zybourne Clock PBP game that I played in which used it but was still rather short-lived. I don't remember anything else about it, but I remember that it existed and I had an electropunk still that created beer whenever I wanted to drink it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:31
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:What stands in opposition to character cooperation? Cooperation is itself an excellent goal, but: if there is nothing but advantage to doing so, then you're actually prejudicing the game against anyone who can't - too busy, social blocks, just not interested - maximize cooperation. Do players have a limited amount of cooperation-resource, and some reason to favor one over another partner? Are you just presenting a large group of people with a puzzle of maximal interpersonal token-exchange to solve every month? (If you do that, someone will volunteer to tell everyone else what to do to maximize the outcome and everyone will either do it, or be resentful of it.) In this case, "art imitates life". There will be competing priorities to deal with and decision making will determine what players want to do with their orders. Ultimately, the workplace I'm in is good with being frank with each other and hopefully that will provide interesting opportunities in the game space as well (some people may have more reservations about being frank when there are professional creds on the line, which is understandable). What it seems like you might be getting at is "what is the need to cooperate", which is both narrative and mechanical in nature. There are three proposed phases in the structure I'm considering: Phase 1: Players are isolated in regions but can talk to each other. Their mission is to explore and rebuild in their regions and find out how to join the regions together. If there is a stall in progress, then Bad Things start happening to the world around the Players, and they will need to figure out how to react to that. Phase 2: Regions joined together, players refocus and find out about a larger existential threat. They need to focus on preparations for an oncoming Bad Thing while also fixing whatever the Bad Thing did to their reality. Phase 3: Players confront the Bad Thing in a major way and settle the score in a big showdown, possibly live, where everybody gets to file in their orders in some kind of huge offsite event like a megagame to take on what amounts to an MMORPG raid boss with goofy mechanics. Roleplaying doesn't need to be part of this tabletop RPG as an explicit thing people do. If they are engaging with the game and getting curious and talking to each other and investing energy to play - that is good enough for roleplaying criteria in my book.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:38
|
|
|
If you haven't read Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming, it has a section called Setting up a Wargaming Campaign (originally published separately) which is all about how to adjudicate long-term games featuring a geographically spread out membership. It's conflict-focused, but you could probably apply some of the lessons there to cooperative play. Here's a series of reviews from Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons: Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part I Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part II Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part III Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part IV The way it was managed was that people would send in their strategic commands, and then Tony Bath and eventually another referee would adjudicate things, sometimes playing miniature wargames with each other, each acting as one of the opposing forces, if the players couldn't come to play one or both at some point.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:45
|
|
|
As far as play by post, I really enjoy the Let’s Play Lone Wolf thread on these forums. The choices are limited and there is only one protagonist. Every player who wishes to participate says what they want to do, and one of the player’s choices gets selected at random. It scales really well because it doesn’t depend on player count and if people miss days it’s not a big deal. Although that story is already defined, I could imagine a DM creating their own adventure and letting the choices be more free form, but still using the “Herman’s Head” mechanic where several players are controlling the same character for scalability and logistical reasons.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 05:49
|
|
|
So, take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure your goal of scalability is a good goal to have. Actually having a game world where dozens of people could be expected to coordinate with each other might not actually be as good for developing cohesion as running a bunch of smaller teams that shuffle membership on a regular basis. Jeff Bezos's two-pizza rule might seem like TED-talk BS (teams should be no bigger than could be fed by two pizzas) but when my workplace switched from one sprawling team of 12 to three rotating teams of 4 with regular checkins I've felt a lot more connected to the goings-on, when it was easier to get overwhelmed before.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 06:56
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:
They're extremely simplistic systems, but Chris Engle's matrix games cover a lot of these bases.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 07:08
|
|
|
Glazius posted:So, take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure your goal of scalability is a good goal to have. Actually having a game world where dozens of people could be expected to coordinate with each other might not actually be as good for developing cohesion as running a bunch of smaller teams that shuffle membership on a regular basis. This was my initial thought too. A tiered action/resolution structure might be better. Eg, squads of ~5 who resolve their individual actions internally and the report through a squad leader (think "caller" from ad&d, maybe combined with "referee"?) "What Red Team did this month". Maybe you could have the referee for that level be someone from a different squad/region, offloading some of those GM duties.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 07:19
