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That I would agree is a bit of a weak spot here, compared to games with random dungeon generation tables, to take an extreme case.
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Jun 29, 2021 17:06
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That I would agree is a bit of a weak spot here, compared to games with random dungeon generation tables, to take an extreme case. Or just a dungeon made ahead of time. BitD does a lot of neat things but it's definitely one of those games of a new wave that expects a lot of things to be improvised on the spot. Some people thrive in this environments; others, like me, gawp like caught fish. The core resolution mechanism has introducing a new Complication as a possible result on every roll. That can really put people on the spot. The counterpart to this is that not everyone can or enjoy mapping out a dungeon ahead of time or whatever, but it's not wrong to point out that Blades in the Dark requires fairly high proficiency with a skill not everyone has.
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Jun 29, 2021 17:38
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LatwPIAT posted:Or just a dungeon made ahead of time. BitD does a lot of neat things but it's definitely one of those games of a new wave that expects a lot of things to be improvised on the spot. Some people thrive in this environments; others, like me, gawp like caught fish. The core resolution mechanism has introducing a new Complication as a possible result on every roll. That can really put people on the spot. The easiest thing is to just be "oh, well, I guess you get really hit hard by that thing you just encountered, Level 3 Harm You're hosed" or "fine, +2 Heat", and let the Entanglements take care of seeds for future content. It's not ideal, though. A more extensive and specific Complications mechanism could do wonders. quote:The counterpart to this is that not everyone can or enjoy mapping out a dungeon ahead of time or whatever, but it's not wrong to point out that Blades in the Dark requires fairly high proficiency with a skill not everyone has. Yeah, absolutely.
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Jun 29, 2021 17:43
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Blades in the Dark frustrated me because absolutely none of the mechanical scaffolding is GM-facing. The players have this whole elaborate system of resource management, territory acquisition, wealth, heat, and then you go behind the proverbial screen and it's basically "just make poo poo up. here's the tier system and a bunch of lore" I would happily play the game if an experienced GM were running it, but the idea of running it is simultaneously intimidating and boring.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Blades in the Dark frustrated me because absolutely none of the mechanical scaffolding is GM-facing. The players have this whole elaborate system of resource management, territory acquisition, wealth, heat, and then you go behind the proverbial screen and it's basically "just make poo poo up. here's the tier system and a bunch of lore" I've had the opposite experience; aside from what we've discussed running it has been a breeze. Everything you're describing makes my life pretty easy, and there are very specific guidelines for GMs. I don't know how playing it goes, I haven't been on that side of things yet.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:49
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hyphz posted:Especially, Greg Stolze is the author of Unknown Armies which is extremely likely to trigger that requirement (it's a modern-day game, the PCs could technically just get on a plane anywhere). It can still be a very creatively demanding game. Coming up with answers to all the questions the game asks during world creation (what is your objective, what was your introduction to the supernatural, what NPCs or institutions fit in these pre-defined mechanical relationship slots) can be difficult and it's very easy for the group to get stuck, especially early on. Both the players and DM can take the adventure in unexpected directions during actual play - the pieces are all on the table at the beginning, but can fit together in ways nobody anticipated. But the scope of what everyone will be expected to improvise and iterate on is agreed on prior to play beginning as part of the game's social contract.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:47
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I mean, if you're looking for a game which really leans heavily on the GM improv thing, Quest is designed specifically around that. The players get a bunch of narrative control abilities and the GM just has to roll with whatever comes out. It's an interesting space to think about though: you've got games like Quest where the GM has to improv continuously, and you've got pre-written modules where the GM in theory acts just as a referee, and I've seen a few games like Tidebreaker or Sentinel Comics which give the GM a bunch of resources and say 'use these to make the PCs' lives miserable' but you don't get anything else, so if the characters can torpedo your plan... it's torpedoed and that's that.
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Jun 29, 2021 20:54
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hyphz posted:The first episode of Ludonarrative Dissidents, a podcast where Ross Peyton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis look at RPG designs, dropped to backers yesterday (the full release is in a month). They were discussing BitD, and the following quote came up: A lot of what people miss about PbtA games is that they're not "no-prep". You still prep for them, you just don't spell out specific scenarios. What you prep is stuff to help you improv, thinking about motivations and connections. What do these Red Sashes do in the day-to-day? How do they get their coin? What city factions are they on good terms with? Bad terms? Who are they doing outreach to, who are they moving against? So when PCs act in unexpected ways, the GM knows how their forces operate, and their improvisation is based on the motivations they've prepped. What's in this room? Oh, pouches, ledgers, some small coin. Looks like they've been collecting protection money from the Lampblacks for a while. The issue you can run into is that the GM is low-key improvising most of the time -- you can't prep before game night and then show up exhausted and lean on your prep, you have to be engaged to run the game. Though there is also an advantage - since as GM you're supposed to know about player capacities in order to be able to appeal to them, the player-facing parts of the rules tend not to be too complicated for the GM to keep in their head. Or, at least, there's a small reference sheet that the GM can also have.
