Alternatives to map-and-key

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean, if a player has some sort of saved up resource (like a boon or favor, or a magical item, or a powerful spell), such that introducing it into the narrative would obviate the entire challenge, then I (as a GM) would end the skill challenge and mark it as successful.

Likewise, if there’s sort of perfect narrative beat introduced, such that the table agrees it would make sense to “finish” the challenge, then it would also make sense to by consensus end the scene challenge and move forward.

Yeah, if for some reason a challenge is entirely fictionally inappropriate, then there's no challenge! That could result from some PC expending some sort of very high level resource. That's fine, some other challenge will soon appear, these are adventurers/heroes after all!

But, in all my years of running 4e, I never ran into a situation where there was some sort of brilliant plan that just turned the whole rest of a challenge into nothing. I would suggest that if such things are happening, then the challenges are pretty weaksauce. All I've ever seen is where a party gave up, or decided on a plan that was outside of the scope of the current challenge, so that resolving it was no longer relevant to play. It is pretty rare, but the possibility exists. In effect the characters 'fail', though it may not be couched in quite those terms.

 

[Pedantic]

Yes, but as the fiction is not solid, it is more about selling the GM why you can roll your best skill.

You have to assume the point of the mechanic is not to try and succeed at the challenge. The goal is to see what happens as a result of the character wanting/trying something, not to act as an agent of the character trying to get the thing (a thing very muddied in skill challenges, because they were presented as an alternative mechanic toward that end originally).

That the optimization problem is trivial (or sometimes undefined altogether) isn't a problem if you're not supposed to care about achieving an outcome in the first place. The point of failure in a conventional game is as a feedback mechanism you can learn from, or as a positional tool to make risks assessment interesting.

If you're equally invested in either outcome, and the important bit isn't what happens, but that something happens, then the roll begins to make more sense. Players in that context aren't trying to make the best decisions, they're simply making decisions that interest them (or perhaps the character) and appreciating the outcome.

It requires a detachment from the counterfactual I personally can't achieve and don't really find interesting; when you remove the learning from the feedback loop, I lose the ability to care about any given outcome, but it's not incomprehensible why someone would like it. I think it comes down to where players source their suspension of disbelief. I think you (and I) are placing it in a sense of agency; I push on things, they react, and I can rely on those reactions to build an understanding and make changes to the environment.

I don't really understand the alternative basis at play here, it's alien to me in the context of a game. Maybe closer to the mechanism I'd use while reading a novel or maybe closer to how some actors feel embodyinga character, but it's obviously different and obviously does exist.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Why are we having a challenge mechanic if the characters are not in a challenge? What does nay of this represent? Why does arbitrary number of arbitrary actions resolve the situation?

It is funny to me how a lot of narrativist mechanics really do not seem to be about the fiction to me. They're about manipulating some meta level mechanic that does not represent anything diegetic and then inventing some plausible fiction around it. But the fiction doesn't really have teeth, it is just malleable mush. I want proper fiction first, where the fiction has weight, where it is solid so that how you interact with it matters. Skill challenges are not that.

I don't even understand you. Why are you playing a game at all? I am playing one for the same reasons, because the structure of the game allows us to measure success and failure, and gauge when and how progress is made. If you want to just do freeform RP without any rules, go ahead! Otherwise I find your argument, kind of unintelligible.

Yes, but as the fiction is not solid, it is more about selling the GM why you can roll your best skill.

No, this is not the case. The fiction is just as much binding when established in any RPG.

 

[soviet]

Why are we having a challenge mechanic if the characters are not in a challenge? What does nay of this represent? Why does arbitrary number of arbitrary actions resolve the situation?

It is funny to me how a lot of narrativist mechanics really do not seem to be about the fiction to me. They're about manipulating some meta level mechanic that does not represent anything diegetic and then inventing some plausible fiction around it. But the fiction doesn't really have teeth, it is just malleable mush. I want proper fiction first, where the fiction has weight, where it is solid so that how you interact with it matters. Skill challenges are not that.

I think that skill challenges were a noble failure. Plenty of games on the storygame side have some means of chaining together individual skill rolls into a larger conflict resolution mechanism. In D&D typically this could only be choreographed through the GM, here in theory is a way of mechanising that rollercoaster so that the GM can also be surprised by the outcome. This also leans into the more gamist aspect of 4e and brings that sense of challenge and transparent stakes into noncombat scenes.

