Narrative Causality?

[The Glyphstone]

I always thought the Bad Motivator scene was an explicit, if subtle, instance of The Force railroading Luke onto his destiny as the Chosen One.

[Max_Killjoy]

I always thought the Bad Motivator scene was an explicit, if subtle, instance of The Force railroading Luke onto his destiny as the Chosen One.


At least "the Force at work" makes more sense than the pile-up of coincidences that brought R2-D2 to Luke.

If the story relies on getting R2-D2 to Luke, at least restrict it to a single coincidence -- life is full of single coincidences. It's the pile-up that puts it over the top, IMO.

[ImNotTrevor]

I always thought the Bad Motivator scene was an explicit, if subtle, instance of The Force railroading Luke onto his destiny as the Chosen One.

The Bad Motivator ability can be framed the same way, but Space Opera's are pretty loaded with handy coincidences.

Essentially, the Bad Motivator ability takes something that is normally GM BS and makes it into a player ability instead. That's about it. Not much else to it.

[kyoryu]

So, I get two things so far:

1) The ability for the player, via rules widgets, to have an impact beyond what their character could do. I get that. That's certainly a thing a number of game systems do, and if you don't like it, you don't.

Some systems do this, other systems give you the ability to have this kind of thing, and other systems don't do it, even in the narrative category (and some traditional systems also include rules widgets of this nature, too).

2) Overriding things because "the story" that the (usually) GM has in mind requires that those things don't happen. Much like Steel Mirror, I don't do that. "The story" is the events that happen, no more, no less. I set up a situation, and the players play through it, and what happens happens, and my "plans" are essentially irrelevant.

One of the big differences I see with "narrative" games is that rather than a fairly set path, with fights occurring because tactical combat is fun, and the stuff in the middle seen as "roleplaying" or just fluff, a lot of them focus on the "stuff in the middle". The games are usually played as unfolding events, with each major interaction representing a significant fork in what might happen. This makes railroading fairly tough, to say the least. Some prominent "narrative" games even have rules/principles there to "play to find out what happens" - essentially, if "what happens" is the bad guy gets shot, then the bad guy gets shot and roll with that. Maybe you thought the game would be about taking out the Bad Guy, but now it's about what happens in the power vacuumn his removal causes, or something.

[Max_Killjoy]

So, I get two things so far:

1) The ability for the player, via rules widgets, to have an impact beyond what their player could do. I get that. That's certainly a thing a number of game systems do, and if you don't like it, you don't.

Some systems do this, other systems give you the ability to have this kind of thing, and other systems don't do it, even in the narrative category (and some traditional systems also include rules widgets of this nature, too).

2) Overriding things because "the story" that the (usually) GM has in mind requires that those things don't happen. Much like Steel Mirror, I don't do that. "The story" is the events that happen, no more, no less. I set up a situation, and the players play through it, and what happens happens, and my "plans" are essentially irrelevant.


1) The player having an ability via rules widget to have an impact beyond what their character could do?

2) I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad.

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Story".




One of the big differences I see with "narrative" games is that rather than a fairly set path, with fights occurring because tactical combat is fun, and the stuff in the middle seen as "roleplaying" or just fluff, a lot of them focus on the "stuff in the middle". The games are usually played as unfolding events, with each major interaction representing a significant fork in what might happen. This makes railroading fairly tough, to say the least. Some prominent "narrative" games even have rules/principles there to "play to find out what happens" - essentially, if "what happens" is the bad guy gets shot, then the bad guy gets shot and roll with that. Maybe you thought the game would be about taking out the Bad Guy, but now it's about what happens in the power vacuumn his removal causes, or something.


See, that's how the group I gamed with for 20+ years did it. The "stuff in the middle" was much of the game and just as fun as the combat, and it was set up as unfolding events, and even if the GM had a course of events in mind, the players' actions were always able to completely able to change what was going on.

However, much of this was before all the "game design theory" stuff existed, and certainly none of us ever took any of it into consideration -- I'm the one who found all the "game design theory" stuff right at the end before just as everyone got too busy with life and/or moved away, after "the Forge era" was almost over. None of us had ever heard of GDS or GNS or "narrative systems"... we used HERO and oWoD and a d100 homebrew system for the most part.

I'm not saying you're doing this, at all... but sometimes it feels like the "narrative focus" advocates are trying to lay claim to what I see as just plain old good GMing as belong under the "narrative" umbrella.

It certainly didn't require us to use any of the systems that call themselves "narrative"... although that appears to be a loaded term by itself, given that a lot of competing ideas seem to be trying to grab that umbrella for themselves. Mr Edwards "conflict of interest resolution" and highly abstract mechanics, versus FFG Star Wars super-crunchy mechanics, versus FATE, versus etc.

[kyoryu]

1) The player having an ability via rules widget to have an impact beyond what their character could do?

Yeah, sorry. Fixed.


2) I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad.

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Story".

I also don't really do that. Play your character - any "story" will naturally come out of what happens as your character tries to do things and others try to stop them.

[Beleriphon]

1) The player having an ability via rules widget to have an impact beyond what their character could do?

2) I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad.

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Story".

Most games tend to frame those decision points as what would be more interesting for my character to do? Your character is an alcoholic so is it more interesting for them to overcome their vice, or succumb to their addiction? If the players choose to have the character succumb to the addiction they usually get some rules widget to play with later. Either way the player is making a decision based on what they think the character should be doing, and depending on the situation they get stuff because the decision was detrimental.


See, that's how the group I gamed with for 20+ years did it. The "stuff in the middle" was much of the game and just as fun as the combat, and it was set up as unfolding events, and even if the GM had a course of events in mind, the players' actions were always able to completely able to change what was going on.

However, much of this was before all the "game design theory" stuff existed, and certainly none of us ever took any of it into consideration -- I'm the one who found all the "game design theory" stuff right at the end before just as everyone got too busy with life and/or moved away, after "the Forge era" was almost over. None of us had ever heard of GDS or GNS or "narrative systems"... we used HERO and oWoD and a d100 homebrew system for the most part.

I'm not saying you're doing this, at all... but sometimes it feels like the "narrative focus" advocates are trying to lay claim to what I see as just plain old good GMing as belong under the "narrative" umbrella.

It certainly didn't require us to use any of the systems that call themselves "narrative"... although that appears to be a loaded term by itself, given that a lot of competing ideas seem to be trying to grab that umbrella for themselves. Mr Edwards "conflict of interest resolution" and highly abstract mechanics, versus FFG Star Wars super-crunchy mechanics, versus FATE, versus etc.

A big portion of the rules in many narrative systems is about getting the game moving using the narrative of the characters, and emulating certain styles of narrative. So the rules in place for Star Wars games will reinforce what we see in the movies. The rules for a sword and sorcery game will reinforce the types of scenarios and characters we see those stories. It doesn't mean that the game slavishly follows how that story goes, it means that the rules are in place to hit the same kinds of beats and tropes one finds in those stories.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, sorry. Fixed.


No need for sorry, I just wanted to make sure I understood. :smallsmile:

Whether one likes that sort of rules widget probably comes down to taste. To me, it seems intensely metagamey and detrimental to immersion.

I've seen ONE very vocal advocate of narrative-based decision making pretty much deride and belittle the very idea of immersion, claiming that it's an impossible pipe-dream and a complete distraction from "good game design", but just that one, and I don't think it was here.




I also don't really do that. Play your character - any "story" will naturally come out of what happens as your character tries to do things and others try to stop them.


That's my approach as well.

Please understand that as I've been less than positive about narrative systems, it's been based on past discussion where people have actively pushed the idea of making decisions from a "storytelling" perspective rather than a "character" perspective, and have even derided "simulationist" games as something like "the belief that story will magically arise from random events".

[Steel Mirror]

Please understand that as I've been less than positive about narrative systems, it's been based on past discussion where people have actively pushed the idea of making decisions from a "storytelling" perspective rather than a "character" perspective, and have even derided "simulationist" games as something like "the belief that story will magically arise from random events".
Yeah that sounds really annoying. :smallbiggrin: They are different tools for different goals, not something with a correct or "better" choice in how to play.

I think I'm starting to get why you're fighting back so hard on certain topics, when from my perspective it seems at times like the discussion has gone rather abstract and theoretical, and most of the people talking here would probably actually enjoy playing in (most) of each other's games.

I do prefer narrative systems on the whole (I think? I'm still not 100% sure of the difference, and honestly these days it's almost less about the "narrative" and more about the lite-rules and fast play, but I digress), but for instance right now I'm thinking of starting a Great War/WW2 gritty Eastern Europe game plus mecha and werewolves (look, just roll with it :smallwink:), and as part of my planning I instantly rejected my usual go-to of Fate because I don't think it gives me what I want. I want tracking inventory to be life or death, the difference between 2 clips of ammo and 3 to be a possibly vital distinction, for every crust of bread and tin of peaches to be treasures that the players hoard and NPCs might kill for. I also want the feeling to be rather bleak, with the real chance of death around every corner (sometimes pointlessly and out of nowhere), but I also want player ingenuity and smart risk-taking to lead to possibly great rewards.

Now all of that can totally be done with Fate, and if I were going for a slightly pulpier action adventure vibe rather than a grueling war epic feeling, it would even excel at the setting. But I don't think the mood that I'm going for is what Fate is best at, so I'm considering other systems, systems which I think would be considered more simulationist and rules-heavy, just because that seems to be the proper tool for this particular circumstance.

On a completely related note, if anyone has any suggestions for a system which you think would work for this game, please feel free to drop me a PM! :smallbiggrin: I don't want to clutter this thread with my own game planning, but the only one I'm thinking of right now is Rogue Trader (even though overall it's far from my favorite system), and I'd love to have a few more choices available for when I finally commit.

[Segev]

I'd like to chime in here because I agree with Max_Killjoy on this front. I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with narrative causality - which I would firmly declare FATE, for example, to utilize whenever Fate Points come up - but I find it frustrating in gameplay. I do like my mechanics to be related to real things in the world. I prefer it to simulate something "real" rather than to allow for approved contrivances in favor of this character or that.

I've skimmed much of the thread, so please forgive me if I miss anything vital, but in the first-page example of the villain escaping because the PC's gun jammed, I prefer this to come about because conditions on the battle required checking for that jam, and that jam happened to come up. (Or, perhaps, because the PC made a choice that resulted in it.) In d20 systems, for example, "the gun jammed" may be an explanation for why the natural 1 on the attack roll missed, and the villain got away. But that isn't the GM spending a Villain Point or offering a Hero Point to the player (and requiring the player to spend a Hero Point if he wants to prevent it); that's a consequence of the simulation that the mechanics represent of the real world: the chance that, indeed, a gun might jam (or some other circumstance might result in you missing that villain on this critical shot).

The closest I would come to "dramatic timing" rules is that I might agree that it's silly to bother checking for success/failure rolls when the results aren't dramatically important. You want to say your PC fires a few rounds into a target, and makes a statistically believable level of success without his gun jamming, I see no reason to roll to see if the gun jams. It would just slow down the game. Sure, have fun.

So it might look like there's some "narrative causality" because the only time the gun's REPORTED to have jammed, by the mechanics, is when it's in a dramatically crucial moment. We're only checking then. But the chance that it did is part of the overall chance of things going against the PC in this dramatic moment; it isn't something invoked and forced by the GM to save the villain.

[BRC]

1) The player having an ability via rules widget to have an impact beyond what their character could do?

2) I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad.

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Story".

1) Yeah, plenty of games have in-built mechanics, usually based around the player spending some meta-resource, to fill in a bit of unestablished "Blank Space", outside their Character's power.
For example, in D&D 5e. A Character can make themselves harder to hit by wielding a shield, getting better armor or higher dexterity, taking the Dodge action, ect. However, the Lucky feat can be used to force an enemy to re-roll their attack. However, the Lucky feat's rerolls represent a purely meta-resource. Unless you fluff it as some sort of fate-bending magic, the Character can't make the decision to use one of their Luck Rerolls to avoid an attack, only the Player can.


2) As for "what makes a better story", I mean the end goal of the game should be for everybody to have a good time, and making a better story usually serves that.

I mean, part of what makes a good story is the characters acting in-character. So, by that regard, it's pretty rare for somebody to act OUT of character in order to make a Better story, unless they've built a character that is disruptive to good storytelling. Most of the time, the choice that leads to a better story can be easily fit with what the character would want to do anyway.

Think about it this way, every Player is filling three roles, with three separate goals, Player, Character, and Storyteller.

The Player wants to Win the game. They want to kill the dragon, level up their character, get the loot ect. The Player acts as somebody with a knowledge of the game rules, and whatever powers are granted to them by the game mechanics.

The Roleplayer wants to achieve whatever in-character goals they have. They may want to kill the dragon, they may want the wealth and prestige that comes from killing said dragon, they certainly don't want to die. They exist as an entity within the world, having whatever abilities their character sheet gives them.

The Storyteller wants to tell a good story. That could be the story of the Heroes Heroically Slaying the Dragon, that could be the story of a Noble Sacrifice To Save The Rest of The Party. They only have whatever abilities they have as player and character, plus the ability to suggest stuff to the GM.

Most of the time, all three roles line up. The Player wants to win, the Character wants to win, and the Storyteller wants to tell a story about them winning.

When the role of the Player overrides that of the Roleplayer, we get Metagaming. The Character doesn't know that Trolls are vulnerable to fire, the Player does.

There are many systems (such as FATE) that have a meta-resource for when the role of Storyteller or Roleplayer overrides that of the Player. For example, when a character with the "Heroic" flaw charges into danger, even though from a "Winning the game" perspective, the best thing to do would be to stay out of it.

I can't say I can think of many situations where Storyteller and Roleplayer are in conflict, as the storyteller is usually trying to tell the story of that character, and staying in character is part of what makes the story good. If you are sacrificing what makes your character unique for the sake of telling a better story, then is the story really all that good?


I have had experience with a player who ended up combining the Storyteller and Player roles in a rather frustrating manner. He had a goal, part of the story he wanted to tell (Nothing wrong with that), achieving this goal was his version of "Winning", and as the campaign was fairly open and we were covering several months of downtime, he had a lot of freedom to choose which methods he used to achieve the goal.

However, his methods largely consisted, not of things his CHARACTER might be trying to do to achieve the goal, but of potential stories that ended in the goal being achieved.

To file off the serial numbers, the character was looking for a hidden treasure left by their father. An NPC knew where said treasure was, but said NPC was very ruthless, exceptionally powerful, and may not have been inclined to help.

The GM Asked "What are you doing to find the treasure".

The Player proceeded to respond with things like:
I Find a map to the treasure in my father's notes!
Another NPC who knows where the treasure is comes to town!
A pre-established NPC with high-charisma comes to town and agrees to talk to the Big Scary NPC on my behalf!

None of which were things the character had control over, and the Player got very frustrated when the GM failed to respond to any of those with "Yes, that thing happens! You find the treasure!"


Edit: It occurs to me, that my entire post is from the Player's perspective.

From the GM's perspective, you have the three roles of

Referee: Master of the Rules, with the power to make rulings, use whatever powers the rules give them (Basically, Absolute power due to Rule 0), and with the goal of making the game mechanically fun.

Everyman: Occupying the role of all the NPCs, with the goal to make them engaging and consistent characters, and whatever abilities those NPCS have in-universe.

And finally Storyteller: With the goal of telling a good story.

Now, with the "Villain escapes because the Gun Jams", that is using the power of the Referee to serve the goals of the Storyteller. However, unless there is some pre-determined mechanic (like, say, the GM must spend a meta-resource to allow the villain to escape), doing so VIOLATES the goal of the Referee. If the PC's can win the fight, only to have victory snatched away by GM Fiat, then the game is no longer mechanically fun. The GM has failed as a Referee.

If there IS some mechanic that influences things on a Narrative level (Say, the GM can spend some resource to force a gun jam), then that should be baked into the system, so the Players know that it exists. In that case, the Players did not mechanically defeat the villain, since they had not negated whatever defense (Either in-universe or purely narrative) that would allow the gun to jam. From the Player's perspective, there is no difference between in-universe factors, and any mechanically-enforced narrative factors. The GM's "Get the Villain out of Jail free" Card is just as much a defense that must be mechanically negated as the Villain's armor and squad of bodyguards.

[obryn]

I'd like to chime in here because I agree with Max_Killjoy on this front. I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with narrative causality - which I would firmly declare FATE, for example, to utilize whenever Fate Points come up
I have to just stop here for a sec, because I've seen this a few times and don't get it.

If my Aspect is, "Barbarian Raider from the Frozen North" and I invoke that on something appropriate with a Fate Point - swinging a sword, climbing a glacier, enduring the cold - I don't see that as substantively different from a more codified skill/attribute system.

[Segev]

I have to just stop here for a sec, because I've seen this a few times and don't get it.

If my Aspect is, "Barbarian Raider from the Frozen North" and I invoke that on something appropriate with a Fate Point - swinging a sword, climbing a glacier, enduring the cold - I don't see that as substantively different from a more codified skill/attribute system.
In that case, it isn't. But if your Aspect is "Barbarian Raider from the Frozen North" and you invoke your Aspect by declaring that the mercenaries who've captured you happen to be fellow Frozen North Raiders who are old allies of your tribe, that's substantially different because you're altering the setting.

Now, sometimes this works. In fact, if the GM doesn't have a reason why this doesn't make sense, having a narrative resource to spend is one way of measuring if you're getting "too many" advantages this way, vs. "just enough."

However, it is contrived, unless there's a strong reason to believe they WOULD be. This actually gets into storytelling, ironically, because what makes for good "narrative injections" into mechanics also make for good storytelling. If it was established that your Northern Raider Tribe is the most common source of mercenaries in these parts, then it doesn't strain credulity at all that you'd know some of these guys and be able to work with that. This is why foreshadowing is so important in storytelling: it lets you establish these things when they're NOT contrived conveniences so that, when they are convenient, they're not contrived.

But the "gun jams so the villain escapes" scenario is the more frustrating one, because now it's not the GM invoking a likely occurrence just because it could happen. It's the GM determining that an occurrence happens just when it's least convenient and most dramatically "interesting" (in his mind).

It's the difference between a 1-in-a-million chance really happening because you rolled it on the dice, and it happening because, as we all know, 1-in-a-million chances are practically 100% chances for The Heroes, as long as it's Dramatically Appropriate.

Which is why "Roll to see if the gun jams" is not a narrative mechanic, but "the gun jams and you get a Fate Point, unless you spend a Fate Point to prevent it" is.


Yeah, plenty of games have in-built mechanics, usually based around the player spending some meta-resource, to fill in a bit of unestablished "Blank Space", outside their Character's power.
For example, in D&D 5e. A Character can make themselves harder to hit by wielding a shield, getting better armor or higher dexterity, taking the Dodge action, ect. However, the Lucky feat can be used to force an enemy to re-roll their attack. However, the Lucky feat's rerolls represent a purely meta-resource. Unless you fluff it as some sort of fate-bending magic, the Character can't make the decision to use one of their Luck Rerolls to avoid an attack, only the Player can. To be fair, "Lucky" is actually modeling your character being lucky. Things seem to go his way more than probability would suggest. There ARE people like that in the real world. (This is actually statistically explicable simply because, in any random sampling, you will have those who are above and below average. If you had a tournament where each round consisted of the players randomly being assigned 'heads' or 'tails' and a coin flip, you'd have the final winner be somebody who always had the right value assigned to him, even though in theory that's statistically improbable that any given person would have that happen.)

So when a mechanic is representing a statistic - even a "mystical" or other non-physical one - of the PC, it's not really "narrative."



Think about it this way, every Player is filling three roles, with three separate goals, Player, Character, and Storyteller.

The Player wants to Win the game. They want to kill the dragon, level up their character, get the loot ect. The Player acts as somebody with a knowledge of the game rules, and whatever powers are granted to them by the game mechanics.

The Roleplayer wants to achieve whatever in-character goals they have. They may want to kill the dragon, they may want the wealth and prestige that comes from killing said dragon, they certainly don't want to die. They exist as an entity within the world, having whatever abilities their character sheet gives them.

The Storyteller wants to tell a good story. That could be the story of the Heroes Heroically Slaying the Dragon, that could be the story of a Noble Sacrifice To Save The Rest of The Party. They only have whatever abilities they have as player and character, plus the ability to suggest stuff to the GM.

Most of the time, all three roles line up. The Player wants to win, the Character wants to win, and the Storyteller wants to tell a story about them winning.

When the role of the Player overrides that of the Roleplayer, we get Metagaming. The Character doesn't know that Trolls are vulnerable to fire, the Player does.

There are many systems (such as FATE) that have a meta-resource for when the role of Storyteller or Roleplayer overrides that of the Player. For example, when a character with the "Heroic" flaw charges into danger, even though from a "Winning the game" perspective, the best thing to do would be to stay out of it.That's an interesting breakdown. This thread, I believe, branched off of one where we were discussing social and RP mechanics which are theoretically designed to help bring the player and the roleplayer back into alignment where they otherwise would be in conflict.


I can't say I can think of many situations where Storyteller and Roleplayer are in conflict, as the storyteller is usually trying to tell the story of that character, and staying in character is part of what makes the story good. If you are sacrificing what makes your character unique for the sake of telling a better story, then is the story really all that good? These come into conflict when the Storyteller believes that the better story involves a certain series of things happening, but the Roleplayer knows his character wouldn't make the choices required.

TV tropes refers to some of the common cases caused by these character derailments which result when the Storyteller wins these conflicts as "idiot balls" and "compressed vices." The character acts out of character in order to further the plot. (Turn-A Gundam is rife with them, most notably when the Princess randomly runs over and joins the enemy side in their car for no reason, and they let her in and treat her like an honored guest for equally no apparent reason, never taking advantage of her as a hostage or anything, just so she's around to comment on and bring information on certain things back with her later.)



I have had experience with a player who ended up combining the Storyteller and Player roles in a rather frustrating manner. He had a goal, part of the story he wanted to tell (Nothing wrong with that), achieving this goal was his version of "Winning", and as the campaign was fairly open and we were covering several months of downtime, he had a lot of freedom to choose which methods he used to achieve the goal.

However, his methods largely consisted, not of things his CHARACTER might be trying to do to achieve the goal, but of potential stories that ended in the goal being achieved.

To file off the serial numbers, the character was looking for a hidden treasure left by their father. An NPC knew where said treasure was, but said NPC was very ruthless, exceptionally powerful, and may not have been inclined to help.

The GM Asked "What are you doing to find the treasure".

The Player proceeded to respond with things like:
I Find a map to the treasure in my father's notes!
Another NPC who knows where the treasure is comes to town!
A pre-established NPC with high-charisma comes to town and agrees to talk to the Big Scary NPC on my behalf!

None of which were things the character had control over, and the Player got very frustrated when the GM failed to respond to any of those with "Yes, that thing happens! You find the treasure!"The thing is, each of these are perfectly viable with FATE points or the like.

Which is the sort of thing Max_Killjoy is, I believe, decrying.

[BRC]

To be fair, "Lucky" is actually modeling your character being lucky. Things seem to go his way more than probability would suggest. There ARE people like that in the real world. (This is actually statistically explicable simply because, in any random sampling, you will have those who are above and below average. If you had a tournament where each round consisted of the players randomly being assigned 'heads' or 'tails' and a coin flip, you'd have the final winner be somebody who always had the right value assigned to him, even though in theory that's statistically improbable that any given person would have that happen.)

So when a mechanic is representing a statistic - even a "mystical" or other non-physical one - of the PC, it's not really "narrative."
Right, but it is a mechanical result with no in-universe explanation or source.



That's an interesting breakdown. This thread, I believe, branched off of one where we were discussing social and RP mechanics which are theoretically designed to help bring the player and the roleplayer back into alignment where they otherwise would be in conflict.

These come into conflict when the Storyteller believes that the better story involves a certain series of things happening, but the Roleplayer knows his character wouldn't make the choices required.

TV tropes refers to some of the common cases caused by these character derailments which result when the Storyteller wins these conflicts as "idiot balls" and "compressed vices." The character acts out of character in order to further the plot. (Turn-A Gundam is rife with them, most notably when the Princess randomly runs over and joins the enemy side in their car for no reason, and they let her in and treat her like an honored guest for equally no apparent reason, never taking advantage of her as a hostage or anything, just so she's around to comment on and bring information on certain things back with her later.)
And Idiot balls hurt the story.
When the Storyteller says "Do Y", and the Roleplayer says "Do X", usually the Storyteller is wrong, because they want to tell a story that requires their character to act inconsistently.


The thing is, each of these are perfectly viable with FATE points or the like.

Which is the sort of thing Max_Killjoy is, I believe, decrying.

And if we were playing a system where you could spend FATE points to make the above things happen, then he would have been proposing a solution from the Player's perspective, if not the Role player's (using a power he had as a PLAYER that his CHARACTER did not have). Instead, he was trying to use the Storyteller's role to solve a problem facing both Player and Roleplayer.

[kyoryu]

Whether one likes that sort of rules widget probably comes down to taste. To me, it seems intensely metagamey and detrimental to immersion.

Sure. Personal preference and all that. You'll notice I'm not trying to argue that one *at all*.

If I were to try to get you to play a game that had those types of things, I'd preface it with "consider this a different type of game, and don't go in with your usual expectations. It's a different style, and *is* different, and might be worth trying, but it'll only work if you kind of empty your expectations a bit."


I've seen ONE very vocal advocate of narrative-based decision making pretty much deride and belittle the very idea of immersion, claiming that it's an impossible pipe-dream and a complete distraction from "good game design", but just that one, and I don't think it was here.

Some people are idiots?

I mean, really, I find it always best to accept what people say and talk to them. To, you know, learn. I hope my approach here has been questioning and clarifying, rather than combative.


Please understand that as I've been less than positive about narrative systems, it's been based on past discussion where people have actively pushed the idea of making decisions from a "storytelling" perspective rather than a "character" perspective, and have even derided "simulationist" games as something like "the belief that story will magically arise from random events".

And I've seen those *exact same arguments* applied to more traditional games. IIRC, on this very forum. I've heard "you should only kill the PC if the player agrees to it" applied to D&D. On this forum.

So, what I'm saying here is really: cool, and I totally get your preference, and yeah there's some real arrogance in many of the storygame crowd that's annoying as heck. But those preferences are applied to a lot of games, even if they're more prevalent in "narrative" games, and aren't necessarily one-to-one tied with them.


Yeah that sounds really annoying. :smallbiggrin: They are different tools for different goals, not something with a correct or "better" choice in how to play.

Could not agree more. The game is the goal, the system the tool. If you're making something with wood, you choose the tools based on what you're trying to build.


I think I'm starting to get why you're fighting back so hard on certain topics, when from my perspective it seems at times like the discussion has gone rather abstract and theoretical, and most of the people talking here would probably actually enjoy playing in (most) of each other's games.

Probably, for the most part. Again, the problem when talking about some of these abstract things is you're not talking about actual events, but, at best, hypothetical events where we're each imagining very different things occurring.


I do prefer narrative systems on the whole (I think? I'm still not 100% sure of the difference, and honestly these days it's almost less about the "narrative" and more about the lite-rules and fast play, but I digress)

I think there's a number of different mechanical/approach things that get lumped in with "narrative", and are worth looking at separately.


But I don't think the mood that I'm going for is what Fate is best at, so I'm considering other systems, systems which I think would be considered more simulationist and rules-heavy, just because that seems to be the proper tool for this particular circumstance.

As a Fate fan, I agree :D


I'd like to chime in here because I agree with Max_Killjoy on this front. I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with narrative causality - which I would firmly declare FATE, for example, to utilize whenever Fate Points come up

Yeah, don't agree with that at all, as a Fate player.


- but I find it frustrating in gameplay. I do like my mechanics to be related to real things in the world. I prefer it to simulate something "real" rather than to allow for approved contrivances in favor of this character or that.

That's *one* of the uses of Fate points, and a rather rare one. Most uses of FP I see are on invokes, and just allow further extrapolation of the current events, staying totally in the here-and-now.


I've skimmed much of the thread, so please forgive me if I miss anything vital, but in the first-page example of the villain escaping because the PC's gun jammed, I prefer this to come about because conditions on the battle required checking for that jam, and that jam happened to come up.

So, again, in Fate you can't have the gun jam without an appropriate aspect in play. Which means we've somehow established previously that the gun jamming is a thing that can happen. Maybe it got thrown in mud, maybe it's from a crappy dealer, whatever. It's not just a thing that is thrown out there for no reason.

The difference here is that in Fate, once we've established that something *can* happen, *when* it happens is based on some player at the table deciding "hey, this would be a good time for this to happen" instead of just a random roll. And if you don't like that, it totally get it.


In that case, it isn't. But if your Aspect is "Barbarian Raider from the Frozen North" and you invoke your Aspect by declaring that the mercenaries who've captured you happen to be fellow Frozen North Raiders who are old allies of your tribe, that's substantially different because you're altering the setting.

It has to be accepted as a reasonable thing to occur for the invoke/declaration/compel to work. Otherwise, no bueno. And that almost certainly means no contradicting previous facts.

Now, in most cases there's a grey area of areas which haven't been declared one way or the other, which is something that some people have a hard time with.

Personally, the above usage of the aspect would certainly be on the "stretching it" side, if there wasn't some previous link between the barbarians of the north and various mercenaries.


Now, sometimes this works. In fact, if the GM doesn't have a reason why this doesn't make sense, having a narrative resource to spend is one way of measuring if you're getting "too many" advantages this way, vs. "just enough."

This is basically the primary usage when it comes to declarations and even many compels. I mean, in a traditional system you might ask "hey, GM, might those barbarians be Frozen North Raiders that I've met?" If the GM would say "yes!", then no FP required. If the GM says "no!" then it's a no either way. If the answer is "maybe?" then the difference is we spend a Fate Point to make it so rather than rolling. Which kind of tends to even out things a bit and provide a bit of lubrication to keep things going.


However, it is contrived, unless there's a strong reason to believe they WOULD be. This actually gets into storytelling, ironically, because what makes for good "narrative injections" into mechanics also make for good storytelling. If it was established that your Northern Raider Tribe is the most common source of mercenaries in these parts, then it doesn't strain credulity at all that you'd know some of these guys and be able to work with that. This is why foreshadowing is so important in storytelling: it lets you establish these things when they're NOT contrived conveniences so that, when they are convenient, they're not contrived.

This is basically what aspects are - Chekhov's gun. An established fact that we can then refer to. The usage of the aspect in this case is a stretch because we haven't established (in the example) a link between the norther raiders and mercenaries.


But the "gun jams so the villain escapes" scenario is the more frustrating one, because now it's not the GM invoking a likely occurrence just because it could happen. It's the GM determining that an occurrence happens just when it's least convenient and most dramatically "interesting" (in his mind).

Again, the GM really can't do that *unless* there's an established reason for it to happen in the first place. And just being a gun isn't generally considered sufficient.


To be fair, "Lucky" is actually modeling your character being lucky. Things seem to go his way more than probability would suggest. There ARE people like that in the real world. (This is actually statistically explicable simply because, in any random sampling, you will have those who are above and below average. If you had a tournament where each round consisted of the players randomly being assigned 'heads' or 'tails' and a coin flip, you'd have the final winner be somebody who always had the right value assigned to him, even though in theory that's statistically improbable that any given person would have that happen.)

So when a mechanic is representing a statistic - even a "mystical" or other non-physical one - of the PC, it's not really "narrative."

I find this argument non-compelling. The same thing could be said of Fate Points - they represent how much Fate has invested in the characters.

I also find it strange that Savage Worlds Bennies don't really get the same level of hate as Fate Points, even though they're even more disconnected from the game world. Pure mechanical bonus! Get 'em for making the GM laugh!

[Max_Killjoy]

When the Storyteller says "Do Y", and the Roleplayer says "Do X", usually the Storyteller is wrong, because they want to tell a story that requires their character to act inconsistently.



THAT. Right there.

When I say that something was done for the sake of "The Story", that's what I mean.

Whether it's in fiction, or in an RPG, when "The Story" wins over consistent and coherent characterization (and character abilities, skills, knowledge, etc), when the character is inconsistent, that's what makes me want to pull my hair out.

[georgie_leech]

THAT. Right there.

When I say that something was done for the sake of "The Story", that's what I mean.

Whether it's in fiction, or in an RPG, when "The Story" wins over consistent and coherent characterization (and character abilities, skills, knowledge, etc), when the character is inconsistent, that's what makes me want to pull my hair out.

That's bad story design in general, and I'd hardly consider it a case against narrative mechanics that they don't make better writers. After all, I don't hold it against, say, D&D's mechanics that they don't produce brilliant tacticians by their very nature.

[kyoryu]

Whether it's in fiction, or in an RPG, when "The Story" wins over consistent and coherent characterization (and character abilities, skills, knowledge, etc), when the character is inconsistent, that's what makes me want to pull my hair out.

Agreed 100%.

I find it orthogonal to the system being used.

Good "narrative" mechanics incentivize characters that do things that you've already established the character should be doing anyway.

[Max_Killjoy]

Agreed 100%.

I find it orthogonal to the system being used.

Good "narrative" mechanics incentivize characters that do things that you've already established the character should be doing anyway.


I think that's the "great divide" in what gets called "narrative" in GNS (and part of why I dislike the GNS model).

Does narrative-focus mean "story uber alles", or does it mean "character-driven"? I think all or almost all of the proponents of various narrative systems that are posting in this thread fall into the latter camp, whereas a lot of my past discussions have been with members of the former camp (in a moment of snark, I am tempted to call them "Edwardians").



That's bad story design in general, and I'd hardly consider it a case against narrative mechanics that they don't make better writers. After all, I don't hold it against, say, D&D's mechanics that they don't produce brilliant tacticians by their very nature.

Whether it's actually accurate or not, the impression I had from past exchanges with people who said they were proponents of "narrative" was that they came across very much as if they were gleefully trying to encode and ensconce that very sort of "bad story design" right into the rules of games.

[kyoryu]

I think that's the "great divide" in what gets called "narrative" in GNS (and part of why I dislike the GNS model).

I could go on for DAYS as to why I dislike the GNS model. Days.


Does narrative-focus mean "story uber alles", or does it mean "character-driven"? I think all or almost all of the proponents of various narrative systems that are posting in this thread fall into the latter camp, whereas a lot of my past discussions have been with members of the former camp (in a moment of snark, I am tempted to call them "Edwardians").

According to Edwards, it means neither. It means "exploration of theme". Of course, nobody uses it that way.

So, really, I dislike the "story uber alles" thing, doubly especially when it refers to "the pre-decided story". The only real thing I make a bit of an allowance for is "keep the game moving", because I'm an adult and have limited time and so sitting around doing nothing for whatever reason doesn't really work for me.

But, yeah, there are people that espouse "story uber alles". Absolutely. I find the game that they play to be fairly orthogonal to that attitude.


Whether it's actually accurate or not, the impression I had from past exchanges with people who said they were proponents of "narrative" was that they came across very much as if they were gleefully trying to encode and ensconce that very sort of "bad story design" right into the rules of games.

I'm sure some do. And Edwards was very much about baking theme into the rules. Basically, if you read between the lines, he was mad that people were playing Vampire without it being about existential horror, and decided that the fix was to make the rules so it was impossible to play any other way.

Why not just talk to people and agree on what your game is going to be about, like a normal human?

[DoomHat]

When the Storyteller says "Do Y", and the Roleplayer says "Do X", usually the Storyteller is wrong, because they want to tell a story that requires their character to act inconsistently.
THAT. Right there.

When I say that something was done for the sake of "The Story", that's what I mean.

Whether it's in fiction, or in an RPG, when "The Story" wins over consistent and coherent characterization (and character abilities, skills, knowledge, etc), when the character is inconsistent, that's what makes me want to pull my hair out.

This! Right here.

When I say, I don't understand what this conversation is even about, that's what I mean.

This just describes railroading doesn't it? This is something that pretty much only happens when players are stripped of agency. In "narrative" games (as I understand them) players are only empowered to act or are likewise restricted by things that have been firmly established about them by the player.

I think there's been lots of talk in regard to the obnoxious things a GM might supposedly be able to do with narrative tools, but what about Untamperable Dice in games that are disruptive and create contradictory Un-fun situations?

Let's say I stat my character to be the ultimate gunslinger. He pays a terrible price for this power by way of being outright comically incompetent in most other aspects in life and has an enemies list that stretches for miles, but god damn it, his bullets do not miss.

