On completely artificial restrictions

[loverdrive]

You seem to be arguing that we can play a system that produces a transcript of play through process of play and then afterwards ignore the transcript of play and narrate it how we wish

No.

A "transcript of play" is produced through narration. A combat minigame produces exactly zero fiction, only boundaries in which the new fiction must be constructed.

Ok, simpler example. Here's my new one-page RPG:
When you do something risky, play a Quake 3 duel with the GM. If you win, your character succeeds. If you lose, prepare for the worst.

Yes, there will be a "transcript of play" produced by the Quake duel. You can, if you want, novelize how Doomgirl ducked behind a pillar and jumped from the other side to railgun Doomguy. Why would you? Nobody cares. That frag represents absolutely nothing about what the character is doing (as your character isn't Doomgirl, she is a knight in shining armour and never even heard of any railgun) — it's just means that your character succeeded at whatever she was doing. Fragging the GM serves the exact same purpose as rolling high on a D20.

 

[pemerton]

I played Burning Wheel yesterday. My last few sessions before that have been Torchbearer. There are resolution systems in these games that are a bit less "quirky" than resolving a versus test by playing out a video game duel - but still, no one thinks that rolling for the body of argument in a Duel of Wits, and then scripting out one's actions, literally corresponds to something happening during an attempt by a Dark Elf to persuade a Half Orc to help with a break in on the docks. In the language of @loverdrive's OP, the scripting procedure is an "arbitrary restriction" intended to drive game play.

The rules for Duel of Wits do require us to inject fiction at various points, as we have to speak our parts. This is a bit like @AbdulAlhazred's comment about PbtA generally "closing the loop" in short(ish) time intervals. So it's not quite the same as playing a whole game of chess to resolve an action declaration!

Two effect(s) of the "arbitrary restrictions" whereby one commits in advance to saying certain things are that (i) more, and more unexpected, words get said than might tend to be the case without the resolution infrastructure, and (ii) things can turn out differently from how anyone might have expected or scripted them left to their own unrestricted devices. I take this to be consistent with the OP.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a big difference between a system using fortune in the beginning and producing a transcript of play by pure narration, and a system using fortune in the middle and producing a transcript of play through process of play.

In one situation we know that a character hid behind a pillar to get cover because we know a priori that they must have done something to succeed and we chose "hid behind a pillar" from free narration because we had authorial permission at that moment. In the other system we know that a character hid behind a pillar because they choose that as a literal move within the fiction as it was being constructed, and we won't know until after the move how it impacted the chances of success.

You seem to be arguing that we can play a system that produces a transcript of play through process of play and then afterwards ignore the transcript of play and narrate it how we wish. And I suppose you could do that. No one is going to stop you. But you'll end up with two whole transcripts of play, which won't agree with each other. And only one of those transcripts will be produced by the game. The other is optional and occurs wholly outside of the game. This from my experience means that the latter is highly unlikely to occur, and that in fact the transcript produced by the process of play will dominate because the other transcript is useless unless you are really attempting to novelize your game into a piece of literature - which is a wholly different process than the game.

This thread arose, presumably, out of another thread in which @loverdrive touched on the idea of having 2 completely disconnected processes, yes. One in which a game, as pure game, would be played, and another in which the outcomes of that game would be mapped onto the fiction post hoc. There's no reason the two would 'not agree with each other' that I can see, and plainly one would presumably MAKE them agree. However I think the goal was to break away from the idea where the character's fictional actions are dictated by what is expedient in a game sense (IE that a character with 'high strength' will naturally always leverage that) or maybe more accurately that RP could be more free from gamist considerations if the two are largely independent.

But yes, I think there's a set of questions about exactly how one can go about this in such a way that one or the other of game or narrative doesn't become largely perfunctory. Certainly if there is a game at all, and the two are connected in any way at any point (which I assume they must be to form an RPG) its difficult to see how RP (the fiction) will entirely escape from gamist constraints.

However, I think this thread is also kind of going in its own direction which maybe doesn't espouse such a deep disconnect between the two in the first place. I personally favor closing the loop fairly quickly so that the two things are highly connected. Frankly I think 4e D&D, played in the way @pemerton and @Manbearcat seem to be running it, really hits the mark pretty well. You can play a combat, and 4e will pretty well support keeping narrative in the background for that if you want, but its also endowed with a rich set of ways to link the two in a fashion that will make sense to all the participants.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I've never seen an RPG that restricted direction of movement. Distance, yes, that is an essential definition, and with VTTs, which I have used for half my hobby 'career', very easy to apply.

 

[Celebrim]

A "transcript of play" is produced through narration. A combat minigame produces exactly zero fiction, only boundaries in which the new fiction must be constructed.

I get that that is your intention, but that's very much a choice. For most RPGs in most of the history of RPGs, that idea that the combat minigame produces exactly zero fiction simply isn't true. For most RPGs in most of the history of RPGs, the combat minigame is producing fiction and is intended to both represent the fictional state and to produce fiction.

