[Savage Worlds] New thinking on old style of play

[Ricky Donato]

Hi, Simon, I'm glad to know that I was able to help.

First, I'm going to quote myself, because I will need these points to answer some of your follow-up questions.

So now there are two questions that need to be answered:
A) "Does Tom crack the bad guy's safe?"
B) "Does Tom find dirt on the bad guy?"

Note that A & B are completely independent questions. Tom could find dirt, or fail to find dirt, regardless of whether he cracks the safe or not. For example, he could fail to crack the safe, but still find dirt in the wastebasket; or he could open the safe, only to find it empty. Further note that the answer to question A is not relevant to Joe at all. Joe only cares about B.

Now, to get to your points.

For Joe to be interested, play must focus on B. (Note I said play, not rules text.) Ways to do this include:
1) Explicitly stating that the outcome of the roll decides the answer to B.
Joe: Tom tries to open the safe.
GM: Make an Open Locks check. If you succeed, then Tom opens the safe and finds dirt inside. Otherwise, Tom opens the safe and find nothing.

I find these answers a little unsatisfying though.  On paper, this style of play looks good, and it may work for you, but my players, I think, would balk at their characters "warping reality" with a good skill roll.  In example 1, it seems like Tom's skill is not "open lock", but "make dirt appear in safes".

I partly agree with you on this point, and I'm not surprised you brought it up. What you call "warping reality" is allowing Joe to have control over the setting. This runs counter to what many games state, which is that "Joe controls his character and the GM controls the world". I can understand why it does not "feel" quite right, because you probably figure that a skill called Open Locks should be about that, not finding dirt. What has just happened is we have exposed a failure in whatever ruleset that Joe is using: the rules presumably don't offer a Finding Dirt skill, but that's what Joe needs because that's what Joe wants to do. Let's rewrite example 1 to have less reality warping:

Joe: Tom tries to open the safe.
GM: Make an Open Locks check. If you succeed, then Tom opens the safe and finds dirt inside. Otherwise, Tom does not open the safe.

Note what happens here if Joe fails his check: question A is answered but B is not. But the answer to B is what Joe cares about, not A, so he is left confused. He might assume that he can try to answer B using a different question A, such as "Tom busts the safe open with a crowbar." This means that either:

1) the GM assumes that B was answered and disallows (overtly or covertly) Joe from trying to open the safe again. We now have a breakdown in play.
OR
2) the GM says, "Make a Use Crowbar check". In this case, answering question B is no longer formalized; Joe will keep trying find dirt using various methods until he either gets tired or the GM finally says "Enough already" in some way. This lack of formality can still work: Joe does have power to answer B, so his enjoyment is less dependent on the GM. But he does not know how much power he has, which is confusing.

One thing is certain about all this: however you state the example, Joe must have power to answer B somehow. If not, you end up with exactly what we discussed earlier: Joe's enjoyment of the game is based solely on the skill of the GM; it is completely out of Joe's control.

I think it'll take a while for me to think about how the points you've raised can best be implimented in my games, but thanks for expressing this point so clearly to me.  In the meantime, I'd like to talk about another possibility.  In your example, you provide:

So now there are two questions that need to be answered:
A) "Does Tom crack the bad guy's safe?"
B) "Does Tom find dirt on the bad guy?"

What about:
C) "Does Tom find something else entirely in the safe, and what is it?"

Or in the example of my game, in the fight on the way to retrieve the spear, there were two questions:

A) "Do the PCs survive the fight?"
B) "Do they get to the Spear?"

but the answer was:

C) "One of the PCs is mortally wounded and now there's a race to get to the Spear in time, and one of the PCs might become a kind of zombie thing".

So I guess what I'm talking about is the possibility for dice mechanics to raise questions, rather than just answer them.  Is this interesting?  Where can this go?

What you are describing is conflict consequences, in other words answers to question B. If I'm reading you right, you want those to be interesting and unpredictable; not just "Tom finds dirt" or "Tom does not find dirt", but "Tom does not find dirt, but does learn that his sister is actually the bad guy's girlfriend". This goes back to my examples #2 and #3 above; make sure the failure is just as interesting as the success, and the more that a player wants to succeed, the more you should hurt him if he fails.

You and your group have done this over and over again throughout your gaming. It happened when one character jumped at the dragon to kill him, and when one character had to run to find the Spear to save another character's life. I suspect that you've done it hundreds of times in your gaming and it is so natural to you that you don't notice yourself doing it.

