Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[hawkeyefan]

I’ll add more later but this stood out.

Through this particular lens that’s exactly what is being said. Through your lens it doesn’t matter whether something was made up on Tuesday or right before. Through others lenses it does.

Criticism involves lenses. Whereas what most people are looking for is actually ‘the truth’.

Ah, so the negative connotations for game you don't like are acceptable?

I have no problem with someone leveling this criticism of a game if that's what they feel. People can find flaws however they find them, and can discuss them.

But expecting for the phrase to be adopted as an accurate depiction of play, though? Why would anyone do that? Would you accept "Mother May I" as an accurate depiction of trad play? Of course not. I would expect either of those terms to be met with resistance, at least generally. It's possible that in a specific instance of play one may suit. Something like "Man, I didn't like how the GM decided to rule how that spell worked... it made the game feel like X" might be relevant to a specific complaint.

Criticize any game as harshly as you like. People can then engage with that however makes sense to them... they can agree or disagree, or some mix of the two. I'm all for legit criticism.

I think it favors whoever initiates the conversation and decides their paradigm is how the conversation will be framed. On ENWorld... I would say that does seem to mostly be the minority stance as they seem to initiate more of the conversations and set their terminology as the de facto lingua for both stances...

I would say that if you don't see the fact that trad style play is the dominant assumption around here, I don't know what to tell you. It's not always considered "a" way, but often "the" way.

Yup. For people who see there as being no difference, the objection is going to seem utterly nonsensical. I'm not intrinsically hostile to on-time decisions for at least some things, but I think not understanding why this matters to some people is just something Story Now proponents are going to have to learn to accept if they want to have conversations with them that bare on that.

It doesn't seem utterly nonsensical, or beyond understanding. But it's simply a preference. It's no more right or wrong than traditional play.

However, because traditional play is the dominant paradigm, it's often seen as the "right" way to play, and other methods are treated as "wrong".

It's not a lack of understanding the appeal of traditional play, but rather the othering of types of play that are not traditional.

 

[pemerton]

Definitely this is a problem for me, largely because it means I can't take actions that involve rolling to try and resolve a complication without risking another one, which really undermines the gameplay loop I'm looking for.

Unless the campaign is coming to an end, won't there be ensuing complications anyway?

This exchange also reminds me of one of the design challenges that I think AD&D and Rolemaster both struggle with. (Probably other systems too, but I'm going with the ones I know best in this respect.) Namely, that the approach to PC build (in AD&D this is mostly spell load-out; in RM PC build is far more intricate) encourages a type of optimisation in the face of expected obstacles; but the upshot can be very tedious play in which every obvious obstacle is easily overcome, and it is hard for the GM to introduce new obstacles without risking a sense of extreme contrivance.

That being said, if the trigger was something other than the players doing things, I can see a system with this kind of constraint being interesting. Is there any system that shoots for that? The most obvious thing to use is time, or maybe some kind of GM side accumulating resource, like in original Descent, where the Overlord has an income and cards with specific negative outcomes they spend it to play.

Aren't wandering monster checks a version of this?

 

[Imaro]

I would say that if you don't see the fact that trad style play is the dominant assumption around here, I don't know what to tell you. It's not always considered "a" way, but often "the" way.

I'm sorry but you didn't ask what the dominant assumption around here is, please go back and read what you actually asked me. That said, what I find is trad players aren't necessarily the majority of those who participate in theory threads, which IMO, is much more relevant to how those threads progress.

 

[pemerton]

Yes it is: if your sub-goal is to avoid attracting attention (where your main goal is to scout the warehouse), being approached by a guard is a clear failure on the sub-goal.

The action declaration I imagined was checking out the warehouse security "without being caught or shot".

A guard asking you your business is not being shot. It's not being caught (as in captured). It's not even being caught (as in having one's cover blown). I reiterate: a Stormtrooper asked Ben and Luke what their business was. This did not result in them being shot, or captured, or having their cover blown.

Worse, if the scene jumps straight to the guard standing close-ish to me asking what I'm doing, that's subverted any options I-as-player might have had to avoid that conversation e.g. by temporarily dropping surveillance and wandering away on noticing a guard was approaching or even looking twice at me.

That's putting a very positive spin on what for the player/PC has become a very negative situation.

Having a chance to seduce or bribe or intimidate or read a guard isn't negative, in my view.

Here is the mechanical framework for that last possibility:

When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll+sharp. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7–9, hold 1. While you’re interacting
with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:

• is your character telling the truth?
• what’s your character really feeling?
• what does your character intend to do?
• what does your character wish I’d do?
• how could I get your character to __?​

Reading a person is an investment in time. It means studying them carefully through the whole conversation, noticing changes in their tone, the movements of their eyes and hands, their most fleeting expressions. In play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through.​

So the GM has put the player in a spot - a guard is talking to them - but has also provided the player with an opportunity - to talk to the guard and learn, for instance, "How could I get your character to let me into the warehouse unannounced?"

It seems to me that you are assuming that the GM has a permission to make a hard move more-or-less at will. (Eg as in most approaches to AD&D play.) But as per the "play loop" that @Campbell posted upthread, the GM in Apocalypse World does not enjoy any such permission.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm sorry but you didn't ask what the dominant assumption around here is, please go back and read what you actually asked me. That said, what I find is trad players aren't necessarily the majority of those who participate in theory threads, which IMO, is much more relevant to how those threads progress.

Many of these discussions struggle exactly because of that dominant assumption. That assumption is what leads to push back.

And yet, there has been very little (if any) of classifying traditional play in any negative light. No one is defining the terms for both sides in this thread.

