Players establishing facts about the world impromptu during play

[Manbearcat]

"Design by Committee" has some serious flaws, speaking as GM for whom world building is a primary strength-- while the ability to create something really cool is a skill, and therefore not a given, collaboratively fusing fiction is its own skillset in a way that solo worldbuilding isn't. You need to manage not just the validity of the fiction, but work out who can say no, why, and how others feel about it, and if no one can say no, its a dice roll at best as everyone pulls the story apart.

I'm going to dedicate some time either today or late this evening after I get home to get a post up. But I'd like to focus it and I'd like to do so via the vehicle of contrasting a few Story Now games. That feels like the best way to have functional conversation.

As I often lament in these conversations, it seems to me that there is a cluster of play priorities or positions that people hold (below), which invariably get smuggled into these conversations and entangled, making it very difficult to disentangle them and evaluate them discretely. These priorities/positions have historically persisted of:

1) No myth setting (setting overwhelmingly, but not always completely, emerges through play) leads to the play priority of explorative discovery being an impossibility. This was your original contention that drew me into the thread.

2) Players being able to stipulate things about setting/situation will often or invariably lead to "bad faith" play where Skilled Play breaks down (eg players will inevitably introduce "move-amplifying" fiction with insufficient constraint and relative impunity).

3) No myth setting where authority for content introduction is relatively (compared with Trad authority distribution) distributed often or invariably leads to incoherency of setting theme or setting continuity (spatial, temporal, or other).

4) "Ask questions and use the answers" as a GMing principle and conversation-governing energy, along with moves/action resolution that obliges a GM to create fiction that is attendant to player-request will often or invariably lead to a "conch-passing" storytelling play aesthetic.

---

#1 is what caught my eye and brought me into the conversation. However, sense then, so far as I can tell, you've expressed #2 - 4 in some iteration or to some degree at the same time. Like I mentioned above, this isn't particularly surprising to me, as these 4 positions overwhelmingly cluster together.

So, if you would guide my follow-up post, I would appreciate it.

* Which of those 4 would you like me to focus on?

* Would it be helpful to discuss it via (a) the juxtaposition of Dungeon World (PBtA like Masks and a hack of Baker's AW) and Dogs in the Vineyard (Baker's initial Story Now offering and, imo, the greatest Forge game and one of the best of all time) or (b) a compare/contrast of Torchbearer/Blades in the Dark (these two games share an enormous amount of overlap in structure, procedures, premise)?

So some configuration like 2a or 4b is really all I'm looking for (and if you want to provide a little context for that choice, that would be helpful!).

Thanks in advance.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm going to dedicate some time either today or late this evening after I get home to get a post up. But I'd like to focus it and I'd like to do so via the vehicle of contrasting a few Story Now games. That feels like the best way to have functional conversation.

As I often lament in these conversations, it seems to me that there is a cluster of play priorities or positions that people hold (below), which invariably get smuggled into these conversations and entangled, making it very difficult to disentangle them and evaluate them discretely. These priorities/positions have historically persisted of:

1) No myth setting (setting overwhelmingly, but not always completely, emerges through play) leads to the play priority of explorative discovery being an impossibility. This was your original contention that drew me into the thread.

2) Players being able to stipulate things about setting/situation will often or invariably lead to "bad faith" play where Skilled Play breaks down (eg players will inevitably introduce "move-amplifying" fiction with insufficient constraint and relative impunity).

3) No myth setting where authority for content introduction is relatively (compared with Trad authority distribution) distributed often or invariably leads to incoherency of setting theme or setting continuity (spatial, temporal, or other).

4) "Ask questions and use the answers" as a GMing principle and conversation-governing energy, along with moves/action resolution that obliges a GM to create fiction that is attendant to player-request will often or invariably lead to a "conch-passing" storytelling play aesthetic.

