Do you prefer your character to be connected or unconnected to the adventure hook?

[Aldarc]

What they are describing as part and parcel of play is hardly so outside of the norm that it is abnormal or strange. In some cases, e.g., Blades in the Dark, it's as simple as paying the game as written. Trying to force a plot is almost impossible with some game systems due to the very nature of dice resolution.

 

[pemerton]

The goal is to learn as you stated. And I do take your testimony at face value. But can you just acknowledge that to see something in practice is much much different than reading about it. I could read all I wanted to about a baseball pitcher's unique fastball, but until I see it in action, I might still not have a full understanding. The same is true for teaching. A teacher can talk about a technique all they want. But until another teacher sees it in use, it would be hard for them to apply. The same is true for surgery. That is why they have live viewings. The same is true for boxing, that is why they have hands-on coaches. The same is true business sales, that is why they have mentors. The same is true for mechanics. That is why they have shop bosses that demonstrate what to do ten times before letting them try it on their own.
All these people are trying to learn something. They need to be shown. This truth is even more pronounced when someone is explaining a technique that falls outside of the norm.

What they are describing as part and parcel of play is hardly so outside of the norm that it is abnormal or strange. In some cases, e.g., Blades in the Dark, it's as simple as paying the game as written. Trying to force a plot is almost impossible with some game systems due to the very nature of dice resolution.

Here I'm with Aldarc.

Unlike pitching, surgery, boxing or mechanical repairs we're not trying to explain a physical process.

The comparison to sales is perhaps a bit more apt, but unlike sales we're not talking about techniques to be used in circumstances of deep conflict of interest and high stakes between parties.

We're talking about playing a game. With friends. There is a time-honoured tradition of using writing to explain game rules. and procedures and techniques It may not be perfect, but it's not useless.

Start a 5e game and tell your players to write "kickers" for their PCs, based on their backrounds, bonds, ideals and flaws. You might want to start at 2nd or 3rd level so the players are a bit more confident to write stuff that is a bit more dramatic. Then start your session. You have a MM in front of you which has stats that support some aspects of action resolution. You have a DC-by-natural-language-difficulty chart in front of you that supports other aspects of action resolution. See what happens!

Unlike surgery or repairs to a car or a boxing match, nothing more is at stake than a couple of hours of recreation time.

 

[Campbell]

Here's a pretty lengthy Let's Play of Blades in the Dark run by Jon Harper, the game's designer..


While they can absolutely be useful there are some limits to Let's Plays in terms of seeing techniques in motion. What we see coming from the GM in any roleplaying game are framing scenes (simply describing the initial state of things), descriptions of the environment, portraying NPCs,, some rules talk, and adjudicating consequences for main character actions. Likewise regardless we see action declarations, character portrayal, and some rules talk from players. What we do not see are the processes of play. This is where play techniques live and breathe.

What are the expectations for play?
When players encounter something in the fiction what is guiding their choices?
How do players and GMs prepare for play?
What principles does a GM use when exercising their judgment as to what should happen in the fiction?

Play is often instinctual and dependent on unspoken social reward systems. The experience of play is also radically different from the output of play. Just like any other creative endeavor the creation of the thing and how it was made has unique value to the creators. The hidden nature of process is a big part of why I do try to do regular check ins with the people I play with and why discipline is so crucial to me on both sides of the screen.

That Monsterhearts quote is top of mind to me whenever I play a roleplaying game (from both sides of the screen) because playing to find out what happens can be like really hard sometimes. Trying to nudge things this way or that way can be real seductive, but in doing so I feel something is lost. It's so easy to become attached to things and not really collaborate with each other.

TLDR Let's Plays are useful, but the only way to really see different techniques in motion is to try them with a real commitment to like following through and embracing the mentality behind them. I think it's a lot of fun. You might too. You might also hate it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Start a 5e game and tell your players to write "kickers" for their PCs, based on their backrounds, bonds, ideals and flaws.

It's interesting to me that players create their own kickers. That isn't what I'd have expected.

Here is an attempt to create kickers for my PC, Flaming Helen, a sorcerer.

Background: Acolyte (Joramy, goddess of fire).
Ideal: Defend civilisation from threats.
Bond: City of Greyhawk militia captain.
Flaw: Obsessed with fire.

Proposed kickers:

1) Unexplained fires are being started in the City of Greyhawk. My idea is that these are being caused by fire elementals summoned by an elementalist who wants to demonstrate the dangers of fire. (A potential arch-nemesis for Helen.)
2) A philosophical school is promoting the idea that fire was invented by human beings rather than being gifted to humanity by the goddess Joramy, as the church of Joramy claims.

 

[pemerton]

It's interesting to me that players create their own kickers. That isn't what I'd have expected.

Here is an attempt to create kickers for my PC, Flaming Helen, a sorcerer.

Background: Acolyte (Joramy, goddess of fire).
Ideal: Defend civilisation from threats.
Bond: City of Greyhawk militia captain.
Flaw: Obsessed with fire.

