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Gray Ghost posted:So, given the in-depth discussion going on in this thread, I'm not sure if this is the right place to broach this topic: I mean, if the clunkiness bugged you enough to start a whole rewrite from almost first principles, I’d say the effort is not being wasted. I have a soft spot for my share of flavorfully baroque systems (I will never regret having run original recipe Deadlands with three decks of cards, a rack of poker chips, three different colors of paper clips to track wounds, etc) but there definitely comes a point when you have to decide whether the intangible charm is worth the tradeoffs in irritation (I won’t be playing Deadlands again). And yes, tabletop gaming has a long, proud history of new games being hacked out of or being made in response to the old. No shame in continuing that grand tradition— the usual stumbling block is not having a clear enough idea of what to discard, and it sounds like you have a good grasp on what and why.
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Apr 24, 2021 23:55
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Monte Cook's entire output for the past decade or more has pretty much been "Interesting settings/concepts expressed through clunky/outdated mechanics", so I don't feel like doing a major system overhaul based on one of his systems would be a particularly bad idea. At their core RPGs tend to be narratively based on existing ideas and genre-conventions anyway.
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Apr 25, 2021 00:58
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Thanks much for the perspective on this. This would be officially my first attempt at designing a game outside of making some custom playbooks and original GM stuff, so it’s a little overwhelming to start with something like IS.
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Apr 25, 2021 04:17
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Leperflesh posted:This is kinda interesting to think about. Many - maybe all - of the cards you draw in Terraforming Mars (which is mostly a game about drawing cards and then using them, and resources drawn from both the board state and your cards, to alter the board state and your cards) have flavor text which could act as roleplaying game type prompts. I could see an argument for prop->plot interaction. It's the other direction that I think is the blocker; no matter how you decide to roleplay it, the options the game mechanics present to you remain the same. You can opt to play the game differently based on your character or whatever, but you're still selecting from a limited menu of choices for each action, and unless you actually change the game's rules, that menu is always whatever the props say it is. garthoneeye posted:This is not germane to your broader point, but the flavor text in Terraforming Mars is so boring and perfunctory, I would be genuinely impressed if someone managed to use it as a roleplaying prompt. It... kind of is germane, actually? A lot of what makes The Quiet Year more of a roleplaying game than Terraforming Mars is the content and use of their respective prompt decks. Though again, The Quiet Year's better set up to have a good prompt deck because its actual rules contain more prop-to-plot interactions. If you say that your society has an abundance of security, that's a prop - a publicly visible element everyone knows about. But what that means in everyone's plot concepts is that, first, security is important to your society, and second, that your people are feeling secure enough to live without worry, and a little more besides that. When a card says to lose an abundance and you pick security, you can't just go on from there thinking that everything has stayed the same. Maybe one of your security measures was physically breached. Maybe something bad happened in the settlement that your security was supposed to protect you from. Maybe everything has physically stayed the same, but a wave of paranoia is making people feel like they need more security. There's an actual "mechanism of action" there, for lack of a better phrase: (prop) no security abundance -> (plot) people feel dangerously insecure (plot) people feel secure -> (prop) security abundance If the cards manipulate your security abundance, something has happened to make people feel more or less secure. If you do something to make your people feel more or less secure (usually a long-term project) that will affect your security abundance. So what are Terraforming Mars's props? You've got a decent number of them. Your map presence, your card tableau, your count of various tags, your income and storage of various resource types. The problem is that, if you decide to start a game of Terraforming Mars being Hippie PlantCo, the "mechanism of action" looks about like: (prop) literally every possible game state -> (plot) I am Hippie PlantCo If you can read every game state into being Hippie PlantCo, nothing that changes your game state can affect your play of Hippie PlantCo. Or in other words, interactions between plot and prop are only meaningful to the extent that a contradiction between plot and prop could exist.
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Apr 25, 2021 05:04
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I admit I do find it dreadfully saddening that the corollary to "You can be whatever you want" in an RPG, is "But you being that has to be under constant threat."
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Apr 25, 2021 17:11
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Only if you assume that conflict is the sole engine of plot development.
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Apr 25, 2021 17:30
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Only if you assume that conflict is the sole engine of plot development. I more meant in reference to Glazius posted:Or in other words, interactions between plot and prop are only meaningful to the extent that a contradiction between plot and prop could exist.
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Apr 25, 2021 18:47
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Contradiction doesn't have to be a threat.
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Apr 25, 2021 18:54
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Okay, I can see how I have to elaborate on that a little bit. So let's suppose that you're playing Fate and you decide to make someone with the high concept "Bandit Queen of the North, Crowned in Blood". You'd expect someone like that would be good at, like, fighting, sneaking, stealing, intimidating, that sort of stuff, right? However, Fate lets you freely choose what skills your character's trained in, and you completely ignore all of those in favor of academics, craft (bookbinding), determination, and pleasant conversation. You have created a contradiction. How is this consistent with your concept? Oh, you can say something like "I'm just an academic who found some uncomfortable truths, the evil empire put that whole bandit queen thing on wanted posters to target me", but then surely your high concept relates to being a rogue academic, with the whole bandit queen thing in scare quotes being another aspect, perhaps your trouble. Or suppose you're playing D&D and fight your way through a bandit fort to confront the Bandit Queen of the North, Crowned in Blood - a level 1 commoner with only a sackcloth robe and 1 hit point to her name. At this point you suspect the DM's trying to pull a fast one, right? Because there's a contradiction between the props of the fight and the expectation of the plot.
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Apr 25, 2021 19:49
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In the language of describing a story, the word "conflict" is a bit more technical than perhaps its colloquial usage. It means something like: an inconsistency that can't be ignored forever; a problem; an impending decision that matters. When I laid out the components of a story (in this post) I included conflict as a probably-essential component. For example, in a love story, the central conflict might be: "do they love each other? y/n" - the story would be unsatisfying if it ended with us still not having any idea whether they love each other or not. Or, the conflict might be "they love each other, but circumstances force them apart" - can they overcome those circumstances so they can be together, or, will they have to survive and move on from one another? Or it might be "they love each other, but also can't communicate effectively and keep hurting each other's feelings," and the conflict here is spelled out - there's an inconsistency between their desire to be together and their ability to be together, and in the story we will find out how that resolves. So it definitely doesn't have to be about violence. Absurd Alhazred posted:Only if you assume that conflict is the sole engine of plot development. And this is important too: while I think most any story has to include conflict, conflict isn't the sole engine of plot development. Events drive plot, as much or more, in that they force change and mark the passage of time. Do they love each other, y/n? Her sister arrives, and gives her some good advice. This is not essentially a conflict, but it's an event that may change the situation, and it does introduce new questions (will she take the advice?) and some such questions can be new conflicts: in this way, you could say that "plot points" drive a plot, sometimes by resolving a conflict and sometimes by introducing one and sometimes by simply changing the circumstances which alters the nature of the existing conflict(s) in some way. So what Glazius seems to be describing is both "conflict as a story element that drives plot" and also "conflict as a structural problem that detracts from the quality of the story." In that latter sense, and as applied to games: if there's a conflict on your character sheet you may be able to explain or resolve that with additional detail, or, you may just be making your play less believable or satisfactory. My low-strength Barbarian may actually be cunning and quick and not rely on raw power to wreck his foes in combat: or, I may actually want to play him as a powerful brawny slab of muscle, but I'm going to fail most of my strength-based rolls and everyone at the table is going to notice and if we never address this conflict people are just going to struggle to ignore it and act like the game is working. Glazius posted:If you can read every game state into being Hippie PlantCo, nothing that changes your game state can affect your play of Hippie PlantCo. This is of the form of the latter type: I have declared I'm Hippie PlantCo, but I'm doing nothing but spamming mining cards. There's a contradiction, and there's nothing in the game rules that forces me to resolve that conflict: there's no GM, and the other players can't take actions that cause me to reconcile my non-hippie activities with my nominal hippie identity. They can't broadcast harsh critique on the Martian News, causing colonists to picket outside HIppie PlantCo's polluted ore refineries, cutting into the company's prestige or something... there's no mechanism to defund my company, or enact new legislation limiting mines near the newly forested regions, or cut pollutant levels in the water tiles, or what have you. However: I could choose to roleplay at the table as an absolute hypocrite of a HippieCo; a cynical CEO choosing "green" branding purely to massage the company's image even as we pillage Mars for its resources and give no attention to terraforming responsibly. In this sense, something that changed the game state can affect how I play Hippie PlantCo, but only purely voluntarily and without any enforcement by the rules of the game.
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Apr 25, 2021 21:39
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I think calling a question like "do you these people love each other?" a "conflict" makes it less useful as a term. Just like replacing "challenge" with "conflict" earlier. Yeah, if you take it broadly enough, everything can be a conflict. Walking on the ground is conflict between you and gravity. What's the benefit? Meanwhile, keeping a stricter formulation of conflict, as something that describes two or more characters or factions at odds makes it clearer when you're trying to formulate other drivers of plot, like Vincent Baker tries to do here, acknowledging that Apocalypse World was explicitly driven primarily by character conflict: quote:Here’s Ursula K. LeGuin: “Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.“
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Apr 25, 2021 23:52
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Well, right off the bat if conflict has to be "two or more" characters, you have eliminated internal conflict, one of the most important types used in all forms of storytelling and literature. I can't really get on board with a definition that doesn't include that. I think articles like this one are still limiting the domain of "what is conflict" as a literary device too much, but this is the sort of stuff that gets taught in most any creative writing class, and is worth having a handle on if we're going to discuss the elements of a story. Two other types listed in that article, character vs. technology and character vs. nature are primarily focused on one character's conflict with external forces that don't carry an individual face, and a third, character vs. society may represent "society" with specific other characters but really those other characters are just a literary device for showing what the society is like that the main character is in conflict with. I don't know how any of this fits into Apocalypse World, or relates to its "model of conflict" but I think from a literary perspective, all of LeGuin's behaviors are things that can be in a game, and be in a story, but I don't think any of them allow a story to dispense with conflict.
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Apr 26, 2021 06:23
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Leperflesh posted:So what Glazius seems to be describing is both "conflict as a story element that drives plot" and also "conflict as a structural problem that detracts from the quality of the story." No, and I have no idea where hyphz pulled that from. I was only concerned with contradictions - a combination of props and plot to present something impossible. If no combination is impossible, any purported effect of one on the other is just player caprice. You can say "a contradiction is when plot and props are in conflict" and that's a reasonable sequence of words, but that conflict isn't as much dramatic as it is existential. Let's suppose Brianna (from my goblin tower example) is instead a character in a multiplayer online game. As before, she decides to target and destroy the goblin tower, and the game engine permits this. But when the goblin tower falls, the goblin archers and the goblin commander that were up there are still up there, getting and giving all the bonuses that Brianna tried to get rid of. Whoever designed the scenario didn't know someone could break the tower, and forgot to rig the goblins for gravity. Something impossible is happening, at least to the extent that if this were going down in real life, the GM would be getting some real dirty looks. (And probably saying some bullshit like "actually, if you knew anything about the falling rules, you'd know that creatures only fall when they move into an unsupported square, and none of those goblins have moved".)
