Stakes, consequences - situation vs "no myth"

[pemerton]

This thread is prompted by RPGing with, and talking about RPGs with, @thefutilist. Those experiences have made me reflect on how I think about the relationship between GMing prep, and establishing stakes and consequences in the context of resolving the actions that players declare for their PCs.

There are a few ways into what it is that I'm thinking about. Here's one, from these pieces of advice from Magpie Games advice, about how the GM should make moves in Masks (which uses PbtA presentation and terminology):

Let’s say that I’m GMing and the Janus, a character named Grasshopper, has been making things difficult for criminal mastermind villain the Spider. Grasshopper is confronting the Spider in his office, and she’s trying to get a read on him. She gets a miss, though, so I’m allowed to make as hard a move as I choose. I could say, “The Spider smirks at you. Some of his goons enter, holding your brother—and they have a gun to his head.” I’m making the move “Capture someone” again, but this version is on the harder end of the spectrum—it implies that Grasshopper’s brother was captured off-screen, without the PCs having a chance to stop it. But this move also fits in with Masks’s principles, agendas, and the particular issues and GM moves associated with the Janus playbook. All that makes it a good move, well outside of whether or not it’s irrevocable. If I said, instead, “The Spider smirks at you. Some of his goons enter, holding your brother—and they have a gun to his head. The Spider nods, and one of the goons fires their gun at point blank. Your brother slumps to the ground,” then I’m not making a good move. This move is harder, more obviously irrevocable...but it violates one of the principles of the game, to make human life meaningful. . . .​

​

We talk about harder and softer moves in terms of irrevocability to communicate to new GMs that, yes, you can make hard moves that make things happen without giving the PCs a chance to intervene right then and there. . . .​

​

But making the move where the Spider reveals that he has captured her sister? That’s way harder—not in terms of irrevocability, but in terms of dramatic weight. Even I, as GM, am gonna feel that one—I like Grasshopper’s sister! I don’t want her to be in danger! But also I do, because I’m the audience to this story, too, and it’s the right hard move to make the scene dramatic and entertaining, especially in accordance with the principles, the agendas, and the Janus’s particular issues. So the principles and agendas of the game point GMs towards the interesting and hard dramatic moves, instead of simply couching things in terms of irrevocability. Which suggests that there are two ways we’ve been looking at and talking about hardness in our conversations throughout these books and across the Internet:​

• Irrevocability, where a harder move greatly changes the world without opportunity for intervention.
• Drama, where a harder move hits them where it hurts. . . .

​

So if we understand that when a GM gets to make “as hard a move as they like,” the game means both that they get to make as irrevocable and as dramatic a move as they like, then two questions arise: How do you make dramatic hard moves, and how do you choose exactly how dramatic they should be? Let’s focus on the first question. First of all, it’s easy to keep pointing at the agendas, principles, and moves of the game as an answer. They’re going to tell you what is and isn’t dramatically appropriate in your game—for example . . ., in Masks it runs up against one of the principles of the game to make the move that the Spider murders your brother in cold blood. It seems like a dramatic move, and it is, but it’s dramatically inappropriate for Masks. After the agendas, principles, and moves of the game, look to these factors:​

• The surprise of the move
• The target of the move
• The consequences of the move . . . .

​

So now, when you need to make a move, you have to figure out exactly how dramatically hard it should be. Just like with how irrevocably hard it should be, though, there’s no easy and fast answer. Not every move should be a surprise—sometimes, the best dramatic move for the moment is exactly what the PC fears and expects. Not every move should have an intensely dramatic target—sometimes, the best dramatic move for the moment is a direct move against the PC, or a general threat, or one that targets a tangential connection. . . .​

​

Always remember that you have control over the irrevocability and drama of your moves—they’re your tools, the dials you twist, to help your game along.​

thefutilist has criticised the approach and technique found in this example:

So to go back to the example of the Grasshopper confronting the Spider. Even if the player of the Grasshopper doesn’t know about the status of their brother. The stakes questions for the GM are different depending on when (in real time) he’d decided the Spider kidnapped her brother. So before the scene starts.

So making a move on a miss that involves retroactively deciding the brother has been kidnapped is adding more situation (and changing the stakes).

If you’re playing to find out which characters cross moral lines, then it has to follow causally from the means by which the characters act. Dropping in more negative situation means you’re no longer a mutual participant in resolving existing stakes questions. Instead you’re generating plot through twists and turns.

The criticism is that the GM's move, in this example, is not answering a stakes question. Rather, it is about introducing new stakes subsequent to the player declaring the action for their PC. Because of this, it "generates plot through twists and turns" rather than resolving conflict across a moral line (this phrase is borrowed from Vincent Baker).

The "twisty-turny" character of the Magpie Games example is further underlined by some of the considerations that are referred to: drama and dramatic weight; and entertainment and surprise.

I think I agree with @thefutilist, but want to work through it a bit more.

