Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Lanefan]

Ok, so now everyone knows and accepts that :
"lots of other games have negative consequences"

So back to the thread. To re re state:

Yes, I think far too many players watch all the fiction (TV and movies) and then set that fictional reality in thier head as the only way. Then when they want to play an RPG, they want to play out that fiction.

And this is the typical "geek/nerd" fiction seen in most movies, like Disney or Marvel ones. The main characters have Plot Armor and there is No Random Character Death. Even more often No Character Death at all. Nearly all foes will be mindless mooks that will be very easy to defeat. The Main Characters will Automatically Succeed whatever the story plot is of the fiction.

Side note: it'll be interesting to see what the upcoming D&D movie does with this - whether or not the main characters have an infinite Plot-AC value. I'm not holding my breath, but I've been surprised before.

So many players, and more then a few DMs come to an RPG with this above mindset. They sit down and want Plot Armor, No Character Death, Mook Foes, and Auto Succeeding, just like a movie.

In fairness, I've yet to encounter any who specifically want Mook Foes, which I take to mean foes that put up little or no real opposition. IME even those (fortunately few!) players I've seen who more or less want Auto-Success still want worthy opponents who need some in-character effort to take down.

I say RPGs are special, different : you can have a much more exciting and more dramatic story...simply by not doing ANY of those above things.

Mook Foes and Auto-Succeeding can be interesting beats to throw in now and then as a change of pace; but can also very easily be overdone.

 

[Lanefan]

One more thing, and I have done.

I spent countless hours playing B/X, AD&D, and similar games in the 80's and 90's. I've played your way A LOT. I had fun doing it, too.

I've seen the question from both sides. You haven't. And I'm telling you right now that the story games I've played are FAR more dramatic than anything I played from 1981-2000.

If I may ask, are you still playing with some or all of the same people you played with in that 1981-2000 run?

I ask because if you're not, then could some of the increase in drama be due to the differences in players between then and now, as well as the different system(s)?

One thing I've seen, playing much the same system for 40-odd years with a few consistent players plus many more who came and went, is that the relative level of various aspects of play - drama, infighting, goal orientation, humour, anything else you can think of - tends to rise and fall in trend-like waves over time; and though there's certainly other influences, perhaps the biggest observable driver of these rises and falls has been what those players who came and went brought to the game while they were involved.

 

[AnotherGuy]

If I may ask, are you still playing with some or all of the same people you played with in that 1981-2000 run?

I ask because if you're not, then could some of the increase in drama be due to the differences in players between then and now, as well as the different system(s)?

One thing I've seen, playing much the same system for 40-odd years with a few consistent players plus many more who came and went, is that the relative level of various aspects of play - drama, infighting, goal orientation, humour, anything else you can think of - tends to rise and fall in trend-like waves over time; and though there's certainly other influences, perhaps the biggest observable driver of these rises and falls has been what those players who came and went brought to the game while they were involved.

Agree.
But, from my perspective, it is also fair to say that games that prioritise the narrative (through the mechanics) over the G and S are likely to have an edge up in that regard.

EDIT: A gamist player in a narrative-based game is forced to change their approach in game whose mechanics encourage/reward a narrative style of play. D&D does very little in terms of encouraging. Traditionally, in the older editions, it is the DM that plays that role of checking that players are consistent when roleplaying their character, that they don't stray from their alignment...etc

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, like I say, I certainly would never deny that people have the idea of emulating reality, but IMHO it is so utterly far from possible that it kind of isn't a real agenda. I mean, lets imagine we could actually do it, what would be the point of RPing that? What sort of 'game' would it be? We'd just be pretend living in the real world? And OK, we extend it a bit and we can all sort of 'get' the idea that its "reality but a lot more fantastic", but we can't even begin to simulate. You can say "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" but we're not even close to good! We're at 'meaninglessly bad'. So bad that we can predict nothing, extrapolate nothing, gain no insight into anything, etc. We, in effect, have a game world and, what 5 Wikipedia articles worth of text about it? OK, 50 Wikipedia articles worth. Wikipedia itself has millions of articles and we can learn very close to nothing about the world even by reading them all, not at the level of telling us details of anyone's life.

This is why I say, there is not, cannot be, any process sim agenda.

While I agree that simulation can never be perfect, I'm a whole lot more optimistic than the quoted post that it can be done well enough for rock'n'roll.

