Simulationist doesn't exist
Russell Wallace
domicile with a nice bridge as my roof. Sue me :) Most of my best
posts so far have disappeared into a vacuum, so I'm trying out this
strategy; if it doesn't work either, I'll forget it.
That said, here's my point:
Note the campaign I referred to in the "Escalation" thread: it was a
story oriented campaign that fluctuated from spectacularly brilliant
to utterly crap and back again.
I thought at the time the problem was the GM was doing things in too
much of a dramatist style, and more simulationism was the solution -
let the PCs (NB: not players! The difference is important here.)
direct things.
I realized, long after, that I was wrong.
In 15 years of everything from dungeon hacks to interactive theater,
I've seen _one_ case that I remember where PC direction of the overall
plot led to a good outcome. That case is one of the shining memories
I'll take with me to my grave. [1]
In all other cases, it was always the case that the GM effectively
directed the entire story, with the PCs only deciding local tactics
for individual problems.
So what I realized was that I was _wrong_. It wasn't the game being
too story-oriented that I objected to. It was that _I didn't like the
particular story being told_.
I wanted to tell my character's story and make it good. The GM had his
own story he wanted to tell, with his own standard of goodness. We
didn't know what each other had in mind. Naturally we came into
conflict.
The solution is to reconcile them (or agree they can't be reconciled;
then I should play a different character or leave the campaign; if the
GM wanted to run a different campaign he'd be doing it already).
How can this be achieved? By discussion up front. By the time it
happens in game via NPCs, everyone has too much emotional commitment.
(On occasion, I've ended up shooting the NPCs in question or vice
versa. When the GM rules that the NPC is invulnerable to everything I
can shoot him with, it just pisses me off even more :))
Doesn't this contradict my extreme DIP stance? Of course. I contradict
myself; I am vast, I contain multitudes :)
More seriously, I find that discussion up front is good _about certain
things_. Specifically, I'm still not interested in talking about what
my character's hobbies were when he was 10 years old or what the
street he lived on was called; that's trivia, I can much better make
it up on the spot.
But I do find it very very helpful nowadays to discuss the core
issues: _what is the story? what will be my character's role in it? is
that consistent with what the GM wants?_
Comments welcome, please :)
[1] Of course I have been in many non-directed games - they've been
the degenerate case where the GM does nothing or doesn't exist.
Everyone without a plantlike boredom threshold quickly leaves to look
for a game where something interesting happens. I'm not saying
nondegenerate cases don't exist, just that they're so rare that I can
only recall one good one in 15 years.
--
"Mercy to the guilty is treachery to the innocent."
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace
mail:rw(at)eircom(dot)net
George W. Harris
wrote:
:In 15 years of everything from dungeon hacks to interactive theater,
:I've seen _one_ case that I remember where PC direction of the overall
:plot led to a good outcome. That case is one of the shining memories
:I'll take with me to my grave. [1]
You need to realize the distinction between
"simulationism doesn't exist" (which you claim) and
"I don't like simulationism" (which you describe).
--
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV!
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Russell Wallace
<gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
> You need to realize the distinction between
>"simulationism doesn't exist" (which you claim) and
>"I don't like simulationism" (which you describe).
I fully realize that distinction. If you look at my message again,
you'll see my claim is that in 15 years of roleplaying in pretty much
every style there is, I've only seen one strongly simulationist
working campaign that I recall - and that one, I liked a great deal.
George W. Harris
wrote:
:On Fri, 05 Apr 2002 23:18:34 -0500, George W. Harris
:<gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
:
:> You need to realize the distinction between
:>"simulationism doesn't exist" (which you claim) and
:>"I don't like simulationism" (which you describe).
:
:I fully realize that distinction. If you look at my message again,
:you'll see my claim is that in 15 years of roleplaying in pretty much
:every style there is, I've only seen one strongly simulationist
:working campaign that I recall - and that one, I liked a great deal.
I don't think there's any doubt that running a
successful simulationist campaign requires a lot more
work on the part of the GM, and in addition to that
requires a group of players who are all comfortable
with that style (such players being rare beasts indeed).
Comedy is easy. Simulationism is hard.
Jason Corley
> I thought at the time the problem was the GM was doing things in too
> much of a dramatist style, and more simulationism was the solution -
> let the PCs (NB: not players! The difference is important here.)
> direct things.
Everybody said this except me.
> I realized, long after, that I was wrong.
I will try not to be too smug.
--
***************************************************************************
"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books,
and there is some evidence that they can't read them either." ---Gore Vidal
Jason D. Corley | ICQ 41199011 | le...@aeonsociety.org
Russell Wallace
<cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>Russell Wallace <sp...@devnull.com> wrote:
>
>> I thought at the time the problem was the GM was doing things in too
>> much of a dramatist style, and more simulationism was the solution -
>> let the PCs (NB: not players! The difference is important here.)
>> direct things.
>
>Everybody said this except me.
David Berkman said something similar back in the old days. Pity he's
not around to say 'I told you so' :)
>I will try not to be too smug.
*grin*
Russell Wallace
<gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
> I don't think there's any doubt that running a
>successful simulationist campaign requires a lot more
>work on the part of the GM, and in addition to that
>requires a group of players who are all comfortable
>with that style (such players being rare beasts indeed).
*nod* That makes sense; combined with the fact that most players who
say they want more simulationism ("This campaign is too railroaded" or
"that didn't make any sense") are really either looking for, or at
least will be happy with, dramatism that goes in the direction of the
story they want.
If one were serious about running a highly simulationist campaign, I
suppose it'd take a lot of up front effort designing a world where
interesting things have a good chance of happening of their own
accord, and also in finding a group of players who like that style;
which would help explain why such campaigns tend to be of long
duration according to people's reports here.
> Comedy is easy. Simulationism is hard.
(_Good_ comedy is nontrivial mind you, but that's another thing.)
Mary K. Kuhner
>*nod* That makes sense; combined with the fact that most players who
>say they want more simulationism ("This campaign is too railroaded" or
>"that didn't make any sense") are really either looking for, or at
>least will be happy with, dramatism that goes in the direction of the
>story they want.
The question is, what do the players actually want? It's often
very hard to figure this out (the Tigger Syndrome, where the players
claim that they'll be happy with anything, but are then unhappy
with everything, is a drastic example) but presumably there is
generally *some* answer out there somewhere.
If the players want to be driving the plot, adding more simulation
*might* help, but actively adding more player direction would help
a lot more. My chief tool for this one is asking the players
what they are going to do next, especially at the end of each
session so I can prepare for the next one. The GM's need to prepare
is just as big a hurdle to player direction as the GM's desire to
plot; having the players brief the GM can help with this.
If the players want the gameworld to make sense, adding more
simulation might help, but it might sacrifice direction. It might
be more productive to look for ways in which the current gameworld
or rules set discourage things from making sense, and fix them.
And if the GM's plot can't make sense, s/he needs a new and better
plot.
If the players want a GM-driven plot, but one that is more to their
taste, communication is about the only answer, and simulation will
*definitely* not help. (The players tend to react with anger, too;
they'll see it as GM abdication of duty.) There are some awkward
groups of players who not only want a GM-driven plot that fully meets
their specifications, but want this to happen by GM mindreading.
I have no suggestions for these folks at all.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Jeff MacDonald
> On Fri, 05 Apr 2002 23:18:34 -0500, George W. Harris
><gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
>
>> You need to realize the distinction between
>>"simulationism doesn't exist" (which you claim) and
>>"I don't like simulationism" (which you describe).
>
> I fully realize that distinction. If you look at my message again,
> you'll see my claim is that in 15 years of roleplaying in pretty much
> every style there is, I've only seen one strongly simulationist
> working campaign that I recall - and that one, I liked a great deal.
>
you're saying you do like it when it's done well, but that it's rare,
and maybe harder to do well.
Certainly can't argue with that. But it doesn't seem worth making much
of a fuss over.
--
-- thejeff --
A woman shouldn't have to buy her own perfume.
-- Maurine Lewis
Steve Mading
: On Fri, 05 Apr 2002 23:18:34 -0500, George W. Harris
: <gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
:> You need to realize the distinction between
:>"simulationism doesn't exist" (which you claim) and
:>"I don't like simulationism" (which you describe).
: I fully realize that distinction. If you look at my message again,
: you'll see my claim is that in 15 years of roleplaying in pretty much
: every style there is, I've only seen one strongly simulationist
: working campaign that I recall - and that one, I liked a great deal.
That statement is incompatable with the claim that they don't exist.
Russell Wallace
<mad...@baladi.bmrb.wisc.edu> wrote:
>Russell Wallace <sp...@devnull.com> wrote:
>
>: I fully realize that distinction. If you look at my message again,
>: you'll see my claim is that in 15 years of roleplaying in pretty much
>: every style there is, I've only seen one strongly simulationist
>: working campaign that I recall - and that one, I liked a great deal.
>
>That statement is incompatable with the claim that they don't exist.
I was exaggerating for effect; the above paragraph wouldn't fit in a
thread title, and "Stuff happens" wouldn't likely have got any
followups ^.^
Russell Wallace
<the...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>So you're not saying it doesn't exist or that you don't like it,
>you're saying you do like it when it's done well, but that it's rare,
>and maybe harder to do well.
I'm also saying a bit more, though. Consider the perennial:
GM: (rules that a PC action fails)
Player: "But my character should be able to do that because..." (gives
reasons based on rules or game world logic)
_If_ both parties are really committed to simulationism, this is fine.
However in a great many cases, the real agenda would be more
accurately stated as:
GM: "I'm not going to let you do that because it would screw up the
story."
Player: "But it's my character's story too, and I think it would be a
lot better if he succeeded here."
The point being, there is a much better chance of a solution workable
to both parties being arrived at if they were explicit about their
objectives. In other words, a great many discussions are phrased in
simulationist terms when the real agenda is dramatist and the
discussion would be better off acknowledging this.
Another example: look at the very long debate in this group about
spell components and whether they would or wouldn't have this or that
game world effect. Here's my opinion: spell components suck for
aesthetic reasons. Do you see Lina Inverse going "Darkness beyond
twilight, crimson beyond blood that flows... oops, dammit, I'm all out
of wallaby testicles, please hold the action for a few days while I go
look for some"? You do not, nor will you, and there are good reasons
for this that have nothing at all to do with economics.
Russell Wallace
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>The question is, what do the players actually want? It's often
>very hard to figure this out (the Tigger Syndrome, where the players
>claim that they'll be happy with anything, but are then unhappy
>with everything, is a drastic example) but presumably there is
>generally *some* answer out there somewhere.
Yep, that's true. Part of the reason for this is that players
themselves don't always know what they want. (I myself used to come up
with all sorts of stuff in terms of game world logic, until I
eventually realized what I really wanted was a particular kind of
story for my character; the logic was merely a tool to that end.)
Part of the issue is that players aren't used to thinking of "I want
such-and-such a story" as an acceptable type of request to make.
>If the players want to be driving the plot, adding more simulation
>*might* help, but actively adding more player direction would help
>a lot more.
Yep.
>My chief tool for this one is asking the players
>what they are going to do next, especially at the end of each
>session so I can prepare for the next one. The GM's need to prepare
>is just as big a hurdle to player direction as the GM's desire to
>plot; having the players brief the GM can help with this.
Good idea.
>If the players want the gameworld to make sense, adding more
>simulation might help, but it might sacrifice direction. It might
>be more productive to look for ways in which the current gameworld
>or rules set discourage things from making sense, and fix them.
>And if the GM's plot can't make sense, s/he needs a new and better
>plot.
Yep.
>If the players want a GM-driven plot, but one that is more to their
>taste, communication is about the only answer, and simulation will
>*definitely* not help.
Yes. Given communication, there are often solutions that will satisfy
both parties.
A small but significant example: consider botch rules in games
systems. Personally I'd rather throw these out altogether, but most
people seem to like them for some reason. Now I've had all sorts of
arguments about the unrealism of these, but that's actually not the
main issue. My real problem with them is that I'm trying to play a
fantasy hero, and while fantasy heroes sometimes get unlucky, they
generally don't make cockups in their field of expertise for no
reason.
In one case, the PCs were on a shuttle entering atmosphere when the
craft was rocked by a large explosion. I tried putting up a magical
force field in case we were coming under hostile fire (a likely
occurrence, given recent events in the game). The dice came up with a
critical failure. A lot of GMs would rule "you botch the attempt",
thus pissing me off to a not insignificant extent.
This GM ruled that the energy flux from the exploding engine disrupted
my efforts, giving me a nasty headache in the process. The tactical
result was exactly the same. (As it turned out, it wasn't external
fire but a bomb in the luggage compartment, so the force field wasn't
needed, and one of the other PCs managed to land the damaged shuttle
safely.) The point was, this explanation solved my problem by not
disrupting my image of the character I was trying to play, _without_
interfering with the group's objective of keeping the critical failure
rule in the game system. A little of that sort of thing can go a long
way.
I'd recommend 'Theatrix', if it's still available, as the only game
rulebook I know of to address such issues explicitly as a first
priority.
>There are some awkward
>groups of players who not only want a GM-driven plot that fully meets
>their specifications, but want this to happen by GM mindreading.
>I have no suggestions for these folks at all.
Me neither :)
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> I thought at the time the problem was the GM was doing things in too
> much of a dramatist style, and more simulationism was the solution -
> let the PCs (NB: not players! The difference is important here.)
> direct things.
> I realized, long after, that I was wrong.
> In 15 years of everything from dungeon hacks to interactive theater,
> I've seen _one_ case that I remember where PC direction of the overall
> plot led to a good outcome. That case is one of the shining memories
> I'll take with me to my grave. [1]
> the degenerate case where the GM does nothing or doesn't exist.
> Everyone without a plantlike boredom threshold quickly leaves to look
> for a game where something interesting happens. I'm not saying
> nondegenerate cases don't exist, just that they're so rare that I can
> only recall one good one in 15 years.
> directed the entire story, with the PCs only deciding local tactics
> for individual problems.
Eh. I think the entire gamist/simulationist/whateverist distinction
is bollocks, and this is precisely why - it's unnatural for a game to be
strongly whateverist, the healthy state is a mix of the three.
Yes, if the GM just creates a world and then sits there like a lump
waiting for the PCs to get themselves in trouble, it takes extremely
active and possibly psychotic players to make it an entertaining game.
Yes, if the players just sit there and sit there like lumps while the GM
"weaves xer story", it takes extremely passive and possibly comatose
players to make it an entertaining game.
But both of those are degenerate, teratological games that should
never be encountered in the wild, sure signs of gaming pathology.
What's happened in almost every successful game[0] I've ever GMed or
played in in the last 24 years was that the GM created a world and some
possible plot hooks, things that are happening in the world that the
players might be willing and able to interfere with. The players then
wandered around[1] until they hit a GM-planted hook they liked, or
created a hook out of something the GM said in passing, or just from
their own hallucinations, and went on that adventure, with the GM
adapting it as necessary to match the player actions.
This is not PC-directed OR GM-directed, it's cooperative. It sure
ain't story-telling, though, because games aren't stories, they're
games. You want to be told a story, then go read a book or watch a
movie or read an online comic. You want to tell a story, then go write
a book or a screenplay or an online comic. If you attempt to force a
game to be a story, then one side of the GM screen or the other is going
to be deathly bored. "No, wait, I see now, it just wasn't the story I
wanted!" is the wrong response. "No, wait, I see now, I should be
playing a game and not trying to force my story on my friends when they
expect a game!" is the right response.
[0] The sole exceptions being one-shots where the players start out with
a fixed mission, but even there the game runs off the rails immediately
after the start.
[1] All too often in bars. Even when the players and GM know how cliche
it is, it's no more cliche than a group of people who stick together at
all times and regularly commit mass murder, breaking and entering, and
sabotage, or any other trope of gaming.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"No one is safe. We will print no letters to the editor. We will give no
space to opposing points of view. They are wrong. The Underground Grammarian
is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle." -TUG, v1n1
Charlton Wilbur
> The point being, there is a much better chance of a solution
> workable to both parties being arrived at if they were explicit
> about their objectives. In other words, a great many discussions are
> phrased in simulationist terms when the real agenda is dramatist and
> the discussion would be better off acknowledging this.
My issue as a player is that I love things that have dramatic shape
when I look back at them, but any noticeable effort to put events into
a dramatic shape while they're being played through destroys a good
bit of the enjoyment for me. (I think Mary Kuhner has also complained
of this.) As soon as I can't ignore the hand of the GM anymore, the
nature of the game changes for me.
Many of my characters don't *have* stories that I think they should
follow; they have things they want to accomplish, and things that I
think would make their stories interesting, but the primary motivation
for my decisions about what the character does is what that character,
put in that situation, knowing what he or she knows, would do.
This isn't to say that I can't enjoy games that are strongly plotted
in dramatic terms; I just don't enjoy them in the same way, and I
don't identify with the character anywhere nearly as strongly. And
given the choice, I'd go for the more simulationist game, especially
in the long term.
Charlton
George W. Harris
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
: Eh. I think the entire gamist/simulationist/whateverist distinction
:is bollocks, and this is precisely why - it's unnatural for a game to be
:strongly whateverist, the healthy state is a mix of the three.
That view seems predicated on the notion
that the gamist/simulatuionist/dramatist distinction is
meant to apply primarily to campaigns rather than to
individual decisions on the part of the GM.
Such a notion is bollocks.
--
"If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they
taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does." -Groucho Marx
Jason Corley
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
> : Eh. I think the entire gamist/simulationist/whateverist distinction
> :is bollocks, and this is precisely why - it's unnatural for a game to be
> :strongly whateverist, the healthy state is a mix of the three.
> That view seems predicated on the notion
> that the gamist/simulatuionist/dramatist distinction is
> meant to apply primarily to campaigns rather than to
> individual decisions on the part of the GM.
