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Badactura posted:I don't understand the distinction between a GM using a rules set to create an encounter to using narrative logic to create an encounter. Both are based on a specific logical structure. Using narrative logic to create an encounter is just like using a rules set to create an encounter, except instead of having to adlib some of the time when the dice are rolling in the weird ends of the bell curve and players are bored or frustrated or disappointed and you have to deal with that, you just adlib all of the time, and also the game system actually includes advice to you on how to adlib. Glazius fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 17:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:Working the refs is bad play, and these players are working the ref. You. You have been worked. In soccer, there is a ton of diving and whining because working the refs is highly effective. In hockey, there is some but less because it's still effective but not as effective. But in rec league ball hockey there is none. And it's not because it's ineffective. It would still be effective! But it's not fun and rec league is for fun, so nobody does it. There have been players who do it, but nobody likes playing with them and after a while they either learn that the culture of the league is not to do that and they stop, or else they quit. There are competitive sports leagues where the players try to win above all else and the refs are professionals paid to make it fair and prevent or punish cheating. The RPG equivalent of that would be playing modules where the GM is a referee who only enforces the rules. In RPGs, whining and working the refs is effective but unfun. It is the best way to "win," but making sure everyone else is having fun is supposed to be more important than winning. I like my ball hockey league because the people there understand that and don't go all out trying to win at the cost of fun and safety. Not every league is like that. It's a cultural problem and it's not something you can solve with the game system aside from only playing modules. (Although some rules systems can help enable or encourage good play.) Because you're 100% right - if the GM is coming up with stuff on the fly, then the best way to "win" is to play guess what the GM wants. You and the players need to understand that while they can still try to win (everyone in my hockey league likes to win and tries to win), their top priority needs to be playing within the spirit of the game and making sure everyone else is having fun.
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Apr 23, 2020 17:14
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The problem with comparing it to "working the ref" in sports is that in sports, there is also - well - the sport. There's rules, there's the laws of physics, there's an objective truth to whether the player's foot was just across the line or not or whether they actually fell or dived. In improvisational RPG there isn't, there's only the ref.
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Apr 23, 2020 17:23
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Sure there is. It's what the game stands for in roleplaying game/storygame. Unlike pure improvisation, a game still provides rules and a framework in which to base uncertain outcomes.
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Apr 23, 2020 17:58
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hyphz posted:The problem with comparing it to "working the ref" in sports is that in sports, there is also - well - the sport. There's rules, there's the laws of physics, there's an objective truth to whether the player's foot was just across the line or not or whether they actually fell or dived. In improvisational RPG there isn't, there's only the ref. - All rules for playing an RPG are tossed out of the window. - The traditional RPG structure and distribution of narrative responsibility still applies, despite this. Unless someone has recommended you try Amber or something, I can pretty confidently bet this isn't true of a lot of the games people have recommended you try. It certainly isn't true of Apocalypse World. Warthur fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 17:58
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hyphz posted:The problem with comparing it to "working the ref" in sports is that in sports, there is also - well - the sport. There's rules, there's the laws of physics, there's an objective truth to whether the player's foot was just across the line or not or whether they actually fell or dived. In improvisational RPG there isn't, there's only the ref. Do you think this means working the ref is more acceptable? Yes, this is ultimately a shared imaginative space. The ref is going to be making a lot of calls, and those calls are artistic in nature, creative as much as they are interpretative, and ultimately they don't matter. There is no World Cup of Winning Dungeons. That makes it more unkind and worse behavior to work them, to reject the collaborative effort of having a fun game and instead treat the ref as the enemy. Working the ref isn't more acceptable because it's more effective. It's a betrayal of trust. It treats the ref, the GM, as the enemy that must be overcome to win the game, and that's just not what a game should be for. Again, you can't enforce a new mode of play if your players refuse it, and your players are clearly not interested in: Story, collaboration, character drama, interesting tactical challenges, or even having fun as friends. They're interested in winning, up to and including the most blatant munchkin bullshit of 'attack the questgiver to head off the twist.' That's not someone working with you to make a better game, and you can't change them with some 'technique.' Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 18:17