|
|
|
homullus posted:They're extremely simplistic systems, but Chris Engle's matrix games cover a lot of these bases. Chris McDowall of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland fame (?) wrote about his experience with them recently, as well as his thoughts of connecting them to RPGs.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 14:10
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Chris McDowall of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland fame (?) wrote about his experience with them recently, as well as his thoughts of connecting them to RPGs. That's a good post. I've never tried one, but they feel almost right as the core of some great games. Anytime I think about rules to add to make them better conform to gamers' expectations, though, I conclude those additions are a step down.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 18:33
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Chris McDowall of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland fame (?) wrote about his experience with them recently, as well as his thoughts of connecting them to RPGs. That was an interesting article. A lot of this stuff reminds me of the one lightweight system I'm quite familiar with, Atomic Sock Monkey's Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ) framework. I've played the base structure game, the Truth and Justice version, and a few "god games" that were sort of player-world-construction semi-antagonistic games run PbP on these forums a few years ago. I've found in the past that PDQ is easy to introduce to people, in particular people who haven't played RPGs before. It's fairly intuitive to have two to four "plus" qualities and around one or two "minus" qualities, with descriptions, and maybe a bit more stuff (in T&J, superpowers are distinct from the rest of the character's qualities, for example, characters may have a soul point pool for rerolls or whatever, you get the idea). The part that isn't as adapted to asynchronous play as I'd like is the conflict resolution, which still relies on characters going in order, rolling dice, a GM adjudicating the outcome, and then "taking damage" by temporarily reducing quality values. The system also relies heavily on players and the GM finding the right balance between overly broad and overly narrow qualities; since they're always freeform-descriptive, there's a gray area that isn't resolvable with hard rules, so it's a judgment call that is easy to get wrong especially as a beginner. Still: the Chris McDowall post, where players get a character/faction with two or three specific attributes, two or so goals to achieve, and may play in a game with more than the traditional 3-5 PCs, sure looks like it's about one step away from PDQ, that step being the assignment of various numerical values to each attribute to establish relative strength and give something to raise or lower based on circumstances. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Apr 19, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 19:19
|
|
|
I remember hearing about PDQ (as Pretty drat Quick), but I never ended up giving it a shot at all. Another one for the pile. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
Glazius posted:So, take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure your goal of scalability is a good goal to have. Actually having a game world where dozens of people could be expected to coordinate with each other might not actually be as good for developing cohesion as running a bunch of smaller teams that shuffle membership on a regular basis. While I'm not disagreeing with this viewpoint I think that the underlying thing is "It's hard, don't do it" which defeats the purpose of the thought exercise. We do have distributed teams of problem solvers at scale across the globe but we don't have a good way to actually encourage them to work together cross-region or build any other connections, so enforcing a hierarchy in a game context will reinforce social norms in the respective region. Also, shuffling memberships on a regular basis would imply that as a lone referee there is some kind of rule that would need to be introduced. The cohort is still large, but the amount of organization that would have to be done to divide the cohort into smaller groups (and there will never be an agreeable number without having some rounded off, meaning, exclusory) just is a thing I am personally not willing to explore. There are some good considerations to be had regarding the specific method of engagement of play, but in terms of scalable logistics the game has to be simple on both sides of the screen and also permit a large amount of people to participate in the same game world. If the answer is "don't do that", it sidesteps the issue and design challenges being discussed, but I still have some more soak time before I arrive at that as a final conclusion. Also, two pizza rule or not, it makes some fundamental assumptions about distributed teams that don't really work in the business realm when you already have existing logistics structures in play, but that's a discussion for BFC or other places that I'd be happy to talk about sometime since we did develop a team-reducing solution for operational work. Anyway, I am hard-headed when it comes to saying that something is not feasible for a design exercise. I believe there is something out there either that has been designed or is waiting for iterative design that can make this work, but it requires approaching it from different angles as discussed previously. It has been done previously, so there should be considerations taken from prior works that can inform the experiment at large scale. Absurd Alhazred posted:If you haven't read Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming, it has a section called Setting up a Wargaming Campaign (originally published separately) which is all about how to adjudicate long-term games featuring a geographically spread out membership. Thanks very much for this recommendation, I have it on order in print and I'll start cracking into it this week! The articles linked also provide some interesting details on the logistics and inspirations underpinning the text to be read. I like how Conan was relegated to essentially a force of chaos that may help or hinder your efforts greatly, and the idea of a "Chaos Monkey" that makes things go haywire in plans is something that will almost certainly be in the cards. Absurd Alhazred posted:Chris McDowall of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland fame (?) wrote about his experience with them recently, as well as his thoughts of connecting them to RPGs. This is basically what I might be looking for and was attempting to enumerate, to the point where I did not know this was a category. It doesn't appear to make any specific notes about scalability, but I'm gonna check out the linked video about Matrix Games in general for design. The idea of a public and hidden agenda brief could be potentially interesting, but designing for a co-operative game would perhaps mean that I would need to again split cohorts and then do a semi-adversarial thing that then turns out to be co-operative all along.