What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

So how about this - can you start an example of how you'd start a scenario, so I (and maybe others) can respond as a character and see how this really plays out? Maybe a new thread? I participated in a thread like this for Dungeon World and it showed my how, although the mechanics were different, and how the DM adjudicated things differently, we could end up with the same results. It highlighted a few things I liked (most of which I was already doing, although didn't always recognize), and some that I didn't like in that game's design. It's not just to see how it plays out, but after each step explain to us what you're doing and how.

Here's an example: Lets set the parameters. This is an FRPG (we can call it 'D&D' notionally though I am not really fixed on mechanics here, lets assume it has a task resolution system of some kind). Its Story Now and No Myth, so the game will be initiated by the players creating backstory for their characters. Lets say that backstory and play will tell us about tone and sub-genre. We'll just imagine one player for simplicity.

The player decides that his goal is to "Find the undead monster which took his sister, and lay her soul to rest!" (yes, I invented that earlier, but it works). So he creates a backstory for his character, from a small town in a backwater area of mountains and forests, filled with superstition and dread of the undead. He lives in house in a small town, and last fall his sister met a mysterious stranger who stayed with the local landlord, who is the family patron. Several people died mysteriously and the sister vanished in the night along with the stranger. The PC made a vow to recover/avenge/lay her to rest, took vows as a priest of the Sun Goddess, and now searches for clues.

The GM frames a scene, the character is told he must go out to a remote hamlet and perform a burial ritual for several people who died mysteriously. The first scene opens with the character riding into the hamlet where he immediately runs into an old man who waves him down, frightening his horse. He stops and the man grabs his stirrup, yells at him to guard his soul and thrusts a garland of garlic bulbs into his hands. The man then runs off. (the player makes an attempt to stop him, but fails).

The GM asks what the character intends to do next, ride on to the house where the dead people are reported to be, check in the tavern by the side of the road nearby to learn more about the situation, or perhaps investigate the situation in some other way. The player states he's riding on to his destination, as that is in keeping with the character's obligation as a priest, and certainly seems to directly act on his motivations.

Thus the next scene is framed in an old farmhouse half a mile up the road. As the character rides up he notes that a couple of horses are already tied up in the yard, and he can see some light coming from the house windows as it is now evening. He ties up his horse and walks in...

Things can continue from here in the vein of the PC performing rituals and gathering information which may lead him to his ultimate goal. Assuming this is a fairly long-term game, then clearly his progress will be slow and measured. He may learn something tonight. He may even learn key things, or it may take him a long time to learn much of anything, and in the meantime he deals with his duties and encounters various signs of the vampire menace.

There are many possible ways the story can go, and the player will generally indicate which one is his preference. If he spends his time investigating and honing his investigating skills, then it will be a game of learning secrets and tracking down hidden foes. If he forges alliances with higher powers and becomes a magically endowed spiritual warrior, then maybe it will become a game of battling horrors face-to-face on a regular basis, fighting off growing hordes of undead or something like that. It could go a lot of ways and the player will choose based on what elements he adds to his character, which things he chooses to do, where he goes, whom he talks to, etc.

All of this is why I liked 4e particularly for this kind of play, as the player has total control of character build! He can signal what he wants with a theme, a PP, an ED, power choices, feat choices, etc. as well as overt actions.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Here's an example: Lets set the parameters. This is an FRPG (we can call it 'D&D' notionally though I am not really fixed on mechanics here, lets assume it has a task resolution system of some kind). Its Story Now and No Myth, so the game will be initiated by the players creating backstory for their characters. Lets say that backstory and play will tell us about tone and sub-genre. We'll just imagine one player for simplicity.

The player decides that his goal is to "Find the undead monster which took his sister, and lay her soul to rest!" (yes, I invented that earlier, but it works). So he creates a backstory for his character, from a small town in a backwater area of mountains and forests, filled with superstition and dread of the undead. He lives in house in a small town, and last fall his sister met a mysterious stranger who stayed with the local landlord, who is the family patron. Several people died mysteriously and the sister vanished in the night along with the stranger. The PC made a vow to recover/avenge/lay her to rest, took vows as a priest of the Sun Goddess, and now searches for clues.