---

#1 is what caught my eye and brought me into the conversation. However, sense then, so far as I can tell, you've expressed #2 - 4 in some iteration or to some degree at the same time. Like I mentioned above, this isn't particularly surprising to me, as these 4 positions overwhelmingly cluster together.

So, if you would guide my follow-up post, I would appreciate it.

* Which of those 4 would you like me to focus on?

* Would it be helpful to discuss it via (a) the juxtaposition of Dungeon World (PBtA like Masks and a hack of Baker's AW) and Dogs in the Vineyard (Baker's initial Story Now offering and, imo, the greatest Forge game and one of the best of all time) or (b) a compare/contrast of Torchbearer/Blades in the Dark (these two games share an enormous amount of overlap in structure, procedures, premise)?

So some configuration like 2a or 4b is really all I'm looking for (and if you want to provide a little context for that choice, that would be helpful!).

Thanks in advance.

I think that one of the issues that you're getting stuck on is the idea that the play priorities are getting "smuggled in" and "entangled" they're entangled because they feed off each other in certain kinds of games, they aren't mutually inclusive, and they aren't per say 'smuggled in' either because while you can certainly hew away from them for a different kind of experience, they still represent a possibly damaging aspect to the experience based off what kind of game you're going for, they have a right to be in this particular conversation because this conversation isn't exclusively about one kind of play, we're discussing the practice of impromptu establishment outside of the strict context of Story Now games, which aren't always immune to these pratfalls, though I know taking for granted that people are 'just doing it wrong' if their experience differs is kind of a thing in the Story Now community.

For instance, if you break the play priorities down that way... I don't care about 2 when I play Masks because it doesn't really damage the core motivation to play that game, which is teen drama, the only thing I care about is making sure they can't completely avoid that drama. But when I play Pathfinder, I would care more about the constraints the players solve problems under. This is an intentional element of Story Now play too, the systems are focused on providing certain experiences-- they aren't kitchen sinks, they don't try to do everything, they're very focused games. As Masks itself discusses, its laser-focused on teenage super hero stories, and while other super hero stories are cool, it doesn't focus on them at all. The dungeon-crawls as archaeology 'agenda' I could be argued to run Pathfinder with would be (and thank you Campbell for the term) 'unhygenic' to Mask's intent, similarly Masks Agendas would probably be 'unhygenic' to Pathfinder.

1 is a misconception, I'm sure there is some variety of exploration that could be enjoyed in a game where players can establish facts of the fiction, and story before is discouraged, but it would be a different variety than I actually enjoy, because the myth referred to in 'no myth' is the driving dimension to what I mean, when I say "Exploration" my posts aren't arguments about Exploration having to be that, they're my way of clarifying what the word Exploration is being used to refer to. So it isn't that I think its impossible, its definitionally so, though I'd be interested to see Torchbearer's mechanics, because its obviously made to emulate some aspects of OSR play, though not necessarily this one.

3 is only really a problem with 1, if I don't care about the discovery of something coherent and rife with intent, I also don't care about the setting being 'coherent' in the same way, and I can enjoy the joys and sorrows of collaborative information establishment on its own terms (and the terms of the specific game I'm playing). Again this comes back to me enjoying different games for different reasons, I love my sweet sweet myth, but sometimes I'm down to ignore that for a different kind of fun.

4 is again, down to the experience I'm trying to have, sometimes the conch passing play aesthetic can be fun, sometimes a set of mechanics that govern who controls what the right way is also fun.
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So uh... the question must be 'unasked', its doesn't really reflect the arguments you're attempting to respond to.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think that one of the issues that you're getting stuck on is the idea that the play priorities are getting "smuggled in" and "entangled" they're entangled because they feed off each other in certain kinds of games, they aren't mutually inclusive, and they aren't per say 'smuggled in' either because while you can certainly hew away from them for a different kind of experience, they still represent a possibly damaging aspect to the experience based off what kind of game you're going for, they have a right to be in this particular conversation because this conversation isn't exclusively about one kind of play, we're discussing the practice of impromptu establishment outside of the strict context of Story Now games, which aren't always immune to these pratfalls, though I know taking for granted that people are 'just doing it wrong' if their experience differs is kind of a thing in the Story Now community.

