Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[RenleyRenfield]

You play to find out the answer to things.

No idea where you're coming from here. Pretty much every game that builds "play to find out" as the core of its ethos has the GM front pressures (AW Threats, DW Fronts, BITD factions and clocks, Daggerheart Campaign Countdowns).

We play to find out what the players do, or dont do, faced with those situations. How the pressures escalate and how they handle that. How their own goals and priorities run into the premise and core of play pressing back.

No, you are adding words together wrong here.

A better example is not the overall 'we play to see what players do" = i mean, that's just roleplay


Play to find out is a tool closer to how some games allow players to use Hero points to add to the fiction, some games use reaction rolls, some games use random encounter tables, and so on. it's not the overall RPG, its the way a designer can determine how much mechanics or wording to stress of the plot, world, events, choices = are generated via play, and not via prep or GM fiat.

If you're playing AW, and you have a Threat, you've most likely built some sort of Countdown Clock. We play to find out, in the specific sub-case of this Threat, what will happen with how it imposes itself on the player's periphery.
...

Then we see what happens.

What you are talking about is wrong for what Play to Find Out means.

What you are talking about is fine, it's just a way of phrasing roleplaying as a general practice.

 

[pemerton]

The first RPG I know of to use the phrase "play to find out" is Apocalypse World. It appears on pp 108-9 of the rulebook:

AGENDA

• Make Apocalypse World seem real.
• Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
• Play to find out what happens.​

Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other. It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not [mucking] around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out.

Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the
players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.

The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline. When you find something you genuinely care about — a question about what will happen that you genuinely want to find out — letting the game’s fiction decide it is uniquely satisfying.​

Page 109 continues with the following:

ALWAYS SAY

• What the principles demand (as follow).
• What the rules demand.
• What your prep demands.
• What honesty demands.​

​

It therefore follows that there is no contradiction between playing to find out and prep (of a certain sort).

The rules for prep are set out on pp 136-47 (followed by an example). They include this, on p 143:

COUNTDOWN CLOCKS
A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’.

When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created.

Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen:

• Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps?
• Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it?
• At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it?​

As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments.

Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out.

For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit: “if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.” Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not [mucking] around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to.​

There are two main ways that a listed thing might happen. One is that, applying the principles in accordance with their agenda, the GM says something, and that something is on a clock. The other way is that, in accordance with the principles, the GM decides to disclaim decision making (pp 110, 116) and thus advances a clock. (Always making a move that follows from the fiction: p 110-11.)

So there is at least one way - this way - of using GM prep as an element in the process of playing to find out.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

The core of the ideas is that you don't have like, a chain of plot and events set out. You don't have "the PCs must do A, and then at some point do B, and then let's see, also C & E or else Z will happen and everybody dies!" It's about posing questions through play and seeing how or if the PCs will answer that.

Is the quite working? seems the site lost the quote.... I will add back in
"Zakel19 said
The core of the ideas is that you don't have like, a chain of plot and events set out. You don't have "the PCs must do A, and then at some point do B, and then let's see, also C & E or else Z will happen and everybody dies!" It's about posing questions through play and seeing how or if the PCs will answer that."

Not really. Again, unless you are doing something I have never heard of, that you are telling players what to say and what to do - which I am not aware of any RPG that does this. The point of your statement is = nothing. it tells us nothing. Of course we set up a situation and then let the players loose to show how it goes. But that isn't Play to Find out.

Typically when designing game, or if a game claims to be strongly play to find out it will have the designer push for rules and wording in descriptions that lean into =

• You avoid pre-scripted events and guaranteed encournters
• You don't define what is actually in the world until it manifests in the moment
• You move narrative control away from a central GM. (In PbtA games, the GM is restricted by their somewhat limited right/obligation to make "moves", and the player's moves often restricting the GMs responses.)

keep in mind, there are games like Fiasco, Polaris, Kingdom, and Microscope = where there is not even a GM at all

 

[billd91]

The core of the ideas is that you don't have like, a chain of plot and events set out. You don't have "the PCs must do A, and then at some point do B, and then let's see, also C & E or else Z will happen and everybody dies!" It's about posing questions through play and seeing how or if the PCs will answer that.
"Wow, I'm really excited to see how the players deal with the portents and doom of this Threat that's going to intersect a bunch of their priorities! Guess we'll see what the dice and Moves brings!" and then you front a scene, and ask "what do you do?" over and over.



When I play Blades in the Dark, I'm genuinely curious to find out if "the fledgling crew can thrive amidst the teeming threats of rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful ghosts, the Bluecoats of the City Watch, and the siren song of the scoundrel’s own vices." And so in play, I bring all of that into the city, refined down via Clocks and Complications, and stuff we develop together at the table into play to ensure those "threats of rival gangs" and "vengeful ghosts" and "vices" show up and we answer the question one way or another!