 

[pemerton]

In most RPGing of the sort that @thefutilist and I are talking about, the GM is going to have to make some stuff up in the course of play: the games we've been playing (Fantasy For Real, S/Lay W/Me), like many RPGs, involve setting up situations where the GM's prep won't cover all of the possible details - of what a place is like, and who is there, etc (the rules of both games expressly give permission to introduce new characters into the current situation) - nor every possible consequence of the things that the players have their PCs do.

What constraints should the GM adhere to in making these decisions - in making stuff up?

Apocalypse World has some pretty express text on this, is fairly well known, and comes out of the same tradition as Fantasy For Real and S/Lay W/Me, so I'll start with it (pp 96, 108-9):

Say This First and Often​

To the players: your job is to play your characters as though they were real people, in whatever circumstances they find themselves — cool, competent, dangerous people, but real.​

​

My job as MC is to treat your characters as though they were real people too, and to act as though Apocalypse World were real. . . .​

​

It’s not your job [as MC] to put their [the players'] characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. . . there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside. . . .​

​

The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline. When you find something you genuinely care about - a question about what will happen that you genuinely want to find out - letting the game’s fiction decide it is uniquely satisfying.​

This already seems to push against the Spider/Grasshopper example - because that example is not based on the fiction's own internal logic and causality. The AW rulebook goes on with more about how to "let the game's fiction decide" (pp 109, 115):

Always Say . . .
• What your prep demands.
• What honesty demands. . . .

Sometimes, disclaim decision-making. In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. The game gives you four key tools you can use to disclaim responsibility: you can put it in your NPCs’ hands, you can put it in the players’ hands, you can create a countdown, or you can make it a stakes question.

Say that there’s an NPC whose life the players have come to care about, for instance, and you don’t feel right about just deciding when and whether to kill her off:

You can (1) put it in your NPCs’ hands. Just ask yourself, in this circumstance, is Birdie really going to kill her? If the answer’s yes, she dies. If it’s no, she lives. Yes, this leaves the decision in your hands, but it gives you a way to make it with integrity.

You can (2) put it in the players’ hands. For instance, “Dou’s been shot, yeah, she’s shuddering and going into shock. What do you do?” If the character helps her, she lives; if the character doesn’t or can’t, she dies. You could even create a custom move for it, if you wanted, to serve the exact circumstances. . . .

You can (3) create a countdown. See the countdown section in the fronts chapter, page 143. Just sketch a quick countdown clock. Mark 9:00 with “she gets hurt,” 12:00 with “she dies.” Tick it up every time she goes into danger, and jump to 9:00 if she’s in the line of fire. This leaves it in your hands, but gives you a considered and concrete plan, instead of leaving it to your whim.

Or you can (4) make it a stakes question. See the stakes section in the fronts chapter, page 145.“Will Dou live through all this?” Now you’ve promised yourself not to just answer it yourself, yes or no, she lives or she dies. Whenever it comes up, you must give the answer over to your NPCs, to the players’ characters, to the game’s moves, or to a countdown, no cheating.​

Options 3 and 4 here, together with the injunction to always say what is demanded by prep, point to the rules for GM preparation (quotes are from pp 136, 143, 145-6):

Prep For Play: Fronts
A front is a set of linked threats. Threats are people, places and conditions that, because of where they are and what they’re doing, inevitably threaten the players’ characters - so a front is all of the individual threats that arise from a single given threatening situation.

Creating a front means making decisions about backstory and about NPC motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care. You do it outside of play, between sessions, so that you have the time and space to think. . . .

The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your fronts, playing your threats, but that doesn’t mean anything mechanical. It means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do. . .

Countdown Clocks
A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’.

When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created. Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen . . . As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments.

Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out.

For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. . . . Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions . . .

Stakes
. . .

Write 2-4 questions about the fates of different characters you’re interested in, NPCs and the PCs but mostly NPCs, by name. . . .

Stakes should be concrete, absolute, irrevocable in their consequences. People’s lives. Maybe not necessarily their lives or deaths, at least not every time, but always materially significant changes to their lives. Resolving the outstanding question means that nothing will ever be the same for them.

They should also be things you’re genuinely interested in finding out, not in deciding. It’s the central act of discipline that MCing Apocalypse World requires: when you write a question as a stake, you’re committing to not answer it yourself. You’re committing to let the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters, answer it.

That’s the discipline and also the reward. Your control over your NPCs’ fates is absolute. They’re your little toys, you can do anything to them you choose. Raise them up and mow them down. Disclaiming responsibility for the two or three of them you like best is a relief. And when you write down a question you’re genuinely interested in, letting the game’s fiction answer it is uniquely satisfying.​

The discussion of stakes questions makes it clear, if it already wasn't, that choosing Option 4 from sometimes disclaim decision-making doesn't itself provide a process to generate an answer. Rather, it formally records the decision to disclaim decision-making. But then some other process - a countdown, the players, or the internal logic of the fiction (perhaps mediated via a player-side move) - must actually yield the answer.

