What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

It absolute is the case that they are getting you to make up stuff. They are just getting you to make up stuff related to their goal. You're still making up stuff.

I'm not sure how else to put this. If the check succeeds, the players goal for his/her PC is realised. If the aura-reading succeeds, the feather has a trait that is suitable for dealing with a balrog (from memory, I think the PC was looking for Resistant to Fire). If the scavenging check in the tower succeeds, the PC finds the mace he is searching for. If the Circles check succeeds, the PC meets up with a NPC of the nature s/he was looking for.

The difference from asking the GM "Do I have any friends/contacts? Who are they?" or "What's around the corner?" or "Are there any interesting trinkets for sale?" is obvious.

 

[happyhermit]

Can you give me an example of a GM-worldbuilding game that uses "kickers" to start the action? I've never come across one.

Strange question, didn't you say you used them in D&D, a game that assumes GM-worldbuilding to some degree? I have seen them used in many games, mostly D&D, though obviously not by name. If you mean a game that assumes some degree of GM-worldbuilding by default and includes "kickers" by default then the game that introduced the formalized concept, "Sorcerer" seems a good enough example.

Does this mean you can agree with the rest of the post? Because you mentioned kickers as a way to differentiate between stories the GM tells in a game with or without GM worldbuilding, it doesn't really do this because they can be used in either, but it still only addresses the singular example I used. By the definition you provided there are lots of other examples of GMs telling stories in a no-myth game.

 

[Lanefan]

... includes "kickers" ...

Kickers? What's these?

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not sure how else to put this. If the check succeeds, the players goal for his/her PC is realised. If the aura-reading succeeds, the feather has a trait that is suitable for dealing with a balrog (from memory, I think the PC was looking for Resistant to Fire). If the scavenging check in the tower succeeds, the PC finds the mace he is searching for. If the Circles check succeeds, the PC meets up with a NPC of the nature s/he was looking for.

So to beat it down to the basics: the player makes stuff up as the goal of the action declaration which if successful becomes part of the fiction, while on a failure the DM gets to make stuff up to explain said failure. 'Bout right?

The difference from asking the GM "Do I have any friends/contacts? Who are they?" or "What's around the corner?" or "Are there any interesting trinkets for sale?" is obvious.

Yes, it is.

But the ask-the-GM approach avoids any risk of the player potentially - dice willing - authoring the solution* to the problem she herself presented in her goals/beliefs/backstory.

* - or a step directly toward said solution.

 

[happyhermit]

Kickers? What's these?

Like a lot of RPG terms, the definition is rather vague. It's a bit of player authored stuff (often a sort of backstory) that the GM uses to help "drive the narrative", shape the world, tailor it to PCs, etc. AFAIK the term comes from Ron Edwards "Sorcerer", but as he says something similar has existed for ages.

ETA; http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1359

A Kicker is a term used in Sorcerer for the "event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins."

For the player, the Kicker is what propels the character into the game, as well as the thing that hooks the player and makes him or her say, "Damn! I can't wait to play this character!"

It's also the thing that the player hopes to resolve at the end of the game. At the start of the next game with the same character, the resolution of the Kicker alters the character in some way, allowing the player to re-write the character to reflect changes. Something that (IMHO) is a much better form of "experience points" than just a mathematical increase in ability. Word up, G!

Hiya,

The Kicker is part of the Sorcerer rules for character creation and it feeds directly into play. I invented the term, and to my knowledge, the concept as well at least in terms of a formal game element.

Jared has it just about right ... the Kicker is a sentence or two written by a player regarding his or her character. Its requirement is that something about the character's life has just changed, in such a way that they must take action. Ideally, the Kicker should not be a no-brainer but pose a bit of a conundrum or even an ethical dilemma. There's a fair permissible range, though - some players like to throw themselves and the GM a curve ball by introducing tres freaky ; others like to introduce a very solid ethical choice. The only bad Kicker is a boring one.

From the GM's point of view, all the player-characters are now in motion. For instance, I tend to run very prep-heavy games, but if the player-characters have Kickers, I don't have to drag them into anything - they are blazing into action of some kind. (Some people have expressed concern that this will "interfere" with the planned run. In practice, everyone who's tried it has done a 180 regarding this concern.)

Anyway (sigh, I hate this part), it's a copyrighted term, it's part of the Sorcerer rules, and I am perfectly happy for anyone to include it in their game design if they give me credit.

Best,
Ron

 

[pemerton]

Kickers? What's these?

Here's a sblocked self-quote:

[sblock]

As the final part of PC building, and trying to channel a bit of indie spirit, I asked the players to come up with "kickers" for their PCs.

From The Forge, here is one person's definition of a kicker:

A Kicker is a term used in Sorcerer for the "event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins."

For the player, the Kicker is what propels the character into the game, as well as the thing that hooks the player and makes him or her say, "Damn! I can't wait to play this character!"

