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Capfalcon posted:That's even weirder to me, because a tournament should be able to say, "Here's the scenario you find yourself in. Have fun!" As I recall it, the way most of those tournaments worked was that the modules were usually comparatively linear because progress was gauged by who got the farthest in, and similarly they were intentionally unfair, adversarial and meatgrindery for the same reason.
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May 14, 2023 23:03
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PurpleXVI posted:As I recall it, the way most of those tournaments worked was that the modules were usually comparatively linear because progress was gauged by who got the farthest in, and similarly they were intentionally unfair, adversarial and meatgrindery for the same reason. Right. The point of the format is that you're essentially playing a competitive CYOA book. The whole idea is the friction between wanting to clear a dungeon as fast as possible with as much loot as possible and trying to avoid running into as many giant mechanical sticks as possible. Sometimes those sticks are traps, sometimes they're big monsters, sometimes they're bandits giving you super-poison and carrying you to jail. It's an interesting format that died out with the D&D tournament scene in general. And, to go back to an earlier conversation we've probably had about the importance of well-designed premade adventures to establish how games should be played: tournament models make for lovely tutorials, because once you strip out the tournament scoring you're left with a bunch of sticks whose only apparent purpose is for the GM to feel smug when the players unknowingly blunder into them. And that's what standardized the definition of adversarial GMing in early D&D.
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May 14, 2023 23:29
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Since the module in question really has a lot of additional context that was previously missing (for unclear reasons) I think it’s still important to return to the fact that in the default social experience is some people around a single table in a shared social experience. They may or may not know each other, may or may not trust each other very much, and may or may not have a good time. However, they bring some implicit trust to the table that they are part of a shared social experience. Improving this trust over time in the default social context is then one of the more important things rather than using something designed for a tournament context (something that doesn’t even get used anymore since nobody runs a meatgrinder tournament and is also, again, a D&D-centric thing that some folks in the thread were attempting to diverge from). Examining the history of this module in greater detail is certainly of worth because Tomb of Horrors and Slavelords do get used as generic strawmen in order to drive home some kind of subjective point. I think a more extended treatment of older game rules texts do warrant some amount of time for people who are already attempting to better their understanding of what they might be able to do to improve the social experience. I believe that there are a lot of words in the Player’s Handbook in AD&D 1e that talk in very unambiguous terms about the concepts of “fair play” on the side of the players, just as there is some treatment done in the corresponding Dungeon Master’s Guide for the referee. Hexed Press and Questing Beast both have extended readthroughs of the relevant sections on Youtube for the curious. This returns to some of the concepts of there being some type of instructive material for “fair play” and “good play”, and play in this case more specifically references the group social experience as opposed to the mechanical experience or the individual experience. The audience, though broadly scoped, could use a modernized synthesis of this for virtually all TTRPGs, but most texts are obscured or ignored. In this, I like the idea behind using narrative and dramatic moves as first introduced explicitly by Vincent Baker to operationalize some of this trust. However, because the information itself can sometimes be hard to filter (part of some of the moves, such as the referee’s moves in PBTA, are to never speak the name of the move aloud) - if there are aids to ensure that the moves themselves are leveraged, then a higher quality of play can be potentially achieved. I say potentially because it’s never a guarantee that external issues won’t sabotage or derail fair play among the social experience - the “cat piss human” problem. Particularly in the modern era, people new to TTRPGs can get the benefit of this even in well entrenched games like D&D by explicitly labeling things on play aids like cards. D&D attempted to do this in various editions by introducing cards, such as in AD&D 2e (Birthright and some third party supplements attempted to introduce spell, combat, and military/army maneuver cards); 4e (all abilities could be written into a card format as well as monster math after MM3 came out); and 5e (a vast majority of OGL content focused on play aids put this in card format as well as second party reference cards for magic items, spells, monsters, and the like). I like the simplicity and elegance of cards. They’re very easy to digest (unless we’re talking Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, both beyond the scope of normal TTRPG conversation) and can have evocative art, easy to transport, and they have some mutability - they can be physically transformed to make copies, grant/revoke them, and also create/destroy them. There’s something more visceral and final about ripping up an index card that has the name of an important NPC or a magic item on it. Everybody generally understands what cards are about when you pull them out. In a situation which starts with ended up in a ‘forced scenario’, cards can be used to also reclaim some amount of agency and potentially spice things up. In one of the modules of Dungeon World where characters are taken captive as slaves, there are some questions posed to players as to the how and why - they get to describe what happens to their characters. Still a bit hand-wavey, but more fun for the players because they are empowered to participate in the social experience. In a tournament setting, this makes no sense to have it be freeform, but you could craft and deal out cards so players can “draft” a reason why they were captured (and still keep play moving in one broad direction). I think a lot of TTRPGs and the breakdown of trust from a mechanical portion is the fact that these games are complex. There are many moving parts and interactions that it becomes difficult to observe everything with perfect clarity - even if an individual does, it’s rarer still for the group to do so and in a reliable way. Adding play tools and designing rules that compartmentalize this information is nothing new, but the format going from an 8.5 x 11” or A5 piece of paper (or multiple pieces plastered onto a screen) to an index card necessarily transforms the clarity and brevity of the information - one hopes.
