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Yeah I’d quibble and say that fail forward at best implies progress, not that it’s requisite. When you spin it on the players it should have options (my go to is a couple that I think of but also just taking ideas). They just don’t have to be good options. Making players decide the least bad outcome (that still advances the story) is a classic example. Also players tend to react stronger to losing a limb or something vs death.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:38
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I don't really have anything to add to failing forward, but I wanted to continue a tangent:Glazius posted:Well, 5E adventures do often include a section on how the player characters get resurrected if they're too baby to have predictable access to that. Does that count? Of course, the dead character's player might find the death an important story beat. Or the opposite. Glazius posted:But in order to actually make combat a turning point, you need to have meaningful support for actions in combat that aren't killing or dying, and support for exits from combat that aren't killing or dying. Are they too problematic narratively? What do you do with six surrendered goblins? What if the PCs surrender instead? Would you have to write an entire in-universe code of honour to regulate fake surrenders and other war crimes? Are they just "too obvious" to have rules? You might not need rules for not fighting, but you can't do a chase scene using most combat systems. Leperflesh posted:I was thinking more along the lines of: in the dungeon crawl, the stirges in the cave room are really just there to (literally) suck some of the PC's blood. Defeating them, maybe you find a gemstone in a nest or something. But the adventure hasn't changed, nothing has been learned that redirects the characters to a new goal or on a different pathway to a current goal, no alliances were made or broken. So if we accept that you can "gate" rewards behind both combat and noncombat challenges, are they 1:1 interchangeable? (PbtA says "yes".) If you take an existing adventure and replace all instances of one with the other, how quickly does it stop making sense as a play experience? Edit; This is all rambly and I don't have any answers. I'm just having too much fun pondering about this.
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Apr 5, 2021 14:57
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Siivola posted:Yeah, I think you're right. Seems to me that even exits as fundamental as fleeing and surrendering seem to get fairly little attention these days. RuneQuest has a ransom system that makes it reasonable for you to accept the surrender of enemies or for them to accept yours.
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Apr 5, 2021 16:46
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Oh, cool! If I remember my Dragon Pass right, that's a major part of the setting in general, that's a solid rule to include.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:03
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Whether or not something is a problem narratively comes down to what the rules engine supports and what the referee and players at the table decide is too much work. I know that for me, it would be a fantastic thought exercise to tap into and nerd out about practices of dungeon societies and how they handle surrender, because there is an implication that sentient creatures (in D&D anyway) do not always fight to the death - it is more likely by the rules for morale checks in older D&D that 'smart creatures' will break and disengage unless they're cornered. Regarding combat having stakes other than 'live or die', LANCER also encourages combats to establish stakes and encourages the GM to be less forgiving than in other games. It expects, for example, that fights have a purpose like "survive", but it also acknowledges that fights that are just robots punching each other until there are no robots left gets stale really fast. This is structured in example SITREPs in the core book and gives a variety of tasks for players and GMs to fight over in a tactical sense. This is all wargame minis stuff that have been more popularized in recent years but they translate very well to the 'tactical narrative': - Protect someone who has narrative and tactical importance as you move through a hot zone - Take and hold a position until egress is available - Take an objective and egress with it (get the macguffin) - Evade enemy forces until tactically appropriate to go into an ambush, or vice versa - Destroy static or mobile objective markers that represent structures of some kind on a large field with lots of terrain - Neutralize a specific enemy while reinforcements arrive) - Navigate from one end of a board to another for egress (combinable with other situations) All of these can have greater stakes than just the immediacy of living or dying. The 'someone to protect' can be a diplomat or scientist that holds the key to preventing a much larger conflict from breaking out. What happens if they die? Players fail, sure, but the narrative can certainly continue as a direct result of that failure. What happens if they succeed? And so on. If this thread and prior threads have any indicator, it's that some tables definitely have a need for rules to say something about specific topics, or else that thing is an impossibility. However, if the specific rules engine does have something to say about it, that means it is of higher importance than non-rules narrative stuff (which then causes other rules engines to pop up that make rules for the narrative).
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Apr 5, 2021 18:14
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Siivola posted:Yeah, I think you're right. Seems to me that even exits as fundamental as fleeing and surrendering seem to get fairly little attention these days. What do you do with six surrendered goblins? You tell them to run for the hills and not come back, because this isn't their fight and you don't want to kill them, and then the GM tells you they run for the hills and won't come back. The trick, of course, is telling the PCs the truth and having them believe you. You'd be surprised how difficult that is to do in some systems! The problem with chase scenes is a more generic case of the problem with the universality of tactical combat, where the universe is presumed to be running under tactical combat rules all the time and they're just more strictly enforced when you roll initiative. If something is supposed to outmaneuver you in combat, then those cold equations apply to all movement.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:22