Yes - this makes it one thousand percent useless. But we've been over this
before. ;)
Irina Rempt
> My issue as a player is that I love things that have dramatic shape
> when I look back at them, but any noticeable effort to put events into
> a dramatic shape while they're being played through destroys a good
> bit of the enjoyment for me. (I think Mary Kuhner has also complained
> of this.) As soon as I can't ignore the hand of the GM anymore, the
> nature of the game changes for me.
Exactly the same here. I played in a one-on-one game with a very good
GM with the slightest story-oriented leanings - if faced with a choice
between two equally likely (in the world) occurrences, he invariably
picked the one that made the better overall story, not necessarily the
one that seemed most interesting in the short term. I began to suspect
that he was setting something up for my character, and it took us a
long time to get that sorted out: knowing that things were being
plotted left me with a feeling of helplessness that spilled over to the
character.
> Many of my characters don't have stories that I think they should
> follow; they have things they want to accomplish, and things that I
> think would make their stories interesting, but the primary motivation
> for my decisions about what the character does is what that character,
> put in that situation, knowing what he or she knows, would do.
Many people would call that "story". There are even some people who
apply "story" in that sense to their own daily life.
I go one further: I don't think, as a player, what the character would
do, I stand in the character's shoes and do it. Having another layer of
abstraction gives so much distance that it might as well be a
preconceived story after all.
Irina
--
ir...@valdyas.org Back up, but not perfect yet: www.valdyas.org/irina
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charlton Wilbur
> I go one further: I don't think, as a player, what the character would
> do, I stand in the character's shoes and do it. Having another layer of
> abstraction gives so much distance that it might as well be a
> preconceived story after all.
I go back and forth; I find it most satisfying when I can simply
channel the character, but I don't need that level of connection to
enjoy the game. In the end, the character does what the character
would do in that situation, and the process I as player use to find
out what the character would do isn't that relevant to me.
(Time for a jargon moment, to make myself clear as mud: I really like
playing Immersively, and my Immersive state is quite resilient -- it's
not like the Immersiveness breaks when things work against it, but
that it fades away bit by bit. Still, trying to play Immersively in a
game that doesn't fit well with me is an exercise in frustration;
playing as Author or Actor or shallow IC well in such a game is likely
to wind up being more fun than playing Immersively badly.)
Charlton
Jason Corley
> Exactly the same here. I played in a one-on-one game with a very good
> GM with the slightest story-oriented leanings - if faced with a choice
> between two equally likely (in the world) occurrences, he invariably
> picked the one that made the better overall story, not necessarily the
> one that seemed most interesting in the short term. I began to suspect
> that he was setting something up for my character, and it took us a
> long time to get that sorted out: knowing that things were being
> plotted left me with a feeling of helplessness that spilled over to the
> character.
This has nothing to do with story, this has to do with scriptedness. That
said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying to
avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
particular case I went ahead and made them more powerful than most of the
NPCs they'll ever come into contact with.
2. Player participation in the scripting. Not only do I give their
characters the ability to do cool things, if they /want/ their characters
to do a particular cool thing, I bend over backwards to accomodate that in
the script. In addition, I solicit ideas for what I want them to do next.
3. Short term. This campaign is aimed specifically at 12-14 sessions. It
has a beginning, a middle and an end. They /will/ get to the end of the
story, it won't just drag on and on with me putting in idea after idea
after idea.
4. Script the generalities and make /heavy/ use of off-screen scripting.
That is, don't try to anticipate too much what the characters will do
on-screen and fudge the game in that direction. Instead, fudge what
happens off-screen and incorporate, to the degree that it is possible,
whatever their choices are on-screen. For their choices to matter in a
scripted game, your script must have flexibility around what /they/ are
doing. (It need not have it outside this.)
One option that I go both ways on is token play. If players are less
"into" their characters they can feel like they are cooperating with you
in creating this script. There is more third-person description in this
game ("Reiko looks completely blank for a second, then she gives a tiny,
very small smile..." instead of "I look..." or attempting to act.) yet
there is enough catharsis (positive and negative) that I get the feeling
that the players are more into these characters than they've ever been in
a non-heavily-scripted game. I think this may be a group=specific thing.
Experiment with it and see.
I have /never/ attempted a game with this degree of scriptedness since I
was in the 8th grade trying to run Dragonlance modules and I obeyed all of
the (definitely not story oriented) advice to make the players do things
and punish them if they don't. It has been surprising and educational and
the group has loved it. I and they agree we would never do this for a long
term game.
> Many people would call that "story". There are even some people who
> apply "story" in that sense to their own daily life.
Mark Twain said that interesting stories always happen to people who can
tell a good story. As my mother is one of these people, I concur.
Irina Rempt
> This has nothing to do with story, this has to do with scriptedness.
> That said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present,
> and here is how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
>
> 1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
> nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
> particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying
> to
> avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
> particular case I went ahead and made them more powerful than most of
> the NPCs they'll ever come into contact with.
I don't like to play powerful characters, and when I made the character
I ended up playing I didn't expect the scripting (neither did the GM;
it was how it evolved, not initial miscommunication). She wasn't
helpless in the beginning, and part of it was the natural helplessness
of a non-powerful person who gets mixed up in things way over her head.
That's why I didn't perceive it as dramatic technique until it had gone
so far that it couldn't be stopped without stopping the campaign; I
*expected* her to feel helpless.
> 2. Player participation in the scripting. Not only do I give their
> characters the ability to do cool things, if they /want/ their
> characters to do a particular cool thing, I bend over backwards to
> accomodate that in
> the script. In addition, I solicit ideas for what I want them to do
> next.
That would rub me completely the wrong way: a script to my
specifications is perhaps even worse than something set up without my
knowledge and cooperation. What the characters want, out of their own
mindset, is much more important for me than what I want for the
characters.
> 3. Short term. This campaign is aimed specifically at 12-14 sessions.
> It has a beginning, a middle and an end. They /will/ get to the end of
> the story, it won't just drag on and on with me putting in idea after
> idea after idea.
Still, it's a story and it goes somewhere. It isn't driven by the
characters, but by the overall story arc. They can't have a *completely
different* story, can they?
[things that don't apply to our game; both of us dislike token play]
>> Many people would call that "story". There are even some people who
>> apply "story" in that sense to their own daily life.
>
> Mark Twain said that interesting stories always happen to people who
> can tell a good story. As my mother is one of these people, I concur.
Hmm. Most of the people I know who try to live their lives as a story
tell very boring stories (and have very boring lives).
Jason Corley
> Jason Corley wrote:
>> 2. Player participation in the scripting. Not only do I give their
>> characters the ability to do cool things, if they /want/ their
>> characters to do a particular cool thing, I bend over backwards to
>> accomodate that in
>> the script. In addition, I solicit ideas for what I want them to do
>> next.
> That would rub me completely the wrong way: a script to my
> specifications is perhaps even worse than something set up without my
> knowledge and cooperation. What the characters want, out of their own
> mindset, is much more important for me than what I want for the
> characters.
Again, this has to do with how connected you are to the character. If you
can't (or don't like to) draw a severe line between what you want as a
player out of the game and what the character wants out of their lives,
this ain't gonna work.
>> Mark Twain said that interesting stories always happen to people who
>> can tell a good story. As my mother is one of these people, I concur.
> Hmm. Most of the people I know who try to live their lives as a story
> tell very boring stories (and have very boring lives).
Thus proving that at the very least the /inverse/ of Mark Twain's theory
is true. People who tell boring stories don't have interesting stories
happen to them.
Mary K. Kuhner
Charlton Wilbur <cwi...@mithril.apartment.cj> wrote:
>My issue as a player is that I love things that have dramatic shape
>when I look back at them, but any noticeable effort to put events into
>a dramatic shape while they're being played through destroys a good
>bit of the enjoyment for me. (I think Mary Kuhner has also complained
>of this.) As soon as I can't ignore the hand of the GM anymore, the
>nature of the game changes for me.
Yes, that's true for me as well.
Some of my all-time favorite moments in gaming have been realizations
about the shape of an ongoing or finished game--that it has some
emergent property, designed in by neither GM nor players, that seems
beautiful, true or right.
In _Paradisio_ we basically discovered something I had never known--
how Stockholm Syndrome works, from the first-person point of view.
We also had a truly stunning prophecy-fulfillment which neither GM nor
player recognized as such until after the fact.
I wouldn't react at *all* the same way to a GM or player who sat down
to produce a demo of how Stockholm Syndrome works, nor to a GM or player
(or GM/player collaboration) production of a prophecy and its fulfillment.
The magical quality--that this thing *happened* of its own nature, without
being made to happen--would be gone. The sense that one could learn
something from the game that was not known in advance to its participants
would be, if not gone, at least compromised.
It's one of the two best things in gaming for me, so I feel fairly
seriously about it. I'd be willing to play in a game where this was
permanently impossible due to too much GM or player intervention, but
not very enthusiastic.
I have never found a metaphor or analogy that is any use in explaining
this particular preference to those who don't share it. I've
tried several times, but it seems to be hopeless. Anything involving
competition or challenge goes off into red-herring-land about "dramatist
GMing doesn't mean that the PCs always win or that PC success/failure
rests on GM fiat." (Yes, I know that.) Anything involving story or
drama goes off into red-herring-land about "there is more than one kind
of good story, and good stories are not necessarily predictable." (Yes,
I know that too.)
All I can say is, if I am walking through the woods and I suddenly
come upon a hidden glade of wildflowers, I have one reaction; and if I
visit a gorgeous garden which presents the same visual spectacle, I
have a different reaction. No amount of technical skill in garden
construction changes, for me, the fact that it is a garden. I like
gardens, but there are some pleasures they don't give me.
The same argument crops up recurrently on the SF writers' newsgroup
rec.arts.sf.composition, where the same two groups are clearly visible.
People who feel as I do will often accept a certain amount of GM or
player intervention, as necessary to make the game work; but it is
dangerous, and one is usually well advised to keep it to a minimum.
I am not at all a strict simulationist, because I have neither the
patience nor the emotional stamina. But I do see some value there
that cannot be entirely replaced by other techniques, and there are
certain key decisions on both the player's and the GM's side that
*have* to be made without reference to their personal goals, or no
wildflowers are going to ensue for that particular game.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Russell Wallace
<cwi...@mithril.apartment.cj> wrote:
>Many of my characters don't *have* stories that I think they should
>follow; they have things they want to accomplish, and things that I
>think would make their stories interesting, but the primary motivation
>for my decisions about what the character does is what that character,
>put in that situation, knowing what he or she knows, would do.
Me too; I think breaking character should be eschewed except as a last
resort in case of emergency. After all, most science fiction and
fantasy has lots of implausibilities in terms of how the world works,
but good stories are not based on the characters doing things that
don't make sense for them.
Russell Wallace
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>In _Paradisio_ we basically discovered something I had never known--
>how Stockholm Syndrome works, from the first-person point of view.
>We also had a truly stunning prophecy-fulfillment which neither GM nor
>player recognized as such until after the fact.
>
>I wouldn't react at *all* the same way to a GM or player who sat down
>to produce a demo of how Stockholm Syndrome works, nor to a GM or player
>(or GM/player collaboration) production of a prophecy and its fulfillment.
>The magical quality--that this thing *happened* of its own nature, without
>being made to happen--would be gone. The sense that one could learn
>something from the game that was not known in advance to its participants
>would be, if not gone, at least compromised.
*nods* I agree. A well run dramatist game can have something of this
too. In the campaign I used as an example, quite a few things happened
and quite a few patterns came together that I hadn't predicted in
advance and I don't think the GM had planned beforehand either.
(Stockholm syndrome, interestingly, was one of them though I didn't
realize it until awhile later.)
The GM can help achieve this by:
- Not planning everything in too much detail, or else being willing to
modify the detailed plans according to circumstances.
- Letting PC ideas work except where there's a compelling reason not
to. (Rather than forbidding them from working except when there's a
compelling reason to do so.)
- In the latter case, if the players are getting frustrated, giving
honest explanations. ("Okay look, yes I did set this up so you don't
really have a chance of winning this fight. But you will have a chance
to escape later after being captured.")
- Either way, not stomping on PCs' core schticks. (The mighty warrior
shouldn't keep getting beaten up and having to be rescued. If this has
to happen once, explain it as bad circumstances rather than
incompetence, and let him have a few clean victories in a row to
compensate.)
The players can help by:
- Picking a character who's reasonably likely to fit the plot. (e.g.
high fantasy generally works better if all the protagonists are noble
at heart, even if they don't appear so on the surface.)
- If it won't damage the character concept, trying to go along with
the plot.
- Respecting other PCs' schticks.
- *** Identifying what it is they really want and explaining it
clearly in the correct terms, when it's discussed OOC, and being
willing to compromise on everything else. *** (For example, I dislike
botch rules partly because they're implausible, but mainly because
they tend to screw up my character concept. I can put up with them as
long as the result isn't described as being due to my character's
incompetence.)
I emphasize the last because it's the mistake I myself made for the
longest time, and it's something I haven't often seen discussed. If
there's a single primary point I'm trying to make in this thread, it's
that one.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 7 Apr 2002 20:27:02 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>: Eh. I think the entire gamist/simulationist/whateverist distinction
>:is bollocks, and this is precisely why - it's unnatural for a game to be
>:strongly whateverist, the healthy state is a mix of the three.
> That view seems predicated on the notion
> that the gamist/simulatuionist/dramatist distinction is
> meant to apply primarily to campaigns rather than to
> individual decisions on the part of the GM.
> Such a notion is bollocks.
Ah, so you think campaigns spring full-formed from the Earth, and are
neither created nor managed by the GM's decisions?
If you follow that tri-elemental system, you will produce a broken
campaign, as we have just seen.
Warren J. Dew
I don't think there's any doubt that running a
successful simulationist campaign requires a lot more
work on the part of the GM, and in addition to that
requires a group of players who are all comfortable
with that style (such players being rare beasts indeed).
I think that actually, a substantial fraction of players, maybe even a
majority, can have fun with the style - once they realize what's going on.
Because the style is rare, this often takes a while, because the players often
have no prior experience in the style. The problem occurs when they go looking
for plots or set piece challenges in what are really just situations.
Warren
Warren J. Dew
Powderhouse Software
George W. Harris
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
:07 Apr 2002 21:28:02 -0400, George W. Harris <gha...@mundsprung.com> spake:
:> On 7 Apr 2002 20:27:02 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
:> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
:>: Eh. I think the entire gamist/simulationist/whateverist distinction
:>:is bollocks, and this is precisely why - it's unnatural for a game to be
:>:strongly whateverist, the healthy state is a mix of the three.
:> That view seems predicated on the notion
:> that the gamist/simulatuionist/dramatist distinction is
:> meant to apply primarily to campaigns rather than to
:> individual decisions on the part of the GM.
:> Such a notion is bollocks.
:
: Ah, so you think campaigns spring full-formed from the Earth, and are
:neither created nor managed by the GM's decisions?
:
: If you follow that tri-elemental system, you will produce a broken
:campaign, as we have just seen.
An individual decision can be gamist,
dramatist, or simulationist.
A campaign is a vast amalgamation of
decisions.
A campaign is most likely to be a mix of
the three, and not exclusively one or the other.
Thus, the distinction is primarily useful
and originally intended to apply to individual
distinctions. To attempt to draw a conclusion
about the usefulness of the distinction while
excluding this consideration is a sign of either
stupidity or dishonesty. One might as well
conclude that the descriptors 'sweet' and 'bitter'
are useless because any person is likely to eat a
tremendous variety of foods which overall are
neither overwhelmingly one or the other.
--
"Intelligence is too complex to capture in a single number." -Alfred Binet
Warren J. Dew
I wouldn't react at *all* the same way to a GM or player who
sat down to produce a demo of how Stockholm Syndrome works,
nor to a GM or player (or GM/player collaboration) production
of a prophecy and its fulfillment.
Is this really true? Suppose a gamesmaster knew, but the players did not, and
the gamesmaster put the player characters into an appropriate captive situation
- but then didn't script the detailed interactions between captors and captive,
but instead allowed the behavior to emerge naturally from the situation. Do
you still think this would necessarily spoil for the player?
Of course, the gamesmaster would have to be willing to allow the experiment to
fail - Stockholm Syndrome doesn't always happen.
Peter Knutsen
"Warren J. Dew" wrote:
>
> George W. Harris posts, in part:
>
> I don't think there's any doubt that running a
> successful simulationist campaign requires a lot more
> work on the part of the GM, and in addition to that
> requires a group of players who are all comfortable
> with that style (such players being rare beasts indeed).
>
> I think that actually, a substantial fraction of players, maybe even a
Yes, it's the GM that much is demanded of. And the rules set
(whose purpose it is to relieve the GM of work). Jason Corley
keeps claiming that Simulationism doesn't work for everyone,
but the reason for his claim is that he tried Simulationism
once, and failed to please, and then he gave it up, lacking
patience and discipline. It is very much analogous to the
caveman who invented the bow. It required practive to learn
to use the bow, patience and discipline, and therefore for
many generations his fellow cavemen refused to use his
invention, preferring the primitive but easy-to-use-immediately
spear. It is much the same way in gaming, some immature person
will "pick up the bow", nock and loose a few arrows, then
announce that "bows" are stupid and vastly inferior to "spears".
On the players, Simulationism is very easy, because there is a
de-emphasis on player skill (character (sheet) skill is what
counts) and the players only have to make large-scale decisions.
Also, tabletop acting is at best unrewarded, and in many groups
even discouraged, so also in this area there is no pressure.
And there is no predeterminedness of outcome, nor any preference
for a particular outcome from any particular situation (the only
preference is that, seen over time, the character with the higher
skill should perform better than the character with the lower
skill), thus one can sustain interest through excitement about
what is going to happen next. One also does not have to take
into account any need to "please the others" when making
decisions, one is free to express the personality of one's
character, without regard to the "story" needing to go in a
particular direction.
Best of all, Simulationism makes it easy for the players to
maintain the willing suspension of disbelief. In fact I see
this as the reason for Simulationism.
> majority, can have fun with the style - once they realize what's going on.