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May 14, 2023 23:51
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aldantefax posted:Since the module in question really has a lot of additional context that was previously missing (for unclear reasons) I think it’s still important to return to the fact that in the default social experience is some people around a single table in a shared social experience. They may or may not know each other, may or may not trust each other very much, and may or may not have a good time. However, they bring some implicit trust to the table that they are part of a shared social experience. Improving this trust over time in the default social context is then one of the more important things rather than using something designed for a tournament context (something that doesn’t even get used anymore since nobody runs a meatgrinder tournament and is also, again, a D&D-centric thing that some folks in the thread were attempting to diverge from). Right, sorry, here's the whole picture. The actual competition module, A1: Slave-Pits of the Undercity, was originally published in 1980. An alternate start with some scraps of plot puts the PCs directly in Highport on a mission from somebody whose territory just got hit by the slavelords, with a cover as prospective buyers. They're on their own to work out where the pits are (under the city's disused temple) and how to get there. The tournament competitive start parks the party having snuck through the guard patrols to land directly in front of a secret door to the slave-pits, which they were told about by an escapee. Timer's running, go dungeon! The "anaesthetic poison we'll pretend you might have saved against" was added in 1986 when the competition modules A1-A4 were collected into Scourge of the Slavelords, as a prologue to the PCs arriving in Highport. And, despite what the module says, it's not actually essential that the PCs get captured? In this case, the factor driving them toward Highport is that one of the slavelords is making a power play and using the PCs as a blunt instrument against his rivals. He orchestrates their escape from the slave galley and their arrival in Highport. The actual purpose of getting captured seems to be forcing the players through the day-to-day life of a galley slave to reduce their suspicions when someone helps them escape, and to get rid of any spells and magic items the DM decides are unsuitable for the adventure, by having them dumped into the sea while the PCs watch helplessly.
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May 15, 2023 01:44
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Glazius posted:The actual purpose of getting captured seems to be forcing the players through the day-to-day life of a galley slave to reduce their suspicions when someone helps them escape, and to get rid of any spells and magic items the DM decides are unsuitable for the adventure, by having them dumped into the sea while the PCs watch helplessly. hyphz posted:Again, in every adventure where this has happened, there's been some room a few nodes away from where the players end up, with the note "the PCs find all their missing equipment here". It doesn't take much experience to trust that this is going to happen. If there's a trust issue there it's over something else, but I'm not sure what that "something else" is.
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May 15, 2023 01:59
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I believe that the remixed modules as noted (thanks for that extra context!) does imply that people could potentially have fun with these things, but also there is a distinct tinge of “this probably wouldn’t be that fun for a vast majority of groups”. Lots of modern groups prioritize player agency and rules tend to go through great lengths at operationalizing it. One of my favorite systems conceptually is DramaSystem by Robin D Laws (thus expressed in Hillfolk), which introduces a structured resource system for dramatic social encounters in the game with players pushing one another in-character around limits that said character would otherwise prefer to not have happen (an elder ceding control of a tribe to a young upstart, for example, is dramatically interesting and also adversarial for those characters). In the case of forced material loss, while it makes sense I think that it’s rather brutish and clumsy but way to weed out problematic mechanical things. A murder mystery, for example, could easily be subverted with a sufficiently powerful player group using any kind of coercion mind-controlling effect or mind-reading effect. That might be great for a very specific group but at the same time can cause weird mental gymnastics or derails on the part of a referee trying very hard to curate a dramatic narrative before it turns all Scooby-Doo. Again this circles back to the trust of a referee and players in a social context. Any one person at the table can place too much emphasis on that mechanical trust and that can run counter to the shared trust of the social experience. In the case of wheedling away material goods of power in front of the players, this kind of dis-empowerment (that is then vindicated as the players work at odds to overthrow the Slavelords) can be very cathartic for some groups. However, this really should be negotiated for in the modern era. The game assumptions and language of trust in tabletop RPGs has changed pretty dramatically from when Slavelords was compiled and published to current. Our understanding of social dynamics at play might not have been refreshed following it, but we can empower ourselves as participants to actively talk about and negotiate the social experience over the mechanics. The mechanical trust is important, but there is also a difference between identifying “load bearing mechanics” versus set dressing. I would also say that anything which involves taking away player agency not being called out in the modern era (versus earlier ones) should be discussed carefully because of that additional harm. One need only remember of the infamous video from the early days of internet fuckery when someone got extremely mad about having a weapon “stolen” from them in a raid (I’m thinking of the Cloudsong incident from Dark Age of Camelot, but replace your favorite ninja loot story here and you get the idea). People can get potentially very upset if their trust over things which otherwise would be completely meaningless in any other context has been violated and broken and it can cause social groups (not just TTRPG groups) to absolutely explode over something that, if you explained it to someone ten years later, would just sound completely unhinged. This is going to sound a bit dry and weird but I think having a measurement of trust and discussing limits (what is normally done in session zeroes) should be considered carefully, especially with newer groups. I still stand by my position earlier that individual issues of trust are beyond the scope of any game to deal with, but figuring out some things to explicitly declare and agree on should be part of those original negotiations and understanding. An inversion not of trust but of security is the concept of “risk”. What is within the “risk profile” of someone who is new to TTRPGs or to that specific table may be wildly different from others. Understanding what behavior is considered known and risky does fold back into trust, and risk in a TTRPG context can be assessed, managed, presented, and played with. Whether or not people would be happy about it is a different story - just look at the concepts surrounding player character mortality and how those have changed over the years in TTRPGs for a prime example of how risk has changed.
