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homullus posted:For me the difference is pretty plain: is there rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule? Then we are talking about RAW. It's RAW even if readers will interpret it in more than one way (because they will). If there is no rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule, but I can infer what the rule might be from the text either on the subject or from analogous rules, then it's RAI. The need for RAI is a failure of the game. A game rule that says "if you have a situation that needs resolution and it's not otherwise covered, do [resolution mechanism]" is RAW, as would the hypothetical game with a rule "characters can only do the actions written on their character sheet." A game without such text would worse, and require RAI. Leperflesh posted:That is a split for RAW/RAI that I have not come across before, and may be a source of the confusion about the terms? If a game doesn't cover a situation at all, how can there be an "intended" rule? It sounds like a clear oversight. We wrote rules for combat, and our game setting is one in which flight would seem to fit (say, "modern earth"), but we didn't write rules for aerial combat: so, there are no rules for aerial combat, intended or written. You're on your own there! I think what homullus was trying to get at isn't quite that broad in scope, for example: Where the game includes unarmed combat, and There is a rule about punching people, headbutting people, elbowing people, and kneeing people, but there is not a rule about kicking people, then We can infer (or interpret if you prefer) that kicking people is something that should be included in RAW but wasn't, and also that we have enough contextual clues ("kicking" should be to "kneeing" what "punching" is to "elbowing") to come up with RAI to fill the gap in RAW. And also that this could only possibly count as a flaw in the game - that is, that it'd be disingenuous to say "this is not a game about kicking". The IRL example that springs to mind is TMNT And Other Strangeness, where the combat rules were lifted from other palladium games but didn't include all the rules they referenced, so you'd run up against actual gaps where after some thought and comparison with other rules, you could figure out what should be there, sort of. And I get that that's not the usual meaning of RAI, but it's so close to "it's obvious that they didn't mean that a spear has no reach" that I don't know how else you'd describe it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 04:59
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? As in, "the ambiguity of a subset of the rules is a core gameplay function"? I love the idea, I don't see how you'd execute it, but if you can do it you will be taking my money. As in "Uh, it's like that on purpose, Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 08:21
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Leperflesh posted:There is another aspect you might mean? It may be an intentional aspect of a game, that players are supposed to be somewhat confused by a game, flailing around a bit, unsure of how things work? If you made a game with a theme of "people feeling disoriented and unsure," using the disorienting, confusing experience of not really knowing how the rules work or what they are, could I guess help to convey that feeling. But I'm pretty skeptical that this is sustainable. I'd love to see an example of this, too. Paranoia sounds like an example of this. Perhaps it's not well enough executed to be obviously intentional, but the impression I got from the versions I read was that players are specifically not supposed to know the rules (either of the game, or of the setting) until told by the GM / Computer, and are to be penalised for questioning the rules in or out of character.
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Mar 27, 2021 08:30
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I think it's deeper than just "asymmetry" with Paranoia, but I'm only really familiar with XP, I don't know if it's different in other editions. The central conceit is not "haha, the players are punished for demonstrating that they know the rules", it's that the players actually can't know whether the rules are currently in play or not, because the very first GM rule is "the rules are only for when you don't already know what you want to happen", which is what drives most of the confused uneasiness of the game. "They're punished for asking or even visibly wondering about the rules" supplements that, but they're separate things. I can't think of a term for that. It's definitely not rules ambiguity as you've described it, but it's different from asymmetry in that it's neither about players not knowing what the rules are, nor about players and GM following different rules. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 09:18
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Glazius posted:<D&D spells> My favorite framework for approaching D&D spells, in particular is that spells are intended to be self-contained single-use exceptions to the general rules. Thus, they do only what they say they do, and unless otherwise indicated do not interact with other rules. That is, three different spells with the effects 1) "A target you can see within 30' of you takes 2d6 damage, and may make a dex save taking half damage on a successful save" 2) "Make a spell attack on a target within 30' of you, on a hit deal 2d6 damage" 3) "A creature of your choice within 30' of you takes 2d6 damage" are three completely different things that don't interact with each other, and you shouldn't try to figure out if the "intent" was that that last one must mean a target you can see (as the text from 1, and as "spell attack" in 2), or to make an attack roll (2), or that the target gets a save (1), or that you must have line of effect to the target ("target" from 1, "spell attack" from 2), or. whatever other thing. I think this fits in thematically with D&D spells being little rote-learned routines that produce their effect when you perform them. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Mar 29, 2021 |
