Watershed Games for Me.

[AdAstraGames]

My first RPG was D&D, in the early 80s.  A bunch of us in junior high started playing it, had fun, then most of us noticed girls and it died out.

The second game was Champions, which occupied me from '85 to 1989.  Champions is probably where I delved deepest into my Power Gamer mode, because it was the first system I'd encountered that tried to let the player model *everything*.  I stumbled across notebooks from high school recently that have countless Champions characters done up in them. 

I think I spent far more time designing characters that never hit the gaming table than I ever did gaming with them.

In college, I got introduced to GURPS with Orcslayer, and it happend to exactly fit what I and my local gamer group wanted to do - medium to low power "gritty" fantasy, where religions were real, combat was deadly and the paradigm made "sense". 

Also in college, I got introduced to actual tactical wargaming as a hobby, and my interests bifurcated - you mean I could get the thrill of flexing my bulging brains in a tactical challenge without having to worry about pissing someone off because I was stealing their scene time, or not engaged while they nattered on, and on, and on about this political mess that we weren't going to resolve because the GM wouldn't let us kill the right people? :)

After college, most of my gaming was tactical gaming and boardgames, with sporadic stints of RPGs, mostly RuneQuest, often times RQ ported to Hero, and Champions...where I found that if I indulged my tactical wargamery bent, I'd get people cheesed off at me.  (Meanwhile, I was getting grumpy at the people who couldn't look at head two phases and figure out a short list of what they wanted to do, and who couldn't be bothered to keep track of where they were in the sequencing.)

My other great stint of gaming was playing on AmberMUSH using the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, where I first got my introduction to scene framing, and Karma as a resolution mechanic, coupled with the concept of consent-based consequences, including the problem of people who wanted to "win" rather than tell stories.

However, my great epiphany in gaming was playing Feng Shui in '98 or '99. I could play an archetypal character, and customise - no more going through laundry lists of abilities, trying to decide what ones I'd actually USE in game.  And the GM did something I considered remarkable.

"OK, everyone knows what the target number on the opponent is, so, roll the dice, and if you succeed, tell me the cool thing you did to hit that mook."

And right then and there, I saw that there was something I'd enjoy in an RPG combat session at least as much as I'd enjoy "modifier hunting" and tactical options.

After that, my patience with the next two Champions campaigns waned dramatically, as combat dragged on forever - and realized that what most everyone in my gaming group wanted was the descriptive structure of all the cool powers in Champions, without the dice herding, the phased movement engine, and trying to min-max the maneuvers table.

"Roll the dice, and if you hit, describe something cool."

It just cut right to the drama.

After that, my character bios for the Champions games got longer.  I gave diagrams to my GM explaining my interrelationships with my DNPCs, and other NPCs in the campaign.  I'd try and incorporate hooks to work with the GM, most of which, frankly, got ignored.

I got to see the GM's penchant for "pull the random lever" style investigations grind the group to mulch.  I tried explaining my intentions at the top of each scene my character was involved in, in the hopes that the GM would reciprocate - and discovered that, since I hadn't explained WHY I was doing this, the GM's natural response was to make things more obstructionist, to keep it challenging.

Eventually, I gave up doing RPGs entirely for a time, because my play on AmberMUSH had stalled out, and my own company was sucking those creative energies away from play.

And all that while, I had that memory of how it could go very very right:

"Roll the dice, and if you succeed, describe something cool." 

My next watershed moment was reading about TRoS, and another element clicked into place:  You should get bonuses for doing things your character believes strongly in.

Now, there were parts of TRoS I didn't like - the massive chart lookups, for one, the five different methods of resolving skill rolls were way too much to keep track of.  And for a game that purports to be as highly tactical as it does, ultimately its decision tree is a blind bluff dice pool. 

However, in watching other people play TRoS, I discovered something - a large number of people were doing this:

"Roll the dice, and use the outcome to describe something cool".

and ignoring the "I hit you in the XI, for three over."  "OK, was that a heavy bladed weapon, or a light bladed one?"  "Light..."  "OK, the armor is this...which means I roll here and here to find out what injury is there."

