Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No, you really didn't. I get that you think you did, but... no.
ETA: For clarity, the post was just this when I quoted it, it was edited to add the additional content after this post was made.
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D&D 5E Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e
ETA: For clarity, the post was just this when I quoted it, it was edited to add the additional content after this post was made.
gorice
Hero
These are good points. Personally, I still struggle, especially once characters reach high levels, but as you say, it's not an insurmountable challenge. Ultimately, though, I think I prefer it if physical attributes map more directly to mechanical attributes (so, a tiger-sized apex predator is obviously trouble and probably has attributes within a certain range).
Notice that he's describing himself. Sorcerer is his magnum opus, and he's describing that.
One difference between the avant-garde and mere poseurs is that the avant-garde hold themselves to their own standards.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
This is very different. In the example @pemerton provides, no one knows if the tower has fallen or not. This is something that will be resolved (or not) in play, via the action resolution mechanics if the state of the tower is called into question. Knowing what I do about Burning Wheel, this will be a contest where, if the player wins their desire for the state of the tower will be true and if the GM wins some other situation may occur (the tower may stand, but be corrupted, or it has fallen, or some other thing).
What you have is the GM determining the state of the tower either by fiat or solo play (ie, the GM playing the game with themselves) and then maybe the players can find out if they ask/do the right thing to trigger the GM to reveal this information.
The differences here mechanically are vastly different, not just in form but also in function.
These are similarly off base. Again, you're looking at this from trying to recreate the end state of play in the example from the principles of play you understand. This is backwards. That you can force this outcome with traditional means doesn't at all mean that the methods to get there were the same. They weren't. If you iterated these over and over, a majority would result in the same outcomes you've hard coded into the prep. If you iterated the BW game over and over, it would wildly diverge and would not have the same outcomes.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
I sometimes get a strong sense of being preached at, or evangelized to, by some of the story-now crew around here; so it's interesting you'd say this.
The evangelizing is part of why I push back against it; as I push back whenever someone tries to preach at me even if I might otherwise agree with their viewpoint.
Well, here are some of the things I took away from the comparison:
* In my Burning Wheel, game, I the player established the dramatic context for my PC as a (the last, seemingly) Knight of the Iron Tower. This then informed subsequent events: I used Circles to meet a former knight of my (ie Thurgon's) order (Frederick) who was able to ferry Thurgon and Aramina along the river. It also informed the GM's framing of the episode with the knight in the crypt (described in spoilered part of the OP of this thread). The difference between this being player-authored and a premise for framing, and something GM-authored that has to be learned by way of "exploration"-oriented action declarations is profound. We can see just one way the difference can manifest in @Crimson Longinus's example of the accidentally fireballed sister.
* The difference between adjudicating a search by way of map-and-key resolution (the sandbox process described by @FrogReaver upthread) and by way of a Scavenging check is also pretty big. The former depends on the GM's pre-authorship: if there is nothing to find then we either have a moment of play that falls flat ("We search - what do we find?" "Nothing" or even runs the risk of stalling, if the players won't accept that "Nothing" is the truth and think they have to declare further actions (eg it's not enough to search the mattress and the fireplace - we have to pull out the stuffing, and stick our heads up the chimney). This can't happen with the Scavenging check, because either is succeeds and Thurgon finds what he was looking for, or it fails and some other consequence ensues - in this case, the Orcs have arrived.
* I've already posted upthread that I would love to see an actual play example, from "living sandbox" play, in which a social resolution unfolds in which it is the PC's dramatic need, rather than the NPC's, that is at the forefront of things. (In Thurgon's case, this was the need to restore Auxol, his ancestral estate, to its former glory.)
I don't know where you are inviting me to go with this.
If someone thinks that anything other than fixed backstory is objectionable; and if they think that any sort of "soft move" is softballing; then they have to suck up the fact that the sister might get fireballed unknowingly, producing what might seem an anticlimactic outcome.
Conversely, if someone wants "no failure offscreen" (in this case, the key offscreen and unrevealed moment is the sister joining the cultists) - certainly a preference of mine - then they have to vary one or more of the above parameters.
I don't see the point of pretending that backstory is immutable, and of seemingly avoiding soft moves, and then having the GM secretly fudge the identity/location of the sister. That seems like an ad hoc solution to a mismatched set of resolution systems and preferences - roughly speaking, the use of Gygax's mechanics to play out a DL-type story - and not an approach that stands on its own merits.
On the issue of "stalled play".
In a RPG which is "backstory first", and situations/scenes are framed by extrapolation from the backstory when the players declare the appropriate actions to "activate" what is latent, then the game can stall in virtue of player action declarations: because the players fail to declare actions that activate new scenes (eg they search the wrong place, they speak to the wrong NPC, whatever it might be).
In a RPG which is "situation first", then player action declarations can't stall play. Rather, the main risk to play is what Ron Edward said here, in reply to a poster having trouble with scene-framing and resolution:
What will stall a situation-first game is if the situations aren't interesting. That's why games like Marvel Heroic RP, HeroWars, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World etc place such a high priority on establishing player priorities for their PCs, and making those clear. An alternative approach, found in The Dying Earth and Prince Valiant, is to rely on genre to do that work.
This also relates to the discussion about how to convey a situation to the players. The basic idea is that you - the GM - want them to have a sense of what is at stake, so they can understand why they should engage the scene, and how they might do so.
(In "backstory" first play, this sense of what is at stake isn't needed in the same way, because the players are expecting to acquire relevant information, including about what is at stake, from their action declarations - like searching, talking to NPCs, etc.)
