hyphz posted:

I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting".

hyphz posted:

I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting".

It's the same as the Shadowrun guy that ended up with me saying "when you spent hours making your character shoot everyone, why complain that it worked?" Pretty much everyone I've asked for help on this from has said that was a wrong and ridiculous thing to say, but it just seems to be exactly what the rules of shared narrative games are encouraging. Hey, player, you want there to be a challenge and it could be interesting if you fail, so why not just lower those stats a few points?

And I've met very few players who would find this fun. All the players I want to know want to at least feel that the challenge is being imposed on them, ideally by the environment of the game world rather than by the GM, but the latter could work as a push. If the player has to take action to create their own challenge, it bleeds through into the fiction and they feel that any challenge their PC did face was just the result of self-handicapping, and gives a very unsatisfying feel. I mean, maybe fans of these games don't think that way, but in that case I reserve the right to feel sad that there isn't a cool Dishonored meets The Dark Project game that will work for players without that mindset.

hyphz posted:

I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting".

hyphz posted:

It's the same as the Shadowrun guy that ended up with me saying "when you spent hours making your character shoot everyone, why complain that it worked?" Pretty much everyone I've asked for help on this from has said that was a wrong and ridiculous thing to say, but it just seems to be exactly what the rules of shared narrative games are encouraging. Hey, player, you want there to be a challenge and it could be interesting if you fail, so why not just lower those stats a few points?

hyphz posted:

And I've met very few players who would find this fun. All the players I want to know want to at least feel that the challenge is being imposed on them, ideally by the environment of the game world rather than by the GM, but the latter could work as a push. If the player has to take action to create their own challenge, it bleeds through into the fiction and they feel that any challenge their PC did face was just the result of self-handicapping, and gives a very unsatisfying feel. I mean, maybe fans of these games don't think that way, but in that case I reserve the right to feel sad that there isn't a cool Dishonored meets The Dark Project game that will work for players without that mindset.

hyphz posted:

I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting".

Tekopo posted:

I think a misunderstanding is how many people treat RPGs as a game (and when I reference a game here I mean in the strictest possible way) which is what hyphz is doing, and how many people are treating RPGs as stories. I don't mean to bring this up in a "lol storygames aren't really games what idiots you are for playing them" btw and I really don't want the whole stupid "what is/isn't an RPG" argument to pop up.

Basically the roots of D&D as a wargame mean that an interpretation of the game is one in which you could explicitly win and lose. The win condition in this case is that you get out of whatever dungeon with whatever loot you have, and that your entire party doesn't die. Stuff like Tomb of Horrors exemplify this. This way of playing RPGs lies extremely within the "game" side of the spectrum, where characters are interchangeable, are lost easily and replaced easily. Within this example, the win/loss conditions of your character are tied with the win/loss conditions of you, yourself, as the player.

On the other end of the spectrum, are "non-games" like PbtA where there isn't a loss/win condition. In PbtA, a player does not have an explicit win/loss condition, although his character still has a win/loss condition. Depending on the player, he might be more interested in making sure that his character achieves his win condition, but this isn't a primary reason why the player plays a PtbA, with more importance given to how the story unfolds and what kind of issues that his character is presented with. This can lead to games where the players of your characters are doing everything wrong, not succeeding at anything they aspire to, and still making an interesting story of how their downfall unfurled, and still provide enjoyment to players. So, since the aim is to create an interesting story, players and GM alike will collaborate in order to make the story interesting, even if this is a negative outcome for the characters involved. It's this disconnect between players/characters (which isn't present when defining RPGs as a game) that makes this possible.

You might have noticed, however, that the current state of mainstream RPGs (D&D and PF) doesn't fit either description. They aren't treated as a game, because characters aren't expendable and the game isn't just about getting through a dungeon alive, but the characters still have personal arcs that they go through that ideally don't just end up with them being dead in a dungeon because they couldn't face X+1 number of goblins.