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Mar 29, 2021 09:09
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Leperflesh posted:We've still got two threads we're intertwining here: "how best do we talk about games, what are the tools for doing that" vs. "how best do we talk about specific mechanics problems people want to raise and analyze within specific games." Sure, but specific mechanics problems are sometimes such an inherent* part of a game that it'd be impossible to discuss them without critiquing if not the entire game then large swathes of it. For example, the current discussion about the wording of certain spells in D&D almost necessitates a broader discussion about what's supposed to be going on with spells in D&D - because trying to figure out if this one spell where the text clearly says "someone else" was really intended to also mean "or yourself" seems completely pointless without some consistent framework in which to talk about how we're intended to understand spells (ie, are they self contained rules that interact only when they say so, or are they supposed to have an overarching consistent logic to them? Or something else?) Because if it's the former, then trying to infer the intent of one spell from another spell (or non-spell rule) is pointless, while if it's the latter you should almost always be able to do so. *I think this is the wrong word but I can't figure out the right one - sometimes the cause of a mechanics problem is an intentional design decision broadly regarded to be either or both of "cool/good/fun" and "what sets this game apart from other games". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 11:34
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Leperflesh posted:Still: I'd say that a poster asking about a "leaf" type rules question isn't necessarily assisted by a series of posts assaulting the trunk... OK, maybe some users need to hear "this game has a severe flaw further up that you should consider house-ruling" but some posters really just would like to know when they should apply a penalty, either by hearing other people's interpretations of the rules as they're written, or finding out that there's some evidence of what was actually intended, perhaps elsewhere in the rules ("the acrobatics skill section applies x penalty under y conditions, that's perhaps what was intended for athletics as well"). I think "assaulting" isn't what I'm trying to talk about here, because I agree with you that "game bad, play something else" is a useless thing to say. But it is useful to point out when there are things elemental to the forest that make someone's leaf question unanswerable from within the forest, because then the discussion can focus on something other than trying to find an answer that doesn't exist in the text. Eg, (in my opinion), it's impossible to get a satisfying answer on the leaf issue "what was the wording of this particular D&D spell intended to mean", because there's a tree-level issue of "D&D contains hundreds of differently-worded spells which do not follow a consistent framework even when they have similar effects to other spells or non-spell rules", and a forest-level cause of "it was done that way on purpose because when the game deviated from that format, an apparently large number of players complained that the game was no longer "really" D&D". In other words, it can be impossible to get a meaningful RAI from the text itself on a particular issue because of an issue further up the tree. When that happens, the discussion must therefore center around different ways people personally approached that issue rather than on attempting to discover some "real interpretation". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 01:35
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KingKalamari posted:Again, I feel like I have a point somewhere in here that I'm struggling to communicate properly (Or at all). It sounds like what you're trying to say is that the way most d20 systems adjust both the die roll and the target number intentionally obfuscates the probability of success, that you think that this is bad design, and that a much clearer way to do it would be to adjust only the target number? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 04:57
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Leperflesh posted:This speaks to Nerdlingen's point maybe; you can notice how the binary D20 pass/fail skill roll mechanism works (a tree) but peel back to the forest-level and you see another aspect of this mechanic: systems where you gain levels, a forest-level foundational decision that affects most everything else about the game. I think it does, and it's probably a better example than the one I was trying to use. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 05:37
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, to use an anecdote I quite literally fell asleep in my pathfinder game recently as I am playing the fighter, and just had a session where I rolled every save possible horribly, so effectively did not exist for a 2 hour combat while the casters in the party worked out how to handle the opponent. Similarly, I was involved in a D&D game where I spent the climactic battle failing saving throws. Literally just failing saving throws. I did not get to take a turn beyond saying "I failed my saving throw". And the response I got afterwards was "that happens sometimes, it's just bad luck" and a refusal to entertain the idea that I didn't get to play D&D that night because I "got to roll dice".