In a non-narrative game (as I understand it), the GM is free to (and indeed expected to by RAW) to rake me over the coals for my extensive list of Disadvantages, but the dice could very easily wind up rewarding me for all that by painting my character as a "deadeye" who apparently can't hit the broad side of a barn.

Meanwhile is a Narrative game (as I understand it), all the bumbling and hardships my character goes through rakes karmic dividends that are filtered through the established "narrative" fact that my character is "the ultimate gunslinger", and so god damn it, his bullets just do not miss.

[georgie_leech]

Whether it's actually accurate or not, the impression I had from past exchanges with people who said they were proponents of "narrative" was that they came across very much as if they were gleefully trying to encode and ensconce that very sort of "bad story design" right into the rules of games.

Right. My point is that just because you can use the system to tell bad stories doesn't make such systems 'about' telling bad stories. Just like the potential to make staggeringly dumb choices that get your character killed in a D&D combat scenario doesn't make D&D 'about' being stupid. Sure, people can and will argue for that, but I don't hold it against the system.

[Max_Killjoy]

And Edwards was very much about baking theme into the rules. Basically, if you read between the lines, he was mad that people were playing Vampire without it being about existential horror, and decided that the fix was to make the rules so it was impossible to play any other way.


Really?

Given his general attitude and posting style, it would not surprise me at all that he shared the disdain the hipster-goths at WW had for anyone who was having badwrongfun with their, ahem, deep meaningful game, and not "exploring personal horror".

Of course, he also seems to have a huge raging mad-on at the WW games for causing "brain damage", I guess because they didn't do enough to stop bad GMs from railroading "stories"?




Why not just talk to people and agree on what your game is going to be about, like a normal human?


No idea, I guess for the same reason that put all that effort into fixing both bad-GM problems and GM-player communication problems by trying to fundamentally change what it means to roll the dice.

[kyoryu]

Of course, he also seems to have a huge raging mad-on at the WW games for causing "brain damage", I guess because they didn't do enough to stop bad GMs from railroading "stories"?

The funny thing with RE, and the "brain damage" quote in particular, is I kinda see where he's coming from. The "story" model of 80s/90s railroad games is so far away from anything you'd consider a story - it's basically people yanked from one fight to another without any real decision-making - that people start to think of stories like that, and it's hard to conceive of stories not being like, like that's the model you develop.

I mean, I kinda get the point.

But... brain damage? Really? And then to double down on it and say "well, I mean, it's kinda like brain damage, but really it's more like child molestation."

WTF?

At that point any actual coherent point you may have wanted to make is going to get so drowned by the incredibly offensive and ridiculous words you've used that you can't have that conversation.

I mean, if I said "RPGs, especially of the railroad variety, actually make bad stories" I doubt you'd disagree.

If I further said "people that have played a lot of those types of game seem to start thinking of stories in that way, and have a hard time making stories that aren't structured that way", I still doubt you'd disagree.

But call it "brain damage" and, gee, people stop listening to the point you make for some weird reason.


No idea, I guess for the same reason that put all that effort into fixing both bad-GM problems and GM-player communication problems by trying to fundamentally change what it means to roll the dice.

Talking to people as people is *hard*. Especially when you don't have the social skills to realize that calling things "brain damage" or "just like child molestation" tends to shut down conversation.

[flond]

Really?

No idea, I guess for the same reason that put all that effort into fixing both bad-GM problems and GM-player communication problems by trying to fundamentally change what it means to roll the dice.

In fairness, I think that those fundamental changes are pretty cool, and a lot more fun then just sticking to task resolution.

[kyoryu]

In fairness, I think that those fundamental changes are pretty cool, and a lot more fun then just sticking to task resolution.

A lot of 'em, yeah. In a lot of cases, I think "do I manage to get the effect I'm trying for" is a more interesting result than "what is the result of this action".

I'm personally a little less fond of the "play a game of Yahtzee and then tell a story" style of gaming, but I'll also accept that some of that is probably due to inexperience and thus weirdness, and the rest is just personal preference and not objective badness.

[Max_Killjoy]

This! Right here.

When I say, I don't understand what this conversation is even about, that's what I mean.

This just describes railroading doesn't it? This is something that pretty much only happens when players are stripped of agency. In "narrative" games (as I understand them) players are only empowered to act or are likewise restricted by things that have been firmly established about them by the player.


I think you're still looking at the problem of "The Story" as only applying to a predetermined course of events being imposed by the GM.

It doesn't have to be predetermined, and it doesn't have to be the GM.

In fiction, it's a problem when the writer comes to a point where The Story they want to tell requires the character to do X, but the character would do Y (based on coherent and consistent characterization, established personality and knowledge and skills for that character, etc).

In an RPG campaign, the player can come to a point where they think that X makes "a better story", but if they were honest with themselves, the character would be far more likely to do Y based on the way they've been playing that character all along. This doesn't require anything being imposed by the GM, and it doesn't require anything that was predetermined about where the story emerging in the game "needed" to go.

Or, as I said earlier... I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad (as you noted).

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Best Story" with disregard to their character.

And the players who do that? I've come across many of them who call themselves "narrative-focused" players -- they lay claim to the same term as people (like all/most on this thread) who are are striving character-centric, character-driven games. That's been a HUGE contributing factor to the confusion and disconnect on this thread, to the instances when we've sensed that we're talking past each other.




I think there's been lots of talk in regard to the obnoxious things a GM might supposedly be able to do with narrative tools, but what about Untamperable Dice in games that are disruptive and create contradictory Un-fun situations?

Let's say I stat my character to be the ultimate gunslinger. He pays a terrible price for this power by way of being outright comically incompetent in most other aspects in life and has an enemies list that stretches for miles, but god damn it, his bullets do not miss.

In a non-narrative game (as I understand it), the GM is free to (and indeed expected to by RAW) to rake me over the coals for my extensive list of Disadvantages, but the dice could very easily wind up rewarding me for all that by painting my character as a "deadeye" who apparently can't hit the broad side of a barn.

Meanwhile is a Narrative game (as I understand it), all the bumbling and hardships my character goes through rakes karmic dividends that are filtered through the established "narrative" fact that my character is "the ultimate gunslinger", and so god damn it, his bullets just do not miss.


If your character construction is that deeply invested in shooting skill and still suffers more than a remote chance of missing any shot less than the highly challenging... then you're playing at a very low "power" level, or the system mechanics probably have too much randomness baked in.

And I've been in games using systems that can result in those "oh come on" moments, and I keep trying to come up with a way to avoid them without also making everything the "highly expert" characters attempt with their "key" skills trivially easy or automatic -- how to ensure at least a modicum of success that requires an opposing character to do well on their roll or whatever to counter it, at the very least.

[kyoryu]

I didn't respond to the "super shooter" thing because, well, I've never encountered that in any rulebook or actual game situation, so I don't really know how to handle it. Most "narrative" games don't provide the kind of min-maxing character creation that really results in that kind of one-trick pony characters.

Now, if I were to do something like that in Fate, for instance, we'd get back to the point that you normally don't roll to see if you hit - you roll to see if you succeed in getting what you want. So if you never miss, but are trying to shoot someone before he escapes, that might mean that you don't get a good shot until the target is out of range/escaped/whatever. depending on the situation.

But, again, that's a situation I've never really seen come up in a game.

[Max_Killjoy]

No idea, I guess for the same reason that put all that effort into fixing both bad-GM problems and GM-player communication problems by trying to fundamentally change what it means to roll the dice.



In fairness, I think that those fundamental changes are pretty cool, and a lot more fun then just sticking to task resolution.



A lot of 'em, yeah. In a lot of cases, I think "do I manage to get the effect I'm trying for" is a more interesting result than "what is the result of this action".


That's not really the line that RE drew, however, and so it wasn't what I was snarking about in my comment (quoted at the top).

"Task resolution" could always be about "did you manage to get the effect you were trying for". It's just that it's about that one attempted action or task, or that one "test", it mapped to one discrete event or closely tied time from within the setting. "Task" rolls could be about whether you succeeded, or how well you succeeded, or how long it took you to accomplish the task, or... etc.

RE wanted to make rolls about "the conflict of interest at hand", and make them about the overall goal you wanted to accomplish. So, if you're rolling stealth to get by the guards, then you roll stealth to get by ALL the guards, and then narrate that whole chunk of the action in some way... or narrate and then make the roll, depending. And if the guards are just there in service to the lord of the castle, then according to RE, maybe your "conflict of interest" is with the lord of the castle, and you should be rolling against that character, and not the guards at all...

Now, I find that latter bit particularly silly, because it's the guards who are going to physically notice you or not notice you... unless the lord happens to be out walking the grounds or something.

Now, why did RE do this?

By his own words, it was because some bad or inexperienced GMs made the error of having an outcome in mind, and either throwing more and more "sneak past the guard" checks at the PCs until they failed, or by telling them that after their successful check, they stumbled into more guards (without even another check).

So here we have RE trying to fundamentally change both what a die roll represents, and how games are played, because instead of expecting GMs to be reasonable and fair, and expecting players and GMs to put the effort into being on the same page... in effect, he believes that an adult should be forbidden from eating steak because a baby can't chew it.




I'm personally a little less fond of the "play a game of Yahtzee and then tell a story" style of gaming, but I'll also accept that some of that is probably due to inexperience and thus weirdness, and the rest is just personal preference and not objective badness.


That style is certainly not what I'm looking for, either, because it's so highly disassociated.

[flond]

That's not really the line that RE drew, however, and so it wasn't what I was snarking about in my comment (quoted at the top).

"Task resolution" could always be about "did you manage to get the effect you were trying for". It's just that it's about that one attempted action or task, or that one "test", it mapped to one discrete event or closely tied time from within the setting. "Task" rolls could be about whether you succeeded, or how well you succeeded, or how long it took you to accomplish the task, or... etc.

RE wanted to make rolls about "the conflict of interest at hand", and make them about the overall goal you wanted to accomplish. So, if you're rolling stealth to get by the guards, then you roll stealth to get by ALL the guards, and then narrate that whole chunk of the action in some way... or narrate and then make the roll, depending. And if the guards are just there in service to the lord of the castle, then according to RE, maybe your "conflict of interest" is with the lord of the castle, and you should be rolling against that character, and not the guards at all...

Now, I find that latter bit particularly silly, because it's the guards who are going to physically notice you or not notice you... unless the lord happens to be out walking the grounds or something.

Now, why did RE do this?

By his own words, it was because some bad or inexperienced GMs made the error of having an outcome in mind, and either throwing more and more "sneak past the guard" checks at the PCs until they failed, or by telling them that after their successful check, they stumbled into more guards (without even another check).

So here we have RE trying to fundamentally change both what a die roll represents, and how games are played, because instead of expecting GMs to be reasonable and fair, and expecting players and GMs to put the effort into being on the same page... in effect, he believes that an adult should be forbidden from eating steak because a baby can't chew it.




That style is certainly not what I'm looking for, either, because it's so highly disassociated.

I admit. I don't really much care why RE did it so much as I care about the result. And I find the result you find silly enticing. I like the idea that in some contexts guards are just appendages of the real villain. I like the idea that if you get a roll to find documents in a room, it means the documents are there. I like the idea that you move towards a central conflict. That we agree to play a game that moves toward a central conflict, and if we've all agreed to that, physics be darned. I like that it adds the likelyhood of a solid genre appropriate resolution.

[Max_Killjoy]

I admit. I don't really much care why RE did it so much as I care about the result. And I find the result you find silly enticing. I like the idea that in some contexts guards are just appendages of the real villain. I like the idea that if you get a roll to find documents in a room, it means the documents are there. I like the idea that you move towards a central conflict. That we agree to play a game that moves toward a central conflict, and if we've all agreed to that, physics be darned. I like that it adds the likelyhood of a solid genre appropriate resolution.


The guards are characters, just like the villain, even if not as well-developed. They are people within that fictional reality, just as "real" as the villain. They're the ones who are going to notice or not notice the PC , because they're the ones who are present and looking/listening for intruders.

The documents are in the room if they're in the room. They are not Schrodinger's documents. No amount of looking for my keys in the bedroom will find them if they're on the coffee table in the living room -- I can look in the bedroom until the heat death of the universe... they'll never be there and I'll never find them. And if the players only "get a roll" when the documents are in the room where their characters is looking, then that telegraphs pretty quickly to the players that they're where they need to look, and they're going to keep tearing the place apart until they find the documents, and even if you cut them off, they're always going to know as players exactly where those documents were.

[RedWarlock]

RE wanted to make rolls about "the conflict of interest at hand", and make them about the overall goal you wanted to accomplish. So, if you're rolling stealth to get by the guards, then you roll stealth to get by ALL the guards, and then narrate that whole chunk of the action in some way... or narrate and then make the roll, depending. And if the guards are just there in service to the lord of the castle, then according to RE, maybe your "conflict of interest" is with the lord of the castle, and you should be rolling against that character, and not the guards at all...

Now, I find that latter bit particularly silly, because it's the guards who are going to physically notice you or not notice you... unless the lord happens to be out walking the grounds or something.


I haven't read his work on it, but I could see that working, if you change the context of the roll. When you're rolling, it's not your stealth skill versus the lord's perception skill, it could be that you're opposing the lord's capacity for management and discipline in his troops. So the random element of the roll is how well those troops are motivated, how well-covered the lord's patrol plan is, that sort of thing. It just requires that the guards' perception is a given (perhaps because of their knowledge of the fortress). It makes it a single-check action, which is easier to make or fail in a single attempt.

I can also see it as a slight disconnect about the role of the GM, in terms of what you describe Edwards' theory to be, because maybe you're only seeing the GM as only a facilitator and workman, there to present the story to the players and see that they're 'winning' or 'losing' as how the GM draws fulfillment.

On the other hand, Fate describes this a bit in its text, too, and I want to say I've seen stuff about this elsewhere, where they talk about giving the GM some resource to conserve or spend (like fate points), even if only in how much they give TO the players or take from them, gives them a bit of a 'game' to run as well. That concept, or Edwards single-roll opposition, offers the GM a challenge to achieve that isn't just 'try to TPK by throwing all the forces at them at once'. It allows the GM to be antagonistic in their management of the world if they want, because it also gives them a leash by trying to limit the opposing roll/skill use to just one significant action, which in this case is the lord's. If the GM were being told to oppose their stealth with EVERY guard's perception they come up against, Iterative Probability says that eventually they fail vs those guards, it's only a matter of time. By limiting the actionable opposition check to the lord's ability to command those guards, it keeps a form of restraint that allows the GM to be a 'player' too.

From what I can read of you, what you've described, maybe you don't think the GM should be able to run that kind of game? They should only be running the world for the players' enjoyment and achievement, not their own (or at least, they're supposed to only be the 'reward of a game/job well-done' type of enjoyment).

Edit: Added this from later reply:


The guards are characters, just like the villain, even if not as well-developed. They are people within that fictional reality, just as "real" as the villain. They're the ones who are going to notice or not notice the PC , because they're the ones who are present and looking/listening for intruders.

Ah, but, why? Why do the guard need to be full characters? Does every NPC need full stats, or do they simply need to provide the challenge to the players?


The documents are in the room if they're in the room. They are not Schrodinger's documents. No amount of looking for my keys in the bedroom will find them if they're on the coffee table in the living room -- I can look in the bedroom until the heat death of the universe... they'll never be there and I'll never find them. And if the players only "get a roll" when the documents are in the room where their characters is looking, then that telegraphs pretty quickly to the players that they're where they need to look, and they're going to keep tearing the place apart until they find the documents, and even if you cut them off, they're always going to know as players exactly where those documents were.

But what if the roll is because the GM wants to offer chances for it to be there, because they want to make the situation flexible? How is this any different from a GM-assist system like a dungeon-crawl generator that says to use room A, B, or C, depending on the result of this dice roll? It means that the 'plot' the GM is conducting is unpredictable, even to them, allowing different situations to arise depending on player and GM dice rolls. A GM could run the same vague 'structure' five different times, with different randomized elements like this, and if it was properly fleshed out, the players might not ever know.

[flond]

The guards are characters, just like the villain, even if not as well-developed. They are people within that fictional reality, just as "real" as the villain. They're the ones who are going to notice or not notice the PC , because they're the ones who are present and looking/listening for intruders.

The documents are in the room if they're in the room. They are not Schrodinger's documents. No amount of looking for my keys in the bedroom will find them if they're on the coffee table in the living room -- I can look in the bedroom until the heat death of the universe... they'll never be there and I'll never find them. And if the players only "get a roll" when the documents are in the room where their characters is looking, then that telegraphs pretty quickly to the players that they're where they need to look, and they're going to keep tearing the place apart until they find the documents, and even if you cut them off, they're always going to know as players exactly where those documents were.

See. But that's a lot of declaration right there. Why are they characters, same as the villian. Because of some goal of fidelity to an imagined world? Why is that the most important goal? It's already been established that fun beats fidelity. So if we decide dramatic pacing beats fidelity. What's the harm of that. Indeed what's wrong with shodinger's documents? Heck in some games like houses of the blooded, those documents may have just been declared to be there by the players. So long as it adds something and everyone's aware and acting in good faith, that sounds way more fun to me. Five people gripping and grabbing at the narrative, tethered loosely to ideas of character. Sounds more fun then "the players are given tiny circles of agency used to explore a gm's world." (And if you disagree that this is fun, fine for you. But that doesn't mean you are correct that yours is the only fun way to play.)

[Max_Killjoy]

I haven't read his work on it, but I could see that working, if you change the context of the roll. When you're rolling, it's not your stealth skill versus the lord's perception skill, it could be that you're opposing the lord's capacity for management and discipline in his troops. So the random element of the roll is how well those troops are motivated, how well-covered the lord's patrol plan is, that sort of thing. It just requires that the guards' perception is a given (perhaps because of their knowledge of the fortress). It makes it a single-check action, which is easier to make or fail in a single attempt.

I can also see it as a slight disconnect about the role of the GM, in terms of what you describe Edwards' theory to be, because maybe you're only seeing the GM as only a facilitator and workman, there to present the story to the players and see that they're 'winning' or 'losing' as how the GM draws fulfillment.

On the other hand, Fate describes this a bit in its text, too, and I want to say I've seen stuff about this elsewhere, where they talk about giving the GM some resource to conserve or spend (like fate points), even if only in how much they give TO the players or take from them, gives them a bit of a 'game' to run as well. That concept, or Edwards single-roll opposition, offers the GM a challenge to achieve that isn't just 'try to TPK by throwing all the forces at them at once'. It allows the GM to be antagonistic in their management of the world if they want, because it also gives them a leash by trying to limit the opposing roll/skill use to just one significant action, which in this case is the lord's. If the GM were being told to oppose their stealth with EVERY guard's perception they come up against, Iterative Probability says that eventually they fail vs those guards, it's only a matter of time. By limiting the actionable opposition check to the lord's ability to command those guards, it keeps a form of restraint that allows the GM to be a 'player' too.

From what I can read of you, what you've described, maybe you don't think the GM should be able to run that kind of game? They should only be running the world for the players' enjoyment and achievement, not their own (or at least, they're supposed to only be the 'reward of a game/job well-done' type of enjoyment).


Things I like about GMing:

Worldbuilding.
Creating characters.
Breathing life into the NPCs, even when the PCs aren't there. The NPCs have their own hopes and plans and schemes going on independent of the PCs, but they also respond to what the PCs do... just like "real" people.
Reacting to what the PCs do and weaving the world's response.
Making something coherent out of the unpredictable.




Edit: Added this from later reply:


Ah, but, why? Why do the guard need to be full characters? Does every NPC need full stats, or do they simply need to provide the challenge to the players?


"Full character" isn't about stats, it's about whether we see that guard as an actual person within that fictional world, or just a narrative automaton, a fictional contrivance there for no reason but to serve "exploration of the theme" or some such crap.




But what if the roll is because the GM wants to offer chances for it to be there, because they want to make the situation flexible? How is this any different from a GM-assist system like a dungeon-crawl generator that says to use room A, B, or C, depending on the result of this dice roll? It means that the 'plot' the GM is conducting is unpredictable, even to them, allowing different situations to arise depending on player and GM dice rolls. A GM could run the same vague 'structure' five different times, with different randomized elements like this, and if it was properly fleshed out, the players might not ever know.


The question is two-fold:

1) Is it established where the documents are the moment they come into "existence" in the game, with their location a fixed fact, just as with any other part of the setting? Or are they in some sort of limbo, with the fact of their location waiting to be established, and then causality of how they came to be in that place split into two, with the in-setting causality to be retroactively established after the effect has occured and the in-game causality based on narrative contrivance?

2) Do the players roll when they search any location, never knowing whether the documents are there? Or do they only roll once they have a chance to find them, thus telegraphing when they're "getting warm"?


When characters start to exist simply as narrative "parts", when the causality of the world is inverted so that effects come first and then the causes retroactively are established afterwards, when everything in the setting exists in a sort of limbo until it's established by character action or character perception... the setting loses its "objectivity" and verisimilitude, and becomes nothing but set dressing. It's as if the buildings on a street are just facades propped up by a couple 2x4s in the back until a PC opens the door, and the NPCs are just mannequins until a PC talks to them.

[kyoryu]

That's not really the line that RE drew, however, and so it wasn't what I was snarking about in my comment (quoted at the top).

Really don't care what RE said. Really, really don't.


RE wanted to make rolls about "the conflict of interest at hand", and make them about the overall goal you wanted to accomplish. So, if you're rolling stealth to get by the guards, then you roll stealth to get by ALL the guards, and then narrate that whole chunk of the action in some way... or narrate and then make the roll, depending.

I don't really have a problem with this.I think it probably works just as well to have a single roll vs. teh guards, giving the guards a bonus for having multiple sets of eyes.


And if the guards are just there in service to the lord of the castle, then according to RE, maybe your "conflict of interest" is with the lord of the castle, and you should be rolling against that character, and not the guards at all...

This I find just silly.

Now the idea that a roll should represent "an action" is... something I don't think holds up to inspection. A lot of rolls, even in traditional games, represent far more than a single, discrete action. In original D&D versions, a combat turn was *60 seconds long*, and so a single combat roll was understood to be a minute's worth of slashing and moving and feinting. Similarly, a search for traps or whatever took a certain amount of time, and was *a single roll*. Not to mention creating items!

Even "simple" combat moves aren't. Grappling someone and hauling them down is a lot of moves... it's moving in, getting an initial handhold, solidifying that hold, shifting weight, executing a throw. And each of those can probably be broken down even further - in fact, probably as far as you want to go.

So the fact that you like a finer level of granularity is cool. But I don't think it upholds some kind of principle about actions representing single discrete efforts, because there's far too many cases where they don't.

[RedWarlock]

Things I like about GMing:

Worldbuilding.
Creating characters.
Breathing life into the NPCs, even when the PCs aren't there. The NPCs have their own hopes and plans and schemes going on independent of the PCs, but they also respond to what the PCs do... just like "real" people.
Reacting to what the PCs do and weaving the world's response.
Making something coherent out of the unpredictable.

I can do that too, AND I can take 5 seconds to evolve those plots in a different direction when my players suggest a different plot point which I decide to not contradict. It's actually BECAUSE my characters are internally-fleshed-out, that I can take their point of view into account when the players alter the playing field.

You're evading my core question, though. Is it a bridge too far for a GM to have mechanics they engage, to 'play GM' as much as other players 'play characters'?



"Full character" isn't about stats, it's about whether we see that guard as an actual person within that fictional world, or just a narrative automaton, a fictional contrivance there for no reason but to serve "exploration of the theme" or some such crap.

Really? A fortress of a hundred soldiers, and they all have pre-defined hopes, dreams, and stats? You're either putting a lot of work that literally can NEVER be used, or you're able to work a lot more on-the-fly than you're describing.




The question is two-fold:

1) Is it established where the documents are the moment they come into "existence" in the game, with their location a fixed fact, just as with any other part of the setting? Or are they in some sort of limbo, with the fact of their location waiting to be established, and then causality of how they came to be in that place split into two, with the in-setting causality to be retroactively established after the effect has occured and the in-game causality based on narrative contrivance?

2) Do the players roll when they search any location, never knowing whether the documents are there? Or do they only roll once they have a chance to find them, thus telegraphing when they're "getting warm"?

Considering this is an entirely constructed scenario for which YOU began the thread, I'm just interpreting to try to describe how it could be functional. The single functional roll serves to both determine the document's existence, and its location. In this scenario, IF the GM is allowing the papers to be established with a roll, then they're already working from a dual-layered reality, one layer where they do exist (regardless of where), and one where they don't (regardless of how hard the PCs search, as covered in that single roll). If it was important enough for the GM to need more details about the documents, or for where exactly they were, they wouldn't've have been setting them up in a roll to begin with, it would be a fixed (albeit hidden) fact of the session.

In this context, the GM is the one running the limbo-state in their head, and presumably can manuever the world to fit both potential scenarios, depending on the players' actions and the fall of the dice. If they can't, they shouldn't be running it this way, and it's not like the system is forcing them to do so, is it?


When characters start to exist simply as narrative "parts", when the causality of the world is inverted so that effects come first and then the causes retroactively are established afterwards, when everything in the setting exists in a sort of limbo until it's established by character action or character perception... the setting loses its "objectivity" and verisimilitude, and becomes nothing but set dressing. It's as if the buildings on a street are just facades propped up by a couple 2x4s in the back until a PC opens the door, and the NPCs are just mannequins until a PC talks to them.
It's all just layers of facade, to me. Those buildings on a street are just lines on a map, the 'characters' are just tokens, the only thing propping them up as real is the words I use to describe them, and the imagination of my players. All else is just a pleasant lie we tell each other about.

[kyoryu]

1) Is it established where the documents are the moment they come into "existence" in the game, with their location a fixed fact, just as with any other part of the setting? Or are they in some sort of limbo, with the fact of their location waiting to be established, and then causality of how they came to be in that place split into two, with the in-setting causality to be retroactively established after the effect has occured and the in-game causality based on narrative contrivance?

I dunno, is the location of the documents determined already?

If it is, and the players search where it isn't, then they don't get documents.

If it's not, and the place they're looking is reasonable, then maybe they find them.

Seems simple enough.



"Full character" isn't about stats, it's about whether we see that guard as an actual person within that fictional world, or just a narrative automaton, a fictional contrivance there for no reason but to serve "exploration of the theme" or some such crap.

The funny thing to me is that most "narrative" games place more emphasis on treating guards as actual people than most "traditional" games I've seen, where they're often littlre more than game tokens.

IOW, there's really nothing special about narrative vs. traditional games when it comes to treating guards and other minor NPCs as fully fleshed characters.

This "narrative automaton" stuff is incredibly vague, and doesn't really *mean* anything to anybody reading this - as in, I have *no idea* how you think that would play out in a game - thus my earlier, repeated request for discussions of things to be about actual game situations, even if invented.

[Max_Killjoy]

Really don't care what RE said. Really, really don't.


I get that, and I fully understand why.

Was trying to establish the context for the rest of my post and make it clear what I was talking about, not give RE any authority over the concepts that he certainly doesn't get or deserve to get.






I don't really have a problem with this.I think it probably works just as well to have a single roll vs. teh guards, giving the guards a bonus for having multiple sets of eyes.



This I find just silly.

Now the idea that a roll should represent "an action" is... something I don't think holds up to inspection. A lot of rolls, even in traditional games, represent far more than a single, discrete action. In original D&D versions, a combat turn was *60 seconds long*, and so a single combat roll was understood to be a minute's worth of slashing and moving and feinting. Similarly, a search for traps or whatever took a certain amount of time, and was *a single roll*. Not to mention creating items!

Even "simple" combat moves aren't. Grappling someone and hauling them down is a lot of moves... it's moving in, getting an initial handhold, solidifying that hold, shifting weight, executing a throw. And each of those can probably be broken down even further - in fact, probably as far as you want to go.

So the fact that you like a finer level of granularity is cool. But I don't think it upholds some kind of principle about actions representing single discrete efforts, because there's far too many cases where they don't.


Somewhere recently, I thought I posted other options for what a roll could represent other than a single instant action. Maybe even in that post?


"Task resolution" could always be about "did you manage to get the effect you were trying for". It's just that it's about that one attempted action or task, or that one "test", it's mapped to one discrete event or closely tied time from within the setting. "Task" rolls could be about whether you succeeded, or how well you succeeded, or how long it took you to accomplish the task, or... etc.


Along those lines, if it best maps the situation and/or best moves the game along, in certain in-setting circumstances, I can see rolling once to evade all the guards -- or separately for each patrol, or each section of the building, or whatever. But not for the reasons that it was being suggested by you-know-who.

As an aside, I never, never cared for the whole "a combat round is 60 seconds, every other attack you attempted is assumed to have failed or been defended against somehow" thing. It really struck me as way too abstract and presumptive. It's actually one of the many reasons I moved from D&D to other systems.

[Max_Killjoy]

I can do that too, AND I can take 5 seconds to evolve those plots in a different direction when my players suggest a different plot point which I decide to not contradict. It's actually BECAUSE my characters are internally-fleshed-out, that I can take their point of view into account when the players alter the playing field.


Not sure how this is a response to what I said...




You're evading my core question, though.


That's... a bit accusatory, isn't it? I'm trying to answer a lot of different points and questions here, maybe it just slipped through.




Is it a bridge too far for a GM to have mechanics they engage, to 'play GM' as much as other players 'play characters'?


Going back and re-reading that part, that sounds too much like ye olde adversarial GM, to me.




Really? A fortress of a hundred soldiers, and they all have pre-defined hopes, dreams, and stats? You're either putting a lot of work that literally can NEVER be used, or you're able to work a lot more on-the-fly than you're describing.


If I drive downtown tomorrow and see people on the sidewalk making their way through the winter weather to wherever they're going, I don't have to know what their hopes and dreams are, to know that they have them.

Likewise, I don't have to have the hopes and dreams of every fortress guard written down in my notes, to regard those guards as characters/"people" complete with hopes and dreams, and not cardboard setpieces or cogs in a narrative device.




Considering this is an entirely constructed scenario for which YOU began the thread, I'm just interpreting to try to describe how it could be functional. The single functional roll serves to both determine the document's existence, and its location. In this scenario, IF the GM is allowing the papers to be established with a roll, then they're already working from a dual-layered reality, one layer where they do exist (regardless of where), and one where they don't (regardless of how hard the PCs search, as covered in that single roll). If it was important enough for the GM to need more details about the documents, or for where exactly they were, they wouldn't've have been setting them up in a roll to begin with, it would be a fixed (albeit hidden) fact of the session.


I cannot even begin to imagine a functional way for a player roll cause documents belonging to an NPC to come into existence, let alone also at the same time determine that those documents are in the room where the PCs are searching.

However, as there are people who really want to play that way (see, "no myth" / "story now"), I have to first present that as one of the setups, before I can address it.




It's all just layers of facade, to me. Those buildings on a street are just lines on a map, the 'characters' are just tokens, the only thing propping them up as real is the words I use to describe them, and the imagination of my players. All else is just a pleasant lie we tell each other about.


I can't treat a world I'm running as a GM, or playing in as a player, like that. At that point, it all just falls apart, the mental investment is gone, it loses all sense of verisimilitude, and why even bother.

[ImNotTrevor]

I dunno if this is worth noting or not at this point, but I'll bring it up anyways:

GNS isn't really followed in game design anymore. At all. Maybe a couple of the diamonds in that rough made it through, but by and large GNS isn't really followed. (Near as I can tell, anyways)

Heck, Edwards himself said that GNS had "outlived its usefulness" back in '05. That this forum keeps bringing up an 11 year old model that the creator abandoned is...weird to me.

Why are we still dragging this old corpse around?

[Knaight]

I dunno if this is worth noting or not at this point, but I'll bring it up anyways:

GNS isn't really followed in game design anymore. At all. Maybe a couple of the diamonds in that rough made it through, but by and large GNS isn't really followed. (Near as I can tell, anyways)

Heck, Edwards himself said that GNS had "outlived its usefulness" back in '05. That this forum keeps bringing up an 11 year old model that the creator abandoned is...weird to me.

Why are we still dragging this old corpse around?

The model has some serious issues, but it also has the benefit of being comprised primarily out of three terms, all of which can be approximately understood easily just by reading them. It's the finer points of the model that were really terrible, and it's these three terms that are the diamonds in the rough.

[RedWarlock]

That's... a bit accusatory, isn't it? I'm trying to answer a lot of different points and questions here, maybe it just slipped through.

Perhaps so. But this is your thread, so I'm trying to address to the points you yourself are bringing up. Your response to my original statement above was fairly tangential to what I was describing.



Going back and re-reading that part, that sounds too much like ye olde adversarial GM, to me.


Actually, that's the benefit of the narrative currency system. You can have an 'adversarial' GM, but because the system has controls and consequences on what the GM alters in their favor, it doesn't feel unfair, because the players have some manner of counter-control, and (at least in Fate) the freedom to reject that currency offer and deny the GM their fiat action.



If I drive downtown tomorrow and see people on the sidewalk making their way through the winter weather to wherever they're going, I don't have to know what their hopes and dreams are, to know that they have them.

Likewise, I don't have to have the hopes and dreams of every fortress guard written down in my notes, to regard those guards as characters/"people" complete with hopes and dreams, and not cardboard setpieces or cogs in a narrative device.

You're treating those as vastly different things, when from my perspective, I can take a 'cog' character and flesh them out on the fly to become more when they need to be. The divide between the two is easily crossed, when the specific detail is warranted.




I cannot even begin to imagine a functional way for a player roll cause documents belonging to an NPC to come into existence, let alone also at the same time determine that those documents are in the room where the PCs are searching.

However, as there are people who really want to play that way (see, "no myth" / "story now"), I have to first present that as one of the setups, before I can address it.

It's your scenario. The single roll in this case answers two questions simultaneously. The first is the question of 'Does the player find the documents?' and is visible to all. The second is for the GM alone, 'Do these documents exist here at all?' The second question is only a question if the GM wants it to be, it's on their own call. The difficulty of the check (this should be a hidden factor) represents the amount of favor the GM is willing to put into that time and interest the player has invested into the action. In effect, it's anti-railroading, because it rewards that investment by the player, rather than a decision the GM made before the search was begun.

If the documents were always meant to be in the room, then the single roll is purely about whether the GM is generous enough to give the player the next clue, or to leave them lost.

If the documents were never in the room, then the roll is a sham, merely there to divert the player with false hope of success. In-character, the character gets the same result, the item not being in the room.

If the roll doesn't determine whether the functional reality of whether the documents exist in the room, then unless there's some secondary factor (such as time limits) then the roll itself is not really needed, you could just tell them it is or isn't there. The roll, existing as a player-observed element of chance, gives them the idea that the document *could* be there, and because you're not just telling them outright, there's a possibility the player's roll, rather than the DM's fore-decision, decides if it is. It's empowering, from one perspective.



I can't treat a world I'm running as a GM, or playing in as a player, like that. At that point, it all just falls apart, the mental investment is gone, it loses all sense of verisimilitude, and why even bother.

But that's my point exactly, you've created this elaborate structure to represent them in full detail, but it's all something you've done in your mind, just as I have. That mental investment is the very thing that creates the verisimilitude.

[ImNotTrevor]

The model has some serious issues, but it also has the benefit of being comprised primarily out of three terms, all of which can be approximately understood easily just by reading them. It's the finer points of the model that were really terrible, and it's these three terms that are the diamonds in the rough.

Kiiinda? Not really?

Since GNS, about 8 different core values and 4 player types have been outlined and are better supported by actual research. (Thats right. WoTC did actual research into this on corporate dollar.) And they are nowhere near so distinct as GNS wants you to think.

Dead theory is super dead. Leave it in the grave.

[Talakeal]

Kiiinda? Not really?

Since GNS, about 8 different core values and 4 player types have been outlined and are better supported by actual research. (Thats right. WoTC did actual research into this on corporate dollar.) And they are nowhere near so distinct as GNS wants you to think.

Dead theory is super dead. Leave it in the grave.

GNS is really useful, but hardly original, it is merely a rephrasing of the GDS aspect of the (imo) far better threefold model.


Out of. Curiosity, do you have a link to the WoTC model, specifically the eight core values?

[ImNotTrevor]

GNS is really useful, but hardly original, it is merely a rephrasing of the GDS aspect of the (imo) far better threefold model.