[Narf the Mouse]

Why not 'Find Dirt' versus 'Hide Dirt'? Then, the quality of the roll determines what is found and where.

Tom rolls High, Joe rolls Low: Joe didn't hide it very well (Perhaps stuck it in the bottom of a desk drawer) and Tom finds what he wants, plus some other usefull stuff.
Tom rolls High, Joe rolls High: Depending on how you handle ties, perhaps Tom finds a clue on the dirt, Tom finds nothing, Tom finds something small to use against Joe.
Tom rolls Low, Joe rolls High: Not only does Tom not find dirt, everything Tom finds says that Joe is an honest and upstanding guy.
Tom rolls Low, Joe rolls Low: Some variant on High/High.

Then, if Tom needs to open a safe, just use his roll as a base. If it's a straight roll-and-add, add Toms' 'Open Safe' skill to the base dice roll - Because that determines how well Tom is doing at Finding Dirt. If it's a roll-over 5, just remove or add one success for every two dice difference.

Not sure how well this would work in practice, though.

[Mike Holmes]

Ricky is doing a great job, but I want to try to get more directly at Simon's query.

Can the dice produce creativity?

Well, I'll try not to get into semantics. But in the example in question I see less the dice creating things as you as the player using them as inspiration. To be clear, this is how everything in RPG narration works. You have previously established facts, and from them you make up new ones. A leads to B.

Lots of people believe that dice are, in fact, a great form of inspiration. Ron has referred to randomization of resolution as a "dramatic springboard." Meaning that, yes, they're in the game to give uncertainty, and to force us to mix things up, instead of relying on any pre-concieved notion of what's going to happen. I mean, if you don't have the randomizers, and you plan out the outcomes...where's the spontenaity of play? If you know that you can't plan out the outcome, you likely won't. And this is usually a good thing.

Illusionism involves planning things out, and then rolling dice and having players make decisions, but the results of that activity don't affect the pre-planned outcome. In this case the "illusion" being created is that the plot being created are a product of the players being creative, and the plot developing organically. When, in fact, it's following a plan. Some people say they prefer this way to play, and certainly some people do have fun with it. But there's a point at which the players become aware to some extent of what's going on, and at that point problems often occur.

Anyhow, that all said, there are, in fact, some techniques that I think you might be interested in. First, as Ricky says, it's possible to create outcomes for events that include fun negative outcomes. Character death is tense, yes, but that's because the player is risking something, not just the character. The player is risking the character not being available for play any longer.

Now, if in fact the story ending right at that point would be fun for the player, that's another issue. With the case of the leap off the cliff, the player was saying that he thought that this was a great way to end the character's story (in fact he understood that either way his character's story would end). I think that's magnificent. But what if the story isn't at that point? Do you still make death the negative outcome? Why? Because it "should" be the negative outcome? Or because it's especially tense?

I propose you can get nearly as much tension with other negative outcomes. Death is only an appropriate "stake" if it's really not just OK, but especially cool if the character dies here and now.


Now, about stakes. This has come up several times recently. Pre-setting stakes has upsides, but it also has downsides. What's more the upsides can be had without the downsides using other techniques. Let me explain:

The upside of stakes is that the players can agree to them. Some people go so far as to allow players to negotiate stakes with the GM. But even where that's not true, usually the player can decide to back out if he doesn't like the gamble, right? So in that way we ensure that the player is OK with the conflict. Hopefully. Further, if the stakes are stated up front, there's no chance that the GM is manipulating things behind the scene, so there's a lot of trust in the players and system that's generated by doing this. These are both good things, but pre-setting stakes is not the only way to get them.

The downside is that when you pre-set stakes, you actually take some of the tension out of the contest in question because we already know before the roll what the possible outcomes are. Further, you lose some of the ability to tailor the result of the outcome to the specific outcome of the conflict. Think of it this way, if you're fighting a dragon, obviously death is a potential outcome, right? If you don't state what the stakes are, does that mean that death can't be a result? No, death is still a stake. But so are a great many other things.

Yes, if the players believe that the GM will not kill their characters, then that tension may not be there. But they'll only feel that way if, in fact, the GM is using illusion to get a pre-planned outcome. If, in fact, the GM is improvising as you do off the results of the roll, aiming only to create a satisfying conclusion to the conflict from which to act extemporaneously (and if he's consistent in this), then he has the best of both worlds. He gets both the tension of death, and the option not to employ it.

