Torchbearer 2nd ed: first impressions

[kenada]

I don't think it is Right to Dream, because as a player you can't just turn up and play with no metagame agenda other than exploring your character and the situation. I think if you do that, you'll get hosed. You have to actively think about how you can "win" - collecting and spending your resources, optimising the distribution of tests across the party, etc.

Isn’t that part of the genre emulation? I would expect someone who isn’t concerned enough about succeeding in a dangerous environment to fare very poorly.

 

[pemerton]

Isn’t that part of the genre emulation? I would expect someone who isn’t concerned enough about succeeding in a dangerous environment to fare very poorly.

I think Ron Edwards comments here apply, with "gamist/step on up" in place of "narrativist/story now":

Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.​

In the context of Torchbearer, I want to say there is no such "simulationism" as one where the situation has lots of challenges/obstacles embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome, and so the players can't resolve the situation with actually "stepping on up" and deploying the resources the game gives them to overcome those challenges. That's gamism/"step on up"/"skilled play".

To put it another way: in Torchbearer I can't just portray a character who is concerned about succeeding in a dangerous environment, and make Dungeoneering checks to overcome those dangers in the way a Classic Traveller player makes Engineering checks at certain specified moments to make sure the jump drive works. I have to actually come up with solutions to the problems that deploy the resources the game gives me. To use language I see often on these boards, which I don't think is perfect but which might convey my point, the game challenges the player, not (just) the character.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Motivation is not relevant to Baker's clouds and boxes analysis. The player has their PC take the higher ground in order to be better able to fight their foe. The player has their PC use a trait in a certain way to get some or other advantage. But one is clouds-to-boxes, the other is boxes-to-clouds.

The object of analysis is the process of play: how the shared fiction is established, and what role (if any) cues/mechanics play in establishing it.

In the high ground example, it is already established in the fiction that that there is high ground. Then the player declares I stand on the high ground - and that fictional change yields a mechanical consequence. Hence it is clouds-to-boxes.

That mechanical consequence (+2 to hit) interacts with another mechanical state of affairs (the dice roll to hit) to produce an arrow from boxes back to clouds - Your character hits mine.

When a TB trait is used, it's in the context of resolving a test, in order to settle the content of the fiction. It is established that the PC is doing such-and-such a thing: that is the action declaration. But it's not established that they are doing it hurriedly, or carefully, or whatever. And the process is that the player establishes a mechanical state of affairs - eg suffering a debuff and thereby earning a check; or spending a limited resource (uses per session) and getting an advantage die - and as part of the rules for doing that, also establishes some fiction (eg I was quick-witted and so go the drop on them or I jumped the gun and misjudged the situation). The fiction has no "life" to it other than as mere colour that is an accompaniment to doing the mechanical thing. It is boxes-to-clouds.

I don't think this is an accurate account of how Torchbearer plays. Torchbearer is not "if you do it, you do it"; and as a special case of that general feature, the GM does not impose trait-based mechanical consequences that follow from how players declare their actions. Players establish trait-based mechanical consequences when they want them, and as part of the rules for doing that must also narrate some appropriate fiction.

Right, this is all true IME. So, the very example @clearstream mentions is one that is derived from our play. My character was quick-witted, and descending a drop using ropes and pitons. I'd already invoked my Nature, so I had rather more dice than I needed (and invoking nature itself followed a similar logic of "hey I need more dice"). So, I chose to do a hasty job, using Quick-witted to justify taking a 1d penalty and earning a check. It was a pure 'boxes' thing! No way did it start with the fiction! Fiction is clearly pretty important in any RPG, TB2 included, but it is OFTEN a 'map of possibilities', like a maze, you can go left or right, well, you can deploy various traits, abilities, skills, and wises, which ones depend on the fiction at any given moment. You make your check, you succeed/fail by some margin, the GM does his thing, and it all references the fiction, but a LOT of it starts in mechanics. Where fiction is MORE significant, in a story sense, is in deciding how things play out.

So, for example, last week we beat a Hedge Witch in a negotiation. Well, that was tricky, but at the end we naturally had to compromise a bit. We agreed to take on another adventure, we got some help from him, and assuming we survive, we'll get what we were originally after. At least in the case of my character, that 'originally after' stems from his belief and general background. So, fiction is central in terms of the overall story and thus establishing our goals in a given scenario, but at a detailed level IME so far, we operate based on "what mechanics can I justify being invoked here that will give me the best advantage." In that sense TB2 feels very OSR D&D!

As best I can judge, PbtA and Torchbearer do not have a great deal in common as far as the process of action declaration and action resolution is concerned, until we get to consequence narration where a Torchbearer GM who is familiar with the PbtA "soft move, hard move" approach to narrating consequences will benefit from that, I think, in narrating twists.