I dunno that I'd call it useful. Really easy to talk about because not very many words? Sure.

Useful? I mean... the creator disagrees at this point.



Out of. Curiosity, do you have a link to the WoTC model, specifically the eight core values?

Here's da sauce, boss: http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

Or at least the closest I could get. Note that this predates GNS Theory, which came about 4 years later.

And threefold model is... also not really used anymore in favor of newer, more complete models.

[RazorChain]

I dunno that I'd call it useful. Really easy to talk about because not very many words? Sure.

Useful? I mean... the creator disagrees at this point.



Here's da sauce, boss: http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

Or at least the closest I could get. Note that this predates GNS Theory, which came about 4 years later.

And threefold model is... also not really used anymore in favor of newer, more complete models.


The survey doesn't even matter...AT ALL. They don't describe how it was done, who they asked, what were the questions. And it only targeted the age group of 12-35..and then they tell us that half of gamers are 19 or younger when they only ask people up to 35.....sheeesh..idiots.
So if you are going to apply scientific methods then this survey is roughly equivalent of a toilet paper.

[Lord Raziere]

I'm sure some do. And Edwards was very much about baking theme into the rules. Basically, if you read between the lines, he was mad that people were playing Vampire without it being about existential horror, and decided that the fix was to make the rules so it was impossible to play any other way.

Why not just talk to people and agree on what your game is going to be about, like a normal human?

Yeah, I kind of hate that white wolfism as well. Particularly in the Chronicles of Darkness, its pretty much engineered to be only about what White Wolf wants now. I may be a narrative gamer, but there is a big difference between WW's narrative railroad, Fate's narrative freedom, or how Legends of the Wulin's narrativism is about tying your character to various parts of the world of your choice in advance, or how Mutants and Masterminds has narrative complications that arise for your hero in an otherwise powers/effect based system, and so on and so forth, not all narrative mechanics are the same.

like Legends of the Wulin's narrative mechanics emphasize both a story AND setting consistency at the same time, because say you want to be a male martial artist who knows a technique only taught in a female only order. There are narrative options where you spend points to pick the explanation of how you got it for your backstory, like whether you disguised yourself or whether you were somehow made an exception due to circumstances, and thus essentially keeping you grounded in the world and what problems would logically arise from the explanation of how you learned that technique. It happened, but of course those problems will still exist and still affect you in certain situations.

Then there are certain systems which are narrative in that they simply change the outcome of the dice rolls from "succeed and move on, fail and nothing happens" to "succeed and move on, fail and something interesting happens". to keep the action moving no matter what you do. for example, if you succeed at picking the lock, you go through door, if you don't succeed at picking the lock, alarms sound, guards come in and once you defeat them, turns out they have the key to get through the door, but of course, people are more alert now and thus thing might be harder for you as you go because you didn't succeed at the lockpicking, or you might have to hurry now that the stealth has been compromised. you still failed, but in a way that advances things forward rather than just a self-contained non-event.

I'd go so far as to say that WW's mechanics for narrative are kind of the worst ones, as well as their attitude about "storytelling" because it leads to a very top-down approach that doesn't really incorporate what players actually want to play or the stories they want to tell, while good narrative mechanics encourage the player to add to the world, come up with their own things and make their own story rather than a singular story that is canonically "supposed" to be told, and be free to have their own agency over their character. The great thing about fate? all those fate points are purely take it or leave it. You could theoretically spend an entire fate campaign without spending a single one or without accepting a single compel and it would be completely valid. you'd be relying entirely on skills and luck of the rolls and stunts, but you'd be able to do it. Everything about Fate is opt-in on the choice of everyone playing.

[Max_Killjoy]

Actually, that's the benefit of the narrative currency system. You can have an 'adversarial' GM, but because the system has controls and consequences on what the GM alters in their favor, it doesn't feel unfair, because the players have some manner of counter-control, and (at least in Fate) the freedom to reject that currency offer and deny the GM their fiat action.


I'd rather just not have an adversarial GM.




You're treating those as vastly different things, when from my perspective, I can take a 'cog' character and flesh them out on the fly to become more when they need to be. The divide between the two is easily crossed, when the specific detail is warranted.


I treat them as vastly different because for me, they are vastly different things. I will try to explain at some point later today when I'm more coherent.

E: OK... Maybe it's just me. I need to look at it as a "real" world full of "real" people. My creative process doesn't handle artifice and contrivance well.




It's your scenario. The single roll in this case answers two questions simultaneously. The first is the question of 'Does the player find the documents?' and is visible to all. The second is for the GM alone, 'Do these documents exist here at all?' The second question is only a question if the GM wants it to be, it's on their own call. The difficulty of the check (this should be a hidden factor) represents the amount of favor the GM is willing to put into that time and interest the player has invested into the action. In effect, it's anti-railroading, because it rewards that investment by the player, rather than a decision the GM made before the search was begun.

If the documents were always meant to be in the room, then the single roll is purely about whether the GM is generous enough to give the player the next clue, or to leave them lost.

If the documents were never in the room, then the roll is a sham, merely there to divert the player with false hope of success. In-character, the character gets the same result, the item not being in the room.

If the roll doesn't determine whether the functional reality of whether the documents exist in the room, then unless there's some secondary factor (such as time limits) then the roll itself is not really needed, you could just tell them it is or isn't there. The roll, existing as a player-observed element of chance, gives them the idea that the document *could* be there, and because you're not just telling them outright, there's a possibility the player's roll, rather than the DM's fore-decision, decides if it is. It's empowering, from one perspective.


It's not my scenario, someone else said used it as an example.

The roll is never a sham -- the character doesn't know if the documents are in the room, so the player doesn't know. If the player decides that the character is going to search that room, then they roll. That decision is independent of whether the documents were ever there in the first place. When you're searching for something in real life, it *could* be there until you look, and after you look, it *could* still be there but you missed it.

If the documents are in the bottom drawer of a fancy end table, and the player says "looking in the bottom drawer of the fancy end table", then the character finds them, no roll needed.

The alternatives are that the GM just tells the player "don't bother rolling", which is telling the player that the documents aren't there, until the GM says "roll", and the player knows that the documents are there... or the GM has to keep the documents in limbo until the player succeeds, and then poof, the documents are magically in that room, and the fictional reality becomes a funhouse of inverted causality.

[Max_Killjoy]

GNS is really useful, but hardly original, it is merely a rephrasing of the GDS aspect of the (imo) far better threefold model.


Those models all end up with terminology problems, as seen in this thread.

Does "simulationist" mean "I want highly associated mechanics and a high level of verisimilitude" or does it mean "I want a rule for everything and everything with a rule, the attempt at a perfect mathematical model of the game world and everything in it including the characters"? Because I'm the former, but about half the time someone calls me a "simulationist", they mean the latter and assume I want things from systems and games that I don't really want.

Does "narrativist" mean "fixate on exploring theme" (the Edwardian model), "story uber alles" (make decisions based on the "best" story progression and structure), or "character-driven / character-centric" (what most people in this thread are posting that they mean when they call themselves "narrativist")?

Etc, etc, etc.

[Beleriphon]

Those models all end up with terminology problems, as seen in this thread.

Does "simulationist" mean "I want highly associated mechanics and a high level of verisimilitude" or does it mean "I want a rule for everything and everything with a rule, the attempt at a perfect mathematical model of the game world and everything in it including the characters"? Because I'm the former, but about half the time someone calls me a "simulationist", they mean the latter and assume I want things from systems and games that I don't really want.

Some where in between I suspect, depending on pedantic one wants to be it can be either extreme.


Does "narrativist" mean "fixate on exploring theme" (the Edwardian model), "story uber alles" (make decisions based on the "best" story progression and structure), or "character-driven / character-centric" (what most people in this thread are posting that they mean when they call themselves "narrativist")?

Etc, etc, etc.

It could be any of the three depending on what we want.

I would suggest that narrative tends to fluctuate between explore a theme and character-centric more than story uber alles. The FFG Star Wars game is about exploring Star Wars as a theme, and having character-centric action drive the game forward.

In many ways a narrativist game tends to work in a state of quantum character flux, without the characters interacting with the game nothing happens. That's true enough of any game, but many narrativist games operate on the uncertainty principle and the GM is expected to work with either result and be prepared for either result. So if we're playing a spy game and James Bond is searching a SPECTRE operating for hidden documents with a more traditional game the GM has determined where they are already and more or less what Bond's player needs to do to find them. With a narrative game the GM knows there are hidden documents somewhere, but may leave the specific location up to the players to determine with a skill roll and the roll also determines not only finding them but a goon squad also walks in at the same time, and now the game is about what does Bond do to the escape with his prize. It could also be that Bond doesn't find the documents because of a complete skill roll failure and but we do learn the documents are at X instead of Y, and now the players need to deal with Bloefeld getting his plan farther ahead than they thought he would.

As a note nothing actually here stops the GM from declaring the documents in a certain spot and leaving the skill to determine how Bond actually finds the documents, if he is noticed or what not. The important discussion in a narrative game often isn't do we find or do X but what happens now that X has happened or not and what complications will arise from this? An important distinction that no matter what the end result of find the documents or not is something interesting should happen, that could be less time to stop the doomsday device, maybe M is suspending Bond for being a terrible super spy, or maybe Bond is caught because he took too longer looking around Bloefeld's office.

[ImNotTrevor]

The survey doesn't even matter...AT ALL. They don't describe how it was done, who they asked, what were the questions. And it only targeted the age group of 12-35..and then they tell us that half of gamers are 19 or younger when they only ask people up to 35.....sheeesh..idiots.
So if you are going to apply scientific methods then this survey is roughly equivalent of a toilet paper.

Ok. So....

Are you arguing that this is weaker than GNS?
Trying to poke holes in an argument I'm not making about this one being better because science?

The point is that GNS fell way out of favor a long time ago. We can probably stop resurrecting its old corpse as if the beast still walks.

The point of bringing up the research is this: based on the GNS predictions we should be seeing (even in this apparent travesty of market research) 3 clear groupings. Not 4 and a Neutral zone that are cloudy clusters.

Sure, the science is not done by strictest and highest standards. But this is Pre-GNS and it shows something very different from GNS. There are no clear dividing lines, there are too many groupings, and there's no way it was created to disprove GNS 4 years before Ron dreamt it up, so we can't even throw that aspersion at it.

Long story short: count that as additional rough evidence that GNS is really, really flawed. And take comfort that game designers don't follow it anymore. And also let the thing die already. >.>

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, I kind of hate that white wolfism as well. Particularly in the Chronicles of Darkness, its pretty much engineered to be only about what White Wolf wants now. I may be a narrative gamer, but there is a big difference between WW's narrative railroad, Fate's narrative freedom, or how Legends of the Wulin's narrativism is about tying your character to various parts of the world of your choice in advance, or how Mutants and Masterminds has narrative complications that arise for your hero in an otherwise powers/effect based system, and so on and so forth, not all narrative mechanics are the same.


Would you consider HERO's Disadvantages, going back to the 80s, as a "narrative mechanic"? Does a mechanic have to be deliberately "narrative", or can a mechanic that predates the concept by over a decade be retroactively categorized?




like Legends of the Wulin's narrative mechanics emphasize both a story AND setting consistency at the same time, because say you want to be a male martial artist who knows a technique only taught in a female only order. There are narrative options where you spend points to pick the explanation of how you got it for your backstory, like whether you disguised yourself or whether you were somehow made an exception due to circumstances, and thus essentially keeping you grounded in the world and what problems would logically arise from the explanation of how you learned that technique. It happened, but of course those problems will still exist and still affect you in certain situations.


I don't know the specifics, so I can't comment on the mechanics. It does sound like a more "mechanics added" version of what I'd expect in the sort of character-driven/simulationism blend games the old group used to play.




Then there are certain systems which are narrative in that they simply change the outcome of the dice rolls from "succeed and move on, fail and nothing happens" to "succeed and move on, fail and something interesting happens". to keep the action moving no matter what you do. for example, if you succeed at picking the lock, you go through door, if you don't succeed at picking the lock, alarms sound, guards come in and once you defeat them, turns out they have the key to get through the door, but of course, people are more alert now and thus thing might be harder for you as you go because you didn't succeed at the lockpicking, or you might have to hurry now that the stealth has been compromised. you still failed, but in a way that advances things forward rather than just a self-contained non-event.


Again, this seems like a "mechanics added" version of very good GMing advice -- don't get caught in a situation where one single roll can jackknife the entire session or campaign. Roll with the punches. Adapt, improvise, move forward.




I'd go so far as to say that WW's mechanics for narrative are kind of the worst ones, as well as their attitude about "storytelling" because it leads to a very top-down approach that doesn't really incorporate what players actually want to play or the stories they want to tell, while good narrative mechanics encourage the player to add to the world, come up with their own things and make their own story rather than a singular story that is canonically "supposed" to be told, and be free to have their own agency over their character. The great thing about fate? all those fate points are purely take it or leave it. You could theoretically spend an entire fate campaign without spending a single one or without accepting a single compel and it would be completely valid. you'd be relying entirely on skills and luck of the rolls and stunts, but you'd be able to do it. Everything about Fate is opt-in on the choice of everyone playing.


I took a 5-minute look at the nWoD Vampire book and decided to not bother, so I don't know what happened with that or with the Chronicles stuff in terms of detailed narrative mechanics. In oWoD books it was pretty much the WW writers admonishing people for having "badwrongfun", wasn't it? Or would you include things like Humanity and Virtues and Frenzy rolls as narrative mechanics?


You know, after this thread, I think my opposition to "narrative RPGing" is going to vary greatly depending on which specific "school" of narrativism we're talking about, and that I'm going to have to be far more specific about how I express that opposition.

On one hand, per what people are posting here, there are a lot of ideas that others consider "narrative" that I'm not really opposed to, or that I'd have considered "just good GMing", and I'm going to try my best to be far more careful about not hitting those people or their ideas with the rhetorical shrapnel.

On the other hand, I'm still not going to have much patience for the Edwardian Themes or Story Uber Alles schools of gaming, any more than I have patience for their cousins in fiction writing.

[BRC]

Everytime I see a "Narrative" RPG system, I always end up just judging it against the following system.
BRC'S Flawless Narrative Game System

1) You and your friends sit around and make up a story.
2) If you can't quickly think of a good way to resolve something, roll a d20, high numbers mean good things happen, low numbers mean bad.

These rules cover literally every situation, work with every setting or type of story, and allow for the creation of ideal stories.


I was personally very dissatisfied with Seventh Sea 2nd edition's rules. 7th Sea 2nd Ed bills itself as a "Narrativist" system, clearly intended to produce action-packed tales of swashbuckling adventure. Which is great, I love action-packed tales of swashbuckling adventure.

But, actually sitting down and reading the rules, I hated them. Trying to push the "Action Packed Swashbuckling Adventure" feel meant that the actual "Game" mechanics were slim, and over-optimized for very specific situations.

Here's the basic non-combat resolution mechanic.

Step 1) The Player declares "Here is what I am going to do, and here is how I am going to try to do it"

Step 2) If the GM agrees to that goal and approach, they then come up with a series of "Hazards" and "Opportunities" for the roll.

Step 3) Player rolls some dice, then assembles the dice into groups of at least 10. Each group of 10 is a Raise.
One Raise means you succeed. Every subsequent Raise means that you negate a hazard, or take advantage of an opportunity.

Now, this system was probably designed with the following scenario in mind.

The character is trapped in a burning ship, with who knows how long before the fire reaches the magazine and the ship explodes!

Player: I'm going to use Athletics to escape the burning ship.

GM: Alright, there is a lot of fire, so three Hazards, each of which gives you one Wound, plus an Opportunity, to grab the Duchess's letter before it burns away.

Which is fine and great. However, "One Raise=Success" means that there's no good way to modulate difficulty between checks, except by coming up with new and more elaborate Hazards. How do you handle something like, say, clearing a 10 foot jump? I guess you could take a wound if you "Succeed, but only by grabbing into the ledge and hurting yourself", how do you make a 15 foot jump any more difficult.

It requires one Raise to talk your way into the duke's chambers. Then, once you've assassinated him, it's one Raise to convince the court that you merely killed an imposter, and that the REAL Duke Died ten years ago! The game becomes an exercise in phrasing your intent such that the GM can't reasonably come up with "Hazards", where you succeed in your stated goal, but suffer some dire consequence. Meanwhile, it's on the GM to keep the game grounded by coming up with a list of hazards to discourage this behavior, since per the rules, there's no good way to say "You can try that, but probably won't succeed", merely "You can try that, and you'll probably succeed, but there will be consequences".

The classic hazard they give is "Take one wound", but every 5th wound is a Dramatic wound, and all non-dramatic wounds go away at the end of each scene. So, in order for there to be any long-term consequence to my 'Escape the burning ship" scenario, I either need them to take at least five wounds, OR present them with some other danger. Otherwise they just mark the wounds, and erase them when the Scene ends.
(Not to mention that it's actually optimal to run around with a single dramatic wound, since all non-dramatic wounds heal, you get a bonus for having one Dramatic Wound, and you don't take your second Dramatic wound until you take your tenth Wound within a scene. Carrying around one dramatic wound just means you get a bonus on everything, with the only penalty being it taking one less wound to hit your second DW).
What they've created is a system where the characters almost never have any risk of failing, it's merely a matter of how battered they are when they succeed. Which is great logic to follow when writing a tale of swashbuckling adventure, but from a gameplay perspective seems like it would make everything kind of dull.

Like, yes, your character escaped from the exploding ship, but as a player, you knew there was basically no chance of that NOT happening. The suspension of disbelief you would have reading that scene in a novel doesn't apply from the player's seat, when you can literally do the math on your chances of escaping from the ship.

[kyoryu]

As an aside, I never, never cared for the whole "a combat round is 60 seconds, every other attack you attempted is assumed to have failed or been defended against somehow" thing. It really struck me as way too abstract and presumptive. It's actually one of the many reasons I moved from D&D to other systems.

What I'm getting here is a preference for more fine-grained resolution, combined with a dislike of Edwardian philosophy. This makes sense.



Heck, Edwards himself said that GNS had "outlived its usefulness" back in '05. That this forum keeps bringing up an 11 year old model that the creator abandoned is...weird to me.

It's not just this forum :(


GNS is really useful, but hardly original, it is merely a rephrasing of the GDS aspect of the (imo) far better threefold model.

Oh, agreed, and not the least bit of that is the fact that GNS is incredibly agenda-based. It basically promoted a specific type of play, and the idea that a game has to be *exactly one* of the three "creative agendas" or is "incoherent" is, I think, not only toxic but incredibly limiting. And the fact that very few, if any, games were "narrative" by RE's definition is rather telling, I think.


I'd rather just not have an adversarial GM.

The thing I like about most narrative games is that they allow the GM to play hard, as there is usually not a razor-thin line between "success" and "dead," as well as (usually) a higher emphasis on failure consequences other than character death.

This is not a necessary or exclusive component of "narrative" games, but there does seem to be a fairly high correlation.

I personally don't want an "adversarial" GM, but I *do* want a GM that can play hard when it's appropriate.


That's because for me, they are two vastly different things. I will try to explain at some point later today when I'm more coherent.

Can I try?

There's a difference in whether a guard is treated as a "real" human being, that is a full person with their own desires and goals, or are simply treated as a widget either there to be an obstacle (more traditionalist games) or serve a narrative purpose. Does the guard have agency? Is any thought given to them as a person?

It's not my scenario, someone else said used it as an example.


or the GM has to keep the documents in limbo until the player succeeds, and then poof, the documents are magically in that room, and the fictional reality becomes a funhouse of inverted causality.

There's an interesting thing here that I think is worth talking about, even without getting into deliberately loaded descriptions ;).

I don't even know if it's a "narrative" thing, as it applies to almost any improvised game, but most narrative games tend to be more heavily improvised so there's definitely a correlation.

In a fully prepared scenario, if there's documents, they will have a location defined ahead of time, and that's where they are. We've established that.

In a more improvised game, the GM may not have even been aware of those documents - their existence may be fully the result of the players following a path the GM had not planned for, but where that path was logical, and the documents, by logical reality, *should* exist. In that case, when the players look for the documents, it's perhaps undetermined whether the documents are in the current location (which again was probably just made up) or not.

It's less an inversion of cause/effect, and more collapsing of a quantum wave function :)


Those models all end up with terminology problems, as seen in this thread.

Does "simulationist" mean "I want highly associated mechanics and a high level of verisimilitude" or does it mean "I want a rule for everything and everything with a rule, the attempt at a perfect mathematical model of the game world and everything in it including the characters"? Because I'm the former, but about half the time someone calls me a "simulationist", they mean the latter and assume I want things from systems and games that I don't really want.

Does "narrativist" mean "fixate on exploring theme" (the Edwardian model), "story uber alles" (make decisions based on the "best" story progression and structure), or "character-driven / character-centric" (what most people in this thread are posting that they mean when they call themselves "narrativist")?


Well, this is the problem with that sort of division scheme, especially one that explicitly says "these are high level, mutually exclusive categories" - they end up grouping things that don't really belong together.

Personally, I prefer thinking about what players get out of systems (which is a lot more than three potential things, though GDNS would all qualify as potential "needs"), and then tags/descriptors of systems.

So the "highly associative" tag, the "exhaustive rules" tag, the "fine granularity" tag, and the "high verisimilitude" tag can all be independent, and exist either which each other or with other tags ("story emphasis", "emergent story", "character emphasis", "theme exploration", or whatever).



The point of bringing up the research is this: based on the GNS predictions we should be seeing (even in this apparent travesty of market research) 3 clear groupings. Not 4 and a Neutral zone that are cloudy clusters.

Sure, the science is not done by strictest and highest standards. But this is Pre-GNS and it shows something very different from GNS. There are no clear dividing lines, there are too many groupings, and there's no way it was created to disprove GNS 4 years before Ron dreamt it up, so we can't even throw that aspersion at it.

GNS kind of inverts scientific theory - it's "make up something I like, and then find evidence to fit it". You start by gathering evidence.


Would you consider HERO's Disadvantages, going back to the 80s, as a "narrative mechanic"? Does a mechanic have to be deliberately "narrative", or can a mechanic that predates the concept by over a decade be retroactively categorized?

In some ways I consider HERO/GURPS to be pseudo-"narrative" or early "narrative" games. And they also show how some of those features can exist quite happily alongside highly "simulationist" features.


Again, this seems like a "mechanics added" version of very good GMing advice -- don't get caught in a situation where one single roll can jackknife the entire session or campaign. Roll with the punches. Adapt, improvise, move forward.

A lot of "narrative" games actually have some fairly generally-applicable GM advice. Even the "don't keep rolling" bit is good advice, I think, due to how probability works - codifying it as a rule creates a pit of success, rather than a system where the implication is you *should* roll for each guard, creating an almost guaranteed failure.


You know, after this thread, I think my opposition to "narrative RPGing" is going to vary greatly depending on which specific "school" of narrativism we're talking about, and that I'm going to have to be far more specific about how I express that opposition.

I think this is a good idea, and one I've tried to promote from the earliest parts of this thread I was involved in. As I said, I prefer tags to categories. There's clearly concepts/"tags" that you dislike, and that's totally reasonable and understandable. I mean, I hate guacamole even though many people like it. But saying you hate "mexican food" as a category is pretty crazy given the sheer amount of varieties of mexican food. And even if I hate avocados, there's avocados in non-mexican food, too. So the problem isn't that I hate mexican food, it's that I hate avocados.

To expand the analogy, I hope it's clear that I've never tried to tell you that you *should* like avocados - only that mexican food is a lot more than avocados.


On one hand, per what people are posting here, there are a lot of ideas that others consider "narrative" that I'm not really opposed to, or that I'd have considered "just good GMing", and I'm going to try my best to be far more careful about not hitting those people or their ideas with the rhetorical shrapnel.

This is one of the main reasons I find GNS to be so damn damaging. It *encourages* this kind of inappropriate lumping.


On the other hand, I'm still not going to have much patience for the Edwardian Themes or Story Uber Alles schools of gaming, any more than I have patience for their cousins in fiction writing.

I also find there to be two separately distinct "story uber alles" schools.

[exelsisxax]

Some where in between I suspect, depending on pedantic one wants to be it can be either extreme.



It could be any of the three depending on what we want.

I would suggest that narrative tends to fluctuate between explore a theme and character-centric more than story uber alles. The FFG Star Wars game is about exploring Star Wars as a theme, and having character-centric action drive the game forward.

In many ways a narrativist game tends to work in a state of quantum character flux, without the characters interacting with the game nothing happens. That's true enough of any game, but many narrativist games operate on the uncertainty principle and the GM is expected to work with either result and be prepared for either result. So if we're playing a spy game and James Bond is searching a SPECTRE operating for hidden documents with a more traditional game the GM has determined where they are already and more or less what Bond's player needs to do to find them. With a narrative game the GM knows there are hidden documents somewhere, but may leave the specific location up to the players to determine with a skill roll and the roll also determines not only finding them but a goon squad also walks in at the same time, and now the game is about what does Bond do to the escape with his prize. It could also be that Bond doesn't find the documents because of a complete skill roll failure and but we do learn the documents are at X instead of Y, and now the players need to deal with Bloefeld getting his plan farther ahead than they thought he would.

As a note nothing actually here stops the GM from declaring the documents in a certain spot and leaving the skill to determine how Bond actually finds the documents, if he is noticed or what not. The important discussion in a narrative game often isn't do we find or do X but what happens now that X has happened or not and what complications will arise from this? An important distinction that no matter what the end result of find the documents or not is something interesting should happen, that could be less time to stop the doomsday device, maybe M is suspending Bond for being a terrible super spy, or maybe Bond is caught because he took too longer looking around Bloefeld's office.

But this seems to be eliminating roleplaying in favor of rollplaying, oddly enough. Your description leads narrativist games to exclusively use rolling to resolve that infiltration, because roleplaying doesn't interact with the schrodinger goal in any beneficial or unique way. If it was a simulationist game, "roll to find documents" isn't a valid action. Maybe narritivist games force the story to move forward, but that's not in itself a good thing. It's throwing out everything in the middle, where actual roleplaying and character development occur.

[kyoryu]

But this seems to be eliminating roleplaying in favor of rollplaying, oddly enough. Your description leads narrativist games to exclusively use rolling to resolve that infiltration, because roleplaying doesn't interact with the schrodinger goal in any beneficial or unique way. If it was a simulationist game, "roll to find documents" isn't a valid action. Maybe narritivist games force the story to move forward, but that's not in itself a good thing. It's throwing out everything in the middle, where actual roleplaying and character development occur.

The "quantum state" certainly can occur in narrativist games, but every one that I'm aware of basically says that if the result of something is obvious, don't roll.

So if it's established that there are documents in the drawer, and the player says "I look in the drawer", then they find the documents.

There's no "quantum state" here, there's no uncertainty, so there's no need to roll.

An actual in-game example - some PCs were looking to get hired on to do A Thing. They were talking to him, and wanted the job, and he was perfectly willing to give it to him. Since everyone's motives lined up, there was no uncertainty, and no rolling required.

[exelsisxax]

The "quantum state" certainly can occur in narrativist games, but every one that I'm aware of basically says that if the result of something is obvious, don't roll.

So if it's established that there are documents in the drawer, and the player says "I look in the drawer", then they find the documents.

There's no "quantum state" here, there's no uncertainty, so there's no need to roll.

An actual in-game example - some PCs were looking to get hired on to do A Thing. They were talking to him, and wanted the job, and he was perfectly willing to give it to him. Since everyone's motives lined up, there was no uncertainty, and no rolling required.

"resolve things like it isn't narrativist" doesn't make the narrativist system look good. But then again, you basically dumped the entire situation that I was responding to.

Can you give an example of any situation which narrativist resolution is superior to simulationist? For systems that use rolling. Otherwise you've engaged in storytelling and it isn't an RPG anymore(and you should say determinist rather than narrativist)

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, agreed, and not the least bit of that is the fact that GNS is incredibly agenda-based. It basically promoted a specific type of play, and the idea that a game has to be *exactly one* of the three "creative agendas" or is "incoherent" is, I think, not only toxic but incredibly limiting. And the fact that very few, if any, games were "narrative" by RE's definition is rather telling, I think.



Well, this is the problem with that sort of division scheme, especially one that explicitly says "these are high level, mutually exclusive categories" - they end up grouping things that don't really belong together.



This is one of the main reasons I find GNS to be so damn damaging. It *encourages* this kind of inappropriate lumping.



GNS kind of inverts scientific theory - it's "make up something I like, and then find evidence to fit it". You start by gathering evidence.


This, along with the way he talks about his "enemies" (aforementioned "brain damage" and "child molestation") is why I view Edwards as a sort of toxic quasi-Messiah wannabe and would-be "revolutionary", complete with followers/acolytes. Conclusion came before evidence, everything must be divided neatly into tight categories, and anything that doesn't fit into his schema is heretical "incoherent".

At the very least, he's an extreme case of The Convert's Fallacy. He used to Suffer from Badwronggames. Then he found a Better Path. Everyone else who isn't on that Better Path with him, in his view of the world must still be Suffering from Badwronggames.




I think this is a good idea, and one I've tried to promote from the earliest parts of this thread I was involved in. As I said, I prefer tags to categories. There's clearly concepts/"tags" that you dislike, and that's totally reasonable and understandable. I mean, I hate guacamole even though many people like it. But saying you hate "mexican food" as a category is pretty crazy given the sheer amount of varieties of mexican food. And even if I hate avocados, there's avocados in non-mexican food, too. So the problem isn't that I hate mexican food, it's that I hate avocados.

To expand the analogy, I hope it's clear that I've never tried to tell you that you *should* like avocados - only that mexican food is a lot more than avocados.


Honestly, I went through repeated discussions over several years, in other places, where, sticking to the analogy, I'd sit down at a table and someone would shove a great big bowl of guacamole in front of me, and say "HAVE SOME MEXICAN FOOD! IT'S THE BEST, EVERYTHING ELSE IS BAD FOR YOU!"




I also find there to be two separately distinct "story uber alles" schools.


Now I'm intrigued, what would those two be?

[kyoryu]

"resolve things like it isn't narrativist" doesn't make the narrativist system look good. But then again, you basically dumped the entire situation that I was responding to.

You're making the assertion that "quantum state == narrativist". I'm directly challenging that assertion.

You don't like "quantum state". Cool. It is not necessary to, nor exclusive to, "narrativist" games.


Can you give an example of any situation which narrativist resolution is superior to simulationist? For systems that use rolling. Otherwise you've engaged in storytelling and it isn't an RPG anymore(and you should say determinist rather than narrativist)

When you, as the GM, don't know the state of something, likely due to heavy improvisation.

I've used this technique in GURPS, before there *were* "narrativist" games. It's no different than the GM going "huh, I don't really know if it's there, let me roll behind the screen to determine if it is", except that you just combine it into the skill roll.


This, along with the way he talks about his "enemies" (aforementioned "brain damage" and "child molestation")

In fairness, some of that was self-directed. He was calling himself brain-damaged as much as anyone else.



At the very least, he's an extreme case of The Convert's Fallacy. He used to Suffer from Badwronggames. Then he found a Better Path. Everyone else who isn't on that Better Path with him, in his view of the world must still be Suffering from Badwronggames.

Mistaking preference for principle, yes.


Honestly, I went through repeated discussions over several years, in other places, where, sticking to the analogy, I'd sit down at a table and someone would shove a great big bowl of guacamole in front of me, and say "HAVE SOME MEXICAN FOOD! IT'S THE BEST, EVERYTHING ELSE IS BAD FOR YOU!"


And it's annoying. Which is why I don't engage in that behavior, and prefer to try to elevate the conversation. "They were jerks, so I'm going to be a jerk!" is not a particularly compelling argument.

I generally believe there are jerks in every group, and unfortunately they're the most noticed by people *outside* that group due to volume.

Now, on the other hand, the other conversation can be

"Hey! I like Mexican food!"
"MEXICAN FOOD IS TERRIBLE IT'S JUST GUACAMOLE ON EVERYTHING!"
"Um, dude, this is a cheese enchilada. There's no guac anywhere. I don't even like guac!"
"YES THAT IS GUACAMOLE THAT'S ALL MEXICAN FOOD IS!"


Now I'm intrigued, what would those two be?

Generally:

1) The GM's predetermined story
2) "Let's make a story together, and do pretentious story things!"

[exelsisxax]

You're making the assertion that "quantum state == narrativist". I'm directly challenging that assertion.

You don't like "quantum state". Cool. It is not necessary to, nor exclusive to, "narrativist" games.

When you, as the GM, don't know the state of something, likely due to heavy improvisation.

I've used this technique in GURPS, before there *were* "narrativist" games. It's no different than the GM going "huh, I don't really know if it's there, let me roll behind the screen to determine if it is", except that you just combine it into the skill roll.


I'm not making that assertion, that was the supposition of the person I was responding to.

What you describe is not narrativist. It's improvisation via randomization. It's the equivalent of "oops, i didn't populate this area, better hit up an encounter table!"

[kyoryu]

I'm not making that assertion, that was the supposition of the person I was responding to.

My apologies. But then you seem to be asserting that "it's obvious what happens, so it happens" is somehow anti-narrativist? I don't quite understand this.



What you describe is not narrativist. It's improvisation via randomization. It's the equivalent of "oops, i didn't populate this area, better hit up an encounter table!"

What's the difference, apart from some vaguely-worded principle and presumption of motive? I don't mean that in a hostile manner, to be clear. I'm just not seeing what the difference here - in both cases, the GM is doing the same thing, in the same scenario. I do find throwing out "narrativist" frequently to be incredibly vague, as I've said countless times in this thread. It's often used as a blanket pejorative without any even reasonably-clearly defined meaning. Mostly because, like "Mexican food", it's a label that is attached to an incredibly wide variety of things, that often are not exclusive to "mexican food".

It just, to me, sounds like saying "cheese melted in a folded piece of flatbread is okay, as long as it's not a quesadilla, because I hate Mexican food." I just don't understand it.

And it's generally not "oops, I didn't populate an area!" It's usually "Hey, the PCs made some decisions, which led to other decisions, and now we're doing something I had zero clue we'd be doing, so I'd better roll with it."

[exelsisxax]

My apologies. But then you seem to be asserting that "it's obvious what happens, so it happens" is somehow anti-narrativist? I don't quite understand this.

What's the difference, apart from some vaguely-worded principle and presumption of motive? I don't mean that in a hostile manner, to be clear. I'm just not seeing what the difference here - in both cases, the GM is doing the same thing, in the same scenario. I do find throwing out "narrativist" frequently to be incredibly vague, as I've said countless times in this thread. It's often used as a blanket pejorative without any even reasonably-clearly defined meaning. Mostly because, like "Mexican food", it's a label that is attached to an incredibly wide variety of things, that often are not exclusive to "mexican food".

It just, to me, sounds like saying "cheese melted in a folded piece of flatbread is okay, as long as it's not a quesadilla, because I hate Mexican food." I just don't understand it.

And it's generally not "oops, I didn't populate an area!" It's usually "Hey, the PCs made some decisions, which led to other decisions, and now we're doing something I had zero clue we'd be doing, so I'd better roll with it."

Both randomized improv and auto-sucess, no roll are system and genre independent. They have no correlation to what anyone may call narrativist or simulationist or rules-light or whatever. It's just something that should be used by DMs when appropriate. So regardless of what you think a narrativist game is, these things have nothing to do with it. It isn't anti-narrativist, it is merely unassociated with any type of game system.

[Segev]

Right, but it is a mechanical result with no in-universe explanation or source.Sure it does. He's lucky. It is as much a mechanical reality as the guy with Strength 18 in a D&D game being strong, and that being the source of his +4 to hit with a melee attack.


And Idiot balls hurt the story.
When the Storyteller says "Do Y", and the Roleplayer says "Do X", usually the Storyteller is wrong, because they want to tell a story that requires their character to act inconsistently. Yep. This is why it's usually a derided trope. The plot, narrative, or whatever the writer wanted to write wouldn't work with the characters he had (or, at least, he lacked the skill to make it work), so he forced it by making the characters act unbelievably.


Yeah, don't agree with that at all, as a Fate player.Fair enough. I can only comment from observation of others' words on the game. So I will take your word for it.


That's *one* of the uses of Fate points, and a rather rare one. Most uses of FP I see are on invokes, and just allow further extrapolation of the current events, staying totally in the here-and-now.

So, again, in Fate you can't have the gun jam without an appropriate aspect in play. Which means we've somehow established previously that the gun jamming is a thing that can happen. Maybe it got thrown in mud, maybe it's from a crappy dealer, whatever. It's not just a thing that is thrown out there for no reason.

The difference here is that in Fate, once we've established that something *can* happen, *when* it happens is based on some player at the table deciding "hey, this would be a good time for this to happen" instead of just a random roll. And if you don't like that, it totally get it.I do prefer it to be something that isn't "invoked" by a sapient entity out of game if it isn't invoked by a sapient entity in game. But, I can see the gameplay value of it. It just tends to distort my level of disbelief, since it lends itself to being more "convenient" than is strictly believable.

That said, it's workable because often the kind of stories being emulated are similar to those in one-writer fiction, where the writer just DECIDES when things are problems. So yeah, the gun jams and the villain gets away. It's believable, but at the same time, you KNOW that that happened because the author wanted the villain to get away, not as a truly "random" occurrence.



This is basically what aspects are - Chekhov's gun. An established fact that we can then refer to. The usage of the aspect in this case is a stretch because we haven't established (in the example) a link between the norther raiders and mercenaries.Sort of, at least. They're the Chekhov's guns related to the characters themselves. They don't establish the Chekhov's guns about the setting truths.


I find this argument non-compelling. The same thing could be said of Fate Points - they represent how much Fate has invested in the characters.If that is a conceit of the setting, that's actually helpful to the believability. I have rarely heard it said that ALL FATE games must have active "fate" as a thing. That any setting where you play FATE must have that supernatural force present.


I also find it strange that Savage Worlds Bennies don't really get the same level of hate as Fate Points, even though they're even more disconnected from the game world. Pure mechanical bonus! Get 'em for making the GM laugh!Fate "suffers" here from the Kleenex problem. Kleenex isn't the only facial tissue, but it's a good shorthand. But it's worse for Fate because there's no universal generic term for Fate points/Bennies/Hero Points/etc.

I am generally using Fate points to refer to all of these. It isn't JUST Fate points that annoy me in that respect.


THAT. Right there.

When I say that something was done for the sake of "The Story", that's what I mean.

Whether it's in fiction, or in an RPG, when "The Story" wins over consistent and coherent characterization (and character abilities, skills, knowledge, etc), when the character is inconsistent, that's what makes me want to pull my hair out.It's already been commented on, but I wanted to affirm those other comments: this is "bad storytelling." Good storytelling tends to have consistent characterization.

You're right when you assert that a lot of GMs who want to do things "for the story" are really just trying to railroad.


The documents are in the room if they're in the room. They are not Schrodinger's documents. No amount of looking for my keys in the bedroom will find them if they're on the coffee table in the living room -- I can look in the bedroom until the heat death of the universe... they'll never be there and I'll never find them. And if the players only "get a roll" when the documents are in the room where their characters is looking, then that telegraphs pretty quickly to the players that they're where they need to look, and they're going to keep tearing the place apart until they find the documents, and even if you cut them off, they're always going to know as players exactly where those documents were.I dunno. I don't mind if the GM feels a need to roll to see if they're in the room. The documents might have several places they could be at any given point in time, and whether they're in the room right THEN might be in question. I don't mind it if a failed Search check means that oh, the villain's secretary actually left them on the desk in the next room, under the pile of other papers, so they weren't here to find. Or that the villain took them with him when he left the office that evening. Or whatever.

As long as it's still believable that this could have happened.

Of course, if the GM does already know exactly where they are, then no, no rolling is needed. But if the GM doesn't know for certain where they are, but only where they might be, establishing a chance they'd be here right now and then rolling to check is perfectly valid.

[Steel Mirror]

Can you give an example of any situation which narrativist resolution is superior to simulationist? For systems that use rolling. Otherwise you've engaged in storytelling and it isn't an RPG anymore(and you should say determinist rather than narrativist)
I hesitate to use the word "superior" because that sounds combative. I'm not here to tell anyone else that the way they are doing it is "inferior", but I will give you an example of when I found a structured metagame mechanic based around a player assuming some authorial power helpful.

I already mentioned it, actually. My players had good reason to suspect that a mob boss was secretly behind a series of spooky supernatural occurrences that were plaguing their city. Unfortunately, all they had were suspicions, and they needed some hard evidence. One of the PCs is an ex-con who spent years in jail, and so has lots of contacts in the criminal world. He asked if he could use a fate point to declare that one of the mob bosses' accountant minions was also an old friend of his from prison who owed him a favor, and so could provide a few files from the boss's business dealings to the players on the down low. They got the papers, verified that the crime boss was paying certain people and making certain payments which backed up their suspicions. There was still more investigating that they did, but the confluence of the PC's backstory (aspects), the player's ingenuity in invoking those character elements and combining it with the in-game situation, and his ability to do so from a strong position thanks to the fact that he'd been storing up metagame resources (fate points) for such an event made for a great and memorable moment.

Now I could have accomplished the same thing in any system, but Fate streamlines and encourages it thanks to how the game is structured, and thanks specifically to the fact that my player felt empowered to make this suggestion as to how the game world would unfold. I would never have thought to introduce this new minor character who knows the PC from the old days, but my player did, and I went along with it. And the game was stronger for it.

[Beleriphon]

Now I could have accomplished the same thing in any system, but Fate streamlines and encourages it thanks to how the game is structured, and thanks specifically to the fact that my player felt empowered to make this suggestion as to how the game world would unfold. I would never have thought to introduce this new minor character who knows the PC from the old days, but my player did, and I went along with it. And the game was stronger for it.

And now you have an NPC you can use, which the player came up with. So its a win-win

[RazorChain]

Or, as I said earlier... I'm not just bugged by a "narrative railroad", which is pretty much a plain-old railroad (as you noted).

I'm also bugged by "narrative decision making" -- overriding things because "it would make a better story" in the course of play. It's not that someone has a set course in mind at the start of play, but rather that the game gets to certain points and someone (GM or player) decides that a particular course of events would "make for a better story" and they make their character's decisions based on that instead of IC considerations, they use whatever "narrative fiat" elements the system might provide, they pass notes to other players or even say something outloud, etc. They're not playing their character, they're trying for "The Best Story" with disregard to their character.

And the players who do that? I've come across many of them who call themselves "narrative-focused" players -- they lay claim to the same term as people (like all/most on this thread) who are are striving character-centric, character-driven games. That's been a HUGE contributing factor to the confusion and disconnect on this thread, to the instances when we've sensed that we're talking past each other.



This is where I disagree with you to some extent. You see sometimes players have to ignore what their character wants or put it on hold to keep the adventure flowing. At various points in my 30 year gaming career there have been players that have stood up in their seats and screamed "DONT MAKE ME COMPROMISE MY CHARACTER CONCEPT". This is a complaint that they don't want to go along with the group or the adventure. In the end it's the player that decides what the character should/will do and as we all know we don't always react predictably to every situation. This only becomes a problem for me if the character acts against their nature. A kind person that starts torturing people to get that vital information....now if that kind person starts to torture people for information because his family has been kidnapped and he needs to find out where they are, then this becomes a character transformation. One PC in my group grabbed the hair of a priest that was trying to crawl away, then the PC cut his throat in cold blood. Given that the priest was part of the inquisition and had been targeting the PC family and almost burnt another PC at the stake this may not have been suprising. But player looked at me after this deed and said "I think my character is becoming evil" as this act was against the character principles. But I Know from past experience that when you push people far enough they will do horrible things (at least in games) even though they are playing good characters.

Anyhow I'm getting sidetracked...but sometimes it's just fun to do what makes for a fun story.

[kyoryu]

Sure it does. He's lucky. It is as much a mechanical reality as the guy with Strength 18 in a D&D game being strong, and that being the source of his +4 to hit with a melee attack.

But somehow this is not a supernatural force?


Yep. This is why it's usually a derided trope. The plot, narrative, or whatever the writer wanted to write wouldn't work with the characters he had (or, at least, he lacked the skill to make it work), so he forced it by making the characters act unbelievably.

Thank you so much for pointing this out.


Fair enough. I can only comment from observation of others' words on the game. So I will take your word for it.

Fate Points are really better understood as "spotlight time", I think. In most cases. Except where they act as controls on how much luck works in your favor.

They're a bit fuzzy around the edges, but "narrative causality", as typically used in this thread, is, I think, one of the least common uses of them.


Sort of, at least. They're the Chekhov's guns related to the characters themselves. They don't establish the Chekhov's guns about the setting truths.

Incorrect. There are all kinds of aspects - situational, setting, etc.


If that is a conceit of the setting, that's actually helpful to the believability. I have rarely heard it said that ALL FATE games must have active "fate" as a thing. That any setting where you play FATE must have that supernatural force present.

Nope, not saying that it's required. Simply that they *can* be explained that way.


Fate "suffers" here from the Kleenex problem. Kleenex isn't the only facial tissue, but it's a good shorthand. But it's worse for Fate because there's no universal generic term for Fate points/Bennies/Hero Points/etc.

I am generally using Fate points to refer to all of these. It isn't JUST Fate points that annoy me in that respect.


Fair 'nuff. I just always find it weird because I find Savage Worlds bennies so *totally* separated from anything in-game at all.

And I do know a number of people that are totally okay with SW bennies but hate Fate Points. I just don't get it. It seems more like a tribal thing at that point - Savage Worlds markets itself as more of a traditional game, and they like traditional games but hate narrative games, so they hate Fate Points because they're narrative, even though they tie into the world much more cleanly than bennies do.


As long as it's still believable that this could have happened.

Exactly, I think that a lot of the complaints are because a technique is used improperly or poorly - perhaps because, to some GMs (especially those used to more railroading), these are COMPLETELY NEW and so they're developing the skills.

It's just the thing where people learn a new technique or skill or whatever, and then have to overapply it to everything until they get a good idea of where it does and does not fit.


Of course, if the GM does already know exactly where they are, then no, no rolling is needed. But if the GM doesn't know for certain where they are, but only where they might be, establishing a chance they'd be here right now and then rolling to check is perfectly valid.

I totally agree.


It isn't anti-narrativist, it is merely unassociated with any type of game system.

Okay, I think we're violently agreeing with each other.

[Lord Raziere]

Would you consider HERO's Disadvantages, going back to the 80s, as a "narrative mechanic"? Does a mechanic have to be deliberately "narrative", or can a mechanic that predates the concept by over a decade be retroactively categorized?

I don't know the specifics, so I can't comment on the mechanics. It does sound like a more "mechanics added" version of what I'd expect in the sort of character-driven/simulationism blend games the old group used to play.

Again, this seems like a "mechanics added" version of very good GMing advice -- don't get caught in a situation where one single roll can jackknife the entire session or campaign. Roll with the punches. Adapt, improvise, move forward.

I took a 5-minute look at the nWoD Vampire book and decided to not bother, so I don't know what happened with that or with the Chronicles stuff in terms of detailed narrative mechanics. In oWoD books it was pretty much the WW writers admonishing people for having "badwrongfun", wasn't it? Or would you include things like Humanity and Virtues and Frenzy rolls as narrative mechanics?


1. Haven't seen them. But generally something is mechanical, concrete if the disadvantage is something like "-2 to this or that" while a more narrative disadvantage is something I could use creatively. like say I take the narrative flaw "illiterate" Obviously, this has the unexpected advantage of making me immune to something like Explosive Runes or something like that, even though its a disadvantage in that I miss out on a lot of written information.

2 and 3. Could be considered that in a way. these newer sort of mechanics are sort of about finding what already works then trying to codify them so that you don't NEED years of experience to arrive at these methods from trial and error for newer groups. Fate Aspects are just an observation that people are human and go after rewards, so if you want a different game were flaws are played out more instead of just being some random thing you take to get more points at character creation, you reward people for making them Things That Matter.

4. Worse. They don't do the badwrongfun stuff in the open anymore, they just act like its your choice, then make the entire system of Chronicles what is basically a cliched horror show. in NWoD, you just had the humanity and virtues stuff, and if you want, you could tear those out and you could probably play it a non-horror manner to some degree, but now the entire thing is like "earn a beat for playing out this horror cliche" or something, making the entire system built to be nothing but what they want even if you took out the humanity and frenzy stuff. OWoD is actually the system considered better for playing superhero werewolves or vampires, because it doesn't matter what they say about in the text about badwrongfun, just ignore it and use the mechanics which aren't designed for horror.

Chronicles is basically the opposite of OWoD: in that, WW is saying "you can play it however you want!" with a false smile, then rigging the whole thing so that it plays out like they want it to no matter what, thus preventing you from just easily playing what they consider "the wrong way". Which is basically the same reasoning they used for Exalted 3e: "we don't want the wrong kind of fans playing our games, lets design the mechanics and such so that it deliberately chases people away if they are not exactly the fans we are shooting for! A smaller more focused fanbase, is a better fanbase". You think I'm kidding don't you, no, thats what devs outright said.

There is a reason why I use things like Godbound and Dresden Files RPG instead nowadays. Which are basically system lite Exalted and WoD but with Fate, more action and system lite.

[kyoryu]

There is a reason why I use things like Godbound and Dresden Files RPG instead nowadays. Which are basically system lite Exalted and WoD but with Fate, more action and system lite.

Fred Hicks has basically said that Fate is his argument against GNS.

And it's a good one. You can play it as an almost-traditional game. You can play it as a total hippy storygame. And any point in the middle. It enables, rather than restricts.

[obryn]

There is a reason why I use things like Godbound
I'm running a Godbound mini-adventure right now. It's good. Like, shockingly good. Way better than - effectively - "OSR Exalted" should ever be.

It's also got some amazing DM advice for sandboxing in a world where the PCs can topple nations in a night's work. And it's not of the expected 'beat them down' variety - it's all about respecting the characters' power and their ability to enact permanent changes on the setting.

[Segev]

But somehow this is not a supernatural force?Maybe, maybe not. Irrelevant, really; it's a property of the character, supernatural or not. I have no beef with "supernatural forces" being real things in a game. I only have a problem with it if there's an unacknowledged force-of-narrative which has no in-setting explanation.



Thank you so much for pointing this out.You're welcome. It is, I think, the core of what Max_Killjoy is expressing distaste for. (He is free to correct me if I'm wrong, of course; I can only attempt to intuit his issues, but this seems like it to me. And I agree with him on it, if so.)


Fate Points are really better understood as "spotlight time", I think. In most cases. Except where they act as controls on how much luck works in your favor.

They're a bit fuzzy around the edges, but "narrative causality", as typically used in this thread, is, I think, one of the least common uses of them.They...don't act like "spotlight time" at all, though. They're just ways of deciding whether coincidence/chance is on your side or not when you don't have a harder mechanic for rolling for success/failure/desired outcome/bad outcome. And while I can...accept them...they bug me a bit because they have a tendency to distort things more to a "convenient for the narrative" structure than a "narrative arises from what happens" structure. I have a preference for the latter, though done well, the former isn't necessarily bad.


Incorrect. There are all kinds of aspects - situational, setting, etc.But those aren't part of the character, are they? Eh, I think we're moving too much into the weeds of Fate-specific mechanics, here.


Fair 'nuff. I just always find it weird because I find Savage Worlds bennies so *totally* separated from anything in-game at all.

And I do know a number of people that are totally okay with SW bennies but hate Fate Points. I just don't get it. It seems more like a tribal thing at that point - Savage Worlds markets itself as more of a traditional game, and they like traditional games but hate narrative games, so they hate Fate Points because they're narrative, even though they tie into the world much more cleanly than bennies do.Okay. I'm not one of them; I haven't really played Savage Worlds and wasn't impressed by its mechanics when I read them. I do group all such "hero point" type things as one thing, but was using "fate point" as my "Kleenex" word for them.



Chronicles is basically the opposite of OWoD: in that, WW is saying "you can play it however you want!" with a false smile, then rigging the whole thing so that it plays out like they want it to no matter what, thus preventing you from just easily playing what they consider "the wrong way". Which is basically the same reasoning they used for Exalted 3e: "we don't want the wrong kind of fans playing our games, lets design the mechanics and such so that it deliberately chases people away if they are not exactly the fans we are shooting for! A smaller more focused fanbase, is a better fanbase". You think I'm kidding don't you, no, thats what devs outright said.I can't speak to Chronicles, but what I've seen of Exalted 3e doesn't seem to be trying to force people to play one particular way. It absolutely is designed to better evoke through mechanics the kind of epic that the game is built to empower, but that hasn't changed from 1e other than they've been a bit more innovative in their combat mechanics. (Seriously, they've got a rather brilliant system, I think, for modeling anime-esq fights where both sides batter on each other with one side or the other being "on the ropes" but neither being really HURT...until a decisive blow is dealt that ends the fight.)

I won't argue that the writers get more than a little full of themselves at times, but I haven't seen evidence that the mechanics are designed to drive away players who "do it wrong." (Their forums on the other hand... oof. There is, shall we say, an approved opinion on real-world issues, and heaven help you if you dare voice any disagreement. Disagreeing is "flame-baiting," while actually flaming is totally okay as long as you're flaming the disagreer.)

[RedWarlock]

Sort of, at least. They're the Chekhov's guns related to the characters themselves. They don't establish the Chekhov's guns about the setting truths.

Yes, but items, locations, settings, and campaigns can have aspects as well. Anything can have aspects in Fate. You can literally use a overall aspect to describe setting/session tone, and both GM and players can play into it.

[Max_Killjoy]

Fred Hicks has basically said that Fate is his argument against GNS.

And it's a good one. You can play it as an almost-traditional game. You can play it as a total hippy storygame. And any point in the middle. It enables, rather than restricts.


Maybe I should buy a copy of FATE as reference, even if it's not the ideal system for me.

If nothing else, I want to support the guy who rejected GNS and deliberately designed a, ahem, "incoherent" game, and seems to have made a very popular game.

[exelsisxax]

I hesitate to use the word "superior" because that sounds combative. I'm not here to tell anyone else that the way they are doing it is "inferior", but I will give you an example of when I found a structured metagame mechanic based around a player assuming some authorial power helpful.

I already mentioned it, actually. My players had good reason to suspect that a mob boss was secretly behind a series of spooky supernatural occurrences that were plaguing their city. Unfortunately, all they had were suspicions, and they needed some hard evidence. One of the PCs is an ex-con who spent years in jail, and so has lots of contacts in the criminal world. He asked if he could use a fate point to declare that one of the mob bosses' accountant minions was also an old friend of his from prison who owed him a favor, and so could provide a few files from the boss's business dealings to the players on the down low. They got the papers, verified that the crime boss was paying certain people and making certain payments which backed up their suspicions. There was still more investigating that they did, but the confluence of the PC's backstory (aspects), the player's ingenuity in invoking those character elements and combining it with the in-game situation, and his ability to do so from a strong position thanks to the fact that he'd been storing up metagame resources (fate points) for such an event made for a great and memorable moment.

Now I could have accomplished the same thing in any system, but Fate streamlines and encourages it thanks to how the game is structured, and thanks specifically to the fact that my player felt empowered to make this suggestion as to how the game world would unfold. I would never have thought to introduce this new minor character who knows the PC from the old days, but my player did, and I went along with it. And the game was stronger for it.

You misread my question. I stipulated that the system rolls to resolve, but you have mentioned a completely dice-free system, and used storytelling resolution. People can like their narrativist games, but so far I see nothing worthwhile at all about systems that roll dice and then also make up story elements. That's the thing i think is strictly inferior to D&D-esque rolling systems.

[Beleriphon]

Maybe I should buy a copy of FATE as reference, even if it's not the ideal system for me.

If nothing else, I want to support the guy who rejected GNS and deliberately designed a, ahem, "incoherent" game, and seems to have made a very popular game.

Why buy when you can get it free? https://fate-srd.com/

[kyoryu]

They...don't act like "spotlight time" at all, though. They're just ways of deciding whether coincidence/chance is on your side or not when you don't have a harder mechanic for rolling for success/failure/desired outcome/bad outcome. And while I can...accept them...they bug me a bit because they have a tendency to distort things more to a "convenient for the narrative" structure than a "narrative arises from what happens" structure. I have a preference for the latter, though done well, the former isn't necessarily bad.

In my experience, the vast majority of Fate Point expenditures are invokes, which really do act kind of like close-up shots or whatever in movies/etc.

*Player misses roll to lift boulder*
GM: "You struggle against the boulder, but it looks like you're not going to be able to move it..."
Player: *tosses FP in* "I heave against the boulder, my Mighty Barbarian Thews bulging with the effort, and manage to push it aside."
GM: "Okay, cool, now with the boulder out of the way..."

Again, this is my experience, not based on hypothetical ideas of how the game will play out in practice.


But those aren't part of the character, are they? Eh, I think we're moving too much into the weeds of Fate-specific mechanics, here.

I'm not really sure why one would expect character aspects to reflect setting-wide foreshadowing, and why that would be a criticism when setting/situation/etc. aspects exist for exactly that purpose.

IOW, I'm kind of asking you to look at whether you've decided you don't like Fate/etc. and are finding the most unfavorable things about it, or whether these are things you don't like about Fate because they're just not things to your taste. This point kind of suggests the former, which is why I bring it up.

I'm totally down with "I don't like XYZ mechanic", as I think I"ve shown multiple times. I tend to argue against "I don't like XYZ thing for Reasons, therefore I will interpret it in the worst possible way in order to validate my dislike".

Sadly, I see a lot of this with "narrative" games as RE definitely was able to draw a firm line and create a ton of animosity.


Why buy when you can get it free? https://fate-srd.com/

You can also get the core PDFs (Core, FAE, FST, and I think a few others) as PWYW (including $0.00), including all artwork, etc.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114903/Fate-Core-System

[Lord Raziere]

I can't speak to Chronicles, but what I've seen of Exalted 3e doesn't seem to be trying to force people to play one particular way. It absolutely is designed to better evoke through mechanics the kind of epic that the game is built to empower, but that hasn't changed from 1e other than they've been a bit more innovative in their combat mechanics. (Seriously, they've got a rather brilliant system, I think, for modeling anime-esq fights where both sides batter on each other with one side or the other being "on the ropes" but neither being really HURT...until a decisive blow is dealt that ends the fight.)

I won't argue that the writers get more than a little full of themselves at times, but I haven't seen evidence that the mechanics are designed to drive away players who "do it wrong." (Their forums on the other hand... oof. There is, shall we say, an approved opinion on real-world issues, and heaven help you if you dare voice any disagreement. Disagreeing is "flame-baiting," while actually flaming is totally okay as long as you're flaming the disagreer.)

.....3e Crafting. That part of the system, I cannot forgive. Maybe its not intended to, but now I cannot or will not ever use that system to try and make an Exalted inventor or whatnot within that system- ever. Because a system thats explicitly said by the devs to be designed like an MMO grind, or a point and click thing is SO suited for playing an inventor! Because I care SO much about fixing a random persons wagon to get points for stuff that is actually important. Oh wait I don't.

[Steel Mirror]

You misread my question. I stipulated that the system rolls to resolve, but you have mentioned a completely dice-free system, and used storytelling resolution. People can like their narrativist games, but so far I see nothing worthwhile at all about systems that roll dice and then also make up story elements. That's the thing i think is strictly inferior to D&D-esque rolling systems.
That particular example didn't mention dice, but Fate is far from a diceless system. In fact, if I recall correctly, the ex-con PC had to roll a few social skills to guit-trip the old prison buddy into handing over the papers. Later on I definitely had the resident scholar roll a skill to interpret the papers and realize that, yes, this was evidence they could use to track down other leads and prove the crime boss was the big bad.

So is that a system that you consider would "roll dice and then also make up story elements"? I'm not really sure what point you are going for if this example doesn't count...

[Segev]

.....3e Crafting. That part of the system, I cannot forgive. Maybe its not intended to, but now I cannot or will not ever use that system to try and make an Exalted inventor or whatnot within that system- ever. Because a system thats explicitly said by the devs to be designed like an MMO grind, or a point and click thing is SO suited for playing an inventor! Because I care SO much about fixing a random persons wagon to get points for stuff that is actually important. Oh wait I don't.

Ah. On the one hand, I see what they were going for. Leaving aside the "MMO grind" comparison (because while I understand it, I disagree that it's really the goal or the end result), it is meant to game-ify the actual crafting process, so it isn't just a thing you stop all gameplay to declare extended downtime to get done with a few rolls that require special accommodation by all the other players. Instead, it's a thing handled over time in game the way everything else is.

And it works for a particular kind of character: the craft-focused character who has it as his schtick. It unfortunately was so well-designed for that style of character, however, that it falls apart for those who want to do it as a secondary or tertiary schtick. (It works "as intended" for those who have it at 'dabbler' levels: they have to work hard to get to make the awesome stuff, but can make the basic stuff relatively easily.) The secondary or tertiary crafter, though, can't do his "when pressed, I can make a minor wonder" thing. And that's a problem.

[kyoryu]

So is that a system that you consider would "roll dice and then also make up story elements"? I'm not really sure what point you are going for if this example doesn't count...

Yeah, I don't really know what that actually means. Could we get an example, with like what acutal dialog might happen at the table?

[Segev]

I'm not really sure why one would expect character aspects to reflect setting-wide foreshadowing, and why that would be a criticism when setting/situation/etc. aspects exist for exactly that purpose.Fair enough. Like I said, I can see why it works. It just is not quite my preference when it comes to HOW one chooses to invoke truths about the setting. Specifically, how to decide if it works out one way or another.

If I'm out of Fate points and I suddenly realize that I think a setting Aspect should be invoked in a particular way, what happens when I say, "Hey, GM, shouldn't ABC be true about things? Or at least, isn't it likely?" Why does my being out of Fate points make this automatically come out in my disfavor? Why is it different than if the GM thought of it independently?

But in truth, my problems with Fate lie more in what I've heard of its conflict resolution system. It seems to invite gaming your declaration of goals in...unfortunate ways.

I only bring it up here because it is one example of the narrative meta-points that can be problematic. Not that they always are, but that they can be. (I've also found that, in my experience, the systems which utilize them wind up with GMs who, mistakenly or not, hand out the points only for things which likely put you in a situation where you have to spend the points to even have a chance of recovering, and then you are still worse off than before receiving the point. But that's probably a function of bad examples of when and how to hand them out.)


IOW, I'm kind of asking you to look at whether you've decided you don't like Fate/etc. and are finding the most unfavorable things about it, or whether these are things you don't like about Fate because they're just not things to your taste. This point kind of suggests the former, which is why I bring it up.It doesn't seem to my taste, though I've never read it thoroughly so I could be persuaded otherwise. My main issue, as I mentioned, lies in its conflict resolution system, which from what I've heard sounds like something where I just need to define my goals like I'm Xanatos: even if I 'lose,' the surrender I offer gets me what I really wanted.

[kyoryu]

Fair enough. Like I said, I can see why it works. It just is not quite my preference when it comes to HOW one chooses to invoke truths about the setting. Specifically, how to decide if it works out one way or another.

If I'm out of Fate points and I suddenly realize that I think a setting Aspect should be invoked in a particular way, what happens when I say, "Hey, GM, shouldn't ABC be true about things? Or at least, isn't it likely?" Why does my being out of Fate points make this automatically come out in my disfavor? Why is it different than if the GM thought of it independently?

Example?

Aspects are true, but sometimes they're not relevant :D

Like, if you're the Princess of the Realm, you don't need to spend a Fate Point to get in the castle. Because you can. Because you're the freakin' Princess, that's why.

Now, if there's Rampaging Monsters About, and it would be super convenient for one to Rampage your way right about now... that's exactly where a Fate Point becomes useful.

Switching to Compels as the example of truth here - if you've got a Broken Leg, you can't climb a ladder. Because that would be dumb. No Fate Point required, that's just true. It's not a Compel.

What *is* a Compel is the thing you need being at the top of the ladder.


But in truth, my problems with Fate lie more in what I've heard of its conflict resolution system. It seems to invite gaming your declaration of goals in...unfortunate ways.

In practice, i don't see this. Usually, the conflict goals are obvious and a natural extension of what's going on - it's not like there's some lengthy discussion/negotiation of goals before a Conflict is entered. Also, neither side has to accept a Concession, so that type of gaming of the system has a natural counter in the fact that there's almost always human judgement happening somewhere.

Plus, if their goals aren't what they want, then on a success, they get their stated goals anyway, so maybe they didn't get what they actually wanted.

Again, this is one of those situations where I can see where the concern comes about in theory, but in practice it's never actually been an issue in any game that I've been part of, on either side of the table.

I could see some players trying this, but frankly Fate is a bad system for the type of player that looks for rules holes to abuse.

[Steel Mirror]

If I'm out of Fate points and I suddenly realize that I think a setting Aspect should be invoked in a particular way, what happens when I say, "Hey, GM, shouldn't ABC be true about things? Or at least, isn't it likely?" Why does my being out of Fate points make this automatically come out in my disfavor? Why is it different than if the GM thought of it independently


Aspects are true, but sometimes they're not relevant :D

Like, if you're the Princess of the Realm, you don't need to spend a Fate Point to get in the castle. Because you can. Because you're the freakin' Princess, that's why.

Now, if there's Rampaging Monsters About, and it would be super convenient for one to Rampage your way right about now... that's exactly where a Fate Point becomes useful.
Yeah this is true. If your setting has the aspect "Turf War between the Elves and Dwarves", that aspect is always true. If you are an elf and you walk into a dwarf bar, things are going to get ugly (and you'll probably get some fate points, plus a sucking chest wound, out of it). If you are getting chased by some angry elves, and you duck into a dwarf bar so that you can try to incite a fight between them which lets you slip away into the night, you don't need to spend a fate point to start up the festivities; the aspect is true all the time. While aspects can and often are used to power FP awards and used as a justification to spend FP to get some influence over the world or the narrative, they also work in the 'passive' sense as just descriptions of important setting details which are always true.

On the other hand, if you are in the dwarven bar trying to convince the dwarves to invest in your questionable business venture, and you want to spend a FP to get a bonus to your roll to convince them, it could go something like this:

GM: (after comparing social skill rolls) "The dwarf seems pretty skeptical. It's a risky idea, and even if the rewards are potentially high, she hasn't gotten to where she is by taking unnecessary risks."

PC: "Darn. Okay wait, these dwarves are in a gang war with the elves right now, right? I'll casually mention that the elves have already expressed interest, but that I'd rather work with dwarves because everyone knows how much more trustworthy they are. But, if the dwarves aren't interested in this great opportunity, I'm sure the elves will be happy to reap the benefits..."

GM: "All right, and you're spending a FP on the 'Turf War' aspect to add +2 to that last roll? Brilliant! She's definitely paying attention now, and the dwarves around the bar are muttering. Seems she's willing to give you some money after all..."

[flond]

You misread my question. I stipulated that the system rolls to resolve, but you have mentioned a completely dice-free system, and used storytelling resolution. People can like their narrativist games, but so far I see nothing worthwhile at all about systems that roll dice and then also make up story elements. That's the thing i think is strictly inferior to D&D-esque rolling systems.

Ok. I'll throw in an example. Houses of the Blooded. This game's very far into the realm of narr play, and uses dice to resolve questions all the time. To the point where it's not actually generally about task resolution, but about fact resolution. To the point of literally being "I search the duke's house." and provided you succeed you can state one fact. Up to and including "I find hidden documents." (If you're willing to risk a higher likelyhood of failure you can add more facts like) "I find hidden documents, tying the duke to the queen". The advantage of this is letting everyone steer the narrative, but with a pacing and timing and distribution system that makes it not quite a free for all.

[Talakeal]

I dunno that I'd call it useful. Really easy to talk about because not very many words? Sure.

Useful? I mean... the creator disagrees at this point.



Here's da sauce, boss: http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

Or at least the closest I could get. Note that this predates GNS Theory, which came about 4 years later.

And threefold model is... also not really used anymore in favor of newer, more complete models.

That article is neat and informative, but I don't think it really applies to game styles outside of "traditional" RPGs, and it says a lot more about player type and game style rather than the rules itself. It does answer a few questions though, for example in my other thread it explains that I am in the ~22% of gamers who think it is appropriate to make sub-optimal decisions for the sake of RP while you (and apparently most of my gaming group) are in the ~66% of gamers that do not.

I also find it to be a weird (and slightly insulting) statement that "The BEST (nor most, but best) DM's come from this group and the BEST game designers come from this group." I am really wondering what their methodology was for determining that or for establishing who the "best" DMs and game designers are.

Also, there are things in each of the four quadrants that I like and some that I don't like, so I am not sure how useful it is for categorizing people if I can't clearly see where I am (I think I am in either the story-teller or character-actor quadrants, but I can't be sure). And of the eight cornerstones that are supposedly universally valued, I don't care about some of them and actively don't want others, so that is questionable.




Ok, so the reason I like the threefold model:

I have always been the "RP guy" in my group. I am always the one who is more interested in dialogue than combat and more interested in playing to my character's motivations than being perfectly efficient. I care a lot more about exploring than powering up and like to spend my time studying the game's lore rather than memorizing the rules.

When 4E came out several of the people in my group loved it, but I hated it. All that we could communicate was that it was all combat and no RP.

So they talked me into trying Spirit of the Century, a game that was all about the story, and they assumed it would be a perfect fit for me. I absolutely hated it and felt it was the worst game I had ever played. Everything was inconsistent and in flux, and the GM constantly wanted me to break character to do his job and flesh out the world for him. Nothing had concrete details for me to hold on to, either with my character or in the external world.

Now, I went online and tried to voice my dissatisfaction on this and other forums, but didn't have the words. I tried to explain it saying that I was apparently more moderate and that "4E was focusing on the G part of RPG while Spirit of the Century was focusing on the RP part, and I needed the whole game." This wasn't accurate to my problem, but it was the best I could come to voicing it.

When I learned about GNS I suddenly had the words to describe my problem. I prefer a combination of simulationist and gamist principles (usually leaning more towards the former) and hate narrativist principles. I realized I actually disliked both Spirit of the Century and D&D4 for the exact same reason, they were not created with a simulationist aspect in mind, Spirit of the Century being more narrativist and 4E being more gamist.

This was a huge revelation for me, and really expanded my ability to judge and identify games.

Of course, the three fold model doesn't explain everything either.

For example, in this very thread people are equating "rules heavy" with simulationist and "combat intensive" with gamist, and although there is some correlation between the two they are not the same thing and it is useful to be able to separate them.

[Max_Killjoy]

It doesn't seem to my taste, though I've never read it thoroughly so I could be persuaded otherwise. My main issue, as I mentioned, lies in its conflict resolution system, which from what I've heard sounds like something where I just need to define my goals like I'm Xanatos: even if I 'lose,' the surrender I offer gets me what I really wanted.


Example?
In practice, i don't see this. Usually, the conflict goals are obvious and a natural extension of what's going on - it's not like there's some lengthy discussion/negotiation of goals before a Conflict is entered. Also, neither side has to accept a Concession, so that type of gaming of the system has a natural counter in the fact that there's almost always human judgement happening somewhere.

Plus, if their goals aren't what they want, then on a success, they get their stated goals anyway, so maybe they didn't get what they actually wanted.

Again, this is one of those situations where I can see where the concern comes about in theory, but in practice it's never actually been an issue in any game that I've been part of, on either side of the table.

I could see some players trying this, but frankly Fate is a bad system for the type of player that looks for rules holes to abuse.


Based on how those who play it discuss it on their forums, FFG's SW is the poster child for "Xanatos pileup" manipulation of conflict-based dice, with pre-roll grubbing for complications and advantages on the rolls to get just the right odds vs outcome balance and all sorts of negotiating over what's going on and finally narrating the results of the dice.

[exelsisxax]

Ok. I'll throw in an example. Houses of the Blooded. This game's very far into the realm of narr play, and uses dice to resolve questions all the time. To the point where it's not actually generally about task resolution, but about fact resolution. To the point of literally being "I search the duke's house." and provided you succeed you can state one fact. Up to and including "I find hidden documents." (If you're willing to risk a higher likelyhood of failure you can add more facts like) "I find hidden documents, tying the duke to the queen". The advantage of this is letting everyone steer the narrative, but with a pacing and timing and distribution system that makes it not quite a free for all.

I personally find such a system awful, but that's just not my type of game. I'm with max_killjoy on narrative causality, but that's not the main problem.

The thing i really hate is when the dice themselves are supposed to be narrative. In your example, the dice themselves are still deterministic, merely what they determine happens to be narrative rather than real causality. Star wars (saga edition?) has the dice roll itself attempt to determine the outcome narratively. You roll dice, which resolves literally nothing, and then the DM interprets the dice and decides what it means. And that's in addition to even figuring out what the hell kind of dice you actually roll, and how many. I cannot find a single advantage of such a system. It's like rolling to determine if the duke and queen are associated, if there is evidence, finding the evidence, and if you get caught all at once and nobody knows what any result actually means until the DM invents the outcome.

[kyoryu]

On the other hand, if you are in the dwarven bar trying to convince the dwarves to invest in your questionable business venture, and you want to spend a FP to get a bonus to your roll to convince them, it could go something like this:

GM: (after comparing social skill rolls) "The dwarf seems pretty skeptical. It's a risky idea, and even if the rewards are potentially high, she hasn't gotten to where she is by taking unnecessary risks."

PC: "Darn. Okay wait, these dwarves are in a gang war with the elves right now, right? I'll casually mention that the elves have already expressed interest, but that I'd rather work with dwarves because everyone knows how much more trustworthy they are. But, if the dwarves aren't interested in this great opportunity, I'm sure the elves will be happy to reap the benefits..."

GM: "All right, and you're spending a FP on the 'Turf War' aspect to add +2 to that last roll? Brilliant! She's definitely paying attention now, and the dwarves around the bar are muttering. Seems she's willing to give you some money after all..."

And the thing I like about this is that it tends to create interesting moments, as various invocations (and the in-world expression of them) create a neat ebb and flow of an action.



So they talked me into trying Spirit of the Century, a game that was all about the story, and they assumed it would be a perfect fit for me. I absolutely hated it and felt it was the worst game I had ever played. Everything was inconsistent and in flux, and the GM constantly wanted me to break character to do his job and flesh out the world for him. Nothing had concrete details for me to hold on to, either with my character or in the external world.

Now, I went online and tried to voice my dissatisfaction on this and other forums, but didn't have the words. I tried to explain it saying that I was apparently more moderate and that "4E was focusing on the G part of RPG while Spirit of the Century was focusing on the RP part, and I needed the whole game." This wasn't accurate to my problem, but it was the best I could come to voicing it.

No, the problem is that you don't like games where players are expected to engage in during-game setting creation.

That's a very easy and straightforward preference.

It's a weird tic I find with some people where they can't just say the thing they like/don't like, but have to attach it to some principle. Almost like they have to justify their preference.

As far as the concrete details goes... well, anything established should be fairly concrete.

(FWIW, I play Fate in a fairly low player-authorship mode).



This was a huge revelation for me, and really expanded my ability to judge and identify games.

Of course, the three fold model doesn't explain everything either.

It explains very little. In this case, you had one thing that is common in "narrative" games (that has little to do with the GNS definition of narrative), and by then saying "I don't like narrative games" you end up getting splash damage on a whole crapload of unrelated concepts.

I'd much rather hear "I don't like, as a player, being expected to make up setting details, especially on the fly" than "I don't like narrative games".

One is specific, and immediately lets me know if someone is a good fit or not for the game I have in mind. The other is vague and might cause me to think there's a good match when there's not, or vice versa.


For example, in this very thread people are equating "rules heavy" with simulationist and "combat intensive" with gamist, and although there is some correlation between the two they are not the same thing and it is useful to be able to separate them.

Absolutely, for instance, "rules heavy" is mostly associated with simulationist games - yet Burning Wheel is generally considered "narrative" and is definitely in the rules-heavy camp. And the subsystems are incredibly "gamist".

Tags > categorization


Based on how those who play it discuss it on their forums, FFG's SW is the poster child for "Xanatos pileup" manipulation of conflict-based dice, with pre-roll grubbing for complications and advantages on the rolls to get just the right odds vs outcome balance and all sorts of negotiating over what's going on and finally narrating the results of the dice.

Haven't played it - do you have a link to some particularly illuminating discussions?

All I can say is that type of play would be a definite turnoff to me, and I haven't really found it in the "narrative" games that I play. Which in no way disputes your experiences.

[Steel Mirror]

The thing i really hate is when the dice themselves are supposed to be narrative. In your example, the dice themselves are still deterministic, merely what they determine happens to be narrative rather than real causality. Star wars (saga edition?) has the dice roll itself attempt to determine the outcome narratively. You roll dice, which resolves literally nothing, and then the DM interprets the dice and decides what it means.I haven't played the game, but I'm pretty sure you are talking about the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG, not Saga edition which was basically a riff on the 3.x system made for Star Wars (it's called the Saga Edition because it was preceded by Star Wars d20, which was a substantially different game that also used the 3.x system as a basic chassis).

The Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) Star Wars is the one with all the funky dice that decide narrative elements. I admit that it sounds pretty cool to me, but I've never played it and don't know the rules at all so I couldn't possibly defend or comment on it.

[flond]

Well, Fantasy Flight games does determine success and failure. It just uses multiple axis for this. Most systems with negotiation do. So you know you succeeded or failed, you just also get some fringe benefits every time you roll (or fringe hindrances). Which is good if you want a situation where things are snowballing and flailing like...you know the star wars movies. Where things are constantly in motion, beyond the intents of the characters.

[exelsisxax]

I haven't played the game, but I'm pretty sure you are talking about the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG, not Saga edition which was basically a riff on the 3.x system made for Star Wars (it's called the Saga Edition because it was preceded by Star Wars d20, which was a substantially different game that also used the 3.x system as a basic chassis).

The Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) Star Wars is the one with all the funky dice that decide narrative elements. I admit that it sounds pretty cool to me, but I've never played it and don't know the rules at all so I couldn't possibly defend or comment on it.

Yes, that's the one. Dice with weird symbols and when you roll them it means nothing because it's up to the DM to make up every outcome anyway. It's like those other narrativist games, except the DM simply decides everything that occurs and the players have no narrative power. Or like a "simulationist" game, except literally every roll is resolved via DM fiat. Everything about it is bad in my experience.

[obryn]

Yes, that's the one. Dice with weird symbols and when you roll them it means nothing because it's up to the DM to make up every outcome anyway. It's like those other narrativist games, except the DM simply decides everything that occurs and the players have no narrative power. Or like a "simulationist" game, except literally every roll is resolved via DM fiat. Everything about it is bad in my experience.
This is not true in the least.

e: I mean, for real, it's fine not to like something but you're either reporting an incredibly bad play experience as the actual game, or you're just plain wrong.

You make a dice pool based on your skill and the circumstances. If you have more Successes than Failures, you win. There may also be advantages, complications, etc. These extra degrees of success or failure, extra complications, extra advantages, etc. cannot overturn your basic success or failure - only color it.

http://i.imgur.com/Wis5XQ8.png

[flond]

Yes, that's the one. Dice with weird symbols and when you roll them it means nothing because it's up to the DM to make up every outcome anyway. It's like those other narrativist games, except the DM simply decides everything that occurs and the players have no narrative power. Or like a "simulationist" game, except literally every roll is resolved via DM fiat. Everything about it is bad in my experience.

That's uh...not true.

When you do something you roll dice verses the gm. The number of success symbols determine if you succeed.

There are ALSO advantage symbols which can be spent for a set list of things OR can be negotiated for non-mechanical benefits.

The key point here is this tends to be negotiated, not decided by one sided fiat, AND that there's a list of standard ideas to fall back on.

[DoomHat]

I personally find such a system awful, but that's just not my type of game. I'm with max_killjoy on narrative causality, but that's not the main problem.

The thing i really hate is when the dice themselves are supposed to be narrative. In your example, the dice themselves are still deterministic, merely what they determine happens to be narrative rather than real causality. Star wars (saga edition?) has the dice roll itself attempt to determine the outcome narratively. You roll dice, which resolves literally nothing, and then the DM interprets the dice and decides what it means. And that's in addition to even figuring out what the hell kind of dice you actually roll, and how many. I cannot find a single advantage of such a system. It's like rolling to determine if the duke and queen are associated, if there is evidence, finding the evidence, and if you get caught all at once and nobody knows what any result actually means until the DM invents the outcome.

I think you misunderstand. The huge difference and advantage is that power is taken out of the DMs hands and put into the player's.
Win the roll, the player declares something to be true (so long as it doesn't contradict something previously established).
Lose the roll, the DM declares what's what (again, so long as it makes sense based on what we know so far).
If there's no tension between those to things, IE, what the player proposes and DM might prefer, then there's no roll.

Isn't not just another way for the DM's whim to rule the day, it's a division and decentralization of authority.

[kyoryu]

Yes, that's the one. Dice with weird symbols and when you roll them it means nothing because it's up to the DM to make up every outcome anyway. It's like those other narrativist games, except the DM simply decides everything that occurs and the players have no narrative power. Or like a "simulationist" game, except literally every roll is resolved via DM fiat. Everything about it is bad in my experience.


This is not true in the least.

It.... kind of is true, in a way.

The argument here is the amount of fiat. Unlike games that tell you the result on a success or a failure, a lot of rules light games don't really give you results, they more constrain them. Like you have a "success" or a "failure" without any indication of what that means, leaving the definition of those terms to some level of human judgement.

Some people just don't like that, and prefer to have results like "the grenade lands in this hex because the rules say so". That's a fairly common preference, really.

[exelsisxax]

"success" doesn't mean much when your goal is not achieved because you rolled a net despair and threat. None of you have actually countered the issue: the DM can fudge in whatever he wants, almost entirely irrespective of what the roll is. All those accessory conditions are causing that problem, not assuaging it. A DM has to consciously mind not forcing everything the way he wants it because so much is under DM adjudication. If the DM wrote something in prep where the bad guy escapes, a DM can accidentally let him escape even after craptons of successes by the players. It would be like playing D&D, except the DM could, honestly, make a BBEG unkillable.

[Talakeal]

And the thing I like about this is that it tends to create interesting moments, as various invocations (and the in-world expression of them) create a neat ebb and flow of an action.



No, the problem is that you don't like games where players are expected to engage in during-game setting creation.

That's a very easy and straightforward preference.

It's a weird tic I find with some people where they can't just say the thing they like/don't like, but have to attach it to some principle. Almost like they have to justify their preference.

As far as the concrete details goes... well, anything established should be fairly concrete.

(FWIW, I play Fate in a fairly low player-authorship mode).



It explains very little. In this case, you had one thing that is common in "narrative" games (that has little to do with the GNS definition of narrative), and by then saying "I don't like narrative games" you end up getting splash damage on a whole crapload of unrelated concepts.

I'd much rather hear "I don't like, as a player, being expected to make up setting details, especially on the fly" than "I don't like narrative games".

One is specific, and immediately lets me know if someone is a good fit or not for the game I have in mind. The other is vague and might cause me to think there's a good match when there's not, or vice versa.



Absolutely, for instance, "rules heavy" is mostly associated with simulationist games - yet Burning Wheel is generally considered "narrative" and is definitely in the rules-heavy camp. And the subsystems are incredibly "gamist".

Tags > categorization



Haven't played it - do you have a link to some particularly illuminating discussions?

All I can say is that type of play would be a definite turnoff to me, and I haven't really found it in the "narrative" games that I play. Which in no way disputes your experiences.

Its actually more the lack of simulation than the presence of narration.

So let me ask you a question; if you think that narrative is a useless label, why is it that some games get labeled as such? Do you not think works as short-hand for "Have X, Y, and Z" elements which I do / do not like? If there aren't common elements which people label as "narrative" then why do you care if people say they don't like narrative games, as that is a meaningless statement as the games they classify as narrative and thus play / dismiss won't be the same ones that you do, so why take offense at it?

[flond]

Its actually more the lack of simulation than the presence of narration.

So let me ask you a question; if you think that narrative is a useless label, why is it that some games get labeled as such? Do you not think works as short-hand for "Have X, Y, and Z" elements which I do / do not like? If there aren't common elements which people label as "narrative" then why do you care if people say they don't like narrative games, as that is a meaningless statement as the games they classify as narrative and thus play / dismiss won't be the same ones that you do, so why take offense at it?

In fairness, Narrative can be applicable as a school or brand without GNS being a good theory. Thus a Narrative game is "a game having features related to the school of narrativeism which was born on the online community the Forge."

[Knaight]

"success" doesn't mean much when your goal is not achieved because you rolled a net despair and threat. None of you have actually countered the issue: the DM can fudge in whatever he wants, almost entirely irrespective of what the roll is. All those accessory conditions are causing that problem, not assuaging it. A DM has to consciously mind not forcing everything the way he wants it because so much is under DM adjudication. If the DM wrote something in prep where the bad guy escapes, a DM can accidentally let him escape even after craptons of successes by the players. It would be like playing D&D, except the DM could, honestly, make a BBEG unkillable.

That's not how it works. I'm not a fan of the system by any means*, but the success means that you did succeed in your task, assuming it isn't canceled. There's also bad things that happen, but if there isn't enough to cancel the successes then they have to be peripheral.

*The concept is interesting, but I've seen it work much better elsewhere,

[exelsisxax]

That's not how it works. I'm not a fan of the system by any means*, but the success means that you did succeed in your task, assuming it isn't canceled. There's also bad things that happen, but if there isn't enough to cancel the successes then they have to be peripheral.

*The concept is interesting, but I've seen it work much better elsewhere,

Alright, so here's where the long arguments about what "success" means. Because depending on your definition, you will interpret the dice vastly different than other people, which is part of the problem. But before that, you even have to qualify the difficulty of achieving that task, which is just as subjective as in other systems, but also randomized and nonlinear. So you spend 10 minutes taking a turn in a game that's supposed to be fast-paced, and then you look at the roll and you don't even know what you got unless you know your DM very well.

And my friend that likes this system thinks it's "fast-paced". >:(

[Max_Killjoy]

In fairness, Narrative can be applicable as a school or brand without GNS being a good theory. Thus a Narrative game is "a game having features related to the school of narrativeism which was born on the online community the Forge."

We've found in this thread that it's a much broader term than that, and that there are those who consider their style, focus, or preferred systems "narrative", who might even be offended to be linked to that particular subschool of "narrativism".

[kyoryu]

Its actually more the lack of simulation than the presence of narration.

So, like, what does this mean? I literally have no idea of what actual thing that occurs at a table that you might not like based on this. Can you give me an example? Like, what might a GM and player be saying that causes this problem for you?

I literally am trying to understand.


So let me ask you a question; if you think that narrative is a useless label, why is it that some games get labeled as such? Do you not think works as short-hand for "Have X, Y, and Z" elements which I do / do not like? If there aren't common elements which people label as "narrative" then why do you care if people say they don't like narrative games, as that is a meaningless statement as the games they classify as narrative and thus play / dismiss won't be the same ones that you do, so why take offense at it?

Because it's meaningless. It's not useful for actually talking about things. It's useful for dividing people into camps and entrenching. It's almost guaranteed that when person A says they have a preference for/against narrative games, that what they have in mind is something totally different than when person B says it.

Keep in mind, I'd have the same reaction to people saying they don't like simulationist games.

It's perhaps *more* distinct for me with "narrative" because of the origin of the term, and how many people use it inaccurately (based on the original definition).

Apocalypse World, Fate, and Fiasco would all be considered "narrative" by some people. They have almost nothing in common.

So I dislike the statement not because people don't like the same games I like - that would be silly. I dislike the statement because it makes discussion *harder*.


We've found in this thread that it's a much broader term than that, and that there are those who consider their style, focus, or preferred systems "narrative", who might even be offended to be linked to that particular subschool of "narrativism".

This is my core issue with the term. I could say I like narrative games, and someone else could say they don't, and yet we could actually like the same stinking games.

[Knaight]

Alright, so here's where the long arguments about what "success" means. Because depending on your definition, you will interpret the dice vastly different than other people, which is part of the problem. But before that, you even have to qualify the difficulty of achieving that task, which is just as subjective as in other systems, but also randomized and nonlinear. So you spend 10 minutes taking a turn in a game that's supposed to be fast-paced, and then you look at the roll and you don't even know what you got unless you know your DM very well.

And my friend that likes this system thinks it's "fast-paced". >:(

I wouldn't call it fast paced, but the games involved in setting that standard for me are very quick to run. With that said, it doesn't need to end up anywhere near 10 minutes a turn.

[kyoryu]

More specifically, my hackles get raised frequently because I've been involved in too many of the following conversations:

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's a narrative game and thus <totally untrue statement>"
Me: "Um, no. Really. That's not a rule. Here's the rules proof of the exact opposite."
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <untrue statement>"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's a narrative game and thus <thing that is sometimes true, but not necessarily, and often found in other games as well>"
Me: "Uh, that happens sometimes, but not really any more than other games, in my opinion, and isn't actually necessary."
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <actually unnecessary thing>"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's narrative and thus <vaguely stated position of principle>"
Me: "Um, what? Because it seems like <traditional game> also does that?"
Person: "NO, TRADITIONAL GAME IS GOOD AND IT'S DOING SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT EVEN THOUGH THEY LOOK THE SAME"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's narrative and thus <assumption/exaggeration of how play may work out from brief or partial readthrough>"
Me: "Well, I can see how you might get that idea, but really, it's <a very small part of the game/doesn't really happen in practice>"
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <assumption/exaggeration>"

It gets old. People that don't play narrative games have a lot of assumptions, many completely inaccurate, about what "narrative" games are. And there's as much variety between them as there are in traditional games.

I mean, imagine how most people here would react if I said D&D 3.x was a terrible system because you were totally locked into a single character concept from the beginning of character creation and could never swerve. They'd (rightfully) go ballistic, because it's demonstrably false and is based on false assumptions from other versions of D&D.

I have not *once* encountered someone saying that they don't like narrative games and then follow it up with a description that does anything near match my experience. And I've heard the *exact same* issue from friends of mine.

[obryn]

Alright, so here's where the long arguments about what "success" means. Because depending on your definition, you will interpret the dice vastly different than other people, which is part of the problem. But before that, you even have to qualify the difficulty of achieving that task, which is just as subjective as in other systems, but also randomized and nonlinear. So you spend 10 minutes taking a turn in a game that's supposed to be fast-paced, and then you look at the roll and you don't even know what you got unless you know your DM very well.

And my friend that likes this system thinks it's "fast-paced". >:(
"Success" means you succeeded at the core task at hand, whatever that might be. Complications are peripheral to that core success.

It seems overly complex for minimal benefit, to me, but that's not really arguable.

Like - if your goal is "hack through security", success means you do. Full stop. A complication may mean you were detected. Or you deactivated too much security. A triumph might mean you learned a secret in the process.

(I specifically don't like how every roll might have complications or advantages, but that's a different topic. It's too frequent, for me, and places too much on the GM.)

[Max_Killjoy]

More specifically, my hackles get raised frequently because I've been involved in too many of the following conversations:

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's a narrative game and thus <totally untrue statement>"
Me: "Um, no. Really. That's not a rule. Here's the rules proof of the exact opposite."
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <untrue statement>"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's a narrative game and thus <thing that is sometimes true, but not necessarily, and often found in other games as well>"
Me: "Uh, that happens sometimes, but not really any more than other games, in my opinion, and isn't actually necessary."
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <actually unnecessary thing>"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's narrative and thus <vaguely stated position of principle>"
Me: "Um, what? Because it seems like <traditional game> also does that?"
Person: "NO, TRADITIONAL GAME IS GOOD AND IT'S DOING SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT EVEN THOUGH THEY LOOK THE SAME"

Person: "I don't like <game> because it's narrative and thus <assumption/exaggeration of how play may work out from brief or partial readthrough>"
Me: "Well, I can see how you might get that idea, but really, it's <a very small part of the game/doesn't really happen in practice>"
Person: "NO IT'S A NARRATIVE GAME AND THUS BAD BECAUSE <assumption/exaggeration>"

It gets old. People that don't play narrative games have a lot of assumptions, many completely inaccurate, about what "narrative" games are. And there's as much variety between them as there are in traditional games.

I mean, imagine how most people here would react if I said D&D 3.x was a terrible system because you were totally locked into a single character concept from the beginning of character creation and could never swerve. They'd (rightfully) go ballistic, because it's demonstrably false and is based on false assumptions from other versions of D&D.

I have not *once* encountered someone saying that they don't like narrative games and then follow it up with a description that does anything near match my experience. And I've heard the *exact same* issue from friends of mine.


I hope I've been able to adjust my understanding of what's going on as new information has been presented, once we got the terminology and "different schools" issues out in the open.

[kyoryu]

I hope I've been able to adjust my understanding of what's going on as new information has been presented, once we got the terminology and "different schools" issues out in the open.

Absolutely.

I think a few of those conversations happened earlier in the thread, but I give you utmost credit for adapting to new information - IOW, you didn't persist in engaging in the third of those lines.

That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but it's really not - it's quite sincere. Being willing to change understanding based on new information is *not*, sadly, a common thing in this hobby :(

[Hawkstar]

Alright, so here's where the long arguments about what "success" means. Because depending on your definition, you will interpret the dice vastly different than other people, which is part of the problem. But before that, you even have to qualify the difficulty of achieving that task, which is just as subjective as in other systems, but also randomized and nonlinear. So you spend 10 minutes taking a turn in a game that's supposed to be fast-paced, and then you look at the roll and you don't even know what you got unless you know your DM very well.

And my friend that likes this system thinks it's "fast-paced". >:(
And how is this different from interpreting a roll of 15 in D&D, or rolling four successes and a glitch in Shadowrun?
The symbols have meaning.

[Koo Rehtorb]

And how is this different from interpreting a roll of 15 in D&D, or rolling four successes and a glitch in Shadowrun?
The symbols have meaning.

I like FFG Star Wars, but this isn't quite fair. Pretty much everything is a binary result with a target number in D&D.

Successes and failures are pretty straightforward but advantage, threat, despair and triumph explicitly have a wide range of various effects you can do with them. It's not the same thing at all.

[Satinavian]

It gets old. People that don't play narrative games have a lot of assumptions, many completely inaccurate, about what "narrative" games are. And there's as much variety between them as there are in traditional games.Yes, there is a lot of variety.

But there are also common things.


Narrative games have mechanisms to achieve a certain goals. Thing a lot of players found difficult to do in traditional games. Those goals revolve mainly around two things :

1. Enforce genre expectations

2. Make sure that the result feels more like a good stories. One of those in the many books or novels that inspired roleplayers to start the hobby.

The first one is something that can be achieved in traditional games as well. But then rule design has to aim for the genre from the beginning and rule designers have to bake genre conventions in. Universal systems are traditionally bad at it and most other traditional games did not do a good job with it either

The second one is something traditional games can't do. Dice and rules determining outcome of actions without taking the flow of the story into account don't produce results that fit tension arcs. Players trying to achieve the goals of their characters don't take stupid risks when the story structure would need an episode of hybris and fall. They also don't make a plan that will fail at the second last stand and one that is smart and suceed at the really last stand. And there are several extensive lists about the stuff that smart or even remotely sensible antagonists or evil overlords should never do comprised of cringeworthy contrievances in movies and novels. Thinks that NPCs mostly never would do if layed realisticly.
If you play a traditional game, you won't get a novel story. People tried to fix that of course and the answer was railroading. But telling stories via railroading is not really that much fun.
And here come the narrative games, baking all those thing into rules. There is a lot of stuff done with vices and weaknesses coming into play at dramatic moments (both for heroes who need a fall and for villians who need a reason to loose). There is a lot of stuff that makes it easier for protagonists and antagonists to survive until an appropriate moment come. There are rules that make Characters work completely differend depending on dramatic role instead of experience or power level. There are rules that make sure during a climax or otherwise important resolution scene the world works slightly different than otherwise. There are rules that make sure, resolved conflicts get replaced by new conflicts and the flow of action, tension and the aamount of neccessary details is controlled firmly by the group regardless how activities play out.
And all the former railroading stuff is still possible, but now often restricted and fairer and players have their part in it too.


Yes, different narrative games are different. They concentrate on different aspects of the problem and even for the same aspect they try different solutions. And most have a lot of other rules that are not really narrative per se and could be in traditional games. And of course even those traditional parts of the games differ as wildly as traditional games themself.



But if you reject the goals that narrative games try to achieve, you probably won't have a lot of fun with them. And that is why "I don't like narrative games" is not a useless statement.



Yes, GNS is has many problems. The most misunderstood part is imho the SIM-part which in many descriptions focusses so much on a single character that it overlaps with actor stance but for some people is understood as detailed bean counting and for even other people includes world simulation.
The next big problem is the handling of mixing or better the utter lack of it and the idea that focussing on one letter rules wise somehow makes better games.
And the third problem is that the Forge seems to have mostly bothered to try to make good narrative mechanics games but offered very little for the G and S part as rule design innovations go and the theoretical exploration here remains shallow too.

But it is still useful. It does explain many rule design conflicts and player interest conflicts. It does even have hints resolving those. It explaines how many rules can achieve certain goals and other rules can't. Just throw away all this "mixing is bad" sentiment and the striving for pure games. And don't assume that all about rule design can be explained in a single small framework.


And yes, there are many narrative rules out there that are older than GNS or Forge. The really old games are rarely "pure" design-wise in any way. And only very view narrative games approach that either. The closest one i ever have played was Engel (Arcana, obv. not the D20 version) which is basically "Whenever you do something you draw a tarot card which gives you an inspirational word and a binary indication if something is good or bad and you tell what happens. The GM does it likewise". This degree is not that common and more mixed approaches seem to be more successful.

[exelsisxax]

"Success" means you succeeded at the core task at hand, whatever that might be. Complications are peripheral to that core success.

It seems overly complex for minimal benefit, to me, but that's not really arguable.

Like - if your goal is "hack through security", success means you do. Full stop. A complication may mean you were detected. Or you deactivated too much security. A triumph might mean you learned a secret in the process.

(I specifically don't like how every roll might have complications or advantages, but that's a different topic. It's too frequent, for me, and places too much on the GM.)

And if your goal is instead "hack security on this door"? or "hack security for [entire location]"? You have to figure out how difficult each of those things should be, and then you still haven't qualified what success is. Hack through security might get you anywhere from having access to the enemy transmissions(that they're going on, not even let you hear them yet) to giving you total and complete control of all networked systems. That leaves almost everything up to the DM's whim, because "success" has no precise meaning in the system.


And how is this different from interpreting a roll of 15 in D&D, or rolling four successes and a glitch in Shadowrun?
The symbols have meaning.

D&D happens to be binary, other games happen to be degree-of-sucess based. FFG SW has like 6 different symbols that can all be interpreted in different ways by as many people as are at the table and themselves resolve nothing. So it's different in every way except the dice you roll have the same shapes.

[obryn]

And if your goal is instead "hack security on this door"? or "hack security for [entire location]"? You have to figure out how difficult each of those things should be, and then you still haven't qualified what success is. Hack through security might get you anywhere from having access to the enemy transmissions(that they're going on, not even let you hear them yet) to giving you total and complete control of all networked systems. That leaves almost everything up to the DM's whim, because "success" has no precise meaning in the system.
You already mentioned how you do this - you adjust the difficulty appropriately. Setting difficulties is bog-standard GMing, and a major part of the GM's duties in nearly every RPG on the planet.

And yes - you do know what success is. It's the thing the character was primarily trying to achieve. In either of those cases, hacking security for a door, or hacking for an entire floor.

There is, indeed, an element of both player and DM interpretation around the margins. But that's still based on what's actually on those dice, which is in turn based on the difficulty of the task and the character's skills. The key is that those interpretations cannot steal away the successful completion of their goal. It can make life complicated, depending on the dice - but if you wanted the door open and you succeed, that door is open.

[Beleriphon]

There is, indeed, an element of both player and DM interpretation around the margins. But that's still based on what's actually on those dice, which is in turn based on the difficulty of the task and the character's skills. The key is that those interpretations cannot steal away the successful completion of their goal. It can make life complicated, depending on the dice - but if you wanted the door open and you succeed, that door is open.

Right, so the end result could be you open the door, that's it. You open the door, and now every stormtrooper on the level knows you're here. You open the door, and learn the master passcode for all of the doors on this level. Or the worst result you open don't open the door, and Darth Vader is now chasing you.

In many ways FFG Star Wars is probably best modeled by looking at the movies and seeing how different stuff in the movies would look in the game. Which is the whole point of the game, emulating how the movies work. That's good for some people, and not good for others. I'll stick to FATE personally since FFG isn't my thing for a variety of reasons. The specific dice mechanics being one of them (overly complicated for minimal gain,as far as I'm concerned), but the idea of how they work isn't my issue.

[exelsisxax]

You already mentioned how you do this - you adjust the difficulty appropriately. Setting difficulties is bog-standard GMing, and a major part of the GM's duties in nearly every RPG on the planet.

And yes - you do know what success is. It's the thing the character was primarily trying to achieve. In either of those cases, hacking security for a door, or hacking for an entire floor.

There is, indeed, an element of both player and DM interpretation around the margins. But that's still based on what's actually on those dice, which is in turn based on the difficulty of the task and the character's skills. The key is that those interpretations cannot steal away the successful completion of their goal. It can make life complicated, depending on the dice - but if you wanted the door open and you succeed, that door is open.

No, i don't know what success is unless I state the thing i'm trying to achieve with perfect legalese. But when you do that, negative consequences stop having anything approaching rational causes. If you say that success in your action is purely determined by having net successes, then just hedge against negative consequence and they can't happen. "hack the door" becomes "hack the door, covertly and without alerting any security or bystanders". You can add disadvantage dice, but it doesn't matter because no results except the successes/failures do anything reasonable. The DM can't do anything negative except to either cause that action to fail or engage in DM fiats.

Most RPGs don't put that kind of burden on a DM, because rolls are actually deterministic of something and can't be qualified endlessly in order to game the system. Tacking a penalty onto an acrobatics roll is nowhere near the same as having to figure out what the hell it means if a player "successfully" hacked a security system, and also rolled 2 despair.

[obryn]

No, i don't know what success is unless I state the thing i'm trying to achieve with perfect legalese. But when you do that, negative consequences stop having anything approaching rational causes. If you say that success in your action is purely determined by having net successes, then just hedge against negative consequence and they can't happen. "hack the door" becomes "hack the door, covertly and without alerting any security or bystanders". You can add disadvantage dice, but it doesn't matter because no results except the successes/failures do anything reasonable. The DM can't do anything negative except to either cause that action to fail or engage in DM fiats.

Most RPGs don't put that kind of burden on a DM, because rolls are actually deterministic of something and can't be qualified endlessly in order to game the system. Tacking a penalty onto an acrobatics roll is nowhere near the same as having to figure out what the hell it means if a player "successfully" hacked a security system, and also rolled 2 despair.
If you're approaching the game like middle-schoolers carefully wording out a Wish, it's probably not the right game for you. And that's okay. :smallsmile: The way you avoid complications is by minimizing the number of risky dice you roll, not by being overly legalistic. If you're not prepared for your life to get interesting when you're doing risky things, you're approaching the game like D&D, not like Star Wars.

I can't disagree with the added burden on the GM. I even alluded to that upthread a bit, and it's my main issue with other games such as Dungeon World - a game I otherwise love and have learned a lot from. But that's a different criticism.

[kyoryu]

Yes, there is a lot of variety.

But there are also common things.

Of course there are.

The problem is that, in my experience, nobody is talking aout those things when they say "I don't like narrative games".

Here's the commonalities (not 100%) that I've seen with narrative games - and keep in mind, please, that I play a bunch of both traditional and "narrative" games. I also don't claim that any of these are necessarily exclusive to "narrative" games, just that they're the biggest commonalities I see.

1) Focus on treating the world as an imaginary world rather than a collection of widgets. Call this "fiction first" (meaning, say what you do in terms of the imaginary world, then figure out how to resolve it) if you want. But the rules widgets used are generally considered a follower to the declaration of what your character is doing, rather than the description of what you're doing being used as a decorator on the rules widget.

2) Focus on the PCs as protagonists, not just "random Joes" (though they could be random Joes that become protagonists). Though, to be fair, this has been pretty well teh standard model in RPGs since the mid 80s.

3a) A lack of emphasis on a "tactical combat model". There's just not a lot of wargaming roots left in "narrative games" - even combats are usually treated just like other skills.
3b) A high level of emphasis on the "story-like" parts of the game - that is, the non-combat bits.

4) A lack of emphasis on character advancement.

Of course, part of the problem is that "narrative" is a GNS term, and is almost never used in the way it was defined by GNS. By GNS terms "enforcing genre" is a *sim* quality, not narrative. Narrative is about exploration of theme. Period. Simulating a genre is simulation, and so falls under "S".

My list above is based on common usage of the term. It is pretty inaccurate from an Edwards-ian viewpoint.


2. Make sure that the result feels more like a good stories. One of those in the many books or novels that inspired roleplayers to start the hobby.

I really don't think that any narrative gamers I know claim that their games make good stories.


The second one is something traditional games can't do. Dice and rules determining outcome of actions without taking the flow of the story into account don't produce results that fit tension arcs.

Strangely, I don't play any games that really do that either.


Players trying to achieve the goals of their characters don't take stupid risks when the story structure would need an episode of hybris and fall.

No, but a number of games do account for character


They also don't make a plan that will fail at the second last stand and one that is smart and suceed at the really last stand. And there are several extensive lists about the stuff that smart or even remotely sensible antagonists or evil overlords should never do comprised of cringeworthy contrievances in movies and novels. Thinks that NPCs mostly never would do if layed realisticly.

I... haven't seen any game that mechanically encourages the evil overlord's list, or that encourages you to fail at "the second last stand". What are these games you're talking about?

I mean, the most popular "narrative" game is probably Apocalypse World (and its variants), which has like none of the stuff you're talking about. The other popular one is Fate, which can arguably said to have the "weakness at dramatic moments" bit, but that's mostly it.


But if you reject the goals that narrative games try to achieve, you probably won't have a lot of fun with them. And that is why "I don't like narrative games" is not a useless statement.

It is not a useless statement *if everyone agrees on what narrative means*. In practice, they don't. In practice, your list of things narrative games do does not match my experience with them.


Yes, GNS is has many problems. The most misunderstood part is imho the SIM-part which in many descriptions focusses so much on a single character that it overlaps with actor stance but for some people is understood as detailed bean counting and for even other people includes world simulation.

And, per GNS theory itself, *includes genre simulation*.


The next big problem is the handling of mixing or better the utter lack of it and the idea that focussing on one letter rules wise somehow makes better games.
And the third problem is that the Forge seems to have mostly bothered to try to make good narrative mechanics games but offered very little for the G and S part as rule design innovations go and the theoretical exploration here remains shallow too.

Agreed on that. But I think the biggest problem with GNS is that it was designed with an agenda - to create "narrative" (by RE definition) games, a type of game which didn't really exist previously. He promoted it to 1/3 of the available gaming space because it was what he liked. To an outsider, it looks *very* much like "I'm going to make a theory that objectively proves my preferences". Sadly, those "theories" usually become very popular, because they resonate with people that share that preference.


But it is still useful. It does explain many rule design conflicts and player interest conflicts. It does even have hints resolving those. It explaines how many rules can achieve certain goals and other rules can't. Just throw away all this "mixing is bad" sentiment and the striving for pure games. And don't assume that all about rule design can be explained in a single small framework.

"Mixing is bad" is the *core idea* of GNS. That's like saying opera is good if you get rid of the singing.

Use GDS instead. It predates GNS, carries the goodness that people find in GNS without the baggage.

[Max_Killjoy]

If you're approaching the game like middle-schoolers carefully wording out a Wish, it's probably not the right game for you. And that's okay. :smallsmile: The way you avoid complications is by minimizing the number of risky dice you roll, not by being overly legalistic. If you're not prepared for your life to get interesting when you're doing risky things, you're approaching the game like D&D, not like Star Wars.

I can't disagree with the added burden on the GM. I even alluded to that upthread a bit, and it's my main issue with other games such as Dungeon World - a game I otherwise love and have learned a lot from. But that's a different criticism.

My impression of how the special dice and all the complications and advantages and so on work out in practice, based on discussions in the game's forums, is closer to exelsisxax's.

I've been trying to find some good examples to link to, so far no luck.

[kyoryu]

My impression of how the special dice and all the complications and advantages and so on work out in practice, based on discussions in the game's forums, is closer to exelsisxax's.

