Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8309122" data-attributes="member: 87792">I'm curious as to which games you look at. Because the games I find inherently create excellent stories are ones like Apocalypse World, Leverage, and Blades in the Dark where a key driver is that things don't go smooth, the most likely result is success-with-consequences. To <a href="http://storyfirstmedia.com/storytelling-tip-the-principle-of-buts-and-therefores/" target="_blank">quote Trey Parker</a> (one of the makers of Southpark): “[I call it] the rule of replacing “ands” with either “buts” or “therefores.” And so it’s always like: This happens and then this happens and then this happens. Whenever I can go back in the writing and change that to: This happens, therefore this happens, butthis happened; whenever you can replace your “ands” with “buts” or “therefores,” it makes for better writing.”A D&D skill check is very much "and" storytelling. "He started to climb the wall [roll] and he made it to the top/and he didn't make it and had to find another way." Meanwhile the all important success-with-consequences rolls (7-9 in AW, 4-5 in Blades, 1s in your dice pool in Leverage/Marvel Heroic Roleplaying) have consequences built in "He climbed the wall but he found he was right over the head of the guardsman". And even on a failed move you do something more interesting than just have to try again. Even "But it was the wrong wall and lead him to the barracks" is a perfectly good hard move which is much much more interesting than a failure that simply leads to either trying again or finding another route.The other key aspect in storytelling I find is <a href="http://improblog.mrpetermore.com/2013/09/reincorporation.html" target="_blank">reincorporation</a> - that is bringing what has come before back into the story. An excellent example of this was the final fight of Wandavision. [Spoiler]Agatha had earlier told and demonstrated to Wanda that within a space "Only the witch who controls the runes can cast her spells and within Agatha's runes Wanda was helpless. In the final fight Wanda was seemingly trying to blast Agatha, which Agatha was absorbing - and some of Wanda's shots were going wide. This was a bluff and Wanda was instead using the shots that "missed" to put runes on the walls of The Hex, rendering Agatha helpless because Wanda controlled those runes.[/spoiler] It would have been an utterly non-sensical fight if it wasn't a direct callback. But what does this have to do with success-with-consequences rolls? Any time you have an open ended roll and especially one with consequences rather than a simple pass-fail you have an opportunity to reincorporate and are frequently inspired to do so.  So there is far more reincorporation, making events matter more and the world denser.I therefore find success-with-consequences systems to produce much denser and more interesting stories, far more tightly centered on the PCs. And to take everything sideways - as opposed to a dungeon exploration where I've pre-written the dungeon. As GM I'm not the one storytelling - we all are and the system in these games is tightening everything.</blockquote>

Verification