What is the point of GM's notes?

[Maxperson]

I might go further than that. Regardless of prep depth, it's actually really easy for players to zig when you'd thought they'd zag and end up deep in the blank spaces of your prep. Even a single city will never be completely prepped, and the best prepped keyed hex map still needs all manner of other details to actually use. It's just part of RPG play.

This. And I love when they zig like that. It keeps me on my toes.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You've mixed winging it with having to improv on occasion. I think we can agree that at the edges improv has to occur to some degree. Winging it though is making up the adventure or inventing whole groups of important NPCs on the fly. And I very much have observed games fall apart under such conditions.

Am I mixing them, or are they just different words for the same thing?

You've provided a distinction between the two that I don't really think is all that significant.

And games can fall apart for any number of reasons. What matters is that whatever method you're using makes sense for the game you're playing. So if I'm going to play some Moldvay D&D, then having a stocked dungeon makes sense. In this case, winging it is likely not the preferred method because the goal of play is not roleplaying characters so much as skillfully navigating your characters through a dungeon of obstacles.

The rules of that game are designed to deliver that experience.

But if instead we're talking about portraying characters and having the kind of protagonist play that has come up in this discussion....where the game revolves around THESE characters specifically, and they can't just be swapped out for others and have the game remain the same......then I would think having rules designed to deliver that experience are what's important.

So for that kind of game, like Blades in the Dark, having rules that will generate new situations in play, which will prompt the players and GM to build on what's happened, combined with rules that will connect PC-centered ideas and goals to the game in a tangible way......it's simply more suited to that kind of play. Committing too strongly beforehand to any ideas will likely see that game fall apart.

The rules of that game are designed to deliver that experience.

 

[prabe]

Given that D&D campaigns can certainly last a long time - one could have more than 1 flaw or have new flaws introduced by the player which may be temporary to a particular storyline. We should not cement characters to one singular unchanging flaw for an entire campaign. Furthermore the system I recommend upthread allows the GM to call upon the flaw via token earned only after one has used their Inspiration or only with the buy-in of the player via offering an Inspiration point for the PC to play to the flaw.
Therefore in both instances the player still controls how often the flaw comes into effect.

Ah. As I've mentioned, I don't use Inspiration or its associated character trait mechanics in my 5E games. I'm happy to observe how the characters are being played and if something seems like a flaw I can react to, react to it. If a party is being ... impulsive (and maybe a touch overconfident) I'll build a scenario where that will make things more difficult for them; if a character sets out to antagonize someone/something really powerful, I'll let him do it, then I'll make him pay for it.

More generally, I agree that D&D campaigns do tend to run long enough that either letting PCs pick more than one flaw or allowing them to resolve or otherwise change them would be preferable to doing neither.

This is a point, were we playing Fate, that I would ask the player (1) "why did you pick this as your Trouble, if you didn't want to see it regularly come up into play?" (2) "how did you envision this Trouble would work out in play for your character?" and (3) "would you like to take the opportunity now to change your character's Trouble?" In Fate a character's Troubles can (and are even encouraged to) change. If a character's trouble involves their long lost brother, to borrow from a discussion from another heated thread, then that may Trouble will naturally change once that brother is found, whether they are living or dead.

Those would be reasonable questions. I guess I'm envisioning a player who chose that Trouble in good faith and hasn't resolved it (so changing it maybe doesn't fit the narrative) and either A) has grown at least temporarily tired of it or B) has dealt with some similar stuff in the real world recently, and just doesn't want to deal with that Trouble tonight. I guess you could agree on a temporary trouble or something, but it seems like something Fate isn't built to handle with particular grace. (Which might be my own crankiness about Fate showing.)

 

[Campbell]

I'm a personally not a fan of flaw mechanics. I like the minor rewards in something like Blades in the Dark for playing conflicted characters, but I generally view it more like cover fire. By explicitly building in a fairly minor reward you basically give a player permission to play to their character a bit rather than wholly to group success. Because the reward is not overwhelming and not repeatable it keeps relatively constrained.