I've been trying to find some good examples to link to, so far no luck.

Don't get me wrong - I don't doubt for a second that people *can* do that. And I don't doubt for a second that some people *do* do that.

I'm mostly saying that I think the correct answer to that is "hey, don't be a jerkface".

Rules like that assume a fair amount of everybody at the table acting in good faith. If you don't have that, they will fail. Which is, to be fair - a weakness. Those systems don't work well with people not acting in good faith.

Of course, I tend to equate "not acting in good faith" with "being a jerk", so it's not a practical weakness for me. It's almost a feature, as it points out those players earlier.

[obryn]

Here's an Actual Play one-shot of FFG Star Wars:
http://oneshotpodcast.com/podcasts/one-shot/25-star-wars-edge-of-the-empire/
http://oneshotpodcast.com/podcasts/one-shot/27-star-wars-edge-of-the-empire-part-2/
http://oneshotpodcast.com/podcasts/one-shot/28-star-wars-edge-of-the-empire-part-3/

It was extended into a long campaign:
http://oneshotpodcast.com/category/podcasts/campaign/campaign-podcast/


And.... If you want to see Fate Core in action, here you go.
http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/fate/atomic-robo/

Both One-Shot and Role Playing Public Radio are awesome ways to get a feel for the workings of a game system, btw. Both have an extensive log of 3-4 episode one-shots, for systems of all stripes.

http://oneshotpodcast.com/category/podcasts/one-shot/
http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/

[exelsisxax]

Don't get me wrong - I don't doubt for a second that people *can* do that. And I don't doubt for a second that some people *do* do that.

I'm mostly saying that I think the correct answer to that is "hey, don't be a jerkface".

Rules like that assume a fair amount of everybody at the table acting in good faith. If you don't have that, they will fail. Which is, to be fair - a weakness. Those systems don't work well with people not acting in good faith.

Of course, I tend to equate "not acting in good faith" with "being a jerk", so it's not a practical weakness for me. It's almost a feature, as it points out those players earlier.

It's not an issue of bad actors, it's that the system contains no precision and no examples to base rulings on. If the DM wants to give me a penalty on an acrobatics check, the pathfinder core rulebook has a chart of numerous conditions and environments with associated penalties. "icy is +5, but the metal beam is only slightly angled, so I'll put a +1 rather than +2 extra" is the same type of thing a SW DM when assigning disadvantage dice. But there's few rules to base it on(when interacting with the environment, at least).

And, again, success is what the DM thinks it is. If you do not clearly communicate your exact intentions, you can easily fail despite having many successes. An example:

P: "i try to hack security" -> figuring out what that roll even is happens, then is rolled
P: "net successes. I now open the flight bay doors..." (pretend additional symbols mean nothing)
DM: "wait, you don't have control of the security system. It just thinks you aren't intruders"
P: "but that wasn't the goal!"

everybody is acting "in good faith" and nobody wants to screw it up. But there's so damn much hand-waving while a lot of the system pretends that the dice are used for resolution that it basically doesn't work. In my experience, it came down to completely giving up any idea of character agency, because everything eventually wound up as an agreement between players and DM about how the game was supposed to do things and ignoring the dice to cut out the pointless middleman.

[kyoryu]

I can't disagree with the added burden on the GM. I even alluded to that upthread a bit, and it's my main issue with other games such as Dungeon World - a game I otherwise love and have learned a lot from. But that's a different criticism.

This I'll agree with. GMing Fate or AW or another PbtA takes a lot more out of me than GMing D&D does.


It's not an issue of bad actors, it's that the system contains no precision and no examples to base rulings on.

The bad actors thing was in response to the arguments about gaming the system by setting up your victory/loss conditions to always be beneficial, and to prevent actual complications.


And, again, success is what the DM thinks it is. If you do not clearly communicate your exact intentions, you can easily fail despite having many successes. An example:

P: "i try to hack security" -> figuring out what that roll even is happens, then is rolled
P: "net successes. I now open the flight bay doors..." (pretend additional symbols mean nothing)
DM: "wait, you don't have control of the security system. It just thinks you aren't intruders"
P: "but that wasn't the goal!"

So, there's this thing that's often used called "Task and Intent". The idea is you state what you're trying to accomplish and how you're trying to accomplish it. "I hack the system" is a task - it has no intent with it. A GM used to these systems will notice that and call that out, and ask what the PC is actually trying to accomplish. So, what the PC should have said is "I want to open the flight control doors by hacking the system", or the GM should have prompted them for it.

Which makes a lot of sense in many cases. Since actions are rarely entirely atomic, there's a lot of mini-decisions being made during "the action" that might be made differently depending on what the desired outcome is.

Even if the GM *doesn't* do this, it's fairly easy to recover from. "Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, you have control of the security system." And then the GM remembers to elucidate that a bit more next time, while erring on the side of the players in the moment. Or, if the "extra reach" is more egregious "yeah, that would have been a much higher difficulty. For now, the computer doesn't think you're intruders, but it'll take additional work to get control of the security system".

Again, the assumption is that everyone is willing to bend a little in these gray areas. That may not be true of all groups, and yeah, they're bad games for those groups.


everybody is acting "in good faith" and nobody wants to screw it up. But there's so damn much hand-waving while a lot of the system pretends that the dice are used for resolution that it basically doesn't work. In my experience, it came down to completely giving up any idea of character agency, because everything eventually wound up as an agreement between players and DM about how the game was supposed to do things and ignoring the dice to cut out the pointless middleman.

This is completely the polar opposite of my experience. I mean, like, I have *never* seen that be an issue. I've only had a few "that's not what I meant!" issues and those were resolved incredibly quickly. I've had far more rules arguments in rules-heavy games. Though, rigorously applying Intent & Task probably helped. This doesn't in any way mean that I'm disputing your experience, to be clear. You had the experiences you've had.

(And, again, the 'acting in good faith' was about the stated goals of a conflict/etc., not general task resolution)

[Max_Killjoy]

Of course there are.

The problem is that, in my experience, nobody is talking aout those things when they say "I don't like narrative games".

Here's the commonalities (not 100%) that I've seen with narrative games - and keep in mind, please, that I play a bunch of both traditional and "narrative" games. I also don't claim that any of these are necessarily exclusive to "narrative" games, just that they're the biggest commonalities I see.

1) Focus on treating the world as an imaginary world rather than a collection of widgets. Call this "fiction first" (meaning, say what you do in terms of the imaginary world, then figure out how to resolve it) if you want. But the rules widgets used are generally considered a follower to the declaration of what your character is doing, rather than the description of what you're doing being used as a decorator on the rules widget.

2) Focus on the PCs as protagonists, not just "random Joes" (though they could be random Joes that become protagonists). Though, to be fair, this has been pretty well teh standard model in RPGs since the mid 80s.

3a) A lack of emphasis on a "tactical combat model". There's just not a lot of wargaming roots left in "narrative games" - even combats are usually treated just like other skills.
3b) A high level of emphasis on the "story-like" parts of the game - that is, the non-combat bits.

4) A lack of emphasis on character advancement.

Of course, part of the problem is that "narrative" is a GNS term, and is almost never used in the way it was defined by GNS. By GNS terms "enforcing genre" is a *sim* quality, not narrative. Narrative is about exploration of theme. Period. Simulating a genre is simulation, and so falls under "S".

My list above is based on common usage of the term. It is pretty inaccurate from an Edwards-ian viewpoint.


I really don't think that any narrative gamers I know claim that their games make good stories.


Strangely, I don't play any games that really do that either.


No, but a number of games do account for character


I... haven't seen any game that mechanically encourages the evil overlord's list, or that encourages you to fail at "the second last stand". What are these games you're talking about?

I mean, the most popular "narrative" game is probably Apocalypse World (and its variants), which has like none of the stuff you're talking about. The other popular one is Fate, which can arguably said to have the "weakness at dramatic moments" bit, but that's mostly it.


It is not a useless statement *if everyone agrees on what narrative means*. In practice, they don't. In practice, your list of things narrative games do does not match my experience with them.


And, per GNS theory itself, *includes genre simulation*.


Agreed on that. But I think the biggest problem with GNS is that it was designed with an agenda - to create "narrative" (by RE definition) games, a type of game which didn't really exist previously. He promoted it to 1/3 of the available gaming space because it was what he liked. To an outsider, it looks *very* much like "I'm going to make a theory that objectively proves my preferences". Sadly, those "theories" usually become very popular, because they resonate with people that share that preference.


"Mixing is bad" is the *core idea* of GNS. That's like saying opera is good if you get rid of the singing.

Use GDS instead. It predates GNS, carries the goodness that people find in GNS without the baggage.

And to expand on what kyoryu said, and illustrate how muddled and overlapping and conflicted the terms have become, and how they in real usage they rarely mean what Edwardians would tell us they mean:

I've always regarded "focus first on the world, then on the widgets" as part of a "sim emphasis" -- I think I've typed "the rules are the map, the setting is the actual territory" or some variation on that so many times that it should auto-fill on my computers. Whereas "focus on the widgets first, the world is just fluff" strikes me as deeply "gamist".

"Focus on the character as a person, rather than a collection of numbers" strikes me as legitimately part of both "narrative" and "simulationist".

It may seem like a minor quibble, but to me there's a big difference between "the PCs are the protagonists because they're special or their circumstances are special" versus "the PCs are special because they're the protagonists".

According to GNS, "genre emulation" is part of "simulationism" -- and yet I've always considered that part of "narrativism", based on what I'd read from people who call themselves "narrativists" and put a great deal of thought into trying to get "genre appropriate events, structure, pacing, and escalation". Part of why I was (perhaps unfairly... :smalleek: ) so anti-narrativist was that I had been under the impression that this genre/storytelling emphasis was the core of "narrative focus".

And it's in where "genre emulation" goes off the rails (from my perspective) that I think certain gamers DO look to make "genre appropriate" tropes part of the natural flow of the game.

Totally agreed that the big problem with GNS was that it was designed working backwards from a conclusion to serve the agenda of one person, and kinda poisoning the well because of how it appeals to people looking for validation.

[Max_Killjoy]

Don't get me wrong - I don't doubt for a second that people *can* do that. And I don't doubt for a second that some people *do* do that.

I'm mostly saying that I think the correct answer to that is "hey, don't be a jerkface".

Rules like that assume a fair amount of everybody at the table acting in good faith. If you don't have that, they will fail. Which is, to be fair - a weakness. Those systems don't work well with people not acting in good faith.

Of course, I tend to equate "not acting in good faith" with "being a jerk", so it's not a practical weakness for me. It's almost a feature, as it points out those players earlier.


I'd say the answers to many problems in gaming are "don't be a jerkface" and "have honest discussions with the rest of the group about the game".

What happens instead, because (as you said) talking to people as people is hard, we get all these efforts to encode "anti-jerkface" and "common ground" measures into the rules.

[kyoryu]

I'd say the answers to many problems in gaming are "don't be a jerkface" and "have honest discussions with the rest of the group about the game".

What happens instead, because (as you said) talking to people as people is hard, we get all these efforts to encode "anti-jerkface" and "common ground" measures into the rules.

Which doesn't work.

Because jerkfaces will always find ways to abuse the rules to their advantage. It's kind of what they *do*.

[Koo Rehtorb]

It's not an issue of bad actors, it's that the system contains no precision and no examples to base rulings on.

But this isn't true??? There's a list of things you can do with advantage/threat and how much each of them cost.

[Max_Killjoy]

Which doesn't work.

Because jerkfaces will always find ways to abuse the rules to their advantage. It's kind of what they *do*.


And this adds a layer of irony to RE's efforts, given that he predicates quite a bit of it on being a "solution" to "bad GMs".

[Koo Rehtorb]

Mechanics won't stop Doctor Evil from being a bad GM. Most bad GMs are not Doctor Evil, though. And mechanics can absolutely give a well intentioned GM who's picked up some bad habits a push in the right direction.

[kyoryu]

Mechanics won't stop Doctor Evil from being a bad GM. Most bad GMs are not Doctor Evil, though. And mechanics can absolutely give a well intentioned GM who's picked up some bad habits a push in the right direction.

Or even a new GM, or any GM, really.

In Microsoft APIs, they have this concept called "The Pit of Success". Which basically means that doing the obvious, easy thing should be successful for the majority of cases. Like, defaults should result in good behavior, and not terrible awfulness. (Whether they achieve this goal is another discussion).

That kind of applies here - the rules should be such that following them in the most straightforward way avoids major GM traps. Do GMs that have each guard roll to notice a player know that they're basically guaranteeing failure? Probably not. But that's the obvious way to handle it, and that's the result.

[Segev]

On the one hand, it should be pretty easy to identify a task for this FFG Star Wars game. "I want to gain access to all the security cameras on this floor." "I want to knock out this specific guard." "I want to get past that squad of guards." "I want to get past all the guards between me and my goal and back out again."

As a GM, I'd veto the last one; that's at LEAST two tasks, and I'd probably argue that it's several if I had the base mapped out with the guards in place.

Other than that, it's a matter of calibrating number of required successes.

Where I would probably balk is if, as seems to be indicated by some posters here, there were no guidelines for how many successes allows for what kinds of tasks to succeed. Example 1-success tasks to N-success tasks (every possible die succeeded) would be a REQUIREMENT, because otherwise we have one of my biggest gripes about 5e D&D: I have no way of knowing whether climbing a wall is a moderate or difficult task.

[kyoryu]

On the one hand, it should be pretty easy to identify a task for this FFG Star Wars game. "I want to gain access to all the security cameras on this floor." "I want to knock out this specific guard." "I want to get past that squad of guards." "I want to get past all the guards between me and my goal and back out again."

Technically, those would be intents. They're stating an end result, without stating *how* you're going to accomplish it. Getting past a set of guards can be done by knocking them out, distracting them, sneaking past them, using a Force power of some sort, fast-talking past them, all sorts of things.

That's why both parts of Intent and Task are important, at least for rules-light games. Or maybe rules-light isn't the right word (again, not my favorite term there). But there's a difference between games that tell you *what* happened (the grenade falls on this hex when you throw it) and games that put constraints on what happens (you succeed, but at a cost, or whatever). Perhaps result-based resolution vs. constraint-based resolution? I dunno. I'm sure people will misunderstand any term used and assert it means something horrible.



As a GM, I'd veto the last one; that's at LEAST two tasks, and I'd probably argue that it's several if I had the base mapped out with the guards in place.

Right, and that's part of the job of the GM in games like this - setting requirements, and letting players choose if they want to engage in them. There's basically a few responses a GM should have in a system like this to a proposed action.

"Okay, you do it."
"That'll be tricky. It's a <foo> roll, at <bar> difficulty"
"In order to do that, you're going to need <things>"
"Nope. That is literally impossible." (used most rarely)

[Koo Rehtorb]

Other than that, it's a matter of calibrating number of required successes.

Where I would probably balk is if, as seems to be indicated by some posters here, there were no guidelines for how many successes allows for what kinds of tasks to succeed. Example 1-success tasks to N-success tasks (every possible die succeeded) would be a REQUIREMENT, because otherwise we have one of my biggest gripes about 5e D&D: I have no way of knowing whether climbing a wall is a moderate or difficult task.

Successes oppose failures. One success more than the failure count means you've succeeded. When you're talking about different kinds of tasks you're talking about the difficulty of the roll.

Edit for clarity - roll difficulty makes it more likely that you will get more failures to cancel out those successes, along with other bad stuff happening.

[Max_Killjoy]

everybody is acting "in good faith" and nobody wants to screw it up. But there's so damn much hand-waving while a lot of the system pretends that the dice are used for resolution that it basically doesn't work. In my experience, it came down to completely giving up any idea of character agency, because everything eventually wound up as an agreement between players and DM about how the game was supposed to do things and ignoring the dice to cut out the pointless middleman.




This is completely the polar opposite of my experience. I mean, like, I have *never* seen that be an issue. I've only had a few "that's not what I meant!" issues and those were resolved incredibly quickly. I've had far more rules arguments in rules-heavy games. Though, rigorously applying Intent & Task probably helped. This doesn't in any way mean that I'm disputing your experience, to be clear. You had the experiences you've had.

(And, again, the 'acting in good faith' was about the stated goals of a conflict/etc., not general task resolution)


I think exelsisxax is still talking about FFG SW, which is really quite rules-heavy while trying to be (one version of) "narrativist".

[Hawkstar]

I like FFG Star Wars, but this isn't quite fair. Pretty much everything is a binary result with a target number in D&D.

Successes and failures are pretty straightforward but advantage, threat, despair and triumph explicitly have a wide range of various effects you can do with them. It's not the same thing at all.Threat, despair, and triumph are codified in how they work. But success and failure are still "Binary", though the target number is "One uncanceled success"


And if your goal is instead "hack security on this door"? or "hack security for [entire location]"? You have to figure out how difficult each of those things should be, and then you still haven't qualified what success is. Hack through security might get you anywhere from having access to the enemy transmissions(that they're going on, not even let you hear them yet) to giving you total and complete control of all networked systems. That leaves almost everything up to the DM's whim, because "success" has no precise meaning in the system.[quote]And in D&D, Hacking security on the door and entire location are different DCs. You have to figure out how difficult those are, and assign a number to it. You have to do something similar in FFG Star Wars with the roll. In D&D, you can say "I'm gonna hack through security" "Okay, DC 15", "I got a 17" - and we're back to you being "But what does that MEAN?!" because the person didn't specify the intent of hacking security. Does that 17 allow him to merely listen in? Do you have control? How's that different from FFG Star Wars?

[quote]D&D happens to be binary, other games happen to be degree-of-sucess based. FFG SW has like 6 different symbols that can all be interpreted in different ways by as many people as are at the table and themselves resolve nothing. So it's different in every way except the dice you roll have the same shapes.No, they CAN'T be interpreted in different ways. Each one has a specific definition (Success at your intent through your method, success at your intent, but failure in a related area. Failure at your intent. Failure at your intent, but a mitigating boon. Critical Success. Critical Failure). And all those definitions and complications are codified in the rules.

[kyoryu]

Threat, despair, and triumph are codified in how they work. But success and failure are still "Binary", though the target number is "One uncanceled success"

...

No, they CAN'T be interpreted in different ways. Each one has a specific definition (Success at your intent through your method, success at your intent, but failure in a related area. Failure at your intent. Failure at your intent, but a mitigating boon. Critical Success. Critical Failure). And all those definitions and complications are codified in the rules.

Compare that to something like GURPS. You try to throw a grenade at a target. You miss! The system will tell you *precisely* where the grenade lands, and the results of that will be based upon the known layout of the scenario.

There's nothing for anybody to make up.

In most constraint-based systems (I'll use that term for now), somebody has to interpret what "failure in a related area" means. There's no concrete result. There's a concrete constraint on what can happen, and you can with a reasonable degree of consistency agree with what would qualify as that and what wouldn't, but there's no concrete, explicit result that comes from the system and not a human being.

Some people don't like that. Personally, I'm okay with it, presuming I trust the GM.

[exelsisxax]

You wouldn't hack a door in D&D, so yes, the attempt should meet with equal, if not greater amounts of confusion.

Shadowrun, on the other hand, has hacking in it. While not having played it, I am led to believe that it has specific rules for such things because it routinely deals with them. When playing such a system, I'd expect player actions to more precisely indicate intent, because players (should) know what they are attempting within the rules structure. FFG SW doesn't have that rules structure. It would be like D&D, except there are no attack rolls, damage rolls, saving throws, or DCs, because the rules only support rolling for "combats". The systems are not comparable in that respect.

Those definitions of success and failure are so broad as to include virtually any kind of thing the DM wants to put you in. It's basically a devil-granted wish: they can always ruin it for you.

And yes, these are all only huge problems with bad DMs I'm just making them all bad to try to clarify the problem. But even with a good DM, it's an issue inherent with the system that doesn't need to be there for the game to work.

[Hawkstar]

It's not an issue. And you only have "Devil-granted wish" if you roll a Success, but with a compromising die result as well. Otherwise, it's a standard wish, or extra-benign wish.

And you can hack a door in D&D if it's a sci-fi modified campaign.

[Steel Mirror]

And you can hack a door in D&D if it's a sci-fi modified campaign.
Or if you have an axe!

...I'll show myself out.

[Max_Killjoy]

Or if you have an axe!

...I'll show myself out.

Let me open the door, no need for the axe. :smallwink:

(Joking, hopefully blatantly so.)

[Segev]

Successes oppose failures. One success more than the failure count means you've succeeded. When you're talking about different kinds of tasks you're talking about the difficulty of the roll.

Edit for clarity - roll difficulty makes it more likely that you will get more failures to cancel out those successes, along with other bad stuff happening.

That's nice, but it doesn't answer the fundamental question that makes me object in 5e: How do I determine the difficulty of, say, "hacking the entire floor's security cameras so I can see through them" vs. "hacking one security camera to show a looped image of empty hallway?"

Does FFG SW give example difficulties for various tasks, or does it just say "hard tasks are X difficutly, easy tasks are Y difficulty" with no connection between what kinds of tasks are actually "hard" or "easy?" That's 5e's sin.

[Thrudd]

I think these sorts of rule and suggestion are what people have a problem with:

Examples from Fate Core

Sometimes, a compel means your character automatically fails at some goal, or your character’s choices are restricted, or simply that unintended consequences cloud whatever your character does. You might negotiate back and forth on the details a little, to arrive at what would be most appropriate and dramatic in the moment. Once you’ve agreed to accept the complication, you get a fate point for your troubles. If you want, you can pay a fate point to prevent the complication from happening, but we don’t recommend you do that very often— you’ll probably need that fate point later, and getting compelled brings drama (and hence, fun) into your game’s story.


Declaring a Story Detail

Sometimes, you want to add a detail that works to your character’s advantage in a scene. For example, you might use this to narrate a convenient coincidence, like retroactively having the right supplies for a certain job (“Of course I brought that along!”), showing up at a dramatically appropriate moment, or suggesting that you and the NPC you just met have mutual clients in common. To do this, you’ll spend a fate point. You should try to justify your story details by relating them to your aspects. GMs, you have the right to veto any suggestions that seem out of scope or ask the player to revise them, especially if the rest of the group isn’t buying into it.



DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM

In Fate, don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. the game operates by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. there should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s more exciting than sensible! you can always find a way later on to justify something that doesn’t make immediate sense.


These are the types of rules and advice that bug some people. Or that aren't appropriate for all types of games, at least.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think these sorts of rule and suggestion are what people have a problem with:

Examples from Fate Core



Sometimes, a compel means your character automatically fails at some goal, or your character’s choices are restricted, or simply that unintended consequences cloud whatever your character does. You might negotiate back and forth on the details a little, to arrive at what would be most appropriate and dramatic in the moment. Once you’ve agreed to accept the complication, you get a fate point for your troubles. If you want, you can pay a fate point to prevent the complication from happening, but we don’t recommend you do that very often— you’ll probably need that fate point later, and getting compelled brings drama (and hence, fun) into your game’s story.



Declaring a Story Detail

Sometimes, you want to add a detail that works to your character’s advantage in a scene. For example, you might use this to narrate a convenient coincidence, like retroactively having the right supplies for a certain job (“Of course I brought that along!”), showing up at a dramatically appropriate moment, or suggesting that you and the NPC you just met have mutual clients in common. To do this, you’ll spend a fate point. You should try to justify your story details by relating them to your aspects. GMs, you have the right to veto any suggestions that seem out of scope or ask the player to revise them, especially if the rest of the group isn’t buying into it.



DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM

In Fate, don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. the game operates by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. there should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s more exciting than sensible! you can always find a way later on to justify something that doesn’t make immediate sense.


These are the types of rules and advice that bug some people. Or that aren't appropriate for all types of games, at least.


Yeah... that's the stuff that bugs me. All that runs about 180 degrees counter to what I consider enjoyable.

Does that mean it's objectively terrible? No, not really.

Does that mean that those particular things are core to "narrative" games or focus? Probably not, no.

[obryn]

I posted a few links upthread so you can get a direct look at how a Powered-by-Fate-Core game runs.

There's Dungeon World and the like up on those podcasts, too.

[kyoryu]

Yeah... that's the stuff that bugs me. All that runs about 180 degrees counter to what I consider enjoyable.

I don't think you'd like Fate. There's enough stuff in there that wants you to think like a player, and enough stuff that suggests what your character should do that I think it runs counter to your tastes.

You might like Apocalypse World.


I think these sorts of rule and suggestion are what people have a problem with:

Examples from Fate Core

Sometimes, a compel means your character automatically fails at some goal, or your character’s choices are restricted, or simply that unintended consequences cloud whatever your character does. You might negotiate back and forth on the details a little, to arrive at what would be most appropriate and dramatic in the moment. Once you’ve agreed to accept the complication, you get a fate point for your troubles. If you want, you can pay a fate point to prevent the complication from happening, but we don’t recommend you do that very often— you’ll probably need that fate point later, and getting compelled brings drama (and hence, fun) into your game’s story.

How does this compare to you with, say GURPS rolling against an addiction score in the presence of the thing you're addicted to?

So, for instance:

GURPS:

GM: "Hey, you're going to be in this bar for a while, and you've got the Alcoholic disadvantage. Give me a roll to resist the alcohol, or be drunk when your contact shows up."
Player: "Okay... " <roll roll> "Uh, I guess I get drunk" or "I resist the alcohol"

Fate:

GM: "Hey, you're going to be in this bar for a while, and you're a Functional(?) Alcoholic. Wouldn't it make sense that you'd get wasted and be drunk when your contact shows up?" <Waves a Fate Point>
Player: "Yeah, I totally would" <takes Fate Point> or "This meeting's too important. The alcohol is tempting, but I've got enough willpower to stick to water" <passes Fate Point to GM>

Personally I prefer the Fate version, since it creates player decisions (good!) and kind of models the willpower aspect of it, as opposed to just being a die roll.



Declaring a Story Detail

Sometimes, you want to add a detail that works to your character’s advantage in a scene. For example, you might use this to narrate a convenient coincidence, like retroactively having the right supplies for a certain job (“Of course I brought that along!”), showing up at a dramatically appropriate moment, or suggesting that you and the NPC you just met have mutual clients in common. To do this, you’ll spend a fate point. You should try to justify your story details by relating them to your aspects. GMs, you have the right to veto any suggestions that seem out of scope or ask the player to revise them, especially if the rest of the group isn’t buying into it.

Again, let's look at a couple variations, and I'm curious how you view them:

Player: "Hey, since I'm an old merc, what's the chance of me knowing one of these mercs here?"
GM: "It's possible. Gimme 6 or less on 2d6"."

Player: "Hey, I've got the Contacts(Mercenaries) Advantage, what's the chance of me knowing one of these mercs here?"
GM: "It's possible. Gimme 6 or less on 2d6"."

Player: "Hey, since I'm an Old Merc, what's the chance of me knowing one of these mercs here?"
GM: "What's the chance of you giving me a Fate Point?"

Player: <slides Fate Point to GM> "I'm an Old Merc, and I recognize Ted the Machine from an old job and walk up to him."
GM: "Sure".

Do some of these strike you as okay, but others don't?

(To be clear, these are honest questions and *not* "traps")


Or that aren't appropriate for all types of games, at least.

You mean different tools are good for different purposes? MADNESS, I TELL YOU!

[Segev]

I dislike GURPS's addiction mechanic, and mechanics like it, because it encourages player behavior with the character that leads to a character behaving differently than what it purports to represent.

Addicts, generally, seek out their vice. GURPS's mechanic encourages players to have their characters avoid temptation like the plague, because only when faced with temptation can they be compelled to indulge (to their detriment). So the encouraged behavior by this system is that of a recovering addict.

Better representations of such things, in my opinion, model the addiction by assigning something like withdrawal penalties. Go too long without the vice, and the penalties start to stack up due to withdrawal and distracting cravings. Until they indulge to "take the edge off" and get rid of the penalty. (And suffer whatever consequences there are for their indulgence in the vice.)

[kyoryu]

I dislike GURPS's addiction mechanic, and mechanics like it, because it encourages player behavior with the character that leads to a character behaving differently than what it purports to represent.

Addicts, generally, seek out their vice. GURPS's mechanic encourages players to have their characters avoid temptation like the plague, because only when faced with temptation can they be compelled to indulge (to their detriment). So the encouraged behavior by this system is that of a recovering addict.

Better representations of such things, in my opinion, model the addiction by assigning something like withdrawal penalties. Go too long without the vice, and the penalties start to stack up due to withdrawal and distracting cravings. Until they indulge to "take the edge off" and get rid of the penalty. (And suffer whatever consequences there are for their indulgence in the vice.)

That's one way - the other way is Fate's way of handing out bonuses when you indulge in your vice. I prefer that, personally. Less bookkeeping.

But either way works, and bypasses the whole issue of "I get points at startup, and then spend the game avoiding that situation" which is mechanically speaking, optimal behavior.

[RazorChain]

I dislike GURPS's addiction mechanic, and mechanics like it, because it encourages player behavior with the character that leads to a character behaving differently than what it purports to represent.

Addicts, generally, seek out their vice. GURPS's mechanic encourages players to have their characters avoid temptation like the plague, because only when faced with temptation can they be compelled to indulge (to their detriment). So the encouraged behavior by this system is that of a recovering addict.

Better representations of such things, in my opinion, model the addiction by assigning something like withdrawal penalties. Go too long without the vice, and the penalties start to stack up due to withdrawal and distracting cravings. Until they indulge to "take the edge off" and get rid of the penalty. (And suffer whatever consequences there are for their indulgence in the vice.)

But in Gurps if you don't want to play an Alcoholic then you don't have to, if you wan't to be a barfly anyways then you could take compulsive carousing. Why would you take alcoholism?

Ah for the extra points....I see....you darn power player.

This is why in Gurps I stopped giving points for disadvantages and just made it mandatory to take 2 and the players can just tailor them to their liking.

[Max_Killjoy]

I dislike GURPS's addiction mechanic, and mechanics like it, because it encourages player behavior with the character that leads to a character behaving differently than what it purports to represent.

Addicts, generally, seek out their vice. GURPS's mechanic encourages players to have their characters avoid temptation like the plague, because only when faced with temptation can they be compelled to indulge (to their detriment). So the encouraged behavior by this system is that of a recovering addict.

Better representations of such things, in my opinion, model the addiction by assigning something like withdrawal penalties. Go too long without the vice, and the penalties start to stack up due to withdrawal and distracting cravings. Until they indulge to "take the edge off" and get rid of the penalty. (And suffer whatever consequences there are for their indulgence in the vice.)

So addicts who are trying to overcome their addiction don't avoid the thing they're addicted to as much as possible?

[georgie_leech]

So addicts who are trying to overcome their addiction don't avoid the thing they're addicted to as much as possible?

Recovering Addicts do. Regular addicts that aren't trying to be not addicts generally don't.

[Segev]

So addicts who are trying to overcome their addiction don't avoid the thing they're addicted to as much as possible?


Recovering Addicts do. Regular addicts that aren't trying to be not addicts generally don't.

What georgie_leech said. Of course recovering addicts try to avoid being tempted. But they, too, are tempted (at least, while addicted) just by their own cravings and stresses. Overcoming addiction is hard.

Addicts who aren't even trying to recover (e.g. those in denial about it even being a problem), on the other hand, often are actively seeking their next fix.

GURPS encourages, at best, modeling recovering addicts only, despite that not being what the flaw says it is or does.

[Max_Killjoy]

What georgie_leech said. Of course recovering addicts try to avoid being tempted. But they, too, are tempted (at least, while addicted) just by their own cravings and stresses. Overcoming addiction is hard.

Addicts who aren't even trying to recover (e.g. those in denial about it even being a problem), on the other hand, often are actively seeking their next fix.

GURPS encourages, at best, modeling recovering addicts only, despite that not being what the flaw says it is or does.

Interesting, and I think the same would be said of HERO's Disadvantages.

However, we may be getting off into the weeds on the actual topic... not sure.

[Segev]

Interesting, and I think the same would be said of HERO's Disadvantages.

However, we may be getting off into the weeds on the actual topic... not sure.

We are, you're right. I was responding to a tangent. My apologies.

[kyoryu]

Interesting, and I think the same would be said of HERO's Disadvantages.

However, we may be getting off into the weeds on the actual topic... not sure.

A bit.

I'm still interested in the responses to the question that generated this tangent.

[Max_Killjoy]

OK, actually, HERO has a Disad called "Dependence" that causes the character to take a negative effect per time period they go without the defined thing they depend on, that could be used to build an addiction.

[Segev]

OK, actually, HERO has a Disad called "Dependence" that causes the character to take a negative effect per time period they go without the defined thing they depend on, that could be used to build an addiction.

It could! Likely it's worth more points if the dependency is, itself, harmful in some fashion. Though I don't know HERO at all. But being Dependent on, say, "Meth" would represent the withdrawal symptoms kicking in, and would still probably have bad things happen after a fresh dose.

[Max_Killjoy]

Getting back to narrative causality a bit...


In random episodic fiction example, the hero always waits until the climactic end-of-episode-or-arc battle to use his Best Attack (power, skill, move, weapon, whatever).

In real life, that attack happens as soon as there is an opening, because as anyone who's been in combat will tell you, "fair fights" are for suckers, and you end every real fight as soon as you can.

Unless there's some quite believable in-setting reason why the character holds back that Best Attack and always hesitates to use it, for me, it gets really contrived really fast.

[Steel Mirror]

Getting back to narrative causality a bit...


In random episodic fiction example, the hero always waits until the climactic end-of-episode-or-arc battle to use his Best Attack (power, skill, move, weapon, whatever).

In real life, that attack happens as soon as there is an opening, because as anyone who's been in combat will tell you, "fair fights" are for suckers, and you end every real fight as soon as you can.

Unless there's some quite believable in-setting reason why the character holds back that Best Attack and always hesitates to use it, for me, it gets really contrived really fast.
Is there a particular game that has that as a mechanic, or is that just a fictional trope that gets your goat?

[Lord Raziere]

There are also a lot of other ways the "best attack" fails to finish the fight that doesn't adhere to that specific cliche:
-it gets worf barraged. The person uses it right off the bat, but the foe proves that it doesn't work
-can't use it because its too destructive- often these best moves cause a lot of collateral damage and the hero is protecting people, so they probably aren't using it unless they are sure they can hit without killing anyone else
-the foe gets the first hit in and somehow incapacitates the person before they can get it off
-the person is tired from doing something else and can't do it right away

so on. so forth. The point of a narrative game is play out the stories you WANT to play, not the stories that are commonly done just because. If you want to tell the story of a smart guy in say, a world full of shonen anime heroes who rely on nothing but brawn and determination, using his smarts to intelligently beat all those guys in a sensible way while screwing over all your foes who think the cliches apply when it doesn't at least not to your character, that is just as valid as any other story, as a random example.

Like I don't go to a narrative game thinking to play out the same thing every one else does, I go to play it so that I can rework it into stories about orcs being good guys fighting against evil or things like that because in narrative games, there is no alignment system or setting to tell me I can't. Nor is there anything telling me that I have to be a wizard for optimization reasons-in a narrative game, if I want to defeat a powerful wizard with an orc using a big sword, that can happen as long as I got a story for how its done that we play out, depending on the logic. Sure the logic for how that happens might get improvised and the reasons why the wizard can't just defeat me easily aren't revealed up front but half the fun is developing the character as you go along anyways.

[Segev]

The two best excuses for "save best attack for end of episode" that I've seen are the oft-misused "dangerous/draining to use it" and "takes time to charge."

The former is often misused as an informed attribute. It's harmful to the character or risks hurting/killing him or others...but it never actually does and he uses it every episode. This can be mitigated by implying that he does a LOT of stuff between episodes, including real, legit fights, and never pulls it out. Having a few on-screen battles and an episode or two of lighter-hearted violence against weaker foes can also help lend verisimilitude to this notion. Better still is DEMONSTRATING the cost. (To that end, don't make it fatal or possibly-fatal; make it draining or collaterally damaging or the like.) If the character uses it, but is pretty much out of the fight if it fails, that's a good enough cost, generally speaking, to explain why it's "once an episode."

The latter is hard to do both believably and with sufficient excitement. Best way tends to be something like "I get stronger as I take damage and can release it later" or "I'm fighting AND building up the energy, just bear with me" or the like.

[Max_Killjoy]

Is there a particular game that has that as a mechanic, or is that just a fictional trope that gets your goat?