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Jun 30, 2021 13:45
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Glazius posted:A lot of what people miss about PbtA games is that they're not "no-prep". You still prep for them, you just don't spell out specific scenarios. What you prep is stuff to help you improv, thinking about motivations and connections. What do these Red Sashes do in the day-to-day? How do they get their coin? What city factions are they on good terms with? Bad terms? Who are they doing outreach to, who are they moving against? Thing is, I've always thought that this to some extent does require preparing a story, because otherwise there's the possibility that what they do will be something that the PCs will never encounter, which obviously isn't what's intended.
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Jun 30, 2021 16:10
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hyphz posted:Thing is, I've always thought that this to some extent does require preparing a story, because otherwise there's the possibility that what they do will be something that the PCs will never encounter, which obviously isn't what's intended. Yeah but as shown this ain’t true. Back when I cared if people thought I did prep, I’d just reading empty notes or look stuff up on my computer while I gave myself 45 seconds to be clever. Now I just stare into space for a bit, which you’ll remember doesn’t work as well over a call so I had to get in the habit of saying of saying it was what I was doing.
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Jun 30, 2021 16:33
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I'm finding that running games out of books is harder than running stuff I wrote myself, simply because even if I haven't prepped a specific scenario, I've internalised my setting and the various stuff around it that I can just say things and have it work.
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Jun 30, 2021 17:45
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Angrymog posted:I'm finding that running games out of books is harder than running stuff I wrote myself, simply because even if I haven't prepped a specific scenario, I've internalised my setting and the various stuff around it that I can just say things and have it work.
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Jun 30, 2021 18:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah but as shown this ain’t true. Yes and no. What I mean is that if you follow the advice “don’t prepare what will happen to the PCs, just decide what the fronts will do” to the letter, then you have a werewolf conspiracy that’s trying to gain power in the town. But the moment you say “and a PC notices one of them at a society party” you’ve broken the advice, you have prepared what will happen to the PC. You might then come up with an excellent reason for the werewolf and the PC to be there but if you are reverse engineering that from the decision that the noticing will happen, you’re still preparing story. If the advice was taken absolutely literally then the werewolves or the Red Sashes or whoever would do their thing and if the PCs didn’t happen to be in the right place at the right time to find out or act then they miss it. If you engineer things so that they don’t miss it then you have prepared story and are no longer following the advice to the letter. It might seem pretty obvious that this wasn’t intended, but it wasn’t to me and the advice worded that way wasn’t helpful for that reason.
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Jun 30, 2021 18:46
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Great thread, I've happily lurked it and wanted to add a completely anecdotal note we had to stop using BitD. We were running late Friday evening (most of us work Mon-Fri) and the players struggled to involve themselves in the fiction to the level the system demands. I know it's not an ideal time to run a game, but we were all left with the feeling that BitD demands a bit too much from the players. The GM fared even worse - she is highly experienced, quick on her feet and highly creative but at the end of a long work week she wasn't finding it fun having to create the fiction and also prompt our exhausted smooth brains to be proactive. It's not a lack of prep - as I said, experienced and creative - it was just having to have a solution to 'what happens next' put a lot on the GM. I know the players should have stepped up but that feels like the core problem to me - neither group had enough gas in the tank. Just my 2c - we loved the system and will be trying Band of Blades during a daytime session during the weekend (ha!)
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Jun 30, 2021 19:55
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Playing a role-playing game does require a certain amount of mental energy and attention. I'd suggest that a group playing tired friday nights might prefer something that asks less of them as a social activity.
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Jun 30, 2021 20:11
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BitD specifically states that it puts a lot of narrative responsibility on the players. A more one-sided game, like a variant of D&D, or Into the Odd, might have been easier on all but your still exhausted GM.
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Jun 30, 2021 20:14
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Leperflesh posted:Playing a role-playing game does require a certain amount of mental energy and attention. I'd suggest that a group playing tired friday nights might prefer something that asks less of them as a social activity. "when do adults have time and energy to do it right" is arguably part of the science of RPGs, so I want to add that I have had phenomenal success with weeknight online RPGs: (1) nobody has to account for travel time, (2) nobody has to wear pants, (3) everyone has their beverages and snacks of choice, (4) nobody has to clean their house, (5) people more rarely schedule other things for work nights. The way adult lives often work, it may well be easier to reliably give up 2.0-2.5 hours nearly every Wednesday night for a year and a half than it is to give up one Saturday a month for four consecutive months. Everyone gets to bed on time, everyone remembers more of what happened last time. If I could get in a group where everyone had full-duplex VOIP (so that people can talk at the same time reliably), it would be perfect. It's still fun to play and joke around in person and touch plastic mans, but I think board games are adequate for that.
