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hyphz posted:I think another one that comes up often is the airburst question. I once did the inverse in a Pathfinder Society game, using Fly and Channel at just the right altitude to deliver magical healing to an ally in distress, without catching any of the nearby foes in the radius of the Channel. I was never a huge fan of the Pathfinder system, but that was an excellent practicum of why people find it fun to dig into the excessively detailed mechanics and come up with unexpected ways to cheese the game.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:29
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Warthur posted:Old school referees like to ask "Are you sure you want to do that?" when the players ask to do something which seems ridiculous, but I've found it more productive to ask "What do you expect to achieve by that?", which is a good way of establishing how the players are envisaging the world as working and giving yourself a chance to clarify how you think the world works. This seems a lot like the GM/player negotiation that comes before an action roll in Blades.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:50
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This seems a lot like the GM/player negotiation that comes before an action roll in Blades. Which is in itself really just codifying good practice.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:55
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Which is in itself really just codifying good practice. It encodes a specific attitude... I think the notion of having the player decide the action rather than stating a goal and having the GM decide the action is not necessarily the most straightforward. I've stumbled and had players stumble over that.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:59
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Regardless of how you feel about the final product, Blades' idea of just baking implicit best-practices into the rules themselves is a good format and should probably be the default state by now. There's obviously parts where you need flexibility and discretion, but those should be flagged as the odd bits out and the rest should not have random, bizarre ambiguities.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:Regardless of how you feel about the final product, Blades' idea of just baking implicit best-practices into the rules themselves is a good format and should probably be the default state by now. There's obviously parts where you need flexibility and discretion, but those should be flagged as the odd bits out and the rest should not have random, bizarre ambiguities. Is it much better than AW in that regard?
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Nov 11, 2021 02:07
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I think it's more explicit in stating it, yes. I'm not saying AW is trying to be mysterious about its approach, and Blades is fundamentally a really hard tweak of AW so obviously they have a lot of the same DNA, but a lot of AW's rules that constrain the MC still aren't really player-facing. Baker doesn't do the nonsense with Super Secret Clubhouse No Players Allowed GM sections, but I've played with people who managed to never learn that MC moves even existed. (Think about how many various grog rages are out there where the thing stopping their weird quantum bear hypothetical is in the Agenda.) Meanwhile, in Blades, those "best GM practices" are presented front and center when they discuss the basics of a resolution mechanic : how do you know what to roll? The player chooses as part of a conversation with the MC.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:30
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I see. Interesting.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:39
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I was delighted when I realized even the newest edition of Call of Cthulhu included that discussion in its skill rules. Even the groggiest pass/fail system can benefit from focusing the discussion on what the PCs want to accomplish.
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Nov 11, 2021 06:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:I think it's more explicit in stating it, yes. I think there's kind of a dual-prong thing here. Blades absolutely has an MC section and MC moves (they're called "GM Actions" and start on page 188) but what it puts much more forward can best be understood as the Agenda/Methods/Principles part of the picture, which has itself evolved since AW to incorporate a player agenda/methods/principles component as well. AW doesn't put as much effort into telling the players how to play it to best effect as it does telling the MC how to, but there absolutely are player best practices to propagate. Monsterhearts also does this, for example. The second prong is that MC moves and player moves operate the same but are adjudicated very differently, to that point that a lot of successors are calling them different things. Most times after a player makes a player move they look at the MC to tell them what happens next. Most times after the MC makes an MC move they look at the players to see how they'll react. In that way they're similar, but the MC doesn't need permission from the players in order to offer them an opportunity, certainly not in the same way that a player needs permission from the MC to seize by force. So there's a benefit for the players to talk about their moves in the abstract, in the course of asking for permission. But there isn't really any parallel benefit for the MC to talk about their moves in the abstract - the best representation of the moves they can make to the players are the ones fully grounded in the fiction with no trace of the abstractions that inspired them.
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Nov 11, 2021 08:25
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Which is in itself really just codifying good practice. Yes, as it kind of is in PbtA, where kind of comes in with the idea of being fiction-first and declaring what you intend to do first and then figuring out what move that is. If someone is proposing something where your immediate response is "how the hell does that fit what's going on in the fiction?" that suggests either there's a miscommunication or misunderstanding about the fiction or someone's messing about, either way that should prompt clarification.
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Nov 11, 2021 13:54
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I think some practices aren't necessarily "good", but it's good that they're stated. Asking players to choose action ratings instead of telling the GM what they want to do and the GM telling them which would be relevant is a choice. I'm still not sure what I think about it, but it's in the open to assess and critique.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:46
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Carried over from the chat thread:hyphz posted:True. The difficult bit there is building a setting where it actually makes sense. OK that may come off as a bit flippant, but I think I have a real point, which is that you in particular, Hyphz, spend way too much mental energy worrying about making every conflict, situation, and decision "logical" or consistent or whatever. That's too high a standard for our space wizard adventures, and it's too high a standard to hold to the makers of modules for the space wizard game. quote:...the PCs take that action they will need to learn that it is a good idea and that will require them to explore and somehow learn that there are enough resources to be shared in perpetuity; why the conflict started and continued anyway; why the additional issues that come about as a result of conflict happening, such as revenge, won't prevent just sharing from resolving the conflict; and how they will know that the sides won't go straight back how they were before as soon as the PCs are off-planet.... Worse yet, many of these are not things that would be uncovered incrementally by PC actions, which means they can't easily be mutually built by the GM and PCs riffing off each other. The PCs would just go to the library and look in the history section. In a star wars game, the PCs can yell at some weird aliens, blow up the oppressive symbol of a faction, get some advice from a swamp goblin, and dump a crime boss into a spikey monster pit, and bam: problems solved, there's a parade, everyone cheers, time to move on to the next planet. quote:I'm not sure if this was misunderstood, because what I meant was that you can't have choices that are all three of: important, unconstrained, and predictable. That makes more sense, and as you explain it I can see your logic. I still don't really agree, in that it's still basically Hyphz declaring rubrics for how games have to work, that other people mostly don't seem to run into or worry about. For example, I don't see much value in worrying about the "predictability" of choices. I can usually predict how a movie is going to go, I can see the structures in a novel, but I still enjoy them; I think players often can foresee the likely outcomes of their actions but still eagerly engage with them - and find their choices meaningful - because of the details and flavors and conversations and so on that come out of them. Like OK, maybe we are pretty sure that we can defeat the lich by destroying the phylactery, so there's no mystery in that: but we can still put a unique spin on it, maybe the GM still pulls an interesting unforseen consequence out of it, or at the very least, maybe we'll just have fun engaging with the tactical combat sim in this game. quote:If a choice is important and predictable, that means you can tell what the best option is The implication here is that there is always moral clarity, or that a group of players playing characters can always reach a clear consensus about what the best outcome is (even if they can reasonably predict all outcomes, which again I argue is rare); but really though, who cares? quote:The only way the choice can not be constrained is if you can't tell what the best option is (it's unpredictable) or it doesn't matter if you don't make the best choice (it's not important). Can't it not matter if you make the best choice, not because it's unimportant, but because the table will have fun regardless? Why do the characters have to choose the "best" option? Even if they're committed to being the good guys, people are flawed, and characters can be flawed too. We can intentionally actually choose any option from a list that is, constrained, and predictable, and important, because we're interested in having a fun game more than we're interested in always taking the optimal path. quote:No, but we have enough knowledge in real life to know when we've done the right thing but got screwed by fate, which is something we'd rather escape from in gaming (and while it's bad when "fate" means "the dice", it's doubly bad if it means "the GM"). Yes, really. It's still fun to go rob the dragon, even if we all knew, tacitly or explicitly, that we were always going to beat the dragon and always going to claim its treasure. We know Indiana Jones is going to survive, we know Luke Skywalker isn't going to get blown up by a random tie fighter before he can blow up the death star, and we know that when we improvised wandering down a random alleyway and the GM pulls out a pre-made map with some thieves for us to fight that we were probably gonna fight those thieves on that map no matter which street we went down. And we don't care. It is not doubly bad, nor even singly bad, when "fate" is decided by the dice or by the GM. That's part of the game we all accepted when we sat down to play. quote:The problem is that it'd be perfectly reasonable for the players to infer one from the other, unless it is normal in this group for the GM to warn the players in a meta fashion about combats that are within the "challenging but fair" scope of the combat system ("are you sure you want to advance? the dragon might be in the next room!"). That is not actually a problem. quote:And the next question will be "how do we find them?" While I don't need to answer that directly, and at that point unless I actually know what those other ways are and where in the setting evidence or documentation of them might be found, I'm stuck just making up arbitrary stuff until a probably-disappointing conclusion. I'm sorry that all of your improvised solutions to player ingenuity are disappointing (I bet they aren't) but this is not actually an big problem for many or most GMs. I think it gets better with experience and practice, and maybe some folks will never get good at it, but it's one of those things that reasonable players are not actually upset about anyway. Players know the GM has not got a street-level map of the entire planet, nor a directory and background of every living thing on it, so when they improvise yhey expect the GM to improvise too and they don't get annoyed or disappointed by the outcomes because you know... game. Fun. Social activity.