Option 3 leaves it in the GM's hands, but not to whim. The GM has to make principled decisions about how to advance clocks. These will be based on the internal logic of the fiction, again perhaps mediated by player-side moves.

So in the end on the GM side it comes back to the internal logic of the fiction, whether the GM's engagement with that is structured (by a countdown, or a player-side move) or "raw". Option 1 is a special case of a "raw" decision about the internal logic of the fiction: "Just ask yourself, in this circumstance, is Birdie really going to kill her?"

I posted about this not too long ago:

What is integrity here? "Just ask yourself, in this circumstance, is Birdie really going to kill her?" When I read this, I am pointed back in the same direction as by Fantasy For Real

<snip>

It's about character, not impersonal causation. And, in the end, aesthetic intuition.

some thoughts on how to do consequences of failure. Should the GM's narration of failure have regard to the values/aspirations of the character (whose action has failed)?

From the technical point of view of what do the rules say?, this differs across RPGs. For instance, Burning Wheel says (at least more-or-less) that it should. This pushes in the direction of no myth + flags, which @thefutilist doesn't enjoy, and has criticised with reference to the Magpie Games example. (Though personally I don't think BW is quite the same.)

Whereas Fantasy For Real points to something else:

consult your understanding of everyone in the whole pickle, including the players’ characters and yours. Some of them are present in the current moment and some of them are not, so refer to your local map – and make new ones – to consider who is affected by the current events, right now, soon, or later. By proactively playing their responses to whatever has just happened, you know what you will say “next.” . . .

At any time, consider all the active participants in the pickle, including the players’ characters, to decide which one will do something next, and where that might be. . . .

shift the circumstances of play upon the outcome of a test. Depending on what’s being attempted and whom it targets, either the acting character or the target may be affected, or both, and often aspects of the immediate environment too. . . .

The whole pickle changes through play: tests change scenes, and altered scenes change everyone’s perspectives or plans. . . .

Play the NPCs as determined to get what they want, and willing to try harder and differently if they have to.​

This has some similarity to "living world"-type approaches, but I think it would be a mistake to equate them.

Perhaps most importantly, I think, there's no reference in the FfR instruction to likelihood by reference to imagined causation. Rather, the GM is instructed to play the responses of those affected by events. The focus is on what the NPCs want, and their perspectives or plans.

This difference is reinforced by FfR's lack of nitty-gritty resolution of the D&D-esque/RM-esque sort. Which means that the GM in FfR can more easily and clearly connect big changes in the situation to test outcomes, rather than the sort of ad hoc-ery that D&D can call for. The rules reinforce this:

You [the GM] also have the job to impose transitions at a larger scale, shifting play location and often skipping some time as well. This is a new “opening” or initiation of play, similar to a scene-shift in other media, although without scripted outcomes. . . .

This dynamic practice permits you to initiate sudden conflicts or remarkable coincidences, whether in the current moment or during the shifts in time and space. . . .​

<snip>

There are a couple of other differences too:

On the GM side, the rules instruct the GM to "Add your characters’ dialogue into play, expressing their views and concerns about the events – over-sharing, in fact." This is a version of DitV's *actively reveal the town in play. No GM turtling.

*And on the player side, FfR has its picklet rules - so players can establish goals/relationships and make them part of the situation. Which is binding even if the Elan test fails, though on a failure the GM gets to narrate how "your efforts cause trouble".​

These help make the characters the centre of the situation. Not an impersonal "world in motion".

So how does the GM decide "which one will do something next"? As per what I've said above, it's not by running a model, or extrapolating impersonal causation. Nor is it by deciding what would make for a good story - the only references to "story" in the FfR rules are in negative terms:

[Making a pickle] is not like writing a story or script. Do not consider where it may go, what the adventurer characters might do, what should happen, or anything else that must be planned. . . .

There is no story plan . . .

The game master is not “telling you a story.” . . .

There is no formal number of adventures to play nor any expectation of dramatic character development, or of an over-arching storyline.​

The only answer I can give at this point is aesthetic intuition.

I want to add: the GM's aesthetic intuition is not about what would be entertaining or dramatic but what makes sense for this character, given the established fictional circumstances.

In the Spider/Grasshopper example, I don't think there's any worry that about the kidnapping making sense. It's rather that it doesn't respect the established fictional circumstances.

 

[soviet]

My initial reaction is that you have 'cut to the chase' in declaring Grasshopper's brother to have been captured off-screen like that, with no prior build up. So the subsequent stakes may feel a bit more arbitrary and unearned. Arguably it feeds into that old RPG trope of PCs having no relatives because they will only end up being turned into hostages.