Proposed kickers:

1) Unexplained fires are being started in the City of Greyhawk. My idea is that these are being caused by fire elementals summoned by an elementalist who wants to demonstrate the dangers of fire. (A potential arch-nemesis for Helen.)
2) A philosophical school is promoting the idea that fire was invented by human beings rather than being gifted to humanity by the goddess Joramy, as the church of Joramy claims.

From the point of view of the "kicker" device, those are a bit too abstract.

Your (2) sounds like some backstory. Given that a kicker is an "'event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins."'. . . [It] propels the character into the game," your (1) seems like it could be tuned up a notch: Helen is responding to a night-time fire with the rest of her patrol, but it can't be extinguished. Helen sees that there is a wizard across the street, controlling a fire mephit!

In standard scene-framing play it would be mostly up to the GM to work out how (2) fits into this (maybe the wizard is an adherent of the school, who thinks the human invention took place by summoning elements?).

And of course it's up to you as the player to decide what Helen does - eg does she try and join forces with the wizard, or does she try and take control of the mephit (or kill it?) to stop the fire, or . . .?

(Apologies for taking control of your character by post - but I wanted to try and concretely illustrate the idea of a kicker.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

Thanks for that answer, it's very helpful. I hadn't realised kickers are supposed to be so immediate.

your (1) seems like it could be tuned up a notch: Helen is responding to a night-time fire with the rest of her patrol, but it can't be extinguished. Helen sees that there is a wizard across the street, controlling a fire mephit!

That sounds really good - it sets a scene, it's very dramatic, and we don't know what's going to happen.

How are the other PCs involved in kickers? Or could the players create a single kicker that affects the whole party? Or could there be both individual and group kickers?
As play progresses are players expected to create more kickers?

 

[pemerton]

As play progresses are players expected to create more kickers?

Dunno the answer to this one - I don't have a copy of Sorcerer, so my knowledge of this is via posts/essays on The Forge.

My intuitive feeling is that a new round of kickers might make sense after a period of "downtime" - ie the immediate sequence of GM-framed scenes has come to a natural pause. From my point of view, what is key to the kicker as a technique is that it puts the PC at the centre of the action as the player conceives of it. So the writing of new kickers would have to be related to the bigger issue of whose job is it, at this point in play, to be deciding what is happening?

I'm also thinking just now that there is a (loose) parallel or analogy here to the patron encounter in Classic Traveller. The Traveller player can always seek to generate a new scenario/situation by having his/her PC hang out in a likely place to try and meet a patron. The rules give the GM authority over the who and what, but not the if and when - the player has his/her PC look for a patron and the encounter dice are rolled (with Carousing-1+ giving a DM of +1 on the check). A player writing a kicker is one step further than this - not just when but key aspects of the who and what with a further dimension of in media res.

At least as I understand the technique, it's the in media res element of a kicker that allows key aspects of the narrative control to pass, fairly seamlessly, from the player to the GM.

it sets a scene, it's very dramatic, and we don't know what's going to happen.

Again as per my understanding, this is central to a kicker. And it's what allows that pivot from player to GM, ie it's what keeps us in a RPG rather than a shared storytelling game. The player frames but doesn't resolve. And doesn't even set all the stakes. Eg in the example I developed from what you set out, we don't know (i) why exactly the wizard chose this building, (ii) what exactly the mephit is doing there, (iii) whether the wizard is linked to the (2) group, or their enemy, or . . . , etc.

How are the other PCs involved in kickers? Or could the players create a single kicker that affects the whole party? Or could there be both individual and group kickers?

The one time I used kickers - in the Dark Sun session I posted a bit of upthread - each player created a kicker and I used my GM-fu to interweave them.

Given that Ron Edwards tends to push away from traditional party play, I suspect (again without actually knowing) that he might take a similar approach.

I think the tendency of D&D to rely on party play is one obstacle to establishing some of the sorts of connections between PCs and events that we're talking about in this thread, but it doesn't have to be insuperable I don't think.

And of course there's always the possibility of the players discussing among themselves as they write their kickers.

 

[Scott Christian]

Here I'm with Aldarc.

Unlike pitching, surgery, boxing or mechanical repairs we're not trying to explain a physical process.

The comparison to sales is perhaps a bit more apt, but unlike sales we're not talking about techniques to be used in circumstances of deep conflict of interest and high stakes between parties.

Wrong analogy. Ok. Teaching. There are hundreds of techniques. It helps to see them. That is why teachers do internships. Counseling. Again, hundreds of techniques. That is why counselors have an internship. Sales. We covered. Crime investigation. They have internships. Really long ones in some places. They need to see the techniques. Acting. Yup, internships, in-person classes, etc. Basically any job that relies heavily on human interaction with multiple techniques can be better accomplished via visually seeing as opposed to reading about. Imagine trying to learn an acting technique from reading versus seeing. Which method would have greater success?
I have a hard time believing, outside of arguing for arguments sake, that anyone here does not understand that.

We're talking about playing a game. With friends. There is a time-honoured tradition of using writing to explain game rules. and procedures and techniques It may not be perfect, but it's not useless.

