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aldantefax posted: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. Well, I was hoping to present a framework for talking about the stuff that RPGs create that aren't or don't have to fit into a bucket labeled "story" on purpose, but let's go into that for a second so maybe it'll be clearer. Once long ago I read somewhere, some sort of "intro to creative writing" thing that said that a story had to have, at minimum, these three components:
I believed that for an embarrassingly long time. Eventually I confronted it with the (imo bullshit) "shortest story", Hemmingway's infamous "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." That prompted me to at least think about the three elements of a story a bit more, in two ways: First, they're obviously wrong, if Hemmingway is correct: the baby shoes story is completely lacking in a setting, the two characters (whoever is selling the shoes, and the baby that no longer needs them) are barely defined, and there only a shadow of a plot, just a singular implied prior event (did the baby die? Or maybe the shoes just didn't fit, etc. etc. etc.) and a current one (someone wants money for them shoes). But there's also more going on, both in Hemmingway's thing and in anything that I would regard as a story. Here are some more elements, some of which may be essential and some merely highly advisable:
Arguably, conflict may be implied by "plot" but I think it's worth calling out, specifically because while For Sale could be argued to have a plot, it sure doesn't have a conflict. Theme is a biggie, and one which we actually engage with all the time with RPGs, often without really discussing it. By theme I do not mean genre. I like this definition: "an idea that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature." Examples: most Dungeons and Dragons games involve themes of battle, teamwork, discovery; Cthulhu Mythos games tend to have themes of horror, futility, loss of sanity, mystery and investigation; cyberpunk themes may include the pervasive corruptive power of the corporate state, cybernetics as a loss of essential humanity, magic as a resurrection of a lost connection to mysticism and supernatural reality; and so forth. Style is harder to pin down when it comes to a live roleplaying game than it might be for a written work of literature. As a writer, my first thoughts have to do with an author's choices of words, sentence structure, etc. which are characteristic and identifiable as theirs alone (one can easily identify a passage from a Hemmingway novel because of his particular writing style); but style also applies to any art form, and while I think any particular table is likely to develop unique stylistic elements of their own, the game materials can impart style as well, particularly as it relates to this tricky word "story." Maybe this is an element deserving of more unpacking later. Humanity is I think an essential component of a recognizable story, in so much as we're pretty uninterested in stories that have zero relation to our humanity. Even (or especially) our works that are about aliens and fantasy creatures always seem to be some kind of investigation or reflection on aspects of humanity. You can make a game in which everyone plays as a literal fish, but pretty soon your players are going to have their fish engaging in battles, or falling in love, or trying to steal from each other, or learning about themselves as they grow up and have to face their own maturity and changing bodies, or maybe just engaging in laissez-faire capitalism. I stuck "resolution" onto the end because I think it's optional... it may not be customary in Western storytelling to introduce conflict and then not resolve it, but there are other styles of storytelling in which conflicts are intentionally left unresolved - including one of my favorite genres of storytelling, actual history. I might be missing something but I think folks can see what I'm getting at here; an RPG gaming session may or may not produce something that possesses most or all of these criteria. Probably they do, and if so, maybe we can comfortably call them "stories" even if they don't neatly fit a structure that we're familiar with in other media (books, film, TV, etc.). Maybe a game session that had nothing but five rounds of a complicated combat played out on a board might could be argued as "not really a story" but to what end? Probably to try and distinguish it from an experience that a person was desiring more, rather than an actual rejection of normal criteria for "what is a story" as applied to a few rounds of a fight. In that case, perhaps it'd be more useful to use terms other than "story" to differentiate types of experiences.
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Apr 16, 2021 06:49
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aldantefax posted: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). This one's easy enough - a story game resolves in story scope. People use the term to talk about both storytelling games, whose rules almost exclusively concern who has control of the narration, when, and for how long, and for RPGs which resolve their die rolls in story-scope, as opposed to task-scope. Task-scoped games resolve their die rolls as single tasks in a larger framework provided by the game - when you attack something in combat, combat is the framework and you're rolling to see if the attack succeeds and how much damage it does (and the something may be rolling to see how well they dodge and soak damage). Compare this to the seize by force move in Apocalypse World, which doesn't assume any kind of larger framework but is one die roll that decides how an entire significant battle goes - you get to pick more and more advantageous options as you roll higher. Story-scoped resolution is much more likely to wind up non-binary because it's trying to account for many potential dimensions of a story coming in, as opposed to task-scoped resolution, which already has a framework to work in that only needs to handle success and failure. As a result, story-scoped games also tend to have a smaller number of player-facing rules, since each resolution mechanic in a story-scoped game is intended to cover a larger potential range of play.
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Apr 16, 2021 06:53
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nelson posted: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? I suppose it comes down to whether you want to dedicate resources to making plague-curing mechanics. If your game is about plagues, you could start with a boardgame like Pandemic and add role-playing aspects to it. But if your game is more like Star Trek, a chapter on handling plague planets is probably not worth the wordcount, so you'd have to handle it using more generic mechanisms: per Miri, perhaps various character skills, as the doctor seeks antidotes, the captain and spock try to convince the inhabitants to cooperate, and everyone copes with status effects caused by the infection. This is the essential tension of the author's choices when writing an RPG: how much system-weight can you dedicate to each possible area of the game; and the outcome of your choices is a heavy driver of theme. You may have also been asking about specific plague-related mechanics, though, in which case... yeah the sky's the limit, you could have decks of cards full of symptoms and contagion vectors, you could roll dice and look on tables of institutional responses, you could go around the table prompting players each to invent and describe a faction that is involved in either trying to spread or trying to stop the plague and also choose one other faction they're in conflict with and why; you could have realistic rules for rates of mutation... all sorts of possibilities.
