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

[thefutilist]

I'm not interested in the "character's" goal here, they're fictional constructs without agency. I'm interested in what the player's goals are and how those are supposed to be pursued. What is the purpose for proposing one action over another, and how should they reason about those choices, so as to prefer some specific approach?

This is both dependant upon the game and who you ask. I disagree with a lot of the other narrativist inclined types here because I do think they’re making stuff a bit mushy.

So assuming you want narrativist stuff (and that’s not an automatic assumption with blades), you’re making two types of decisions.


One: manipulating the game state and mechanics to get to your desired fictional state.

Two: making expressive choices bound by your character and the situation. You can put this in many other ways but an easy one might be ‘making moral choices on behalf of your character.’

What you’ll probably find is that most narrativists exist on a spectrum of how much they want type one decisions in their game. Any game that’s heavy on meta-currency is going to have loads of type one decisions, maybe even predominately type one decisions.

There’s also crossover, the decisions aren’t pure and discrete because one influences the other.

 

[Pedantic]

This is both dependant upon the game and who you ask. I disagree with a lot of the other narrativist inclined types here because I do think they’re making stuff a bit mushy.

So assuming you want narrativist stuff (and that’s not an automatic assumption with blades), you’re making two types of decisions.


One: manipulating the game state and mechanics to get to your desired fictional state.

Two: making expressive choices bound by your character and the situation. You can put this in many other ways but an easy one might be ‘making moral choices on behalf of your character.’

What you’ll probably find is that most narrativists exist on a spectrum of how much they want type one decisions in their game. Any game that’s heavy on meta-currency is going to have loads of type one decisions, maybe even predominately type one decisions.

There’s also crossover, the decisions aren’t pure and discrete because one influences the other.

Yeah, that makes sense. I struggle to understand how those two kinds of decision could coexist, and why it would not be arbitrary to pick one or the other, especially if both are expressed through the same mechanical framework all the time.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'm solidly pro-manipulation here. My issue is that RPGs are deeply inconsistent about whether or not players should be doing mechanical manipulation and when. I am not using the term pejoratively; if I had it my way, games generally would simply not include mechanics players are not supposed to try and leverage.

Yup, I'd agree. I'm going to selective in the rest of my responses.

Let's take the case that @Crimson Longinus put forward earlier. If the player's goal is to succeed at the stated goal of a given score and to come out as far ahead on resources so they can continue to do so in future, it is beneficial to a player looking to minimize complications to, to the best of their ability, persuade their GM to set as many possible clocks that will not matter if they aren't filled by the end of score. This essentially lets them create new pools of resources they can spend.

The players shouldn't really have anything to do with setting clocks, especially during a score - that is entirely the purview of the GM. The kind of manipulation you're talking about requires nonstandard play. I don't disagree with you, but that's not really how it works, and personally I've never seen anyone play like that. To some extent I think that some folks in this thread are spinning white roomed scenarios with only a limited grasp of how some games actually play, rather than how they read. That's not exactly a criticism, but I find it odd when people posit these extreme examples like they are somehow an obvious outgrowth of the rules set.

This is putatively undesirable behavior, and out of the bounds of how a player should approach the game. Similarly, a player should seemingly propose actions without regard for how they might be categorized into one skill or another; or at the very least, in situations where more than one skill may apply, players should not seek to manipulate their action declarations to use their higher ranked skill if possible.

Well, yes and no. Speaking for myself, I almost always propose actions with a specific skill in mind, but I don't mention the skill in the declaration, and I don't argue (much) if the GM doesn't agree with what I thought might be the case. I leave it to the GM and see what happens. In the sad event that there are serious and regular disconnects between my declarations and the GMs interpretation I might be in the wrong game.

Both of those cases that were discussed earlier don't make sense, if the player's goal is to succeed in their action declarations and/or in whatever goal their pushing in the game state. Either the player is laboring under a different set of incentives with a different actual goal (the thing I think is the case), or those situations are some kind of design weakness, or there are other rules in play (my proposal players should be making decisions as if in ignorance of their mechanical consequences).

Hmm. No one should be suggesting that the mechanical consideration be completely ignored (it's probably impossible to ignore them at some level). What should be up front though is the situation at hand and what will solve/overcome/avoid/etc the obstacle in question. Canny actions naturally suggest moves forward on longer term goals, but that's not always appropriate.

Given how much the design is lauded as achieving the goals, and indeed, these are not held up as weaknesses to be shored up because they produce undesirable player incentives, it seems clear to me that players should be using a completely different criteria to make decisions.

Honestly, I think part of the problem is trust. Do I trust the GM to interpret my action declaration in the way I intended, do I trust them to see how it might affect long term goals, or mitigate current blowback. What this misses, and what rather too many actual FitD GMs miss, is that the game is purpose designed to navigate this interpretive moment in the conversational back and forth of the declaration itself. The game mitigates for a lot more back and forth in that regard (to avoid misinterpretation) than a game like D&D even hints at. It's a very different at-table experience too.