Indeed, much of the evolution of RPGs in the first 15 years or so of their existence was to tighten the connection between the game mechanics and the fictional state so that combat minigame (or anything else) more closely produced the transcript of play and further produced a more cinematic transcript of play. (I use the term "cinematic" here to refer to the idea that everyone at the table is likely to closely imagine the same events from the transcript of play, that is, the process of play is producing a less abstract and more easily visualized result.) While there are limits to that and designers eventually realized that there were tradeoffs involved to that, the ideas involved in that period were never wholly relinquished in most game systems.

Can you do something different? Sure. Is it going to be satisfying to everyone that the combat minigame is not recording the state of the fiction? Probably not.

Aside from that, the sort of combat minigames you are talking about in the original post with moves constrained to chess like moves for the purpose of increasing the need to plan ahead or with moves limited to a random selection of cards aren't in fact the sort of pure minigames as fortune resolution mechanic akin to your "Quake 3 duel" whenever you roll the dice. That is to say, they are probably going to at least be recording, "You are fighting six goblins in an abandoned temple with a roughly cross-shaped floor plan and an altar in the western section" or "You are fighting a blue dragon on a boulder field of broken scree during a thunderstorm". They aren't as abstracted from the fiction as you seem to claim.

And aside from that, it ought to be obvious the utility of "Quake 3 duel" whenever you would need to test a fortune is probably lower than just rolling the dice if in fact "Quake 3 duel" isn't producing any transcript and is just a fortune mechanism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I get that that is your intention, but that's very much a choice. For most RPGs in most of the history of RPGs, that idea that the combat minigame produces exactly zero fiction simply isn't true. For most RPGs in most of the history of RPGs, the combat minigame is producing fiction and is intended to both represent the fictional state and to produce fiction.

First hand reports of yours truly from early D&D, Traveler, Boot Hill, Metamorphosis Alpha, and other '1st gen' RPGs is that their combat mechanics were mostly FAIRLY abstract. Yes, in some games less so than others. D&D was pretty abstract, as was MA (and GW) since they all use the same basic rules, give or take. TSR D&D never did really evolve from that. You could narrate things to a degree, but you had to make up a lot of it from whole cloth. Boot Hill is a real exception, its combat is detailed, tactical, takes place on a grid (the town map) 99% of the time, etc. However it also generally consists of "I roll a 50, I fire first, bang bang bang you're dead!" Traveler has range bands and I'd say its combat rules get a bit more detailed than D&D, as PCs can attack, dodge, parry, etc. and there are 3 types of damage, sort of.

Other later games are a very mixed bag, though few of them get more detailed than Traveler. (RQ and RM spring to mind), though RQ is not a LOT more detailed than Traveler. In fact the main problem when people attempted to do this is, the mechanics were too unrealistic to support such a use case! I remember that RQ had the problem that melee-focused characters frequently were killed by their own fumbles, as statistically this would happen sooner-or-later. Claw Law/Arms Law kind of avoided those simple foibles, but it, and a couple other systems like Aftermath, were just too cumbersome for most people.

Honestly, WotC D&D barely improved on this situation. I'd be hard pressed to name a system that has really measurably done so. AD&D 1e combat is still (aside from its horribly unclear/obtuse rules) fairly state-of-the-art, actually.

Indeed, much of the evolution of RPGs in the first 15 years or so of their existence was to tighten the connection between the game mechanics and the fictional state so that combat minigame (or anything else) more closely produced the transcript of play and further produced a more cinematic transcript of play. (I use the term "cinematic" here to refer to the idea that everyone at the table is likely to closely imagine the same events from the transcript of play, that is, the process of play is producing a less abstract and more easily visualized result.) While there are limits to that and designers eventually realized that there were tradeoffs involved to that, the ideas involved in that period were never wholly relinquished in most game systems.

Well, games like TSR's FASERIP Marvel Super Heroes game simply made the linkage less explicit. The same could be said for Top Secret. One very early example is Tunnels & Trolls, who's combat system is ENTIRELY abstract. These are not LESS abstract, in my opinion! Quite the opposite.

 

[loverdrive]

However, I think this thread is also kind of going in its own direction which maybe doesn't espouse such a deep disconnect between the two in the first place. I personally favor closing the loop fairly quickly so that the two things are highly connected. Frankly I think 4e D&D, played in the way @pemerton and @Manbearcat seem to be running it, really hits the mark pretty well. You can play a combat, and 4e will pretty well support keeping narrative in the background for that if you want, but its also endowed with a rich set of ways to link the two in a fashion that will make sense to all the participants.

More or less, yes. Here, the crux of the point is that restricting the available options can emphasize, for the lack of a better term, system mastery. Whether it's "connected" to fiction or not, the way I see it, is secondary here.

The larger theoretical framework is still very much in development, I'm in the process of honing my understanding of my preferences myself, and trying to explain them to other people is a part of that.

