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What always confuses me about PbtA games, and BitD for that matter, is how the GM fairly decides how many obstacles there should be in the way of the PCs before they achieve a goal. My favorite example was the Dimmer Sisters house inflitration which is the sample of play in BitD. It happens that the players manage to convince a ghost to show them where the item they are looking for is. But what if they hadn't done so and/or a roll to find their way failed? There is no map of the house, so the GM is making the house up as they go, and every roll is likely to cause attrition to the players so how big a house does the GM make up? The problem is that most of the classic answers end up with being: * it's based on "drama" so the PCs ought not to really try to overcome obstacles cleanly because the GM will not allow them to complete until they have suffered the correct amount. * it's based on "the session" so the PCs again have no investment in trying to use skill or strategy because the only thing that can let them win is the time in real life. I know people say that having a map would make no difference if the PCs don't know where they're going, but I just don't feel it works like that in practice. Even if you have a "lady or the tiger" choice, it's a whole different ball game if you know someone else is able to swap the rooms around based on their own agenda.
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Jan 7, 2018 16:54
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Covok posted:I propose a Counterpoint. There is very little difference between this and any other role playing game. It's not as if, when you're not using a premade Adventure, that you don't rely on the GM to come up with the obstacles. No Cosmic Force keeps the GM from making it up as they go along and it's pretty much required in every game since actions will never perfectly match up with the original intent of the rules or even the GM's plans. This is nothing you need to pbta, this is simply a reality of the medium. If you're using a classic premade adventure with a situation like that, exploring a defined and unusual area, then hopefully there's a map. If there's a map, then even if the PCs are navigating blind, they know that the lady and the tiger is fair. Ok, the PCs can still do weird stuff, but if they decide to pickaxe through a wall for some reason then you still know what's behind it. And if there's a dragon behind it then the players won't leave the table saying "he just put that dragon there to penalize us for axing through his wall". If there's not a map, then the adventure ought at least to be telling the GM how to decide how many obstacles there should be, and ideally the kind of thing they would be, even if they can't tell exactly what they are. But too often they cop out with "let the players have fun with this" or "make it a difficult ride" or something which in practice just comes down to "minimum suffering" or "the wallclock". The worst is "until the players are tired of it" which, if most obstacles cause attrition, basically means that the way to avoid attrition is to become bored as quickly as possible!
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Jan 7, 2018 17:19
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Covok posted:Counterpoint: most people don't use pre-made adventures in their games. And, when they do, it's only for small bits. Eventually you make your own stuff. Which means making a map becomes difficult. I still do it from time to time, but it's not uncommon to run without one if I can. There are a lot of games where I can definitely do. I actually disagree with that. The success of Paizo on Adventure Paths and of the adventure-centric strategy for D&D 5e shows that there are plenty of players out there who absolutely do play premade adventures regularly. They may not be the "hardcore" players or the ones who hang out on forums, but there are apparently plenty of them. Furthermore, drawing your own map in advance to make an adventure is still fine. It's having to make it up on the spot that's the problem, that seems to put the GM in an impossible quandary. Of course there's also the possibility to play a system without attrition, but that makes the system very light and arguably removes it from the game category entirely.
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Jan 7, 2018 17:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:Session time seems like a fairly basic measure of how many things you should throw in front of the players. Yea, but both of those lead to degenerate strategies. For example, quite a few games feature "story points" which you can spend to make a challenge easier. This will usually involve making the challenge take less real time, or consume less resources. If the GM is judging the number of obstacles based on real time or remaining resources, then rationally you should never spend story points; if you make the current obstacle take less time or resources, then there will be more obstacles added until the minimum required level of resource expenditure or time is reached. It's like the "never boost when you're in 1st place in Mario Kart because you just aren't allowed to get more than a certain distance ahead" issue. BitD has heavy attrition; failures can count up to consequences which take substantial resource expenditure to resolve. If the GM is fixing that level of resource expenditure in advance as the condition for the number of obstacles to encounter, why bother even trying to deal with the obstacles cleanly? (Edit: I know about clocks in BitD, but there is no clock used for "exploring the mansion" in the sample of play, and using one would be a serious breach of versimilitude. I suspect quite a few groups would actively parody that "hey we have looked in 3 rooms so this is the last spot on the clock, let's go look in the outhouse and the artefact will have to be there!" In addition, does an empty room advance the clock as one full of hostile spirits?) hyphz fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 18:02
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Serf posted:simply going into a room will not cause a clock to tick. there has to be a roll associated with it, some clocks tick on successes, others tick when you fail. And how risky does that roll have to be? The players will instantly spot that the best strategy is to seek out the lowest risk rolls that still count, which is guaranteed to cause problems about what the threshold is. Does a roll to avoid a trap which chops off your legs count as much as a roll to understand an ancient language? If one of those types doesn't count, how many counting rolls does the GM have to provide compared to non-counting rolls? If they use a wooden pole to trigger the trap thus avoiding it without a roll, does that make it not count, so they should jump into the trap even though they all know it's a bad idea?