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Warthur posted:You are talking about a situation where: It isn't true at the low level, but that's the trick - there's always a higher level that ends up subsuming the lower level. To stick with the sports analogy, even if there's rules for how we determine if you score a goal or not, that doesn't mean a whole lot if the opposing team doesn't use the same rules and the ref just decides how many goals they score - which is very common. For example, sure there's rules for battles and the Go Aggro rule in Apocalypse World, but only the GM decides how many battles you will face before you get where you're going. Sure there's rules for sneaking around and taking Shadow stress in Spire, but there's no statement of how far and how many guards there are on the Chambers at Amaranth. And really, that ties into the challenge problem. If I say there's five different security measures and the players roll high five times, then the emitted story doesn't reflect any challenge. If I just keep making up security measures until the players have rolled low a number of times, the emitted story will reflect challenge but I will have cheated the players and robbed them of agency.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:21
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Glazius posted:Using narrative logic to create an encounter is just like using a rules set to create an encounter, except instead of having to adlib some of the time when the dice are rolling in the weird ends of the bell curve and players are bored or frustrated or disappointed and you have to deal with that, you just adlib all of the time, and also the game system actually includes advice to you on how to adlib. No I understand, I meant the distinction hyphz makes between the two. I don't get the distinction between 'what is happening is overseen by the logic of a mathematical system' and 'what is happening is overseen by the logic of known or foreseeable facts based on the setting and what has previously been described.' Both are objective points of reference.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:24
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hyphz, you can't disclaim all decision making. I mean, you deciding which module to buy is a manifestation of GM Fiat, albeit one obscured under many layers. You need to pony up and actually take responsibility for making decisions. You players will either trust that your decisions are fair and made in the interests of everyone having an enjoyable experience, or they won't. If they do trust you, great! If they don't,  Seriously. If you can't break your players of their terrible habits and lovely attitudes, jettison them and get new players.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:28
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hyphz posted:And really, that ties into the challenge problem. If I say there's five different security measures and the players roll high five times, then the emitted story doesn't reflect any challenge. If I just keep making up security measures until the players have rolled low a number of times, the emitted story will reflect challenge but I will have cheated the players and robbed them of agency. You know what, Hyphz, why don't you define what you mean by 'challenge' ? You keep throwing it around but it seems as though neither board games (which have arbitrary difficulties constructed by the designers/authors) nor video games (ditto) nor tabletop games (again, ditto, but more collaborative) nor static fiction (Characters either succeed or they fail, after all, in the end) has the thing you call 'challenge' which doesn't seem to really correspond to any real quality of play nor fiction. It's not characters facing hardship, because they can do that even with successful rolls; it's not a chance of failure, because even if they roll successfully they could have failed; it's not responding to the world and finding a way to overcome it, because you reject the invented challenges of fictional worlds that appear fictional and all of these are invented challenge. Basically it seems like the way to get the challenge you want would be to make players go climb a rock wall or juggle something to succeed at tasks: That's an objective, external challenge (but it's still one you're imposing based on your sense of what's proper, not something naturally necessary to do to attain their goal, so... I guess that wouldn't work either?) Also, please respond to my previous post about working the ref; one of the reasons people get so frustrated is that you don't actually respond to their points, you respond to a subset of those points and ignore the rest. I'm putting this at the end of something that seems like it will grab your attention so I'm pretty sure you've read this.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:30
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hyphz posted:For example, sure there's rules for battles and the Go Aggro rule in Apocalypse World, but only the GM decides how many battles you will face before you get where you're going. Sure there's rules for sneaking around and taking Shadow stress in Spire, but there's no statement of how far and how many guards there are on the Chambers at Amaranth. Both Apocalypse World and Spire use systems where your rolls are not binary success/fail states; they work in complications. Those complications build up and handling them becomes, at the very least, the "B"-plot of the campaign alongside whatever it is the players try to accomplish. If you put a ton of rolls between the players and their goal, odds are the consequences will snowball to the point where they become the main plot. The reason this doesn't matter is that so long as the PCs are doing stuff, a game is happening, whether that's the thing the PCs were intending to do when they set off or a different thing which seemed more important to them along the way. So, yeah, it's down to you choose how many rolls it takes to get from A to B. How do you make that call? Well, how interested are you in what happens when the PCs get to B, and do you think the players are more excited about getting to B or the poo poo that they are getting into along the way? If you really want them to get to B don't put roll after roll between them and B. It's fine: so long as you didn't put a lever at B saying "Yank this and all the challenge in the setting vanishes", there'll be more rolls down the road to generate consequences and hijinks. Do you want the long slog to B to be the point of the campaign, and do you have their buy-in for a campaign which is framed as an epic slog towards B which may never make it there? Then have them keep rolling until you judge the time is right for them to reach B and enjoy the consequences along the way.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:55
