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 chadu | |
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Occasionally when doing game design, I come up with a mechanic or a take on a mechanic that seems really obvious/intuitive/easy/fun for me, but that some readers just don't get, some readers get (and decide whether or not they like it), and some readers really really groove on. The primary example here, of course, is the Damage system of the various PDQ games -- when you take damage, you reduce one or more of your choice of Qualities. This permits a player to attempt to keep his or her character's effectiveness optimized for whatever conflict the character is in as long as possible. (As rob_donoghue has thumbnailed it: "You can punch Spider-Man in the girlfriend!") Anyway... In an Unknown Armies campaign long ago, taschoene was getting frustrated by whiffing many, many rolls, even in stuff his character was good with. (Well, UA is kinda a whiffy system.) What I eventually suggested to him -- and I believe it helped -- was that he should interpret that failed roll in a way that, while it sucks he flubbed, it was still FUN for him. Thus, the nugget of this idea for S7S was born. One of the ideas I'm pushing in S7S is player narration of both their character's successes and failures, with the GM helping out (by embroidering, slightly editing, or taking over if the player is coming up blank) with the narration. I think this does several things (but I might be mistaken; speak up if you have an opinion!): 1. Eases the sting of failure. When it's the player's right to explain how the character failed, they feel some "control" over the randomness of the events depicted by the dice. 2. The intended action may have failed, not the character. S7S swashbuckling PCs are STYLISH and AWESOME. When something goes wrong, it should be in a STYLISH and AWESOME way. It doesn't even have to be the character's fault. One of the examples I give in the book is that of climbing a fortress wall. Say the character flubs his Climbing/Athletics/Acrobatics roll to do this. That does not have to mean the character sucks at climbing -- other complications, outside of the character's control, may have arisen (like a defender at the top of the wall cuts the rope free of the grapple or starts dropping pointy rocks on the character, a cannonball smashes into the fortress wall and shakes the character loose, an ally begins to fall and the character stops climbing to swing over to rescue him, etc.). 3. It gives the player's character a chance to earn Style Dice. The more a player talks, the better chances of the GM and/or other players think something that player said was cool or funny... which leads to Style Dice. 4. It eases the GM's burden of moment-by-moment description. By ceding a bit of narrative control in the clinches to players, the GM can spend more time describing the rest of the world and all of the NPCs. 5. It increases the GM's burden of overall material to juggle. I see this as a positive thing -- if the players are constantly inventing new stuff or situations from their narrations ("I failed at my Diplomacy attempt because in this culture, when you bow to the Countessa, having your right arm behind you back is an insult, and that's the way we do it on Colrona!"), the GM is getting more and more tools to build new/further/deeper situations, setting details, and characters. [It probably does some other things, too, but I can't figure those out at the moment: there's too much blood in my caffiene system. (MOAR CAWFY!)] Back to the point at hand: Is player narration of both success and failure one of those bits of "mad rpg theory" that you -- personally -- do not get, get and dislike, get and like, or get and groove on? Inquiring mind (er, me) would like to know! Tags: asmp, evilhat, game design, gaming, mad rpg theory, pdq, s7s
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From: bruceb |
Date:
April 23rd, 2009 02:49 pm (UTC)
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Pretty much.
What I really want - need, probably - is the advice on making failure interesting and rewarding to the player. That's the practical revolution that I'm really interested in, and probably the single biggest thing that's changed about my play style this decade, putting that as an active priority everywhere I can.
For me, narrative authority is a side effect of that. I don't especially care about it, to be honest. I don't lie awake at night worrying about. I have lain awake at night worrying that bad luck with the dice left my players stranded without much fun to have, and wishing I could think of more to make the failures at their intended efforts lead to something more rewarding.
As nearly as I can tell, my players feel about the same, or at least many of them do. They like narrating. Some like it a lot. Some end up explicitly GMing scenes while I just watch sometimes. :) But narrative authority doesn't seem to be the answer to their concerns about failure, either.
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From: whswhs |
Date:
April 23rd, 2009 02:15 pm (UTC)
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I don't tend to approach such outcomes in that way.