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Apr 16, 2021 06:57
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Tabletop roleplaying games are mostly a conflict resolution framework that are contextualized by theme and style. It can be argued that if a game no conflicts to resolve and no way to introduce conflicts to resolve, it would perhaps be lacking in its categorization as a game - maybe you would call it a toy instead of an actual game. For games generally, there is always some kind of conflict even if the stakes are as low as possible - conflict is still there to serve as the framework for exploration of the narrative space the game provides. I would say that rather than theme, using 'concepts' may be better, because there are multiple, and they can be prioritized in a variety of ways. Each of the concepts likely will have conflict inside of them, even ones that seem benign on the surface - a game about togetherness and community will almost invariably have some kind of conflict which seeks to disrupt that peacefulness in some way or prevent it from returning. However, each concept can be weighted differently and may even allow for flexibility in how those concepts are weighted. A game predominantly on some foundational pillars will often find tables prioritizing whatever seems most interesting to them and there's not really a way around that from a design perspective without being extremely heavy handed. However, if you attempt to reduce the core elements of a given game to its conceptual components or thematic components, then you might get somewhere interesting. Style as is mapped to a tabletop game has to do with rules interactions for what does exist. I don't think that it's necessarily difficult to derive the style as presented by the rules engine because some core assumptions about the reality that the rules engine presents makes the game style shift to meet the needs of the concept and theme above. Humanity itself should be qualified that it can operate at multiple scales. The default one is to operate on an individualistic layer and control a single character over the course of their lifetime, but not all tabletop RPGs are like this, some allow for development of groups and whole organizations and domains that extend well beyond a single character. Making decisions of a domain in Birthright has little to do with the individual character but has a lot to do with how a player wants to develop their domain, which may coincidentally line up with character motives. I think the only thing that a tabletop RPG specifically needs to do is have conflict as the core assumption. Without it you don't have the actual recipe needed to start creating a game of this type.
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Apr 16, 2021 07:14
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aldantefax posted:Tabletop roleplaying games are mostly a conflict resolution framework that are contextualized by theme and style. It can be argued that if a game no conflicts to resolve and no way to introduce conflicts to resolve, it would perhaps be lacking in its categorization as a game - maybe you would call it a toy instead of an actual game. I can think of several board games which revolve around optimisation problems and don't contain any conflict. Hanabi is the first example to come to mind. Regarding "story games", I always thought the standard definition revolved around the mindset of the player, and whether they are trying to act as their character would if the situation was real, as opposed to act as their character would in a story. hyphz fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 16, 2021 |
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Apr 16, 2021 19:00
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hyphz posted:I can think of several board games which revolve around optimisation problems and don't contain any conflict. Hanabi is the first example to come to mind. The conflict is put forth by there being a time and resource limit because you get a finite amount of tries before things go boom or you 'solve' the thing. You're taking the word "conflict" and ascribing it in a more narrow sense, whereas I'm using conflict as catch-all word for "a challenge of some kind". If that is missing, there is no game and instead a performance of some kind.
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Apr 16, 2021 19:10
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hyphz posted:I can think of several board games which revolve around optimisation problems and don't contain any conflict. Hanabi is the first example to come to mind. "Conflict" can mean, simply, "incompatibility" - there is problem, and you must make decisions in an attempt to resolve the problem, one way or another: the status quo is, as defined by the game's rules, not allowed to persist. A game of Solitaire can be said to have a conflict: the deck has been shuffled, and you must attempt to resolve the chaos via specified sorting rules, making a series of decisions about where and when and how to place each card you turn up. quote:Regarding "story games", I always thought the standard definition revolved around the mindset of the player, and whether they are trying to act as their character would if the situation was real, as opposed to act as their character would in a story. That's an interesting distinction to draw. I think I generally prefer players not to try to play their characters "realistically" - both because that doesn't really mean anything, and, because their characters are not in "realistic" situations anyway. We draw inspiration for our games from fiction and imagination, and both of those are richer for avoiding the mundane, especially things like the risk-avoidance behaviors most sane people apply to dangerous situations. Then again, "as they would act in a story" may be restrictive in some way too: as discussed earlier, "story" might mean different things to different people, and I might like a player to feel empowered to let their character make decisions that wouldn't necessarily fit in a novel, or a movie scene, or something. E.g., don't be a slave to narrative imperative: checkov's gun may be on the table, but no, you don't have to make sure it gets used eventually, because our game is for our enjoyment first and foremost, and story structure doesn't have to force our hand.
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Apr 17, 2021 00:52
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hyphz posted:Regarding "story games", I always thought the standard definition revolved around the mindset of the player, and whether they are trying to act as their character would if the situation was real, as opposed to act as their character would in a story. What does "acting like their character would if the situation was real" even mean? I mean, I wouldn't lanesplit a cargo spaceship through the stargate traffic close enough to rip off antennas and fins in order to avoid the imperial interceptors, knowing that the slightest fuckup would kill me. But that's very definitely something that a particular character I play would do, because a) he's a very good pilot and b) he stopped caring all that much about his own life about 12 sessions ago. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 01:36
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Even characters in stories are supposed to make “realistic” decisions given the circumstances. If the story is written well there is an internal consistency to the imaginary world and the characters’ behaviors within it. Same is true with RPGs, except played well instead of written well.