The GM frames a scene, the character is told he must go out to a remote hamlet and perform a burial ritual for several people who died mysteriously. The first scene opens with the character riding into the hamlet where he immediately runs into an old man who waves him down, frightening his horse. He stops and the man grabs his stirrup, yells at him to guard his soul and thrusts a garland of garlic bulbs into his hands. The man then runs off. (the player makes an attempt to stop him, but fails).

The GM asks what the character intends to do next, ride on to the house where the dead people are reported to be, check in the tavern by the side of the road nearby to learn more about the situation, or perhaps investigate the situation in some other way. The player states he's riding on to his destination, as that is in keeping with the character's obligation as a priest, and certainly seems to directly act on his motivations.

Thus the next scene is framed in an old farmhouse half a mile up the road. As the character rides up he notes that a couple of horses are already tied up in the yard, and he can see some light coming from the house windows as it is now evening. He ties up his horse and walks in...

Things can continue from here in the vein of the PC performing rituals and gathering information which may lead him to his ultimate goal. Assuming this is a fairly long-term game, then clearly his progress will be slow and measured. He may learn something tonight. He may even learn key things, or it may take him a long time to learn much of anything, and in the meantime he deals with his duties and encounters various signs of the vampire menace.

There are many possible ways the story can go, and the player will generally indicate which one is his preference. If he spends his time investigating and honing his investigating skills, then it will be a game of learning secrets and tracking down hidden foes. If he forges alliances with higher powers and becomes a magically endowed spiritual warrior, then maybe it will become a game of battling horrors face-to-face on a regular basis, fighting off growing hordes of undead or something like that. It could go a lot of ways and the player will choose based on what elements he adds to his character, which things he chooses to do, where he goes, whom he talks to, etc.

All of this is why I liked 4e particularly for this kind of play, as the player has total control of character build! He can signal what he wants with a theme, a PP, an ED, power choices, feat choices, etc. as well as overt actions.

First, does "no myth" mean there is no established setting, and it's invented by the players and/or GM as the game progresses?

So, when I read this example I'm just reading a railroad, the only real difference from a traditional railroad is that in theory the "plot" came from the character. But I don't think that's a fair assessment either, it's just the way it reads.

Examples: How far away is the old man? Have I seen him before? I might not want to go see him. Why do I take the garlic bulbs? What if I don't want to? I'm on horseback and he's on foot, why can't I catch him?

Do I have to go with a choice the GM gives (house, tavern)? You say "investigate in some other way." Do I have any restrictions?

Did I pass by anything on the way to the house? Were there other houses, people, businesses, etc.?

These might have come out in an actual game, but I can't tell.

From this description, along with many others, it tends to lead me back to the same thought, and perhaps this is where we differ. As a player I'm interested in the experience. That is, when I go home I want to think back and remember the stuff that happened. I like to feel like I'm in control of my character. That I thought like them, made decisions like them, and took actions as them. I (and the other PCs) are in control of what we do, where we go, etc. within the setting that's presented by the DM. I really don't care how they do that. Published adventure, pre-authored notes, improvised, random determination, fudging rolls, whatever. It literally makes no difference to me. I don't even care if they cleverly manipulated us. If the story of the characters is interesting and we felt like we were acting as our characters, then we're happy.

I get the sense that you, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and many others feel the opposite. That the how the GM does all this matters as much, if not more, as the results themselves. That if the GM somehow made a decision that actually turns your "control" into an illusion, that it ruins your experience. I think that's reasonable, but I really don't get it. Why would that be important? The only way that comes to mind is that people treat it as a game. That is, that the game itself is what's important, and it's "played" like any other game. And to me, the game just exists to help us figure out what happens within our game. That is, the rules are guidelines, and can be adjusted as needed to facilitate whatever the story is we're writing.

Ironically, I also love game design. I think that a well written rule set does exactly that, without the need for going outside the rules very often. While I don't inherently oppose fudging, illusionism, etc. I also think that it's almost never needed anymore because the rules are so well designed. And we've tweaked many of them for our home campaign too.

Anyway, instead of writing out what would happen, I want to collaborate on what does happen. Frame the initial scene for me (perhaps something different than this one), and I'll provide my input on what my PC does and we can see where it leads.