I would think a more effective way would be to 'earn' the situation by having it grow from the fiction, maybe as a front. This could be focused around the Grasshopper failing to deal with Spider effectively before he got to this level of resources and power, or around the Grasshopper failing to protect his alias well enough to keep his family out of harm's way, or around the Grasshopper's relationship with his own brother and failure to keep him from falling in with the wrong crowd, go into vigilantism or investigation on his own, etc. All of which lead to the classic Spider-man trope of 'this is basically my fault'.

 

[pemerton]

Here's some Burning Wheel rules text, from Gold Revised (pp 9, 11, 13, 24, 30-32, 72, 377; but it goes all the way back to Revised) and the Codex (p 116; but it goes back to the Adventure Burner):

In the game, players take on the roles of characters inspired by history and works of fantasy fiction. These characters are a list of abilities rated with numbers and a list of player-determined priorities. . . .​

​

The GM presents the players with problems based on the players’ priorities. The players use their characters’ abilities to overcome these obstacles. To do this, dice are rolled and the results are interpreted using the rules presented in this book. . . .​

​

Burning Wheel is very much a game. While players undertake the roles of their characters and embellish their actions with performance and description, rolling the dice determines success or failure and, hence, where the story goes. . . .​

​

Let’s start with the core of the Burning Wheel system. We call it “Intent and Task.” . . . What do you want do and why do you want your character to do it? . . .​

​

what happens after the dice have come to rest and the successes are counted? If the successes equal or exceed the obstacle,​

the character has succeeded in his goal - he achieved his intent and completed the task. . . .​

​

When the dice are rolled and don’t produce enough successes to meet the obstacle, the character fails. What does this mean? It means the stated intent does not come to pass. . . . When a test is failed, the GM introduces a complication. . . . Try not to present flat negative results . . . Strive to introduce complications through failure as much as possible. . . .​

​

Unless there is something at stake in the story you have created, don’t bother with the dice. Keep moving, keep describing, keep roleplaying. But as soon as a character wants something that he doesn’t have, needs to know something he doesn’t know, covets something that someone else has, roll the dice.​

​

Flip that around and it reveals a fundamental rule in Burning Wheel game play: When there is conflict, roll the dice. There is no social agreement for the resolution of conflict in this game. Roll the dice and let the obstacle system guide the outcome. Success or failure doesn’t really matter. So long as the intent of the task is clearly stated, the story is going somewhere. . . .​

​

When burning a character, a player in Burning Wheel designs relationships for his character that are important to him. Relationships exist in order to define important personae not controlled by the players. Traditionally, they’re called NPCs by the GM and players. During play, they are used by the players and GM to get into and out of trouble, provide detail and depth to the background, and create conflicts.​

​

If one of your relationships is your wife in the village, the GM is supposed to use this to create trouble in play. If you’re hunting a vampyr, of course it’s your wife who is his victim! Suddenly, you’re swept up in a plot of terror and intrigue.​

. . .​

According to the Burning Wheel (page 32), when a test is made, the player announces intent and task and the GM states the results of a possible failure. It’s a good habit to get into, and a valid rule, but I confess that I do not explicitly announce the terms of each test. Why? . . . I find the results of failure implicit in most tests. If I’m doing my job correctly as the GM, the situation is so charged that the player knows he’s going to get dragged into a world of naughty word if he fails. We project the consequences into the fiction as we’re talking in-character and jockeying before the test.​

I think that BW is different from the Spider/Grasshopper example, but I don't know if it's easy to explain why. The example of the Vampyr and the PC's wife can make them look the same; and the introduction of complications on failure can look pretty twisty-turny.

I think it goes back to stakes questions. In BW, the fundamental stakes questions are established by the players in choosing the priorities that are components of their PC builds. Relationships are among those priorities - and so the player, in making their PC's relationship with their wife a "player-determined priority" has put the fate of that NPC, and her relationship with the PC, at stake. The GM's decision about the Vampyr particularises the stakes question, but doesn't fundamentally change it.[/INDENT]

The same thing with consequences, I think. When is something at stake, such that the dice must be rolled? When it speaks to a players' priority for their PC - and it is the GM's job to push things in this direction. And the complications then flow from and iterate back on this.

The game gives the players tools - a little bit like Fantasy For Real's picklet rules - to establish elements of the fiction that will bring the players they have determined for their PCs to the fore, namely, Circles and Wises (and similar "knowledge" skills). The Codex gives an example (p 99), of

a group who needed to sneak into a well-guarded citadel tower. Dro chimed in, “I have Architecture. I want to use my knowledge to find us a secret entrance.”​

The instructions to players expressly tell players to use the rules to help establish compelling situations (Gold Revised, p 552):

• Players in Burning Wheel must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. Players are supposed to push and risk their characters, so they grow and change in unforeseen ways.

• Use the mechanics! Players are expected to call for a Duel of Wits or a Circles test or to demand the Range and Cover rules in a shooting match with a Dark Elf assassin. Don’t wait for the GM to invoke a rule - invoke the damn thing yourself and get the story moving!