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 05:42
|
|
|
Tangent here, but repeatedly reading "asynchronous" has caused my brain to think about how almost all ttrpgs are asymmetric in play - that is, the traditional RPG model is that all players except one control a single detailed character, and the remaining player both plays as the opposition characters/creatures while also doing most of the fiction-building and adjudicating and rewriting the rules. This is in stark contrast to most multiplayer computer games which in nearly every instance I can think of are not asymmetric - that is, while individual players abilities or units might differ, all players are generally playing much the same game in much the same way. Also, while the traditional model of "The GM is the builder and arbiter of the fiction" is being challenged by newer games, the "player characters vs the world-as-played-by-the-GM" model generally has not. Several questions arise from this! 1) What would a symmetric ttrpg look like? What would have to change from the traditional model to support a game where all players are playing a similar way - that is one where no player is singled out to control "the opposition" or "everyone who is not a player-character"? Could you have, for want of a better description, a fully PvE ttrpg? 2) What other forms of asymmetry might a ttrpg take that aren't the traditional model? Eg, could the idea of a group of players each controlling a character versus a single player controlling their opposition still function without that solo player also being the referee, scenario designer, and world-builder?
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 05:45
|
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Tangent here, but repeatedly reading "asynchronous" has caused my brain to think about how almost all ttrpgs are asymmetric in play - that is, the traditional RPG model is that all players except one control a single detailed character, and the remaining player both plays as the opposition characters/creatures while also doing most of the fiction-building and adjudicating and rewriting the rules. This is in stark contrast to most multiplayer computer games which in nearly every instance I can think of are not asymmetric - that is, while individual players abilities or units might differ, all players are generally playing much the same game in much the same way. Also, while the traditional model of "The GM is the builder and arbiter of the fiction" is being challenged by newer games, the "player characters vs the world-as-played-by-the-GM" model generally has not. The only one that I can think of is Microscope or other GM-less type games. Theoretically, LANCER's mech combat engine is considered to be symmetrical, but if you're calling a game fully symmetrical like how chess is* (notwithstanding turn order and such) then it mostly has stayed in the realm of collaborative world building games like Ben Robbins made (Microscope, Kingdom, Follow). In most tabletop RPGs there is an assumed referee which by their existence makes gameplay asymmetrical - unless everybody is the referee or nobody is, then the game cannot be in that way. Since a tabletop RPG as qualified earlier needs to be a game (collaborative or adversarial) with open ended conflict resolution, this does not necessarily need to be done by a singular referee. Microscope is a good example of this type of play, since everybody has the same capabilities, but as the turn order progresses each person assumes authorial control with a structured way to challenge. Other games that are definitely tabletop RPGs which do not require a referee are games which depend predominantly or exclusively on player-player interaction instead of player-NPC interaction (though another player could control an NPC). Dramasystem handles this and doesn't really require a referee because everybody is on equal footing in terms of resources as play begins, though their narrative roles may be quite different. The fact that there are no games in contemporary popular landscape which expressly addresses this in the tabletop RPG world may point to the fact that it requires a specific level of familiarity with the rules, which not all players at a table are willing to take on. The one who does end up having the most familiarity will almost certainly take a moderator or referee-like role even if one is not expressly defined in the rules. You can modify certain games like AGON to be run GM-less by democratizing the challenge generation - normally this would be the role of the referee but there is nothing that says you couldn't have players propose their own challenges on an island that they choose to journey to, then play to find out what happens there. However, games which focus on tactical moment to moment game play may fall short or end up turning into something without open ended outcomes, ergo, they'd be boardgames with more silly accents.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 06:36
|
|
|
aldantefax posted:Since a tabletop RPG as qualified earlier needs to be a game (collaborative or adversarial) with open ended conflict resolution I think I get what you mean by this, but can you elaborate? I searched the thread for that phrase and related keywords that I could think of and came up with nothing. Are oracles and random tables close enough to "open-ended" to count?