You've given my my starting point (although I understand I would have come up with this on my own):

The player decides that his goal is to "Find the undead monster which took his sister, and lay her soul to rest!" (yes, I invented that earlier, but it works). So he creates a backstory for his character, from a small town in a backwater area of mountains and forests, filled with superstition and dread of the undead. He lives in house in a small town, and last fall his sister met a mysterious stranger who stayed with the local landlord, who is the family patron. Several people died mysteriously and the sister vanished in the night along with the stranger. The PC made a vow to recover/avenge/lay her to rest, took vows as a priest of the Sun Goddess, and now searches for clues.

If I could, I'd rather skip the taking vows as a priest, just to avoid magic and other magic special abilities. So I'd prefer to be a rogue, and perhaps the "less favored" sibling to my parents. Not that they don't love me, but that I'm a bit of a disappointment in my level of success in the world. I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but have a tendency to find a way to get out of the problems that creates for me. I've grown up on the family farm, primarily growing barley, but I'm good at managing to do less work than the others. When I do work, I tend to be "lazy" in the sense that I'll struggle to do something in one trip because it's faster, rather than to do it more easily in two trips. I'm happy to take on any work that clearly has a benefit for me.

I prefer to be known as Slant, my sister was Estra. I'm not sure I make the connection between "find the undead monster" and "my sister vanished into the night along with the stranger." What evidence is there that she's dead, much less by an undead monster? Would there be any reason to suspect the stranger to be an undead monster?

I'll go with missing, but with recent events in town several people have gone missing recently, and their bodies later found emaciated, their skin leathery and stretched across their bones, as if mummified. My parents are grieving, and feel it's just a matter of time before her body is found, but are too fearful of the old spirits and the sanctity of the dead to question this as being anything but the will of the gods.

I don't believe my sister is dead, at least not yet, so my goal is to "find her before she dies a horrible death, or find her killer if she is." I suspect that I would have heard about a stranger if one had been present around the time of the other disappearances or deaths. So I probably wouldn't consider him a prime suspect unless there's some evidence to the contrary. I'm also assuming that she has been gone for more than one day, in that I might not have considered that there was any issue that she was gone in the morning (she tended to get up earlier than me), until my parents asked about her, in which case I would have assumed she went someplace. But if she hadn't returned by that evening we'd start asking around, and after she was gone for maybe two or three days, that we'd start to get very worried. Perhaps by day 5, my parents have decided that there is no hope, and that's the point I'm ready to go find her. Other bodies were found perhaps 10 days after their disappearance, although they were often found in relatively remote locations, so they might have been present for a few days. So I'll say the shortest period between disappearance and discovery of the body is 9 days.

I have a few questions. From what I understand, I, as the player, established that the mysterious stranger stayed with the landlord and our patron. What can the landlord tell me about the mysterious stranger? Who determines that, me or the GM? How did the people die, and when the sister "vanished into the night with the stranger" was it something seen, or that when I woke up one day I found my sister was gone, without any obvious trace, and the stranger also happened to be gone? Again, who determines the details?

Let me know if you can clarify those, and if we're ready, what's my opening scene?

.

 

[Maxperson]

And why would this be? Is it because that's the only time when the players actually have some agency over the fiction!? When there are ZERO stakes so the GM is not driving things in terms of his or her view of the agenda? Now the dwarf's player gets to 'drink wine'. Is the reluctance of players to have deeper agendas (I mean, this one is pretty trivial, you can accomplish it in real life, you don't need to RP it!) simply because they know better than to have significant ones that get attention and that they are allowed to really drive forward?

It seems to me that you get what you expect! GMs are largely creating the conditions under which this sort of observation might hold. IME players start out wanting much more. They either stop playing, perhaps becoming GMs or going on to other things, or else they learn to settle. That is unless they have the good fortune to find a [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] to be their GM!

Now, I don't think that ALL players would rather have some significant agenda that is served by the game all the time, but I think very many more of them really actually do harbor these desires than you give credit for. Their hopes were often buried in intersections and such long ago!

In my games there may well be times when the PCs are said to recreate and spend time hanging out in a tavern, or whatever. It may represent an interlude or a challenge scene where information is gathered, or etc. If the players explain that their characters indulge in various side interests at these times, that's cool, but the dwarf warrior who is in search of his lost father isn't focused on finding another ale keg, even if he is a fine judge of its quality! At least not in any greater sense. It certainly isn't an 'agenda'. (I could imagine this in a non-serious type of game, and we have had some of those).