For instance, if you break the play priorities down that way... I don't care about 2 when I play Masks because it doesn't really damage the core motivation to play that game, which is teen drama, the only thing I care about is making sure they can't completely avoid that drama. But when I play Pathfinder, I would care more about the constraints the players solve problems under. This is an intentional element of Story Now play too, the systems are focused on providing certain experiences-- they aren't kitchen sinks, they don't try to do everything, they're very focused games. As Masks itself discusses, its laser-focused on teenage super hero stories, and while other super hero stories are cool, it doesn't focus on them at all. The dungeon-crawls as archaeology 'agenda' I could be argued to run Pathfinder with would be (and thank you Campbell for the term) 'unhygenic' to Mask's intent, similarly Masks Agendas would probably be 'unhygenic' to Pathfinder.

1 is a misconception, I'm sure there is some variety of exploration that could be enjoyed in a game where players can establish facts of the fiction, and story before is discouraged, but it would be a different variety than I actually enjoy, because the myth referred to in 'no myth' is the driving dimension to what I mean, when I say "Exploration" my posts aren't arguments about Exploration having to be that, they're my way of clarifying what the word Exploration is being used to refer to. So it isn't that I think its impossible, its definitionally so, though I'd be interested to see Torchbearer's mechanics, because its obviously made to emulate some aspects of OSR play, though not necessarily this one.

3 is only really a problem with 1, if I don't care about the discovery of something coherent and rife with intent, I also don't care about the setting being 'coherent' in the same way, and I can enjoy the joys and sorrows of collaborative information establishment on its own terms (and the terms of the specific game I'm playing). Again this comes back to me enjoying different games for different reasons, I love my sweet sweet myth, but sometimes I'm down to ignore that for a different kind of fun.

4 is again, down to the experience I'm trying to have, sometimes the conch passing play aesthetic can be fun, sometimes a set of mechanics that govern who controls what the right way is also fun.
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So uh... the question must be 'unasked', its doesn't really reflect the arguments you're attempting to respond to.

Its very interesting. I’m certain you feel like you engaged with my post and helped to progress conversation, but I don’t even know where to begin because I feel like conversation has now been completely stalled out!

2 things to maybe help that progression:

1) The beginning part of what I was talking about actually agrees with what you’ve written. When I’m discussing “smuggling in” I specifically mean “smuggling in play priorities that are disagreeable with other priorities or games that aren’t intended to serve those priorities...or at least not clearly delineating the boundaries.”

2) On my (1) above and your response that it’s “definitionally impossible.”

Let us pretend it is a Turing Test.

I describe a setting and situation and ask you what do you do? Our conversation evolves to firm up all matters of situation and tighten up the resolution of the setting your character is interacting with.

How do you know whether you’re interacting with improvised material vs heavily prepped material?

The only answer I can consider is “I’ll know it because humans can’t fool me into not being able to tell the difference between the two...no matter how good they are at improvising.”

Is that basically your position? That no improv GM could ever reach the level of a prep-heavy GM when it comes to unstructured free form, environmental exploration?

And if that is true...how is it not just an artifact of your cognitive sensitivity/capability (it here being the perception of objectivity, of tangibleness, of persistence, of volition of the shared imagined space)?

 

[darkbard]

1 is a misconception, I'm sure there is some variety of exploration that could be enjoyed in a game where players can establish facts of the fiction, and story before is discouraged, but it would be a different variety than I actually enjoy, because the myth referred to in 'no myth' is the driving dimension to what I mean, when I say "Exploration" my posts aren't arguments about Exploration having to be that, they're my way of clarifying what the word Exploration is being used to refer to. So it isn't that I think its impossible, its definitionally so, though I'd be interested to see Torchbearer's mechanics, because its obviously made to emulate some aspects of OSR play, though not necessarily this one.

