Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7347164" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think it depends where it comes from.The one time I can recall doing a fully-fledged "total party capture" was around 3rd level in my main 4e game. The PCs were defeated in a combat, but only one was fully dead (dropped below negative bloodied hp by "friendly fire"). I asked who wanted to keep going, who wanted to change PCs, etc - the warlock player wanted to change to sorcerer (feylocks are a hard build to play) and the others all wanted to stick with their PCs. So 3 of the PCs awake in their goblin cell; they can smell roasing half-elf (the unhappy fate ot the warlock); there's a strange drow in the cell with them (the new sorcerer); and meanwhile, the paladin PC surges back to life on the altar where the goblin shaman has been trying to use his body as an ingredient of an undead-summoning ritual.I don't see that as agency-negating. It's a consequence of the earlier failure - which was a pretty hard failure, the first TPK for our group in over 10 years - and where it puts the continuity of the PCs into question, the details of that have been discussed with the players.A hard frame into a capture without any context resuling from prior play and consequences I think might be a different thing. It would depend on context, of course.I think an important feature of the "standard narrativistic model" - and it's coming out in a lot of  [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s posts too, about how he would handle various things - is that there's a general transparency about what's going on. So if the GM misjudges, and the framing is experienced by the players as agency-negating, or not speaking to their concerns, this will come out - because either it will fall flat (and so you move on, establishing whatever narrative continuity, or even retcon if necessary, will get things to somewhere where the game picks up again), or the players will take hold of it and turn it their way and then you'll see that agency re-emerge.I guess that a continual back-and-forth power struggle is conceivable. That would be a degenerate game. And the degeneracy would be pretty obvious to the participants!Well, for my part, I probably wouldn't be framing a capture then!Though again context is just about everything. In my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy Hack game, the PCs were fighting a crypt thing. The doom pool got to 2d12, and in this system if the doom pool has 2d12 in it then the GM can spend those dice to end the scene. So I did - and given that the scene-ending was one with the PCs fighting a crypt thing, I had it teleport them to some distant room in the dungeon.So they weren't captured, but they were lost - and so all started the scene with a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication.Pretty soon, as they commenced wandering the dungeon looking for a way out, I framed a scene in which they found themselves in a large chamber with Sigils on the wall (a scene distinction). One of the players - the same one who plays the invoker/wizard - declared an action to eliminate his Lost in the Dungeon complication, resting on the premise that the Sigils were actually a map/description of the dungeon. His check succeeded, and so indeed the PC was able to decipher the sigils, and work out where he was in the dungeon, and hence ceased to be lost.That's not strictly a capture scenario, but it's in the neighbourhood. It wasn't a big thematic thing - the system is pretty romp-y, and that particular episode was more about me getting to use a crpyt thing for the first time in a long time (like, decades)! But it didn't shut down player agency, and because of how the system works, and the way it expects the players to engage the fiction, it left plenty of opportunity for the players to do the things they wanted to do with their PCs.I can see why you say this, but I don't think I agree. The example I just gave probably explains that a bit, but I'll say some more.In real life, being in prison obviously is pretty different, and far more constraining, than being in (say) a tavern. But when we're talking about a shared fiction, it's just another bit of fictional positioning.In my 4e game, the PCs broke out of the cell and killed all the goblins (whom they had their eyes on in any event); but then later on, when some were rather house-bound "guests" of the duergar, they made friend with them and (sort-of) tried to save them from the doom that they (sort-of, a bit but not completely inadvertantly) brought down upon them.In my BW game, the wizard Jobe has spent the last couple of sessions in prison. Some failed checks have meant he hasn't been able to escape, but various personages keep coming to visit him - first the Gynarch of Hardby, and now Jabal (whom I think he is likely to try and kill the next time we get a chance to play). The fact that the action has been confined to a prison hasn't stopped the player being able to drive things.I think framing the PCs into capture isn't as wildly different from other situations as is sometimes thought - but perhaps it throws some questions around technique, agency etc into particularly sharp relief.Establishing connections is one way of doing it, but I don't really see where GM force comes in - the players can work this stuff out for themselves! In my BW game it turned out that the PC assassin's sinister master, who tormented her until she fled from him into the forest, was the balrog-possessed brother of the wizard PC. That possibility was pretty obviously on the table as soon as one player wrote a Belief "I'll free my [wizard] brother from evil possession" and another "I'm going to flay my [wizard] former master and send his soul to . . .", and I took it as given from the get-go, but the players didn't actually confirm it, in play, until quite a few sessions in (I think it might have been triggered by the finding of the black arrows when hoping to find the mace), when the player of the assassin PC finally decided that she had learned enough, in character, to arrive