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Jan 7, 2018 18:15
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Splicer posted:Where is this sample of play? Page 137 onwards. They bypass the exploration aspect by having a ghost show them where the artefact is, which is fine for making the example short so that it fits in the book, but not so good for actually showing how to run the game.
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Jan 7, 2018 18:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:When did Frank Trollman get an account? Nah, I'm not quite that mad against the "magical tea party". But if every sip of tea is gradually draining my life force, I want to know how deep the pot is. 
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Jan 7, 2018 20:09
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Serf posted:the most common roll will be a risky roll with a standard effect, which translates to 2 ticks on the clock if you succeed. if players attempt to get controlled rolls then that should be hard to pull off But how do you make it hard, when if there’s nothing prewritten, the players all know they’re getting a controlled roll when you give them one? Do you make other rolls as part of the process? Because those will all plug into the probability equation...
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Jan 7, 2018 21:44
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Serf posted:but it all flows from the fiction. you're having a conversation about what is going on, and the GM has the final say on some things, but in the end you're all there to tell a fun story about daring scoundrels pulling off risky jobs and getting into trouble. everything is driven by wanting to have that sort of story. That’s where I tend to trip up though. How can anything “flow from the fiction” if it’s not written yet? If the existing fiction says there’s a trap on that door, fine, it’s risky to open it. But you can’t “follow the fiction” to know when it is time to make up a trapped door. The desire to have qualities to the narrative is OK except that the system explicitly threatens to not have that kind of story if system based play is weak. A good heist story doesn’t end with “and then they spent three weeks and all the loot they got looking for a sawbones to set Donny’s broken arm”. Not unless it’s a morality story about how awful being a scoundrel is, which is Fiasco’s territory, not Blades’.
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Jan 7, 2018 22:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:You know that when people say "follow the fiction", they mean the stuff that's happening in-game as it's being played, right? In the case of a “trapdoor” which is just an interesting potential feature which is explorable without direct cost, yes, sure. But I said a “trapped door”, a door protected by a trap. That’s going to cause attrition and damage to the PCs. My making it up is arguably a bad thing for the players. If I’m going to do so “when it’s interesting” then one day the success of a heist will depend on it not being interesting, and the players will thus be rewarded for playing so that it isn’t.
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Jan 7, 2018 22:32
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Evil Mastermind posted:You know, hyphz, when you say things like this it really makes me think you've never actually played an RPG. Because this makes no sense at all. The players want interesting obstacles, but they also don't want to have their epic heist story end with "and then they screwed up and all got maimed". And every time the GM does the former, the system can potentially take over and introduce a dice-roll chance of the latter. I mean, my nightmare scenario for this was in a Shadowrun game when a player made a character with some ridiculous level of shooting ability - the highest the system allows I think; another made a mage etc. Since it's city/sandbox based I was having to adlib and was trying to go with the 'what makes sense' process but it was falling apart on that. Mages are 1% of the population, would a dive bar really have one on security? No, just like real clubs don't have packs of bouncers with tasers in case Andre the Giant shows up and starts trouble. They might have planned for someone with a gun, but does it make sense for them to have planned for someone who is the best sharpshooter in the universe to the point it is actually physically impossible to be better than him? No. That will almost never make sense. But that mage and sharpshooter are going to be in every encounter. Later on the player said "well, I'm a bit bored, it seems I just shoot everything". At that point I got frustrated and just shouted "you spent hours going over the books and working out your points to make sure your character would be able to shoot anything and everything, why are you complaining that it worked?" Needless to say that didn't go over well. And that's the problem, my experience with every real life group I've met is that the players might want to be challenged but they want to feel they're trying not to be.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:14
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Reene posted:Contrary to the popular perceptions about PbtA games (including Blades) by people who have never run them or read the rules, there are specific rules governing when a GM can or should introduce an obstacle or complication. They're called soft moves and hard moves and they're triggered by specific things the players do. Oh god, not those rules. Yea, the ones that say the GM gets to make a hard move when the "players look to them to see what happens next", which they arguably do all the time. And which is a truly lovely thing for the players to learn they are being penalized for. And the ones that make "use up their resources" a single move when resource management is meaningless if it's determined by how often the GM picks that option from an arbitrary list. They're the single worst part of the whole PbtA idea.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:17