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Apr 17, 2021 04:44
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I mean, I wouldn't lanesplit a cargo spaceship through the stargate traffic close enough to rip off antennas and fins in order to avoid the imperial interceptors, knowing that the slightest fuckup would kill me. But that's very definitely something that a particular character I play would do, because a) he's a very good pilot and b) he stopped caring all that much about his own life about 12 sessions ago. My go to example for this was in XD’s PbtA game where my character was seriously beaten by a werewolf and contracted lycanthropy. While he was recovering in his caravan, the other PCs went to another meeting, and a mysterious figure appeared to be following them. I asked if my character could be overtaken by wolfiness and attack the mystery figure as they passed the caravan in the town. XD allowed it and worked it into the plot extremely well. But my character would never have wanted to turn into a werewolf (it scared the hell out of him) nor to attack a person who, although mysterious, hadn’t done anything wrong. I asked if he could do it because, well, I was trying the whole “play to find out what happens” thing and I wanted to find out what would happen. The dynamic was interesting: it meant I had many more options at any given time (because I wasn’t restricted by my character) but was less involved with the character. It was about OOC mindset though. In a “non story game” XD would have been completely reasonable to rule that my character was taken over by his lycanthropy, but I would never be expected to suggest it, in fact I might want a saving throw - not because I would necessarily mind that happening, but because it would give concrete representation at the table to the fact that the character was unwilling. There’s also the balance and potential issue. In a non story game if my character failed their save and attacked the guy I would expect it to be an even or favourable fight because otherwise the GM is hitting my character with a save or die. As it was my character got his rear end kicked but didn’t die, but since I suggested the fight I had no issue with it. On the other hand, had the fight gone well for my character I also knew that whatever it could achieve would be constrained by narrative standards - that even if he was the leader of the werewolf conspiracy and I had kicked his rear end he wouldn’t be defeated then and there because that would end the campaign in the second act.
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Apr 17, 2021 04:51
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I still don't understand the distinction between "as if the situation was real" and "as if they were in a story" in terms of character actions. When a player acts "in character", does that not necessitate taking into account the conceits of the fiction in which that character exists (ie, "the story")? When a player constructs part of the story with the GM, they're not acting in character. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 04:55
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The other example was the podcast where they played Masks and someone picked the Nova. What they had in mind was someone who had a risk of, say, a 20ft explosion if their powers overloaded. So they could stay 20ft away from their party or others, with the attendant risk of being isolated or not having room, or trade off the need for a full strength power with the risk to others caught in the blast. Which is pretty easy to imagine as what you would do if you had a superpower that worked like that. But the system instead said that if they rolled badly on Unleashing then there was a risk of causing harm no matter what they did, because the Nova’s story is about their experience of being powerful but dangerous. And they found this hugely frustrating because knowing that they could not enter the character’s mindset. They found it frustrating to have to think that the character would hope they could control things this time, while looking at the playbook odds saying otherwise.
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Apr 17, 2021 05:14
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That's not how Masks works though. You don't get to pull the bullshit of writing a flaw that says "20' explosion" and then always carefully saying "I'm 21' feet away from everyone" whenever you do anything. You're playing the Nova, where a quarter of the character description says "it's wonderful... and terrifying. Lose control for even a second, and other people get hurt", not "you're a boring safety dad who always carries a tape measure so they can lawyer their way out of consequences"
Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 05:29
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I still don't understand the distinction between "as if the situation was real" and "as if they were in a story" in terms of character actions. “Acting like a character in a story” describes someone acting in the way fictional characters do, specifically in the way they act that regular people don’t. They’re typically dramatic, larger-than-life characters, unconcerned with everything but the present, and willing to take extreme risks regularly not because it is in any way plausible they’d survive a dozen death-defying stunt each month, but because that’s the kind of thing highly unrealistic fictional characters can be expected to miraculously do. Sometimes their actions seem to be driven more towards what would be the most dramatic than by a sound mind. Real people... generally don’t. They’re careful (or dead) and their lives are messy and meandering.