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hyphz posted:
First off: yeah, in these systems if you want to make something harder or more focused on a scene, number of rolls is often the way, and second... The second thing is ok? Like, you kind of, learn to tune difficulty up or down for a given sequence during a game, but also if you set up a ton of hard security stuff and the players ace all the rolls and get past them all, players love that too. Like, it's fine if they get past without trouble because math says that's unlikely to be every scene so it's cool when it does happen.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:You know what, Hyphz, why don't you define what you mean by 'challenge' ? You keep throwing it around but it seems as though neither board games (which have arbitrary difficulties constructed by the designers/authors) nor video games (ditto) nor tabletop games (again, ditto, but more collaborative) nor static fiction (Characters either succeed or they fail, after all, in the end) has the thing you call 'challenge' which doesn't seem to really correspond to any real quality of play nor fiction. It's not characters facing hardship, because they can do that even with successful rolls; it's not a chance of failure, because even if they roll successfully they could have failed; it's not responding to the world and finding a way to overcome it, because you reject the invented challenges of fictional worlds that appear fictional and all of these are invented challenge. I've mentioned it before. It's the fictional properties that give the feeling that Luke could not have hit the exhaust port without using the Force, and even then it was a close thing. It's the fictional properties that give the feeling that actually, Jackie Chan would have gotten his rear end kicked if he hadn't done that cool stunt, rather than just doing it for japes. It isn't hardship. Luke doesn't come back with his X-wing smashed to bits and racked with guilt over the rebel ally he let die. Jackie isn't stunned and needing his bones reset after the fight scene. It was difficult, but they won. That's why they feel like a heroic character. If you insist that difficulty is only expressed by marginal cost, then you get characters who don't feel competent because they rarely manage to achieve anything without something going wrong. And of course, chance doesn't cut it either. When you get dumb writing cop-outs like a human straight up dodging a bullet in Charlie's Angels, you don't say "ah, but it was unlikely they would have done that." You believe that Luke's shot to the exhaust port was difficult because of the way it's been staged and paced and established up to that point, not because someone says that "it was one in a million." How do they do it? A combination of staging, exceptionality in plot allowances, and pacing - which seems to be very hard to do in an RPG without robbing all agency, but at the same time needed for the characters to feel right. quote:Also, please respond to my previous post about working the ref; one of the reasons people get so frustrated is that you don't actually respond to their points, you respond to a subset of those points and ignore the rest. I'm putting this at the end of something that seems like it will grab your attention so I'm pretty sure you've read this. That's usually just because I don't particularly have a reply to them, or because I think I replied to them elsewhere. quote:Working the ref isn't more acceptable because it's more effective. It's a betrayal of trust. It treats the ref, the GM, as the enemy that must be overcome to win the game, and that's just not what a game should be for. Working the ref has to be acceptable if the ref is all there is. It doesn't have to be taken "the enemy that must be overcome to win the game". Like, it's perfectly possible that the players want to make the GM happy and so they do what they think will make the GM happy, but it's still playing to the GM's behaviour patterns instead of the game.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:17
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"Working the ref" is different to "collaborating with the GM." A player who's thoughtful, supportive, and sportsmanlike may well be doing that in part so that the ref feels positively about the game as a whole, but they're not working the ref. Working here means taking advantage of and manipulating the ref, in bad faith. And that is not inherent to TTRPGs. Players always interface with the ref, and with each other (because the GM is also a player). But they don't always 'work the ref' in the sense we mean when we say a soccer player is working the ref. Also, your definition of challenge is fundamentally broken, I think. You say it's a quality of the fiction, but you also say that it dwells in the player's experience, not in the characters in the story. What you're missing is precisely the willing suspension of disbelief! We suspend our disbelief about the vase being present precisely because the writers (and probably Chan himself) had a cool idea for the vase to be there, so they scripted