At the Intersection of Skilled Play, System Intricacy, Prep, and Story Now

[chaochou]

I'll reply later as I don't have time, but a quick preview is that you're providing examples of play that are to create better story and not advocate for the characters. And the demand for actual play seems weird, because that's just seeing up dueling anecdotes. Examples should be to illuminate arguments, not be the arguments.

No, I don't think I am.

And I take the opposite view, that arguments absent of actual play are empty dogma. An 'argument' which doesn't intersect with the experiences of actual play adds zero value to any discussion. So without actual play of Fiasco as its basis, I'm not going to entertain assertions about how Fiasco must be. Without play of Burning Wheel as its basis I'm not going to entertain assertions about how Burning Wheel must play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

No, I don't think I am.

And I take the opposite view, that arguments absent of actual play are empty dogma. An 'argument' which doesn't intersect with the experiences of actual play adds zero value to any discussion. So without actual play of Fiasco as its basis, I'm not going to entertain assertions about how Fiasco must be. Without play of Burning Wheel as its basis I'm not going to entertain assertions about how Burning Wheel must play.

I agree that discussion of a thing with no experience of the thing can be off the mark. See this thing all the time with people talking about games they've never played. I have played these games, though, and either my characterizations of them are notably flawed and that can be addressed or they are not. Play examples are useful for illumination, but a play example cannot ever make general assertions about play. That's arguing from the specific to the general, which is flawed. You can argue from the general to the specific, though, where you can assert the general case and provide a specific play example. Insisting on only play examples is shooting any useful discussion in the for, though.

I'll be getting back to your earlier post shortly.

 

[pemerton]

My group frequently plays Apocalypse World and one way I get the players to take insane risks and do ridiculous dramatic stuff is to remind them that the audience wants to see that stuff. Don't turtle, if you're gonna do it, do it.

<snip>

And in Fiasco you don't get a say in how your scene turns out. So there is nothing to do but to play hard

This made me think of my experience playing two-player, shared-GMing Burning Wheel.

We both burned our PCs, I suggested a starting scene and my fellow player agreed and we worked from there. Scene-framing was a mixture of consensus and one player framing for the other's PC; resolution and consequences were handled by the player who was not rolling the dice - though even there a bit of discussion around consequences did take place.

It was "story now" play, and both PCs got hit quite hard.

None of this is to deny the Czege principle (maybe better called the Czege conjecture?). But to work out the application of the principle you need to get pretty close in to the details of what is happening. For instance, it was dice and not consensus that established a failed Resources check. But did that mean the PC also lost the cash die that had been used to help the check? We read the rules together, discussed the fiction, and came to an agreed consequence. The die was lost.

EDIT: I hadn't seen the following yet when I posted, but it seems fitting that I should add it in to this post:

Without play of Burning Wheel as its basis I'm not going to entertain assertions about how Burning Wheel must play.

 

[pemerton]

That's arguing from the specific to the general, which is flawed.

Something has gone wrong here, I think, because arguing from the specific to the general is how most knowledge in the social sciences is created (maybe economics is an exception, at least purporting to have a methodology closer to some natural sciences - that said, biology and some parts of chemistry might be closer to social sciences than to physics as the dominant conceptual model for natural science reasoning).

There's an element of pedantry in this post, but it's not just pedantry. "Story now", "step on up" etc are ideal types, intended to allow us to group phenomena in ways that are illuminating and explanatory (and that are not self-evident independently of deployment of the types).

The phenomena in question are RPG play experiences.

Can we have a RPG play experience where player protagonism drives the action (whatever exactly that consists in), where the principles that the GM follows are about following that action and piling on the pressure, where there is no "the story" because the new fiction the GM introduces is immediate and responsive in just those ways, and where everyone also knows that, when the fiction reaches a particular point in time, the protagonists will die? I don't see why not.

You might want some way to manage the passage of time, in order to make the coming of the end more than just GM fiat: some canonical way of mapping actions and events to the passage of time, perhaps a certain number of turns each, or even something like a Doom Pool. The timing could also be handled player-side: eg every PC has two Beliefs, and a tick is placed against a Belief if it is enlivened/engaged/implicated by an episode of play, and when every PC has a tick next to each Belief the next GM move is to bring things to their climax.

I have, but haven't yet read or played, My Life With Master, and I imagine it has some interesting and powerful techniques for handling this sort of thing.