It's also the thing that the player hopes to resolve at the end of the game. At the start of the next game with the same character, the resolution of the Kicker alters the character in some way, allowing the player to re-write the character to reflect changes.​

In my case, I was mostly focused on the first of those things: an event or realisation that the character has experienced just before play begins, which thereby propels the character into the game. The main constraint I imposed was: your kicker somehow has to locate you within Tyr in the context of the Sorcerer-King having been overthrown. The reason for this constraint was (i) I want to be able to use the 4e campaign books, and (ii) D&D relies pretty heavily on group play, and so I didn't want the PCs to be too separated spatially or temporally.

The player of the barbarian came up with something first. Paraphrasing slightly, it went like this:

I was about to cut his head of in the arena, to the adulation of the crowd, when the announcement came that the Sorcerer-King was dead, and they all looked away.​

So that answered the question that another player had asked, namely, how long since the Sorcerer-King's overthrow: it's just happened.

The other gladiator - whose name is "Twenty-nine", that being his number on the inventory of slaves owned by his master - had been mulling over (no pun intended) something about his master having been killed, and so we settled on the following:

I came back from the slave's privies, ready to receive my master's admonition to do a good job before I went out into the arena. But when I got back to the pen my master was dead. So I took the purse with 14 gp from his belt.​

(The 14 gp was the character's change after spending his starting money on gear.)

Discussion of PC backgrounds and the like had already established that the eladrin was an envoy from The Lands Within The Wind, aiming to link up with the Veiled Alliance and thereby to take steps to save his homeland from the consequences of defiling. So his kicker was

My veiled alliance contact is killed in front of me as we are about to meet.​

(A lot of death accompanying the revolution!)

With all that in place, we started the session proper.

[/sblock]

didn't you say you used them in D&D, a game that assumes GM-worldbuilding to some degree? I have seen them used in many games, mostly D&D, though obviously not by name. If you mean a game that assumes some degree of GM-worldbuilding by default and includes "kickers" by default then the game that introduced the formalized concept, "Sorcerer" seems a good enough example.

Sorcerer is clearly not a game that involves GM worldbuilding of the sort described in the OP of this thread.

Sblocked, fFrom Ron Edwards (designer of Sorcerer), "Setting and emergent stories":

[sblock]

This essay is really about setting but I found that I had to explain the story part first. . . .

n the interest of the whole essay’s point, I’m specifying here that we’re talking about a game text which includes a detailed setting, in which the various locations, problems, and NPCs . . . are easily identifiable or can easily be created once you’ve studied it in some detail. Enjoyment of the setting’s content as such is one of the intended joys and significant features of play. . . .

Story Now play does not merely inject a dose of flexibility or improvisation into Story Before play. It’s a different animal entirely. For example, the classic “play my character vs. play for the story” dichotomy is literally impossible. There simply isn’t any “the” story. The only way to get a story is through people playing their characters.

It relies heavily on situational crisis within the fiction, and not only the knowledge among the players that their characters are significantly embedded in it, but their enjoyment of that because the characters’ allegiances and priorities are free to unfold and change during play. . . .

nitial preparation doesn’t start with setting but rather with an evocation of setting, providing the necessary environment in which to visualize a character, and no more. Therefore setting information is deliberately kept sketchy at the outset, without any points of interest except for how it provides adversity toward the characters, if indeed that occurs at all. And when it does, the setting remains strictly facilitative of the primary conflicts embedded in the characters themselves.

Other games which rely on this model include Dust Devils, Lacuna, Primetime Adventures, shock:, Sign in Stranger, Poison’d, and Dogs in the Vineyard . . .

Story Now design has typically favored the character-centric approach probably due to the influence of Sorcerer . . .​

[/sblock]

In that essay, Edwards goes on to discuss how worldbuilding can be adapted to Story Now play, by departing from the Sorcerer approach (emphasis added by me):

[sblock]

Character-centric Story Now play is consistent with epic literature and myth, classical drama, and adventure fiction of all kinds. . . .

I went into this much detail about this way to play because historically, it was developed first as an explicit alternative to the Story Before methods described earlier. Therefore in early Forge discussions, a perceived dichotomy formed which contrasted Setting with Story Now (Narrativism). Here, I’m firmly calling this dichotomy false and showing that Story Now play can function very well using a setting-centric approach. . . .

[T]he game I first really applied this model with [was] called Hero Wars . . .

Enjoying the setting isn’t an end-stage outcome, it’s a starting and prevailing commitment. Nor is a single person expected to be the docent for the textual setting; rather, it belongs to everyone for inspiration and use. Play deepens it and provides nuances, and most importantly, changes it. . . .

One concern that crops up a lot for playing this way is how expert people have to be even to get started. Although not everyone must be expert, certainly no one can be ignorant either. . . .

In my experience, the solution begins with a single person choosing the location, at least when the group is playing the game for the first time. He or she should provide a brief but inspirational handout which summarizes the entire setting, focusing on colorful and thematic points; if the opening text of the game book provides this, a quick photocopy will do. . . .

I want to focus on several game texts that present explicitly powerful settings which as I see it simply scream out to be utilized as I’ve described above, but which are also saddled with play-advice that undercuts the potential. . . .

