The Forge Archives

In a previous thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20099.0), I was asked some interesting questions and given some interesting suggestions that I jumped to address (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20099.msg210265#msg210265), only realizing later that I'd drifted far from my intended purpose of working on my game's setting.

This thread is intended to continue those parts of the discussion that I wish to separate from my setting work.  Here is a part of a very interesting post which I feel belongs here, and to which I will respond shortly (though feel free to beat me to it!):

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 14, 2006, 02:13:59 PM
This is a chronic, chronic problem of games that try to apply the traditional D&D/GURPS/White Wolf model to anything besides "let's win the fight at the least possible risk to ourselves." If your game-text is all about one thing -- seeking out and confronting inhuman horror, for example -- but your mechanical rewards are all about another thing -- e.g. the more fights you win, the better you fight next time; or, the more you stay at home and train, the better you get  -- then you have a fatal disconnect. The key is to figure out what kind of behavior you want from the players -- the players, the players, the players; forget the characters for a minute, they're not real anyway, they're just instruments of the players' imaginations. Then make your mechanics reward  that kind of behavior and nothing else.

This is a tremendously personal choice, but I can make some suggestions based on what you've already said:
- A "realistic" skill system that makes characters more proficient the more they practice when not adventuring is a game-killer: It encourages everyone to stay home, instead of going out and getting in trouble.
- A "realistic" money system that makes characters pay for everything, and forces players to concentrate on how much they spend and how much they earn, won't work for you: It encourages everyone to focus on money, not adventure and horror.
- A traditional "XP" system that makes characters better fighters the more fights they win, as in D&D, is a mediocre fit for what you want: It encourages getting into trouble, but never more trouble than you can currently handle -- if you have an overwhelming foe, the logical response is to go kill off some wimps first, so you can get strong enough to take on the big guy.
- A "lose to win" system, as in FATE ("Aspects"), Tony Lower-Basch's Capes, or Miller's With Great Power..., where being defeated this time gives you some kind of points that you can use to buy victory next time, and where buying victory tends to expend your points and leave you vulnerable to defeat again, might be a very good fit: It nicely replicates the whole "we lose, we lose again, we lose again, we finally win!" dynamic of many heroic stories. It can even be "realistic" if you justify it in terms of, "dang, you had to run screaming from the monster that time, but next time you'll be prepared for its horrific appearance," or "hey, you lost that fight, but in the process you think you spotted the monster's crucial weakness -- you'll be ready for it next time!" (Viz. every second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
- A "fallout" system, as in Dogs in the Vineyard, where your character can gain new traits and abilities from being defeated or harmed, might be a very good match, too: "Okay, I barely escaped with my life that time, so now I have the trait 'I fear demons' at level 10 -- next time I'm in a fight with a demon, I can harness my fear to fight harder and win!"

Hi Carl,

Your Power 19 file is very interesting ! Great propositions from other members too!

My take for question #3:

I suggest that you bring about your Ideologies under a few "families", so that you have you players minimally work together. The player's goals would be to see their faction prosper by completing important political/social objectives.

The best example I could state would be Mage RPG, where you have 3 big factions (Traditions, Technocracy, Nephandi) each comprising a variety of positions.  Thus you could have Pro-Magic, Anti-Magic and "Resurrectionist" factions, with Ideologies within each (eg. Curative Pro-Magic, Opportunist Pro-Magic, etc.). You could even have Faction Points, representing one PC's standing and influence within his faction, and allow players to total their PC's FPs when acting together - forcing group co-operation. These wouldn't be "experience points", but a measure of your world's global change towards the goal they work for. Attaining thresholds (e.g. every 10 Pro-Magic points) could give a similar bonus to motivate and reflect the world's change. I think the online game "[Something] of Camelot" has a similar mechanism, spreading players over 3 warring factions with incentives for intra-faction co-operation.

Suppose for example that your PC group is made up of 5 Pro-Magic PCs, each with his own Ideology. By playing the first part of your campaign, they complete 5 major plot points - gathering 5 Pro-Magic Faction Points together and various Ideology points individually. At mid-time,

"Winning the game" could simply imply winning 100 Faction Points and thus deciding your World's fate, representing the Faction's advance over others and ending up with 1) a Magic world ; 2) a Magicless world ; 3) the world as it was before the Cataclysm.

Moreover, secondary Ideology points could determine, within each Faction "sucess", which Ideology dominates, e.g. a Magic World tainted by Opportunist Magi or healed by Curative Magi, etc.

Non-magi could have the advantage of never suffering from the negative effects of using magic, and perhaps winning more easily Ideology points (if not Faction points, or vice-versa).

That way you give both your players and characters a setting-oriented goal. This could be Gamist as well as Narrativist, not unlike Paul Czege's My Life With Master for ex. The GM's role could be to oppose them (if you take a Narrativist system) or to challenge them (with a Gamist system). Since I'm not convinced about the existence of Simulationist systems (at least, significatively different from Gamist ones), I'll leave it without an example, with all due respect.

Just my 2 cents.

Erick

Listen to Sydney, Sydney speaketh much truth.

I'd only tweak one thing.  Instead of a Lose to Win mechanic which does nicely fit most heroic fiction...how about a Win to Lose mechanic...the more you win, the more inevitable your finally losing will be.  That fits in with the whole struggling against an enemy who eventually must destroy you.

Something like every time the characters succeed (by some standard) the GM gets a point.  The GM then uses that point to destroy civilization.  As the players fight and win to save their own little corner of the world they hear stories about another kingdom to the west that's fallen to the Orcs.  A favorite NPC...the Good King they held in awe...the "King Arthur" figure who saved them from the "Saxons"...yeah him...how many points will it take to just kill him off.  When the PCs come back from successfully running to ground and destroying a rampaging beast they return to find their village weaping and mourning the death of the King...the death that they were powerless to stop.  The death that was inevitable.

To me...a mechanic like that (or some alternative with similar effect) just exudes menace...its different from anything out there, and it ties directly into the theme of the game.

Wait a minute...how is giving the GM the power to destroy the world a REWARD system...?

Because reward systems are for PLAYERS...and players playing your game WANT to see their character's triumphs displayed against the backdrop of ultimate futility...otherwise they'd be playing some less menacing.

And Ralph is freakin' scary.

Compare Erick's idea vs. Ralph's and think about how different each of those makes the setting, by the way: "The players get points to make the world better if they win" creates a totally, utterly different tone and moral cause-and-effect from "the GM gets points to make the world worse if the PCs win." One way you get Moorcock's Elric and Stormbringer; the other, Tolkein's Aragorn and Frodo.

Personally, I hate, hate, hate, hate hate hate haaaaaaaaaaaaaate "splats" in the Ars Magica / World of Darkness style, because no matter how hard you try, most people will look at that and go, "okay, if I want to play one of those guys, I should have these powers, these goals, and these attitudes, pretty much like everyone else in the same clan/house/tribe/whatever."
D&D's much-maligned race + alignment + class combination actually gives you a fair bit more versatility, and in fact forces players to make choices instead of just following a template: A Lawful Good hobbit thief is a very, very different character from a Chaotic Evil elven thief/warrior, for example. (Every time I think about D&D from an RPG theory perspective, I'm more impressed with it -- not that it's what I want to play, but it's damn good at what it does). Somewhat similarly, Tony Lower-Basch's Capes does a really interesting thing called "click-and-locks" in which you have one list of superpowers, and another list of personalities, and you get to pick one of each and then customize. (Check out http://www.museoffire.com/Games/Downloads/ClickAndLock.swf).