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Nov 24, 2021 18:49
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Leperflesh posted:The implication here is that there is always moral clarity, or that a group of players playing characters can always reach a clear consensus about what the best outcome is (even if they can reasonably predict all outcomes, which again I argue is rare); but really though, who cares? This is actually an interesting question: can you get to a non-trivial moral quandary in a tabletop role-playing game? Games like D&D might talk big about morality through obnoxious alignment arguments, but they only really have one effective moral compass: the one that leads characters to the next level.
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Nov 24, 2021 20:51
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This is actually an interesting question: can you get to a non-trivial moral quandary in a tabletop role-playing game? Games like D&D might talk big about morality through obnoxious alignment arguments, but they only really have one effective moral compass: the one that leads characters to the next level. getting to the next level should be possible regardless of the morality of the characters
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Nov 24, 2021 23:27
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This is actually an interesting question: can you get to a non-trivial moral quandary in a tabletop role-playing game? Games like D&D might talk big about morality through obnoxious alignment arguments, but they only really have one effective moral compass: the one that leads characters to the next level. Although I haven't directly been in such an adventure myself, I've read plenty of accounts of people who decided it was time for their character to die, like, voluntarily, because it fit the story really well. A heroic, or even a tragic death, can be an alternative to relentlessly pursuing a level-up. That said: there are people who claim to want heavy-duty Serious Stuff in their games. I don't especially love a comical farce outside of one-offs like Paranoia, but I prefer a balance I guess, I'm not really into legitimately-upsetting or depressing gameplay. I get more than enough of that stuff in real life. But some folks want it? Even with that taken into account, sure, I've had legit moral quandries presented, or presented them, once or twice. My first one was unintentional: I was a newbie DM of a D&D game, the players reduced an enemy (a hobgoblin) to exactly 0 hit points, and by rule that meant he was incapacitated but not dying. They immediately had to decide what to do with him, but due to the circmstances, taking a prisoner along really didn't seem like a good idea... but neither did it seem like like letting him go would be good. Is it fine to execute a helpless foe? If I'd been more experienced, I'd have read the discomfort in the room and resolved the issue for them, but I hadn't thought about or planned for it and in the end, I had the hobgoblin curse at the characters to goad them into killing him, as he promised to return with his tribe and murder them all even as he lay there unable to fight. So they delivered the coup de grace, and then I just tried to move things on and not let them dwell on it. What would the morally correct thing to do, from their perspective, be? Gosh that's a deep and difficult question. It's not fair to judge people in a different setting, with different rules (as those people understand them), different culture, different circumstances, right? Maybe they don't live in a society with functioning, pervasive, powerful government to which one can defer matters of security or justice. Maybe effectively there's generational war between the elves and the hobgoblins, and it's unfair to expect a random elf to spare a random hobgoblin, however morally laudable we might view it as outsiders. Maybe it would be morally wrong for the PCs to attempt to "reform" an intelligent nonhuman person whose own culture positions banditry and combat as morally correct? I think it's... not exactly an error, but at least usually inappropriate, to ask a random D&D table to engage with that stuff, given that most of the rules and material in the game pushes players towards treating "monsters" as disposable foes not deserving of moral consideration. It's something you can discuss during session 0, of course. These days, one of my takeaways from that experience is that I generally don't treat intelligent nonhumans as "monsters" regardless. If I want to position antagonists for my players, I provide foundations for that antagonism that gives the players options, or, I make it totally unequivocally clear when an antagonist isn't in whatever they would consider a "perfectly fine to kill on sight without any additional justification" class. Otherwise, if I just want some killable mooks, there's always options that don't give me icky feelings: zombies, robots, magically animated rock elementals, zombie rock robots, etc.
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Nov 25, 2021 00:22
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Leperflesh posted:OK that may come off as a bit flippant, but I think I have a real point, which is that you in particular, Hyphz, spend way too much mental energy worrying about making every conflict, situation, and decision "logical" or consistent or whatever. That's too high a standard for our space wizard adventures, and it's too high a standard to hold to the makers of modules for the space wizard game. I think this is getting a bit too tilted towards discussion of the Star Wars module. My issue isn't that they didn't include all the details necessary to resolve the conflict, it's that they included the possibility of doing so at all without supporting it and when it was ridiculously out of scale to everything else. It'd be like a Godlike adventure being about rescuing some POWs and then in the conclusion section saying "award the PCs 5 XP extra if they also managed to end WW2." They don't have to include every detail about how to do this in the module, they just have to delete that sentence. The kick-off for all of this was Coolness Averted's post about LFP posts all being the same regardless of how the GM was actually going to run, with the specific text being: "I don't have a fixed story I'm looking to tell or direction planned for the game. Everything is based on what the players do, I react to the choices you make. I don't railroad you along a story I've already made up. The world exists outside of the player characters and the plot will move along regardless of what you do -if you don't investigate or interact with something, things going to happen without your intervention. This is going to be a story and character driven game, with a focus on roleplay and creative solutions." quote:Yes, really. It's still fun to go rob the dragon, even if we all knew, tacitly or explicitly, that we were always going to beat the dragon and always going to claim its treasure. We know Indiana Jones is going to survive, we know Luke Skywalker isn't going to get blown up by a random tie fighter before he can blow up the death star, and we know that when we improvised wandering down a random alleyway and the GM pulls out a pre-made map with some thieves for us to fight that we were probably gonna fight those thieves on that map no matter which street we went down. And we don't care. But all of these disagree with "I don't have a fixed story or direction planned..". And the objective here is not to say "ha-ha, see, you broke your promise!". The objective is to ask why making and then breaking this promise is something that "we all knew, tacitly or explicitly". If we all know that, why would no notional LFG post actually say that?
