Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[CandyLaser]

As someone who does think about story beats and narrative flow and stuff like that…yeah I don’t think anyone talks like that?

We just drop into character headspace or not as fits the mood, and pretend to be heroic fantasy weirdos, instead of mundane real life weirdos.

I do find it useful to talk about framing scenes explicitly from time to time. I'm currently running a game of Fellowship, which is a PbtA game designed to emulate heroic fiction, most notably Lord of the Rings as well as a lot of JRPGs and cartoons like Avatar and She-Ra. One thing that makes Fellowship somewhat unique is that the GM has a playbook of their own; the 'default' GM playbook is called the Overlord, and it represents the GM's character, who fills the Sauron role in the heroic story being told. You can't have your big villain on screen all the time, so it's helpful to cut away from the PCs every now and then to show what the Overlord is up to. In our last session, for instance, while the PCs were busy helping a village of slime people escape from the Overlord's armies, the Overlord was busy elsewhere in the world, so I provided a little scene that started something like this: "We see a sweeping view of a large city on a hill. The city is mostly built of marble and stone, but brightly colored banners, flags, and lights are everywhere. Even in the middle of the day, there are fireworks going off over the skyline. And outside the city, overlooking it from a nearby ridge, we see [the Overlord]..." But this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Edited to add: there are also games like Fiasco that, in my experience, encourage people to engage in a little bit of meta-talk about scenes, beats, etc. I don't know of any PbtA games that are that overt about it, though.

 

[FrogReaver]

No one at my table talks about "narrative beats" or similar jargon, nor about "scene framing" or "flags" - we are playing a RPG, not designing or analysing one; and part of that is pretending to be in a fantasy world and doing our best to behave is that world possesses an external reality.

You keep making posts that imply things about others - and me, in particular! (or, at least, those are the implications I'm most sensitive to) - that are simply not true.

What I find most interesting is that the first casualty in this exchange was most the interesting point @Micah Sweet brought up - if choosing which direction to go is important to your players then taking that away from them is a notable example of reduction in player agency that’s in the past been posited to be a trade off. Its a solid concrete example of how agency is lost in some areas and gained in others.

 

[hawkeyefan]

To be fair. I’ve never found that or any rule in D&D to be self evident. I always make sure to fully explain it to new people.

Sure, but do we consider most folks talkinrg RPGs here to be new?

 

[pemerton]

What I find most interesting is that the first casualty in this exchange was most the interesting point @Micah Sweet brought up - if choosing which direction to go is important to your players then taking that away from them is a notable example of reduction in player agency that’s in the past been posited to be a trade off. Its a solid concrete example of how agency is lost in some areas and gained in others.

If choosing what colour pantaloons a character wears is important to a player, than taking that away might upset them. But it would be rare, I think, to characterise choice of trouser colour as an important manifestation of player agency in RPG play.

When I am GMing White Plume Mountain, of course the players take seriously their choice of which corridor to go down, as they know (even if they are choosing mostly blindly) that this will determine what it is that their PCs observe and/or encounter.

When I am GMing Prince Valiant, they don't worry about distances and directions per se - those are not relevant to game play. The last time issues of internal architecture arose, it was resolved like this:

Morgath had fallen back into the donjon with Agol, Elizabeth and Flora, defending them to the last. He asked Flora if there was any way out, and I consulted the scenario: Flora "shows them a secret tunnel (that she is fairly sure Sir [Satyrion] knows nothing of)" and so Morgath and friends were able to escape the fallen castle. Agol was successful (Hunting + Presence) in leading them to join up with the others on the plain between the two castles.

The players do, as their PCs, sometimes have places they wish to go to, but the travel is resolved via GM scene-framing, just like any other event in the game. When the PCs wanted to travel from Britain to Constantinople, various episodes of travel were resolved, together with events along the way; and we all looked at a map I have photocopied from The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History to help coordinate, in a general way, our shared sense of time and place. But the map didn't determine the events, except in the sense of providing me with background colour: the PCs took over a Duchy in France, travelled by sea to Italy where they escaped the clutches of a treacherous noble, and were forced by inclement weather to land on the Dalmation coast and finish their trek overland. In that trek, they met Huns in the hills, and then ancient, restless dead in the forests of Dacia, before travelling along the Black Sea coast to Constantinople.

To describe this as the players' agency being "reduced" in comparison to the play of White Plume Mountain would in my view be a misdescription, reflecting a failure to grasp the different processes of play in each game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I find most interesting is that the first casualty in this exchange was most the interesting point @Micah Sweet brought up - if choosing which direction to go is important to your players then taking that away from them is a notable example of reduction in player agency that’s in the past been posited to be a trade off. Its a solid concrete example of how agency is lost in some areas and gained in others.