I personally am intrigued by the idea of a mechanic for "high concepts" : y'know, the Hollywood-pitch style of presenting an idea for a story or character, like "it's Wolverine -- only a 90-year-old woman!" or "a noble paladin -- who must atone for summoning a demon!" or "a humble farmboy -- whose epic destiny is to stay a humble farmboy!" Yes, "high concept" is a term of abuse, but the good ones capture something essential: dynamic situations and characters -- ones that can't possibly stay the same as they are, and which therefore can lead to dramatic stories -- are driven by paradox, some profound tension between two things that must be resolved.

In terms of the fiction, we're talking about creating situations (not the whole setting, mind you, but specific locales with a specific cast of NPCs) that are dynamically unstable, torn by profound internal tensions -- which, of course, both sides (or all three sides, or all four...) immediately look to the player-characters to resolve: say, "we must rally all resources against the menace of the Orcs and strike first before they grow too strong!" vs. "the peasants are already overtaxed and the barons restless, we must cut back the watch on the borders before it drives us into bankruptcy, riot, and rebellion!" For your game, this means looking at the setting in terms of latent conflicts that will occur and reoccur wherever the characters go.
In terms of character generation, we're talking about creating characters who can't stand still: Wherever they're from, whatever they used to do, whatever they used to believe, it doesn't work for them anymore, and they have to leave, do something else, find a new cause. The classic Wolverine / gunslinger / ronin character works on this principle, the driving paradox in this case being "I'm all alone with no worthy master to serve -- but my whole life is about fighting for a good cause -- so as soon as I run into a decent person who needs help, I will risk everything for them!" For your game, this means thinking about what a normal knight, mercenary, priest, peasant, etc. would be in this world, and then about what kinds of experiences would make normal life impossible for each, jolting them into adventure.
In terms of reward systems, we're talking about contradictory incentives that pull the players both ways. (Forget the characters, for a moment; they're not real, just instruments, etc.). Ron Edwards's Sorcerer is a classic example: Your player-character is by definition a sorcerer, and your only ability that makes you different from anybody else is your ability to summon demons, and the more demons you summon, the more powerful you become -- and the more you risk falling into madness, damnation, and death (through your Humanity score falling to zero). Tony's Capes is a freakin' maelstrom of contradictory incentives (way too complex to discuss here). For your game, this approach means thinking of two (or more) things the characters should care about and devising mechanics such that protecting one means endangering the other, and trying to protect both equally risks destroying both.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 14, 2006, 09:59:48 PM
Compare Erick's idea vs. Ralph's

I'll address your point in a bit, but for the moment I have to state that Erick's post does not belong here.  I was hoping he'd find a way to remove it before people saw it.  Ah well.  That post was intended for Carl Brussler's "Constructive criticism on setting material" thread.

Apologies, David. Feel free to delete the post.

Quote from: Valamir on June 14, 2006, 09:00:54 PM
Something like every time the characters succeed (by some standard) the GM gets a point.  The GM then uses that point to destroy civilization.  . . . When the PCs come back from successfully running to ground and destroying a rampaging beast they return to find their village weaping and mourning the death of the King...the death that they were powerless to stop.  The death that was inevitable.

In college, I shared a lot of Philosophy classes with a Ralph M.  He had some good ideas, but I think you win.  A Win-to-Lose mechanic is exactly the right direction to be thinking in...

I can immediately see two opposite ways this could be implemented:

1) The GM keeps his own score card, deciding for himself what counts as a player "victory" and tallying points accordingly.  This info is kept secret from the players.  Every so often, the GM "spends" his points to make something bad happen.  The effect of all this is that the players never have an uninterrupted string of positive experiences.  "We met a nice guy who helped us, we killed a monster, we found an ancient book, we killed another monster, we found the trail out of the Forest of Madness... this world isn't so bad after all."  Something should remind the GM to smack that down.

2) The players know what situations give the GM points, and see him accrue them.  This will lead to a nice feeling of dread and hopelessness ("Shit, we met a nice farmer who fed us for free, something terrible will happen soon"), but may also lead to bizarre, meta-gamist choices ("No, don't ask for free food, if he says yes we'll be facing some fallout that much sooner!").

I like the first better.  A reward system is still a reward system even if it's invisible, right?  (Although "GMs, don't let your players read this section of the book!" might be a logistical issue...)

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 14, 2006, 09:59:48 PM
In terms of the fiction, we're talking about creating situations . . . that are dynamically unstable

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 14, 2006, 09:59:48 PM
In terms of character generation, we're talking about creating characters who can't stand still:

Nice.  Both of these would help encourage a kind of play appropriate to the game's themes.  When I'm working on writing up some helpful hints for GMs and players, I will definitely come back to this.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 14, 2006, 09:59:48 PM
In terms of reward systems, we're talking about contradictory incentives that pull the players both ways . . . For your game, this approach means thinking of two (or more) things the characters should care about and devising mechanics such that protecting one means endangering the other, and trying to protect both equally risks destroying both.

That's fantastic.  Part of my opposition to rewards systems has been an opposition to dangling meta-game incentives for players, who then wind up motivated by stat scores etc. instead of the in-game concerns that are intended to be Lendrhald's focus.  But if each "reward" entails a cost... so that you're not really improving, just evolving... then the system would serve more to track player choices than to bias them...

I'm not sure what kind of character attributes would be ideal to measure for a system like that... if I invent a bunch of metrics with no relevance to character effectiveness, characters may not really care when these go up or down...

Quote from: David Berg on June 16, 2006, 02:40:39 AMThe players know what situations give the GM points, and see him accrue them.  This will lead to a nice feeling of dread and hopelessness ("Shit, we met a nice farmer who fed us for free, something terrible will happen soon"), but may also lead to bizarre, meta-gamist choices ("No, don't ask for free food, if he says yes we'll be facing some fallout that much sooner!").

I'm actually in favor of letting the players know. A reward system isn't a reward system if the players don't know about it, because the whole point of reward systems is to give people incentives to act in a particular way.

Even the "meta" choices aren't so bizarre when you think about the source material: How often are wandering heroes in dark stories really reluctant to let people help them, precisely because they know that horrible things will happen to anyone decent who gets entangled with them? (Not just in horror: Look at Westerns, or the Incredible Hulk, or Wolverine).

More fundamentally, don't be afraid of "meta." It's superficially logical to say, "the players will be totally immersed in the story and make decisions based on that, so if you show them the mechanics they'll be jolted into awareness of how arbitrary it all is." But here's the thing: Your players aren't really there. You can say, "The pit's too big to jump!" or "It's a big, scary monster" or "you feel like you're gonna die" all you like, their imagination may not be up to it. It can actually help make the fiction more concrete if you say, "It's a big pit, you need to roll a 12 on 2d6 to jump over it, good frickin' luck" or "It's a big, scary monster, look how many more dice it has than you [clatter, clatter]" or "you feel like you're gonna die, here, let me cross out all your hit points except this last one."

I could go on for hours about the Myth of Actor Stance, the Fallacy of Meta Avoidance, and the Dogma of Immersion...but I've done all that before.  I'll be happy to rant further on those topics if you're interested but otherwise I'll spare you the diatribe.

Instead I'll point you to my last post in  This Thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20035.0) which has my most recent commentary on the topic and move on.