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Apr 26, 2021 13:20
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Considering that American creative writing became a CIA psyop to fight socialist realism, and that Le Guin is specifically critiquing its tenets (although I am not sure she was aware of this connection, just of the paucity of imagination it resulted in), maybe the use of "conflict" for everything is worth interrogating instead of just accepting.
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Apr 26, 2021 14:56
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Glazius posted:If you say that your society has an abundance of security, that's a prop - a publicly visible element everyone knows about. But what that means in everyone's plot concepts is that, first, security is important to your society, and second, that your people are feeling secure enough to live without worry, and a little more besides that. I think this might be getting at the part of this that hasn't completely been sitting right with me Glazius posted:aside from the player or players, a game can have up to two other classes of elements: the props, which are the objects used in gameplay, and the plot, which is the fiction of the game as held in the minds of the players. Both require a certain amount of consensus to be reached between the players in order to operate properly - if you're using plastic figures on a gridded map (a prop), it should be clear which figure is in which square. Contrarily, if everyone, even GM Dave, forgets that Dave said there were orc raiders in the Black Forest (a plot element), the plot will proceed as if there were no orc raiders in the Black Forest. I don't really understand what the line is between plot and props here. There's a few ways things are being explained, but they mostly seem to be tendencies rather than hard rules. * Props are objects, Plot is in the minds of the players: things that are being represented with physical objects do seem pretty clearly to be props, but it also seems that plenty of props can be held completely in the mind (tracking HP in your head, etc). Except the Black Forest example says that even physically represented objects can be non-Prop * Props are public knowledge, Plot is personal: I'm struggling with this one a little, definitionally. If my backstory is that I'm a former turnip farmer, that seems like plot at first (when only I know it), but does it turn into Prop once I say it aloud to everyone? Or possibly even just when I write it down on my character sheet? The Black Forest example is confusing me a little here. Is the idea that when the minis are put on the map initially they're Prop, but once they fall out of people's minds they become Plot? Or is it that the world map is a visualization of rumors that the PCs have heard while the tile map is based on what they're seeing right at this moment? Does the tile map become plot if the PCs are all blinded and you're suddenly just moving the monster minis around as a "I think they might be here" representation as opposed to a "they're definitely here" one? Related, are keyed dungeon maps Prop or Plot? What about the true killer in a murder mystery? They aren't publicly known, but they're non-mutable and actively shaping play consistently throughout the game session in a way that's feels on par with, like, HP to me. * Props are commonly accepted, Plot is headcanon: It feels fair to say that something can't become Prop without being accepted as part of the Shared Imaginary Space by all members, but is that a defining trait? In my previous turnip farmer example, is the moment that it turns from plot to prop the moment that the other players go "oh, okay" and not the moment I say it to the table? * Props are mechanical, Plot is narrative: In your first post you give an example of a lady shaking down a goblin tower, and cite the non-mechanical description of that event as Plot, while calling the specific mechanics involved in taking it down Props. Is it that non-mechanical descriptions are Plot (there's a goblin tower in front of you, it looks a little flimsy), but mechanical ones are Props (the goblin tower is 4 Tiles in front of you, DC 20 to shake it down / the goblin tower is at Near range, it has the Flimsy tag)? Is the idea that natural language description gets serialized into mechanics, which then run in a little parallel universe and spit back a result that gets deserialized back into natural language? This was my first take on the distinction, but your above post about your Quiet Year society having an abundance of security seems to contradict this--there you have a natural language description that's agreed upon as Prop and people's personal takes on it as Plot. * Props are lasting, Props are ephemera: You specify that Plot is meant to be commonly accepted, but only for the moment--I think the implication here is that Props are the things that stick around? I'm also a little confused by this one--is the idea that a natural language description isn't "real" until it's locked into reality by having a mechanical depiction? Is "there are Orcs in the Black Forest" counted as Plot because it gets forgotten before it ever gets used (it would be real and Prop if it got remembered) or because it's a depiction of the player's understanding of the world based on rumors they've heard (it would become Prop if the players confirmed it firsthand). This is a real cool model, I just want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly--is Prop meant to be determined by one of these or is it the Venn overlap between multiple of them? Right now there are three main versions of this I can visualize, and I'm not sure which you're intending. * Prop is everything agreed upon in the Shared Imaginary Space, Plot exists as ideas in the players' minds that almost immediately gets converted into Prop (or rejected) as soon as it's spoken * Plot is the moment to moment meat of the game, and Prop is a sub-state that you jump into to resolve situations. They're both equally important, but Prop's function is to resolve uncertain situations in the Plot and add twists. * Prop is the physics of the game world, and Plot is how we relate to it/set dressing we lay on top of it.
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Apr 26, 2021 20:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Considering that American creative writing became a CIA psyop to fight socialist realism, and that Le Guin is specifically critiquing its tenets (although I am not sure she was aware of this connection, just of the paucity of imagination it resulted in), maybe the use of "conflict" for everything is worth interrogating instead of just accepting. Considering the idea of controlling the poets and the storytellers for the purpose of supporting the state over the freedom of the artists goes at least as far back as Plato, I'm disinclined to credit the CIA with inventing the notion. But more importantly, I'm dismayed to still be arguing that the word conflict from a storytelling perspective is not intended to be restricted to characters in conflict with one another, and especially not to exclude "ways of being" as storytelling devices. I accept that perhaps that connotative meaning is impossible to escape, but we may use another less loaded word, such as "problem" or "obstacle" if you prefer? It may also be useful to reference storytelling and its structures from around the world, and from historical eras, if you would like to further distance analysis from excessive influence by American politics. I'd rather do that anyway to be honest, although I confess I'm not well-equipped.
