Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7080656" data-attributes="member: 42582">Warning, long post incoming!I've highlighted one sentence in this post, because it illustrates what, in my view, tends to undermine immersion: if I'm meant to experience the fiction in the same way (whatever exactly that means) as my character, then why am I having to ask how coats are hung. Wouldn't I (as my PC) know that?Would it disorient the player and disrupt his/her roleplaying? Well, it won't stop performance, I guess. Actors are (I assume) used to being told about what the norms are that their characters are used to, as part of helping them understand how to play their characters, how to react to things, etc.But [MENTION=6802765]Xetheral[/MENTION] didn't talk about roleplaying in that sense - the word used was immersion. And I personally think that that sort of GM mediation is an obstacle to immersion. As I said, I feel it makes the character feel like an alien.And I don't see how GM prep really deals with this issue. GM prep doesn't make the world more "lived in" from the point of view of the player experience of "inhabiting" the PC.Why does the player need to be stopped? That is, what is the issue here?In 4e, the system offers no mechanic for handling this. The advice is simply to "say 'yes'", and this is different from "say 'yes' or roll the dice": the latter is a principle about resolving action declarations, whereas the 4e advice is about player introduction of fictional content. In my 4e game it hasn't come up very often, but one episode I remember is that of a player declaring that his PC gives the secret signal of his cult to the captain of a band of elves with whom the PCs had met up. I took a "yes, but" approach: I thought it might be a bit strong to have the elven captain as an ally, so declared that the captain seemed not to recognise the symbol; but that a bit later, the lieutenant approached the PC and indicated that he had noticed the signal, and then went on to offer cult-related assistance.In BW and Cortex/MHRP - the other two systems I'm GMing at the moment - the player's declaration that the PC's brother is there is an action declaration. In MHRP it requires spending a "plot point" (a type of player resource that is a central component of that game's resolution economy) to create a "resource", which is (in effect) a species of buff with fiction attached. In the absence of spending the point, at best the player is trying to add some colour to the scene, but can't actually get help from the brother.In BW either the player is calling on a relationship (which is a type of resource - not entirely unlike a AD&D henchman - established as part of PC building) or is making a Circles check. For the latter, the GM can "say 'yes'" rather than calling for a roll of the dice, if there is nothing at stake; otherwise (as with any other action declaration) a DC is set and the check is resolved. If it fails, the most natural response to the example you gave would be something like "Your brother takes your coat from you, and snarls 'I'll keep this as a downpayment for all that you owe me . . .'" - ie the situation has become one in which the PC has to deal with the enmity of his/her brother.Well, there are (at least) three things here.First, if the player wants to play a revenge story of his/her PC against the PC's brother, will s/he immediately narrate an encounter with the brother? To some extent, we have to trust that the players will push the fiction in the directions that speak to what they want out of the game. (I think this connects to some of the ideas [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has been talking about, but I don't know whether he would exactly agree with what I've said here - I hope he might post about that.)Second, I think there is an issue here that is not about GM predetermination but rather about responsibility for framing conflicts. The so-called <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">"Czege principle"</a> posits, as an empirical conjecture, that "it's not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict." In other words, the tension/drama/excitement of play can be better served by the mechanics, and/or the GM, in various ways, mediating the introduction into the shared fiction of the nemesis against whom revenge is sort. For instance, the appearance of the nemesis might be the result of a successful check (eg the player delcares a tracking check, and succeeds, and now the PC comes over a ridge to see his/her nemesis camped on the hillside below), or of a failed check (eg the player fails a Circles check, and instead of meeting his/her contact in the alley finds his/her nemesis there, standing over the dead body of the contact, with a loaded crossbow pointed in the PC's direction and saying "So, at last we meet . . . "), or simply framing ("You see your nemesis through the crowd: vice versa also, and having noticed you the nemesis starts to hurry off. What do you do?").These sorts of things would be instances of the player providing the hooks for play, including the existence (in the shared fiction) of the salient story elements (namely, the nemesis; and the PC's desire for revenge), but not actually him-/herself deciding unilaterally when the conflict occurs.Third, I think there is a high degree of tension between the proposition that "story takes craft" - implying that pre-authorship is therefore desirable - and the proposition that "in a RPG the players make choices that matter". Because if the latter proposition is true, then what has happened to the former? What is left of the GM's carefully crafting, if the players are allowed to make meaningful choices?To the extent that "story takes craft", I