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May 15, 2023 02:25
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PurpleXVI posted:.. comparative quotes .. Good grief. Were there actual guidelines on what items were not permitted to be carried between the scenarios, or was it just whatever the GM didn't feel like dealing with?
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May 15, 2023 04:11
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hyphz posted:Good grief. Were there actual guidelines on what items were not permitted to be carried between the scenarios, or was it just whatever the GM didn't feel like dealing with? Yeah, you'd sure think that dumpstering literally all the treasure and power the PCs have amassed to this point would come with some guidelines about what sorts of things would break the adventure! You'd sure think that. You get one sentence that says "you decide what they keep". Look. I don't mean to harp on just this one adventure collection. I just find it very illustrative to contrast the light plot spackle on the initial publication of the module with the loving Saw-rear end contraption they strapped onto the rerelease five-six years later. The thing about any principles espoused in the DM's guide is that without any kind of worked examples they're just theories. The sample adventures and published adventures should be serving as examples of how to follow through on the principles the DM's guide tells you to follow. They're not necessarily going to cover everything, like how to deal with specific player types at your table, but the instructions those adventures give to the DM should line up with the principles the DM's guide says the DM should be following.
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May 15, 2023 16:09
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Glazius posted:You get one sentence that says "you decide what they keep". I mean, the thing that's getting me here is the perception that this kind of plot hammering is bad (which I agree it is) and adversarial (which I'm not so sure about), and it would be better to have trust between the players and GM in a "conspiracy" to tell a story. My problem is that if this kind of trust is actually present, then that same trust makes these actions no longer adversarial. If we get captured no matter what, it's because there's cool story in the prison break. If my Wand of Mind Reading gets mysteriously washed away in a freak storm, it's because there's a cool murder mystery coming up. If you don't want these things present, then the solution is to have plots that don't depend on them, but that's really difficult to do in many cases. Now whether or not the written module encourages that trust is another matter and the way it's been written it sounds like it absolutely doesn't.
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May 15, 2023 17:02
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The system is adding to the adversarialness, so is the stealth. Sometimes in pulp, the genre I run the most, the players get caught in the death trap or the villain gets away. If I want to show up a cool death trap, I ask if I can give everyone a fate point, metacurrency. Anyone who says yes wakes up in the death trap, anyone who says no, maybe they can escape!, and I save the death trap for later. Same for the villain escaping, except in the final conflict of the scenario, when they can only went because players have chosen to do something I would let them escape. (whether it’s splitting their focus or trying to plan that wouldn’t work and the dice aren’t with them.) Yesterday, I was going to have a villain get away in a Gyrocopter and end the session, but one character said he wasn’t going to end combat yet… so the villain shot him while trying to escape, a damaging but not deadly attack. The player picked up a downed enemy’s sniper rifle, and hit the gyrocopter with his “one more shot!” stunt. BLAM! My point is, if you want something to happen in the fiction that the players haven’t justified with their actions, choices and mistakes, they should get rewarded, not lied to. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 23:05 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 17:13
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Golden Bee posted:My point is, if you want something to happen in the fiction that the players haven’t justified with their actions, choices and mistakes, they should get rewaeded, not lied to. If it's being done in a trustworthy way, isn't the story the reward?