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Jun 30, 2021 20:23
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PeterWeller posted:Cool! No worries. I look forward to your reply. I hope I'm not coming across as dismissive. Oh no worries at all! A lot of these posts are more me trying to work some relatively hazy, vague thoughts I've been having about decidedly abstract concepts into something resembling a coherent idea, and doing actual back-and-forth and being challenged on what I'm talking about is helpful to actually shape those thoughts. It doesn't help that I was very tired and hungry when I made a bunch of my original posts, which I don't think helped in terms of coherency. I have done some thinking while rested and sated and think I have something more resembling a coherent point, but before I get into that I just wanted to address your other point: PeterWeller posted:Yeah, it can seem silly, but it can also provide DMs with a useful tool. I think we should also be clear about what we mean with "the twenty types of goblin problem". I think there's a difference between, for example, Rime of the Frostmaiden including "Icewind Kobolds," who are just like Monster Manual Kobolds except their Con score is higher (so they have more HP) and their gear is better, and Tomb of Annihilation including kobold subtypes like the "Inventor" and "Scale Sorcerer", who have specific abilities and powers beyond those of a basic kobold. The former strikes me as excess, something that could be handled with a note instead of a full statblock (increase the local kobolds' HP by 4 and AC by 2), but the latter strikes me as a decent reason to fully stat out these kobold subtypes for more variety in combat encounters. That's actually a practice I can more readily get behind and something I think D&D would be smart to lean more heavily into in their monster designs. What I was thinking of when talking about excessive goblinoid subraces was more along the lines of things like Norkers, Xvarts, Jermlaines and various other creatures that are basically just minor variants on existing monsters with maybe one unique feature to justify their existence if you're lucky. With that out of the way: To my ramblings! So, some context for people since this is a discussion being migrated here from another thread. In the Tabletop Game Industry thread the topic of ring mail and studded leather came up, specifically how these two things aren't actual pieces of armor with any historical precedent and were just created to fill out steps on the AD&D armor table and also how the concept of historical accuracy is weirdly and inconsistently applied by groggy reactionaries ("Havin' the wimminz in my fantasy games is against the spirit of historical accuracy! Now excuse me while I read through this table of armor and polearms from radically different historical periods that would almost certainly never be used by someone delving into an ancient ruin!"). This got my brainmeats thinking 'bout some thoughts I've been having recently about some of the weirder, unexamined design decisions of tabletop games (D&D specifically), and how I feel like a bunch of them are perpetuated by a similar kind of mindset that crops up frequently among traditionalist gamers (And by traditionalist I mean gamers heavily married to specific existing gameplay or system paradigms and who get very weird when those paradigms are questioned or challenged). So, what originally got me thinking about this topic was thumbing through some of the old Monster Manuals and Monstrous Compendiums from 1st and 2nd edition AD&D and realizing how much page space was dedicated to redundant or unnecessary monsters. I made the mistake of using varieties of bear as an example when I was discussing this, which isn't really a good illustration of the concept I was actually trying to get at because there is at least a gameplay motivation behind having multiple varieties of bear represented (Black Bear > Brown Bear > Polar Bear). No, what I'm really trying to get at is the way the earliest editions of D&D filled out a lot of their monster manuals with entirely redundant entries; stuff like them having entries for a wide variety of real world animals that the players were both likely never going to need to interact with (How often were AD&D players likely to pick a fight with a Narwhal? Or a skunk?) and, more egregiously, were often mechanically very similar to other creatures that were already represented in the Monster Manuals (Are a raven and a hawk really so different from each other from a mechanics POV that they need separate entries in the old MMs?), and this kind of consciously keyed me in to a way of thinking that I think underlies a lot of...weirdness, for lack of a better term, within the mindset of RPG players and designers: The idea of the rules of the game not existing as a means to facilitate play, but as a lens through which to interpret and classify things. It's a little bit along the lines of the whole "rules-as-physics" mindset you sometimes see from tabletop players, but runs a little bit more deeply. It's the idea that the rules of a tabletop game are not set up as tools that allow players to abstractly represent real world actions or play a game, but are a framework through which things can be analyzed and classified, even independent of actual gameplay. Now, I think a lot of the weirdness in Monster Manual entry selection from the early editions was motivated more by the business practices of TSR (With 2nd edition's Monstrous Compendium loose leaf binder sheets being a model that lended itself very well to filler) than trying to force everything in the real world through the lens of D&D, but I think it kind of inadvertently ended up solidifying this relationship with the rules in a generation of player's heads. Of course these books mechanically spec out every individual species of animal one could possibly think of, regardless of whether or not players will ever need to fight it; it's not like there's a greater goal to the game's mechanics, they are merely a system of quantifications through which to interpret things! It's a very methodical and concrete kind of mindset that I think runs through a lot of weird attitudes some players and developers have to tabletop games. Along the same lines, I think this kind of overly concrete thinking is something that is unconsciously reinforced by some of the design decisions of a lot of roleplaying games. For instance: In D&D it's kind of an arbitrary design decision that monstrous humanoids need separate and unique statblocks from regular humans. After all, at the end of the day, what really differentiates a goblin from a slightly shorter-than-average human brigand? There's definitely a gameplay benefit to treating orcs and goblins and the like as mechanically distinct from your average, run-of-the-mill bandit, most notably in that it gives players distinct, visual signifiers of the relative difficulty of these guys as combatants, however it's ultimately a relatively arbitrary decision. The weirdness starts to crop up when the game begins to build lore and world building around these original mechanical decisions, and the idea of monstrous humanoids as beings fundamentally different and separate from humans becomes an ingrained part of the infrastructure of D&D reality. You take that with the other idea of the D&D ruleset as a lens through which to classify reality, and you end up with people making really weird logical contortions to justify what is, to an outsider, entirely arbitrary aspects of the game. Suggesting that D&D change up its relationship with how it handles sapient nonhumans is met with such angry resistance and cognitive dissonance from some people not just because of covert racism (Though that's often a factor as well) but because it challenges their ingrained understanding of the reality within the game.