I'm a pretty good reader. In fact, it's a primary component of my profession. Some might even say the primary component. But I do not understand what you mean by exploration here. In relation to what you say about No Myth, what you write suggests to me that exploration only means to you discovering that which is already crafted. A preference for this seems very much at odds with No Myth Story Now gaming.

[...]

4 is again, down to the experience I'm trying to have, sometimes the conch passing play aesthetic can be fun, sometimes a set of mechanics that govern who controls what the right way is also fun.

But nobody here is talking about conch passing games! That's not what No Myth Story Now means.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well to begin with, I'm unclear on where you're trying to drive this conversation? It sounds like you have a bit of a mission and want me to smooth the way for you to feel as if you've accomplished it, your objective appears to be affecting some kind of change in me.

But putting that aside...

I'm not concerned with whether the material is improvised or heavily prepared, I'm concerned with the methodology of its design rather than its timing, as influenced by the role of the person creating it. When one person, improvising or not designs something, they develop a plan for the elements and how they fit together, the authorial intent of the piece as a whole. You may have heard the term 'Creative Vision' in the past, and heard the adage "Too many cooks spoil the stew." My experience of player establishment of fiction is that it lacks, or sharply reduces, the patterns that run through the text of the game world and deplete its meaning as a literary work in its own right. This is actually twofold though--

For a useful example of how intentionality, authorship, and collaboration collide consider SCP, where individuals draft stories and containment entries about a fictional facility dedicated to securing, containing, and protecting the supernatural to add to the wiki. One of the coolest things about the work, is that many of the articles take place in the same interconnected canon, mysterious elements of one story might be references to others, or speak to a metaplot hinted at through a variety of articles. As a reader it can be especially fun to sort through these interconnected canons. But for the most part, those interconnected articles are the work of single individuals or small groups, or planned collaborations-- when reading articles its important to keep in mind whose articles you're reading because it gives you a good idea of which patterns you're looking for, what is likely or unlikely to be a reference to some other work-- these become miniature canons of their own.

1. The first point relevant to what you're asking me is the presence of intentional, referential, and hidden interconnections in the text of the game world. Collaboration can still accomplish this, but it typically requires a 'writers room' where the overall pattern is actively discussed so everyone is on the same page about what is being hinted at, or at least that they're hinting at something unestablished. In the context of player establishment in a TRPG, establishment is usually public (especially, but not exclusively, in Story Now games where 'establish' is an active verb used to refer to information being said outloud, and accepted into everyone's picture of the situation) to the same audience who would have the opportunity to pick up the hints as part of their explorations of the game world, speculate on them, and potentially leverage that information as a reward for their observational skill (or have narrative questions answered for them, anyway). The useful element of traditional player boundaries, in this context, is not the timing of the content creation, or the singular mind, but the presence of the 'screen' between the person creating the content and the person 'reading' it-- the GM (or GMs!) can have information hidden from the players that is still canon to the game world itself, allowing the dissemination of that information to become an element of explorative play. Someone needs to be hiding somehing FROM ME for it to be a mystery to me, and that thing needs to exist before me finding out about it to be meaningfully hinted at. You can kind of reconstruct that process from the other end, as a GM without knowing the 'unestablished' information, (it'll be kind of hard, having done it myself) and it'll just be how well you can carry off the illusion and its eventual transition into something concrete, since it still relies on their conviction something specific is there. Exercises in building a mystery where no one knows the secret until its established logically from the clues are fun, but they play differently.

