[Tell Me] Interactivity Spectrum

[TheTris]

"Tell me" is my new roleplaying game, designed for two purposes.  Firstly, to explore this idea, secondly to reveal what sort of play people want in a given group.

In "Tell me" there is one stat that is always important.  That Stat is called "Movie-ness".  Each character has a seperate score here.

There are also several skills that are important, but not always in the same way.  These are called "Shoot Laser Pistol" "Answer Riddle" "Ride Mammoth" "Cook" and many many other things, depending on what your character can do.

Both Movie-ness ranges from 0 to 5, skill from 0 to 10.

Each player creates a character with the help of the other players.  The character should have no defined fate or destiny at this point.  The players and GM agree on a setting to tell their story in.

Movie-ness starts at a number of the players choice.  For each movie-ness, one destiny is stated for the character.  These are written down.  It is suggested that skills start at 5, or less if characters are not very good at those skills.

Play proceeds.

Skills are rolled on a D10, with a roll lower than or equal to skill being a pass.  This is largely irrelevant to the story.

The GM is free to let the story unfold as he will, railroading the players to fit them into his exciting and intricate plot, with the following exceptions:

Characters with movieness may not be killed, except if there are no characters with a lower (or no) movieness left.  characters with 5 movieness are unkillable.  High movieness characters also tend to be involved in more grandiose plots and scenes.

A number of times equal to 5-Movieness each session, a player may state that a given roll is important, and stake some significant plot change against a penalty for failure suggested by the GM.

A player may adjust movieness by 1 in either direction, at the start of each session.

Example of play:

Bob has Movieness 4.  Dave has Movieness 1.  the plot has them escaping from an evil empire of intelligent dinosaurs.  they are trying to rescue the princess, but currently have no idea where she is

GM - "The dinosaurs are catching you as you approach the gaping canyon - it's a hard leap if you want to jump it"
Bob "Okay...I fail"
Dave "Okay...I pass"
GM "Dave, you manage to leap to the other side, and hear a scrabbling behind you, as Bob slips and begins to fall.  Luckily the autopilot on your starship has started working again, and it swoops past you into the cavern, Bob, you are scooped up by the bay door, and saved from a terrible death"
Dave "Can I catch the ship's rail as it flies past and climb in"
GM "Sure, but as you turn to see it, the saurons are stopped on the other side of the canyon, holding a figure you recognise way over their heads - it's the princess, and as you look on in horror she is thrown into the abyss"
Dave "NO WAY!  Man, That princess is too cool to die.  I'm staking on this roll - I want to use climbing to dive into the canyon, catch the princess, and cling to the wall until the autopilot picks us up"
GM "The penalty is a long fall to your death, Dave"
Dave "I'm game..."

GM tips:  A player who sets Movie-ness to 0 is saying "I want bass playing".  A player who sets Movie-ness to 5 is saying "I want participationism".  If everyone sets Movieness to the same number, that's great.  If they end up all over the place, good luck :-D

What I'm getting at:

Having seen the description of participationism (little girl providing name for grandad's story, which doesn't really change the story) I realised that I think there is a scale going on.  If I watch the latest film of my chosen genre, I could almost be in an extreme outlier of roleplaying games, where I have no influence on plot at all - just enjoy the ride.  A bit down from that and I get to chose names for my character, and then skills, and these things start being more important, and I can influence plot, and then I start being a major contributor to the plot, and then the GM is just bass playing, and the plot all comes from players.  Then I guess the players walk off and write their own novels or something, and they have total control.

To what extent is this valid?  Is there a scale of control that can start with something pretty much like a movie (or a bedtime story, perhaps) and end with a writers desk (or probably a daydream, more accurately)?  Is this interesting to anyone else?

Is a roleplaying game with an explicit lever that sets how much control you have/cede useful?

what would you set Movieness at?

[Bret Gillan]

Hi TheTris!

If I understand correctly, your game more or less works as what we think of as a "standard" roleplaying game with skills determining character success at resolving tasks, but with the added Trait "Movie-ness" which determines:

1) Whether the character can die.
2) How many times per session the player can directly meddle in the plot.

First, some minor comments:

+ You mention Fate and Destiny, but in your description they don't really affect the game at all. Did you have something in mind for this or are you still working it out?

+ Your suggestion for starting skills at 5 gives characters a 50% chance of succeeding at things they're skilled at. This seems a bit low to me.

Now a bigger comment:

Your game sounds like an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure how successful it is at its stated goal, and for the moment we're ignoring whether this would be a "fun" RPG, we're talking about whether it effectively sets the participationism dial.