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Apr 17, 2021 05:44
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But we don't generally tell stories about "real" people (in that sense) in ttrpgs, right? The protagonists are inherently larger than life characters. Even in the old "you are a dirt farmer" D&Ds, you're still playing the dirt farmers who decided to go treasure hunting in monster-infested caves, not the dirt farmers who farmed the dirt.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:24
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Stories in tabletop RPGs can certainly be more on the realistic side based on the narrative, style, and rules engine, however abstractions will always need to be made. Whether or not concessions are made for a specific character's personality and what makes sense for the developing game can be done exclusively in character, but also can be done out of character as well. Characters are "real enough". Meaning, they have some level of humanity per Leperflesh's notes, and that allows for us as observers of those characters to think through what they may be going through. If you were playing a fully realistic character, there are many, many things that cause reality to break down in games that you will need to make a concession somewhere ad absurdium. By attempting to ascribe some kind of rigorous thing to work around a limitation in the case of Masks and the Nova, most people who are familiar with dramatic examples would make what Elector_Nerdlingen's observation was: it's not narratively or dramatically interesting to always be away from conflict that harms people the Nova cares about through some kind of rules massaging. The interesting bit is what happens when the rules break down. This is basically what the core dramatic tension is for Cyclops in X-men, since he cannot control his powers except through external tooling (laser-blocking glasses, visor etc). What happens when that fails? Lasers go everywhere. It is not a good time and it hurts people. It is a core part of that character's identity, but no human in real life has an uncontrollable laser gaze that can be suppressed with some kind of special material. This also rolls back to open-ended conflict which makes tabletop RPGs interesting. The most interesting parts of the narrative are things which don't have easy answers, or taking a difficult situation and putting into the narrative to see what happens, as in the werewolf scenario. If it is more interesting to determine the linear distance of powers in a tactical combat scenario and avoiding friendly fire, yeah, that's interesting because it influences tactical decision making, but is only one piece of the puzzle. A superhero with uncontrollable superpowers doesn't choose to turn off their superpowers, and characters in a game ultimately are avatars that are controlled by players who get to determine all kinds of things that happen to them, good, bad, or otherwise. The actual value of something happening to a character is irrelevant as long as it's interesting to the table. If someone is taking the rules in a very narrow banded sense and getting frustrated with them because the rules work against them, then either the rules need to change or the person perceiving the rules needs to change perspective. Finding a character's limitations and risks frustrating but still wanting to play the character can be worked around since if you understand why they are there and what they represent, maybe you're not cool with that. The character would fundamentally be different, but then maybe you want a different game as a result. No game rules text is hard and fast nor will it force someone to behave in a specific way. They will attempt to make pointed suggestions that work inside of the rules framework, but if it doesn't work, nobody will prevent the rules from being changed to better suit the needs of the table itself. If someone doesn't want to actually adhere to the rules while other people are having a good time and instead makes an attempt at some kind of mechanical superiority, that is a specific table challenge that has nothing to do with the narrative weight of a character nor their ability to make decisions in or out of character with relation to the game. Many designers, players and referees have a hard time with grasping open-ended scenarios. This comes down to calibration, and the rules can only extend so far to calibrate a given table and individual on how they might treat the rules engine. If someone is determined to view a rules engine in an extremely rigid and binary or singular sense with no compromise and things must be this way or else everything is terrible -- this is a mindset that, with rules engines, may be mitigated, but sometimes there is no helping people if they don't jive with a game. That still has nothing to do with characters behaving in a realistic way.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:47
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:But we don't generally tell stories about "real" people (in that sense) in ttrpgs, right? The protagonists are inherently larger than life characters. Even in the old "you are a dirt farmer" D&Ds, you're still playing the dirt farmers who decided to go treasure hunting in monster-infested caves, not the dirt farmers who farmed the dirt. Some people do. It's perfectly valid and sometimes even desirable to roleplay mundane other people, if only because you're a huge nerd super into the details of crop rotation.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:59
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LatwPIAT posted:Some people do. It's perfectly valid and sometimes even desirable to roleplay mundane other people, if only because you're a huge nerd super into the details of crop rotation. Fair enough, I can see how that applies in a particular subgenre (and I'd genuinely love to hear how that works out as a game too). But I don't think it relates to differentiation between like characters in a story and like real people, when the games under discussion involved things like "turning into a werewolf" and "hurting people with my superpowers". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 07:08
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Leperflesh posted:I suppose it comes down to whether you want to dedicate resources to making plague-curing mechanics. If your game is about plagues, you could start with a boardgame like Pandemic and add role-playing aspects to it. But if your game is more like Star Trek, a chapter on handling plague planets is probably not worth the wordcount, so you'd have to handle it using more generic mechanisms: per Miri, perhaps various character skills, as the doctor seeks antidotes, the captain and spock try to convince the inhabitants to cooperate, and everyone copes with status effects caused by the infection. Miri is a medical crisis (a contagious plague) and a diplomacy crisis (the locals don't trust you and violence isn't an option) both complicating a research mystery (where did the plague come from?) and a contact mystery (what do these people value?). The specifics of the episode might not be accounted for in the rules, but viewed as their broader categories they're the things that the crew have to deal with all the time in Star Trek, aren't they? So a game that tries to model how Star Trek tells stories will make every character capable, to one degree or another, of solving these mysteries and weathering these crises. Maybe a general pattern of "defend against a crisis while you solve the mysteries, use bonuses from solving the mysteries to finish off the crisis"?
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Apr 17, 2021 07:19
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hyphz posted:The other example was the podcast where they played Masks and someone picked the Nova. What they had in mind was someone who had a risk of, say, a 20ft explosion if their powers overloaded. So they could stay 20ft away from their party or others, with the attendant risk of being isolated or not having room, or trade off the need for a full strength power with the risk to others caught in the blast. Which is pretty easy to imagine as what you would do if you had a superpower that worked like that. Yes, this seems fairly characteristic of someone from a system with task-oriented resolution coming to a system with story-oriented resolution. Task-oriented systems often give you complete control of yourself in exchange for the GM having a similar degree of hostile control over your opposition, so it's possible to give yourself a fixed drawback and exploit a tactical map to make it meaningless. However, story-oriented systems don't have to give you complete control of yourself, since the story is a negotiation between what you and the GM want to happen. You can't do a story thing that says there's a drawback and narrate yourself into a position where that drawback doesn't apply, in the way that you'd tactics yourself into a situation where it didn't apply.