There have been a couple of examples of how people have done so in the past, which I think were introduced by @FrogReaver but besides those, no one's really tried to categorize trad play in any way, except perhaps the exception of describing one type of trad play as "map and key" play by @pemerton . Which is about as benign and on the nose type of jargon that we're likely to find.

This thread has been pretty evenly represented, I'd say, and is mostly absent actual criticism of any kind of play.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

People change. But of course, sometimes they don't, too, and there's always the risk of the evangelical parts of a fandom dropping into what I refer to as the "You'll like this fish!" problem. I'm pretty sure my wife would find the fail-with-consequence part of PbtA intolerably annoying, and no positive feature of the experience would outweigh it.

I'm certainly not evangelizing, at least in this instance. But I'm extremely glad I gave FitD and PbtA multiple tries, because they wound up solving a whole slew of frustrations that I've had with trad gaming, ever since I started playing any RPGs more than 30 years ago. I just had to embrace the notion that "winning" the game doesn't have to always mean being optimized and hyper-cautious.

Again, as always, nothing wrong with optimized play. I just resist the idea that every game in every setting in every genre should be played the same.

 

[pemerton]

A post from @chaochou in the "theory thread" thread prompted some reflections from me that I'll drop in here.

They're also relevant to map-and-key resolution.

The thoughts are about the "evaluative orientation" or "normativity" of the fiction. By this I'm not meaning "Is it good or bad from an objective moral sense?" (eg paladins vs assassins). I'm meaning its orientation towards protagonist goals and desires.

I'll come into this topic by referring back to "reading a person" in Apocalypse World. As I pointed out, that move allows asking questions which the controller of the read character has to answer. Here's a bit more rules text (all quoted from p 201 of the rulebook):

you might already know the answers to these questions, you might not. Either way, once you’ve said them you’ve committed to them and they’re true. . . .

“Dude, sorry, no way” is a legit answer to “how could I get your character to __?”​

Now let's look at that last one. For whom is it a legit answer? It's fine for one player, playing their PC, to respond to another player who is playing their PC in this way. But is it fine for the GM?

When the GM answers a "read a person' question, they're making a move. And unless the player has failed a roll (ie 6 down), which if they're asking a "read a person" question they haven't; or unless the player has handed the GM a golden opportunity on a plate, which if their PC is just talking to a guard who has come up to ask them their business, they havn't; then the GM's move should be soft, not hard.

Now what makes a move soft or hard is context-sensitive, but "Dude, sorry, no way I can help you get into the warehouse unannounced" looks like it could be pretty hard as a move, because given what we already know the player is hoping to achieve it's an irrevocable shutting off of one avenue of possibility.

The general point here is that what is an acceptable thing for the GM to say about the fiction, in AW, is conditioned by how it bears upon what the players want for their PCs. This is express in some of the labels for GM moves ("Announce future badness", "Put them in a spot", etc) but is also implicit in the whole contrast between soft and hard moves - a hard move is irrevocable (p 117), but what counts as salient irrevocability is obviously relevant to what the players want for their PCs.

This is what I mean by the "evaluative" or "normative" orientation of the fiction. AW isn't the only RPG in which this is a thing - eg it's also a thing in Burning Wheel, although the technical devices that are used are different. Likewise in HeroWars/Quest. And in other RPGs too.

Map and key play, on the other hand, is most naturally suited to "neutral" fiction - because so much framing and consequence, in map-and-key play, is settled by decisions made ahead of time (ie when the map is drawn and the key written).

Torchbearer is an interesting hybrid in this respect, because it uses map-and-key as a type of base or foundation, but the method of "twists" for failure is where the GM is able to respond to what the players want for their PCs by introducing non-neutral stuff.

 

[clearstream]

Yup. For people who see there as being no difference, the objection is going to seem utterly nonsensical.

One can easily notice technical differences, right. When invention is done in the moment, the particulars of that moment are available to inform it. Facts that invention at a prior time could only guess at. Examples have been given elsewhere. The invention can be focused on the actual locations and situations reached in play.

When I'm running an immersionist campaign where the world is expected to exist independently of the characters, I might spend an hour for each hour of play. That effort is a finite resource: any gains made from invention in advance come at the cost of something else. Running a second weekly session, say. That's especially inefficient for elements that don't turn out to enter play.

Just-in-time is responsive and efficient. It's a trade off, with the timing of invention paying out in ways that can suit differing aims. I think those aims can form lenses for evaluating the technical features (their consequences for us), but the technical features themselves are able to be described.

 

[pemerton]

When I'm running an immersionist campaign where the world is expected to exist independently of the characters

Is there any RPG in which the world does not exist independently of the characters? Maybe Toon and The Primal Order?

Just-in-time is responsive and efficient. It's a trade off

I take it that you're confining the concept of "trade off" here to your own experience? It doesn't seem like a generalisable characterisation.

 

[clearstream]

Is there any RPG in which the world does not exist independently of the characters? Maybe Toon and The Primal Order?

I'd rather avoid diving into a discussion of that here. It could be an extensive digression and doesn't seem all that important to settle for the conversation at hand.

I take it that you're confining the concept of "trade off" here to your own experience? It doesn't seem like a generalisable characterisation.

It is true that, for the sake of brevity, I have not extensively ennumerated possible trade offs. As an example of another, invention in advance may consult references, perform calculations, and draught details that would be far too costly at the table... but who does that consulting, calculating, and draughting? Any benefits come at a cost to other players who could have a stake in deciding what matters and performing the relevant invention.

That's why I suggest that aims might form lenses for evaluation. I have different aims at different times, and sometimes set my aims aside to give priority to someone else's.