Above you list 2 options:
1) GM accrues points and keeps them secret
2) GM accrues points and lets players know.

I'll throw out another just to stir up some more ideas.

3) Players choose when the GM gets points.  In exchange they get something else.

Ralph's #3 - I like it. Especially because you could use it let players "buy" precisely the kind of misery they want for their characters:

Quote from: example of hypothetical mechanic
FIRST PLAYER: Okay, that encounter was bad, but if we just stay on the trail, we'll be out of the forest in another two days and...
SECOND PLAYER: Two days? Excuse me, we haven't eaten for a day already.
THIRD PLAYER: Yeah, remember how we had to dump all our remaining food to keep that thing from chasing us?
FIRST PLAYER: Oh. Right.
SECOND PLAYER: So what we can get if we spend Expendiency Points?
GM: How many?
THIRD PLAYER: Five!
FIRST PLAYER: Dude, we are not going to give him that many. Two, max.
GM: Two Expediency buys you... lemme see. [consults rules and notes]... Okay, as you're walking along through the forest, weak from hunger, you see a clearing up ahead, and a little cottage, with a pretty little peasant girl gathering berries. She smiles at you...
SECOND PLAYER: No! Last peasant girl who gave us free food ended up with her father getting possessed by a demon and eating her eyeballs.
THIRD PLAYER: Yeah, we're not dragging any more innocents into this. We keep walkin'.
FIRST PLAYER: "Go back in the house, child," I say as we walk past. "Don't you know never to talk to strangers?"
GM: She shrinks back inside.... Okay, so you keep walking, and as you do, you [points to first player] start remembering this old rhyme your mother used to sing to you -- something about the Little People, and how they would bring milk and bread to those whose singing pleased them -- you think could probably hum it if you...
SECOND PLAYER: Uh, wait, is this anything like the fairy rhyme my last character's mom taught him? The one he used when our ship was about to sink?
GM: Sorta.
THIRD PLAYER: Hell no, then.
GM: Hey, I'm sure your old character is very happy with the Mermaid Queen in her palace beneath the waves.
FIRST PLAYER: To the extent that he, y'know, still can be consider to exist as an individual, sure.
GM: Picky, picky. Okay. You bite your lip and suppress the urge to hum the old fairy rhyme. Now you [points at second player] think you see a herd of deer grazing, just a little bit away. If you just leave the path for a minute, you could probably get into bowshot and bag one for venison...
SECOND PLAYER: And then get lost on the way back and attacked by those wolf-things like last time? Yeah, right, I'm just so eager to "just leave the path for a minute."
THIRD PLAYER: What else?
GM: [consulting a table] Guys, these aren't going to get any better as we go, you realize that?
FIRST PLAYER: Yeah. We know.
SECOND PLAYER: Let's go back to the peasant girl and ask her for some food.
THIRD PLAYER: Right. Figuring out how to save her sounds like more fun than another monster fight or trying to deal with the Fae again.
GM: That'll be two Expediency, please.

Quote from: Valamir on June 16, 2006, 12:23:52 PM
I could go on for hours about the Myth of Actor Stance, the Fallacy of Meta Avoidance, and the Dogma of Immersion...but I've done all that before.  I'll be happy to rant further on those topics if you're interested but otherwise I'll spare you the diatribe.

I'm definitely interested.  However, let me see if I can give you something concrete to respond to:

My co-designer A. and I participated in a game called Telvar.  Telvar is a D&D-ish game that one GM (E.) has been running in the same setting for over 15 years.  In its early stages, I believe it was a random compilation of modules and map-making.  However, E. kept extensive notes on what happened where.  The result was that, when he eventually finished deciding what all was in the world, that setting was complete with the results of the exploits of past gaming groups.  Ever since then, the setting has largely just sat there, ready for new groups to explore it at will.

There's one important way in which it has not "just sat there" -- E. tracks the passage of time meticulously, as well as everything it brings.  I don't know whether it's determined by dice-rolling or just by E.'s idea of what makes sense, but seasons come and go, weather shifts, travel gets easier and harder, commerce ebbs and flows, some nations are stable while others endure power struggles or coups.

This game had a profound effect on A., who felt that the world's concrete existence lent his character's actions a gravity and significance they would have otherwise lacked.  Even more important, though, was the sense that the setting was not being fabricated for player enjoyment, and instead actually existed in its own right.  That's right: although you will never physically enter Telvar, it is real, in a way that a string of towns and roads constructed only to entertain a specific group of players (and challenge them with a "fair" level of difficulty) is not.  In Telvar, if you wander into the Marsh Ruins (a level 8 module, unbeknownst to the players) when you're level 5, you will not succeed in banishing the spectre and finding the treasure.  In fact, you will probably die.  Once the players learned this, it seemed to me that their interest in the setting increased dramatically.

So, for Lendrhald, A. and I have been working from the starting point that the world itself is inviolate.  Once we're done creating it, the setting should "just sit there", for players of all dispositions (...who are willing to play it in the first place, that is) and characters of all power levels.  Therefore, any rewards systems which modify the setting are forbidden.  Character actions may not deform the world.  More to the point, given our design goals: players must not get the impression that character actions deform the world.

This was the reason for the preference I stated re: the Win-to-Lose mechanic:

Quote from: David Berg on June 16, 2006, 02:40:39 AM
The GM keeps his own score card, deciding for himself what counts as a player "victory" and tallying points accordingly.  This info is kept secret from the players.  . . . (Although "GMs, don't let your players read this section of the book!" might be a logistical issue...)

Speaking of systems that might or might not deform the world in apparent-to-players ways:

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 16, 2006, 11:04:29 AM
Even the "meta" choices aren't so bizarre when you think about the source material: How often are wandering heroes in dark stories really reluctant to let people help them, precisely because they know that horrible things will happen to anyone decent who gets entangled with them? (Not just in horror: Look at Westerns, or the Incredible Hulk, or Wolverine).

Sounds good, as long as there's a reason for it.  In your 3 examples above, the reasons are clear: violent people frequently have violent enemies, and are occasionally themselves threats to those around them.  Wolverine might gut you by accident (or cuz he lost his temper), or you might take a bullet meant for him (cuz there are always plenty aimed his way).

I can think of a few ways to encourage these dynamics to evolve in-game:
1) come up with items PCs might acquire that are useful, but dangerous to those around them
2) include in most civilized locales a gang or clan that takes offense easily, holds grudges, and seeks revenge
3) give monsters who PCs fight but don't kill the ability to find them again

Again, my first inclination is to stay away from mechanisms that tell the players, "If you do X, the world (via the GM) will change itself in order to do Y."  Like, giving the players Bad News points and having them know that "The shed Molly stumbled into wouldn't have been filled with vipers if I had one fewer Bad News point!  (Or, she wouldn't have chosen to look up, causing her to stumble... wherever the difference lies, somehow she'd still be alive.)"

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 16, 2006, 11:04:29 AM
You can say, "The pit's too big to jump!" or "It's a big, scary monster" or "you feel like you're gonna die" all you like, their imagination may not be up to it. It can actually help make the fiction more concrete if you say, "It's a big pit, you need to roll a 12 on 2d6 to jump over it, good frickin' luck" or "It's a big, scary monster, look how many more dice it has than you [clatter, clatter]" or "you feel like you're gonna die, here, let me cross out all your hit points except this last one."

Mechanisms that merely represent what's going on in-game, without changing it, are not problematic for me.  If "you're down to 1 hit point" stirs a player's imagination better than my description of his experience, then that is what it is and I have no complaints.