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Nov 25, 2021 16:28
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hyphz posted:The kick-off for all of this was Coolness Averted's post about LFP posts all being the same regardless of how the GM was actually going to run, with the specific text being: "I don't have a fixed story I'm looking to tell or direction planned for the game. Everything is based on what the players do, I react to the choices you make. I don't railroad you along a story I've already made up. The world exists outside of the player characters and the plot will move along regardless of what you do -if you don't investigate or interact with something, things going to happen without your intervention. This is going to be a story and character driven game, with a focus on roleplay and creative solutions." Largely because the book lied to them. GMs believe this when they say it because that's the pitch whatever GM material they're reading gives them, and so they pass it on. But the material never actually prepared them to provide the things it said it would, so they make the empty promise that was made to them. And players have only played these games of empty promises, so they don't really expect anything more. Saying the expected thing is, at least, not a warning sign of any particular GM badness. It intersects with a common oversight in a lot of roleplaying game materials, of assuming the players won't fail. Now, while as a GM you are there to fail, to yield some tiny portion of the infinite universe you control to the single character each player controls, you still can't just assume the players won't fail, not if you're leaving it up to chance. What have you done for the dice, that you should be repaid? But a large amount of material is written as though player failure is not an option, and I've seen a similar XP kicker to the one that ticked you off, hyphz - the MegaDumbCast is running through the Marvel Superheroes series of timetravel modules, and one scene has a karma reward for the PCs capturing Hitler. Hitler's in the scene, true. But he's behind power level gently caress You armored glass, and you're only in the scene because you got railroaded into a sealed chamber with power level gently caress You walls where they pumped in power level gently caress You knockout gas, and now you've been brainwashed by Nazis to murder each other. But Hitler's in the scene! And the PCs can get points for capturing Hitler! How do they do that and what happens then? "I dunno," says the module author. If the GM material doesn't to anything to disabuse you of this bad habit, of considering only PC success when you set up a scene, you wind up with, well: Leperflesh posted:I was a newbie DM of a D&D game, the players reduced an enemy (a hobgoblin) to exactly 0 hit points, and by rule that meant he was incapacitated but not dying. They immediately had to decide what to do with him, but due to the circmstances, taking a prisoner along really didn't seem like a good idea... but neither did it seem like like letting him go would be good. Is it fine to execute a helpless foe? If I'd been more experienced, I'd have read the discomfort in the room and resolved the issue for them, but I hadn't thought about or planned for it and in the end, I had the hobgoblin curse at the characters to goad them into killing him, as he promised to return with his tribe and murder them all even as he lay there unable to fight. So they delivered the coup de grace, and then I just tried to move things on and not let them dwell on it. Not to try and point-score by poaching a much younger DM's experience, but if you consider what the hobgoblins want as warfighters, well, they could maybe want the PCs to surrender and hold them for ransom? Those are both things that happen in actual wars, as in, the contesting of two political entities against each other. So when the PCs come one micron short of success and have a hobgoblin at their mercy, you flip that and have the hobgoblin surrender and do what they say. Lay low in the foothills while the PCs clear the ruined temple? You're the boss. And there's probably a question in your minds right now that illustrates another problem. The question is "how do the players know the hobgoblin is telling the truth?", and the answer is "because you told them he was, and you can tell the players the truth". Still through their characters, you know? "Yeah, that's a war oath. Hobgoblins may be cruel and destructive, but they're not oathbreakers, especially when it comes to war oaths." The problem is that maybe you're not actually playing a game where you can tell the players the truth. This is another bad habit the GM material can put you in - always hedge, always qualify, always say "you think", always say "it looks like". If you just tell your players that something is true that's giving up a tiny grain of your infinite power to define the world! When you can't tell your players the truth, you give them a world where they can't trust anyone, where everything is uncertain. You're going to need a pretty twisted morality to get on in a world like that.
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Nov 28, 2021 21:33
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Glazius posted:Not to try and point-score by poaching a much younger DM's experience, but if you consider what the hobgoblins want as warfighters, well, they could maybe want the PCs to surrender and hold them for ransom? Those are both things that happen in actual wars, as in, the contesting of two political entities against each other. Being taken for ransom and taking others for ransom as an alternative to just dying is provided as an example occurrence in the original RuneQuest (or, rather, whatever version you'd consider Classic RuneQuest you can get from Chaosium), and ties into the more socially connected expectations about the characters, player and otherwise.
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Nov 28, 2021 22:54
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Glazius posted:But Hitler's in the scene! And the PCs can get points for capturing Hitler! How do they do that and what happens then? "I dunno," says the module author. I think there's a big painful difficulty with module-writing, and it's that you ideally want to make sure that both cool situations pop up and also that the PCs can influence the flow of events, but the more work you do setting up the first the less you get of the second. In the history of module-writing, RPGs leaned heavy towards the second and gradually drifted more and more towards the first over time (until the OSR, which usually but not always goes sandbox again). It feels like there has to be some way to thread the needle between the two, but I haven't seen much stuff that does so. I feel like I've seen a bunch of games and settings that basically throw down dozens of hooks but don't go into detail on any of them (Ultraviolet Grasslands, a lot of Patrick Stuart stuff), books that give you a concrete map and cast of characters without much guidance on cool things that could happen (Hot Springs Island, Scenic Dunnsmouth), and tons of modules that are basically linear stories with tons of cool scenes that the players don't have much room to steer (either through failure or self-direction). Of the three, I like the 'concrete map' style by far the best, but it can be hard to make an interesting build-up of events happen even when all the ingredients for one are present. I think that all three styles fail on that same basic front, though--they do the easy work (thinking up cool premises), but don't help GMs with the actual hard parts of running a game--how to handle unexpected situations. On some level it is the job of the players and not the module writer or the GM to figure out how to capture Hitler, but you should really still give some material that the GM can build off of to help adjudicate the unexpected. If poo poo does go sideways, what's Hitler's evacuation plan? Without trying to account for every way things could break down, what are the general blind spots and weak points in the Nazi organizational structure? What does Hitler want more than he wants to gently caress with you, that you could use to try to leverage up a little room to free yourself? I feel like there has to be a middle ground between a summary of Hitler's life story and a scripted scene that just gives GMs a seed of guidance to build up their on-the-spot adjudications around. Hot Springs Island probably does the best job of this I've seen--it goes pretty in depth into the motivation of each character/faction/etc in the setting, with a focus on the immediate over backstory fluff. It does a real good job of building a powder keg of a situation, but even with it I do really wish it gave more guidance on ways things could break interestingly. "They want to backstab their boss" is good, but is even better with a few one-sentence "If they become the new boss, they'll put the old boss on a mock trial before executing them" non-binding scene ideas. Glazius posted:The problem is that maybe you're not actually playing a game where you can tell the players the truth. This is another bad habit the GM material can put you in - always hedge, always qualify, always say "you think", always say "it looks like". If you just tell your players that something is true that's giving up a tiny grain of your infinite power to define the world! I half-agree with this. I think that the PCs knowing they can trust the info they're being fed is 100% vital to functional play, but uncertainty is really fun and is what creates genuinely morally interesting situations, and it is possible to have both at once--just roll for it. Like, you can tell the players "they seem sincere and probably won't be back, but you can't be sure--I'll roll a d6 and as long as it doesn't come up a 1 they'll honor the deal". That way it doesn't break down into a "never trust the GM, never show a weak spot" while still allowing for the act of doing the right thing to have more weight to it due to the risks involved.
