Contrivance in story dynamics

[pemerton]

The Torchbearer idea of parents, friends, mentors, and enemies may be a good idea, but I'm not sure how much it will be used. The current idea of bonds and flaws is not used that much by the DM to mine for ideas. I like the idea of having a roll to see who in your circle can help.

I'm not sure if you're expressing a view based on familiarity with Torchbearer, or conjecturing a bit more abstractly.

If the former, I'd be curious about your experiences. If the latter, all I can say is that the random events tables, and the rules for town phase, make friends, parents, mentors and enemies pretty central - so I don't feel that the role of they've been playing in my group's sessions is particularly disproportionate compared to what the designers intended, nor particularly atypical for what the system will produce if played in accordance with its instructions.

Some of the movie events are contrived like meeting Chaucer when the happen to need a scribe/forger. The DM knows the party is going to look for a forger and introduced him in that manner to provide roleplay and set up a flaw of his in the gambling. It is more interesting than going to town and trying to get in with the thieves' guild and setting up that part of the story if there is no need for them later. The knight need armor and goes to market to meet a smith. He has no money so the DM comes up with a way to allow him armor by introducing the woman smith. A yes-and solution.

I would like to think I come up with great NPC like this on the fly but likely do not as much as I could. I might have a smith nobody wants to work with but likely a half-orc or halfling would be more fun in the role.

These are the sorts of things for which a Circles check works well. If you succeed, you meet a friendly armour who knows how to improve your armour. If you fail, well maybe you still meet the scribe you need, but you also become liable for his gambling debts - or maybe instead you meet your enemy, like when Adhemar comes to taunt William in his prison cell.

 

[pemerton]

I agree with you that an unbounded random encounter system is not likely to generate meaningful connection of story threads but an appropriately curated one might. I don't really see a big difference on this axis between a GM curating such a list and a game's mechanics doing this work.

I'm not sure what sort of list you have in mind.

I think the general difference between using mechanics and using GM curation when it comes to "chance meetings" is much the same as that between using mechanics and using GM curation when it comes to fighting, or to scaling walls: rolling dice is more exciting, it allows the players a greater say in what is at stake, and it creates the possibility of the GM as well as the players being surprised.

If you want any type of real meaningful story, you need contrived events. You can't jut do a random mess and then call it a story and have something even remotely decent.

For an RPG, it is all about the GM making planned controlled forced events, even more so if the players refuse to do so and just "sit there" and expect the story to just happen.

I don't really get the games with they have wacky 'story' rules. I get most players will refuse to act in a game, as that is too common. I don't really get the rule of "ok player roll to see if your character knows an NPC pal"......and then the player just sits there while the GM makes a planned controlled forced contrived event. Does that roll really make the player feel like they are doing something? I'd think the GM could just do the event and save time.

Your last paragraph is a bit weird to me. In the abstract, I can reiterate my paragraph above that I think gameplay in RPGs is often exciting - the players decide what they want their PCs to do, they help set the stakes, and then they roll the dice and we all find out what happens next; whereas GM curation is closer to the GM reading the players a novel.

And I can set out a concrete example from my Torchbearer play: Fea-bella's player decided that Fea-bella (an Elven Dreamwalker) wanted to reach out in her dreams to her adventuring friend Glothfindel, the Elven Ranger. She rolled for Circles, and failed: and so (as determined, and narrated, by me as GM responding to the failed Circles test) she had a vision of Glothfindel, but not of him riding to the town to help her on her intended wilderness journey. Rather, it revealed that Glothfindel had been kidnapped by her enemy, the Dreamwalker Megloss. The fact that she had an enemy already on her PC sheet - written there as part of PC build - made this easy to do as a GM.

That unexpected turn of events underpinned our next few sessions of play: eventually the PCs were able to convince Megloss to release Glothfindel from where the latter was imprisoned beneath the floorboards of the former's house, on pain of reporting Megloss to the authorities as a kidnapper.

I guess I would contrast that with your last paragraph in this way: you imagine the GM saying OK, <Fea-bella's player>, roll to see if your character knows an NPC pal. Whereas what actually happened at my table was that Fea-bella's player said OK, we need to journey through the wilderness. A ranger would be handy, and luckily my PC sheet records that I have a friend who is an Elven Ranger - Glothfindel, So, being a Dreamwalker, I'll make a Circles check to reach out to him in my dreams.

The encounter between the PCs and Megloss happened as the result of a failed check when they were trying to burgle his house - as a result of the failure I narrated a twist, ie that Megloss comes home! They were the ones who decided to try and persuade him to release Glothfindel, and they succeeded (Fea-bella's player did most of the heavy listing, with an astonishingly lucky open-ended roll during the Convince conflict).