Interesting marginal case here:
In the game he ran, A. refused to tell players the difficulty numbers for their rolls.  Why?  The situation in which the player says, "My character thinks it's unlikely that he can jump the pit, but he's brave and foolhardy!" and then says, "12 on 2d6?  Never mind," is a sure immersion-buster.

Oh, I'm right there with you and your friend: I love building settings, I've got a history degree and am a professional journalist so I am full of fun fiddly facts and sociological patterns to play with, I love the historical appendices in the back of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and get irritable when the Silmarilion fails to explain what the economic basis of the Second Age elven kingdoms is (who's growing the food for all these frickin' heroes, anyway?).

But[/i].

You do not have fifteen years of play to build up this setting, like your friend E. with his "Telvas" world. Even if you did, you probably couldn't convey all the coolness in concentrated form to someone reading your game-book. So, as a practical matter, you and anyone else running a game in Lendrhald is going to have to do what E. probably did quite often for the first, oh, ten years of running Telvas: Make stuff up -- either on the spot, or staying one step ahead of the players by going home after each session and feverishly prepping the next one.

The traditional solution to this problem is to never, ever, ever admit to the players that the setting is being fabricated for their enjoyment. But this means your entire social interaction is based on lying -- either the players lying to themselves (when they darn well know that you just made something up) or the GM lying to the players ("Oh, no, that was in my notes all along, really") -- which is corrosive to real, open communication, which is a big deal, seeing that all the game really is, is you and your friends sitting around talking to each other about cool stuff.

There's at least one other way, however: a way to keep the setting "real," in the sense you're using of "driven by its own internal logic rather than by whim," even as you are inventing it on the spot. I think good GMs have always done this, although without necessarily being conscious of it. The trick is to shift your attention from getting the setting itself defined in every detail -- since, as a practical matter, you can't -- and instead focus on the process by which new setting is generated. In other words, we're talking about algorithms for creating consistent fiction. Then the players may well realize, "Oh, yeah, the GM just made that up right now," but they'll also think, "but of course, there would be a Dark Temple / legionary outpost / crazed hermit right here, that makes perfect sense!"

An example of how you'd set up these algorithms, and some factors to seed the system, for Star Wars:

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on August 24, 2005, 06:44:06 PM
There was a great (if long and sometimes rambling) discussion of what is the bare minimum you need to create a usable setting on the fly over at  Vincent Baker's blog, Anyway (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=73). My bottom-line lesson I took away is that what you need is (a) a few "rules" to generate new setting elements on the fly and (b) a couple of "seed crystals," specific and vivid images which suggest a whole bunch of possibilities.

For example, Star Wars:

Seed Crystals:
a) A really huge wedge-shaped spaceship is chasing a tiny little one! Zap, zap!
b) An old monk-dude and a dude in a mask with a black cape are fighting with laser swords!

Rules:
a) The Evil Galactic Empire relies on overwhelming brute force, not individual skill or courage.
b) The heroic Rebel Alliance makes up for limited resources with skill and courage.
c) A Jedi Order once used "The Force" for cool psychic powers, but using the Force out of anger led some to Evil.
d) There is a Galaxy-spanning civilization with interstellar travel, planet-busting weapons, and sentient robots -- but all of it basically feels like something out of the year 1945.

If everybody at the table agrees on these elements, you should be able to generate specifics as needed pretty fast. E.g. in Star Wars, "does the ship have a teleporter? Well, no, that doesn't feel very 1945 -- but launching lots of fighters does!" or "If the Galactic Empire are mostly such thugs, who'd be a properly scary villain? Ooh, a fallen Jedi!"

How does this work in practice? Well, the example that got me thinking was from Vincent Baker's website, www.lumpley.com, specifically http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=73:

Quote
Last summer sometime Ninja J and I spent a whole afternoon walking all the heck over Northampton. Among many other things, we talked about a beloved old game he'd GMed; particularly, we talked about how rich and alive its setting was, how detailed. His players ate it up, he said, they'd go on and on about how compelling, complete, fully realized the setting was.

Then he told me how he'd done it. He'd taken three principles - I wish I could remember them in particular, J please step in here, but they were like "nobody thinks that they themselves are evil," "the Grand Galactic Empire is procedurally conservative," and "nobody really enjoys their job" - three principles something like those, and whenever any of his players asked him about anything in the setting, he'd simply apply those principles to create the answer.

"I duck into a broom closet." "Okay. There are a bunch of reg-77f portbrushes in there, but someone hasn't bothered to replace them yet, they're all slimy and they smell." All the details you'd need to bring the setting home, give it weight and momentum, and yet J didn't precreate the contents of a single broom closet.

Now, looping back to my last post, and that "Expediency Point" example: Yes, those hypothetical players are entirely aware that their GM just made up this stuff on the spot -- that the little girl, or the faerie rhyme, or the herd of deer did not exist in the game world until they became potentially useful for the story. At the same time, the players also entirely aware that all of these things are being generated according to certain rules and a consistent logic: they're not going to end up being abducted by small aliens, they're not going to run into a happy little village where everyone is really happy and there are no dark secrets, etc. The setting feels real not because there's some written reference for every detail, but because every detail elicits a reaction of "Of course, there's one of those there!"

The bottomline reason I like players getting to know what the mechanics are, and getting to see the numbers (or lists, or Tarot cards, or whatever you're using), is that your game's rules aren't merely the physics of your imaginary world: they represent the moral cause and effect as well. If the rules say, for example, "every good deed done by the player-characters immediately generates d6 points of Evil for the GM to use to make things worse," or "every NPC the player-characters like should be put in deadly peril as soon as possible," that makes a tremendously powerful statement about how this imaginary universe works -- and it's a statement the players should see so they can begin to feel the reality, not just of the details, but of the logic underlying those details.

Hey David, I'm going to offer a couple of points on the subject of preexisting world.  They may be of use to you, or they may be examples of irreconcileable philosophical differences.  But I'll start by saying, I know exactly what you're saying.  A few years back, the words coming out of your mouth, came out of mine.  I have a library of hundreds of history books which I've used over the years largely as RPG references.  I once spent 8 hours in a library doing research so I could accurately portray what an authentic celtic village looked like.  "This world is preexisting on its own and you're just traveling through it" was my own holy grail.

Then I got over it.

Partially this was because I no longer have the time to dedicate to that level of game prep (the rise in popularity of eurogames demonstrates that thats pretty common these days).  More importantly it was because I realized I didn't need it to enjoy the game.  So here's the 2 points I want to make on the topic.

1) Imagine a man once took a family road trip across country.  It was the greatest family vacation of his life, and he still remembers it fondly.  On the way they stopped every 100 miles and he and his dad took a wiz by the side of the road.  But it would be a mistake for him to think that the only way he could ever enjoy a vacation again in his life is if he wizzes by the side of the road.  Further, despite that likely being one of the more memorable aspects of the trip that always gets brought up and laughed about...it would be a mistake to conclude that those episodes were what made the trip fun.

You may want to consider the possibility that your memories of Telvas are the same way.  It may have been the greatest campaign of your life and you still remember it fondly, but it would be a mistake to think that that's the only sort of campaign you could ever enjoy.  All of that meticulous planning and tracking may be the most memorable aspect of the campaign and the thing that evokes the most comments and admiration; but it would be a mistake to conclude that that specifically was the primary reason you found the campaign fun.

