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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? Comedy serious answer: oh, you haven't heard of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? (CAUTION: contains a substance known to be Jenna Moran by the state of California.) Serious comedy answer: yes, it's called D&D 5E. A sprawling, confusing, and contradictory ruleset means people are constantly asking questions and arguing about rules on the Internet. This increases the game's online presence, which is good for sales.
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Mar 27, 2021 16:19
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I think RAW and RAI are really just weak vs. strong Chesterton's Fence conjectures. You know:G. K. Chesterton posted:There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” It should be assumed that institutions exist for some reason, rather than for no reason. So let's suppose there seems to be an inconsistency in the rules for, I don't know, industry-leading RPG product Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition. Sculpt Spell posted:Beginning at 2nd level, you can create pockets of relative safety within the effects of your evocation spells. When you cast an evocation spell that affects other creatures that you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell's level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage on a successful save. So, suppose Wizzrobe detonates a fireball at point-blank range, with Fightgar and Shanksworth and Clericsdottir all in. Fireball is a third-level spell, so Wizzrobe can exclude four creatures. That's everyone, right? Well, no, it's not. Wizzrobe can exclude four other creatures that he can see, and Wizzrobe is not another creature from themselves. But you've kind of got to play games with pronoun referents to get to that point, and the description just mentions creating pockets of relative safety. Why can't you create a pocket of safety for yourself? It isn't clear. If there was a statement explicitly about that, like "As the source of the spell, you are unable to exclude yourself. Stand clear." it would cover this corner case, but instead there's nothing. The RAW posture can be summarized by a guide linked from the parent thread: Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards posted:Sculpt Spells: Remove the sting out of AoE spells that would include an ally (Evocation only naturally). This makes blaster style Wizards actually good, as now you can blat with impunity. By RAW, you can not exclude yourself from damage (which is pretty weird if you ask me), but you can move before you cast, so its not as big a deal as you think. Basically just saying "well, to the extent there's an inconsistency it must exist for a reason" and not taking it any further than that. The RAI posture is that we need to know the reason, so that means going to look for developer commentary on the issue, see if anyone else has asked after the same thing. If there's an official-looking statement about whether or not evocation wizards should be excluded from their own spells, they'll be happy. So, Arivia: what is a useful posture for approaching the question of whether or not Wizzrobe should be able to create a safe pocket for themselves in their own point-blank fireball?
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Mar 29, 2021 04:28
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Xiahou Dun posted:I've been optimistically reading this discussion about "ambiguity" in rules to be something like, to draw a giant contrast just for the purpose of example, PBTA-style giving you some prompts and you work out what the fiction is at the table vs. 3e flubbing the rules on drowning and just being an obvious mistake. PbtA games are ambiguous about the stuff they can't define. Like, Act Under Fire says "On a 7-9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice." What makes sense for the MC to do depends on the state of the game, what the fire is, and how bad you're in it when you act. There's guidance offered for how the MC can parse what's going on and what they should do, but ultimately the call has to be up to them at the point of use. If players aren't satisfied with what happens it's usually more down to the MC's judgement than confusion about the rules. Sculpt Spell, on the other hand, is ambiguous about the stuff it has to define. There's no expectation that Wizzrobe can sometimes exclude themselves from their own evocations and sometimes not, depending on the situation. Sculpt Spell should give you a definitive answer, and if players aren't satisfied it's because of a confusion about the rules.
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Mar 30, 2021 06:39
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Siivola posted:This is a really good point! I’ve been playing a character who mainly deals damage in fights, and I've noticed the first couple of hits in particular feel completely pointless. Regardless of how hard I hit the monster, someone else probably needs to finish it off. My only contribution is whether that takes two or three attack actions. Yes, I really appreciate the set up/take down paradigm in use in games like Fellowship and Voidheart Symphony, where enemies have one hit point and sometimes a checkbox that says "set up?" (The big ones have multiple individual features, each with a checkbox and one hit point.) Every success in combat is a setup or a takedown. Leperflesh posted:So, what I'm seeing now is more of an interesting focus on combat. Makes sense given the focus for many games. But what about noncombat? Sometimes a skill roll is crucial and sometimes it isn't. In a typical melee with three to five PCs against some bad guys, yes, the players probably know the outcome is a foregone conclusion - they're going to win - and the distance between the worst-case and best-case scenarios are perhaps a matter of some spent resources and a certain amount of attrition. It's interesting to see you say that - isn't there much less capability to spend resources to improve the circumstances or results of skill rolls, as compared to combat rolls?
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Apr 1, 2021 19:08
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hyphz posted:It seems "fail forward" has had two meanings at different times. Sometimes it means "if you fail the roll something else happens". Sometimes, it means "if you fail the roll, you succeed but something goes wrong later on" (eg, "if you roll low to pick the lock, you do open the door but the guards get a bonus to detect you because they heard something weird"). I think the last one was taken from Sorcerer at some point? LatwPIAT posted:It's pretty good but I want to add two caveats: The "forward" in "fail forward" means "motion", not "progress". A better statement is "don't make them roll for the same thing twice". If somebody's not on a critical plot path, bounce them off and point down the path; if somebody's on a critical plot path, give them a price to pay to keep going. Since Indy jumping is on the critical plot path - well, it's a bit unfair to point D&D at that, because D&D is a binary pass-or-fail skill system, it doesn't really contain the idea of a price to pay. If Indy beefs it in Blades in the Dark, you just tell Indy that he beefs it, plummets into blackness, and dies in obscurity - then he can resist as normal. If Indy beefs it in an Apocalypse Engine game, maybe you were planning if he almost made it to give him the choice between going full-tilt and taking damage from the collision or backing off enough to land somewhere secure and burning some adventuring gear to climb up, so you just do both - he takes the (unexpected to him) damage and winds up somewhere he needs to burn adventuring gear to get up. In Fate, the easy out is to rack stress or consequences or negative boosts to make up the margin of failure, depending on how far away Indy is from a scene break. But in all of these systems, it's generally good practice not to get sucked in by the odds and think only about Indy's success when you present him with the roll. Think about failure, and don't let him make the roll until you've come up with a way for it to be interesting. Getting sucked in by the odds can be a big problem when you're writing an entire adventure, leading you to create scenarios where success is expected and unremarkable and failure is complete and devastating.