It was a simple agenda, because that's all it needed to be for my example. For a more significant agenda, see my example of going north to become king of he northern barbarians.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

First, does "no myth" mean there is no established setting, and it's invented by the players and/or GM as the game progresses?

No Myth is a general term for games where setting is not established in any fixed way, yes. I mean, part of the basic premise of the game may dictate certain 'givens', if the game were a 'modern urban fantasy detective' genre concept, then presumably it would involve some more-or-less-fantastic version of some real-world metropolis, with all the potential detail that might bring with it. However, it wouldn't be presupposed what sorts of fantastic beings existed in this world or how they were organized, if they were threats exactly, who the characters were, etc. That would all largely be determined based on player inputs via backstory, expressed interests, build choices, and the actions they choose to take, particularly in early establishing scenes.

So, when I read this example I'm just reading a railroad, the only real difference from a traditional railroad is that in theory the "plot" came from the character. But I don't think that's a fair assessment either, it's just the way it reads.

I'm not sure I understand how anything here would be a 'railroad'. First the player expressed a belief/goal for his character. This goal, plus additional backstory, established his location, profession, a dramatic need, and what the desired focus (undead monsters or something similar) would be. NONE of this came from the GM, and in fact a GM is really only mentioned at paragraph 3, where he frames a scene.

Examples: How far away is the old man? Have I seen him before? I might not want to go see him. Why do I take the garlic bulbs? What if I don't want to? I'm on horseback and he's on foot, why can't I catch him?

I see no reason why the player cannot engage with these questions, or take these actions. It wasn't intended that the player had no choices here. I indicated this with "the player makes an attempt to stop him, but fails" to show where a check was attempted and as a result the character didn't get to interact further with this old man character. The player could certainly state that he gets rid of the garlic at this point if he wants. Potentially other checks could have been involved as well, maybe for surprise, for reaction if the player wanted the character to call after the old man and beg him to come back perhaps, etc.

The point is, this is a pretty normal sort of encounter in a 'social exploration' mode of play. It could as easily happen in your game.

Do I have to go with a choice the GM gives (house, tavern)? You say "investigate in some other way." Do I have any restrictions?

No, I'm not restricting the character. Remember, the player is signifying interest and guiding play by his choices, so if he suddenly decided to tromp off into the woods to find out what was on the other side, then that would be weird and inconsistent with his previously stated character development. I guess it could lead to an entirely different story about druids or something, maybe undead would get factored back in later? I don't know! Most players are not that 'flighty'.

Still, I think if the player has some other idea or concept about how to address his character's needs, then he could express it here. He could simply refuse to accept the disappearance of the old man, go find some dogs and track the sucker down come hell or high water. I wouldn't find that to be untoward, just unexpected! I'm betting there's someone in the village with a decent hound dog, and that garlic has the guy's scent on it...

Did I pass by anything on the way to the house? Were there other houses, people, businesses, etc.?

OK, again, a fairly reasonable question, and the GM is going to be able to provide some sort of answer. I think my basic answer would maybe be "its getting dark and you see a few lights here and there, as if people are about their evening activities. As you proceed further on there are fewer houses."

These might have come out in an actual game, but I can't tell.

Yeah, if you were a player and you asked any of them I would not find it unusual or problematic.

From this description, along with many others, it tends to lead me back to the same thought, and perhaps this is where we differ. As a player I'm interested in the experience. That is, when I go home I want to think back and remember the stuff that happened. I like to feel like I'm in control of my character. That I thought like them, made decisions like them, and took actions as them. I (and the other PCs) are in control of what we do, where we go, etc. within the setting that's presented by the DM. I really don't care how they do that. Published adventure, pre-authored notes, improvised, random determination, fudging rolls, whatever. It literally makes no difference to me. I don't even care if they cleverly manipulated us. If the story of the characters is interesting and we felt like we were acting as our characters, then we're happy.

I get the sense that you, @pemerton and many others feel the opposite. That the how the GM does all this matters as much, if not more, as the results themselves. That if the GM somehow made a decision that actually turns your "control" into an illusion, that it ruins your experience. I think that's reasonable, but I really don't get it. Why would that be important? The only way that comes to mind is that people treat it as a game. That is, that the game itself is what's important, and it's "played" like any other game. And to me, the game just exists to help us figure out what happens within our game. That is, the rules are guidelines, and can be adjusted as needed to facilitate whatever the story is we're writing.

