QuestWorlds is coming—who else is hyped?

[Autumnal]

Swiping from the right sort of people is a constructive act!

 

[Autumnal]

Gonna see if I can get in a few posts while waiting on news about family stuff. First up, the kind of thing I wish more RPGs told us about their intents. Some OSR games do, Onyx Path has gotten better and better at it, and like that, but there are far too many un-tipped hands out there.

Story points allow you to buy an additional success in a contest or change the fiction in your favor. The player characters (PCs) have a pool of story points to spend. That pool refreshes between quests or when the PCs take some downtime.

Normally, your gamemaster (GM) should ensure that defeat takes your PC’s story in an interesting new direction. Unlike some games, where your goal is to win against challenges set by the GM, in a storytelling game, your goal is to tell a good story together. Just as in fiction, the protagonist can suffer all sorts of reversals, so in a storytelling game, your PC should suffer adversities before they triumph (or meet their tragic end). As a result, we recommend against the tendency to buy off defeat with story points in the middle of the story. Instead, use story points when defeat would damage the concept of the character that you have been building or lead to an unsatisfactory climax to the story.

Your GM should push the story in an interesting new direction on defeat, not send it to a dead end. If there is no interesting branch from defeat, they should consider an assured contest instead.

In other genres, it may feel less appropriate that you can cheat certain death. For those genres, you can simply drop story points without impacting the game.

In games with a strong player vs. player element, your GM should dispense with story points, as they become disruptive if used against each other.

 

[GMMichael]

Gonna see if I can get in a few posts while waiting on news about family stuff. First up, the kind of thing I wish more RPGs told us about their intents. Some OSR games do, Onyx Path has gotten better and better at it, and like that, but there are far too many un-tipped hands out there.

What's an example of an untipped hand?

The QuestWorlds (I assume) quote is ambiguous to me, which doesn't help me to discern intent. What's an "interesting new direction?" What does "change the fiction" look like? Is that a retcon? I've never seen a GM say, "you fail the contest. Welp, game over!"

 

[pemerton]

What's an "interesting new direction?" What does "change the fiction" look like? Is that a retcon? I've never seen a GM say, "you fail the contest. Welp, game over!"

Are you really not familiar with these ideas in the context of RPGing?

 

[Autumnal]

The archetypal untipped hand is the early editions of D&D, which did a truly terrible job explaining what play was expected to look like and how rules were intended to support that.

I’ve been quoting a bunch from Questworlds in this thread, and this quote exists in that context.

 

[GMMichael]

Are you really not familiar with these ideas in the context of RPGing?

I've heard the ideas. That doesn't mean that I know how QW is using them. "Interesting new direction" never made sense. "Change the fiction" could mean altering the expected outcome, changing an historical element, or even taking a big detour going forward.

There have been enough definition arguments on this board to show that some terms can't be thrown out and universally understood.

 

[Autumnal]

Okay. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have energy or enthusiasm to get into those questions further at this time. I’m just sharing bits I find interesting while waiting around for answers on medical and legal fronts affecting my family right now. So for the next however many weeks, this won’t be the kind of thread you’d like. Sorry.

 

[Reynard]

Gonna see if I can get in a few posts while waiting on news about family stuff. First up, the kind of thing I wish more RPGs told us about their intents. Some OSR games do, Onyx Path has gotten better and better at it, and like that, but there are far too many un-tipped hands out there.

Specifics of narrative tools aside, I agree that it is good when a game tells you what it wants you to do with it. Too many even modern games seem to believe that playing coy makes them more desireable. Don't hide your rules behind walls of questionable prose, and don't hide your design intent behind walls of rules.

I have not read the whole thread: are there example settings in the book, or otherwise readily available? I always felt that a good "setting agnostic" system should have examples of what kinds of worlds it is intended for, and how to implement them in that system. Savage Worlds and Fate both make it easy.

 

[Autumnal]

Yeah, there are. Early on the book introduces five campaigns: vintage space opera (where the astrogator’s job includes slide rule use), dark-edge steampunk cities amid the frozen arctic wastes, 1970s New York superheroes, Renaissance-era explorers of the inner earth, and a more D&D-ish fantasy setting. Then we see one or more of them in the examples for every part of the rules, from general mechanics to character creation to different kinds of conflict resolution to individual and group doing of deeds outside core competencies to experience and character development and on and on. So in the course of the book, you get astonishingly abundant examples. And I have t yet gotten to the section on creating your own “genre pak”.

 

[pemerton]

"Interesting new direction" never made sense.

The contrast is with nothing happens - which is a fairly frequent outcome of a whole host of common D&D-esque action declarations (I look for a secret door; I try and open the door; I pick the lock; I look inside the cupboard to see if there's anything interesting in it; I shoot at the deer as it runs through the woods; etc, etc).