In its attempt to be simulationist, TRoS had become cumbersome, and its player base had basically split into those who wanted to go through all the grit for the results, and those who went

"Roll the dice, and use the outcome to describe something cool."

I'm not sure how this fits into the Big Model, aside from diagramming how my RPG tastes have changed over the years...and to be honest, reading the Forge makes my eyes cross with the use of Capitalized Jargon of Hidden Meaning.  Even worse is when everything is acronymed...

(For what it's worth, one of the things I admire about Fate is that it manages to do a lot of Forge-related "theory", and then got rewritten to use plain, simple, declarative English.)

[Callan S.]

Hiya, welcome to the forge!

I'll be a bit of a devils advocate - have you played enough "Roll the dice, and if you hit, describe something cool." to notice how much your in control? I mean absolutely in control - for the GM or another player to interact with what you say (before your done saying it) would actually be a breach of the rules.

Since you have fresh eyes I'm curious about what you might think of this 'give' mechanic (I think its an example of give, anyway). It's just something I've mocked up here:

You can have up to five controlled move points, having a 50% chance of gaining one every, say, 15 minutes of real life time.

Okay, combat with previously mentioned mooks involves three stages. In the first, you roll and if you pass, say what you'd like to happen. Then the GM takes what you've said and puts a twist on it. You can pay an controlled move point to ignore that, or give and keep the point for latter use, while the GM's twist becomes part of the result.

The second and third stages involve repeating the above twice more (the third is the finishing move), but no more rolling to hit. The important bit to note: Each time you take what happened before and continue on with that. And that's it.


Sadly here we'll be talking in terms of what we think it'll do, rather than actual play. BUT, how predictable is it, do you think, if you always buy off the GM's twist? Compared to how unpredictable the move ends up as if you don't buy it off?

AND isn't it sucky when the GM insists on something that you as a player simply do not buy into? Having to accept the GM's input because of social pressure? What do you think about having no pressure at all, instead (the GM can't give input)? I think that's the same as having absolute control from above. Now in relation to all that, what do you think of the buy out? Do you think it's a pressure, but an economic one - one you can resist if you want but hey, maybe the GM's input is intriguing and you'd also get to keep the point? An interesting pressure?

I'm interested to see if this clicks with you at any point or points, to see if this theory gets anywhere with someone who isn't a old hand at the forge.

[nystul]

First of all - my path was pretty similar to yours. My first RPG was the first RPG - three little books that changed my life. I played a LOT of D&D - even more AD&D but my first watershed was the Hero System. The ability to create what I wanted felt like a brave new world. My brother and I had binders of characters and powers - hundreds of them. We reveled in our newfound freedom. The underlying system was a slow moving pain in the ass but we were in love. Over the years I went through a Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu phase but D&D and Hero were constants. The next watershed wasn't a system so much as a realization. Rules didn't really matter. Once I figured that out I played fast and loose, which gave me even more freedom but eventually undermined my interest in gaming altogether. Having stripped away everything but the storytelling it didn't feel like I was playing a game any more. Sure, I could tell a story with my friends but why do I need to play a game to do that? We were doing improv around a game table. Since I have a background in theatre I just ditched the game table and took off to make movies. Now that I'm gaming again I don't play fast and loose any more. I play by the rules, or I don't play at all.

I have been catching up on the metasystem structures of indie games that have emerged since I stopped playing and I have a love-hate relationship with mechanics that involve negotiating the outcome of scenes. It seems like there is this tenuous, almost ephemeral sense of where the game exists at all. I ran a weekly LARP for a while where the rules were a form of consensus. All you had to do was say what you were doing, describing any effects of your actions that weren't obvious. If the other characters in the scene with you didn't think that you should be able to do what you said you had done, they would make a statement that modified your declaration somehow. If you weren't comfortable with the modified outcome you had the option to appeal to one of the veteran players who wore a special nametag - they would then step in resolve the situation. There were very few incidents of modification statements and no one ever made an appeal. The non-system system worked like a charm. That given, why bother with adding steps to the process? From where I sit, either play a game that uses mechanics to build a story or blow off the mechanics entirely. The middle ground seems kind of pointless.

