Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[FrogReaver]

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.

I see what you did there. This boils down to a claim that some types of player agency just don’t matter.

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.

Yep. Obviously their choices here matter! Both to them and to the gameplay.

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:

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.

Sorry but all this jumping between games is part of where confusion about how different games play starts. When you tell people about games and constantly jump from one to another - especially when they are similar but different, it makes it incredibly difficult to learn and internalize anything about them.

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.

I might could say something on this if the example came from a game we had actually been discussing. But as it stands nearly anything i say is likely to be based on information about a totally different game.

 

[innerdude]

I made a conscious decision to use vampire magic mumbo-jumbo to beat the bastard into a bloody pulp instead of just threatening or shooting him in the head with a rifle my character keeps behind the counter, because that would have more interesting consequences. A decision that was both suboptimal and ran contrary to how I envisioned my character anyway

My experience with D&D 3 / PF1 for 9 years was a long procession of watching players engage in these same kinds of "hijinks" for much the same reason --- they just wanted something interesting to happen.

This was one of the major reasons that led me to look away from D&D in the 2010s. No matter how "simulationist" the game world was, it was undercut by players making outrageous character choices just to push back against the heavy-handed GM Force driving the direction of play at every turn.

It's like every description of play l see from Bloodtide on this site---of course he's complaining about "problem child" players at every turn. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more your players will rebel against your ego driven GM overreach, and coherent gameplay will slip through your fingers."

Because everyone knows the solution to players getting out of line and wanting things is to punish them for having ideas about their characters and what's important to those characters in the fiction.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I sort get the idea that Story Now ensures that something interesting happens. I have played in trad games where there were indeed long stretches where nothing interesting happened, and it is frustrating. I think it was often related to some sort of pixel hunty logic where there was interesting stuff somewhere, but we as player were poking at wrong things. Personally I really hate this, and in my own games try to make sure this doesn't happen.

Now mechanics where failures compel the GM to introduce complications is certainly one way to ensure that at least something happens. Whether that something is interesting probably still depends on the GM though.

When GMing trad games I try to plan dynamic situations, where there is something going on, so regardless of what the PCs do, even if nothing, some change of situation will eventually occur.

One observation I made about the Blades game I was playing in, was the situation was rarely like this. The situation was static until we as the players introduced change and chaos. But I am not sure if this is necessarily something that must be in this way in such a game, or is it just how the GM chose to run things.

 

[Maxperson]

I have no idea why people think many of the things they do about the PbtA engine. My other head scratcher is calling it GMing with training wheels.

That's easy. The apocalypse is bad. Therefore anything powered by the apocalypse must also be bad.

 

[pemerton]

Sorry but all this jumping between games is part of where confusion about how different games play starts. When you tell people about games and constantly jump from one to another - especially when they are similar but different, it makes it incredibly difficult to learn and internalize anything about them.

I might could say something on this if the example came from a game we had actually been discussing. But as it stands nearly anything i say is likely to be based on information about a totally different game.

Upthread I posted this about an example of setting creation provided by another poster:

I am fairly confident that you have participated in past threads that discuss the use of prep as a coordinating tool, and a source of things to say, rather than a constraint on action resolution.

The prep that @Faolyn describes seems perfectly suited to those function: eg the Elven Bard has enemies from a rival steading; and the Orcs probably worship the Earth Gods, which creates plenty of scope for seeding conflict or prompting hard choices. Etc.

The use of setting in Prince Valiant is another example of this.

The players know about France, Italy, Dalmatia, Dacia, Constantinople and Cyprus not because, in the course of play, they have had their PCs perform actions that prompt me as GM to tell them information about these elements of the setting. They know about them because they know that we are playing a game set in a fictional version of the 7th to 8th centuries CE.