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Jul 1, 2021 02:42
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Saying it this way makes a lot more sense, and I thank you for spending the time to think it over and reclarify things. I largely agree, with the note that even if it's not immediately apparent, many of the small monstrous humanoids in D&D do have minor mechanical tweaks to make them different, even in pre-3e editions. It's not as obvious as say Kobold Pack Tactics, but it IS there. Actual redundancy is less common over D&D's history than you might think. You note the 2e MC era as being prone to redundant or useless monsters, but the various 2e monster collections are actually pretty diverse and do a relatively good job of covering the specific monsters relevant for specific settings or parts. As an example, 2e has way less dinosaurs than you'd expect from a system just generating stats for the hell of it, and the vast majority are for the dinosaur jungles of Chult in the Forgotten Realms. This isn't to say that there's absolutely no redundancy, but it accrues in specific ways dependent upon the edition in question. 2e has redundant entries when you compare across settings: both Birthright and Forgotten Realms have 2e Seelie/Unseelie Faerie stats that are pretty similar, but they're very different in their place in the setting. 3e has a shitload of tiny animal stats, which are all slightly different familiars (and they're EXCEEDINGLY redundant when you look at the benefits each familiar grants). Part of what a monster collection does in D&D is to basically be a bunch of ideas, and stuff like narwhal stats IS useful in that respect for getting GMs to think differently and use things they wouldn't usually reach for. I personally reach for my monster books a lot when I'm stuck to get an idea of "okay, what could be cool and different here" and come on a whale with a unicorn horn is very fun to toss into a water adventure in that respect. This kind of brings me to the last point which is that it's very unlikely to actually have everything in a given monster book be appealing for you (or me, or a third person), and they by general necessity often cover more ideas and more range than you can use in a single campaign. At the very least, winter wolves don't fit in your desert campaign, etc, so things that often feel redundant or useless narratively are useful in a different campaign. So a lot of what feels like redundancy (do we really need another predatory animal that challenges level 2 characters) is making sure the specific challenges and options are facilitated in the varying different parts of play. It's that curse of D&D's nonspecificity - being so wide in its scope means it covers a lot and needs to recover ground that other RPGs focused on smaller areas/genres/stories often don't need to. But your point about people taking these various game design and setting differences as an idea of an internal rules as world reality is very apt, I think, and it's been dogging D&D for ages. Aaaaaaaaages. It probably happens for other fantasy RPGs too, but I'm most familiar with D&D instead of people yelling about the stamina of an Empire rat catcher or something.
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Jul 1, 2021 03:18
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The 2e Mosntrous Compendiums are actually one of my favorite rpg bestiaries and have a lot of really interesting and cool monsters in them, but at the same time are also unfortunately touched by some of the larger business problems of 2e that ended up leading to TSR's downfall (hardcore supplement bloat in particular). While I definitely agree that by design there's going to be a percentage of entries in a bestiary that aren't going to be applicable to a particular campaign or that will suit the taste of an individual GM, I think there's always a fine balancing act it has to pull off in how niche a given entry can be while still justifying its inclusion (Man, if anyone has a story about a DM making legitimate use of 1e's infamous Morkoth, I wanna hear that story!). The pitfall the Compendiums tended to run into most frequently was monsters that were interesting to read about, but not in a way that would really work in a tabletop game (Which has sort of become the bread and butter of Monte Cook in his post D&D endeavors?).
