RPGs are ... Role Playing Games

[Hussar]

Celebrim, that's one of the best descriptions of "Illusionism" I've seen and goes a long way to explaining a lot of the disagreements that I have.

Thanks for that.

 

[The Shaman]

Well designed random tables help alot.

Try this:
0) Let the players determine thier own goals. One good starting point is asking them were in the game world they want to start out. Obviously, you need self-motivated players to manage this.
1) Randomly select an encounter with an NPC. If its a humanoid, you'll need a random profession subtable appropriate to the race.
2) Randomly determine the creature's hostility level. If the PC's interact, faithfully follow diplomacy rules for modifying creature hostility. Don't decide whether the monster is an ally or an enemy.
3) Decide on the spot what the creature is doing here.
4) Repeat.

If you do this long enough, the players ideally become immersed in the setting. Typically, you end up with players who are scheming rather than thwarting schemes. The PC wants to conduct a cattle drive, rob a bank, go on a crusade, organize a war party to plunder the tribe on the other side of the river, etc. It puts the PC's in a position to be active rather than merely proactive. As the DM, you've got no idea how the story is going to work out. You don't prep a story. You don't even prep NPC motivations. You end up with something more like SimCity and less like 'Balder's Gate' or 'Knights of the Old Republic'.

I'm sure The Shaman can tell you more about the techniques than I can.

That's actually a pretty good primer, Celebrim.

A couple of points:

Well designed random tables help alot.

Yes, they do.

The Mythic Game Master Emulator is a really exciting new approach to randomization in tabletop roleplaying games.

I don't generate all of my random encounters on the spot; I'll use the various tables and such to prepare lists of encounters before or between game-nights, then simply pull from the list of prepared encounters. For example, for the Traveller game, I prepared a list of scout ship encounters; each time a random roll called for a scout ship, I'd just use the next one on the list, then replenish the list in the weeks between games. This keeps up the flow of the game, without breaks for lots of dice rolling, but still maintaining the stochastic nature of the game experience. The prepped material is the basis for improvising the actual encounter during the game, so in the case of a scout ship, a few different rolls give me some ideas about what it's doing and why, and I can ad lib from there.

This also makes prep fun, at least for me. It delivers unexpected results, which keeps the game (and the referee) from getting stuck in a rut.

Let the players determine thier own goals.

I participated in a lengthy thread over at Big Purple a month or two ago about character backstories; in one of my posts, I wrote, "A character backstory should place less emphasis to what your character's done and more emphasis to what your character's going to do." Ideally the adventurers are driving the action in pursuit of their goals, and if it all goes really well, you end up with this:

Typically, you end up with players who are scheming rather than thwarting schemes.

That's my gaming-nirvana right there. It's the players taking initiative, thinking through how their characters get from where they are now to where they want to be, using both player and character skills and resources in developing strategy and tactics.

Put another way, I'm not looking for player characters who want to uncover or join a conspiracy; I want them to be the conspirators.

You don't even prep NPC motivations.

In some cases that's true; for my Traveller game, I was dealing with a setting which includes multiple worlds with tens of billions of people, so other than a few notes about high-ranking Imperial nobles and such most likely to be mentioned in a TAS newsfeed, NPC motivations were generated along with the encounters themselves.

For my Flashing Blades game, however, folding historical figures into the game means I know quite a bit about the motivations of quite a few of the NPCs, so I would call this one somewhat conditional.

 

[LostSoul]

At some level, almost every game involves some measure of illusionism.

No. No. Not at all. When players make meaningful choices, there is no illusionism. A game that does not rob players of those choices does not have illusionism.

In other words, even the most grim and gritty sandboxes are almost always places to play, not places to work and perform monotonous repetitive tasks as they realisticly ought to be.

Illusionsim has nothing at all to do with realism.

edit: Illusionsim is when players think they are making choices but in reality the outcome of those choices have been pre-determined by another player. (Currency does not play into this.)

Contrast this with participationism, where players realize that the choices they make don't matter, but they are willing to go along for the ride.

