Players establishing facts about the world impromptu during play

While some of his points are well taken, and I'm sure no one here is really under any illusions about how negative some of it is phrased or is trying to insult anyone else, I can't help but notice the way his terminology is toxic in another way. It feels like it grooms the reader to an extent, conditioning them to internalize the framework through its use of medical and purity centric language, and look down on play from other aesthetic movements in an especially contemptuous way.

"Degenerate"
"Bitter"
"Unhygienic (that's where this one came from too right?)"
"Brain Damage"

They condition one to think of differing play styles and viewpoints, and a lack of purity of agenda, in a... very problematic way, I'm sharply reminded of language traditionally used to police 'deviance' in mid century psychology literature. It also conditions readers to see very clear right and wrong ways, and to police those ways--whereas maybe there's more than one way to skin the cat of competing play agendas in traditional games. I'd be very careful of using his vocabulary uncritically.

I say this as someone whose enjoyed playing Masks for a while, and who just picked up BITD because it sounds awesome and so far as I'm reading it, am not disappointed.

edit: I just found the original post about 'brain damage' jesus christ, he straight up writes like a supremacist, like in the sense of using the same tactics.

Fenris-77 said:

I'll take a stab at procedural play for in this context, and @pemerton can correct me at need. Procedural Play refers to the mechanical loops and decision points baked into a rules set. In a story now game the 'story now' part is baked right into the rules. The mechanics of the game as written facilitate Story Now play. Pathfinder doesn't have those mechanics or decision points.

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Thanks. I think I got it, but let me try to summarize back. If I intend to run Pathfinder as a Story Now game, but I engage in its usual procedures, then I (paraphrasing Edwards) undercut its potential for that. For example, if I follow the default assumptions about equipment, then it functions as a tool for increasing the power of the PCs, so they can take on tougher challenges, but that’s not supposed to be the point. It’s not that equipment or tracking money is problematic per se. It’s how it functions in the game that can undermine your agenda.

Like I said before, this is (somewhat selfishly) for my own edification. I’m preparing to run a Worlds Without Numbers one-shot that has a high likelihood of replacing the system I’m using to run my campaign (currently OSE but really transitioning from PF2). WWN seems like it’d lend itself to setting-centric Story Now play, so I’d like to try doing that, but I want to make sure I have a good understanding of what I am doing to avoid incoherent play.

What I’m doing now (following the Alexandrian’s hexcrawl advice) is just too onerous. It’s been several years since this campaign started, and I still haven’t keyed most of my map. With WWN, I want to delegate much of setting generation to the system and rely on its faction mechanics as a source of dynamism. If we’re doing it right, then we can play to find out what happens, and I don’t need to kill myself prepping content to maintain the setting conceit.

Hygienic / Unhygienic was my own choice of words. I mean it only in regard to the game we all have agreed to play or are discussing. I am not speaking to different sorts of games at all. I am a big believer in a shared play agenda, that at any given table we all need to be striving for the same sort of play experience. One of the best ways I have found to get on the same page is just to have us all take on the agenda of the game we are playing.

Games like Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, and Masks have certain expectations that both players and GMs are expected to follow. I believe in treating the instructions to the GM just like any other rule, subject to change if we all agree, but binding otherwise. This is particularly important for Story Now play because there is an expectation that players will invest in their characters, but only approach play from a position of character advocacy. That leaves you in a pretty vulnerable place (given the emotional heft we are aiming for) if other players or the GM uses their authority in ways that run counter to the spirit of play. If they use your vulnerable place, but are not willing to go there with you.

kenada said:

Thanks. I think I got it, but let me try to summarize back. If I intend to run Pathfinder as a Story Now game, but I engage in its usual procedures, then I (paraphrasing Edwards) undercut its potential for that. For example, if I follow the default assumptions about equipment, then it functions as a tool for increasing the power of the PCs, so they can take on tougher challenges, but that’s not supposed to be the point. It’s not that equipment or tracking money is problematic per se. It’s how it functions in the game that can undermine your agenda.

Like I said before, this is (somewhat selfishly) for my own edification. I’m preparing to run a Worlds Without Numbers one-shot that has a high likelihood of replacing the system I’m using to run my campaign (currently OSE but really transitioning from PF2). WWN seems like it’d lend itself to setting-centric Story Now play, so I’d like to try doing that, but I want to make sure I have a good understanding of what I am doing to avoid incoherent play.

