end of game: All Your Base Pairs Are Belong To Us

[James_Nostack]

On Saturday, July 30 I ended my Alternity campaign, conducted via IRC for 157 weeks.  This thread aims to do three things; skip over the parts that don't interest you:

* Recount what happened, because I love to gloat
* Thank the Forge peeps for improving my GM'ing
* Point out a curious intersection of Actual Play and Conflict Resolution
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THE END OF THE GAME
Earlier threads-- Help my game stinks
Hurray my game is cool again!
Making sure the game stays cool

The finale of the campaign finds the heroes doing two things simultaneously--

* Trying to persuade a large refugee camp in an old lunar mining coloy to put aside internal differences and unite against tens of thousands of trash-heap junk-robots.  This involves many Bangs about prioritizing food or defense, human rights vs. military necessity, and so on.

* Uploading scans of their brains into drone-bodies on Jupiter's moon Callisto to lead a student revolt against a despotic AI governer as two enormous space fleets controlled by the setting's superpowers clash overhead.  Even if the players' surrogates defeat the AI, there's a delicate act of politics to make sure Callisto stays free from either side.  (Also, whichever side wins the space battle, will go on to slaughter the opposing superpower, killing billions.)

Bang 1:  Evil Junk Robot Leader says, "You refugees don't have sufficient medical care.  Your children are dying of disease.  I want official control of your territory, but you're allowed to stay there.  Grant me sovereignty, and I'll ensure that medical supplies reach you."

Response 1: The player who's character has adopted one of the dying children essentially says, "We would rather die."  And the children begin dying off, including his own.

Bang 2: The revolutionary movement against the Callisto AI is being financed by Mutant Hitler--it's a ploy so that he can use the moon as a staging ground against the enemy fleet.  So, the heroes have to decide if liberating Callisto is worth giving Mutant Hitler a competitive edge for domination of the solar system.  (They have been fighting Mutant Hitler for three years of real time.)

Response 2: "You drive a hard bargain, Mutant Hitler.  But let's do it."

Bang 3: After defeating the AI, Callisto is now up for grabs.  Mutant Hitler demands custody, but his erstwhile ally, Evil Sneaky Guy, wants it too--and he will allow the heroes secret access to Mutant Hitler to assassinate him, if they dare.  Of course, doing this will anger the opposing fleet, which still wants to use Callisto for resupply, and the commander has been authorized to pulverize the place to get what he needs.  So--honor the arrangement with Mutant Hitler (and set up a truce in their longstanding vendetta), give into the opposing commander's threat (and keep Callisto in one piece), or ally with Evil Sneaky Guy to kill Mutant Hitler (which threatened to keep the bigger war going).

Response 3: Through some clever use of social skills, the heroes allowed the Opposing Fleet to resupply... on the condition that the fleet returns home.  This spares Callisto, but also protects the Opposing Side from Mutant Hitler's aggression.  Meanwhile they hand Callisto over to the Evil Sneaky Guy, so they can visit Mutant Hitler and kill him.

Bang 4: The heroes arrive at Mutantville, and denounce Mutant Hitler in parliament--at which point he agrees to resign from power to prevent further investigations.  The players know what this means--Mutant Hitler is up to no good, and has deeper schemes at work!

Players visit Mutant Hitler's villa to find out what he's up to, and possibly assassinate him.  It turns out, however, that Hitler has released a doomsday retrovirus that will rewrite the human genome.  Bacteria transfer DNA by touching; humans will become the same way.  (This is called "horizontal gene transfer" in Biology.) 

So, within seven years this plague will distribute Mutant Hitler's special genetic boosts to the entire solar system--billions of people stronger, smarter, more willful than before.

Plus--the whole Mutantville agenda consists of declaring genetic superiority over others.  Mutant Hitler has arranged so that, once this thing spreads, Mutantville no longer has a reason to exist as an international superpower.  The government will dissolve.  The Opposing Side will be infected biologically, but achieve a political victory.  In other words, both sides in the Cold War manage to achieve total victory in their own spheres.

Mutant Hitler promises a future where people no longer have a genetic identity, where the gene pool becomes a river flowing through everyone--where schizophrenia and myopia are as transient as the common cold.  Of course, it would involve turing the human race into bacteria-clones in the service of hidebound Artificial Intelligences... but it would end the War.

So--do the heroes permit this to happen, or do they sound the alarm--protecting human dignity and freedom, but potentially damning the solar system to eternal warfare?

Response 4: Players hemmed and hawed on this for a little while.  Two players were down with the transformation.  The third character felt unsure, but when he remembered that his child (from Bang 1) died due to poor immune system he came on board.  So, in effect, the little kid who died so piteously in Bang 1 ended up determining the fate of the human race.

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Long post--I'll do thanks and the theoretical point in a moment.

[James_Nostack]

Saying Thanks

I wanted to say thanks to all the Forge people, because when I showed up at the Forge in November my game was in pretty sad shape after two years of play... and the last few months on the Forge helped me sharpen my skills to the point that we were all having a wonderful time.

