Celebrim
Legend
Played it. Yes, FoD is similar but less elegant. And I feel FoD suffers from the same problem many complex cooperative games suffer from of not giving individual players enough agency to make their own decisions, as you inevitably will have the more dominate players in the group trying to control all of play.
It doesn't. I'm just using one situation to have a concrete thing to talk about, but this applies to everything that isn't trivial.
It's not but everything still applies. Taking a short cut between various locations just corresponds to an increasingly detailed map, and while at the highest granularity no one can make every location at that map, that doesn't mean that having the most detail map wouldn't be a great thing. It just means as I already alluded to, there is a limit that a human creator has to giving players agency.
That's a difference without distinction. The chase is just the time sensitive fast-moving portion of an investigation. Investigations tend to have maps too, with nodes linked by clues, we just rarely draw that out because it's not generally needed unless you are very carefully plotting something.
The thing you have to understand is I knew and know exactly what you meant, but you don't have a clue what I mean. You don't seem to realize that you are describing conflict resolution mechanics that are indifferent to the fiction and don't involve any meaningful choice by the players (similar to for example a 4e D&D skill challenge), and where 90% of the mechanic as it pertains to the fiction is just DM fiat. You're making my point for me and you don't even know it.
sigh The PC's in your game could be replaced by random number generators for all the agency you've just outlined. The lack of preexisting fiction means that all they can do is engage with the mechanics in trivial ways, and everything is just color like I said - change the drapes on the stage. You really need to read rule sets more broadly.
There is not in the general case perfect symmetry been a player and a GM. The GM has powers and responsibilities the player doesn't have. For example, the player is well a player not a referee (not every sport is Ultimate) and there are things you can say about referees that aren't true about players. The most important way something that is written down differs from something that isn't, is if you have something written down and you alter it in the course of play, then you know you are railroading. You are conscious of that fact. But if you have nothing written down, you can't know if you are railroading and in fact must always presume you are running a railroad. Indeed, the games you prefer to play seem to be the railroad-y sort were the GM is not only endowed with all power but actively encouraged to use it.
It depends. Does the player have narrative authority over that thing he imagines? So long as the player is only imagining things that only impact the player character themselves, then they are real. If the player for example images that his player prefers porter to stout, then even if that hasn't yet come up in the game, then that's still a real fact about the character. Or if the player decides, that his favorite color is green, then even if he hasn't said anything that's still a real fact about his character. Who could dispute that it is? It's his character. But again, perfect symmetry doesn't apply here. Unlike the GM, the player has no duty as the secret keeper. It's cool if he is one and exploring his character is exciting, but he's not really got that as a duty. The player is trusting the GM to have some cool secret he's hidden and that that secret is real from the beginning of the story. If it's not, then it can only be found when the GM decides it can or should be found. If on the other hand, I have everything written down the players can wreck my plans by finding short cuts or back doors I didn't expect, or triumphing too easily, or otherwise exploiting the limited ability of the NPCs to resist their actions. In my case I'm actually trying to simulating a reality, and in your case you are making it up as you go and it does in fact make a difference.
You don't know a lot about this subject. I would suggest you read "Hot Pursuit: The Definitive D20 Guide to Chases" or the 1e WEG Star Wars rule book. Those are some of the best chase rules I'm aware of. The way you are handling chases is almost entirely backwards of the way I handle chases, and your notion of "correct way to succeed at the chase" is just... well, it just shows that there is a ton of gaming you haven't been exposed to and your notion of what a prepared game is like is well, not very helpful to your understanding. From my perspective you aren't handling chases at all, as your generic rules for skill challenge resolution are just generic rules for handling anything regardless of its particulars and are typical of the railroad-y games that prioritize GM fiat that I tend to avoid.
I'm familiar with it. I'm not a fan of it but for very different reasons than you are, and your perception of it is I think wholly false as I think most people who have actually run it will affirm. Games of Masks of Nyarlathotep will have similarities, but no two of them will have the same transcript. And there is plenty of agency, including the ability to fail spectacularly which is one of the most important proofs that the players do have agency. (If they can't fail spectacularly, then it's just a different sort of railroad.)
As soon as you said, "But I have mechanics for that..." I didn't think I could. For most people who game, the outcome of a proposition is determined by the combination of the fiction and the mechanics. The fact that you didn't understand that I was saying "the fiction matters" clued me in to just how you thought of play. As you put it later "It could simply be improvised into existence once the conflict is concluded as a loss for the PCs".
Nope. Just hard "no". All player choices have "actual consequences". But if the GM can make up the consequences because the GM isn't limiting themselves to the fiction, or if the mechanics don't connect to the fiction in any meaningful way (and in your case both are true) then while there are actual consequences those consequences are not under any meaningful control by the player and their choices are not meaningfully connected except through the transcript which is more or less entirely generated by the GM in your case. And players that are experienced with both approaches can in fact tell the difference.
If you want to watch an example of a game where the players have nearly zero agency at all, and at best only have "mother may I" agency, go watch Wil Wheaton play FATE Core run by Ryan Macklin. If you can't tell that the players have zero agency, then the problem is you've never had agency.
If you mean by "quality" how fun the game is, then in a sense I can agree with you. But if you mean by "quality" the experience of play, like what it is like to be in the game as a quality different from just whether it is fun (the aesthetic, if you will), then now, the two games have a very different quality to them. If you are playing an ad lib game, one of the things that you have to be comfortable with is that you don't really have any agency. And that can be fine as long as you go into the game with that understanding and lean into the Thespian aspects of RP, and maybe even Expression and Narrative aspects, but agency in the sense I mean it just won't exist. (OK, it can. I can imagine the rule and procedures of play for giving players agency in an ad lib game, but they are yet a whole other way of playing that you aren't describing.)
Last edited:
