At the Intersection of Skilled Play, System Intricacy, Prep, and Story Now

[chaochou]

That wasn't the claim. The claim is that some resolution methods do interfere.

And this claim is contradicted by the original Narratavist essay. So you can take up with the author, but what you can't do is tell me what Story Now is when what you're actually discussing is your narrow-minded and insular redefinition.

 

[chaochou]

Necessary not sufficient ring a bell? There's more to it than the single bullet point from your last post. You lost more below, so you clearly understand there's more to it.

It may ring a bell with you. But 'narrativism really is that easy' (see that little bit?) is the sentence which demonstrates your 'necessary not sufficient' is your own smuggled in falsehood. All that's required for Story Now is right there, in my quote, and is present in my play of Fiasco and Montsegur. And many other games I've been playing since 2001.

Your claims to what is required are directly contradicted by the essays on Story Now. Your claim about resolution are directly contradicted by the essay on Story Now.

 

[Ovinomancer]

ROFL. Again, you're not arguing anything. You're asserting. From you're position as someone who only took Story Now at face value as a playstyle in, when was it... 2019? FIve years ago you'd have argued with equal certainty that everything you've just posted is nonsense.

So excuse me if I don't give any credibility to someone who wants to tell me what Fiasco is, or does, or be told what 'everyone says about it' when I was playing when it was published in 2009 and you were 10 years late to the party.

Ah, another ad hom. I made clear points. I'be explained, in detail, my reasoning. You've apoealed to authority, insulted me, and now are committing a generic galaxy on top of an ad hom. Which is funny because you've liked plenty of my posts where you agreed with me despite however recent my experience was.

My two core points remain:

1. Consensus resolution requires compromise with protagonism.

2. Forced end states put pressure on protagonism and pacing by introducing Gamist incentives.

 

[Manbearcat]

Earlier this year I finally picked up a (PDF) copy of My Life With Master (which had the added benefit of a very pleasant email exchange with Paul Czege, a designer whom I admire greatly).

I skimmed it when I got it, but have just now read it closely. I think it bears directly upon some of the themes of @Manbearcat's OP.

Players in MLWM play minions who serve a NPC Master - think, broadly, of a gothic horror setup. The action is driven by the relationships between various stats: Fear (the degree of terror the Master exercises over both the minions and the townsfolk), Reason (the tendency of normalcy to prevail despite the depredations of the Master and their minions), Self-Loathing (a minion's self-hatred that gives them power over the Townsfolk but also gives the Master power over them), Weariness (a minion's lack of will to resist or to try) and Love (a minion's degree of human connection to one or more ordinary people).

Dice pools to resolve conflicts are built out of these stats (eg test F+SL vs L-W to see if a minion obeys a command from their Master). And certain relationships between the stats also trigger events (eg if W > R, then a minion is captured): most importantly, if a minion resists a command from their Master and L > F+W, then the endgame is triggered: the minion and their Master are locked in struggle, and the Master will die, but until that happens (which is a function of dice rolls), the other players get a series of scenes, in turn, in which we find out what is happening to their PCs as everything comes to its culmination.

Once the Master dies, each player narrates the epilogue for their minion, but in accordance with constraints established by the relationships of the various stats. For instance, if SL > W+R then the minion in question destroys themself; but if W > SL + R then the minion flees or wanders off, unable to bear to go on. Only if L+R > SL+W is the minion able to integrate themself into ordinary society.

In the rulebook (pp 38, 40), Czege comments directly on the interaction between the system elements I've described in the preceding two paragraphs:

The GM alternates, after each such roll [to see if the Master has been killed], between rounds of framing scenes without player input​

and rounds of framing scenes called for by the players. Presumably it could take a few cycles of this before the Master is dead, all the while the players are sorting out the final trait values that will inform their individual Epilogues, likely working with intent toward having certain desired outcomes available to their characters.​

Clearly there is scope for skilful play here, as different sorts of scenes, and different approaches to a GM-framed scene, provide opportunities for different sorts of conflicts, which in turn can yield different sorts of consequences for a minion's stats. Yet MLWM is a quintessential "story now game". So how should we think about this?