> Because the style is rare, this often takes a while, because the players often
> have no prior experience in the style. The problem occurs when they go looking
> for plots or set piece challenges in what are really just situations.
I've stated before that if just one player makes a pro-active PC,
then that pro-active PC will generate sufficient plot and conflict
to sustain interest for the other players, because the others
couldn't care less whether the "plot" comes from the GM or from
another player.
Also, as Mark Divine Wind Hughes points out, the world itself
should be a dynamic place, a place where stuff happens on its
own (driven by NPC desires and motivations). An example of this
is the campaign world I've created, AErth, which is a very
conflictual setting. Mark's claim that the Simulationist
setting is lifeless and static is criminally false, proven by
the fact that Simulationists desire realism in *all areas,
including the sociological/psychological realm, and a static
setting where nothing happens is blatantly *unrealistic*.
The players do need to be deprogrammed of some of the silly
notions that abound in roleplaying gaming, but once that is
accomplished, Simulationism tends to work. Provided, of
course, that the GM has the intelligence and patience to
"master archery".
> Warren
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Charlton Wilbur wrote:
> My issue as a player is that I love things that have dramatic shape
> when I look back at them, but any noticeable effort to put events into
> a dramatic shape while they're being played through destroys a good
I agree with that.
> bit of the enjoyment for me. (I think Mary Kuhner has also complained
One thing Mary has said, which I disagree with, is that the setup
must not be convenient. I believe Mary used Harry Turtledove's
"World War * Balance" tetralogy as an example.
Unlike Mary, I think that an intelligent setup is good, not just
good but necessary. A world needs to be intelligently designed
in order to be interested. Also I think this is one of the most
important skills demanded of a Simulationist GM. To create
worlds and NPCs that have potential to be interesting.
> of this.) As soon as I can't ignore the hand of the GM anymore, the
> nature of the game changes for me.
>
> Many of my characters don't *have* stories that I think they should
> follow; they have things they want to accomplish, and things that I
> think would make their stories interesting, but the primary motivation
> for my decisions about what the character does is what that character,
> put in that situation, knowing what he or she knows, would do.
Yes, and this is what roleplaying gaming should be:
Competetive storytelling. Not players competing with each other
(here the GM is regarded as a "player") but characters competing
with each other. The NPC Olaf Norski wants all of Denmark to
pray to the Christian god, while the NPC Sven Forkbeard wants
all of Denmark to sacrifice to Odin and to throw the "Roman
pansies" out of Denmark. Who gets his story told?
We can't know beforehand. To find out, we *game* it out. Even
better, there is room for the player character to participate
too. They, too, get to try to tell their stories. Maybe they
have opinions on the Danish Civil War? If so, they enter the
fray on whatever side they sympatize with or that pays the
most. If not, they go to do other things, while the Civil
War heats up or cools down according to the dynamics of
international politics and the actions of small teams of
NPC agents.
One of the biggest reasons for having rules it to find
out which story gets told. Often conflicts are complex,
with many factors (lots of different skills and attributes
are relevant) being important. The way to find out who
wins is to roll dice and compare the dice result to the
relevant trait, that way you achieve something that lives
in the interesting semi-randomregion, between boring
randomness and equally boring predeterminedness.
This "game it out" may sound difficult in a "player skill"
sense, but it really isn't. Gaming conflicts out does
involve decision making, but often it is such that Sven
Forkbeard has average'ish personal attributes but several
very skilled men (and perhaps some women?) in his hird,
so it is very obvious that he will use those agents
rather than act personally. It is so obvious that it would
be misleading to call it a strategic decision (even though
it is, in the pedantic sense of the word).
Likewise, Olaf Norski is overall a very competent person,
gifted with high attributes and skills, loved by several
Saints and Angels. His hird is a bit lacking, and his
barbaric tendencies makes it difficult for him to get
aid from the Papacy (dificult, not impossible. The Pope
wants nothing more than to see Olaf conquer all of
Denmark). Again it is obvious what approaches Olaf should
and should not take. Go personal. He should lead his
armies in battle, using his charisma and leadership and
strategy skills to gain victory. Use diplomacy to get
aid from other nations (even though he has a deservedly
bad reputation, he has high Charisma and Diplomacy
skills). Or he can call upon his Divine Patrons. Or he
can make use of his charm to try to recruit better
agents. There are some potential ones running around,
freelancing in Christian Europe. One in particular is
in a perpetual crisis of Christian faith, and Olaf's
Theology skill (as well as his unorthodox beliefs) might
appeal to this (highly competent) NPC.
The same is the case for any PCs. Very often they will have
high abilities and low abilities, and it is extremely simple
to figure out which methods to try when one wants to
accomplish something. It is equally simple to realize what
approaches one should probably not take.
Perhaps the biggest lie about roleplaying gaming is the use
of the word "cooperative" or "communal" in "cooperative
storytelling". You don't cooperate. Instead you get in
your character's shoes, and then you do what he would do,
wthout regard to what tickles or offends the others at
the table.
> Charlton
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Jason Corley wrote:
>
> Irina Rempt <ir...@valdyas.org> wrote:
>
> > Exactly the same here. I played in a one-on-one game with a very good
> > GM with the slightest story-oriented leanings - if faced with a choice
> > between two equally likely (in the world) occurrences, he invariably
> > picked the one that made the better overall story, not necessarily the
> > one that seemed most interesting in the short term. I began to suspect
> > that he was setting something up for my character, and it took us a
> > long time to get that sorted out: knowing that things were being
> > plotted left me with a feeling of helplessness that spilled over to the
> > character.
>
> This has nothing to do with story, this has to do with scriptedness. That
Some people, when they use the word "story", are talking about
scriptedness, that is that the events of the game (macro-, per
perhaps also microscale events) are predetermined.
Another use of the word story is that the events are not (fully
or even at all) predetermined, but that certain events are
desirable, such as cool combat stunts. That is, cool combat
stunts are so desirable that any concern for simulation is
overridden: a character with mediocre Agility and a yellow
belt in Karate gets away with as many and as difficult cool
combat stunts as the Jackie Chan-clone PC.
A third way of using the term "story" is simply to mean
"anything but combat". Many roleplaying gamers will
complain that a campaign they were in had no story, and
when you prompt them for a detailed explanation, it
turns out that what they mean was that the campaign had
nothing but combat in it. What they mean when they say
"story" is not scriptedness or dramatism or actorism,
but simply that conflict types other than combat should
be common.
> said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
> how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
>
> 1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
> nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
> particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying to
> avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
On the other hand, if the GM just wants to tell stories to
the players, helplessly incompetent PCs are a blessing.
> particular case I went ahead and made them more powerful than most of the
> NPCs they'll ever come into contact with.
>
> 2. Player participation in the scripting. Not only do I give their
> characters the ability to do cool things, if they /want/ their characters
I do that too, I just require the players to choose what
abilities to do which cool things they want, while they make
their characters. If you want to do flying leaps and wild
acrobatics, you should (A) raise Agility, (B) get a high
Strength-to-Size ratio *and* (C) buy high levels in Karate
and Acrobatics.
The difference is, I differentiate PCs. PCs are allowed,
even encouraged, to be utterly cool dudes, but the players
must determine their realm of coolness, before gamestart.
In my campaigns, you're never just cool. You're cool at
combat, cool at charm, cool at stealth, cool at *something*.
If you get bored with your character's coolness, you must
either have your character learn some new skills (this may
be feasible if the new coolness skills depend upon the same
attribute as the old coolness skills, but sometimes they
don't) or else retire your character and make a new one.
> to do a particular cool thing, I bend over backwards to accomodate that in
> the script. In addition, I solicit ideas for what I want them to do next.
I bend over backwards to accomodate that. But in the rules.
Want to make Spiderman. No problem (you just need a bit more
Goodie Points than the default recommended amount - but I
suggest letting the players vote on what the GP budget should
be, of 80, 100, 120 or 150). Want to be a Bruce Lee/Chuck
Norris/Rambo clone? Go ahead. Explain the nature of your
desired coolness to me, and I will help you make the right
decisions, during character creation.
> Jason D. Corley | ICQ 41199011 | le...@aeonsociety.org
--
Peter Knutsen
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
> On Sun, 07 Apr 2002 23:15:04 GMT, Charlton Wilbur
> <cwi...@mithril.apartment.cj> wrote:
> >
> >Many of my characters don't *have* stories that I think they should
> >follow; they have things they want to accomplish, and things that I
> >think would make their stories interesting, but the primary motivation
> >for my decisions about what the character does is what that character,
> >put in that situation, knowing what he or she knows, would do.
>
> Me too; I think breaking character should be eschewed except as a
> last resort in case of emergency. After all, most science fiction
> and fantasy has lots of implausibilities in terms of how the world
> works, but good stories are not based on the characters doing things
> that don't make sense for them.
I'll disagree with that. :)
In /Night Shift/, I'm taking an extremist approach towards social and
mental skills: I'm leaving them all out. There are -no- social skills,
attributes, mental attributes, or personality mechanics in my system.
If a PC speaks with an NPC, it's up to the *player* to decide whether
or not they think the NPC is telling the truth. If they see a brutally
mutilated corpse, it's up to the player to decide whether his PC is
disgusted or horrified.
My thinking is that this increases the potential for horror because
there is much less certainty in play: if a player rolls a 37 on a
Sense Motive check, they can be reasonably sure that their PC knows
whether the NPC is hiding something. But if they have to make the
judgement themselves, then they can never be sure, and they have to
stake their own judgement on the table. This raises the stakes in the
game.
In some sense this reduces the accuracy of character play, because the
PC wouldn't necessarily screw up when the player would, but I think it
will make for a better game, because I think it will increase the
intensity of character identification.
Neel
Mary K. Kuhner
>On the players, Simulationism is very easy, because there is a
>de-emphasis on player skill (character (sheet) skill is what
>counts) and the players only have to make large-scale decisions.
It depends on the player. A player who is touchy about PC death,
for example, may find a simulationist game with no script immunity
extremely difficult. While I admire Warren's game, I don't think
I could play in it for this reason.
Players, like GMs, come in different kinds. What is easy for one
will be hard for another. What is *fun* for one will be unfun
for another.
Gods, I hate it when I find myself saying this over and over again.
Maybe it's just time to killfile you instead.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Mary K. Kuhner
>Mary Kuhner posts, in part:
> I wouldn't react at *all* the same way to a GM or player who
> sat down to produce a demo of how Stockholm Syndrome works,
> nor to a GM or player (or GM/player collaboration) production
> of a prophecy and its fulfillment.
>Is this really true? Suppose a gamesmaster knew, but the players did not, and
>the gamesmaster put the player characters into an appropriate captive situation
>- but then didn't script the detailed interactions between captors and captive,
>but instead allowed the behavior to emerge naturally from the situation. Do
>you still think this would necessarily spoil for the player?
I wouldn't think of that as "producing a demo". A demo would be more
like the Ars Magica module which says in its designer notes "This
adventure is set up to illustrate that treachery is destructive to
the Covenant" and then has six or seven episodes all of which
'illuminate' this pre-determined conclusion. When I ran it, we didn't
feel it offered any insight into treachery at all.
It's possible that much greater subtlety would change my conclusion, but
so far I haven't seen an example. The only times I've seen real insight
come out of a GM's or player's attempt to demonstrate, rather than
experiment with, a particular concept have been times when the GM or
player *failed*. Failure can turn it back into an experiment.
I knew a GM who set up to illustrate the idea that insanity can be
liberating. The course of the game works, for me, as a nasty
illumination of ways in which, for a specific case, that might not be
true at all. But even this requires someone who is not willing to
do continual adjustments and thereby prevent failure....
>Of course, the gamesmaster would have to be willing to allow the experiment to
>fail - Stockholm Syndrome doesn't always happen.
That's one of the differences between an experiment and a demo--a demo
is definitely *not* supposed to fail.
In the Stockholm case, I naively thought that this particular PC would be
immune, or would have thought so if I'd considered the possibility
much (I didn't, until later). I figured Paradisio would have to resort
to mind control, and it's the fact that they didn't which gave the
experience its peculiarly horrific and disturbing qualities.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Jason Corley
> Unlike Mary, I think that an intelligent setup is good, not just
> good but necessary. A world needs to be intelligently designed
> in order to be interested. Also I think this is one of the most
> important skills demanded of a Simulationist GM. To create
> worlds and NPCs that have potential to be interesting.
Because, y'know, stories /never/ have interesting characters and
interacting with interesting characters is /never/ a challenge.
Dude, I /agree/ that the Threefold applies best during campaign design,
when GM intent is both perfectly transparent and completely dispositive of
what happens. I believe this despite it being verboten. However, this is
just nonsense. Every GM has to create an interesting world.
> Perhaps the biggest lie about roleplaying gaming is the use
> of the word "cooperative" or "communal" in "cooperative
> storytelling". You don't cooperate. Instead you get in
> your character's shoes, and then you do what he would do,
> wthout regard to what tickles or offends the others at
> the table.
OH NOES PETAR! SOMEONE MIGHAT BE COOPERATING! THEY MUST BE BAD
ROLEYPLAYERS!!! BRING YOUR ONE TR00 WAY TO US!!!
--
***************************************************************************
"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books,
and there is some evidence that they can't read them either." ---Gore Vidal
Warren J. Dew
It depends on the player. A player who is touchy about PC death,
for example, may find a simulationist game with no script immunity
extremely difficult. While I admire Warren's game, I don't think
I could play in it for this reason.
You might not be able to play an adventurer, but you could play an artisan, or
perhaps even a guardsman.
And, if I recall correctly, when I first joined this newsgroup you didn't want
any script immunity; you decided you needed it shortly after because of out of
game issues, and you were willing to accept the downsides.
Indeed, it seems to me that some of those downsides are now just surfacing,
years later, given some of your recent concerns about where Chernoi's crew is
going in the escalation thread and some other threads. Admittedly, I don't
know the whole story here, and it may still be a perfectly good tradeoff from
your point of view.
Players, like GMs, come in different kinds. What is easy for one
will be hard for another. What is *fun* for one will be unfun
for another.
This is most certainly true.
I think the biggest player related difficulty with world oriented campaigns,
though, is related to a valid point of Peter Knutsen's: that at least one
proactive player character is needed. Most players don't want to put in the
work required to play a proactive character.
Gods, I hate it when I find myself saying this over and over
again. Maybe it's just time to killfile you instead.
We need to get a critical mass. Right now, the 'one true way' posts outnumber
the 'diversity' peoples' posts, and some of the one true way people - Peter,
and Jason whom he is responding to - have become so entrenched in these views
that I don't think they can be changed.
To be fair, Peter at least understands that some people have other preferences
than his - he is just intolerant of those people because he thinks they would
have more fun playing his way - while Jason insists on remaining stubbornly
ignorant of any preferences other than his own.
Jason Corley
> We need to get a critical mass. Right now, the 'one true way' posts outnumber
> the 'diversity' peoples' posts, and some of the one true way people - Peter,
> and Jason whom he is responding to - have become so entrenched in these views
> that I don't think they can be changed.
> To be fair, Peter at least understands that some people have other preferences
> than his - he is just intolerant of those people because he thinks they would
> have more fun playing his way - while Jason insists on remaining stubbornly
> ignorant of any preferences other than his own.
WTF?? Check my last four posts not in reply to Peter. They /all/ say that
there are a lot of different preferences that go into things and that I'm
only offering my way. Sorted by thread and then date:
======
"I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness.." "One option that I go both
ways on is token play...I think this may be a group=specific thing.
Experiment with it and see."
======
"(Irina): a script to my
> specifications is perhaps even worse than something set up without my
> knowledge and cooperation. What the characters want, out of their own
> mindset, is much more important for me than what I want for the
> characters.
(me) Again, this has to do with how connected you are to the character. If
you can't (or don't like to) draw a severe line between what you want as a
player out of the game and what the character wants out of their lives,
this ain't gonna work."
======
Yeah, I've really got the One True Way bug - I claim my way doesn't always
work even for my game, and that it certainly isn't going to work with
certain other preferences. Hurrah for my One True way! It sucks!
/Peter/ is the one that believes in One True Way and that the rest of us
should watch TV. I call him on it constantly and ridicule it, this is
true. In so doing I am on-topic for rgf.advocacy - just look at the
charter. =D
Russell Wallace
Krishnaswami) wrote:
>In /Night Shift/, I'm taking an extremist approach towards social and
>mental skills: I'm leaving them all out. There are -no- social skills,
>attributes, mental attributes, or personality mechanics in my system.
>If a PC speaks with an NPC, it's up to the *player* to decide whether
>or not they think the NPC is telling the truth. If they see a brutally
>mutilated corpse, it's up to the player to decide whether his PC is
>disgusted or horrified.
Cool.
>My thinking is that this increases the potential for horror because
>there is much less certainty in play: if a player rolls a 37 on a
>Sense Motive check, they can be reasonably sure that their PC knows
>whether the NPC is hiding something. But if they have to make the
>judgement themselves, then they can never be sure, and they have to
>stake their own judgement on the table. This raises the stakes in the
>game.
Yep.
>In some sense this reduces the accuracy of character play, because the
>PC wouldn't necessarily screw up when the player would, but I think it
>will make for a better game, because I think it will increase the
>intensity of character identification.
But it increases the accuracy of character play because, however good
or bad your players might be at playing a character, they will
certainly be better at it than some plastic polyhedra. So you should
get positive results all round :)
Russell Wallace
wrote:
>It is very much analogous to the
>caveman who invented the bow.
Hint: even if you _believe_ that everytime someone disagrees with you
it must be due to incompetence, you're much less likely to be regarded
as a dickhead if you refrain from _saying_ so.
>On the players, Simulationism is very easy, because there is a
>de-emphasis on player skill (character (sheet) skill is what
>counts) and the players only have to make large-scale decisions.
Actually this is orthogonal to other play style issues.
In general, simulationism may or may not be easy on the players; the
tricky bit is that pretty much all players want good stories to happen
(even though some players prefer them to not be preplanned). Much of
the art of simulationist play therefore, is to set up the world and
the PCs so that good stories are likely to emerge without having to be
preplanned. (They usually don't in real life, after all.)