I think that I only care about the process in terms of what roles the different persons playing the game take and how they experience play. I don't, for instance, think its 'bad' just because a GM fudged a roll in a DM-centered type of game in order to keep it on track. If the game worked and was fun and the experience was what I wanted then I have nothing to complain about.

I also think you worry too much about how much the player is in control of the character in Story Now. Players play their characters, they're in charge of them. Yes, the game is not some kind of strict stream-of-consciousness thing where you never skip anything, but no game REALLY is that anyway. Meaningful, that is addressing some character need/agenda/core issue of play, decisions are always made by players, not forced on them by the GM. Other aspects may depend on the system and its focus and intent. For example you might have a check to see if you brought enough torches, or you might have the player decide an exact torch number and track them all.

Ironically, I also love game design. I think that a well written rule set does exactly that, without the need for going outside the rules very often. While I don't inherently oppose fudging, illusionism, etc. I also think that it's almost never needed anymore because the rules are so well designed. And we've tweaked many of them for our home campaign too.

Well, its a question IMHO of agenda of the GM. If he's got a fixed idea of where things go, he may NEED to resort to these things, but maybe not. Certainly there are games which eliminate that issue, and don't hand control to players either, but for example 5e is NOT one of them! Illusionism and force are issues in 5e just like in 2e!

Anyway, instead of writing out what would happen, I want to collaborate on what does happen. Frame the initial scene for me (perhaps something different than this one), and I'll provide my input on what my PC does and we can see where it leads.

You've given my my starting point (although I understand I would have come up with this on my own):

The player decides that his goal is to "Find the undead monster which took his sister, and lay her soul to rest!" (yes, I invented that earlier, but it works). So he creates a backstory for his character, from a small town in a backwater area of mountains and forests, filled with superstition and dread of the undead. He lives in house in a small town, and last fall his sister met a mysterious stranger who stayed with the local landlord, who is the family patron. Several people died mysteriously and the sister vanished in the night along with the stranger. The PC made a vow to recover/avenge/lay her to rest, took vows as a priest of the Sun Goddess, and now searches for clues.

If I could, I'd rather skip the taking vows as a priest, just to avoid magic and other magic special abilities. So I'd prefer to be a rogue, and perhaps the "less favored" sibling to my parents. Not that they don't love me, but that I'm a bit of a disappointment in my level of success in the world. I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but have a tendency to find a way to get out of the problems that creates for me. I've grown up on the family farm, primarily growing barley, but I'm good at managing to do less work than the others. When I do work, I tend to be "lazy" in the sense that I'll struggle to do something in one trip because it's faster, rather than to do it more easily in two trips. I'm happy to take on any work that clearly has a benefit for me.

I prefer to be known as Slant, my sister was Estra. I'm not sure I make the connection between "find the undead monster" and "my sister vanished into the night along with the stranger." What evidence is there that she's dead, much less by an undead monster? Would there be any reason to suspect the stranger to be an undead monster?

I'll go with missing, but with recent events in town several people have gone missing recently, and their bodies later found emaciated, their skin leathery and stretched across their bones, as if mummified. My parents are grieving, and feel it's just a matter of time before her body is found, but are too fearful of the old spirits and the sanctity of the dead to question this as being anything but the will of the gods.

I don't believe my sister is dead, at least not yet, so my goal is to "find her before she dies a horrible death, or find her killer if she is." I suspect that I would have heard about a stranger if one had been present around the time of the other disappearances or deaths. So I probably wouldn't consider him a prime suspect unless there's some evidence to the contrary. I'm also assuming that she has been gone for more than one day, in that I might not have considered that there was any issue that she was gone in the morning (she tended to get up earlier than me), until my parents asked about her, in which case I would have assumed she went someplace. But if she hadn't returned by that evening we'd start asking around, and after she was gone for maybe two or three days, that we'd start to get very worried. Perhaps by day 5, my parents have decided that there is no hope, and that's the point I'm ready to go find her. Other bodies were found perhaps 10 days after their disappearance, although they were often found in relatively remote locations, so they might have been present for a few days. So I'll say the shortest period between disappearance and discovery of the body is 9 days.