Vaxalon, Mike Holmes, Vincent, Ron, Clinton, Nate, Lxndr, Eero, Tony, Jesse and everyone else who's names I cannot recall, all contributed to my gradual evolution as a GM, and hence indirectly to the fun we were having. 

The game ended in a terrific way, and the turnaround was entirely due to this place.  Four people had a great time thanks to you.

[James_Nostack]

The Actual Gaming Question

As mentioned up-thread, the outcome of the campaign--and the end result for the human race--came due to one player's decision.  We had been using Conflict Resolution for the last six months of the game, and one player had this to say:

In the final scene of the whole campaign, Drake finally gets the point. The Space Amish are doomed, cursed by their own lack of intercourse with the big, wide world to die of trivial infections, a point brought to painfully personal relief for him. At the very last moment, he realises that the Doomsday Weapon of the group's arch-enemy has the only chance of sparing his people from utter destruction, and he embraces it at last.

Very weird, but very rewarding. Importantly, it's not something I would ever have come up with for Drake as a goal/aim; it just arose naturally from the events of the game itself. I would never have metagamed this, and it's part of why I resist too much metagaming myself.

By "metagaming" he's talking about the sometimes extensive amount of OOC discussion that accompanies Conflict Resolution (at least how we play it).  This time his understanding of the stakes, risks, and all the rest of that was achieved through immersive behavior, in part because I was too engaged myself to bother with applying our rules for Conflict Res.  It was an electrifying moment, but addressing his feelings etc. through Conflict Resolution would have ruined it, and I avoided this mainly by luck.

It's strange--I've noticed that Conflict Resolution, though quite powerful, also tends to deplete some of the "immersive-ness" of Task Resolution play.  Generally I've been happy to make that sacrifice in the interest of pacing, but in this case the immersion was critical and great to watch. 

Does anyone have any advice on when to handle stakes, issues, desires and all that stuff explicitly, without also limiting the "immersion factor"?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Your write-ups of sessions are always interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Does anyone have any advice on when to handle stakes, issues, desires and all that stuff explicitly, without also limiting the "immersion factor"?

Well, I've been interested in this particular issue for a while myself, although I come from the other side of the equation: I know no immersion, and never have cared about it in practical terms. So going on a search for the elusive beast is quite interesting for me, especially as here in Finland immersion is the great, shiny grail of gamingdom. Everybody claims to have it or search for it, so it shouldn't be that hard to catch it. Somehow it's managed to elude my investigation this far, though. My current theory is that I've always had immersion, but never just minded it because it's such a natural part of play.

So, anyway. Here's a take on conflict resolution and character immersion: what does conflict resolution inherently require of the player? As I see it, a typical conflict resolution system requires of the player one thing, and one thing only: utter aloud your goal in the conflict. Now, the question: in the immersive state, do you or do you not know what you want? For some reason the answer seems to be that you don't, because people seem to think that uttering aloud their goal in a conflict is something that requires coming out of the immersion.

Consider this dialogue:
GM: So, what are you doing next?
Player: I'm going to assassinate Mutant Hitler!
GM: That's great, let's apply system! <applies system>
GM: Verily, the omens are good. How are you going to do the assassination?
Player: <continues in immersive state towards assassinating Mutant Hitler>
Then, consider this one:
GM: So, what are you doing next?
Player: I'm going to assassinate Mutant Hitler!
GM: That's great. You approach his personal compound, but need to climb over his mutant-fence to do the deed.
Player: <rolls climbing> I succeed! And continue quietly towards my nemesis.
GM: That's good, you climb over the fence and confront the mutant-SS.
Player: <rolls fighting> I succeed again!
GM: <continues describing the events based on the task rolls>
Player: <continues declaring intent>

Question: how, specifically, the former is less immersive than the latter? Is it that the player already knows the result of the events when describing them? Because if that's it, you could try playing it so that the GM knows the conflict result, but the players don't. That way they can immerse without hindrance up to the point of narration where the GM chooses to reveal whether they were successful or not. Or is the problem indeed in having to reveal your intent before actually doing the deed? Because it seems to me that the player in the second example is just as clear on what he's trying to do as the player in the first one.

Consider: what if complaints about conflict resolution stem from something completely different than the immersion question? Because in my experience, most of the dislike conflict resolution causes doesn't really come from the question of immersion. Rather, it's quite common that players dislike conflict resolution simply because it requires them to think straight and take some little degree of logical responsibility for character actions. Some players schooled by certain kinds of play simply don't want to reveal their real goals, because in some traditional play this actually makes it harder to succeed with the goal; much easier to keep it secret, do separate tasks, and reveal at the final moment to the other players how these particular tasks entail the goal the player was trying to achieve all the time. And because you approved these tasks, the player says, you have to approve of the ultimate logical result, as well.

Just a thought. I'm very much not an expert in immersion-related questions.

[James_Nostack]

Hi Eero, I am glad you enjoyed my write-ups--your advice was always very helpful.

Maybe the issue isn't Conflict Resolution, but the particular way I applied it.  I would ask players what they hoped to accomplish in a particular scene.  We would then discuss what is at stake.  If the stakes bored me as a GM, I allowed it without a roll.  Otherwise, the players could narrate their attempt to solve the problem, and based on their cunning plans and skill at creative writing, they could earn mods for the eventual dice roll.

