What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

But you did try to paint me as unreasonable for following the example.

I just found the example to be rather contrived. I mean, players don't normally behave that way, certainly not to such an extreme degree that its impossible to engage in some sort of player-centered kind of play.

You're contradicting @pemerton, now, as he's said it was a player belief and not a side quest. I agree with @pemerton -- the player gets to pick a limited number of things she cares about, it's not the GM's place to rank them or decide that this one isn't that important.

Well, as far as I can tell, that specific belief was secondary to the more general belief about the brother. It doesn't even make sense by itself. So I would call it 'subsidiary'. If you think about it, this specific belief "I will get something to help my brother before leaving the town" is more about a statement of determination, of an URGENT desire vs the overall "I will save my brother" belief being potentially more long-range. Failure to achieve the immediate goal doesn't invalidate the long-range goal, and its easy to imagine that the character would prioritize the longer-range goal over the shorter (though this might be subject to how the player wants to portray his character, maybe he's so impulsive and fixated on immediate goals that he WOULD damage his own chances for a quick fix).

Thus I, as a GM, would play it as the one belief is subsidiary and secondary to the other, and a 'quest' to satisfy this subsidiary goal may be less urgent and something of a side show, although its quite easy to see it as a critical first step as well. As it turned out it was a distraction and actually helped lead to (in the narrative at least) the eventual failure of the main task.

We weren't talking about spotlight time, but how play engages various kinds of agency. Spotlight time isn't something unique to either playstyle, nor is it engaged with any real difference between the two.

In my mind this was and is part and parcel of one discussion. There is a natural evolution of 'spotlight', it naturally emerges from Story Now play; at least in a D&D-like game.

The decision on which route to take wouldn't be a question generally framed into a scene by the GM, though. As you've said, that's a free play setup question, not a scene. Once the Fellowship chose the Mines, the GM of the Ring clearly framed the confrontation with the goblins which spiraled out of control into the confrontation with the Balrog, which had a serious consequence for the Fellowship (and Gandalf's player in particular).

I think it would! First of all there's a scene in which the characters are camping and the crebain (birds) fly overhead, and then they enter into a debate in which the 3 choices are discussed. First they reject Moria, and then the Gap of Rohan, and then choose Caradharas as their first choice. Clearly their attempt to cross the pass results in a failure, which would be mechanical in most game systems. The result is they wind up back near where they began, and then wolves attack them. At this point they become convinced there's only one remaining choice, Moria. This would be handled quite naturally in my own game. The debate itself might be handled as a challenge in which different options can be elicited, thus producing the pass as a best choice. Another SC results in failure to cross the pass, and play continues with finding the gates and having an encounter (the successful opening of the West Gate could be taken as a skill check during the encounter with the Watcher, or simply as the inevitable consequence of choosing this path and given the composition of the party).

The events following this, in Moria, would likely represent a whole other challenge, presumably being a partial failure. Some of the party emerge largely unscathed, Gandalf is lost. It all seems relatively straightforward. I mean, is it a perfectly likely Story Now narrative? Hard to say really, but in at least some aspects it could certainly arise out of that style of play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here's what my experience coming from Apocalypse World and other games I have run using similar techniques has shown me: When you define characters first and then define the world around them the level of setting depth that develops around things is dependent on proximity to the characters - both geographically and logically. You might have only a feint idea of what is happening over in Bosnia, but you know that girl with the cute nose ring at the local coffee shop just quit. You really liked her. You might have some idea of why the elves left the forest, but you know why the king put your brother in the dungeon. You also get to kind of explore the world together as time goes on and we are forced to author new stuff so we have interesting stuff to play through.

It's a really big deal to me that characters feel connected to the foreground of the setting. That they are more than just individuals. A character needs to have drives, relationships, a family, and a place in the world. I find that building the world up around the characters makes this much easier to accomplish than going the other way around.