• Participate. Help enhance your friends’ scenes and step forward and make the most of your own. It doesn’t matter if you “win,” so long as the story spins in a new and interesting direction. If the story doesn’t interest you, it’s your job to create interesting situations and involve yourself.​

I think this role of the players in BW, which is different and more "authorial" than AW, changes the play experience. There is less "exploration" of the situation as a pre-given fictional state of affairs. But I don't think it is "plot created via twists and turns".

I also think that Luke Crane's remark about the results of failure being implicit is important. The player's authorial contribution is in establishing the situation - both big-picture (eg relationships) and also more immediate (what is going on in this scene?). But determining outcomes still depends on rolls, and it is the GM who is responsible for failure.

This is where aesthetic intuition comes into play. But rather than intuition about what another character wants (as in AW or FfR), it is intuition about what is flowing from the situation which was such that the player had to roll dice, rather than the GM just "saying 'yes'".

 

[pemerton]

For the player to play their PC in the context of rising action across a moral line, they have to know where the moral line sits. Or, at least, be able to know.

This is why the GM in DitV has to actively reveal the town in play, and why the GM in FfR has to have their PCs "over-share". This is how the player comes to know the situation.

This was discussed a bit in the 4e era, in the context of an example of skill challenge resolution in the 4e DMG, where the GM has decided ahead of time that "The NPC refuses to be intimidated by the PCs. Each use of this skill [Intimidate] earns a failure" (DMG p 76). To me, what was often neglected in that discussion was that the example also included this GM decision, as part of prep:

Insight (moderate DCs): You empathize with the NPC and use that knowledge to encourage assistance. First success with this skill reveals that any use of the Intimidate skill earns a failure.​

So while the GM does not actively reveal the NPC's disposition in play, the set-up includes a pathway for the players to obtain that information, and itself frames a choice across a moral line: a player who has their PC go straight to intimidation rather than empathy suffers a repercussion of that choice.

Of course, this set-up only makes sense if, in the fiction, the NPC is someone whom the PCs can't intimidate. (In the DMG example, it is a Duke sitting at the head of his banquet table.) But that just goes back to the importance of "saying what honesty demands" and being true to the fiction's internal logic.

In Burning Wheel, the moral line is not revealed in quite the same way as in DitV or FfR. The players' own decisions in PC-building - namely, establishing the priorities that are components of PC build - goes a long way to establishing the salient moral lines. And the game focuses play on these both by the instructions to GMs for framing and consequence, and via the rules for when players are awarded Persona points (Gold Revised, p 64, but like the other quotes from this imprint the rules go all the way back to Revised):

Embodiment
When a player captures the mood of the table perfectly and further drives the story onward, one persona point is awarded. Moments like great speeches, desperate decisions or gruesome revenge fall into this category. . . . a player really must go above and beyond in his roleplaying.

Moldbreaker
If a player comes to a point in the story where his Beliefs, Instincts and traits conflict with a decision he must make - a direction in which he must go - and he plays out the inner turmoil in a believable and engaging manner, then he earns a persona point. . . . To earn the reward, the player must really push his character.​

Because "the story" and "the direction in which the player's character must go" are themselves consequences of the player-determined priorities that are components of that character, these rewards are earned for the player's engagement with the moral line(s) that they have established in building their PC.

Part of what gives these rewards bite is that the GM can hold a player's feet to the fire (Gold Revised, pp 54-5):

A player may change his character’s Beliefs as he sees fit. Characters are meant to grow and change through play. hanging Beliefs is a vital part of that growth. However, the GM has final say over when a Belief may be changed. If he feels the player is changing a Belief to wriggle out of a difficult situation and not as part of character growth, then he may delay the change until a time that he sees as appropriate.​

*​

The overall point of this particular post has been to try and draw out more about the relationship between a player's play of their PC and the addressing of a stakes question - as opposed to the changing of the stakes by the GM's narration of consequences.

In AW and FfR, this is established by holding the prepared situation firm but actively revealing it to the players in play. Burning Wheel is more "no myth"-y, but the stakes questions are rendered firm in the process of framing and resolution, based on what is express and implicit in the interplay of the players' priorities for their PCs and the GM's decisions about framing and obstacles.

I hope I've succeeded in showing a genuine contrast with the Grasshopper/Spider example, where the stakes questions are not held firm but are retrospectively established in the service of "drama".

I also hope I've succeeded in showing a contrast with play that focuses around "exploration", where the players make low-stakes action declarations to prompt the GM to reveal more about the setting and situation, so that players can learn the truth about the situation and hence the stakes questions. (This is the sort of play that I have sometimes characterised as "playing to learn what is in the GM's notes".)