That question is not rhetorical, and I'm curious about others' views. My starting point for an answer is that the game does not dictate what sort of outcome is desired. The player can decide what sort of ending their minion "deserves" and play towards that. So the skilful play is a means but not an end. Regardless of what happens, you will get to narrate an epilogue for your minion.

That said, I wonder how much "step on up"-drifted play of MLWM has taken place, where players struggle to be the one whose minion gets to kill the Master, or gets to have a normal life once the Master is dead. I can't believe there's been none.

First, addressing the solicited anecdotes:

Dogs and MLwM were actually my initial forays into these games (later came Sorcerer and The Shadow of Yesterday). Both Dogs and MLwM have both plenty of scope for Skilled Play while simultaneously being games that center on visceral, provocative scenes where the thematic content the players are engaging with through their PCs demands a fairly high measure of (some alchemy of) fortitude/will + some level of engagement with a concoction of emotional commitment/retreat/revulsion (about the thematic touchstones, about the PC you're playing, about the milieu, and about the NPCs you're interacting with).

The two RL groups I've GMed these games for have featured a mix of people in terms of personal background and history with TTRPGs. I think a few interesting notes are:

* As scenes accrue, statistics change, and nature becomes revealed (in either game), its nearly impossible to not reorient to your PC.

* While there is absolutely a "Skilled Play Pressure" element to play, its inevitably entangled with the above emergent consequence of playing. You may have either, or, both rough thematic goals for a character or even gamestate goals for a character at the outset of play (or even healthily into it). But the pressure of those things intersecting with the scope of Skilled Play for these games gets perturbed as your orientation to your PC invariably changes. It may result in a realignment...possibly a significant one (you may find yourself playing someone you are very conficted about...or worse). That tension of scope of Skilled Play + clarified win/loss cons + confrontation with hardening/softening/reorienting scene content isn't an accident!

* Two of the players in the groups mentioned above have been regular Torchbearer and Blades in the Dark players in my RL group for those games. They are very inclined toward (and capable of) Skilled Play in all four of these games mentioned. However (and this is the last thing I'll say before I close out this post as I'm running out of time!), these "loss con" inputs in Blades and Torchbearer have had significant roles to play in their play (which incontrovertibly features a hefty dose of Skilled Play):

1) In Torchbearer, Nature 0 and Nature 7 means the character retires. The reality that players have complete say in both (a) how much they risk this prospect and (b) how it resolves within the fiction if it comes to that means that these two players are, by far, the most apt to push toward these loss cons for their characters. They've both retired multiple characters as a result of this while only a single other character has been retired from this within all the other players combined.

That is not a coincidence.

2) Those same two players? Those two players are the most prone to take on the significant burden of concession in Conflicts, up to and including seeing their characters removed from play. Again, they get so much say in this that I'm confident this is not a coincidence.

3) Cut to Blades. The exact same thing applies for Traumas, retirement (or worse) due to collecting 4 Traumas, and being sent to Ironhook Prison when Arrest comes up on Entanglement. Same deal. These two players are much more apt to (a) play within that red line where Traumas are lurking, (b) get Traumas, (c) retired due to Traumas, (d) take the fall for the The Crew when Arrest turns up.

Again...not a coincidence I don't believe.


My point to all of this?

I think "win cons" aren't the only pressure on or interaction with Skilled Play. In fact, that may not even be the most remarkable/interesting/impactful one.

It may very well be that the expression of agency (amount and kind) and the attendant trajectory on play that agency provides when it comes to "loss cons" is something that should be put under the microscope. Particularly when it comes to Skilled Play pressures within Story Now ("capable"...we can append that rider to TB for now) games and particularly for players who are much more inclined to engage with that "Skilled Play Throttle."

 

[Manbearcat]

I thought I was pretty good at reading English academic sociology publications, and know quite a bit about the underlying structures of RPGs.

But it turns out there's an Inside Baseball inside Inside Baseball.

(What is this about? )

Feel free to ask a specific question and I'll try to nail down a specific answer for you!

Anything come to mind about what you've read in this thread?

Anything in the lead post or subsequent posts that you find particularly interesting/compelling/confusing?