In a RPG which is "backstory first", and situations/scenes are framed by extrapolation from the backstory when the players declare the appropriate actions to "activate" what is latent, then the game can stall in virtue of player action declarations: because the players fail to declare actions that activate new scenes (eg they search the wrong place, they speak to the wrong NPC, whatever it might be).
In a RPG which is "situation first", then player action declarations can't stall play. Rather, the main risk to play is what Ron Edward said here, in reply to a poster having trouble with scene-framing and resolution:
If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS [= shared fiction] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS [= shared fiction] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
What will stall a situation-first game is if the situations aren't interesting. That's why games like Marvel Heroic RP, HeroWars, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World etc place such a high priority on establishing player priorities for their PCs, and making those clear. An alternative approach, found in The Dying Earth and Prince Valiant, is to rely on genre to do that work.
This also relates to the discussion about how to convey a situation to the players. The basic idea is that you - the GM - want them to have a sense of what is at stake, so they can understand why they should engage the scene, and how they might do so.
(In "backstory" first play, this sense of what is at stake isn't needed in the same way, because the players are expecting to acquire relevant information, including about what is at stake, from their action declarations - like searching, talking to NPCs, etc.)
I can only go on what I glean from your posts. Upthread you said that you can't post excerpts of actual play in part because it doesn't involve the sort of process you take to be characteristic of "story now" play. More generally, you often seem to respond to my accounts of play as if it is foreign to you.
If I've got the wrong impression I apologise. I am just trying to make sense of your posts.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
By Improv™ with a Capital-I I am referring to the principles of Improv Comedy/Theater. Stuff like don't block, add information, don't ask questions, yes/and. Basically where we are all trying to work towards a common direction together basically in cahoots. These sorts of techniques are not really congruent with play that's focused on exploration of character or challenge oriented play in my experience where blocking, asking questions, and attempting to draw hard lines are all things I consider essential features of play.
On play stalling : If you run Blades or Apocalypse World according to instructions / best practices play will not stall. It has other failure states that don't generally apply to curated traditional play or living sandbox play. Namely things can get silly pretty quickly if players take it in those directions. This a pretty common thing that happens when players first encounter indie games before they settle in. Also some players do not like being addressed directly or put under pressure. Other players might not like the spotlight player being able to make decisions that affect them without hashing things out. Creative differences between players can be a really big deal here.
The reason for it not stalling is procedural rather than mechanical though. You are telegraphing and then making good on those threats if players do not respond so something will always be happening. If you apply the same techniques in more traditional games the same will also be also be true. Depending on the game some mechanics might rear their ugly head in ugly ways. The big ones here tend to be attrition models, win buttons, and special abilities that reframe the situation without risking anything.
The games are not magic and they do not do stuff on their own. You need to do what they tell you to. Playing them as instructed to will result in a different play experience because you are doing different things then you would do running a curated traditional game or a living sandbox. I don't think any sort of play is perfect. The failure points of different technique sets tends to be different though.
On play stalling : If you run Blades or Apocalypse World according to instructions / best practices play will not stall. It has other failure states that don't generally apply to curated traditional play or living sandbox play. Namely things can get silly pretty quickly if players take it in those directions. This a pretty common thing that happens when players first encounter indie games before they settle in. Also some players do not like being addressed directly or put under pressure. Other players might not like the spotlight player being able to make decisions that affect them without hashing things out. Creative differences between players can be a really big deal here.
The reason for it not stalling is procedural rather than mechanical though. You are telegraphing and then making good on those threats if players do not respond so something will always be happening. If you apply the same techniques in more traditional games the same will also be also be true. Depending on the game some mechanics might rear their ugly head in ugly ways. The big ones here tend to be attrition models, win buttons, and special abilities that reframe the situation without risking anything.
The games are not magic and they do not do stuff on their own. You need to do what they tell you to. Playing them as instructed to will result in a different play experience because you are doing different things then you would do running a curated traditional game or a living sandbox. I don't think any sort of play is perfect. The failure points of different technique sets tends to be different though.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
The main difference between a platonic living sandbox and a platonic Story Now game is that in a platonic Story Now game literally everything you do as a GM is centered on creating and resolving an on screen situation that is directly relevant to the narrative trajectory of the player characters based on their dramatic needs. The fallout to the setting is based entirely on the narrative logic of what has just occurred rather than causal reasoning of its attendant ramifications on the setting. You are trying to make the fallout of what happens in each scene as meaningful as possible.
In a platonic living sandbox pretty much the inverse is true. What the player characters seek out to do is just one small piece of the living sandbox. One of many inputs. Causal rather than narrative logic wins the day. We base fallout not on reflecting the narrative weight of player decisions and conflicts, but on reasoning based on the fiction what the fallout should be.
No game is really going to fit either platonic ideal though. The specific arrangement of priorities, techniques and the tradeoffs that entail are going to differ from game to game. Blades in the Dark in particular while not being a living sandbox game does utilize a number of techniques that make it closer to living sandbox play than say Sorcerer would be. It still utilizes those techniques in ways that are fundamentally different than say Stars Without Number.
In a platonic living sandbox pretty much the inverse is true. What the player characters seek out to do is just one small piece of the living sandbox. One of many inputs. Causal rather than narrative logic wins the day. We base fallout not on reflecting the narrative weight of player decisions and conflicts, but on reasoning based on the fiction what the fallout should be.
No game is really going to fit either platonic ideal though. The specific arrangement of priorities, techniques and the tradeoffs that entail are going to differ from game to game. Blades in the Dark in particular while not being a living sandbox game does utilize a number of techniques that make it closer to living sandbox play than say Sorcerer would be. It still utilizes those techniques in ways that are fundamentally different than say Stars Without Number.
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