Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[The Shadow]

Well, perhaps oddly, I always felt that the attempt to cloth situations and milieu in impersonal (often but not exclusively simulationist) ways feels particularly disempowering. Like, the way the Great Wheel in classic TSR D&D is depicted as some sort of endless eternal 'timeless' balance. The World Axis depiction of an active dynamic struggle between order and chaos, with the ultimate outcome yet to be determined, just seemed vastly more interesting and likely to figure in a dramatic story arc. 4e's designers felt this as well, and you can sense the clear way in which dramatic necessity is a clear priority throughout the system.

I have no beef with 4e. I quite liked its lore and cosmology, much better than in any edition that had come before. And I stand in awe at the intensity of design effort to produce exactly the game they had in mind. It was an astounding achievement.

Unfortunately, the game they had in mind wasn't a game that I had much interest in playing. The strong tactical, battlegrid element of it didn't appeal to me in the slightest degree.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I see, thank you for the clarification.

I think the word 'model' is getting us back into the weeds of whether one is really trying to "simulate" something or not. My take has been that isn't really the case, that nobody is really trying simulate the world - but that many people do want to feel that has been done. They want enough of a feel of reality that they can surrender themselves to it, immerse themselves in it.

Can you simulate something that doesn't exist? I think is the fulcrum on which that question rests, I think so, and I think it provides the latitude to the model that I mentioned in terms of my own ability to accept a gamist reality, because the purpose isn't accuracy, its the utility and texture.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

While I'm sure that players exist who don't care much about consistency, I think caring about it is very far from being a trait exclusive to "simulationists". Narrative gamers often have a strong sense of responsibility for the fiction, to ensure that inconsistencies don't arise.

Right, it is more where this consistency is vested, and perhaps what it covers. In our Narrative focus games we have established fiction, and that fiction is not normally contravened arbitrarily. If Pietra is our ally, she continues to be such, at least until some sort of change to that status is signaled in the fiction, and then it has an 'explanation' in terms of the logic of events, which has integrity. Without that, play would be largely impossible. The character's actions and needs would certainly be meaningless, so I'm not sure what such play would do except create a sense of bathos perhaps. This is the point of the game Paranoia, which is a pretty niche game that really isn't intended for long-term play. Its fun for a couple sessions, basically. Toon in the other game which shares some of these traits, as the 'explanations' for the fiction can be pretty much arbitrary as long as the participants accept that they reflect some form of 'cartoon logic'.

 

[loverdrive]

I've pondered about decoupling outcomes from the fictional situation quite a bit, but never really had an opportunity to crystalize it into words, and it seems reasonaly relevant to the thread, so why not do it here.

I've come to a conclusion that I, contrary to what I thought, actually don't give a single quack about leveraging fictional positioning. From micro-details to ubiquitous things like "my character is good at fighting and this is a fight", I sincerely don't care.

I prefer for all actions to have the exact same probability of success, as this allows for greater flexibility in character expression — if you don't have to worry whether [X] will work, you can role play freely.

I, honestly, feel kinda dumb — this is completely obvious, but it occured to me only recently.

More than that, the basic flow of any RPG looks like:

1. Player states what they want to happen
2. A rough outline of an outcome is decided using the rules
3. Someone describes what happened "on-screen", filling in any missing necessary details

First, a whole bunch of "game" can be packaged into step 2. Of course, when it's just rolling dice, meaningful gameplay must be created elsewhere, but even something as simple as bidding in Undying already works great. Now I'm working on an RPG that uses a fighting minigame for that purpose, and I'm generally happy with the results (well, the fighting minigame at this moment sucks, but still)

Second, the outline being rough gives an opportunity to resolve any situation while maintaining consistency, and, again, gives more freedom for expression. If it's not "you succeed at the task at hand and the new fiction must reflect that", but "you end up in a more favourable position than before", it's much easier to work with.

 

[The Shadow]

Can you simulate something that doesn't exist? I think is the fulcrum on which that question rests, I think so, and I think it provides the latitude to the model that I mentioned in terms of my own ability to accept a gamist reality, because the purpose isn't accuracy, its the utility and texture.

"Texture" is a very good word for what's going on. It needs to feel right, in ways that aren't always easy to quantify. "Simulate" still rings false to my ear; it connotes too much precision, too clinical an attitude... More fundamentally, I don't think the thought process used in actually simulating something and the thought process in coming up with a "simulationist" mechanic really have much of anything in common.

Right, it is more where this consistency is vested, and perhaps what it covers. In our Narrative focus games we have established fiction, and that fiction is not normally contravened arbitrarily. If Pietra is our ally, she continues to be such, at least until some sort of change to that status is signaled in the fiction, and then it has an 'explanation' in terms of the logic of events, which has integrity.

Alliances can be a tricksy subject. It could be revealed that Pietra was only pretending alliance all along, had been worming her way into our confidence for her own purposes, possibly even intending to betray us. I would find that a legitimate development, provided that it was consistent with Pietra's past behavior and the rest of the fiction.

(Of course, potentially even more interesting would be the reveal that she had originally intended to betray us in that way, but had come to actually like us or believe in our ideals or otherwise truly support our cause.)

But yes, I certainly agree with your larger point.

This is the point of the game Paranoia, which is a pretty niche game that really isn't intended for long-term play.

Now that I think of it, Paranoia kind of is an example of a game where everything is meaningless. But that isn't an ironic reveal at the end of the story, it's front and center from the beginning. The best you can hope for is to be the last clone standing... for now.

I've pondered about decoupling outcomes from the fictional situation quite a bit, but never really had an opportunity to crystalize it into words, and it seems reasonaly relevant to the thread, so why not do it here.