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Apr 1, 2021 02:15
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Leperflesh posted:How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? The best design space for that is probably the "party sheet" or "crew sheet" which has been popping up in more and more games in the past little while. Fitd games use it to track the group's relationships with other factions, upgrades to their hideout or spaceship or whatever, and so on, but there's no reason it couldn't track things like interpersonal drama and incluide mechanics for it - like you can Push an ally without spending stress if you check "I am frustrated that they couldn't pull their poo poo together" on the crew sheet, which could then be used as an xp trigger (like trauma), or do something special when it got resolved during a scene, or whatever else. If you wanted to direct the fiction via mechanics, you could have different types of crew have different kinds of interpersonal drama reasons, triggers, and resolutions. Eg, smugglers aren't going to have all the same kinds of tension that revolutionaries would have.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:00
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hyphz posted:"Trickier" in the sense that if Indy encounters an armed enemy who's out of whip range, he now has to flee, surrender or die. And the only way he can guarantee that won't happen is to flee right now. All of those are much more dramatic risks than failing one particular approach to the area. Why would he, without his gun, encounter an armed enemy who's out of whip range? You have made up a scenario that would suck, yes. Don't do that.
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Apr 4, 2021 22:16
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hyphz posted:That's not really the question. The question is: does the player know that there is no chance of that encounter? The trick is understanding that the player also knows how fail-forward works and understands that whatever just happened is neither a brief stay of summary execution nor a complete lack of consequences.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:36
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hyphz posted:I think that to work this requires something that's frequently missing, which is an understanding - either conveyed through the sense of the plot or explicitly - as to what the ultimate cost is. "The game consists of pre-written scenes that will happen in order no matter what. There are two possible pre-written results for each scene which effect the difficulty of the next scene, but no way to effect the plot or even fail until the climax" is just a railroad though. It has nothing to do with the concept of fail-forward as it's being discussed.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:11
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Double post, butaldantefax posted:2. Players need to be able to communicate to the GM when they are interested in something. I'm not sure I agree that this should be part of a structured reward system. I think players and GM should be encouraged by the game text to be open and honest about what they're interested in, what they want more of, what they want less of, and so on, but I don't think that mechanics are the way to approach that though! It's just a conversation to be had every so often, and if it absolutely must be formalised, I'd much rather it was formalised as a conversation rather than as some kind of rewards structure. But if it were going to be part of the reward structure, I think it'd fit in well as part of the post game wrap-up where games like Blades in the Dark have their xp distributed, so maybe you're onto something. What I mean is, it seems to be something that would be a natural part of a conversation that started with "At the end of the session, mark xp if you 1) Addressed a tough challenge with <playbook specific words> 2) Expressed beliefs, drives, heritage, or background 3) Struggled with issues from your vice or trauma" My group already uses that to express what they found engaging - "1 - Yeah, when I picked up the chair and started fighting those 4 tough guys at once, I <addressed a tough challenge with force or threats>, so I'll mark XP for that. That was an awesome scene, I was on the edge of my seat wondering when they'd kick off. I hope they come back later on and cause more problems and get their asses kicked again, and I should probably apologise to the publican..." with other players getting to say stuff like "I loved that too, but I enjoyed the chase scene afterwards more" or "I felt kinda sidelined for that part". So adding it as a formalised end-of-session step seems like a really good idea and I wonder why more games don't do it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 11:24
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nelson posted:I feel like playing a mini-campaign that really leans into the later (D&D naturally)... one where you absolutely can fall to your death by missing an athletics check. The following basic format is a lot of fun for this: Get Basic D&D (Mentzer version, red box with Elmore art, level 1-3). Make a dungeon with traps and pits and monsters and stuff. Use the pre-written one in the book for inspiration. It needs to be "fair" as in "there's nothing they can't win at-level". That is, if they're on level 1, there mustn't be a section that level 1 characters can't overcome. Whether they will is irrelevant, but this is a classic dungeon with levels signposted with stairs down (or whatever other obvious thing). No single encounter is unfair. The dungeon as a whole is very nfair indeed. The dungeon has a mystic barrier on the entrance that allows (n players) characters inside at a time, crippling nausea strikes the (nth + 1) character who tries to enter a short while after they enter. The portal glows blue when the dungeon isn't full, red when it's full, and purple when someone's in mortal danger. You have a great big pile of pregens that sits face down. The only blank space on them is the name field. If this seems onerous, there are many many different apps available to generate Basic characters available on everything from an iphone to a commodore 64. Time, light sources, etc are tracked. When a character dies, the next character from the pile shows up in however many turns it takes for them to get to the party by the most direct safe route*. They have been following the trail of destruction. (Optionally, the player taking the new pregen must finish their drink). XP is tracked as it is gained, leveling up happens immediately. Expect to go through two pregens per player per session in total (someone will still be on their original guy, though). It's a ton of fun but will get old pretty quickly, so plan it as a 1-2 session thing and don't expect it to produce a long-term game. *Alternative rule: The player who's just lost their character must roll up a new character, and the new character arrives when it is completed. In Basic, this will take all of 5 minutes if someone's going slow. Play mustn't cease while this happens, so encourage the others to continue by threatening a random monster check.