On one hand, there are outcomes with hard physical consequences: you get a broken leg, you lose consciousness, you die. I do not consider those to be negotiable. Player characters are narrated as physical entities that exist in a physical world, and one of the traits of physical worlds is intractibility. It's the GM's job to maintain the ongoing sense of the world, including that intractibility.
On the other hand, there are what could be called soft outcomes: loss of self-control, failure to persuade, social awkwardness and humiliation, revelation of information. It's much harder to reduce those to a short "lost points" treatment. But as a GM, I deal with those by talking about them with the player, and sometimes with the whole group of players. "What might Chad have said that would give offense to all of his players and totally fail them to accept his ruling on this rules question?" Framing it as a choice between GM control and player control treats it as an adversarial or zero-sum situation, and in doing so completely fails to grasp the shared interest of both players and GM in maintaining a believable world in which a credible narrative can emerge. It seems from your detailed comments that you do in fact envision an ongoing process of negotiation, but describing it in terms of a rules alternative between player control and GM control does not convey that.
And I'll close with a bit of narrative: In my recent fencing-students-in-1717-Paris campaign, three of the PCs got set upon by a gang of street thugs, including a big guy with a club. And in the aftermath, the surgeon's examination of the injured leg of one of the PCs showed that it was broken, and broken badly enough so that it could not be expected to heal straight. And the player's comment was, "Bad Leg and Addicted to Laudanum? How cool is that?!" That's the kind of players that I want to have.
On the other hand, if your rules system is producing so many series of bad rolls that it's hard to maintain the sense that a highly competent character actually is competent, then I would call that a defect in the rules system as a rules system; and I think that allowing the GM to have mercy on the players by letting them plea bargain to a less disturbing outcome is just failing to address the basic failure of the rules. Whenever any dice engine becomes destructive of narrative flow, it is the Right of the Players to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new game mechanics, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect good participatory narrative.
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From: chadu |
Date:
April 23rd, 2009 04:27 pm (UTC)
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Player characters are narrated as physical entities that exist in a physical world, and one of the traits of physical worlds is intractibility. It's the GM's job to maintain the ongoing sense of the world, including that intractibility.
I think we've had something like this discussion before, Bill, previously about superhero games. ;)
Let me try to summarize to provide a basis for further discussion, and please correct me if I misrepresent:
* You like enumerating the rules of the setting, and then hew to them in a hard, simulationist sense.
* I like enumerating the rules of the genre/media underlying the setting, and I hew to those in a strong, verisimilitudic sense.
Fair characterization?
Framing it as a choice between GM control and player control treats it as an adversarial or zero-sum situation, and in doing so completely fails to grasp the shared interest of both players and GM in maintaining a believable world in which a credible narrative can emerge. It seems from your detailed comments that you do in fact envision an ongoing process of negotiation, but describing it in terms of a rules alternative between player control and GM control does not convey that.
In the text, I believe I do not present it as an adversarial battle for narrative control -- though I do do so in this lj post. As part of the rules, players describe success and failure; the GM handles everything else, and can step in if the player doesn't want to narrate.
I don't know if that mitigates things.
And the player's comment was, "Bad Leg and Addicted to Laudanum? How cool is that?!" That's the kind of players that I want to have.
Me too! And I've been lucky enough to have several in the course of playtesting and writing the game.
I think the new Foible mechanic helps reward that sort of thing, and the existing Story Hook mechanic does too.
On the other hand, if your rules system is producing so many series of bad rolls that it's hard to maintain the sense that a highly competent character actually is competent, then I would call that a defect in the rules system as a rules system
Actually, all of the PDQ-based games are somewhat slanted in favor of PC success (Average Ranked character doing an Average Difficulty task is trying to hit a 7 on a 2d6 roll.)