>I've stated before that if just one player makes a pro-active PC,
>then that pro-active PC will generate sufficient plot and conflict
>to sustain interest for the other players, because the others
>couldn't care less whether the "plot" comes from the GM or from
>another player.
Unfortunately this isn't the case. I've seen zillions of players quit
campaigns because "I never get to do anything" when the problem was
that their characters were completely passive, so that the proactive
PCs got all the spotlight time; the GM would have had to constantly
spoonfeed the passive characters.
>Also, as Mark Divine Wind Hughes points out, the world itself
>should be a dynamic place, a place where stuff happens on its
>own (driven by NPC desires and motivations). An example of this
>is the campaign world I've created, AErth, which is a very
>conflictual setting. Mark's claim that the Simulationist
>setting is lifeless and static is criminally false, proven by
>the fact that Simulationists desire realism in *all areas,
>including the sociological/psychological realm, and a static
>setting where nothing happens is blatantly *unrealistic*.
But a setting where most places most of the time nothing happens that
would be interesting to play, is highly realistic. (Real life is like
that after all.) If that isn't the case for AErth, then that must have
taken a great deal of skill on your part in setting it up; it's not
easy to do.
Wayne Shaw
wrote:
>But it increases the accuracy of character play because, however good
>or bad your players might be at playing a character, they will
>certainly be better at it than some plastic polyhedra. So you should
>get positive results all round :)
Actually, when it comes to properly representing how, say, diplomatic
a given character is supposed to be, I'd say that in many cases the
plastic polyhedra _are_ better at it, at least in terms of consistency
with what the character is supposed to be.
Russell Wallace
wrote:
That argument probably isn't worth exploring in detail again, so I'll
note disagreement and leave it at that ^.^
Peter Knutsen
Russel talks as if you roll dice to find out how well a character
performs, and this is a gross oversimplification, which misleads
the uninitiated and pushes the debate off the track.
What you do is you combine a random factor with a numeric (or
disguised-numeric as in FUDGE) trait.
Russel insinuates that when a roleplaying gamer wants to find
out whether a rogueish PC can seduce a serving wench, a coin
is tossed, and if it's heads up, the PC scores, if it's tails,
the PC sleeps alone.
This is untrue (and Russel almost certainly knows this, but it
suited his rhetorics to loudly pretend that it is true).
What is done is that you make a roll versus a trait of the
rogueish PC, be it a Charisma or Apperance attribute, or a
Seduction skill, or perhaps a Speak Language skill (or, for
optimal realism, a combination of it all[1]). Thus there can be
two PCs both intend upon bedding wenches, but one PC is enabled,
through the use of rules and mechanics, to be better at it
then the other PC. Over time, if you count the number of nights
in which each PC has to sleep alone, you will see that there is
a pattern: The PC with the highest Seduction skill (or Charisma
or whatever, or all of it) scores most often.
Thus, plastic polyhedra are, in fact, *excellent* at
creating accurate character performance, when the polyhedra
are(and they *always* are) used in combination with a number
from the character sheet. Directly contrary to what Russel
states.
People who try to game without polyhedra (or other randomizers)
are forced to play characters who are, at most, as capable as
they themselves are. Without randomizers and rules, I cannot
play a character who can swing a sword better than my ability
to describe sword play in such a way that it tickles the GM
in the right place (i.e. my descriptions has to fit the GM's
hidden model of what constitutes good and bad sword moves).
Nor can I play a character who can seduce serving wenches any
better than I myself can.
In fact the absence of randomizers, and the absence of rules,
makes *role* playing impossible. You are forced to play your-
self, something I call (only when it is enforced) self-play,
something which is fundamentally different from (and inferior
to) role play.
--
Peter Knutsen
[1] As an example, FFRE uses both Language and Etiquette
skills as "caps" on other social skills. If your Speak
French is 3 (bad but useable) then your effective Secution
skill cannot be higher than 6 (which by the way is a
pretty good score). This allows such skills to be very
useful, even though they are rarely (if ever) rolled
against.
Mary K. Kuhner
[responding to my comments about script immunity]
>And, if I recall correctly, when I first joined this newsgroup you didn't want
>any script immunity; you decided you needed it shortly after because of out of
>game issues, and you were willing to accept the downsides.
The decision was based partly on out-of-game issues, but in large part
on the history of _Sun in Splendor_ and _Paradisio_. In both campaigns
we had ongoing problems with really excessive rates of PC mortality;
the entire party would often die. Neither of us were satisfied with
this, since it tended to kill interesting continuations, as well as
breaking the player/character bond and encouraging the player to
"turtle". This level of lethality might suit other play groups, but
it suited us poorly.
We tried a number of things to fix this. We tried to beef up the
player's tactical success rate, but we pretty much failed. (A variety
of causes--partly that anything new I learned, Jon would generally
learn too; partly innate talent; partly stochastic fluctuations which
will sooner or later add up over a long campaign.)
We tried to reduce encounter difficulty, but this wasn't a big success
either. Not only did the PC mortality rate remain high, but we
would end up having nasty quarrels over it. There's a psychological
law involved, at least if both participants are somewhat pessimistic:
your side's chances always look worse than the opponents'. You can
see that some of your guys are low on hit points, or nearly out of
expendables, or close to breaking and running. You can't see that
about the opponents, not nearly as easily anyway. So Jon always felt
that the PCs had faced a reasonable fight--until they died, anyway--
and I almost always felt they had faced an unreasonable one, even if
they happened to live. (We found with RTOEE that the positions
reverse when I am GMing and he is playing, though not to as extreme
a degree because of the tactical skill difference and my greater
pessimism.)
We tried playing non-combat scenarios. I had some success with this
as a GM--the whole _Haven Hill_ campaign had only one fight in it,
if I recall correctly--but Jon had less. He found the higher
emphasis on NPC interaction too mentally fatiguing; for him, combat
was a useful break from it. (I'm pretty much the other way around,
though I also got tired of a straight-up diet of diplomacy
eventually.)
Eventually we settled on script immunity. I like it because it puts
the bulk of the responsibility on one person, the GM: it greatly
reduced recriminations about "You should have been able to win that
fight, you idiot." The corresponding player responsibility is to
avoid taking too many risks and forcing the GM to use script immunity
too often, and I find that responsibility much easier than the
responsibility of near-perfect tactical play plus good dice luck.
We couldn't make it work in a high-combat game, of course, without
distorting things too much: but _Radiant_ is not high-combat.
>Indeed, it seems to me that some of those downsides are now just surfacing,
>years later, given some of your recent concerns about where Chernoi's crew is
>going in the escalation thread and some other threads. Admittedly, I don't
>know the whole story here, and it may still be a perfectly good tradeoff from
>your point of view.
The pattern from _Sun in Splendor_ and _Paradisio_ is that without
use of either script immunity or retcon, the campaign would have
ended approximately six to seven years ago, within a year of its
start, due to the deaths of most or all of the PCs. I suspect
the vampires on Jump City would have been responsible; they
certainly had the opportunity and motivation.
I know for a fact that Markus would be dead, actually twice now, or
maybe three times.
The campaign has major problems now, but I'm grateful for the
seven extra years. I'm also not sure that script immunity is to
blame for the current problems. I'd say that escalation, work-
related stress, and fuzziness of parts of the world model due
to lack of formal mechanics are the most obvious problems. (The
fuziness encourages the escalation. We had a long talk recently
about new forms of psi or tech which cannot be countered by any
means currently known in the campaign, and Jon was strongly of
the opinion that those problems would have been much easier to
avoid if we had been using a more fully worked-out system.)
>I think the biggest player related difficulty with world oriented campaigns,
>though, is related to a valid point of Peter Knutsen's: that at least one
>proactive player character is needed. Most players don't want to put in the
>work required to play a proactive character.
You need a bit more than that, though. You need a proactive player
who does not make unmeetable demands for the outcomes of his/her
actions.
For example, I become frustrated and demoralized if I tackle several
projects in a row and cannot reach resolution with any of them--
they all peter out with neither clear success nor failure. I would
be very unhappy on the "unsolved cases" branch of a police force, since
most of those cases will remain unsolved and all the work done on them
will come to nothing.
This is a hard preference to accomodate in a strongly simulationist
game. Some improvement can be made by careful choice of PC (no
police detectives!) and initial situation. Some improvement can be
made by abstraction, but it's difficult because often neither GM
nor player can predict in advance which projects will hit paydirt
and which will peter out. And I know from experience that if I hit
too many peter-out projects in a row, I'll go from being a usefully
proactive player to a whiny liability.
This is easier to accomodate, I think, if the PCs' goals are rather
straightforward. _Radiant_ has experimented, over its lifetime,
with everything from "I need to make some money trading here, so
I can pay the mortgage" to "I need to solve the fundamental
sociological mysteries of Harry's Landing." The latter kind of
problems are interesting, but they take a long time and a lot of
effort, and heavily emphasize my weaknesses as a player when they
don't work out. We could certainly have more success with a
combat-and-intrusion campaign. I don't think I'd find it as
interesting right now, but if we decide to abandon _Radiant_ as
over-escalated I'll certainly give it serious thought.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Jason Corley
> People who try to game without polyhedra (or other randomizers)
> are forced to play characters who are, at most, as capable as
> they themselves are. Without randomizers and rules, I cannot
> play a character who can swing a sword better than my ability
> to describe sword play in such a way that it tickles the GM
> in the right place (i.e. my descriptions has to fit the GM's
> hidden model of what constitutes good and bad sword moves).
> Nor can I play a character who can seduce serving wenches any
> better than I myself can.
This assumes an adversarial stance between the GM and the players that
does not exist in every group. It does not exist in my group - we've tried
it and we don't like it. Without this adversarial stance, it is perfectly
appropriate for (for example) a socially inept player to describe a method
of seduction based on what they've read in Shakespeare or seen in movies
and the GM to evaluate, given what they know about the character and the
target, success.
It also assumes that the GM exists to be tickled. Online roleplaying games
exist that are both numberless and GMless. Conflict is resolved by
comparison of paragraphs describing general character capabilities and
numberless descriptions written by the ocnflicting players of their
characters actions in the situations. These games have existed for over 12
years.
Once again you are fouled up by your narrow mindset of what gaming is. You
have mistaken your way for everyone's way. Grow up.
Robert Scott Clark
<cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
<some stuff>
>Once again you are fouled up by your narrow mindset of what gaming is. You
>have mistaken your way for everyone's way. Grow up.
You are both being idiots because you are both taking extremist views.
Peter is saying that randomness is required, while you are forwarding
the absurd notion that a GM can be perfectly objective.
Peter is correct in that any system that uses GM arbitration is going
to be skewed by the GM's preferences (beliefs, fancies, whatever)
You are correct that a situation can be arbitrated without rules and
randomizers and still take the abilities of the character (instead of
the player) into account.
The fact that both of you are stuck in extreme corners is really sort
of pathetic.
Nis Haller Baggesen
>
> Jason Corley wrote:
> >
<Snip>
> > said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
> > how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
> >
> > 1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
> > nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
> > particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying to
> > avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
>
> On the other hand, if the GM just wants to tell stories to
> the players, helplessly incompetent PCs are a blessing.
>
John Kim
>Ah, so you think campaigns spring full-formed from the Earth, and are
>neither created nor managed by the GM's decisions?
>
>If you follow that tri-elemental system, you will produce a broken
>campaign, as we have just seen.
I don't get this. What would you say is a campaign which
"follows" the threefold model as opposed to "not following" it?
As far as I can see, the threefold model has no prescription
for what you should or should not do in a game. It is a nomenclature,
not a recipe. Unlike you, it does not have any language calling a
given game "broken" or "wrong".
Irina Rempt
> Unfortunately this isn't the case. I've seen zillions of players quit
> campaigns because "I never get to do anything" when the problem was
> that their characters were completely passive, so that the proactive
> PCs got all the spotlight time; the GM would have had to constantly
> spoonfeed the passive characters.
And when you *do* spoonfeed them, either they object to that too or
they completely fail to notice. I've had players quit a game because
"nothing happened" right after a session in which I both had their camp
stalked at night and put them in the middle of a plot to overthrow the
king.
Irina
--
ir...@valdyas.org Back up, but not perfect yet: www.valdyas.org/irina
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Scott Clark
By providing the labels, it sets up the expectation that one of them
will apply.
You have certainly seen people come here and make posts that ammount
to nothing more than "how do I make my game more Simulationistic". If
the threefold was actually used as nothing more than a classification
system, it would be less worrisome - still highly inaccurate, but less
worrisome.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote:
>Russell Wallace wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately this isn't the case. I've seen zillions of players quit
>> campaigns because "I never get to do anything" when the problem was
>> that their characters were completely passive, so that the proactive
>> PCs got all the spotlight time; the GM would have had to constantly
>> spoonfeed the passive characters.
>
>And when you *do* spoonfeed them, either they object to that too or
>they completely fail to notice. I've had players quit a game because
>"nothing happened" right after a session in which I both had their camp
>stalked at night
Did the characters notice this happening? The players?
>and put them in the middle of a plot to overthrow the
>king.
Did the player know this, or did he think it was just a group of NPCs
taking smack.
Jason Corley
Now going very far afield from the subject line. Of course this is to be
expected because of my stance on the Threefold, but hey.
Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu> wrote:
> For example, I become frustrated and demoralized if I tackle several
> projects in a row and cannot reach resolution with any of them--
> they all peter out with neither clear success nor failure. I would
> be very unhappy on the "unsolved cases" branch of a police force, since
> most of those cases will remain unsolved and all the work done on them
> will come to nothing.
Oooh, good datapoint. I have a player just like you in that preference.
My wife is /slightly/ different in that she doesn't mind a string of
failures so long as she /knew going into the game/ that it was very
possible and had nothing to do with how well she played. For example,
if there was a police detectives game and I said at the outset, "not every
crime gets solved no matter how good the police are", she would happily
(out-of-character) accept the failure and gleefully roleplay her character
moping, or sulking, or lashing out, or drinking, or whatever the
coping or non-coping mechanism the character has.
I actively enjoy characters that sometimes have long strings of failure.
This happens quite a bit in online RPGs like MU*s, for example. I enjoy
putting my characters through the wringer and on display for the enjoyment
of others. Now, it does /eventually/ get old - if he can't succeed at
/anything/ I tend to move on after a while. But that's a different
intolerance: the intolerance of having the same same same same thing
happen in the characters' life for months. I get just as tired when they
are successful for months, or even for narrower preferences - if it's a
White Wolf game and they only do supernatural things for months or only
mundane things, for example.
A lot of accomodating all these preferences has to happen at the design
level, I think. If I was gonna do a police detectives game I would have to
decide whether to make it "realistic" in the sense that some cases are
indeed unsolvable, which would satisfy my wife, or "unrealistic" in the
sense that all cases are solvable, to accomodate the player with your
preference. I hate hate hate the use of the word "unrealistic" here,
because it's totally inaccurate and it has a negative connotation but I
can't think of a better one. "Law & Order" is unrealistic under this
definition because the cops always catch the bad guy (or who they
reasonably think is the bad guy) even though they may have a long series
of unsuccessful cases "off camera".
Jason Corley
> On 9 Apr 2002 21:40:41 -0700, Jason Corley
> <cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>>Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>>
> <some stuff>
>>Once again you are fouled up by your narrow mindset of what gaming is. You
>>have mistaken your way for everyone's way. Grow up.
> You are both being idiots because you are both taking extremist views.
> Peter is saying that randomness is required, while you are forwarding
> the absurd notion that a GM can be perfectly objective.
Did I say that? Not at all. What I said was that it is quite possible for
a non-adversarial GM to accurately make judgment calls in a numberless
system - indeed, for non-adversarial players to make the judgment calls in
a numberless, GMless system.
> You are correct that a situation can be arbitrated without rules and
> randomizers and still take the abilities of the character (instead of
> the player) into account.
This is what I said, yes.
> The fact that both of you are stuck in extreme corners is really sort
> of pathetic.
Very well. I am pathetic for saying there is a different way. ;)
Wayne Shaw
<cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
>> People who try to game without polyhedra (or other randomizers)
>> are forced to play characters who are, at most, as capable as
>> they themselves are. Without randomizers and rules, I cannot
>> play a character who can swing a sword better than my ability
>> to describe sword play in such a way that it tickles the GM
>> in the right place (i.e. my descriptions has to fit the GM's
>> hidden model of what constitutes good and bad sword moves).
>> Nor can I play a character who can seduce serving wenches any
>> better than I myself can.
>
>This assumes an adversarial stance between the GM and the players that
>does not exist in every group. It does not exist in my group - we've tried
>it and we don't like it. Without this adversarial stance, it is perfectly
>appropriate for (for example) a socially inept player to describe a method
>of seduction based on what they've read in Shakespeare or seen in movies
>and the GM to evaluate, given what they know about the character and the
>target, success.
And then still ends up causing the success or failure to turn on the
ability of the _player_ to convince the GM, essentially disconnected
from the ability of the character.
>
>It also assumes that the GM exists to be tickled. Online roleplaying games
>exist that are both numberless and GMless. Conflict is resolved by
>comparison of paragraphs describing general character capabilities and
>numberless descriptions written by the ocnflicting players of their
>characters actions in the situations. These games have existed for over 12
>years.
And as someone who played on a MUX for a number of years, fail in
their attempts to get decent game play far more often than they
succeed. That they continue is primarily based on two issues: many of
the people involved are sufficiently interested in putting a narrative
together that they'll tolerate a lot of inconsistency to get there,
and the open-endedness of the system-free nature appeals to some
people. But as a model for resolving events that are in doubt, they
thoroughly suck.
>
>Once again you are fouled up by your narrow mindset of what gaming is. You
>have mistaken your way for everyone's way. Grow up.
While Peter's usual simulationist fundamentalism gets in the way of
his ability to see other styles, he's far more right in this one for
more people than you want to give him credit for, Jason, and if you
think otherwise, I think I'd follow your own advice.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote:
>
>And then still ends up causing the success or failure to turn on the
>ability of the _player_ to convince the GM, essentially disconnected
>from the ability of the character.