Point being that there's more than one way to skin a cat...don't assume you need your current game to skin it the same way...or even that it needs to be a cat.


2) The key to a good campaign setting is one that engages the players.  If the players are engaged, its good.  if not, not so much.  Building a deep preexisting detailed setting that is not deformed by the characters (an interesting turn of phrase, that) is one tool that can lead to engaged players.  To the extent it does, good.  But it is neither guarenteed to do so, nor is it the only way to do so.  I would argue that its not even the most reliable way of doing so.

In my experience a much more reliable means of getting players to engage with the setting is to give them an ownership interest in it.  We are most likely to be interested in things that we help create, and we are most likely to create things that we find interesting.  Consider how popular writing fan fic or doing mods for computer games is.  In fact, PC game companies today design games especially to be mod-able by the players because 1) they know that players who have a sense of ownership in the game will keep the game alive for years with very little additional expense, and 2) legions of creative players can invent more, better, and cooler stuff than any designers could on their own.

Similarly, in an RPG, players who have a sense of ownership in a campaign will tend to be much more engaged for a longer period of time, and generally the combined creative powers of the other players at the table will create more, better, and cooler stuff than any GM (or setting book author) could on their own.


You may decide you're not interested in pursuing such an approach for your current project.  But I highly recommend you don't rule it out just based on preexisting assumptions or a limited past experience (no matter how profound).  Experiment around playing some games that operate on a different paradigm and see what you think.

Ralph

Ralph-

I hear ya on the Holy Grail realism tip.  To be honest, I'm actually a story-first guy at heart... plus, I'm brainstorming a near-future fascist political satire game whose agenda will likely be pure Gamism. 

A lot of the motivation to do Lendrhald the way A. and I are doing it derives from having played with a lot of rules lawyers, physics nerds, and guys who are in many ways a pain to run for; and empathizing with them.  Every time a player tried to do something smart that didn't work, or something nonsensical that did work, we thought, "but, but that's stupid!"  Thus was born the Holy Grail ideal of a game in which that need never be said.

I've never played a game that succeeded in that, and most of the ones I've heard of that try sound lower on the flavor spectrum than A. and I like our fantasy.  So, we've concluded that having a 100% sensible game with a distinct feel to it is a worthy endeavor, regardless of how difficult being 100% sensible makes the design process.

Quote from: Valamir on June 17, 2006, 11:32:36 PM
2) The key to a good campaign setting is one that engages the players.  If the players are engaged, its good.  if not, not so much.  Building a deep preexisting detailed setting that is not deformed by the characters (an interesting turn of phrase, that) is one tool that can lead to engaged players.  To the extent it does, good.  But it is neither guarenteed to do so, nor is it the only way to do so.  I would argue that its not even the most reliable way of doing so.

I'd guess that it depends largely on the players.  "Here's a game that makes sense" has, all by itself, won over A.'s engineer buddies (although A.'s particular GMing style may also have a lot to do with that). 

But if I was playing, what would engage me would be the atmosphere (of course, I have a feel for the atmosphere already).  Finding optimal ways to convey that feel to new players and GMs is the underlying goal of all these threads I've started.

Quote from: Valamir on June 17, 2006, 11:32:36 PM
In my experience a much more reliable means of getting players to engage with the setting is to give them an ownership interest in it.

That's certainly been a huge part of my interest in many games I've played in.  However, as a story-minded player, what I've felt a need to own (or, y'know, co-own) was not any part of the setting, but some part of the arc of the campaign. 

A Rifts example:
I as a player like the thought of stealing powerful Coalition weapons. ->
When faced with a need to break into a Coalition base, my character suggests we steal weapons while there. ->
What would otherwise have been a story about rescuing an NPC becomes a story about rescuing an NPC and stealing weapons.  All the clever lies we tell and crazy encounters we have are partly my fault, giving me partial ownership of our group story of what we've done and will continue to do. ->
I care about where this story goes and whether our many efforts eventually bear fruit.

At the moment, Lendrhald is intended to encourage this type of ownership, through allowing the characters to choose their own path.  They should peruse the setting, find what interests them, and go poke it.  The setting itself should ensure that, whatever their choice, there will be something cool there (more on how to do that in my reply to Sydney).

Quote from: Valamir on June 17, 2006, 11:32:36 PM
generally the combined creative powers of the other players at the table will create more, better, and cooler stuff than any GM (or setting book author) could on their own.

More, better, and cooler stories/campaigns -- I agree.  More, better, and cooler setting material?  Hmm.  Maybe.  I'm having trouble reconciling any way to even allow that with my "100% sensible" goals, but it seems possible that they're not mutually exclusive...

Quote from: Valamir on June 17, 2006, 11:32:36 PM
Experiment around playing some games that operate on a different paradigm and see what you think.

I suspect what I think will be, "I have plenty of cool new ideas I'm dying to use -- but they don't fit with Lendrhald."  But you're right, I should definitely go find out...

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 17, 2006, 10:01:28 PM
you and anyone else running a game in Lendrhald is going to have to do what E. probably did quite often for the first, oh, ten years of running Telvas: Make stuff up

Good observation.  To date, A.'s been of the "prep feverishly" school, while I've been of the "prep just enough that nothing I make up on the spot is glaringly out of place" school.  His games run smoother, mine run more frequently.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 17, 2006, 10:01:28 PM
The traditional solution to this problem is to never, ever, ever admit to the players that the setting is being fabricated for their enjoyment. But this means your entire social interaction is based on lying

I have no problem with lies, as long as everyone in the room is in on them.  Then it's a sort of willful mass-self-deception (goes rather well with a game based on imaginary people and places, I think)... 
"Sure, that Orc would have been already-wounded even if you hadn't taken all that alcohol-poisoning damage... no question." (wink) 
"Uh-huh." (eye roll)

But I agree, actually trying to deceive your buddies is not cool.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 17, 2006, 10:01:28 PM
The trick is to shift your attention from getting the setting itself defined in every detail -- since, as a practical matter, you can't -- and instead focus on the process by which new setting is generated.

That is an excellent suggestion.

A mechanism or guide which defines or aids that process would be the perfect replacement for my "prep just enough that nothing I make up on the spot is glaringly out of place".

As for your examples, my initial impression is that most of them are analogous to stuff I already know about my setting: villagers operate in X way, monsters operate in Y way, an Ancient civilization has left ruins about, the stars grow and shrink and are dangerous when large... 

I will think more on this, though... there may be some key characteristics to the Star Wars "rules" and "seed crystals" (and especially Ninja J's "principles") that make them handy for use.  Having a fuller awareness and understanding of such characteristics would definitely be useful.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on August 24, 2005, 06:44:06 PM
the example that got me thinking was from Vincent Baker's website, www.lumpley.com, specifically http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=73

Neat.  To me, one line stood out:

". . . most RPGs' setting material . . . is the end product of a creative process. What do we roleplayers need? We need the starting point of the creative process instead."

I've given players a setting to explore, and freedom to choose creatively within that setting... but a starting point?  Not really.  This hearkens back to your suggestion earlier in this thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20113.msg210365#msg210365):

Create characters who can't stand still -- whatever they used to do, it doesn't work for them anymore.  What kinds of experiences would make normal life impossible for each likely background?