Yeah, at least in my PbtA play, there's much more of a feel of really starting purely from the fiction. Your bonds may be considered when you think about how you will react, for example, but I don't recall a lot of strategizing how I'm going to get +1 forward or something. Its more like if I don't have a good idea how to proceed I might invoke DR in a DW game, but its less about getting dice bonuses and closer to a D&D-esque sort of "I want to evaluate which directions I can go next." I would generally think (though my experience is pretty limited) that TB2 is going to put "get me a check" or "How can I bring untaxed nature into play so I get more dice?" TB2 is also a very 'conflict centered' game. Exploration is more 'glue' than anything. You get to a conflict, and its all basically this structured process where you roll against obstacles in a structured way. Even in exploration it has felt more like we came to some keyed situation and it has an Ob rating, and we came up with how to get the dice we needed with the least grind, chance of a twist/consquence, and the most chance of a check! (all without using any inventory that wasn't required).

I think it is labelled Describe to live. The GM describes the situation or obstacle - which is fiction - and the players describe what their PCs do to overcome it - which is fiction. But the process of then determining the full scope of the action declaration - including who is helping or aiding, what gear is being used, etc - and the process of resolving that - what skill is being tested, what fate or persona is being spent, what traits activated, etc - is not fiction first at all. AW and DW have no real analogue to this. And obviously rolling the dice in those RPGs is not much like building and then rolling and resolving a dice pool in Torchbearer.

Exactly. DW for instance is generally more forgiving in absolute mechanical terms, there aren't the sort of harsh conditions that stack up on you through the grind/failure as there are in TB2. You generally feel a lot less urgency to milk every throw of the dice, though some will be pretty significant. The dice throwing mechanics are also a lot simpler. You always have 2d6, the target numbers don't vary. You might get hold/forward, and you do have ability bonuses, but that stuff is simple to game out, the strong guy tosses checks for 'strong stuff'. TB2 requires a LOT more thought in terms of getting the right dice etc. So in DW you spend a second or two probably with "OK, what am I doing about the charging orc?" but in TB2 you might well all spend 2 minutes with your sheets figuring that out!

Now maybe the differences get compressed with some GMs. DW can definitely produce very high pressure play that really rewards "hey, if I make a DR check now, I can possible get a significant advantage later, but it might also expose us to a soft move, hmmm...." and things can 'snowball', the PC's inventory DOES have significance, etc. Likewise I think a GM could really surface the story and move things quicker and slightly de-emphasize the "milking the mechanics" kind of thing in TB2. It might require building a certain confidence in the GM using a style where maybe not every misstep or untaken advantage is deadly.

At least to me, you seem to be describing here exactly the difference between DW's "If you do it, you do it" approach, and the lack of that in TB. In TB there are lots of ways to do it, in mechanical terms - skills, buffed in various ways, with or without help, gear, etc, all which is brought in by the player, or not, depending on available resources - and a big part of the player skill required is to decide how to do it on this occasion.

Yeah, right, DW is just not a game where you are worrying the boxes a lot. You get pushed there by the fiction, the box happens, you are back at the story without a lot of wandering around on that side. Each action is pretty atomic and most of what happens is fiction-first. There's a lot more of a feeling of in TB2 you describe the general thing you will accomplish and then sort of fiddle around with it a bunch until it trips the right mechanical buttons. At least in my DW play that doesn't really happen. You declare an action, a move is (perhaps) equated to it, and you just roll to see how it goes.

I don't think this is contentious at all. From the OP:


Burning Wheel is "story now", but I don't think is "fiction first" if by that we mean DW-style "If you do it, you do it." Conversely, Classic Traveller is fiction first in that sense, but needs a bit of tweaking to play as "story now", and Moldvay Basic can be played fiction first in that sense and will need a lot of tweaking to play as "story now".

In general: "fiction first" is a description of (some features of) the process of action declaration and resolution. Whereas "story now" is a description of the "creative agenda" - ie what are we all hoping to get out of creating this shared fiction together.

Yeah, it can be subtle. So, in 4e you have this pretty mechanistic combat process where both sides roll against the other guy's defenses. You can certainly bring a lot of story into that via various paths, but in my game, HoML, there are no 'defenses' and the players roll all the dice. If a monster attacks you, you pick a 'defense' (which can be basically anything you can fictionally justify and that works within your action economy). Its a rather more story now kind of way of running combat. In the limited play we've managed to get in it seems like the typical process has been that the player comes up with a fiction of how they defend, and then there's sort of a fuzzy decision made as to exactly what that is, but the general point being its pretty centered on the fiction. I mean, you may well do like in DW and describe what your character does full well understanding exactly what mechanic will result, but that feels a lot close to 'PC Stance' reasoning "I know how to use this axe really well, I'll threaten the orc with it." vs TB2 putting the mechanics more front and center (or even 4e doing that in a lot of typical cases).