See, stakes are meant to overcome player indoctrination that says that the GM is always futzing with things behind the scene. If that's not happening, and demonstrably not happening, then explicit stake setting is really just not needed in most cases.

There's another benefit to setting stakes, which is that players get used to "Conflict Resolution" quickly when you do this. So, actually, there's a training value to using this technique for, again, players used to illusionism GMs. But, that being the case, once you've gotten the player's trust that you're creating extemporaneously, then there's no longer any reason to have these training wheels on. (Note that I'm not saying that there aren't times when using Stake setting isn't for other reasons, and good technique in those cases. Merely that if it's only being used to get to conflict resolution that you can grow out of it).

How to you reinforce Conflict Resolution? Instead of setting stakes, have players set goals for their character. It is infinitely more maleable to manipulate an outcome based on looking at character goals than it is to deal with stakes which are pretty much set in stone.

I have more on this, but I'll let this sink in for a bit first.

Mike

[Narf the Mouse]

All interesting, but just want to make one note: Death only at dramatic points seems to be definite Narrativism. Death when the character would logically die (Health is zero, poisoned and failed three saves, plagued for a week without a cure) seems to be definite Gamism.

For a Gamist, the tension comes from 'Do I Win'? Therefore, the Gamist wants win and loose conditions, otherwise the game isn't fun. This is what might be called 'Game Dramatics'.

For a narrativist, the tension comes from the story. Therefore the Narrativist wants winning and loosing to be dramatic. Story Dramatics, in other words.

At least, that's what my inner Gamist and Narrativist seem to be saying. Don't ask me about Simulationism, I seem to havee fumbled that stat roll.

[Simon C]

I don't really want to get bogged down in a semantic argument about GNS, an argument I'm surely not equipped for, but I see the "constant possibility of death" as more of a simulation thing than a gamist thing.  In a game about brave heroes risking death, the Simulationist in me wants death to be a constant and real risk, reflected in the rules.  Correct me if that's not a correct interpretation. However I think that GNS is kind of a side issue to this discussion.

I agree with Ricky that many of these things I've being doing in my games for years without really thinking about it.  I guess this post is an attempt by me to more consciously recognize the techniques I'm using, and the effects they have.  I think I'm moving a lot closer to that goal.  Mike, I think you've expressed very well the benefits and drawbacks of two different techniques, and I need to think more about how these things work in my game. 

I think at this point I'm pretty satisfied with this exploration of my game.  I don't think these issues are entirely resolved for me, but I need to do a lot more thinking, and in any case I think further discussion is likely to boil down to "what works for me..."

Thanks everyone for your help with this.  I'd love to hear any further comments, but at this stage I feel my questions have been answered.

Simon

[Ricky Donato]

My final piece of advice is that, after trying some techniques (new or old), that you post about it here so we can discuss with you what you did and the benefits and problems with them.

This was a great thread. I'm glad I could help.

[Callan S.]

Is this an illusion? Does the existance of a GM with power over game events preclude (or diminish) the possibility of an unsuccessful outcome to the point where any tension is only percieved?  For example, in the above game, it seems like the final blow against the dragon could have gone either way, but you could also argue that I had engeneered the situation to be an almost certain win for the players, especially given the way SW works often allowing critical rolls to succeed.  More significantly, in the case of racing to reach the spear, I pretty obviouly engeneered that situation so that  there was a good chance of success.  There was no "guide", so I basically made up the odds.  Do the seemingly small choices I make as a GM, like "they'll run away now", or "he won't make the death blow, he'll fight your buddy". Make a large impact to the chances of failure?  Am I always just "making up the odds", or can the player genuinely feel they had a chance of failure and chance of success that was influenced by their decisions?

More interestingly: Are there any specific techniques that can be used to highlight, increase, or otherwise improve these moments of tension?  Either by increasing the stakes, or by making the outcome less subject to being occluded by the intervention of the GM.  I think for example that the "fortune in the middle" technique discussed in this forum is an excellent way of doing this.  Are there more

Unlike others, I think you are bringing illusion into the tension, but you also think the tension is the important part of play here. It aint, in my evaluation The most important parts of your play, where the players have been visibly excited and pumped up, have been where one PC decides to betray, where another decides to risk the kingdom on a desparate attack, where one PC decides to run a lethal gauntlet to save a friend.