I do no like Compels in FATE though. I'm not a fan of suffering now to be awesome later or basically playing out tropes. I want mechanics to align player and character perspectives as much as possible rather than to encourage what I would call portrayal or characterization. I usually strive for embodying the character. Vices in Blades, Willpower triggers in World of Darkness, Strife in L5R 5e, Intimacies in Exalted, and basically the entire way Dogs in the Vineyard works is much better than Inspiration for playing flaws or Fate Points for accepting Compels to me.

 

[Aldarc]

Those would be reasonable questions. I guess I'm envisioning a player who chose that Trouble in good faith and hasn't resolved it (so changing it maybe doesn't fit the narrative) and either A) has grown at least temporarily tired of it or B) has dealt with some similar stuff in the real world recently, and just doesn't want to deal with that Trouble tonight. I guess you could agree on a temporary trouble or something, but it seems like something Fate isn't built to handle with particular grace. (Which might be my own crankiness about Fate showing.)

It doesn't seem difficult to handle gracefully in Fate at all. In Fate Condensed, you can rewrite any aspect apart from your High Concept at the end of a session as a milestone. It doesn't necessarily need resolved. If they don't want to deal with that Trouble tonight, then Fate is a game that encourages open communication and discussion between the GM and players. I'm not sure why Fate couldn't handle it with grace.

 

[prabe]

It doesn't seem difficult to handle gracefully in Fate at all. In Fate Condensed, you can rewrite any aspect apart from your High Concept at the end of a session as a milestone. It doesn't necessarily need resolved. If they don't want to deal with that Trouble tonight, then Fate is a game that encourages open communication and discussion between the GM and players. I'm not sure why Fate couldn't handle it with grace.

My concern is that by temporarily removing an Aspect from play, one might cause problems with the Fate Point Economy (which I found to be pretty easy to break by scarcity). There's also the fact that I don't like--and never have been happy with--"session" as a mechanical unit of play. Ending an in-game narrative arc at a specific real-world time isn't something I've had any success with.

 

[Aldarc]

My concern is that by temporarily removing an Aspect from play, one might cause problems with the Fate Point Economy (which I found to be pretty easy to break by scarcity). There's also the fact that I don't--and never have--been happy with "session" as a mechanical unit of play. Ending an in-game narrative arc at a specific real-world time isn't something I've had any success with.

If someone doesn't want to deal with a Trouble, then I'd let them change it to something they'd rather deal with that night. No biggie. I kinda like the idea of having several Troubles that players could switch out for game sessions. It's also not difficult to modify "session" to another mechanical unit of play (e.g., days). There are so many different versions of Fate out there. It's less of a game and more of a toolkit.

I'm a personally not a fan of flaw mechanics. I like the minor rewards in something like Blades in the Dark for playing conflicted characters, but I generally view it more like cover fire. By explicitly building in a fairly minor reward you basically give a player permission to play to their character a bit rather than wholly to group success. Because the reward is not overwhelming and not repeatable it keeps relatively constrained.

I do no like Compels in FATE though. I'm not a fan of suffering now to be awesome later or basically playing out tropes. I want mechanics to align player and character perspectives as much as possible rather than to encourage what I would call portrayal or characterization. I usually strive for embodying the character. Vices in Blades, Willpower triggers in World of Darkness, Strife in L5R 5e, Intimacies in Exalted, and basically the entire way Dogs in the Vineyard works is much better than Inspiration for playing flaws or Fate Points for accepting Compels to me.

It may seem like semantics, but Fate's Troubles aren't so much a flaw mechanic as it is a character complication mechanic. It can be a character flaw (e.g., Manners Like a Goat), but it definitely doesn't have to be (e.g., Massive Debt to Jabba the Hutt). It's mainly meant to be a character's chosen lightning rod for GM complications that they want their character to experience in play.

 

[Imaro]

I'm a personally not a fan of flaw mechanics. I like the minor rewards in something like Blades in the Dark for playing conflicted characters, but I generally view it more like cover fire. By explicitly building in a fairly minor reward you basically give a player permission to play to their character a bit rather than wholly to group success. Because the reward is not overwhelming and not repeatable it keeps relatively constrained.

I do no like Compels in FATE though. I'm not a fan of suffering now to be awesome later or basically playing out tropes. I want mechanics to align player and character perspectives as much as possible rather than to encourage what I would call portrayal or characterization. I usually strive for embodying the character. Vices in Blades, Willpower triggers in World of Darkness, Strife in L5R 5e, Intimacies in Exalted, and basically the entire way Dogs in the Vineyard works is much better than Inspiration for playing flaws or Fate Points for accepting Compels to me.