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Apr 17, 2021 07:28
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hyphz I was a dick to you the other day about the worker placement thing. Nothing you said merited that. I'm sorry. ------ Going to be a lot of capitalisation of keywords coming so if that annoys anyone, eh. ------ The essence of worker placement is that you have a limited number of WORKERS, a larger number of potential JOBS, and OPPORTUNITY COSTS for not placing workers in one in another. The OPPORTUNITY COSTS can be NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES for not filling jobs and/or missing out on POSITIVE EFFECTS for filling specific jobs. The negative consequences can be immediate, or they can be TIMERS. Timers can be a countdown that you can complete the game before by playing EFFICIENTLY, or they can be timers that are ACCELERATED (or just not negatively accelerated) by you not placing workers on them, or they can be a set number of turns that you will be assessing your REWARDS at the end of. In a competitive worker placement game the timers are usually provided by the other players (you're all racing to hit a points threshold before the others) or there's an end of game timer that you all compare your points at the end of (the reward is winning!) For an RPG specifically you also need regular FEEDBACK, both positive and negative. It's OK in a worker placement game for you to get limited feedback in play and to get better from repetition, but in an RPG each challenge may be unique so you can't rely on improving skill over multiple iterations. Also in a competitive worker feedback game you get continuous feedback from pulling off big cube combos and watching your opponent pull off better/worse big cube combos So for Miri you'd have: Workers The player characters are the workers, maybe gaining allies also adds workers. Timers Madness One per player other than Spock Tiered consequences: Madness precursors makes working jobs hard Final Consequence: You go mad and die Kid Problems Either one per Major Kid or a generic repeating timer where you choose Kid Problems from a list when it fills. Jobs Historical research Multiple slots If worked: Reveal other timers and tasks, gain various Cubes to assist other rolls. Limited Cube supply If unworked: N/a Kid wrangling Multiple slots (one per major kids + a generic Kids slot?) If worked: Slows the Kid Problems timer. Possibly gain various Cubes (like Knowledge or Ally or Trust) to spend on other rolls. If unworked: Possibly working just one kid accelerates another kid's timer Disease Research: Multiple slots If worked: Gain various Cubes to spend on other rolls, ultimately gain enough Research cubes to reveal Cure Research job. Reveals Madness timers if not already revealed. If unworked: No immediate issues Cure research Multiple slots If worked: Gain various Cubes to spend on other rolls, ultimately accumulate enough Cure Cubes to stop the Madness timer (and win the game!). If unworked: No immediate issues Game After Action Report First interval: The Madness timers start ticking. Captain Kirk is set to work a Kid timer, befriending Miri. Everyone else engages in Historical Research. Thes all produces some Knowledge Cubes and reveal the Madness Timers and Medical Research . Second interval: Doctor McCoy and Spock switch to Disease Research. Kirk continues working Miri (this sounds grosser and grosser every time I write it but uh also kinda true to the episode). IIRC Yeoman Rand just kind of hangs around and accumulates stress. Maybe her player had to leave the session. Or maybe she's a job. Third interval: The Kid Hideout is revealed, either as a set consequence of the Miri job or due to spending Cubes generated by the Miri job. A bunch of Kid timers hit 0 and they steal a bunch of equipment. The selected consequence is that they lose some Equipment, slowing Cure Research and adding a Risk to deployment. Getting the equipment back removes these penalties. Fourth interval: Kirk stops working the Miri job to work the Yoeman Rand job and Miri's timer restarts. It immediately runs out and the consequence Yeoman Rand Kidnapped happens. Bones and Spock are still working the cure. Fifth Interval: Kirk spends a bunch of Cubes to work all the Kid jobs simultaneously, recovering the Yeoman Rand and Equipment jobs and earning some Trust Cubes. Bones and Spock are still working the cure and kind of stopped paying attention to his bullshit a while ago. They get enough cubes to trigger the cure, so they use it to attempt to stop Bones's timer. Then Kirk says "But I got the equipment!" and the GM says "No backsies" so they roll and Bones is fine. Or maybe the GM offers them some free Drama Cubes to roll the dice, who knows. Game Conclusion: They accumulated enough Cubes that they can get a Good End where all the kids live and they agree to go to school or whatever, but not enough that they get loving IMMORTALITY as a quest reward. Kirk's player insists on a touching end scene with Miri and the GM suddenly remembers that Kirk's player always put Nowi in his party and maybe she should stop inviting him anymore. e: You could also skip the kid timers and have unworked kids just roll on a consequences table every turn or whatever. Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 14:05
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A lot of games give the basic tools for this, but what they don't do is have multiple pages in the back of the book with different timers and jobs and workers and such that you can lego brick together into a quick and easy "find the cure" scenario. And that is I think the big lack. You get instructions and guidelines (if you're lucky), but it's easy to throw together a quick combat encounter by pulling a bunch of dudes with the right numbers from the monster manual but for non-combat stuff you don't get that level of prefab.
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Apr 17, 2021 14:27
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:That's not how Masks works though. You don't get to pull the bullshit of writing a flaw that says "20' explosion" and then always carefully saying "I'm 21' feet away from everyone" whenever you do anything. The thing is, in a system with "exactly a 20' explosion" that shouldn't be bullshit. If you're playing (dear god) Hero System or something, then there should be a map and there may not be 20' of space available, or doing so might mean that the guy with the shield aura has to choose between including you or including the rest of the party, or it might mean that you can't fight while rescuing the hostages because you'd be too close to them so someone else has to rescue them instead.. and yes, maybe sometimes they do have to take the risk of catching people in their radius because the alternative is their buddy going down or a bunch of innocents being killed. Of course, doing that starts to lose the feel of comic superheroes and starts the dreaded gradual slowing down of the turn cycle. But the tradeoff is alignment of the player's mindset and the character's. As a reader you know that Cyclops losing his visor is dangerous, and as an author you know that 's an important part of Cyclops' character, but Cyclops can still always act like he doesn't want it to happen - which doesn't mean he stays home and never shoots blasts, because the tradeoff of that is too great for him. But that tradeoff would be in a very different place if he knew that any time he fired a powerful blast there would be a chance of his visor coming off regardless of any villain having a power that could remove it or anything else about the situation. And if it does get taken off, he'll close his eyes, and while that might not successfully prevent anyone from being hurt it represents his best effort to minimise it - and that's represented to the player in a non-storygame by a saving throw.