I have a few questions. From what I understand, I, as the player, established that the mysterious stranger stayed with the landlord and our patron. What can the landlord tell me about the mysterious stranger? Who determines that, me or the GM? How did the people die, and when the sister "vanished into the night with the stranger" was it something seen, or that when I woke up one day I found my sister was gone, without any obvious trace, and the stranger also happened to be gone? Again, who determines the details?

Let me know if you can clarify those, and if we're ready, what's my opening scene?

.

OK, I have to break off now, and we can maybe create a thread for that tomorrow? I think it could be fun!

 

[Lanefan]

I would analyze B2 as mostly inappropriate for Story Now for several critical reasons:

1) The entire adventure at the Caves of Chaos, while not scripted in the sense that it must be undertaken in a strictly linear fashion, is a FIXED set of scenes. If these scenes address character needs and player agenda it by pure chance.

Or it's tangential, or is merely building up to something later.

OK, the premise is the keep on the edge of civilization. What does this say about civilization? What does it say about wilderness? About their relationship, and that of people, PCs particularly, to either of those things?

This early in the campaign, how much of this really matters? Maybe after this adventure, once the PCs start exploring more widely, answers to these questions may present themselves and-or become relevant; but in the here-and-now of the Keep and the Caves, who cares?

Establishment of a Fighter, wizard, cleric, and thief: These are generic characters built to classes which are basic archetypes. What is unique about these guys and what compels them? B/X and 1e both ASSUME fighters want to build keeps, wizards want/need components etc, rogues want riches, and clerics want to build temples. What is actually pushing these guys? Does the fighter wish to establish a keep because his family honor is at stake after they lost their holding somewhere else? Is the wizard attempting to achieve some specific magical effect? Why? What is the basis of the cleric's friendship with the fighter? Are they related, old friends, lovers?! What deity does this cleric even serve? Why is the rogue out here on the edge of civilization instead of cutting fat purses in some market town? How did he become friends with a fighter?

Where to start?

Fighters building keeps and clerics building temples are long-term goals that - in 1e - carry at least one specific mechanical requirement: that the PC be of at least a certain level. MUs needing components and thieves seeking riches are both kind of ongoing goals that don't really have a defined point at which the goal can be declared as achieved. Thieves starting guilds and MUs building their own labs are those classes' long term goals analagous to the fighter and her keep.

And the Caves can directly help in achieving all of these. There's treasure in them thar caves, so the immediate goals of the thief (riches) and MU (components scavenged in the field and-or bought with said riches) are satisfied, while still remaining as onging goals as you can never have enough. And the Caves provide all four classes with a boost toward achievement of their name-level goals (the keep, etc.) by being a fine source of experience points which build (a bit) toward the level required by the stated goal. Why they each have their own particular goal is, for purposes of play, mostly irrelevant - particularly at such a low level when achievement of the goal is so far away the Hubble couldn't find it.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

And why would this be? Is it because that's the only time when the players actually have some agency over the fiction!? When there are ZERO stakes so the GM is not driving things in terms of his or her view of the agenda? Now the dwarf's player gets to 'drink wine'. Is the reluctance of players to have deeper agendas (I mean, this one is pretty trivial, you can accomplish it in real life, you don't need to RP it!) simply because they know better than to have significant ones that get attention and that they are allowed to really drive forward?

There's a number of possible reasons for a "reluctance to have deeper agendas", all of which in the end boil down to the player doesn't want one.

It seems to me that you get what you expect! GMs are largely creating the conditions under which this sort of observation might hold. IME players start out wanting much more. They either stop playing, perhaps becoming GMs or going on to other things, or else they learn to settle. That is unless they have the good fortune to find a [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] to be their GM!

Now, I don't think that ALL players would rather have some significant agenda that is served by the game all the time, but I think very many more of them really actually do harbor these desires than you give credit for. Their hopes were often buried in intersections and such long ago!

I've had a number of players over the years get their first introduction to RPGing through my games and (admittedly anecdotally) I would disagree with this statement.

And, if I'm "a player who has a significant agenda that is to be served by the game all the time" that by extension means I don't really want any other players in the game! It's extremely unlikely our different agendas are going to perfectly line up, and any time spent serving one of their different agendas isn't spent serving mine. This is a very selfish and entitled stance, and one I want no part of.

