- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Yo, I know you're hoping I'll make your thread good and popular by trolling it, but... you're 100 percent correct! Hitch your wagon to THIS star!
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Mar 17, 2015 14:04
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Apr 29, 2024 04:30
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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i dont know what the gently caress this thread is about
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Mar 17, 2015 15:55
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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If I understand the distinction between these playstyles correctly, some decent names for them could be "objective based" and "narrative based".
A player in an objective based game has a series of goals that he is trying to achieve; the game is about reaching these objectives and surpassing the obstacles that are between the players and those. While the wide world or the characters themselves have room for fleshing out, they are not the focus of the game, the challenges are. The closest comparison that I can make is with the Mario series: what happens is set in motion by the kidnapping of Peach, true, but you aren't really playing for that, you are playing because jumping on mushrooms and avoiding oversized bullets is fun.
A player in a narrative based game is also having fun, but in a different way: what matters to those sort of games is the roleplaying, the characters' story arcs and the setting they are in. The players' choices aren't dictated by what they believe is the best way to solve their problems: they are dictated by what makes a better story, or makes the most sense for their characters.
The truth is that most games are somewhere between these two extremes; not only that, but a lot of characters in narrative based games do have an objective in their lives and obstacles between themselves and those objectives; so a player's choices could be the same indipendently from where the focus lies.
I am not sure if this is the correct interpretation or even if it makes sense but I don't know how to put it better than that.
It's not complicated: RPGs feature powerful masculine warriors and wizards uniting to overcome obstacles placed by a fair and objective DM.
Storygames are a bunch of basket weavers discussing their feelings while the "storyteller" (enabler) gives them all participation As and fudges dice rolls.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:24
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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I was thinking that procedural and dramatic were the best terms, but now I feel they'd be confusing, because we have the powergamer/whatever-you-call-people-who-make-ineffective-characters-for-"roleplaying" types who blend the two.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:49
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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They're different extremes in the same medium, and there are all sorts of things in between.
It's like how Koyanisqaatsi and Transformers: Age of Extinction are both movies.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:53
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Yeah but what is the Citizen Kane of RPGs
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Mar 17, 2015 17:00
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Mar 17, 2015 17:15
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Okay. The basic problem I have is that the heuristic doesn't really do what you say it does. Take D&D, for example. If we look at an encounter, (using the 1e/2e definition where every situation where you have interact with specific things in the game) we generally have a spectrum of possible outcomes from best to worst, sometimes forked. The party can accomplish all of its goals, end up getting completely killed, or anything in between. Just a four-person party, regardless of its objectives, has five possible final states without considering limited resources. It's in fact quite possible to construct an encounter in, say, D&D 4e, that has more meaningful outcomes than Heroquest's nonary resolution mechanics and is still eminently playable. Of course, it would be a combat encounter and most of them don't achieve that level in any case.
So there's that, one pretty important example of D&D falling into the "storygame" quadrant. It's also the most important one. "Failure driving the story forward", if it is distinct from more-or-less consensual railroading, is encapsulated in this as well. "Equivalent mechanical significance and depth"? I have no idea what this means, really. Binary resolution means that success and failure are equivalently important automatically, and while critical hits may break this, it's also not anything that draws much discussion except in a highly altered form.
"Influence over when and how" and making an infinite string of failures non-discouraging are things that require a lot more clarity, because as they stand they suggest bad design. If you mean something like Fate Points for the first one, though, that's a great segue into what your heuristic seems to be sorting, to me.
It's sorting out abstraction from concreteness. Because, well, if we take an idealized RPG that has one roll for attack and damage, and where each unit only rolls once per turn, a four-turn combat between two teams of four involves 32 rolls. In something like Fate, it would involve 8. In D&D, the number of rolls would be even higher, and so you'd need more than quadruple the number of Fate Points in order for them to have the same mechanical weight and power, and they would need to be individually weaker. Because Fate is abstract. AW is even more so. But this abstraction is why you need trinary resolution and so on and so forth, because you have to compress all the things that would go down in a concrete game's fight or hacking sequence or whatever into one or two rolls. Abstract versus concrete really shouldn't, in my opinion, be a gigantic split when it comes to design. AW doesn't have gigantically different GM advice from D&D, at its core level. And for that matter, it's also a spectral phenomenon.
Note that you can apply this not only to D&D but also to a lot of other conventional games.
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Mar 17, 2015 23:00
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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ive read a lot of words but i still dont know whats going on in this thread
I made jokes about this in the chat thread, which people didn't get, because it's a chat thread in Trad Games, so somebody made this thread to continue the discussion, which isn't a discussion anyone needs to be having ever, because holy poo poo
Okay. The basic problem I have is that the heuristic doesn't really do what you say it does. Take D&D, for example. If we look at an encounter, (using the 1e/2e definition where every situation where you have interact with specific things in the game) we generally have a spectrum of possible outcomes from best to worst, sometimes forked. The party can accomplish all of its goals, end up getting completely killed, or anything in between. Just a four-person party, regardless of its objectives, has five possible final states without considering limited resources. It's in fact quite possible to construct an encounter in, say, D&D 4e, that has more meaningful outcomes than Heroquest's nonary resolution mechanics and is still eminently playable. Of course, it would be a combat encounter and most of them don't achieve that level in any case.