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:The trick is understanding that the player also knows how fail-forward works and understands that whatever just happened is neither a brief stay of summary execution nor a complete lack of consequences. I think that to work this requires something that's frequently missing, which is an understanding - either conveyed through the sense of the plot or explicitly - as to what the ultimate cost is. If you don't have an ultimate cost, you get Fail Forward Forever, something which was actually mandated in one of the sample adventures for the Firefly RPG. This isn't exactly the adventure, but it's the same idea: if the players fail to fly through the asteroid belt, an asteroid damages the ship and it's harder to land in the right place on the planet. If they fail to land in the right place on the planet, they can't ambush the enemies and the fight will be harder. If the fight goes badly, the PCs may be injured or delayed in disarming the detonators. If they fail to disarm the bombs, they disarm the majority of them but one goes off and causes a small number of civilian casualties. This sounds like it works, but it can be a let-down when the PCs get to that point, because assuming they have seen their rolls, the players realize that actually this whole plot his been about that small number of civilians. But if you instead switch it so that someone important - let's say the PCs romantic interest - is one of the casualities at risk, then suddenly fail forward becomes much less appealing from a player perspective - especially because of the classic issue, that it gives them only one chance at each challenge rather than allowing a problem solving exercise. So if the stakes for the whole thing can be defined - and by this I mean the actual stakes, not the implied fictional ones (ie, not "all the bombs will go off" if that was never a possibility to actually happen) I can see this working much better.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:47
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This is where I think it is useful to draw the distinction between the stakes of a scene and the stakes of an action. Even with fail-forward applied to the action mechanic, the stakes for the scene should still be in question. This of course raises the additional question of how to come up with good scene stakes and reasonable action model for a scene.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:58
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(note: using the 'you' generically here, not 'you' as in OP directly) This is a very specific interpretation of failing forward relative to an interpreted example. Communicating the short-term and long-term stakes in failing forward is good form. The example you give directly is some smoke and mirrors stuff going on that appears to have differently calibrated expectations of what the results are. In fail forward, the stakes do not have to be clearly defined all the time and can follow the fiction to be made on the spot based on the time, circumstance, and mood. All examples produce one specific outcome that are not finalities. If the referee knows what is going on in the structure of the larger narrative and so do the players (there is a bomb, it will hurt people, you are heroes, go defuse the bomb) mean that the cooperative narrative has some core assumptions: - There is an external threat - The players must go deal with it in some way - The tone of the game implies what the stakes are, and their likelihood of success/failure This does not include the amount of obstacles in the way nor the outcomes defined. This would normally be defined through play. An optimistic type of game means that failures will get in the way of players and cause more complications for them to problem solve, but if they were to fail those complications either they would fail in their mission, but the story still moves on and they get there in the nick of time to solve a much more difficult problem than a routine bomb disarm. In a game that is more serious and tragic where consequences hit harder, maybe the bomb does go off and causes damage that will last through the further narrative (assuming there is one, otherwise, in the denouement). If you want to continue to project specific examples, they are open for wider interpretation. Plus, in terms of qualifying meaningful stakes, the players should have some kind of narrative tie to the stakes, and perhaps there are mechanics that actually support this (pointing again to LANCER since it has rules for explicitly qualifying stakes and relationships ahead of a mission): - Each player has an internal tie to the place or people that the bomb is going off in, meaning they will pull out all the stops in a desperate attempt to save them when they know the chances are low. They may make risky gambits and possibly even die knowing that their risks are worth it to save the place and people they know. Or maybe, they don't know the people or the place, but they have a duty to do so, and they must grapple with the reality of the situation and whether or not they must go against their duty in the name of self preservation. - Each player has an external tie to the situation instead. This might mean that a player has a cache of money or some kind of material stakes that has a connector to an internal tie. "One last job to save my child dying from a disease that only a fantabulous amount of money or rare medicine can cure", and so on. In reality the actual thing generating the threat that sets characters off to go do the thing in the first place has very little to do with the why characters are doing it. The true underlying stakes are the dramatic poles that are set up which push and pull the characters to accomplish an external goal (defuse the bomb), or fulfill an internal goal (validate their emotional poles or resolve an internal plot thread). If you take the specific example above and continue to start hammering at it by taking a very rigid interpretation of how this works, then part of what the rules or game text encourages is actually a railroad in terms of progression, because the actual outcomes of success/failure provide only one option when failing forward. That's not in and of itself a bad thing and useful for a GM to understand, but the players need not approach every situation as a problem solving exercise that requires external skill usage, unless your table is treating the game in that specific way. In this case, you would want to restructure whatever game text to best suit your table so that solving problems can be done from multiple instead of singular checks.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:23
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Alright, since things got quiet after fail forward, I want to talk about mechanical advancement awards for players and GMs, the most classic of which are loot and experience points (which is kind of like loot, only you can't eat it). In the previous thread, it was argued that experience points were bad, and if you gave out experience points, you (me, in the previous thread) were also bad. However, after further exploration, some things came up that I also expanded upon in the megadungeons thread when designing the Mysteries subsystem. For more on this: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=510222594 Summary of observations: 1. Players need a positive reinforcement loop. 2. Players need to be able to communicate to the GM when they are interested in something. 3. Players need minor and major narrative and procedural rewards. 4. Players want experience points. You can probably replace experience points with any other type of practical reward, but the first three points I generally stand by. Thus, for discussion purposes: - What serves as a suitable minor reward? Major reward? - How do you calibrate your tables to determine what reward structure is acceptable? Are there any divergences from the parent rules engines that you use? - How come some rewards feel crappier than other rewards in the modern era? Are there older reward structures or ones from less popular games which could be used instead? - What is the "best" reward system for specific types of players? GMs? - Can the GM have their own reward structure as well? How might this be modeled? - Can a negative reinforcement loop also be used as part of reward structures? - Are there general guidelines for creating rules and mechanical structures to help players communicate clearly to the GM for rewards that they're looking for, as in Legends of the Wulin? How might this be used for other RPGs?