2. The second is the 'too many cooks' portion where not only is getting everyone on the same page about what you're trying to create hard. But the addition of fictional elements has the potential to overwrite, not the established fiction around the table, but the unestablished fiction some of those elements may have been building to. In other words John may start building an NPC off the premise that their dead wife in their backstory was killed by them (but that hasn't been established in the fiction) but Susan might introduce to the fiction that there were actually killed in this other circumstance. Any 'hints' in the NPCs behavior up to Susan's establishment of that fiction are now 'unmoored' from the piece of fiction intended to have caused them, which can be frustrating if you can feel the undercurrent of hints and other people can't. Now, the systems we're discussing do allow the GM to have a final say about what elements make it into the fiction, which helps, but then the player attempting to unravel these hints probably needs to mentally parse who added what to the fiction to figure out what 'hints' came from someone who could posses hidden information. Alternatively, the need to keep the unestablished information fluid can make it far more difficult to engage in this kind of game play at all, I actually had an experience with this for a piece of major hidden lore recently where I had an idea I intentionally reminded myself wasn't canon unless it worked out, then that piece of information ended up in a chain of cause and effect and I 'established' it by telling the other GM about it, and why I thought I'd accidentally established it (a hard frame happened where the things would have to be true for X to have happened, so it wasn't said, but hole of its shape was carved into the fiction.)

This is what I meant by definitionally. it has to do with what the play I'm yearning for actually consists of, and how that relates to player establishment.

 

[pemerton]

@The-Magic-Sword, I don't know anyting about your RPGing experience or preferences beyond what you're posting. But I think I'm having trouble following some of your posts.

My experience of player establishment of fiction is that it lacks, or sharply reduces, the patterns that run through the text of the game world and deplete its meaning as a literary work in its own right.

<snip>

John may start building an NPC off the premise that their dead wife in their backstory was killed by them (but that hasn't been established in the fiction) but Susan might introduce to the fiction that there were actually killed in this other circumstance. Any 'hints' in the NPCs behavior up to Susan's establishment of that fiction are now 'unmoored' from the piece of fiction intended to have caused them, which can be frustrating if you can feel the undercurrent of hints and other people can't.

I'm not sure which RPG(s) you have in mind when you raise this problem. And your other posts aren't helping me work that out.

We frame into scenes where things are happening based off what the player characters want to do, or what things just happen to happen in the world around them. we describe action and reaction in the fiction. We use comic book panel frames as the examples of play and agendas describe.

<snip>

Players have, reject, and take influence from one another and the NPCs as the described in the book. We use playbook mechanics as described by the individual playbook, ranging from my soldier's (we alternate GM between me and someone else between arcs) attempts to request certain kinds of Aid from Aegis, to the Harbinger's ability to define the roles of individuals in the future. Villains show up, I try to pace fight scenes like a comic book, players have their characters do things, sometimes they look for specific things to use in those scenes if they have a cool idea, and if it fits the fiction we establish it as part of the scene. Sometimes people have ideas for what something is like, which the GM hears, modifies as necessary, and implements accordingly-- such as the underground medical facility and halfway house my Transformed friend had their character visit as an alternative to the 'AEGIS' facility they were in the narrative officially attending, I think it was technically established in a backstory question answer from the playbook. They had ideas, not for scenes, but for what the place was like, which I took and ran with, establishing new elements of the fiction on top as the scene played out. Sometimes we name characters collectively, especially because its a good way to get dumb superhero names, and someone will suggest some cool aspect of them or a power or something and we'll run with it.

I'm not sure who the We is here. At first I wondered whether you meant that no scene can be framed without table consensus - which would be a difference from (say) Apocalypse World or Dungeon World as canonically played. But your description of the GM role in hearing, modifying and implementing seems to suggest something less consensus-based and more AW-ish. Likewise your calling out of collective naming of characters as a special case.

I had a similar question about who the we is who describes the action and reaction in the fiction. I'm not clear who is doing that. From what you say there seem to be distinct player and GM roles - who gets to establish consequences of characters doing things?