BW has systems for prep - for "burning" monsters, magic items, NPCs, etc. But it is actively hostile to GM prep of situations, whereas Torchbearer is (as far as I can tell) reliant on GM prep of situations.

Right, a TB2 adventure is a fairly structured affair. It has a location, which you have to get to via the rules for traveling, and it consists of a number of obstacles, some of which may be conflicts, and some not. While its going to be pretty flexible in terms of "Oh, the players decide to talk to the goblins instead of trying to hack them to bits." the existence of goblins at a point in the adventure as an obstacle is keyed AFAIK. There isn't anything like the back-and-forth that happens in DW establishing the shape of the world or what you will run into next. Players do get to inject some fiction, similarly to BW I think, but I don't think the idea of the game is that this is going to shape everything in quite the same sense. Maybe more in a strategic sense it does? Not so much in a tactical sense within an adventure though.

I don't think it is Right to Dream, because as a player you can't just turn up and play with no metagame agenda other than exploring your character and the situation. I think if you do that, you'll get hosed. You have to actively think about how you can "win" - collecting and spending your resources, optimising the distribution of tests across the party, etc.

But I agree with @kenada that it isn't "story now" just because play might, over time, tend to produce a narrative character arc.

'Right to Dream'? lol. There sure seems to be a mind-boggling amount of very specific terminology out there now...

 

[pemerton]

'Right to Dream'? lol. There sure seems to be a mind-boggling amount of very specific terminology out there now...

In this case, it is nearly 20 years old although perhaps not in widespread use: The Forge :: Simulationism: The Right to Dream

 

[kenada]

So, fiction is central in terms of the overall story and thus establishing our goals in a given scenario, but at a detailed level IME so far, we operate based on "what mechanics can I justify being invoked here that will give me the best advantage." In that sense TB2 feels very OSR D&D!

OSR “skilled play” is all about player skill over character skill though — “the answer’s not on your character sheet”. TB2 creates the feel of an OSR game, but the techniques it uses are very different. I’d expect the level of sheet-based play in TB2 to be off-putting to someone who really buys into that approach.

'Right to Dream'? lol. There sure seems to be a mind-boggling amount of very specific terminology out there now...

“Right to Dream” a/k/a “Simulationism”. As far* I can tell, people haven’t been using GNS terms here, and “simulationism” carries so much baggage that I’d rather just use the article’s subtitle instead anyway.

Update: added missing word*

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

OSR “skilled play” is all about player skill over character skill though — “the answer’s not on your character sheet”. TB2 creates the feel of an OSR game, but the techniques it uses are very different. I’d expect the level of sheet-based play in TB2 to be off-putting to someone who really buys into that approach.

Right, it invests much of the authority of the game on the sheet, and the associated mechanics, than it does in the GM. So GM has plenty of clout, but players look first to their own defined mechanics, and then comes "oh, and what is Ob?" and "Oh, gosh, margin of failure one, lets see, twist or condition?" etc. Definitely different.

“Right to Dream” a/k/a “Simulationism”. As I can tell, people haven’t been using GNS terms here, and “simulationism” carries so much baggage that I’d rather just use the article’s subtitle instead anyway.

Yeah, well, people quickly warped the meaning of that one. I think it was a poor choice of terminology. Anyway, sometimes it can be useful, but clearly the world has moved on from GNS, though perhaps that is more evolution for some than revolution.

 

[clearstream]

Right, this is all true IME. So, the very example @clearstream mentions is one that is derived from our play. My character was quick-witted, and descending a drop using ropes and pitons. I'd already invoked my Nature, so I had rather more dice than I needed (and invoking nature itself followed a similar logic of "hey I need more dice"). So, I chose to do a hasty job, using Quick-witted to justify taking a 1d penalty and earning a check. It was a pure 'boxes' thing! No way did it start with the fiction!

Do you feel a GM is permitted in TB2 to rule that an instance of using a trait against oneself isn't legitimate? Or to put it another way, on what grounds was your use of the trait against yourself legitimate?

Fiction is clearly pretty important in any RPG, TB2 included, but it is OFTEN a 'map of possibilities', like a maze, you can go left or right, well, you can deploy various traits, abilities, skills, and wises, which ones depend on the fiction at any given moment. You make your check, you succeed/fail by some margin, the GM does his thing, and it all references the fiction, but a LOT of it starts in mechanics. Where fiction is MORE significant, in a story sense, is in deciding how things play out.