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Elfgames posted:why was an ultra badass wizard and the world's best sniper hitting up some podunk divebar? That's what they apparently do in Shadowrun. Hey, don't blame me if the setting doesn't make sense. Reene posted:I think hyphz is coming from the school of classic D&D DMing where the DM was expected to be actively, assholeishly antagonistic towards the players and it was expected they would use DM fiat to punish players for not playing in a way they felt was correct (which was, incidentally, one of the behaviors that pre-set adventuring modules was meant to curtail, because it set limits on the DM and players alike). Not so much that as "if the players do get their characters maimed in the heist, and they think the DM was being actively and assholishly antagonistic to them, how can they be proven wrong?" It just seems impossible. "We all died to that trap, there was no map, you just made the trap up, you knew we were weak in those skills, how can you possibly argue you weren't just deliberately screwing us?" Trusting the GM is one thing, but how does the GM ever challenge the players without breaking that trust in the actuality of the moment? Making a general rule like "I won't be unfair to your guys" sounds good until you get to the exact moment, but what's fair when the PCs open a door, the GM has to decide what's behind it right there, fully aware of their exact skill scores and HP totals at that moment? Covok posted:Soft moves and hard moves exist in every game. They are the backbone of GMing. They are two Core Concepts of game design put into words. They are introducing challenges for the players to solve and failure states that don't end the game so that there is risk. It isn't. In a classic dungeon crawl say, when the players run out of things to do, they can go kick down a door. Or not. It doesn't get forced onto them. If you're using a map, then the players know what's behind that door was always there. If their PCs are tired out and they kick down a door and meet a dragon that was always there, they know they screwed up. If the dragon was only spawned there by the GM, they know they've just been screwed or penalized. If the GM knows full well, as he/she will, that their HP totals are low and their anti-dragon spells are offline, then placing the dragon there "fairly" at the moment the door is kicked down is impossible. hyphz fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 23:42
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Elfgames posted:no it really isn't. in Shadow Run the players are assumed to be "shadowrunners" who make shadow runs against megacorporate targets. do you often run a game with seemingly 0 idea of what you're playing? I was using a sample adventure which had that exact setup. Even if they're running against big corps they apparently get recruited in dive bars because that's a cyberpunk trope.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:50
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Serf posted:you are absolutely describing a breakdown between the gm and the players. don't play with/be a lovely gm and understand that the game is there for every person to enjoy. And that's hitting the nail on the head - I can't see how you can possibly do that unless it's decided in advance. If it's not in advance, then at the moment you make the fiction up, you just have too much information to not set up for a particular outcome. If the players are worn out and out of spells and you spawn a dragon, you know what the outcome's going to be, and you've effectively set up for it whether you like it or not. If you don't spawn the dragon, the players know they can walk around worn out and there will never be one. The Dimmer Sisters house is explicitly described in the printed fiction as one that nobody who has entered has ever left. Isn't maintaining the integrity of that statement exactly the same as setting up for a particular outcome?
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Jan 7, 2018 23:53
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Splicer posted:So if you're playing a *world or similar game and your players walk through four rooms, use up all their spells in those rooms, then open the last room and there's a dragon in it, that's a dick move because there's no way they can survive that. It doesn't matter what system you're playing. If you have a map in advance that says there's a dragon in that room, the players use their spells up in the first four rooms and then open the last room and see the dragon, that's fine because you are maintaining the integrity of the map. If you don't have such a map and the players use their spells up in the first four rooms and then open the last room and see a dragon that you've just spontaneously decided was there, then whether you like it or not you've just set up for that outcome because you know too well what is going to happen. If you don't have such a map and you want to avoid setting up for outcomes then the players will know that anything they meet when they kick down a door will be something they have a chance against, no matter what bad a state they're in, because you can't set up an outcome. quote:Don't send a low tier, inexperienced crew to the Dimmer Sisters' house. If they decide to go there knowing that no one returns they should expect things to be rough. It isn't unfair to put difficult challenges in a place they have been told will almost certainly kill them. Cool, now write to the author and ask why he sent them to the house in the example of play and had them safely escape after a few rolls. quote:It's a polite fiction (heh) that allows you to shift responsibility for the consequences of character actions away from the GM. He's saying that without this psychological barrier/misdirection/whatever between the GM's actions and player's misfortunes the players will be mad at the GM for making a dragon eat the dwarf rather than at the dragon for eating the dwarf or at themselves for making the dwarf look so delicious. Nail on the head. Well, with one exception: it's in the GM's head. It's not "the GM making up some bullshit to kill you", it's "me making up some bullshit to kill the PCs", again even if it's exactly the same monster. hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 00:19
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Covok posted:The worst thing about great Indie Games is no one ever runs them so getting into a game become super high pressure and if you don't get in you probably never get to play. What I'm saying is, I know that feel, bro. Ask me about Tenra Bansho Zero. Hey, the worst thing is I can never face running them because they all have the same problem I'm running into here  BTW, there's no GM playing the monsters in Gloomhaven, they have fixed AI and any remaining decisions are made by the players (who are completely allowed to go easy on themselves). It's pretty good, but it's not really that satisfying for RP style play, the cards make player actions feel a bit out of control and the story breaks easily if the players fail missions ("hey again guys! we're just.. uh.. doing this ritual again!").