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Jul 1, 2021 03:37
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One thing I like a lot about early D&D editions is how a monster's Hit Dice also by default determines a bunch of their other stats, so if you're writing a module or something you could really fit a statblock in a sentence--name, number appearing, hit dice, attack damage, defense rating, maybe move speed and morale if you really want. It makes it real easy to create a new monster type for the mini setting you're creating without needing to overformalize it into being An Official D&D Monster Type 4e did a good job of it, too, in the other direction--just genuinely make each of the different monster types (even of similar power levels) feel meaningfully different on a stats and abilities level
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Jul 1, 2021 04:31
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KingKalamari posted:The 2e Mosntrous Compendiums are actually one of my favorite rpg bestiaries and have a lot of really interesting and cool monsters in them, but at the same time are also unfortunately touched by some of the larger business problems of 2e that ended up leading to TSR's downfall (hardcore supplement bloat in particular). While I definitely agree that by design there's going to be a percentage of entries in a bestiary that aren't going to be applicable to a particular campaign or that will suit the taste of an individual GM, I think there's always a fine balancing act it has to pull off in how niche a given entry can be while still justifying its inclusion (Man, if anyone has a story about a DM making legitimate use of 1e's infamous Morkoth, I wanna hear that story!). The pitfall the Compendiums tended to run into most frequently was monsters that were interesting to read about, but not in a way that would really work in a tabletop game (Which has sort of become the bread and butter of Monte Cook in his post D&D endeavors?). I think your mention of the morkoth also speaks to how what's "interesting to read about" is also "interestingly playable" for different GMs. Like an underwater weird creature with its own lair and direct motivations to get in there and tangle with it (the 1e morkoth) is something I would instantly put in as an encounter, the only reason I can't do it for my next session is my PCs aren't anywhere near the sea. That's not to say there's not monsters that can't work that have been written about - Pathfinder 1e has extensive entries on stuff like the alpluachra that doesn't fit how that system does encounters at all - but I'm wary to say a lot of or even some monsters are completely useless. There's bad eggs but a lot of what are commonly thought about as "bad designs" are at least usable if you're willing to shift your frame of thinking a bit. Arivia fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jul 1, 2021 |
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Jul 1, 2021 04:32
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hyphz posted:Yes and no. Yes, a crucial part of your prep is that you're thinking about how it's going to affect the PCs when you do it. It's the difference between "the werewolves schmooze their way into a high society party because the PCs are there" and "the werewolves schmooze their way into a high society party that the PCs are at because they want to schmooze into high society parties" You don't do your little GM dance off in a corner where the PCs can't see you, you do it where the PCs are. And the PCs are... out for a score against the Red Sashes. Of course information about the Red Sashes is going to be there. (Though since this is Blades, the PCs are self-directing their own scores -- it doesn't matter what information they do or don't find at this time about the Lampblacks getting extorted or the payoffs to Lord Scurlock.) You prep the way things are going now. What you don't plan out is a story - the way things are going now and must continue to go. The PCs must win the fight, the PCs must find the information, the PCs must let Red-Eye Romero get away.
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Jul 1, 2021 05:10
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Glazius posted:You don't do your little GM dance off in a corner where the PCs can't see you, you do it where the PCs are. And the PCs are... out for a score against the Red Sashes. Of course information about the Red Sashes is going to be there. Well, seemingly so, but it isn't quite as cut and tried as that. Say that for whatever reason, the PCs do not notice the werewolves at the high society party or do not consider them a threat. Then you have to know what the werewolves will do next, and you have to know how the PCs will know about it. While "the PCs must win the fight" might not be a story aspect you plan, "the PCs must become aware of the conspiracy" has to be. Ditto, probably, with "the PCs must be able to defeat the conspiracy" - even if the PCs end up deciding to join the conspiracy instead, it must not be impregnable to them, and that sticks in the plan right up until the assault on the underground HQ. I know this might seem daft and pedantic but this was a key part of my earlier misunderstandings. I loved the idea of Legacy because as written with the "don't prepare a story, just decide what the Fronts do" statement, it sounds like I just kind of prepare a general map of an area, work out what antagonists in the area would do, plug it all into the system and the group and hey presto, story emerges! But it doesn't. I can't just say "the other tribe have secretly found an unexploded bomb and are preparing to send it into the PC's settlement". No, I have to work out a clue chain, arrange coincidences as appropriate, and wrestle with the whole situation of trading pacing against agency that makes me so uncomfortable, just like I would in many other games. The PbtA system might be good for injecting twists and keeping things running fast but that phrase suggested that somehow the system will manage things so that it doesn't end up with "one day the PCs pull open a newly arrived crate, campaign over" or "one day the PCs are about to pull open a newly arrived crate, notice something strange about it and dump it in the lake instead, plot over". But it doesn't, and that was a huge disappointment. Ditto with the interest in Spire - hey, here's a really fascinating city with lots of surreal moving parts, here's the Aelfir council the PCs are trying to defeat, decide what they do and set the PCs loose and you've got a revolution plot! Hell, that sounds awesome! ... Except it's not what it supports at all. Inevitably everything has to be divided into smaller sandboxes where, again, the Fronts have to be reverse engineered from what the PCs will do or to give them opportunities, and the revolution as a whole is unplayable (even the author said on Discord that "you're not playing the revolution, you're playing revolutionaries"). Again, huge downer from my POV.
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Jul 1, 2021 17:24
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hyphz posted:Well, seemingly so, but it isn't quite as cut and tried as that. Say that for whatever reason, the PCs do not notice the werewolves at the high society party or do not consider them a threat. "What if the heroes don't notice the dungeon entrance and just keep walking down the road?"
