Players establishing facts about the world impromptu during play

[Fenris-77]

Ahh, yes, it's all me. Please, by all means continue to insult anyone who disagrees with you and please make me the author of all your ills. There is obviously is no possibility that you might not be in complete understanding of a game you've played one example of and misrepresented poorly mechanically in a bunch of ways (repeatedly and ad nauseum). I don't give a hoot what you like or don't like, or play or don't play, but if you want to call people bigots because they don't agree with you about games of pretend elves then the problem, sir, is you and not anyone else.

Don't shovel your paranoid delusions of forum persecution over on me. It's both inappropriate and laughable.

 

[dragoner]

As a GM I love it when players do it well, and dread it when players do it badly. So as a player I do it a bit more than most, but feel very wary of stepping on GM's toes.

I have fears that it would turn into a munchkin fest, or total slapstick; we have had Paranoia games that ground to halt due to people going the total slapstick route. Sometimes being GM is to corral the wild cats.

 

[Manbearcat]

I said “blunk” as the past tense of “blink” in the DW game I GMed last night.

That was me establishing the new past tense for “blink” in that game.

Any subsequent alternate usage will destroy continuity and totally pull me out of my immersion and exploration of and skilled play deployment of verb tenses.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:

Neither of you will agree with this. But, both of you need a break. @Fenris-77 and @The-Magic-Sword you are both done in this thread.

 

[pemerton]

OK, so, full frontal caveats, my playing OSR/D&D as story now, even in part, is very much a personal thing for me. I don;t have a guidebook or a set of rules about how to make that work. So I am running a fantasy sandbox using Black Hack 2E, and I am trying to run it as story now as possible. So I'll try to explain how that works for me.

The first hurdle for running D&D or OSR as story now is that the mechanics really don't help, and in places even push back against it. This is less of an issue with rules light OSR games than it is with D&D (or Pathfinder, I'm afraid). Most story now games have a limited success mechanic, or a success with complications mechanic. When a player rolls a result like that it's a signal for the GM to 'make a move'. In my case I'm using the standard AW or more specifically Dungeon World keeper moves. The problem is that there's no mechanical place to insert that move. So what I tend to do is take the aggregate of the party rolls in a round, or in a situation, and use that as a bellweather to see if I'm going to make a move. If things go badly, I'll add complications, if things go well, I won't.

<snip>

So when my example game started I had a very traditional amount of prep done for where I thought the player were going to go. I had dungeon locations, factions, maps the whole schmozzle. As players are wont to do, they didn't go that direction at all. At which point I thought, ok fine, I'm going to run this like DW and see how it goes. I'd done this in bits many times, but this time I was going to play it to the hilt. So I wrote up a couple of fronts (the DW version of prep, which is minimal as all get out) and I just let the players roll. As they went places and did stuff I reacted and adjudicated. I made up the occasional new map, as PbP kind of requires some props, but that's it. Even now, the party is in pretty critical danger, and I'm not sure what's going to happen next.

This is interesting. I think your approach to complications makes sense - ie on an intuited group-check basis.

I guess my question would be, what is the OSR system bringing that DW wouldn't? I don't think that's a question you'd answer here-and-now. It's more about thinking through our system choices - eg every time I toy in my mind with the idea of trying HARP, I just think Doesn't Burning Wheel do all this and more of what I want? What do we get - aesthetics, familiarity, particular quirks or favourite subsystems - from these various systems we have available to us?

 

[pemerton]

The cleric rolls well, and I truthfully tell him that he sense undead nearby.

Where does this truth come from? Is the check a success and hence the cleric is warned, or is this a failure because it's an adverse consequence (in DW terms, failure => narrate a pending threat)?

I don't think there is a single answer to the above question. When I posted years ago about narrating, ad hoc, a roper in response to a 4e player's successful Perception check to inspect a stone column, some other ENworlders thought that was very "gotcha". My view is that, in 4e D&D, it's not objectionable - the players get XP that reflects the extra challenge, and it makes the encounter more interesting, and the player was clearly half-expecting it (why else inspect the column?). In a club game with strangers I'd probably be less extravagant as a GM.

 

[pemerton]

one of the things about 4e that I hated was the way the game encouraged the PCs to just wade into the enemy. In my OSR games, doing such things means almost certain death. If you enter a large room, and see a lot of enemies, you fall back to a defensible position. At least at lower levels. This is less important at higher levels but tactics and position matter the strategy is just different.

<snip>

I want people to succeed because they played well.