Frankly, if you're looking at the dial, being unkillable and being able to affect the plot 5 times a session (with the GM being able to declare whatever cost he feels like, even) is waaay on the low end of the scale.

The way I see it, on the low end of the scale is your stereotypical railroaded, task-based resolution system where the players are just observers to the plot. Honestly, your Movie-ness 0 set up sounds about right for this.

However, 5 Movie-ness doesn't seem like that much participationism, especially when you compare it to games like, say, Capes, where players are constantly negotiating to affect the plot, bringing in new characters, and establishing the setting.

Perhaps instead of making Movie-ness a numerical value, it could be a number of traits that determine what the player has Narrative control over? Like I have the power to bring in new NPCs, but I can't affect the setting, but you have traits that allow you to affect the Setting and Narrate Scene Resolution?

Ooh! And what if a part of the game involved players competing for that Narrative control? That's getting off-track, though.

All that said, I'm not yet seeing much "game" to your game. It's an interesting experiment, but it'll need more to grow from experiment into game.

[MatrixGamer]

Tris

Participation gets at power to control the game. Some players like to just watch and be entertained - I think a lot of Forge players want more control.

"Tell Me" by allowing the game master total control over how to unfold the story puts the players more at the spectator side of the scale. The "Movieness" stat moderates what the GM can do to characters but if they only get 0-5 times to intervene with the GM during play they don't have a lot of power over the game. Say for instance I've just dove after the Princess. I make my roll so she is safe. I fail my roll and we both die. Who has the power to describe how this happens? It sounds like that goes to the GM.

From what I gather of narrativist games that use dice pools, the power to narrate outcomes shifts back and forth between players and GM. The power there is pretty equal.

In Engle Matrix Games players always say what happens next. The GM/referee only decides how like an argument is to happen so the GM can effectively veto a narration but not make their own in place of what the player says. Power has now shifted to the players.

For my tastes games that give big power to players need to give them a game world to play in as well. If I have to make up the world, make up the story, and make up everyting that happens in the game, then I'm having to work way too much as a player! I want the GM or game designer to do more.

I suspect that when you run "Tell Me" with players that the Movieness stat is not going to be as useful as you think. It does tell the GM the reality level the players want but it doesn't do anything to help players work together. In play its only effect is to declare points "important".

Do an actual play experiment and write it up so we see how the game plays.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

[TheTris]

Bret - Yep, sorry about that - it's a forum rules thing - I have no actual play, so I made a game to explore this idea.  It's intended to be a very basic game, to throw the idea to the front.

I think one of us is mis-understanding partipationism.  My understanding from reading the Forge was that it refers to a game where players have little influence on what happens plot wise, but instead add details and colour.  You seem to suggest it refers to a game where players participate in adding meaningful elements to the story.  I believe that's opposite to the intended meaning.  There is a good glossary on this site, if you want to check.

About the game:

Firstly let me correct you on Movieness - Movieness 0 gives you 5 "plot changes" a session, but you can die, and have less cool things happen by default - you trade story telling power for cool stuff happening to you, or vice versa.  This means Movieness 5 guarentees you to be alive at the end with a big destiny to fulfil, but no choice as to how you get there.

So Fate and Destiny is just a way of stating "This character is out of your control, really, but cool things will happen".

I think you are right that Movieness 0 (you say 5, but I think you missed the "you can change things 5 minus Movieness" bit) doesn't have enough influence on the plot to be even close to satisfactory.  I missed that.  Perhaps it goes from 0 to 20, and you get one fate/destiny for each 5 points???  And I REALLY like the idea of sacrificing Movieness giving you more control over different aspects.  This seems a bit like the Impossible thing before lunch - can a player have meaningful plot control via NPCs, and another have meaningful plot control via scene resolution, seperately from each other?  But I really like the idea.  There has to be a way to get it to work...I'll think about this...

Anyway, this would mean players choose where on the scale of (in a film sense, rather than a forge sense) "Actor-----Director" they want to sit.  The original intention was for them to chose where on a scale of "Awesome stuff happens-----My character has some real influence" they want to be.

Matrixgamer -

Again, I've reread Participationism, and I'm convinced it's talking about players having no power to influence the story in a meaningful way.  Again you hit the same point that I missed - that 5 times may be too few for players to have real influence.  Finally, I don't think this game would work well in actual play.  It's a framework for presenting an idea - that the game scales from being like having a story read to you, to daydreaming your own story, with pretty much every game ever being somewhere in between.