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Apr 2, 2021 03:36
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Siivola posted:Yeah. Tthis seems to encourage having combat just for the sake of having combat instead of providing what Leperflesh called an "interesting pivot". Well, 5E adventures do often include a section on how the player characters get resurrected if they're too baby to have predictable access to that. Does that count? But in order to actually make combat a turning point, you need to have meaningful support for actions in combat that aren't killing or dying, and support for exits from combat that aren't killing or dying. Like: the Invincible Overlord bought all the food in your village with the Star Sapphire of the Sapphire Star and after the mayor gets over being blinded by opulence he tasks the PCs with obtaining a proportional amount of money and food for it by transporting it to a city big enough to have that, since his only real option for protecting this thing is refuge in obscurity. The fourth night out a goblin scouting party tries to do a smash and grab on your camp, not interested in killing, just in stealing what they can and fleeing into the night. How do you run that as a GM? (Bonus question: how do you run it when the PCs are the goblin scouting party?) Fate runs the stealing part as a contest/conflict hybrid, the robbers making skill rolls to get successes and the camp doing normal combat; if it gets to the escape part, the chase is a pure contest that may end in a conflict if the robbers are cornered. Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark just completely disclaim the idea of a separate combat system, you're just doing whatever you want whenever you want, and what happens as a result is what makes sense.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:12
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Leperflesh posted:Well, that's going a step or three beyond what I had in mind, although it's definitely cool. Oh! You mean the encounter has something to say about the dungeon? Like, if you were fighting the stirges in some goblin caves you could learn something if you plugged your nose and picked through the carrion afterwards. If you found a couple hapless goblins you'd know this was a more wild part of the dungeon where the goblins weren't really in control. If you found a rustled sheep with a goblin knife driven into its brain you'd know the goblins had effectively created guard stirges and maybe you take a second look at that gem or keep an eye out for other places the goblins are going to use cave fauna against you. (Running Dungeon World, people can just roll the dice and ask you "who's really in control here?" You get used to providing answers and the situation where the answers give people +1 forward.)
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Apr 3, 2021 21:06
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Leperflesh posted:Where a GM - and advice for the GM - could improve things, might be to explicitly choose storylike functions for each scene, whether it's a set piece fight, a skill challenge obstacle, or an RP-heavy social scene. And to continue with the stirges example, yes: there can easily be more to the cavern room than some deadly birds. A clue as to what's going on, especially if it changes the player's perception from a previous state. How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? Well, when you're dealing with random initiative and an open battleground, you really don't have the option to put any kind of dramatic weight into combat, except accidentally as circumstances align. Any "scenes" you plan inside of it can be broken up by pretty much anybody else at any time. Your best bet is for using some kind of reflection system in the aftermath to pretend a scene actually existed. Just saying it flat out like that sounds a little mocking, but I'm being serious - there's a lot of value in recontextualizing a scene after you've played it out to help you think about it differently.
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Apr 4, 2021 02:55
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Siivola posted:Yeah, I think you're right. Seems to me that even exits as fundamental as fleeing and surrendering seem to get fairly little attention these days. What do you do with six surrendered goblins? You tell them to run for the hills and not come back, because this isn't their fight and you don't want to kill them, and then the GM tells you they run for the hills and won't come back. The trick, of course, is telling the PCs the truth and having them believe you. You'd be surprised how difficult that is to do in some systems! The problem with chase scenes is a more generic case of the problem with the universality of tactical combat, where the universe is presumed to be running under tactical combat rules all the time and they're just more strictly enforced when you roll initiative. If something is supposed to outmaneuver you in combat, then those cold equations apply to all movement.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:22
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As far as rewards go, a structure that I've found kind of interesting is the one in Golden Sky Stories. The main means of reward during games is a fairly common if niche one among Japanese RPGs, basically "applause", though it's called "dreams" in the game. Whenever you do something in the game that someone else approves of, you get a point. Specifically according to the game rules, something helpful, or something adorable, because Golden Sky Stories is about a little town in the sticks and the adorable shapeshifting animals who live there and try to be helpful. Dreams are spent to strengthen your connections to other people or places, and whenever you start a scene with one of those or they show up in it for the first time, you get Wonder (magic fuel) based on your connections to them and Feelings (skill fuel) based on their connections to you. But it's a much less permanent growth in power than it might seem - Wonder and Feelings will stack up through the game but they're lost at the end, and all of your connections clear as well. You get Memories (universal points) based on their total strength, which is a fraction of the Dreams that went into them in the first place, and you retain a connection stub called a Thread that starts the connection at one point stronger the next game you make it in, or 2 points if you got it to the maximum of 5. The "applause" concept has made it over here as well. Just off the top of my head, there's: * Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, which gives your character an XP reaction such that you're fishing for facepalms or fist-pumps, for one XP point on a track of 15 to 50 * Pasion de las Pasiones, where each player is responsible for both a telenovela character and a role in the "home audience" watching the show - certain moves your character does get a bonus to the roll if an audience member has the right reaction * Epyllion, a magic-of-friendship-but-with-dragons game where each player picks a virtue to shepherd represented by some colored gems, whenever someone else expresses that virtue you give them one of your gems, and you can cast the good magic by returning gems and rolling +gems returned. (and the bad magic by marking corruption) * and I guess D&D 5 has inspiration, but that's only awarded by the GM, the bit where you can only hold 1 often results in people not spending it and therefore not getting it, and you're not always making the rolls for something your character's doing so it's not always useful
