Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9526984" data-attributes="member: 42582">The emergence of RPGing from out of wargaming is pretty fundamental to how the genre has been received, and has developed. The work on RPG design that led to games like Prince Valiant, Maelstrom Storytelling, Hero Wars/Quest, Apocalypse World is all about taking some of the formal characteristics of a wargame (eg numerical ratings of attributes, a very tight correlation between game elements and in-fiction elements, etc) but adapting them to allow a radically different sort of game play. (Vampire, I think, illustrates an aspiration at the radically different game play that has failed to undertake the necessary development and adaptation.)If improv theatre aficionados had invented something like RPGing back in the early 1970s, what would it have looked like? Maybe something closer to <a href="https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=13116" target="_blank">A Penny for My Thoughts</a>? Which I personally don't consider a RPG at all, because it has no action resolution. This is connected to the wargaming origins - it's an individual avatar version of training your squad/battalion/whatever from raw recruits to elite guards. Separating that idea of advancement from the narrow military focus is clever design. Linking it, in a narrative sense, to things like the actual story of Ged's growth from apprentice to wizard (in the Earthsea books), or the implied story of Conan's growth from wandering thief to warband leader to self-proclaimed king (in REH's Conan stories) is also clever design.The fact that the actual play of D&D - especially in its classic form - doesn't actually produce fiction that resembles either Earthsea or REH Conan, and yet this does not seem to have hurt the game's popularity, is a curious thing to me. It suggests that, at least for many player, trappings of fiction matter more than the deeper content of fiction.Social interaction is not being done "for real", though. No one is actually persuading anyone of anything. To take an extreme example, so as to clearly illustrate the point: the 3E module Bastion of Broken Souls includes, as part of its set-up, an angel who is a "living key" to a gate - that is, the gate can only be opened by killing the angel. Now the module itself has some good ideas but terrible follow through, and in this particular case it tells the GM that the only way to open the gate is for the PCs to kill the angel in combat. But when I adapted the module into a Rolemaster campaign, I ignored the bad advice. And one of the PCs in my game reasoned with the angel, explained to her what was at stake and why it was essential to open the gate, and as a result the angel willingly permitted the PC to kill her.But this doesn't mean that the player actually persuaded anyone to let him take her life! It's all just pretend. Someone who is not actually moved or persuaded is making decisions about whether an imaginary person is moved or persuaded. There are many ways to structure and guide that sort of decision-making procedure, and "I think it makes sense that this rather thinly-described person would be moved or persuaded by that" is one of them, but not the only one.Well, yes, if you have rules that don't produce the outcome you are hoping for, they will be bad rules. Vincent Baker makes that point nicely <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/497" target="_blank">here</a>:your rules impose a structured causality upon your game's fiction. If they were a good match in design, then in play the game works the way you meant it to. If they were a bad match in design, then in play the game doesn't work how you intended. Bold barbarian warriors maximize their armor and when they go into battle it's a matter of grinding ablation, not decisive action; your grim & gritty noir detective has to carry an assault rifle because a .38 won't kill a dude; the team of morning-cartoon superheroes bicker, bean-count their resources, and wind up working for the highest bidder.If you want players to portray and inhabit vibrant characters, and your "influence points" rule is producing a tactical obsession with managing and hoarding points, then your rule is a bad one! That doesn't show, however, that it is impossible to have any other system of rules for structuring and guiding how someone decides that an imaginary person is moved or persuaded, beyond the ones suggested by [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER].By this measure, D&D combat is metagame - when I resolve a fight in AD&D I'm not thinking about parrying and thrusting and dodging and maiming and the like; I'm thinking about how I need to score N more hit points of damage before my own hit points get ablated.These are not the only possible components of a non-combat resolution system.So here's a rule for social resolution: when you, as your character, make an impassioned plea to a NPC, and there is no established in-fiction reason why the NPC is implacably opposed to what you want, then - if you spend an influence point - the NPC does as you requeset. I don't think that's a very good rule - as in, I'm doubtful that it will produce compelling fiction and vibrant characters in play (although perhaps I'm wrong even about that, as the "no established in-fiction reason" clause motivates players to warm up to their impassioned pleas by trying to suss out how a NPC stands on various issues, and maybe that will produce some compelling fiction and vibrant characters; it would need testing to find out). But it doesn't involve the player engaging with anything other than the words and deads of their PCs, and so would not involve "metacurrency" in [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER]'s sense.But it would be a resolution system that, like D&D's combat resolution system, permits a declared action to be resolved without the causal process that actually produces that outcome in the fiction being established in the course of resolution. To elaborate: when a character/creature/monster is dropped to zero hp (or fails a death save, or whatever) in D&D we know they are dead, but we don't know - in the fiction - how they were killed. Blood loss? Run through the heart? Decapitation? The rules don't tell us.And in my imagined resolution system, we would know that the NPC was persuaded by the PC's impassioned plea, but we wouldn't know exactly how or why they were so moved.I've been directly and indirectly observing RPGers whose principal and preferred game is D&D for a long time. My sense is that many of them are not very interested in the technical game aspects of play.In the old days, for instance, when spell load out was an important thing, they were not very interested in the wargame-y/planning/tactical aspect of choosing spells, working out when to cast them, etc. That stuff was grist to the mill for RPGers of a wargame-y or even more generally game playing bent; but not very important to players who mainly wanted to imagine their PC getting up to hijinks. On multiple occasions in the 1990s I surprised, sometimes delighted, sometimes shocked these sorts of D&D players by showing what was possible, within the formal AD&D PC build framework, when it came to building and playing a mechanically effective character.I think this is one reason why many D&D players did not like 4e D&D very much: it's not a game that lends itself to imagining my PC getting up to hijinks without having to engage with the technical components of the game. Like many contemporary "indie"-esque RPGs, 4e tried to tightly integrate the technical components of the game with the imaginative elements of play.5e D&D, on the other hand, considerably relaxes that outside of the combat domain. (For some reason - I conjecture that it is due to the received skirmish wargame legacy of RPGing - it is widely accepted that combat will be a hijinks-free domain that is resolved via application of technical rules.) The players can imagine their PCs getting up to hijinks, with the GM using a combination of responsiveness to PC-build-elements-as-descriptors (in 5e D&D speak, this is described thus: "if a character has a high enough bonus that the DM thinks the results of the declared action are not uncertain, then the GM is not required to call for a roll") and sheer fiat to make the game move along.Expecting these sorts of players to enjoy 4e D&D is like expecting them to enjoy Burning Wheel - it's not going to happen!</blockquote>

Verification