In my games there may well be times when the PCs are said to recreate and spend time hanging out in a tavern, or whatever. It may represent an interlude or a challenge scene where information is gathered, or etc. If the players explain that their characters indulge in various side interests at these times, that's cool, but the dwarf warrior who is in search of his lost father isn't focused on finding another ale keg, even if he is a fine judge of its quality! At least not in any greater sense. It certainly isn't an 'agenda'. (I could imagine this in a non-serious type of game, and we have had some of those).

A dwarf in search of his lost father...a brother trying to save his brother from balrog possession...an lovelorn elf trying to find her true path in the world - navel-gazing angst and personal drama ****. If this was all the game had to offer you'd hear my screams slowly getting fainter as I ran away as fast as I could! I'm looking for entertainment, dammit; and while tragedy and drama certainly help with this, in the end it still mostly comes from comedy and action.

Lan-"if your character doesn't somehow make the players at the table laugh at least once a session, you really are doing it wrong"-efan

 

[pemerton]

If, for example, a player set out pacifism between races as a goal, a DM might introduce the Caves as a shining example of a situation where multiple races of sentient creatures live more or less peacefully in the same small valley...and theat player's/PC's challenge would then become one of stopping the party from killing everything in there.

Isn't the whole premise that these orcs etc are attacking the local humans?

 

[pemerton]

What we don't see in this example is all the lead-up showing how the rogue got to this point. The agenda and reasons for being here would very likely have long since been established. What the rogue thinks and feels at that particular moment would of course be up to the player to narrate on the fly, should she so desire; as would the decision of what if anything to sacrifice or trade off in order to achieve her immediate goal of stealthily getting into the castle.

My point is that [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] doesn't tell us anything about (for instance) any such sacrifice being required. Or anything else that brings character personality or agenda to the fore. The only choice the player of the rogue had to make was do I declare a search, or do I not bother? Nothing was at stake.

it's not very often that much characterization comes out of what are in effect largely mechanical action declarations. "This is a logical place for a secret door so I'll search for one" tells us maybe a bit about the character, but mostly that's just a simple Search declaration - not much in it; and it's unfair to point at this as a reason for any lack of characterization or personality.

What it tells me is that this is not a game in which advocacy, in Eero Tuovinen's sense, is important.

And at least in my games most of what we learn about characters comes out of action declarations.

I've posted many actual play links in this thread, and described a number as well. Here are just a handful:

* A Traveller PC asks the bishop whether mysterious mental abilities are part of his religious practice. We see how keen the PC is to find someone to teach her psionics.

* As the mage Joachim is decapitated in front of him, a Burning Wheel PC looks around the room to see if there is a vessel to catch the blood. We see that the PC is committed to ensuring that his dark master gets the blood of this mage so it can be offered to the spirits of the earth and darkness.

* The first thing the mage Jobe does when he returns to his now-ruined tower, after 14 years away, is search for the nickel-silver mace he had left behind when the orcs attacked. We see how important this mace (and, more generally, the prospect of enchanting items) is to this PC.

* The skinchanger scout climbs up the pallisade of the giant steading, looks around and sees a barn, and then takes a giant ox from it to try and trick the giants by offering to sell their own cattle back to them. From this we see that the PC is a trickster.

* War Machine is flying above Washington, DC, with his "date" in his arms. He knows that she has some sort of interest in the Stark tech Multi-Person Orbit and Reentry Vehicle on display at the Smithsonian, and would probably like him to help her steal it. When he receives an alert that intruders are in the museum, he leaves the woman hanging from the top of the Washington monument. We learn from that where his loyalties lie; and also that he is not very ruthless.

* The paladin of the Raven Queen persuades his fellow PCs to pacify rather than kill a wild cave bear that they encounter in a ruined temple. The PCs calm the bear, and the player of the paladin says "I feel really good about not having killed that bear." We learn that the PCs, led by this PC in particular, are not (always) ruthless killers.

* The invoker/wizard decides to let the Raven Queen take the souls that have been freed from the Soul Abattoir, even though he knows that Vecna wants them, and - given that the Eye of Vecna is implanted in the character's imp familiar - may take revenge for the decision. We learn that this PC is loyal to the Raven Queen and is prepared to thwart Vecna (whom he nevertheless, in some sense, worships). (We also see, once again, how liable Vecna is to betrayal! It must be his fate.)