Agreed! Story Now characters are much more likely to have well-developed connections with the setting. How can they not? I guess you could really go out of your way to construct a character as a total loner from some strange foreign land or something. In standard D&D play this is almost UNIVERSAL, the PCs just hit town, they know nobody, have no allegiances, no connections to anyone, nothing but the coin in their purse and clothes on their backs. Consider the classic example, B2, the characters hit town in the first scene of the module. There's virtually no provision for them to be locals at all as I remember it. The term 'murder hobos' wasn't just invented randomly, it sort of perfectly describes the average PC, some kind of rootless drifter with a murky past and a dubious career.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Close, but not quite.

What I asked was more like "what happens if the players don't have an agenda". Nothing about whether they're willing to engage with one if it wanders by in front of them; theyre probably all set for that, they just don't have an agenda of their own and aren't interested in coming up with one...or (and this is more where I come from) want to wait until the game is nicely under way and see if anything suggests itself from the run of play.

Lanefan

Yeah, and I think there were a couple of iterations of answer to that and some follow-on comments by others, which amounted to: I can usually elicit a usable agenda fairly quickly from most players with some leading questions. Then there was the observation that players don't REALLY have 'no agenda', they want to do SOMETHING interesting and when the point was pressed then I stated that I thought it was unrealistic to posit entirely passive players that won't rise to ANY bait. Then I got told I was misrepresenting what had been posted. I didn't think I was misrepresenting anything, just that there were several slightly different iterations of positing this sort of 'no agenda' situation.

To be clear, as stated originally, I don't think players are likely to remain without agenda for very long. Its possible that some options need to be provided, or suggestions, or elicitation of more character backstory to draw out an agenda, etc. No doubt it is easiest for a GM when the players come all loaded for bear and dive right into generating a story. It is still possible for things to work if they aren't that proactive. I just don't think its realistic to posit players that will reject ANY attempt to draw them in. I don't know what someone like that is doing, why do they play? Even so, given the party has other players I stated its still workable as long as SOME of them will help get the ball rolling. There can always be a 'freeloader' or two, they generally evolve as sort of 'sidekicks', but often they eventually take on their own goals. This is likely to be a newer player.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Here's what my experience coming from Apocalypse World and other games I have run using similar techniques has shown me: When you define characters first and then define the world around them the level of setting depth that develops around things is dependent on proximity to the characters - both geographically and logically. You might have only a feint idea of what is happening over in Bosnia, but you know that girl with the cute nose ring at the local coffee shop just quit. You really liked her. You might have some idea of why the elves left the forest, but you know why the king put your brother in the dungeon. You also get to kind of explore the world together as time goes on and we are forced to author new stuff so we have interesting stuff to play through.

It's a really big deal to me that characters feel connected to the foreground of the setting. That they are more than just individuals. A character needs to have drives, relationships, a family, and a place in the world. I find that building the world up around the characters makes this much easier to accomplish than going the other way around.

I'm curious about this, having just run my first session of Blades in the Dark. Blades features a pretty well detailed setting, with a bunch of tightly integrated mechanics that interface with that setting. Characters are mechanically tied to the setting through almost all of the choices in build -- you pick friends, rivals, vices, vice dealers, heritage (both ancestry and family details), prior professions/backgrounds, who you pissed off/made friends with in establishing your hunting grounds, which faction you pissed off for this, which likes you for that, and so forth. The characters are woven into the details of the setting through the act of creation. But Blades is written by the same author of and also very close to in mechanical resolution to *World games. What do you think of this difference in creation, which is very much setting first then character. Granted, players have a good bit of room to add new details, but not that much and only within the conceits of the established setting.