So what you get is a strange gelling of game and non-game elements that doesn't really work in conjunction with each other. It's difficult to reconcile the fact that in the current version of D&D, character and player win/loss conditions coincide, yet there is still a drive to create a story: although this does halfheartedly work in social situations, it dramatically falls down during combat scenarios, where due to mechanical constraints, the game more or less forces you to kill characters as a loss condition. 4e actually pulled back the curtain on this facet of RPGs, which I do find hilarious.

What some storygames attempt to do is create combat scenarios in games that don't explicitly have a loss condition, and I guess this is confusing to people that have been used to playing stuff like D&D, because before the only situation in which this occurred was social situations (you fail a social encounter and you get captured, a fight starts, you run away, people hate you etc etc etc). I think this is where the disconnect is: storygames treat every single situation experienced by the players like a D&D social encounter.

Tekopo posted:

I think a misunderstanding is how many people treat RPGs as a game (and when I reference a game here I mean in the strictest possible way) which is what hyphz is doing, and how many people are treating RPGs as stories. I don't mean to bring this up in a "lol storygames aren't really games what idiots you are for playing them" btw and I really don't want the whole stupid "what is/isn't an RPG" argument to pop up.

Nuns with Guns posted:

If it was a campaign splat it'd get derailed in the first town.

Nuns with Guns posted:

It's not so much that something like the PBtA system is "less game and more story" than it is that building the story is the game of it. The win condition isn't to crawl out of the dungen with all your limbs and a sack of gold, but that you made an entertaining story about how that happened.

That's also why you can't do a premade module of the whole adventure. The appeal of the game is that both players and the GM drastically shape and redirect the story in play. If it was a campaign splat it'd get derailed in the first town.

Yawgmoth posted:

Have you ever been in a game of anything where this wasn't the case anyways?

Tekopo posted:

Please note that in my wall of text, I was using a strict definition of what a "game" is as a mean to explain my argument, rather than making a value-judgement on PbtA. The strict interpretation of a "game" is that it is only a thing where people can explicitly win or lose in concrete terms (ie there is a defined win or loss trigger present within the game).

This, however, is not my personal interpretation of what a "game" is, and my own definition is much broader and does include PbtAs/other storygames. I just used the strict interpretation as a short hand for "an activity that has a strict win/loss condition": sorry that I didn't make this explicit.

Nuns with Guns posted:

lol, no, but apparently hyphz has.


I get what you're saying. The difference in a fail state of PbtA games is one of those would be a failure to create and entertaining story, which usually comes from compounding problems of inappropriate player/GM play and a weak adaption or understanding of Apocalypse World rules. In something like D&D it would be more like "my character/party wiped, time to reroll and try again."

e-not that it's impossible for D&D games to fail for other reasons, but for the most part it's hard to fail in a PbtA game or Blades like that so long as you enjoyed the way that story played out.

Serf posted:

the mistake you made with the shadowrun player is that you weren't putting challenges in front of them that didn't play to their strengths. what they were asking for was variety, and you didn't provide that for them. you never challenged their weak spots or put them into positions where they would have to do something they were suboptimal at. you took away the wrong lesson

Tekopo posted:

4e actually pulled back the curtain on this facet of RPGs, which I do find hilarious.

Tekopo posted:

What some storygames attempt to do is create combat scenarios in games that don't explicitly have a loss condition, and I guess this is confusing to people that have been used to playing stuff like D&D, because before the only situation in which this occurred was social situations (you fail a social encounter and you get captured, a fight starts, you run away, people hate you etc etc etc). I think this is where the disconnect is: storygames treat every single situation experienced by the players like a D&D social encounter.

hyphz posted:

I did consider that. But the problem was that he was so heavily min-maxed for "shooting the other guy and not getting shot" that anything that didn't play into that strength was a certain failure before dice ever hit the table.

hyphz posted:

How did it do that?

quote:

I don't entirely see that myself. The flaw for D&D with social encounters is that it makes them either a single die roll or dependent on the player's skill rather than the PCs, but I've never seen one where the players were expected to be happy OOC about the encounter going badly IC.

hyphz posted:

but I've never seen one where the players were expected to be happy OOC about the encounter going badly IC.