[AdAstraGames]

Hiya, welcome to the forge!

I'll be a bit of a devils advocate - have you played enough "Roll the dice, and if you hit, describe something cool." to notice how much your in control? I mean absolutely in control - for the GM or another player to interact with what you say (before your done saying it) would actually be a breach of the rules.

I'd not say my eyes are fresh so much as I've had the time to savor my introspections.  I've been tangentally related to the Forge community for years.

As to the question above - part of "Roll the dice and if you hit, describe something cool" is that Feng Shui's hit mechanism is "The amount you beat the target number by is the amount of beat-down you put on the guy", with Mooks generally going up on one or two hits.

So, describing punching the Mook through a plate glass window and out of the fight is just dandy.  Not quite so good for the Big Named Villain in the piece, where it'd take a few hits to drop him.

I've been thinking on this for Worlds of Honor (Power 19 is on the First Thoughts forum), and changed it to "Roll the dice, and if you fail, describe how you failed", with the GM describing the cool ways the NPCs fail.  It's a variant of something I saw in Trollbabe.

Okay, combat with previously mentioned mooks involves three stages. In the first, you roll and if you pass, say what you'd like to happen. Then the GM takes what you've said and puts a twist on it. You can pay an controlled move point to ignore that, or give and keep the point for latter use, while the GM's twist becomes part of the result.

The second and third stages involve repeating the above twice more (the third is the finishing move), but no more rolling to hit. The important bit to note: Each time you take what happened before and continue on with that. And that's it.

I'm not sure what monetizing the twists (turning them into currency that transfers back and forth between players and GMs) gains us in this context.

Sadly here we'll be talking in terms of what we think it'll do, rather than actual play. BUT, how predictable is it, do you think, if you always buy off the GM's twist? Compared to how unpredictable the move ends up as if you don't buy it off?

AND isn't it sucky when the GM insists on something that you as a player simply do not buy into? Having to accept the GM's input because of social pressure? What do you think about having no pressure at all, instead (the GM can't give input)? I think that's the same as having absolute control from above. Now in relation to all that, what do you think of the buy out? Do you think it's a pressure, but an economic one - one you can resist if you want but hey, maybe the GM's input is intriguing and you'd also get to keep the point? An interesting pressure?

I'm interested to see if this clicks with you at any point or points, to see if this theory gets anywhere with someone who isn't a old hand at the forge.

I'm not a regular poster on the Forge, nor am I really a newbie.  I tend to read it when I've got an RPGish project, and try to find my way around what's here, which is a jumble and written in Capitalized Words of Hidden Meaning and acronymed to hell and gone.

Given the likely number of exchanges, this looks like it'd turn into an accounting exercise rather than a story-driven game.

Instead, what I'm trying to do is find some way of making failure/setbacks in one scene give you a token that can be used for a benefit in a future scene that doesn't act as a reward mechanism for "OK, I'm gonna find the most painless thing to fail at, and fail it a LOT, to rack up those tokens so I can make the climax anti-climactic!"

I've got the beginnings of an idea for that, but it probably doesn't belong in Actual Play.

That being said, I'm thinking on the muddled jumble of essays describing stakes in a game, and trying to see if I can turn them into something that works fluidly; right now the discussion of stakes blurs from mechanism into social convention and scene framing.

[Callan S.]

I'm not sure what monetizing the twists (turning them into currency that transfers back and forth between players and GMs) gains us in this context.

There is no exchange - if you use a point, it's just burnt up.