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Apr 8, 2021 10:00
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hyphz posted:Is there a good way of avoiding moment-to-moment play and overarching goals becoming decoupled? It's a standard in fiction, but can feel awkward in a game? Like, what, accidentally, or on purpose? Have you got a "for example" you're thinking of? I mean, one of my go-to setups in an AW-engine game is to explicitly offer people a long-term drawback in exchange for a short-term solution.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:37
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hyphz posted:Well, I went and thought about this and recovered a bit from some bad stuff, and I think it comes down to a mechanic question in an oblique way. Well, worker-placement and deck-building are both competitive means to draft actions for yourself and deny them to other players. RPGs are usually played as cooperative because they involve a central rules interpreter and adjudicator in the GM, and putting that central role in a competitive game is just going to lead to sentiments of favoritism. Cooperative board games usually also eliminate the role of antagonist, leaving it up to random chance, both because the cooperative actions aren't intended to handle absolutely anything but just a certain subset of anythings, and because board games don't care about your feelings - all your game elements do what they say and there's little or no room for interpretation to handle events your current cooperative state has no answer to. The main reason an RPG presents obstacles that get dealt with via the things the RPG is about (dungeon-crawling) instead of things the RPG is not about (the scientific method) is because your character's backstory to date and all the customization you've done to them have also been informed by the things the RPG is about, instead of the things the RPG is not about. Shifting over to a gameplay mode that's not about what the RPG is about, no matter how good that mode is, is going to feel disconnected and samey because it doesn't respect anything about your character.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:12
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aldantefax posted:When people say 'story game', though, they tend to point to things where the rules are mostly absent, or up to loose interpretation, as in Everway. Rarely do people describe something like Runequest as a storygame, even though it is highly focused on its narrative, setting, and the very specific aesthetic and world it attempts to explore (see also: Pendragon, another Greg Stafford joint, or any genre-specific system like Feng Shui and so on). This one's easy enough - a story game resolves in story scope. People use the term to talk about both storytelling games, whose rules almost exclusively concern who has control of the narration, when, and for how long, and for RPGs which resolve their die rolls in story-scope, as opposed to task-scope. Task-scoped games resolve their die rolls as single tasks in a larger framework provided by the game - when you attack something in combat, combat is the framework and you're rolling to see if the attack succeeds and how much damage it does (and the something may be rolling to see how well they dodge and soak damage). Compare this to the seize by force move in Apocalypse World, which doesn't assume any kind of larger framework but is one die roll that decides how an entire significant battle goes - you get to pick more and more advantageous options as you roll higher. Story-scoped resolution is much more likely to wind up non-binary because it's trying to account for many potential dimensions of a story coming in, as opposed to task-scoped resolution, which already has a framework to work in that only needs to handle success and failure. As a result, story-scoped games also tend to have a smaller number of player-facing rules, since each resolution mechanic in a story-scoped game is intended to cover a larger potential range of play.
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Apr 16, 2021 06:53
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Leperflesh posted:I suppose it comes down to whether you want to dedicate resources to making plague-curing mechanics. If your game is about plagues, you could start with a boardgame like Pandemic and add role-playing aspects to it. But if your game is more like Star Trek, a chapter on handling plague planets is probably not worth the wordcount, so you'd have to handle it using more generic mechanisms: per Miri, perhaps various character skills, as the doctor seeks antidotes, the captain and spock try to convince the inhabitants to cooperate, and everyone copes with status effects caused by the infection. Miri is a medical crisis (a contagious plague) and a diplomacy crisis (the locals don't trust you and violence isn't an option) both complicating a research mystery (where did the plague come from?) and a contact mystery (what do these people value?). The specifics of the episode might not be accounted for in the rules, but viewed as their broader categories they're the things that the crew have to deal with all the time in Star Trek, aren't they? So a game that tries to model how Star Trek tells stories will make every character capable, to one degree or another, of solving these mysteries and weathering these crises. Maybe a general pattern of "defend against a crisis while you solve the mysteries, use bonuses from solving the mysteries to finish off the crisis"?
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Apr 17, 2021 07:19
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hyphz posted:The other example was the podcast where they played Masks and someone picked the Nova. What they had in mind was someone who had a risk of, say, a 20ft explosion if their powers overloaded. So they could stay 20ft away from their party or others, with the attendant risk of being isolated or not having room, or trade off the need for a full strength power with the risk to others caught in the blast. Which is pretty easy to imagine as what you would do if you had a superpower that worked like that. Yes, this seems fairly characteristic of someone from a system with task-oriented resolution coming to a system with story-oriented resolution. Task-oriented systems often give you complete control of yourself in exchange for the GM having a similar degree of hostile control over your opposition, so it's possible to give yourself a fixed drawback and exploit a tactical map to make it meaningless. However, story-oriented systems don't have to give you complete control of yourself, since the story is a negotiation between what you and the GM want to happen. You can't do a story thing that says there's a drawback and narrate yourself into a position where that drawback doesn't apply, in the way that you'd tactics yourself into a situation where it didn't apply.