As an aside, my first session of Blades went fantastically, we all had a blast. We built a crew and characters together, and I used the suggested starting scenario of the gang war in Crow's Foot. They immediately threw off the shackles by telling Baz to f off and promptly took a job from the Dimmer Sisters to plant a cursed relic in Baz's office, which they pulled off with a stealth plan going through the skylight in the Lampblack warehouse and a nice flashback to lace the wine the guards were drinking so they could slip into Baz's office. They did manage to set off an alarm as they were exiting, though, as a combined consequence to a number of 'success with cost' rolls, and that has the Lampblacks thinking their crew might have been involved so they're now at negative relationship. Totes awesome play even if rocky to start as they adjusted, but, by the end, they were leaning into it and offering devil's bargains to each other.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm curious about this, having just run my first session of Blades in the Dark. Blades features a pretty well detailed setting, with a bunch of tightly integrated mechanics that interface with that setting. Characters are mechanically tied to the setting through almost all of the choices in build -- you pick friends, rivals, vices, vice dealers, heritage (both ancestry and family details), prior professions/backgrounds, who you pissed off/made friends with in establishing your hunting grounds, which faction you pissed off for this, which likes you for that, and so forth. The characters are woven into the details of the setting through the act of creation. But Blades is written by the same author of and also very close to in mechanical resolution to *World games. What do you think of this difference in creation, which is very much setting first then character. Granted, players have a good bit of room to add new details, but not that much and only within the conceits of the established setting.

As an aside, my first session of Blades went fantastically, we all had a blast. We built a crew and characters together, and I used the suggested starting scenario of the gang war in Crow's Foot. They immediately threw off the shackles by telling Baz to f off and promptly took a job from the Dimmer Sisters to plant a cursed relic in Baz's office, which they pulled off with a stealth plan going through the skylight in the Lampblack warehouse and a nice flashback to lace the wine the guards were drinking so they could slip into Baz's office. They did manage to set off an alarm as they were exiting, though, as a combined consequence to a number of 'success with cost' rolls, and that has the Lampblacks thinking their crew might have been involved so they're now at negative relationship. Totes awesome play even if rocky to start as they adjusted, but, by the end, they were leaning into it and offering devil's bargains to each other.

Nice! This is of course a real strength for a lot of 'story games' that they do very specific settings quite well. When genre expectations and whatnot are spelled out very clearly and the characters have a fairly set concept space to fill, then its likely they will 'fit' pretty well. Of course that means choices are limited, as you noted. Obviously this kind of game can have limited lifespan and replay value unless the players are particularly into the specifics. Of course there's room for infinite such games out there. I personally really like the PbtA model of providing options in the form of a series of 'moves' that evoke the specific conceits of a given genre. DW, for instance, is really pretty narrowly aimed at producing play that is narratively analogous to B/X vintage D&D. It gets HARD to apply it outside of that space. Of course its also easy enough to invent new games in the same vein which work in other contexts, though some are less straightforward, or just too open ended to really work well in this format. For instance it would be harder to make a true space opera game using PbtA IMHO. You can obviously do some niche stuff there, but each class of character is really fairly narrow in these games.

 

[Campbell]

I'm curious about this, having just run my first session of Blades in the Dark. Blades features a pretty well detailed setting, with a bunch of tightly integrated mechanics that interface with that setting. Characters are mechanically tied to the setting through almost all of the choices in build -- you pick friends, rivals, vices, vice dealers, heritage (both ancestry and family details), prior professions/backgrounds, who you pissed off/made friends with in establishing your hunting grounds, which faction you pissed off for this, which likes you for that, and so forth. The characters are woven into the details of the setting through the act of creation. But Blades is written by the same author of and also very close to in mechanical resolution to *World games. What do you think of this difference in creation, which is very much setting first then character. Granted, players have a good bit of room to add new details, but not that much and only within the conceits of the established setting.

As an aside, my first session of Blades went fantastically, we all had a blast. We built a crew and characters together, and I used the suggested starting scenario of the gang war in Crow's Foot. They immediately threw off the shackles by telling Baz to f off and promptly took a job from the Dimmer Sisters to plant a cursed relic in Baz's office, which they pulled off with a stealth plan going through the skylight in the Lampblack warehouse and a nice flashback to lace the wine the guards were drinking so they could slip into Baz's office. They did manage to set off an alarm as they were exiting, though, as a combined consequence to a number of 'success with cost' rolls, and that has the Lampblacks thinking their crew might have been involved so they're now at negative relationship. Totes awesome play even if rocky to start as they adjusted, but, by the end, they were leaning into it and offering devil's bargains to each other.