For me as a GM (and possibly as a player as well) this had several advantages--

1.  The players told me what interested them.  I think it's a mark "gaming maturity" to be up front about what you want.  Makes it easier on everybody.

2. The involved parties are invested in the conflict, thanks to discussion of stakes.  If what's at stake bores me, the players automatically win.  If what's at stake doesn't bother the players, they don't exert themselves to stop it.  This is a mode of scene framing.

3.  There were opportunities to "immerse" via pre-roll narration.  A character could invent new details about the setting, showcase a particular character quirk, and so on--and the cooler it was, the more I would reward it.

4.  The outcome is unpredictable but always interesting, and takes the story in fun places.  This helps me avoid railroading.  (Confession: I usually had a flow chart based on a few probable strategies to each dilemma.)

I can't speak for this player, obviously, but I did notice that some of this involved a lot of OOC discussion.  Here I will paraphrase the usual thought process--"Step 1: Forget about what the character wants, what do I want as a player?  Step 2: Gee, the stakes you proposed aren't interesting to me--would you accept these stakes instead?  Step 3: Now I have to think up some colorful bits of narration, instead of just reacting to things IC.  Step 4: The outcome is interesting, but it arose out of Step 2--there's no 'game reality' itself, I'm defining the stakes as I play." 

The killer is probably Step 2, which is (from the GM's point of view) the most important.  Players and GM agree on stakes, possibly with some negotiating or plea-bargaining.  Since this involves stepping out of character, it can threaten the sense of immersion.

I'd be interested to see other forms of Conflict Resolution that don't involve explicit conversations about what's at stake.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'd be interested to see other forms of Conflict Resolution that don't involve explicit conversations about what's at stake.

Check out Polaris, coming out this fall in all well-stocked entertainment shopping units near you. It features a conflict resolution system that sounds like something you'd like; the conflict is negotiated first, and the die is only rolled if players fail to agree to a solution. It should prove illustrative to me, too, when I get to play it for real.

Another title I have to recommend is the oldie-goldie, Dust Devils. If you read and apply it right, it leads to a very feverish kind of conflict resolution that goes along these lines:
1) I claim completely unreasonable action
2) The opposing characters decide whether to get into the way of my mighty thews
3) Conflict resolution system is utilized
4) Narration tells how the things go down
I don't know whack about immersion, so I don't know if what I have with DD is immersion, but it sure could be with the players shitting themselves from excitement. The key here is that there's no necessary OOC negotiation at all; sure, you have to manipulate mechanics, but all contestible contents of narration are contested in IC terms. The GM usually cannot start a conflict at all without a particular NPC being the resisting party of the conflict. Whatever the stakes of a conflict are, they are set by the characters agreeing to get violent on each other, not by OOC discussion.

About the stakes - you're right that there is several ways to define them. What you seem to be using is a very secure and fair method, because it's a consensus negotiation; all players have to agree to the stakes. However, remember what Vincent Baker said about immersion? Immersion only happens if a player has authority to initiate action. Immersion requires that a player has a right to initiate the conflict unilaterally by the virtue of his position in the SIS. If Vincent is to be believed, that's what immersion is: your ability to be there without constant affirmation from the mechanics and other players. However, there's dangers to that: if you'll look at recent threads at the Chimera forum, you'll find a discussion about how Dust Devils allows players to rape character's of other players without player consent. That's what unilateral conflict initiation means: you're in a position to do stuff even when the other players don't want it.

[Jason Lee]

There are a few things people can mean when they say immersion:

1.  Identification with character.
2.  "Being" the character.  Having a sensation of being another person.
3.  Not knowing what's going to happen next.  Tension.

I'm sure there are more.   A player can lose identification with character by being unable to empathize with the situation or character.  The sensation of being a different person can be lost by anything that pulls the person out of character - slow resolution systems and out-of-character negotiation mechanics.  Tension loss can look like #2 in that metagame mechanics can cause it, but I think the actual loss of comes from too much control over results.  I discovered, eventually, that what I meant by immersion was a combination of 1 and 3.  My working hypothesis is that that combination is what creates the emotional response you get from being an audience to fiction.  If you go to a suspense movie, sit down in the theatre, and just watch the movie without trying to guess the ending then you get to be surprised, amazed, and shocked.  If you guess what'll happen next you lose that sensation.  Same sort of thing.  If you get too much power to influence the course of events then you lose tension.  It's sort of hard to be surprised by what happens if you know ahead of time.

It's possible that the problem is not from out-of-character negotiation itself, but instead from the loss of tension.  With both conflict and scene resolution combined you can end up with play where the only moments of tension are at beginning of the scene, and the scene itself is just filling in color based on the dice results.  You still have dynamic play across scenes, but not within it.

If this is the problem, you could try making the scale smaller and using conflict + action resolution.  That's about the right balance between control and tension for me.  Still using conflict resolution so I don't get screwed out of my intended result, and using action resolution so events unfold dynamically within a scene.