4e players sometimes play well, and sometimes succeed because of that! Sometimes this means falling back to a defensible position. Sometimes it doesn't. That depends very much on context and characters.

I also coincidentally believe that such an outlook and approach is the best way to "be your character". You are seeing through your characters eyes and acting as your character.

If my character is Conan - as authored by REH - then wading into the enemy is the best way to be my character!

It's why I avoid most things that require the player to stop making decisions as their character. The decision process is what is important and I want it to be a character centric thing.

But if I always have to think in wargaming terms yet am trying to play Conan, then I'm constantly being forced out of character.

 

[pemerton]

Is there a right to dream (Simulationism)? That’s what I want (create the initial setting and situations, then play to see what happens when they meet the PCs). However, there’s this nagging thing in the back of my mind that says Simulationism might not actually be distinct from Story Now.

My own view is that Edwards is right to draw the distinction. He does so, in a slightly negative way, in his gamism essay where he mentions "the person who wants to see full-blown Narrativist values 'just appear' from a Simulationist-play foundation. It's possible, but not as easy and intuitive as it would seem."

The more that the focus is on "exploration" per se - be that the players just enjoying the characters they've come up with, or the GM and/or players enjoying the setting, or some interaction of these (eg seeing how the GM riffs off the players riffing of the GM's initial situation) - then I think the less likely it is that story will emerge. Of course there will be a series of events, and they may be engaging, charming, even thrilling - but will they be dramatic in a story-telling sense?

Of systems I'm familiar with, the one that might come closest to this is The Dying Earth - but this is at least in part because it pack so much dramatic trajectory into its PC build rules (eg temptations) and its reward rules (taglines), and also its resolution rules can compel PC behaviour (persuasion rules). I believe that it's for these reasons that Edwards classifies it as a "narrativist"-oriented system even though it doesn't actually satisfy his formal definition of such a system (ie it doesn't expressly set-out to address a "premise"/theme in the literary sense thereof).

My play of Rolemaster, over nearly two decades, shifted in a non-self-conscious way from simulationism towards story now, but as I posted upthread this did lead to a lot of bumping into the minutiae of the system. I would also say that the "now" in our "story now" RM play was often "story next session" - there is such a lot of system/mechanical overhead in RM that often that would soak up the bulk of a session which would become, in effect, a lead-up to the enusing pay-off. These days I wouldn't have the patience for that. I want things to move along at a speedier clip!

 

[pemerton]

Take the essay I linked. It frequently quotes Gygax because he writes some nice things, but the role-playing game itself is not about those things. Edwards variously identifies AD&D as Step On Up or incoherent. There’s some stuff on High Concept Simulation, but it feels like a grab bag of classic games. It also suggests that the Right to Dream can be about things like coping with childhood trauma, and then spend several paragraphs talking about reality simulation. That’s a frequent issue I see when trying to find other discussions on it.

That feels wrong to me. The idea I’ve had is it’s game as science experiment. You take an initial situation, setting, plot, or whatever; and then you add PCs to it. After things go in motion, you need to let them play out without interference. Inspired by the idea of the impartial referee in OSR play, I think you need to disclaim any attachment to outcomes. Where Story Now expects you to be a fan of the characters, you need to be a fan of the experiment and its integrity. Based on that, I’d posit that the Right to Dream should be considered something distinct from Story Now even if it overlaps quite a bit (e.g., a story emerges through play even though that’s not necessarily the point).

I agree with Edwards, and I think with you, that Right to Dream/"simulationism" absolutely is a different thing from "story now". It can be character-based (I don't have a lot of experience of this, but some Pendragon or Champions play will be like this) or situation-based (some less-railroady CoC can be like this) or setting-based (I get the impression that at least some D&D play in published settings is like this; also I think "historical" RPGing including C&S and OA fantasy-history games can probably be like this; likewise at least some Gloranthan RPGIng).

Edwards' essay on this I think is very good. I first read it nearly 20 years ago when I was still a regular RM GM (and continued to be for several years). It explained, brilliantly in my view, both the appeal of RM and its pressure points (eg why does every new supplement have a new initiative system?!). It also made sense of my "high concept" experiences, including why they're different from RM-ish purist-for-system values and what their relationship is to GM force.

 

[Campbell]

@pemerton @kenada

A fair deal of the sort of trindie games my core group plays a decent amount of (Exalted 3e, Legend of the Five Rings, Infinity, and our Vampire hack) basically plays out as Story Now in the streets and Right To Dream in the sheets. World building and scenario design is often built with character dramatic needs in mind, but in the course of the session both the GM and other players mostly just play their characters and the setting out with integrity.