 

[TwoSix]

This is the "no goal" option, or perhaps "the goal is not a product of gameplay." I'm still not totally clear on how to make decisions, or why those decisions are interesting. "Create compelling fiction" isn't parsable as a game; figuring out how you did isn't evaluated by result or mechanism but by a different kind of critique. If making decisions is not a question of gameplay, it's motivated by other concerns, and I can't help but feel those are not products of systems and mechanisms in the game, but from some outside force, perhaps the attitude the players are expected to adopt.

I mean, we have plenty of highly competitive events where the end-state isn't determined by a particular metric, but by an evaluated critique. There's a big one happening right now in the Winter Olympics; figure skating.

But even in trad-style games, it's not like a determinable metric of success (other than possibly survival) has ever really been the focus; D&D has been described for decades as "a game you don't play just to win". It would be odd to hold BitD or the various PbtA games to that standard, when they don't claim that as a goal of play to being with.

I guess I just don't see the issue with TTRPGs not being a "game" in the sense of having win/loss conditions, but rather a structured canvas to allow for expression of narrative.

 

[zakael19]

It seems to me that you are more focused than that.



With respect, I'd say you've lost the forest for the one mechanical tree.

What I'm talking about is the overall process, and how hard it is for the player to reach the goal they've chosen. If you lessen effect, that makes it harder to reach the goal - they will need to take more chances of failure/setback, take on greater risks, or spend more resources, to succeed in the way that actually means something for the player.

In the overall process of achieving a goal, probability, risk, and reward are all part of "how hard is it?" Sure, the rules may say, "A 4 is a basic success" (or whatever), but if the GM is setting effect, they set what "a basic success" means in the context, and therefore how many basic successes will be needed, or whether a critical success will be needed, or what have you - the point is actually pretty system-agnostic.

I guess I’m lost here. When I was responding to somebody else’s comments way back i was understanding the discussion as about the success or failure of an Action Roll (which has a goal and risk), not of the whole score Conflict.

So uh, yeah? The GM has pretty big say on the frame of the score writ large (although what the players establish via Gather Info / Flashbacks / etc plays in quite a bit). We’ve talked in this belabored subject before about how you can use clocks to make that sort of thing super open and objective if the table wants.

 

[FrogReaver]

I mean, we have plenty of highly competitive events where the end-state isn't determined by a particular metric, but by an evaluated critique. There's a big one happening right now in the Winter Olympics; figure skating.

But even in trad-style games, it's not like a determinable metric of success (other than possibly survival) has ever really been the focus; D&D has been described for decades as "a game you don't play just to win". It would be odd to hold BitD or the various PbtA games to that standard, when they don't claim that as a goal of play to being with.

I guess I just don't see the issue with TTRPGs not being a "game" in the sense of having win/loss conditions, but rather a structured canvas to allow for expression of narrative.

I kind of agree about traditional style RPGs. But they don’t pretend they are not doing that do they?

 

[zakael19]

This is both dependant upon the game and who you ask. I disagree with a lot of the other narrativist inclined types here because I do think they’re making stuff a bit mushy.

So assuming you want narrativist stuff (and that’s not an automatic assumption with blades), you’re making two types of decisions.


One: manipulating the game state and mechanics to get to your desired fictional state.

Two: making expressive choices bound by your character and the situation. You can put this in many other ways but an easy one might be ‘making moral choices on behalf of your character.’

What you’ll probably find is that most narrativists exist on a spectrum of how much they want type one decisions in their game. Any game that’s heavy on meta-currency is going to have loads of type one decisions, maybe even predominately type one decisions.

There’s also crossover, the decisions aren’t pure and discrete because one influences the other.

I definitely don’t consider myself a “narrativist” (whatever that means to whoever you ask), I just play and run games in the way I understand the text to want; and that brings joy to my table.

 

[TwoSix]

I kind of agree about traditional style RPGs. But they don’t pretend they are not doing that do they?

I mean, if I think about illusionism I tend to associate that pretty strongly with trad play.

I'm not sure what other kind of pretending might be going on; you'll have to spell it out for me.

 

[Fenris-77]

I mean, if I think about illusionism I tend to associate that pretty strongly with trad play.

I'm not sure what other kind of pretending might be going on; you'll have to spell it out for me.

F-A-T-E

 

[Umbran]

I'm not interested in the "characters'" goals here, they're fictional constructs without agency. I'm interested in what the players' goals are and how those are supposed to be pursued.

Well, in the bog standard approach to play, the character goals are not cleanly separable from the character goals - the game, character, and character goals should be chosen in alignment, so that the gameplay action of driving the character to attempt to reach their goals produces what the player wants, whatever that is.

I note this is not narrative-play dependent. It is a broad thing about playing games.