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 06:48
|
|
|
Closest I can think of is Gloomhaven and that’s a board game that resembles an RPG instead.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 13:05
|
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I think I get what you mean by this, but can you elaborate? I searched the thread for that phrase and related keywords that I could think of and came up with nothing. Are oracles and random tables close enough to "open-ended" to count? (long form, for those following this specific conversation) Pretty much all board games are closed systems. There is a beginning and some multiple amount of endings and all conflicts and outcomes will drive forward toward the ending at some point. Either there is a winner (one or more players, the game board, or nobody) or there is a conclusion (time runs out, an objective is reached). Even in a board game like Tales of Arabian Nights, there is still a beginning, middle, and end state, because the game must have some kind of ending. Gloomhaven is also the same way, because each map as well as the larger metaplot of the game has an ending. Conversely, all tabletop RPGs are open systems. Meaning, conflicts and outcomes may drive forward to some ending at some point, but no outcome is considered to have a binary output and can change the nature of the game at any time. Rules can be changed or created on the fly, any number of scenarios can be approached in any number of ways (though some make much more sense narratively than others) and the players collaborate to construct a story out of the rules engine. Tabletop RPGs have the flexibility to never end, if one so wishes. There are many old yarns at this point of the "forever RPG" that people play and while characters, players, and referees may enter and leave play, the game itself can move on and go an infinite number of trajectories. Part of the beef with some modern tabletop RPGs are that there were too many concessions to operationalize them into closed systems. The backlash as a result of that were that the nature of the game changed because you didn't play to find out what happened there, you already know what's going to happen because of the surrounding structure of the game. Other tabletop RPGs were created in response to the much more closed systems that the western industry was driving towards which highlighted the open ended nature. Some video games embrace the open ended nature of tabletop RPGs and have their own categories - simulation, sandbox, etc. Other video games may have open ended problem solving but will ultimately drive at some kind of ending. If we take the above and say "Microscope is a tabletop RPG", it actually does define a beginning and ending as part of the mechanical framework, but it does not have a referee, nor does it have a strict requirement on when the game ends. You can infinitely zoom into events and create new events in the timeline until you're blue in the face. Is it a game? Absolutely. There are rules and conflicts where you play to find out what happens through group conversation.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 16:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 08:54 |
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:1) What would a symmetric ttrpg look like? What would have to change from the traditional model to support a game where all players are playing a similar way - that is one where no player is singled out to control "the opposition" or "everyone who is not a player-character"? Could you have, for want of a better description, a fully PvE ttrpg? Isn't this technically Polaris? I suppose you could describe it as a series of four linked asymmetrical games, but everyone will at some point fill all the roles, if I understand it correctly. The "linked asymmetrical games" conceit comes up in a couple other places as well, like Alas Vegas. E: for those not familiar, Polaris is a story game about knights at the end of civilization who almost inevitably fall to corruption; it's for four players, because when you're doing your stuff, the person to your left, to your right, and across from you have distinct, defined obligations to represent the world, though you don't to my understanding ever all play the PCs at the same time so it's not really truly symmetrical. Alas Vegas is a (middling) rotating GM game with an intended sharp four-part structure so everyone plays and everyone DMs. Neither of these quite answer the question of a single asymmetrical game, because they both enforce symmetry by making multiple people effectively control "the opposition" at different points, but they show off symmetry at a certain scale. Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Apr 20, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 16:24
|
|