it in. We ignore that this entire scene was choreographed, filmed multiple times, worked to look as believable as possible; we pretend the hero is acting spontaneously in response to things which exist, rather than being scripted. But you insist this disbelief is impossible to have in TTRPGs, that players can never have a loose, willingly suspended stance towards the fiction that allows them to go 'wouldn't it be cool if' or 'yeah, that makes sense, I guess that would be more challenging.' The player isn't Jackie Chan the character, the player is Jackie Chan the actor, and their PC is the character, and there's no reason not to just enjoy that. Characters face real challenges and overcome them, and players face the challenge of making the scene interesting, the mechanics function. These are the equivalent of the challenges of writing a script, choreographing it, pulling off the stunts that make up the scene - it's the framework and logistics of the fiction. And at the end of it, you can say with total honesty, 'My character won that fight by grabbing the vase and throwing it!' because that's what happened in the setting and that was interesting. This doesn't require pure author stance, or absolute IC/OOC division. Just a little willing suspension of disbelief, trust in the fiction, and creative joy. Otherwise you're WTF Fairies, insisting that the world be both real and fictional, material and narrative, not recognizing that the 'reality' of the world is a fictional device, the materiality of the world is a tool for narrative, that these things can work together only by actually recognizing how they operate together and choosing not to sweat it. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 19:22
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Neopie posted:First off: yeah, in these systems if you want to make something harder or more focused on a scene, number of rolls is often the way, and second... The second thing is ok? Like, you kind of, learn to tune difficulty up or down for a given sequence during a game, but also if you set up a ton of hard security stuff and the players ace all the rolls and get past them all, players love that too. Like, it's fine if they get past without trouble because math says that's unlikely to be every scene so it's cool when it does happen. On the topic of setting the difficulty, narrative games like AW also give you the ability to "zoom in" or "zoom out" on the level of conflict depending on the needs of the moment. If you're wading through a bunch of low-level minions on your way to the Lich-Empress' Tower, then yeah, maybe a single roll can resolve the entire fight. But to face the Lich-Empress herself? That "final-boss-fight" is going to be handled in way more detail because you've been building to it. It carries more dramatic weight. You can go whole-hog with this and almost get a blow-by-blow battle if you want to, but the system gives you the flexibility to set the scope where you need it. Many moons ago I wrote an example of both methods, which is up on the AW forums here: https://lumpley.games/thebarf/index.php?topic=6645.msg28796#msg28796 On the topic of players succeeding their way through the challenge, don't forget that this also gives you an awesome opportunity - have the players tell you how they overcome the obstacle. This will give them a chance to showcase their characters' awesomeness and will keep people engaged at the table. GM: "Wow, OK, you rolled a 20 and found the secret door! Yeah, it's a section of the wall that pivots, it's very well camouflaged. How did you find it?" Player: "Oh, um...ooh! I used a little bit of my Blinding Powder and looked for drafts and air-currents that were out-of-place!" Or maybe: Player: "Claswyll is super loving bored watching Alaric and Buckstone fumble around like rubes looking for trigger mechanisms and poo poo. Leaning up against the wall with a sigh to wait for them to give up, I give a start as the section wall starts to move. But I don't let those jerks know I'm surprised, I totally pass it off as an 'I meant to do that' thing." This lets the players say something about their characters, to reinforce the character in the role they're playing. EDIT for hyphz: And this is how you capture that feeling of success against the odds - by letting the players tell you how their characters are awesome. Ilor fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 19:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:"Working the ref" is different to "collaborating with the GM." A player who's thoughtful, supportive, and sportsmanlike may well be doing that in part so that the ref feels positively about the game as a whole, but they're not working the ref. I think that creates a distinction that isn't borne out. Like, if the GM wants the PC to be awesome and the player collaborates with that, and then in the next scene the GM wants the PC to be challenged but the player still want to just be awesome, the player's behaviour didn't change. It doesn't seem fair to say that suddenly the categorisation, and the moral appropriateness, of the player's behaviour has shifted when they didn't change their behaviour at all and maybe didn't even know that the GM had changed theirs. quote:Otherwise you're WTF Fairies, insisting that the world be both real and fictional, material and narrative, not recognizing that the 'reality' of the world is a fictional device, the materiality of the world is a tool for narrative, that these things can work together only by actually recognizing how they operate together and choosing not to sweat it. My issue here is that as written, this should apply to any game with a fictional world, but it doesn't - computer games in particular have no problem with it. If you play Spider-Man on the PS4 you get to feel that you're doing cool stuff, and while you know the encounter is staged it's still a challenge - and you know that you if you don't do the cool stuff right then you'll lose.
