Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Thomas Shey]

Well, that's neither here nor there. Look upthread to @pemerton's response to the Warehouse example where he does exactly what I'm alluding to - a consequence that is an "opportunity" - note opportunity in this sense simply means "chance" as in an opportunity to move forward, backward or sideways, as it were. However, I do think that you are right that many people consider this to be problematic and that any "consequence" of a success=failure, no matter what.

But, I do think that a this is the primary sticking point when trying to compare the two systems. The insistence that one system must adhere to the mechanics of the other. It does work the other way too. A player who declared, in a trad game, that the warehouse guard was his friend from school would be very much violating the intent of the system. Players simply don't have the authority to do that and that's largely intentional. You can't "explore and discover" if you can edit what you find.

Though there are interim systems. In a lot of systems with vigorous metacurrency and dramatic editing, popping one (or in some cases more) metacurrancy to do that would be considered at least potentially legitimate. Its just not something you'd get to do as a matter of course.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, I would largely agree with this and I think that's where @Lanefan's difficulties lie. Seeing a consequence (probably not the best term since consequences are almost always bad - perhaps opportunity would have been a better choice but, that ship has long sailed) as a failure is baked into trad play. You fail the roll you get a consequence. You succeed the roll and nothing bad happens.

Perhaps, but I've been trying to get at something a step earlier here: where a prior failure is assumed by the scene where there wasn't any roll or opportunity to avoid that failure.

To elaborate: Player states "I'll spend the day discreetly watching the warehouse looking for entrances, guard patterns, shift changes, that sort of thing; all the while trying not to get caught or shot." No dice are rolled.
Thinking it a soft move, the GM says something like: "OK. After a few hours a guard approaches you... <then speaks in character as the guard, asking what I'm doing here> ..."

What the GM just did there was arbitrarily decide my attempt at being discreet has failed (a big part of being discreet is not being noticed or attracting attention, and clearly I've done both)...or, perhaps less charitably, has railroaded me into a situation I-as-character (and thus as player) didn't want as an outcome.

Now if I'd been given, say, a roll to maintain my discreet-ness and come up with partial success (on outright failure I assume guards-plural would be coming at me with handcuffs! ) - and-or a roll (which I then fail) to notice the guard's approach in time that I could innocently turn my face away, wander off, and avoid any conversation - all would be cool; and now I gotta talk my way out of this in character and-or make what I can of it. Absent those chances (or similar) to avoid the undesired scene, however, I posit the scene as presented is invalid.

 

[Campbell]

To elaborate: Player states "I'll spend the day discreetly watching the warehouse looking for entrances, guard patterns, shift changes, that sort of thing; all the while trying not to get caught or shot." No dice are rolled.
Thinking it a soft move, the GM says something like: "OK. After a few hours a guard approaches you... <then speaks in character as the guard, asking what I'm doing here> ..."

What the GM just did there was arbitrarily decide my attempt at being discreet has failed (a big part of being discreet is not being noticed or attracting attention, and clearly I've done both)...or, perhaps less charitably, has railroaded me into a situation I-as-character (and thus as player) didn't want as an outcome.

Now if I'd been given, say, a roll to maintain my discreet-ness and come up with partial success (on outright failure I assume guards-plural would be coming at me with handcuffs! ) - and-or a roll (which I then fail) to notice the guard's approach in time that I could innocently turn my face away, wander off, and avoid any conversation - all would be cool; and now I gotta talk my way out of this in character and-or make what I can of it. Absent those chances (or similar) to avoid the undesired scene, however, I posit the scene as presented is invalid.

I would respond with clarifying questions first. I need to know what you are doing specifically, right here, right now. Before I know that we cannot determine if a basic move applies, and the GM certainly cannot make a move. To do it, do it means you actually have to commit to a specific course of action before we can move forward.

The example also starts from a pretty weak frame. If there's that little sense of urgency, I'm not doing my job as a GM.

On another level this is part of an evolving conversation. If you don't like a GM Move I just made, we can talk about it really quick. I'm still going to make some sort of move, but if there's a misunderstanding of what's going on in the fiction, we can like hash it out.

 

[Hussar]

What the GM just did there was arbitrarily decide my attempt at being discreet has failed (a big part of being discreet is not being noticed or attracting attention, and clearly I've done both)...or, perhaps less charitably, has railroaded me into a situation I-as-character (and thus as player) didn't want as an outcome.