In my experience, I don't have any need as a GM to make "planned controlled forced events" in the way that you seem to be describing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

MY feeling, the one I get from playing this sort of game at least, is that when you go back and describe play in a purely narrative fashion, you might get something that sounds a bit like Knight's Tale, but when you are PLAYING it, the experience is a lot closer to the sort of problem solving process you go through playing a B/X game. Its just that the scope of the problem solving is the fiction "how will this play out?" as opposed to "how will I disarm this trap?" There is also, potentially in both cases, the element of Role Play "what would Takeo Okazashi, Cutter of the Wayward Souls want in this situation?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree with you that an unbounded random encounter system is not likely to generate meaningful connection of story threads but an appropriately curated one might. I don't really see a big difference on this axis between a GM curating such a list and a game's mechanics doing this work.

I see, potentially, a large difference. However, GMs are pretty influential even in a game like BitD where the players exert a lot of 'pull' on the direction of the action. Its not really an either-or. The situation that works less well, IME is the opposite one where EVERYTHING is completely GM presented and the players are doing nothing but picking which of the predetermined scenes to visit next. This is kind of a lot of the classic adventures where 'story' is attempted, because the only mechanism is to IMPOSE it. Dragon Lance is the poster child.

 

[pemerton]

MY feeling, the one I get from playing this sort of game at least, is that when you go back and describe play in a purely narrative fashion, you might get something that sounds a bit like Knight's Tale, but when you are PLAYING it, the experience is a lot closer to the sort of problem solving process you go through playing a B/X game.

For me it's different from that, because as a player I don't need to worry that I'll lose my PC if I poke the wrong thing with my 10 pole, and as a GM I don't have to worry in the same way about the right balance in adjudicating fictional positioning and ensuing action declarations - because I can just call for a roll and let the dice decide!

EDIT: Agreed about the difference from DL. I think something like DL would be great in Torchbearer - perhaps dial back the grind a little bit, but it has site-based adventuring turning up meaty magic items, and all the exaggerated fantasy tropes (Elves, Dwarves, Knights, etc) that Torchbearer does so well.

Even dragonriding becomes easy in Torchbearer, because of its smooth rules for help etc from adding a cohort/follower to a conflict. (By way of contrast, Burning Wheel inherits the FRPG tradition of rather fiddly mounted combat rules, though I think not as bad as Rolemaster's.)

FURTHER EDIT: A Dragonlance clearly grants +1 Might to its wielder, and I think it also turns the help from a dragon they're riding from +1D to +2D on an Attack or Feint action.

 

[Lanefan]

If you want any type of real meaningful story, you need contrived events. You can't jut do a random mess and then call it a story and have something even remotely decent.

Well, I think you can, provided the story is allowed to emerge post-hoc rather than be preordained going in or forced in the moment.

For an RPG, it is all about the GM making planned controlled forced events, even more so if the players refuse to do so and just "sit there" and expect the story to just happen.

True; if the players are passively expecting the GM to drive the bus then the GM either has to start the engine or find new players. And IME most GMs have at least a vague idea in mind for a story should this situation arise. The - big! - problems arise mostly when that "vague idea" becomes a locked-in thing from which the players can't deviate.

 

[aramis erak]

Well, I think you can, provided the story is allowed to emerge post-hoc rather than be preordained going in or forced in the moment.

True; if the players are passively expecting the GM to drive the bus then the GM either has to start the engine or find new players. And IME most GMs have at least a vague idea in mind for a story should this situation arise. The - big! - problems arise mostly when that "vague idea" becomes a locked-in thing from which the players can't deviate.

It is a spectrum, not a boolean...

 

[Umbran]

But I wouldn't want to use it as a model for how to run a campaign, for just the reasons you post above: too much contrivance.

Put another way, were I a player in such a game where things just kept "conicidentally" happening to occur just at the right and most convenient moments to keep a story going, I'd feel that setting logic and believability was being sacrificed on the altar of story, i.e. a different but still noticeable (and annoying) form of railroad. It's jarring, and often considerably more noticeable than the GM thinks it is.

One person's contrivance for story is another person's deus ex machina.

I prefer contrivances when they are player generated in some way.

PbtA games often have a "Legwork" move, in which the players initiate finding someone to help, and if the roll succeeds the player can narrate a good deal about what is found. Now it isn't a GM reaching in for the story, it is the player generating it by the rules.

In Fate, players can act to create aspects on a scene, or a difficulty like busted-up armor can be an element the PCs have to Overcome - so again, the players can act to create the narrative contrivance.

Depending how such things play out out, it can seem like metagame or dissociated mechanics, and many players would prefer to push such stuff off to the GM. So sometimes you have a little tension between the game and the player's preferred modes of play.