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Apr 23, 2020 20:34
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Again, Hyphz, gotta say, man, most of us are either not encountering these issues, or else we're able to work through them with our fellow players. Please stop thinking of this in terms of "this is how this is and must be." It isn't. It just isn't. It's okay if you don't quite understand how it isn't, but please stop acting like the rest of us are lying when we say that our games don't end up working the way yours do.
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Apr 23, 2020 20:44
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hyphz posted:The problem with comparing it to "working the ref" in sports is that in sports, there is also - well - the sport. There's rules, there's the laws of physics, there's an objective truth to whether the player's foot was just across the line or not or whether they actually fell or dived. In improvisational RPG there isn't, there's only the ref. In a game without cameras and video replay, the player who deliberately watches the long clear sail over their head before taking off running, so they can land a clean breakaway shot without being blown offsides, is working the ref just as much as the player who waits until the ref's back is turned and charges an opposing player to play it off as an accidental collision. One player wants the ref to be right, the other one wants them to be wrong. So there's this Platonic ideal of a shadowrunning group, that Shadowrun will do you no favors in actually trying to put together and scene for, but hear me out. There are a variety of roles on a shadowrunning team, and you're playing a modestly experienced shadowrunner, so you're someone the team can look to to fill one of those roles, in addition to some other basic competencies like being able to transit around the city and have the occasional productive social interaction with regular people that doesn't end in murder. Also, runs are chaotic sons of mothers, so you should also be able to step up into one or two other roles and limp the team over the finish line if the specialist there is incapacitated or otherwise occupied. If somebody knows that's what the game is about, and then sits down to character creation and guns all their guns into guns like some kind of Gunnery Smurf, do they want you to be right, or wrong?
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Apr 23, 2020 20:52
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Yeah I'm not sure what to tell you that everybody hasn't already said but JackMann's post seems the most helpful; Everybody in here has either experienced these issues and moved past them, or doesn't experience them at all. The issue is with you or your party or the games you're playing, and these are all fixable and adjustable factors, not universal truths.hyphz posted:I think that creates a distinction that isn't borne out. Like, if the GM wants the PC to be awesome and the player collaborates with that, and then in the next scene the GM wants the PC to be challenged but the player still want to just be awesome, the player's behaviour didn't change. It doesn't seem fair to say that suddenly the categorisation, and the moral appropriateness, of the player's behaviour has shifted when they didn't change their behaviour at all and maybe didn't even know that the GM had changed theirs. But i will say this creates a divide that doesn't exist. I always want the pcs to be awesome, and I can do that by making them the star of the scene and have the world bend to their will, or by challenging them and having them overcome a problem. These aren't opposing ideas, they're just two (of many!) different ways to have the same thing happen.