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Jan 8, 2018 02:53
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Nuns with Guns posted:You've had the exact same argument with people in these threads over PbtA at least three times now, and each time it's come down to you barely understanding the rules, a deeply uncharitable reading of the bits you have read, and a frankly sociopathic assumption of Player/GM interactions in a game of collaborative storytelling. Maybe stick to games you're more comfortable with because there's clearly some part of the abstraction here you can't comprehend? Well, if I’m getting in people’s nerves to the extent that they’re keeping count then I’ll shut up about it! But dammit, I’m tired of the 5e/Pathfinder treadmill as much as the next RPgoon. But so many other games drop the ball on premades so that they become the entrenched default. And in many cases they _could_, which is what’s so annoying. I mean, maybe BitD is a special case because of the nature of the system but it’s a general principle. It’s not just PbtA either. I mean I ran FFG Star Wars for a while and that has a premade with a scene where the PCs are exploring a giant wrecked spaceship underwater to recover something, and there’s a sea leviathan poking around at it. And it sounds cool but there’s no map and the leviathan has no stats or actions other than “if the PCs actually try to fight this thing they lose”. And so hey let’s have them find a few empty rooms so it feels big and let’s do the dramatic escalation thing where they see a shadow and then it goes by in a window and then there’s a bang and then after they’ve explored an area it creates a breach in the hull but obviously it will never actually matter and I’m just sitting feeling like a bad stage magician because I can see all the wires. And the players know that too and are playing along but just kind of bemused because they know they’re finding the thing and getting out and nothing they do really changes anything. And yes I can have them roll but it’s all made up and any damage they take from a bad roll would have no meaning to it other than bad luck and me being mean. The fiction sounds cool but an Ewok with a stick would be more exciting for the players because at least it is statted and has some independent system engagement. I focus a bit on BitD because I love the idea so much, but where BitD goes Fellowship follows, and indirectly so does Strike in non combat scenes.
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Jan 8, 2018 14:51
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Serf posted:i think i found something more your speed The problem with “it’s beyond their reach to make” is that if the author doesn’t make them the GM has to. So they are saying they expect an unpaid amateur member of the public to do what they, a paid and published and possibly professional author, claim they cannot. And the game-as-conversation metaphor seems to work only as long as it’s the “we all know you’re going to win guys, just make it make sense” model. As long as there’s the possibility of that conversation ending with “and then you fail and roll badly and die or take trauma and it takes everything you’ve got to heal up” then it stops being a conversation and becomes an argument or persuasion. And that makes social manipulation fair game because that’s what you do in an argument.
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Jan 8, 2018 16:54
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Splicer posted:What's the adventure called? I wanted to post that but I haven't got the books with me here Jimbozig posted:If anyone has a tool in which I can easily make gridmaps (that I can sell - so the tool needs to give me rights to publish its art assets in the maps I make) that don't look like garbage, I'd like to know. Me too. Scarily I find the level editor for DROD is actually better at making grid maps than plenty of RPG focussed tools because of the automatic rigging it performs. Mr. Maltose posted:It's just a little bit psyduck that you think a conversation about a game that includes a less than optimal outcome must by it's nature devolve into a battle of wills and social skullduggery. Well, how often do you normally have a conversation which will at the end have a "positive or negative outcome", that you're invested in? It's when you're trying to persuade someone to do something, or sell something to them, or give you a job, or go on a date, and so on.. and all of those interactions are characterized by social behaviors which don't apply to regular conversations with no such stakes.
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Jan 8, 2018 18:40
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Serf posted:the thing is that this is a conversation that has agreed-upon guidelines. you're here to tell a collaborative story, not fight over who gets to "win". you've agreed that you're going to collaborate, and that one person has more power than the others, but the game has rules that allow you to curb their authority. and that's among tons of other rules that help to guide the flow of the conversation. Right, but the dynamic is more complicated than that. 1. The players would like their PCs to walk out carrying an armload of magic artefacts. If they aren't interested in that, what's the point in playing? 2. The players would rather than their PCs corpses did not end up lying in the second level covered in runes of shame and goblin dung. But they want the possibility of that happening, because if that possibility does not exist, how is there any tension in the story or any need to think about actions beyond the bare minimum of making sense? 3. The GM would probably also quite like the PCs to succeed. But if he/she acts on that desire, they always will and 2 will be violated. 4. The GM would probably not particularly like the PCs to end up failing. But they can't act like that, because if they do, there will always be a way for the GM to bail the PCs out at the last minute, and once the players work out that the GM is doing this, 2 will be violated. (In PbtA this is the contradiction between "maintain integrity", "make moves", and "be a fan of the PCs".) So it's not quite collaborative, or it's "collaborative but one of the people involved has to pretend they're not collaborating". Splicer posted:Seriously, take a break from your current campaign and run some danger patrol one shots. I'll answer any questions you have and give you some tips! I could only find a beta version that seems to be 7-8 years old and a "pocket edition". I read the pocket edition since it wasn't described as alpha/beta, so maybe I missed a lot of stuff. But as far as I can see it's just a dice game, the actual actions you take never matter. You're encouraged to use certain stats against enemies that are weak to them but since there is no limit on what any stat can do there is no reason to ever not do so.