Why did you use "disconnected" when "not directly correlated" would
have been a better choice? Or do you actually believe that a GM is
not capable of taking character skill into account during arbitration?
Peter Knutsen
I think rather than "not capable of" it would be alot more correct
to say "not the least inclined to".
The biggest problem is that it never *occurs* to most gamers that
the outcome of social conflict should not depend on the skill of
the player but on the skill of the character.
Many, many gamers are still deeply in the AD&D mindset of "we need
rules only for combat. If the PCs interact peacefully with NPCs, it
gets roleplayed" (which implies that success or failure depends on
the skills of the players). The hardwired and unthinking division
of conflicts into violent conflicts and non-violent conflicts,
without any conscious recognition that both belongs to the same
category of activity: conflicts.
Slightly tangential to this, many people (Steve Mading, who posts
in rec.games.frp.misc and who at one time also posted in here, is
an example) tends to assume that the PCs will be average specimens,
and therefore the players *can* perform as well socially as the PCs.
But this is not always true, outside of the narrow mindset of
first generation rules systems.
What if an D&D3 PC has a Charisma of 28? I'm sorry, but I find
it completely unlikely that any players have a Charisma that
high, therefore they cannot roleplay how a PC with CHA 28
interacts with NPCs (or PCs), and therefore rules must be used
to simulate the extremely high CHA of this PC.
But Steve Mading, and *many* others, quietly assumes that all
the PCs will be somewhere within a couple of standard
deviations of normality. Because that was what it was like
in AD&D, and they haven't noticed that newer systems like
GURPS and Hero, FUDGE and FFRE, are *much* more statistically
open.
It is very possible that some of the most gifted Actorist
gamers out there has the equivalent of D&D3 CHA 20 some
even has 22. But there's a big difference between 22 and 28,
and even then most gamers will be CHA 8-14, which means that
the difference is even bigger. In fact the difference between
CHA 14 and CHA 28 is so big that you can't "fake" or "pretend"
or "roleplay" your way out of it.
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Robert Scott Clark wrote:
> Peter is correct in that any system that uses GM arbitration is going
> to be skewed by the GM's preferences (beliefs, fancies, whatever)
Yes, but see below.
> You are correct that a situation can be arbitrated without rules and
> randomizers and still take the abilities of the character (instead of
> the player) into account.
There are always rules. The question is only whether the rules are
written down on paper, or if they float around inside the GM's
skill (most likely in a state of extreme fuzzines) in the form
of a conceptual model.
All GMs have ideas and notions about what constitutes good and
bad combat moves, good and bad pickup lines, good and bad
library research strategies. The difference is that some GMs
believe themselves capable of mentally simulating such events,
while other GMs believe themselves uncapable (or at least
not capable enough) and thus they resort to written rules.
(There is a third type, like me, who has a mental model but
then codifies this model in the form of written rules).
I far prefer written rules, viewable models, because those can
be criticized, and those can be understood. If there is a
written rule that I disapprove of, I can talk to the GM and
argue for it being changed. But if the rule exists only inside
the GM's skull, perhaps in the form of a notion that "shields
are a disadvantage in meelee, they cause far more problems
than they give defensive benefits" then I am screwed. Not only
is it difficult for me to criticize this rule, argue for it
being unrealistic and therefore deserving of change, it is
difficult for me to even get to *know* this rule.
Once again: There are always rules. It's just that if they
are hidden inside the GM's skull, you can't see them, and
therefore on a superficial examination you conclude that
the game is rules-less.
(Heh, this is also a good argument for adopting my jargon
of "fudge-light" and "fudge-heavy" rather than "rules-heavy"
and "rules-light". Because the amount of rules is always the
same, a full set of models about how stuff (including people)
works. The question is thus not how many rules there are,
but how codified and accessible the rules are)
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Actually no. Because if the GM wants the PCs to succeed at some-
thing difficult (like an undertrained chick, or a nontrained
Hobbit, killing the Witch-King), something that is way beyond
their capabilities, he can just fiat that it happens (Tolkien
did it beforehand, by prophesying that the Witch-King was
"fated not to be slain by Man", GM's are more likely to commit
ad-hoc).
The other way around, where the GM desires the PCs to fail
at something, even though the PCs are so competent that failure
would not realistically occur, cannot be fiated as easily, it
is much harder.
Therefore incompetent PCs are the easist kind of PCs to tell
stories to, because they are helpless against the GM, they
have no capabilities with which to "fight" the GM, with which
to affect the direction of the "story".
--
Peter Knutsen
Harald Nachtigall
characters dying.
Style and scope can vary in a simulationist campaign as much as in other
styles (but only from campaign to campaign)
Simulationism needs a consistent base of reality. To minimize perception
problems from player to player or player to DM you take the assumption
everything works realistically and work with rules. Then you look what genre
reality you want to have and what realistic processes are to complicated to
use in game. You use the rules system of your choice, bend it until it feels
right and as long as you know the effects of your changes and you are aware
of the effects they have everything is fine, even if the result is AD&D 1.
If you are unconfortable with a game effect change the rules, but be sure
you know what you do. Same goes for the simplifikation of rules. Do what you
must to smooth your game but be sure you have an idea what the true
resolution would look like if you need it.
You also donæ„’ have to start with the whole world. Talk with your players,
set your scope and everything is fine. In a simulation you decide on
boundaries and rules in the system. Up to the start every thing can be
discussed as long as the resulting rules are consistent in the system and
nothing disrupts basic logic and probability.
Itæ„€ your job as a game master to ensure that the system contains enough
room for character development and enough conflicts to be interesting, but
this should be true for all game masters of any style.
Your next duty is to inform your players on the used rules and boundaries as
far as their characters could possibly know them.
Once you started the rules are fixed and global for all structures in your
system unless you mutually change them with your players, ie. extending the
scope or changing the way something works with consent of most of your
players.
This is simulationism. Make a consistent, logical system and then let it
run. You wonæ„’ get it perfect but you still can fix it and get better.
There is no need for whole world creations, lack of action or characters
inevitable dying like flies.
Harald Nachtigall
>
> GM: "I'm not going to let you do that because it would screw up the
> story."
> Player: "But it's my character's story too, and I think it would be a
> lot better if he succeeded here."
>
This just shows that dramatism and storytelling per se has nothing to do
with a role playing game.
Eradicating all challenge and surprise there is nothing left to make it a
game and with the development only depending on which player can impose his
ideas on the others by using players abilities there is no role playing.
It is about the same like a manipulated football game being sports.
About simulationist roleplaying (and the corresponding player style
"Immersive play") being much more demanding it is to say that this is most
probably true but there is always the chance to start small and improve.
The player must be able to immerse in his character and make him true enough
to have motivations and goals of himself which he can then start to tackle.
The game master must be much better prepared or better at consistent
improvising because he an´t know where his players are heading and it isn´t
his style to railroad them back to territory he is comfortable with.
Having then much more active and involved players he will see his work much
more scrunitized so his world needs much better work than the gamists or
story tellers world where no one excpects a truely functional world.
Sadly active players are rarely to get and there is bunch of players with
their gaming style already damaged by simulationist game masters. I´ve seen
to many gamers that don´t dare to show any ideas of their own or even ask
questions even when invited to because of experience with gamemasters that
will punish any breaking of the golden preplaned way the adventure has to
go.
How many munchkins and powergamers are just rebells against game masters
dictatorship armed for a doomed confrontation but trying to take as many of
his loved strory with them as they can?
Harald Nachtigall
Harald Nachtigall
slrnab5nav...@h00045a4799d6.attbi.com...
> In /Night Shift/, I'm taking an extremist approach towards social and
> mental skills: I'm leaving them all out. There are -no- social skills,
> attributes, mental attributes, or personality mechanics in my system.
> If a PC speaks with an NPC, it's up to the *player* to decide whether
> or not they think the NPC is telling the truth. If they see a brutally
> mutilated corpse, it's up to the player to decide whether his PC is
> disgusted or horrified.
The example with telling the truth is a perfect example why this doesn´t
work.
If the players has informations (or the character has them surely) to check
the statement of the NSC no decission is needed.
If the character could possess such information the game master has to
decide whether he has these informations or not.
If there is no information to verify the content itself checking truth is
much more a task of body language than checking words (This is the case in
many social tasks). It is about the conscious and inconscious information
that is given parallel to the words. Some characters probably even have
psychologic training to recognize these signals.
Having no system to abstract this it would be the damned duty of the game
master to give the player every information that his character consciously
and inconsciously gets and any knowledge the character has from training and
prior experiences, and that in a consistent and senseful way. Probably the
player is also a psychologist and could achieve a level of succes like his
character if the game master would oinly give him all necessary information.
If you insist on players qualification and no system to help you, be sure to
meet the qualifications of all your players in every field. That beeing
impossible the need for a system to help with the transformation of player
knowledge and character knowldege is immanent.
Same goes for almost any other problem where the information and knowledge
is not trivial enough to have no chance of misinterpreting or lacking
details.
This doesn´t mean that a roll should be all to deal with every task. Let the
player try his best and give him a modifikation to his roll based on the
energy and creativity he has put in the show, but not on the quality of his
performance if he tries to circumvent the worst and obvious errors. This
allows for improvement of the players ability to instead of frustrating him
with the demand of achiving performance like the character would from the
beginning.
Just another thought about your way of gaming. Why not use the same
resolution to other physical tasks. There surely is no gamemaster that would
deny the real-life Bruce Lee clon the chance to show him that the players
pixie bard hasn´t lost the bar room brawl in the troll´s inn by taking the
game master to the backdoor for a few minutes ... .
> My thinking is that this increases the potential for horror because
> there is much less certainty in play: if a player rolls a 37 on a
> Sense Motive check, they can be reasonably sure that their PC knows
> whether the NPC is hiding something.
Rolls for things where player can´t know whether they succeed are usually
done by the game master in secret ... .
Harald Nachtigall
Mary K. Kuhner
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>The biggest problem is that it never *occurs* to most gamers that
>the outcome of social conflict should not depend on the skill of
>the player but on the skill of the character.
Why do you say that it's never occured to them? Isn't it possible
that it *has* occured to them, and they have decided they don't like
it? I know that that was the case with my gaming group.
I see the issue as more one of the level at which player decision
is to take place. Even in combat, the most highly mechanized of
all areas in most RPGs, some decisions are strictly reserved to the
players, and almost no groups allow them to be made by the
mechanics. These decisions would include:
--who do we attack?
--which of us attacks which of them?
--if we have the choice, where do we attack?
--do we used ranged or melee combat?
--if they flee, do we pursue?
--if they surrender, do we spare them?
Considered objectively, these decisions involve skill just as surely
as swinging a sword or shooting a bow. But even systems which have
a "strategy" or "tactics" skill generally do not allow it to override
player choice in this matter, because, frankly, most players would find
this excruciatingly boring and disempowering.
As one gets to more and more detailed tactical decisions, however, the
number of players who are still interested in making those decisions
themselves decreases. There is no optimum satisfactory to all players;
I can prove this, because my husband prefers and enjoys a level of
tactical decisionmaking that I find boring and frustrating.
Player skill versus character skill also becomes more of an issue as
you progress to more detailed decisions, because it may be reasonable
to expect a player to grasp basic strategy and yet unreasonable to
expect him to grasp, say, fencing parries.
I see exactly the same thing happening with social situations. There
are high-level decisions which practically *have* to be made by the
player in order for any kind of game to result; for example, the player
really must be allowed to set her own diplomatic goals. There are
low-level decisions which can almost never be made well by the player;
for example, I would certainly use either dice or fiat to determine
if my character manages to speak the alien language sufficiently well,
because there is no hope of my using player skill successfully here.
And there are a broad range of levels in between where one group will
prefer to use player skill, modified by character constraints, and another
will prefer to use mechanics.
I'd really like to emphasize "modified by character constraints" there.
This is particularly obvious to me because our "house style" has only one
player. We use very minimal social mechanics and seldom resort to them,
so if player skill were the only criterion for success all of the PCs
should be equally successful at social skills. This is totally untrue.
Vikki's understanding of human nature is so poor, and her social skills
so undeveloped, that her only hope of getting someone to go along with
her plans is to either appeal to authority or threaten them with force.
Her results are totally different from Chernoi's for this reason.
I represent this by having Vikki think about how to "persuade" people
only in Vikki-like terms; I don't use my knowledge of what the NPC
might actually be thinking, but instead try to imagine how Vikki
would reconstruct that (and she is very, very bad at it--she was
raised by aliens). This took quite a lot of practice, but when I was
playing her regularly I got fairly good at it.
PCs who are more socially adept than their player are also possible,
though it takes more GM cooperation. I am fairly sure Chernoi is more
socially adept than I am. It's a combination of greater self-confidence
and having the GM recognize and reflect the fact that she's got a lot
of presence and can be very persuasive. If the GM were not cooperating,
I probably couldn't succeed in depicting Chernoi as more charismatic
than I.
Analogies in combat situations would be having a player say "I choose
a good ambush site, with cover for us and clear lines of fire" and
having the GM interpret that differently based on the PC's level of
skill--choosing a mediocre site for a novice and a superb site for an
expert.
Saying "this always works" or "this never works" are gross
oversimplifications. GMs and players have a very wide range of
strategies available to them for handling detail level and player
versus character skill.
Personally speaking, I am much more interested in diplomacy than I
am in combat, so for me the considered optimum--it's not a matter of
not having thought about it!--is moderate to high abstraction for
combat and low abstraction for diplomacy. I accept that it would be
easier for me to portray highly-diplomatic characters if we used more
abstraction, but the price is too high.
When I had a player who wanted to portray highly-diplomatic characters
but was actually flatly incompetent, I had a difficult time figuring out
a good solution. People with detailed combat systems have the same
problem with tactically incompetent players....
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Jason Corley
> On 9 Apr 2002 21:40:41 -0700, Jason Corley
> <cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>>
>>This assumes an adversarial stance between the GM and the players that
>>does not exist in every group. It does not exist in my group - we've tried
>>it and we don't like it. Without this adversarial stance, it is perfectly
>>appropriate for (for example) a socially inept player to describe a method
>>of seduction based on what they've read in Shakespeare or seen in movies
>>and the GM to evaluate, given what they know about the character and the
>>target, success.
> And then still ends up causing the success or failure to turn on the
> ability of the _player_ to convince the GM, essentially disconnected
> from the ability of the character.
Not at all. If the GM looks at the character sheet and sees a
non-numerical description of this kind:
DISADVANTAGE: EMOTIONALLY INEXPRESSIVE. Jimmy is extremely poor at
expressing his emotions. A lifetime of uncaring parents and cold-hearted
teachers has given him little outlet for his emotions other than in his
painting (see 'Skill') above.
And Jimmy says, "I attempt to sway the crowd with my impassioned outrage
at this terrible event." and hits every single one of the GM's
tickle-points with how outraged he is acting, the GM can quite properly
look at the sheet and at Jimmy's performance and say "you fail."
Less extreme cases are more problematic but it's only a matter of degree,
not of kind.
>>It also assumes that the GM exists to be tickled. Online roleplaying games
>>exist that are both numberless and GMless. Conflict is resolved by
>>comparison of paragraphs describing general character capabilities and
>>numberless descriptions written by the ocnflicting players of their
>>characters actions in the situations. These games have existed for over 12
>>years.
> And as someone who played on a MUX for a number of years, fail in
> their attempts to get decent game play far more often than they
> succeed.
In your opinion. By golly, Wayne, didn't you just tell me to accept that
people have different preferences? I think that knock on your door is a
telegram from the kettle calling you black.
> That they continue is primarily based on two issues: many of
> the people involved are sufficiently interested in putting a narrative
> together that they'll tolerate a lot of inconsistency to get there,
> and the open-endedness of the system-free nature appeals to some
> people. But as a model for resolving events that are in doubt, they
> thoroughly suck.
Those two things you list are indeed true, but I don't think they fail to
resolve things that are in doubt at all. Not even a little bit.
I just witnessed a fight between an action-movie ninja character and the
Batman on Project Infinity MUX, a GMless numberless multiplayer game. The
two players resolved the possibly intractable combat (certainly in
Champions it would have taken /hours/, and in many other systems the genre
convention clash would have just been too great) in about thirty seconds
of out-of-character discussion and spent about half an hour gleefully
putting the characters through their paces.
Was there doubt about who would win? Of /course/ there was. Both
characters are the pinnacle of human perfection and perhaps are slightly
superhuman in their capabilities. Did the players resolve the conflict
quickly and accurately and (most importantly) satisfyingly? Without a
doubt.
Was it due to story concerns? HELL NO. It was a goofy throwaway scene that
was put together in some respects /just so/ we could see who would win and
enjoy the characters exercising their more-than-us capabilities.
You are extrapolating your preference and your experience to everyone, not
so severely as Peter but you are doing it nonetheless.
Yes, it is true that some GMs who are not any good at running numberless
games will certainly give the advantage to the player who most suits their
play style. Peter says that will always happen. Because in his world
numberless GMs are all shitty GMs. That is not the case here in the real
world.
>>
>>Once again you are fouled up by your narrow mindset of what gaming is. You
>>have mistaken your way for everyone's way. Grow up.
> While Peter's usual simulationist fundamentalism gets in the way of
> his ability to see other styles, he's far more right in this one for
> more people than you want to give him credit for, Jason, and if you
> think otherwise, I think I'd follow your own advice.
As should you. Peter said there was only one way to play, I provided an
example of another way that I enjoy. Show me where I said my way was the
only way and I'll apologize. Until then, live with it.
Georgina Bensley
> > >And then still ends up causing the success or failure to turn on the
> > >ability of the _player_ to convince the GM, essentially disconnected
> > >from the ability of the character.
> >
> > Why did you use "disconnected" when "not directly correlated" would
> > have been a better choice? Or do you actually believe that a GM is
> > not capable of taking character skill into account during arbitration?