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Apr 8, 2021 23:03
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It's Basic levels 1-3, there's almost nothing a starting character has that's worth looting, and the group should broadly get to keep anything they find in the dungeon unless it gets used up or wrecked. The "worst" thing that could probably happen is a level 1 fighter gets plate somehow, and that's what rust monsters, really deep pits, underground streams, and thieving goblins are for. And if someone wants to use the silliest D&D as a vehicle for telling the story of Jimmy Twelve Shields who went into the dungeon with no shields and came out with twelve shields... ok?
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Apr 9, 2021 01:11
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hyphz posted:Regarding "story games", I always thought the standard definition revolved around the mindset of the player, and whether they are trying to act as their character would if the situation was real, as opposed to act as their character would in a story. What does "acting like their character would if the situation was real" even mean? I mean, I wouldn't lanesplit a cargo spaceship through the stargate traffic close enough to rip off antennas and fins in order to avoid the imperial interceptors, knowing that the slightest fuckup would kill me. But that's very definitely something that a particular character I play would do, because a) he's a very good pilot and b) he stopped caring all that much about his own life about 12 sessions ago. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 01:36
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I still don't understand the distinction between "as if the situation was real" and "as if they were in a story" in terms of character actions. When a player acts "in character", does that not necessitate taking into account the conceits of the fiction in which that character exists (ie, "the story")? When a player constructs part of the story with the GM, they're not acting in character. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 04:55
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That's not how Masks works though. You don't get to pull the bullshit of writing a flaw that says "20' explosion" and then always carefully saying "I'm 21' feet away from everyone" whenever you do anything. You're playing the Nova, where a quarter of the character description says "it's wonderful... and terrifying. Lose control for even a second, and other people get hurt", not "you're a boring safety dad who always carries a tape measure so they can lawyer their way out of consequences"
Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 05:29
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But we don't generally tell stories about "real" people (in that sense) in ttrpgs, right? The protagonists are inherently larger than life characters. Even in the old "you are a dirt farmer" D&Ds, you're still playing the dirt farmers who decided to go treasure hunting in monster-infested caves, not the dirt farmers who farmed the dirt.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:24
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LatwPIAT posted:Some people do. It's perfectly valid and sometimes even desirable to roleplay mundane other people, if only because you're a huge nerd super into the details of crop rotation. Fair enough, I can see how that applies in a particular subgenre (and I'd genuinely love to hear how that works out as a game too). But I don't think it relates to differentiation between like characters in a story and like real people, when the games under discussion involved things like "turning into a werewolf" and "hurting people with my superpowers". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 07:08
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hyphz posted:I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: What about your "non-story" scenario means that the player doesn't want to engage with the fallout when they decide to use their Captain Collateral power? What about your "story" scenario precludes the player (and character) from carefully considering if the tradeoff is worth it before using their Captain Collateral power rather than just doing it because the player wants to explore the fallout? E: and the biggest question, why is a player, especially a "non-story" player, choosing Captain Collateral out of a list of possible character types if they don't want collateral damage to come up? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Apr 18, 2021 |
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Apr 18, 2021 03:14