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Nov 28, 2021 23:26
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OtspIII posted:I half-agree with this. I think that the PCs knowing they can trust the info they're being fed is 100% vital to functional play, but uncertainty is really fun and is what creates genuinely morally interesting situations, and it is possible to have both at once--just roll for it. Like, you can tell the players "they seem sincere and probably won't be back, but you can't be sure--I'll roll a d6 and as long as it doesn't come up a 1 they'll honor the deal". That way it doesn't break down into a "never trust the GM, never show a weak spot" while still allowing for the act of doing the right thing to have more weight to it due to the risks involved. Telling the players the odds is pretty much telling them the truth. Like "roll Parley with advantage, we'll see how it goes"? It's still laying out the truth. (Honestly I'd have gone for that but one hobgoblin grunt with 1HP is a little more of a foregone conclusion.) OtspIII posted:I think there's a big painful difficulty with module-writing, and it's that you ideally want to make sure that both cool situations pop up and also that the PCs can influence the flow of events, but the more work you do setting up the first the less you get of the second. In the history of module-writing, RPGs leaned heavy towards the second and gradually drifted more and more towards the first over time (until the OSR, which usually but not always goes sandbox again). It feels like there has to be some way to thread the needle between the two, but I haven't seen much stuff that does so. Even with a lot of forethought, there's still table-to-table variance to create the unexpected that the GM will still have to deal with. I don't think it can ever be gotten rid of entirely. That said, the Apocalypse World style is to go extremely hard on preparing the major actors and their motivations, and the events that flow from those motivations if the PCs didn't get involved. This does mean that it can wind up low on setpieces, and AW will tell you that it's not going to help you plan out specific sequences. Though it makes up for it by being in kind of a perpetual state of setpiece, given that you're just supposed to go hard on the environmental greebles and applaud any PC who tries to play off them?
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Nov 29, 2021 02:33
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Glazius posted:That said, the Apocalypse World style is to go extremely hard on preparing the major actors and their motivations, and the events that flow from those motivations if the PCs didn't get involved. Oh yeah, actually AW/Dungeon World might be the place I've seen do what I was talking about best. Ultimately, I think what I want is less plotting explicit contingencies and more giving inspiration on how to handle the unexpected. Dungeon World instincts are a really good example of that--just listing a NPC's go-to moves for when things get real. There are always going to be situations beyond what any prep can expect, but a couple of motivations/instincts/etc can do a pretty good job of making a GM feel like they have a starting point to work from rather than just feel like they're being arbitrary. That said, I do still wish that more modules gave ideas for how unlikely situations might play out--not because it's important that the situation gets resolved Correctly if it does come up, but just to make it clear that off-the-rails things can and should happen, with an inspirational example of how one might handle them. Also, if you are going to offer XP for capturing Hitler, there are a few low hanging situations you could just give advice on. Just a couple simple sub-paragraph "If containment is breached, then..." In part to make it clear that it could happen, in part so that the GM isn't starting from scratch if it does happen, and in part to give the GM the excuse to leave some cracks in the Nazi's defenses the players might be able to exploit.
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Nov 29, 2021 03:37
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This conversation is reinforcing an observation I've had in the last few months, on another topic, that might be illustrative, or at least it's led me down the same path. I've been watching a lot of woodworking videos on Youtube. There's several really really good channels; they present all kinds of useful and practical information, about tools especially, but also demonstrating various entry-level to intermediate projects, and showing off techniques as they go. It's great. You can get a long ways towards becoming "a woodworker" just by watching videos and doing your best to replicate what they do. But when I'm in my garage space, actually doing my own projects, I encounter a completely different obstacle (or really set of them) that so far, I almost never see addressed in any of the videos I watch, and that's the need to solve problems, often improvisationally. Because nobody ever has exactly the same tools as the demonstrator in the video; the same layout, the same workbench, the same exactly wood with the same moisture content in the same ambient humidity, etc. Invariably, you're trying to either make the same thing but with moderately different stuff, or you're trying to make your own thing using your stuff and attempting to apply techniques you've learned. Either way, you're guaranteed to encounter little problems to solve. Some of them are tiny: "in the video he used flat-headed recessed screws but I have round-headed ones. Hmm. How can I still recess them?" or "I'm out of 120 grit. Can I just start with 150?" Some of them are moderate: "He used a table saw for all his cuts, but I don't have one. I'll have to use my bandsaw or hand saws, and those don't work exactly the same. Can I still get the accurate cuts I need?" And some of them are so big they can stop the project completely, at least for a while: "I need the two edges of these boards to be perfectly flat, so they can be edge-joined, but I don't have a jointer and when I try to use hand planes I keep getting bad results. I'm stuck!" In all of these cases, what the amateur woodworker needs is the skill of figuring things out on their own. Changing the project, or adapting tools, or finding a different approach. If you don't have the expected tool, do you have something that you can make work? If you're modifying the project to suit your different needs, can you still succeed? If you run into a big problem, and you don't have an expert standing there to tell you or teach you how to solve it, can you go away and think for a while and doodle on some paper and eventually find a solution? I think all of this leads me to two conclusions: 1. Youtube needs some "how to creatively solve project problems in the woodshop" videos 2. I think this is related to the roleplaying game problem being discussed in the philosophy thread! Because what game books and modules usually do a lot of, is give you some very specific projects to build and tools to use, and if you (and your players) all do things exactly as expected, great! But the reality is that no table of players ever perfectly conforms to what the game author laid out; some kind of house rules, some kind of off-script push, some kind of situational block is basically guaranteed to crop up, often. As a GM or as a player, you need the skill of improvisation, adaptation, problem-solving. And gosh it'd be great if the game materials we used spent more time teaching us that, vs. giving us another tutorial on how to use a OtspIII posted:Ultimately, I think what I want is less plotting explicit contingencies and more giving inspiration on how to handle the unexpected. Yeah.
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Nov 29, 2021 21:12
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OtspIII posted:Oh yeah, actually AW/Dungeon World might be the place I've seen do what I was talking about best. Ultimately, I think what I want is less plotting explicit contingencies and more giving inspiration on how to handle the unexpected. Dungeon World instincts are a really good example of that--just listing a NPC's go-to moves for when things get real. There are always going to be situations beyond what any prep can expect, but a couple of motivations/instincts/etc can do a pretty good job of making a GM feel like they have a starting point to work from rather than just feel like they're being arbitrary. Knowing the reasons why is a big help in general. What does this NPC want? Why does this dungeon exist? In gods' name what are the players trying to pull? That last one's also important. In AW-style games you kind of have to know what your players are planning because moves trigger based on the fictional goals they're trying to accomplish. A sudden outbreak of violence could be an attempt to go aggro, seize by force, or even just a classical wasteland manipulate someone. It depends what your players are trying to get out of it. But in systems where that's not the case, another one of those bad GM temptations is to adjudicate the players' actions "neutrally", without question of what they were trying to do, producing a result completely disconnected from the GM's prep and with no necessary connection to whatever the players hoped to accomplish. When you're clear on what your players are trying to do, it helps you give them results that make sense to them.
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Nov 30, 2021 07:00
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Leperflesh posted:I've been watching a lot of woodworking videos on Youtube. I'm going through loosely the same process right now with my teaching process--I'm increasingly convinced that the most common big blocks my game programming students are running into are less in the "how does an 'if' statement work" layer and more in the "how do I come up with a creative idea and then break that down into a series of concrete rules" layer. When they struggle with the second layer, it comes out as them struggling with the first, but I'm more and more convinced that the most painful stumbling block is just answering the question of "how do I visualize what I should be working towards", and if you can answer that it turns lessons on the formal properties of programming concepts from being abstract and academic to being concrete and useful. You can listen to someone describe the shape of a hammer for hours, but if you don't understand why nails are useful none of what you hear is going to mean anything to you.