The goal isn't necessarily to simulate the fantastic reailty to a T, it's instead to simulate it to the point where the GM and players are all on the same page in feeling like the characters are inhabitants of an actual world or setting that exists beyond them and could in theory exist without them e.g. if their characters all got plane-shifted to a different world or setting.

Put another way: if as either player or GM I feel the game world is real enough that I could go outside, look at a star, and picture that game world orbiting around that star (perhaps incorporating "magical" physics we've yet to discover here on Earth) then we're good to go.

 

[Lanefan]

So, in general when there is a formal agreement that death isn't in play, I don't see a lot of fudging to avoid it. I see a house rule or set of house rules to treat 0 hp as a defeated status that doesn't necessarily mean death. It might mean you need to seek medical attention/healing. It might mean you get captured. It might mean some sort of concession must be given. This sort of thing is common in games like Dune 2d20, Seventh Sea Second Edition, et al. where the stakes for being defeated are determined by the play group or the GM.

I misread the bolded as "It might mean some sort of concussion must be given", which also kinda fits.

 

[Manbearcat]

I guess this is the "factory default" question? I can say a car is "factory default" only if you never ever change anything on the car. But I'm not sure where your examples is going?

I feel like your out on some way far out tangent. I don't care at all about what other people think of anything.

But I guess your doing a version of my Bicycle Example, that I use when people tell me "D&D is broken" or "monks are weak" or "whatever is whatever because of the game rules". My response is my Bicycle Example. That is how you choose to use the rules effects the game. You get a Bicycle, carry it over to a trail full of deep thick mud. You set the bike down, get on it and sink and get stuck in the mud: then say "the Bicycle is Broken". It's not the bike, it's how you are using it.

But what are you getting at?

Alright, quick lookback at what I was responding to (I'll go ahead and tag @Lanefan here because he responded as well):

You kind of lost me with "system say". Would that not be Player and DM say? If all the players and the DM all read the rule that says "no player character can ever die in this game", and everyone agrees to play that game with that rule....then it's both players and DMs agreeing....

This was your response to me when I made a post that broke out the three essential parts (in one of multiple ways to look at games):

* GM's say

* Player's say

* System's say

So the first two are participants at the table that are executing the game. The analog to this is the owner/driver of the Porsche GT3.

The third one is the designers/engineers/artists executing their design process into a realized product. That then is onboarded by the above participants in order to experience the realized product. That is the Porsche GT3.

From what I can tell by the statement I've quoted directly above, you're attempting to carve out a position of "there is no system's say (there are only participants opting in or out of whatever the system - eg designers - has to say)", which is not a terribly uncommon refrain among a subset of gamers.

So, in my Porsche 911 GT3 question (which is a paragon example of extremely tightly integrated, holistic design where every constituent part is meticulously married to the others...where the experience is very sensitive to fundamental changes), I'm attempting to figure out the limits of your position here. Surely it can't be that all designs are opt-in, opt-out. Scale it down to something like a painting you put on your wall at home. Even if you're an extremely capable artist, you're likely to be disinclined toward "oh, I'll just add a tree...riiiiiiiiight...there (!)" Right? Or do the paintings on the walls of your home contain various personal contributions or amendments to them (like the tree)? Same goes for your music; have you dubbed in a line that you thought up or re-recorded something with another layer of percussion or strings or something, changing the composition? Or do you change all your hand-me-down recipes from grandma or whomever? If you only change some, what is the litmus test for the change?

So that is what I'm asking. When something it a tightly integrated, holistic design with meticulous marriage of each constituent part...and the experience of the thing is sensitive to fundamental changes...what is your litmus test for the change? And related, do the engineers of the Porsche 911 GT3 have no say (no "system's say")? What about the artist and the painting? What about the band and its song? What about grandma and her recipe? When does grandma and her recipe have its "say?" Does it (the Porsche, the painting, the song, the recipe) never have a "say" in the matter and so you deem its always just the owner/driver/replicator's decision to opt-in or opt-out of her design/system? Or is that "say" only proportional to expertise in the discipline (you're going to make changes to the song if you're an expert musician, changes to the painting if you're an expert painter, changes to grandma's recipe if you're a capable cook, etc)? What are the boundaries of this? Does this litmus test hold for all holistic, meticulously balanced, sensitive to fundamental changes, ecosystems (complex network of interconnected systems)?

What are the limits to these things (the decision to make changes vs deference to the design platform and its results)?

