I'm not terribly impressed with Luke Crane's reasoning. Recall that I said that my goals are two fold and interrelated. I want everyone to have fun. And I want the resulting play to have a 'novelistic' quality to it. By that I mean, that I want the resulting story to be memorable and powerful in the same ways that a good movie or a good novel are memorable and powerful.
Ostencibly, Luke seems to have the same goals. He certainly explicitly stats that in the foward of BW, and its implied throughout his discussion. But the problem I have is that Luke doesn't seem to know how a story works. He seems divorsed from the mechanics of writing a novel, of creating 'cool', and of good script writing. He seems to think he knows how it works, but the lessons he's drawing from what he knows of novels and movies are IMO not the best.
The Say Yes rule is difficult to adjudicate, yet it's one of the most vital elements of the system. It grants the GM authorial power to cut right to the important stuff and skip the extraneous or tiresome action.
Now, there are two important things to note here. First, I don't think a GM needs to be granted authorial power. Authorial power is pretty much assumed to reside with the GM in any system that has a GM. Why you'd need to explicitly grant authorial power to a GM when he already has it, I'm not sure. I've never been in a system where it wasn't assumed that the GM could handwave past unimportant events, extraneous events, or tiresome action. I've never played an RPG where in practice we didn't handwave past unimportant events, extraneous events, or tiresome action. I don't think this is really about granting the GM anything. This is about setting expectations of play. This is about Luke ensuring that anyone who plays his game gets an experience presumably consistant with how Luke would GM it.
Secondly, note that this authorial power is granted to the GM and not the player. This is almost part and parcel of the confusion of thinking you need to grant it to the GM anyway, in as much as this would only be an interesting rule if it granted authorial power to the player. But, quite explicitly it doesn't.
In a recent campaign, our characters were crossing a narrow span over a chasm. . . One of the players, Rich, described his character hopping up onto the railing and capering along. Should Pete [the GM] have called for a [skill/stat check] for Rich's character to keep his balance? No. Never. Why?
Ok, I'm listening. I can imagine several possible coherent answers. Let's see if Luke provide one.
Certainly "in real life" there's a chance of falling, but in the story, it just didn't matter. Rich was roleplaying. He was embellishing, interacting with Pete's description. Rich made the scene better.
Wait.. what? That's subjective. Does this action make the scene better? There is some incoherence in this. The player was embellishing the scene. But from a writerly perspective, embellishment of an unimportant scene is bad writing. Even Luke seems to agree with that. Moreover, let's look at this from the perspective of a writer. If a writer decides to tell us that the character dances on the railing above a precipice, then by the rule that a writer says nothing that isn't important, the writer is clearly trying to tell us something important about the character. What is the writer telling us in a scene like this? Well, the writer is telling us that the character is a show off. The character takes risks that are unnecessary and makes unnecessary embellishment of his skills. We are learning that the character is rash, cocky, and a eager to impress people (perhaps has low self-esteem beneath his showy veneer). The writer here is the player. The player is telling us that the character is a show off. Probably, I'm guessing that the player is not in actor stance doing this. The player himself is showing off.
How should the story respond to that? What meaning does this create?
By the rule that nothing appears in a story unless it is important to the story, if we ignore this establishing scene we are allowing bad writing. The story here can go one of two ways - either the character is actually cocky with reason in which case this nonchalence might be warranted or else the character is reckless without cause and the purpose of this scene is to establish that the character sometimes gets himself in trouble or makes trouble he finds it hard to get out of.
And what would the [check] have accomplished? He would have succeeded . . . [or] he would have fallen and we would have had to save him. It would have turned out like a false note in a bad action movie. . .
Wait.. what? If this is an action movie, the 'false note' is the character showing off in the first place. Heroes swagger, but they don't engage in childish 'look at me' tricks like dancing on a railing over a precipice. Heroes only use their skills like that when the scene is important to let them accomplish heroic things. The charact is violating a fundamental rule of action movies by showing off (showing poor moral judgment). If this is an action movie, we don't have to roll for the results.... 100% of the time the character will fall. If the character is a villain, he'll plunge to his death. If the character is the comic side kick, he'll get saved at the last moment by the hero who will gently reprimand the sidekick who'll look suitably chagrined. This scene will NEVER appear in an action movie otherwise because it serves no purpose to the story otherwise and because it sounds a false note (the hero lacks an essential heroic quality, namely, 'level headedness').