See, that's the problem right there. You are framing this as a failure. It most certainly isn't. It's just simply not a failure. It's a complication, sure, but, it's not a failure. It absolutely WOULD be a failure in a trad game. And, you are absolutely right that it would be seen as railroading and objectionable. In a non-traditional game though, this is just par for the course. The DM is practically obligated to do this, if not 100% expected to.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But, that's not the goal of an attack. The goal of an attack roll is to deal damage. Period. Now, the player might want to remove the target from play, but, that's not the goal of a single attack. A single attack simply tells you whether or not you succeed in ablating the baddie's HP. That's the success/fail states.

But thinking of the goal of an attack is to deal damage is a pure D&Dism. This is my point.

The character is not thinking "I want to take away some of this beastie's hit points", the character wants to eliminate an enemy.

The whole structure of Hit Points and Damage rolls is a system that is similar to a series of partial successes.

Compare with Savage Worlds where, outside of Wild Cards, your attack actually does remove the target from play on a success. (Note, the system is more complicated than that, I do realize). In that system, it would be fair to state that the goal of an attack is to remove a target from play. But, in a HP system, that's simply not true. That might be the overall goal, but, again, not the success/fail states of the action itself.

Right, this is my point. Compare it to systems where it can happen more frequently, and the impact that HP and damage rolls have on play... and then how that impact becomes baked into the way discussion happens.

All I'm saying is that partial successes shouldn't be as alien to trad players as we may think because they happen all the time... we just don't tend to think of them that way because the system that causes it is simply accepted as "truth". The system makes us think "I can't kill this guy in one shot, I can only do some damage".

Partial success isn't thought of in this way because it's not cited as such. But it's baked into the system.

Yeah, that's semantic nonsense, or possibly projection too far into a different mechanical structure. The goal of a dungeon crawl is to escape with treasure, so is a successful roll to open a locked door a partial success?

Intent isn't evaluated at the level of individual actions in that kind of task based resolution system (and even the rules lightest trad games use that model for combat), it's evaluated in aggregate action choice.

You're calling for a procedure with a known effect on the board state when you declare an action. Actions have a pre-established magnitude (or an established range of magnitudes) and achieving any given player side intent that can't be summarized in one action necessarily involves stringing several together. There is no action you can succeed on (setting aside the save-or-die spell question for a second) that kills the monster in one hit, so it's not possible to have a player side intent to kill the monster in one action, that's outside the set of legal moves the game allows.

It's not semantic nonsense. It's just a reframing of how we look at hit points and how they color our perception of what's happening in play. And then how that perception can carry over into discussions about RPGs in general.

Of course it's possible to kill creatures in one hit. It's less common than not doing so, but depending on level and hit dice, you certainly can expect it at times.

Only when you consider an apple an orange. Progressive success systems and subsystems are simply not the same as simple success systems and to act like they are is not going to convince much of anyone of anything.

They're both RPG systems. We can certainly compare them. I'm not saying they are the same. I'm saying they both involve situations where partial success is achieved. They don't do this in the same way, certainly. I'm not saying that.

I'm trying to offer a take that maybe helps bridge the gap a bit. It needn't be as hard an adjustment as many seem to think it must be.

 

[Hussar]

All I'm saying is that partial successes shouldn't be as alien to trad players as we may think because they happen all the time... we just don't tend to think of them that way because the system that causes it is simply accepted as "truth". The system makes us think "I can't kill this guy in one shot, I can only do some damage".

Partial success isn't thought of in this way because it's not cited as such. But it's baked into the system.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Sure, I can see that. I'm not entirely sure I'd frame it that way, but it does make sense.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter because even with the notion of partial success, there are no negatives, or at least direct negative consequences to the PC for dealing damage. Your success, even if it isn't a complete success as you say, doesn't come with any "opportunities" or consequences other than the monster can still attack. But, even then, that's not a consequence of your success. It's largely divorced from your success.

In other words, the monster would never gain a bonus to hit your character because you dealt damage to it. It's not even obligated to target your character.

 

[Aldarc]

Well, that's the kind of question that generally goes over that well in any dedicated venue to a general-purpose system, honestly.

That's the thing. They primarily challenged my question about the Cypher System weaknesses in terms of what genres it could handle. But what genres a system can do isn't really all that useful, IMHO, when it comes to understanding a system's strengths or weaknesses. Most of the time genre amounts to the color of lipstick on the pig. I'm not impressed when someone says that a system can do any genre. This is why some claims about 5e as an omni-system that can do anything also bounce off me. It doesn't really get to the nuts and bolts about what sort of games 5e was designed to do or even designed around (see Bounded Accuracy).