 

[pemerton]

Here is Vincent Baker on immersion:

You know that thing where you're so into your character that you adopt her emotions, mannerisms, outlook, mood, heart and soul? It's a rush? You aren't thinking about your character, you just do what she'd do without thinking? It gives you deep insights into your character that turn out, on reflection, to be deep insights into yourself, your friends, and the world? It feels totally alien and natural at once? You crave it? That's what I mean by immersion. I assume that's what everybody means by it. . . .​

​

I propose that Immersion happens when three things coincide. . . . The three things are the affirmed rightness of your vision, permission to act with passion, and faith in the robustness of the game's fiction. ("Time" is not one of the three, although they all take non-zero time to develop.)​

​

The affirmed rightness of your vision​

This is social. Your fellow players share ownership of your character, remember; you want and need for them to affirm that your vision of your character is right. They trust you with your character. They won't step in and contradict, override, undercut.​

​

Permission to act with passion​

Furthermore, whatever you have your character do, they won't react defensively. If your character threatens something they value, they'll deal with the threat passionately in response, but without ever carrying the struggle up into the social level.​

​

You aren't constrained by the fear that having your character act might step on someone else's toes.​

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Faith in the robustness of the game's fiction​

And you have to trust that the game has room for your character in it. You can't be worrying whether this decision that your character's making might break the game. You have to know, securely enough that it's unconscious, that even if your character transforms the game entirely, the game'll survive.​

​

There. The affirmed rightness of your vision, permission to act with passion, and faith in the robustness of the game's fiction.​

It's normal to think of immersion as something on the player side rather than the GM side. But I think what Baker says here is closely related to the "aesthetic intuition" that the GM has to use to make decisions about what to say next.

Baker gives this example in DitV (p 89):

What’s at stake: do you get murdered in your bed?

— The stage: your room at night. A possessed sinner creeps into your room without waking you.

— You roll only Acuity, because you’re asleep. I roll Body + Will.

— My first Raise will be to hit you in the head with my axe. I get my axe dice too! I’m rolling a lot more dice than you, so probably you have to Take the Blow. But check it out - that means you take Fallout and get to say how, it doesn’t mean you’re dead. You aren’t dead unless the whole conflict goes my way.

— So let’s say that you take the blow: “I hear him coming even in my sleep, but he gashes me bad...” Then it’s your Raise, and you can escalate: “...I come awake already in motion, with blood in my eyes and my knife in my hand!” Away we go!

I should tell you, in an early playtest I startled one of my players bad with this very conflict. In most roleplaying games, saying “an enemy sneaks into your room in the middle of the night and hits you in the head with an axe” is cheating. I’ve hosed the character and the player with no warning and no way out. Not in Dogs, though: the resolution rules are built to handle it. I don’t have to pull my punches!

(You’ve GMed a bunch of RPGs before, right? Think about what I just said for a minute. You know how you usually pull your punches?)​

That "pulling of punches" is the lack of permission to act with passion. It's admitting a type of "external" constraint on the fiction, like drama or entertainment.

As Baker went on to say,

I think that a game design that fulfilled these design goals [necessary for immersion] would create extremely intense, profound play. Furthermore, I think that as a design challenge it's an excellent one: difficult but not impossible, at the frontier of theory, compelling and immediate, practically guaranteed to make a successful game.​

When Baker was writing this in 2005, I don't know how far short of it he felt that DitV falls (if at all). AW is his best-known attempt to satisfy these design specs.

 

[thefutilist]

I want to Steelman BW and DW but imagine me doing it with a raised eyebrow or something.

If we put FFR, Sorcerer, AW (as I interpret it) into a category, situational constraint Then put Showdown into another category, mechanical constraint). We could say that BW and DW are closer to Showdown than they are FFR, Sorcerer, AW. With BW in particular this becomes really apparent when we look at Torchbearer.

Importantly showdown has the equivalent of flags that point directly to the issues addressed and determine framing.

If I was trying to be kind to MASKS I’d say the real issue is that this stuff is introduced off the back of the resolution mechanics in a way that’s just sloppy. Contrasted with Torchbearer where introducing twists has more constraint.

Furthermore, when I’ve talked to adherents and proponents of DW and BW (really meaning you and other members of our extended play group), stuff is chunked such that it resembles or is or constrains, in the same way as situational play.

Take Champions for instance. That’s in the situational bucket but there’s going to be chapters where the GM has to re-prep or recommit to solid stuff. Say after three sessions they prep and introduce the next set of antagonists. Or Dogs with a Town. If you scale that down you could see how flag based play could constitute a load of mini situations determined by the belief (or Bonds in DW).

In the grasshopper case there is no cohering mechanical flag, just the principles and moves and they don’t serve the same function.

 

[aramis erak]

I'll note that the Burning Empires rules, players frame about half the scenes (assuming 1-3p and 1 gm). It clearly focuses the narrative even tighter with the scene budget...
As with BW, the intent and technique distinction holds, and a lot of the advice is identical to that in BWR. But it hits differently once you get to Scene Budgets.