Sometimes the fiction triggers moves, which resolve mechanically based off the relevant dice rolls. I follow the instructions to have adult NPCs tell the players who they are, which triggers moves as they accept or reject those statements and shift labels. The results of moves and sometimes things that just happen in the fiction cause me to inflict a condition, the players sometimes voluntarily mark conditions if they think it suits the fiction. The conditions inform them of how their character is feeling, which they express in the moment to moment roleplaying as modified by that character's personality, and they attempt to clear conditions by taking the initiative to do teen drama stuff (summarizing, but it depends on the condition) just like in the rules, its been suggested that those should mostly be color, but thats hewing back away from the instructions, which discuss the resulting spiral of action and reaction between players, and between players and NPCs as good, causing more shifting of labels, conditions and moves and 'driving the fiction forward.'

I'm not seeing here where the John and Susan problem that you described is arising. Which move results in Susan getting to change John's envisaged backstory for the death of the NPC's wife?

We don't plan story arcs but the GMs sometimes hard frame into situations (not too much, like the book says, this is what I had to be careful of), closest we've come to that was me realizing I established a connection between one event happening and another by making one the cause of the other while I was GM.

I don't follow the bolded bit. What was the problem with establishing connections between events? A related question - is event here a synonym for framed situation, or does it mean consequence that flows from resolving a player's move, or does it mean something else again?

My guess is that the bolded bit refers to the same episode of play as this:

the need to keep the unestablished information fluid can make it far more difficult to engage in this kind of game play at all, I actually had an experience with this for a piece of major hidden lore recently where I had an idea I intentionally reminded myself wasn't canon unless it worked out, then that piece of information ended up in a chain of cause and effect and I 'established' it by telling the other GM about it, and why I thought I'd accidentally established it (a hard frame happened where the things would have to be true for X to have happened, so it wasn't said, but hole of its shape was carved into the fiction.)

But I'm still not clear what's going on. First, this seems to be a case of you doing something as GM rather than as a player. Second, I don't understand what the problem is. In AW terms this seems to be an instance of thinking offscreen together with announcing future badness. That's standard stuff.

the players enjoy their characters and have ideas about what they'd like to do with them, but they don't force those ideas, instead they learn about them through ongoing play and new situations, shifting relationships and confrontations with people whose perspective they didn't consider.

How does what you say just above relate to this following earlier post of yours?

because setting and situation orbit around the players and are defined by their dramatic needs, it renders the material that I would typically enjoy exploring subordinate to those dramatic needs. Because the world is defined around the dramatic needs of the characters, the character's stories can't be defined in the same way by their emergent interactions with the world.

<snip>

Similarly, I like to be able to discover themes baked into the text of the game world, and then have the emergent choices of the characters in the actual narrative of the game sessions, be inter-textual with those themes, with the world itself defining the dramatic needs of the characters by confronting them with those themes, allowing them to explore, react, reject, and comment on them.

I ask this question because (for instance) I don't see the contrast between learning about one's character through ongoing play and new situations and characters' stories being defined by their emergent interactions with the world. But if I'm following your posts then you think that there is a contrast between the former - Masks play - and the latter - "trad"/"neo-trad" play.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well for one thing, the topic of the thread isn't game specific, I'm discussing the consequences of player establishment not as it exists in a singular game, but how it affects games it is included in-- I'm not talking about how I play any specific game, I'm discussing how it influences aesthetic of play as something included in games. Like, player establishment as an element of design, and how that affects the experiences players can have. I play games as intended, or in very intentionally modified ways, I'm not out here trying to run sandbox hexcrawls in Masks or something.

As for the question you're asking, the difference is the texture of play as it relates to the "world being generated during play for the purposes of our story using procedures and player establishment, even if that establishment is moderated by the GM" (Story Now) vs. "the world being designed independently of the players, them inserting themselves into it is the fiction of the game session." (Story Before)

What you'll notice, is that post edit, I clarified away the chronological references, story before as improv makes sense to me, because it has to do with the mentality I use to design the content, but its getting away from the intuitive meaning of the words, I admit.