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Apr 7, 2021 01:37
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Failing forward on one action doesn't necessarily change the stakes for an entire scene. If you're on Doomfuck Island to stop the New Reich from getting the hidden Stone of Truth, and you gently caress things up repeatedly and significantly, they can get the Stone and escape, and cause major consequences to the story! What fail forward means is that the whole game isn't going to grind to a halt because Jerry's researcher failed his roll to open the door the Sanctum of the Stone. Fail forward keeps the game interesting and fun, but it doesn't remove the overall threat of defeat.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:53
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hyphz posted:I think that to work this requires something that's frequently missing, which is an understanding - either conveyed through the sense of the plot or explicitly - as to what the ultimate cost is. "The game consists of pre-written scenes that will happen in order no matter what. There are two possible pre-written results for each scene which effect the difficulty of the next scene, but no way to effect the plot or even fail until the climax" is just a railroad though. It has nothing to do with the concept of fail-forward as it's being discussed.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:11
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Double post, butaldantefax posted:2. Players need to be able to communicate to the GM when they are interested in something. I'm not sure I agree that this should be part of a structured reward system. I think players and GM should be encouraged by the game text to be open and honest about what they're interested in, what they want more of, what they want less of, and so on, but I don't think that mechanics are the way to approach that though! It's just a conversation to be had every so often, and if it absolutely must be formalised, I'd much rather it was formalised as a conversation rather than as some kind of rewards structure. But if it were going to be part of the reward structure, I think it'd fit in well as part of the post game wrap-up where games like Blades in the Dark have their xp distributed, so maybe you're onto something. What I mean is, it seems to be something that would be a natural part of a conversation that started with "At the end of the session, mark xp if you 1) Addressed a tough challenge with <playbook specific words> 2) Expressed beliefs, drives, heritage, or background 3) Struggled with issues from your vice or trauma" My group already uses that to express what they found engaging - "1 - Yeah, when I picked up the chair and started fighting those 4 tough guys at once, I <addressed a tough challenge with force or threats>, so I'll mark XP for that. That was an awesome scene, I was on the edge of my seat wondering when they'd kick off. I hope they come back later on and cause more problems and get their asses kicked again, and I should probably apologise to the publican..." with other players getting to say stuff like "I loved that too, but I enjoyed the chase scene afterwards more" or "I felt kinda sidelined for that part". So adding it as a formalised end-of-session step seems like a really good idea and I wonder why more games don't do it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 11:24
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I think it depends on if it’s an active or passive reward system since in my specific example that I generalized the summary from, it comes from a system that is post-session reward spending. Part of where I feel a lot of games fall short on the reward side is getting a reward that doesn’t do anything for players, it’s only a passive expression of their progress. However, if they are able to actively invest that progress into things, regardless of when that happens, that is still interacting with the reward system in some way and getting into a positive feedback loop - “this is a good thing, I use good things to get more good things”. The ‘things’ in this case are narrative rewards in an unfolding meta-story (Mysteries) that they can collaborate and invest in, but I can see it for other things too. Examples in play from systems that use an active reward system: - Legends of the Wulin and Weapons of the Gods, where “Destiny” is a combination of active XP earned as well as something to be spent on things that players have direct interest in even if they don’t have narrative bearing at the immediate moment. They have different categories and triggers but represent a distinction between your classic experience system where number only goes up and doesn’t do anything. - GURPS is a point-driven system and the experience points gained at the end of a session (usually not during a session) are used to further improve your character, or, optionally, may be spent during a session for spot bennies (buying successes or avoiding failures) - Shadowrun’s Karma system is also like the GURPS system but is generally more convoluted because you have a Karma Pool (or used to, dunno if that’s still a thing) - additionally, you can permanently burn Karma in order to buy successes when they otherwise would be impossible or near-impossible to make by dice rolls alone. This is a neat idea but happens super infrequently - in all the time I played Shadowrun I only ever burned Karma like, once, and that was during the conclusion of a multi-session adventure, after which we moved onto other games. - Runequest’s system (Chaosium version) used a “use it and maybe gain more stuff on it” is another active form of reward generation but happens at end of adventure only. Did you use a skill? Then if you had a checkmark next to it then clearly you had a learning experience, so you can roll to see how much skill you gained. This has some weird math related to it and also isn’t frequent enough in and of itself, but it does encourage players to find situations to leverage skills even if they are not necessarily the ‘right skill’ in a given situation (Oratory comes to mind with the classic attempt at trying to talk things out when swords and axes are already in play). - I feel that PBTA and FitD both have ‘hidden reward systems’ in that they don’t explicitly declare that something is an active reward but is instead a micro-reward. Making a good roll for example generates opportunities, a reward in and of itself, but any skill that allows to take a forward is kind of like a reward as well that is initiated by the player. It can be argued it’s not a reward, but taking forwards is a minor part of those rulesets that isn’t explicitly stated as such in most other systems. Adding rewards in an explicit fashion in end of session tends to be a good idea because it allows for calibration and lets people briefly bask in their victories and also to bring to attention some lowlights that could be worked on in the future. For D&D where end of session experience is kind of waived as people moved to milestone systems, there wasn’t a great way in the modern era to actually track when a milestone was hit and it was mostly arbitrary. Some players quite prefer that, but others craved the experience point gain as a form of reward to validate their play. Whether or not that’s a “correct way of fun” or “badwrongfun” is up for extended debate, perhaps, but I think the takeaway is that having a structured reward system that allows for a two-way door for communication is useful and arguably important for future game design, since I agree there should be more of it in published works.
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Apr 7, 2021 15:26
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As far as rewards go, a structure that I've found kind of interesting is the one in Golden Sky Stories. The main means of reward during games is a fairly common if niche one among Japanese RPGs, basically "applause", though it's called "dreams" in the game. Whenever you do something in the game that someone else approves of, you get a point. Specifically according to the game rules, something helpful, or something adorable, because Golden Sky Stories is about a little town in the sticks and the adorable shapeshifting animals who live there and try to be helpful. Dreams are spent to strengthen your connections to other people or places, and whenever you start a scene with one of those or they show up in it for the first time, you get Wonder (magic fuel) based on your connections to them and Feelings (skill fuel) based on their connections to you. But it's a much less permanent growth in power than it might seem - Wonder and Feelings will stack up through the game but they're lost at the end, and all of your connections clear as well. You get Memories (universal points) based on their total strength, which is a fraction of the Dreams that went into them in the first place, and you retain a connection stub called a Thread that starts the connection at one point stronger the next game you make it in, or 2 points if you got it to the maximum of 5. The "applause" concept has made it over here as well. Just off the top of my head, there's: * Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, which gives your character an XP reaction such that you're fishing for facepalms or fist-pumps, for one XP point on a track of 15 to 50 * Pasion de las Pasiones, where each player is responsible for both a telenovela character and a role in the "home audience" watching the show - certain moves your character does get a bonus to the roll if an audience member has the right reaction * Epyllion, a magic-of-friendship-but-with-dragons game where each player picks a virtue to shepherd represented by some colored gems, whenever someone else expresses that virtue you give them one of your gems, and you can cast the good magic by returning gems and rolling +gems returned. (and the bad magic by marking corruption) * and I guess D&D 5 has inspiration, but that's only awarded by the GM, the bit where you can only hold 1 often results in people not spending it and therefore not getting it, and you're not always making the rolls for something your character's doing so it's not always useful
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Apr 8, 2021 10:00
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There are also a bunch of systems - going back much further in time at least to some games in the 80s - that give players some sort of "hero" tokens/points that are spendable as either an auto-succeed or a major bonus to some action, and which are recovered via GM boon for doing something cool/good roleplay/goal achievement, etc. These work well in systems with no XP and even those with little or no character advancement: you need to spend them to get under your cap so that you can actually earn more, and earning more is a reward for good play.
