Vincent Baker on mechanics, system and fiction in RPGs

[kenada]

Im not sure I can reconcile one person telling me his games are evidence of his design work and another telling me that they're not related.

That Baker has created a certain type of game as a product of his design work doesn’t necessarily mean his design work leads only to creating that type of games.

Not all of them, and thats the reason why genre emulation was picked on. Genre Emulation mechanics are progression mechanics, and additionally are all far too complex for the resulting stories to be considered genuinely emergent.

Sure, some tabletop role-playing games concern themselves more with playing through or experiencing a curated experience. The GM is still in charge of things, but they’re not trying to create an emergent story. I’m having trouble seeing how that relates to “Genre Emulation” mechanics.

Since you mention later wanting to make sure we’re all speaking the same language, I’d like to get some clarity. When I think of “Genre Emulation”, I think of recreating and mechanically reinforcing the tropes of literary or film genres, which seems more like physics or perhaps internal economy, tactical maneuvering, or even social interaction mechanics —all of which are emergence mechanics.

Their more basic forms Yes,and et al would count, however.

Would you also include mechanics like conflict resolution or progress clocks?

Plus, as an aside, my personal theory is that emergent storytelling is already happening in games inherently. Mechanics in of themselves tell stories, and great webs of them tell even greater stories.

We had a thread about that a few months ago. Sadly, it didn’t get much traction. I think what the text means by “emergent storytelling” is something different than the various stories that emerge from the interaction of mechanics (like the example of Elden Ring in the video discussed in that thread). The sidebar is specifically talking about progress-as-journey, particularly how it can be useful for stories (versus progress-as-resource).

There are certain elements it identifies as required for a good story (coherence, novelty, causality, credible characters). It observes a difference between dramatic tension and gameplay tension, then it touches a bit on how games (particularly video games) can adopt mechanics to create the feel of being storylike. It does this to try to explain how progress-as-resource does not necessarily conflict with storytelling. The rest is as-quoted above.

The issue with relying on emergent mechanics alone is they need something to tie them together to provide the expected dramatic tension because that won’t happen naturally. I pointed to tabletop role-playing games as having a solution because they typically designate one participate whose job it is to take care of those sorts of things: the GM. Baker’s games show one way of operationalizing that, but it’s not the only one.

Games in general already have genres of their own, and as an artform all games convey meaning through interactivity, which comes from Mechanics. Genre Emulation works for gamifying genres in other art forms (and we even see examples of that style in video games already. Uncharted/Max Payne style games), but it fundamentally isn't emergent on its own.

This seems to imply a similar definition to the one I’m using, but the conclusion is very different. Can you give an example of a Genre Emulation mechanic and how it relates to the progress of the player?

As controversial as it is to say, as I no doubt will get naughty word for it, genre emulation as progression mechanics are just a form of railroading, and most genre emulation games are hybridizing with an emergent game form to hide this. Uncharted allows for emergence with open levels and free form gameplay, PBTA with the integrated Improv game.

Railroading is fine if people understand that’s what they’re doing. It’s a problem when it’s hidden, and the players wouldn’t be cool with that.

That comes down to mechanic types. As the book says and Ive reiterated, that statement of universality applies to Discrete mechanics only.

Fair enough. I’m still skimming through it and focusing on different sections. It seems like there needs to be an another exception made for what the GM brings to tabletop role-playing games.

 

[Emberashh]

When I think of “Genre Emulation”, I think of recreating and mechanically reinforcing the tropes of literary or film genres, which seems more like physics or perhaps internal economy, tactical maneuvering, or even social interaction mechanics —all of which are emergence mechanics.

The difference between what the book was referring to by naming those mechanics and their seeming equivalents in genre emulation are aesthetic.

For example, given we're talking tabletop games, take 2d6 + Mod versus a TN. This is what AW uses as a core mechanic to resolve Moves, which as you note reinforce film/comic/literary/etc tropes.

In 2d6 RPG, the same mechanic is used to resolve different Actions that directly model the individual actions of a character.

Now, xdY + n as a mechanic is just a number generator. It doesn't do anything on its own, but its easy way to depress the computational overhead to process and generate a consistent chance of some number appearing.

But depending on what one wants to do, it can be used to provide different aesthetics.

This is actually where the whole issue of people having to "unlearn" DND to learn PBTA comes from. People used to DND are used to the latter aesthetics of direct action modeling, and when PBTA doesn't constrain people from rolling too much they're going to run into issues of feeling like their character is an idiot when rolls in PBTA produce a negative feedback loop most of the time.

Plus, I'd disagree on physics and internal economy being correlative to tropes, at least for the most part. I can see the physics angle for cartoon physics, but I'd wonder if cartoon physics would be worth mechanizing at all.

Would you also include mechanics like conflict resolution or progress clocks?

Conflict resolution, sure, depending on what it is. Clocks I'm iffy on, though that might just be my dislike for them.

I think what the text means by “emergent storytelling” is something different than the various stories that emerge from the interaction of mechanics (like the example of Elden Ring in the video discussed in that thread). The sidebar is specifically talking about progress-as-journey, particularly how it can be useful for stories (versus progress-as-resource).