Tekopo posted:

It's not about being happy, but that's the entire point of roleplaying games, even in D&D. This is the disconnect that I'm talking about, actually. The social parts of D&D and PF try to act like they are a game, but mechanically they are not, because the direst consequences for failing a roll is that the players actually get to play the game properly by entering a fighting segment (which, to some players, would actually be a reward rather than a penalty). That's exactly the problem that D&D and PF have.

hyphz posted:

I absolutely agree about that, in fact I wondered if a "penal combat" system should be added to these games to prevent that.

But I don't see the assertion behind the fact that stories cannot be told under a system where the PCs and players are not expected to do the best they can to succeed, even where failure would be more narratively interesting - because that quickly becomes a can of worms in that it has to be the right kind of failure that doesn't end the story, and it has to be at the right frequency or you Worf Effect the PC, and it has to be insulated so the other players don't get penalized for what someone else did, and by the time it's all allowed for there's probably pretty much no options left. (Worf Effecting the shooter guy was one of the problems I had with trying to work around him in Shadowrun.)

If you're reading a book and a character acts in a way that goes against the character's desires and makes it obvious that the author has just written them doing that so that the story proceeds in an interesting way, then that's a bad book, but not every book is like that. And if you can write a book without it the author never having to openly do that, surely you can tell a story without a player ever having to do that, too?

hyphz posted:

hyphz posted:

I absolutely agree about that, in fact I wondered if a "penal combat" system should be added to these games to prevent that.

But I don't see the assertion behind the fact that stories cannot be told under a system where the PCs and players are not expected to do the best they can to succeed, even where failure would be more narratively interesting - because that quickly becomes a can of worms in that it has to be the right kind of failure that doesn't end the story, and it has to be at the right frequency or you Worf Effect the PC, and it has to be insulated so the other players don't get penalized for what someone else did, and by the time it's all allowed for there's probably pretty much no options left. (Worf Effecting the shooter guy was one of the problems I had with trying to work around him in Shadowrun.)

If you're reading a book and a character acts in a way that goes against the character's desires and makes it obvious that the author has just written them doing that so that the story proceeds in an interesting way, then that's a bad book, but not every book is like that. And if you can write a book without it the author never having to openly do that, surely you can tell a story without a player ever having to do that, too?

hyphz posted:

I don't see the assertion behind the fact that stories cannot be told under a system where the PCs and players are not expected to do the best they can to succeed, even where failure would be more narratively interesting

hyphz posted:

I absolutely agree about that, in fact I wondered if a "penal combat" system should be added to these games to prevent that.

But I don't see the assertion behind the fact that stories cannot be told under a system where the PCs and players are not expected to do the best they can to succeed, even where failure would be more narratively interesting - because that quickly becomes a can of worms in that it has to be the right kind of failure that doesn't end the story, and it has to be at the right frequency or you Worf Effect the PC, and it has to be insulated so the other players don't get penalized for what someone else did, and by the time it's all allowed for there's probably pretty much no options left. (Worf Effecting the shooter guy was one of the problems I had with trying to work around him in Shadowrun.)

If you're reading a book and a character acts in a way that goes against the character's desires and makes it obvious that the author has just written them doing that so that the story proceeds in an interesting way, then that's a bad book, but not every book is like that. And if you can write a book without it the author never having to openly do that, surely you can tell a story without a player ever having to do that, too?