Are you looking at it with a wholey mechanical focus? I'm make a very, very rough estimate that perhaps it was something like if you were looking at a combination lock (that chained a bike to a post) and thinking "Okay, I put the combination in and the lock opens up. I'm not sure what putting a combination in gains us". Strictly in terms of the combination lock, nothing - it just locks and unlocks. It's very boring by itself and perhaps it coming up as a real sore thumb in terms of that.

Given the likely number of exchanges, this looks like it'd turn into an accounting exercise rather than a story-driven game.

Turning to the bike analogy again - when you first learn to ride a bike, it's not really about going forward. There's alot of "Okay, get leg over, don't fall off, now try to tap foot along the ground, keep handlebars straight, don't tense up...etc, etc". When you first lean it, it isn't about going forward. And yet once you lean it, you go forward so much better.

Are you detecting how it would always be, or are you detecting what the learning phase would be like?

Instead, what I'm trying to do is find some way of making failure/setbacks in one scene give you a token that can be used for a benefit in a future scene that doesn't act as a reward mechanism for "OK, I'm gonna find the most painless thing to fail at, and fail it a LOT, to rack up those tokens so I can make the climax anti-climactic!"

I'd argue that's essentially the same mechanic, thematically renamed. You have a method of gaining the points (failure here, rather than my RL timer). Then you buy off the input of others latter on (buy off a failure that came from a dice roll or such, which most likely was asked for by the GM (so its the GM's input being bought off)).

On the painless thing, a quick suggestion is for players to define a small list of failure types and then have to draw from that. Much like player assigned TROS spiritual attributes, that puts them in the hotseat to entertain themselves so they wont put in something piddly.

[AdAstraGames]

Are you looking at it with a wholey mechanical focus? I'm make a very, very rough estimate that perhaps it was something like if you were looking at a combination lock (that chained a bike to a post) and thinking "Okay, I put the combination in and the lock opens up. I'm not sure what putting a combination in gains us". Strictly in terms of the combination lock, nothing - it just locks and unlocks. It's very boring by itself and perhaps it coming up as a real sore thumb in terms of that.

Not quite - I'm very big into RPGs as reward structures for specific styles of play - I'm not quite sure what this reward mechanism does for us that social convention doesn't do better.

Given the likely number of exchanges, this looks like it'd turn into an accounting exercise rather than a story-driven game.

Turning to the bike analogy again - when you first learn to ride a bike, it's not really about going forward. There's alot of "Okay, get leg over, don't fall off, now try to tap foot along the ground, keep handlebars straight, don't tense up...etc, etc". When you first lean it, it isn't about going forward. And yet once you lean it, you go forward so much better.

Are you detecting how it would always be, or are you detecting what the learning phase would be like?

To me, it looks like it's a little bit too much passing of tokens and poker chips back and forth as a mechanism.  I could be mistaken - this was one of the grumbles my group had about Universalis, that players focused too much on the spending of points to define things in game, and less on the game.

Instead, what I'm trying to do is find some way of making failure/setbacks in one scene give you a token that can be used for a benefit in a future scene that doesn't act as a reward mechanism for "OK, I'm gonna find the most painless thing to fail at, and fail it a LOT, to rack up those tokens so I can make the climax anti-climactic!"

I'd argue that's essentially the same mechanic, thematically renamed. You have a method of gaining the points (failure here, rather than my RL timer). Then you buy off the input of others latter on (buy off a failure that came from a dice roll or such, which most likely was asked for by the GM (so its the GM's input being bought off)).

On the painless thing, a quick suggestion is for players to define a small list of failure types and then have to draw from that. Much like player assigned TROS spiritual attributes, that puts them in the hotseat to entertain themselves so they wont put in something piddly.

Actually, what I eventually came up with for Worlds of Honor about 6 hours after writing the reply you replied to is this:

If you make a die roll involving your Dramatic Hooks, AND you fail, AND there were no successes derived from the Dramatic Hooks, describe a spectacular and entertaining failure (the meta rule here is you always describe how your character fails), and gain a Drama Point.

