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Mechanics that support what you want as a Player to feel like you matter
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9216431" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>I worry that this is conflating multiple things. For example, you brought up FATE points as a resolution model, and I find that system's take on creating advantages uniquely disempowering. You essentially describe any kind of plan, and the result is a +2 bonus to the next relevant roll/attack. +2 is a significant number in that game's math, making that reasonable course of action...but it just doesn't matter what you actually did. Instead, you're using your aspects, the scene's aspects, the enemy's aspects and so on to provide flavor to your chosen action.</p><p></p><p>My choices "mattering" as a player to me means that I must be able to make better or worse choices, and the resulting game state must be meaningfully different after I've committed to an action. I need to be able to put myself in a better position or mess up and put myself in a worse one, or I'm not really playing a game. And to be perfectly clear, "making a bad decision" can't be a function of "rolling poorly." Rolling dice to get a particular outcome is a risk that's calculated into the decision in the first place.</p><p></p><p>That whole discussion feels orthogonal to the questions of agency/impact you're raising, which instead seems to be focused on broad outcomes of player actions in aggregate. I have mixed feelings here; my instinct is to keep actions as atomic as possible, and then derive the rest of the board state from them, shuffling responsibility for the things that can't fall into such a framework to the GM (i.e. what do the NPC's want, and what actions do they take to achieve that?). The problems there are well documented as Hard Problems in RPGs, relationship systems, more involved social systems than "roll the change their mind check" and so on. I don't have a good answer for those, but frankly I'd prefer they remain a hard problem than imperil agency elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>Conflict resolution is fantastic at resolving those, but I find it pretty garbage for tactical gameplay; outcomes are singular and completely negotiated, which means you're immediately giving up any ability to modify the distance between any given action declaration and your goals, unless you're doing some subversive stuff where you try to hide your actual goal in several smaller action declarations that's clearly not in the spirit of declaring your intent.</p><p></p><p>The "gameplay" as I'd define the term is mostly in offering multiple proposals that will get you where you want to be in hopes of getting the least negative consequences...and the systems are so subjective about what consequences even mean that trying to optimize a given outcome is fraught. It's all good and well to decide I'd rather have "A Broken Arm" than "Haunted by Spirits" but that decision just doesn't ever resolve to a mechanical state I can make strategic choices about, it's just more narrative choices on top of narrative choices.</p><p></p><p>The tl;dr version comes down to this. I should be able to declare actions that will result in knowable outcomes that the GM has no control over, and I should be able to make choices that leave me in a better or worse position relative to my desired goal. I should be able to try and win, which necessitates that playing badly and losing be possibilities, and that whether or not I lose not be determined by the GM alone.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9216431, member: 6690965"] I worry that this is conflating multiple things. For example, you brought up FATE points as a resolution model, and I find that system's take on creating advantages uniquely disempowering. You essentially describe any kind of plan, and the result is a +2 bonus to the next relevant roll/attack. +2 is a significant number in that game's math, making that reasonable course of action...but it just doesn't matter what you actually did. Instead, you're using your aspects, the scene's aspects, the enemy's aspects and so on to provide flavor to your chosen action. My choices "mattering" as a player to me means that I must be able to make better or worse choices, and the resulting game state must be meaningfully different after I've committed to an action. I need to be able to put myself in a better position or mess up and put myself in a worse one, or I'm not really playing a game. And to be perfectly clear, "making a bad decision" can't be a function of "rolling poorly." Rolling dice to get a particular outcome is a risk that's calculated into the decision in the first place. That whole discussion feels orthogonal to the questions of agency/impact you're raising, which instead seems to be focused on broad outcomes of player actions in aggregate. I have mixed feelings here; my instinct is to keep actions as atomic as possible, and then derive the rest of the board state from them, shuffling responsibility for the things that can't fall into such a framework to the GM (i.e. what do the NPC's want, and what actions do they take to achieve that?). The problems there are well documented as Hard Problems in RPGs, relationship systems, more involved social systems than "roll the change their mind check" and so on. I don't have a good answer for those, but frankly I'd prefer they remain a hard problem than imperil agency elsewhere. Conflict resolution is fantastic at resolving those, but I find it pretty garbage for tactical gameplay; outcomes are singular and completely negotiated, which means you're immediately giving up any ability to modify the distance between any given action declaration and your goals, unless you're doing some subversive stuff where you try to hide your actual goal in several smaller action declarations that's clearly not in the spirit of declaring your intent. The "gameplay" as I'd define the term is mostly in offering multiple proposals that will get you where you want to be in hopes of getting the least negative consequences...and the systems are so subjective about what consequences even mean that trying to optimize a given outcome is fraught. It's all good and well to decide I'd rather have "A Broken Arm" than "Haunted by Spirits" but that decision just doesn't ever resolve to a mechanical state I can make strategic choices about, it's just more narrative choices on top of narrative choices. The tl;dr version comes down to this. I should be able to declare actions that will result in knowable outcomes that the GM has no control over, and I should be able to make choices that leave me in a better or worse position relative to my desired goal. I should be able to try and win, which necessitates that playing badly and losing be possibilities, and that whether or not I lose not be determined by the GM alone. [/QUOTE]
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