Thus, Pete could Say Yes to the action. Rich wanted his character to look cool crossing the briged. Great! Move on.
That's one way to look at it, but if you look at it that way you aren't ever going to achieve 'story versimilitude'. Your game will never play like a great action movie or a great novel. You'll in fact be making a 'bad action movie' filled with 'false notes'. Maybe, Rich wanted his character to look cool crossing the bridge. But Rich in fact, like a bad writer, didn't know how to accomplish that and further adopted a character stance that was add odds with his intention - be a heroic protagonist. Instead he acted like the comic sidekick. But, perhaps we should be more fair to Rich. Maybe Rich _knew_ he was adopting the stance of a comic sidekick. Maybe the 'Say Yes' of this scene is exactly 'You fall, but your comrade grabs you just as you are about to tumble to your death'. Could we in fact 'Say Yes' that way? Wouldn't that being 'Failing forward', to use another term of art (the result of failure here is the blow to the characters ego).
Later, those same characters needed to cross a narrow ledge to gain entry to a lost tomb. Pete described wind whipping along the cliff walls. We would have to make [checks] to cross and get in. This was a totally legit tes. The tomb was the goal of a long quest. Would we get in unscathed? Or would this cost us? . . . If we failed, we'd lose those precious resources!
Again, I'm just totally baffled. If this really is an action movie, and this is an important scene than we can be 100% sure that all the protagonists - the hero and the comic sidekick alike - are 100% certain to make it across the narrow ledge. There will be some color of difficulty with the character whose color of weakness is 'afraid of heights' or 'a bit clumsy', but everyone is getting across the ledge. The narrow ledge in fact represents no real danger in a story at all. In a movie it is a device used only to establish for the audience that the action is rising and the heroes are undergoing suitable trials and hardships. The ledge respresents a transition from the safe world on this side of the ledge to the dangerous mythic world on the other side. If it doesn't do those things, it shouldn't even be played out. Narrate past this in a single sentence because it is unimportant - no dramatic themes are at stake. (Technically, that's only an assumption, but it would require having been to this ledge earlier in the story and failed its test to invalidate that assumption. In which case, the story is about defeating that ledge.)
The fact that Luke admits in this test that there is a chance of failure, and there is a potential cost here of all places, is 100% admission that we aren't playing inside a movie and there are very very important differences. Worse yet for me, Luke is actually in the process of deciding what is important for entirely subjective reasons (obviously, I have different standards for judging what is important), means that Luke isn't accomplishing what he says he's accomplishing. By priviledging his chosen scene with the ledge over the scene with the bridge, Luke is deciding for the players what story is being told, what it means, and what roles the characters will have within it. Failure exists where Luke says it does, and not where he says it doesn't. We are telling Luke's story. The GM's authorial power is being used heavy handedly to insure the resulting action is the one the GM wants.
To be fully frank, I'm rather dubious of the claims of motive here. I don't really believe that there is zero chance of the character stumbling on the bridge railing because Luke is allowing the character to look cool. I believe there is zero chance of the character stumbling off the bridge railing because the possibility of failure here would disrupt the story Luke wants to tell. Luke has decided that is this high place - and not that one - where the drama will happen, where failure will occur, and where meaning will be created, and if that is put at risk by the player's hijinks and the character's capers the reasoning
is ignore the player under pretence of giving them what he wants.
In another recent game, our previous session ened with . . . a pact with a revanent to laed the group across endless plains. At the beginning of the next session, I had to resist every bad GM impulse. . .