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Apr 26, 2021 21:18
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Leperflesh posted:Considering the idea of controlling the poets and the storytellers for the purpose of supporting the state over the freedom of the artists goes at least as far back as Plato, I'm disinclined to credit the CIA with inventing the notion. Did you read the article? It's not that they came up with the idea, it's that they actually attempted to do so, and their attempt had long-lasting effects.
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Apr 26, 2021 21:38
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I did read the article. LeGuin, the author of The Dispossessed, a novel portraying a functioning anarchist society, surely has better credentials than I do to criticize American political influences on creative writing, especially anti-Leftist influence; but my read of what AA has presented does not seem to extend to LeGuin outright rejecting the notion that conflict is an essential part of a story; rather, she seems to me to be encouraging writers to consider that conflict is not the only mode of human interaction, which IMO is a distinct issue. My point is that all of Western literature is already heavily influenced by the constraints and controls imposed by countless forces including religions and governments, and going all the way back to Classical thought. The CIA example is illustrative but not singular and I'd argue not even dominant, compared to, say, the influence of Puritanism, or more broadly Christianity, on American literature. If we choose to reject sources describing the fundamentals of creative writing because they have been politically influenced, we may struggle to find any sources... but at least, we can look to writing less-influenced by Western culture to explore alternative narrative structures?
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Apr 26, 2021 22:20
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OtspIII posted:This is a real cool model, I just want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly--is Prop meant to be determined by one of these or is it the Venn overlap between multiple of them? Right now there are three main versions of this I can visualize, and I'm not sure which you're intending. Number 3 is a good thematic summary, but it doesn't do much for description. How does this do you? Props are things that could be equally well-known by all players. Plot is something that isn't equally known, but could still be agreed upon. Even then It's a little tricky to talk about what type of game element something is when it doesn't actually show up in the game. When I say "orc raider figures on the Black Forest" that's not talking about their presence on a strategic map, sorry. That description was confusing. It's on just a drawing of the gameworld map, meant to serve as a symbolic overview and common reference point for all the players - everybody agrees that they've heard rumors of orc raiders in the Black Forest, ranks of skeletons coming through the White Mountains, a dragon lairing in West Blue Bay. The truth behind those rumors is still at GM Dave's discretion. When you tell the other players your backstory, you haven't made it equally well-known to them. They're not thinking of your backstory exactly as you're thinking of it, but you have got their agreement on it. You're still entitled to come up with more details about it you haven't told everybody else yet, and nobody else can add details to it without your approval. When I say "an abundance of security" is a prop in The Quiet Year, that's because "an abundance of RESOURCE" is a special game term, and everybody knows the resources the settlement holds as important, having collaboratively defined them at the beginning of play. As a game term "an abundance of security" is something equally well-known by all players. If GM Dave turns the lights out and runs monsters around in the dark, while that isn't equally well-known by all players in the moment, the players could demand an accounting of things from Dave after the fact -- too late to help their characters, but enough to understand where and how things were moving. GM Dave doesn't get to suspend tactical movement rules in the dark, after all. If GM Dave is working off a keyed map, the map as it's been revealed to the players is a prop. The unrevealed map isn't part of the game yet, so it's not really accurate to call it any kind of game term. At any time GM Dave could edit the unrevealed map as he saw fit - maybe there was only one hour in the session, so in the interests of wrapping things up he cut out literally all of the remaining map except for the final boss room. You could call it "potential prop"? Maybe?
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Apr 27, 2021 14:21
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I think calling a question like "do you these people love each other?" a "conflict" makes it less useful as a term. Just like replacing "challenge" with "conflict" earlier. Yeah, if you take it broadly enough, everything can be a conflict. Walking on the ground is conflict between you and gravity. What's the benefit? I'm pretty sure that kind of substitution would put you somewhere in Wanderhome, no matter where you placed it. Most of the NDNM games have some kind of conflict element to them even if they're focused around other sorts of human action, but Wanderhome leaves it behind almost entirely. It's also GMless, which helps share the load around. I look at that list and it strikes me that conflict is rather asymmetric in comparison to those others. Conflicts have a winner and a loser, and in GMed games the GM is there to lose. But I can't imagine the sort of effort involved if you sat down to play a game about discovery where you were the only person who could be discovered, or who could do the discovering.
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May 1, 2021 02:52
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Glazius posted:I look at that list and it strikes me that conflict is rather asymmetric in comparison to those others. Conflicts have a winner and a loser, and in GMed games the GM is there to lose. But I can't imagine the sort of effort involved if you sat down to play a game about discovery where you were the only person who could be discovered, or who could do the discovering. AW is driven by conflict between player characters, I thought, so they win and lose to each other. I don't think there's anything particularly out of the ordinary for a GM to be the only one being discovered, either, if, say, they're playing a dungeon that the players` characters are exploring.