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Apr 17, 2021 07:28
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hyphz posted:The thing is, in a system with "exactly a 20' explosion" that shouldn't be bullshit. If you're playing (dear god) Hero System or something, then there should be a map and there may not be 20' of space available, or doing so might mean that the guy with the shield aura has to choose between including you or including the rest of the party, or it might mean that you can't fight while rescuing the hostages because you'd be too close to them so someone else has to rescue them instead.. and yes, maybe sometimes they do have to take the risk of catching people in their radius because the alternative is their buddy going down or a bunch of innocents being killed. Of course, doing that starts to lose the feel of comic superheroes and starts the dreaded gradual slowing down of the turn cycle. No, it's absolutely bullshit, because in order to balance this drawback, not only does there always have to be a map but every map has to take this 20' danger radius into account. This means that if the players ever do something unexpected that the GM has no prepared map for, Danger Radius Man can talk himself into a position of impunity. This is a common weak point in task-resolution systems; the requirement for a large amount of supporting information that comprises the structure where tasks are happening, and the system balanced with the assumption that the task structure will always exist in full rigor. Glazius fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 17:30
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hyphz posted:I think the issue is much more fundamental than the particular operation of that rule in Masks. It's the fundamental difference between: No, hyphz. The issue is the operation of that rule in Masks, because this argument: hyphz posted:Agreed, but the manner in which it's resolved is the key. is not an honest argument. The person making the argument is not sincerely attempting to create a more realistic world or a more believable character. They're trying to get a bonus to a roll at half-off and saying whatever they think will persuade the GM into giving it to them. This is a depressingly common reflex from people used to task-scope resolution systems when they see a rule which only has a story or roleplay cost, such as "you will cause unwanted collateral damage unless you spend another burn". The story or roleplay cost is enforced by the GM, but when a task-scope system instructs the GM it will often tell them that they're not supposed to privilege their preferred story or roleplay outcomes, but instead be a neutral arbiter of task accomplishment in service of some nebulous "reasonable state of affairs". By rhetorically casting a cost as unreasonable a player can, possibly, dissuade the GM from imposing it. But in a story-scope resolution system, the GM is instructed to privilege the story and roleplay outcomes consistent with the genre and ideas the game is about. Lethal collateral damage is not a paralyzing concern for any active comic book hero, because collateral damage in comics is so very rarely lethal that the times when it happens are defining events in a hero's career, or turn out to be frauds not directly caused by the powered individual. If the first time the Nova rolls a 6 the GM decides their power went out of control and detonated a city block, killing hundreds, they're going to get pushback from the players not on the grounds of how reasonable that would be but on how bad it is for the story. Glazius fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Apr 18, 2021 |
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Apr 18, 2021 04:47
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hyphz posted:I think this gets to the core of what I'm trying to say though. No, very few characters in a story actually realize they're in a story. Explosion Man isn't worried about bringing a building down when he stops a mugging because he's never brought a building down before. Explosion Man's player is going to have to think in terms of narrative causality rather than physics, sure. And if somebody has fundamental problems with the nature of superhero media, they're not going to have a good time playing a story game about superheroes. But... I think that's more of a feature than a bug, really? If you don't enjoy a genre, why would you expect to have a good time playing a game about it?
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Apr 18, 2021 18:58
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hyphz posted:It's more that that media has to make sure that the mindset of the character, or at least the most likely mindset that the reader will project onto the character, is appropriate. Even if we know that Cyclops' lasers might go crazy or Explosion-Man might bring down the building, the story has to avoid leave the reader with the impression that Cyclops or Explosion-Man is being reckless to the point of no longer being a relatable hero, especially in a world where many other supers exist. No, hyphz. You're still in task town. In story town, the GM gets to decide what happens when Explosion Man causes collateral damage. The odds that Explosion Man will kill hundreds of people are 0% if the GM doesn't want him to and 100% if the GM wants him to. It's not up to the story alone to convince the reader that Explosion Man isn't being psychopathically reckless. The reader is also responsible. If nobody in the story treats Explosion Man as a reckless psychopath, and the narration doesn't call Explosion Man a reckless psychopath, the reader can still "be convinced" Explosion Man is a reckless psychopath if that's what they want to believe.
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Apr 18, 2021 23:19
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Weirdly enough I think you can adopt some stuff from Diplomacy here? When you talked about working asynchronously to coordinate objectives it was the first thing that sprang to mind. Maybe borrow "the grind" from Torchbearer to put a timer on a dungeon dive and make it just the old-school city built on top a sprawling dungeon. You'd need to heavily curate things from your end to present an "enemy front" for people to negotiate. Like, you're in a dungeon room with some goblins and an old stone coffin on a platform separated by a moat. Everybody has three action points they can commit to searching the room, fighting the goblins, crossing the moat, et cetera. You get a small bonus by pouring additional actions into doing something, a middling bonus by helping someone else, and a large bonus by helping someone else from a different front. Like, if you get somebody over to the coffin that's a "different place" and they can support fighting the goblins with ranged abilities. The key to asynchronous planning is that multiple people need to be able to make decisions at once. Anything that relies on or, worse, responds to somebody else's action really doesn't work if you can't be around to process immediate interrupts.
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Apr 19, 2021 03:53
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So, take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure your goal of scalability is a good goal to have. Actually having a game world where dozens of people could be expected to coordinate with each other might not actually be as good for developing cohesion as running a bunch of smaller teams that shuffle membership on a regular basis. Jeff Bezos's two-pizza rule might seem like TED-talk BS (teams should be no bigger than could be fed by two pizzas) but when my workplace switched from one sprawling team of 12 to three rotating teams of 4 with regular checkins I've felt a lot more connected to the goings-on, when it was easier to get overwhelmed before.