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Apr 23, 2020 20:58
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hyphz posted:It isn't hardship. Luke doesn't come back with his X-wing smashed to bits and racked with guilt over the rebel ally he let die. Jackie isn't stunned and needing his bones reset after the fight scene. It was difficult, but they won. That's why they feel like a heroic character. If you insist that difficulty is only expressed by marginal cost, then you get characters who don't feel competent because they rarely manage to achieve anything without something going wrong.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:16
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hyphz posted:My issue here is that as written, this should apply to any game with a fictional world, but it doesn't - computer games in particular have no problem with it. If you play Spider-Man on the PS4 you get to feel that you're doing cool stuff, and while you know the encounter is staged it's still a challenge - and you know that you if you don't do the cool stuff right then you'll lose. It does apply to every fictional world! You just suspend your disbelief for those! It's not a logical incoherence of TTRPGs, it's that you personally find it easier to forget that every cool thing you do in Spider-Man is a fabricated system designed to feel hard but really be doable. Video games are the very definition of fabricated, choreographed spaces for the players to feel cool. It's all kayfabe. And when you say 'lose' you mean 'go back and try again' - Do I feel less accomplished because it took me many tries to kill a boss in Sekiro, when in a story version of the same thing that fight would have happened only once? No. I don't, because the accomplishment was always couched within the framework of the game and the feeling, however fabricated, is real. All fiction is like this, you just don't suspend disbelief for TTRPGs because you can see the workings behind the scenes. But many people can, in fact, enjoy the art they themselves create! Authors can think of characters overcoming difficulties and challenges as a real thing, which really describe the character, even when they know that every element of the difficulty and the story are their creation. Jackie Chan can feel good about pulling off stunts that look cool even though they were made far easier by the apparatus of story creation.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:29
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Warthur posted:Except poo poo goes wrong for Luke and Jackie Chan all the time; Star Wars is full of these twists of fortune, Jackie Chan's characters constantly get into scrapes through bad luck. Yes, at the end of the day they pull through, but without the occasional setback the stories would be monotonous. the x-wing example seems really weird given that a fairly big part dagobah was that part where Luke crashed his space ship, watched it sink, wasn't good enough to get it out himself, had to beg a lil frog guy to do it, who spent the entire time saying "listen dude if you can't do this i dunno if you can beat up your dad" then he went and tried to beat up his dad but got clowned on really bad and lost his best friend and his hand and generally had a very bad day despite still being The Hero and being the only one any good at The Force and stuff
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Apr 23, 2020 21:53
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hyphz posted:My issue here is that as written, this should apply to any game with a fictional world, but it doesn't - computer games in particular have no problem with it. If you play Spider-Man on the PS4 you get to feel that you're doing cool stuff, and while you know the encounter is staged it's still a challenge - and you know that you if you don't do the cool stuff right then you'll lose. Hyphz, I actually agree with some of what you're saying, and it's what turned me off of all systems where the agenda is for the PCs to overcome challenges. The challenges are arbitrary, it can be hard to know how to set them, and there's always a question of what's fair, what's fun, and what's a kick in the teeth. I'm not sure a game like that could possibly satisfy my current group. I am a sad, frustrated, cranky old man and I want to spend my fantasy life giving the world the beating it so richly deserves. Other members of my group love strong opposition. When I GM, Blackironheart usually complains that I'm not pushing the PCs hard enough. No GM could please us all. But Ilor doesn't have to, because we don't play to overcome challenges. We're the protagonists of this poo poo. We're not going to lose. Ilor's going to be a fan of our characters. We're playing to find out what twists and turns the story's going to take. The GM doesn't have to worry about whether the encounters are too hard or too easy. He doesn't have to be infallible. You're right that it's a little arbitrary to decide whether getting from here to there through the haunted swamp should be easy, or a die roll, or a whole series of encounters. The GM does his best to make it interesting and if I'm bored, I say, "Hey, Ilor, not for nothing, but we've been in this swamp for two hours, and I really just care about getting to Eisenstadt, can this please be the last dang random encounter?" Then sometimes he says, "Yeah, I get that, but then again, you knew this road was demon-infested when you left, right?" Or maybe he says, "Dude, every time you travel a road, you know there might be demons. You know they're drawn by sound and frightened by light. You lost your torches and had a shouting match. Get your act together or die in the swamp." And that's the end of it.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:54
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JackMann posted:Again, Hyphz, gotta say, man, most of us are either not encountering these issues, or else we're able to work through them with our fellow players. Please stop thinking of this in terms of "this is how this is and must be." It isn't. It just isn't. It's okay if you don't quite understand how it isn't, but please stop acting like the rest of us are lying when we say that our games don't end up working the way yours do. I don't really mean to be that way, it just gets a bit tedious if I have to keep writing "I can't see that.." before everything, and I don't mind if people say I'm wrong. That said, "it doesn't happen for me" isn't particularly helpful on its own since it doesn't tell me why.