 

[Manbearcat]

1. Consensus resolution requires compromise with protagonism.

2. Forced end states put pressure on protagonism and pacing by introducing Gamist incentives.

What do you think about your 1 and 2 here and what I've written above about "loss cons", agency around loss cons/play trajectory (particularly PC trajectory), and Skilled Play pressures/Gamist incentives?

Maybe, if you would, talk about Mister's actions in the scene in the bar early on in our Blades game (which...I think we can all agree...none of us saw coming), how Traumas and any other "Sword of Damocles-ish" aspects of system/shared imagined space impacted your orientation to play generally and specifically to the Gamist incentives in that game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What do you think about your 1 and 2 here and what I've written above about "loss cons", agency around loss cons/play trajectory (particularly PC trajectory), and Skilled Play pressures/Gamist incentives?

Maybe, if you would, talk about Mister's actions in the scene in the bar early on in our Blades game (which...I think we can all agree...none of us saw coming), how Traumas and any other "Sword of Damocles-ish" aspects of system/shared imagined space impacted your orientation to play generally and specifically to the Gamist incentives in that game.

I think consensus resolution is anathema to skilled play and I don't think fixed end have much to say about it.

I very much agree with your post above and the idea that Skilled Play can coexist with SN play. Bring aware of and leveraging system in pursuit of protagonism works fine. It's when the goal shifts from protagonism to a more Gamist goal that issues arise.

That scene for Mister involved trying to sneak a bomb into an enemy hideout to crack open the defense for an assault. This was successful -' Mister had infliltrated as a delivery worker and planted and primed the bomb. However, it turned out that there we
as an innocent in the hideout, being held there as hostage. This out pressure on Mister's background as an ex-guerilla in the Skovland resistance which he left in part because he no longer wished to be part of a losing fight that primarily killed innocents. So Mister made a choice, secured the hostage and set of the bomb using himself as a shield for the hostage. This succeeded with complication, and the resist roll ended up stressing Mister out of the score and earning his first team's, reckless. Up until that point, Mister had been a more careful planner, but surviving the explosion changed him. Much later Mister picked up Cold a a trauma and wouldn't have even thought twice about leaving the hostage behind.

All through this play, I fronted Mister's protagonism, but also made sure that he had the right PC build tools to enable it and used resources and system to best portray his dramatic needs. We all did in that game. Aligning play to protagonism can be 100% skilled.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Regarding this most recent disposition change of the thread, I’m going to offer up something for folks interested in this segment of the discussion.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with some pals last night after running Stonetop for them.

I posed a hypothetical of a game about the world ending via asteroid/comet strike. It’s not about forestalling the apocalypse but rather it’s about how you spend your last days. Do you write a letter and speedily drive it across country to hand deliver to someone you secretly love or someone you need to make peace with? Do you plot and assassinate the murderer of a loved one? Do you plan and throw a massive party? Do you convince your loved ones to join you in ritual suicide and do the deed? Etc.

The game is about engaging with that premise, resolving it, and revealing these characters via scenes that accrue Despair, Meaning, and Connection. You create your opening character, you create a goal, your assign stats. Those stats and that goal are foundational to the resolution of your final scene. As you move through scenes toward the final scene of your character, these stats change as immediate fallout and upon reflection (Dogs in the Vineyard-ish).

The background of the apocalypse is constraining framing to generate and animate these characters; to provoke play. The antagonist here is not the impending apocalypse.The antagonist is “what will stop you, particularly internally (eg your Despair score exerting more influence than your Meaning and/or Connections score), from doing what you set out to do in the time you have.”

1) Is this a Story Now game because it fits all the parameters and confined and focused play space for premise/distillation of emergent theme/character is not anathema?

2) Is this not a Story Now game because the encoded constraints on premise disallow you from choose your antagonist as “The Impending Apocalypse” and allowing play to flow from that antagonist/goal? Put another way, if you could choose your antagonist as The Impending Apocalypse > create a scientist PC whose goal is to forestall the apocalypse > your scenes and derivative stats and “final showdown” would be anchored to that goal, then the game only now becomes Story Now?