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 17:13
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Whew. Finally caught up on the thread. After reading all the talk about fail forward vs binary pass fail, and acknowledging the former is far superior, I feel like playing a mini-campaign that really leans into the later (D&D naturally)... one where you absolutely can fall to your death by missing an athletics check. In this variation, there is no resurrection or death saves, if you bite it, your character is gone BUT in the next scene (or room if we’re talking dungeon crawls) there is a new PC with “one thing different”: Pick one (and only one) of Name, Race, Class, or Physical Attributes (height, weight, age, gender, etc...) that is different for the player whose character died to continue playing. “Hey guys look, it’s Larry! He’s somehow alive!” “Who’s Larry? My name is Gary. Pleased to meet you.” or Narrator’s voice: The Role of Larry (the Wizard) will now be played by Larry (the Barbarian). Something like that.
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Apr 8, 2021 21:41
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nelson posted:I feel like playing a mini-campaign that really leans into the later (D&D naturally)... one where you absolutely can fall to your death by missing an athletics check. The following basic format is a lot of fun for this: Get Basic D&D (Mentzer version, red box with Elmore art, level 1-3). Make a dungeon with traps and pits and monsters and stuff. Use the pre-written one in the book for inspiration. It needs to be "fair" as in "there's nothing they can't win at-level". That is, if they're on level 1, there mustn't be a section that level 1 characters can't overcome. Whether they will is irrelevant, but this is a classic dungeon with levels signposted with stairs down (or whatever other obvious thing). No single encounter is unfair. The dungeon as a whole is very nfair indeed. The dungeon has a mystic barrier on the entrance that allows (n players) characters inside at a time, crippling nausea strikes the (nth + 1) character who tries to enter a short while after they enter. The portal glows blue when the dungeon isn't full, red when it's full, and purple when someone's in mortal danger. You have a great big pile of pregens that sits face down. The only blank space on them is the name field. If this seems onerous, there are many many different apps available to generate Basic characters available on everything from an iphone to a commodore 64. Time, light sources, etc are tracked. When a character dies, the next character from the pile shows up in however many turns it takes for them to get to the party by the most direct safe route*. They have been following the trail of destruction. (Optionally, the player taking the new pregen must finish their drink). XP is tracked as it is gained, leveling up happens immediately. Expect to go through two pregens per player per session in total (someone will still be on their original guy, though). It's a ton of fun but will get old pretty quickly, so plan it as a 1-2 session thing and don't expect it to produce a long-term game. *Alternative rule: The player who's just lost their character must roll up a new character, and the new character arrives when it is completed. In Basic, this will take all of 5 minutes if someone's going slow. Play mustn't cease while this happens, so encourage the others to continue by threatening a random monster check.
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Apr 8, 2021 23:03
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If you do that, do something to disallow looting the corpses of your comrades for their best equipment, probably.
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Apr 9, 2021 01:02
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It's Basic levels 1-3, there's almost nothing a starting character has that's worth looting, and the group should broadly get to keep anything they find in the dungeon unless it gets used up or wrecked. The "worst" thing that could probably happen is a level 1 fighter gets plate somehow, and that's what rust monsters, really deep pits, underground streams, and thieving goblins are for. And if someone wants to use the silliest D&D as a vehicle for telling the story of Jimmy Twelve Shields who went into the dungeon with no shields and came out with twelve shields... ok?
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Apr 9, 2021 01:11
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Dungeon Crawl Classics is heavily based on this type of experience in its early stages of play. Each player generates (or has generated for them) some amount of characters, usually four, and then you throw them into a meatgrinder of an adventure. You roll all your stats 3d6 straight down the line no swaps, start with one thing, and you are basically a scrub trying to fumble your way through some kind of overtuned and possibly horrific thing. The characters that make it out the other side through tactical choices involving losing characters are said to have passed through the character funnel, and as such get to level 1. It takes about five minutes or less to generate a new character as well (in case you get guests at the table, need reinforcements, or some other such things). This provides some interesting things to think about since by intentional design it makes players think about their characters and make choices like who to save and who to send into what possibly might be certain doom. Characters automatically get a history that was developed through play and come out the other side and have a reason to band together (because they've already achieved level 1 by surviving through some serious poo poo) and it handles everything rather nicely. Once the novelty wears off you can just start characters at level 1, and some of the extended adventure supplements also recommend it, but don't require it.