The scene budgeting means every scene is important to the framer, and since that includes player framers...
It also heavily restricts rolled actions - each PC gets only one action (not counting Circles rolls) scene, and if it's not a formal conflict, a limited number of rolls, even.

And having so few rolls per session, consequences and the usual BW Negotiation... it gets pretty intense. Every Roll is drama, because every roll is precious.

 

[thefutilist]

I’m working through this as well so I’m not sure how relevant the following is.

There’s a strain of advice that basically goes as follows:

If the character has a statement about their values, let’s say ‘just at all costs’, then it’s the GM’s job to pressure that. At all costs? Really? What about now? Even now?


So if I’m playing Grasshopper and we had such a statement (maybe even informally), then the Spider bringing in the Grasshoppers brother is applying the pressure.

At the extreme this is framed as saying it’s the GM’s duty to bring it and it’s actually a failure of their role if they don’t. The player is saying they want exactly the type of situation where their brother is in peril.


In situational play this just isn’t guaranteed. In fact I’d say there are varieties of no-myth play where this isn’t guaranteed.




To break a stakes question into pieces we can look at four components.

How the stakes are established

How they are instantiated

How they are answered

Whether we care


In Apocalypse World the care component comes first and then gets turned into a stakes question. It’s notable that this is GM side only.


Let’s take a hypothetical game where it’s established up front that it will end with the Spider holding the Grasshoppers brother hostage and the Grasshopper having to make a hard choice. Let his brother die or let the Spider go.

No one cares about that choice at the start of the game, I mean maybe in the abstract but presumably the goal of such a game is to create content that provides context and investment around this final choice.

Montsegur 1244 is an actual example of such a game. You’re a Cathar and the choice is whether to renounce your faith or be thrown on the fire. Showdown utilises a similar mechanic around which character the player wants to live or die. At the start of the game they have no context for the choice and probably couldn’t care either way.

So stakes questions in the abstract, don’t align with what the players themselves are necessarily interested in.

This becomes apparent when what the player character is invested in, is different from what the player is invested in. This potential incongruity of investment provides a lot of the complexity and emergence in certain resolution systems, in others it can be fatal to the game. Indexing has to assume a certain congruence between the character want and the player want to work well (imo).



To add another knot into this. How we as players parse the fiction, our reaction to it on the thematic level, is also not necessarily totally congruent with either what we’ve invested in or what the character is invested in.




@pemerton Here’s a point of contention that I’m honestly unsure about but might help us get to something.

The Elven sword master in ‘the Gift’ has an obvious decision baked in. Will they take up their sword again?

In situational play (which the scenario could be played as, this is maybe an important tangent), anyway in situational play. We don’t know the circumstances around this decision or IF it will ever become a relevant decision. The GM’s job is orthogonal to applying pressure. The painted context will occur ‘naturally’ or not. At least in idealised form, I think it’s maybe more complex than that in practice.



I often treat all no-myth the same but this flattens out complexity. Even putting it into the two buckets of genre play and flag play is ignoring a lot of important variables. The Pulsipher critique of the California crew is obvious given the medium (although not necessarily true). I find a lot of the Narrativist push back amounts to ‘of course the players have agency, I mean I’m sucking their dick aren’t I.’

A lot of the stuff you mentioned in terms of attitude and approach to play can be invisible in rules text but you see it downstream in particular implementations of technique. What is it that MASKS is going for?

It doesn’t seem like in MASKS the Spider can kidnap the brother and it turns out the Grasshopper doesn’t care ‘yeah shoot him, you’d be doing us all a favour.’ In fact I suspect such a choice, in theory, would be disorientating. Isn’t the miss meant to index a failure of the character to achieve their goals? A downbeat moment?


Hmm I don’t think that constitutes a thesis of any kind but I’m throwing it out there anyway.

 

[pemerton]

There’s a strain of advice that basically goes as follows:

If the character has a statement about their values, let’s say ‘just at all costs’, then it’s the GM’s job to pressure that. At all costs? Really? What about now? Even now?

<snip>

At the extreme this is framed as saying it’s the GM’s duty to bring it and it’s actually a failure of their role if they don’t.

<snip>

In situational play this just isn’t guaranteed. In fact I’d say there are varieties of no-myth play where this isn’t guaranteed.

<snip>

I often treat all no-myth the same but this flattens out complexity. Even putting it into the two buckets of genre play and flag play is ignoring a lot of important variables.

This all seems right.

stakes questions in the abstract, don’t align with what the players themselves are necessarily interested in.

This becomes apparent when what the player character is invested in, is different from what the player is invested in.

<snip>

Indexing has to assume a certain congruence between the character want and the player want to work well

This seems right too.

(Just to confirm: by "indexing" you mean *the GM drawing on the player's statement of value/flag/etc to apply pressure.)

How we as players parse the fiction, our reaction to it on the thematic level, is also not necessarily totally congruent with either what we’ve invested in or what the character is invested in.

