[Super Action Now!] Bubba Bad's bad day, + hobo clones & son of sasquatch

[Marshall Burns]

Callan,
I think I covered that in the middle paragraph of my previous post: "also, the other people don't have an arena to test their abilities either (without the possibility of success, it's not really a test)."

But if you're actually talking about something completely different, please feel free to correct me.


David,
Ah, here we are, here's the little frog under the fountain that's causing all the problems:  I patently disagree with your first sentence.

The kinds of performance and ability that SAN! rewards and is designed to reward is being gutsy and being funnier than the other guy, in a very one-upmanship kind of fashion.  Is this Gamist?  I say "Hell yes!"  There's more to Gamism than resource management, point husbanding, extrapolating probabilities, and other such crunchy bits; that's all just shit we've been left with from wargames!  (I say that as a former system-monkey.)  Historically, that seems to be all there's been to Step on Up about in terms of game texts, but you can Step on Up about anything; if one guy says, "Hey, I bet I can do (blank) better than you!" and the other guy says, "Oh yeah?  BRING IT!" then they're gonna be Stepping on Up.  Ever been to a poetry slam?  That's people competing based on the performance and creativity of their (usually improvised) poems, and it gets scary fierce.  If people can compete about creativity there, they can do it in RPGs.

You really can compete over just about anything.  As a side example, that one time I played Vampire, we were competing to see who could be the kewlest, darkest, spookiest, most gothin'-est guy in the group (it was middle school, what can I say?).  Not explicitly, but that's what was really going on.  We weren't exercising any Right to Dream, we certainly weren't trying to make Story Now; we were Stepping on Up.

-Marshall

[Callan S.]

Hi Marshall,

It doesn't answer my question. Whether at that point it's a trial or not is kind of ancillary . Is it a big deal or stale, when someone else is on a winning streak? I mean at the moment it becomes apparent they are.

[Marshall Burns]

Hi Callan,
The way I see it, the fun produced by Gamist play results from the test & demonstration, and if an arena for those is not present, or the process of pursuing them is undercut by unforeseen (and probably unagreed-upon) factors, the player will feel screwed and stop having fun.

Now, the moment that it becomes apparent that someone is on a winning streak, it can still be fun for the other guys because they're just that much more motivated to defeat that guy.  What I'm talking about is winning (whether by in-game rubrics, textual win-loss conditions, or Social Contract based challenges) consistently over several sessions of play.  Which it seems I wasn't very clear about.  Now, in my experience, when that's happened it's been me in that winning chair (this was rare in RPGs, mostly happened with board games and video games), people became unwilling to play me until a great deal of time had passed.

Does that answer your question?
-Marshall

[jag]

It seems clear to me that:
1. This game can be 'broken' by players who don't cooperate with the spirit of the game.
2. This game can be a riot for at least one game group.

The first is common to most RPGs.  The second is a good start.  The big question is whether the game is as enjoyable with more groups and their different dynamics.  That can only be answered by more playtests with different people.

It seems David is concerned mostly with the first point, which is that the optimal rule strategy isn't the desired social strategy.  Part of this might come down to the social contract -- by playing this game, everyone needs to implicitly agree to the statement "Tonight we're going to play a silly game with vague victory conditions.  Sure, you can be a jackass, and you might even win, but we'll frown at you while applauding the disco samurai that win-loses."

So your social reward, the real one, is sometimes conflicting with the mechanical reward -- at the end of the night, if one player spend half the time off his chair laughing, while the other only snickered twice, who actually won?

It does raise the question (probably related to the big question above) of whether there's a rules modification that brings the mechanical reward more in line with the social one, but honestly that might not even matter.  A game that, when approached with the right attitude, causes hilarity is an awesome one.  It just might not be suitable for the player who only cares about mechanical rewards.

james

[Callan S.]

Hi Marshall,

Yeah, that's alot more clear. I get that issolation, but basically it's the nature of people. In such an environment, your left weighing up getting a consistant opportunity to play Vs kicking ass. Tieing this back to resolution, I could see the conflict between wanting both of them influencing what stats are treated as part of a roll. Might be useful to test whether its there, next playtest.

[Marshall Burns]

James,
I see your points.  However, I would like to say that I don't think ANY game is not vulnerable to breaking by people who aren't willing to cooperate with the spirit of it.  As Ron pointed out, you can always knock the pieces off the board.