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May 15, 2023 20:48
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hyphz posted:If it's being done in a trustworthy way, isn't the story the reward? I have two responses here. 1) Brains are dumb and like getting specific rewards, and a cool story is a very loose reward that any RPG group would be getting no matter what. 2) To make a more useful point than basic pop psychology, it's as much about showing that you're operating within the system as anything. Compelling an aspect to put someone in a bad spot and giving them a fate point is an established part of the system, so doing it like that shows that you're playing the game and not just loving around with arbitrary traps. It's like how a version of Scourge of the Slave Lords that went "congratulations (?) on infiltrating the slavers' prison, take 500 story XP" would probably be considered less adversarial, because being captured is being written like one way to do a plot beat and not an arbitrary gotcha.
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May 15, 2023 22:19
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hyphz posted:If it's being done in a trustworthy way, isn't the story the reward? No. The snarkiest answer I can give is that I don’t know someone with any amount of humility who would ask for four hours of peoples’ time a week, and say “my story is it’s own reward.” The story is created between what players bring, my reactions, their reactions, and my prep. It’s like trying to take credit for what people do at your birthday party because you posted. A more complex answer: a general heroic character arc means the characters will face more obstacles at the beginning, and be more able to overcome them by the end. If I’m going to declare temporary victory (the elevator begins to lurch…, the sales girl had sprayed you all with a knockout perfume, etc), I’m exercising story control. As the arbiter of the world, it’s not right for me to do this without compensating the players. They have no recourse within the game; if there’s trust, they know I’m putting them in an interesting situation instead of just flexing, but the meta currency papers-over the unfairness. It says “you guys are smart and probably could’ve found a way out of that, but I really wanna get to the cool thing I like, so at the end of the scenario you’re going to have more power and more success because I gave you fate points.” Detour: I have created a habit of, when I need to grab a snack but it’s not long enough for five minute break, doing so before a telegraphed in game conflict, and letting the players plan what they’re gonna do. If I’m not in the room, I can react honestly instead of scheming and trying to win, which is a natural human reaction. It also contributes to group cohesion, because they can focus only on each other, not getting any new details about the world or NPC relationship development.
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May 15, 2023 23:17
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O cool. I do that with cigarette breaks.
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May 15, 2023 23:20
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hyphz posted:I mean, the thing that's getting me here is the perception that this kind of plot hammering is bad (which I agree it is) and adversarial (which I'm not so sure about), and it would be better to have trust between the players and GM in a "conspiracy" to tell a story. The "adversarial" in this case is a particular kind of hosed up, of the "trying to use in-game methods to address out-of-game problems" style. Like, if you have one player who wants to pick fights with even the most notional opposition, and one player who wants to try and talk down all but the most fervent opposition, those players are having an out-of-game problem - they enjoy different things in the game and they can't both always do what they want. Rather than leaving it up to in-game means - making it incumbent on Stringfellow the bard to somehow restrain Grognak the barbarian so a fight doesn't start - you resolve this out-of-game by asking your players to come to some kind of agreement where they're, like, taking turns, and maybe not setting up your scenarios to put so many encounters in that grey area between hostility and diplomacy. In this case, the two factions pursuing different things from the game are "the PCs, trying to accomplish objectives the GM openly presented them" and "the GM, trying to present the secret module story", and they have no choice but to settle things through in-game methods, where the GM has final authority over how the game proceeds. To talk a little more about the in-game vs. out-of-game divide: Golden Bee posted:Sometimes in pulp, the genre I run the most, the players get caught in the death trap or the villain gets away. If I want to show up a cool death trap, I ask if I can give everyone a fate point, metacurrency. Anyone who says yes wakes up in the death trap, anyone who says no, maybe they can escape!, and I save the death trap for later. Fate Points aren't an in-game method to resolve an out-of-game conflict; rather, they offer an opportunity to separate player motivation from character motivation and clarify the nature of an in-game conflict. Stringfellow doesn't want to fight but sometimes his reedy little arms can't hold Grognak back; Grognak doesn't want to talk but sometimes Stringfellow can fast-talk him out of violence. If the players are both satisfied with how much they can take their preferred approach with Fate Points acting as the mediator, all well and good. But even then, if Stringfellow's player is dissatisfied with how much combat is happening, as the GM you can't just shrug your shoulders and say "the Fate Points have spoken", you have an out-of-game problem and in-game means won't be sufficient to address it.
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May 16, 2023 02:08
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Agreed. It’s very hard for mechanics to make someone want to play game they aren’t interested in conceptionally. (The exception is pay to win mobile gem matching games.)
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May 16, 2023 03:18
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Golden Bee posted:Agreed. It’s very hard for mechanics to make someone want to play game they aren’t interested in conceptionally. (The exception is pay to win mobile gem matching games.) And The Most Dangerous Game, obviously.