 

[Fenris-77]

Regarding this most recent disposition change of the thread, I’m going to offer up something for folks interested in this segment of the discussion.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with some pals last night after running Stonetop for them.

I posed a hypothetical of a game about the world ending via asteroid/comet strike. It’s not about forestalling the apocalypse but rather it’s about how you spend your last days. Do you write a letter and speedily drive it across country to hand deliver to someone you secretly love or someone you need to make peace with? Do you plot and assassinate the murderer of a loved one? Do you plan and throw a massive party? Do you convince your loved ones to join you in ritual suicide and do the deed? Etc.

The game is about engaging with that premise, resolving it, and revealing these characters via scenes that accrue Despair, Meaning, and Connection. You create your opening character, you create a goal, your assign stats. Those stats and that goal are foundational to the resolution of your final scene. As you move through scenes toward the final scene of your character, these stats change as immediate fallout and upon reflection (Dogs in the Vineyard-ish).

The background of the apocalypse is constraining framing to generate and animate these characters; to provoke play. The antagonist here is not the impending apocalypse.The antagonist is “what will stop you, particularly internally (eg your Despair score exerting more influence than your Meaning and/or Connections score), from doing what you set out to do in the time you have.”

1) Is this a Story Now game because it fits all the parameters and confined and focused play space for premise/distillation of emergent theme/character is not anathema?

2) Is this not a Story Now game because the encoded constraints on premise disallow you from choose your antagonist as “The Impending Apocalypse” and allowing play to flow from that antagonist/goal? Put another way, if you could choose your antagonist as The Impending Apocalypse > create a scientist PC whose goal is to forestall the apocalypse > your scenes and derivative stats and “final showdown” would be anchored to that goal, then the game only now becomes Story Now?

I think its pretty clearly Story Now, but I suspect I'll get some pushback on that.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Something has gone wrong here, I think, because arguing from the specific to the general is how most knowledge in the social sciences is created (maybe economics is an exception, at least purporting to have a methodology closer to some natural sciences - that said, biology and some parts of chemistry might be closer to social sciences than to physics as the dominant conceptual model for natural science reasoning).

There's an element of pedantry in this post, but it's not just pedantry. "Story now", "step on up" etc are ideal types, intended to allow us to group phenomena in ways that are illuminating and explanatory (and that are not self-evident independently of deployment of the types).

The phenomena in question are RPG play experiences.

Can we have a RPG play experience where player protagonism drives the action (whatever exactly that consists in), where the principles that the GM follows are about following that action and piling on the pressure, where there is no "the story" because the new fiction the GM introduces is immediate and responsive in just those ways, and where everyone also knows that, when the fiction reaches a particular point in time, the protagonists will die? I don't see why not.

You might want some way to manage the passage of time, in order to make the coming of the end more than just GM fiat: some canonical way of mapping actions and events to the passage of time, perhaps a certain number of turns each, or even something like a Doom Pool. The timing could also be handled player-side: eg every PC has two Beliefs, and a tick is placed against a Belief if it is enlivened/engaged/implicated by an episode of play, and when every PC has a tick next to each Belief the next GM move is to bring things to their climax.

I have, but haven't yet read or played, My Life With Master, and I imagine it has some interesting and powerful techniques for handling this sort of thing.

Bob is a man. Bob is tall. Therefore all men are tall. This is specific to general. It's logically flawed.

 

[pemerton]

Bob is a man. Bob is tall. Therefore all men are tall. This is specific to general. It's logically flawed.

Bob is a man. Bob is tall. Therefore men, the kind, have the capacity to be tall. That is also specific to general, and as it happens is sound.

It's not indefeasible - maybe Bob is tall despite being of the kind men (eg something happened early in life that stretched Bob). That's why generalisation needs to rest on close attention to possible defeaters. (And not just in the social sciences - this is also an issue in natural science experimental design.)

No one is asserting that every game with a fixed timeline is, or must be, "story now". Even if the fixed timeline is known to the players, and so is not GM-parcelled-out "metaplot", that does not mean that the game is, or must be, "story now". But it might be. There is no contradiction between player protagonism, and no "the story", and a known pre-established cut-off for the action, any more than "story now" must mean there are no impassable mountain ranges, nor fixed cosmologies, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Regarding this most recent disposition change of the thread, I’m going to offer up something for folks interested in this segment of the discussion.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with some pals last night after running Stonetop for them.