The problem of course is that skill challenges were undercooked and the developers themselves couldn't really agree on how they worked. If you had experience with similar (superior) mechanics from other games (as we did) then you could apply that and make something decent out of them but it did rely on everyone playing within the lines to some extent. For example, if you have some big dramatic move that logically could end the SC on its own... well, save it to the last part of the challenge then.

My own game Other Worlds has a similar 'sequence of conflicts' mechanism called Set Pieces which IMHO is much more effective. It's conflict resolution so a bit different but fundamentally the two sides take it in turns making rolls that either escalate or resolve the situation.

In other words, on my go I can choose to escalate this duel (or diplomatic negotiation, or car chase, or whatever) by taking an action that seeks to give me a bonus to the rest of the situation going forward ('I have the high ground!') or gives the other side a penalty going forward ('You're disarmed!'). Jockeying for position, essentially.

Or, I can move to resolve the overall conflict by taking a course of action that would be definitive one way or the other - going for the death blow that might leave you open to a counterattack, threatening to blow up the negotiations if you don't get your way, trying a death-defying stunt that if it succeeds will let you escape your pursuers, etc.

Because it puts this pacing tool of 'do things carry on building up or is this the moment of truth' in the hand of the participants, it avoids a lot of the artificialness and stops the situation dragging on beyond people's appetite for it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You have to assume the point of the mechanic is not to try and succeed at the challenge. The goal is to see what happens as a result of the character wanting/trying something, not to act as an agent of the character trying to get the thing (a thing very muddied in skill challenges, because they were presented as an alternative mechanic toward that end originally).

That the optimization problem is trivial (or sometimes undefined altogether) isn't a problem if you're not supposed to care about achieving an outcome in the first place. The point of failure in a conventional game is as a feedback mechanism you can learn from, or as a positional tool to make risks assessment interesting.

If you're equally invested in either outcome, and the important bit isn't what happens, but that something happens, then the roll begins to make more sense. Players in that context aren't trying to make the best decisions, they're simply making decisions that interest them (or perhaps the character) and appreciating the outcome.

It requires a detachment from the counterfactual I personally can't achieve and don't really find interesting; when you remove the learning from the feedback loop, I lose the ability to care about any given outcome, but it's not incomprehensible why someone would like it. I think it comes down to where players source their suspension of disbelief. I think you (and I) are placing it in a sense of agency; I push on things, they react, and I can rely on those reactions to build an understanding and make changes to the environment.

I don't really understand the alternative basis at play here, it's alien to me in the context of a game. Maybe closer to the mechanism I'd use while reading a novel or maybe closer to how some actors feel embodyinga character, but it's obviously different and obviously does exist.

A lot of narrativist mechanics are like this. The games have weird incentive structures that might disassociate the player decision space from the character decisions space, especially if we assume that the player is trying to succeed, instead of just dispassionately seeing what happens. And whilst I personally am not super invested in my character's success, it would be a lie to claim that I am not invested in at all. And I generally think that mindset where the players just do not care about the success is so rare, that it seems questionable to design mechanics that assume such.

 

[soviet]

A lot of narrativist mechanics are like this. The games have weird incentive structures that might disassociate the player decision space from the character decisions space, especially if we assume that the player is trying to succeed, instead of just dispassionately seeing what happens. And whilst I personally am not super invested in my character's success, it would be a lie to claim that I am not invested in at all. And I generally think that mindset where the players just do not care about the success is so rare, that it seems questionable to design mechanics that assume such.

I don't think this characterisation of narrativist games as relying on players being uninterested in a particular outcome is correct. I think in fact many narrativist games rely on players pushing for their character's agenda.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't even understand you. Why are you playing a game at all? I am playing one for the same reasons, because the structure of the game allows us to measure success and failure, and gauge when and how progress is made. If you want to just do freeform RP without any rules, go ahead! Otherwise I find your argument, kind of unintelligible.

You said characters are not in challenge. Then why are we using challenge mechanics? What does it represent? To me the point of roleplaying games is the fiction, and the purpose of the mechanics is to represent the fiction. If they are not doing that, why are we having them?

No, this is not the case. The fiction is just as much binding when established in any RPG.

But it is not. Because the fiction is in service of the rules and new fiction must be generated to satisfy the rules. Characters must take certain number of successful actions, and it does not really matter what they are, or should they have greater or lesser impact in the given situation. Fiction is invented why this did or did not resolve the situation dictated by the number of mechanical steps required.

Yeah, if for some reason a challenge is entirely fictionally inappropriate, then there's no challenge! That could result from some PC expending some sort of very high level resource. That's fine, some other challenge will soon appear, these are adventurers/heroes after all!

