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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9504313" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Just the opposite. The failure to recognize also means people are most often unaware of these elements and how to approach them.Just hop over to the DND forum here and try talking about Improvise Action; you'll be met with cries of "GM Fiat" even though improvisation, and yes,and along with it, is explicitly a part of the rules. Some of that is on the person being unreasonable, but that in of itself is rooted in poor, unintegrated design.No, I don't think so. Yes,and is what it is, and it has a specific definition which I'm adhering to. No,But isn't actually distinct from it, fyi, just a different side of the same principle.And besides that, if one really wants to dig into the question of how improv ought to be approached, I actually take more to "Follow the Follower" as the rule over Yes,And, but understanding that is harder on a purely textual basis, which is the advantage Yes,And has over it, and it can be very easy to misapply that approach in the narrative improv thats core to RPGs.Constant escalation isn't necessarily whats called for in a narrative, so its on the other participants understanding that they can organically deescalate without having to block the other participants. Its much harder to teach that purely through explaining it via text than Yes,And is, where you just need to understand how to accept what the other participants are doing, rather than paying attention to the ebb and flow of the game itself in addition.This is where integration becomes key and why I harp on about it so much, as the game itself is well suited to bear the need for deescalation. Easiest example I can point to there is the issue of HP bloat; all other things being well designed, HP bloat means things drag on unnecessarily and begets more and more extreme escalations to overcome. With carefully curated HP values, you can avoid this problem to keep things snappy.HP bloat generally isn't blocking, but it is a problem that manifests in and impacts the experience in a very similiar way.More like I just have virtually no interest in starting another Forge, and for whatever reason people seem very averse to asking questions and having a dialogue, and responses often come from a place of "I disagree" rather than "help me understand your meaning, and here's what I've done to try and understand you".I don't mind explaining myself more thoroughly, but that has to come with actual engagement, and its been my experience that when I give such an explanation, nobody reads it because its a lot to read and internalize.I have a design post on the front page that's received zero responses, despite putting the effort into clearly communicating how I defined the design problem, what I wanted out of it, and how I arrived at my solution, as well as the necessary context to understand how the system works.And thats just for a concept of a combat system adapted from my current one, not an entire design philosophy embedded into every aspect of of a large scope game like Labyrinthian. Hence my focus being on the game itself more so than trying to create a movement or whatever.And of course now the academic brain in me wants to do it anyway, so I guess we'll see.All that said, the core question here isn't really that complex. As I noted, if a game presents an open ended possibility space (What do you do?), its an improv game.Given that, if you understand the dynamics of blocking in improv, there's a clear throughline from blocking to the various issues I've pointed to, because they cause the same kind of problems in the play experience.Blocking of course isn't the only problem that can manifest in Improv games, but most often, if an issue doesn't qualify it probably still can be expressed through something already identified in Improv. HP bloat mirroring the issue of constant escalation in narrative improv is such an example. No one is being blocked, but the experience is still disrupted because an unwelcome extreme has been introduced.Oh for sure, it isn't necessarily bad, but it comes down to consent. Even after taking to and internalizing my ideas about improv, I don't find any issues integrating with more railroaded experiences, whether thats plotwise or thematic, because I'm doing so with informed consent. That's ultimately the idea behind Yes,And, after all. Narrative Improv experiences hinge on the idea that certain things are fixed (at least initially) in the experience, and its on participants to accept those ideas.The importance of Session Zeroes and setting expectations is how that need for informed consent manifests in RPGs. I would hope one can see why I keep coming to the conclusions I do.I see. The issue was you changed the context of the example. In theirs, Person 1 isn't a stranger to Person 2, but a spouse or significant other, which they established in what they said. Person 2 then rejects that idea directly.But, even then, its still a bit of a bad example even on their part, as whether or not thats blocking actually depends on the context of the interaction and the nature of the experience itself.If we're talking Improv Comedy, this could very easily be the basis of a bit, and the players can bounce off each other trying to reconcile their two conflicting ideas of who they are as characters.But if this was supposed to be a serious, grounded narrative improv experience, Person 2 would be in the wrong, but only if it goes against the idea of the narrative. Person 2 could easily be portraying a character whose literally losing their mind, and the pair can follow each other down that route, and this would be perfectly inline if the narrative was intended to be a psychological drama.We don't ultimately know if this was truly a block because we have no context for what the purpose of the scene was and what happened after person 2's response.I mentioned earlier the importance of establishing Game Tone in my game; this is why. A narrative experience doesn't have to be one note (ie, only one thematic premise), but the group needs to understand the tone they want to maintain as they approach a variety of possible narratives, including for that matter, things less serious or even comedic, even if their chosen Tone is more to the grim and gritty.Note: After going back to the linked page, I did see they noted that the context of the scene was explicitly the beginning of one where nothing else has been previously established.This is where the nature of narrative improv comes in, because a lot of things are established ahead of time; in the instance of an RPG, the rules and the gameworld are preestablished with the general understanding that people will behave as you'd intuitively expect.Accosting random people in a bar about nefarious activities just makes you come off as a narc; of course they're not going to talk to you, even if they don't have anything to disclose anyway.Thats where we get into the weeds of specific implementations and integrations. In the instance you're pointing to here, it comes down to how the procedure to interact with a person is mechanically designed. The common wisdom to not call for a roll if there's not a chance of failure is a common way to approach that in a system-generic way. Indie game style roll-if-the-system-acknowledges-it is another way.My personal preference is to just recontextualize what dice mechanics are for and what results mean; that's manifested in quite a few ways throughout my system but the first instance was me realizing that letting modifiers eclipse the die (eg up to +30 on a d20 roll) actually makes for both a simpler game to run over time, and makes the swinginess of 1d20 very desirable and exciting, particularly when combined with Interpretative Difficulty rather than hard target numbers.I certainly don't see any issues just based on this. There's a clear collaboration going on between the three participants in that procedure, and the only way to disrupt it, as you noted, is if people just play it incorrectly.The only stickling point Id say is the nature of possible consequences and how thats determined, but without more context its hard to say. How it works could still avoid it, or it could push towards something like Writers Rooms, where how consequences are suggested, too often (or at all) necessitates stepping out of the game to hash them out.</blockquote>

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