I've come to a conclusion that I, contrary to what I thought, actually don't give a single quack about leveraging fictional positioning. From micro-details to ubiquitous things like "my character is good at fighting and this is a fight", I sincerely don't care.

I prefer for all actions to have the exact same probability of success, as this allows for greater flexibility in character expression — if you don't have to worry whether [X] will work, you can role play freely.

I, honestly, feel kinda dumb — this is completely obvious, but it occured to me only recently.

...Huh. It feels very weird for every action to be equally probable. Maybe that's because I'm still partly "sim"? But maybe not. "My character is good at X" is as much a detail of the fiction as any other.

More broadly, are you saying every task has an equal chance of success, or every conflict? Because of course, games generally prioritize one over the other. EDIT: I would find the latter far more palatable than the former.

Second, the outline being rough gives an opportunity to resolve any situation while maintaining consistency, and, again, gives more freedom for expression. If it's not "you succeed at the task at hand and the new fiction must reflect that", but "you end up in a more favourable position than before", it's much easier to work with.

Yes, I think there's interesting work to be done (and some has been done) in this space.

 

[Lanefan]

To be fair, it does sometimes feel like claiming to value "realism," in terms of naturalistic physics (or whatever else) while also wanting a game with "magic" and "elves" is bit of a stretch. IMHO something has to give when trying to do both. That's fine if you know where and when you want to sacrifice the realistic in favor of the fantastic and/or the fantastic in favor of the realistic.

Or if you know (or at least think you know) how to somewhat-seamlessly merge the fantastic into the realistic. This has always been my goal in theory, though I've never got closer than a rather long way from it in practice.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, I once created a fairly realistic-sounding weather table for parts of my campaign world. It just wasn't that interesting! I even generated a bunch of weather for a whole year and whenever the PCs went outside I'd look up the weather, but basically it was boring and trivial after about 3 sessions of play. It would matter to real people, but it didn't serve the purposes of game play very well.

Given that the current weather is going to greatly influence each partipant's visualization of pretty much any outdoor scene, I find this rather odd. Yes it's trivial - until it isn't; and it doesn't take ten seconds to give a quick weather summary "It's sunny, cool, light wind at your backs" or "You've got passing heavy showers, sometimes-gusty winds mostly from the west, and it's getting colder as the day goes on". Worth doing every time, IMO.

Even if what they're doing is something fairly trivial e.g. walking from one town to the next, I'll still narrate the weather just to set the tone. It makes a difference to how the characters/scene is visualized during that walk if it's a bright warm day or if it's pouring rain the whole time; and gives the players the opportunity to roleplay (even if only as a passing comment) how the weather might affect the moods of their characters much like real-world weather affects our moods.

Weather can also change the actions of the characters. In the example above where it's getting colder as the day goes on, that might cause the characters to stop early and make camp before those showers start turning to snow, thus making their journey take longer (where such delay might have known or unknown consequences elsewhere).

And, given I'm a weather geek in real life, of course it's going to be as realistic as I can get it!

 

[loverdrive]

More broadly, are you saying every task has an equal chance of success, or each conflict? Because of course, games generally prioritize one over the other

I'm not entirely sure the difference between a task resolution and conflict resolution actually exist, to be honest: it's just a matter of scope.

Regardless, it's not important here. I'm talking about both.

Huh. It feels very weird for every action to be equally probable. Maybe that's because I'm still partly "sim"? But maybe not. "My character is good at X" is as much a detail of the fiction as any other.

Imagine a hypothetical system:

1. There's a player who controls a single character, and at any moment they can declare that their character does something ("I hit him with my sword!", "I kiss her!", "I flap my arms like a bird and fly!")
2. There's a GM who resolves each of these actions as follows: every third action succeeds and the character ends up in a better position, all others create more problems than they solve.

Yes, literally anything you can think of, regardless of how reasonable, awesome or silly it is, has the exact same chance of success at a given moment.

Yes, your character being, say, good at fighting and bad at math doesn't influence whether they'll succeed or fail at all.

Yes, nothing is stopping your character from solving a mathematical equation of the Universe, ascending to the godhood and reshaping reality to their liking.

But if you have created a character who is good at fighting and bad at math, why would you do that instead of expressing a character you have created by acting consistently with the character concept?

 

[Lanefan]

To elaborate on the "as if"... It was common back in the day, and still is in some corners of the OSR world, to explain some of the more bizarre design decisions of early D&D in terms of "realism".

For example, level limits for demihumans were explained by, "If they could keep levelling over their long lives, they'd dominate the world!" Which, it is explicitly or implicitly stated, would be "unrealistic".

For me it went the other way: those level limits didn't make the least bit of realistic sense; and so over the years I dropped them. And yes this means there's a few ultra-high-level Elves out there, but perhaps fortunately not all Elves have great attention spans and thus don't stick at doing any one thing for their whole lives.

Of course the retort is perfectly possible (and was made even in the early days) that adventurers are extraordinary people who don't necessarily match the broad demographic profiles of the population... And that in any case, why do game mechanics have to support that degree of world-level "realism"? But that retort had remarkably little effect.

Indeed, and nor should it. IMO adventurers should reflect the broad demographic; with their extraordinariness coming from the fact they're willing and able to undertake the extremely high risk task of adventuring in order to get on that juicy level-advancement fast track.

This is one reason why having adventures be at least somewhat lethal is important: without that risk and associated winnowing-out process, the reward becomes unbalanced in a hurry and you do end up with way too many ultra-high-level people in the setting.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

The answer would usually be:

So that you can take on the role of the character, and think of the problem from their perspective using the mechanics as a proxy for how they might weigh different solutions. If I know I can solve a problem in a way that is inconsistent with my concept, the need to partition that information away from the character's decision-making, distances me from them. The restrictions of the game enhance the playing of a role by guiding me toward that sense of alignment with my character.