What I’m doing now (following the Alexandrian’s hexcrawl advice) is just too onerous. It’s been several years since this campaign started, and I still haven’t keyed most of my map. With WWN, I want to delegate much of setting generation to the system and rely on its faction mechanics as a source of dynamism. If we’re doing it right, then we can play to find out what happens, and I don’t need to kill myself prepping content to maintain the setting conceit.

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Sine Nomine games are some of the more drift able games in my experience. They already use an experience system based on achieving character goals and lack a lot of the power fantasy elements (that get in the way sometimes) you see in more modern versions of D&D. It's also very compatible with ad hoc PbtA style moves for noncombat stuff.

I often use
10+ Success
7-9 Success With Consequence
6- Prepare For The Worst

kenada said:

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “procedural play”? I’m struggling with the distinction and how it would make something more or less “Story Now”.

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To use Forge terminology, I'm referring to all the techniques and associated mechanics that support purist-for-system resolution: keeping track of time; keeping track of rations; keeping track of encumbrance; keeping track of location in map-and-key terms. In games like AD&D, 3E D&D, RM, RQ and (to some extent) 5e D&D this interacts with all sorts of effect durations and all sorts of recovery schedules.

In practice there is often a lot of handwaving of this stuff, but that opens the door to "railroading" or at least GM Force applied outside the notional system parameters (eg the GM "just decides" that by the time the NPCs catch up and attack the duration of the protection spell cast at the start of the day has already expired). But keeping track of it shifts the focus of play away from "story now" or even "story anytime at all" to all those minutiae. As well as the actual focus of time spent at the table, it is also an obstacle to the use of certain techniques: story now GMing often uses fairly strong scene-framing; but in (eg) Rolemaster it's almost impossible to bring any scene to a definitive close because there is probably some ongoing effect or ongoing consequence that mandates keeping track of the passage of time. And even non-scene-framed Story Now approaches like (say) Apocalypse World still rely on the GM to be flexible in the narration of the passage of time (eg a Defy Danger or Act Under Fire might be a moment's action, or a night spent hiding from enemies who are searching for you.

Another way to put it that has just occurred to me: in AW/DW the passage of time is (basically) just colour. Likewise in Prince Valiant. Whereas in Rolemaster it is anything but, and the ways in which the resolution mechanics engage it, and countless similar points of minutiae, can inhibit story now much of the time.

kenada said:

Let’s suppose that I have a “sandbox” set up as described previously (with some situations and a setting, but no plot). That sounds Story Now. However, if I understand you correctly, certain elements can push you away from that towards a more “procedural focus” and a “wargamey” feel. Is “wargamey” just a euphamism for Gamism? That is, the equipment list pushes them towards viewing their gear as a tool for overcoming challenges, and a challenge-focused mindset is antithetical to Story Now?

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I think I've addressed most of this above. I'm not surprised by your question about euphemism, but I was thinking that even beyond gamism you can get into stuff that is much like the techniques of wargame play: making lists of gear, managing dispositions of forces, logistics and the tracking of resources, etc. Again my main lived experience of this is the RM context but I can easily extrapolate from that to RQ or AD&D.

The flipside of that is my Prince Valiant game, where the players - whose PCs are leaders of a warband - are always threatening to detour us into that sort of stuff but I do my best to pull us away from it! There are various features of Prince Valiant that make that possible, but here's just one of them: in warband vs warband combat the rules tell us who wins, but don't allocate casualties. That's up to me as GM. And the main determinant of who wins is the skill of the leader on each side - which for the PCs' warband is one of them! So the resolution framework doesn't in itself generate pressure to track all the details down to the last missing horseshoe on the last of the Hun auxiliaries' ponies - unlike (say) RM's War Law.

Campbell said:

Hygienic / Unhygienic was my own choice of words. I mean it only in regard to the game we all have agreed to play or are discussing. I am not speaking to different sorts of games at all. I am a big believer in a shared play agenda, that at any given table we all need to be striving for the same sort of play experience. One of the best ways I have found to get on the same page is just to have us all take on the agenda of the game we are playing.