Indeed that was my read as well. I think what Adams had in mind was closer to not just a story being emergent, but all of its components being emergent and then combining to form a story.

So you wouldn't model the tropes, they'd just emerge spontaneously on their own.

And I don't think that these can't converge without external management (a GM, etc).

In fact I'd theorize that if you set up the base mechanics right they'd create a feedback loop that reverberates into a state that hits all of the marks Adams calls for. It'd just be tricky to do this in a video game because it'd need simulate things like talking. Recent developments of AI voices is changing that though, so the pieces are there.

Can you give an example of a Genre Emulation mechanic and how it relates to the progress of the player?

I think I covered this above, but Ill also add that genre emulation can go wrong. Ive related the aesthetic issue PBTA tends to have (roll too much > negative feedback loop goes into overdrive > feel like idiot), and thats where we can end up violating the Credible Character requirement. But, that negative feedback loop itself, even when its operating as intended, can violate both Causality and Coherence.

Pretty much no story is just endless contrived drama, at least not ones that are considered good. TV Shows run into that problem when they just keep going on forever, and apropos, a lot of PBTA tends to work better as one shots or relatively short campaigns.

Hence, why I think PBTA could do with a means of a more rigid turn structure and a roll economy for PCs. In AW, at least, the math of progression could be tweaked so that the drama feedback loop flips to Positive around mid way; that'd help to make the overall play sequence of a campaign correlate better with more typical plot structures.

It’s a problem when it’s hidden, and the players wouldn’t be cool with that.

Precisely, which is pretty much a concise explanation for why I bounced so hard off PBTA, but not Ironsworn.

Ironsworn was my first exposure to these kinds of games, and the design being solo focused actually masks a lot of these issues. I can see them now of course, and Ive long since adjusted the game to address the aesthetic issues. (Just use higher base stats and I give myself limits to roll)

But there really isn't the same benefit in non-outlier PBTA examples. Others combat it in other ways, though; Fellowship for example, while not a game I particularly enjoyed (I just don't care for creative writing as a game), also masks a lot of the issues due to how it splits the authorial stance.

 

[Emberashh]

We had a thread about that a few months ago

Now having read the topic, I have four anecdotes Id like to share, that I think will illuminate my preferences and why I'm critical in particular about certain things.

Firstly, two stories about DayZ, the OG Zombie survival game.

It was a summer night, and as I tend to do playing that game, I was cozied up in the dark with nothing going on but the game. My character had been alive for a while, and I was pretty stacked as far as gear went, and back then you could actually keep a base hidden, so all in all I was well above the normally hectic scavenging gameplay and had settled into more or less a hunter role as I kept exploring around.

Anyway, as I'm playing night falls in-game, no moonlight, and a pretty obnoxious thunderstorm rolled in. So not only am I genuinely in the dark IRL, but also in-game, and the storm sounds drowned out pretty much everything including my footsteps. I did have night vision, but as it happens it sucks in those conditions.

Not too long after this, I realize my foods run down, and as I'm on the opposite end of the map from where my stuff is, I know Ive got to find something sooner or later. As it happens, I managed to hear a Deer through the storm, and I decide to go after it.

Now, I don't know why I decided to do so, but I got it into my head that I wanted to try and sneak up on the Deer and see if I could just stab it. So, I crouched and, with my knife out, slowly crept up to the deer. This took close to 10 minutes of effort, as I inadvertently lost sight of them in the rain and had to double back.

But eventually I got up close, and just as I stood up so I could attack, CRACKKKKK.

A gunshot rings out, who knows how far away. Its an SVD (a sniper rifle in the game), and the Deer drops dead in front of me. I haul absolute ass out of there, because while I had a rifle on me, I had no way to know where they shot me from, especially because the only way they could have taken the shot from a distance is with a night vision scope.

Miraculously though, no other shots get taken. I never knew if the guy even saw me, and he just missed or what, but believe me when I say I never felt my heart pound so much.

This was in the Standalone version of DayZ.

In the original mod, I once befriended a guy and as it happened, he was in a clan and so I joined up with them shortly afterwords.

One day, one of the clanmates got a hold of a helicopter, and so to celebrate we all loaded up and started romping around the main server we stuck to. This went on for a few nights over a holiday weekend, and by the third, we were just sticking with it as it worked.

We had managed to fly over to the southeast part of the map, and we were hovering over Rog, which is one of the ruined castles on the map. We were trying to figure out where to go, and as luck would have it, PANG. Another gunshot. This time a M107 .50 cal (i don't remember if this was stock to the mod or not), and they took out the heli doing this.

It was actually pretty funny, because the guy took the shot so far away we didn't even hear the shot itself, just the PANG of the bullet hitting the rotors and then our collective amazement as we dropped out of the sky and blew up.

The person who did it apparently had access to our Teamspeak, and lo and behold its one of our rivals from another clan. The dude literally assassinated the lot of us.

What then proceeded to happen over the next three hours was 15 people chasing one guys character across like 3 or 4 different servers, and ending in a raid and basewipe when one of my clan managed to steal a heli that had some guns on it.

I still remember mowing down like 20-30 tents with the guns very vividly.

=======
Now, a story from Ark: Survival Evolved.