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Jul 1, 2021 17:36
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Splicer posted:The you, the GM, have hosed up, and everything after that is you trying to recover. I think this was their point, that they initially expected the system to handle their not loving this up and found that it really didn't Dungeons are weird in this, too--their whole strength is that they have one big conceit at the start (you go into them), and after that they're so simultaneously dense and compartmentalized and dangerous that they create decent play just by nature of their structure, and then are relatively easy enough to run that it's not hard to make them really fun without juggling too many moving parts. One of the big reasons for their staying power is that they really kind of do create a floor of functional play just by their structure in a way that most play structures don't Like, with the werewolves at the dinner party, the GM isn't necessarily prepping that the PCs are out for a score on the werewolves--they're prepping the hook of "let's introduce another gang active in the area", and then there are a bunch of ways the PCs can take it from there. Like, maybe the PCs will be proactive and decide to plot a heist against them. Or maybe they'll try to hire them as mercenaries. Or maybe they'll be preoccupied with some other plot going on, and this is just foreshadowing for when the werewolves make the first move. Or maybe the players are busy with other stuff, and the werewolves being there are just a worldbuilding detail (that the PCs could have turned into another plot-line, but didn't). It's tricky, since you sort of need to have plans for how to handle any given one of these well/give the players well telegraphed entry points into doing them while not overprepping for paths people don't go down. Like, obviously it gets a lot easier once the players are hooked in enough that they're stating their intent beforehand, but there is going to be that stage of introduction where it's not clear what direction things are going to fall. I think the point they were making is that these games are doing things that help with that a bit (determining the NPC drives), but still leave most of the actual work (designing actual situations that are both legible, interactive, and non-railroady for the players)
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Jul 1, 2021 18:58
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I think in the case of relative prep people are just good at different things. Like, when you do prep for a game you want to focus on:
Dungeon crawls favour the first one because they're a confined area: You can map out the entire place and know every possible thing the PCs might bump into down there, and not have to prep anything else. The pro here is that it's possible to prep everything and minimise improv, and you can do that prep whenever it's convenient for you. The con is that systems designed around this (e.g. D&D) do really badly when things jump the rails -- although they're often supported with books upon books of monster stat blocks and pregen encounters for just those occasions, because everyone knows that when they jump the rails you have a problem. BitD and similar games lean hard on the third one: It provides a detailed setting with shitloads of gangs that all want their own things and have their own plans, and while this stuff may never be directly encountered, when you need to make something up on the fly you can consult your knowledge of the setting (or your fronts or whatever) for inspiration. The pro here is that it's much harder for the PCs to do something that completely derails the session, but the con is that the baseline amount of improv the GM has to do is way higher. This is why PbtA, FitD, Lovecraftesque, and other heavy improv games all have ways to bump some of the improv burden onto the player(s).
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Jul 1, 2021 19:43
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OtspIII posted:I think this was their point, that they initially expected the system to handle their not loving this up and found that it really didn't Exactly. “The players must decide the werewolves are dangerous” seems like exactly the kind of story the book is telling me I shouldn’t prepare. With the "the players walk straight past the dungeon entrance" example - well, if I'm meant purely to play the Fronts, then I'm just playing the necromancer who holed up in the dungeon, and he isn't going to go out of his way to have the dungeon discovered by the PCs or anyone else. Now granted, to some extent the PbtA system does give a prompt to deal with this (players wait to find what’s happening -> GM soft move -> show signs of an approaching threat) but that means I have to work out what the signs are and then establish why they were left even if doing so wouldn’t happen in the actions for the Front. hyphz fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jul 1, 2021 |
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Jul 1, 2021 20:46
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hyphz posted:Exactly. “The players must decide the werewolves are dangerous” seems like exactly the kind of story the book is telling me I shouldn’t prepare. there are like 30 different versions of Fronts now, but aren't Fronts supposed to make themselves visible through their actions to the players? So you don't even have to really make the soft move, if the players don't go in the dungeon that is obviously a Place of Some Spookiness then that choice means the Front continues and things get worse. So their choice has visible, deliberate consequences. Conversely, the players need to decide the werewolves are dangerous, sure, but you can also threaten and show how they are dangerous TO the players. If the players don't think a bunch of half-eaten people were attacked by something dangerous I'd probably have an out-of-character discussion as to what their expectations of danger ARE.
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Jul 1, 2021 22:49
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Arivia posted:Conversely, the players need to decide the werewolves are dangerous, sure, but you can also threaten and show how they are dangerous TO the players. If the players don't think a bunch of half-eaten people were attacked by something dangerous I'd probably have an out-of-character discussion as to what their expectations of danger ARE. Right, but that's confusing the object of my working out what the werewolves would do, since chances are they are likely to want to leave the corpses somewhere where they wouldn't be noticed. And it's not that I think they should do this and the game would go missing, it's that the hardest thing to improvise is when you have to deal with a contradiction like this. The villain wants to keep things secret, the PCs need to find what's going on, what is just the right mistake for them to make to appear competent but at the same time clue things in? It's definitely into the area of "preparing a story" at that point and that kind of thing is something that a good writer would probably need several drafts and back-and-forths to answer.