Games like Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, and Masks have certain that both players and GMs are expected to follow. I believe in treating the instructions to the GM just like any other rule, subject to change if we all agree, but binding otherwise. This is particularly important for Story Now play because there is an expectation that players will invest in their characters, but only approach play from a position of character advocacy. That leaves you in a pretty vulnerable place (given the emotional heft we are aiming for) if other players or the GM uses their authority in ways that run counter to the spirit of play. If they use your vulnerable place, but are not willing to go there with you.

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I think I have a bit of a different view, and reading Ron's... posts, are bringing it into crystallization. I'm not attempting to fight you, just using the debate as a jumping off point for exploration of some very abstract concepts, and we're beginning to touch on sensitive topics and your candor is inspiring me, as it often has since I started posting here again. This might be a little weird, but I'm in uncharted territory for me as I write, which represents its own vulnerable space, but its at our most vulnerable that we can achieve the fullness of our power, so... here we go.

A professor of mine once recommended a book to me entitled "Care of the Soul" (by Thomas Moore, not the author of Utopia) to help me deal with my traumas and my self-loathing, and in it, the author (a therapist in his own right) discusses the desire to take the personality traits that cause us harm, the things we hate about ourselves and destroy them, and how it hardly ever works, and how its not healthy for us to do. He proposes an alternative framework, wherein we consider our "I" the thinking, decision making self, as a kind of shepherd and all of those personality traits milling about our minds, as sheep.

For the most part, the shepherd just sits back and watches, the sheep don't need to be controlled, they just kind of do their own thing, interact, graze. But every so often a sheep begins to stray too far away, or begins to do something dangerous, and the shepherd just goes, and gently herds the sheep back to safety. Moore suggests that this is a healthier framework for us to consider our own personality traits and emotions-- they aren't evil, or need to be destroyed, they just need a little watching, the book spends the rest of the text discussing examples and expanding on this central theme. That the things that make us who we are, aren't unhealthy by themselves, and we can only achieve harmony by accepting them as they are, and changing the nature of our work on ourselves to self-care, just making sure we don't get into trouble.

Reading Ron's 2006 post, the shaming, degrading language he uses to discuss how certain play aesthetics hold back the medium, and on his fellow gamers-- even if he tries to justify it with redefinition, and his discussion of Story Now play procedures as prosthetics for people damaged by prior experiences with RPGs, and your post about shared agendas as necessity for vulnerability makes me think.

What if the sheep and the shepherd analogy could work for roleplaying games as well? What if instead of beating a purity drum, we instead looked for ways to soften the friction of differing play styles, designing in a way that doesn't establish a rigid set of rules about what participants ought to want, but softening the tension those differing play styles create-- guide the sheep back only when necessary.

I say that, and realize that I've been slowly coming around to this for a long time now as I grow increasingly frustrated with attempts to purify the experience of roleplaying games to create ludo-homogenity in the interests of its players. I would submit that you aren't hurt by differing play expectations in your state of vulnerability, but by a lack of respect for your play expectations from the other participants. It feels like we're running away from the problem instead of confronting it, by seeking people who want only the same things, instead of confronting the way difference is policed and resented at the table.

Different play agenda-- the desire to fulfill character arcs, the desire to overcome challenges, the desire to see drama between the members of the cast play out, the desire to experience power fantasy, the desire to experience combat as war or sport, the desire to have a story where we are the key figures, the desire to joke around, the desire to be immersed in and explore a well designed fantasy world, any motivation to play, and therefore agenda for a game; could very well be compatible if everyone engages with the understanding that they're all present.

I'm not saying Story Now is conceptually wrong, games that focus on specific experiences, and use that focus to laser hone in on unique designs is one that I consistently admire. But it seems like maybe it should exist not as a panacea for the woes of roleplaying games (Jokes on Ron really, a game happened that attracted people and seemingly holds them instead of letting them bounce off, and it has all the focus I used to have sitting in math class) but as artistic achievements and fun games in their own right for the groups that think their specific play goals sound neat-- they should be played not because they're salvific, and represent a utopian revolution of the RPG hobby, but because they're fun and require that focus to do the things that they do, alongside the RPGs that do the things they can't with breadth and diverse use cases.