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Apr 9, 2021 01:45
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My solution to Fail-Forward/Partial Success is to always have an opponent present to take advantage of the opening created. I never quite got the logic of "oh you fall of the bridge but find a cavern" and whenever I tried to deploy GM Moves it always felt very forced and unnatural. But if you have a Guard nearby, or a dickhead rival who can react to your poor attempt I could always keep the narrative flowing in a more logical way. Also I just fundamentally don't care about players having to roll against the environment. in I think 12 sessions of Spellbound Kingdoms my players made one roll against a static environment DC, instead of an opposed roll against an NPC. They're adventurers, they can climb a wall. Now climbing a wall with a half dozen soldiers manning the battlements? That's a roll I suddenly care about. nelson posted:Whew. Finally caught up on the thread. After reading all the talk about fail forward vs binary pass fail, and acknowledging the former is far superior, I feel like playing a mini-campaign that really leans into the later (D&D naturally)... one where you absolutely can fall to your death by missing an athletics check. In this variation, there is no resurrection or death saves, if you bite it, your character is gone BUT in the next scene (or room if we’re talking dungeon crawls) there is a new PC with “one thing different”: Pick one (and only one) of Name, Race, Class, or Physical Attributes (height, weight, age, gender, etc...) that is different for the player whose character died to continue playing. I did a Sharpe-style L&F hack, Pomp and Circumstance, that had almost exactly this mechanic. Characters could suddenly meet a grisly end if they ran out of an invisible Luck resource, and another member of their squad got promoted to main character. You'd keep one of your character descriptors (Background and Social Standing) and change the other, and then slide your stat number up or down by one. The idea was your new character would be almost the same kind of person as their predecessor, but not quite. And you were encouraged to swear to avenge their horrible death. There was also an Attack on Titan PbtA that had great Funnel rules - you'd start with a bunch of level-0s, and characters only get given a surname and a backstory if they live long enough to reach level 1.
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Apr 9, 2021 21:09
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Is there a good way of avoiding moment-to-moment play and overarching goals becoming decoupled? It's a standard in fiction, but can feel awkward in a game?
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Apr 14, 2021 09:26
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hyphz posted:Is there a good way of avoiding moment-to-moment play and overarching goals becoming decoupled? It's a standard in fiction, but can feel awkward in a game? Like, what, accidentally, or on purpose? Have you got a "for example" you're thinking of? I mean, one of my go-to setups in an AW-engine game is to explicitly offer people a long-term drawback in exchange for a short-term solution.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:37
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Well, I went and thought about this and recovered a bit from some bad stuff, and I think it comes down to a mechanic question in an oblique way. Like, at the moment we have essentially two mechanical styles for RPGs: improv storytelling and the wargame. Most RPGs combine aspects of these in some way or other. But the problem is that they do both have limits and some themes just don't fit cleanly into them. I mean, my go-to example is Curse of the Crimson Throne for Pathfinder. It has a theme that revolves around curing a plague. Yet if the PCs actually try to cure the plague, they'll be rebuffed. What they're supposed to do is to do "Pathfinder adventurer stuff" until they happen to find a cure at the bottom of a dungeon. Now, for that example that's fine - if you're playing Pathfinder that's what you'll expect to be doing, after all. But why couldn't we, you know, cure the plague? Pandemic In The Lab has mechanics for simulating engineering disease cures cooperatively. Where's the game or adventure that builds on that the same way we built on Chain Mail? What I find especially bothersome is that if I mention this people will guarantee to start talking about "the story" and how its progress will be integrated with curing the plague. But in practice, what that tends to mean is that we aren't actually curing the plague, but doing one of a few standard quests that are established as ways to advance a story: find the rare element, uncover the evil mastermind who unleashed the plague, find the corrupted scientist on our team who he's bribed.. and all those could work, and they'd probably be fun as well if that's what you're up for, but they do get dreadfully predictable. But if you say you don't want that, the defence is "that would be a boring story". Yes, it would be a boring story. But Pandemic In The Lab isn't a boring game, so why does that matter? Now, you can argue that it's semi-competitive, ok, but in that case, Hanabi is completely cooperative and is a boring story ("we put on a fireworks display") but also isn't a boring game. Where's the RPG that evolved from worker-placement or deck-building, and the things that those mechanics are good at simulating?
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Apr 15, 2021 15:03
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hyphz posted:Well, I went and thought about this and recovered a bit from some bad stuff, and I think it comes down to a mechanic question in an oblique way. You have played at least one PbtA game, so you know there's at least one other, and mostly several. If you've played Blades in the Dark you know that heists and faction relationship management are also available as mechanical styles in RPGs.
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Apr 15, 2021 16:22
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Absurd Alhazred posted:You have played at least one PbtA game, so you know there's at least one other, and mostly several. My experience was that the PbtA system acts as a driver and source of inspiration for cooperative storytelling. However, it's true I suppose that might not have to. This is one of the things that interested me most about Under Hollow Hills - that it changes the creative artefact that's being produced from a traditional story to a description of a circus performance, which might not have a narrative arc, but is still an entertaining thing to produce. It's still supposed to be connected to events happening in the area where the performance is, but it doesn't intrinsically have narrative structure, which is good as otherwise every single time the circus stopped there'd be a bad guy trying to burn it down or a key performer getting kidnapped or a lost orphan wanting to join or any of the standard hooks which impose their associated standard (and, after a while, predictable) structures on play.