A Drama Point can be cashed in at any point in time, and allow you to re-roll any Dramatic Hook dice that turned up as failures in a future exchange.  Any Drama Points that are unused at the end of the mission vanish into the aether, so it's a use it or lose it resource.

This neatly sidesteps the "fail at stomping rats" pump.

[Callan S.]

I'm just wondering: 'a spectacular and entertaining failure'. Taking in the whole dramatic theme of underdog turns good, is the spectacle of the character trying to win at somehing that important to him. Given that its been determined he WILL fail (though he doesn't know that), the only thing that could be being shown (by the player) is how much he cares about doing that thing. Would that fit at all as an awkward description of its point?

If it does, I could see how my earlier suggestion just doesn't gel.

[AdAstraGames]

I'm just wondering: 'a spectacular and entertaining failure'. Taking in the whole dramatic theme of underdog turns good, is the spectacle of the character trying to win at somehing that important to him. Given that its been determined he WILL fail (though he doesn't know that), the only thing that could be being shown (by the player) is how much he cares about doing that thing. Would that fit at all as an awkward description of its point?

If it does, I could see how my earlier suggestion just doesn't gel.

Huh.  Callan, there are times when I wonder if you and I are using the same language. :)

So pardon me while I frame this in an old-school way.

Parsing that description, the sequence goes like this:

1) Describe intention and provisional action
2) Roll dice
3) If you fail, describe how. 
3a) If you fail, and a Dramatic Hook, was involved, and NONE of the Dramatic Hook dice came up with a success (5 or 6 on a d6), describe something really catastrophic, and get a Drama Point to use later.

Drama Points left over at the end of the mission/plot arc vanish into the ether, so use them or lose them.

Drama Points can be used to re-roll any Dramatic Hook dice that came up as failures.  Alternately, you can spend one Drama Point to change any one Dramatic Hook die to whatever value you prefer it to be (there's a reason why this is sometimes useful).

In particular, if something goes totally wrong, the player is encouraged to make it entertaining with the description, and gets a reward to use later in the story for doing so.

[Callan S.]

No, my question is: if the rules you were describing were a cooking recipe, what is the payoff of the recipe? I'm asking about the payoff, rather than the details of the recipe itself. It might seem so dreadfully simple that it's not worth mentioning "To eat it, of course!", but I am very interested all the same.

In that other post I was having a blind stab at the payoff being about making a statement about characters goals and personal beliefs (in the face of crisis and loss).

As I've seen the forge in action, there's alot of focus on the payoff, then going back to the recipe and changing it to suit the payoff desired. When I first started designing years ago, I focused on recipe first and messed about with it to see if it increased my payoff, rather than asking 'what the hell is the payoff I want?'.

Do you want to talk in terms of payoff? Is payoff a bit too forgey to bring up? I just find it impossible to talk strictly in terms of fiddling with recipes.

[AdAstraGames]

No, my question is: if the rules you were describing were a cooking recipe, what is the payoff of the recipe? I'm asking about the payoff, rather than the details of the recipe itself. It might seem so dreadfully simple that it's not worth mentioning "To eat it, of course!", but I am very interested all the same.

Ah, I see the angle you're coming from.

To me the payoff is rewarding players for acting in a way consonant with the source materials used for the RPG.

I'm not quite art-house enough in my outlook to give the GM a bowl of "You're screwed for plot purposes" points to help him structure the traditional "W" style four act plot, but rewarding players for putting their characters in situations where they'll fail spectacularly while holding firm to their beliefs is something I'm quite willing to do.

Most of the scene-bidding/scene point mechanisms I've seen and participated in have resulted in a serious "break" from the verite of the scenes in question, as people start bidding poker chips to purchase control away from other parties.  The only time I've seen it work well was the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is quasi-competitive in nature and a refinement of the game Balderdash.

And besides, any game that says "If your party numbers more than twenty, pool your resources and conquer Belgium, or do something similarly worthwhile..." is quite handy.