This sounds like it's true, but I haven't internalised it into my thinking to the same degree as the previous two bundles of quotes. If you've got an example in mind, I'd be interested?

Eg I don't know if you've would see our game of Showdown as an example? After the first flashback scene, you succeeded in making me hate my character. But he still won the duel, as per my narration - I was loyal to him to the bitter end!

Here’s a point of contention that I’m honestly unsure about but might help us get to something.

The Elven sword master in ‘the Gift’ has an obvious decision baked in. Will they take up their sword again?

In situational play (which the scenario could be played as, this is maybe an important tangent), anyway in situational play. We don’t know the circumstances around this decision or IF it will ever become a relevant decision. The GM’s job is orthogonal to applying pressure. The painted context will occur ‘naturally’ or not. At least in idealised form, I think it’s maybe more complex than that in practice.

This seems right to a degree. But let's look at the Belief and Instincts:

Beliefs
*Violence begets only Grief; I am done with it.
*If I serve Prince Finrir well, and help him become the Etharch he was meant to be, I will have absolution for failing my father.
*If I fail to help Prince Finrir become who he was born to be, I must pass to the West and bring my sorrow with me.

Instincts
*When challenged, take the defensive stance.
*When violence is shouted for, speak peace.
*Keep my sword in reach.​

In addition, there are also his various Affiliations, Reputations and Relationships that place him in a network of Elven nobility based on his own background and reputation as the master Sword Singer.

Normally, the BW GM, if playing in accordance with the rules, would be looking for the opportunity to frame scenes that suggest violence and challenge, probably in the context of those relationships to nobility (and especially the Prince). In The Gift, though, it is the Dwarf players who have the authority over opening and closing scenes; so the normal rules don't quite apply.

Still, the scenario does tell the GM the following:

As the GM, it’s really important for you to familiarize yourself with the Beliefs, Instincts, Relationships and histories of the characters. . . .

As players lose focus or become lost or tired. Talk to them. Get their feedback. Find out what their plans are. Remind them about their Beliefs if they are foundering for direction or uncertain. Play their consciences. Be the devil on their shoulders. Don’t tell them what to do, but feel free to make lurid and dangerous suggestions.​

The GM can also use their authority over NPCs - various servitors in the Dwarven Halls - to similarly push the players:

The GM plays the role of any and all of these secondary characters. Usually, all they do is guard doors or relay messages. Any important action in this scenario must be taken by one of the player characters. Of course, the GM should use his role as the servants and staff to heat up the situation. He should gossip about what he heard so-and-so talking about, or scream bloody murder if he sees it.​

And the GM is given the following advice in relation to the Sword Singer:

There’s this great temptation [for the character] to use the sword and end it all quickly and decisively. Play this up. Urge him to do what he does best. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. Either he fights passionately for peace and saves the day, or succumbs to his Grief and wades into the scenes committed to pure cathartic violence. Cool. . . .

prod him to action. Remind him, if he wants a certain course of action - whether bloodshed or peace - he’s got to undertake it himself!​

So while it's true that we don't know the circumstances around the decision to take up the sword again (or not); and while the decision is not quite coming like a freight train; still, I think that it's prospect is more than just a possibility.

I'm not sure where that leaves us on this point of contention - maybe it's about how "The GM’s job is orthogonal to applying pressure" (you) relates to "Play their consciences. Be the devil on their shoulders" (Luke Crane). My own take is that the GM applies pressure by being the devil on the shoulder - and, in more conventional BW play, by presenting scenes that create opportunities and invitations (so "the devil on the shoulder" is presented "diegetically"). The player is the one who makes the choice ("Now?" "What about now?").

In the games we've played, the closest to this I think has been The Lover in S/Lay W/Me. The GM is obliged to present the Lover in scene; and the way the game is set up gives the player an incentive to take action towards the Lover in some fashion (in order to get the dice); but what action the player takes is up to them (Abandon them to a grim fate / Bring them with you when you leave / Leave alone, gracefully / Stay there with them).

A lot of the stuff you mentioned in terms of attitude and approach to play can be invisible in rules text but you see it downstream in particular implementations of technique. What is it that MASKS is going for?

It doesn’t seem like in MASKS the Spider can kidnap the brother and it turns out the Grasshopper doesn’t care ‘yeah shoot him, you’d be doing us all a favour.’ In fact I suspect such a choice, in theory, would be disorientating. Isn’t the miss meant to index a failure of the character to achieve their goals? A downbeat moment?

This is interesting. To stretch (what I take to be) the point of the example a little, it's as if there is no analogue of Embodiment and Mouldbreaker.

Or to look at it more technically: in BW the failure narration should index the intent of the action; not some more abstract stakes question that is found in the various "flags". Whereas the Grasshopper/Spider example is going straight to a flag, rather than some more narrowly-construed intent of the action that failed. (And in a way that's no surprise, as I think Masks - following AW - doesn't use "intent and task" resolution.)