So there's whole spiel I could go into about my first experience with Ark and how I eventually ended up in a Tribe, but thats not the story I want to tell. Instead, I want to talk about Chinese hackers. They suck, and Ark in those days had huge problems with these people. Our Server collectively decided on a policy that basically said we'd all put aside anything and everything to wipe them whenever one or two of them show up.

One time, a couple of them showed up and they ended up at our base, and as hackers do they started a aimbotting us to death.

Over the next hour or so, what erupted was basically Benny Hill shenanigans where a bunch of naked bodies wearing only helmets started piling up on the walls as they kept killing us. (They could only hit the head so body armor was a waste of time)

We kept up the fight, trying our best to basically use the one rifle we had in the base to keep trying to countersnipe the hackers. Eventually we won out as they mustve run out of ammo.

From there, the server eventually convened to go hunt them down and clear them out. We managed to track them to a cave they had managed to glitch a base into and while not as funny (as we basically just had another Tribes tank T-rex just take their shots while it ate their walls), it was particularly memorable to see around 30 people gathered with Dinos, guns, bombs and all the like, ready to destroy everything the hackers had once they were dead and couldn't spawn back. Quite the spectacle.

======

Now, a not so fun story about Kerbal Space Program.

Kerbal is a game I've long loved, and its a game that over time I could consistently come back to even as I tired of it. The really neat thing about Kerbal is that while on the surface its a wacky explosion simulator, the game's mechanics, even sans mods, really do allow you to take the space exploration sim as seriously as you want.

Being the type to do just that, over time I envision pretty grand designs for Missions; not the kind that can go to every planet it one go, but ones that more or less directly emulate a realistic-ish Mars exploration type scenario. In particular, I got pretty attached to two of them: the 1969 Integrated Program Plan, and a plan not too dissimilar from what we see in the Martian, itself based on a version of the Constellation plan.

Now, these plans are naturally pretty complex, and take a lot of work, and that remains true even in the abstracted solar system of KSP. As a result of wanting play through these plans, I inevitably burn myself out. I try too hard to make the game tell the story I want to experience, and eventually I peter out and stop playing altogether.

Its such a problem with KSP that Ive actually only ever gotten to the Mars analogue legitimately once, in approximately 3000 hours of playtime, and that was only because I forced myself to just do it the Kerbal way, which isn't nearly as complicated.

Now, if I play Kerbal more or less as intended, without all the extraneous stuff that Im adding to better emulate the stories I wanted to experience, the game is still great fun. I can land on the Mun in my sleep. Sometimes I literally do; I dream about the game sometimes.

But as soon as I get that itch to try again, it spells doom.

===

Now, why did I tell those three anecdotes? Well, to illustrate that yes, gameplay can in fact make for incredible and memorable narratives. In that topic, the opposition seemed opposed to that possibility, but also dismissed the idea that a narrative being made out of the events after the fact counted.

That to me seems wrong. For one, I just don't consider forming a literal movie narrative directly is desirable, and that seems to be what they thought counted.

And for two, in real life this is just how stories work. If any sort of story about a real event is told, it gets conveyed through a narrative. That doesn't mean the real, 1:1 sequence of real events isn't a story, though. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be a narrative worth telling.

The absence of all the inbetween moments, the times in the above stories where nothing might actually be happening, doesn't invalidate that the story is still emerging from the entire sequence of events.

And I shared that first story about DayZ for exactly this reason, because part of the appeal of DayZ, one of the few games I can genuinely never tire of playing, is that what makes the stories it tells really special is all of those inbetween moments of nothing.

DayZ is often referred to as a jogging simulator, and thats not that far off. Even in well populated servers, there are long stretches of time where you're just wandering around looting. Hours even.

Because of this, you as the player tend to enter into a state of fairly deep relaxation. Its almost meditative at times.

And then a player shows up and all hell breaks lose as you panic and freak out at the prospect of getting beaten to death with a can of beans.

Its a game that conveys genuine terror in a way that even most horror games struggle with. Its quite extraordinary, and it speaks to why DayZ, for all its issues, remains a mainstay while all the derivative zombie games have basically been forgotten. (The looter shooter spin offs are a different story)

And even now, as someones whose deeply familiar with DayZ and for whom the game has lost any illusion of it being anything other than a game, running into somebody unexpectedly still hits exactly the same way.

And I shared the others just to nail home what can come out of games. Naturally, I have plenty from the tabletop space, but I wanted to share video game examples precisely because its much clearer that what results is because of the game itself (and some hackers, in the Ark example), and that being limited as video games are isn't really a detriment.

But I shared the Kerbal story as a contrast, and to highlight exactly why I do not care for narrative forward games on the whole, and why I, in direct contradiction of basically all trends in TTRPGs, think people are over obsessive with telling stories.

I just know what results when you try too hard, and from my perspective it feels like the whole hobby is collectively following the same path I do every time I start playing Kerbal and get that itch.

Plus, in terms of just being practical about running and playing in a ttrpg, trying too hard to make a story happen is just a hell of a lot of stress and overhead. Its not uncommon to see DMs burn out on DND, not just because of the system being a PITA, but also just because the desire to make a story happen is omnipresent and it consumes so much of the thought going into playing.