In Masks I do the former as the game demands, in Pathfinder I do the latter even when I'm improvising. As far as I can tell, some of the posters here are trying to convince me I'm imagining that there's any difference at all. Also announcing future badness isn't what I mean, I just looked it up (since Masks doesn't have anything like that.)

My only original point is that player establishment isn't equally conducive to all desirable game outcomes. I enjoy Story Now gaming too, I actually ordered Blades in the Dark from how awesome it sounds. Its just separate from all that story before exploration stuff I brought up.

Oh yeah, and I don't think my style is trad/neo-trad either, because it doesn't prioritize individual character arcs, it prioritizes the world itself, the player's stories just emerge from their interactions with it.

Edit: lemme come back to this post for additional clarity, ive been typing during cutscenes in FF 14 and i noticed i used some confusing verbage in terms of using preexisting/improvisational but still different than player established, but i don't know that i can fix it tonight.

I LIED I FIXED IT

 

[Campbell]

@The-Magic-Sword

There are absolutely are pretty substantial differences. The differences are just more nuanced and nothing like conch passing or a writer's room. I have seen that sort of play and been at those tables. I hate it. I also see it as radically inconsistent with my understanding of games like Masks. Even more so when it comes to Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts.

It's part of what Play Passionately calls The Culture of Outcome:

The Culture of Outcome​

Over on RPG.net hyphz (real name unknown to me) wrote about a kind of player who outwardly seems very invested in character and story but expresses frustration over not being able to simultaneously have moments of suspense and doubt and still have the story turn out “right.” Hyphz refers to this kind of player as a “Fake Narrativist.”

Bailywolf (Bruce Baughn?) in a follow up post suggests the following:
“…I think this guy is asking for a system which doesn’t resolve … hits and misses, but which resolves conflicts where all possible outcomes are interesting and engaging. meaning, it’s not about “winning” or “losing”, but about the mechanics producing story twists and spawning more play.

…

He doesn’t want to roll to hit… he wants to roll to see if unexpected and dramatic naughty word happens in a scene. If he’s got an agenda- a way he wants it to turn out- then he has something to try for, but if the mechanics output something cool regardless of who’s agenda is realized, then I think he’d be happy with it.”

To which I say, no, the type of player hyphz is talking about absolutely does not want that. The type of player hyphz describes exhibits confusion between Story, Character and Outcome as if all three of those things are one and the same. Failure to achieve a desired Outcome (good or bad) is tantamount to not having been allowed to play his Character “correctly” which results in the Story having been “ruined.” No matter how compelling from an external point of view the undesired outcome may be, the player now believes his character to be in the “wrong” story. It’s no longer the story he built his character to tell.

So much dialogue is spent discussing GM-driven railroading that I think player-driven railroading is under discussed and under identified. Once upon a time on The Forge we spoke of the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast. That is, it is impossible for the GM to control the story while the players control the protagonists. I would now like posit the OTHER Impossible Thing Before Breakfast. That is, it is impossible for the players to control the story while the GM controls the antagonists. You simply can not have legitimate adversity without legitimate risk.

Going a little further in hyphz’s thread there are people who are questioning the existence of such a hypothetical player. I’m currently running a Sorcerer & Sword game. I was a little surprised when one of my players said to me, “I don’t like how much the dice define my character in this game.” Considering that the character’s choices and actions were 100% under her control I was a little confused by this so I asked a few key questions. What I discovered was that there had apparently been a few key conflicts she had failed. Failing those conflicts had, to her, rewritten her character concept because the character she wanted to play “would have” succeeded at those things.

The amusing thing, to me, is that from the point of view of an external audience member those conflicts didn’t look any different than any other conflict she had failed but had been fine with. To me, all I saw was a character in motion and the outcomes from that motion. There were no cues to suggest to me the same a priori character redefining “it” moments that were so obvious to the player herself. Even if I had the power to “fudge” those rolls there was nothing to suggest that I should do so. This “character via outcome” exists entirely within the mind of the player.