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Apr 15, 2021 18:48
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I think I can kind of get what hyphz is talking about. Although it may be an overgeneralization to say that everything that isn't a combat engine is "cooperative storytelling" because... well, even the combat is also cooperative storytelling, that's sort of what a Roleplaying Game is. Maybe a better way of putting it is that RPGs tend to have one major focus for a boardgame-alike experience - combat - and that most or all other systems in RPGs tend to be simpler, with perhaps one or two die rolls determining a focused outcome or result of an in-game question. A boardgame in which you roll one die and then advance to the next question is considered pretty simple... e.g., chutes/snakes and ladders. RPGs obviously have more flexibility and especially more creativity involved in moving from one roll to the next but the analogy is helpful for recognizing the game modes that lean more heavily on player improvisation vs. the game modes that lean more heavily on a detailed, complex, highly specified mechanics engine in which a broad set of predefined choices each have specific and tightly-defined mechanisms and outcomes available. If you are going to attack, you must do one of these types of attack, follow the rules for that attack, and then the outcome is produced by the game, you don't get to "improvise" that your opponent takes more or less damage or is stunned now unless the game says that's the result. Out of combat, a player (including the GM as a player) gets to "improvise" that an NPC is surprised at what you just said, or that the trees are full of cute monkeys, or that someone is falling in love. There are game systems that aren't about combat, but which are more complex or engaging than a simple unitary die roll against a skill or a single out-of-combat utility spell, though. A couple that come immediately to mind are D&D4e's Rituals system, and the hacking systems used in various cyberpunk games. I'm confident that there are additional examples, perhaps some that use a deckbuilding mechanic? Worker placement is an interesting idea, although I'm always a bit wary of a design idea that starts with a mechanic and then seeks a place to use it, rather than starting with a design goal and then seeking an appropriate mechanic to implement it. But how about RPGs that have a realm-management component? Allocate your governmental resources here and there, perhaps in cooperation and/or competition with other neighboring or overlapping entities and powers (the other players, the GM, or automated game systems) and then advance time by a week/month/season/year/era and see how your choices affected things. How about castle-building/development mechanics? No matter what you're doing, though, you're still feeding inputs into an engine that produces outcomes (or cues for them) which are components of the collaborative storytelling exercise that is a pen-and-paper traditional RPG. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Apr 15, 2021 |
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Apr 15, 2021 19:18
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hyphz posted:My experience was that the PbtA system acts as a driver and source of inspiration for cooperative storytelling. Definitely check out World Wide Wrestling for a similar setup, with the added interest that the player characters are trying to create a narrative for the imaginary audience.
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Apr 15, 2021 20:14
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Leperflesh posted:I think I can kind of get what hyphz is talking about. Although it may be an overgeneralization to say that everything that isn't a combat engine is "cooperative storytelling" because... well, even the combat is also cooperative storytelling, that's sort of what a Roleplaying Game is. The thing with "cooperative storytelling" is that taken literally, it can work at multiple levels and becomes far too wide a term. To a chess afficionado, "e4 e5 Nf3 Nc6 Bb5 a6.." might be a story. To a soccer fan, a play-by-play commentary might be a story that attracts significant excitement and emotional investment. But nobody would refer to chess or soccer as a collaborative storytelling activity even though the players are collaborating on those aspects that deliver that stream of events as a result. Likewise, "this bunch of goblins were threatening us and then Bob fireballed them and rolled all sixes and killed them all in one round" is a story which might well be doing the rounds in a gaming group, but depending on the context in many collaborative storytelling groups it would be considered unsuccessful because the defeat of the goblins is narratively unsatisfactory. The thing is that it doesn't allow for the mismatches between a story and a game. I mean, take my old saw of Spire. Reading the Spire book is rather like reading a travelogue. I can imagine that a travelogue novel where the author walks around the beautiful city of Venice while secretly making observations of social unrest and trying and sometimes failing to contact those who seem to be influential leaders of it could be fascinating. Set it in a city with magic with architecture that makes Portmeirion look like a grid city and it should be even more so. But suggest this for an RPG campaign - the entire campaign, as it could be the entire novel - and it wouldn't work at all. I've heard people say it would be a boring story. It wouldn't, of course. It would be a boring game. But the mismatches can work well the other way as well. Another example suggested was "if you read a novel about a romance between the CEO of a company and a lowly worker, you don't expect it to include a procedural of running the business." Yet there are plenty of extremely successful games about running businesses. Yet there are few if any RPGs that work that way, because it would be "a bad story". But does it matter in that case? It seems that even the indie RPGs tend to constrain themselves to either mechanics that share both story and game, or have no structure at all but assume that the intersection of those two will be used.
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Apr 15, 2021 22:02
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I don't think there is a particular need for a tabletop RPG to tell a story. You can get stories from anywhere. However, the mechanics that are constructed and aesthetics presented in most tabletop RPGs have more open ended results than a boardgame, which typically has a binary "someone wins, and someone does not (whether or not they lose is up for debate)". You can create stories without any need for a rules framework to call it a tabletop RPG or boardgame. You can also create rules without the need for telling a story. Some might argue you don't even need multiple people to create a story for a tabletop RPG or a boardgame, since solo play is their own category. Using a published adventure as a broadly sweeping example of how tabletop RPGs are supposed to be played when it appears to inform certain things in a very specific way is one way of playing, but there are tabletop RPGs that are out there with roots more in worker management and other mechanical constructs that would normally be found in other games. Resource management like worker mechanics were featured in AD&D 2e in the Birthright expansion which enabled specific and detailed rules for domain level management instead of an implied framework from previous editions of D&D, and there are games which implement card-based elements out there like Everway, which had no dice and just cards. If you cherry pick a specific board game mechanic and say "where is the tabletop roleplaying game that is a derivation of this mechanic", if it isn't out there yet, it will be there at some point in the future and is something worth exploring. Published adventures in the current era have much the same burden that video games do - they are designed to sell, typically as much as possible, and meet genre conventions in order to make the page count and time spent on the adventure worthwhile to some specific audience of players. Pathfinder Kingmaker focuses more on domain management while adventuring, to use a PF-specific example, but Rise of the Runelords is much more about having big fights and doing whatever it is the Pathfinder Society does inside of that setting, which is mostly have big fights and exploration stuff. If you extrapolate "why can't you have the story you want from the written text of a published adventure", it's because the author didn't scope the use case to be relevant or it was removed on the editorial or publisher floor. That's industry forces at work which removes what could potentially be meaningful outcomes to explore inside of a published work. Whether or not it provides a specific satisfying engagement for an individual would be the ideal result, but since you cannot design a published work to be all things to all people, some kind of concession must be made to get a product out there, complete or not. Semantically speaking, taking the word story versus game and trying to mix that with tabletop role playing games will lead to misunderstandings, so there has been some kind of distinction to say what is more forward based on word ordering: storygame, a game where the story is the paramount topic at the table, is a distinction some systems make an attempt to sell as a distinguishing factor. Also, taking a specific game, experience, and interpretation of it and then saying "this doesn't work" is implied that it doesn't work specifically for that one person. It does not, and should not, imply that it is unworkable or unrunnable for 100% of people unless it is designed to be inoperable. Taking something that is to be read and digested linearly instead of engaged with open ended outcomes is making a comparison that will never meet in the middle since they're in two different camps. There are probably games out there that could focus on the specific examples and more are coming out thanks to the barrier to self publishing and distribution being significantly lower thanks to the various platforms out there that permit it. At that point, it comes down to design intent and figuring out the right mechanics to use to blend the appropriate details for the type of game that is to be presented. Games that feature romance prominently with dramatic forces that complicate matters are out there. Either, they have not been discussed in detail here, or they are in the process of being created.