And then when you swap over to a PBTA game, its also not uncommon to find people who feel like being a GM is a massive amount of work because of how much has to be improvised and made up on the fly, incidentally another consequence of the aesthetic problem.

For me, when I run any of these games, I stick to the idea that these are sandboxes, and what stories I introduce into the gameworld are written with this in mind. They're either non-linear in nature (ie, the PCs can engage its stages in any order), which is easy, or they're timeline flexible, which is a writing method that allows me to write stories that can shift and adapt when things happen in a story to accomodate player choices on when to engage, while still letting that story play out even if they choose to ignore it.

What results is a more or less living gameworld that has tons of stories being told all the time. Very satisfying stories in fact, ones I can be proud of, even if the PCs ignore them entirely. If I write a story about Thanos, I write it with the assumption of the PCs assumed absent.

Ergo, if the PCs never engage that story, Thanos' story plays out and thats that. Good bye 50% of everybody. Its a great story, and if the PCs decide then to engage, that becomes a story for them to discover as they deal with its fall out.

But if they choose not to ignore it, then they can change it. Its set up and runs in my games in such a way that the PCs could intervene at any time past t+0 and the story will adapt to it in real time as their interactions pile up.

Whether they derail it entirely, or play out Infinity War, or get bored and do something else instead partway, or some other unpredictable decision, it all works out because I as the GM have all the stages of that story in place to mold into a good story.

And that only gets better when I step into Thanos as my own PC, and use that to my advantage to adapt the overall story even more to the specific interactions the PCs introduce.

This method, for me, does better at delivering an emergent story than any others Ive seen, and Ironsworn in particular gets enhanced considerably by running the gameworld like this. I don't consider that particular combo to be the peak, as obviously I have a deep fondness for story machines (to use the new term), so my own preference is closer to something that focuses direct modeling rather than genre emulation, but it is very very potent.

 

[kenada]

The difference between what the book was referring to by naming those mechanics and their seeming equivalents in genre emulation are aesthetic.

For example, given we're talking tabletop games, take 2d6 + Mod versus a TN. This is what AW uses as a core mechanic to resolve Moves, which as you note reinforce film/comic/literary/etc tropes.

In 2d6 RPG, the same mechanic is used to resolve different Actions that directly model the individual actions of a character.

Now, xdY + n as a mechanic is just a number generator. It doesn't do anything on its own, but its easy way to depress the computational overhead to process and generate a consistent chance of some number appearing.

But depending on what one wants to do, it can be used to provide different aesthetics.

Is that “aesthetic” in the MDA sense or a different one? If the former, I’m having trouble following. What is being evoked differently between the PbtA-style loop and the task-oriented loop?

This is actually where the whole issue of people having to "unlearn" DND to learn PBTA comes from. People used to DND are used to the latter aesthetics of direct action modeling, and when PBTA doesn't constrain people from rolling too much they're going to run into issues of feeling like their character is an idiot when rolls in PBTA produce a negative feedback loop most of the time.

The constraint on rolling in PbtA is that to do it, you do it (and if you do it, you do it). Rolls happen only when a trigger move requires a roll. Players shouldn’t be rolling unless a move triggers and requires a roll. Additionally, the GM shouldn’t be framing them into neutral situations. There should always be some kind of stakes, so when you do things in the fiction, and that triggers a move, the GM can make moves that follow in response.

If I had to blame any particular thing, it would be the onboarding process that requires learning the required social interaction mechanics from outside the game, especially when they’re taught as universal to tabletop role-playing games rather than those of a specific game. Not only does it set one up for confusion when trying a new (and different) game, but one will end up propagating that particular understanding when teaching others.

Plus, I'd disagree on physics and internal economy being correlative to tropes, at least for the most part. I can see the physics angle for cartoon physics, but I'd wonder if cartoon physics would be worth mechanizing at all.

Yeah, physics is a stretch (haha). I want to use it for things like properties of the genre setting, but it seems mostly for video game stuff like physics engines and rhythm games. Would not being able to die in Toon count?

Internal economy seems practically mandatory. Those mechanics are all your resource-related feedback loops. Stuff like stress and trauma in Blades in the Dark, Hx in Apocalypse World, and so on. Tactical maneuvering feels comparatively much more limited (using your gangs in BitD?).

In fact I'd theorize that if you set up the base mechanics right they'd create a feedback loop that reverberates into a state that hits all of the marks Adams calls for. It'd just be tricky to do this in a video game because it'd need simulate things like talking. Recent developments of AI voices is changing that though, so the pieces are there.

Maybe. Presumably that’s why it’s an active area of research.

I think I covered this above, but Ill also add that genre emulation can go wrong. Ive related the aesthetic issue PBTA tends to have (roll too much > negative feedback loop goes into overdrive > feel like idiot), and thats where we can end up violating the Credible Character requirement. But, that negative feedback loop itself, even when its operating as intended, can violate both Causality and Coherence.