Nuns with Guns posted:

You keep revisiting the idea that for some reason players consenting to complications or adversity where it makes fictional sense is not playing "optimally" as through players and PCs are some objective truthbots that must break a game over their knees. Even though multiple people have told you this isn't how it works. In fact, it's the exact same broken logic Frank Trollman applied to FATE, so those comparisons earlier are disturbingly apt. Worse, this is the exact stupid argument James Desborough was making when he was wondering why PCs in Apocalypse World aren't a constant orgy ball rolling across the wastelands to optimize xp gain. I hope you're happy with this knowledge.

hyphz posted:

I can sort of see the desire to do that for fiction in an agreed romantic style. But it seems here what I’m being told is that the PCs have to spend resources trying to pick the lock and at the same time be cool with knowing that the GM could just spawn another locked door between them and their goal, 10 more, 100 more, because hey it’s not that bad if they don’t manage to pick one. That just seems a sideways argument.

quote:

If they get into position, make the roll, and have their effect, they get what they
earned. Don’t weasel out of it! Things are hard enough on them already. Don’t be a
skinflint about victories; defeats will come without your thumb on the scales. The
scoundrels are at the bottom of the faction ladder, but that doesn’t mean they’re
ineffective. It means they needs lots and lots of victories to make it. They’re good
at the game, they just started out with negative points on the board. The same goes
for secrets. If they make the discovery, tell them all about it. Don’t hold on to your
precious secrets. It’s more fun to find out what they do about it once they know.

hyphz posted:

And none of the rules mentioned deny that. The GM is a fan of the players and wants to see them overcoming obstacles, well hey there’s loads of obstacles to overcome in the form of doors. If he keeps throwing doors at them until they fail and get caught, well, that’s ok because he wants to see how cool it is when they break out of jail. And the GM could play off the PCs expectations in a normal environment, but this is not a normal environment, it’s explicitly meant to be bizarre, it’s a scary haunted house run by witches, who’s to say they can’t make a reality pocket of infinite locked doors if they want? Sounds like an excellent way to trap thieves.

It’s a player agency issue. What people are saying seems to me to come down to “not having agency is cool because the story can still be good”. But what if they want agency for agency’s sake?

Serf posted:

there's nothing stopping the gm of a d&d game from putting a million locked doors between the players and their goal either. but bitd actually has rules that say, "you shouldn't do this"

hyphz posted:

But what “have they earned?” If they have earned access through that one door, that says nothing about not being another one. If they have earned success, then every heist is one roll. If they have earned some percentage of success, then what percentage? When we’re judging effect, what measure is it by? Can it have great effect at opening the door but limited effect at getting to the loot at once?

hyphz posted:

But what “have they earned?” If they have earned access through that one door, that says nothing about not being another one. If they have earned success, then every heist is one roll. If they have earned some percentage of success, then what percentage? When we’re judging effect, what measure is it by? Can it have great effect at opening the door but limited effect at getting to the loot at once?

hyphz posted:

I heard that one written in the other direction about Monsterhearts - where in that game if a human has sex with a supernatural, they trigger their “dark self”. So naturally a player asked, “wouldn’t we just not do that then?”
[quote]

[quote]
Oh, and I have nothing against these games. I just want to know how to be one of the cool kids they’re playable for!

Canine Conspiracy posted:

Out of a fear of arbitrarily locked doors and the desire to minimize danger and maximize profits, I have decided to stay home from this whole dungeon thing and start a small business. Here is a list of sensible and safe investments I am making with my starting gold, and here is a wishlist of magical items I'm interested in buying when my midlife crisis hits. What do I roll to file for an EIN?

hyphz posted:

But it seems here what I’m being told is that the PCs have to spend resources trying to pick the lock and at the same time be cool with knowing that the GM could just spawn another locked door between them and their goal, 10 more, 100 more, because hey it’s not that bad if they don’t manage to pick one. That just seems a sideways argument.

Sion posted:

So, on the subject of literally fuckin' anything else how's everyone's week shaping up? I'm back at work tomorrow oh no

thefakenews posted:

Please show me in the rules where D&D stops me doing this as a GM. Hell, show me in the rules where any traditional RPG stops me doing this.