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hyphz posted:But in an RPG, you have a force acting on the player much harder than the story acts on the reader - the rules. If the players know that there is nothing Explosion-Man can do to prevent that explosion occurring 1/6 of the time, because it says that in the rulebook, then it's going to be much harder to produce a sequence of events in the game to overcome that knowledge such that Explosion-Man doesn't come across as a recklass rear end in a top hat to the players, and especially not so that Explosion-Man's player doesn't feel like he/she is playing the character as a reckless rear end in a top hat. But Hyphz, it doesn't say that in the rulebook. It specifically says that the Nova can spend extra burn to avoid the collateral damage. It says that because the ficitonal character "The Nova" exists in a story, or a if you prefer a series of fictional events, within a genre which is generally well-understood (and further defined in the rulebook), and in that genre, the Nova archetype isn't a reckless rear end in a top hat with a power that has a random chance to cause massive damage which they use all the time for shits and giggles. Neither is the Nova some random kid who tries to stop a mugging and accidentally levels a building and kills a thousand people because they lose control of their powers 1/6 of the time no saving throw but chose to do it anyway. The Nova is a kid who knows they can lose control, knows what the consequences of that will be that people they care about get hurt, has tools to prevent that from happening, and will nevertheless find themselves in a situation where they are going face a choice between risking doing that and something worse happening and that causes them deep anxiety. This is not only a genre trope, it's also explicitly laid out in the rulebook, which you really should think about reading. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 18, 2021 |
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Apr 18, 2021 23:45
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If that's Hyphz's point, then perhaps he could be asked to engage with the people trying to engage with that point, rather than conjuring tortured examples from games he hasn't read and then but-what-if-it-was-ing when people tell him that that's not how those games work? To reiterate my position on that point: There's no distinction between a character "acting as if it were real" and "acting as if it were a story", because the character is necessarily a character in a story in every way that matters - they are a fictional person embroiled in a series of fictional events. The story ("the fiction", the "verisimilitudinous mileau", whatever, it all means the same thing) is defined partly by the rules of the game, partly by genre conventions, and partly by player consensus. This never changes, although the proportions of those things might. The character never knows they're in a story (outside of a very specific fourth wall breaking sort of game about characters-vs-the-author or similar, but if you're playing that then you've already resolved this discussion to your own satisfaction). The player always knows that the character is in a story, no matter how many levels of separation they try to insert between the person rolling the dice and the fictional person in the story. This is true even if the player has decided to pretend that the story is to be treated as "real" and that the character will "behave as though it were real" - that's just another way to look at that separation, not a whole distinct approach. In the specific example of the Nova in Masks, we must assume that the player is engaging in good faith with the game - that is, they have read and understood the rules, they have a handle on the genre conventions, and they have formed a consensus with the other players about the tone and scope of the fiction. Given that, it's difficult to see where the distinction could lie - the character is a character in a piece of genre fiction, the powers operate as the rules say they do, and the players (including GM) will behave as such. If they don't, they're not engaging in good faith with Masks. So the character doesn't accidentally/randomly blow things up causing an emergent story that was out of the player's control. The player or character may choose to blow up more than they wanted blow up to in order to blow up the thing they were trying to blow up way harder than they could otherwise blow it up. The player might coldly calculate the cost/benefit in this particular instance, or might do it because it sounds cooler than not doing it, or because it fits in with the genre, or because it seems particularly cinematic, or it portrays the character as they have been perceiving it, or because it's an important character development moment. None of that means that the character is any more or less a fictional character embroiled in a series of fictional events - that is, a story. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 19, 2021 |
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Apr 19, 2021 01:19
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Glazius posted:So, take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure your goal of scalability is a good goal to have. Actually having a game world where dozens of people could be expected to coordinate with each other might not actually be as good for developing cohesion as running a bunch of smaller teams that shuffle membership on a regular basis. This was my initial thought too. A tiered action/resolution structure might be better. Eg, squads of ~5 who resolve their individual actions internally and the report through a squad leader (think "caller" from ad&d, maybe combined with "referee"?) "What Red Team did this month". Maybe you could have the referee for that level be someone from a different squad/region, offloading some of those GM duties.