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May 1, 2021 03:03
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Absurd Alhazred posted:AW is driven by conflict between player characters, I thought, so they win and lose to each other. I don't think there's anything particularly out of the ordinary for a GM to be the only one being discovered, either, if, say, they're playing a dungeon that the players` characters are exploring. Finally read the link. I should have known he was talking about Under Hollow Hills. But no, when Vincent Baker writes about "characters" and "players" in the AW context, he's also talking about characters that are played by the GM. "Ask their player questions and they'll answer you" is what you get from reading a person and all the NPCs are played by the GM, so that's who you ask. The GM has an entire worksheet and several chapters to help them create all of the characters that will threaten the PCs' society from all directions, some deliberately, others simply by their nature. Apocalypse World PCs are a lot less like the Get-Along Gang than the assumption in many other RPGs, and the GM's also encouraged to find the rifts between them and hammer in an NPC to split them wider, but it's not intended to be session one, choose sides, fill your hands. D&D dungeons are a blend of discovery and conflict. D&D characters certainly are, so there's that mitigating factor when it's players exploring a D&D dungeon. I'm thinking more about a game where all there is is discovery, where all the players are all about discovery, where the dungeon is only about discovery. The preptime-to-play ratio or the demands of improv in the moment would be pretty high, don't you think?
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May 1, 2021 05:20
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Glazius posted:Finally read the link. I should have known he was talking about Under Hollow Hills. That's fine, but it's still not just the GM losing. quote:D&D dungeons are a blend of discovery and conflict. D&D characters certainly are, so there's that mitigating factor when it's players exploring a D&D dungeon. I'm thinking more about a game where all there is is discovery, where all the players are all about discovery, where the dungeon is only about discovery. The preptime-to-play ratio or the demands of improv in the moment would be pretty high, don't you think? Well, D&D became a lot more about combat with time, and did start with a lot of wargaming rules, but crawling a dungeon can be much more about discovering things than necessarily fighting them. And I don't think it's much more complicated to create an interesting curiosity in a dungeon than it is to create a combat encounter, especially if you build off of how the players engage with it when they get to it, and removing all the rules that go into combat and progression in combat and mostly combat-focused or -related capabilities and bonuses and access to spells which mostly deal with combat from that hundred-page list at the end of the PHB would leave a lot of room to work with.
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May 1, 2021 05:50
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I just remembered that I meant to respond to this, but never actually did. I think it's an interesting enough discussion that I don't feel too bad about the necromancy, though.Glazius posted:Number 3 is a good thematic summary, but it doesn't do much for description. I was probably a little uncharitable in my description of #3, but that's also because it's the one of the three I most disagree with, ahaha. Glazius posted:How does this do you? Props are things that could be equally well-known by all players. Plot is something that isn't equally known, but could still be agreed upon. Even then It's a little tricky to talk about what type of game element something is when it doesn't actually show up in the game. That's an interesting distinction, although I think it's way more of a gradient than two things of different types--details within a RPG session are constantly coming in and out of focus. Like, let's say the players open a door. The GM tells them "there are goblins in this room"--the existence of goblins then would become a prop, right? It's equally well known to all players, but there are still a ton of details about the scene that haven't been established, like exactly where in the room each goblin is standing. Any goblin could pretty much be in any part of the room--I think their positions would count as Plot under this system? The players talk with the goblins a little, and as part of this conversation the GM narrates "the leader of the goblins steps to the forward of the group as they speak". This lays down a slightly more in-focus view of the positioning of the goblins, but there's still a ton of ambiguity. We know the leader is now closer to the players than any other goblin (this fact would become a prop, right?), but beyond that any configuration is still pretty much possible. It looks like a fight might break out, so the GM slaps down a bunch of minis on a grid map on the table. Suddenly we know that the goblin leader is exactly 15' north and 5' east of the Paladin. The exact positioning of each goblin pretty clearly becomes a Prop. Is that an accurate way of thinking about Plot & Prop in your system? Or would the position of the goblins be Prop the whole time, since the players *could* query the exact positions of the goblins at any time (even if the GM hasn't decided on the exact positions yet)? If it's the first, that's pretty much just my description #1 (" Prop is everything agreed upon in the Shared Imaginary Space, Plot exists as ideas in the players' minds that almost immediately gets converted into Prop (or rejected) as soon as it's spoken"). If it's the second, I'm not clear on what the difference is between a goblin's position (all details not nailed down yet, but could be at any time by asking the GM about it) and a player's backstory (all details not nailed down yet, but could be at any time by asking the player about it). Glazius posted:When I say "an abundance of security" is a prop in The Quiet Year, that's because "an abundance of RESOURCE" is a special game term, and everybody knows the resources the settlement holds as important, having collaboratively defined them at the beginning of play. As a game term "an abundance of security" is something equally well-known by all players. That's my bad, I really need to play this game  Glazius posted:If GM Dave is working off a keyed map, the map as it's been revealed to the players is a prop. The unrevealed map isn't part of the game yet, so it's not really accurate to call it any kind of game term. At any time GM Dave could edit the unrevealed map as he saw fit - maybe there was only one hour in the session, so in the interests of wrapping things up he cut out literally all of the remaining map except for the final boss room. You could call it "potential prop"? Maybe? Glazius posted:Props are the things all the players are expected to agree upon as absolutes, even if they have no physical presence at the table; Dave may be privately tracking the hit points of the orc raiders during a combat but everyone agrees that hit points exist and that they're moving up or down by the same number and you die when they hit 0. Plot is the things all the players are expected to agree upon only in the moment, even if there are physical reminders; This may come down to differences in personal playstyle (I'm a big fan of old-school somewhat sandboxy dungeon crawls), but I don't see any difference between HP and a dungeon map here. Like, yeah, I guess you could modify a map on the fly if you want to for pacing needs, but you can also fudge HP totals on the fly for pacing needs, and in most circles I play in both would be seen as about the same level of fudging--you're taking the challenge that the players are here to experience and cutting a portion of it out so that you can get to the ending before people have to go home for