I posed a hypothetical of a game about the world ending via asteroid/comet strike. It’s not about forestalling the apocalypse but rather it’s about how you spend your last days. Do you write a letter and speedily drive it across country to hand deliver to someone you secretly love or someone you need to make peace with? Do you plot and assassinate the murderer of a loved one? Do you plan and throw a massive party? Do you convince your loved ones to join you in ritual suicide and do the deed? Etc.

The game is about engaging with that premise, resolving it, and revealing these characters via scenes that accrue Despair, Meaning, and Connection. You create your opening character, you create a goal, your assign stats. Those stats and that goal are foundational to the resolution of your final scene. As you move through scenes toward the final scene of your character, these stats change as immediate fallout and upon reflection (Dogs in the Vineyard-ish).

The background of the apocalypse is constraining framing to generate and animate these characters; to provoke play. The antagonist here is not the impending apocalypse.The antagonist is “what will stop you, particularly internally (eg your Despair score exerting more influence than your Meaning and/or Connections score), from doing what you set out to do in the time you have.”

1) Is this a Story Now game because it fits all the parameters and confined and focused play space for premise/distillation of emergent theme/character is not anathema?

2) Is this not a Story Now game because the encoded constraints on premise disallow you from choose your antagonist as “The Impending Apocalypse” and allowing play to flow from that antagonist/goal? Put another way, if you could choose your antagonist as The Impending Apocalypse > create a scientist PC whose goal is to forestall the apocalypse > your scenes and derivative stats and “final showdown” would be anchored to that goal, then the game only now becomes Story Now?

I think it's obviously Story Now. I know you've referred to DitV, but your mechanical set-up makes me think of Czege-type designs (My Life With Master; I'd have to go back and check, but I think Nicotine Girls also uses a PC-build structure a bit like this).

 

[Manbearcat]

I think its pretty clearly Story Now, but I suspect I'll get some pushback on that.

I think it's obviously Story Now. I know you've referred to DitV, but your mechanical set-up makes me think of Czege-type designs (My Life With Master; I'd have to go back and check, but I think Nicotine Girls also uses a PC-build structure a bit like this).

It’s no surprise that you see MLwM in that proposed game!

Alright, so now let’s subtly perturb our thoughts exercise:

* Resolving the impending doom IS an alleged primary site of conflict in the game (rather than being premise constraintand provocation).

* During actual play, getting to the final scene or the final scene itself (where you try to resolve the impending doom) involves Force which subverts the rightful (rightful here meaning - what the premise + procedures/principles/reward system is designed to engage with, propel, and resolve) input that players are supposed to have had.

---

I hope we can all agree that is quite a different deal/play experience/design than the one I put on offer above.

And those differences are rather important to the question (and cut to
The heart of premise constraint/focus at the design level vs actual Force; which is a during play phenomenon).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Bob is a man. Bob is tall. Therefore men, the kind, have the capacity to be tall. That is also specific to general, and as it happens is sound.

It's not indefeasible - maybe Bob is tall despite being of the kind men (eg something happened early in life that stretched Bob). That's why generalisation needs to rest on close attention to possible defeaters. (And not just in the social sciences - this is also an issue in natural science experimental design.)

No one is asserting that every game with a fixed timeline is, or must be, "story now". Even if the fixed timeline is known to the players, and so is not GM-parcelled-out "metaplot", that does not mean that the game is, or must be, "story now". But it might be. There is no contradiction between player protagonism, and no "the story", and a known pre-established cut-off for the action, any more than "story now" must mean there are no impassable mountain ranges, nor fixed cosmologies, etc.

The statement that men have the capacity to be tall does no work, it makes no predictions, it cannot be used to categorize men. Are most tall? Are many? Are few? We don't know.

To drag this back to the topic, an example of play that appears to be a thing doesn't b tell much. Are most moments of play this? Are many? Are few? A scene description of play that appears to be Story Now says nothing towards the next moment. This a game that toggles between some scenes that have dramatic treatment and others that are hard railroad might, with a specific example, be mistakenly categorized.

Play examples are excellent sources of illumination for general arguments. They do almost nothing on their own. The demand to only discuss in terms of examples of play is flawed.