 

[Cadence]

In fairness, I've yet to encounter any who specifically want Mook Foes, which I take to mean foes that put up little or no real opposition. IME even those (fortunately few!) players I've seen who more or less want Auto-Success still want worthy opponents who need some in-character effort to take down.

Mook Foes and Auto-Succeeding can be interesting beats to throw in now and then as a change of pace; but can also very easily be overdone.

IIRC, 13th Age mooks have ok-ish damage and to hit, but much less hit points for their level. And extra damage from killing one carries over to the next one. Was there a 1e rule about the less than 1hd monsters and high level characters where you could take out a bunch of them? The ones in 13th Age don't all have to be low level though.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Ok, I get Railroad is a super loaded term....I just did not feel like typing out linear directed set story etc.

It's not that railroad is a loaded term. It's that it's the wrong term. So is linear directed set story. None of those are true.

You're arguing against your own error.

I don't know the game, so can't really talk about it.

That's why I explained the relevant bit, which you snipped out of your reply. Here it is again.

That game has potentially severe consequences, including character death and similar consequences that effectively end the character’s story. One of these, interestingly, gives the player the choice: the character will die, but they get to take one last action with a bonus because it is the last thing they’ll ever do OR they can deny death and come back to the world of the living, but changed, always changed.

One PC in my game got that and decided to come back changed, and the impact that decision had on the campaign was drastic. Far more severe than any PC death I’ve ever seen.

What do you think about this kind of element in a game? When a serious consequence is going to be applied to a character, the player is given an option: character death, or significant change. Would you say this leads to less consequence or more? Why?

Ok?

Well now you can proceed with the knowledge of what people mean when they say "system says". There are many games and gamers who don't consider the GM to be the final say about the game in all ways. There are those of us who view the rules as not optional, but rather something to be followed as much as possible.

Ok?

Considering your past comments about how you railroad your players all the time to get the plot you want, because your players are not interested enough in anything other than their PC living and so they just want to get to the next fight... in other words the lack of any consequence other than PC death means that anything else is pointless to their interest... I thought you'd benefit from an explanation of how that stuff actually can matter to others.

Perhaps there's a reason your players are disinterested in anything other than fighting and so you have to railroad them from one encounter to the next. Perhaps that reason is the way you run the game.

Perhaps not. Maybe you have nothing to gain from this discussion at all. That's fine. But at the very least, you should at least realize that not everyone runs a game the same way you do. Stop assuming we all are doing what you are doing.

 

[The Shadow]

If I may ask, are you still playing with some or all of the same people you played with in that 1981-2000 run?

It wasn't a single set of people during that whole time, but it's a fair question. One person is still around from that era, who was usually the GM. I met him in 1988.

I ask because if you're not, then could some of the increase in drama be due to the differences in players between then and now, as well as the different system(s)?

One thing I've seen, playing much the same system for 40-odd years with a few consistent players plus many more who came and went, is that the relative level of various aspects of play - drama, infighting, goal orientation, humour, anything else you can think of - tends to rise and fall in trend-like waves over time; and though there's certainly other influences, perhaps the biggest observable driver of these rises and falls has been what those players who came and went brought to the game while they were involved.

Fair. When people game together a long time, these trends do happen. However, both of us had the overwhelming impression upon trying narrative-style games that those games facilitated drama directly in a way no game we'd experienced previously managed to do. To the extent there was a trend, it certainly skyrocketed at that point!

We both now love this style of game and have no particular desire to go back on a regular basis. I've recently tried some OSR gaming online with a different group, and while I did enjoy myself sporadically, it definitely wasn't the same experience.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You don't get to tell the people you're insulting not to feel insulted, and it's really not improving your argument that your fallback position is patronizing your audience for their lack of intellectual curiosity. Find a better way to make your point, or preferable, a better point to make. We're not delusional, we know what abstractions are, and we know what we're doing with them.

Oh, come off it.

Unless you've got a better tool for achieving the stated goal, "simulate a fictional world players can run around in," than "stop trying to do it, it's impossible," you have nothing to add to that particular conversation, and you're just staking out the inverse polarity version of whatever nonsense @bloodtide is doing.

Listen, I didn't AT ALL say that people should 'stop doing' anything. Find where I said, suggested, or hinted at any such thing. You're reading into what I said what you want to hear. I'm not going further down this rabbit hole with any of you on that one. And who are you to tell me what I do and don't have to add? I think you would actually get some fun insight from discussing the nature of 'sim' and examining it further! We don't need to do that here in this thread though, it seems a bit like a different topic.