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Apr 16, 2021 00:44
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Absurd Alhazred posted:You have played at least one PbtA game, so you know there's at least one other, and mostly several. I'd call PbtA just about the purest improv storytelling game I can think of. The move structure is designed to work to the rhythm of freeform. And I think railroad group story experience is something else again.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:07
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hyphz posted:Well, I went and thought about this and recovered a bit from some bad stuff, and I think it comes down to a mechanic question in an oblique way. Well, worker-placement and deck-building are both competitive means to draft actions for yourself and deny them to other players. RPGs are usually played as cooperative because they involve a central rules interpreter and adjudicator in the GM, and putting that central role in a competitive game is just going to lead to sentiments of favoritism. Cooperative board games usually also eliminate the role of antagonist, leaving it up to random chance, both because the cooperative actions aren't intended to handle absolutely anything but just a certain subset of anythings, and because board games don't care about your feelings - all your game elements do what they say and there's little or no room for interpretation to handle events your current cooperative state has no answer to. The main reason an RPG presents obstacles that get dealt with via the things the RPG is about (dungeon-crawling) instead of things the RPG is not about (the scientific method) is because your character's backstory to date and all the customization you've done to them have also been informed by the things the RPG is about, instead of the things the RPG is not about. Shifting over to a gameplay mode that's not about what the RPG is about, no matter how good that mode is, is going to feel disconnected and samey because it doesn't respect anything about your character.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:12
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neonchameleon posted:I'd call PbtA just about the purest improv storytelling game I can think of. The move structure is designed to work to the rhythm of freeform. And I think railroad group story experience is something else again. I'm pretty sure The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen does it better.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:30
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hyphz posted:Well, I went and thought about this and recovered a bit from some bad stuff, and I think it comes down to a mechanic question in an oblique way. There are games that have cure the plague mechanics though. It just won't be a single die roll of your medicine vs the plague DC. Also a lot of games do have "worker placement" if they have decent extended task rules. Your character is the worker. e: I was there when you were talking about the plague thing, your hypothetical was one guy saying "I roll to cure the plague" Splicer fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Apr 16, 2021 |
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Apr 16, 2021 01:46
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Splicer posted:Also a lot of games do have "worker placement" if they have decent extended task rules. Your character is the worker. I guess BitD downtime activities are worker placement in a sense.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:50
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There is some kind of card-based "board game" game thing where you build a fairy tale by playing and interpreting the cards, it's very freeform and the "game" aspect is only just barely there, and I'd consider it just about the purest form of "telling a story" game there is, short of total no-rules improv. But the "role-playing" aspect isn't really there, so it probably doesn't qualify as an RPG. You typically have a protagonist character, and nominally the storytellers are in control of them, but you're not explicitly playing as that character. Anyway, I think fax is on to something important in terms of the semantics of the word "story." I would like to suggest some clarifying words: event, scene, narrative, chronicle. I select these words to be evocative of the types of construction that we collaboratively produce through RPG play hopefully without muddying the waters with the connotative meanings surrounding words like "story" and "adventure." An event is a thing that happens. Scene: A series of events in which probably at least one character is present for some amount of time in some kind of location or perhaps in motion through a set of locations. A word I nearly used instead is "vignette" which may be more broad and therefore encompassing of some times of event-series that don't easily break down into "scenes." A narrative is a point of view about events. Someone is representing how things happened, which in turn assigns meaning. If a person is relating events to you, it is their narrative version of those events. Even machine-generated versions of events are narratives because all "versions of events" require choices to be made about exactly what to show and in how much detail, but let's not be too pedantic and just presume that as far as RPGs go, people are both creating and experiencing them, at the time and after-the-fact. A player's moment-by-moment live experience of events creates the visceral experience of chronicles and scenes. Narratives often are related in terms of scenes, although not always; scenes are a useful tool for defining boundaries between narrative chunks, basically, although they also can have an explicit mechanical function in some games. Lastly, a chronicle is a retelling. Typically that word refers these days to a recorded version, but a person can also relate a chronicle verbally. Importantly, a chronicle is not the same as a "story" - at least as I mean the word here. A chronicle doesn't have to have the elements we might require of a story (like a rising action, a conflict that is resolved, clearly delineated protagonists, etc.): a real-life history book can be a chronicle while not being very story-like. A "retelling of events" I think can apply to someone describing the events of an RPG without requiring that those events had to comprise a "story." I think it might be helpful if we as players demand less "storytelling" of our RPGs, and focus more on the experiences that RPGs actually always or almost-always produce... scenes consisting of events, which sew together to form a narrative, which we experience in some order and can later relate in some manner, giving our own perspective and perhaps enjoying the perspectives of others via their chronicles.