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Jan 8, 2018 19:30
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Serf posted:who does this? who wants this? this is pure d&d as played by 6th graders thinking. the point of the game is not to have some sort of mony haul adventure where you grab all the cool poo poo and then you're done. you put interesting characters in dangerous situations and then see what happens to them Ok, fair enough, but the players have to act like that. Otherwise why not walk into their heist carrying a banner and banging a big bass drum? quote:you're confusing "be a fan of the pcs" with "give them everything forever and never challenge them". fans want to see their favorite characters overcome challenges, not be rewarded at every turn. being a fan requires putting characters through the wringer. Overcome! Not fail to! I'm not talking about when the GM decides there's some goblins there for the PCs to fight. I'm talking about after the dice are rolled and rolled low and the PCs are disarmed on the floor with goblin spears at their throats. Do they get run through? A fan wouldn't want that. But if the GM acts on that basis - and nothing can ever prevent them from doing so - then the PCs will know from the beginning they're in no real danger. Even if they do end up on the floor with spears at their throats, they'll always overcome. And if they'll always overcome, there's not really any challenges, we're just pretending there are. quote:the pcs should always be at risk of failing. and the rules reflect this. there are tons of outcomes that are "failure" and "mixed success". the thing is that "death" is often the least interesting outcome for a roll. pbta and bitd encourage you to come up with something more interesting than that. this can be seen as "bailing out" the pcs, but that's not the intention. you want the characters to keep going (until it just wouldn't be interesting for them to do so), so you challenge them with other outcomes. maybe you get rescued, but now you owe your savior a huge debt. maybe you die but some greater power brings you back but wrong. it requires creativity If those turkeys never come home to roost, how do they mean anything? Great, we owe them a debt, we go on an adventure for them, but if we hadn't then of course we would be going on an adventure anyway because it's what we do.
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Jan 8, 2018 20:01
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Serf posted:and these are examples of following through on your threats Right. Now wind back to context. Are these things which would happen in the normal way if this was just a conversation? If not, is it surprising that the RPG conversation isn't a normal conversation and ends up having manipulation in it?
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Jan 8, 2018 20:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:Holy poo poo. More like "I can't imagine my friends thinking that a story that ends with their characters getting shot is fun." (Thinking they might be shot is fine, though.)
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Jan 8, 2018 20:59
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Splicer posted:Should have specified, I meant the Beta. It's obviously unfinished, and never will be, but it's good fun and great for teaching you how to have fun hurting your darlings. I see what you mean, but it avoids the original issue which is how, with no map, the GM decides how many obstacles to spawn before success. In Danger Patrol the game locks that number in the rules and makes every threat a separate encounter so there are no pacing errors caused by that. Most narrative games either don’t do it at all or use a clock so the numbers are predictable. What do I mean by manipulation? “I’ve taken a bunch of Harm and the GM is spawning encounters as long as we’re interested. Quick! Everybody get bored!”
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Jan 8, 2018 21:57
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Serf posted:if the gm goes along with this, then they've stopped portraying the world honestly. "Honestly" means based on the truth, but if there is no map there is no truth. Say your PCs were breaking into a modern bank vault. What possible way is there for people to break into a bank that it "makes sense" the bank wouldn't have defended against? Evil Mastermind posted:You know, hyphz...maybe RPGs aren't for you. If I could genuinely think that I'd burn my books, but I don't for two reasons: 1) 5e and PF don't have this problem, and while they have other problems (such as me being sick to the back teeth of them) a glance at the popularity/sales statistics will confirm that they define what an RPG is more than everything Evil Hat ever printed. 2) Even when I've asked this question before, and even when I've asked on other forums, nobody's ever replied by posting about that time when they ran Blades/PbtA/whatever and saying what their thought process was for choosing the number of obstacles the players faced.
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Jan 8, 2018 22:16
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Elfgames posted:these are the words of a crazy person. Pretty much any sane person if you have a game with rules based on fun that thus creates a stupid feedback loop. Look at the choices: 1) Keep having fun, keep having encounters, Dave's character being seriously injured probably dies to those encounters and that's less fun for him 2) Stop having fun for a moment, the encounters end, we get the treasure, that's fun, the next adventure can be fun again and Dave's character is fine
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Jan 8, 2018 22:18
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Mr. Maltose posted:What in the actual factual gently caress, my dude. They have been quoting the principles in the book, but as far as I am aware nobody has said what they actually did.