The origins of this problem are obvious: simply aping the models provided by D&D2 (especially Dragonlance) . . . Among many others, one consistent problem with such texts is being forced to reconcile the deeply community-oriented problems of a given location for play with the inappropriate assumption that player-characters are a team of outsiders who’ve just arrived from very far away. Since these can’t be reconciled, each text repeats a whole circular and unsuccessful mantra about it without managing to deliver meaningful or even engaging instructions. . . .

[F]or setting-centric Story Now play [t]he idea is to embrace the setting as a genuine, central source of the colorful thematic dilemmas explicit in the games’ introductory text, and to resist the retraction and retreat to comparatively tame Story Before which are explicit in the later GM-advice and scenario-preparation text.​

[/sblock]

In the context of this thread, the most striking element of Edwards's description of setting-heavy "story now" RPGing is that it is the group, not the GM, that "owns" the setting. And Edwards is certainly not talking about the sort of establishment of setting that we're seeing discussed at this stage of this thread (eg that a secret door does or does not exist in a certain wall; that a bribe is or is not willing to be bribed; etc).

My use of the default 4e cosmology in my main 4e game, and of Dark Sun in my 4e Dark Sun game, is something like what Edwards describes here, although both settings are "light" and stereotypical enough that play also bleeds into the character-centric approach.

 

[pemerton]

It's a bit of player authored stuff (often a sort of backstory) that the GM uses to help "drive the narrative", shape the world, tailor it to PCs, etc.

For the player, the Kicker is what propels the character into the game, as well as the thing that hooks the player and makes him or her say, "Damn! I can't wait to play this character!"

It's also the thing that the player hopes to resolve at the end of the game.

he Kicker is a sentence or two written by a player regarding his or her character. Its requirement is that something about the character's life has just changed, in such a way that they must take action.

Thining of the kicker as "backstory", or as something that the GM uses to help drive the narrative, is (I think) missing some of the point.

The kicker is something that propels the character into the game by requiring that they take action. It is a thematically/dramatically compelling situation authored by the player.

Here is another description of it by Ron Edwards:

Sorcerer presented the Kicker Technique, which is to say, a player-authored Bang* included in character creation, giving the GM responsibility to make it central to play. It may be considered the precise opposite of the "character hook" concept presented in many adventure scenarios and role-playing games.​

[size=-2]* An in-fiction event which make a thematically-significant or at least evocative choice necessary for a player[/size]​

Upthread, or maybe on the other thread, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] posted that the setting has to be neutral and that the players can't write their own adventures. The "kicker" technique is in complete opposition to those principles.

 

[pemerton]

So to beat it down to the basics: the player makes stuff up as the goal of the action declaration which if successful becomes part of the fiction, while on a failure the DM gets to make stuff up to explain said failure. 'Bout right?

Yes. The most classic example in the history of RPGing would be "I try and kill the orc."

But the ask-the-GM approach avoids any risk of the player potentially - dice willing - authoring the solution* to the problem she herself presented in her goals/beliefs/backstory.

There is also a classic term to describe a game in which the players have to work out the GM-authored solution: it's called a railroad!

 

[Sunseeker]

There is also a classic term to describe a game in which the players have to work out the GM-authored solution: it's called a railroad!

That's terribly inaccurate and dishonest, and you know it.

Reasonably speaking certain problems have certain solutions. If you need to burn something you cannot freeze it. If you need to de-ice something you cannot make a move silently check.

If you want to try to kill the orc, you cannot do so with a heal check.

Railroads may exist where there is one, or few solutions to a problem. Railroads do not automatically exist simply because a player cannot declare anything to attempt resolution.

Making this kind of black-and-white statement makes this whole discussion pointless.

 

[pemerton]

That's terribly inaccurate and dishonest, and you know it.

I don't know it to be dishonest - I'm sincerely asserting it.

Reasonably speaking certain problems have certain solutions. If you need to burn something you cannot freeze it. If you need to de-ice something you cannot make a move silently check.

This is all true, but has no bearing on my remark to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION].

If you want to try to kill the orc, you cannot do so with a heal check.

Equally true. And if you want to find a secret door you can't do it wihout a Search (or other appropriate) check. But again, that has no bearing on my remark to Lanefan.

The discussion between Lanefan and me is not about whether or not a Perception check is necessary to find a secret door. It's about whether or not there should be an additional, mediating step in action resolution, namely, the GM secretly deciding (by way of pre-authorship, or rolling a die, or whatever) whether or not a secret door "exists" to be found. That is what I am calling a railroad.

If the GM's preauthorship was about whether or not an orc will be killed in a combat, I think that nearly every ENworld poster would recognise it as a railroad (and the debate would turn into one about whether or not railroading, by way of fudging to keep NPCs alive, is a good or bad thing). I am asserting the same thing about searching for a secret door.

I recognise that not everyone agrees that the secret door case is a railroad. That's fine - it wouldn't be the only time people have had different aesthetic judgements. But the fact that others have different preferences doesn't change mine!