clearstream
(He, Him)
From the Apocalypse World rulesI don't know what this means. The notion of what is at stake in a scene is about the player of the game. It's a concept that sits in the same general domain as literary criticism: like, we ask what is at stake for a protagonists.
In the context of RPGing, if we're establishing and resolving stakes for NPCs, then we've left player-driven RPGing way behind in the rearview mirror!
STAKES
These are based very closely on stakes in Ron Edwards’ game Trollbabe.
Write a question or two about the fate of the threat, if you’re interested enough in it to wonder how it will turn out.
You can write your stakes questions at a wide range of scales. Start here:
-- A person’s or a small group’s circumstances or living conditions.
-- A person’s life or the lives of a small group of people.
-- The safety, success, failure, growth, or decline, in some particular, of an organized group of people.
And if one of the players is playing a hardholder, include:
-- The safety, growth, or decline, in some particular, of the entire holding
It sounds like you might not have employed this technique, so what I find is that by having stakes in mind for NPCs a GM can better discern emergent conflicts. It broadens the definition of "adversary" to include any creature whose stakes could conflict with the characters' which can obviously be just as much about good and positive things those creatures lives hinge on, as malign.
In Daggerheart I noticed this
Ground the World in Motive
The characters in Daggerheart are driven by their motivations. An ambitious baroness wants to gain status and increase her sphere of influence, so she acts in ways that extend her power. A large swamp serpent is motivated by hunger and the desire for safety within its territory, so it hunts outsiders, but it might not chase them beyond its territory if it’s full.
Each adversary stat block suggests a couple general motives, but when you’re depicting important NPCs, consider both their short-term and long-term goals and desires. A renowned thief might be most immediately driven by a desire to steal crown jewels from a caravan traveling through the forest, but their ultimate goal is to avoid being caught by the king’s guard—if both of these impact their decisions, this helps create a multidimensional character.
The players might not always know a character’s true motives, but if you keep motivation in mind, you can depict the world with depth and consistency. When you hint at or reveal an NPC’s motives, this helps the players make moves to push and pull on those hopes and fears. Show how motivation leads the party’s allies to act in solidarity with them even at personal risk.
Action without motivation can feel like choreography. When a supposed ally betrays the party, your story will probably hit harder if the players understand those motivations, truly making the betrayal both sudden and (in retrospect) inevitable.
From Trollbabe then
Stakes & Consequences
Every adventure of Trollbabe includes something called "the Stakes,” which is to say, a conflict at hand in the setting of the adventure. Someone or perhaps a whole bunch of someones, in this place, at this time, want something, and cannot get it easily. The Stakes are whatever is desired.
Is the person who desires the Stakes a victim of injustice, or its perpetrator? Is the desired thing a person, a relationship, a resource, a status, a political goal, or what? How does this factor into the troll and human issues discussed previously? Preparing and defining these things are left for a later section, but the key point here is that any adventure is filled with individuals, run by the GM, who are busily in action regarding problems and agendas.
The point of having Stakes is to generate something else entirely, called Consequences. Consequences are how the conflict at hand turns out: the resulting status of the Stakes and the fates of everyone involved. Again, a trollbabe’s very presence tends to amplify or to complicate most people’s takes on whatever situation is occurring, and therefore tends to move a conflict about some Stakes into a resolution with Consequences.
The player has no responsibilities regarding Consequences; the trollbabe does not have to “fight for justice” or be anything to anyone – except that, given what she is, she will be involved as far as everyone else is concerned. Consequences will occur, as the Stakes must change, develop, and come to any form of resolution through the course of the trollbabe’s presence and voluntary-or-involuntary involvement in the situation.
Stakes and Consequences occur at a specific Scale, or basically, the extent of people and territory that are affected by the outcome of the situation. The smallest Scale would be one-on-one interaction, with the Consequences essentially affecting the well-being of single or very few persons. Larger Scales include extended family, an organized group like a war company, on up to villages and whole lands. The range of Scales is presented later in the rules. For now, the point is that Trollbabe play begins at the personal level, and that the Scale of play may increase specifically and only at the request of a player, between adventures.
Eventually, if the players want, Stakes and Consequences may be occurring at the level of the entire land, in which case results might include such drastic events as the trolls wiping out humans, humans wiping out trolls, or some sort of accord being reached for good and all.
So I think you could possibly read this as only players "want something and cannot get it easily" i.e. have stakes, but that is not how I read it and Baker implies outright that he did not either. For me, it immediately chimed with something I was already doing which was to ensure creatures had motives... what do they want? what's at stake for them? And it's then in the interplay of those stakes with the players that conflict emerges.
Another way (although I had formerly seen it as complementary) is to determine the direction the fiction should go in (via the flow from fiction to system to fiction) and then make the creature's stakes fitting... or ignore them entirely I suppose, embracing them as the philosophers zombies that they kind of are.To make the same point by reference to actual published games: the GM in BW or in DitV can't "say 'yes'" to a NPC's declared action; in AW the GM never rolls the dice - Seize By Force, Go Aggro and Seduce/Manipulate are rules the players invoke, that resolve stakes for their PCs.
Okay. Calling it "nature" obfuscated that pretty well. I assumed it was something more than establlishing authority.He and I have both answered this: by "the nature" of the fiction, @hawkeyefan meant whether or not what is at stake, and the thematic nature of resolution (assuming resolution has some thematic nature), is established unilaterally by the GM
That's surprising, because it's foundational to Edwards' concept of narrativism. The reason player must be understood as simultaneously author and audience is because of differences in the medium of games (non-linear, dynamic) and books or films (linear, non-dynamic). Narratology eventually had to make an adjustment to this, leading to post-classical narratology. Ludologists like Espen Aarseth called ludonarrative "ergodic literature" meaning it was literature you had to do some work to unearth.I still don't know what this means. Like, what sort of narrative is organic to books? Off the top of my head, I think of four books: The Woman in White, The Quiet American, Myself and Marco Polo, and Ulysses.
Or to films? I think of Black Panther, The Seventh Seal, Citizen Kane and Ashes of Time.
Similarly, I have no idea what narrative is organic to games. Or even to RPGs.
I put it myself that
Narrative subsists in a reader traversing a set of signifiers, organised with in mind a meta-property, which is their collective signified. This applies to games as well as books, films, and comics. A reader works to traverse a “text”. Whether that is as little as turning the page or keeping their eyes open, attentive, and processing, or as much as making decisions that rearrange the signifiers. Narrative intention lies in the organisation or curation of the signifiers, without which we could otherwise call ordinary living "narrative".
So a ludonarrative is an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers (think of elements like snippets of history, illustrations of forests and towers, rules modules such as character ancestries, creature descriptions and parameters, and so on: all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story).
I was using organic but perhaps supervenes is a better word: ludonarrative is the kind of narrative that supervenes on storygames, and not storybooks.
I suppose you could argue that the narrative vocabulary (the curated signifiers) are both finite and chosen by the GM, so that in some way the volume containing all tellable stories is predetermined and thus players never get to decide what's at stake for them other that to choose stakes that can exist within that volume. I think that count (of possible stakes) is so vast and unpredictable that it sure seems to me that players are deciding what they want to put at stake and pursuing it. The greater difference is what @Campbell said - "play that addresses the thematic premises embedded in the character" - which now I reread it can be understood a few different ways, but generally a sandbox could conceivably be considered play that address the thematic premises embedded in and between character and world.It's not true that, ordinarily in a sandbox, the players decide what's at stake in a scene. Very often this is established by the GM, as part of the process of keying the sandbox.