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Apr 16, 2021 05:00
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I'll continue to indulge myself in pontification; All of the previous post is of course ignoring the game part. So without looking up other people's probably better formulations, here's my view of gaming. A game consists of one or more challenges which are addressed via meaningful decisions, and with some aspect of voluntary participation for the purpose of enjoyment.
If we take this and the prior post together, \ a role-playing game must then involve not only an experience of generating events/scenes/narratives/chronicles, but also provide players with challenges and opportunities to make meaningful decisions to address them. A good RPG, I'd argue, integrates these, with each supporting the other. I wonder if this is at all helpful to addressing hyphz' question... combat in a typical RPG does involve stringing together events, creating scenes, presenting challenges, and making meaningful decisions, and players may form perspectives on events as personal narratives, and relate them as chronicles if they like. As do non-combat scenes, but if non-combat scenes are paltry the challenges and meaningful choices part, they may be less game-like.
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Apr 16, 2021 05:45
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To followup on that, I don't believe that "story", specifically, "narrative", need be completely divorced from mechanics in a given rules engine. I would even put forth the argument that rules engines are created to shape specific types of narratives which then can be shorthanded to genre categorization: dungeon crawling, sword and sorcery, science fiction, utopian fiction, urban fantasy, etc. However, not all mechanics need be specifically related to the service of the narrative, or scenes therein. Lots of rules engines have discrete components which can be isolated and used optionally in a modular way that could, but do not necessarily need, to have an impact on the narrative. Let's take Everway as an example. Everway was a diceless RPG produced by TSR during the AD&D 1e and 2e era where basically anything that had an unclear outcome or required some additional oracular storytelling had a deck of cards that were wordless, filled with evocative images that were appropriate to the setting it wanted to portray. You couldn't get more mechanically clear that the narrative follows mechanics there, but the actual mechanics themselves usually rolled up to "have a conversation about the interpretations of the deck". Similarly, as is pointed out for the Chaosium version of Runequest, there is a massive priority on character creation on what the ancestry of your character was and their history that led up to the current. It puts the importance of the clan and ancestry as one of the foremost things to present a culture that wasn't a strict analogue to what we would consider "generic fantasy Europe" or what-not, and also served to introduce an unfamiliar but extremely dense world to new and old players. The generative aspect of it also provided mechanical benefits and penalties that also influenced the growth trajectory of the character - pretty important stuff. When people say 'story game', though, they tend to point to things where the rules are mostly absent, or up to loose interpretation, as in Everway. Rarely do people describe something like Runequest as a storygame, even though it is highly focused on its narrative, setting, and the very specific aesthetic and world it attempts to explore (see also: Pendragon, another Greg Stafford joint, or any genre-specific system like Feng Shui and so on). Why is that? What is the stigma that more rules = gets in the way of story, thus, rules-heavy games are not story games? I suspect the answer mostly comes down to a comparative line between games that are and are not D&D, which is the gold standard of punching bags for mechanics, narrative, and a whole host of other things. People use to say, "Look at this other game. This is an experience that D&D does, but better and with less rules. This is an experience that D&D does not provide." And so on. You can replace D&D with any other major published system, but for most new game players, they know D&D and maybe Vampire and Shadowrun and that's about it. Because "storygame" the term is then comparative to inform people that a game is "rules light and not like other major popular systems out there", we get the semantical beef where rules are not conducive to narrative, so the design pedigree of storygames is...have less rules, have more flexible rules, make sure the rules inform the narrative progress in a non-binary way. The primary distinction between a boardgame and a tabletop RPG is this non-binary bit where players and the referee collaborate and go an unlimited number of directions in the narrative that is the extent of the boundary of the table's skill and imagination. Boardgames only have a finite amount of outcomes and usually it has to do with who wins, and who does not. All actions in a boardgame service this very clear cut objective, even boardgames which are primarily story driven, like Tales of Arabian Nights! The flexibility of rules in a tabletop RPG then should be enough to allow for flexibility of interpretation at the table. Again, this is something that does not benefit boardgames, because they need to drive towards a closed outcome - the game must end, in other words, and in order to do so it must have clearly defined rules. All the arguments in boardgames come down to ensuring play is consistent so that the outcome of the game is considered fair. The amount of arguments about tabletop RPGs is as limitless as the amount of outcomes that a given ruleset can provide. The rules light part I have some beef with, because if the implication is that adding more rules means you have less story in your game, how do people generate stories in a satisfying way with systems that have a lot of rules? Why is one system that has more rules more popular than one that does not? Is there some kind of value being ascribed to the inherent worth of rules inside of games? I propose that if one wanted to make a game that has a rich narrative for players to dive into to provide structure to make creating those stories accessible. Kevin Crawford's games do this quite well with providing lots of mechanical and narrative guidance on how to handle those games. The same is true with Runequest and even other rules engines that are considered complex and crunchy like GURPS. I feel that in D&D's case, particularly in the modern era, there is a conception that the game, and the narratives, must be structured in the way the publisher presents the material, and only in that way. Those who are able to peel back the superficiality of that presentation and discard it in part or entirely are able to take the system, bash it into whatever story they want to tell, and have an okay time with it. I like Leperflesh's general structure of definition for "story". This maps generally to what would be understood from a dramatic structure as well as has been used in other critical analysis of those kinds of components that aren't explicitly game rules related. The interesting bit is the 'chronicle' part that reframes and continues the story propagation long after the origin of the story has long passed. I feel like many games strive to generate those kinds of stories that can be chronicled and told fondly to people across the world or even in just local social circles.
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Apr 16, 2021 05:45
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Mechanics are an interesting topic. There are certainly entertaining stories about curing a plague, like the Star Trek episode Miri. But how do you actually represent that in a RPG. I mean this is obviously something you could do free form but how do you make a game out of it?
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Apr 16, 2021 05:55
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