My first thought is that the job of providing a "starting point" should indeed be entrusted to Character Creation.  I shall brainstorm on answers to the above question soon.  Of course, this may not be sufficient in itself.  There's also the reward system discussion, hopefully to be resumed here upon resolution of more general issues in another thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20115.0).  I continue to like your "contradictory incentives" idea.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on August 24, 2005, 06:44:06 PM
Now, looping back to my last post, and that "Expediency Point" example: Yes, those hypothetical players are entirely aware that their GM just made up this stuff on the spot -- that the little girl, or the faerie rhyme, or the herd of deer did not exist in the game world until they became potentially useful for the story. At the same time, the players also entirely aware that all of these things are being generated according to certain rules and a consistent logic

I'm okay with the players being aware that the GM is making stuff up.  What I'm concerned about is letting them influence what he makes up, as this leads to metagame decision-making instead of in-game decision-making.  Your example illustrates this:

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on June 16, 2006, 01:31:12 PM
GM: Two Expediency buys you... lemme see. [consults rules and notes]... Okay, as you're walking along through the forest, weak from hunger, you see a clearing up ahead, and a little cottage, with a pretty little peasant girl gathering berries. She smiles at you...
SECOND PLAYER: No! Last peasant girl who gave us free food ended up with her father getting possessed by a demon and eating her eyeballs.

Second player's character would only react this way if there was an actual, in-game reason why "free food" = "eaten eyeballs".

Of course, if this player decides to react that way without a rational reason, just based on superstition, then kudos to him for good roleplaying.  His character's creeped out.  The only problem is: he can make a scene actually bad news or not by spending Expediency Points!  And knowing that fact destroys being creeped out.

Your sample interaction is well-written, and I could imagine it taking place, with a great tension between a) likely starving, b) inviting harm on a little girl, c) likely getting mugged by Leprechauns, d) likely getting lost.  That'd be fun.  The only problem is, what happens when you pick one?

Quote from: example of hypothetical mechanic
GM: You finish eating, and the adorable peasant girl smiles at you.  (Pause.)  Do you head out?
FIRST PLAYER: Let's wait here.
SECOND PLAYER: Yeah, I want to see what happens to her.
THIRD PLAYER: I check the windows.
GM: She looks very confused.  "Do you wish to stay?" she asks.
FIRST PLAYER: "No, we have to be on our way."  How long should we wait around?
SECOND PLAYER: Maybe the inevitable won't happen 'til we're out of sight.
FIRST PLAYER: Shit.  I don't want to leave her.
THIRD PLAYER: Well, think about it, in-game our characters have no reason to think she's in danger...
FIRST PLAYER: We might have a bad feeling after previous experiences...
THIRD PLAYER: *skeptical look*
FIRST PLAYER: Okay, fine.
GM: You exit the little house and return to the trail.  You walk a ways, everything is still.  Then, just as you're rounding a bend, you hear-
SECOND PLAYER: A scream.  *sigh*

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg on August 24, 2005, 06:44:06 PM
The bottomline reason I like players getting to know what the mechanics are, and getting to see the numbers (or lists, or Tarot cards, or whatever you're using), is that your game's rules aren't merely the physics of your imaginary world: they represent the moral cause and effect as well . . . it's a statement the players should see so they can begin to feel the reality, not just of the details, but of the logic underlying those details.

"This imaginary universe, insofar as Men can measure it, works solely according to physics -- except as it applies to PCs, in which case it also works according to a perverse system of karma!"  That's the kind of statement I know I don't want to make.  Rendering perverse karma universal is unacceptable for a different reason -- human society would wind up really weird.

If I institute a "moral cause and effect" in an effort to drive home a creepy feel, and the unknown is better than the known at being creepy, then making the "moral cause and effect" known to the players will make it less creepy, defeating the reason for its existence.  More concretely, see my hypothetical play example.

Am I trying too hard to accommodate asshole players who aren't willing to help out the GM by suspending some disbelief?  Sometimes it seems that way... still, I think it's way more fun to actually be creeped out than to pretend...

Dave, do you, personally, live in a universe that is "100% sensible" and "operates solely according to physics"? Because I sure don't. Ever heard of the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska -- the hundred-million-dollar product of the extraordinary power of Alaska's Senator Stevens on the Appropriations Committee, connecting a tiny island with almost no population to the mainland? How about the Roman Empire's refusal to work out any kind of succession system, even after repeated civil wars over who'd get to be Emperor? The expenditure of massive resources by societies throughout history on building functionally non-productive structures like temples, up to the point of self-imposed ecological collapse on Easter Island after building so many giant heads out of stone? Physics doesn't explain these things: Psychology and politics do, and they're way more complex and paradoxical... although even physics isn't "100% sensible": Light is a particle and a wave; if you learn the position of an electron, you can't know its velocity; time slows down the faster you go; etc.

Let me reemphasize something crucial:

Your job, as the game designer, is not simply to write rules that replicate physical phenomena in a plausible way. What's more important is the moral cause and effect. The ancient Greeks believed in hubris: It's admirable to strive for success, but the most successful inevitably overstep themselves and bring about their own destruction. Medieval Christians and Muslims believed that those who submitted to the will of God would be blessed with success, and those who were cursed with failure must have earned it by evil deeds or thoughts. 19th century Englishmen believed that the most virtuous would succeed by dint of their superior rationality and self-discipline, and that the lower orders of society were condemned to their state by their own sloth and brutishness. Modern Americans tend to be believe that everyone should be happy and successful, and if you're not, you need to figure out who's to blame (government? liberals? big business?), because it can't possibly be you, and it certainly can't be just some random damage from an unfeeling universe.

Your players absolutely believe in some kind of moral cause-and-effect, even if they don't consciously realize it; you do too; I know I do (even though I realize my ideas are often irrational -- I've had about five years of therapy....). So if your written rules stick purely to physics, then it'll be up to the GM to enforce all the higher-order cause-and-effect. But you can write rules that create a universe like that human beings believe they live in (and, heck, maybe we really do), where actions have moral consequences.

So maybe everybody knows in Lendrhald that "only the good die young," or that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," or that "if anything good happens, it won't last," or "if someone helps you out of the goodness of their heart, you can bet they're too nice to last long." These aren't "superstitition": these are cultural attitudes based on observation of how their world really works.

I like having moral cause and effect exist within the world (for all the reasons you so eloquently stated), but not as transparent game mechanics.  It's something that's very complex, like psychology.  I think attempting to simplify in this case produces results that will feel contrived to the players.  That was basically the point of my example about leaving the little girl's house.

A world in which everyone thinks "if anything good happens, it won't last" is very different from one in which this theory is actually provable by simple experiment and observation.

In the Middle Ages, a lot of people spent part of the time acting like they were afraid of going to Hell (going to Church, giving the Church as much money as they could) and the rest of the time acting like it was life on earth that mattered ("This is my chair, if you take it I'll kill you!")  If Hell had been provable ("Danny just died, let's see whether he floats upward in a column of white light or is swallowed by a fiery pit!"), society would have turned into something unrecognizable from the context of actual history (everyone paralyzed by fear of doing something Evil, hoping to die before being subjected to any more temptations).

To me, it seems like a tall order to ask players to:
a) separate out-of-game knowledge ("the world definitely works this way") from in-game knowledge ("the world appears to possibly work this way"), and
b) refuse to perform in-game investigations that would expand their in-game knowledge ("let's keep track of good things vs. bad things, to be better prepared for the next bad thing"), and
c) collaborate with the GM's attempt to make things creepy ("uh oh, what's gonna happen?!") instead of getting bored because the creepiness-attempts feel contrived ("we leave the house; when do we hear her scream?")