But, in all my years of running 4e, I never ran into a situation where there was some sort of brilliant plan that just turned the whole rest of a challenge into nothing. I would suggest that if such things are happening, then the challenges are pretty weaksauce. All I've ever seen is where a party gave up, or decided on a plan that was outside of the scope of the current challenge, so that resolving it was no longer relevant to play. It is pretty rare, but the possibility exists. In effect the characters 'fail', though it may not be couched in quite those terms.

To me it suggest that you do not have very imaginative players or that the GM is railroading by shutting down their ideas to satisfy the structure of the skill challenge mechanism. And of course the former might be due the players being trained by the latter. They do not bother to try to come up with anything creative, as all that matter that they roll anything and generate the successes.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't think this characterisation of narrativist games as relying on players being uninterested in a particular outcome is correct. I think in fact many narrativist games rely on players pushing for their character's agenda.

And if they do that, weird incentives arise. Many narrativist mechanics allow the player to affect things the character couldn't and give the player salient knowledge that the character doesn't have. This causes the character and player decision spaces to diverge, and now we have the player making meta writers' room decisions to benefit their character who could not actually decide those things.

 

[soviet]

And if they do that, weird incentives arise. Many narrativist mechanics allow the player to affect things the character couldn't and give the player salient knowledge that the character doesn't have. This causes the character and player decision spaces to diverge, and now we have the player making meta writers' room decisions to benefit their character who could not actually decide those things.

What examples were you thinking of? Because this isn't my experience.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Because that's what narrativist mechanics do. They let player's directly manipulate the story in a way that only the GM normally can.

Lot's of people get tripped up on this thinking that "immersive" = narrative and for many people the meta nature of narrativist mechanics takes them out of their immersion.
They are still excellent ways of creating compelling stories -- including stories about your PC, but you are taking a more "author" like role as well as an immersed role and need to switch hats between them.

The story is the game. You as a player get to use mechanics to change it (you can literally change the world, plot, actions of other factions etc). In more trad mechanics/play the only way for a "not the GM" to change the story is to embody the character and have them do something.

Well, lets not overemphasize that. I'll take the example of Dungeon World, since I am running it now. The players, before creating characters, expressed some ideas/preferences for a type of milieu/sub-genre of play. Then they assembled some character ideas over a few weeks and made some characters. As things settled out, they fleshed these out with alignment and bonds, so giving them some motivations/goals and some ethos, along with some backstory for each and their race/class choices, etc. I asked them a bunch of questions throughout this, and it was established what each character was doing, how they were related, etc. This also established some more parameters of the milieu, the name of the city, who the authorities are, their relationship with the characters, and what sorts of things we were interested in having in the story, in a very general way.

So, during play, the players suggest things like what sorts of skills they might bring to bear (moves in DW) and I explain the situation, details, possible consequences, etc. This is a conversation, and the players then act in character. Sometimes moves obligate me to say things. Like Discern Realities with a successful 10+ result means a player gets to ask 3 questions from the DR list, and I have to answer them in a way that is useful to the characters, plot wise. They even get a +1 Forward when they act on those answers directly.

But, no player is literally ever saying "well, a guard shows up now and drives off the bad guy" or anything like that. Nor are they saying "well, there's a sewer grate I can open here" or anything like that. Certainly those might be things a player could suggest are happenings or circumstances that either explain an outcome, or provide for an interesting option. Often in DW GMs probably take up those suggestions, but you have to look at your principles and techniques to decide. If a player simply always wants an easy way out of any bad situation they've got themselves into, that's probably not how you want to GM! No, the bad is not driven off, you have to either fight him, or attempt to flee, exposing yourself to possibly lethal damage, choose! You get into a situation like this, as a character, by the GM making hard moves against you, and that's usually a matter of the dice. Honor the dice!

DW is "Play to Find Out What Happens" not "Play to find out how the player weasels out of every consequence and gets every reward." Players are free to contribute their imaginations to play, but all play has to have some sort of integrity, just like with other techniques.

Now, other RPGs may be much more generous with player fiction, even relying on it heavily or entirely. They have different structures and different forms of arbitration of outcomes, and different goals. 4e, and most RPGs that I'm very familiar with, expect the GM to be the mechanism that upholds the Czege Principal however, that challenges and responses to challenges are the responsibility of different parties (like I think in Fiasco players make up the obstacles for other player's characters to deal with).