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Jul 1, 2021 23:37
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It is a basic trope of this very broad genre of fiction (the protagonists pursue antagonists who don't want to be pursued) that no matter how smart or clever or resourceful the antagonists and no matter how incompetent or clueless or distracted the protagonists, there's always an opportunity that gets the protagonists involved and moving toward the conflict. What I'd suggest is that you don't begin from a point where the antagonists and protagonists have no relationship to each other. If there's a pre-existing relationship, that gives you something on which to plausibly hang a hook that doesn't feel overly contrived, or undermines your intention of making the antagonists feel dangerous and powerful. For example, one of the werewolves recognizes a member of the party and comes over to chat. Or gloat. Or accuse. Or proposition. Or hire. Yes, they want to hide their nefarious deeds, and getting the PCs involved directly undermines that desire, but the antagonists always imperfectly hide their deeds, that's fundamental to the genre. Make them as incompetent or sloppy or flawed as necessary to meet the attentiveness of your players, and don't wring your hands too much about the rest, because your players aren't going to attack the plausibility of their antagonists on the basis that "they were so incompetent we finally noticed them and got to have an adventure." Arivia's point that they can "threaten and show the players how dangerous they are" doesn't have to be literally corpses, if the players never go somewhere that the corpses could plausibly be. And I think you can prepare in advance something like "such and such werewolf wants to eat so and so PC for <reasons>" without undermining the game's desire that a lot of the play be improvised? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jul 2, 2021 |
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Jul 2, 2021 01:32
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I mean, if a faction is doing a lot of crimes like killing or tax evasion, eventually they're likely to create some kind of evidence that this has happened. So it's reasonable to fast-forward to where that kind of thing happened and the characters notice it. Pacing is one of your important GM superpowers.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:41
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It’s not about the desire that the play be improvised, it’s about the desire that a narrative would emerge without having to actively create it, which is what that “don’t plan a story, just work out what the Fronts do” seems to imply. But actually you have to plan a story, because as you mentioned “the protagonists are aware of the antagonists” is absolutely necessary for the game to work, but there’s no reason for it to happen in the domain of “working out what the antagonists do” unless you are planning a narrative in the process. Again, a game where the players build a city in a given map (and Legacy does say to define a map) and decisions about what the antagonists do, alone, result in an immersive narrative about rebuilding civilisation sounded awesome to run or play in. A game of creating a series of threats that have been considered and adjusted based on the PC’s responses to them and with the antagonists’ reaction revolving around the PCs doesn’t seem as much fun to play and my desire to run it dropped to nil. So this isn’t really about asking for advice, just critiquing the claims about “don’t prepare a story” when this is to some extent unavoidable.
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Jul 2, 2021 04:24
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hyphz posted:Exactly. “The players must decide the werewolves are dangerous” seems like exactly the kind of story the book is telling me I shouldn’t prepare. The players don't have to decide that. You can just straight say it. "Just then, the herald at the door announces the entrance of the Baroness von Uberwald and her entourage. The Baroness has never been one to keep a leash on her temper in social situations, and she's the best behaved of her whole court. Are they planning mayhem tonight, or something worse?" You tell the players things their characters would know. The kind of story you shouldn't prepare is one where there's a secret murder coming unless some player (not PC, player) thinks to ask the exact right questions. You're a fan of the characters. You want to see them struggle against the threats that they know exist, not just get chumped out of nowhere and wake up with half their body burned off, in hock to a genocidal terrorist.
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Jul 2, 2021 06:55
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You solved it, doing any GM prep at all is the same thing as writing out an entire PF adventure path, or indeed a novel.hyphz posted:The villain wants to keep things secret, the PCs need to find what's going on, what is just the right mistake for them to make to appear competent but at the same time clue things in? None of those things need to be true. You might not like them but it's actually completely okay to have cackling dumb villains. Just look at world politics heyoo  In fact, Vincent Baker explicitly recommends making NPCs act on their first impulses in Apocalypse World. Not only does it keep the ball rolling, it gives everyone a clear character.But importantly, the PCs don't need to find out... well, anything. If we're talking about Blades specifically, the game is about the players' wants and the things they do to fulfill those. It doesn't actually matter what anyone in the world is doing until the PCs go burgle their house. It's not a mystery-solving game, except when the mystery is "where the gently caress do the werewolves keep their stuff". So in a sense you're absolutely correct, you went looking for a campaign setting that runs itself and that really isn't what these games have. Instead, they have a bunch of improv tools that create the illusion of one, when applied to a player-driven game. You're trying to use them to run a GM-driven story and then getting frustrated that your story remains a story.
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Jul 2, 2021 07:00
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But also story hooks aren't "a story" they're "a hook." You haven't decided what will happen next, you've decided something that's already happened. You did this already, just by having a setting with things in it - stuff happened to cause those things to be there in the setting. Hell, just by deciding "there are werewolves at the party" you've created a hook based on prior events - the werewolves got to the party somehow, they became werewolves somehow, someone decided to throw a party, these are events, yeah? All I'm suggesting is that you make that hook more hookish. Instead of "there are werewolves" you can say "there are werewolves who hate the PCs" or "there are werewolves who want something the PCs have" or "there are werewolves who are fed up with constantly trying to hide and have this self-destructive need to be seen by someone, so they can feel powerful and bold instead of meek and fearful." These are NPC motivations that can give you stuff, in advance of your play session, on which to improvise actions more likely to bring the NPCs into conflict with the PCs in a way they can't accidentally miss or ignore. It'll be up to them what to do, and for games like Blades, it'll be up to them and you to find out what happens next through play, but preparing motivations or backstory in advance of a game session is not the same thing as deciding in advance what's going to happen.
