A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

while there are definitely some differences in specific techniques, that the way you are employing PV has a lot in common with AW. PV seems to be somewhat less explicit about the processes by which players help to define the fiction

Agreed. I also think it gives the GM a little more latitude in managing "offscreen" elements, because there is no requirement to say/do what your prep demands.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the vast majority of principles translate just fine from one game to another. Where the mechanics are different, they probably shape play differently.

I think CoC is really, really limited both by its history and by horror as a genre. The adventures published for the game over the decades have formed an expectation of play that is ... railroady, IMO. Horror, especially its Lovecraftian branch, is ... plausibly not the best genre of fiction to apply Story Now to, what with the tropes of hidden knowledge and secret histories and tainted bloodlines and insane narrators--it just seems as though the "gotcha" is part of (maybe the heart of) the fiction. In other words, I'm deeply unsruprised you had troubles trying to run it like a PbtA game. While 5E might be limited in similar ways by its history and by WotC's business model (making money by selling published adventures), I haven't found it to be limited in anything like the way it sounds as though you found it to me--horses for courses, probably.

Oh, but there are a couple of quite excellent 'Story Now' type games that do Cthulhu quite well! In fact we did a bit of experimentation with using PACE for that (a micro RPG that could be thought of as pretty close to what happens if you cut Maelstrom down to a couple pages and make it diceless). It works nicely! The parts of CoC that get in the way are all the clunky BRP/RQ legacy game process and mechanics where the GM invents everything, and resolution is all just 'PC skill test pass/fail' mechanics. What I found is that players loved stuff like having the option to 'go insane' as their response to something! Sure, that might spell the end of the character, perhaps, but the goal in a Cthulhu scenario really cannot seriously be said to be survival anyway, right? I mean, only a very few of HPL's main characters walk away relatively intact. Another approach might be to design the game such that the PCs are peripheral characters in the story, but I'm not sure how to really make that engaging. It might work as a sort of escalating thing though, where first you cross paths with your Mad Uncle and get a whiff of the weirdness, and then the game 'levels up' to "he's vanished, you have his journal, weird stuff is happening, what do you do...".

Anyway, either way, I'd never go back to an 'old school' sort of RPG format for any of that, it just gets in the way. A PbtA might work.

 

[prabe]

the goal in a Cthulhu scenario really cannot seriously be said to be survival anyway, right?

In my experience, that's the only viable goal, since the adventures are written so you're not really saving the world--succeed at the adventure or horribly bomb, the world won't end; the stakes you're playing for are a lie.

Can you tell I fell out of CoC a while ago?

Sounds as though you're using Lovecraftian tropes to play a game that generates non-Lovecraftian stories. Which is cool--I'm not a huge fan of undiluted Lovecraftian fiction in my TRPGs myself.

 

[Fenris-77]

The PbtA Mythos game is called Tremulus I believe.

Edit: Yup, that's it, I knew I had a copy somewhere. It's a pretty slick ruleset too.

 

[pemerton]

In my little inexperienced box, collaborative story telling is about collaborating to tell a story (all rpgs do this) DUH But the games that I would label as such are ones where the player has the right to establish facts about the story other than what his character attempts to do. In a more traditional game (no better word has been given than traditional) the DM would be the one doing that and even though he might sometimes delegate to the players or a player for some specific detail into the world, the player has no expectation that typical play will consist of the ability to do such things.

This means that one of the most famous RPGs of all time, Traveller (1st published 1977), turns out to be a "collaborative storytelling game" rather than a traditional RPG.

This relates to what I posted upthread to @Bedrockgames: you two are using "traditional" or "old school" to capture something that is actually a retro-oriented reconstruction.

Even early D&D players - many of them being also wargamers - thought that plyers could establish facts about the story other than PC attempts, eg by using the combat rules to bring it about that opponents are dead.

 

[pemerton]

I don't actually have a problem with describing those games as catering more toward dramatic needs. That's a description of them we all agree on? Maybe Drama First Rpgs?

We already have the phrase story now. Do we need a new one?

 

[pemerton]

I think, maybe somewhat in a way that is analogous to other people saying that a sandbox can lead to player agenda focused play, that a 'story now' or 'zero myth' type of game can also lead to exploration.

Here's an example, from about 10 years ago. The system is 4e D&D.

 

[pemerton]

You and your group are camped alongside a road having stopped on a journey to the shrine. You see a campfire in the distance with maybe two or three people making camp around it. Later that night* you are awakened by screams of terror in the distance and more figures around that distant campfire. Clearly there something going on over there.

What do you do?

<snip>

I noticed that out of the stuff I created for that campaign this adventure worked as as a self-contained sandbox so I developed it further like I did the Scourge of the Demon Wolf. The reason it works is because it has a clear inciting incident. The attack on the peasant boy and knight's daughter. Plus it is enough of a stereotype that most hobbyist "get" what the situation is without the overhead of the campaign background.

In my campaign the players can do anything that their character are capable of. They can find a dungeon and explore (Dungeon World), they can wander the ruins of a fallen empire of magic (Apocalypses World), they can plan out a heist (Blades in the Dark) within the same campaign and the same setting.

<snip>

I think one disconnect we have, is you don't realize importance of how the setting described. I am not making up stuff all the time. It is actually uncommon. I am instead acting on information that been established beforehand. In the case of the Majestic Wilderlands often established decades ago by other players in pursuit of long ago goals.

The players can't have their PCs find a dungeon and explore it if the GM hasn't written it (as per the information that has been established beforehand ie the GM's notes, map and key).

A player can't have his PC find his brother if the GM has decided already that the brother is dead.

Etc.

Furthermore, the GM is framing these situations like attacks on peasant boys with - it seems to me - a relatively strong expectation that the players will engage with them.

Now if you're saying that the GM alters or adds to the pre-authored fiction and frames the scenes to reflect evinced player interests, how are you describing an approach any different from heavy-prep story now play?

Look if you want a campaign where characters set the direction and the freedom to go anywhere, this is why the hexcrawl format of the Wilderlands is a good thing.

Which is why in 2020 I included this in the book I just published
View attachment 131043

I don't see that allowing the playes to "trash" the setting by making their mark is very unique to your RPGing. It's something that has been part of my RPGing since at least the second half of the 1980s.

It's certainly an expectation in AW, DitV and I would expect BitD that the players will "trash" the setting. In all my RM GMing, and in our 4e game, and in all my current games, this is taken as a given.

I don't really understand what your point is, or on what basis you are claiming this is unique.

 

[Fenris-77]

Just because prep exists for a sandbox doesn't mean the DM is beholden to it. It happens all the time. So sure, in a vacuum, a dungeon or brother could be manufactured on the fly. I've done it, as, I'm sure, have lots of people. Not all of course, and maybe not even many, but some. I think it's a mistake to take the pov of the most prep beholden sandbox GMs and then project that onto the wider group. This is why taking playstyle as the first layer of analysis is so fraught IMO.

 

[pemerton]

Just because prep exists for a sandbox doesn't mean the DM is beholden to it. It happens all the time. So sure, in a vacuum, a dungeon or brother could be manufactured on the fly. I've done it, as, I'm sure, have lots of people. Not all of course, and maybe not even many, but some.

Sure. But why would a GM who is doing that assert so vociferously that there are these fundamental differences between what is happening in their game and what is happening in (say) my BW and Prince Valiant games.

This is why I invited @FrogReaver, @Bedrockgames and @estar to comment on my post upthread. In what ways do they think that the episodes I set out - one imagined by Vincent Baker, one actual in my Prince Valiant game - differ from a "true sandbox"?