I think what you say about power in Narrative games being pretty equal is interesting - that is my experience too, but I'm not aware of why.

[Bret Gillan]

Tris,

I understand your intention in posting this idea here and wasn't criticizing it, just saying if you want to make this into a full-blown game, I think it has a way to go.

Participationism, as I understand it, is a type of game in which players have no ability to make thematically important decisions for their characters and are aware of this fact - in your game this would be represented by Movieness 5. All they can do is make rolls against their skills to succeed in actions. So I don't think it can be correctly used to describe a spectrum, instead it describes on end of that spectrum - the other end being a game in which plays can make thematically important decisions about the game. Can someone with a good theory vocab correct me if I'm wrong?

I think I understand Fate and Destiny now, but it seems a little weak - it's just a signpost saying, "Hey GM, make the game about this," and then you hope that he does. Perhaps the players could have a better chance of succeeding at rolls (an automic success maybe?) or narrative control over the game when their Fate or Destiny comes into play?

Your scale of "Awesome stuff happens-----My character has some real influence" is confusing to me - these two can't happen simultaneously?

[TheTris]

Welcome to "Bret spots all the incoherant gaps in my post" :D  I agree with pretty much everything you say.

Okay, we agree on participationism, it was you saying "However, 5 Movie-ness doesn't seem like that much participationism, especially when you compare it to games like, say, Capes, where players are constantly negotiating to affect the plot, bringing in new characters, and establishing the setting." that confused me.  It seemed to suggest that Capes was more participationism, whereas it seems to me that the player influence means it is much less so.

This has no chance of being made into a full blown game by me, way too many other ideas on the go at the moment :-)

It's a weak shell of a game, designed to showcase one idea - a scale of participation, which (confusingly) has total participationism at 0, and more and more influence the more you turn the "Movieness" dial towards zero.

The one conceptual idea this is supposed to showcase (and it looks like I fell over big time) is that if you keep turning that figurative dial, you get to participationism where the little girl says "and the princess is called Zoe, right?" and then keep turning, don't you get to a story?

I think I was leading to something like "Are novels roleplaying games with no participation at all?" and more interestingly "What is the other end of this scale?"

I apologise for distracting people with a badly written spur-of-the-moment game :-(

[Bret Gillan]

Okay, we agree on participationism, it was you saying "However, 5 Movie-ness doesn't seem like that much participationism, especially when you compare it to games like, say, Capes, where players are constantly negotiating to affect the plot, bringing in new characters, and establishing the setting." that confused me.  It seemed to suggest that Capes was more participationism, whereas it seems to me that the player influence means it is much less so.

Sorry, that was misinterpretation of the "Movie-ness" scale, which I think I understand now. The higher it is, the more like you're watching a movie and the less like you're playing a roleplaying game.

This has no chance of being made into a full blown game by me, way too many other ideas on the go at the moment :-)

Anyhow, before someone else says it, this forum is for the design of roleplaying games with the intention of eventually publishing them. If you don't plan on actually seeing this game through to the end, then someone is probably going to get snarky with you for posting about it.

[Arpie]

That's a great argument Tris. And a fascinating example. It brings up something I've been struggling with as well.

The concept of the trade-off seems workable, but I'm always leery of that kind of thing after having been bitten in the ars by white wolf-type trade power-for-security systems over and over again.

But it's a pretty simple concept and I think it's worth considering as a way to give players a chance to kind of forewarn the GM how much they're going to want to contribute.

I think, however, a lot of the people that would WANT high movieness would also dislike the idea they couldn't die. They would probably want to feel clever enough to avoid dying and take the risk.

How about a change from the risk of imminent mortality  to the risk of being incorrect? What if having a 5 moviness meant that you were never wrong, morally speaking. Your decisions, while quite possibly reprehensible or stupid would always turn out to be the Right Thing To Do. The GM would, in fact, be bound by the contract of the game to make sure that, no matter what, the consequences of your actions (and the way key NPCs reacted) would reflect that the high moviness guy is Always Right.

Then you can tack on the old movie rule that, someway, somehow, the bad people must die by the end of the movie*.

*Unless they help the good guy - the guy with the highest movieness 0 at the last minute.

Color suggestions: movieness might also be called "It" or "Star Quality"
and making characters might be called "The Treatment"

PPS. I do very much like the idea of starting with very little and bleeding yourself into the game.
I'm not going to be able to post much more on this thread for the next week, but I look forward to seeing where it's gone when I get back from making Christmas Cookies this weekend.