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May 16, 2023 03:36
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Narrative metacurrencies just seem to push the problem, though. If the players trust that the GM is trying to tell a story that all the players will enjoy and will accommodate all their characters, why would they need or want to spend points to make them change what they’re doing?
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May 16, 2023 13:37
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hyphz posted:Narrative metacurrencies just seem to push the problem, though. Because it's a gameified way to handle the push and pull of collaborative storytelling, and gameifying storytelling makes it a lot easier to tell stories together in the first place. It's not like these mechanics only exist to create trust. Creating trust by applying them equally is just a nice side effect.
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May 16, 2023 16:37
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Benny points of any kind "feel better" as a reward for players willfully putting their characters up for some risk or harm. They're an acknowledgement that the character is being deliberately set up in a way they can't avoid, rather than fudging something behind the scenes to arrange for the specific trouble the GM wants. In exchange, the player is being paid for the added risk. And hopefully the benny points are actually worthwhile in whatever system uses them so that it feels like a nice reward to get. The root of a lot of this tension on what's an "adversarial" action is whether or not we should be treating "unfair" actions that operate outside the player/character's ability to react or deflect as "adversarial" or just complete bullshit. I think nowadays people would say something like the old Tucker's Kobolds is adversarial, but not necessarily unfair. The kobolds are presumably operating within the rules of the game, they've just set up an elaborate series of traps, take advantage of cover mechanics, used ranged combat missiles and grenades, and are able to overwhelm by sheer number of attack rolls because there's probably a few dozen of them to 3-5 high level player characters, so every little peck of crossbow damage adds up. They're not firing save DC 50 poison-tipped arrows to one-shot PCs, or using GM-contrived magic spells the characters don't have access to. The issue that comes up is when a game doesn't delineate that kind of "fair play" tough encounter from an unwinnable one. A lot of GM advice for a long time as treated both methods as equally valid and regularly used in the GM's toolkit. And the more arbitrary unwinnable scenario is faster also just plain easier for a GM to set up instead of a massive setpiece scenario with a lot of variables in place for the kobolds to succeed in being a serious threat to any character past level 4.
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May 16, 2023 19:44
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Ehhhh, to me "Tucker's Kobolds" both felt adversarial and unfair. The GM's "counters" to what the players try feels pulled out of his rear end right in the moment, rather than something the players could in some way have foreseen and prepared for, or scouted out. The entire exercise seems to be for the GM to smugly prove that he's smarter and more powerful than the players. Ultimately a lot of things are going to be hidden from the players, though, you can never "prove" what TN or DC a GM planned ahead of time, or "prove" what enemy stats were, or "prove" that the giant antimagic golem just around the corner existed prior to the party mage demolishing the last encounter effortlessly with spells, so to some extent it's always going to come down to whether the players believe the GM's on "their side" enough to not pull that sort of poo poo when something's just set them back.
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May 16, 2023 19:49
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Nuns with Guns posted:Benny points of any kind "feel better" as a reward for players willfully putting their characters up for some risk or harm. They're an acknowledgement that the character is being deliberately set up in a way they can't avoid, rather than fudging something behind the scenes to arrange for the specific trouble the GM wants. In exchange, the player is being paid for the added risk. And hopefully the benny points are actually worthwhile in whatever system uses them so that it feels like a nice reward to get. If you actually read Tucker's Kobolds the story isn't so much that the kobolds are playing within the rules, it's that the players just aren't reacting at all. The story is all "These fuckin kobolds come outta nowhere and hit us with spears and arrows and then they dive away before popping back up with traps and blah blah blah and we're all like oh poo poo our donkeys died and half our guys are gone and we're just screaming like we're in a hell scene man" instead of any one person saying "Okay, can I roll initiative?"
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May 16, 2023 20:03
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The story ends “Tucker’s Kobold’s were the worst things we could imagine. They ate all our donkeys and took our treasure and did everything they could to make us miserable, but they had style and brains, tenacity and courage. We respected them and love them, sort of, because they were never boring.” By all accounts, the use of huge exaggerations (“NOOOOOOO!!!!”) and the fact of the group had already met these guys makes me think that the Kobolds fought more than fair. And the fact it’s a recurring dungeon story means the players entered of their own free will. That means they are a different story than the impossible saves of the slavers’ module. It’s weird to see Tucker’s Ks used in this context, because they’re usually used to illustrate ‘combat sport vs combat as war’, which I believe we’ve already done in this thread.
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May 16, 2023 20:31
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Golden Bee posted:The story ends “Tucker’s Kobold’s were the worst things we could imagine. They ate all our donkeys and took our treasure and did everything they could to make us miserable, but they had style and brains, tenacity and courage. We respected them and love them, sort of, because they were never boring.” See, I have a different perspective... I don't really think Tucker's Kobolds happened at all. I think it was 100% poo poo that was made up.