Well, since its a choice of blindly going left or blindly going right, what exactly is this choice you have been deprived of? If we're talking about some choice where the players are well-informed and the different options are things relevant to them, then we're both talking about the same thing, eh? I mean, choices abound in Narrativist play, but they're choices like "do I save my best friend, or become the most powerful fighter in the kingdom?"

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I do find it useful to talk about framing scenes explicitly from time to time. I'm currently running a game of Fellowship, which is a PbtA game designed to emulate heroic fiction, most notably Lord of the Rings as well as a lot of JRPGs and cartoons like Avatar and She-Ra. One thing that makes Fellowship somewhat unique is that the GM has a playbook of their own; the 'default' GM playbook is called the Overlord, and it represents the GM's character, who fills the Sauron role in the heroic story being told. You can't have your big villain on screen all the time, so it's helpful to cut away from the PCs every now and then to show what the Overlord is up to. In our last session, for instance, while the PCs were busy helping a village of slime people escape from the Overlord's armies, the Overlord was busy elsewhere in the world, so I provided a little scene that started something like this: "We see a sweeping view of a large city on a hill. The city is mostly built of marble and stone, but brightly colored banners, flags, and lights are everywhere. Even in the middle of the day, there are fireworks going off over the skyline. And outside the city, overlooking it from a nearby ridge, we see [the Overlord]..." But this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Hell yeah I do similar stuff sometimes in D&D, because I trust the players to honor the dramatic irony of knowing what the PCs don’t, from time to time.

There is a scene is Dimension20: Misfits and Magic, where Abria Iyengar tells Brennan Lee Mulligan that his character doesn’t hear soemthing.


What you don’t hear…

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Sure, but do we consider most folks talkinrg RPGs here to be new?

To a given game they haven’t played yet? Yes.

How many decades they’ve spent playing D&D doesn’t make the play dynamics of Monster of The Week at all obvious without explanation.

 

[niklinna]

Well, since its a choice of blindly going left or blindly going right, what exactly is this choice you have been deprived of? If we're talking about some choice where the players are well-informed and the different options are things relevant to them, then we're both talking about the same thing, eh? I mean, choices abound in Narrativist play, but they're choices like "do I save my best friend, or become the most powerful fighter in the kingdom?"

Most powerful fighter! Most powerful fighter! Friends are for suckers.

 

[hawkeyefan]

To a given game they haven’t played yet? Yes.

How many decades they’ve spent playing D&D doesn’t make the play dynamics of Monster of The Week at all obvious without explanation.

Right, but we weren’t actually playing the game. We were discussing the game. No one answered as specifically as requested because many previous answers had made the answer fairly clear. I realized what was happening and offered a clear and specific answer.

When asked why no one else had done so, I said because it was unclear that was still needed.

 

[clearstream]

I think searching for secret doors thing might be the "it is almost a move" issue someone mentioned earlier. Moves are somewhat specific, but if someone is doing something that is kinda similar to the situation assumed by the move, but still not quite it, it might be a bit awkward.

That was me, thinking about Assess in Avatar. It's easy to find examples.

The table, guided by the GM, has to arrive at a view as to whether or not the declared fiction falls under the general descriptors that appear in many (not all) player-side move triggers.

This is right, albeit sometimes it goes wrong. I believe that relates to what @Lanefan was hitting with falls.

fiction justifies action misleadingly appears to justify invoking a rule goes off the rails further fiction?!​

​

Folk wind up trying to figure out why the rule they invoked didn't fit, sometimes diagnosing that as a fault with the rule. That has them doing what ideally shouldn't be done, which is invoke the rule and then work out if it was justified.

Rules mastery helps, which comes out of study and play. On the designer's side, lucidity and honesty helps. By honesty I mean - look at your rule and see what it does read plainly. What it does, not what you designed it to do.

Thinking about this, I noticed something about constitutive rules. The general idea with them is that the constituted activity is made possible by the rule. On surface then, it could appear that constitutive rules would break the chain of justification, because the constituted activity is invoked by the rule, and not the other way around! Throwing a psychic blade and teleporting to it is constituted by the Psychic Teleportation sub-rule of the Soul Blades rule. In theory, without that rule that's not something you can do in your fiction.

That last claim is very evidently mistaken. I could add throwing out a psychic knife and teleporting to our fiction if I wished, even without the rule. (This gets back to my view on how rule zero technically operates, in another thread.) The process of design involved someone imagining that fiction prior to forming the rule, and then forming the rule in order to communicate their envisioned fiction to players, regulate it, and validate it. (I have definite ideas about the role that envisioning fiction and prospectively playing, plays in TTRPG rules design.)

We read the Psychic Blades rule, are inspired to say new things - such as "I form a knife with my mind, fling it through his window, and teleport to my beloved's side!" When we say them, we invoke the rule. In this case with very strong binding between rule and fiction.

Perhaps it is right to observe that - The more a rule serves broad and preexisting norms, the more "almost fits" cases we get. (We possess rich reservoirs of description to draw from.) The more a rule constitutes unique fiction, the less.