 

[pointofyou]

I'm not sure what sort of list you have in mind.

I think the general difference between using mechanics and using GM curation when it comes to "chance meetings" is much the same as that between using mechanics and using GM curation when it comes to fighting, or to scaling walls: rolling dice is more exciting, it allows the players a greater say in what is at stake, and it creates the possibility of the GM as well as the players being surprised.

An unbounded list would be one that contained more or less all the possibilities the game offered with no consideration for the PCs. An appropriately curated list would have some or most or all the results being relevant to the PCs' motivations and interests. I believe such an appropriately curated list can work as well for generating results relevant to the PCs' motivations and interests as a mechanic that inserted such things as a result of resolution checks. Of course a game where the GM had to curate a list this way would play differently in many other respects than a game where the mechanics did this work.

I agree with you that resolving things is exciting and it is where the heart of the fun is in TRPGs.

 

[pemerton]

@pointofyou

I'm still not quite sure what sort of list you have in mind, and how you see it being operationalised.

In my OP I mentioned Event rolls in Torchbearer. These are triggered at definite moments of play - when the PCs make camp, when the PCs arrive at a settlement so as to enter it, when the PCs tell tales in a tavern, etc. Some of the entries on the tables make reference to particular categories of relationship - eg a PC's parents, or a PC's enemy - while others do not; but there is a general instruction given to the GM to treat the written event results as a starting point for tailoring to the characters and situations in the ongoing game.

As an example:

In a recent Torchbearer session I rolled a tavern rumour for Golin, the Dwarven Outcast. The rumour result was to the effect of you learn about a bad thing happening to people who fit the description of your parents. But Golin is an orphan! (Established as part of his PC build - you can either choose to have parents, and get +1 Circles and somewhere to stay for free when you're in your hometown; or you can choose to be an orphan and start with an heirloom worth 1D of cash). Golin does, however have a friend, Vaccin the alchemist, in the town where the tavern rumour was heard (another PC build option) - but that town is not Golin's hometown.

So I thought for a minute or so, and then checked with Golin's player about two things - one, that Vaccin was old (yep, he agreed with that) and two, if he knew how Golin had been orphaned (nope, he didn't know how). I also checked Golin's age on his PC sheet - 43 years old.

And then I narrated that Golin got talking to one of the old-timers in the tavern, and that old-timer commented that Vaccin seems to have a thing for Dwarven friends, because about 40 years ago, he (Vaccin) was friendly with a Dwarven couple who had visited the town with their young bairn. But the old-timer had only ever seen them that one time . . .

So that's an example of how I took a relatively generic event description, and adapted it to fit the situation and the character, and thereby established some new bit of backstory that connects Golin and his friend Vaccin, and opens up the possibility of a new adventure, namely, learning what happened to Golin's parents.

Another couple of examples:

In the session before the one I just wrote about, the PCs haggled with an alchemist/taxidermist (not Vaccin, but one he put them in touch with), over the price he would pay for a couple of captured stirges. That all went fine, and then the PCs left town for a bit, and dickered with some bandits, and then came back to town. And so I rolled for the town event, and the result was:

A funeral celebration. Some old bastard is dead, and folks are celebrating in the streets. Someone offers you a cup of strange wine. Remove hungry and thirsty or if not hungry and thirsty, you wake up hungry and thirsty and hung over the next morning. In the latter case, you may remove angry or afraid if you have them.​

I told the players that while the PCs were journeying, the alchemist/taxidermist had died from an unexpected stirge poisoning. They laughed. And Golin (as played by his player) immediately started plotting: in their dickering with the bandits, the PCs had persuaded the Dwarven bandit Gerda to leave the gang and join them; and now Golin saw a chance to insert her into the alchemical hierarchy in the town, a vacancy having just been created.

And in our most recent session, the PCs irritated a cinder imp who was living happily in an enemy Dreamwalker's home, and then drove the imp off. When they re-entered town I again rolled an event roll, and it indicated a fire at the premises of the Hedge Witch, rendering that town facility no longer available (the event has 6 possible locations/facilities listed, and calls for a die roll, and that's what I rolled). Golin had already interacted with the Hedge Witch in an earlier session, trying to buy explosives, and so this was something that stung a bit. And the cause of the fire was taken to be obvious - ie the angry and recently-set-at-large cinder imp. This sets up the possibility of the hedge witch becoming an enemy of the PCs as a future consequence for a failed check in this town.

I'm not sure if this is anything like the sort of approach to a curated list that you have in mind. But those are examples of how Torchbearer does it; and so far I'm very happy with the dynamic it creates, with the world unfolding around the PCs but ample opportunity to connect it to their escapades, and provide springboards for future escapades, in a way that is closer to a genuine story and less like a police procedural's murder-of-the-week.