Can you see how the decisions they made are more important, FAR more important than whether they suceed at what they decided to do? The betrayal doesn't even involve dice rolls and yet you can see the players reeling, crying betrayal, crying out how it's awesome.

I think you are bringing in illusion (I've had many such concerns with my own GM'ing duties), but what your gaining control of isn't important to the players at these times of play. Don't get me wrong - if you try this at times when their PC's aren't making key descisions, they would boil you alive. But when the key thing is player descisions, you rigging the dice (unintentionally or otherwise) is kind of a moot point to them because your not messing with what's currently very important to them: The decision itself!

BUT what you say about dice taking control out of your hands and bringing in surprise situations like the spear run, is spot on! What you've just played is good. But a change in system could take the game to places you never expected. But it's not about working on tension, imo.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm glad you've had your questions answered. I'm going to address one point, however, that may be somewhat tangential, but yet might be informative.


So far, Simon, you seem to be on a rather classic trajectory in your understanding of how RPG play works in terms of the GM-player power split - who is responsible for what? And in trying to solve certain problems, you've resorted to the typical solutions. For instance, like many GM's you started out with more "linear" play...meaning using either overt or covert force to cause the plots that occur in play to follow a particular line.

Then you discovered that what you really wanted was the players to be creating plot with their character decisions. And in order to do this you've tried to attempt what I've at times called "Open Play." Meaning that you present the world as it is, and let player drive lead to plot decisions.

The next step, however, is to realize that all play is collaborative. It's actually inescapable, to some extent all RPG play is collaborative, or intended to be so. The only difference between these splits is where the participants try to hold the boundaries on who has what power. But in practice these boundaries are always eroding toward the center - where players and GMs share power over a wide range of elements of play.

Basically the idea that there's some split where the players only control their characters, and where the GM only controls everything else, is fallacious. In practice, in a very real way, that never happens in a pure sense.

For instance, players will constantly be defining small things about the universe. "I pick up a rock" creates a rock nearby the character to pick up - and probably one that's large enough to hurt somebody too (we all know why he picked up that rock). If the GM says, "While eating, somebody comes into the tavern," he's controlling the characters in that he's saying that they're actually in the act of eating when the event occurs. Even if they say that their character is eating, how do we know that one isn't finished before the others?

These are minor cases, but they're indicative of a more important phenomenon. When you a GM say, "Well, there's this dragon you could deal with...or you could do something else," there's a subtext there that reads, "But I only have the dragon stuff worked up, so if you do something else, I'll have to work that up, and, oh, by the way, I am interested in this dragon storyline, seeing as I've bothered to write it up."

The fact is that we avoid talking overtly about sharing the power in play, because certain traditions aimed at combating extremely dysfunctional play are in place that say we should not. That is, a lot of RPG tradition exists because we want players to face challenges in play as players, and yet we also want the players to play the characters in an interesting and plausible way. When, for example, a player kills all of the baby kobolds because, "they weren't worth any EXP alive" then we decry the act as not paying attention to plausibility, and we move to ensure that this sort of decision-making process doesn't happen again. The player is only allowed to consider what his character knows when making decisions.

Conversely GMs are prevented from playing around with the set-up after the fact, because it voids a sense of fair play, and that the game world has any permanency to it. Basically because of percieved abuses by players or GMs (which really come down to different priorities showing), we strive to try to set up a division where these problems cannot occur.

The problem is that it inevitably fails.

The players may even sense that you're trying to cede control of their characters' destinies in presenting them with the option of going after the dragon, and saying it's OK if they don't. But the problem is that they know that you want to do it, and that it'll probably be fun, and don't have any reason to go for anything else.

What you have to do is to simply succumb to the notion that you can share power with your players. That it's not all "GM drives plot" or "players drive plot" but that "we all drive plot."

Put another way, it's fine to "railroad" if you define that term as controlling only certain parts of play. Put even better, the key is simply to understand that, as GM, you have to provide the players with some place to make creative input into play. And that any control you take in order to provide the players with occasion to be creative is, in fact, a good thing.

That is, "Open Play" only works if your players are actually all really GMs. Somebody has to provide the framework for the plot to develop. Yeah, the players can do it themselves if they're all extraordinary players. Or even if one of the players really pushes forward, and creates the conflicts for all of the characters.