Perhaps the real problem here is, "How can I write the text such that it properly informs prospective players about the spirit of the game?"  Maybe the text already does that for some people, and maybe it doesn't for others.  I'm in the process of a third draft to clarify things and present them in a tastier fashion, so when I get done I'll have to ask for input on this issue.

So your social reward, the real one, is sometimes conflicting with the mechanical reward -- at the end of the night, if one player spend half the time off his chair laughing, while the other only snickered twice, who actually won?

Hang on--I might be wrong here, but I think there's a misunderstanding re: the poker face thing.  You get points by making at least one other player react (giggle, guffaw, gape, gasp, gag, or grin, by the rules) to your narration of your character's (either your PC or an NPC under you control) actions.  The only thing a poker face can do is stop someone else from getting points--but ONLY if everyone's doing it, because you only have to get a reaction out of a single other player.  Personally, if it's even possible to keep a poker face throughout this game (which I doubt), it will not avail anyone anything in this game, because I just can't see everyone doing it.  But maybe I'm wrong on that too.

As a second point, I don't consider mechanical "rewards" (experience, bonus dice, TILT!, d4 fallout Traits) to be rewards at all -- they're just a means to an end.  Whatever the END is, that's the reward.  And I don't think the END is ever "winning."  Winning is just another means to an end, with the end being whatever it is you get out of winning, which I believe is related to that "test & demonstration" thing.

And speaking of more playtests with other people... I don't have any other people.  I live in a small town.  But if anyone reading this wants to playtest, please do so!  There's a text available with all the rules here.  The two areas I'm currently concerned about are the TILT! economy (that is, are the prices appropriate?) and whether the text informs the players regarding the spirit of the game.

-Marshall

[jag]

Marshall,

I think our posts are actually mostly in agreement, although the language I used was deceptively neutral.  Any RPG can be broken, so the fact that there is some method to break your game isn't a big problem.  I also agree totally that mechanical rewards aren't the real rewards; it's always the social rewards that matter.  And an appropriate social contract between the players is all that's needed to make your game awesome.

BUT, having your mechanical rewards in line with the social ones might make this social contract easier easier.  Since the social contract is fuzzy (absent a forge-esque pre-game chat), what players see (after they briefly glance at the introduction) is the rule that 'If i laugh, i give the other person resources to use against me.'

I guess i want to reëmphasize that i think your game concept looks awesome, and this isn't some fatal flaw.  But it seems it would be some how "cleaner", and certainly more portable to random gamers you've never met, if following the mechanically preferred strategy was also the socially preferred (and therefor more important) strategy.

An example that comes to mind when i think of your game is the board game RoboRally.  Briefly, you pilot robots through a factory replete with conveyor belts, crushers, bottomless pits, and lasers, trying to get to the goal first.  To move your robots, you "program" them (with cards you draw) at the beginning of the turn.  Where the game shines is that each phase, the robot does what you instructed to, regardless of whether something has intervened -- so a set of instructions that made perfect sense in isolation can, after you've just been pushed slightly aside by someone else's robot, send you onto a conveyor belt that leads you into a crusher.

Now, in RoboRally, the mechanical rewards are getting power-ups and getting to the goal, but I can't honestly remember which games I've won and which i've lost.  The social reward comes when you slightly interfere with someone else's robot, so that their beautiful program that would have brought victory instead sends them into an endless pit, and the laughter and "oh shit!"s that result.

The point of this digression is that by pursuing the mechanical rewards/goals in RoboRally, you are unwittingly enabling the social ones.  You explicitly did this in SAN! by giving TILT! when you make other people laugh, which is awesome.  The flip side of this, tho, is that you give TILT! to other people when you laugh, so mechanically you should never be the first to laugh.  If you made it so there wasn't a mechanical incentive not to laugh, i think it would mesh even better.

Again, it looks like it'll play really well now, as long as people approach it in the right mindset.  But by resolving that one conflict, i think you might be increasing the number of mindsets[1] that make it work.

james
[1] As if one could quantify mindsets.

[Marshall Burns]

James,

Yeah, okay, I see what you mean.  And RoboRally sounds like a blast.

However, everything that I've said about the "point" of SAN! up to now might be wrong...  I had a chat with David yesterday, and it turns out I completely misunderstood what he was getting at, and what he was getting at made pretty damn good sense--and called stuff I thought I knew about the game into doubt.  I'm preparing a post for tomorrow dealing with David's points and the fact that I'm not sure what the game was actually doing, with a new play account with detailed use of the mechanics so that I can get outside opinions of what's really going on.  Plus I'ma have a discussion about it with the group Thursday.

-Marshall