Start a 5e game and tell your players to write "kickers" for their PCs, based on their backrounds, bonds, ideals and flaws. You might want to start at 2nd or 3rd level so the players are a bit more confident to write stuff that is a bit more dramatic. Then start your session. You have a MM in front of you which has stats that support some aspects of action resolution. You have a DC-by-natural-language-difficulty chart in front of you that supports other aspects of action resolution. See what happens!

Unlike surgery or repairs to a car or a boxing match, nothing more is at stake than a couple of hours of recreation time.

You are spot on. It is a game. Stakes are low. And, (sorry to everyone if I sound like a broken record), I have DM'ed games that start like this. I have been a player in games that start like this. They can be a lot of fun. My experience from both, me behind the screen and others behind the screen, is that things become pre-plotted. Exactly like I described earlier. When they don't become pre-plotted, they switch to mere random encounters that may or may not be tied together with a loose theme that may or may not have character arcs and a plot. Again, my experience.
I have taken at face value that others have been able to not have one of these two things happen. I have accepted that. But, visual evidence for a D&D 5e game, where this happens I have never seen. Not at my tables for the past 30 years. Not at any of the dozens of conventions I've played at. And not in any video online that I have watched.
I have stated many times other game mechanics may lend themselves to this, and they probably do it well. But I am looking for what I asked, not something else. I want to see it to learn; to bring back to my tables. I am not trying to argue. I am merely asking for tutelage. But, no one can seem to provide it. Instead it is read this (My point on visuals is extremely clear) or look at this game. Do you show an actor a video of a teacher in a room using a teaching technique. While both may be manipulating an audience, you do not. You show an actor using the same technique, because stage craft is different than a classroom. D&D is its own thing.
If the video does not exist, do me a favor. Ask why? Then please answer that question in writing so we can discuss.

 

[Campbell]

@Doug McCrae

Kickers should be something like disrupts the characters life and demands action in some way. They are meant to be personal to the character. You might like try to link them together, but it's not like mandatory. Sometimes you will play an entire Sorcerer game where the characters never meet although their actions should usually affect each other.

The following explains it a bit better than I do.

Spoiler: Annotated Sorcerer

The Kicker

There’s two issues to discuss about starting Kickers.

1. Go back to that point about the distinct differences among the three levels of a Sorcerer player-character: a person, a person who’s a sorcerer, and a sorcerer who faces a Kicker. Don’t mix them up or fold one into another. Most especially, “I just bound a demon!” cannot be the sole
content of a Kicker.

2. Simplicity and honesty matter here too. An excellent Kicker from one of the earliest Sorcerer games was, “Just released from prison.” At first glance, it may seem ordinary – and yes, that’s the strength of it. I’m not saying that the player had real-life prison experience. I’m saying that he could relate to the situation in ordinary human terms. I certainly can; I am close friends with at least two people who’ve served hard time.

The Kicker is defined as a fictional crux point, meaning, this will be a crucial moment for the character. Therefore in this case, prison did make a difference to him in some undisclosed way, and now is the time to see whether that difference is going to work out for him or not.

Sometimes that crux-point concept can be sticky too. For example, a player made up a great initial character concept, a former child star with a drug habit, married to a politician, strategically using his sorcery to eliminate his wife’s political opposition. For the Kicker, he proposed a couple of situations
in which his wife’s political enemies were investigating him or her, one of which included something really bad the demon had done, but my point to him was that the character had clearly been successful so far, and therefore must have handled any such situations well in the past. In other words, the proposed Kickers were simply “more of the same” material that we’d expect to be part of his back-story anyway. I asked him to think laterally: what sort of situation
would throw a rock into his character’s life which could not be solved simply by sending his demon as usual, but would rather upset the assumptions that he’d been so carefully protecting? He instantly said, “My wife puts me in detox.”

That’s how to get a Kicker.

That's the starting Kicker. When you get to the point that a character's Kicker is resolved Ron recommends sitting down and discussing if there's like more story there. Sometimes the game simply ends when everyone's Kicker is resolved. Sometimes you introduce new characters at the end of a character's shelf life. Sometimes create new ones.

Ron talks about creating Kickers as a shared activity. Just like creating characters. Both the player and the GM are involved in process and must be happy with the results.

 

[pemerton]

If the video does not exist, do me a favor. Ask why?

I can tell you why, in my case. Because I have zero interest in presenting my leisure activity as a videoed teaching tool for you, or anyone else.

I have DM'ed games that start like this. I have been a player in games that start like this. They can be a lot of fun. My experience from both, me behind the screen and others behind the screen, is that things become pre-plotted. Exactly like I described earlier. When they don't become pre-plotted, they switch to mere random encounters that may or may not be tied together with a loose theme that may or may not have character arcs and a plot. Again, my experience.

That hasn't happened to me.

Here is an account of our most recent Prince Valiant session. You can follow its links back through our sessions to the first one. (There are about 14 sessions, I think - with maybe 12 or so posts.)

You will see that there has been no switching to random encounters, and no pre-plotting. The campaign started in Kent. It is now in Cyprus. One of the first three PCs died in the first session. The other two, who began as a father-and-son knight of little skill and reputation, are now leaders of a holy military order which has travelled east on a crusade.

Most of the situations have been taken either directly, or via adaptation, from episodes in the rule book and the Episode Book.