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Apr 19, 2021 06:56
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder about this. Oh! No, there is an absolute answer, and it's pretty simple. It's going to result in a state of affairs where some games that call themselves RPGs don't meet the criteria, but that's always a caution when you're dealing with voluntary self-labeling. Forgive the wall, this is a copy-paste from somewhere else. Here's famous and successful game designer Sid Meier, defining what it is that is a game: "a game is a series of interesting choices". That's a video of a talk he gave at the 2012 Game Developers' Conference, but the idea is much older than that. What makes a choice interesting? Well, what makes a choice trivial is when there's an obvious right answer, and trivial choices aren't interesting. An interesting choice is a choice with a complicating factor to it, which can take many forms. The choice's options could have different situational benefits, such that you also need to understand the overall situation in order to make it. The choice could need to be made under too much time pressure for you to fully understand the available options, so you make your best guess and deal with it. The choice's consequences could be unknown, either because they're actually hidden from you and only hinted as to their overall quality, or because the consequences are fully laid out but the framework in which they operate is too complicated for you to fully understand. But an interesting choice always has a complicating factor to it. Remember that for later. And here's more nichely famous and successful game designer D. Vincent Baker on how rules operate in games. He gots a bunch more readings on that site, but here's your takeaway: 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. 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; there may be a publicly visible map with "The Black Forest" marked on it and Dave may have put some orc raider minis there, but exactly what it means for there to be orc raiders in the Black Forest is left to Dave's determination and is not up to the players to freely interrogate. Since players mediate all interactions, it's useful for many purposes, such as this explanation, to think of rules as though the players weren't there, as in this series of diagrams. We can think of rules as prompting prop/prop interactions or plot/plot interactions, or in the more immediately useful case, as prompting prop -> plot interactions or plot -> prop interactions. Here's a worked example, about The Quiet Year, a collaborative map-drawing game that involves drawing from a deck of prompt cards. Chapter Three: The Rules - The Week/Drawing Cards posted:The active player draws a card, reads the relevant text aloud, and resolves it. Picking a question from a card to answer is a prop -> plot interaction. The card and its text are physical objects. Choosing which question is more interesting or fitting to answer, and coming up with an answer to the question, both take place in the realm of the plot - in picking the question and giving its answer, you create a new story. Drawing your answer on the map is a plot -> prop interaction, because your answer becomes a common reference point that any other player can use and you're creating a common physical reference for that point. But one of these interactions represents a more interesting choice than the other one. I was not anticipating the exact text of the rules when I went fishing for the direct quote, but it's easy to spot the answer here since it's the one that actually involves the word "interesting". Coming up with an answer to the question is more interesting than drawing the answer on the map. Why? The reason you draw the answer on the map is to remind people of the answer you already gave, and you get immediate feedback from people about whether or not your drawing actually reminds them of your answer. If it doesn't work you can erase and draw again. If you're stumped, you can ask the other players what would remind them and they can tell you. But when you're answering the question you're coming up with the answer on your own, and changing the plot for everyone. (A tip for playing The Quiet Year: if one of the options on the card has an answer that seems so obvious to everyone that drawing it on the map will be the more interesting part, consider taking the other option.) In much the manner of a college textbook, now that I have worked a single example I will assume you understand the concept completely and move on to more advanced applications. Specifically, let's consider the four categories created by the presence or absence of interesting choices in prop -> plot ("to plot") and plot -> prop ("to prop") interactions. Spoiler: it's a role-playing game if it's got interesting choices going both ways. NONE TO PLOT, NONE TO PROP: The Monopoly Gambit Declined "But wait," says Not That Younger Me. "If I play Monopoly and take the doggy and I pretend that I'm a doggy, aren't I role-playing? Doesn't that make Monopoly a role-playing game?" No, Not That Younger Me. You are not as clever as you think. The reason is because that choice has no teeth, in the rules. It presents no new hooks to the props - the choices available to someone pretending they're a doggy are exactly the same as the choices available to someone playing Monopoly at the next table over wondering why you spend so much time sniffing things. And it presents no hooks to your plot - nothing changes because you're pretending you're a doggy. You don't get to ride the railroads for free because doggies don't pay and you don't get to flick someone's houses off Marvin Gardens because a doggy pooped there and ruined the property values. Or to simplify, you can pretend you're a doggy while playing Monopoly, but Monopoly doesn't care. TO PLOT, NONE TO PROP: The Inevitable Let's talk some more about the prompt deck in The Quiet Year. A lot of GM-less games have some kind of randomized prompting mechanism like this. But, in a lot of GM-less games, the randomized prompting mechanism has certain parameters you can't change. The first thing somebody does on their turn is draw one card. There's nothing in any plot you can create that can excuse them from drawing one, or that can allow them to draw more. Only the prompt deck can allow you to manipulate the prompt deck in any way. And similarly, if one of the choices on the prompt deck is "lose an Abundance" - a resource you've noted as important to your settlement that you have a lot of - you can't take that choice and then just say that the plot you've agreed on says that all your Abundances are too well-guarded to ever lose any. The prompt is real. It's up to you to work out how it happens, but it must happen. This particular prop can affect the plot, but the plot can't really affect it in return. There are no interesting choices the plot will let you make. TO PROP, NONE TO PLOT: The Shadow-Play Consider the Reputation system from Shadowrun Fifth Edition. A runner has three reputation ratings: Street Cred, Notoriety, and Public Awareness. They increase and decrease as you prove yourself a good/terrible person for other runners to interact with, as you destroy and damage lives and property/scrub your record, and as you get caught on camera and make the ten o'clock news/spread misinformation, respectively. So based on events in the plot, you manipulate these ratings, which are props. And you can make interesting decisions about what to do based on how you want those ratings to go. Getting points of Street Cred increases your Social Limit with regard to the runner crowd - you'll be able to count more successes you make on social rolls. Getting points of Notoriety and Public Awareness... has absolutely no mechanical effect. A GM might say "oh, your Notoriety's going up" or "oh, your Public Awareness is increasing" but any consequences of either of these attributes exist completely in the mind of the GM, cannot be affected by you, and do not even relate to other numbers you might be concerned with, like any particular skills possessed by NPCs or ratings possessed by, say, corporate security. Notoriety and Public Awareness are examples of mechanics which only present interesting choices going to the props. I... have to admit I have trouble thinking of mechanics that work this way that I don't consider somehow broken. Maybe someone else will be able to provide an example? TO PROP AND TO PLOT: Role-Playing Game Mechanics So Brianna and her comrades-in-arms are raiding a goblin camp and there's a rickety watch/archer tower in the middle of it. Goblins are up there shouting out combat advice and