Note that I chose those names for brevity. Those aren’t the book’s terms. It just has a paragraph or so for each bullet in the sidebar. A Credible character is one who acts in a “psychologically credible” way. If you’re not doing that in a PbtA game, you’re going against your principles (“name everyone, make everyone human”). The same is true of Casuality, which refers to not going back in time or returning to the status quo. Apocalypse World is definitely a game about not maintaining the status quo. It may be that some PbtA games fail at those things (since there is quite a bit of variance among games), but neither should be an issue in Apocalypse World.

Pretty much no story is just endless contrived drama, at least not ones that are considered good. TV Shows run into that problem when they just keep going on forever, and apropos, a lot of PBTA tends to work better as one shots or relatively short campaigns.

Hence, why I think PBTA could do with a means of a more rigid turn structure and a roll economy for PCs. In AW, at least, the math of progression could be tweaked so that the drama feedback loop flips to Positive around mid way; that'd help to make the overall play sequence of a campaign correlate better with more typical plot structures.

My only experience with an actual PbtA game as a player was Stonetop. It went sessions and would have gone more, but I dropped out because the system really wasn’t working for me. I think it could have gone on quite a while though. It would have depended on how well we played.

Precisely, which is pretty much a concise explanation for why I bounced so hard off PBTA, but not Ironsworn.

Ironsworn was my first exposure to these kinds of games, and the design being solo focused actually masks a lot of these issues. I can see them now of course, and Ive long since adjusted the game to address the aesthetic issues. (Just use higher base stats and I give myself limits to roll)

But there really isn't the same benefit in non-outlier PBTA examples. Others combat it in other ways, though; Fellowship for example, while not a game I particularly enjoyed (I just don't care for creative writing as a game), also masks a lot of the issues due to how it splits the authorial stance.

What’s the hidden element in PbtA games that caused you to bounce off them? The MC isn’t supposed to be calling out which moves they’re making, but you’re supposed to be transparent about what is happening. It’s not a game of unraveling the MC’s hidden state. It’s emphatic that’s not part of your agenda.

 

[pemerton]

take 2d6 + Mod versus a TN. This is what AW uses as a core mechanic to resolve Moves, which as you note reinforce film/comic/literary/etc tropes.

In 2d6 RPG, the same mechanic is used to resolve different Actions that directly model the individual actions of a character.

<snip>

This is actually where the whole issue of people having to "unlearn" DND to learn PBTA comes from. People used to DND are used to the latter aesthetics of direct action modeling, and when PBTA doesn't constrain people from rolling too much they're going to run into issues of feeling like their character is an idiot when rolls in PBTA produce a negative feedback loop most of the time.

I don't think it's very accurate to say that player-side moves in Apocalypse World reinforce film/comic/literary/etc tropes.

I mean, what tropes are reinforced by Seize By Force, or by Seduce/Manipulate?

I also don't find your remark about a negative feedback loop persuasive. You seem to be treating 7 to 9 as a miss, where as the AW rulebook is quite clear that it's a hit.

 

[Emberashh]

Is that “aesthetic” in the MDA sense or a different one? If the former, I’m having trouble following. What is being evoked differently between the PbtA-style loop and the task-oriented loop?

Its been a while since I read the MDA paper, but its entirely possible its morphed into a completely different usage for me at this point.

I refer to Aesthetics as being the overall result of what I call synchronicity, which is a measure of possible Immersion (in the sense of being lost in playing the PC) that considers whether or not how a given Action in a game feels to the Player, is themed by the game, and what the Player percieves the Action to be, are all synchronous with each other.

For example, jumping in Mario. All three are met fairly heavily, which makes sense given the effort Nintendo puts into getting that specific element exactly right. The game feel produced by the action is satisfying as it produces a pleasant to engage skill test on the players part (just like real jumping often does), the actual look of the Jump on-screen correlates to the players engagement of the Action, and the perception of the player of these elements synchronizes as the Jump produces the expected results, and triggers intuitive feedback from the game when it doesn't. Ie, if you fail a jump, you know its because you missed the timing.

Naturally the first reaction to this is probably going to be that this is just video game design, no doubt from the Theming aspect. Theming in a tabletop game is just as prevalent, and that's generally where Ive found most aesthetic problems are sourced, with their effects being centered in player perception. (Game feel does it too, but for the issues Ive been pointing at, the issues in theming)

In the given PBTA example, the Action itself is fine. Rolling dice is always fun and its what people expect from TTRPGs.

But the Theming is where the issue is, and this relates to the negative feedback loop thats created by the dice rolls. Because the bulk of results are themed as either Failures or Success at a Cost, this in turn can mess with player perception when there's too many rolls, or indeed if some other bit of theming (we're superheroes!) conflicts with it. (We're superheroes but we're also bumbling idiots!) (Note, not talking about Masks, just a made up example)

Fixing it can come from a lot of directions. The design intent here is that the negative feedback loop is desirable, so if we want to stop it from going into overdrive, a roll economy is probably the best way to introduce that constraint (as testing reveals that insisting on buy in doesn't serve as an consistent constraint across all players).

But you can also just change the probability space for how often the negative feedback loop starts. A higher stat array in Ironsworn accomplishes that pretty handily and has been a staple house rule of mine for years.

What is being evoked differently between the PbtA-style loop and the task-oriented loop?