therefore prefer to approach RPGing from a perspective that takes as a premise that all the parties at the table will be contributing to the crafting (eg by creating PCs who are driven, in some sense, by dramatic needs). I also prefer mechanics and procedures that tend, by their very nature, to yield story as an outcome of their use. The 4e combat mechanics are a very clear illustration of this: when used in conjunction with the encounter building guidelines they produce, "automatically" as it were, combat encounters which have dramatic pacing: the PCs are pushed hard (monsters and NPCs have higher default damage and higher default hp), and put on the ropes, but then - if played well by their players - are able to rally (PCs have a depth of healing resources that monsters and NPCs lack), pull out all the stops (PCs have a depth of non-at-will resources that monsters and NPCs lack) and thereby turn the tide, ultimately achieving victory.4e skill challenges require more skillful GMing to achieve the same dramatic pacing, but they can be used in a similar way.MHRP/Cortext establishes story through the way dice pools are built (because they are built up out of dice that literally represent elements of the fiction), and every outcome has some literal meaning in the fiction (ie is not just a mechanical notation such as hp depletion). And the rice and fall of the doom pool (the GM's resource pool) conveys directly the sense of dread or the "room to breathe" for the PCs. Of the three games I GM, I think it is the "lightest"/least serious in the sort of story that it supports.Whereas BW is the most "heavy" or grim in this respect. It's system guarantees that failure will be frequent, and it relies upon its principles for the narration of these failures to do deliver story (as things improve for the PCs, but then turn against them - and because of the basic GMing principles, this is all speaking to the PCs' dramatic concerns).This is a response to Campbell and [MENTION=6802765]Xetheral[/MENTION] (I'm tagging in case the embedded quote doesn't trigger a notification).For me, the importance of intent - in 4e skill challenges, and almost all BW resolution (it has some rather intricate sub-systems, especially its melee combat sub-system, that make intent less important than task for certain action declarations) - follows from what I just wrote in reply to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]. It is the narration of success and failure in terms of intent that delivers the rise and fall that is part of a story.I find that focusing on task alone doesn't do that job (unless task is so expansively characterised as to include intent also). To give one example: in my 4e game, the players succeeded at a skill challenge that involved having dinner with the baron (at his invitation) in the company of his advisor (whom they knew to be an evil necromancer; and who himself knew that they knew; but who did not want to be revealed to the baron, and whom they did not really want to reveal less that embarrass the baron and/or turn the baron against them) while keeping secret from the advisor that the magical tapestry he had spent years searching for was, in fact, in the dwarven PC's herald's backpack about 15 feet from the dining table. (Details <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">here</a>.)Focusing on intent was key to my GMing of this, modulating the consequences of success - which, by the rules of the game, must bring the players closer to what they (as their PCs) want - with maintaining pressure via framing so that the situation is still "alive" and hence the players have a reason to keep declaring actions for their PCs.The final resolution of the skill challenge involved the 10 CHAR dwarf fighter/cleric making a social check against the advisor, calling him not by his courtly name but by the name used among the goblin and hobgoblin armies he was secretly commanding, and thereby trying to goad him into revealing himself to the baron. The check initially failed, but then another player spent a resource (an action point) to (in the fiction) add another taunt, and thereby (in the mechanics) add a bonus to the dwarf player's check that turned the failure into a success.That was the end of that session; in the next session, we opened with the taunted advisor turning on the PCs. I declared some action for him, or said something about the situation - I can't now remember what - but then one of the players reminded me: We succeeded in the skill challenge, with the goal of having the evil advisor reveal himself. The player's point was that I, as GM, would be dishonouring that success by now allowing some action or element of framing that tended to allow the advisor to try and conceal his evil or make the PCs look like the bad guys. The success doesn't just result in the advisor doing something (in this case, being goaded into attacking the PCs); it also establishes a "meaning" or a context, within the fiction, for that "something" - namely, the advisor is revealing himself as an evil traitor to the baron.I've given examples upthread already of failures producing story through a focus on intent (eg the discovery of the black arrows; finding the fouled waterhole) so I won't elaborate anymore on that.I would say that this is all true for me also, at least for 4e and BW.For Cortex/MHRP I feel I'm still on more of a learning curve, including learning exactly what prep (if any) might be useful. NPCs/creatures are very easy to create on the fly, plus I have books full of "datafiles", so that particular aspect of prep (which looms larger in BW and 4e, both of which like a degree of mechanical heft to the threats/challenges) isn't so important.</blockquote>

Verification