Instead, I'm suggesting that we need to re-examine what a play agenda really is, and what it demands in inclusive terms. How can we allow differing ones to safely and happily coexist at the same gaming table?

kenada said:

Thanks. I think I got it, but let me try to summarize back. If I intend to run Pathfinder as a Story Now game, but I engage in its usual procedures, then I (paraphrasing Edwards) undercut its potential for that. For example, if I follow the default assumptions about equipment, then it functions as a tool for increasing the power of the PCs, so they can take on tougher challenges, but that’s not supposed to be the point. It’s not that equipment or tracking money is problematic per se. It’s how it functions in the game that can undermine your agenda.

Like I said before, this is (somewhat selfishly) for my own edification. I’m preparing to run a Worlds Without Numbers one-shot that has a high likelihood of replacing the system I’m using to run my campaign (currently OSE but really transitioning from PF2). WWN seems like it’d lend itself to setting-centric Story Now play, so I’d like to try doing that, but I want to make sure I have a good understanding of what I am doing to avoid incoherent play.

What I’m doing now (following the Alexandrian’s hexcrawl advice) is just too onerous. It’s been several years since this campaign started, and I still haven’t keyed most of my map. With WWN, I want to delegate much of setting generation to the system and rely on its faction mechanics as a source of dynamism. If we’re doing it right, then we can play to find out what happens, and I don’t need to kill myself prepping content to maintain the setting conceit.

Click to expand...

OK, so, full frontal caveats, my playing OSR/D&D as story now, even in part, is very much a personal thing for me. I don;t have a guidebook or a set of rules about how to make that work. So I am running a fantasy sandbox using Black Hack 2E, and I am trying to run it as story now as possible. So I'll try to explain how that works for me.

The first hurdle for running D&D or OSR as story now is that the mechanics really don't help, and in places even push back against it. This is less of an issue with rules light OSR games than it is with D&D (or Pathfinder, I'm afraid). Most story now games have a limited success mechanic, or a success with complications mechanic. When a player rolls a result like that it's a signal for the GM to 'make a move'. In my case I'm using the standard AW or more specifically Dungeon World keeper moves. The problem is that there's no mechanical place to insert that move. So what I tend to do is take the aggregate of the party rolls in a round, or in a situation, and use that as a bellweather to see if I'm going to make a move. If things go badly, I'll add complications, if things go well, I won't. I should also be up front here, I'm doing this Play by Post, so I have time to consider between each action declaration. I'm not 100% sure how well this would go live. I works fine when I run games for my kids, but they aren't exactly pushing me as a GM. So the moves in DW if you read over them are pretty much what most DMs are doing anyway, at least good DMs.

More specifically about the list of moves and what they do in D&D or Pathfinder. Here's the list from DW:

If you take the time to read those you see that fit almost seamlessly into D&D, aside from the moves bit. The actions are what DM do already in those games. What the list does, for me, is to focus my response and my adjudication to be about the characters' actions and the fallout from those actions, rather than anything about what I think should happen next.

So what does this mean for my prep? Well, let me tell you. So when my example game started I had a very traditional amount of prep done for where I thought the player were going to go. I had dungeon locations, factions, maps the whole schmozzle. As players are wont to do, they didn't go that direction at all. At which point I thought, ok fine, I'm going to run this like DW and see how it goes. I'd done this in bits many times, but this time I was going to play it to the hilt. So I wrote up a couple of fronts (the DW version of prep, which is minimal as all get out) and I just let the players roll. As they went places and did stuff I reacted and adjudicated. I made up the occasional new map, as PbP kind of requires some props, but that's it. Even now, the party is in pretty critical danger, and I'm not sure what's going to happen next.

What I'm currently running the game with would fit on an index card. I have two factions, a couple of one line NPCs that might get used, some countdown stuff, and that's about it. Everything else is based on established fiction and natural consequences.

This would be really hard in a pre-written setting I think. A benefit for me is that it's my setting, so not only do I have a good feel for 'what makes sense' but I'm also not struggling against cannon. Anyway, that's the broad strokes and I'm sure it's not the whole picture. Feel free to ask for details or clarification.