But why not the GM? It's only problematic for the GM to provide such input if he controls the output. If he's using illusion or some other set of techniques to control the outcome, then, yes, the players may not be having fun (though some argue that there are players who want this). And they certainly won't if/when they see the illusion at work.

The fact is that through skill and/or negotiation with players, you can always ensure that the input you're putting into play is making play fun for the players instead of taking away their fun.

So, with the example at hand, instead of saying, "I have this dragon thing, but you can do something else, if you want," instead say, "I have this dragon thing worked up that should be fun." And then proceed to make it fun for them by ensuring that it's not a linear plot.

This is largely accomplished by one overall technique, which is simply to set up situations for conflicts for which you cannot predict the outcome. And then, in play, when playing through the situation, simply following the players' decisions in creating your next plot input.

Very simply, when prepping for play, think less in terms of what will happen, and more in terms of what might happen, and what you can do to respond to it if/when it does. In play, largely it means "winging it" where that's not as scary as it sounds because your prep is there to support winging it (as opposed to having prep that requires you to either force outcomes or abandon the prep).

The other main technique that supports this is to simply talk about it between the players. If you say things like, "I was thinking that a scene between your character and NPC A would allow for you to work out some of their issues, because I think it'll be interesting to see what will come of it - should we do it?" then the player understands that you don't have a pre-planned outcome, and that you setting up such a scene is done in order to present him with the opportunity to create reactions and such.

This runs in direct contradiction to the "tradition to prevent dysfunction" sort of rule like, "You're not there, you can't talk to him!" Players should not only speak about their own desires as a player, but they should do things in play that are acting on player knowledge. No, of course not in an implausible way.

But, for instance (to use a now classic example), if Player A knows that Player B has a character in a fight in a park near to where his character is having a drink player A can do one of the following:

1. "My character goes home." (reasoning that, since the character doesn't know about the fight, that he can't show up)
2. "My character goes to the fight!" (reasoning that he wants to help player B's character).
3. "My character goes home, and on the way happens to pass by the park and see the fight happening." (reasoning that he as player wants his character to help that of player B, and using a plausible explanation for why the character might go there).

Option 3 is maximally fun. The player gets what he wants, and plausibility is not broken.

In practice, everyone is always doing this to some extent. But often times players will put aside choices for fear of being accused of "cheating." So they usually hide this decision-making process, arguing for the plausibility of an action when challenged. "My guy woulda done that."

The problem with this is that it hides the player behind the character, and relieves the player of the responsibility to play the character in an entertaining way. Same with the GM, actually. By bringing this dialog into the open, and, most importantly, by saying that this sort or reasoning is explicitly allowed in all cases, we ensure that players are acting only to entertain themselves and each other.

In this way you can share power openly and in a way that everyone is pretty much garunteed to enjoy. All the problems of trying to push the boundaries to a certain specific area go away as they are clearly set by early negotiations in play (augmented by more later as neccessary).

Forcing players down a pre-selected path (all GM plot control) is liked by few players. Using illusion only delays problems, or diffuses them. Making players create the plot entirely by themselves is also a problem, as players rightly expect the GM to help. Consider that your best option may be to share the power to shape plot with your players, the GM putting in his part, and the players putting in theirs.

This seems obvious on the face of it, but so much traditional technique makes actual substantive player participation in creating plot impossible. When, in fact, this is what most players really want in play. Even in Gamism play, players want to be able to influence the outcome of things by their skill - that's the opportunity you give them in that sort of play. Give them the same sorts of ability to alter the path of play in other forms of play, too.

Mike

[Simon C]

Hmm, I think I see your point.  This thread seems to be pretty clogged up with issues, and is spiralling away from discussion of a specific "actual play", but I'm still interested in these issues.  I'm planning a one-on-one game with my wife in the near future, and I'll try to post that in actual play for further discussion.  Some techniques I'm hoping to try are:

- More explicit stating of stakes before rolling
- Bennies (meta-game points) able to be spent on substantive narrative control
- "Kickers"
- More explicit scene framing, including scenes asked for by the players.  I think that this last adresses the issues you've raised in a way that is useful to me, allowing for "between scene" discussions of what direction the plot will take.  I like your description of more "collaborative" play, and I hope that scene framing will help me do this.

I have high hopes for this game, but I think it'll present some difficulties as well.  My wife has an amazing imagination, and I love playing with her, but she's relatively new to gaming, and has been burned by some bad experiences, so she's a little shy of taking narrative control. I'll discuss this more in the new thread.