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Jan 8, 2018 22:29
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xiw posted:In AW there's no fixed 'number of encounters' because you're not writing adventures, you're setting up threats and PCs and playing to find out what happens based on the actions the PCs take. If you try and 'design an adventure' you are breaking the written rules of the game and it explicitly warns you that the game will be dumb and bad if you do that. Last time I ran it the entire session played out based off the skinner being obsessed with one of the chopper's gang and accidentally psychically lobotomising her and causing trouble with the fish cultists to try and distract from that. Ok, well I'm not at all familiar with the AW setting. So what was the Skinner trying to do when they "accidentally psychically lobotimised" the gang member? Did they do that as the result of a failed roll or series of rolls and what was the goal of that series?
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Jan 8, 2018 22:39
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Well, I’ll sum that up: a) I don’t see how concepts can follow from the fiction when that fiction isn’t written in advance of the time you need that concepts; b) I don’t see how concepts can follow from the fiction when PCs generally are exceptions to established rules in the fiction (if the
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Jan 8, 2018 22:56
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Freudian posted:If you cast Avada Kedavra at someone, they die. Why did JK Rowling take exceptionality to the level of ignoring this when writing Harry Potter? Because he was the protagonist, and stories are about unusual things happening to the protagonist. The PCs are protagonists of your campaign, and unusual things will happen to them. It’s not that, it’s the “follow the fiction” idea. One of the reasons I focus so much on that example of play from Blades, in fact. There is not a whole lot of information about the Dimmers in the book but it is established that: * they are experts at trafficking with ghosts which makes them evil and scary * they have a huge mansion * no one who enters has ever left. In the example of play which the same author wrote as how their game ought to be played: * the PCs see two rooms and nothing else * they meet one ghost who is easily subverted * they leave unbothered. That doesn’t seem to be following the fiction. It seems to be doing the absolute opposite of the fiction. (My phone just auto corrected that to “filleting the fiction” which seems really appropriate.)
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Jan 8, 2018 23:16
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remusclaw posted:Outside of some nihilistic takes on horror, the whole "no one ever comes out again" thing always has an implicit "until our heroes went in" tacked onto it. Ok, but if the heroes can upend all of the established principles in the fiction, how can you “follow it” while running for them? Even if you don’t take “no one has left” literally, one ghost who turns out helpful and two rooms is a bit weak for a legendary haunted mansion, surely? But then when I think like that I realise I cannot think of any amount that would be enough.. same as the problem I have with “if the PCs succeed at robbing a modern and secure bank, then it was too easy for what it is” By the way “checkmate bladeailures” is exactly the opposite to how I feel.. hyphz fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 23:37
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Emy posted:So you're saying you object to the very idea of a game where the PCs are modern bank robbers, because banks are hard to rob? And your objection to the Dimmer Sisters score is effectively the same? I object to "integrity of the world" being seen as the primary GM guidelines for running a game about robbing modern banks, because by that integrity there should be no way to successfully rob a bank. I mean, who hasn't read a news story about a bank heist or a hack or something and just said "seriously, that worked!?". If we feel that the integrity of the real world is being violated when we read about it, then it sure as heck violates the integrity of fiction! The objection to the Dimmers is similar - they're described as having a "legendary house" (and yes they are also listed as Tier 2 so the book contradicts itself again) and the way it's written would suggest that technically a world with integrity allows for no success. remusclaw posted:They are not upending the fiction, part of fiction is that there are these characters, protagonists we will call them, or maybe heroes, that drive the story forward, and who often can, depending on the sort of story being told, do things that other people dare not do. RPG's in general, outside of the groggiest take on Call of Cthulhu perhaps, are telling these sort of stories. No, that's part of the way fiction is generally written. But the author of Blades did not include any weaknesses that PCs could play into in his very brief description of the Dimmer Sisters' house. If he had done so, I would have been much less likely to be having this thread. The GM can make them up, but they are surely not following the fiction if they do, because there is none leading there. Serf posted:if you're looking for hard-and-fast rules on how much you should put in front of the players, you're not going to find them. the game doesn't need them because you are following the fiction as it has been established by the group What fiction was he following when he made up the music room, the ghost, the presence of a piano, the subvertability of the ghost.. literally anything in that scene? covok posted:When I am doing things, I try to gauge my players interest. I also use my own interest. If the party is split, I also try to give consideration to time. Ok, that's cool. And I appreciate you had a player who wanted their character to go out with a bang. But do you think there has even been a case where, because a player was interested in something, it ended up with you spending more time on it and their character suffering a negative consequence which they would not have had if the player had been less interested? covok posted:I mean, I ran chuubos once and that's a game where everyone is just living life day by day in a tiny little town and most advantageous involved two people talking about their relationships and having strange dreams and Wacky Adventures with the gravekeeper. Chuubo's is another game I'd love to try, I presume you're talking about the Pastoral mode though? I can see how that mode works because it's more or less admitting from the start that you're just RPing for the pleasure of RPing those characters in that setting and nothing particular needs to happen. But if you were running one of the Adventure or Techno modes it seems to start having the same problem again, bad stuff can happen to the PCs, and the players will want to avoid it. I was really disappointed when I read through the GMD campaigns and saw that you start with some really cool iconic-sounding characters and then the campaign turns out to be all about how quickly you can get them warped, hung and in some cases literally mutilated. Like hey I want to play Rinley because she sounds like an awesome energetic comedy trickster character and then 2/3rds of the way through she ends up breaking down in horrified tears because she's just learned she can be physically poisoned by having the wrong dream.