To sort of backstop the above, I'm going leave an extended quote from the frontspiece of Vagabonds of Dyfed, which is far more eloquent than I'll ever be about this exact issue:

Meaningful Choices
The player character’s decisions — their players’ choices — are all that really drive the “story” of this game. There is no metaplot, no three act structure, no pending climax or deus ex machina. There is a simple input output of choice-action-reaction-choice.

To ensure that these choices are meaningful and significant demands complex and interesting situations. No “right” option or single solution — everything comes at the expense of something else, everything requires sanding down the layers, nothing is for certain. Good people can exhibit evil and cruelty, just as despots can display great acts of kindness or malevolent sorcerers can weep honest tears of sorrow.

Likewise, how the characters solve a particular problem or approach a situation is just (if not more so) important than the details of the scene itself. They want to feel clever, they want to win. And a hard-fought, bloody victory is all the sweeter and more valuable if it is earned rather than given.

In order for them to make those choices, the players have to know — have to understand — the world. It has to be revealed to them as inhabitants of that universe; fill their senses with meaningful details, realistic and ugly truths. Let them immerse.

Ok, in a moment of insomnia driven clarity I'm going try to and provide a more concrete example. The example is fictitious, but only because I want to play to some super common actions and tropes that haven't come up in my actual game. The adjudication is what I'm after here. So let me spin you a story...

The party has defeated some bad guys, lets say Ghouls, in a smelly crypt. They came to this godforsaken place because there was a rumour that a book could be found deep in the underbelly of a cursed monastery, a book of magic! Dum da dum!! So they fight their way down a level or two, end up in a big crypt, with say 10 large stone sarcophagi, and they fight and defeat 12 ghouls in that room. So, as a Dungeon World GM, my fist question is this: The last ghoul falls backward in a spatter of gore, the room is now silent around you, what do you do?

So lets assume here we have a fighter, a thief, a wizard and a cleric. We're playing to tropes, we might as well go all in. The thief says I'm going to start cracking open coffins to look for loot. The fighter, silly sod that he is, jumps in to help. The wizard, intrigued by the runes on the sarcophagi, wants to roll a lore check or some naughty word to decipher them. The Cleric, who's no one's fool, says he's going to stretch out his sense to see if there are any more undead nearby. Sounds pretty standard, right? Ok, so on to rolls and adjudication.

The thief and fighter combine and crack open a couple of sarcophagi, finding some treasure in the process. This is a successful STR roll, but obviously noisy. The wizard spend some time looking at the runes, but a bad roll means he gets nothing. The cleric rolls well, and I truthfully tell him that he sense undead nearby. OK, so those are the rolls, what the heck to do with that? Here's my story now thinking. The thief and fighter just succeeded but made a lot of noise, the wizard just boned his lore roll, and the Cleric found out there are undead nearby.

As I'm writing this, my first response would be as follows, and my first response is what's honest here if I'm going to follow the fiction in my head as I'm writing this. I have no prep for this room, no plans, and no idea. So, there's a lot of noise, the runes are undeciphered, and there are undead nearby. At this point I'm going to make a harder move, and deciding which to do (hard or soft move) is an art, not a science. In this case, given the actions, what's going to happen is that undead are going to rise out of some of the other sarcophagi and attack the party. What kind of undead? Who knows, at this point I'll turn to a random table, of which I have MANY for just this kind of situation.

So I narrate that the lids of the other sarcophagi start to slide back, a sickly green light illuminates the chamber, and movement can be seen within. Now I'm back to where I started, and I ask the party What do you do?

I hope that makes sense in terms of the adjudication logic.

I would say that in my style of gaming conflict resolution is very much like a wargame. Preparation & Tactics matter greatly in the outcome. In fact one of the things about 4e that I hated was the way the game encouraged the PCs to just wade into the enemy. In my OSR games, doing such things means almost certain death. If you enter a large room, and see a lot of enemies, you fall back to a defensible position. At least at lower levels. This is less important at higher levels but tactics and position matter the strategy is just different.

All that stuff is desirable to me. I want people to succeed because they played well. I also coincidentally believe that such an outlook and approach is the best way to "be your character". You are seeing through your characters eyes and acting as your character. It's why I avoid most things that require the player to stop making decisions as their character. The decision process is what is important and I want it to be a character centric thing.