raining down arrows. This does not sit well with Brianna, who being of exceptional musculature decides to take hold of the tower and topple it. After a mighty effort, the tower tumbles to the ground in a crash of splinters, and the goblins are wounded in the carnage - as, unfortunately, is Rath, who was in the way of the tower as it collapsed and couldn't dodge clear in time. That's the plot. Given your roleplaying game of choice you could pretty easily work out what the props are and how they operate. And there's plenty of interplay there, too. But where are the interesting decisions, that I can honestly say this goes both ways? Well, let's assume for one impossible second that Brianna is not being played by Brian van Hoose, who in one breathless sentence after declaring intention to knock the tower over goes on to detail the WTN (Wreck Target Number) and SQ (Splintrification Quotient) of the only tree in these woods that Rossolin's Black Goblins have a sufficient TQC (Tool Quality (Carpentry)) to build structures out of. The general sort of question flowing to the plot is "what happens?" and the question flowing to the props is "how does it happen?" Let's say we're working within a task-resolution system, which operates largely by setting pass-or-fail difficulties for PC tasks. Pretty much any edition of Dungeons and Dragons will work like this. In this situation, "what happens" is probably an interesting choice for Brianna to make; that is, that she has multiple options available to her and after some consideration pushing the tower over jumps out at her. And, at the very least the GM has interesting decisions to make on the how-does-it-happen front. They have to come up with a task framework for Brianna to try and push the tower over in, or at least pass judgment on one that may or may not be done in the rules text. They may even do this before the game proper, if, say, Brianna picked up the Wrecking Machine feat last level and they were thinking about it when they keyed the battle map. They're making sure that what seemed like a sensible thing for Brianna to do actually works out in the game's resolution framework to be worthwhile. In the cut and thrust of play that follows, assuming the task framework meshes with other task frameworks such as "the combat round", many other interesting decisions may well flow out of Brianna's decision to push the tower over. The GM may decide how the goblins respond. Rath may decide to risk chasing the goblin shaman into the collapse zone. Brianna may decide to consume various resources in order to increase her odds. But again, at the very least, Brianna's choice of action and the GM's choice of how to adjudicate that action were interesting. Or we could be working within a story-resolution system, which operates by exposing various story elements to players and letting them roll for resolution quality. The decisions can reverse in this case. In, say, Dungeon World, Brianna has a move on her sheet called "Bend Bars, Lift Gates" that opens "when you destroy an obstacle with pure strength" and she can aim to engage that move; the move spells out varying degrees of consequence that Brianna can lessen, but not quite avoid, as she rolls higher. The decision of "how it happens" can be made in this case largely by Brianna. But based on the consequences the move lays out, the GM makes the interesting decision of "what happens next". Which can include the tower collapsing on Rath. Again, more can go on here. The GM can agree Brianna has a clear shot to make the move, or they can say she has to deal with the goblin arrows somehow, or maybe that someone needs to clear the way (maybe someone with a daredevil attack pigeon, eh, Brand? Eh? Eh?) and they can move the spotlight around at will so they can break focus on Brianna as she's resolving the move and do a loop around the table to see what everybody else is doing, to get inspiration for how to narrate the fallout from Brianna's action. Or we could be working in a kind of hybrid system, like Fate or Burning Wheel, where the GM has some responsibility both for setting the mechanical bits of the task and coming up with plot consequences for a failure, over and above the simple state of task failure. And Brianna has interactions to do on both sides as well. But in every one of these cases, it isn't Brianna alone who's solely responsible for making the interesting choices. In a role-playing game, the complicating factor (from before!) is the interesting choices previously made by other people, though it's possible that those "other people" aren't making choices right along side you. Maybe they're the game designers - in the case of The Quiet Year and other GMless games, the predefined prompting elements aim to provide you with interesting choices to make even if you can't interact with them.
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Apr 21, 2021 05:58
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OtspIII posted:To summarize, is the absolute answer you're proposing that a RPG is a game where there's both prop (mechanics) and plot (narrative) and they both have interesting choices both within and between each other? I think that mostly tracks Just between each other. Prop-to-prop interactions are often just bookkeeping and don't have to be that interesting; plot-to-plot interactions are usually more interesting, but they're also usually more initiated by the players than mandated by the game.
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Apr 21, 2021 15:47
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Leperflesh posted:Substitute "theory" for "model" and I'm with you here. I blame myself for using two similar words in the example. Let's call props "dice" and plot "clouds", which is what Vincent Baker uses in the information flow diagrams that accompany some of that source stuff. It's an RPG when there are interesting decisions to make in both the cloud-to-dice and dice-to-cloud directions, or "can I topple the goblin watchtower?" and "the goblin watchtower falls! what now?" respectively.
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Apr 21, 2021 22:11
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DalaranJ posted:So, I read Jon Peterson's new book The Elusive Shift and I wanted to discuss a part of it, and I think this is the place. Fortunately, I can constrain the discussion pretty well, thanks to Jon Peterson's blog. I think that ultimately this is one of the few times where a polar area diagram might actually comes in useful? Actually contrasting these things and suggesting one limits the other isn't necessarily borne out in reality; people are large, they contain multitudes, so it's best to just say something like "John is +7 Winning, +2 The Experience, -3 Novelty, +4 Realism; Elhven Tahcticks is 3 Winning 5 Experience 0 Realism 7 Novelty; John won't like Elhven Tahcticks much". Leperflesh posted:Well OK, Gloomhaven is on rails (and I think we've maybe found a better definition anyway, and aren't talking about the endstate as being the only way in which a game may be "open) but how about Terraforming Mars? My company card is my character sheet, I have lots of choices to make, I can totally choose to make terraforming decisions that I think are "in character" for me, and I could totally berate my fellow players with my monologues as I enact them. neonchameleon posted:A better example of a borderline case would be the boardgame Diplomacy, played with your soon to be ex-friends. It's at some levels a game where there's no plot to prop interaction - but at other levels the player to player interaction is everything. You can't change the rules, but the rules are at a very very macro scale. You can however change the outcomes because the whole thing is interactive and is about how you play your empire and there are so few rules that that's all it's about. And playing in character is both entirely in line with the game and your choices change things for everything. I'd personally say it's not an RPG, but I think it's where the borders are fuzzy. Both ways, remember. Props also to plot. Nothing about Terraforming Mars or Diplomacy is set up to in any way engage with or challenge your roleplaying, and the way that you can tell this is, if you took advantage of a board state in Diplomacy or a drawn card in Terraforming Mars that completely contradicted the character you'd set up but got you closer to winning the game, would anybody else actually accept it as a dramatic internal struggle that scarred your character, the way they'd accept a similar sort of element in an RPG? No, they'd all just think that you flaked on the character idea you had so you could win.