the night. I think I might have lost sight of what Plot is, in all this--wouldn't something like HP be what you agree upon only in the moment? If I express that my character says something (which I think is Plot under your system), that's true forever within the game--it's not something people stop agreeing happened after the scene is over. HP sort of is, though--once the fight is over the fact that the goblin had 7HP at the start of turn 3 really doesn't have any remaining presence within the game's agreed-upon space It does feel like there's some meaningful difference in type between the fact "my character wants to take revenge on the tyrant who killed his parents" and the fact "my character has 17 hit points", and that what makes RPGs fun is in how those two types of facts can both affect each other, but it feels like we've gotten further and further from that dynamic the more we've talked about this. Or, to put it more concretely, I don't really understand how "my character wants revenge" is meaningfully different from "the goblin is 10' away" when measured on the basis of being equally knowable to all players. It's true that the players might have a slightly different understanding of the details of my character's mental state than each other, but that feels equally true of things like goblin positioning to me--you and I both agree the goblin is 10' away, but I see it dancing in a jeer and you see it slouching threateningly/you and I both agree my character wants revenge, but I see my character on a slow burn while you see it as a overflowing passion. I agree there is something that feels different, but I'm not confident we've found the best way to divide that difference yet
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Jun 6, 2021 21:28
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OtspIII posted:It does feel like there's some meaningful difference in type between the fact "my character wants to take revenge on the tyrant who killed his parents" and the fact "my character has 17 hit points", and that what makes RPGs fun is in how those two types of facts can both affect each other, but it feels like we've gotten further and further from that dynamic the more we've talked about this. Don't talk about things "becoming plot" or "becoming prop". They're one or the other depending on what they are in relation to the game rules, and they don't change. I'll take another stab at explaining the difference: Nobody can tell you "your character wants revenge against the duke, you have to attack them!" You're the only one who gets to decide what "your character wants revenge" means and how that interacts with the situation. Because you're playing a cooperative game it's sporting conduct to consider everyone's enjoyment, so your decision should consider that e.g. your party mates probably wouldn't appreciate you letting go of the rope they're all clinging to so you can go attack the duke. But it's always your decision. This is in contrast to: Anybody can tell you "you're 10' away from the goblin, you have to move closer to attack them." Everyone can know what the props of the game mean and how they interact. In practice, not everybody does know, but that's most often by choice or out of convenience. Like if the PCs are negotiating with goblins in a cave and it turns into a fight. While the negotiation is going on, even if the battle map isn't set up, the map of the cave and the positions of the goblins are still props, they're just props the PCs haven't asked to visualize yet. When the fight starts the GM can't just scatter the PCs to the four corners of the map, pinned in by goblins, right? They'll say things like "I didn't move there!" or "Didn't I notice the goblins cutting me off from everybody else?" as though the props had always been in play.
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Jun 8, 2021 14:07
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While I really really appreciate the effort, that it's been this hard to tease apart these two definitions suggests that they're not ideal as a system for everyone to use to analyze games. Even with many posts laying it out I still keep coming up with exceptions that would seem to invalidate the definitions, or at least overcomplicate them. I guess I should not project and just say, I'm finding it difficult to apply this system myself, as an analytic tool.
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Jun 8, 2021 19:51
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Glazius posted:Nobody can tell you "your character wants revenge against the duke, you have to attack them!" You're the only one who gets to decide what "your character wants revenge" means and how that interacts with the situation. Because you're playing a cooperative game it's sporting conduct to consider everyone's enjoyment, so your decision should consider that e.g. your party mates probably wouldn't appreciate you letting go of the rope they're all clinging to so you can go attack the duke. But it's always your decision. Why can't they? That seems like it's a thing that's a feature of many roleplaying games.
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Jun 8, 2021 20:21
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LatwPIAT posted:Why can't they? That seems like it's a thing that's a feature of many roleplaying games. Because then it’s not a role playing game anymore. If you *have* to attack the duke, it’s just a tactical combat game with long cutscenes.
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Jun 8, 2021 20:41
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nelson posted:Because then it’s not a role playing game anymore. If you *have* to attack the duke, it’s just a tactical combat game with long cutscenes. I think they're referring to "storygames" where players can exert that kind of narrative control over each other's characters, not JRPG-style railroads.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:02
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Yeah, plenty of games let you gently caress with a players emotions or motivations, or let GMs make hard moves to just have bad poo poo happen with no chance for PCs to prevent it.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:21
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Off the top of my head, I know WoD/CoD did some of that stuff. Here's an example of one of the listed conditions in the second edition of CoD:CoD2e p.289 posted:GUILTY Personally, I've always preferred the systems like this that get more comfortable with letting the mechanics drift into the mental/social spaces that games closer to D&D leave completely up to nebulous freestyle and interpretation. If being exhausted can be an in-rules condition with specified effects, why can't "vengeful" be done in the same way, where you have to pass some kind of check for self-restraint to not immediately enter combat against the duke? You could argue that the rules are just getting in the way of your roleplay or whatever, but the same thing is true about the exhaustion case. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jun 8, 2021 |
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Jun 8, 2021 21:44
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The obvious one is FATE, with "I'm compelling your Hot Head Cool Shades aspect to get real mad at the duke and take a swing at him". You can pay to avoid it but still.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:40
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Vanguard Warden posted:Off the top of my head, I know WoD/CoD did some of that stuff. Here's an example of one of the listed conditions in the second edition of CoD:
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Jun 8, 2021 22:48
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It occurs to me that this could just as well describe some seriously old school RPGs like Call of Cthulhu. "You lose 5 sanity; you [roll] have violent animosity towards the next person you meet. Say hello to the Duke."