 

[Doug McCrae]

And yet, as The Shaman insists, it still moves.

Does it? Or does it need the players (or one player who leads the others) to push it?

 

[Doug McCrae]

A key point at which prepared material becomes a plot is once you, the GM, imagine it interacting with the PCs in some way.

For example a PC has been established as a rake. So you create a beautiful woman who's secretly a spy for the English as a foil for him. Plot, right there. But it would also be plot even if no such PC exists. In fact even if no PCs exist yet. The character works as an NPC because it is likely that one or more PCs will be rakes, as you would expect in a Three Musketeers-esque milieu.

Or you create a dungeon containing treasure and rumours of said treasure in the neighbouring village. Plot. Because you can be practically certain that in a D&D game players will want treasure. Because that's how D&D works.

It could be said that all that's required for plot-hood is extension through time. In four months the orc armies will invade, if the PCs do nothing. In three weeks Mt Fury will erupt (pretty much no matter what the PCs do). But I think both the orc army and the volcano must occur in the PCs' vicinity, they must be relevant to the PCs, to become plots.

 

[Wolf1066]

My fourpence, standard disclaimers apply, YMMV etc...

I have a setting. It's a reimagination of Night City - some things have changed (like I moved it to Australia, renamed some of the regions, put in different/new gangs etc).

That setting is full of stories.

There's "The Ripper" murdering prostitutes by slashing them up with Wolvers, there's "The Vampire" exsanguinating victims and leaving their drained, cleaned corpses in dumpsters, there are kids going missing, there are powerful corporate heads making power plays, there are all manners of other people going about their daily lives - legal and illegal.

A million stories in that dark, naked city.

All of which will continue happening without any intervention of the players at all.

Then we have the player characters, all with backgrounds that give them skills, advantages, disadvantages and little quirks -and all, until very recently, unemployed. This is Cyberpunk: you don't meet in a bar, decide to trust each other and go off adventuring. There has to be a reason for "the team" other than "hey there's a sign on the wall offering 1000GP for the safe return of the King's daughter, what say we band together and earn it?"

Now, there are many excuses for a team - they're all childhood friends etc. - but I wanted the players to be strangers to one another so they would have to role play getting to know one another and spend in-game time getting to know one another's strengths and weaknesses.

I also wanted them to be fish out of water, strangers in a strange land etc, so they would have to role play building up their local knowledge and their support networks.

So, this group of strangers are called together by the one thing they have in common - an employment broker - and assembled into a team at the behest of a new employer overseas in Australia. That's the back-story I provided.

Given that the players have a choice of taking the job or not playing the game, the story has them flying to Australia to meet their new boss.

Now they are in a place where they will interact with the other stories that are going on. How they decide to respond will determine a lot of what happens and how it happens.

Many of the people they encounter have their own stories and their own goals. Which of those stories the players choose to get embroiled in will determine what is recorded of the players' personal stories.

Certain things will happen regardless of what they choose - certain things will happen wherever the characters happen to be at the time - outside the pub or the mall or their home or while they're on the way back into town - they'll come upon a story I've created and choose how they will respond to it.

Also, they are employed - and their employer will send them out on certain missions that will have "unexpected" twists that the players are going to have to respond to - or possibly die.

This, to me, is like real life - there are a lot of "stories" out there... he wants to set up his own business, she's just looking for the quiet life, he's wanting to find a woman who truly loves him etc. We wander around in our own stories - with our own motivations and goals. We encounter people and respond to the situations based on what we're wanting and their reactions are grounded in their own motivations - they don't do things at random (even though it may see they do).

I've got the setting and a bunch of stories, the players move in midst of that and write their story of how they affect - and are affected by - the setting and the other stories. What happens if what they've done directly hampers one of those powerful corporate heads?

Will the things they do hamper a corporate head? I've no idea, their stories are in the early stages when they're finding their feet in a strange town and I've really got no idea what they will decide to do. But if they do hamper a corporate head - or annoy the wrong people - then what happens will not be random.