* The chaos sorcerer decides to seal the Abyss, by rendering one of his zones into a permanent and impenetrable zone of entropy, even though this means he will never recharge that daily power. We learn that this PC is prepared to sacrifice his magical power in order to sever the connection between the Abyss and the rest of the cosmos.​

If action declarations aren't telling you anything about the PCs, that's a pretty clear sign that you're not playing a game in the "standard narrativistic model".

On a broader scale, characterization and personality mostly tends to develop during what we might consider as "downtime": while sitting around the campfire getting to know the other PCs, or via things done while in town between adventures. Maxperson's wine-guzzling Dwarf is a fine example - the whole wine business is rarely if ever going to come up while in the field, but it's known to be an ongoing part of the Dwarf's character.

As with Maxperson's example, this tells me something about the dynamics of your games: the GM is the one who establishes the stakes of situations, with the players having little or no significant input. And there is little or no "advocacy" in Eero Tuovinen's sense.

The following passage from Christopher Kubasik's "Interactive Tookit" seems relevant to this:

Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.

Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By “seeing” how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.

But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.

Character is action. That’s a rule of thumb for plays and movies, and is valid as well for roleplaying games and story entertainments. This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character’s actions.

But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.​

This is an early statement (1995, I think) of the ideas that Eero Tuovinen is talking about when he refers to advocacy and "the standard narrativistic model".

In most RPGs combat mechanics are more or less vastly different from exploration mechanics and-or social mechanics; and any attempt to unify the three things into one overarching set of mechanics is an absolute mistake, and doomed to failure.

This was already addressed by [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]. Here are some RPGs I'm familiar with where the gulf you assert is absent: Burning Wheel, Cortex+ Heroic, HeroWars/Quest, Dogs in the Vineyard, The Dying Earth. Here are some where the basic mechanic is the same, although there are extra bells and whistles for combat: Rolemaster, Classic Traveller, Runequest, 4e.

If by "most RPGs" you mean the versions of D&D that Lanefan is familiar with, well OK, but that's an idiosyncratic definition of "most".

 

[Lanefan]

So this is the sort of scene that dominated the couple of times I played a Story Now game. The next scene is back at the command center, centering on a sub-plot. The problem that I had with the scene in the show (not my favorite, it has it's moments though and I like some of the characters), and scenes like this is that it feels so contrived.

It's relatively obvious as they frame a scene what's going on - oh, this will be a gunfight scene. The meta aspect of a TV show makes this more obvious since we're either just before or just after the last commercial break. But the scene unfolds in a predictable manner - they can't catch the quarry at this point, so a "dramatic" gunfight ensues, the quarry makes an escape, and now that the drama of the scene has occurred, it's quickly wrapped up.

While I get that it's one way to tell a story, we prefer to let things unfold at a slower pace. We like things to focus more on the characters themselves, getting into their heads, and allowing them to experience the world as if it's a real world, and not a dramatic TV show.

There's an element involved here that's too important to ignore: time.

A dramatic TV show only has a certain amount of running time in which to tell its story, and thus is oftentimes forced to skip from scene to scene just to get the story told within the alloted time.

A typical home-played RPG has no such resctriction. Telling the story has no real-world deadline behind it; and a single session is equivalent to picking up a book at whatever page you put it down, reading a few pages, then putting it down again. There's nothing forcing a single session to follow a dramatic arc (intro-tension-buildup-climax-denouement). In fact, probably the only thing that could force an RPG to skip from scene to scene like a TV show is a very limited attention span by its DM and-or players.

I agree with most of the rest of what you said, except for:

The same approach is probably reflected in my musical tastes, which started with progressive bands like Yes, Genesis, along with Pink Floyd, particularly the pre-Dark Side era, and moved into more experimental and improvisational long form music, ambient, etc. (among many others). I like the dynamics, the slow builds, the meditative moments where little is happening, and that sort of thing.

What does it say then, that depending on mood I'm either a metalhead or an 80's new-waver or (more recently) a synthwave-chillwave fan; yet I also like an explorative game?

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Isn't the whole premise that these orcs etc are attacking the local humans?

In the example I gave of the player setting pacifism between races as a goal, this could easily be made to fit in: let the player find out in-character about this conflict and see if she tries to intervene or mediate and pacify both sides.