Are these two things incompatible?

[Calithena]

1. "You're in a cavern of undulating stone, with an ancient brass demon-idol hulking above its farther reaches. Three bestial humanoids stand guard before it, waving flails..."

(During the battle, a player says: "I race behind one of the stone ridges and get out my bow. using the stone for cover." The GM says: "The hyena-man stands on high ground, covering all approaches with his waving flail." Modifiers are imposed on this basis.)


2. "OK, I paid x encounter points for an Oil Slick up there on the slope. So it forces a roll to avoid slippage any time anyone crosses it, and imposes a movement modifier regardless."

(During the battle, a player says: "I want to ignite that slick." The GM says: "No-one put points into it as a fire hazard, sorry." The player says: "Not even with this fire charm I got from the Daughter of Flame?" The GM says: "Um, no, it's not in the description.")

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Like some other people around here I'm lately obsessed with adversity-managing games like Rune and DiTV. I disagree with the assumption of some around here that such rules are constraining; I, speaking as GM, find them intensely liberating. One drag of being GM in a traditional game is that you're not really 'in the game'; you're a facilitator and an imaginer par excellence, things I also find enjoyable, but you have to pull your punches. Making GM adversity/force a resource lets you be another player. I like it.

But I also like the endless, spontaneous freeform creativity of just riffing off each others' descriptions afforded by traditional games. This is something I still find alluring about the "system is the physics of the gameworld" approach. You make shit up and then the rules give you a toolkit for translating your riffs into mechanics. Sometimes this leads to huge imbalances, but playing well can involve exploiting just such imbalances.

So anyway, my question. Can you have both at once?

Here's an argument for 'No':

- On the first approach, the core reality of the game is what you're imagining. System gives tools for adjudicating that on the basis of the elements included in your imagination. On the second approach, the core reality of the game is a conflict resolution process, which is essentially managed at the human level. If your game is fundamentally determined by a resource management algorithm, it can't allow stuff to just emerge spontaneously out of competitive freeform imagination-riffing.

On the other hand, here's an argument for 'Yes' in the particular case above: you have a move for either side which is called something like 'transform an element'. When the group agrees that someone has creatively used an imaginative element, you get a 'break' in what's established so far: maybe someone gets to allocate some kind of resource to transform the situation, or whatever. One simply notes that such things come up in play and provides a mechanic or resource to adjudicate them as part of the overall flow of the game.

I guess I'm mostly interested in discussing this one way or the other.

[Alan]

Hi Calithena,

I'm afraid I can't figure out what two things you're asking about.  Are you talking about how the players talk?  Or do you mean how elements get added to the SiS?  Or when resolution occurs in a declared action?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Don't respond to this thread. Sean posted using his old username by accident (software switch enabled it; never mind the details). We'll start it all over later, and this will go to the Inactive File.

Best,
Ron

[Calithena]

I'm asking about the difference between free-form negotiation of how elements in the SiS get used in conjunction with a ruleset which provides a 'physics' for such elements in terms of how they translate into game mechanics (the default assumption of traditional RPGs and the basis of the mistaken assumption that 'realism' is an essential component of good roleplaying - I'm sure I'm right that that's the work that the notion of 'realism' does for a lot of gamers but start a separate thread if you're interested in that) and systems which manage the game effect of player and GM resources up front (Rune, Dogs in the Vineyard - also by default systems that have players rolling against themselves (e.g. Trollbabe) to adjudicate everything).

I am struggling with a potentially incoherent desire and want to find out if it's really incoherent or if there's a compromise or fix. The desire is on the one hand to allow the boundless-feeling creativity I associate with early RPGs (after 1980 = not early for purposes of this discussion) and to give that creativity mechanical 'weight' (as it does when your first level characters can nail a wyvern by setting up a clever rockfall trap, e.g.) and on the other hand to constrain GM-force as a kind of fixed input in the way that the pNPC rules in Dogs and the Encounter design rules in Rune do.

To stick with D&D-like stuff for a minute, Rune allows you to design terrain, weird magic, etc. for your encounters in a straightforward way. But you design it in terms of the precise modifiers it introduces to a situation. (Could just as easily be die pools for purposes of this discussion; the point is that the encounter design forces your resource to work in a prespecified way.)

So Rune doesn't fit the bill (though it's a cool game and I'd love to play it). You can't figure out something clever to do with the oil pits in the description unless the runner pre-specified a potential effect. There's no negotiation of the imaginary elements in play.

DitV is somewhat better in this regard but shares with TSoY the assumption that only human/sentient adversity really matters. (When you bring in the flaming oil pits in DitV you get 2d6 for working them into your narration, or 2d8 if they're big - I assume they're excellent, being flaming oil pits and all). This is fine for both games because both games have to do with human drama. It is less fine for a game that places a premium on tricky negotiation of stuff in the SiS.

OH - somehow this morning I logged in under my old account! I normally post here as Sean. I'm logging out as Calithena now and will make further posts in this thread under my proper name.

Edit - seeing what Ron posted I guess we'll have to take this all to a new thread. Oh well.