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Apr 22, 2021 06:04
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Leperflesh posted:It also occurs to me that there are board games, with fixed rules and no plot->prompt interaction, that nonetheless build a sort of role-playing right into the game. For example, Mysterium requires one player to say nothing out loud, but attempt to communicate clues to the players by choosing a subset of cards, all of which have only artwork and no words on them. Players try to discern patterns out of what the silent player is giving them, she listens to their deliberations and may alter her choices based on what they're saying, and importantly, there are no rules about how cards should be interpreted. Players collaboratively invent "rules" - conventions, ideas, approaches - for interpreting the cards shown to try to match them to suspects, murder weapons, etc. In this sense, there is a plot -> prop interaction in play... which props the silent player chooses is affected by improvised collaborative ideas and rules invented at the table on the fly. And, the table's ideas about what rules to invent are affected by the improvised set of choices the silent player makes. Yet, all of this takes place within a limited set of possibilities (the cards drawn from the deck, the possible suspects and rooms and so on, are all fixed by what cards you have in your game, you have a set number of turns to try to win as a group, etc.) so in that sense, the prop->plot and plot-> prop interactions are sort of illusory? No, they're not rules. They're better-understood as... locally-favored strategies, I guess? If you repeatedly played wargames in the same friendly local gamestore on a handful of prebuilt dioramas with the same people, the same thing would happen, patterns in play would arise, but it wouldn't be "a rule" that you try to occupy the central valley first. You're also confusing secret information for plot, which is understandable. Portions of the plot may be kept secret, but it's all meant to be shared when it becomes relevant, as opposed to Mysterium, where the entire game is about overcoming an artificial communication barrier. In Mysterium, you're trying to understand what another person is saying, in the game's own very restrictive "language". In an RPG, while the GM may withhold information about the world until you take certain relevant actions, there's no challenge to communicating that information clearly when the time comes.
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Apr 22, 2021 22:53
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Leperflesh posted:Is it important, or not important, for the sake of your analogy, that in many games the GM is not the sole arbiter of what it means that the king has red hair? Including sometimes players having full power to decide (ad-hoc or otherwise), individually or collectively, what an otherwise still undetermined setting or plot detail will be, without the GM having veto power? Yes, I'm assuming we're talking about a D&D-style game here where the GM has most of the power over the world plot. Other games assign responsibility for plot to players in different ways. OtspIII posted:Like, D&D skill checks are kind of weird in this format. When to use a skill check is a common-sense call by the GM, which skills to use is a common-sense call by the GM, what the DC should be is a common-sense call by the GM (with some examples/guidance given by the book that absolutely do not cover all situations), and the effect of passing or failing one is entirely up to a common-sense call by the GM. Are skill checks mostly within the realm of Plot and not Prop? The only part of them that has that sort of 'objective' equally-knowable quality is that you roll a die and add the bonuses from the part of the character sheet your GM chose for you Let me diagram this real quick then. You want to climb down the mossy cliff behind a waterfall (plot) so the GM thinks about the difficulty (plot -> prop) and says "sure, make a DC 18 Str(Athletics) check". You roll, add, and get a 20 (prop). The skill check passes (prop -> plot), and you climb down the cliff successfully (plot). The GM knows you're being hunted by the mob (plot) so they think about the mechanics for that (plot -> prop) and say "roll a d6. Don't roll a 1, or they found you". You roll a 4 (prop). It wasn't a 1 (prop -> plot), so the mob doesn't find you today (plot). It all seems pretty clear to me. Glazius fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 20:45
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OtspIII posted:This reminds me of an interesting genre that's relevant to this discussion. How familiar are you with Free Kriegsspiel (sometimes abbreviated FK or FKR)? It's a movement playing games that do have mechanics, but very explicitly don't have any Prop. It's one of those things that on the edge of being a RPG/not being one, but the actual moment to moment gameplay is still extremely RPG-like Yeah, one of the common functions of Prop elements is to disclaim decision-making onto them. Usually in concert with some kind of randomizer, rather than letting some kind of state machine tick over. FK sounds more or less like the original Kriegspiel, with an experienced referee making calls on how well military maneuvers would work. quote:The part that's a little tricky is in when the two intersect--the DC of a climb is something that gets determined completely by judgement call, but then gets used for a plot->plot interaction (rolling your skill value against it). What you say above makes sense, though--that's just the spot where Plot gets translated into Prop. It doesn't matter that the process by which the DC gets determined isn't something preset or knowable to all, because this process happens before we actually get to the Prop level. So far so good A random prompter the GM uses in secret might not even be part of the game, actually. If it's not available to the other players, it's not that much different from the GM making decisions on their own. It's also probably a bad idea to keep it secret if they intend to reuse it, because if it were done openly it would absolutely be a prop and maybe the other players have something to say about those odds? Heck, maybe there's some game mechanic the GM is forgetting about that might be a better fit. If it comes out into the open, the GM can also start making plot -> prop connections to modify it - as the other players propose actions, the GM can say "if you do that, it makes it more/less likely for the mob to find you". ("Less likely" at a 1 might mean rolling a "find save" on another d6 and getting at least a 6/5/4/3/2, or stepping the d6 up to a d8/d10/d12.) quote:To be clear, there are really just two big sticking points I have with this theory at this point: Yes, the relevant distinction is that the prop is knowable at the time it's used. In a lot of games, don't the rules give the GM the power to make new rules for situations the existing rules don't cover? The rules-as-played for a game that does that could never be fully known in advance, because new rules can be created to suit the moment. I think it's the combination of a novel mechanic done in secret that's the tipping point here. A non-novel mechanic done in secret is, for example, the GM's monsters moving tactically through darkness. The PCs can't see them move, but they still follow the known movement rules. Doing a novel mechanic in secret is the GM disclaiming decision-making onto something only the GM knows about, which, to say again, is not much different from the GM making decisions on their own.