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Apr 23, 2020 22:09
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hyphz posted:I don't really mean to be that way, it just gets a bit tedious if I have to keep writing "I can't see that.." before everything, and I don't mind if people say I'm wrong. That said, "it doesn't happen for me" isn't particularly helpful on its own since it doesn't tell me why. Not to put too fine a point on it, but at the end of the day the problem might just be "you're kind of weird and your main group is extremely ill-suited to this sort of thing". (And I mean that in the nicest way possible, nothing wrong with being kind of weird about this kind of thing.) So, I'm going to give one more piece of advice from Apocalypse World: To do it, do it. Grab a more freeform RPG than you're used to like Apocalypse World, get a group together that would enjoy that type of game more than your usual group, and just give it a shot. It'll give us all something more concrete to talk about than just worrying about the nature of conflict in RPGs, at the very least. Alternatively we could keep talking about this, since it's still pretty fun, but I'm standing by this not being something you can work through for yourself just by talking about it.
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Apr 23, 2020 22:18
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Not to put too fine a point on it, but at the end of the day the problem might just be "you're kind of weird and your main group is extremely ill-suited to this sort of thing". (And I mean that in the nicest way possible, nothing wrong with being kind of weird about this kind of thing.) I appreciate that you don't mean it badly, I'd (obviously) rather not just chalk this up to yet another thing that others can do and I can't and there's no particular reason why. quote:get a group together that would enjoy that type of game more than your usual group, and just give it a shot. It'll give us all something more concrete to talk about than just worrying about the nature of conflict in RPGs, at the very least. Well, I did mention that I did that for CFA and that challenge was an issue to the limited extent that challenge is an issue in that game. But I can't really get a group together for something that's just an experiment for me and is likely not to be fun for them.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:04
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You can find people who would have fun with your experiment; the two are not mutually exclusive.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:06
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Angrymog posted:I don't know if this is related to Hypz-chat, or my own personal hangup, but I absolutely hate doing skill rolls in games until I see how the GM handles failure with someone ele's character, because I've seen a few too many GMs who use a failed skill roll as an excuse to make your character look like an idiot. yeah, 'botches' are a big tell of whether a GM is a jerk. Especially in d&d and other games where the system and/or house rules that encourage them are usually designed by people with no concept of how math works. Sorry there shouldn't be a 5% chance that any given action results in results in a pratfall unless we're playing "It's Always Sunny in Neverwinter." That said, I currently have a group that has reactions to "You're trapped in a burning building, what do you do?" with stuff like "I take off my shoes [which have knives strapped to them] and hold them in my hands, arms outstretched spinning in circles" or "I spend my shift of guard duty at camp taking psychoactive substances to go on a vision quest" Oh, that fire thing also happened because there were monsters in the room that were afraid of fire, so the bard had the brilliant idea of lighting all of the group's torches, specifically shoving some down his pants and doing a 'fire dance' which also had a failed roll. So yeah my group is signed on for "It's Always Sunny in Dungeon World"
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Apr 23, 2020 23:10
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hyphz posted:For example, sure there's rules for battles and the Go Aggro rule in Apocalypse World, but only the GM decides how many battles you will face before you get where you're going. Sure there's rules for sneaking around and taking Shadow stress in Spire, but there's no statement of how far and how many guards there are on the Chambers at Amaranth. The underlined part is straight up wrong and the rest of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how apocalypse world works.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:51
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hyphz posted:I don't really mean to be that way, it just gets a bit tedious if I have to keep writing "I can't see that.." before everything, and I don't mind if people say I'm wrong. That said, "it doesn't happen for me" isn't particularly helpful on its own since it doesn't tell me why. I'll put a fine point on it. It happens for you because your players are assholes.
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Apr 24, 2020 00:44
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mllaneza posted:I'll put a fine point on it. Seriously, this is a hypothesis you’ve discarded out of hand. But, maybe try approaching things with the idea that your players have been playing in a way that makes things unpleasant or difficult. Maybe try running a Spire one-shot with the CFA group, or something
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Apr 24, 2020 01:17
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Joe Slowboat posted:Seriously, this is a hypothesis you’ve discarded out of hand. But, maybe try approaching things with the idea that your players have been playing in a way that makes things unpleasant or difficult. Maybe try running a Spire one-shot with the CFA group, or something Except I can't work out a Spire one-shot - I have Strata, but many of the topics in that are uncomfortable. And even then, I get stuck trying to think what would actually be subvertable by the PCs that will be accessible to effectively raw recruits and hasn't been subverted already.