Edited at 2009-04-23 04:28 pm (UTC)
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From: whswhs |
Date:
April 24th, 2009 04:26 am (UTC)
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You say that "S7S swashbuckling PCs are STYLISH and AWESOME. When something goes wrong, it should be in a STYLISH and AWESOME way. It doesn't even have to be the character's fault." But "the character's fault" isn't a necessary explanation in any game system. I mean, say we're playing GURPS, and I have a character with skill 20 in something. They'll still fail on a rolled 17 and critically fail on a rolled 18. But that's not going to come across as "the character's fault"; it's the irreducible minimum of bad luck and unfavorable situations that anyone can run into. Very few game systems let you build a character who has a zero probability of failure.
On the other hand, this stated goal is somewhat at odds with your statement that "all of the PDQ-based games are somewhat slanted in favor of PC success (Average Ranked character doing an Average Difficulty task is trying to hit a 7 on a 2d6 roll.)" You've just defined a situation where a character fails 42% of the time! If I wanted to build a character who came across as awesome, I would want them to be able to succeed better than 95% of the time, and succeed at a penalty better than 50% of the time. You seem to be defining a mechanic under which those "awesome" characters can't attain a very high rate of success, and then complaining that the result is frustrating to the players, and coming up with a narrative trick to make the failure bother them less. But if you picked a more appropriate mechanic in the first place you might not have that problem.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves." If you define numbers that produce frequent failures, then those numbers will produce the impression that the characters are inept.
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From: chadu |
Date:
April 24th, 2009 12:23 pm (UTC)
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But "the character's fault" isn't a necessary explanation in any game system.
I would agree that it isn't necessary, per se, but it's an entertaining explanation.
I mean, say we're playing GURPS, and I have a character with skill 20 in something. They'll still fail on a rolled 17 and critically fail on a rolled 18. But that's not going to come across as "the character's fault"; it's the irreducible minimum of bad luck and unfavorable situations that anyone can run into.
In my play experience, the majority of players ascribe failures and critical failures to the fault of the character, not bad luck or crappy situations.
Different gamers and gaming environments, I reckon.
You've just defined a situation where a character fails 42% of the time!
Success 58% fits my definition of "slightly slanted towards success."
My apologies. I momentarily forgot that you're not into my game system -- very few characters will have Average Rank Qualities. (Average Rank is the assumed untrained ability in anything that isn't secret, esoteric, or special.)
The majority of characters will be Good [+2] at things they're trained in, some will be Expert [+4], and a few will opt for Master [+6]. That gives, respectively, 2d6+2, 2d6+4, and 2d6+6 versus an Average Difficulty of 7.
How do the statistics of those work out?
Edited at 2009-04-24 12:23 pm (UTC)
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From: whswhs |
Date:
April 24th, 2009 04:56 pm (UTC)
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Chance of failure is respectively 17%, 3%, and none.
In general, I would consider "none" to be too small a chance of failure; even the world's greatest master ought to have a small chance of failure on a task difficult enough to roll for at all. But the smallest chance of failure possible in your system is 3%, the same as for Expert. That's probably too high. It's part of the reason I don't really like 2d6 systems all that well; the 3d6 system of GURPS not only gives you an irreducible minimum of failure of 2%, but lets you have an irreducible minimum of critical failure of 0.5% within that! Given that you're working with 2d6, though, I think it's probably better to go with Master having no chance of failure.
As to players ascribing failures to the character's lack of skill, I find it hard to believe that anyone would do so if it said right there on their character sheet that the character had skill 15 or 16. I don't see my players doing that. The saying I'm familiar with in those circumstances is "the dice know," which I take to be expressing a sense of fatalism, if anything: the dice are seen as a medium for divine intervention, as it were.