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Jan 9, 2018 00:38
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thefakenews posted:You seem to think "follow the fiction" means "refer only to things that have been written down". It doesn't mean that. And how can it be "established" before the game, other than by being written down in advance of the game? xiw posted:Isn't this solely a problem with you? like, by your own statement, banks *are* robbed, so your lack of ability to believe that banks can be robbed in the fiction is solely a problem you have to fix. Banks are robbed. But even most actual bank robberies don't seem plausible except in hindsight. That's a problem when you have to make up how hard it is to rob a bank and are supposed to do so based only on what seems plausible, without hindsight. gradenko_2000 posted:And similarly since the Dimmer Sisters house is rumored to be inescapable, the GM has license to throw as many obstacles in the path of the players into order to make sure that nobody really does get out of there alive, because that's what the fiction says. Or it would if "follow the fiction" was the only guideline they were following, which is what people seem to be saying. But that's not the question. The question is how many obstacles they should throw in to a) get the players out of there alive, but also b) make it not so easy that it's totally at odds with those rumors existing. Serf posted:the fiction that dictates those things as possible stuff that could be found in a ghost-warded house of witches. its not hard to do if you're capable of even the slightest iota of creative thought Possible that those things would exist, sure. Plausible that a ghost bound by experts could be subverted by a bunch of random footpads? Much trickier to argue. Plausible that they would then find the valuable thing they were looking for, in the huge mansion, in 2 minutes flat? Ummm. hyphz fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 01:26
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Elfgames posted:hyphz have you ever ran a game that wasn't a module? No. I tend to lose a lot of confidence at the old statement from the Ab3 rants - "think about the worst book ever published; it's better than the best thing you ever wrote.." thefakenews posted:Why is this difficulty easier to overcome if I am preparing a D&D 5E adventure? I had to think about this but unfortunately, the answer turns out to be "because caster supremacy". Unless that vault's owned or made by a 20th level wizard there's a way in. (And I don't like caster supremacy, but it seems relevant here.) Or because the setting is medieval and banks aren't necessarily super secure (remember in the original example I said a modern bank, not one that would show up in the canon BitD setting) thefakenews posted:The example in the book doesn't take place over two minutes. Do you understand the difference between task resolution and scene/conflict resolution? The screen time is compressed vs a room by room dungeon crawl, but it doesn't mean time didn't pass in the fiction. Mmm. I can understand time passing if the players are waiting for the solar eclipse or something like that, but using a "time passes" skip over when the players are in what could be a fascinating and unusual environment would seem a bit disappointing to me as a player at least.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:58
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unseenlibrarian posted:So I was bored and went to look up the context of said quote! I didn’t make that clear. It was an rear end in a top hat character in the story, but Ab3 wrote that story, so he was really saying that to himself. And I’m sure he had felt that at some point because doing anything creative can turn out like that. I meant that I shared the feeling he apparently had about himself, not that I took the story as a life lesson. About “reading the rules”, though, they tend to dodge around the issue. For example, the rules to Fellowship have an entry on “make a cut that follows” which I think has an explicit reference to Trollman (“just because you can show signs of an approaching threat anytime doesn’t mean that bears show up whenever the players fail a roll”). But that joke kind of falls down because it makes the rule a straw man, there is nothing to say you couldn’t use the same cut every time if you made it fit in a more sensible way. And there’s pretty likely going to always be some way to make “deal damage” fit - but that has a codified effect in the rules, whereas “show signs..” doesn’t. So how often you pick it will have a notable effect. Same with “being a fan..” in that book; it has the rider “make them earn it” in the text, but no clue what the price should be.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:15
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Tekopo posted:I'm not sure how many times people can say "failure is fun/rewarding/can lead to interesting situations" before the entire conversation just becomes a series of circular arguments and nitpicky discussions of semantics. I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting". It's the same as the Shadowrun guy that ended up with me saying "when you spent hours making your character shoot everyone, why complain that it worked?" Pretty much everyone I've asked for help on this from has said that was a wrong and ridiculous thing to say, but it just seems to be exactly what the rules of shared narrative games are encouraging. Hey, player, you want there to be a challenge and it could be interesting if you fail, so why not just lower those stats a few points? And I've met very few players who would find this fun. All the players I want to know want to at least feel that the challenge is being imposed on them, ideally by the environment of the game world rather than by the GM, but the latter could work as a push. If the player has to take action to create their own challenge, it bleeds through into the fiction and they feel that any challenge their PC did face was just the result of self-handicapping, and gives a very unsatisfying feel. I mean, maybe fans of these games don't think that way, but in that case I reserve the right to feel sad that there isn't a cool Dishonored meets The Dark Project game that will work for players without that mindset.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:58