This is typical Forge talk. The urge to 'make it real' is not merely something that has pro's and con's to be weighed and considered, but is in fact the impulse of a 'bad GM'. I see Luke's decision to not play out the plains but instead to handwave them as being a valid authorial decision based on a variaty of legitimate concerns, and in fact something I might have done in the same circumstances. But had Luke decided to play out scenes in the journey I would have also seen it as a valid decision based on a variaty of legitimate concerns, and in fact something I might have done in the same circumstances. There isn't one right way to approach a scene like this, and indeed the same group of players can prefer to do it one way at one point and do it another at a different point. But Luke on the other hand see his choice as the only 'good GM decision' possible. However, I'm inclined to think based on his wholly subjective choices to make one fall impossible and another fall possible, that Luke's real test of what is good GMing is whether he did it. Personally, I can at least imagine 'good stuff' occuring in the journey, but obviously if at the moment you couldn't imagine that 'good stuff' then by all means skip the journey and go to the first 'good stuff' you can imagine.
Don't Be a Wet Blanket, Mr GM
Don't call for a test just to see a characer fail.
If a player . . . describes something simple and cool for his character, don't call for punitive [checks]. Ask yourself, "Is anything really at stake here?" A good measure . . . is whether or not they actively challenge or build into a challenge for a Belief or Instinct. If not, just roleplay through it.
I'm going to largely ignore the assumption that GMs call for tests 'just to see a character fail', and instead focus on the fact that all of this is subjective. Whether something is 'cool' is subjective. This tends to be an issue in games that award mechanical bonuses to characters for player driven 'cool' narration - it's up to the DM to determine what cool is. The player may think his narration is totally cool, but it can fall flat for the GM. Since the GM is giving mechanical awards for 'coolness' in practice what this means is the GM is saying 'yes' to the things he wants to succeed and saying 'no' to things he doesn't want to succeed. Likewise, whether something is really at stake is also subjective (and not surprisingly entirely up to the GMs judgment, see the pattern). As my description of the meaning of a character capering on the railing above a chasm shows, whether something about the character is at stake is an opinion. This difference of opinion may not matter, we can always default to the players opinion in scenes where in the GMs opinion nothing is at stake... ok, nevermind, maybe that opinion does matter.
However, let's ignore that for now and point out that the distinction in Luke's example is rather arbitrary. The player jumping up on the railing and capering about is an artifact of Luke's system. The player did it because he knew he couldn't fail, because he knew the GM Luke wouldn't allow failure then. Luke is apparantly encouraging this sort of goofy childish capering because everyone at the table(?) thinks it is 'cool', which is fine but rather turns my stomach (player or GM, I wouldn't find it 'cool' for the reasons outlined above). For most GMs though, this sort of offstage outside of the story capering isn't really the issue (for one thing, we don't direct/produce scenes that are onstage but treat them as if they were off stage). The real issue is that players ask to do something cool at a time when it would also be dramatic and important to the story. Say what you will about the centipede, it was cool, dramatic, and important to the story (which is why on one level I love it). A really powerful bit of advice about saying 'Yes' that might actually impact play would be to actually say 'Yes' then, when it matters (which ironicly is what Hussar's GM ultimately ended up saying, though I have my doubts about why). That oddly wasn't the focus of the discussion about adjudicating 'Say Yes', because that's the hard part of adjudicating it, and returns us to the problem of 'Aren't we just saying 'Yes' to the things the GM wants to happen, and saying 'No' to the things the GM doesn't want?'.
Ironicly, I'm personally much more sympathetic to just saying 'Yes' to the centipede and bypassing the desert however important or unimportant it could be than I am to saying 'Yes' to the player's goofy capering. Again, my problems with the centipede example aren't what people seem to assume that they are.
And furthermore, I'm again struck by how the mechanics of 'Belief' and 'Instinct' are at Luke's table not being used as mechanisms player empowerment, but as mechanisms to limit and restrict player authority over exploration and over even their own character. Instead of being tools to increase the depth of character, they end up being tools of restricting character exploration. I really wonder whether we could take this interpretation and apply it to any reasonably complex story, so that no character appeared in the story in any scene where a simple list of beliefs and instincts were not in play or where we could render down characters to just a few simple beliefs? I'm really beginning to wonder what purpose that Luke thinks is being served in limiting the number of Beliefs and Instincts. How does a player go about signalling to the GM, "Hey, I want this scene to be important. Stop treating it as unimportant because you don't think it is?" Or, "Hey, I want to add this to my list of beliefs. I'm not depricating my other beliefs, I'm just deepening the character or I'm discovering something new about the character I didn't know before hand." What would be wrong about having 20 or 30 instincts?