Thats where we come into the question of whether or not PBTA even allows for a first person POV, at least as far as Moves are concerned. Im of the opinion it doesn't; Moves step the player into a third person POV, and this is where the difference is. A task-oriented loop never leaves first person unless the Player steps out of the game loop entirely.

This is where Player perception becomes important, and why I think genre emulation isn't all that great, because it understandably has to blend a constant shift between 1st and 3rd person, and that flip even bleeds over into game feel, where the Action is still fine in theory but starts to feel bad because of the other two going haywire. (Ie, the pincushion effect)

But, when the buy in works, it clears the issue. Hence why Ironsworn never gave me this particular issue, as I came into it for the solo experience, and so the flipping back and forth just doesn't cause these issues because that's just how the solo experience works.

In fact if I cared to, Id probably end up liking a few different PBTAs if I tried and played them solo, though that'd depend. Ironsworn also themes a lot of what it does in the 1st person, and I can't say that doesn't have a big effect on why I like it so much.

But, the buy in doesn't always work, and it certainly didn't for me, and still doesn't despite being much more aware of whats going on and having more control over how I'd react.

The constraint on rolling in PbtA

You're right of course, but as noted, I just don't consider it to be a very good constraint, as it doesn't consistently work.

Incidentally, the solution I proposed is right there in the system already in how GM moves are metered out. I think it just needs to be applied in the other direction.

Internal economy seems practically mandatory. Those mechanics are all your resource-related feedback loops. Stuff like stress and trauma in Blades in the Dark, Hx in Apocalypse World, and so on. Tactical maneuvering feels comparatively much more limited (using your gangs in BitD?).

Those are mechanics in those games, but they aren't tropes in of themselves. So perhaps we're both not on the same page about what we consider to be tropes. I think of tropes in terms of stuff you find on tvtropes. Narrative patterns that happen in different kinds of story media.

A Credible character is one who acts in a “psychologically credible” way. If you’re not doing that in a PbtA game, you’re going against your principles (“name everyone, make everyone human”).

Thats another instance though where the constraint isn't consistent, and rubs up against the previously mentioned aesthetic issue. Not only can engaging a Move feel like your character isn't acting credibly, but it can also result in a bigger problem on a more macro scale.

Constant drama being packed on over and over, even when the Moves are used at an intended rate, starts to cause a coherence issue, not unlike a tv show completely losing any dramatic credibility when things start becoming contrived to keep the show going another season.

What’s the hidden element in PbtA games that caused you to bounce off them?

I explained above. In a nutshell, the constant flipping between a first person POV in the improv game, and a third person POV any time Moves trigger, and Id additionally add the requisite OOC-but-still-ingame talk that tends to result from how the game works.

That last bit I don't hold against any of these games. Theres more than a few genres that, if I was playing with people who were just as in-tune with it, wouldn't result in nearly as much of that issue. I won't hold whats basically a skill issue against the game.

I mean, what tropes are reinforced by Seize By Force, or by Seduce/Manipulate?

They're literally in the name, for one, and if you're familiar with post-apoc stories its easy to see where those Moves come from.

Most good PBTA games, the ones where the designers actually understood what AW was doing, will be very clearly reinforcing specific tropes indicative to the chosen genre with the Moves, and Playbook design in general is going to do the same in a broader sense, if playbooks are used at all anyway. Ironsworn doesn't use one for example and its not difficult to see what the tropes are.

You seem to be treating 7 to 9 as a miss, where as the AW rulebook is quite clear that it's a hit.

Moves don't care about it just being a hit. Some just treat a weak hit as reason to give less benefits (ie choose 2 instead of 3 as on a 10), but many others introduce success with a cost, many of which in turn reflect on the competance of the character if they aren't housruled to some other theming.

You may personally not object to that, others do. Success with a cost isn't the same thing as Success, and no amount of arguments to the contrary are going to change how someone feels about the difference.

 

[kenada]

Plus, in terms of just being practical about running and playing in a ttrpg, trying too hard to make a story happen is just a hell of a lot of stress and overhead. Its not uncommon to see DMs burn out on DND, not just because of the system being a PITA, but also just because the desire to make a story happen is omnipresent and it consumes so much of the thought going into playing.

I’m trimming this down because I wanted to focus on this part, but I want to say thank you for the detailed post.

The thing about PbtA games, or at least Apocalypse World and those that work similarly (because not all PbtA games work the same), is that it should play like your DayZ and Ark stories (particularly the Ark one). The GM is not supposed to be making a plot happen. Apocalypse World is emphatic about that when discussing the MC’s agenda.

Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other. It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not f—— around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out.​

What the MC would be doing is framing the scene: you’re in your base, and then someone gets headshot. It’s the damn hackers, and they’re head-shotting people left and right. What do you do? So you respond, and shenanigans ensue. Eventually you gather the whole posse, pursue them to a cave, and then finally clear them out.

---

That was basically all of our Blades in the Dark sessions. My favorite one was when I got word that the Silver Nails were making a play to recruit a group of cultists just outside of Duskvol. Their plan was to send a champion to fight the cultists’ champion and take over the cult. I had had my sights on taking over the Silver Nails, so that wasn’t going to do.

At this point, our gang was pretty connected. I think we were at least tier III if not IV. I talked to the Gondoliers to find out when and where they were departing, and then I hid. Their champion was a young kid. He got onto the boat, and it departed. He never stood a chance.