>
> I think rather than "not capable of" it would be alot more correct
> to say "not the least inclined to".
>
> The biggest problem is that it never *occurs* to most gamers that
> the outcome of social conflict should not depend on the skill of
> the player but on the skill of the character.
Now, I'm obviously just one person, but it's always been my
impression/assumption that the GM is at least taking the character's skill
into *account* when social conflict is going on.
If my dwarf is trying to pick up a wench at a bar and he's got a charisma
of 3, then regardless of my personal skill at picking up girls I do not
expect to have an easy time of it. It still might be possible to succeed,
if for various reasons she didn't flee and I had a lot of time to attempt
to impress her and managed to hit the right spots with her, or perhaps she
could be swayed by my flashing a lot of gold, or...
If, on the other hand, she easily tumbles to a few smooth lines, then my
expectations are:
1. She has a secret dwarf fetish. It could happen.
2. She's using me for some nefarious purpose.
or
3. The GM is an airhead who'll take any excuse to get the PCs laid.
In the case of 1 or 2, I'll expect to eventually see some signs of this.
If I don't, then I'd probably bring it up with the GM... "Hey, the dwarf
has no charisma. What does she see in him?"
It would upset me to see regular results that appeared to be disconnected
from character skill. But I don't mind them being a little influenced by
player skill as long as everyone's having fun. And I would expect that in
any case where the player feels uncomfortable or incapable (or bored) of
playing it out to the skill level of the character, that a roll could be
substituted.
Has this not been the case in your experience? Are your dwarves getting
too much action? :)
Peter Knutsen
"Mary K. Kuhner" wrote:
>
> In article <3CB4665A...@knutsen.dk>,
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
> >The biggest problem is that it never *occurs* to most gamers that
> >the outcome of social conflict should not depend on the skill of
> >the player but on the skill of the character.
>
> Why do you say that it's never occured to them? Isn't it possible
> that it *has* occured to them, and they have decided they don't like
> it? I know that that was the case with my gaming group.
I thought it was obvious that I was talking about *normal* role-
playing gamers, not the atypically cerebral crows in here. Sorry.
> I see the issue as more one of the level at which player decision
> is to take place. Even in combat, the most highly mechanized of
I think I see it that way too, but for some reason it didn't
come out in my previous post.
There is a hierarchy of decision levels. At the top you have
what I call Strategy, Moral or Life decisions. (All on the
same level, the highest possible).
A Strategic decision would be that the skirmish at Anduin
turns out differently, and only Frodo and Boromir survives.
Frodo is rather wounded. Boromor then offers to take the
ring, promising to throw it into the Mount Doom volcano.
Does Frodo give him the ring? That's a Strategic deficion.
In an alternate timeline, Frodo and Sam are travelling alone,
when they find Gollum, wounded and hungry. Do they feed him
and tend his wounds, or do they kill him? That's a Moral
decision (although it also has stategic implications. One
can think up decisions that are 100% Moral with no Stra-
tegic element).
In a third timeline, Aragorn has only recently met Arwen
Evenstar (Elrond's daughter), when the Party departs from
Rivendell, so when he meets Eowyn in Rohan, he is rather
more responsive to her displays of affection (or rather,
he notices them, unlike the Aragorn in the novel). He
ends up having to make a decision: Arwen or Eowyn?
There is no Strategic element involved, and since Aragorn
has not given Arwen any promises, there is also no
Moral element. It is purely a Life decision, showing what
kind of character Aragorn is (what kind of woman does he
prefer?).
Originally, I thought in terms of only Strategic and
Moral decisions, but then I found out I had to add Life
decisions as well.
Beneath this top level there are lower levels of decision
making. I think it is obvious that players can't be
allowed to only decide on the top level, they must also
(at the very least) be allowed to decide on the next-
highest level.
But we can get pretty low. Do I swing from the left at
his flank, just below his rib? Or do I thrust towards
his solar plexus? Or do I lift my sword and bring it
down hard on his shoulder blade?
Pardon my FRench but how the hell should I know?! I'm
not my character, my character has a Sword skill of 8,
let's roll some dice and see if he manages to hurt
his enemy.
> all areas in most RPGs, some decisions are strictly reserved to the
> players, and almost no groups allow them to be made by the
> mechanics. These decisions would include:
>
> --who do we attack?
> --which of us attacks which of them?
> --if we have the choice, where do we attack?
> --do we used ranged or melee combat?
> --if they flee, do we pursue?
> --if they surrender, do we spare them?
This is correct.
But in many cases, support skills exists that can provide
the players with better information upon which they can
make decisions.
Frodo has Empathy (which in FFRE is an Advantage and
not a skill, but nevermind that), so he has a chance of
"seeing through" Boromir and guessing his real motive.
Likewise, FFRE has a skill called XenoFamiliarity, which
allows a character to be familiar with members of species
other than his own. So if the party is attacked by Orcs,
the PC who has XenoFamiliaryt can use his skill to
determne stuff, like who the leader of the Orcs is, or
what approach can best be used to demoralize the Orcs
(in order to minimize fighting).
In both cases, character skill can aid the players to
make better decisions.
I think it would be a mis-use of the term "Tactics", but
RPG rules systems can contain a lower-level skill (I
believe GURPS World War II has an "Operations" skill)
which can allow players to gain "advice" from the GM
or from other players, if the player is not very
knowledgeable about combat procedures. Thus if he
rolls for this skill, the GM or some other player
can advise this player on when h should dodge, parry,
retreat and so on.
But in the end, the decision is upto the player. Barring
Panic Mechanics that might enforce fleeing (this exists
in some systems. Not in FFRE, though).
> Considered objectively, these decisions involve skill just as surely
> as swinging a sword or shooting a bow. But even systems which have
> a "strategy" or "tactics" skill generally do not allow it to override
> player choice in this matter, because, frankly, most players would find
> this excruciatingly boring and disempowering.
This is correct, but a "Tactics" or "Operations" skill
could still be used as a source for "advice", if the
player desires this.
In fact a lot of RPG rules mechanics seems to me to
be about getting access to various forms of information,
which in turn can help the player to make better
decisions.
> As one gets to more and more detailed tactical decisions, however, the
> number of players who are still interested in making those decisions
> themselves decreases. There is no optimum satisfactory to all players;
Yes, this is correct.
> I can prove this, because my husband prefers and enjoys a level of
> tactical decisionmaking that I find boring and frustrating.
>
> Player skill versus character skill also becomes more of an issue as
> you progress to more detailed decisions, because it may be reasonable
> to expect a player to grasp basic strategy and yet unreasonable to
> expect him to grasp, say, fencing parries.
Yes.
> I see exactly the same thing happening with social situations. There
> are high-level decisions which practically *have* to be made by the
> player in order for any kind of game to result; for example, the player
> really must be allowed to set her own diplomatic goals. There are
This is also correct, but with some exceptions.
For instante, Bartering doesn't involve any meaningful
"branches", once the process has been started. The goal
is obvious and always the same: get the best possible
price. For this reason I always just roll quickly to
see how a Barter ends, I find listening, as two numbers
slowly but steadily approaches each other, to be very
boring.
(There may be cases where a PC or an NPC decides not to
"push very hard" in a Barter, but this is decided before
the process starts, and can be handled simply by a
voluntary skill penalty)
Other forms of social interaction just about always involve
the potential for branching (the PC gets new information,
and this may change the short-term or long-term goals of
the PC, or just his or her attitude in general or specifi-
cally towards the NPC), and therefore they should be
played out, but with dice rolls to translate the player
dialog into character dialog.
> low-level decisions which can almost never be made well by the player;
> for example, I would certainly use either dice or fiat to determine
> if my character manages to speak the alien language sufficiently well,
> because there is no hope of my using player skill successfully here.
Also it would be a waste of time for you to spend several
months learning an artificial language. And that's if we
pretend that the language exists in a learnable form
which I believe not to be the case.
> And there are a broad range of levels in between where one group will
> prefer to use player skill, modified by character constraints, and another
> will prefer to use mechanics.
>
> I'd really like to emphasize "modified by character constraints" there.
> This is particularly obvious to me because our "house style" has only one
> player. We use very minimal social mechanics and seldom resort to them,
> so if player skill were the only criterion for success all of the PCs
> should be equally successful at social skills. This is totally untrue.
> Vikki's understanding of human nature is so poor, and her social skills
> so undeveloped, that her only hope of getting someone to go along with
> her plans is to either appeal to authority or threaten them with force.
Yes, you choose to grossly underplay Vikki in social conflicts.
This is good, even deserving of a reward (GURPS would give you
more points at character creatin, for taking on a "mental
disadvantage. FFRE would reward you with bonus points after
each session for "patterned irrationality").
> Her results are totally different from Chernoi's for this reason.
With Chernoi, your husband has to "translate" what you
say and how you say it into what Chernoi says and how
she says it (although the "how" is probably more in need
of translation thanthe "what").
This can be done with or without randomizers, but there is
always an underlying model for how it is done, either in
the form of written rules, or else a fuzzy mental model.
> I represent this by having Vikki think about how to "persuade" people
> only in Vikki-like terms; I don't use my knowledge of what the NPC
> might actually be thinking, but instead try to imagine how Vikki
> would reconstruct that (and she is very, very bad at it--she was
> raised by aliens). This took quite a lot of practice, but when I was
> playing her regularly I got fairly good at it.
>
> PCs who are more socially adept than their player are also possible,
> though it takes more GM cooperation. I am fairly sure Chernoi is more
> socially adept than I am. It's a combination of greater self-confidence
> and having the GM recognize and reflect the fact that she's got a lot
> of presence and can be very persuasive. If the GM were not cooperating,
> I probably couldn't succeed in depicting Chernoi as more charismatic
> than I.
But the GM is on your side, he agrees with you in general that it
should be possible for a PC to be more socially adept than the
player, and he agrees in specific with you that Chernoi should
be more socially adept than you are.
Not all players are lucky to have such a good GM.
> Analogies in combat situations would be having a player say "I choose
> a good ambush site, with cover for us and clear lines of fire" and
> having the GM interpret that differently based on the PC's level of
An alternative is that the GM doesn't interpret it, but just
gives some formof bonus, like improved initiative and letting
all the PCs be in concealed positions when the fight starts.
A sort of abstraction, but one that still lets the PC with
the high Ambush skill gain benefit from it.
> skill--choosing a mediocre site for a novice and a superb site for an
> expert.
>
> Saying "this always works" or "this never works" are gross
> oversimplifications. GMs and players have a very wide range of
> strategies available to them for handling detail level and player
> versus character skill.
>
> Personally speaking, I am much more interested in diplomacy than I
> am in combat, so for me the considered optimum--it's not a matter of
> not having thought about it!--is moderate to high abstraction for
I know you have thought about it. So has everyone in here,
perhaps even Jason and Russel. When I talk about people
not considering the issue, I am talking about roleplaying
gamers in general, who are very different from the quite
atypical people who posts here in rec.games.frp.advocacy .
> combat and low abstraction for diplomacy. I accept that it would be
> easier for me to portray highly-diplomatic characters if we used more
> abstraction, but the price is too high.
>
> When I had a player who wanted to portray highly-diplomatic characters
> but was actually flatly incompetent, I had a difficult time figuring out
I think NPC Attitude rolls might be a good place to start.
I invented some rules for them when I GMed Quest FRP, but
they relied on a table so they never got used. The rules for
FFRE are tied to the dice mechanic (each degree of Success or
Fumble ties directly to a specific NPC Attitude), so these
will be used once I start GMing FFRE.
Also in general dice rolls vs skills can be used to translate
what (and how) players say into what PCs say.
A different, but equivalent approach, is to roll first and
then the player roleplays the outcome. This only works for
Actorists, of course. If the Actorist player rolls a 5S then
he does his very best to convince the guard to let them
enter the town. If he rolls F-4 then he messes up badly
at several steps in the exchange, so that the guard would
be most likely to attack the PCs rather than let them in.
> a good solution. People with detailed combat systems have the same
> problem with tactically incompetent players....
The difference is, it seems to me, that combat rules don't
have to be detailed, but social interactions do.
> Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
--
Peter Knutsen
Mary K. Kuhner
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
A much more reasonable posting. Thanks. I'd have to say, though:
if you think your audience here in this newsgroup doesn't contain
any of the people you are railing about, why are you railing about
them here? You aren't likely to convince anyone, since you're talking
about someone else's problems, somewhere else; and every time you
slip up and make blanket statements you'll tend to get flamed, since
the counterexamples are right here and waiting to pounce.
>For instante, Bartering doesn't involve any meaningful
>"branches", once the process has been started. The goal
>is obvious and always the same: get the best possible
>price.
I think this is a misconception caused by the fact that we come from
a society that mostly doesn't haggle (except, for some reason, over
cars) and that is so cosmopolitan that when it does haggle, the person
involved is generally a stranger.
In societies that haggle a lot, you are generally not doing a one-off
deal with a stranger; you're negotiating with someone who will be
a regular haggling partner of yours over the long term, or at least
with a member of such a group. You may be willing to give a little
this transaction to get a little next transaction. Intangibles such
as the other person's warm regard are actually meaningful; he may
be in a position to help you out later on.
There's a good description in _Culture Shock: United Arab Emirates_
one of the books I read to try to improve my depiction of Chernoi.
I agree that one-off haggling is one of the most boring things around,
and I would personally abstract it--in fact I'd normally go further;
I hate to track money, and I'd abstract the whole scene out. But
I'm sometimes willing to play out Chernoi's bargaining scenes because
her long-term relationship with her suppliers actually counts. I think
a helpful rule is that if the NPC's name isn't worth learning and
remembering, the haggle isn't worth depicting.
>Other forms of social interaction just about always involve
>the potential for branching (the PC gets new information,
>and this may change the short-term or long-term goals of
>the PC, or just his or her attitude in general or specifi-
>cally towards the NPC), and therefore they should be
>played out, but with dice rolls to translate the player
>dialog into character dialog.
My take on this is that in many situations, the ways in which
fine-tuning one's words or body languages can influence the outcome
can reasonably just be ignored.
If Chernoi proposes to the Order that they undertake a raid on
First Landing, the outcome will be 99% decided by whether she can
provide a cogent reason why they should do this and overcome the
inevitable objections. I am willing to ignore the other 1% which
comes from details of how she uses her voice and eyes and so forth.
Okay, maybe it's 5% or 10% in real life; I'm still willing to ignore
it in most cases.
>Yes, you choose to grossly underplay Vikki in social conflicts.
>This is good, even deserving of a reward (GURPS would give you
>more points at character creatin, for taking on a "mental
>disadvantage. FFRE would reward you with bonus points after
>each session for "patterned irrationality").
I tend to resent such awards bitterly and react very poorly to them.
I consider it part of my enjoyment as a player to play Vikki as
accurately as I can. I would also worry that if I encountered a
situation where roleplaying Vikki accurately was advantageous, the
GM would be concerned that I was "cheating". (This does happen
occasionally. Vikki cut a Gordian Knot for Chernoi once by simply
telling an uncooperative underling that she would personally shoot
him on his next error--and this turned out to be a good strategy,
better than Chernoi's more diplomatic one had been.)
>With Chernoi, your husband has to "translate" what you
>say and how you say it into what Chernoi says and how
>she says it (although the "how" is probably more in need
>of translation thanthe "what").
>This can be done with or without randomizers, but there is
>always an underlying model for how it is done, either in
>the form of written rules, or else a fuzzy mental model.
I would agree, with the caveat that the written rules may be less
fuzzy but in my experience they are also less complex, and therefore
more visibly artificial.
>But the GM is on your side, he agrees with you in general that it
>should be possible for a PC to be more socially adept than the
>player, and he agrees in specific with you that Chernoi should
>be more socially adept than you are.
>Not all players are lucky to have such a good GM.
This is true. I am not personally interested in rules meant to
protect the players from a bad GM; I decided about ten years ago that
life was too short to play with bad GMs.
If the GM disagrees that I should be able to play someone more socially
adept than myself, I don't think I want to fight back with mechanics;
it is too easy for him to 'win' such an argument even with the
mechanics, since social situations *always* have some judgement calls
in them. I would prefer to play a character who is less socially
adept, or else to find a different game.
>> When I had a player who wanted to portray highly-diplomatic characters
>> but was actually flatly incompetent, I had a difficult time figuring out
>I think NPC Attitude rolls might be a good place to start.
>I invented some rules for them when I GMed Quest FRP, but
>they relied on a table so they never got used. The rules for
>FFRE are tied to the dice mechanic (each degree of Success or
>Fumble ties directly to a specific NPC Attitude), so these
>will be used once I start GMing FFRE.
I don't think attitude rolls would have been any help. The player's
problems were not tactical (saying the wrong thing at the wrong time
and offending people), they were strategic. For example, he wanted
someone to help him, but he would never take the trouble to find
out what they wanted in return, and if they asked for something in
return, he wouldn't deliver. I find it next to impossible to compensate
for this with mechanics except by going to an abstraction level where
the player is no longer making decisions--and doing so is often
impossible. Suppose that the NPC would do task X only if the PCs in
turn did task Y. I can't abstract completely, because the PCs have
to know about (and do) task Y, and it may be something (say, a quest)
that can't be swept under the rug.
>Also in general dice rolls vs skills can be used to translate
>what (and how) players say into what PCs say.
I can see this for 'how' but not for 'what'. If Chernoi asks Linda
to provide access to the Archives in return for Chernoi's information
about local Rastur, well, how is a dice roll going to change the
fact that that's not a fair trade from Linda's point of view? It
seems hard to take any of the responsibility for 'what' away from
the player roleplaying here, without losing 'what' completely (i.e.
we just find out that Chernoi and Linda bargained, but not what the
bargain was--which is completely unacceptable here.)
>The difference is, it seems to me, that combat rules don't
>have to be detailed, but social interactions do.
Yes. And therefore many players will find that the abstraction/
no abstraction and player skill/character skill tradeoffs are
*different* for social skills. You seem to be arguing that they
must be the same; I don't agree.
