Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[The Shadow]

I don't want to exaggerate what counts as "significant", "dramatic", "meaningful" etc. There's plenty of scope for rising action as well as climax.

I want to reiterate this point too. In contrasting styles of game, it can sometimes come across that everything in story games is Sturm und Drang - at a fever pitch all day, every day.

Of course it isn't. Who could take it? When I say I want every single scene to be meaningful, I don't mean that it has to be Hamlet's soliloquy or the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. I just mean it should relate somehow to the larger issues.

To some extent, all gamers do this - at least all I'm aware of. I don't know of anyone who, when restocking adventuring supplies, plays out every single interaction with every single merchant. "Have you any genuinely 10' poles, my good man? That one looks to be nine and a half!" Nor, as the old joke goes, does anyone feel the need to have their character go looking for the bathroom!

Nor do story games have to breathlessly address the highest and most noble of themes at all times. Like, my group's archetypical game is a group of criminals reminiscent of Burn Notice - infiltrating and taking down criminals much nastier than ourselves for fun and profit. (And, in some cases, reluctantly saving the world along the way - it's where we keep our stuff!)

The basic idea is that I want the game to flow like fiction - everything supporting the narrative, not spending a moment on anything that doesn't support it in some way. That's all I mean by "meaningful" or "dramatic".

 

[Pedantic]

Yes, we eventually resolved that. I agree that if one wants a record of unbroken success through superior planning, Fate is probably not going to be a satisfactory game.

To be clear, this is the set of incentives and the gameplay I want, but not necessarily the outcome. If anything, I would prefer to be frustrated and improvise on a pretty regular basis, so long as I can be rewarded for my choices. I imagine you could (depending how you tended to conceptualize the setbacks created by compels) contrive to create roughly the same narrative under a system designed both ways, but the choices players would be making would be completely different.

Best practices for what, according to who? The entire problem is there are disagreements on what constitute best practices.

That's kind of exactly the problem, isn't it? We don't have consensus on the goals we're achieving, and it's getting disingenuous to describe it as all as "roleplaying." Someone could quite reasonable ask for advice and receive two contradictory pieces of information that both presume an entirely different desired outcome and set of priorities.

 

[The Shadow]

That's kind of exactly the problem, isn't it? We don't have consensus on the goals we're achieving, and it's getting disingenuous to describe it as all as "roleplaying."

I don't know that it's quite that bad. We're all playing roles, surely. But just as there are different types of fiction and different types of drama, maybe we need to be clear that there are different types of roleplaying, with different sets of expectations and demands. Just like nobody has to like a particular genre or style of fiction, nobody has to like every flavor of roleplaying.

And it's probably good for all of us occasionally to try something outside of our wheelhouse now and then, but none of us need to feel obligated.

Someone could quite reasonable ask for advice and receive two contradictory pieces of information that both presume an entirely different desired outcome and set of priorities.

This is unfortunately true at present. A big part of the problem is that we don't have a standardized vocabulary to discuss our differences.

EDIT: To be more precise, to some extent such vocabulary exists, but it largely hasn't penetrated to rank-and-file gamers.

 

[Pedantic]

I'd suspect its because some of what you want is actively detrimental to what they want, and its hard for them to get around that and see its serving your purposes and those of similar interests quite well. As such its hard for them to frame it in non-negative ways.



As I reference above, I think its worse than that; I don't think its possible to discuss "best practices" in any broad sense until you look at what a game is trying to do and for who.. Even things I think are, fundamentally, terrible practices serve some people quite well. The best you can do is make (at best flawed) estimates of how many people a given approach serves well and poorly.

I sort of understand the urge against division here, in that it's both potentially demeaning ("you're doing something that isn't really roleplaying!") and alienating to a subset of an already fairly small hobby, but it's very frustrating that we must constantly state our commonplaces (and inevitably get pushed to more and more extreme versions of them) every time we try to discuss these things. The usual form this seems to take is someone saying "that problem is solved by X" when X is antithetical to what I was trying to achieve and ran into a problem with at the start. Then you have to explain why X is an inappropriate solution, and the discussion becomes about trying to wear away at the commonplaces you were starting from instead of proceeding toward trying to resolve the design problem.