I do have ideas that I plan out for our gaming session - as both their employer and The Cruel Hand of Fate, I have a fair idea of where I want to send them for the day and what sort of things I can throw in their way. I also have encounters with people (who, if the players play their cards in a particular way, may have information that could be interesting or useful) that may or may not happen depending on what they do - but I still plan for them, at least have the character and motivations of the NPC set.

And if they do solve or tie up some mysteries or stories along the way or find some of the little "treasures" I have hidden around the place, I can always introduce a few more story arcs, more things for them to find - in and around doing their work, paying their bills and having fun during their time off.

But basically everything that happens is driven by some story or other - the NPCs stories - and the outcome will vary depending on how the characters decide to respond.

For me, having the characters wandering around with every meeting and reaction to them being "random" (if the very small subset of possibilities contained in a reaction table can be said to be truly random) robs the game of realism. "You meet [one of twenty different species] who is a [one of twenty different character classes] and (s)he wants to [one of twenty different actions]" just does not compare with "well, since you blew the lid on a major operation, a guy who has 8.3 billion euro and a small army at his disposal is now out to get you for screwing his chances to become Senator."

In my games, if the characters elect to take a six month tour of Europe, they will come back to find that the place they left has totally changed - the stories marched on without them.

 

[Fifth Element]

The trouble with illusionism is that its alot like winning a game when you are a kid and then discovering that the person you played the game with let you win.

Now this is definitely not a fair characterization of my approach. I said nothing about making things easier, or more likely for the PCs to 'win'. I said the idea is better: more fun, more awesome, or what have you.

I'm selective about which player ideas I use. Recently as the PCs were exploring a dungeon and discussing amongst themselves what they might run across. One player suggested mind flayers just to be funny; mind flayers are a bit out of their league at their level. But it really fit in with the themes of the dungeon, and gave me a good idea of how to plant a plot hook I'd been looking to give them. So mind flayers it is!

A couple of PCs nearly died in the fight, but it was a very fun fight. So I was glad I used the player's idea, even though it made it more challenging than I had originally anticipated.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Well designed random tables help alot.

I am sure the little fella appreciates it too.

 

[Fifth Element]

As I think about Celebrim's definition of illusionism, I realize that what I described in the other thread is definitely not illusionism. It's not about making player choice irrelevant, it's about giving players input into the adventure design process, without them realizing it.

If I had decided myself during my prep work that mind flayers were going to be there, how would that be any different than improvising a change to mind flayers based on a player's out-of-game comment?

So not only is improvisation a valid term for this, illusionism is an invalid one.

 

[Celebrim]

Now this is definitely not a fair characterization of my approach. I said nothing about making things easier, or more likely for the PCs to 'win'. I said the idea is better: more fun, more awesome, or what have you.

Doesn't matter. If you make the game harder in order to make it more exciting, that's illusionism too. Even if you don't make the game harder or easier, if you are deciding what is more awesome and secretly changing the unpainted part of your world in response to something out of game, that's still illusionism.

The problem alot of people have is that they find a term like 'Illusionism' demeaning, so they immediately shy away from it and get all defensive - "I don't engage in illusionism. Not my game!" I'm not entirely sure why they'd do that though, because every RPG is nothing more than a conceit among the players. Everything on some level is illusion. The game space is not real.

I'm selective about which player ideas I use. Recently as the PCs were exploring a dungeon and discussing amongst themselves what they might run across. One player suggested mind flayers just to be funny; mind flayers are a bit out of their league at their level. But it really fit in with the themes of the dungeon, and gave me a good idea of how to plant a plot hook I'd been looking to give them. So mind flayers it is!

A couple of PCs nearly died in the fight, but it was a very fun fight. So I was glad I used the player's idea, even though it made it more challenging than I had originally anticipated.

Did you tell the players that you only put mind flayers in the dungeon because one of them suggested it? If you didn't, then that's the heart and soul of illusionism.