That's not to say that no event occurred in the fiction to provide the PCs with this information and the related ideas:

Walking through the streets of Warwick warming up for the wedding, the PCs came across a NPC knight - the slightly aged Sir Prag - being thrown out the window of an inn. It turned out a group of foreigners (a Viking, a French knight, and a Greek poet/scholars) had had a falling out with Sir Prag over whether or not British knights are the flower of chivalry. It turned out that Sir Jean had returned from crusading, and had picked up some companions on his travels. He had met Sir Lionheart, the self-proclaimed greatest of British knights, in the Holy Land, but had heard that Lionheart was now dead.

When it came out that one of the PCs - Sir Morgath - had killed Sir Lionheart, Sir Jean expressed his excitement at meeting him in the lists (at the tournament that was to be part of the wedding festivities).

Sir Justin, meanwhile, learned from Homer (the scholar/poet) of the wonders of Byzantium, making him keen to travel to the east on a crusade.

But the point is the player knows what all this fiction means because they already understand the setting.

The players, in choosing to have their PCs travel east on crusade, are expressing their desire to have their PCs framed into those sorts of encounters. It's pretty much the opposite of the players going left or right and as a result meeting the ogre or the treant (depending on what the GM's secret map and key say). The players want their PCs to be framed into a certain sort of situation/scenario, and the resolution of travel etc plays a coordinating role in relation to that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think you nailed the divide between the two systems with this sentence.

Perhaps, but she did so in a clearly biased way. "Traditional games tend to be boring because the rules don't care about being interesting" (obvious paraphrase). How is that less insulting than anything I've said is to storygamers?

 

[thefutilist]

When GMing trad games I try to plan dynamic situations, where there is something going on, so regardless of what the PCs do, even if nothing, some change of situation will eventually occur.

This is basically what I do to get emergent story through play. Say If I was playing D&D, I might come up with a premise like ‘The king is dead and the succession is uncertain’, so everyone makes characters who are pretty invested in who the next King is going to be. Then pull the first group of NPC’s from the PC backgrounds. Create some more npc’s who are really invested in who the King is going to be. Give them stats and other resources like armies and magic swords and stuff. Then play to turn the unstable situation into a stable one. Mainly by framing scenes around where the characters meet and seeing how the conflict between their opposing views pans out.

Now I’m not sure I’d actually use D&D to do that because it works at a level of granularity that makes me uncomfortable. I’d also have to tweak the resolution mechanics slightly. You can pretty much import that basic structure between trad games and many story games and it might turn out that in some cases trad games are a better fit.

 

[loverdrive]

My experience with D&D 3 / PF1 for 9 years was a long procession of watching players engage in these same kinds of "hijinks" for much the same reason --- they just wanted something interesting to happen.

This was one of the major reasons that led me to look away from D&D in the 2010s. No matter how "simulationist" the game world was, it was undercut by players making outrageous character choices just to push back against the heavy-handed GM Force driving the direction of play at every turn.

It's like every description of play l see from Bloodtide on this site---of course he's complaining about "problem child" players at every turn. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more your players will rebel against your ego driven GM overreach, and coherent gameplay will slip through your fingers."

Because everyone knows the solution to players getting out of line and wanting things is to punish them for having ideas about their characters and what's important to those characters in the fiction.

While I understand the sentiment, I honestly did not have such experience, or, at least, didn't perceive it that way.

I, as a player, actually don't mind linear GM-curated adventures, at least, as long as I know where the damn rails are. I don't mind expressing agency through little silly non-decisions that ultimately don't matter and justifications I find for actions my character is supposed to take for the game to progress. Trad games work for that!

They also work for some kind of grand high-stakes adventures, slay the princess, save the dragon, all that.

But the kind of game I enjoy the most is ultimately mundane and down-to-earth, where characters aren't saving the world or robbing trains, but instead, say, run a bar. Or go on a roadtrip through, like, mundane normal towns and cities and not perilous wasteland. Things like that.

There trad games just break in half, regardless of GM-curation or lack thereof.

 

[pemerton]

I, as a player, actually don't mind linear GM-curated adventures, at least, as long as I know where the damn rails are. I don't mind expressing agency through little silly non-decisions that ultimately don't matter

What colour are your pantaloons?

 

[loverdrive]

What colour are your pantaloons?

I'd say red. Yeah, red sounds good.