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Apr 19, 2021 07:19
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Tangent here, but repeatedly reading "asynchronous" has caused my brain to think about how almost all ttrpgs are asymmetric in play - that is, the traditional RPG model is that all players except one control a single detailed character, and the remaining player both plays as the opposition characters/creatures while also doing most of the fiction-building and adjudicating and rewriting the rules. This is in stark contrast to most multiplayer computer games which in nearly every instance I can think of are not asymmetric - that is, while individual players abilities or units might differ, all players are generally playing much the same game in much the same way. Also, while the traditional model of "The GM is the builder and arbiter of the fiction" is being challenged by newer games, the "player characters vs the world-as-played-by-the-GM" model generally has not. Several questions arise from this! 1) What would a symmetric ttrpg look like? What would have to change from the traditional model to support a game where all players are playing a similar way - that is one where no player is singled out to control "the opposition" or "everyone who is not a player-character"? Could you have, for want of a better description, a fully PvE ttrpg? 2) What other forms of asymmetry might a ttrpg take that aren't the traditional model? Eg, could the idea of a group of players each controlling a character versus a single player controlling their opposition still function without that solo player also being the referee, scenario designer, and world-builder?
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Apr 20, 2021 05:45
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aldantefax posted:Since a tabletop RPG as qualified earlier needs to be a game (collaborative or adversarial) with open ended conflict resolution I think I get what you mean by this, but can you elaborate? I searched the thread for that phrase and related keywords that I could think of and came up with nothing. Are oracles and random tables close enough to "open-ended" to count?
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Apr 20, 2021 06:48
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I'm also wondering about that definition. For example, in my heart I know that Scum & Villainy is an RPG, but it has a specific trigger for Endgame (you reach however many rep with a particular faction), and Endgame is a defined sequence (briefly, you do three more jobs, the setting is altered in a major way, the game ends). I guess you could faff around to the extent that you never reached that state, but that feels like both players and GM would have to be engaging in bad faith - that is, you're supposed to try to succeed at jobs, and jobs are supposed to effect faction rep, so inevitably you'll end up at Endgame unless you all die before that.
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Apr 20, 2021 23:35
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Leperflesh posted:You've hit on why I've always disliked that model: each of the axes imply exclusivity or opposition. I don't accept that personal and campaign goals are opposed, nor that "simulation" is in opposition to fantasy or roleplaying. This. Simulation and roleplay are absolutely not opposed, and most of the apparent conflict between them is that the game being discussed is either simulating the wrong things for the roleplay that people want to do (or that the game says it's supposed to support), or often that it's just bad simulation that gives silly results. Personal vs campaign goals sounds like it might have some merit in context - the chart implies that what's really meant by personal goals is "powergaming" ("playing to win at the game mechanics", I think?) and what's meant by campaign goals is "storytelling", and those might tend to diverge a fair bit in AD&D as it was played at the time. But one of my criteria for a good RPG is that winning at the mechanics will also produce a good story (and obviously from that: that an RPG where winning at the mechanics tends to produce a bad story is a bad RPG).
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Apr 21, 2021 23:39
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Leperflesh posted:For example, Mysterium requires one player to say nothing out loud, but attempt to communicate clues to the players by choosing a subset of cards, all of which have only artwork and no words on them. Players try to discern patterns out of what the silent player is giving them, she listens to their deliberations and may alter her choices based on what they're saying, and importantly, there are no rules about how cards should be interpreted. Players collaboratively invent "rules" - conventions, ideas, approaches - for interpreting the cards shown to try to match them to suspects, murder weapons, etc. I have played a little bit of Mysterium and I never managed to think of it that way, but you're right about players inventing rules. I have played a lot of Dixit and there's a similar emergent framework for interpreting cards that happens after a group plays together for a while, and it can get so strong that the game becomes almost incomprehensible to an outsider. I think this is related to how many TTRPG groups end up with a set of what to any outsider would be "house rules", but to the group is just how the game is played - they haven't necessarily thought about "making house rules", often haven't discussed them, and they rarely write them down. Then a new player will join and go "huh?" or they'll post about a rule on the internet using their group's interpretation (or fabrication) and get in an argument. Is there an existing word for these emergent rules/frameworks?