My character was a leech, which is really good at alchemicals. I’d booby-trapped where I knew he’d sit. I wanted this to be a quiet kill, so I used standstill, a poison that causes temporary paralysis. One boot to the chest, and over the side of the boat he went without a struggle. We then proceeded to the island.

If you don’t know anything about Blades in the Dark and Duskvol, the Silver Nails are a Severosi gang. My character was also Severosi. The cult wasn’t going to know the difference. They just knew a Severosi was coming.

The actual fight against the leader was pretty intense. He was vile and secreted something nasty, but that didn’t affect me (because of an expert advancement I’d taken). I rigged up bombs and tried to do whatever I could to outsmart him. Eventually, I drew my sword. It was a gamble. I’d never drawn it up until that point (so we learned something new about Beaker, my character). As he came lunging at me for a final blow, I stepped out of the way and put my sword through him.

This was a relief to the cult because their leader had actually taken it over. (This was established earlier in the session as part of the original framing. The contest was to replace the usurper with a Silver Nails champion.) However, there was a twist. The ghost of their former leader needed laid to rest. I ended up having to fight him too. The GM asked if I wanted to use any of my leech stuff, but I said no. I was going to fight the ghost with my sword. It seemed like the honorable thing he’d want. Fortunately, I didn’t die (and actually won).

None of that was planned. During the initial framing, the GM made a guess at my tactic for framing the initial scene, but what happened was based on the actions I took. He thought I would assault the champion on the way down from the Mustang Inn to the waterway, but I wanted to be more discrete than that (because holy crap fighting the Silver Nails by myself would have been rough and probably suicidal). That lead to my rolling Connections to see if the Gondoliers to help, and they did.

Out of that, we managed to prevent the Silver Nails from going up a tier, and I got a gang of red witch cultists. That was pretty awesome. There were a lot of awesome moments in our BitD game. Other favorites include the time I suckered my rival into going to prison just by playing cards with his nephew and reminiscing about the good old days back in college (we were trying to convince him a particular faction had betrayed him, so this was a social score); and our final score where we had been contracted to kill the former head of the city watch. In a way we failed because we didn’t do the deed. While we were assaulting his house, we found his family. I went to his wife and showed her incriminating (and damning) evidence regarding her husband I had kept from our previous score and suggested she should give herself to She Who Slays in Darkness. I handed her my sword, and she ended up being the one to kill her husband. Good stuff.

 

[pemerton]

They're literally in the name, for one, and if you're familiar with post-apoc stories its easy to see where those Moves come from.

Seize by Force could factor into any physical action-oriented story or situation. Seduce/Manipulate seems like it could fit into noir as much as into post-apocalyptic. These don't seem very genre-trope-y to me.

Moves don't care about it just being a hit. Some just treat a weak hit as reason to give less benefits (ie choose 2 instead of 3 as on a 10), but many others introduce success with a cost, many of which in turn reflect on the competance of the character if they aren't housruled to some other theming.

I don't know what games you have in mind. What you describe isn't part of Apocalypse World as written. There's no MC-move Show the character's lack of competence, and the relevant principle is in fact Be a fan of the characters.

Eg pp 192 (Acting Under Fire), 194 (Going Aggro):

Keeler the gunlugger’s taken off her shoes and she’s sneaking into Dremmer’s camp, armed as they say to the upper teeth. If they hear her, she’s <in trouble>. (On a 7–9, maybe I give her an ugly choice between alerting the camp and murdering an innocent teenage sentry.) She hits the roll with an 8, so the ugly choice it is. “There’s some kid out here, huddled under this flimsy tin roof with a mug of who-knows-what. You think you’re past him but he startles and looks right at you. You can kill him before he makes a noise, but you’ll have to do it right this second. Do you?” “Yes, duh,” she says. “Great. You leave him dead and make your way in. You’re crouching down by a big piece of fallen wall, looking into Dremmer’s camp. He’s eating with a couple other guys, they have no idea you’re here.”

Keeler’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, she’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of her rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” her player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” She hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have him barricade himself securely in: “no brains, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note to myself, on my front sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again.​

Success-with-a-cost isn't really an element of Apocalypse World, I don't think.

 

[kenada]

Its been a while since I read the MDA paper, but its entirely possible its morphed into a completely different usage for me at this point.

I refer to Aesthetics as being the overall result of what I call synchronicity, which is a measure of possible Immersion (in the sense of being lost in playing the PC) that considers whether or not how a given Action in a game feels to the Player, is themed by the game, and what the Player percieves the Action to be, are all synchronous with each other.

Ah, okay. Thanks. That helps clarify.

For example, jumping in Mario. All three are met fairly heavily, which makes sense given the effort Nintendo puts into getting that specific element exactly right. The game feel produced by the action is satisfying as it produces a pleasant to engage skill test on the players part (just like real jumping often does), the actual look of the Jump on-screen correlates to the players engagement of the Action, and the perception of the player of these elements synchronizes as the Jump produces the expected results, and triggers intuitive feedback from the game when it doesn't. Ie, if you fail a jump, you know its because you missed the timing.