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Jul 2, 2021 07:09
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I think the underlying philosophy issue here is that nobody seems to actually be clear what a "good story" means in the context of an RPG, other than that it's something universally good. I suspect we can blame this on Ron Edwards - GNS might be dead, but up until that the term "drama" was usually used in place of "story" for that aspect of gaming. As it is there's a weird conflation between a) "story" meaning the entire series of fictional events that in an RPG session, and b) the term "story" or "plot" from literature analysis. The problem is that a) and b) are very different, and that there are plenty of things that might influence how enjoyable a session is other than the emitted series of events. For example, suppose a game session in which the PCs were strictly railroaded through the plot of Hamlet. It would probably not be all that enjoyable to be railroaded to that extent, yet in order to argue that the session didn't have a "good story" you would have to argue that Hamlet is not a good story and several generations of tradition would disagree. But the "story" focus misses it - "the means by which the IC events are generated" is not itself an IC event. And in practice that turns out to be much more important. I enjoyed the PbtA games that XD and PXG ran very much, but none ultimately produced a story that would stand alone as a literary artefact. That isn't a criticism of them, it's just an illustration that those games aren't supposed to do that. It's a cheesy thing to say but "it's about the journey and not the destination". And pretty much all literary analysis of stories is based on the destination - on the story that is written down after everything is done. I'm not aware that there's any analysis at all of what makes particular sections of a story more enjoyable for the writer to write. My confusion with that "don't prepare a story" is that at first glance it seems obvious and accepted that it means not to prepare a fixed series of absolute events. But it's fine and necessary to prepare a series of abstract events ("the players learn about the conspiracy, the players uncover who is involved, the players defeat or otherwise deal with the conspiracy"). Now, at this point I - wrongly - had the belief that the system of PbtA or BitD or whatever story based system would step in and generate the concrete events that satisfy those abstract goals, from player action. But of course it doesn't, if the GM doesn't take steps to make the players learn about the conspiracy then they won't. And that involves the GM asking the question "what mistake does this competent conspiracy make, that it is detected?". And that in turn can domino through to needing to work out why the conspiracy made that mistake, and what internal politics or unusual circumstances or whatever caused it, and before long they're doing a ton of preparation that's not focussed on "what does the conspiracy do" but "what sequence of events do the players experience and how is it justified" which is exactly preparing a story. Now, ok, technically you can not "prepare" it and try to improvise it but that's just shifting the same thinking from one period of time to another and making it harder to do because now there's a time limit.
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Jul 2, 2021 16:42
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hyphz posted:But it's fine and necessary to prepare a series of abstract events ("the players learn about the conspiracy, the players uncover who is involved, the players defeat or otherwise deal with the conspiracy"). Vincent D. Baker posted:It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not loving around). It's okay to have a conspiracy! It's not okay, in these games, to make the game about your conspiracy. If the players miss it or purposefully steer away from it, the game must become about whatever else it is they're interacting with. The conspiracy can still go on behind the scenes, but if it's so secret that the players don't actually interact with it in any plausible way, you might as well be writing about the Moon. The prep (fronts, NPCs, dungeons, whatever) exists solely to give you something to say when the players ask a weird question. As long as the answer makes sense in the fiction thus far, any answer is actually fine! You can and should decide these things on the fly, when the players turn the spotlight onto them. It's fine to just blurt out "uhhh werewolf prints!" and then take a smoke break to figure out why the gently caress a werewolf of all things would have been there. Edit: It's not unlike the kind of improv we do when playing characters in any game. No matter how much prep you might do, playing your character is ultimately just saying whatever fits the character as you know her in the situation you're in. The Apocalypse World MC does the exact same thing, the only difference is they're playing all the non-player characters, organizations and the weird magic storm always swirling about. Siivola fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Jul 2, 2021 |
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Jul 2, 2021 18:25
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Siivola posted:These are pretty much exactly the beats AW and its successors tell you not to prepare. This is pre-planning a storyline and I'm gonna quote Vincent Baker on this: But another word has dripped in. A "storyline". What's a storyline and how is it different from a story and a plot? A "line" has the suggestion of something thin that must be followed, so this is just advice not to railroad. You still need something to start things off with. If you don't have that, the PCs won't make any moves at all. I mean, ultimately, you have to have the sequence "the PCs try to do something; something acts against them; they learn about that thing; they defeat or overcome the thing." If you don't have those four steps then you don't have a functioning game. If the PCs don't try to do anything then the game is dead. If nothing acts against them, you're just asking what they do and then saying they succeed. If they don't learn about it or need to learn about it then the issue will be resolved too quickly. If they don't defeat it then the climax will be negative (I mean, ok, they may "find a way to bypass it" but that's not necessarily as satisfactory especially given the heavy tilt most games have towards combat as climax)
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Jul 2, 2021 20:54
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hyphz posted:But another word has dripped in. A "storyline". What's a storyline and how is it different from a story and a plot? A "line" has the suggestion of something thin that must be followed
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Jul 2, 2021 20:56
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