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May 16, 2023 21:23
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Because it's a gameified way to handle the push and pull of collaborative storytelling, and gameifying storytelling makes it a lot easier to tell stories together in the first place. It's not like these mechanics only exist to create trust. Creating trust by applying them equally is just a nice side effect. But it seems that rather than creating trust, it implies adversarialness. If Bob and his colleagues are working together to write a report, Bob wouldn't say "ok, every time I take out something you wrote I'll tell you why and I'll give you a point, and you can spend a point to replace anything I've written no questions asked." If I'm working together with Bob, why do I need a resource to override him? If we're trying to produce the best possible report together, why would we limit accepting either of our contributions, compared to just focussing on the best result? Also, I agree with theironjef that the Tucker's Kobolds story smells distinctly off because the action economy is screwy.
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May 16, 2023 21:34
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hyphz posted:But it seems that rather than creating trust, it implies adversarialness. If Bob and his colleagues are working together to write a report, Bob wouldn't say "ok, every time I take out something you wrote I'll tell you why and I'll give you a point, and you can spend a point to replace anything I've written no questions asked." If I'm working together with Bob, why do I need a resource to override him? If we're trying to produce the best possible report together, why would we limit accepting either of our contributions, compared to just focussing on the best result? The simple answer is because we're involved in a creative exercise(unlike writing a report), and generally creative exercises are more interesting with limitations. When you have a limited supply of something, or rules you have to operate inside, then you need to think up clever or interesting ways to do things rather than just taking the shortest and most direct path there with the least loving about. The supplemental answer is that because it's a creative exercise it has no objective end state or win condition at which it's done, unlike a report, so there's a purpose to just reshuffling things to gain new permutations, to see what they can be. Unlike the report where it's just a matter of shoving in the necessary elements as efficiently as possible to get it done so you can go do fun things instead.
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May 16, 2023 21:40
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1. The author is relating it as a story, not a combat report. 2. The players and I are not cowriting a story like we’re working on a screenplay together. We’re playing a game. Our goal isn’t finished product*, it’s an experience. *Some argue a screenplay isn’t a finished product either, but a blueprint for making a movie.
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May 16, 2023 21:41
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hyphz posted:Narrative metacurrencies just seem to push the problem, though. No, narrative metacurrencies only really work if there isn't a problem, in the sense that you're thinking. The metacurrency is not a bribe to get Stringfellow's player Alex to accept a course of events that Alex fundamentally doesn't want to happen, where Grognak picks a fight. The metacurrency is to compensate Stringfellow for being in a scene they're not good at, which Alex is fine with participating in. This is because the metacurrency doesn't exist to model player frustrations and desires, but the intensity of narrative focus on a character. You know how this works: the smart guy says "we must try to understand this creature" and the tough guy has to jump in to stop it from eating the smart guy's face, then when they're back at the lab the smart guy exhaustively explains the strengths and weaknesses of the creature and the tough guy says "can you say it again in English, doc?", cue laughtrack. When a character's in a scene they're not a good fit for, they build up narrative metacurrency. When a character's in a scene they're a good fit for, they spend narrative metacurrency. Narrative metacurrency is accrued and spent based on how the scenes as they're presented suit the character; it's not a way to control how much a player gets to play what they like.
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May 16, 2023 22:06
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Referees are not mind readers. Attempting to accommodate player design all the time will cause mismanagement of expectations when things don't go their way, and can be interpreted as the referee not getting a meaningful say in the collaborative experience. Similarly, this can point to a situation where the impact of challenges is significantly less because the challenges themselves don't require as much lateral thinking which no preconfigured rules have an easy answer for (such as using an ability in a novel way during combat). Metacurrency can be used as one method to explicitly declare what players want and provide referees latitude on how to figure out what that is going to be. If it's not said explicitly, then people aren't leveraging principles that allow them to truly express their needs out of the social experience. Since this thread has a fondness for nitpicking on really specific examples and then expanding that into some kind of generalization, the "smart" character in Glazius' prior post will default to using knowledge as a method of understanding the creature and they have a spotlight scene for doing so. Nowhere in this scenario did the player of the smart character explicitly ask for the spotlight scene - and they may feel uncomfortable actually realizing the scene as well. What if (to further contextualize this character) the person who plays the smart character doesn't want to exposit in spotlight scenes about how smart they are, but instead prove through actions and supporting their friends with knowledge because they have a desire not just to feel powerful, but to feel powerful by helping their friends in the game? If this is not actually said, then the spotlight scene can become awkward as a player is put into the role of a smart character expositing to the others when really what they wanted (and did not say out loud) was a chance to point out weaknesses in the next fight. They didn't need the spotlight scene to do this, and might even feel guilty that they took spotlight time away from other people. I'll write it again because it keeps coming back in a circle in this thread - if you're not explicitly declaring what you want as a player or referee and just assuming everybody else knows what you want through mechanical decisions or metacurrency manipulation, it comes back to finding the right way to communicate, and in the shared social experience saying something explicitly for what you want will always be better than expecting other people to be able to know how to have fun with you all the time. This also feeds back to trust, which is again beyond the scope of the mechanical portion of TTRPGs. If you can't trust yourself to express yourself in this explicit way - or, you can't trust that other people will hear you at the table with respect - this needs to be looked at elsewhere. There's a sense that TTRPGs are a social panacea, but these principles of healthy communication and trust are only incidentally picked up by engaging with other people instead of expecting that the game's implications build that for you.