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Apr 24, 2020 01:32
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:The underlined part is straight up wrong and the rest of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how apocalypse world works. I appreciate that might be true as a judgment for someone who's got the right idea but I don't see it in the book. Seize by force says that you take control of something but does not limit the number of things you might have to take control of in order to achieve something. Go Aggro says you go aggro on "someone", not everyone. None of the Agendas limit it. There is the statement about "don't deny the character success when they've fought for it and won it", but no rule that one instance of Sieze by Force must constitute fighting for and winning any given goal in the game (which would be daft). In fact, Moves Snowball typically states that any given conflict will require more than one move, but not how many it would require. In the Moves Snowball example, there's an encounter with 3 NPCs, but no statement of how this figure 3 was arrived at - nothing in the rules would seem to stop it being 30.
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Apr 24, 2020 01:42
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hyphz posted:Except I can't work out a Spire one-shot - I have Strata, but many of the topics in that are uncomfortable. And even then, I get stuck trying to think what would actually be subvertable by the PCs that will be accessible to effectively raw recruits and hasn't been subverted already.
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Apr 24, 2020 01:45
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hyphz posted:continued fundamental misunderstanding of apocalypse world Did you read the whole book yet?
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Apr 24, 2020 01:50
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hyphz posted:Go Aggro says you go aggro on "someone", not everyone. You can absolute Go Aggro on large groups of people - the rules for size differences between a single person and a gang will give them an advantage if they decide to force your hand, but use a dangerous enough weapon and you can make a mob hesitate when you have the drop on them. hyphz posted:In the Moves Snowball example, there's an encounter with 3 NPCs, but no statement of how this figure 3 was arrived at - nothing in the rules would seem to stop it being 30. Presumably if Plover was capable of bringing 30 people in, Marie would have known. The chapter brings us in the middle of her beef with Isle, who is part of a Family threat. quote:Here’s my big plan, by the way. Isle’s listed in the cast for a threat called Isle’s family, which is a brute: family (naturally enough). Its impulse, accordingly, is to close ranks and protect their own. What’s most fun is that I’m acting on that impulse but I’m using Plover, Church Head and Pellet—members of Keeler’s gang!—as Isle’s family’s weapon. It’s just like when Keeler uses them to go aggro or seize by force, only I’m the one doing it. Presumably the MC figured that Plover would be able to get two of his friends from the gang to back him and not the whole group. But there's nothing like D&D Challenge Rating or whatever for encounters - if Plover can bring 30 people and would, then you can absolutely send 30 people after the PC. Apocalypse World PCs are pretty capable, and if a Brainer decides "I'm not fighting 30 people" they can most likely get away.
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Apr 24, 2020 02:10
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What I don't understand is how the gently caress anyone can read apocalypse world and then start asking questions about how many baddies they should plan to have show up and how many challenges they need to put in before they let the players have a victory and how many battles they should have as the PCs travel from a to b.
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Apr 24, 2020 02:13
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Well, I tend to think of that because of the risk of a low level cut. As much as the game might think in terms of Fronts and Threats and Clocks, at some point a player will ask for a distance in feet, how many people they see, what a door is made of. Failing to answer just ruins immersion, and making it up tends to trigger contradictions quickly, for me at least.
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Apr 24, 2020 02:57
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Why would an Apocalypse World player ask for a distance in feet and inches, and why would you need to give them one if they did? What are the characters doing? Did their actions constitute a move? What move? What does the text of that move tell you, Hyphz, to do about it? Again, have you read the whole book? I promise you it covers this.
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Apr 24, 2020 03:12
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hyphz posted:Well, I tend to think of that because of the risk of a low level cut. As much as the game might think in terms of Fronts and Threats and Clocks, at some point a player will ask for a distance in feet, how many people they see, what a door is made of. Failing to answer just ruins immersion, and making it up tends to trigger contradictions quickly, for me at least. I've played and ran Apocalypse World and I can tell you neither I nor my players asked for specific measurement in feet, the exact number of people, or what things are made out.
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Apr 24, 2020 03:13
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