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Apr 17, 2021 15:19
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A saving through is mandatory to avoid the ill effects of something, but from a dramatic narrative game perspective, there are systems out there which are fully voluntary. FATE, for example, allows players a mechanical way to obtain more of the game's narrative resource, FATE Points, by playing up their foibles, taking the initiative, and generally being a proactive character instead of a purely reactive one. As a player in a more traditional game system like HERO or what not, there is no incentive to 'take a fall' in this way. However, a newer opportunity for players that is still rather foreign is to put characters into interesting and potentially horrible situations that is then interesting to play to find out what happens. Attempting to ascribe specific and hard and fast tactical rulings to a narrative device without recognizing the underlying intent of the device, and becoming frustrated with the challenges that it presents is in a way a certain kind of roleplaying, since it changes how you would think about the reality presented at the table. However, attempting to do so in order to completely circumvent a core character dramatic tension of being in control means that the player is not interested in exploring that specific point and is instead looking exclusively for mechanical benefits - "powergaming", though that term has historically carried a negative connotation. If what you seek is a tactical and strategic game of superheroes blasting each other while working around their limitations, then sure, that is one mode of play in a tabletop RPG. If you would rather prefer explore the narrative side of things, that is another mode of play. Both can be serviced in the same system as long as the player buy-in is there. You can replace pretty much any specific instance of "player does not like X limitation" and the resulting advice would be the same - if they don't like it, change the player or change the rules or narrative to benefit the player instead. Uncompromising over such a thing leads to arguments, misunderstanding, and generally breaks group cohesion.
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Apr 17, 2021 16:13
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hyphz posted:The thing is, in a system with "exactly a 20' explosion" that shouldn't be bullshit. If you're playing (dear god) Hero System or something, then there should be a map and there may not be 20' of space available, or doing so might mean that the guy with the shield aura has to choose between including you or including the rest of the party, or it might mean that you can't fight while rescuing the hostages because you'd be too close to them so someone else has to rescue them instead.. and yes, maybe sometimes they do have to take the risk of catching people in their radius because the alternative is their buddy going down or a bunch of innocents being killed. Of course, doing that starts to lose the feel of comic superheroes and starts the dreaded gradual slowing down of the turn cycle. Think of a D&D Wizard trying to explain why this spell doesn't need spell components or consume spell slots. When you charge up your powers, roll + conditions you currently have marked. On a hit, hold 3 burn. On a 7-9, mark a condition. On a miss, hold 2 burn and mark three conditions. Spend your burn on your flares. You lose all burn at the end of the scene. Choose four flares. ❑ Reality storm: You channel a destructive burst with your powers. Spend 1 burn to directly engage a threat using your powers, rolling + Freak instead of + Danger. If you do, you will cause unwanted collateral damage unless you spend another burn. He didn't have the burn to avoid collateral damage and got mad when he dealt collateral damage. It real dumb. Cyclops doesn't risk hurting people every time he unleashes on some guys because Cyclops doesn't unleash on guys when he's low on burn. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 16:29
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hyphz posted:The thing is, in a system with "exactly a 20' explosion" that shouldn't be bullshit. If you're playing (dear god) Hero System or something, then there should be a map and there may not be 20' of space available, or doing so might mean that the guy with the shield aura has to choose between including you or including the rest of the party, or it might mean that you can't fight while rescuing the hostages because you'd be too close to them so someone else has to rescue them instead.. and yes, maybe sometimes they do have to take the risk of catching people in their radius because the alternative is their buddy going down or a bunch of innocents being killed. Of course, doing that starts to lose the feel of comic superheroes and starts the dreaded gradual slowing down of the turn cycle. No, it's absolutely bullshit, because in order to balance this drawback, not only does there always have to be a map but every map has to take this 20' danger radius into account. This means that if the players ever do something unexpected that the GM has no prepared map for, Danger Radius Man can talk himself into a position of impunity. This is a common weak point in task-resolution systems; the requirement for a large amount of supporting information that comprises the structure where tasks are happening, and the system balanced with the assumption that the task structure will always exist in full rigor. Glazius fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 17:30
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Splicer posted:❑ Reality storm: You channel a destructive burst This is where the book gets a bit confusing: this isn't the unleash move, it's a seperate move apparantly called "charge up your powers". As I understand it, in the podcast it did happens on the unleash move because the text of the Nova playbook implies that the GM should be harsher to Novas when they use that move than others. I don't know if that's the right interpretation but I could understand reading it that way.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:12
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hyphz posted:This is where the book gets a bit confusing: this isn't the unleash move, it's a seperate move apparantly called "charge up your powers". As I understand it, in the podcast it did happens on the unleash move because the text of the Nova playbook implies that the GM should be harsher to Novas when they use that move than others. I don't know if that's the right interpretation but I could understand reading it that way.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:23
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hyphz posted:The thing is, in a system with "exactly a 20' explosion" that shouldn't be bullshit. If you're playing (dear god) Hero System or something, then there should be a map and there may not be 20' of space available, or doing so might mean that the guy with the shield aura has to choose between including you or including the rest of the party, or it might mean that you can't fight while rescuing the hostages because you'd be too close to them so someone else has to rescue them instead.. and yes, maybe sometimes they do have to take the risk of catching people in their radius because the alternative is their buddy going down or a bunch of innocents being killed. Of course, doing that starts to lose the feel of comic superheroes and starts the dreaded gradual slowing down of the turn cycle. Masks isn't a system with that, though. The Nova is always going to have a chance at collateral damage because that's what the Nova is about. If you pick the Nova, declare your collateral damage is in a 20 foot radius, and then always say you're standing 30 feet away from everything important, you have failed to understand the point of the playbook, and you're being a powergaming jackass. Pick another playbook if you don't want to care about collateral damage.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:45
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Tsilkani posted:Masks isn't a system with that, though. The Nova is always going to have a chance at collateral damage because that's what the Nova is about. If you pick the Nova, declare your collateral damage is in a 20 foot radius, and then always say you're standing 30 feet away from everything important, you have failed to understand the point of the playbook, and you're being a powergaming jackass. Pick another playbook if you don't want to care about collateral damage. Yes, that's true, and I'm not criticising Masks. But in practice if you end up having to say this to a player they're going to feel rubbed extremely the wrong way, and if they've been RPGing for any length of time they might not expect it - remember that the tactical collatoral damage trade-off on Fireball has been a staple of D&D and d20 games almost since they were invented. I've always had some sympathy with the school of thought that "power gaming" and "min-maxing" could really only happen in character generation or OOC decisions. For IC decisions, it's just the character trying their best to succeed. And the simplest case of the storygame differentiation is that a storygame breaks if all players have their characters always try their best to succeed.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:55
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I don’t understand the concept of trying to minimize collateral damage.