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Jun 8, 2021 23:18
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Yep. Mechanics for "you're scared, so you have to run away" are probably the most common oldschool example.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:58
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Glazius posted:Don't talk about things "becoming plot" or "becoming prop". They're one or the other depending on what they are in relation to the game rules, and they don't change. Claiming that the two categories don't have any gradient between them doesn't sit right with me, but maybe I'm still missing something. Although I think your comment on the game rules might highlight one of the big differences between how we're looking at things--I tend to take a pretty broad view of what the 'rules' of a game are; there's the stuff written in the book, but in play people very frequently use only a subset of the rules in the book/change them up (either through error or because they don't fit the situation being resolved), and append them with a huge catalogue of implicit rules internalized through years of running RPGs across multiple systems. Basically, I view the rules/system as being whatever--in practice--gets used to resolve what happens in game. It sounds like maybe you're coming at this from more of a social contract angle? The rules are a contract that all players implicitly agree to abide by when they sit down to play the game, Props are things that are bound within those rules, and Plot are things that exist outside of that contract? I think my dissatisfaction with that take (which may or may not be what you're imagining) is that the social contract that determines what it's "okay" for participants to do is way broader than the game's 'rules', and would include things like not breaking the group's lines/veils, or even to some extent things like... Glazius posted:Because you're playing a cooperative game it's sporting conduct to consider everyone's enjoyment, so your decision should consider that e.g. your party mates probably wouldn't appreciate you letting go of the rope they're all clinging to so you can go attack the duke. But it's always your decision. The issue I have with "it's always your decision" is that, to some big extent, it isn't, and to a similar extent I'm able to bend the 'rules' of the game as I play. Like, if I declare that my character slits the throat of another character as they sleep, it's entirely within the group's authority to say "no", in the same way that they could say "no" if I declared that I wasn't down when I hit 0HP. In the other direction, it's also within the GM's authority to say "gently caress it, that result sucks, I'm overruling it" on a bad roll even though there's no rule in the book that says that you can. The 'rules' of a game are a useful tool for helping facilitate agreement within the group on how a situation is resolved, but those rules are much larger than what's written in the book, largely implicit, and constantly in subtle flux. Glazius posted:Anybody can tell you "you're 10' away from the goblin, you have to move closer to attack them." I don't think that's true. Only the GM can tell you that. You can also say that about yourself, to some degree, but your statement traditionally needs to be approved by the GM before it's 'true'. Or do you mean that anyone can tell you that "if you're 10' away and don't have a reach weapon, you can't attack"? Because that's more of a rule itself, which doesn't really seem like either a Plot or a Prop under this framework. Glazius posted:Everyone can know what the props of the game mean and how they interact. In practice, not everybody does know, but that's most often by choice or out of convenience. Like if the PCs are negotiating with goblins in a cave and it turns into a fight. While the negotiation is going on, even if the battle map isn't set up, the map of the cave and the positions of the goblins are still props, they're just props the PCs haven't asked to visualize yet. I mean, they very likely haven't even been visualized by the GM yet, either--they kind of don't exist as anything other than potential at this stage. So, using my idea of 'rules' from above, would you say that 'Prop' is specifically the game-state governed by the subset of rules that have been explicitly laid out (if only by being written in a book), and by extension have been locked in place? So it's not just a mechanics vs narrative thing--it's more about the stuff everyone has signed up for vs the stuff that's just coming from one person? Like, if we decide to play a D&D module, the fact that the king has red hair is a prop--it's laid out in the book that we all agreed to play out. If I ask what color a guard's hair is, that's plot, though--since the GM had to improvise it? And then if the GM decides that the group of goblins is hunting the players and finds them if they roll a 1 on a d6, that's plot as well--it's a mechanic, but it's not one that's part of The System that the players agreed to use for this game. But the wandering monster mechanic is more of a Prop thing, since it's detailed in the module itself? I guess exactly what tile each goblin is standing on wouldn't be something written in the rules, but the fact that monsters occupy tiles would be, and so the x/y coordinate they occupy within the room would count as a Prop? Or does the king having red hair not count, since it lacks the "and how they interact" aspect you were talking about? Does it need to be both pre-agreed-to and mechanical to qualify? I'm going to try to summarize what I think your position is (mostly so that if I'm wrong you can point out how): RPGs are games where people cooperatively create a narrative taking place in a shared imaginary space. Over the course of play, different people contribute different facts about the shared imaginary space that move the narrative along. There are some informal methods that people use to decide which facts are accepted and which are rejected (usually this takes the form of the GM making common-sense rulings). There are some situations, though, that everyone has pre-agreed to use specific and mechanical routines to resolve. In the course of resolving these situations, a bunch of almost computer-variable data-style facts gets created--things like HP integers and the X/Y coordinate of characters on a battle grid or a list of skills that your character is proficient in or the statblock of your weapon. These data-facts are Props. Every other fact about the game world is Plot. Props almost by nature affect Plot: the mechanics that modify Props typically are designed to also have an impact on Plot parts of the narrative--when the hireling's HP hit 0, my character gets sad; when a wizard's spell generates a 10x10x10 cube of water that splashes out everywhere, my socks get soggy. Plot is also able to affect the Props, typically needing to pass through a common-sense authorization process (either by the GM or consensus). Vitally, however, Prop can not be modified by non-mechanical player decision--your sword can gain 10' reach by tying a rope to the handle, but it can't gain 10' reach just because you want it to. Plot can be modified at-will as long as it doesn't contradict previously stated facts or get rejected (usually due to not fitting the logic of the world, either by the GM or consensus). Is all that correct, and if so did I miss out on any big aspect of it? I think I got thrown a bit when you would say things like "Plot is the things all the players are expected to agree upon only in the moment", because I'd pretty strongly argue that Plot-level facts that have been accepted as true by the group are just as true and important as Prop-level facts--the difference lays in the ways you can modify/interact with them, not in how long they stay true for; once you've established that the king is Henry IX it's just as immutable a part of the world as that this goblin has 7HP (at least until a coup happens or the goblin gets stabbed). I think I'd still disagree with the idea that a monster's position within a room is only Prop, not at all Plot, but maybe I should wait for you to respond to make sure I'm not up the wrong tree on this before I go any further Edit: oh god, I missed a bunch of posts between when I started and finished writing this--sorry if I'm retreading any redundant ground Ash Rose posted:Yeah, plenty of games let you gently caress with a players emotions or motivations, or let GMs make hard moves to just have bad poo poo happen with no chance for PCs to prevent it. I took the example to be using a D&Dish system that doesn't do this. Like, what's a Plot in one game can absolutely be Prop in another. OtspIII fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jun 9, 2021 |
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Jun 9, 2021 01:16
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I like how Ron Edwards flips the script on "rules" in one of his recent videos: agreeing to adjudicate according to what's written in a specific book or set of books is a rule, one that isn't enforced by that book - an inanimate stack of paper/a PDF on your computer - but by you as a group at the table.