Perhaps your case could be put S > D > S where the first S is your appreciation of the mechanics, the D is some form of Describe to Live giving the GM enough detail to drive resolution, and the final S is the change in the system (−1D, gain a check.) I think though that somewhere in there is intended to be legitimating fiction. You put it that the legitimating fiction comes where I put D. The text admonishes against "reaching" so it seems to me that prior fiction must also matter. Your desire to avail of the mechanic provokes a speech act that must not jar with prior fiction (ideally follows naturally from it).

I'm not trying to assert as certainly right or rebut an analysis: I intend and hope my comments are understood as investigatory. How might this be true, could we look at it this way, etc. Note though - as an aside - that I do share intuitions with the poster who asked

I don't get why you want to tightly couple "positioning" and "legitimacy" into a single concept and then have a different independent concept of "effectiveness" that touches on a lot of the same things as your positioning. It seems to me that it would make more sense to think of positioning as a concept which feeds into the process of determining both legitimacy and effectiveness.

Baker in the end resisted that suggestion and chose to keep effectiveness separated from positioning. In this I depart from his construction. A version that doesn't include effectiveness can't be predictive. What I believe goes on is that folk apply it with tacit intentionality.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you feel a GM is permitted in TB2 to rule that an instance of using a trait against oneself isn't legitimate? Or to put it another way, on what grounds was your use of the trait against yourself legitimate?

honestly I haven't dissected the rules with a fine toothed eye to try to suss out every little turn of phrase and such to say if the rules do or do not claim that one particular participant is envisaged as some final authority. The system certainly does not have the tone or feel of a game where the GM swaggers a bit 'Rule 0' kind of stick around and gets to say "Oh, no you don't!" OTOH in our actual play the process felt like consensus. At no point did @Manbearcat tell us that wasn't going to fly, though he sometimes pointed out various factors or things that we might have been overlooking (some of this might be a reaction to the fact that we are all new to this system too).

My feeling is that the traits and such are pretty general. So they have clear connotations, but were picked so as to allow them to be evoked in a wide variety of situations. Still, if the GM or the other players thought my use of one didn't relate to the fiction and was thus inappropriate; I think the best course of action would be to go with the feeling of the table. I think we all played with that idea in mind.

Perhaps your case could be put S > D > S where the first S is your appreciation of the mechanics, the D is some form of Describe to Live giving the GM enough detail to drive resolution, and the final S is the change in the system (−1D, gain a check.) I think though that somewhere in there is intended to be legitimating fiction. You put it that the legitimating fiction comes where I put D. The text admonishes against "reaching" so it seems to me that prior fiction must also matter. Your desire to avail of the mechanic provokes a speech act that must not jar with prior fiction (ideally follows naturally from it).

Right, and that seems like what generally happens. In the conflict we played in our last session my character invoked his 'First Born' trait, explaining to the Hedge Witch that he was simply carrying out his responsibilities and how it would be advantageous to be on his side, since he was the next head of what he implied is a powerful elf family (honestly, I'm not sure how much of that will turn out to have been exaggeration and how much turns out to be just fact, but that's how he spun it).

He also has 'Quiet', maybe I could have employed that by staring down my opponent? As you can see, these things are fairly flexible. I can just say that definitely I looked to my sheet and imagined ways that I could trigger mechanics that would add dice where I needed them, or allow rerolls or whatever.

I'm not trying to assert as certainly right or rebut an analysis: I intend and hope my comments are understood as investigatory. How might this be true, could we look at it this way, etc. Note though - as an aside - that I do share intuitions with the poster who asked


Baker in the end resisted that suggestion and chose to keep effectiveness separated from positioning. In this I depart from his construction. A version that doesn't include effectiveness can't be predictive. What I believe goes on is that folk apply it with tacit intentionality.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think the GM pretty has to be able to rule against certain instances of using a trait against the PC. Much like @AbdulAlhazred I have found that in actual play the process tends to very much a matter of discussion and consensus, but in terms of where the buck stops, it's the with the GM, IMO anyway.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the GM pretty has to be able to rule against certain instances of using a trait against the PC. Much like @AbdulAlhazred I have found that in actual play the process tends to very much a matter of discussion and consensus, but in terms of where the buck stops, it's the with the GM, IMO anyway.

Yeah, it might be interesting to closely read the rules text. Not that I think rules text is always definitive of the character of actual play in a lot of RPGs, but it often at least tells you what the authors had in mind.