But still, we're talking past each other a lot less than we were,
and I appreciate this.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Blackberry
>
>[...]
What did I miss? Why is a "player-directed campaign" more "simulationist" than
a "campaign with stuff going on"? There's stuff going on in the real world all
the time, and people get scooped up in it.
--------------------
"Over the river, and through the woods...
...let me see that map!"
-- Laurie Anderson, "New Jersey Turnpike"
Charlton Wilbur
> And when you *do* spoonfeed them, either they object to that too or
> they completely fail to notice. I've had players quit a game because
> "nothing happened" right after a session in which I both had their
> camp stalked at night and put them in the middle of a plot to
> overthrow the king.
I have a hard time in some types of game because I like simulationist
mysteries: I know what happened, and the characters get to figure it
out. The problem with this is that I am not always accurate at
predicting what the characters will do, and it is frustrating for me
as well as for the players when the characters pursue a string of dead
ends in a row.
The alternatives -- drop more leading clues, or plan the mystery
dramatically (they find 2 dead ends before the clue that plays off) --
are not especially appealing.
Charlton
Steve Mading
: Nis Haller Baggesen wrote:
:>
:> Peter Knutsen wrote:
:> >
:> > Jason Corley wrote:
:> > >
:> <Snip>
:> > > said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
:> > > how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
:> > >
:> > > 1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
:> > > nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
:> > > particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying to
:> > > avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
:> >
:> > On the other hand, if the GM just wants to tell stories to
:> > the players, helplessly incompetent PCs are a blessing.
:> >
:> That would seem to depend greatly on the kind of story you want to tell.
: Actually no. Because if the GM wants the PCs to succeed at some-
: thing difficult (like an undertrained chick, or a nontrained
: Hobbit, killing the Witch-King), something that is way beyond
: their capabilities, he can just fiat that it happens (Tolkien
: did it beforehand, by prophesying that the Witch-King was
: "fated not to be slain by Man"
Nitpick: The witch king was not killed by a hobbit in the books.
He was in a fight with the hobbit merry and a human woman Eowyn.
The human, who *had* trained to fight, was the main part of the
battle. The hobbit just got in a lucky blow from behind while the
witch king was turned to face the bigger threat of the woman. It
wouldn't have amounted to any damage, either, if it wasn't for the
fact that the blade he was using was magical, and explicitly wrought
for the purpose of killing that kind of creature. Even so, Merry
still didn't kill it, just distracted it at a key moment and then
Eowyn had her chance and killed it.
Russell Wallace
<DeCal...@gmx.net> wrote:
>This just shows that dramatism and storytelling per se has nothing to do
>with a role playing game.
I think our views on that matter are far enough apart that a debate
would be unconstructive, so I'll note disagreement and leave it at
that ^.^
>How many munchkins and powergamers are just rebells against game masters
>dictatorship armed for a doomed confrontation but trying to take as many of
>his loved strory with them as they can?
But I think you're right about this one. Whenever I hear a GM
muttering about "munchkins" I always think "wherefore beholdest thou
the mote in thy brother's eye, yet perceivest not the beam in thine
own eye?".
Probably none of us here are that sort of GM, so is there any useful
advice we can take from this?
I think there is; a lot of us will sometimes find ourselves, as
players, in situations where it's important not to come across as
munchkins, and I've found it's important to establish what the GM
_really_ wants and compare it to what I really want and look for a
compromise.
Example from the other day's AD&D game: I was proposing to use fly
spells to cross a swamp and reach the mountains on the other side, and
calculated it should only take an hour or two, figuring a reasonable
flight speed of, say, 40 mph.
The GM objected that flight speed was only 10 mph. (Supposedly there's
some justification for this in the rulebook; I don't know, and don't
really care.)
At this point I spent a couple of minutes in a private conversation
where I asked him what he was trying to achieve by this. It turned out
the issue for him was that the plot required us to spend a night in
the swamp because otherwise we wouldn't get to meet an important NPC.
(The PCs weren't aware of this, and had no IC reason to want to spend
a night there.)
Now as far as I'm concerned this is a perfectly good and valid reason
why the party need to spend a night in the swamp. My concern was
partly simulationist and partly a matter of character image (I don't
think of my character's magic as having such bizarre, irrational
limitations).
Because I now knew what each of us was really looking for, I was able
to suggest a solution that met both of our requirements: since we'd
never been to these mountains before, and the geography of this
continent had never been defined, he could just put them further away
without damaging consistency, so we'd end up in the swamp overnight
even with realistic flight speed. He did, and it worked fine.
--
"Mercy to the guilty is treachery to the innocent."
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace
mail:rw(at)eircom(dot)net
Russell Wallace
<cwi...@mithril.apartment.cj> wrote:
>I have a hard time in some types of game because I like simulationist
>mysteries: I know what happened, and the characters get to figure it
>out. The problem with this is that I am not always accurate at
>predicting what the characters will do, and it is frustrating for me
>as well as for the players when the characters pursue a string of dead
>ends in a row.
>
>The alternatives -- drop more leading clues, or plan the mystery
>dramatically (they find 2 dead ends before the clue that plays off) --
>are not especially appealing.
How about planning a steady ramp-up? For example if the solution
involves a cult worshipping the Great Old Ones, rather than rely on
the players to guess the significance of a single clue (which not
being telepathic, they probably won't, and everyone will get
frustrated), have the cult's developing activities provide a stream of
clues of slowly increasing obviousness so that sooner or later the
players are bound to get it?
John Kim
>> What would you say is a campaign which "follows" the threefold model
>> as opposed to "not following" it?
>>
>> As far as I can see, the threefold model has no prescription for
>> what you should or should not do in a game. It is a nomenclature,
>> not a recipe. Unlike you, it does not have any language calling a
>> given game "broken" or "wrong".
>
>By providing the labels, it sets up the expectation that one of them
>will apply.
Well, my FAQ at least explicitly and repeatedly denies this
starting with Question #2 ("Q: Which one am I? Dramatist, Gamist, or
Simulationist?" A:"Most likely, none of the above. Your individual
style cannot be pidgeonholed into a single word. More to the point,
you probably use a mix of different techniques, and work towards more
than one goal. ...").
Steve Mading
: In some sense this reduces the accuracy of character play, because the
: PC wouldn't necessarily screw up when the player would, but I think it
: will make for a better game, because I think it will increase the
: intensity of character identification.
It certainly does make it hard for people to play characters
that are better at social skills than they themselves are.
And it also removes a lot of game 'balance', by not assigning any
values to the social skills (and using the player's social skills
instead), you end up with characters that appear equal on paper,
but aren't in reality - one is a good fighter and a bad talker,
the other is a good fighter and a good talker too.
But, it also sounds like a lot more *fun*, and in a lot of respects
that's what really matters. I'd be willing to give up on a bit
of balance, and on the ability to play a character more glib than
me, if in exchance for that I get the ability to act out the
character with more freedom to immerse into it.
I've been back and forth a little on this issue before. But having
the painful experience of witnessing a couple of players who think they
are good talkers, but aren't, playing characters that are supposed
to be good talkers, but need the die rolling to make that happen,
I've changed my mind a bit. It's just downright annoying to have to
constantly rewind in my mind and go, "Okay, I know that attempt at
diplomacy sounded absolutely awful, but the character is supposed
to be good at it, and I know the player is socially inept, so
I'll just ignore what I heard and pretend he said something more
reasonable."
But I don't like the idea of not representing social features
on the character sheet at all, because it also closes the
door on getting points back for chosing to deliberately play
a character who is worse than you at social skills. It's a
downright hoot to deliberately choose to say the "wrong thing"
from time to time because it's the in-character thing to say.
I'd prefer the following general principle:
Build your character with the skills you think it should
have, including social. But during gameplay you don't
really use them directly unless you really need the help,
or the GM feels you are abusing this laxness in the rules
by acting your character in a manner much more glib than
his stats say he should be. In general, be honest with
yourself and try not to make a character that's a lot
better than you are at social skills. Play one that's
equal to or worse than yourself.
Steve Mading
: But Steve Mading, and *many* others, quietly assumes that all
: the PCs will be somewhere within a couple of standard
: deviations of normality. Because that was what it was like
: in AD&D, and they haven't noticed that newer systems like
: GURPS and Hero, FUDGE and FFRE, are *much* more statistically
: open.
Oh, yes, as everyone here knows, I have such a history in this
group of thinking the AD&D way is always the right way, because
I so *love* AD&D, as my posting history here can show - oh
yes, I am *such* an AD&D lover, and think it should be the
standard or normality.
Idiot.
Russell Wallace
<le...@NOanthrobunnySPAM.com> wrote:
>What did I miss? Why is a "player-directed campaign" more "simulationist" than
>a "campaign with stuff going on"? There's stuff going on in the real world all
>the time, and people get scooped up in it.
But the stuff that happens in the real world hardly ever makes a good
story, and would hardly ever make a good game. Almost all campaigns
rely on the GM setting up scenarios so that they'll be interesting to
play out.
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
>
> I have a hard time in some types of game because I like simulationist
> mysteries: I know what happened, and the characters get to figure it
> out. The problem with this is that I am not always accurate at
> predicting what the characters will do, and it is frustrating for me
> as well as for the players when the characters pursue a string of dead
> ends in a row.
Go for incompetent criminals who clumsily perpetrate a crime and lay
a half-assed frame on a second group of incompetent lowlifes. That
will be solvable, and realistic too. Panic and frantic butt-covering
are rather more plausible than brilliant murderers who create locked
room mysteries, anyway. I think this is the standard template for
writing hard-boiled detective fiction, actually.
Neel
Mary K. Kuhner
Charlton Wilbur <cwi...@mithril.apartment.cj> wrote:
>I have a hard time in some types of game because I like simulationist
>mysteries: I know what happened, and the characters get to figure it
>out. The problem with this is that I am not always accurate at
>predicting what the characters will do, and it is frustrating for me
>as well as for the players when the characters pursue a string of dead
>ends in a row.
>The alternatives -- drop more leading clues, or plan the mystery
>dramatically (they find 2 dead ends before the clue that plays off) --
>are not especially appealing.
It's a hard problem. Here are a few more sometimes usable tricks:
--Have the PCs mainly doing something else, and working on the
mystery as clues become available. This way they don't stall when
the current clues are unhelpful; they just go back to their other
projects.
This can lead to massive information overload and other problems if
overused, though. (That's one of _Radiant's_ current problems.)
--As someone else suggested, have an ongoing mystery rather than
a one-time mystery, so that more clues must eventually arise.
--Abstract the dead ends: "You spend fifty hours on the crime
scene forensics, but to no avail." This only works if the GM can
predict in advance which are dead ends, though, and can also
produce a scripted feeling even in an unscripted game. If player
input is necessary to explore the forensic possibilities, you
generally can't abstract.
--Try to operate in a naturally clue-rich environment. Written
mysteries are a bad source of RPG ideas, because they are generally
clue-poor (so that the solution won't seem obvious to too high a
percentage of the readers, and will last a whole book). A very
enjoyable game can come from a fairly clue-rich (and potentially
easy) mystery setup.
--Have people rather than objects as key elements. It is hard,
after a point, to think of any new leads to try on a gun or a
bloodstain. It is almost always possible to think of new things to
try with a person. Tail them, bug their phone, impersonate their
aunt, bribe their psychiastrist, read their diary.... Also, look
for situations where the suspects can be determined and the difficulty
is figuring out which is guilty, rather than situations where there
is a blank slate for suspects as well.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Wayne Shaw
<cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
And nothing you've said tells me that the GM cannot be swayed by the
player to the view of his unskilled character being able to sell
someone on the matter. Particularly in those ambiguous cases. Or,
just as bad, fail to convince the GM of a legitimate one, just because
the player is unconvincing.
>> And as someone who played on a MUX for a number of years, fail in
>> their attempts to get decent game play far more often than they
>> succeed.
>
>In your opinion. By golly, Wayne, didn't you just tell me to accept that
>people have different preferences? I think that knock on your door is a
>telegram from the kettle calling you black.
I don't have to be right all the time for my point to be valid, and
given that I heard enough people on multiple MUX and MUSHes make the
same statement, I'm quite firm in that opinion. The fact it worked
for some people doesn't make my statement untrue. When you can
demonstrate my experiences were _not_ representative, come back and
we'll talk.
>
>> That they continue is primarily based on two issues: many of
>> the people involved are sufficiently interested in putting a narrative
>> together that they'll tolerate a lot of inconsistency to get there,
>> and the open-endedness of the system-free nature appeals to some
>> people. But as a model for resolving events that are in doubt, they
>> thoroughly suck.
>
>Those two things you list are indeed true, but I don't think they fail to
>resolve things that are in doubt at all. Not even a little bit.
Then, bluntly, I think you're living in denial. I saw that occur
sufficiently frequently that even _proponents_ of the medium commented
on it regularly.
>
>I just witnessed a fight between an action-movie ninja character and the
>Batman on Project Infinity MUX, a GMless numberless multiplayer game. The
>two players resolved the possibly intractable combat (certainly in
>Champions it would have taken /hours/, and in many other systems the genre
>convention clash would have just been too great) in about thirty seconds
>of out-of-character discussion and spent about half an hour gleefully
>putting the characters through their paces.
And under similar circumstances in the exact same type of environment
on MUSHes as diverse as Children of the Atom, GarouMush and Dark
Dreaming, I saw the same process bog down incredibly the first time
there was the least clash of assumptions.
>Was it due to story concerns? HELL NO. It was a goofy throwaway scene that
>was put together in some respects /just so/ we could see who would win and
>enjoy the characters exercising their more-than-us capabilities.
>
>You are extrapolating your preference and your experience to everyone, not
>so severely as Peter but you are doing it nonetheless.
I'm extrapolating from commentary from people on every MUSH I was ever
on. If that's your definition of "my experience", it essentially
makes any nonstatistical data invalid, and you'll excuse me if I don't
buy that.
>
>Yes, it is true that some GMs who are not any good at running numberless
>games will certainly give the advantage to the player who most suits their
>play style. Peter says that will always happen. Because in his world
>numberless GMs are all shitty GMs. That is not the case here in the real
>world.
And I'd not claim that. But I will claim that the number that can run
even adequately without system support is quite small, and I've seen
very little evidence to change my mind over the years on that.
>> While Peter's usual simulationist fundamentalism gets in the way of
>> his ability to see other styles, he's far more right in this one for
>> more people than you want to give him credit for, Jason, and if you
>> think otherwise, I think I'd follow your own advice.
>
>As should you. Peter said there was only one way to play, I provided an
>example of another way that I enjoy. Show me where I said my way was the
>only way and I'll apologize. Until then, live with it.
And I'm saying your counterexample doesn't make it a good idea, it
just shows Peter, as usual, is overgeneralizing.
Blackberry
>
>>What did I miss? Why is a "player-directed campaign" more "simulationist" than
>>a "campaign with stuff going on"? There's stuff going on in the real world all
>>the time, and people get scooped up in it.
>
>But the stuff that happens in the real world hardly ever makes a good
>story, and would hardly ever make a good game. Almost all campaigns
>rely on the GM setting up scenarios so that they'll be interesting to
>play out.
Well, now that "simulationist" has been redefined for me in the context of this
discussion...
I think it's entirely disingenuous to believe that an entirely player-run game
session will not have any meta-game concerns at all.
"Guys, let's hurry, I have to pick up my wife in an hour!"
"Are we out of Dew already? Let's put off attacking the fortress until after a
store and pizza run."
Russell Wallace
<le...@NOanthrobunnySPAM.com> wrote:
>I think it's entirely disingenuous to believe that an entirely player-run game
>session will not have any meta-game concerns at all.
Not sure who believes it won't, but it's certainly not me :)
Jason Corley
Detective comics, too.
Gary Johnson
: On the players, Simulationism is very easy, because there is a
: de-emphasis on player skill (character (sheet) skill is what
: counts) and the players only have to make large-scale decisions.
Hi, Peter. It seems to me that if those large-scale decisions involve
choosing which character skill to use at which point in time, there's
still a strong emphasis on player skill: what's different is that it's
player skill at using the game system instead of player skill at
describing how to use the skill in "game world" terms. (I'd use "real
world" terms, but some skills cover things that don't happen in the real
world, like summoning extradimensional beings or travelling through
cyberspace.)
: Also, tabletop acting is at best unrewarded, and in many groups
: even discouraged, so also in this area there is no pressure.
Doesn't placing a low value on "acting in character" make the game more
like a cooperative boardgame along the lines of the Lord of the Rings game
(sorry, don't know which one) where each player is a hobbit and you have
to use renewable and non-renewable resources (that is, cards) to get to
Mount Doom and end the game?
: And there is no predeterminedness of outcome, nor any preference
: for a particular outcome from any particular situation (the only
: preference is that, seen over time, the character with the higher
: skill should perform better than the character with the lower
: skill), thus one can sustain interest through excitement about
: what is going to happen next.
Or, one can feel the in-game events have the same randomness and lack of
resolution that one gets in real life and find it all less fun because of
it. In my personal experience, almost all players and GMs find resolving
conflict consistently enjoyable: waiting for decision points to come
along where there is conflict to resolve is sometimes fun for some players
but often deadly dull for others. Your personal experience may vary.
: One also does not have to take
: into account any need to "please the others" when making
: decisions, one is free to express the personality of one's
: character, without regard to the "story" needing to go in a
: particular direction.
I would expect there is often still a set of external expectations that
affect game play, such as not killing the other players "because I don't
have to please anyone else and it's what my character would do".
Presumably this isn't what you mean by "story".
: Best of all, Simulationism makes it easy for the players to
: maintain the willing suspension of disbelief. In fact I see
: this as the reason for Simulationism.
Could you confirm, please, that this statement is arguing that because the
players accept the rules system as a fair depiction of the game setting,
anything that happens as a result of the game mechanics is believable? I
may be misunderstanding your intention here: it seems to me that (a) not
all SOD issues are to do with the outcomes of events (for example, genre
assumption clashes, character movitations that don't seem reasonable)
and (b) not all outcomes of a game mechanic will be believable (for
example, something that has a 1 in 10000 chance of happening may still
break SOD even if the lucky number comes up). Your thoughts?