I suppose, I'm really just saying that I don't think we're playing the same games (sometimes even in cases where we're literally using the same rules), and that we might benefit from more splitting. I find myself routinely put in common company with people more OSR inclined than I actually am, because we're both talking to a tradition that is comparatively more incompatible with what we're doing. Even though, if I and that other party were in discussion alone, we'd find plenty to litigate just between ourselves.

 

[The Shadow]

Musing on terminology some more... Most people who read fiction can describe the difference between first-person and third-person narratives. Many can even explain how the difference affects them and why they like one as opposed to the other.

How many gamers can similarly talk about the difference between actor stance, director stance, and author stance? Say what you will about the Forge, and even GNS (and there's plenty to be said) - to my mind, that threefold distinction is incredibly valuable in understanding what goes on at the table.

Of course, one major complication is that, unlike fiction which almost never mixes first with third person, games and players shift between stances constantly, usually without even noticing! It might do us all good (and I'm certainly including myself here) to start noticing more when and how that happens. After the fact, not in the moment, of course!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Musing on terminology some more... Most people who read fiction can describe the difference between first-person and third-person narratives. Many can even explain how the difference affects them and why they like one as opposed to the other.

How many gamers can similarly talk about the difference between actor stance, director stance, and author stance? Say what you will about the Forge, and even GNS (and there's plenty to be said) - to my mind, that threefold distinction is incredibly valuable in understanding what goes on at the table.

Of course, one major complication is that, unlike fiction which almost never mixes first with third person, games and players shift between stances constantly, usually without even noticing! It might do us all good (and I'm certainly including myself here) to start noticing more when and how that happens. After the fact, not in the moment, of course!

I have a very hard time taking the Forge seriously, even though I know intellectually that they have something to offer, because they are heavily biased against simulation as a style of play.

 

[bloodtide]

There is a THIRD OPTION, which is to play to find out what dramatic and exciting things actually happen. And beyond that, to synthesize that story out of character motivations, participant imagination, spur-of-the-moment improvisation, etc. Like in a BitD game, there IS no plan, at all. The GM doesn't have one, the players probably don't have one, it just EMERGES out of play. That's how the ranger thing was too, nobody planned it, nobody knew where it was going, I just played the character true to a certain (albeit extreme and fairly one-dimensional over all) concept that just came from random dice and happenstance at first. These games are VERY organic.

Note though this is not "third" option: that third option is the DM and players all agreeing on the emergent(secret railroad). It's not true "emergence" as the DM and players all have agendas that they will use to shape and change the game. The Dm can just alter game reality at will to fit their agenda. The players will amazingly have thier character do or not do things based on the agendas. And should there be a dice roll that is not liked, it will just be changed. That is all secret railroading.

Why would meaningful encounters be "once a year, ultra rare"?

Why not have every encounter be meaningful?

If every encounter is meaningful, and none are anything esle, then this goes back to Player Characters can die any time any round any way. And people say they don't want that....

The dichotomy is that the character can either die in play or it can't. Whether or not the character succeeds in its goals is a different equation.

Yes, again Character Death and Quest Failure are separate and different. Except that Character Death also means you failed the quest too.

But if it can die against one thing then - assuming a good-faith neutral-arbiter GM who lets the dice fall where they may - the whims of random chance dictate there's a possibility, however small, of it dying any time it puts itself at risk. And sometimes, like it or not, the whims of random chance are just gonna insist on having their say.

To have it that the character can die only in certain dramatically-appropriate scenes/situations but not in other more mundane scenarios tells me there's a problem with both internal campaign/setting consistency and willingness to honour die rolls; the exception, of course, being in-fiction set-ups where the character's fate has somehow been determined in advance and you're playing out the route it takes to get there.

Randomness is the whole point of dice, and the whole combat system. If your going to rule no player character death for an encounter, why even use the combat rules? By your own set play style nothing will happen? Is it really that much fun to just sit back an win combat after combat, after you made it impossible for your character to loose?