There were also the usual assertions that the Cypher System was a "story game" meaning that the GM could focus on "story" (see your earlier point). A few even argued that the Cypher System's mechanics meant that it was even more of a "story game" than games that are commonly called "story games": e.g., Fate, PbtA, FitD, etc. But again, I think that their understanding of "story" is heavily rooted in the aforementioned sense of the meaning where it is GM-authored fiction and even some GM-Force mechanics (i.e., GM Intrusions).

 

[Pedantic]

It's not semantic nonsense. It's just a reframing of how we look at hit points and how they color our perception of what's happening in play. And then how that perception can carry over into discussions about RPGs in general.

Of course it's possible to kill creatures in one hit. It's less common than not doing so, but depending on level and hit dice, you certainly can expect it at times.



They're both RPG systems. We can certainly compare them. I'm not saying they are the same. I'm saying they both involve situations where partial success is achieved. They don't do this in the same way, certainly. I'm not saying that.

I'm trying to offer a take that maybe helps bridge the gap a bit. It needn't be as hard an adjustment as many seem to think it must be.

You're doing precisely the opposite. The thing that everyone gets up in arms about is when you attempt to frame the underlying thing we're all doing as part of a unified theory that can fit comfortably on your terms alone. That's the thing that makes it look like you're claiming a monopoly on the truth about what roleplaying is, and makes all the trad gamers who are still in the room after the jargon has come out growl.

If you wanted to offer a bridge, then you'd do it backwards. Explain how success at cost is really equivalent to hit point ablation, or really, how you can map everything that happens in Story Now framing to a map and key model with just a bit of effort (both things I do not think are true, nor worth doing). Or, you could not do that, and accept the two play loops are not the same. We will all get along better if you don't attempt to frame them as equivalent, and instead focus on what is achieved and desired by people doing different things, or if you move your analysis back up a level and find commonality at a more fundamental trait of the activity, like @clearstream has been trying to do.

Of course it's possible to kill creatures in one hit. It's less common than not doing so, but depending on level and hit dice, you certainly can expect it at times.

This is a red herring, and you're smart enough to know that. If a player can kill a monster with one attack, the decision space they're playing in changes, and now they're gambling based on their actual odds of doing so (and attacking has increased significantly in value). 4e's minion rules are built entirely around exploiting the effect this has on player decision making.

 

[clearstream]

no one has adopted or played any role

I'd like to ask your further thoughts on "role"? An important feature of an ontological description is that it includes everything expected to be in the category and excludes everything expected to be outside it. The description works as a whole, so that even if adopting or playing a role is not distinctive to RPG, it might be that there are activities that satisfy all of

1. ongoing authorship of common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in
2. regulatory and constitutive rules
3. a linkage from fictional position (and thus the fiction) to the regulatory and constitutive rules

but that in being games in which participants do not adopt or play a role, should be excluded. I don't know that we have yet said exactly what adopting or playing a role entails? How do we recognise that a role has been adopted or played? What kinds of role can there be? What does it mean to adopt or play a role? What about acts performed in memory-of or picturing a role?

A particular challenge I am thinking of is Everest Pipkin's "The Ground Itself" (available on itch.io and drivethruRPG.) The game is characterised as a story-telling and world-building game. The author writes that "Fundamentally, this is a game about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone." I experience it to be about imagined memories: who we might have been, what we could have left behind. (Perhaps that will let in some sort of notion of adopting a recollected role.) Coming from experience playing "Artefact", for me, it works as successfully solo as with the recommended 2-5 players. I feel like I am playing an RPG when I play it (others may feel differently: it has a strong card drawing component, for instance... one that reminds of Tarot rituals and of course, "Everway".)

As time permits, I look forward to other folk's thoughts.

 

[Lanefan]

See, that's the problem right there. You are framing this as a failure. It most certainly isn't. It's just simply not a failure. It's a complication, sure, but, it's not a failure.

It's a failure, with associated complication...my point is that neither as player nor character was I given a chance of success in something where success is, while not certain, surely a reasonable possitility.

It absolutely WOULD be a failure in a trad game. And, you are absolutely right that it would be seen as railroading and objectionable. In a non-traditional game though, this is just par for the course. The DM is practically obligated to do this, if not 100% expected to.

Am I truly reading you right here, that in a non-trad game the DM is "practically obligated" to railroad?

If no, you might want to rephrase.

If yes, then...well, no wonder I'm put off by the idea.