Actually, now I have an idea: if there's a significant random element to the "if anything good happens, it won't last" mechanism that keeps it from being testable, we may avoid trouble:

- Instead of the GM assigning a "5 points of Bad" event as soon as the players spend 5 points of Expediency, maybe the GM could make 5 rolls on the Metaphysical Fallout table, which is filled with highly variable results. 

- Or, there could be a "5 points of Bad" event lurking out there for the players, but die rolls at regular intervals would determine when it strikes (I'd want these roll results to be secret, though).

Spending Expediency Points would still be correlated with some form of eventual badness, but characters would have plenty of sensible ways to respond to this (rationalization, denial, paranoia) given its hazy nature.  Kind of like Hell in the Middle Ages!  (I hope.  Haven't thought this through yet...)

So this would be a reward system in which the existence of the system is transparent ("The GM's rolling on the Fallout table!"), but the moment-to-moment workings of it are not  ("What'd he roll?  Damn he has a good poker face...").  The incentives on player behavior would be less, but the tone of the game would still be conveyed.

I see what you're getting at, but I just don't spend much time worrying about "in-character" vs. "out-of-character" knowledge anymore: the players are both the authors and the audience of the story, and I've always found people pretty capable of distinguishing those two roles where they need to be distinguished. I've heard it argued that the best way to ensure a character doesn't discover a secret is to tell the player that there's a secret and that their character shouldn't know it yet: Players are marvellously inventive at torturing their own alter egos.

Likewise, I don't worry much about surprising the players: it's fun, but it's the cherry on top, not the ice cream. Anyway, how many horror stories really rely on surprising the audience? Yeah, sure, the monster may go "boo!" at an unexpected moment, but everyone in the audience knows something bad's gonna happen, even while the characters blunder along obviously. In fact, that's the real source of tension most of the time: "No! Don't go in there!"

So, as far as your three concerns:

Quote from: David Berg on June 19, 2006, 01:33:22 PM
To me, it seems like a tall order to ask players to:
a) separate out-of-game knowledge ("the world definitely works this way") from in-game knowledge ("the world appears to possibly work this way"), and
b) refuse to perform in-game investigations that would expand their in-game knowledge ("let's keep track of good things vs. bad things, to be better prepared for the next bad thing"), and
c) collaborate with the GM's attempt to make things creepy ("uh oh, what's gonna happen?!") instead of getting bored because the creepiness-attempts feel contrived ("we leave the house; when do we hear her scream?")

(a) Most players I've dealt with are very good at this. Just in the last session of my The Shadow of Yesterday campaign, one of them gleefully figured out a plausible reason to rush, headlong, alone, and unprepared, into the most dangerous area of the map -- and of course the other PCs all immediately set off to help -- without asking 20 armed and armored NPC knights to come along!
(b) Why shouldn't they keep track of this stuff? They're the authors of the story, right? You wouldn't ask a TV writing crew to do a script without ever knowing how many minutes of screen time they had left before the credits had to roll; you shouldn't ask your players to come up with cool stuff without knowing the kind of universe their characters are in.
(c) I, as a player, would be much more tense if I knew the girl was going to scream than if I wasn't sure whether she was in danger, or maybe a monster would try to eat me instead. And it would allow me to focus my creative energy on developing a relationship between my character and the girl's character so we really cared when she started screaming.

Sydney-

I'm enjoying this discussion, and have plenty more to say on the topics you addressed.  I think we're getting too general for this thread, though.  I'll PM you with some thoughts, and maybe we can port some version of this into an Actual Play thread.

-Dave

I think it's best if this thread return to some of the specific brainstorms-in-progress, re:
- processes and elements for generating new content ("rules", "seed crystals", "principles" etc. and what makes them work), including story events the GM can use to encourage (or force) encounters with the creepy bits in the setting
- character creation elements that encourage encounters with the creepy bits in the setting
- not-testable-in-game mechanics for conveying themes (very complex? heavily randomized?)
- other ways to use system to convey the feel I'm going for, given the constraints I'm currently imposing (cannot make it sensible or advantageous for characters to think or act in ways that are too bizarre for players to empathize with)

Lendrhald's primary creative agenda is Simulationist, for anyone that helps.

I popped in here from a different thread. I was talking about trying to get player contributions in setting development, and I'd still like to argue for it.

To give a little perspective, I also have some strong Simulationist tendencies. I was 'alpha Storyguide' of an Ars Magica saga that ran for a long period, and as I saw it, my role there basically had two pieces: rules maven, and world consistency tyrant. Under my enlightened rule <ahem>, we had 7 years with 6 or 7 different GMs running stories at different times, with only a couple hiccups that had to be retconned out. So I very much sympathize with the concern that, if one lets players add freely to the setting, it will wreak havoc with a carefully constructed world consistency. (N.B., I suspect many here won't share that concern. That idea is noted, but for purposes of this post, at least, I'm going to treat it as valid.)

Turning to Lendrhald, my impression is one that much of the inviting bits of creepiness about the setting is that, frankly, the PCs are in the middle of a largely unknown world, and that there will be chunks of that world that may never get understood by the characters, or quite likely the players. I'm not going to go into detail again (see my post in the other thread), but I strongly believe that if you try to decide these facts and hide them from the players, you're doomed to failure. So I think you would be well-served by mechanics that let players/GMs add truly unknown mysteries to the world -- mysteries that, at time of creation, really are not understood by anyone. And yet at the same time we want the game to reflect a Simulationist's core value of world consistency.

So, let us attempt to reward the behavior that we want to see in players. We want to see them adding strange things to the world, things which are creepy and unexplained; yet we want these things tied into existing facts. We want the things that are added to usually play into the characters' story. I think this is not at all impossible. Far from a final system, but let me attempt to do so:

Create some form of metagame currency, let me call it Coins. Whenever a player wants to add something to the world, there is a base price to do so: 5 Coins. That's a lot, so players shouldn't just add things very often; usually they will try to take advantage of the discount. For every previously established aspect of the world that this addition ties into, there is a reduction in cost by 1 Coin; this discount can be taken back by tying the mystery to other things after it is established. So let me take my example of an underground bunker in the desert, created as a convenience to escape flying abominations. That costs 5 Coins, and the player can't afford it; so he adds that the door is marked with a glyph that the players saw in the ruined city on the other side of the continent (1), and that inside the bunker they find the reeking bodies of 4 Orcs (2). The player pays 3 Coins, and a sheet is drawn up for the mystery of the bunker. If the players never come back to it, the 3 Coins are lost and the mystery endures. But, instead, 2 sessions later the GM has the players find a rotting map with the location of the bunker clearly marked. Now the GM takes a Coin and is entitled to spend it ... on something I haven't figured out yet -- I don't want to use it in the Buffy style of 'make life hell points' because of the Simulationism, though maybe something similar can be worked out. I also have to think about how players acquire Coins (aside from linking to existing things); maybe they get paid whenever the GM uses something paid-off that they created. Hmm.

Now I see a lot of flaws in this, so as I say, not a final system (I made it up in the last 20 minutes), but maybe it can point a way towards how you might try to tie together metagame systems with a Simulationist philosophy.

It would be valuable to me too to see if Davids question can be answered, rather than if he can be persuaded to a different style of play.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 19, 2006, 10:34:38 PM
much of the inviting bits of creepiness about the setting is that, frankly, the PCs are in the middle of a largely unknown world

Definitely, and I heartily encourage further thought on how to best accomplish this in a way that is meaningful to the players.  (We started on this in the setting thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20099.msg210501#msg210501) but didn't get too far.)