It's a goat-getting trope, AND I've seen that exact trope used as an positive example of "emulating genre" a couple of times.

[Lord Raziere]

It's a goat-getting trope, AND I've seen that exact trope used as an positive example of "emulating genre" a couple of times.

and? Your not a genre player. It doesn't apply to you, so you can ignore it.

However there are people who clearly thought that whatever rules you value didn't meet their values and made those instead. I can think of a few genres I like where mechanics like that would be welcome, for specific fights where they would matter. Because sometimes you just got to have that dramatic final confrontation with the BBEG, and if you use it too early, he will have something prepared to deal with it so the final battle is all about plays to make him spend all his defenses on other stuff, so that when you launch your strongest attack he has nothing up his sleeve anymore.

For you, I guess consistency and results matter more, but the purpose of these tropes are more about the journey than the destination. To have a long fight with twists and turns and finally get off your strongest attack at the end- is for the sake of enjoying that fight itself. Much like how some people will fake evil supervillain laughs for the sake of acting hammy and over the top. Its just fun to do it or the sake of doing it. To you it may be played out, but it not might be to the person playing it out.

Often this genre stuff is for the sake of enjoying the genre. Its fine if you don't enjoy the genre. But for some, when in another game you want to be hammy, over the top and doing things more silly and so on- all it will get you is penalties and a lack of satisfaction because the character is not MEANT for realism and instead meant to somehow fit into a certain genre in some ways.

You prefer setting emulators over genre emulators. thats fine. Narrative games are in some ways, genre emulators. I prefer genre emulators, because they have a consistency of their own I like better than a setting consistency.

Like, its not that a genre emulator is inconsistent. Its just that its consistent to story archetypes and how that genre plays out, how the events are typically structured than how the world is. Like to me, I like a consistent action-comedy sort of thing with some intelligence and genre-savviness in there, that will be totally unrealistic in a fight for the sake of making things more awesome, but handle anything outside of fighting more realistically assuming there isn't a joke to be made, and the variance comes from applying that consistent style to different worlds and protagonists.

[Steel Mirror]

It's a goat-getting trope, AND I've seen that exact trope used as an positive example of "emulating genre" a couple of times.
I admit, depending on how it was done that's a game I would probably enjoy if I were in the right mindset. But then, I love shonen-type shows like that a lot, it's a guilty pleasure, and some small doses of a game which just embraces the ludicrousness and has the proper amount of "beyond the impossible!" mixed in would be good fun.

Course if one of those abilities showed up in say, my Dresden Files game, with no justification beyond "of course you save the best attack for the most dramatic moment!", that would annoy me a lot, too.

[Talakeal]

Is there a particular game that has that as a mechanic, or is that just a fictional trope that gets your goat?

13th age more or less.

[obryn]

13th age more or less.
Escalation die-dependent abilities?

[ImNotTrevor]

I admit, depending on how it was done that's a game I would probably enjoy if I were in the right mindset. But then, I love shonen-type shows like that a lot, it's a guilty pleasure, and some small doses of a game which just embraces the ludicrousness and has the proper amount of "beyond the impossible!" mixed in would be good fun.

Course if one of those abilities showed up in say, my Dresden Files game, with no justification beyond "of course you save the best attack for the most dramatic moment!", that would annoy me a lot, too.

Yeah, if I'm playing a game meant to feel like Power Rangers, it darn well better have that sweet sweet formulaic plot I know and love.

[kyoryu]

Yeah, if I'm playing a game meant to feel like Power Rangers, it darn well better have that sweet sweet formulaic plot I know and love.

A reasonable stance.

But some people want to play "what if Power Rangers existed in real life?"

Which is a different game altogether.

[ImNotTrevor]

A reasonable stance.

But some people want to play "what if Power Rangers existed in real life?"

Which is a different game altogether.

Yes. Hence why I said I wanted it to feel like Power Rangers, rather than saying I wanted to play as teenagers given cool armor and called upon to go into battle against alien conquerors by a nice alien.

I was trying to specify that if I'm playing a game meant to emulate the SHOW, it needs to emulate the SHOW.

If we want to explore a more realistic take on PR mythos (which I'm sure is a thing) then the system needs to do THAT.

[obryn]

Yeah, if I'm playing a game meant to feel like Power Rangers, it darn well better have that sweet sweet formulaic plot I know and love.
Exactly. See also: Feng Shui 2.

If the game doesn't play like a Hong Kong action movie - if you can't be Jackie Chan, Jet Li, or Chow Yun Fat - it has failed to accomplish its primary design goal.

[Talakeal]

Yes. Hence why I said I wanted it to feel like Power Rangers, rather than saying I wanted to play as teenagers given cool armor and called upon to go into battle against alien conquerors by a nice alien.

I was trying to specify that if I'm playing a game meant to emulate the SHOW, it needs to emulate the SHOW.

If we want to explore a more realistic take on PR mythos (which I'm sure is a thing) then the system needs to do THAT.

Thats one way to look at it. The narrative elements of a show and the stylistic elements dont always go hand in hand. For example Torchwood and Dr Who take place in the same setting but the shows seem to have very different narrativemqualities.


Escalation die-dependent abilities?

I think so? I dont remember the details as we never actually got around to starting the campaign, but I remember characters get stronger as the fight goes on and was told it is to represent the finishing moves you see in tv shows like the mega sword.

[obryn]

I think so? I dont remember the details as we never actually got around to starting the campaign, but I remember characters get stronger as the fight goes on and was told it is to represent the finishing moves you see in tv shows like the mega sword.
It's not that you're getting stronger; it's a pacing mechanic designed in part to speed along fights that are going too long. There are some abilities that are dependent on it, but mostly of a variety like "roll a d6; if you roll below the Escalation Die, X happens."

Most of the time, you can pull out your big whammies whenever, but you may choose to save them for the higher Escalation numbers if you see fit.

[Lorsa]

I'm coming late to the party, but I'd like to add a few things.

First, I... kind of disagree with the definition of narrative causality that's been tossed around. I view it not as "what makes a good story" or "what should the story do here" or "what must happen to make the story go the 'right' way" and more of "what has been established?"

You can see this in movies and stuff all. The. Time. In Guardians of the Galaxy, we see crazy-ass geysers as we zoom into the opening planet - and so we're not surprised when Star-Lord gets caught by one as he's trying to run out.

That, to me, is narrative causality. It's this rhythm of "establish, then payoff" that occurs all over in fiction. Even knocking someone down, and then taking advantage of that is a small example of this.

So when talking about the "gun misfiring" example, in Fate, specifically, we need to have an aspect somewhere in play before we can make the gun misfire. If we know that the gun is in some way suspect, or has been damaged, or is trouble-prone, then it misfiring doesn't surprise us and meets up with the requirements of narrative causality. If the author hasn't established with the audience, in some way, that the gun misfiring is an expected occurrence, then the audience feels cheated. It's a kind of foreshadowing, or an application of Chekov's gun.

I am coming even more late to the party, but I wanted to ask:

Why is THIS your definition of narrative causality? And how do you differentiate it from normal causality?

To me, Chekov's gun is a literary tool precisely meant to avoid narrative causality by introducing elements to make future actions seem logical.

If your narrative follows "normal" causality, that is when there is a plausible cause-effect relationship between the events, we tend to accept it more readily. It is only when things start to feel illogical, out of place, only occurring to forward the plot that we start to object. This is what I think most people refer to when they talk about "narrative causality", when things happen for no other apparent reason than to forward some specific plot.

So I will again ask; why is it that you want to use another definition?

[Max_Killjoy]

I am coming even more late to the party, but I wanted to ask:

Why is THIS your definition of narrative causality? And how do you differentiate it from normal causality?

To me, Chekov's gun is a literary tool precisely meant to avoid narrative causality by introducing elements to make future actions seem logical.

If your narrative follows "normal" causality, that is when there is a plausible cause-effect relationship between the events, we tend to accept it more readily. It is only when things start to feel illogical, out of place, only occurring to forward the plot that we start to object. This is what I think most people refer to when they talk about "narrative causality", when things happen for no other apparent reason than to forward some specific plot.

So I will again ask; why is it that you want to use another definition?


That's a far more reasonable formulation of "Chekhov's gun" than the one I usually see, which is an admonition that if something is shown, it must later be relevant and actively used in the story. Which to me sounds like "you can never just have setting details, and you must telegraph everything to the audience".

[Friv]

That's a far more reasonable formulation of "Chekhov's gun" than the one I usually see, which is an admonition that if something is shown, it must later be relevant and actively used in the story. Which to me sounds like "you can never just have setting details, and you must telegraph everything to the audience".

The key for Chekov's Gun is that it's meant to refer to big things - you don't set up major events that aren't going to be followed through on. It's also sort of specific to theatre, which is a very different medium from a novel. You can do a two-page digression in a novel that doesn't break flow, whereas in an 80-minute play things are a bit more constrained.

The original phrase that the term comes from is as follows: "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." The idea is that once a loaded rifle is on stage, the audience is paying attention to it. Their attention has been drawn to it. It's a big deal. If that big deal turns into nothing, people feel like the story never finished.

[kyoryu]

I am coming even more late to the party, but I wanted to ask:

Why is THIS your definition of narrative causality? And how do you differentiate it from normal causality?

To me, Chekov's gun is a literary tool precisely meant to avoid narrative causality by introducing elements to make future actions seem logical.

If your narrative follows "normal" causality, that is when there is a plausible cause-effect relationship between the events, we tend to accept it more readily. It is only when things start to feel illogical, out of place, only occurring to forward the plot that we start to object. This is what I think most people refer to when they talk about "narrative causality", when things happen for no other apparent reason than to forward some specific plot.

So I will again ask; why is it that you want to use another definition?

The difference being that there's a contract, basically, that you *show* the audience something to make the future events plausible.

Consider the GotG example - when Star-Lord flies into the planet, he could have easily taken a different route, and not gone past the geysers on the way in. The audience would never have seen the geysers, but they'd (objectively) still be there.

But then when Star-Lord's ship got hit with one it would have felt cheap and abrupt.

The opening shot with the geysers was framed as such deliberately, to establish that such a thing is possible.

Similarly, if your heroes are in a bar and ninjas attack, that's nonsensical. However, if something has established in the setting that ninjas are attacking (or at least ninja-like people), then it makes sense.

That's not "realistic". It's a deliberate fiction technique that often flies in the face of reality. It would be just as realistic for events to happen with NO foreshadowing, so long as there was an explanation, even if that explanation was unknown to the audience/players.

Now,


It is only when things start to feel illogical, out of place, only occurring to forward the plot that we start to object.

is just what I call bad writing/GMing.

So, why do I prefer my definition of narrative causality? Well, because what you describe is just bad, so elevating it to a "proper" thing seems unnecessary, unless the goal is to be pejorative to an entire set of games.

For the same reason, I wouldn't consider forcing players to roll for every little thing they did (climbing stairs, etc.) to be "simulationist logic". It's bad GMing, pure and simple, and tarring a whole category of games with that would be, well, rude.


The key for Chekov's Gun is that it's meant to refer to big things - you don't set up major events that aren't going to be followed through on. It's also sort of specific to theatre, which is a very different medium from a novel. You can do a two-page digression in a novel that doesn't break flow, whereas in an 80-minute play things are a bit more constrained.

The original phrase that the term comes from is as follows: "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." The idea is that once a loaded rifle is on stage, the audience is paying attention to it. Their attention has been drawn to it. It's a big deal. If that big deal turns into nothing, people feel like the story never finished.

And the analogy was originally about a long speech that an author wanted in a play, but which Mr. Chekov felt should be removed. So even in the original context, you can have "unnecessary detail", just don't draw attention to it. Plays are also by their nature fairly compressed - there's simply not *time* to add a lot of extra detail.

[Max_Killjoy]

is just what I call bad writing/GMing.

So, why do I prefer my definition of narrative causality? Well, because what you describe is just bad, so elevating it to a "proper" thing seems unnecessary, unless the goal is to be pejorative to an entire set of games.

For the same reason, I wouldn't consider forcing players to roll for every little thing they did (climbing stairs, etc.) to be "simulationist logic". It's bad GMing, pure and simple, and tarring a whole category of games with that would be, well, rude.


It has a meaning outside of RPGs, however -- "Things happen because the plot says they should." -- and that's the meaning I've been using.

In the case of RPGs, that doesn't require "the plot" to be pre-existing or pre-determined.

[Lorsa]

The difference being that there's a contract, basically, that you *show* the audience something to make the future events plausible.

Consider the GotG example - when Star-Lord flies into the planet, he could have easily taken a different route, and not gone past the geysers on the way in. The audience would never have seen the geysers, but they'd (objectively) still be there.

But then when Star-Lord's ship got hit with one it would have felt cheap and abrupt.

The opening shot with the geysers was framed as such deliberately, to establish that such a thing is possible.

Similarly, if your heroes are in a bar and ninjas attack, that's nonsensical. However, if something has established in the setting that ninjas are attacking (or at least ninja-like people), then it makes sense.

That's not "realistic". It's a deliberate fiction technique that often flies in the face of reality. It would be just as realistic for events to happen with NO foreshadowing, so long as there was an explanation, even if that explanation was unknown to the audience/players.

The thing is, as you yourself made clear, is that the fiction technique exist to make events seem plausible. We, the audience, can follow the cause and effect flow. Since we know there are geysers, it feels plausible to have one hit the ship.

One could view this as narrative causality, but Max_killjoy would probably just think of it as "causality". As long as we can logically and plausibly, within the established fiction, follow the chain of events; things feel causal.



Now,

-Forum removed Lorsa quote-

is just what I call bad writing/GMing.

So, why do I prefer my definition of narrative causality? Well, because what you describe is just bad, so elevating it to a "proper" thing seems unnecessary, unless the goal is to be pejorative to an entire set of games.

For the same reason, I wouldn't consider forcing players to roll for every little thing they did (climbing stairs, etc.) to be "simulationist logic". It's bad GMing, pure and simple, and tarring a whole category of games with that would be, well, rude.

I don't think the term was ever meant to be pejorative to an entire set of games. In fact, I think Max_killjoy got the term from a source outside of gaming entirely.

Yes, what I describe IS bad, and if you agree that it is bad then you and Max are in agreement there. As he (Max_killjoy) tried to point out, it is a type of poor writing which has been phrased "narrative causality", as it tends to break our idea of what could plausibly happen in the story for the sake of the narrative.

However, I doubt there is any RPG out there which have rules that function for this type of narrative causality. As you said yourself, Fate aspects have to be present and established in order to be "triggered", so that is still within the "normal" type of causality within a fiction. I guess GMs that resort to railroading would qualify for the kind of "narrative causality" that Max_killjoy is so averse to.

But yeah, if you take it as being a pejorative to a set of games, or a particular game style, I agree that it is a bad term, or wrongly defined. However, then I think we need another term to define this particular type of bad writing.

[Max_Killjoy]

The thing is, as you yourself made clear, is that the fiction technique exist to make events seem plausible. We, the audience, can follow the cause and effect flow. Since we know there are geysers, it feels plausible to have one hit the ship.

One could view this as narrative causality, but Max_killjoy would probably just think of it as "causality". As long as we can logically and plausibly, within the established fiction, follow the chain of events; things feel causal.




I don't think the term was ever meant to be pejorative to an entire set of games. In fact, I think Max_killjoy got the term from a source outside of gaming entirely.

Yes, what I describe IS bad, and if you agree that it is bad then you and Max are in agreement there. As he (Max_killjoy) tried to point out, it is a type of poor writing which has been phrased "narrative causality", as it tends to break our idea of what could plausibly happen in the story for the sake of the narrative.

However, I doubt there is any RPG out there which have rules that function for this type of narrative causality. As you said yourself, Fate aspects have to be present and established in order to be "triggered", so that is still within the "normal" type of causality within a fiction. I guess GMs that resort to railroading would qualify for the kind of "narrative causality" that Max_killjoy is so averse to.

But yeah, if you take it as being a pejorative to a set of games, or a particular game style, I agree that it is a bad term, or wrongly defined. However, then I think we need another term to define this particular type of bad writing.

Here's a comment from a game's text: "DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM... don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. the game operates by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. There should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s more exciting than sensible! You can always find a way later on to justify something that doesn’t make immediate sense."

"Do what's exciting, who cares if it makes sense!" and "Whatever, figure it out later." do a pretty good job of summarizing an approach to writing that ruins fictional works for me.

Now, RPGs aren't fiction, and what works in one and what works in the other are not matched sets, plus tastes vary, so I'm not necessarily making a claim at an objective thing here.

[Lord Raziere]

Here's a comment from a game's text: "DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM... don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. the game operates by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. There should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s more exciting than sensible! You can always find a way later on to justify something that doesn’t make immediate sense."

"Do what's exciting, who cares if it makes sense!" and "Whatever, figure it out later." do a pretty good job of summarizing an approach to writing that ruins fictional works for me.

Now, RPGs aren't fiction, and what works in one and what works in the other are not matched sets, plus tastes vary, so I'm not necessarily making a claim at an objective thing here.

Eh.

Tastes vary in both. A lot of people like lots of things that aren't actually all that consistent or well thought out ahead of time but are exciting, just look at some successful movies. The ones who complain about consistency and realism tend to be nerds with too much time on their hands in my experience. Me, I used to think I wanted consistency and realism to because some nerds kept complaining about them, but then I realized that it basically eliminated everything I'd want and have fun with, and it turns out I just have a very wide tolerance for that sort of lack of realism or consistency that most nerds don't.

Me if nothing is happening, then I'm not really interested all that much. there can be breather episodes yeah, with opportunities for comedy, to have a break in the action, or to have conversations with each other characters over various topics, but I expect action and excitement eventually and consistently at some point, because thats what I roleplay for. I mean, I still value consistency and logic to a degree, I'm not throwing them out entirely, but I use them only to enhance what I want enhanced, and not something valuable unto themselves. If I want an action-y world, I got to have the world run action-y logic and be consistent in a way that causes a lot of action to happen.

Like if you tell me that I can play a warrior guy who can go berserk and such, I expect there to be opportunities where I can fight people and unleash the rage y'know?

[icefractal]

Here's a comment from a game's text:
...
There should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. Wow, that would annoy me too. Particularly since it's so unnecessary - one of the strengths of TTRPGs is that the time-scale is fluid, so if three months would go by IC and none of the players or the GM care about what's happening during that time, then it can literally take less than a minute OOC.

Personally speaking, I don't mind narrative causality for things that aren't the focus, but it bugs me when it comes into the spotlight.

Like for instance, travel at the "speed of plot" that gets you to the BBEG just as he's starting the big demonic ritual. If that part was just glossed over ("Riding day and night, your horses are about to collapse by the time you get to the Devil's Hatbox. From inside, you hear chanting ..."), then that's fine.

But if the journey there was a challenge, we risked hazards and made plans to get there faster ... and then it turns out we were always going to get there in just the nick of time? Great, thanks for making the last couple sessions retroactively pointless. :smallannoyed:

[Lord Raziere]

But if the journey there was a challenge, we risked hazards and made plans to get there faster ... and then it turns out we were always going to get there in just the nick of time? Great, thanks for making the last couple sessions retroactively pointless. :smallannoyed:

Again, a difference in values. For someone narrative minded, the point is not success, but doing it for the sake of going through those obstacles themselves. For feeling the danger of those hazards, the journey being just as important as the destination. On the flip side of the coin, its considered boring and pointless if you don't meet any challenges at all and get there before the BBEG has had any time to become a threat and you kill him in one shot before anything can happen, so its pointless to try if everything is going to go well. I didn't sign up to auto-win everything no matter how well I prepare or how good I am at combat.

[The Glyphstone]

Wow, that would annoy me too. Particularly since it's so unnecessary - one of the strengths of TTRPGs is that the time-scale is fluid, so if three months would go by IC and none of the players or the GM care about what's happening during that time, then it can literally take less than a minute OOC.


Indeed, especially since the idea of a breather period is, in itself, a common and strong narrative element. Characters who do nothing but constantly move from crisis to crisis will wear out of break down. Even heroes get downtime to relax between bouts of saving the world.

[kyoryu]

A single line of text is hardly cause to say that's an overriding concept of the game. As with all things, it's a matter of proportion and scale - as a fan of Fate, I probably read that as a "consider interest and adventure in addition to realism" while a detractor might read it as "EVERYTHING EXCITING ALL THE TIME SCREW REALISM".

Honestly, most games follow that to *some* extent, or our games would revolve around playing peasants farming. (Which is the opposite extreme, and certainly not what I'm saying anyone is proposing).

[Max_Killjoy]

A single line of text is hardly cause to say that's an overriding concept of the game. As with all things, it's a matter of proportion and scale - as a fan of Fate, I probably read that as a "consider interest and adventure in addition to realism" while a detractor might read it as "EVERYTHING EXCITING ALL THE TIME SCREW REALISM".

Honestly, most games follow that to *some* extent, or our games would revolve around playing peasants farming. (Which is the opposite extreme, and certainly not what I'm saying anyone is proposing).


Given some of the other things we've run across in this discussion, I have to wonder if we're missing context that went into writing that section. To me, in isolation, it sounds like really bad Hollywood writing advice.

(I just watched the director's commentary for a film I rented, and he went on and on about how they cut this scene or changed that scene because it wasn't "moving the plot along as fast as possible", but the difference came down to maybe 5 minutes difference for a ~120 minute movie... yet the things they cut would have given SO MUCH context to what was going on.)

HOWEVER, the sections from FATE in question are written with such emphasis that they could be (over)reactions to a different kind of game that many players might find unenjoyable, that drags on bogged down in minutia and repeated lengthy focus on mundane daily "downtime" life.

[Beleriphon]

Given some of the other things we've run across in this discussion, I have to wonder if we're missing context that went into writing that section. To me, in isolation, it sounds like really bad Hollywood writing advice.

Its missing context to a great degree. The idea behind FATE is that the characters are competent at what they can do, they aren't the best, but they are competent at what they are doing. Which leads to FATE generally treating the game play as an action movie. The easiest way to compare is Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Harderererererer. We follow the evening of John McClane in Die Hard, he spends a year doing something police like (which we don't really focus on) and then in Die Hard 2 we have another adventure. FATE focuses on what would amount to the two movies, it isn't that the characters don't have down time or mundane things to do its just that they tend to be background for the action. That isn't a requirement of the game, but the focus of FATE by default is kine of action movie-ish so it tends to encourage focus on the exciting or important bits rather that all the stuff in between.


(I just watched the director's commentary for a film I rented, and he went on and on about how they cut this scene or changed that scene because it wasn't "moving the plot along as fast as possible", but the difference came down to maybe 5 minutes difference for a ~120 minute movie... yet the things they cut would have given SO MUCH context to what was going on.)

There a bunch of stuff that can mean, and often times it means the filmed scene felt clunky or messed with the pacing, or didn't actually add anything meaningful. That said a movie isn't a game, so comparing the two isn't necessarily helpful as far as structure goes. If you look at most movies there's always a bunch of content that gets cut for any of a variety of reason. Now sometimes


HOWEVER, the sections from FATE in question are written with such emphasis that they could be (over)reactions to a different kind of game that many players might find unenjoyable, that drags on bogged down in minutia and repeated lengthy focus on mundane daily "downtime" life.

There is that, its a different focus of the game as well. If you think about it most games to this to some degree or another. D&D tends to skip the boring bits, Pendragon doesn't overly focus on the minutiae between the summer adventuring seasons, Ars Magica does seasons, a bunch of games have stuff that skip parts of the in setting time to get the game moving.

[kyoryu]

We accept a lot of convenience in our games. All of our games.

Your typical RPG is a tactical combat system with some "other stuff" attached, where characters grow in power (usually primarily combat power) over time. That's not a value judgement, it's just a statement of fact.

In these games we routinely see that the PCs encounter a series of fights that are *just below* what they're capable of. Anything that is too tough for the PCs to fight is handled in a way where it's clear the challenge is avoidance, and again, with an expectation of winning.

Look at the popular example of fighting bandits. It's unrealistic as anything. Criminals don't attack superior, or even fair forces. They fight when they have an unmistakable advantage. The only way bandits would attack PCs (and if we assume they're not "special" in any way, then bandits would know about people *like* them) would be if they were assured victory. But that's not what we see. Because PCs need to have fights to build xp, which means they need enemies that they barely outclass - close enough to have an interesting fight, but not likely to actually kill them.

We're just so used to that we don't think about it any more.

The way *I* interpret the advice is fairly close to Beleriphon in general, but I also look at another thing:

Let's say the GM has to decide what comes next. And there are three options.

Option 1: Likely, but boring (probably, "nothing happens"). We'll rate this at 90% likely, 0% interesting

Option 2: Plausible and interesting. We'll rate this at 70% likely, 70% interesting

Option 3: Entertaining but implausible. We'll rate this at 0% likely, 90% interesting

You seem to assume that the game is recommending Option 3. I see it as recommending Option 2.

And, really, there's nothing wrong with that. Always doing the "most likely" thing is in fact unrealistic. The most likely thing to happen on any drive is that nothing will happen - yet most people will be in at least one car accident in their lives.

[Segev]

The typical excuse for bandit attacks on well-armed adventurers is quantity vs. quality. At the level(s) where D&D, at least, expects adventurers to be playing "caravan guard" or otherwise wandering with obvious valuables that might tempt a highwayman, they don't look overtly impressive.

The heavily armed warrior is in nice, but not unapproachably expensive armor (because the bandits may not be able to tell that it's magic). The wizard is either advertising his nature (and thus first up for the crossbow bolt volley) or looks like some sort of wuss scholar. Etc. The bandits may view the fighter as dangerous, but they've got numbers. And numbers usually win the day. In fact, action deficit really does kill in D&D and most other RPGs. (Not all, but most.) However, levels do make a big difference, so a 3-level advantage makes a dozen or so bandits into a CR 4 encounter for the ECL 4 party. They think they outnumber them at least 3 to 1; surely they can take them.

At lower levels, it's goblins and kobolds and the like, using the same line of reasoning. They outnumber the bigger, stronger demihumans, so they can win!

That adventurers are particularly tough but indistinguishable from 'normal" travelers is the primary reason this happens with any verisimilitude.

Once the party is riding exotic mounts and bearing obviously magical gear with spellcasters who are casually using magic the way a child uses their toys - to stave off boredom - they usually don't get attacked by bandits.

"Hm. I count at least a dozen stones flying around the wizard's head, and his robes look like they're practically glowing with power. The fighter is riding a griffon, and if they have a rogue, I haven't spotted him yet. Let's not even get into the holy high priest of the order of smitographers bearing a burning mace. Yeah, we're not messing with these guys."

[Knaight]

The typical excuse for bandit attacks on well-armed adventurers is quantity vs. quality. At the level(s) where D&D, at least, expects adventurers to be playing "caravan guard" or otherwise wandering with obvious valuables that might tempt a highwayman, they don't look overtly impressive.

It's still an excuse though - a bandit group with triple the numbers would also generally benefit from said obvious valuables, but they conveniently don't attack. It just puts it in that 70-70 category that Kyoryu mentioned where the weaker bandit attack is in the plausible region.

[Lorsa]

To kyoryu:

I seem to remember having seen somewhere in this thread an offer to host some form of FATE game? Since you are one of the two people on this forum I'd be dying to play with, and I think in order to really "understand" how FATE is supposed to run I need a GM who already knows it; I would be stupid if I didn't take you up on the offer.

I don't enjoy online games as much as real-life ones, but to have you as a GM, I would gladly make an exception.


Here's a comment from a game's text: "DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM... don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. the game operates by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. There should be very few moments in the game where the pcs are free of conflicts or problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long breather. When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s more exciting than sensible! You can always find a way later on to justify something that doesn’t make immediate sense."

"Do what's exciting, who cares if it makes sense!" and "Whatever, figure it out later." do a pretty good job of summarizing an approach to writing that ruins fictional works for me.

Now, RPGs aren't fiction, and what works in one and what works in the other are not matched sets, plus tastes vary, so I'm not necessarily making a claim at an objective thing here.

Well, I do sort of follow the 'Drama is better than realism' creed in my games as well. Not to the extent that the players get a feeling things are implausible, but still, not 100% "realistic".

Like for example, in a WoD campaign I ran where the PCs where all mortals fighting against supernaturals (or making allies with them, because apparently Werewolves are just fluffy dogs?), each of the four characters had something "supernatural" related happening to something related to their family.

One of them had a little sister who started hanging out with a (more nasty than their allied) Werewolf gang, and also later become a Werewolf herself.

One of them had parents which lived in a neighborhood where a real estate agent started using a Ghost to "chase away" residents and buy their houses cheap.

One of them had a cousin who got addicted to Vampire blood.

One of them had a father who was basically part of Demon worshiping cult.

All of these were consistent with their family members' personalities, and the father Demon worshiper almost unavoidable considering how the player had described their father (he was actually one of the main antagonists in the campaign). They could all, theoretically, happen. However, that they'd all happen is hardly realistic. It was a choice based solely on drama. None of the players complained, nor did it violate their verisimilitude (which I would hold in high regard). Probably because I did it "right" (as in, the events were both very intriguing to the players, and temporally spread out over a long period; had they all happened at the same time, I doubt they'd been as accepting).

But yeah, I too value drama highly. I think it would be very hard to have a fun game without adhering to the principle of drama to 'some' extent. Still, consistency and verisimilitude is important.

[kyoryu]

It's still an excuse though - a bandit group with triple the numbers would also generally benefit from said obvious valuables, but they conveniently don't attack. It just puts it in that 70-70 category that Kyoryu mentioned where the weaker bandit attack is in the plausible region.

Right. And if you do find the overwhelming bandit force, it's staged as an "avoid" encounter, and not as an ambush.

And from a pure "simulationist" view, the PCs aren't special, so bandits would *know* what mages looked like (in general) and would be aware of such PC types.

Besides that, we have the fact that PCs conveniently go through ever-marginally-increasing difficulties of encounters is clearly *primarily* so that the PCs can fight appropriate enemies as their skills increase. Sure, there's plausible reasons for that, but those aren't the *cause* of that arrangement.

Even in old-school megadungeons, the levels of dungeons getting more difficult as you go down is purely to provide good gaming, regardless of what rationalization is used for it.



I seem to remember having seen somewhere in this thread an offer to host some form of FATE game? Since you are one of the two people on this forum I'd be dying to play with, and I think in order to really "understand" how FATE is supposed to run I need a GM who already knows it; I would be stupid if I didn't take you up on the offer.

Cool. I'll send you a PM.


I don't enjoy online games as much as real-life ones, but to have you as a GM, I would gladly make an exception.

Awww <3


But yeah, I too value drama highly. I think it would be very hard to have a fun game without adhering to the principle of drama to 'some' extent. Still, consistency and verisimilitude is important.

Right. And I think that most people agree that all three are important. It's a matter of prioritization and weighting, not absolutes. Which doesn't mean there aren't real differences, but that it's not a matter of people that aren't like you pegging their particular criteria at 100%. Saying "hey, drama is important!" doesn't mean that you ignore plausibility completely - it just means that perhaps you value "interesting" slightly higher and draw your lines a bit differently.

[Segev]

It's still an excuse though - a bandit group with triple the numbers would also generally benefit from said obvious valuables, but they conveniently don't attack. It just puts it in that 70-70 category that Kyoryu mentioned where the weaker bandit attack is in the plausible region.

What do you mean, the bandits with triple the numbers don't attack? Why wouldn't they? That's a DMing choice, there. I've no problem with bandits attacking when they're over-CR for the PCs; the PCs have a choice to make about how to handle the situation. "Stand and fight" is probably a bad one in that case. But they'll still be quite a surprise for bandits who expected much weaker prey.

[Knaight]

What do you mean, the bandits with triple the numbers don't attack? Why wouldn't they? That's a DMing choice, there. I've no problem with bandits attacking when they're over-CR for the PCs; the PCs have a choice to make about how to handle the situation. "Stand and fight" is probably a bad one in that case. But they'll still be quite a surprise for bandits who expected much weaker prey.

I mean that it is fairly routine for non-narrativist games to still see the narrow band of encounters disproportionately often, which represents a certain amount of decisions that come from weighing quality in terms of gameplay and/or narrative and not just setting simulation. That crops up in the decision of how many bandits there are in the first place, where there are enough to end up in the suggested range and not an equally plausible but vastly larger group.

[Segev]

I mean that it is fairly routine for non-narrativist games to still see the narrow band of encounters disproportionately often, which represents a certain amount of decisions that come from weighing quality in terms of gameplay and/or narrative and not just setting simulation. That crops up in the decision of how many bandits there are in the first place, where there are enough to end up in the suggested range and not an equally plausible but vastly larger group.

It's my experience that you don't see "more bandits" in larger groups as you level, but that you move to areas where the threats are inherently bigger. You were in goblin country before you moved to orc country. Now that that's old hat, you do your work in ogre country.

[Knaight]

It's my experience that you don't see "more bandits" in larger groups as you level, but that you move to areas where the threats are inherently bigger. You were in goblin country before you moved to orc country. Now that that's old hat, you do your work in ogre country.

Putting aside how this is the same sort of artificial scaling given enough plausibility to become unobjectionable, that's besides the point. The point is that in any encounter where there would be something like a "random" bandit attack, there could easily be one with more and smarter bandits attacking with overwhelming force. There's a range of plausible options, and there's a selection made within that range by the GM such that the probable outcome isn't a TPK.

[Max_Killjoy]

Putting aside how this is the same sort of artificial scaling given enough plausibility to become unobjectionable, that's besides the point. The point is that in any encounter where there would be something like a "random" bandit attack, there could easily be one with more and smarter bandits attacking with overwhelming force. There's a range of plausible options, and there's a selection made within that range by the GM such that the probable outcome isn't a TPK.


It might be as much an issue of D&D and derivative games (level-based, for the most part) having a very steep progression, taking characters from "competent seasoned soldier or the equivalent" to "cheesy movie hero" to "demigod / fantasy-genre-superhero".

[Steel Mirror]

It's my experience that you don't see "more bandits" in larger groups as you level, but that you move to areas where the threats are inherently bigger. You were in goblin country before you moved to orc country. Now that that's old hat, you do your work in ogre country.
This is a basically convention or trope that exists for the convenience of a game, not a priori because it makes sense. In this case, it's a game convention, and using it bothers some people and not others. Using genre conventions for the convenience of a fun game is what we are talking about in this thread when we speak of 'narrative' contrivances, but narrative or genre conventions are no more inherently unrealistic than game conventions like scaling baddies or dungeons which mysteriously are full of traps, enemies, hazards, and loot which all hover around a narrow band of difficulty. I know people who are bothered by narrative contrivances and not scaling bad guys, vice versa, and people who are fine with both and people who hate both.

Piping up about which ones you like and which ones bother you is fine, in fact I think it's an important thing to know about yourself so that you can figure out which games you will probably enjoy and which you probably won't (though I'll also throw a plug out there for trying something unfamiliar or out of your comfort zone every once in awhile, you might find that you like it!). But saying that one is a "good" game while the other is "bad" strikes me as a bit inconsistent.

[icefractal]

I don't see why the bandits would need to scale at all - we're not playing tabletop Oblivion simulator here. :smallwink:

Instead, the role of the bandits changes:
* Starting out, it's a tense fight against a few bandits and running the **** away if a large group shows up.
* A few levels later, it's a tense fight against the large group and small groups are usually no big deal.
* A few levels past that, the large group is an ordinary encounter.
* A few more levels, and maybe you don't even play out the fight, just decide how you're handling them.
* And eventually, they're just a background thing - "On your trip, you ran into a lot of bandits; none of them were a threat, but it's more than typical for the area."

Meanwhile you're running into other types of foes as well.

[kyoryu]

This is a basically convention or trope that exists for the convenience of a game, not a priori because it makes sense.

Exactly. While the specifics (what we're being convenient for, how much we're ignoring plausibility, what decisions are getting "shifted" by that convenience, how familiar/accustomed people are to the type of shifting happening), most games I'm aware of do it to some extent.

Which doesn't mean, also, that people can't take objection to how a game is doing said weighting/shifting, if it's for different purposes, or a different amount, or just in a way that they're not used to and so jars them out of the zone.

But I know of no game that runs purely on "what would be realistic".