As it stands, today, 20.03.2023, there're two largest pieces of the puzzle:

• A) Disconnecting resolution from fiction (as in, it doesn't matter what the character is actually doing as their situation, abilities and whatnot bear no influence on the outcome, and the rules don't try to model the game world in any sense, only being concerned with distributing narrative authority) emphasizes authorial intent of the players, allowing to concentrate on what is "cool" rather than on what is effective
• B) Making the game fun makes the game more fun (duh), and creating completely arbitrary (from the perspective of fiction) rules is an easy way to create an engaging game without making it ludicrously complex

The two are possibly related, but it's still unclear to me how, and in this threat, I'm more concerned with the latter than the former.

Maybe A) isn't actually desirable, and making the resolution mini-game harder or easier depending on fictional circumstances, but still allowing the player to compensate for it by system mastery would lead to the same general outcome, and it's just my frustration with randomness is speaking.

Aside: most games focused on storytelling are rules-light and most rules-light games basically boil everything down to a roll of the dice, so maybe that's why I'm not fully satisfied with them. It needs more pondering.

Emphasizing player skill in the resolution mini-game would allow the player to do hard things as a flex (?), giving suboptimal options more weight than mere chance.

As an example, let's say I've created a cocky wizard Laura, and her character sheet says "Flaw: I can't back down from a challenge". A hostile NPC taunts her, like "You are nothing without your magic tricks, you witch!", and I, as a player who wants to see her cocky wizard being cocky on-screen, am tempted to respond with "Fine, I'm gonna beat you into a bloody pulp with nothing but my bare hands!".

But, as a player playing the damn game, I know that this will just handicap me for no real change in the gameplay. I'll just roll dice with less chance of success, and this scene will also probably drag out longer than it needs to. It's a no-win situation, both bad for my character, and, more importantly, ####ing boring.

If the resolution mini-game instead was, say, a fighting game in the vein of Tekken or Street Fighter, I could flex my skill and win without using the strongest combos, purely relying on my reaction, prediction and knowledge of the game mechanics, earning my right to portray my character the way I see fit and both creating a neat parallel between what the character is doing and what I'm doing and making the NPC's humiliation more "real" in the process.

---

The biggest problem with me trying to piece all this together is that... I don't really play tabletop games other than RPGs. When I try to imagine mechanics that would work for my purposes (be short and demand skill), I imagine videogames (and mostly action games, as I don't really play strategy/tactics games either).

I don't really have any other frame of reference. I'll need to expand my knowledge on smaller, faster boardgames that don't take hours, like Twilight Imperium and GoT, which make up the majority of my experience with boardgaming.

 

[pemerton]

As an example, let's say I've created a cocky wizard Laura, and her character sheet says "Flaw: I can't back down from a challenge". A hostile NPC taunts her, like "You are nothing without your magic tricks, you witch!", and I, as a player who wants to see her cocky wizard being cocky on-screen, am tempted to respond with "Fine, I'm gonna beat you into a bloody pulp with nothing but my bare hands!".

But, as a player playing the damn game, I know that this will just handicap me for no real change in the gameplay. I'll just roll dice with less chance of success, and this scene will also probably drag out longer than it needs to. It's a no-win situation, both bad for my character, and, more importantly, ####ing boring.

This post is a response to what I've quoted. I don't think it develops @loverdrive's A+B agenda very much, but reflects my own thoughts about this interesting case.

I think I have two of them.

(1) I would like there to be a bit of a change in gameplay. One way is to "zoom in", like Fight! (as opposed to Bloody Versus) in BW, or an extended as opposed to simple contest in HeroWars/Quest.

(2) I like the system to respond to the fact that you're pursuing your flaw. In BW, for instance, this earns artha. In TRoS it opens up Spiritual Attributes. Etc. I don't think the system response necessarily has to make the odds of success equivalent to the "optimal" approach - but they can also help open up new avenues of gameplay (eg choosing how to use a limited resource).

 

[Li Shenron]

I think there's a lot of value to be derived from embracing the gaminess of games, especially in TTRPGs. I've had much, much more fun with 5E combat when I've ran a bunch of silly experiments with restricting movement and actions, that I've ever had with it on the either side of the screen -- and that enjoyment translated into other aspects of the process (like, y'know, characters, story, all that) that weren't even in the focus.

Nothing wrong with having fun, as long as you understand that adding this sort of "completely artificial restrictions" basically changes the game from an RPG to a tabletop game.

Tabletop games are awesome and draw their strengths pretty much from the fact they have a limited set of (indeed) completely artificial rules. which the players can learn to control and master. RPGs in general draw their strengths instead from their sheer freedom and versatility. It's of course ok to play a hybrid of the two.

 

[pemerton]

Nothing wrong with having fun, as long as you understand that adding this sort of "completely artificial restrictions" basically changes the game from an RPG to a tabletop game.

This claim seems false.

Turn-by-turn resolution of combat is a "completely artificial restriction" but is found in many games that most people classify as RPGs, including D&D 5e.