Rather than responding to the rest of George's post piecemeal, let me reiterate some of my positions that he and others may have missed:
- I am definitely open to some form of allowing GMs to generate new setting content.
- I want to exercise pretty rigorous standards of consistency with world plot, physics, logic and culture for any new setting generated.
- Metagame incentives that naturally tend to influence how the characters think and act give me the willies.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 19, 2006, 10:34:38 PM
Now I see a lot of flaws in this, so as I say, not a final system (I made it up in the last 20 minutes), but maybe it can point a way towards how you might try to tie together metagame systems with a Simulationist philosophy.

It really is a cool idea, but rather than upholding my Simulationist goals (e.g. "the world makes sense"), your example seems to uphold Narrativist goals (e.g. "the world elements have good story potential").  Coming up with something because it's convenient or cool and then trying to shoehorn it into interrelatedness with developed world elements is the easiest way to break a consistent world.  ("Uh, so, wait, if the only food that Orcs can eat for more than a week grows only in humid climates, why did they have a dwelling in a desert spot nine days travel away from the nearest jungle?")

If you want to concoct another example, great, but first try to really understand where I'm coming from (read the entirety of this thread and this other thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20115.0)) and address the specific concerns I've voiced.  I apologize for handing out a reading list, but I think the subject is sufficiently complicated to warrant it.  Providing quick summaries has just left me answering the same questions over and over again.

Quote from: David Berg on June 20, 2006, 04:29:54 PM
- I am definitely open to some form of allowing GMs to generate new setting content.
- I want to exercise pretty rigorous standards of consistency with world plot, physics, logic and culture for any new setting generated.
- Metagame incentives that naturally tend to influence how the characters think and act give me the willies.

Yup, I can (and did) understand all those things. My goal right now is to try to convince you that not all metagame systems need necessarily influence how characters think and act. Most of the ones you will find here at the Forge were enacted with Narrativist or Gamist sensibilities, so you will have some work to do to try to construct such a system; but I think it should be possible, except maybe for the most diehard of immersionist players. Furthermore, I'd like to argue that such a system is likely to, in actual practice, lead to *more* creepy unknown rather than less.

Quote from: David Berg on June 20, 2006, 04:29:54 PM
It really is a cool idea, but rather than upholding my Simulationist goals (e.g. "the world makes sense"), your example seems to uphold Narrativist goals (e.g. "the world elements have good story potential").  Coming up with something because it's convenient or cool and then trying to shoehorn it into interrelatedness with developed world elements is the easiest way to break a consistent world.  ("Uh, so, wait, if the only food that Orcs can eat for more than a week grows only in humid climates, why did they have a dwelling in a desert spot nine days travel away from the nearest jungle?")

Perhaps it can be treated as a mystery -- after all, there's lots of unknown in this world (that's part of the point, right?), so there may well be a good reason, simply one still unknown. But I do see your argument -- as I said, the system is flawed. So change the system a little bit. Give discounts only for each already established setting element which would tend to support this being here, instead. Add surcharges for any that tend to argue against it. That changes the dynamic a little bit. You might need some control of the rate of things being added (because 'too many weird things' breaks things too) -- say, the more things that get added in a session, the more expensive they get --  plus some way to balance out 'lucky advantageous events' with 'unlucky disadvantageous events'. As it's stated, too, this one would tend to create fewer true mysteries, too, since new elements will tend to be well-connected; figuring out how to get the right tension between consistency and mystery is probably the heart of the problem here. But I don't think that these are insurmountable issues, though I'm not going to be able to work them out on a message board.

I think you hear "players can add to the world" and immediately think "Oh my God, what if the player doesn't Get It?" Well, true, if all the players (including the GM) aren't on at least approximately the same page, you're going to have problems no matter what the game is. (A player playing Dogs in the Vineyard out to 'win all my conflicts' who cares not at all about the judgements he is passing will screw that up that game for the whole table.) But, a player cognizant of the setting's tone and having read the (now rather less detailed) setting information is perfectly capable of adding good, consistent stuff to the setting -- always granting that it is not necessarily the *same* good stuff that the GM, or you the game author, might have added. Add a system which rewards and encourages the kinds of contributions lining up with your Simulationist ideals, because it will be a way for you and the players at the game table to help a player who doesn't Get It to Get It, and you've got a lot of potential (and a game I would definitely be interested in playing, either as a player OR a GM.)

Now, maybe you will eventually conclude that you don't want this kind of thing in your game. What I am seeing, though, is that there are a lot of people here thinking along these lines, and you are dismissing the idea almost out of hand. That's why I have responded to you.

In any case, I think I'm done. If you still are convinced you don't want these kinds of metagame mechanics in your game, I will bow out and let you continue, and maybe go write my own game inspired by the thoughts Lendrhald has provoked in me.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
My goal right now is to try to convince you that not all metagame systems need necessarily influence how characters think and act.

Quote from: David Berg on June 20, 2006, 04:29:54 PM
I don't think that these are insurmountable issues, though I'm not going to be able to work them out on a message board.

I am open to being convinced (that's the point of this thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20115.0)), but convincing me will require trouble-shooting on a message board.  The concerns I've voice are neither simple nor confined in their scope.  Any suggestion that doesn't address implications and fallout down to fine details of implementation leaves me pretty much where I'm at now.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
. . . you will have some work to do to try to construct such a system; but I think it should be possible, except maybe for the most diehard of immersionist players.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
Add a system which rewards and encourages the kinds of contributions lining up with your Simulationist ideals, because it will be a way for you and the players at the game table to help a player who doesn't Get It to Get It, and you've got a lot of potential (and a game I would definitely be interested in playing, either as a player OR a GM.)

Suggestions noted.  At the moment, I don't think it would be possible to implement them without compromising my goals.  Why do I think that?  Reading the threads should answer that, but I'll state it (in simplified form) again: Some players will prefer a setting that feels like it exists in its own right to one that transparently responds to their desires.  Lendrhald is a game designed partly to satisfy such players.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
I think you hear "players can add to the world" and immediately think "Oh my God, what if the player doesn't Get It?" . . . a player cognizant of the setting's tone . . . is perfectly capable of adding good, consistent stuff to the setting -- always granting that it is not necessarily the *same* good stuff that the GM, or you the game author, might have added.

Speculating unfavorably on my motives is not appreciated.  The effort to provide a substantial and non-contrived world is the source of my concern, not some hoarding of creative control.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
Furthermore, I'd like to argue that such a system is likely to, in actual practice, lead to *more* creepy unknown rather than less.

More volume?  Sure.  I think I've already illustrated why I think "creepiness" will suffer, though.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
What I am seeing, though, is that there are a lot of people here thinking along these lines, and you are dismissing the idea almost out of hand. That's why I have responded to you.

"See reasoning I've already stated" isn't "dismissing the idea almost out of hand", it's being disinclined to take the time to repeat myself for people who didn't bother to process my specific arguments, understand how they relate to this issue, and respond to address that.

Quote from: Threlicus on June 20, 2006, 09:26:04 PM
maybe go write my own game inspired by the thoughts Lendrhald has provoked in me.

Go for it.  I'm sure you can interface a player-created-setting mechanism with some version of creepy realism... I'm just guessing that it'll be very different than Lendrhald's version.

-Dave