Oddly, I don’t really see much of a problem satisfying the “fake narrativist” and indeed I think a lot more design has gone towards satisfying that creative aesthetic than people think. Perhaps, again, owing to the fact that I don’t think the phenomenon is well identified. For example, consider the debates over linear vs. bell-curve outcome probabilities. One of the primary points made on the bell-curve side is that it makes outcomes more predictable. In fact, Fudge dice are sort of the extreme product of that debate since the bell-curve is centered on zero no matter how many you roll.

Post resolution modification systems also tend to support this style of play. Pre-roll modification systems such as Fan Mail in Primetime Adventures or Bonus/Roll-Over dice in Sorcerer tend to be about emotional weight and narrative momentum. However, consequences are consequences once the mechanic is deployed. Post roll resolution such as Fate Points in Spirit of the Century and Drama Dice in 7th Sea cater much more to the notion that random success and failure are cool for generating detailing but when the critical conflicts (as identified in the player’s mind) come up the outcome can be controlled to conform to expectation.

Could there be more design advances in this direction? Perhaps. But I think there needs to be more analytical honesty among this play base first. Frankly, I see a lot of denial about this style of play. The player clearly holds a profound need to have his character’s story turn out “right” but at the same time rejects all tools that would explicitly allow him to do so. So the tools that have been developed are all indirect, leaving holes where things might still not turn out right if the resources aren’t at hand or enough aberrant die rolls happen.

But that’s a design discussion and this is Play Passionately.

A big part of why I don't like narrative game as like a thing is that it confuses technique and agenda. Similar techniques can be used to achieve radically different agendas, but a game like Masks tells you how it's meant to be used. There's a lot of very specific instruction provided to the GM that involves engaging the players as their characters and does not really provide for unprompted this would make for a "better story" types of insertions to the fiction. The game expects more disciplined use of the described techniques.

I get that a lot of people see these games and expect unfettered use of these techniques to run amok because they just see games in terms of division of narrative authority, but more disciplined use of the tools that are provided is expected.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

@The-Magic-Sword

There are absolutely are pretty substantial differences. The differences are just more nuanced and nothing like conch passing or a writer's room. I have seen that sort of play and been at those tables. I hate it. I also see it as radically inconsistent with my understanding of games like Masks. Even more so when it comes to Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts.

It's part of what Play Passionately calls The Culture of Outcome:



A big part of why I don't like narrative game as like a thing is that it confuses technique and agenda. Similar techniques can be used to achieve radically different agendas, but a game like Masks tells you how it's meant to be used. There's a lot of very specific instruction provided to the GM that involves engaging the players as their characters and does not really provide for unprompted this would make for a "better story" types of insertions to the fiction. The game expects more disciplined use of the described techniques.

I get that a lot of people see these games and expect unfettered use of these techniques to run amok because they just see games in terms of division of narrative authority, but more disciplined use of the tools that are provided is expected.

I'll admit I should have been clearer, I was saying that even in the extreme of conch passing, it can be fun (as it was in college), not that Story Now games are conch passing, the example was meant to express my frustration with non-curated worlds. That curation is a little harder in Story Now, even though the systems give the GM final say because they simultaneously discourage the kind of elaborate world building that really makes other kinds of play for me, and because in practice there's social pressure to not be too judicious with saying no "Yes, and..." is still a major value in these games, it goes against their spirit to exert too much control over setting.

Meanwhile, I value very emergent stories in my Pathfinder play, but not emergent worlds, instead I like for my nicely designed and curated worlds to collide with the players and produce stories by virtue of them making contact with it. That probably isn't trad, because it doesn't focus on making or telling a specific story?

 

[kenada]

Meanwhile, I value very emergent stories in my Pathfinder play, but not emergent worlds, instead I like for my nicely designed and curated worlds to collide with the players and produce stories by virtue of them making contact with it. That probably isn't trad, because it doesn't focus on making or telling a specific story?

Non-protagonistic Story Now?