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Apr 17, 2021 20:30
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I think it's fair to say that in-game "power gaming" can happen when the player is confusing the exactitude of rules information with in-character understanding. "In real life" a person with explosion power probably hasn't been through rigorous lab testing that discovers that there's a perfect 20 foot radius beyond which nothing is harmed - becasue, of course, that's a rules abstraction. It's necessary to make such abstractions when designing a tactical combat game that is played on a grid, because you need to know which squares are and aren't affected, and having some kind of logarithmic fall off of damage potential in a sphere, accounting for air pressure differentials and secondary damage, etc. is too unweildy to work for a game. But when we're in-character, we're supposed to not know that we have exactly 38 hit points, that an enemy is exactly 65 feet away, and that we're out of Fate Points for today. In a tactical combat game, we accept that the player will make decisions for their character on the basis of this information anyway, because they're playing a game, and usually the game at least attempts to balance for this. D&D expects players to move their mini to a square that is in range for the blast, and not waste the blast power by intentionally ignoring that they're 5' too far away for it to work. D&D is making concessions in order to enable a more interesting and engaging tactical puzzle. But the guy with the 20 foot thing isn't playing D&D, and if it's not a tactical battlefield puzzle game embedded in an RPG, the players at the table should all be on board with the basic idea that their drawbacks are going to happen sometimes, and they shouldn't use out-of-game knowledge about precise limits (and why is there a precise limit on that power in this kind of game? That seems like a mistake?) to try to turn the game into a tactical puzzle, that's not the idea here. The player should not act as though his character is capable of positioning himself precisely like that, and the GM should not provide maps with that sort of precise measurements, if they're not part of this kind of game. Cyclops doesn't want to accidentally cut loose and injure civilians or his friends, but his player should play as though he's always taking that risk; maybe cyclops tries to not cause a problem in this combat by intentionally positioning himself with the crowd of civilians to his back, but that doesn't mean the GM has to play along and let him not have any risk this time: a civilian he didn't notice can still get caught in the blast, or cyclops can get punched and spun around, or whatever, and the player should not find that to be a problem; the GM and other players are playing along to make sure his character's whole deal remains relevant in the story. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 20:54
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hyphz posted:... the simplest case of the storygame differentiation is that a storygame breaks if all players have their characters always try their best to succeed. Categorically false. Storygames have no requirement for characters to fail by categorization because characters do not have perfect control over their situation at any given time. People directing the characters might, and characters may have a primary or even singular focus to do their best to succeed - what hero phones it in by half-assing an attempt to succeed at something? This is another narrow interpretation that is being turned into a generalization. A storygame can be anything that is in service to whatever story that is attempting to be put forward. This has a common term - power fantasy. However, it can examine the critical weaknesses and flaws of characters. Some people find being powerful all the time and making the right decisions all the time interesting and have an intense dislike for any other mode of storytelling and play. Entire genres of fiction as well as games of all kinds service this desire to be powerful. It does not make the whole of whatever definition people are adhering to for storygames, nor is the inverse an absolute either, where storygames will fall apart if people attempt to be their best at whatever they're doing. In the specific case of the example that has been danced around for the last 30 posts or so, the idea of the design behind a character that is prone to collateral damage vs. the player expectation and desire to not have that happen but without compromising either on the player or referee side means that there is something that the table needs to resolve, not the rules engine, or its designers. If someone cannot accept their character has flaws in that specific way but also does not want to make any changes to their characters or the way the game is played at all, then this is similar to driving in first gear down a freeway and complaining that a car is going too slow.