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May 17, 2023 15:40
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I think it's important to remember that game mechanisms don't only exist to "solve problems" - they also exist to create interesting choices, limit choices, and otherwise turn an abstract collaborative improv session into "a game." Gamification makes sense for playing an RPG, and probably does not make sense for Bob and his colleague writing a report, because they have a different objective. We are gathering to gamify storytelling (or really, as Golden Bee correctly points out, have an experience), not merely to tell stories. Co-authors writing a novel don't need to gamify their project either, but they're not playing a game. This is basically tautological, a role-playing game is a game, not just role-playing. Perhaps engaging in mechanisms that shift spotlights between characters with different goals and different means of achieving those goals, or to go back a few extra posts in the thread, "narrative metacurrencies" in general, can just be a game for the sake of being a game.
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May 17, 2023 18:24
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Leperflesh posted:This is basically tautological, a role-playing game is a game, not just role-playing. Perhaps engaging in mechanisms that shift spotlights between characters with different goals and different means of achieving those goals, or to go back a few extra posts in the thread, "narrative metacurrencies" in general, can just be a game for the sake of being a game. This gets into the issue of what constitutes a game, though. Most games are, at least in part, adversarial. Those which are co-operative, or solo, tend to have some kind of general obstacle in play. Even "gamified learning" has the obstacle of the difficulty of learning the material. But there's very few storytelling games that are adversarial (Baron Munchausen maybe? Although that game may not work if actually played as a game to win) or where the GM and players co-operate to deal with some aspect of the rules that's trying to mess up the story. Or is the obstacle supposed to be "the creative difficulty in coming up with the story"? I like that idea very much, but it doesn't seem particularly ideal, because nobody really knows how to overcome it.
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May 17, 2023 19:10
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I would disagree that most RPG’s are adversarial, any more than a mother saying “here comes the airplane” is involved in aviation.
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May 17, 2023 19:11
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Leperflesh posted:Gamification makes sense for playing an RPG, and probably does not make sense for Bob and his colleague writing a report Somebody clearly hasn't dealt with corporate metrics before.
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May 17, 2023 19:13
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I disagree that games are always either adversarial or have an obstacle in play, although those are common aspects. But also I don't think "what is a game" is necessarily germane to the thread. It should be sufficient to say that we do not need to justify RPG game mechanics on the basis that they must address "problems" at the game table, if we can simply accept that game mechanisms exist in order to make games be games. If narrative metacurrences are interesting or engaging or fun, that's enough. PurpleXVI posted:Somebody clearly hasn't dealt with corporate metrics before. I have; they do not make sense, at least not for Bob and his colleague. Their primary goal is to drive engagement, and they generally leverage addiction psychology factors to do that, although they can also incorporate techniques like chunking effort, templating, etc. which work independently of "being a game." If Bob and co can't manage to write a report together, gamification isn't going to help. yes, I do realize you were joking of course Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:18 on May 17, 2023 |
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May 17, 2023 19:14
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hyphz posted:This gets into the issue of what constitutes a game, though. Most games are, at least in part, adversarial. Those which are co-operative, or solo, tend to have some kind of general obstacle in play. Even "gamified learning" has the obstacle of the difficulty of learning the material. You're doing that thing again where you make huge sweeping generalizations while also retreating into a semantic argument. How are "most" games adversarial when you don't have a working definition of a game? What does that even mean.