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Nov 30, 2021 16:07
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Previous discussion in this thread and doing some reading into System Theory for an unrelated project has inspired me to take my own shot at a Theory of RPGs. I figured I'd post it here before I put it on my blog, to see what people think. It's going to be a big old wall of text, and in some ways is going to stay pretty abstract (I'm intentionally taking a maximally-wide non-prescriptive approach), but I hope y'all find it interesting Note: This is also a pretty rough draft, so I haven't given a lot of thought to things like terminology. A fair amount of this will probably evolve in later drafts --- --- --- I’ve been getting more into System Theory lately, and Luhmann’s takes on social systems more specifically, and it’s inspired me to take a shot at systematizing exactly what goes on during a session of a RPG. This is just a first draft, largely so that as I do further reading I have a concrete example to play against and test my understanding of things. This is going to be fairly zoomed out, and probably a lot less immediately applicable or prescriptive than a lot of existing models of RPGs floating around out there. I’ll also note that this definition intentionally casts a wide net--it also encompasses activities like improv comedy and childrens’ make believe. If you want to call this a theory of collaborative storytelling (collaborative imagining?), then that’s okay. I’m going to call it a theory of roleplaying games as a shorthand, though, since that’s going to be my main focus. I’m going to start with a general description of how this theory views RPGs, breaking them into three main parts, going over each of them in brief before going deeper and deeper into the sub-parts that make them up. What Is A RPG? A RPG is a group of Players engaging in the shared creation of a Shared Imaginary Space--a shared image of a fictional world that the Players all hold in their heads and contribute to together. However, because each Player’s mind is a closed system, the only way they can contribute to the SIS is through Artifacts of Play--spoken words/character sheets/etc--which act constantly to synchronize their mental images, maintain the stability of the SIS, and allow for its evolution. Playing a RPG is a process of constant synchronization between Players’ mental images and constant negotiation wherein the group collectively offers contributions to the SIS, which must then be either accepted, rejected, or mutated, generally through a pre-agreed upon system. Let’s take a closer look at each of those three main concepts. The Shared Imaginary Space The Shared Imaginary Space is the central focus of the RPG--a fictional world/narrative/situation that the players collectively imagine and contribute to. The Shared Imaginary Space is inherently a contradiction--in reality each player holds an entirely different mental image of the game’s space, and the SIS exists more as an ideal that must be constantly worked towards than as a reality. That process of constant synchronization generally happens invisibly, but is absolutely vital to the maintenance of a Shared Imaginary Space; the moment that the players can not come to an agreement as to what “really” is happening within the Shared Imaginary Space the RPG has, definitionally, stopped functioning. The Shared Imaginary Space within this model encompasses all of the things about the game and world which are collectively known to the players. This includes the Fiction, the world and events that the players are collectively imagining. I am also placing the game’s System within the SIS--the process by which contributions to the Fiction are presented and contradictions are resolved. The System itself is split into two sub-sections, the distribution of Authority throughout the players and the Rules that the players have collectively agreed to operate under. Ambiguously part of the SIS is the game’s Metacommentary, communally shared thoughts that are about the game but are neither Fiction nor System. The Fiction of a RPG is the story, situation, or space being created through the act of play. This often includes a cast of characters, the passage of time, a story being told, etc, but such features are not definitionally required--The Quiet Year does not feature traditional named characters, for example. What is consistently true about the Fiction of a game, however, is that it is made up of a collection of Facts about the world, each contributed by one or more players. The System of a RPG is the process by which those contributions are either integrated into the Fiction, and to a lesser extent the process by which contradictions that are discovered within the Fiction are resolved. On some level, every RPG uses the same system--one player makes a claim about the Fiction and the group then decides to either fully accept that claim and integrate it into the Fiction as a new Fact, reject it, or mutate it in some way--changing it before accepting it as Fact. In practice, however, most RPG groups find such an ambiguous method lacking in support and structure, and choose to adopt collections of communally agreed upon procedures to assist in this process. Many games distribute Authority, or the ability to control specific parts of the Fiction, unevenly among the players and process--the classic example of this is a game in which all but one players each control the actions of a single character, and the remaining player acts as a Game Master who controls the rest of the world, while a rules document modifies this Authority in specific situations and dice rolls complicate Authority through the introduction of randomness. This distribution of Authority helps facilitate long-term play by making sure that there is always a process for resolving disagreements over whether to accept a player’s contribution or not--it, in theory, gives the final authority on whether to accept a contribution or not to a single player, to avoid stalemates that would threaten to grind the game to a halt. The distribution of Authority acts as a lubricant to help the process of contributing to the Fiction flow more smoothly and with less time spent consensus-building. That said, this Authority is on some level a contrivance--at any time any player retains the ability to object to any contribution they find objectionable enough; imagine a situation in which one player’s character dies in a particularly unsatisfying and unfair manner and the table rises up in objection and demands the event be rejected. Authority is further modified by the adoption of Rules, a list of constraints and procedures the group has collectively chosen to use. These often come in large part from a Rulebook (Dungeon & Dragons 5e, Fiasco, RIFTS, Apocalypse World, etc), but also include any rules agreed upon by the group. These Rules can either be Hard Rules, part of an informationally closed system of mechanical numbers, tags, and operations used to resolve specific situations, or Soft Rules, which are more conventions that the group either explicitly or implicitly sets for itself on matters such as setting, fairness, acceptable content, and tone. Hard Rules are what most people think of as RPG mechanics--they relate to the State of the game, concrete Facts that can be recorded as data and manipulated with logical or mathematical operations. State includes common RPG concepts such as Hit Points, Ability Scores, Skill Ratings, Traits, Movement Speed, position on a grid, Initiative Score, etc, and Hard Rules are the operations that use or modify these Facts such as attack rolls, taking damage, skill checks, taking a turn, expending a resource, etc. These Facts and operations often have a loose connection to the Fiction--they usually (but not always) correspond to elements within the fiction (Hit Points vs how injured a character is), but don’t necessarily exist as a concept within the Fiction itself. Hard Rules exist as in a parallel stream to the Fiction, both affecting each other, and both usually attempting to synchronize, but ultimately separate systems. Generally, an event within the Fiction (a player character attacking a goblin with a sword) will be recognized as having a specific Rule that covers it (an attack roll) and play will dip momentarily out of the Fiction layer and into the Rules layer as the players resolve the operation. Typically the operation both modifies the State (the goblin loses HP) and also contributes to the Fiction (the PC’s sword strikes the goblin and draws blood). The existence of Hard Rules and State are arguably the dividing line between a Role Playing Game and other methods of collaborative storytelling such as Improv Comedy or Cops & Robbers. Soft Rules are agreements constraining the players that lack the hard computational forms of Hard Rules--things like social conventions, common sense, and expectations for setting, tone, content, fairness, etc. Some of these are explicit, either coming from a Rulebook (setting expectations) or from discussion among the players (discussions beforehand about the type of game people want to play), but many are implicit--there are endless norms surrounding play that are unstated but generally understood within a social group (players should do what’s fun and not what’s boring, players should act fairly towards other players, players should not be sexist/racist/etc, and so on). Soft Rules do not typically have procedures tied to them, but they do shape and restrict play in a more organic fashion, by informing and aligning the types of Facts that the players choose to accept into the Fiction. Soft Rules both keep the Fiction more coherent, by establishing beforehand what types of play are expected, and also help to make the process of contribution more structured and less ambiguous for the players--they help to send a message that if your contribution aligns with the rules, it will likely be accepted by the other players without significant need for negotiation. Rules exist to set expectations within a group and to give players more predictability and structure to their play while lessening the amount of time spent consensus building; a set of commonly understood rules allows players to make contributions to the Fiction and know that they are almost assured to be accepted to the group with no pushback, while also allowing them to strategize and engage in conflicts with other players (usually the GM) while assuring that their actions will be meaningful--if they were to fight a goblin, the winner of the fight will generally be determined by the strategies used, dice rolled, and stat sheets of each character rather than by one player simply declaring that they win or by a contextless coinflip. An important quality of both types of rules is that they are collectively known--this is the reason that I place