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Apr 17, 2021 21:10
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hyphz posted:Yes, that's true, and I'm not criticising Masks. Also, a player saying "My character uses reality storm to attack all the robots but OH NO it all goes wrong" IS having his character try his best to succeed. The player knows the character is going to gently caress everything up, but the character doesn't. If you're saying it breaks if the player always try to have their character take what the player knows is the optimal choice then... just don't use Reality Storm when you only have one Burn. This is, again, mechanically equivalent to a Wizard casting fireball on the fighter and complaining he couldn't "shape" it around him. That's not how fireball works, wizard! Maybe you should have used a different spell! Splicer fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 21:23
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hyphz, forget all the nonsense you've built up in your head over the masks thing and look at this instead. Imagine there was a Sorcerer spell in D&D called Weird Magic which whenever you cast it you could either burn a second spell slot OR the GM gets to pick a bad magic effect "that harms a party member or at least one innocent party". Sorcerer: "OK There's no civilians about right?" GM: "No" Sorcerer: "And there's no party members near the hurt orc?" GM: "Well they're in the same fight but not right next to the orc no." Sorcerer: "OK I'm casting Weird Magic on the injured orc for 5+3d6 damage." GM: "You burning a second slot?" Sorcerer: "No." GM: "The magic chains over to the Rogue and also deals him 5+3d6 damage." OR GM: "The magic expands unexpectedly and catches the Rogue in the blast for 5+3d6 damage." OR GM: "The damage changes to Force, hurling the orc in a random direction and landing on the Rogue, dealing the Rogue 5+1d6 damage and knocking him prone." Sorcerer (to any of the above): "BULLSHIT" What is your opinion on that? Splicer fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 21:42
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I'll pile on and take issue with the definition of the word "success" apparently in use here, separate from like the immediate idea of a pass/fail on a die roll and instead being about "character success." What does that even mean, to say "my character succeeded?" At what? Did they win the game? If not, then... survival? Leveled? Achieved a personal goal? Experienced an arc? Is a Cthulhu mythos game a failure for the players if the characters all die or go insane? If we can accept definitions of the word "success" that includes characters not winning at everything they attempt to do, then we can also reject the formulation that a character causing collateral damage they didn't want to cause has "failed" - and by extension, the notion that a player who can accept that part of their character's oeuvre is their tendency to accidentally cause collateral damage is "accepting failure of their character" or something like that. "Tragic outcome" is a theme in fiction, it's not "failure."
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Apr 17, 2021 21:54
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And, again, the thing I keep coming back to over and over, if it was important that the character not cause collateral damage they could have: Spent a second burn Used a normal attack action The character isn't locked into always hurting the gently caress out of people if they try their best. They only do it under specific circumstances. The player CHOSE to do collateral damage, and then got mad they couldn't... "narrative lawyer" their way out of it.
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Apr 17, 2021 22:03
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aldantefax posted:In the specific case of the example that has been danced around for the last 30 posts or so, the idea of the design behind a character that is prone to collateral damage vs. the player expectation and desire to not have that happen but without compromising either on the player or referee side means that there is something that the table needs to resolve, not the rules engine, or its designers. If someone cannot accept their character has flaws in that specific way but also does not want to make any changes to their characters or the way the game is played at all, then this is similar to driving in first gear down a freeway and complaining that a car is going too slow. Agreed, but the manner in which it's resolved is the key. If you had a superpower which would sometimes - often enough to worry about - generate an explosion in 20' around you, and you would be fully responsible for anyone harmed by it, then of course you would try to use it only in open spaces and only when it was absolutely necessary. If the power in question instead had a significant chance of harming multiple people in the area no matter what you did to prevent it then, probably, you would only ever use it if the alternative was much worse. Maybe if someone was about to detonate a bomb that would destroy the whole area and you could stop them. But even then, they might be a suicide bomber but you're not, and you have to live with all the GBH and potential murder charges. It would be a horrible situation to be in. But most Masks tables would say you can't do that, that playing a Nova that does that is breaking the story. They say you have to go out and use that power, even just to stop a bank robbery. And that's problematic in stories. People writing stories about Novas, Cyclops included, do have to make sure that the character isn't coming across as an idiot needlessly endangering innocent people. Cyclops's visor doesn't come off easily, he can close his eyes, he can make guesses as to things that might try to remove it and avoid them, etc. The problem is that the player having to work out how to do that themselves, while knowing the actual danger level because the rules tell them it, can be tremendously uncomfortable for some players. They don't want to have to hold two incompatible mindsets at once - the character mindset that using their power is worth it, and the player mindset that it is predetermined for it to regularly cause damage because that's what the story is about. They would much rather just have the character mindset, so that they can imagine that they are the character. That does not mean that they don't want a story. If they would only use their power when the stakes are high, then they want the stakes to be that high. If there are narrative devices that are used to make Cyclops not an idiot taking a nuclear bomb to a fist fight then they want those to exist in the game as well, in the form of saving throws or whatever.
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Apr 17, 2021 22:03
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hyphz posted:Agreed, but the manner in which it's resolved is the key. Also also, and I also cannot also emphasize this enough also... taking reality storm is optional. You choose 4 out of 10 powers. e: It really cannot be expressed how bad an example this is. It's like a D&D player getting mad that his Wizard isn't good at sword, so he keeps trying to describe his sword swings to make himself better at sword and getting mad when he still misses all the time. Except in this situation the Wizard also has a "good at sword" spell that he's not using because??? Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 22:10
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Splicer posted:hyphz, forget all the nonsense you've built up in your head over the masks thing and look at this instead. I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: Non-story: "My character does not want to deal collateral damage, so I will try my best to prevent collateral damage by using all the rules options available to me to avoid it, and will never use abilities that are certain to deal collateral damage unless the tradeoff is worth it, and if the rules system will not allow me to do this except by never using any powers then it's broken and bad" and Story: "My character does not want to deal collateral damage, but I will use abilities which inevitably deal collateral damage or have a high chance of doing so which cannot be mitigated, even though my character does not want to, because my own objective is to explore how he/she/we deal with that situation."
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Apr 17, 2021 22:44
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