I think character exploration is a focus, but not quite the focus of Blades in the same way it is for a game like Apocalypse World. Still the setting material is low resolution enough to really explore in play. It's also far more focused on scenario design with a focus on actual play. I like to think of Duskvol as a dungeon with a vibrant ecosystem that responds to player actions. The core of the faction game is built on OSR tech and the best sort of dungeon design. It even utilizes the crawl-rest-crawl-rest cycle with its excellent downtime mechanics.

I really like that those names on the sheet are with a few exceptions just names and occupations. In our game those Allies and Rivals ended up becoming really fleshed out. We also ended up adding a substantial amount of depth to those characters and other major faction characters. The relationship map just for my character by the end of play was staggering.
Still the core of the game is that faction struggle. I think it's important to have some of that predefined for the sake of tactical play which is a strong suit of Blades in the Dark. We often began play by looking at that faction chart which shows our relationship with each faction and their current tier in order to target who we wanted to bring down and who we wanted to raise up.

Basically => Duskvol = Really Big Dungeon
Blades = Apocalypse World + Stars Without Number + B/X

 

[Lanefan]

All I'm saying about this, in the current context of discussion, is that it is clearly not a case of the players exercising agency over the content of the shared fiction. I don't see how that can be controversial!

It isn't controversial, and nor should it be. The players want to explore the game world and see where that exploration leads them; and build or derive their goals out of whatever comes of that process. And who knows, they might each be on their third PC by that time depending on the lethality level.

The other thing the players probably want to do - and this is something else I've seen little to no mention of in your game logs - is get to know the other PCs in the party that they don't already know.

I always see the first - and maybe the second and third as well, depending on circumstance - adventure in any campaign as essentially a shakedown cruise where the PCs get to know each other, the obvious liabilities are either winnowed out or at least identified for what they are, and the party tries to gel as a party. There's not much backstory yet, though this is a good time to drop in hints and foreshadowing that might not make sense until much later.

The first answer is that creating a character with some sort of driving force is a requirement for play. It's part of character creation in most of these games. A Burning Wheel character's Beliefs are as much a part of character creation as generating their stats. Same goes for Aspirations in New World of Darkness or Intimacies in Exalted 3 or a Kicker in Sorcerer.

The second answer is a social one. As a player you are expected to contribute to the game by playing a character with Beliefs they are willing to fight for. You wouldn't create a D&D character who wanted to traipse about town all session instead of going where the monsters live to steal their stuff. It's the same deal.

To me that's like starting the game with the character's career already half over: I didn't get to play through whatever adventures and events led her to those Beliefs and-or goals. I'd far rather my character's goals grow organically out of the run of play rather than be baked in at char-gen; and I'd also far rather they be a lot more malleable over time than this seems to allow for.

Also, the GM is not obligated to provide your character with a motivation. You are. I can help you come up with one if you are having trouble doing so, but it is ultimately on you. You provide the protagonism. The GM provides the antagonism.

The initial motivation I provide can be as simple as wanting to get out and see the world, put my [class skills] to use, and maybe make a g.p. or two in the process. After that it might not be until an adventure or two down the road when I see some slave getting beaten in a plaza that I decide my goal will be to abolish slavery in this realm...and five adventures later I might realize (rightly or wrongly) that my stated goal, while noble, is also utterly unachievable; and change to some other goal based on things that have come up in the meantime.

Assuming, of course, that character is even still alive...no sure thing when it has me for a player.

 

[Maxperson]

The second answer is a social one. As a player you are expected to contribute to the game by playing a character with Beliefs they are willing to fight for. You wouldn't create a D&D character who wanted to traipse about town all session instead of going where the monsters live to steal their stuff. It's the same deal.

Sure you would. I've both played in and run D&D games that were primarily social, taking place almost entirely within a city or cities.

 

[pemerton]

in your system can a PC ultimately outright fail at its intended goal, and if so, what happens? Example: if my goal is to be king, and we get to some climactic point that determines whether I get the throne or not, and I somehow blow it either by bad dice luck or follish actions - what then?

That depends entirely on the context of actual play.