 

[The Shadow]

I have a very hard time taking the Forge seriously, even though I know intellectually that they have something to offer, because they are heavily biased against simulation as a style of play.

Absolutely no question on the bias! Certain individuals there get downright insulting on the topic even from my point of view! I wish they'd realize how off-putting that is.

That said, there have been some valuable insights arrived at over there.

Note though this is not "third" option: that third option is the DM and players all agreeing on the emergent(secret railroad). It's not true "emergence" as the DM and players all have agendas that they will use to shape and change the game. The Dm can just alter game reality at will to fit their agenda. The players will amazingly have thier character do or not do things based on the agendas. And should there be a dice roll that is not liked, it will just be changed. That is all secret railroading.

You clearly aren't understanding anything people are saying to you on this topic. Or else you are using a definition of "railroad" very different from any way I've ever seen it used before.

Just for starters, why are you assuming that the GM can "alter game reality at will" in our games? In a lot of story games (though not all), the fiction is the shared responsibility of everyone at the table.

Why are you assuming die rolls will be changed? My group never changes die rolls in our games, ever.

Of course everyone has their own agendas! That's hardly even worth saying. In story games, we try to be honest about what our agendas are and seek them above-board, through game mechanics. Almost like it's a "roleplaying game" or something.

Maybe you should stop telling us how our games must be and start listening to what we say about them? Maybe we have more insight about our own games than you do?

If every encounter is meningful, and none are anything esle, then this goes back to Player Characters can die any time any round any way. And people say they don't want that....

Once again, this is based on the pure assumption that only character death is meaningful. I reject this assumption.

Randomness is the whole point of dice, and the whole combat system. If your going to rule no player character death for an encounter, why even use the combat rules? By your own set play style nothing will happen? Is it really that much fun to just sit back an win combat after combat, after you made it impossible for your character to loose?

Death is not the only way to lose a combat. I should think this is sufficiently obvious... Someone can be beaten without dying.

Basically, @bloodtide, what it comes down to is that you think we're playing the same kind of game you are, but badly. What we're telling you is that we're playing a different kind of game entirely.

 

[Manbearcat]

Note though this is not "third" option: that third option is the DM and players all agreeing on the emergent(secret railroad). It's not true "emergence" as the DM and players all have agendas that they will use to shape and change the game. The Dm can just alter game reality at will to fit their agenda. The players will amazingly have thier character do or not do things based on the agendas. And should there be a dice roll that is not liked, it will just be changed. That is all secret railroading.

This is not correct.

In the games that facilitate the sort of play that @AbdulAlhazred is talking about, the system has a huge amount of say (which is why I've historically called this phenomena "system's say!"). Neither GMs nor players get to short-shrift or curtail that "system's say." It constrains moments of play specifically and it binds play broadly by giving it a superstructure. This is done via transparent, table-facing procedures, rules, principles, and an overarching agenda for play from which those things all stem from.

Typically, what people who haven't played these games conceive of when they try to imagine this sort of play is not "secret railroading." The typical (brutally mistaken) epithet is "that sounds board-gamey."

Both are deeply mistaken, but the latter is at least somewhat understandable because boardgames have a significant amount of "system's say" that participants can't just NOPE OUT of. The reason why participants don't opt out of the constraining rules/procedures, principles, superstructure of these games is simple; "they work." They work to produce the sort of play that is advertised on the tin of these games (so why in the world would you opt out!).

 

[The Shadow]

The reason why participants don't opt out of the constraining rules/procedures, principles, superstructure of these games is simple; "they work." They work to produce the sort of play that is advertised on the tin of these games (so why in the world would you opt out!).

Yes, EXACTLY!! They work! They facilitate a certain type of play.

When I first got Fate (which wasn't the first time I played it) I was dumbstruck by how the mechanics quietly force story beats to just happen, without anyone exactly intending it. It feels almost like black magic at first!

Scum & Villainy was similar when my group played it. It also makes things pop, though in a distinctively different way than Fate. We ultimately decided we liked Fate's way better on the whole, but took on board some lessons from the way S&V did things, so all to the good.