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May 17, 2023 19:25
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hyphz posted:This gets into the issue of what constitutes a game, though. Most games are, at least in part, adversarial. Those which are co-operative, or solo, tend to have some kind of general obstacle in play. Even "gamified learning" has the obstacle of the difficulty of learning the material. Games are not actually adversarial. They're playing at being adversarial. People involved in the game can be presented with conflicting goals and take their pursuit of those conflicting goals seriously but the most important element of the game is that people prioritize staying within the structure of the game over pursuing their conflicting goals. in the traditional players-play-one-person-GM-plays-the-world model of RPGs, the GM also has a power, unusual in many games, to define the structure of the game itself. Genuinely and not pretendingly adversarial play becomes possible, both by the GM warping the game in pursuit of his goals and players pressuring the GM to warp the game in pursuit of theirs.
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May 18, 2023 09:23
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I've been running paid games for the last 8? or so months and it's been very interesting and rewarding but I think one of the most intruiging things I've encountered from playing with a lot of strangers is seeing very clearly what problems they've had in the previous games they've played. Some classic examples
These are especially funny because I run very rules lite systems with tons of roleplaying and generally a feel good energy to them but I have been making a habit to say things in certain ways or try and make it clear that I really do just want them to beat the challenges I set up, rather than lord over them when I own them with my epic encounters. One thing I did recently when running Masks (a superhero rpg) was ask if the players would be okay with a supervillain getting away but if he did they'd get to ask a question and he'd awnser honestly, flavoured as one of the characters hesitating because it was their big bad evil nemesis.
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May 19, 2023 04:01
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ItohRespectArmy posted:I've been running paid games for the last 8? or so months I'm curious about the paid-game dynamic in general. Do you feel that it changes your style if you're being paid? Are you more likely to go soft on the players than normal? Are there things you do in a paid game that you'd otherwise do much differently if you were playing with your friends? I'm not just focusing on stereotypical Mr. Grapes "Did you make their giant greatsword worthless while fighting in a bolt-hole" style gritty grimdark nonsense, but even just basic stuff: Are you more likely to go all out on 'special effects' (cool minis and maps etc) if you're getting paid because they're expecting a certain level of production value or something? A local bar in my area wants to pay me to run a weekly campaign game there for the staff and I'm always kind of hesitant about it, perhaps in an overly lame way that I'd have to 'compromise my vision' or whatever. That's a really pretentious way to put it but I think it boils down to the ever-present fear of DM burnout and would I be sufficiently excited and motivated to run what I consider a good campaign if I think I'd have to work more towards their preferences/expectations/whims if they're paying me.
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May 19, 2023 09:43
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I'm curious about the paid-game dynamic in general. Do you feel that it changes your style if you're being paid? Are you more likely to go soft on the players than normal? Are there things you do in a paid game that you'd otherwise do much differently if you were playing with your friends? I'm not just focusing on stereotypical Mr. Grapes "Did you make their giant greatsword worthless while fighting in a bolt-hole" style gritty grimdark nonsense, but even just basic stuff: Are you more likely to go all out on 'special effects' (cool minis and maps etc) if you're getting paid because they're expecting a certain level of production value or something? I try to carry an air of professionalism for sure I would say that is the biggest thing, I take serious, labourious time explaining safety tools and my expectations for the game. I would say I overlook and accept things that would annoy me when playing with friends and try to be as accomodating as possible. I think the main difference from when I play with friends is that I make the focus all about the game, I try and make it the main and total focus of everything, if we're riffing, it's about the characters, if we're having serious discussions I always try and loop it around to the game. I don't run d&d or pathfinder so it's not like I scale down the cr number or have easier encounters, I mostly run PBTA stuff and try to make it very much about telling a good fun story as if it were our own little tv show which would be my gming style anyway but I do make an effort to be relentlessly positive in all of my games when I can be quite grouchy outside of it so I do perform to some extent but it also is very enjoyable and rewarding. As for special effects, I literally don't do any of that which probably sounds funny but I run games with google sheets or foundry depending on the system without maps or lighting really, I'll sometimes splash in some nice music but I haven't ever had anyone have a problem with that. I have had periods where I was very worried about GM burnout but the main thing that keeps me going is that paid players are generally extremely invested in the game. I have heard tales of extremely entitled players but I haven't encountered most of them, a sad thing I'd say is that I have generally had an eaiser time running paid games than when I ran free ones regularly. If I'm having a bad mental health day which is fairly on and off, I just don't run and I try to explain it. Like anything you need to listen to your body/mind when it comes to this sort of thing but I would certainly suggest giving it a try if you have interest in it. tl;dr: it's actually pretty nice honestly, the vast majority of paid players I've had have been very respectful and dedicated to games that they're in, I do feel like I have to perform but if I think I can't I don't. It is a job though, like any other. ItohRespectArmy fucked around with this message at 09:56 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 09:52
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Yeah, i've done some paid games as a player and honestly everybody was in and engaged, they're some of the best groups i've had made from strangers. I'm pondering setting up a pay game to DM myself based on this experience.
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May 19, 2023 12:48
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