Naturally the first reaction to this is probably going to be that this is just video game design, no doubt from the Theming aspect. Theming in a tabletop game is just as prevalent, and that's generally where Ive found most aesthetic problems are sourced, with their effects being centered in player perception. (Game feel does it too, but for the issues Ive been pointing at, the issues in theming)

In the given PBTA example, the Action itself is fine. Rolling dice is always fun and its what people expect from TTRPGs.

But the Theming is where the issue is, and this relates to the negative feedback loop thats created by the dice rolls. Because the bulk of results are themed as either Failures or Success at a Cost, this in turn can mess with player perception when there's too many rolls, or indeed if some other bit of theming (we're superheroes!) conflicts with it. (We're superheroes but we're also bumbling idiots!) (Note, not talking about Masks, just a made up example)

Fixing it can come from a lot of directions. The design intent here is that the negative feedback loop is desirable, so if we want to stop it from going into overdrive, a roll economy is probably the best way to introduce that constraint (as testing reveals that insisting on buy in doesn't serve as an consistent constraint across all players).

But you can also just change the probability space for how often the negative feedback loop starts. A higher stat array in Ironsworn accomplishes that pretty handily and has been a staple house rule of mine for years.

One of the things I like about Blades in the Dark over plan PbtA games is you can resist any consequence. If you get a partial success or even a failure, you can choose to make it not happen (or reduce it if it’s a big consequence). There’s a risk to doing that, but it gives you control and helps mitigate badness. It’s a design I like enough that I’ve incorporated it into my homebrew system (as described here).

Thats where we come into the question of whether or not PBTA even allows for a first person POV, at least as far as Moves are concerned. Im of the opinion it doesn't; Moves step the player into a third person POV, and this is where the difference is. A task-oriented loop never leaves first person unless the Player steps out of the game loop entirely.

Let me be honest, I don’t like moves. My issue with them was not the immersion issue you cite. I didn’t have a problem speaking and acting from a first person perspective. My issue is unless everyone has internalized all the triggers, you’re going to get situations where you try to whisper the sacred words of Helior to your lamp, and the GM is asking you’re trying to cast an invocation, but that’s actually the set up move to be able to do that.

I don’t think that’s a flaw in the game per se. It’s just a way of structuring it that doesn’t work for me. (And the Lightbearer playbook in Stonetop kind of sucked.)

This is where Player perception becomes important, and why I think genre emulation isn't all that great, because it understandably has to blend a constant shift between 1st and 3rd person, and that flip even bleeds over into game feel, where the Action is still fine in theory but starts to feel bad because of the other two going haywire. (Ie, the pincushion effect)

I’m not really seeing though how moves are genre emulation. Apocalypse World gives them thematic names and designs, but that’s going to be the case for almost any role-playing game. The issue you’re describing is it sounds like they don’t work well for you either.

You're right of course, but as noted, I just don't consider it to be a very good constraint, as it doesn't consistently work.

My primary experience as a player was Stonetop. I never felt like we were rolling too much. My issues were more fundamental to how it was designed. It uses moves way too much —even for things not triggered by the players. The setting was pretty interesting too. The game just didn’t do it for me.

Those are mechanics in those games, but they aren't tropes in of themselves. So perhaps we're both not on the same page about what we consider to be tropes. I think of tropes in terms of stuff you find on tvtropes. Narrative patterns that happen in different kinds of story media.

They are mechanics, but they reflect tropes. Blades in the Dark even has its own entry on tvtropes. Stress and trauma are Misery Builds Character. For Hx, I was thinking how it represents the relationships between the characters, and how you survive together in such a hostile world is the core theme of Apocalypse World.

Thats another instance though where the constraint isn't consistent, and rubs up against the previously mentioned aesthetic issue. Not only can engaging a Move feel like your character isn't acting credibly, but it can also result in a bigger problem on a more macro scale.

I don’t see how engaging a move isn’t acting credibly. Your character is doing a thing, and then the move happens. If you didn’t mean to do it, then why do it? That’s on the player to make sure their character is behaving how they want.

If the issue is that misses lead to hard moves, or that weak hits may also involve soft moves, then there’s a more fundamental issue at play. (Which based on your response to @pemerton, could be the case?)

I explained above. In a nutshell, the constant flipping between a first person POV in the improv game, and a third person POV any time Moves trigger, and Id additionally add the requisite OOC-but-still-ingame talk that tends to result from how the game works.

That last bit I don't hold against any of these games. Theres more than a few genres that, if I was playing with people who were just as in-tune with it, wouldn't result in nearly as much of that issue. I won't hold whats basically a skill issue against the game.

Would it be a fair assessment that immersion is a pretty high priority for you when you play?

 

[Shardstone]

Baker Et al are focused on building genre emulation mechanics. Genre Emulation is only one means of storytelling in games.

The assertion that genre emulation = (TT)RPGs (as was seen more than a few times in these topics), isn't accurate and is in turn very exclusionary to other methods.

Plus, Baker et al's overall method for genre emulation isn't the only way to do it, and the third person authorial stance it takes wouldn't be compatible with most video games until some sort of proto-Holodeck type game is possible.

Why does it matter that Baker et al's methods are just one of many methods?