And the fundamental difference between the portents and doom of this Threat that's going to intersect a bunch of their priorities and a chain of events set out (under the presumption that the PCs are going to somehow interact with them) is what exactly? You're characterizing the plot set out as something PCs "must do", but if the players want to play the AP/adventure/plotted campaign and create PCs interested in the issues at play, how's being excited about how the PCs are going to interact with the campaign plot different from being excited about the PCs interacting with the portents and Threat that intersects with their priorities?
How are you not "playing to find out" in both situations? You're certainly gonna find out some things that you couldn't have before in the absence of play.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

How are you not "playing to find out" in both situations? You're certainly gonna find out some things that you couldn't have before in the absence of play.

I think the general ideas being mushed here is design language vs just describing roleplay. They are not the same, but the words are

One is "how to make a game within limits/guidelines/special rules"

the other is "let's set up a scenario and play it out"

both are fine, but one is not the same as the other.

 

[pemerton]

The core of the ideas is that you don't have like, a chain of plot and events set out. You don't have "the PCs must do A, and then at some point do B, and then let's see, also C & E or else Z will happen and everybody dies!"

I think this is absolutely one part, yes. So "play to find out" contrasts with Adventure Paths, metaplot, etc.

I think the other part is that it contrasts with purely exploration-oriented RPGing (like, say, classic D&D). The focus in that sort of play isn't really on what happens (to the PCs, to their friends and family, to their community, to the world). It's on whether the players do well or not in beating the dungeon and earning their XP.

EDIT: Finding out whether or not the players can solve the riddle presented to them by the GM, or finding out whether or not the players (via their PCs) can defeat, in combat, the Orcs that the GM confronts them with, is not the same as playing to find out in the AW sense. As per my paragraph just above, in AW the play is to find out "story"-type stuff: the fate of protagonists and the things that those protagonists care about.

 

[soviet]

The emphasis is on 'play to find out' and who is doing the finding out - it should also include the GM.

If you are a player in essentially any RPG then, yes, you play and you find out what happens. And if you didn't play, you wouldn't find out. But what is it you are finding out? How was it generated?

What 'play to find out' implies is a causative relationship. The process of play itself created what happened. Not just in terms of, how did the situations that happened get resolved, but, what were the situations anyway? Could different player choices have created completely different situations, with different stakes, different participants, different knock-on effects? Could different dice rolls or mechanical outputs have created completely different situations, stakes etc too?

Or were the situations that happened in play pre-determined by virtue of being in the GM's notes? Did the players' actions create those situations, or simply allow them to be revealed? Not how the situations will be resolved, of course, but probably the broad sequence of events. 'The PCs will be sent to explore the Impossible Tower, and there they will find the Secret of Great Soup, and then there will be a big battle with the Dark Chef. So, in this kind of game, the GM is not playing to find out anything other than the details of how those things are concluded and what lines people say when they complete a stage.

 

[zakael19]

You're characterizing the plot set out as something PCs "must do", but if the players want to play the AP/adventure/plotted campaign and create PCs interested in the issues at play, how's being excited about how the PCs are going to interact with the campaign plot different from being excited about the PCs interacting with the portents and Threat that intersects with their priorities?
How are you not "playing to find out" in both situations? You're certainly gonna find out some things that you couldn't have before in the absence of play.

Well, if the players are sitting down to play an Adventure Path I hope they're excited to engage with that!

But I think it's generally hard to have a pre-written adventure that doesn't start making assumptions about what the players must do at some point, unless you all accept "failure" as a running condition. I think an example close to mind is Red Hand of Doom. In some ways I think you could treat that as a Dungeon World Campaign Front (I think??): the Red Hand invades the Vale! What will you do?

If the players have reasons to care about the vale, and you leave everything else open, you can play to find out how or if they go about facing that threat. If you have written down, as @soviet says , all the possible and allowed ways they can do so - probably not really finding out much together?

 

[SteveC]

Sooo... FYI... absolutely none of this is "Play to find out."

Okay. Thanks for your opinion.

 

[SteveC]

This all kind of underscores the fundamental uselessness of the whole "play to find out" statement as a practical matter. As if any RPG can't lay claim to that statement. Whether it's no prep or extensive prep, RPGs have pretty much always been about playing to find out what happens, what the PCs do, how situations are resolved, how puzzles are solved.

Pretty much this. There's a thing that's going to happen. Will it? Don't know, the ending isn't determined. If the players do nothing, it's going to happen. Will they do something? What? Stop the event? Agree with it and get onboard? Or figure some point out that's inbetween? Don't know.