Even in cases where the role a "bandit attack" has might shift, as described above, usually the GM will present the encounter in different ways to reflect the power disparity - the attack at level 1 might be either set up in an "avoid the bandits" way, or at worst the bandits confronting them and demanding money/etc. At level 5, the bandits might ambush and take an "attack first" mentality, because that's the only way they're a challenge.

[Segev]

Putting aside how this is the same sort of artificial scaling given enough plausibility to become unobjectionable, that's besides the point. The point is that in any encounter where there would be something like a "random" bandit attack, there could easily be one with more and smarter bandits attacking with overwhelming force. There's a range of plausible options, and there's a selection made within that range by the GM such that the probable outcome isn't a TPK.


This is a basically convention or trope that exists for the convenience of a game, not a priori because it makes sense. In this case, it's a game convention, and using it bothers some people and not others.

My point was more that you move to those areas because you CAN, not because the DM is driving you there. I'm looking at this as a sandbox type deal right now, because obviously a more linearly-driven campaign will have the plot ramp you through the sorting algorithm of evil, and that will be a touch more artificial. (The justification there tends to be that you're getting closer to the heart of evil's power, so of course more powerful things are waiting for you. Or that you're drawing more of the BBEG's personal attention.)

With the "bandits on the highway" thing, you encounter the lower-level bandits in one area and do that first because you know that the more powerful ones make the route through the more dangerous area...more dangerous. Whether by scouting or rumor-gathering, you figure out where you can safely go.

If you choose to stay in the "low-level bandits" area, you're a big fish in a small pond, and those bandits either learn to leave you alone or get curbstomped. If you choose to go into the "ogre bandits" area while still level one, you'll find yourself playing more of a rogue's game very quickly if you want to avoid being clubbed into tender meaty chunks for their cook pots.

The progression is "believable" because it's player-choice-driven. The world is out there, and is what it is. Go do things that help you rather than get you killed.

[kyoryu]

It's *plausible*. And it's entirely for the convenience of the PCs.

In a more sandbox game, instead of the "sorting algorithm of evil", you have generally increasing levels of badness as you move away from Ye Olde Quaint Homeville.

That's not done for the sake of realism. It's because it makes good gaming sense. We can come up with plausible reasons for why that's the case, and that's fine - but those reasons are justification, not the driving motivation.

And that's all I'm saying. In almost any game, realism is only *one* of multiple considerations for why things happen. And realism doesn't contradict game convenience or being interesting, until it does.

It's kinda like the Stormwind Fallacy. Just because you're concerned about things being interesting does not mean you're unconcerned about them being realistic.

The caveat is the same as my caveat for the Stormwind Fallacy - at some point, you have to choose which is more important. You can make the realistic option interesting, and you can find ways to make the interesting option realistic. But at some point you have to choose to focus on one or the other. (For the Stormwind Fallacy, you can optimize any character choice, and you can come up with an in-character rationalization for any optimization. But those aren't the same thing).

[Knaight]

My point was more that you move to those areas because you CAN, not because the DM is driving you there. I'm looking at this as a sandbox type deal right now, because obviously a more linearly-driven campaign will have the plot ramp you through the sorting algorithm of evil, and that will be a touch more artificial. (The justification there tends to be that you're getting closer to the heart of evil's power, so of course more powerful things are waiting for you. Or that you're drawing more of the BBEG's personal attention.)

The progression is "believable" because it's player-choice-driven. The world is out there, and is what it is. Go do things that help you rather than get you killed.

It's believable because it's consistently within the plausible range given the setting; the mere existence of these areas that map conveniently to a level is another case of a GM decision happening that can line these encounters up in a non-narrative game. Ultimately there's always points within a game where decisions are being made between multiple different options that are plausible. All the drama-first advice says is to shift a little more towards the plausible but less probable side in the name of keeping things interesting than otherwise. The behavior is there in any game.

[Segev]

It's believable because it's consistently within the plausible range given the setting; the mere existence of these areas that map conveniently to a level is another case of a GM decision happening that can line these encounters up in a non-narrative game. Ultimately there's always points within a game where decisions are being made between multiple different options that are plausible. All the drama-first advice says is to shift a little more towards the plausible but less probable side in the name of keeping things interesting than otherwise. The behavior is there in any game.

Oh, sure, such decisions are made by the GM. But in truth, even semi-randomly populating your world and then trying to ask "what would happen?" from the things placed therein can lead to "a good zone for this level range" in various parts of the map.

If the starting village is in a "high level zone," then you probably need to think on why that village isn't overrun.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's *plausible*. And it's entirely for the convenience of the PCs.

In a more sandbox game, instead of the "sorting algorithm of evil", you have generally increasing levels of badness as you move away from Ye Olde Quaint Homeville.

That's not done for the sake of realism. It's because it makes good gaming sense. We can come up with plausible reasons for why that's the case, and that's fine - but those reasons are justification, not the driving motivation.

And that's all I'm saying. In almost any game, realism is only *one* of multiple considerations for why things happen. And realism doesn't contradict game convenience or being interesting, until it does.

It's kinda like the Stormwind Fallacy. Just because you're concerned about things being interesting does not mean you're unconcerned about them being realistic.

The caveat is the same as my caveat for the Stormwind Fallacy - at some point, you have to choose which is more important. You can make the realistic option interesting, and you can find ways to make the interesting option realistic. But at some point you have to choose to focus on one or the other. (For the Stormwind Fallacy, you can optimize any character choice, and you can come up with an in-character rationalization for any optimization. But those aren't the same thing).


To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a binary choice, or that a player can only care about one at a time.

If anything, I'd object to the notion some put forth that "verisimilitude" and "interesting" are mutually exclusive or competing goals.

[kyoryu]

If anything, I'd object to the notion some put forth that "verisimilitude" and "interesting" are mutually exclusive or competing goals.

Absolutely.

As I said, given a 0/100, a 100/0, and a 70/70 option, I think most people would gravitate to the 70/70. Whether you'd prefer a 80/60 over a 60/80 or the other way around (or 90/80 vs. 80/90 or whatever) is probably the real discussion - and, frankly, to me in most cases they're each going to be good enough in most cases that the typical player will be happy with either one.

[Max_Killjoy]

OK -- these may have been partially addressed, but I think the thoughts were caught up in other things when the thread was going fast.

1) Only rolling when something is contested or in doubt.
Doesn't this run the risk of telegraphing information to the players that their characters don't have? And thus distancing them from their characters, and getting into more metagaming?

2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?

[Segev]

1) Only rolling when something is contested or in doubt.
Doesn't this run the risk of telegraphing information to the players that their characters don't have? And thus distancing them from their characters, and getting into more metagaming? It could, handled clumsily, but in my experience it's more used for things where the players already should know it's mostly a foregone conclusion. Or used only after the players have committed to it.

So, for instance, if the players don't know if the trio of well-armed bandits are bluffing their fool heads off, are really bad at reading the party's threat level, or are actually Chuck Norris, the Doctor, and Q... then you wait until the players actually commit to "we fight them" before revealing that the battle is a foregone conclusion (because they're bluffing AND had thought the party was weaker than the party is).

If, on the other hand, the players flat-out know that this cliff is a trivial climb, just let them narrate climbing it. Only pull out the dice when you reveal that there's something they didn't know that makes it more dangerous.


2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?Depends how it's done.

For me, at least, it's acceptable to have the reason I couldn't find it be that Bob the Butler had just taken it out of the room for polishing earlier that morning, and hadn't yet brought it back, if I'm working with a search skill system that has an "auto-fail" chance (so that no matter how good I am, I can fail if I roll this on the dice). To me, what that's doing is combining certain random, out-of-my-PC's-control elements in with the skill roll.

It isn't that I just failed to notice the object that was hidden in the room, even though I am the best eagle-eyed detective in the world; it's that it wasn't there to be found. And yes, we determined that post-hoc.

The places it starts to damage the fiction of the world is when my skill level can cause something to be there that shouldn't be. If the silver key to the moon vault is NEVER kept in the chambermaid's quarters, a high skill roll shouldn't retroactively have made this particular chambermaid have accidentally swept it into her apron's pockets yesterday, coincidentally, so I can find it there in her laundry today.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that "it is (not) there" based on your roll should only come up if whether it would be in the locale being searched is a fair question. If it definitely would be, or it definitely wouldn't, then this is unsatisfactory. If it might or might not be, then the success/failure of your roll in part determining if it even was is okay.


As an example in D&D, one thing that "clever" dungeon writers have done in pre-printed modules is declare that a trap will NOT be found unless the players specify that they search EXACTLY where the trigger is hidden. They justify this by claiming that a generic search check can't see it if they don't specifically look in this one spot. I've also seen players who try to circumvent the search DC of something by painstakingly describing every which way they look at every little thing.

The search check is supposed to abstract this. Did your character think to look at the roof of the gargoyle-statue's mouth to find the note stuck up in there? That SHOULD be covered by whether you rolled high enough on Search. Not by whether you thought to say, "And my PC looks in the gargoyle's mouth, checking behind teeth, looking for a hollow under the tongue, eyeballing the back of the throat (and seeing if it has a carved-out esophagus), and looking up at the roof of the mouth."

I've also seen multiple people search a room, and when one failed the search check badly enough to miss the equivalent of a DC 5 object in near plain sight, and the other rolled really well, the DM said that the reason the second one found the silver key is that it had fallen off its proper hook and been accidentally kicked under a curtain.

The GM ad hoc'd why it took so much better a search, and it's fine.

Basically, if there is uncertainty as to something's location, it's probably okay to let success or failure on the search check determine if it's even there to be found.

You CAN, alternatively, roll to see where it is, or pre-determine where it is, but the level of abstraction you're going to allow is still important. If it's in the closet of this room, is that "another room," or does searching the room include searching the closet so a high enough check will find it?

[kyoryu]

OK -- these may have been partially addressed, but I think the thoughts were caught up in other things when the thread was going fast.

1) Only rolling when something is contested or in doubt.
Doesn't this run the risk of telegraphing information to the players that their characters don't have? And thus distancing them from their characters, and getting into more metagaming?

If that's something you're really worried about.

There's a number of way that this gets handled in practice, but frankly I don't typically worry about it *that* much. Most players I know can keep that separation, as much as they can avoid using their encyclopedic knowledge of the monster manual.

The most immersive, old-school game that I've played in had a strong expectation that you would only make decisions based on what your character knew. If you were wearing certain types of helmets, for instance, you were supposed to only make decisions based on what your character could actually see.


2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?

No. Not when used properly.

From a GM's perspective, when a player asks "is the widget here?" there's really three answers from the GM's side:

1) "Yep, wonder if he can find it."
2) "Nope, he ain't gonna find it."
3) "... that's a great question."

All that rolling if something is there really does is combine "is it there?" and "do they find it?" for the third case. Once something is *known*, in any game I've dealt with, it's assumed to be immutable.

(Note for pedanticness and to head off strawmen: If it is "known" that something is in a given place, then all that means is it's there *at that moment*. It can still be moved! There's no meta-requirement that the position be locked in place any more than the GM deliberately placing it would create that requirement.)

In other words, it's exactly the same as in a more traditional system having that be two rolls - one to determine if the thing is there, and the other to see if you can find it. The only potential difference is the visibility of this happening.

[BRC]

OK -- these may have been partially addressed, but I think the thoughts were caught up in other things when the thread was going fast.

1) Only rolling when something is contested or in doubt.
Doesn't this run the risk of telegraphing information to the players that their characters don't have? And thus distancing them from their characters, and getting into more metagaming?

Eh, not really?

90% of the time, something "Not being in doubt" means that there is no chance of the PC's action failing for whatever reason, which doesn't really add any new information, it just confirms that the "Safe" action was, in fact, a safe action.

The rest of the time, it's usually some information that will be revealed immediately regardless, like the presence of a trap (You either spot the trap, or trigger the trap, regardless the character learns about the trap almost immediately after the roll is made).
Other times, GM's can resolve things with a secret roll, or use passive skills.

Finally, that "Metagaming", if it happens, could be in-character. Knowing that you had to make a roll, but failed could translate as a "Gut Feeling", your character THINKS they saw something (A spot roll was made), but can't say what, or even if they saw something.


Regardless, as far as Immersion is concerned, I think having the players pause to roll Sense Motive on every single conversation with an NPC (on the off chance that they're lying) would break immersion even more, rather than just doing it occasionally. Since you are constantly rolling dice and doing math, rather than focusing on roleplaying.


2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?[/QUOTE]

Okay, so, this really depends on what the DICE are simulating, and the use of "Blank space" in the setting.

the Dice, especially in a system with a lot of swing like a d20 system, are usually considered to represent your character's efforts. A high roll on a search check means that your character was, at this moment, especially perceptive and good at searching.

But, from another perspective, the Dice actually represent any non-determined element, external or internal, that could influence success or failure.

Consider, say, the Gather Information skill. A success means I went to the right bar to ask the right person the right question. A high Gather Information skill means I know which questions to ask which people in which bars.

But, a success inevitably means that I got lucky. With something like Gather Information, it's entirely possible to do everything right and still find nothing. Luck is always going to be a factor. Now, there's a difference between knowing where Billy the Snitch drinks, and picking a random bar that happens to contain Billy the Snitch on that particular evening in that the former is more likely to work (Represented by the higher skill).

Back to Search, there are both internal and external factors that could determine success or failure of a search check, the primary one being whether or not what you're looking for is even there.

Consider, there are three outcomes to a search check

1) It's there and I find it

2) It's there and I don't find it

3) It's not there (Therefore I don't find it).

We've already accepted RNG plays a role. If there are 40 places something could be hidden in a room, a higher search skill can represent how many places you can check in 10 minutes, a success on the roll could mean either "You thought to check in the place where it actually is", or "It happens to be in one of the places you thought to check".

So, going back, if we let the dice determine whether it's even in the room to begin with, you get basically the same logic.

There is a chance it is in the room, and if so, a chance that you will find it.

You're simply letting one roll cover both probabilities.

Edit: Better example, Knowledge Rolls.

If Wally the Wizard makes a roll to identify an arcane rune, then that roll is covering TWO probabilities

1) What is the chance that Wally has studied this particular rune (Or, has studied enough about this style of rune to determine it's function, even if he hasn't studied this one specifically)

2) What is the chance that Wally, at this moment, remembers what he has learned.

A higher Knowledge (Arcana) skill represents everything (Both level of knowledge, and ability to recall it) that would contribute to this success.

Most GMs, for the sake of sanity, focus on the first probability. You make the roll, if you succeed, then it means that this particular rune happens to be one you've studied. If you fail, then you skipped lecture that day to sleep off a hangover after a party with your Wizard Frat. This way you can't have a player constantly re-rolling the knowledge check to see if their character suddenly remembers this particular rune. Similarly, if a Character succeeds on a roll to recognize a rune, and then later sees that same rune, most GM's will just say it's the same rune, rather than making the player re-roll to check if they remember it THIS time.

If you want to go with the extreme "The World as a set simulation, the Dice cannot alter reality" thing, then for every character with a knowledge skill, the GM would need to determine ahead of time everything that character had studied, and have the Knowledge roll be determining how well they remember a given piece of information, which requires a massive amount of bookeeping.

As-is, it's possible that a GM could pre-emptily determine that a character might NOT know some piece of information (This particular Rune is the first of it's kind, created by a new, highly secretive school of wizards. There is simply no way for anybody not from this school to have seen this Rune before), but once again, that's a special case, as is the case where, for story reasons, it wouldn't make sense for the character to have NOT learned about this rune before, and they just forgot it at this particular moment.

So, while "A good search check means it's in this room" is fishy, it's not without precedent.

[obryn]

2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?
This is a lot more common than you might think. I know you are not, personally, talking about D&D, but let's look at the humble saving throw.

What does a successful save mean? It means the PC has succeeded in negating part or all of something - be that a wand of paralysis, drinking poison, getting caught by a fireball, charmed by a vampire, etc. But how have they done it? The rules shrug. It's a game mechanic that exists so that the PCs have a chance to survive otherwise certain doom. The details of how John Rogue, standing in the middle of an empty room evades half or all of a fireball's damage will have to be figured out post-hoc.

Don't take my word for it, take Gary's.


http://i.imgur.com/WPQUG1r.png
http://i.imgur.com/P1VRXb8.png

[Max_Killjoy]

This is a lot more common than you might think. I know you are not, personally, talking about D&D, but let's look at the humble saving throw.

What does a successful save mean? It means the PC has succeeded in negating part or all of something - be that a wand of paralysis, drinking poison, getting caught by a fireball, charmed by a vampire, etc. But how have they done it? The rules shrug. It's a game mechanic that exists so that the PCs have a chance to survive otherwise certain doom. The details of how John Rogue, standing in the middle of an empty room evades half or all of a fireball's damage will have to be figured out post-hoc.

Don't take my word for it, take Gary's.


http://i.imgur.com/WPQUG1r.png
http://i.imgur.com/P1VRXb8.png


I prefer to have the player start with what they want to do, then find the roll to do it -- rather than invoke a rule, make a roll or spend a point or whatever, and then retro-explain what happened.

GG's mechanics-first, "roll something then figure it out" approach, is precisely what I don't want in most cases. It's a blend of abstraction and disassociation that I don't care for at all.

[kyoryu]

I prefer to have the player start with what they want to do, then find the roll to do it -- rather than invoke a rule, make a roll or spend a point or whatever, and then retro-explain what happened.

This is pretty much what Fate and AW (narrative systems, ironically) do. They usually call it "fiction first", fiction meaning "the imagined world", not some kind of "story" thing.

[icefractal]

If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?It certainly hurts deep immersion (if the players know that's how it works, anyway), but deep immersion is pretty tricky to pull off and IME the majority of campaigns don't have much of it.

Beyond that, I think this boils down to exploration vs creation. People play RPGs for a lot of reasons, so it's not going to be something everyone cares about, but getting to explore/discover a fictional place is fun (IMO) and putting the authorial power on the players prevents that. I'm not saying that creating stuff isn't fun too, but it's a different type of fun than exploration.

For instance, if I hear about The Half-Sunk City, research it, and the GM says "Ok, you tell me what the city is like, and that's now how it is." then I'm going to be a bit sad that I don't get to find out about or explore that city. Creating part of a setting can be enjoyable, it just doesn't scratch the same itch.

As several people have mentioned, having the roll determine it doesn't necessarily mean that the players are determining it or that the game's reality is totally fluid, it can just mean that:
1) The GM hasn't determined that part of the reality ahead of time and is doing it as-needed. And ...
2) That part of reality is determined using dice as an oracle, rather than personally created by the GM.

On the one hand, while providing some exploration, that's not as fun to explore as something that fully exists and was deliberately created. On the other hand, GMs are only human, no reasonable player is going to expect that every single detail of every single room was planned out ahead of time. At some level of granularity it's going to come down to being random or made up on the spot. So ultimately it's a trade-off between discovery potential and other factors like faster prep, less wasted time, ease of winging it, and so forth.

[Max_Killjoy]

This is pretty much what Fate and AW (narrative systems, ironically) do. They usually call it "fiction first", fiction meaning "the imagined world", not some kind of "story" thing.


No disagreement here. If we're playing with the pigeonhole model... I'd consider "rules first" something that leans "gamist", with "fiction first" actually being more of a common ground for "sim" and "nar".

[Koo Rehtorb]

For instance, if I hear about The Half-Sunk City, research it, and the GM says "Ok, you tell me what the city is like, and that's now how it is." then I'm going to be a bit sad that I don't get to find out about or explore that city. Creating part of a setting can be enjoyable, it just doesn't scratch the same itch.

There's certainly room for both. Often in the same game.

[kyoryu]

For instance, if I hear about The Half-Sunk City, research it, and the GM says "Ok, you tell me what the city is like, and that's now how it is." then I'm going to be a bit sad that I don't get to find out about or explore that city. Creating part of a setting can be enjoyable, it just doesn't scratch the same itch.

That can be a bit much for me. I've played in games where even the threats we saw were the result of the GM going "okay, what do you see there?"

I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not really what I'm looking for in an RPG. If I wanna write, I'll write.

On the other hand, if someone's playing a barbarian from the frigid north, and wants to expound on their culture, that works well for me, both as a player and as a GM. Talking about life in my tribe without having to ask the GM every second only enhances immersion to me.


On the one hand, while providing some exploration, that's not as fun to explore as something that fully exists and was deliberately created. On the other hand, GMs are only human, no reasonable player is going to expect that every single detail of every single room was planned out ahead of time. At some level of granularity it's going to come down to being random or made up on the spot. So ultimately it's a trade-off between discovery potential and other factors like faster prep, less wasted time, ease of winging it, and so forth.

Well, there's two key things here:

1) Not all games are about exploration.

2) It's not a binary between "designed" and "random". In most cases that I've seen, the GM will determine the important bits (even if on the fly) and use randomization for less critical bits. Like, in a post-apocalyptic game you might roll to see if you can find a car you can get working again (or, more likely, find said car before <some bad thing> happens). The fact that cars are there is set. The location is set. The detail of "is there a car in repairable shape" is not set.

And I don't think it's really level of detail that determines what is set and what is not - it's the *importance* of the detail, at least immediately. Think of most TV shows - if it's a new setting, you know very little about the setting at first, but will discover more over time. You might know very detailed things about certain parts of the setting, but only vague broad statements about others, if they're less immediately relevant.

Really, if we're going to use GNS ickyness here, I'd see it as being most counter to *gamist* behavior, as it breaks the contract of a set challenge that must be overcome.

[obryn]

That can be a bit much for me. I've played in games where even the threats we saw were the result of the GM going "okay, what do you see there?"

I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not really what I'm looking for in an RPG. If I wanna write, I'll write.

On the other hand, if someone's playing a barbarian from the frigid north, and wants to expound on their culture, that works well for me, both as a player and as a GM. Talking about life in my tribe without having to ask the GM every second only enhances immersion to me.
That's where I am, too. I'm good with collaborative world-building, but there are limits. Things involving a character's background? Create away! Mid-adventure? Nnnnnot really.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's where I am, too. I'm good with collaborative world-building, but there are limits. Things involving a character's background? Create away! Mid-adventure? Nnnnnot really.


That's roughly where I am as well.

Now, as a GM, if a player says something or writes something that I think is great and fits into the setting and so on, I'll quietly run with it and work it in where it fits. But it's at my discretion and not really an overt thing.

There was one instance when the players decided they needed to track down their favorite NPC, a lovably roguish bard and "agent" who had previously helped them with "traveling songs" that warp distance and time to speed up travel. Since they obviously wanted to know more about him, I made an entire night's session out of them traveling to this little border town where they'd tracked him down to, meeting his daughter they didn't know about, etc.

I made up the town, the region around the town, the daughter, details about the bard's life and history and why the mother wasn't around, etc, all of it, on the fly, that night, because the players were interested in that aspect of the world that I hadn't fleshed out. And the entire time, I was taking little tidbits from their side comments and working them in as subtlety as possible.

However, for me, here's a key thing -- I was able to do that seamlessly and smoothly because the world was already richly laid out. I had a framework to go from. The little town and the story behind why his daughter was there and the mother being gone and the landscape around the village and all that... flowed naturally from the established details. It wasn't from scratch, it grew organically from what had gone before.

[Steel Mirror]

However, for me, here's a key thing -- I was able to do that seamlessly and smoothly because the world was already richly laid out. I had a framework to go from. The little town and the story behind why his daughter was there and the mother being gone and the landscape around the village and all that... flowed naturally from the established details. It wasn't from scratch, it grew organically from what had gone before.
For what it's worth, this is close to my ideal when GMing, as well. I make up stuff on the fly all the time, but I don't tell my players when I do. I also carefully lay some things out in advance, letting them discover or overlook it as appropriate-and sometimes those get changed before they encounter them, as well. I'm sure they know I do both, but they don't always know which setting details and plot developments are which, which helps everyone buy into our fictional world and treat it as this established, pre-existing thing when we all know that's not the case.

And this is in Fate, where they can use FP to invent setting details and NPCs as we've talked about already. In those cases, the fact that it's an actual mechanics with clear delineations on when they can do that sort of setting invention and when they cannot actually helps the game feel more consistent, IMO. The fact that they someone has "Latest Bearer of Poor Old Richard's Haunted Bifocals" as an aspect means that they get some authority over inventing details relating to that artifact, its history, and the organization in our campaign that has been hunting for it, but not necessarily any authority to say "oh there's a church on this block so we run inside to escape the vampires", as that's something the GM has more authority over and that they have no specific ability to overwrite.

[kyoryu]

If a character is a mercenary, and they start talking about the bar they've been to in this town, I'm gonna run with it.

But I don't generally prefer for the players to tell me what it is that they find in the middle of the dark forest.

Now I will use sometimes ask *uninvolved* players for more information, but not people actively involved in the current situation.

[BRC]

I've spoken about this before, but personally I love using this sort of "Blank Space" in-game. Filling in setting details that are perfectly consistent with the world as described so far, but have not yet been established. It's the best way to have a fully realized setting, without overwhelming the players with a massive infodump at the start. It also helps the players feel more invested in the world, since they helped create it, rather than just having the GM Vomit world details all over them.

The Line for me is are you filling in a blank space to enhance the story, or are you doing it because it helps you solve an immediate problem you are facing.

This comes into a sort of social contract situation. The GM presents the players with a scenario, the game here is for the players to solve this scenario with the tools they have at their disposal, not for the Players to "Solve" the scenario by re-writing it.

For example, it's perfectly reasonable for, when the PC's arrive in a new town, one of the players declares that they have a cousin who came here and joined the city guard. If that makes sense for the characters and the town, the GM can sign off on it, and we're good to go. You have a cousin in the city guard. Later on, if they need to talk with a prisoner held by the Guard, that cousin could be useful.

However, if they arrive in town specifically to interview a prisoner held by the city guard, you can't just invent a convenient cousin with the access you need. The GM presented you with a scenario (Interview this prisoner held by the Guard), you don't get to change that scenario to an easier one (Interview this prisoner held by the Guard, which includes your cousin who would be glad to help you).

[RazorChain]

Alright, so here's where the long arguments about what "success" means. Because depending on your definition, you will interpret the dice vastly different than other people, which is part of the problem. But before that, you even have to qualify the difficulty of achieving that task, which is just as subjective as in other systems, but also randomized and nonlinear. So you spend 10 minutes taking a turn in a game that's supposed to be fast-paced, and then you look at the roll and you don't even know what you got unless you know your DM very well.

And my friend that likes this system thinks it's "fast-paced". >:(


Even in "Simulationist" systems the interpretation of success is largely up to the GM, it's not always about success/failure. A success by large margin can give you some additional benefits even when not bundled into the rules. So GM's running the same simulationistic system can interpret the exact same die roll differently.

[RazorChain]

It certainly hurts deep immersion (if the players know that's how it works, anyway), but deep immersion is pretty tricky to pull off and IME the majority of campaigns don't have much of it.

Beyond that, I think this boils down to exploration vs creation. People play RPGs for a lot of reasons, so it's not going to be something everyone cares about, but getting to explore/discover a fictional place is fun (IMO) and putting the authorial power on the players prevents that. I'm not saying that creating stuff isn't fun too, but it's a different type of fun than exploration.

For instance, if I hear about The Half-Sunk City, research it, and the GM says "Ok, you tell me what the city is like, and that's now how it is." then I'm going to be a bit sad that I don't get to find out about or explore that city. Creating part of a setting can be enjoyable, it just doesn't scratch the same itch.

As several people have mentioned, having the roll determine it doesn't necessarily mean that the players are determining it or that the game's reality is totally fluid, it can just mean that:
1) The GM hasn't determined that part of the reality ahead of time and is doing it as-needed. And ...
2) That part of reality is determined using dice as an oracle, rather than personally created by the GM.

On the one hand, while providing some exploration, that's not as fun to explore as something that fully exists and was deliberately created. On the other hand, GMs are only human, no reasonable player is going to expect that every single detail of every single room was planned out ahead of time. At some level of granularity it's going to come down to being random or made up on the spot. So ultimately it's a trade-off between discovery potential and other factors like faster prep, less wasted time, ease of winging it, and so forth.

This can be done in different ways.

I often use metacurrency in my games, as a teenager I ran games in my local gaming store and the owner who is a true old timer introduced me to the concept of Plot points, I don't know where he got it from and as this was in '92 this was way before FATE and the internet (I first got a 1200 baud modem in '93). But the concept was you could spend Plot Points to alter a scene by adding to it or change it in some way.

Though the years various groups I have played with have experimented using metacurrency that could either affect rolls other other aspects of the game. Today I use Fate points and those are actually not inspired by FATE but by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay which gave you fate points to save your bacon when you rolled badly on the wound table.

But I allow the players to change scenes to their advantage. For example in one session they needed information from the city watch and one PC who is a former mercenary used a fate point to add an NPC, a former merc buddy who he fought alongside who had joined the city watch. This adds to the campaign on the fly as the players are never going to account for everything about their characters and this allows them to flesh out the setting and their characters at the same time. This can also be used to add items to a scene for example an unarmed PC declares that the owner of the house is a fencing enthusiast and has crossed swords mounted on his wall....of course I as the GM can always veto...this isn't get out of jail for free cards. The downside is that I use fate against them and add complications...that's how they recover their fatepoints.

If a player wants to make up a local legend about a sunken city I might just go with it or even grab the reins if the player just wants to introduce it to the setting. Of course it just might be based on nothing like many legends are or I could just make it real in the setting if it sounds fun. A whole storyline spanning about 3 sessions evolved in my current campaign because one PC offhandedly remarked about a demon in the hills.

The same is when people are roleplaying and make up some fluff about where they are from or introduce something new from their past......most players do this in some form or another as they can't account for everything in their back stories....the halfling grobbart might go on about how a fight was nothing compared with when he was fighting skaven in the sewers of Middenheim even though it has never been mentioned before, this adds to the character and fleshes him out.

What I am saying is you can do both....I'm a very entrenched "simulationist" but adding to the setting helps immersion and makes it feel alive.

[Jay R]

OK -- these may have been partially addressed, but I think the thoughts were caught up in other things when the thread was going fast.

1) Only rolling when something is contested or in doubt.
Doesn't this run the risk of telegraphing information to the players that their characters don't have? And thus distancing them from their characters, and getting into more metagaming?

Yes, absolutely. I've played with one DM who only rolled when something was in doubt. Which means that by saying, "I search the room," you learn instantly whether anything is hidden there. If he had you roll, then something is there to find, whether you rolled well or not.


2) Determining facts based on the outcome of rolls, as opposed to revealing extant facts.
If the players know that whether the thing they're searching for is in the room (at all, in the first place) is determined not by whether it's there, but rather by how well they roll, doesn't this risk ruining the sense of the "fictional world" as a "real" place that their characters inhabit?

Yes. More importantly, it's too easy to exploit. I have a Ranger with an extremely high Spot (24 ranks). If a roll a natural 20, but there's nothing to spot, the DM will invent something. Once I noticed it, it's become all too tempting to make a Spot roll in any situation, because it will occasionally create a new magic item.

[Steel Mirror]

Yes, absolutely. I've played with one DM who only rolled when something was in doubt. Which means that by saying, "I search the room," you learn instantly whether anything is hidden there. If he had you roll, then something is there to find, whether you rolled well or not.
That's not precisely what I understand "only when something is in doubt" to mean. In your case with searching the room, I would have the players roll, even if I know that there is nothing to be found, because the point is that they don't know whether something is to be found. Since they are in doubt, and I'd like to keep them in doubt, I'd have them roll anyway.

Or to use another actual example from one of my games, there is a scary vampire guy who is absolutely untrustworthy whom my players have been forced to cooperate with a few times. When he gives them information they often roll social skills to see if he is being sincere with them. Now, the thing is, he has always been sincere so far. But he comes across as this oily git, so even if they roll well on the insight test, I roll my dice secretly, then announce "he seems to be telling the truth". They can never tell whether to take that as "he is being sincere" or "he is lying too well to know he is lying". Now this is an example where what they roll literally doesn't matter. If they roll low, his oily demeanor and general habit of projecting a personality of cultivated barely trustworthiness is enough to convince them of his sincerity. If they roll well, they can see past that outer shell...to convince them of his sincerity. But since his defining feature is that nobody ever is really sure what his deal is and whether he is playing them, having them roll still serves a function.

The 'don't roll unless the outcome is in doubt' advice I've always taken to be more like, if your players are trying to break into a building and have to climb a fence with razor wire on it, sure, you could have them all roll athletics. But what happens if one of them fails? Are you going to keep letting them roll to eventually hit the right number and get past the obstacle, no dramatic stakes involved? If so, then asking everyone to make rolls is a waste of time, since the outcome is never in question. So you can just skip the rolls, say they all eventually make it over the fence, and spend your precious gametime in other places where it actually means something.

Those situations can alse be dealt with using "success, but" or "failing forward" as I like to think of it, but all of those approaches exist to help cut down on truly pointless dice rolls at the table (as contrasted with dice rolls that the GM knows are pointless but which serve a purpose in keeping players on their toes or invested in the fiction of the world).

[Satinavian]

Okay, so, this really depends on what the DICE are simulating, and the use of "Blank space" in the setting.

the Dice, especially in a system with a lot of swing like a d20 system, are usually considered to represent your character's efforts. A high roll on a search check means that your character was, at this moment, especially perceptive and good at searching.

But, from another perspective, the Dice actually represent any non-determined element, external or internal, that could influence success or failure.

Consider, say, the Gather Information skill. A success means I went to the right bar to ask the right person the right question. A high Gather Information skill means I know which questions to ask which people in which bars.

But, a success inevitably means that I got lucky. With something like Gather Information, it's entirely possible to do everything right and still find nothing. Luck is always going to be a factor. Now, there's a difference between knowing where Billy the Snitch drinks, and picking a random bar that happens to contain Billy the Snitch on that particular evening in that the former is more likely to work (Represented by the higher skill). It still hurts versimilitude. The problem is less the dice determining the success, the problem is the skill part determining luck with random interferences. If a roll covers both then i suddenly can train to pick the bar where coincidently the contact i am looking for is.

That becomes more obvious with really high skill numbers which generate a situation where i only have to look at one place where the item i am looking for might be and it will nearly always be there


Random parts have to be random and not skill dependend. The only exception are some luck stats but any system using those implies that randomness doesn't work like randomness in the real world and that there is some fate stuff going on.



If you want to go with the extreme "The World as a set simulation, the Dice cannot alter reality" thing, then for every character with a knowledge skill, the GM would need to determine ahead of time everything that character had studied, and have the Knowledge roll be determining how well they remember a given piece of information, which requires a massive amount of bookeeping. Well, no. A higher knowledge skill means that the character knows more things. There is no problem rolling a dice to determine if he knows this particular thing and getting higher chances of success with higher skill ratings. Completely different to the search example.

If the search example would use two random rolls, one (independend of skills) to determine if the item is there and one skill roll to find it if present, it would not be problematic.

[kyoryu]

It still hurts versimilitude. The problem is less the dice determining the success, the problem is the skill part determining luck with random interferences. If a roll covers both then i suddenly can train to pick the bar where coincidently the contact i am looking for is.

That's really only true if you've minmaxed a skill so high that you can basically never fail...


That becomes more obvious with really high skill numbers which generate a situation where i only have to look at one place where the item i am looking for might be and it will nearly always be there

Yes. I don't play games where that's really possible.


Random parts have to be random and not skill dependend. The only exception are some luck stats but any system using those implies that randomness doesn't work like randomness in the real world and that there is some fate stuff going on.

So long as there's a chance of failure, a single roll can sum up both quite nicely.

[Satinavian]

That's really only true if you've minmaxed a skill so high that you can basically never fail...Or if something can be at different places (like 5 possible enemy bases) but is not actually hidden very well (which means not a high skill can be required to find it)


So long as there's a chance of failure, a single roll can sum up both quite nicely.If there are influences of skill and influences independend of skill you can't really do that. A skill roll would have the weong behavior and a pure random roll would also have the wrong behavior.

[kyoryu]

Or if something can be at different places (like 5 possible enemy bases) but is not actually hidden very well (which means not a high skill can be required to find it)

So make the required roll even higher.


If there are influences of skill and influences independend of skill you can't really do that. A skill roll would have the weong behavior and a pure random roll would also have the wrong behavior.

Incorrect. If you wanted to work out the math involved, you could find a single target number that would exactly duplicate the probability of the combined rolls. Usually that's not necessary, and just adjusting the roll to be more difficult based on the likelihood of finding the information is sufficient.