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Jun 9, 2021 01:27
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It's true -- one of my recent epiphanies was that the rules of the game are contained entirely within the rules of the social space, including the social agreement to abide by this extra set of rules, at least for now. The same is true for language, which leads me to the design thought that you can offload game-rules-complexity onto the rules of natural language (a la Fate aspects or PbtA moves) or the rules of the social space. Although making adjudication of your game dependant on the social structure of the group playing the game feels like it would increase the risk of genuine social fallout. And it occurs to me as I write this that the rules of physical reality are in the same category -- dexterity games already offload rules onto physics, but something like Ten Candles also does this in an RPG form with the rule that if a candle goes out, it's out. And all the Dread clones. And that one game where you tie yourself to the other player. I don't know what to do with this understanding, but I wanted to talk about it.
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Jun 9, 2021 10:45
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potatocubed posted:And that one game where you tie yourself to the other player.
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Jun 9, 2021 12:53
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OtspIII posted:So, using my idea of 'rules' from above, would you say that 'Prop' is specifically the game-state governed by the subset of rules that have been explicitly laid out (if only by being written in a book), and by extension have been locked in place? You're right that there are parts of the game that don't interact with anything. I didn't mention them initially because for purposes of the definition they don't matter at all, but they absolutely exist. Like, you know how there are a thousand different versions of Monopoly with different text and graphics where sometimes it's a Star Wars and sometimes it's a college campus but they're all the same game of Monopoly? They can definitely affect your play and enjoyment of the game, but they don't affect the game itself. You've got my definition mostly solid, but I can see you're still having trouble applying it. The concept of "parts of the gameplay that don't interact with anything" might help? Let's look at the king with red hair. It can be public knowledge that the king has red hair - like, you're playing a module, the DM has the cover propped up in front of you, the king is on there, he's got red hair. Everybody knows it. But as a game element, it might be better to think of it as "what it means that the king has red hair". If "the king has red hair" doesn't interact with anything, then technically everybody knows equally well what it means that the king has red hair, but it's not plot or prop, just decoration. But if "the king has red hair" is an element of the plot, then who knows the whole of what it means that the king has red hair? Who gets to decide what it means that the king has red hair? It's just the GM, isn't it? "The king has red hair" is a plot element that the GM controls, and while the players may eventually know the whole of what it means, only the GM gets to decide. When a player starts asking after the hair colors of various guards, the GM should probably ask, like, "why do you want to know", right? The GM asks because they suspect the player is chasing after some of what it means that the king has red hair, and the GM's the one in control of that, so they should decide what to say in light of it. And the player, trusting the GM is acting in good faith, might say something like "Red hair's pretty distinctive, right? And if you have a bastard maybe you get him a cushy job like palace guard to zip some lips. You hear stories, y'know?" And maybe the GM nods along and hands it over: yeah, there's this one red-haired guard with a very distinctive nose shape who's getting a pretty free ride of it. Or they make it a challenge: this is a plot element but I'm not just handing it over. Yeah, everyone hears stories, and in a lot of palaces, like this one, the guards are clean-shaven and tuck their hair into their helmets. You ask why and the polite answer is "so they stay unobtrusive on duty" or something, you keep pushing and it's basically understood in polite society that you're yelling "KING-BASTARDS! SHOW ME YOUR KING-BASTARDS!" So maybe don't do that, but what do you do? Or they deflect: for your purposes, it's just a decoration. There's a decent number of red-haired guards, and while it's possible that the king is good at both loving and cover-ups, it's more likely that red hair is just pretty common in these parts, as you recall from the journey in. You'd need to do some long-term observation if you wanted to figure out that somebody was getting the bastard treatment. There isn't that kind of asymmetry to the knowledge of, say, what it means for somebody to have 7 hit points. Everybody can know what that means pretty equally. There isn't a secret line in the DMG that says if the players ever line up three enemies with 7 hit points they win the jackpot, open secret envelope G to find out what it is.
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Jun 9, 2021 22:34
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