them within the Shared Imaginary Space. The process of adding new rules or editing existing rules is not dissimilar to the process for adding to or editing the Fiction--changes can be made by group consensus both at the start of play when choosing what Rulebooks, norms, and house rules to incorporate, and also in the middle of play, if a situation arises that the current rules are not handling to the group’s satisfaction. A game will inevitably accumulate Metacommentary, collectively shared thoughts that are neither Fiction nor System. This includes table talk and strategizing--Players discussing what they should do next, discussing how they feel about how the game is going so far, etc. Metacommentary is different from the other parts of the SIS in that it does not go through the same process of consensus approval that the rest of the SIS does. It is useful for coordinating play and can have great impact on the way the rest of the SIS is perceived by the Players. The Players The Players are the group of people who are engaging in playing the RPG. Each of them has their own Personal Imaginary Space, the version of the Shared Imaginary Space held within their own mind. Their PIS is made up of Facts already incorporated into the SIS and their own personal Headcanon, a mix of the ideas they use to bridge the gaps in description provided by the SIS and their own not yet stated contributions to the Fiction. The RPG is driven by their Desires, what they hope to accomplish through play. Through play they have an Experience, which may or may not fulfill those or other Desires. Because each Player’s mind is a closed system, the Shared Imaginary Space exists more as a goal to work towards or a dynamic than as an actual existent thing--it exists instead as a series of Personal Imaginary Spaces, each existing in the minds of one of the Players. These Personal Imaginary Spaces are constantly synchronizing through play, and in a functional game are able to stay close enough to each other in shape that a Shared Imaginary Space is able to exist on a practical level. As Players generate Artifacts of play--such as verbal statements or filled out character sheets--the other Players perceive these Artifacts and use the information contained within in order to stay more or less on the same page as the other Players. This process is imperfect, of course--if one Player describes a scene, two other Players are very likely to have two different mental images of the scene described. Is one character’s hair brown or red? How close are they standing to me? What does a space vampire look like? The Players will contribute their own Headcanons, filling in the gaps in description that naturally occur. These Headcanons are generally ever-changing, updated as additional details are described or as clarifying questions are asked, and can easily turn into full-fledged Facts as the Players act off of them in creating their contributions to the Fiction. When two Headcanons are revealed to differ, the group must decide which one to accept as Fact--a process usually handled by Authority, although if there’s a general consensus that one Player’s idea is more compelling than another’s it may be accepted even if contributed by a Player without Authority in that area. It is common for a Player to have ideas of what’s going on within the portion of the Fiction that they have Authority over that they have not yet communicated to the other Players--this is also an element of Headcanon, although it is much less fluid and ever-changing. For a non-GM Player this might include things such as a character’s thoughts, emotional state, or backstory. For a GM this might include the setting prep they did before the session, the truth behind mysteries, and ideas for homebrew rulings. Artifacts that have not been shared with and accepted by the group also have more to do with Headcanons than the Fiction--be it a character’s backstory written on the back of a character sheet that nobody else has read or a keyed map kept secret from the other Players by the GM. Play would not happen if it were not for the Desires of the Players--the productive force that motivates them to join together and decide to hold a RPG session. This force can take countless forms and may be different for different Players. For one Player it may be the desire to be a cool elf with a big sword. For another it might be the desire to engage with and master a ruleset. For another it might be to hang out with friends. For a member of an Actual Play podcast, it may be to create a podcast episode that gets a lot of listens. For a person who doesn’t know anything about RPGs it may be a vague desire for ‘fun’. Importantly, the Desires that motivate a Player to begin a RPG session may or may not line up with what they actually get out of the play--a Player who thinks they enjoy RPGs due to the opportunity to perform system mastery may actually enjoy them because of the excuse to spend time with friends, or a Player who comes to a RPG session with the Desire to learn what RPGs are may quickly replace that Desire with the Desire to see their character’s story play out. Desires are explicitly what motivate a person to play, not the value the Player gets from the game in practice. The Experience of a Player is what they are actually getting out of roleplaying--the pleasure, fun, frustration, boredom, memories, social bonds, etc that they might gain through play. This can be quite varied, depending on the shape and environment of play. If the RPG is to replicate itself--that is, if the Players are going to continue playing--the Experience must maintain or create Desires in the Players. This may be accomplished by fulfilling existing Desires, failing to fulfill existing Desires, creating new Desires, or any other similar process that ends with the Players Desiring to play more sessions. This theory is not especially interested in prescriptive descriptions of RPGs, or of reducing the shapes they might take into completed lists, but I figure I should probably take a moment to address where Fun fits into this theory. It is my strong opinion that fun/pleasure/fulfillment for some subset of Players can be found in just about any moving part of this theory. There is pleasure to be had in the fulfillment of pre-existing Desires, but there is also pleasure to be discovered in exploring the tension between the Fiction and Hard Rules, or in building up Headcanons, or in speaking in a funny voice as you generate Artifacts, or in system mastery, or in watching a story unfold, or in the physical act of rolling dice, or in any of infinite other spaces. This theory is a bit too zoomed out to engage with fun too directly, but it is my hope that in taking such a zoomed out view of RPGs unexplored spaces that fun could be found in might be discovered and worked within. Artifacts of Play If the Personal Imaginary Space of each Players exists only within their own mind, how do the Players communicate their visions and create the consensus needed to support a Shared Imaginary Space? They do so through the creation and use of Artifacts of Play--all of the communicative acts and props used during play. These include Utterances, ephemeral spoken word contributions to the SIS, as well as Records, physical recordings of the game State or Fiction, Rulebooks, documents brought into the group that were created outside of play that the Players collectively agree to adhere to, and Randomizers, processes that exist outside of the Players which can create unexpected results. Also acting upon the process of play is the Environment, everything that is not the RPG. One of the first steps of play is the creation of the game’s System. This process may be small to the point of invisibility, as in the case of a child’s game of Cops & Robbers, but for most RPG groups it begins with the choice of which Rulebooks to use. Rulebook is a blanket term for any Artifact that contains a bundle of Rules and Facts that has been created before play began--its most usual form is a written document. Some examples of Rulebooks might be the D&D Player’s Guide, a Setting Guide, a one page pdf posted on someone’s blog, a list of homerules written by the GM, or a module. The majority of play is made up of a process by which the Players make a series of contributions to the Fiction and State of the game. When those contributions are ephemeral, such as made via spoken word or pantomime, they are Utterances, and when they create lasting documentation, such as a character sheet adjustment or chat log, they are Records. Both behave in fundamentally the same manner--a Player presents the contribution to the group and it is either accepted and added to the Shared Imaginary Space, it is rejected, or it is mutated and changed in some way before being accepted. For example, let’s say that a Player says that their character opens a door. The contribution may be accepted by the group--the door is now open within the Fiction. It may be declared by the GM or the other Players that there is no door and that the character does not try to do this thing--perhaps the Player forgot that the door was kicked off its hinges earlier in the scene and so this would cause a contradiction if accepted. The GM could also modify the action, by saying that the character attempts to open the door but finds it locked instead. They could also invoke or create a Hard Rule operation to modify the action unpredictably by having the player roll a six sided die plus their Door Opening skill rating and have different outcomes based on the result of the roll--on a 4+ they open the door and on a 3- they find it too stuck shut to open. Any such technique that uses inputs from outside of Player intent to modify the process by which the Shared Imaginary Space is added to is a Randomizer. The most common form of this is a die roll, but the process would also include things such as drawing cards, physical challenges (the Player who can grab the token off the table first wins initiative), consulting an AI chatbot, guessing which of two hands holds a token, or any other technique that goes outside of direct Player intent. Randomizers generally plug into the Hard Rules part of the SIS, and can be seen as a sort of semi-Player, offering up contributions that shape the SIS takes every bit as much as the true Players. The Environment is a catch-all term for everything that is not the process of playing the RPG. It includes things such as the room that play is occurring in (if it is happening in person), the non-RPG topics that have been on the minds of Players, the social dynamics between Players, the snacks on the table, the moon, non-RPG table talk, the history of human civilization, and literally everything that is not the game itself. While it does have an impact on the manner that play occurs--a swelteringly hot room may drain the energy from play, personal enmity