When the feather turned out to be cursed, and hence not so useful for confronting the balrog-possessed brother, the game proceeded. When the balrog-possessed brother was decapitated in front of the mage PC - hence putting an end to his attempts to redeem his brother - the game proceeded. The player wrote new Beliefs for his PC - at the moment, they are:

Joachim's blood will help make the Rod of the Blue Wizard.

I will learn more of the coming apocalypse (hell gates, demonic possession, …), so I will help Halika summon Joachim's spirit for revelation of Lungorthin's plans.

I am a Servant of the Secret Fire and will oppose Lungorthin's orcish legions, so I will read Joachim's secret paper to uncover his Storm of Lightning spell.​

Lungorthin is the balrog. Halika was a PC, but - as that player often does not make it to sessions - is played more often now as a NPC.

If there is nothing left for the character to do in dramatic terms - either success or failure is total - then the campaign is over. (As Eero Tuovinen describes in his account of the "standard narrativistic model".)

It's fairly modest agency - it doesn't actually establish any shared fiction, it just vetoes one of the GM's offerings.

And in so doing moves toward establishing what fiction is going to be shared: we're not going to be sharing any fiction about taking down the Baron, as that fiction isn't of interest.

This is the basis for my comparison to "choose your own adventure" (which [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] objects to).

Establishing what to do from a list of options provided by the GM is modest agency.

Hence when you say that there is more agency in (i) having the GM say "You're in town, what do you do?" then starting things at the situation the player has signalled as salient, I can only assume that you mean: there is more agency in choosing from the GM's list of possible situations, and in gettting the GM to tell you more about the world s/he has made up, than there is in actually providing the content of a situation. I don't know what conception of agency you are working with here.

 

[pemerton]

It's amusing that you cut out the bits of my post where I specifically point out those mechanics that are after the fact resource expenditures to reduce consequences and then present these exact things as if it refutes my argument. I'm specifically taking about action declaration to reduce or mitigate risk which is why I called out the post-hoc mechanics.

I don't really know what you mean by this. I know that there are games where players can spend resources to mitigate conseequences - eg 4e has a version of these in some combat-relevant interrupts; and at our table we allow action point-fuelled retries or interrupt-speed augments in skill challenge resolution. But I didn't refer to any such system above.

Blind declarations in Fight! are not "after the fact resource expenditures to reduce consequnces". Nor are any of the action declarations I described in relation to Cortex+.

The HeroWars and HeroQuest revised systems I described are not "after the fact" mitigations - they are bidding (ie blind declarations).

"Giving" in Dogs in the Vineyard is not blind - and it eliminates fallout but doesn't stop the fictional consequences at all - it's a trade off of yielding the fiction to preserve the character.

So as I said, I don't really know what you're talking about here.

I'm aware BW uses a more complicated combat mechanic, and one that is especially brutal and difficult to use. This isn't common in player-facing games, though, so it's not really a good example of the nature of the genre, just of itself. That said, the combat mechanics of BW are really designed to make fighting a bad choice

<snip>

even a simple combat has a reasonable chance of leaving you dead

Melee in BW is not a bad choice. Nor a good choice. It's a choice.

It's not true that "even a simple combat in BW has a reasonable chance of leaving you dead". Most PCs will have a Mortal Wound around 9 to 11. This will require a Superb hit, or a Mark with a decent weapon. A Superb hit requires 5 successes. A Mark requires 3 successes, and it's not like you won't notice the opponent is wielding a dangerous weapon.

The system is no more brutal than (say) RQ, RM or low level D&D. In fact it's lest brutal than RQ, RM or 1st level classic D&D.

My BW PC has the following four Beliefs and three Instincts:

The Lord of Battle will lead me to glory.

I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory.

Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more!

Aramina will need my protection.

When entering battle, always speak a prayer to the Lord of Battle.

If an innocent is threatened, interpose myself.

When camping, always ensure that the campfire is burning.​

So it's not a bad choice for me to fight to protect Aramina, to purue glory, or to interpose myself - even violently - to protect innocents.