: I've stated before that if just one player makes a pro-active PC,
: then that pro-active PC will generate sufficient plot and conflict
: to sustain interest for the other players, because the others
: couldn't care less whether the "plot" comes from the GM or from
: another player.
Hmm. What if I'm not interested in stock market manipulations, but that's
what the proactive player wants to do? What if my character isn't good at
manipulating the stock market, and I'm not keen on a simulationist game
where my character gets to be consistently incompetent? Essentially, what
if I want to do something, but (a) don't know what and (b) don't like
any other player's suggestions?
<snip>
: The players do need to be deprogrammed of some of the silly
: notions that abound in roleplaying gaming, but once that is
: accomplished, Simulationism tends to work. Provided, of
: course, that the GM has the intelligence and patience to
: "master archery".
It seems to me that your argument here is essentially that "people who
like X have fun doing X". If I like playing in a Simulationist style,
Simulationism works for me. Seems a fair enough point: I don't like the
whole primitive-sophisticated weapon model, but YMM (and clearly does) V.
Cheers,
Gary Johnson
Home Page: http://www.uq.net.au/~zzjohnsg
X-Men Campaign Resources: http://www.uq.net.au/~zzjohnsg/xmen/start.htm
Fantasy Campaign Setting: http://www.uq.net.au/~zzjohnsg/selentia.htm
Jason Corley
> On 10 Apr 2002 10:42:43 -0700, Jason Corley
> <cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>>Wayne Shaw <sh...@caprica.com> wrote:
>>> On 9 Apr 2002 21:40:41 -0700, Jason Corley
>>> <cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>>
> And nothing you've said tells me that the GM cannot be swayed by the
> player to the view of his unskilled character being able to sell
> someone on the matter. Particularly in those ambiguous cases. Or,
> just as bad, fail to convince the GM of a legitimate one, just because
> the player is unconvincing.
I never claimed that the GM cannot be swayed by anything. You are saying
"but numberless systems allow for bad GM choices!" Yes, they do, of course
they do, number-filled systems do too.
Like Mary said better in another post, I don't blame systems for bad
GMing.
>>In your opinion. By golly, Wayne, didn't you just tell me to accept that
>>people have different preferences? I think that knock on your door is a
>>telegram from the kettle calling you black.
> I don't have to be right all the time for my point to be valid, and
> given that I heard enough people on multiple MUX and MUSHes make the
> same statement, I'm quite firm in that opinion. The fact it worked
> for some people doesn't make my statement untrue. When you can
> demonstrate my experiences were _not_ representative, come back and
> we'll talk.
Why should I demonstrate your experiences were representative of anything?
As far as I know, ever gamer who I have never met and played with plays
exactly like Peter. All I know is what I have experienced and what gamers
I have played with experience.
>>two players resolved the possibly intractable combat (certainly in
>>Champions it would have taken /hours/, and in many other systems the genre
>>convention clash would have just been too great) in about thirty seconds
>>of out-of-character discussion and spent about half an hour gleefully
>>putting the characters through their paces.
> And under similar circumstances in the exact same type of environment
> on MUSHes as diverse as Children of the Atom, GarouMush and Dark
> Dreaming, I saw the same process bog down incredibly the first time
> there was the least clash of assumptions.
Yes. There are bad players and bad staffers on GMless numberless MU*s.
Heck. I frequent a web board dedicated to mocking them and pointing out
their many failures.
I do not and will not blame their ineptitude on numberlessness. Their
ineptitude stems from their own total crushing inability to /play the
game/. Just as the shitty GM can ruin a tabletop game by not knowing what
to do or doing it badly, so too a shitty player can ruin a GMless online
game because the responsibilities have been delegated differently. The
responsibilities are not /different/ - they are just in the hands of
different people.
> And I'd not claim that. But I will claim that the number that can run
> even adequately without system support is quite small, and I've seen
> very little evidence to change my mind over the years on that.
Adequately /for you/.
>>As should you. Peter said there was only one way to play, I provided an
>>example of another way that I enjoy. Show me where I said my way was the
>>only way and I'll apologize. Until then, live with it.
> And I'm saying your counterexample doesn't make it a good idea, it
> just shows Peter, as usual, is overgeneralizing.
It clearly is a good idea for those of us that enjoy it and know what
we're doing with it. ;)
Nis Haller Baggesen
>
> Nis Haller Baggesen wrote:
> >
> > Peter Knutsen wrote:
> > >
> > > Jason Corley wrote:
> > > >
> > <Snip>
> > > > said, I am running my very most scripted game ever at present, and here is
> > > > how I am avoiding feelings of helplessness:
> > > >
> > > > 1. Genre choice and system choice. A game in which the characters are
> > > > nearly-incompetent simlpetons adrift on the sea of destiny is a
> > > > particularly poor choice for a highly scripted game if you're trying to
> > > > avoid helplessness. The characters must be powerful, and in my own
> > >
> > > On the other hand, if the GM just wants to tell stories to
> > > the players, helplessly incompetent PCs are a blessing.
> > >
> > That would seem to depend greatly on the kind of story you want to tell.
>
> Actually no. Because if the GM wants the PCs to succeed at some-
> thing difficult (like an undertrained chick, or a nontrained
> Hobbit, killing the Witch-King), something that is way beyond
> their capabilities, he can just fiat that it happens (Tolkien
> did it beforehand, by prophesying that the Witch-King was
> ad-hoc).
>
> The other way around, where the GM desires the PCs to fail
> at something, even though the PCs are so competent that failure
> would not realistically occur, cannot be fiated as easily, it
> is much harder.
The 'fated to happen' cop-out works both ways. And to me it would always
seem much more plausible the bad circumstances made something fail
rather than incredible luck making something work.
>
> Therefore incompetent PCs are the easist kind of PCs to tell
> stories to, because they are helpless against the GM, they
> have no capabilities with which to "fight" the GM, with which
> to affect the direction of the "story".
If the GM dictates stories, then nobody can really do anything - just
like if the players dictate stories (Which they can, just as well as the
GM). Numbers on a sheet wont help in either case.
Competent PC are much easier top tell certain stories to, since
incompetent PCs would not get involved in those stories.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote:
>
>
>Nis Haller Baggesen wrote:
>>
>> Peter Knutsen wrote:
>> >
>The other way around, where the GM desires the PCs to fail
>at something, even though the PCs are so competent that failure
>would not realistically occur, cannot be fiated as easily, it
>is much harder.
Why?
Robert Scott Clark
<le...@NOanthrobunnySPAM.com> wrote:
>On Sat, 06 Apr 2002 01:54:11 GMT, sp...@devnull.com wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>
>What did I miss? Why is a "player-directed campaign" more "simulationist" than
>a "campaign with stuff going on"? There's stuff going on in the real world all
>the time, and people get scooped up in it.
I don't recall the last time I was "scooped up" in anything.
Nis Haller Baggesen
>
> >
> > GM: "I'm not going to let you do that because it would screw up the
> > story."
> > Player: "But it's my character's story too, and I think it would be a
> > lot better if he succeeded here."
> >
>
> This just shows that dramatism and storytelling per se has nothing to do
> with a role playing game.
> game and with the development only depending on which player can impose his
> ideas on the others by using players abilities there is no role playing.
there may be little that can be identified as 'gaming' or 'game playing'
but I don't see how the 'role playing' disappears - Roles are played
even in theater.
Charlton Wilbur
[responding to Jason Corley:]
> >Yes, it is true that some GMs who are not any good at running numberless
> >games will certainly give the advantage to the player who most suits their
> >play style. Peter says that will always happen. Because in his world
> >numberless GMs are all shitty GMs. That is not the case here in the real
> >world.
>
> And I'd not claim that. But I will claim that the number that can run
> even adequately without system support is quite small, and I've seen
> very little evidence to change my mind over the years on that.
At one point I tried to run a systemless game by e-mail. Characters
were defined in writing; no numbers anywhere. It worked, but only
because of the slow pace (at least compared to paper games): when I
needed to resolve an action involving hand-to-hand combat, I asked one
of my friends who is a martial artist. When I needed to resolve an
action involving fortune-telling, I spent an hour in the library
researching the I Ching. There is no way that I could have run such a
game face to face; the dice, and the rules, cover up for all the
things I simply do not know, since you cannot interrupt a game session
for two hours while you run to the library and find out some obscure
fact. There was also a major NPC who (for very good reasons) spoke
only by quoting other material, often fiction, and there's no way I
could have played a character like that that well in realtime; my
memory for quotes is adequate, but my library is much better....
It also worked because I did some weeding of participants. I
recognized a couple of Cyberpunk 2020 characters with the stats filed
off, and advised them that they'd probably not be getting the sort of
action that they were expecting; sure, it was set on the Moon in a
cyberpunky world, but it was *much* more mystery, intrigue, and
politics than combat. As a result, the people who were involved were
all explicitly interested in the same style of game.
Charlton
Robert Scott Clark
<mad...@baladi.bmrb.wisc.edu> wrote:
A.
>But, it also sounds like a lot more *fun*, and in a lot of respects
>that's what really matters. I'd be willing to give up on a bit
B.
>his stats say he should be. In general, be honest with
>yourself and try not to make a character that's a lot
>better than you are at social skills. Play one that's
>equal to or worse than yourself.
But then, points A and B conflict. You certainly wouldn't ask the
same of someone who could not swordfight or aim a gun.
Blackberry
Well, like this:
I went to a party with some friends of mine who I'd known for a while. About an
hour into the party, they all went downstairs and invited me along. Turned out
there was just another level of people dancing and drinking there. We went into
an adjoining room and they started getting out bags of cocaine and said to me,
"Oh, hey, would you stand guard at the door for us?"
Sounds like an adventure hook to me. :)
Robert Scott Clark
Yea, and racial seperatists claim not to be racist. You can scream
what you just said from the rooftops if you want, but in practice, it
is not used that way.
Robert Scott Clark
<cor...@cobweb.scarymonsters.net> wrote:
>I never claimed that the GM cannot be swayed by anything. You are saying
>"but numberless systems allow for bad GM choices!" Yes, they do, of course
>they do, number-filled systems do too.
>
>Like Mary said better in another post, I don't blame systems for bad
>GMing.
Damnit, now I have to go delete that post where I was going to say
exactly this - two people beat me to it.
Georgina Bensley
> >his stats say he should be. In general, be honest with
> >yourself and try not to make a character that's a lot
> >better than you are at social skills. Play one that's
> >equal to or worse than yourself.
>
> But then, points A and B conflict. You certainly wouldn't ask the
> same of someone who could not swordfight or aim a gun.
... unless everyone else in the group really wanted to play a boffer larp
/ paintball game and was having fun doing it.
If everybody wanted to play a fantasy game in which they would play out
the battles with rubber swords, and a complete klutz like me tried to
write up a character with maxed-out swordfighting skills, there would be a
problem. Someone here who plays boffer larps may be able to tell you how
they compensate for it - personally, I just avoid those games, so I don't
know. Handicaps or bonuses of some sort?
Similarly, if the group really enjoys playing out the social conflicts,
but the player and character skills don't match up, it will be slightly
problematic.
Robert Scott Clark
<le...@NOanthrobunnySPAM.com> wrote:
>On Thu, 11 Apr 2002 13:16:54 GMT, Robert wrote:
>>
>>On 10 Apr 2002 14:28:46 -0700, Blackberry
>><le...@NOanthrobunnySPAM.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Sat, 06 Apr 2002 01:54:11 GMT, sp...@devnull.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>[...]
>>>
>>>What did I miss? Why is a "player-directed campaign" more "simulationist" than
>>>a "campaign with stuff going on"? There's stuff going on in the real world all
>>>the time, and people get scooped up in it.
>>
>>I don't recall the last time I was "scooped up" in anything.
>
>Well, like this:
>
>I went to a party with some friends of mine who I'd known for a while. About an
>hour into the party, they all went downstairs and invited me along. Turned out
>there was just another level of people dancing and drinking there. We went into
>an adjoining room and they started getting out bags of cocaine and said to me,
>"Oh, hey, would you stand guard at the door for us?"
>
>Sounds like an adventure hook to me. :)
You chose to go to the party, you decided to go down stairs instead of
staying in the kitchen and macking on some blonde, you didn't
immediately leave the room when the cocaine came out. Without the
players directly cooperating, you've got nothing.
And, to be honest, it sounds like a 30 second anecdote to tell at
dinner parties if the topic of drugs comes up, not exactly something
to build a conversation over, let alone an "adventure".
Robert Scott Clark
wrote:
>
>> >his stats say he should be. In general, be honest with
>> >yourself and try not to make a character that's a lot
>> >better than you are at social skills. Play one that's
>> >equal to or worse than yourself.
>>
>> But then, points A and B conflict. You certainly wouldn't ask the
>> same of someone who could not swordfight or aim a gun.
>
>... unless everyone else in the group really wanted to play a boffer larp
>/ paintball game and was having fun doing it.
>
And at that point, I would seriously question whether or not they were
roleplaying. Sounds to me like they are alternating a little
roleplaying with a little cooperative violence.
Just like there are computer RPGs that market themselves as "tactical
RPGs" or "first person shooter with RPG elements", it seems like a
decent number of P&P RPGs need the same sort of disclaimer - "RPG with
tacked on faux swordfighting used as resolution mechanic". But I see
said tacked on swordfighting to have as much to do with playing a role
as playing darts to resolve a combat would be. To return to CRPG
terminology, it's a mini-game.
To return to the example of acting out social skill encounters, that's
just a mini-game too. It's the use of the "Charades with words and
let someone rate us on performance" mini-game to resolve an in-game
challenge.
Jason Corley
> [ snip example of PBEM systemless game that worked because of hours of
> prep for each exchange ]
This is definitely one strategy that can work. Another is empowering
players (not characters) to make more decisions about the way things are
going. The MU* model works a lot like this. By delegating some GMing
authority to players who know the capabilities of their characters in more
detail than they are writing, you get to focus on the areas where the
players /can't/ make decisions about their characters competence (like
when up against unknown villains or in investigating some deep mystery or
so forth.) This reduces the need for a lot of prep time by quite a bit.
(Nonetheless, MU*ing does have more prep time than tabletop because most
people don't pause in silence for a minute and a half to give their
replies at tabletop - although in a lot of situations this might be a good
idea!)
> It also worked because I did some weeding of participants. I
> recognized a couple of Cyberpunk 2020 characters with the stats filed
> off, and advised them that they'd probably not be getting the sort of
> action that they were expecting; sure, it was set on the Moon in a
> cyberpunky world, but it was *much* more mystery, intrigue, and
> politics than combat. As a result, the people who were involved were
> all explicitly interested in the same style of game.
It is /extremely/ important in situations like this to have good
communication about campaign focus. I think it's important in all
situations but you give a good example about why it's mega-important here.
Jason Corley
I did the same thing once I read Mary's reply. It was way better than the
one I had composed. ;)
Mary K. Kuhner
Steve Mading <mad...@baladi.bmrb.wisc.edu> wrote:
>I've been back and forth a little on this issue before. But having
>the painful experience of witnessing a couple of players who think they
>are good talkers, but aren't, playing characters that are supposed
>to be good talkers, but need the die rolling to make that happen,
>I've changed my mind a bit. It's just downright annoying to have to
>constantly rewind in my mind and go, "Okay, I know that attempt at
>diplomacy sounded absolutely awful, but the character is supposed
>to be good at it, and I know the player is socially inept, so
>I'll just ignore what I heard and pretend he said something more
>reasonable."
It gets even tougher when the character's backstory indicates that
he should be eloquent and socially capable, but in play he
isn't. But this is a general problem with backstories. Sarah Kahn
told an anecdote about two characters who had been bosom buddies
in the backstory, but as soon as they were actually played they
proved to hate each other passionately....
I've felt, lately, that it's better to aim for characters whose
*overall* social adeptness is similar to the player's, but to allow
for specific areas of aptitude (or ineptitude). This can add a
lot of character flavor and it's often easier for the GM to manage
than generalized social grace. For example, when Jon is GMing for
Vikki (who was raised by Rastur) he provides very good descriptions
of what the Rastur around her are doing with their attitudes and
body language, whereas Chernoi gets only generalities ("His ears
are back, his elbows are out" whereas Vikki hears "He's very uneasy
with the position you're taking; push much harder and he'll go
for a weapon.")
>But I don't like the idea of not representing social features
>on the character sheet at all, because it also closes the
>door on getting points back for chosing to deliberately play
>a character who is worse than you at social skills. It's a
>downright hoot to deliberately choose to say the "wrong thing"
>from time to time because it's the in-character thing to say.
If it's a downright hoot, why is a bribe necessary to do it?
One answer to this, for some groups, is "The other players won't
tolerate me playing sub-optimally unless there is some mechanical
reward." Sometimes this is just competitiveness; sometimes it
comes from point starvation. I like the GURPS sidebar suggestion of
giving the full 145 points and just not point-costing disads.
Many roleplaying systems, perhaps responding to the D&D tradition,
start out beginning PCs with rather few points, and players have
to make nasty choices between conception and effectiveness. With
more points one may get more relaxed and diverse character designs--
as long as the players don't think "more points --> more difficult
scenarios --> just as much need to optimize as before." It may help
to give lots of points but set upper limits on stats and skills.
>Build your character with the skills you think it should
>have, including social. But during gameplay you don't
>really use them directly unless you really need the help,
>or the GM feels you are abusing this laxness in the rules
>by acting your character in a manner much more glib than
>his stats say he should be.
This is about what we do. Chernoi has social skills on her
character sheet, to make it a more complete description, but we
roll for them only when there's a problem. The usual problem
is not abuse or player difficulty in roleplaying, but the desire
to abstract. If Chernoi has to interrogate twenty-eight
suspects, no way am I going to provide enough roleplaying to
let the GM tell how well she does; so we roll dice.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com