between players may impact the player Desires and contributions--it is not part of the RPG itself. Unclassified Thoughts Rulebooks, and the fact that they are often not read in full by all (or often, any) of the Players, can create a strange dynamic where there are elements that are both within the Shared Imaginary Space (they are written in the Rulebook, which has been added to the SIS) and simultaneously not within the SIS (nobody knows about them because nobody has read/remembers that part of the Rulebook). A more common relative of this dynamic is the one where some Players have read the Rulebook and others have not. Similarly, a Record that has been written down but not shared with the group is not truly in the SIS yet and can come to contradict the rest of the game (for example, a Player may make a Rules error when creating their character). All situations create contradictions within the Shared Imaginary Space which must be corrected by Player consensus once the contradiction comes up in play. The System by which contributions are accepted or rejected from the SIS defaults to a negotiation--a Player makes a contribution and the group must reach consensus on whether it will be added or not. This consensus can be reached explicitly, through discussion, or implicitly, by lack of objection. In simple children’s games, like Cops & Robbers, this may be the only System that exists (this is probably being unfair to children, actually--even within Cops & Robbers there are all sorts of norms and expectations present and developing through the process). This system has a great drawback, however--it is relatively easy for it to come to an impasse; if a situation arises where consensus can not be reached the game simply tears itself apart and can not progress, and for this reason most RPGs have additional Rules and Authorities to lubricate the process. Some collaborative storytelling playstyles may include only Soft Rules. In improv comedy, there are typically not hard mechanical processes, but there are a series of cultural Soft Rules such as “Say Yes”. Free Kriegspiel has quite a few Soft Rules meant to facilitate play but actively avoids incorporating any Hard Rules. More classical RPGs contain a mix of both Soft and Hard rules, although there are some games not commonly referred to as RPGs that also contain both, such as Matrix Games. The interplay between Hard Rules and the Fiction is one of the great unique features of RPGs. They exist as two parallel streams, both informationally closed, but both constantly affecting and being affected by the other. Typically, an occurrence within the Fiction will be judged by the Players to activate the conditions for a Hard Rule to come into play. Play will then switch to the resolution of the operation associated with the Hard Rule--a process that may involve a simple binary check (once per day you may take X action), incorporate Randomizers (make a die roll), dip back into the Fiction (gains a +2 when used on a friend), or incorporate additional Player contributions (state your desired effect). The process, once resolved, will then have some impact on (usually) the Fiction and (often) the State, and the normal process of play will resume. Contradictions can easily crop up within the Shared Imaginary Space, and once discovered must be resolved in order for play to continue. For example, it might be noticed that two differing contributions stating a character’s hair color might have both been accepted by the group--the group must then come to a conclusion as to what that character’s hair color “truly” is in order for the coherence of the SIS to hold. The process for doing this is not significantly different than ordinary contributions to the SIS--Players will simply contribute resolutions until a consensus is reached. --- --- --- I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this--especially if there are segments that get too abstract to visualize, or areas that could use more examples
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May 17, 2022 16:09
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I really like it. When I read it, I can't help but compare it to things like "the big model" and "clouds and boxes," which have a lot of similarities to what you wrote. What is interesting is the places where they differ. Your calling the randomizer a semi-player is an interesting perspective. Notably, the most argued about element of the big model, the creative agendas, is absent from your discussion. You don't talk about the "why" of it all. Which is fair because I think that maybe sits at a higher level than your model here. You are laying out the pieces in the Lego bin, and a group's shared goals will determine how they assemble those Legos and the hard rules, soft rules, etc that they choose will either help or hinder them (or both) in achieving their shared goals. I guess maybe that's like a necessary next step in how you apply a model like this in analyzing actual games. You can't say why one system works while another doesn't unless you have more detail about what the group wants the system to contribute to the SIS.
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May 17, 2022 18:13
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I think it would benefit from engaging with prior writings in the space, to make it clear what's new, what's different. I can trace most of what you're talking about to the Forge, and before that to RGFA (rec.games.fantasy.advocacy), and before that to, say, Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, which also treads similar ground, even though he collected data in the late 70s.
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May 17, 2022 18:20
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Jimbozig posted:I really like it. When I read it, I can't help but compare it to things like "the big model" and "clouds and boxes," which have a lot of similarities to what you wrote. What is interesting is the places where they differ. It is definitely in large part a response to my dissatisfactions with the Big Model, and I think you're getting at one of the biggest of those dissatisfactions--I'm pretty actively trying to avoid judgement calls and prescription in favor of description. The Creative Agenda (and GNS more generally) is all about telling designers how they *should* make their games, while I'm much more trying to aim for how designers *could* make their games. Desire is my loose analogue to Creative Agenda, but it's explicitly about what motivates play and not what makes play 'good'. What people actually get out of play falls under Experience in my model, and it feels like trying to catalogue all the things people could get out of playing a RPG is inherently kind of silly. Like, all sorts of things, right? There are as many "why"s as there are people playing RPGs Edit: Oh, and I totally forgot about "clouds and boxes" even though I'm realizing now that they're also extremely where a lot of these ideas came from. I definitely need to give that all a reread--Baker is definitely the RPG theorist I was most influenced by early on in my RPG design days, but it's been a long while Jimbozig posted:I guess maybe that's like a necessary next step in how you apply a model like this in analyzing actual games. You can't say why one system works while another doesn't unless you have more detail about what the group wants the system to contribute to the SIS. This might be the answer to the above problem--I want to avoid ever saying "These are the three (3) reasons people play RPGs", but just saying "people play RPGs for lots of reasons" is a definite cop-out. I considered including a section on examples of common forms RPGs take and analysis of actual play at the end of this, but I realized my wall of text was already reaching dangerous levels and wanted to get the theory in front of people to make sure I wasn't being totally incoherent before pushing it further Absurd Alhazred posted:I think it would benefit from engaging with prior writings in the space, to make it clear what's new, what's different. I can trace most of what you're talking about to the Forge, and before that to RGFA (rec.games.fantasy.advocacy), and before that to, say, Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, which also treads similar ground, even though he collected data in the late 70s. Oh wow, how have I never heard of Shared Fantasy before? I'll definitely check that out I was debating how intertextual to get with this, and decided for this fist draft I'd try to keep it fairly self-contained, but I do think you're probably correct. A segment more directly engaging with previous theories and explaining similarities and differences would probably be a good thing, especially where I'm borrowing language--I'm pretty sure that my Shared Imaginary Space is a bit broader than the Forge definition since it includes System, for example. I also was actively holding myself back from using jargon from Deleuze or Luhmann in this draft, but I may do a bit more explicit reference to philosophy and system theory in future versions OtspIII fucked around with this message at 19:21 on May 17, 2022 |
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May 17, 2022 19:16
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I don't think we need to go over the well-trod ground of classifying the different types of shared goals a group might have, and how a mismatch between players in how they understand those goals can lead to conflict. I do wonder if you think that those goals or agendas are part of the SIS, since your definition of SIS is more expansive than some others I've seen. You have the rules and system in the SIS. They are certainly subject to the same problems you identify where one member's idea of the goal might differ from another's, just like one member's imagined cave might have a taller ceiling than another. So it might belong in the SIS... But on the other hand, when made explicit, the other mismatches get definitely resolved. "No, let's agree the cave ceiling is only 9 feet up." I've never seen a game where you say "ok, the ceiling is 20 ft for you, and 4 ft for me." But mismatches in goals don't always get unified even when made explicit. A: I am here to maximize my character's success, advocate for my character, and make interesting tactical and strategic trade-offs to achieve that. B: I am here to get my character into trouble, cause playful chaos, and see how everyone responds and adapts and how our weird fun story evolves. This mismatch might be explicit without necessarily being a problem for anyone, as long as the system supports both of them and does not force them into conflict. But many systems would force them into conflict and would require that they be synthesized or compromised in order to avoid issues. Does that become part of the metacommentary in your model?