From reading your first paragraph I would have thought you would have liked Inspiration in 5e. It is a minor reward that gives a player permission to play their character a bit rather than wholly to group success. It's not overwhelming and you can only hold a finite amount of inspiration. I'm curious what you don't like about it?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm a personally not a fan of flaw mechanics. I like the minor rewards in something like Blades in the Dark for playing conflicted characters, but I generally view it more like cover fire. By explicitly building in a fairly minor reward you basically give a player permission to play to their character a bit rather than wholly to group success. Because the reward is not overwhelming and not repeatable it keeps relatively constrained.

In my current Blades game, I'm playing a Leech named Haight and his vice is Stupor. The way I've set it up is that he has an academic view of drugs, and he finds that they help him with his crafting. He gets his best ideas when he's under the influence (or at least he thinks he does). And he looks at the spectrological/electroplasm sphere as simply another science and he wants to learn about it.

Based on this, I jump at any chance to study or interact with ghosts or other entities. This has come up a few times during play as he's taken risks in those areas that aren't necessarily connected to the Crew's goals, but which put a Score at risk. So far, he's taken a potent drug on a Social Score with the Dimmer Sisters in an attempt to impress them that he can handle himself- the risk being that he'd be too inebriated to help on the social score; on another Score he led some cohorts into an area that was currently besieged by ghosts in an attempt to learn what he could, and to use some equipment provided to him by the Sparkwrights (some of which he kept, which means they may come looking for it in the future).

So in these cases, I've been able to mark some XP for introducing complications related to my Vice. I don't know if I'd call that a minor reward or not....it feels pretty meaningful.....but ultimately, it's more about portraying him honestly now that we know who he is. So the XP is just a nice bonus, but really it's like "Oh you know Haight can't resist this" kind of situation.

 

[Emerikol]

Am I mixing them, or are they just different words for the same thing?

You've provided a distinction between the two that I don't really think is all that significant.

Really? So inventing massive amounts of information that all has to remain consistent is the same as just answering an unexpected question based upon a fully developed character.

And games can fall apart for any number of reasons. What matters is that whatever method you're using makes sense for the game you're playing. So if I'm going to play some Moldvay D&D, then having a stocked dungeon makes sense. In this case, winging it is likely not the preferred method because the goal of play is not roleplaying characters so much as skillfully navigating your characters through a dungeon of obstacles.

I've found playing old school D&D is not a hindrance to roleplaying. Mechanics are not necessary to roleplay. Mechanics may help some roleplay and in some cases hinder others for that matter.

The rules of that game are designed to deliver that experience.

I get that the game you mention is focused on providing mechanics to achieve an experience you want. For me though while it might assist in roleplaying it would ruin other aspects of what I like about a game so it wouldn't be a win. And I don't need those mechanics to have a fun roleplaying game with lots of interaction between PCs and lots of immersion.

But if instead we're talking about portraying characters and having the kind of protagonist play that has come up in this discussion....where the game revolves around THESE characters specifically, and they can't just be swapped out for others and have the game remain the same......then I would think having rules designed to deliver that experience are what's important.

I think your jaded, game shop AP style D&D play is affecting your judgment. My games are not at all like that. A dungeon is a job but my players are more than their jobs. So I expect, my games would differ depending on which characters got played. Now do players go completely against type? No. Not sure they would want to do that.

So for that kind of game, like Blades in the Dark, having rules that will generate new situations in play, which will prompt the players and GM to build on what's happened, combined with rules that will connect PC-centered ideas and goals to the game in a tangible way......it's simply more suited to that kind of play. Committing too strongly beforehand to any ideas will likely see that game fall apart.

To the style of play the game seems designed for then no arguments. For a deeply character driven and immersive game, I'd say it's not required at all. It perhaps goes back to the age old debate from years ago about whether you need mechanics for something to be part of the game. I don't think you do.

I think we both want what we like but I won't be caricatured in my own style of play as if there is little or shallow roleplaying going on in my games. I don't see that. I see players invested in their characters and being immersed as those characters. They interact with the world and have a rich roleplaying experience.