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It depends entirely on how much you trust your players and their reaction to the dramatic moment. With some groups it works well, with others, not so much. I have, however noted a tendency of even when it is being done successfully, people tend to fall back to being reactive to the gamemaster. Probably from habit. [Actually the style die mechanic to purchase background seems to have more of an effect in this regard of building the world/events than the success/failure of rolls.] It also probably works best with situations of "total success" or "total failure," rather than in situations where actions can be repeated ad infinitum. In the later case it often just becomes a minor inconvenience to goal-hungry players (although perhaps charging style dice for repeat attempts might alleviate this situation). So it can work, and work well, but it does require familiarity with the game that both the players and gamemaster desire. I suppose it all comes down to bad form over blocking other characters, including the NPCs. Incidentally, Houses of the Blooded does a similar thing mechanically with it's wager system. If you fail the test then your statement doesn't succeed, but you do get half your claimed wagers to describe the situation. In the example given, you fail to leap between the buildings (the stated objective) and then you spend your wagers to "grab a clothes line and swing onto a balcony below, surprising a beautiful woman with whom you want to spend the night with." While a nice idea in actually quantifying the degree of failure and success, I personally found the game system a bit too too "clunky" to do a good job at it (although it's improved if you double people's effective dice, allowing them to make more wagers, but then you have to rely on the players not attempting to roll all their dice to get "overkill" on the success chance). |
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I haven't had a chance to run S7S yet, but I like the idea of players narrating for success or failures. There are other reasons, too, but two that jumped out are:
1) After years of only GMing, I've started rotating, so I've been a player again--and I know that I want to narrate... :-) (in fact, I've found playing to be almost boring lately, which has really made me look at my own GMing from a different perspective), and
2) In my experience with my current group, the more they narrate and have input, the more engaged they are (and the better the game goes in general). But the old GM before me was a very dominating GM (I'm not really knocking the GM--he had an energy and creativity that kept it interesting, but the fact was you were a participant in his game, not equals)--so my players are still getting comfortable with player narration. It's definitely hasn't been their training until two years when I've been introducing new games and styles of play gradually. So having player narration responsibilities (and rewards) clearly spelled out and proceduralized is helpful.
And I also really like the idea that failure is not necessarily due to the character's skill. In books and movies, it isn't uncommon for a conflict to end due to outside influences (like a wall crumbling between opponents or the rope being cut or running out of time). And, of course, the same goes for successes (a character could win because of circumstances, dumb luck, etc., too). I like those kind of elements in a story, and tying it to narration of success or failure keeps it fair and fun.
(I've realized lately that I'm much more interested in following "story logic" and genre conventions in games than I am in any kind of reality emulation.)
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>> Back to the point at hand: Is player narration of both success and failure one of those bits of "mad rpg theory" that you -- personally -- do not get, get and dislike, get and like, or get and groove on? <<
This is one of the main fuels of gaming for me. If it isn't there, I get bored. If I'm gamemastering, I have to make sure that one person's narration doesn't bore someone else, because if I'm enjoying it, I'll let it run forever. I kid you not, I had to make "Pause" cards for the quiet players in my last game. But when the balance was right, it was just awesome.
The fact that you engineer this stuff into the mechanics of your games is why I play and recommend them. I have yet to find anyone else who does this as well, let alone better, than you.
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You're welcome.
The more I think about it, the more I realize -- you're not just a better designer, your process is smarter. You consider what people enjoy about gaming, what they want to do WITH and IN a game, not just the idea of the game itself. When you have those end goals in mind, it's easier to build the mechanics of the game to support them. That way, even if the details aren't perfect, it's simple to tweak them into place; we don't have to rebuild half the game to get what we want. And the mechanics also do a lot of the refereeing by discouraging bad behavior and rewarding good behavior on the part of the players: you make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. So the gamemaster doesn't have to spend as much time ragging on people.
Almost all the games out there are variations on a theme that began with the rise of fantasy roleplaying games, and people forget that the origin was in wargames. That necessarily puts intricate combat at the forefront in most games, but that's not why everyone plays. There are far fewer systems designed with a broad focus or a different focus, let alone ones that put heavy-duty infrastructure behind anything else. World Tree, for example, is a super-flexible system that lets people emphasize different things, but where it really shines is the magic system; that's a good example of game mechanics supporting something other than straight combat.
I like games that are different, but most are unique more because of their setting/character flavor than their mechanics. You seem to write at a much deeper level of code than most people do. That stands out. The end result is usually a game that is not only fun to play, but enlightening in terms of life lessons. Since that's another prime reason I play, it's another major attractor for me.
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