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Apr 22, 2021 08:02
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Leperflesh posted:I'm talking about ad-hoc "rules" that evolve at the table. For example, "Hmm, this card has a lot of yellow... maybe she means, the weapon with the yellow background" vs. "Hmm, look, there's light sources. Maybe she means the candlestick?" As two very obvious criteria, the designers may have anticipated those two factors when choosing artwork for cards. But the interpretations definitely extend beyond factors the game designer could have anticipated. When my wife is the silent player, I might choose a card she offered and make an association based on something I know about her, which the designers couldn't possibly have known. And tell the other players. And now this is a "rule" or maybe a better word is "rubric" we're using in the game. I think it does. "This ghost communicates like this" (eg, uses color-matching, or numbers-matching) emerging during a game surely qualifies as plot > prop even if it's not intentional on the part of the players or designer. e: On the "deciding that games exist on exactly two axes, and then categorising games based on that" discussion, I have little to contribute other than it's such an extremely D&D thing to do that I can't help but wonder if some of the categories have been made up just to fill in the grid, as it were. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Apr 23, 2021 |
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Apr 23, 2021 06:28
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Yep. Mechanics for "you're scared, so you have to run away" are probably the most common oldschool example.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:58
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hyphz posted:Cool. And what's going to happen? Either she's going to oppose the PCs doing something in the future, or she's going to be doing something herself that someone else is opposing and the PCs end up helping her... no matter what you do, Drosselmeyer gets you. You can't not have a story without not having a game. Yes. Things will happen. We don't know what's going to happen because we didn't plan it, but something's definitely going to happen and we will find out what that is as we play this game that has a story in it. Glad you finally understand.
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Jul 3, 2021 04:09
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hyphz posted:Except you do know what's going to happen. A story is going to happen. And sadly, there aren't that many viable stories. I mean, you can't go down the road to get the milk without learning that all the milk has been brought up to fuel the evil ritual of bovinity that the secret cult in the town has set up, oh look, it's another mystery to combat structure. And I'm pretty sure that structure, at least, was prepared - maybe years ago. What?
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Jul 3, 2021 04:54
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Siivola posted:I can’t remember if it was Vincent Baker or Luke Crane who was speaking at a local convention years ago, but one of them mentioned that the story isn't present at the game table, it's in the memories we construct of that game. Yes. The gameplay creates the story. Even in a pre-written, railroaded, D&D module. The story the group ends up with isn't contained in the written material, it's produced when that material is used to play a game.
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Jul 3, 2021 09:36
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Has "games have a structure, which is provided by both rules and players" been under debate?
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Jul 4, 2021 02:09
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hyphz posted:Well, I think the relation is that you can't "not prepare a story" because you have to at least predetermine that you will provide that structure, or work out how that you fit whatever events happen into that structure. Likewise, you can't "just play the fronts" because providing that structure would not be achieved by doing that. Those aren't the same thing. The last time I ran WWWRPG, this is the total prep I did: 1) The player characters are wrestlers in a pro wrestling league in Melbourne, Australia, circa 1985. 2) The owner of the league is Sir Sydney Hobart (real name: Bruce Smith) who directs the company from his luxury yacht, the Straia III. 3) Chet or Brett or Chad or Brad or whoever is the soulless and interchangeable representative of a soulless interchangeable american TV company. 4) The main announcer is former heavyweight title holder "Big" Bill Blundstone. 5) The next scheduled show, and opening scene of the game, will be THE SUNDAY SUPER SLAM THIS SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAAAAAAAAAAY That's it, that's all, no story prepared, just that outline sketch of the fiction as it stands when we first view it. The structure came from the game's rules and from the player's own additions to the fiction (in the beginning, their characters, alliances, and rivalries as produced during the first session). The story happened as we played and found out what would happen next. Nobody had any idea what that would be.
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Jul 4, 2021 03:12
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hyphz posted:And: What is the narrative structure of pro wrestling, and how does knowing it equate to pre-writing a story?
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Jul 4, 2021 04:38
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Do you genuinely believe that making a statement "we are going to play a game about X" is the same as pre-writing a story about X?
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Jul 4, 2021 05:50
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