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May 17, 2022 19:31
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Jimbozig posted:I do wonder if you think that those goals or agendas are part of the SIS, since your definition of SIS is more expansive than some others I've seen. You have the rules and system in the SIS. I see those goals as being partially in the Soft Rules and partially in the Desires (and if people talk about their Desires, also in the Metacommentary). I see your A and B positions as being pretty firmly Desires--they are the things the player are showing up to do. These can very much differ from Player to Player (and will probably be ever-changing even within a Player over time). In contrast, if the group decides together that this is going to be a more serious tactical game vs a comedy of errors then those would be Soft Rules. This might be accomplished by the GM laying out tone expectations formally at the start of the campaign, or it might be accomplished through subtle social cues, but if it's a matter affecting how everyone is expected to act it would be a Soft Rule. Like, you can imagine a situation where you're playing a charops-driven tactical combat game, somebody declares that they're doing something suboptimal for roleplaying reasons, and the group basically goes "come on, don't do that, take this seriously"--rejecting the contribution. If one player is expecting a game with a certain tone that the rest of the group hasn't picked up on yet, that would be a case of a Headcanon borne out of a communications failure. Once it comes up the group will either accept the contribution of "hey, this game should have this tone", reject it, reach some sort of compromise, or maybe the player will simply revise their expectations without ever bringing it up. All of this can easily happen purely with subtext, potentially to the point that people aren't even consciously realizing it's happening I think it is an interesting point that it's pretty easy to imagine situations where Soft Rules reach states of Contradiction. Most groups adopt the implicit Soft Rules of "Keep things interesting" and "Players get to choose what their own characters do". If a player is just consistently being really boring, those two Rules create a contradiction and the group has to decide how to resolve it--do you let stuff stay boring or do you go "come on, don't do that--do something interesting instead"? This isn't unique to Soft Rules vs Soft Rules contradictions, though. If an already-decided fight goes on too long the Hard Rules of the combat system can contradict the "keep things interesting" Soft Rule, and it's entirely reasonable that the group may choose to end the fight faster through dropping the enemy's max hp. If one player has a cool idea for a hook relating to their father being a pirate king or something, but then they realized that they mentioned offhandedly that their father was a farmer ten sessions ago, it's fair that the Fiction could get into a fight with "keep things interesting" and the group might just choose to retcon the Fact of the farmer dad. Nothing is immutable within the SIS, as long as the group can reach consensus about changing it
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May 17, 2022 20:20
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Right, cool. That helps clarify, and I feel like maybe you have grouped together under Desires things that I would put in two separate groups. There are the things that I put in my example, which are desires but also statements of intent representing a distinct mode of play. And then there are things like "hang out with friends" and "tell jokes" and "make an entertaining podcast" which I don't really see the same way. Obviously there are some overlaps and I couldn't necessarily draw a bright line dividing one from the other, but the one type seems much more soft rulesy/systemy than the other. I think my commentary here is ultimately getting at what I would want to use a model like this for. I would want to answer questions like: Why do groups pick the systems they do? Why does a system work for one group and not another? How can we tell if there are a set of required soft rules that should really be hard rules for any given game? More broadly, how do you use this model to design a game or to analyze a game critically?
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May 17, 2022 20:48
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Jimbozig posted:Right, cool. That helps clarify, and I feel like maybe you have grouped together under Desires things that I would put in two separate groups. How would you feel about a distinction between Desire and. . .Strategy? Strategy in this case being the player's thoughts and plans about the game--including both "next turn I'll charge the archer and spend an action point to attack them twice" and "if I reveal my Dark Secret now it'll be a really cool and memorable moment". Sort of an internal metacommentary, sharing some borders and/or overlap with Desire. Jimbozig posted:I think my commentary here is ultimately getting at what I would want to use a model like this for. I would want to answer questions like: On some level I think the model is less morals and more metaphysics, but that's all fair. I think the main value is just in trying to let people see things from more flexible perspectives. There's fun to be had in playing with every part of the machine--if you can see more of the machine, maybe you can see new types of fun to chase. The closest thing to something "bad" or "undesirable" in the model is the Contradiction, but even that could potentially have fun built around it. Exquisite Corpse is all about the joy of watching contradictions pile up. Telephone is a game all about communication errors. There's a lot of unexplored ground still out there That said, if I expand on this it would probably be in a direction to try to answer those questions. I think it'll always be from more of a "new perspectives naturally give new ideas and shine light on some hard to see problems" place than a "if you're a gamist, pick a gamist system" one, but there are probably some fun ways I could take this. Maybe the concept of time and attention share? Any system is naturally going to focus more or less time and mental energy on certain moments of play (negotiation of contributions, strategizing about optimal Hard Rule system mastery, colorful characterization within submissions to the Fiction)--diving deep into and spending time on any given one of those can be fun, but they will always to some extent come at the expense of all those other possible moments? IE-Exquisite Corpse style contradiction mechanics can be cool, but have a heavy gravity well, and probably don't play nice too intertwined in the middle of a complex tactical combat ruleset (which has its own deep gravity well)
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May 17, 2022 22:05
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OtspIII posted:How would you feel about a distinction between Desire and. . .Strategy? Strategy in this case being the player's thoughts and plans about the game--including both "next turn I'll charge the archer and spend an action point to attack them twice" and "if I reveal my Dark Secret now it'll be a really cool and memorable moment". Sort of an internal metacommentary, sharing some borders and/or overlap with Desire. D&D 3E's customer surveys broke down the way people approached the game along two axes: the rules <-> the story and long term <-> short term Strategy (long rules), tactics (short rules), scenes (short story), arcs (long story). It's something different to reveal a dark secret when you want to spice up a scene vs. when you want to conclude an arc, for instance.
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May 18, 2022 22:33
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