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Jun 11, 2021 06:17
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Leperflesh posted:By this conception, if I play a game of solitare and nobody's around, the cards aren't props, because I can cheat and nobody will know but me. How can the player's knowledge of game mechanics matter? If players literally don't know the game, everything that used to be props are now plot? I'm being D&D-centric because it's probably the most imbalanced distribution of plot responsibility out there. Many other games spread a lot more plot-determining power around, but in most cases they still just make one person responsible for any plot element, just not the same person. Fewer games spread any kind of prop-determining power around, in the sense of improvising new rules as needed, and there are some "GM-less" games which are usually played by a fixed ruleset with little to no room for improvising. But that aside, that's an interesting couple of examples you picked. The only thing that makes for a game of solitaire is your own discipline in holding yourself to the rules. If you play a game of solitaire and you cheat, you're not playing solitaire anymore. You're performing a card-stacking activity which occasionally bears some resemblance to the rules of solitaire, and the cards are just decoration, not props. As an aside, I say "just decoration", but decoration isn't irrelevant. Decoration can contribute greatly to the appeal and feel of a game in play. It can make it easier to improvise new plot developments, and it can make it easier to manage props by making them more relatable than cold equations. The only reason I say "just decoration" is that decorative elements do not participate in the "is this an RPG or not" logic of plot and prop interrelating. If you play one of the many intellectually propertied versions of Monopoly and appreciate the atmosphere, that doesn't suddenly make it an RPG. If players don't know and aren't allowed to learn the game, then from their perspective all the props are decoration, because they have no idea how to engage with them. They engage the game only on a plot level, as if it were pure Kriegspiel - they say what makes sense to them to accomplish their character goals, and then there's some rattling around before judgement is passed. It's the same way with a die with secret mechanics that the GM rolls in secret, really. The player has no idea how to engage with it except with on a plot level. What more is "the same way" in both of those scenarios is that there's a complicating factor to their play that the player doesn't know about. They're not actually appealing purely on a plot dimension, there's the distortion that the hidden mechanics are applying to their choices. They might be better off or worse off by making certain choices and not know it. And that feels a lot like they're being cheated. Glazius fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jun 13, 2021 |
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Jun 13, 2021 00:34
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Leperflesh posted:It's interesting to see a third element introduced, decoration. And, while I am pretty sure I understand your explanations, which I thank you for the great deal of effort you've put into providing, I'm also convinced that this isn't going to be a useful way to discuss games, at least for me. I can't point to game elements and categorize them without also specifying that specific players (one, several, or all) at the table do or don't understand or believe they understand correctly or haven't learned yet, what it is on a rules vs. known-facts vs. decorative chart. How can I say "this part of this game's plot/prop exchange has x, y, and z attributes" if the nature of that element is different when Bobby temporarily brain-farts and forgets the rule? Well, if you're looking at a game as a theoretical exercise, you can probably assume that all your theoretical players aren't going to forget or be ignorant of any part of the game they shouldn't be. Contrarily, if you're analyzing a play session, you can analyze the game objects as they were used by the players at the moment.
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Jun 23, 2021 03:47
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hyphz posted:The first episode of Ludonarrative Dissidents, a podcast where Ross Peyton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis look at RPG designs, dropped to backers yesterday (the full release is in a month). They were discussing BitD, and the following quote came up: A lot of what people miss about PbtA games is that they're not "no-prep". You still prep for them, you just don't spell out specific scenarios. What you prep is stuff to help you improv, thinking about motivations and connections. What do these Red Sashes do in the day-to-day? How do they get their coin? What city factions are they on good terms with? Bad terms? Who are they doing outreach to, who are they moving against? So when PCs act in unexpected ways, the GM knows how their forces operate, and their improvisation is based on the motivations they've prepped. What's in this room? Oh, pouches, ledgers, some small coin. Looks like they've been collecting protection money from the Lampblacks for a while. The issue you can run into is that the GM is low-key improvising most of the time -- you can't prep before game night and then show up exhausted and lean on your prep, you have to be engaged to run the game. Though there is also an advantage - since as GM you're supposed to know about player capacities in order to be able to appeal to them, the player-facing parts of the rules tend not to be too complicated for the GM to keep in their head. Or, at least, there's a small reference sheet that the GM can also have.
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Jun 30, 2021 13:45
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hyphz posted:Yes and no. Yes, a crucial part of your prep is that you're thinking about how it's going to affect the PCs when you do it. It's the difference between "the werewolves schmooze their way into a high society party because the PCs are there" and "the werewolves schmooze their way into a high society party that the PCs are at because they want to schmooze into high society parties" You don't do your little GM dance off in a corner where the PCs can't see you, you do it where the PCs are. And the PCs are... out for a score against the Red Sashes. Of course information about the Red Sashes is going to be there. (Though since this is Blades, the PCs are self-directing their own scores -- it doesn't matter what information they do or don't find at this time about the Lampblacks getting extorted or the payoffs to Lord Scurlock.) You prep the way things are going now. What you don't plan out is a story - the way things are going now and must continue to go. The PCs must win the fight, the PCs must find the information, the PCs must let Red-Eye Romero get away.
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Jul 1, 2021 05:10
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