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Serf posted:the mistake you made with the shadowrun player is that you weren't putting challenges in front of them that didn't play to their strengths. what they were asking for was variety, and you didn't provide that for them. you never challenged their weak spots or put them into positions where they would have to do something they were suboptimal at. you took away the wrong lesson I did consider that. But the problem was that he was so heavily min-maxed for "shooting the other guy and not getting shot" that anything that didn't play into that strength was a certain failure before dice ever hit the table. Tekopo posted:4e actually pulled back the curtain on this facet of RPGs, which I do find hilarious. How did it do that? Tekopo posted:What some storygames attempt to do is create combat scenarios in games that don't explicitly have a loss condition, and I guess this is confusing to people that have been used to playing stuff like D&D, because before the only situation in which this occurred was social situations (you fail a social encounter and you get captured, a fight starts, you run away, people hate you etc etc etc). I think this is where the disconnect is: storygames treat every single situation experienced by the players like a D&D social encounter. I don't entirely see that myself. The flaw for D&D with social encounters is that it makes them either a single die roll or dependent on the player's skill rather than the PCs, but I've never seen one where the players were expected to be happy OOC about the encounter going badly IC.
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Jan 9, 2018 20:16
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Tekopo posted:It's not about being happy, but that's the entire point of roleplaying games, even in D&D. This is the disconnect that I'm talking about, actually. The social parts of D&D and PF try to act like they are a game, but mechanically they are not, because the direst consequences for failing a roll is that the players actually get to play the game properly by entering a fighting segment (which, to some players, would actually be a reward rather than a penalty). That's exactly the problem that D&D and PF have. I absolutely agree about that, in fact I wondered if a "penal combat" system should be added to these games to prevent that. But I don't see the assertion behind the fact that stories cannot be told under a system where the PCs and players are not expected to do the best they can to succeed, even where failure would be more narratively interesting - because that quickly becomes a can of worms in that it has to be the right kind of failure that doesn't end the story, and it has to be at the right frequency or you Worf Effect the PC, and it has to be insulated so the other players don't get penalized for what someone else did, and by the time it's all allowed for there's probably pretty much no options left. (Worf Effecting the shooter guy was one of the problems I had with trying to work around him in Shadowrun.) If you're reading a book and a character acts in a way that goes against the character's desires and makes it obvious that the author has just written them doing that so that the story proceeds in an interesting way, then that's a bad book, but not every book is like that. And if you can write a book without it the author never having to openly do that, surely you can tell a story without a player ever having to do that, too?
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Jan 9, 2018 20:58
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Nuns with Guns posted:You keep revisiting the idea that for some reason players consenting to complications or adversity where it makes fictional sense is not playing "optimally" as through players and PCs are some objective truthbots that must break a game over their knees. Even though multiple people have told you this isn't how it works. In fact, it's the exact same broken logic Frank Trollman applied to FATE, so those comparisons earlier are disturbingly apt. Worse, this is the exact stupid argument James Desborough was making when he was wondering why PCs in Apocalypse World aren't a constant orgy ball rolling across the wastelands to optimize xp gain. I hope you're happy with this knowledge. I heard that one written in the other direction about Monsterhearts - where in that game if a human has sex with a supernatural, they trigger their “dark self”. So naturally a player asked, “wouldn’t we just not do that then?” I can sort of see the desire to do that for fiction in an agreed romantic style. But it seems here what I’m being told is that the PCs have to spend resources trying to pick the lock and at the same time be cool with knowing that the GM could just spawn another locked door between them and their goal, 10 more, 100 more, because hey it’s not that bad if they don’t manage to pick one. That just seems a sideways argument. And none of the rules mentioned deny that. The GM is a fan of the players and wants to see them overcoming obstacles, well hey there’s loads of obstacles to overcome in the form of doors. If he keeps throwing doors at them until they fail and get caught, well, that’s ok because he wants to see how cool it is when they break out of jail. And the GM could play off the PCs expectations in a normal environment, but this is not a normal environment, it’s explicitly meant to be bizarre, it’s a scary haunted house run by witches, who’s to say they can’t make a reality pocket of infinite locked doors if they want? Sounds like an excellent way to trap thieves. It’s a player agency issue. What people are saying seems to me to come down to “not having agency is cool because the story can still be good”. But what if they want agency for agency’s sake? Oh, and I have nothing against these games. I just want to know how to be one of the cool kids they’re playable for!
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Jan 9, 2018 22:21
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