So there's that, one pretty important example of D&D falling into the "storygame" quadrant. It's also the most important one. "Failure driving the story forward", if it is distinct from more-or-less consensual railroading, is encapsulated in this as well. "Equivalent mechanical significance and depth"? I have no idea what this means, really. Binary resolution means that success and failure are equivalently important automatically, and while critical hits may break this, it's also not anything that draws much discussion except in a highly altered form.
"Influence over when and how" and making an infinite string of failures non-discouraging are things that require a lot more clarity, because as they stand they suggest bad design. If you mean something like Fate Points for the first one, though, that's a great segue into what your heuristic seems to be sorting, to me.
It's sorting out abstraction from concreteness. Because, well, if we take an idealized RPG that has one roll for attack and damage, and where each unit only rolls once per turn, a four-turn combat between two teams of four involves 32 rolls. In something like Fate, it would involve 8. In D&D, the number of rolls would be even higher, and so you'd need more than quadruple the number of Fate Points in order for them to have the same mechanical weight and power, and they would need to be individually weaker. Because Fate is abstract. AW is even more so. But this abstraction is why you need trinary resolution and so on and so forth, because you have to compress all the things that would go down in a concrete game's fight or hacking sequence or whatever into one or two rolls. Abstract versus concrete really shouldn't, in my opinion, be a gigantic split when it comes to design. AW doesn't have gigantically different GM advice from D&D, at its core level. And for that matter, it's also a spectral phenomenon.
Note that you can apply this not only to D&D but also to a lot of other conventional games.
It's so
This is starting to sound a bit GNS.
Anyway, here's some bullshit to contribute: a useful heuristic for whether something's on the storygame side of the spectrum might be the role of a character's failure in the mechanics. Does failure mechanically drive the story forwards? Does the game give equivalent mechanical significance and depth to a character's failure? Does it account for multiple types and layers of failure, both concrete and abstract, where a character can succeed on one level and fail on another? Does the game give players influence over when and/or how their character fails? Could a character conceivably fail to achieve their goals over and over again without the player losing interest or feeling that they've somehow failed? If you look at systems like Apocalypse World, FATE, Dogs in the Vineyard, Don't Rest Your Head and so on, the answer to most of these questions is yes - the systems themselves are built to make failure something that the players are mechanically and creatively involved in, and something that drives their story.
It's not perfect - Metrofinal would definitely be classified as a storygame even though ultimate success is explicitly guaranteed - but answering the question 'is failure interesting for everyone involved' does seem useful.
Restriction and unpredictability do lead to surprising outcomes and force people to be creative, but that's not limited to (or even really a property of) crunchy systems. As a specific counter-example to Traveller, there's the world generation mechanics of Diaspora, a space sci-fi FATE game (which I think is inspired by Traveller). Minimalist games like Microscope and The Quiet Year also generate unforeseen outcomes despite consisting of very few mechanical moving parts. The Quiet Year also has random generation of sorts, as the players take turns drawing from a deck of cards that add generally-described events to the story and leave it to them to fill in the blanks in addition to choosing their own actions.
I think Conway's Game of Life is a good example of this - a few simple rules give you massively complex behaviour (without just devolving into chaos). I think you can achieve the same thing in RPGs by making the system have few unique moving parts and just applying them in different ways in a network of asymmetrically connected entities (that may have different forms of the same properties). As an example, in Monsterhearts (admittedly I haven't played it myself) each character has some personal issues, some unique moves and different levels of the same stats everyone has, and links between the characters in the form of strings, and when you prod something the whole social network starts wobbling uncontrollably. This is assuming that the players are invested in and actively contributing to the game, which I think we should do in this kind of discussion.
goddamn stupid.
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Mar 17, 2015 23:12
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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I...think someone is trolling someone else? But the person being trolled is also trolling in return? And the result is some kind of strange in-jokey thing that nobody really understands, even the original posters?
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Mar 17, 2015 23:14
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Okay. So does the stupidity come in because the posts are too long, or is it just that any kind of thinking about roleplaying games beyond "is this good/bad" is stupid in and of itself, or is it for some reason that you can't articulate in a single sentence, or what?
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Mar 17, 2015 23:20
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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i'm seriously laughing at it, does that count
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Mar 17, 2015 23:22
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Okay. I'm not arguing about "storygames vs. RPGs", and I'm sorry that I misinterpreted your jokes in this thread as being in good fun.
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Mar 17, 2015 23:24
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Apr 29, 2024 04:30
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Mar 17, 2015 14:04
you quoted me