at the realisation that her evil master was the same wizard that the other PC was trying to save.And I guess that up until that point it was always open for it to go a different way, although I don't think that was ever a realistic likelihood.But as well as this sort of interlinking, which I aim for just by generic GMing techniques, and which (say) Fate establishes by default as part of the PC build process, I thik it's reasonable to expect players to engage the fiction with an eye on their stuff even if the GM hasn't put it clearly in front of them. (This is an individualised application of the idea that "the players will take hold of it and turn it their way and then you'll see that agency re-emerge.")So in my Traveller game, when the PCs were at the manse of the bishop trying to learn about alien artefacts on Enlil, and various religious-type topics were being discussed, one of the PCs asked (not quite so blatantly, but not very subtly either) whether practitioners of the world's religion have psychic powers. This is because that PC has no real interest in aliens, but is ultra-keen on learning psionics. It was a pretty provocative question, and I called for a reaction check (with a bonus for the previous successful interaction) which didn't go too well, and so the PC didn't get to learn exactly what she wanted. But it wasn't a complete dead end either, and it certainly took her closer to her goal - she now wants to go to Ashar, which is another world that seems to be connected to, or perhaps the source of, Enlil's religion.That's not a particularly profound example, but it shows how a player can play for his/her stuff even if the GM hasn't really put it front and centre. Another example I can think of is from my 4e game, and involved a confrontation with Yan-C-Bin. This was first and foremost about the Emergent Primordial PC, who is a worshipper of Corellon as well as a devotee of Chan, the Queen of Good Air Elementals (who sided with Corellon and other gods during the Dawn War) - he had been tempted by Yan-C-Bin, and Pazrael, and chaotic forces more generally, early in the campaign, and this was something of a culmination of those earlier episodes. But ultimately it was the player of the fighter PC who seized control of this situation with both hands. The character is an Eternal Defender in service to Moradin, and the only PC with "Good" in the alignment box on his PC shet; and he also (following Torog's death) has taken on the portfolio of imprisonment, pain and torture. When Yan-C-Bin started reciting a litany of wrongs done to the djinni since the Dawn War, including their jailing, the player of the fighter PC gave a powerful speech in reply. Here's an excerpt from my actual play report of this session:I think that proactive players actively look for ways to engage with the fiction, to get their stuff out there, and make it speak to them. Sometimes there can be a bit of turn-taking or spotlight sharing, but for me the game is at its best when multiple players are each engaging with a given situation and trying to do something with it.EDIT: I just saw this post, which is closely related:Well, Tim's player and Bob's player are both sitting at the table together, so they're already committed to doing this thing together. What actual form that takes can be pretty varied, though.In my old RM game (with Vecna et al), Xanthos and Xialath were two of the main PCs - both wizards of an ancient order, both happy to engage in a bit of demon summoning and black magic. Xanthos was a very standard wizard build for our game - good lore skills, good meditation (helpful for quick recovery of spell points), OK perception, excellent Duping and Lie Perception but otherwise mediocre social skills (he relied on his enchantment magic!) Xialath, on the other hand, had been built a bit differently - excellent perception, excellent all-round social, lawyering as well as other lore, engineering (to help with his Rock to Mud spells) - but, as a result, no meditation.So when Xialath's player found himself falling behind in respect of spell point recovery, he leveraged his other PC assets - good Streetwise, for instance - and made contact with drug dealers in the shadier parts of the Rel Astran bazaars, and bought himself some hugar - a spell point recovery enhancing drug on the RM equipment tables, but quite expensive and highly addictive. So Xialath ended up addicated to hugar, and had to forego the lease on his estate because he ran out of money, and ended up utterly wretched and destitute (there were some other factors in there as well, but the hugar was the beginning of the slippery slope).The upshot was that we had these two PCs, one trying to arrange world domination, the other hoping to be a magistrate but instead - while a powerful wizard - broke, homeless, addicated to a mind-altering drug, and really at the end of his tether. How did these two character arcs intersect? Well sometimes simply through Xanthos turning up in the morning (after the PCs rested for spell points) and making sure Xialath was ready to leave for whatever mission they had planned. Sometimes it meant Xanthos buying Xialath the hugar he needed to function. And ultimately it meant that Xanthos offered Xialath a return to status and influence in Rel Astra - and a magistracy! - if he would join with Vecna in the conquest of Rel Astra.Ultimately it's a social game, and so people have to be able to get along in their play. And at least in my group, the players use the standard range of social techniques for trying to make sure this works out, just like in any other ongoing collective enterprise. We had one player who probably once a year or so could get pretty heated if he thought another player was being a d*ck, but I'm not talking about anything more than a few harsh words.But what I'm trying to show with some of these examples is that there are a lot of different ways that players can connect and intertwine their PCs - and that's even before the GM starts looking to do the same with framing - to make the game work smoothly for everyone involved.</blockquote>

Verification