My answer of course is that it is definitely Story Now (I mean, provisionally given the outline of system and my assumptions of play process). Certainly a fixed outcome does not negate Story Now. The apocalypse happens to the WORLD, not the character. It is not, as you say, something you are in conflict with, it is just fiction which informs the tone and genre of the milieu. Story Now does NOT require Zero/Low Myth, and it doesn't require Zero/Low 'meta-plot', it just requires that the players are in control of thematic choices. Certainly if we look to the essay linked in the OP we find THEME and PREMISE as very central factors.

Anyway, a lot of people do like/prefer Low Myth and a lot of payer autonomy, and perhaps a good bit of 'open endedness' in the fiction, but really things can be pretty nailed down and still be Story Now, as long as the player can say "my character is like this, and it affects his actions like so, and changes him like this" (and then maybe that doesn't happen as stated because of fortune, and now we have 'Play to Find Out What Happens'). I think there's always a need for some of Play to Find Out in any Story Now, and that too is clear to RE.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Bob is a man. Bob is tall. Therefore men, the kind, have the capacity to be tall. That is also specific to general, and as it happens is sound.

It's not indefeasible - maybe Bob is tall despite being of the kind men (eg something happened early in life that stretched Bob). That's why generalisation needs to rest on close attention to possible defeaters. (And not just in the social sciences - this is also an issue in natural science experimental design.)

No one is asserting that every game with a fixed timeline is, or must be, "story now". Even if the fixed timeline is known to the players, and so is not GM-parcelled-out "metaplot", that does not mean that the game is, or must be, "story now". But it might be. There is no contradiction between player protagonism, and no "the story", and a known pre-established cut-off for the action, any more than "story now" must mean there are no impassable mountain ranges, nor fixed cosmologies, etc.

Reasoning from particular to general is not unsound, as you say. It is merely INDUCTIVE REASONING taken to the weakest limit (IE if I once see the sun rise in the east I may generalize that to "the sun rises in the east", and from a purely evidentiary point of view that as weak as an assertion can get). I could cast this in Bayesian terms too, I have one prior, that's enough to generate a probability density against. Thus a betting man would logically want to put his money on "the sun will rise in the east again tomorrow" as there's no instance of a counterfactual. Obviously if the sun rises in the north tomorrow, well then I will need to carefully consider any further predictions, but I still have 'rose in the east' and 'rose in the north' as priors...

And yeah, maybe you set your Car Wars campaign in the "Last Days", its still about building weapon studded cars and doing crazy stuff with them, blowing up the other PCs cars, etc. Its surely not story now, but you can still have everyone die 'next Saturday' and it works as a game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It’s no surprise that you see MLwM in that proposed game!

Alright, so now let’s subtly perturb our thoughts exercise:

* Resolving the impending doom IS an alleged primary site of conflict in the game (rather than being premise constraintand provocation).

* During actual play, getting to the final scene or the final scene itself (where you try to resolve the impending doom) involves Force which subverts the rightful (rightful here meaning - what the premise + procedures/principles/reward system is designed to engage with, propel, and resolve) input that players are supposed to have had.

---

I hope we can all agree that is quite a different deal/play experience/design than the one I put on offer above.

And those differences are rather important to the question (and cut to
The heart of premise constraint/focus at the design level vs actual Force; which is a during play phenomenon).

Yeah, I think this is now a game where key story elements are restricted to the GM and player inputs don't matter to the plot anymore (at least much, they will probably still change some details). Is that not Story Now? Hmmmm, well, there isn't 'Play to Find Out' anymore. OTOH there are games that are fairly deterministic (IE Pace, which is diceless) that DO have some Story Now character in most play. So, I think the problem with this scenario isn't that the GM is essentially dictating that the day gets saved, that in and of itself is not different from 'the Earth will be inevitably destroyed'. Its the FORCE, the PCs are going to save the Earth! Now, if that's not the cae, if its up in the air, and resolving some dramatic premise about the characters or their relation to the situation, etc. is going to decide how that plays out, well then we're back to no force and Playing to Find Out What Happens, right? I think PtFOWH is a pretty strong concept!