[The Puddle] Middle Earth game and rules questions

[johnmarron]

I was going to make an actual play post about the Middle Earth Puddle game I'm running at the moment, but one of the players (Chris - CPXB here) made a post about the game on RPGNet that did such a good job of describing the session, I thought I would just include a link to that post.  I hope this isn't a Forge no-no.  I also wanted to ask people's opinions on a couple of rules questions, which I'll include below the link.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=137628&highlight=puddle

   As we sat down to begin our first session of play, the two players had a couple of questions for me.  First, they wanted to know how the rules would handle player vs player conflicts.  My immediate thought was that, given our pre-game situation discussion, this probably wouldn't come up, but my decision was that if it did become an issue, I would have both players roll and whoever got the most successes would get to narrate first.

   The second question was, what happens if two PCs are involved in the same event?  In this case, I decided that both would roll, and the outcomes of the individual rolls would determine who narrated.  The only thought I had on order of narration was that successful player narration would occur before any GM narration.  This came up in the first session when one player rolled a failure and the other a player narrated success in a combat scene.  In play, this worked out fine and the successful player did his narration after which I narrated the outcome for the unsuccessful player.

    I find it somewhat ironic that purely by chance our game turned out to be set in the same setting and time period as Cassidy's example game in the Puddle rules.  One player (Adrienne) expressed some trepidation before the game about the level of player narration and directorial control expected of her, but since both players are recent (and enthusiastic!) converts to Universalis, I knew this would not be a problem.  I told her that if she could handle (and enjoy) Universalis, the Puddle would be a breeze because her  narrative responsibilities were actually less in this game (no player scene framing, no narration of negative or neutral outcomes, more existing GM-created backstory and NPCs to work with, etc.) than in Uni.

   Anyway, we're doing our second session tonight and I think the game is going great.  My first attempt at a Puddle game last year ended in disaster due in part to my poor pre-game prep along with a group of players with no experience with player-empowering systems like this one.  This game has reassured me that the great potential I saw in reading the Pool and Puddle was actually real.

John Marron

[Paul Czege]

Hey John,

The http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=787">relevant historical conversation.

Paul

[johnmarron]

Hey John,

The relevant historical conversation.

Paul

Paul,
  Thanks for the link.  I read that discussion last year before my first failed Puddle game, but had forgotten it.

John

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

John, linking to the RPG.net discussion is A-OK and vastly preferred over mirroring it here. So that's all good.

I'm interested in any comparison you can make between this session and the "failed" one. What made the difference?

Best,
Ron

[johnmarron]

I'm interested in any comparison you can make between this session and the "failed" one. What made the difference?

Best,
Ron

Ron,

I think there are a couple of major factors that differed between the two Puddle games (both of which used Middle Earth as a setting).  In my first attempt (with a different group of 4 players), I failed to have any real pre-game discussion of what kind of game we were going to play, initial situation, kickers for characters, etc.  I asked for player input, but here the second factor came into play.  These guys were definitely traditional D&D style players, and I think they were very uncomfortable with the idea that I wanted their input on "plot" and setting.  They were expecting a much more passive experience in which they showed up with characters and I provided them with a story, despite my repeated attempts to explain how the Puddle was different, and how this new style of play differed from the previous games they had been in.  

I'll take most of the blame for the game collapsing, since I obviously didn't convey what kind of game I was looking for to them very well.  I should have taken a more "forceful" or heavy-handed approach during character generation, to at least have the players work out some ties to the general situation or other characters.  Instead, we ended up with a definite non-situation style game with 4 disparate characters with no reason to become involved in the plot-seed I had (red flag right there, but getting suggestions of what they wanted in the game out of these guys was like pulling teeth), or have anything to do with each other.  I don't recall exactly when we played last year, but I'm hoping it was before I read Ralph and Balbinus' RPGNet thread about situation driven play, otherwise I really dropped the ball.

The same two factors (in reverse) are what is making this current Puddle game work.  We had an extensive pre-game discussion about setting and situation, and the 2 players came up with characters that are tied strongly to the situation (which is:  The Witch-King of Angmar is launching an invasion to conquer Rhudaur).  Chris's character is a border lord who, in the course of the game, will have to decide if it is better to fight the rising evil and probably be defeated, or to join the enemy at the cost of his "soul", along with his independence and the freedom of his people.   Adrienne's character is the half-caste bastard sister of the lord of the next keep north which has already fallen to the enemy.  Her character has strong ties to the common people of her land, and during the course of the game will have to make the same decision about fighting the enemy, as well as determing if she will come out of the shadow of her once powerful brother and become more of her own person.  Good characters, with reasons to interact (if the players want to), excellent reasons to engage with the situation, and two people whose stories and decisions we all want to see played out.

The other element working in our favor is the fact that I introduced these guys to Universalis a while back.  Previous to that they had mainly played crunchy traditional games (mostly D&D), but they took to Universalis in a big way, and now have an ongoing weekly Uni game (which I don't play in due to time constraints).  Given their exposure to much more player empowerment and directorial control in Universalis, at least the concepts behind the Puddle weren't completely alien to them, as they were to my earlier group.  Chris (being usually the GM for their games) slipped into narration and directorial control easily.  Adrienne, whose GMing experience is more limited, took a little longer to warm up to providing more  description and using all of that power, but now she's an old pro at it.

I think the players are enjoying the game as well, and I think I've made a couple of converts to this style of play (finally!  before these guys it was a long dry spell of not playing or playing in not very fun traditional games for me).  Our next project, after the Puddle wraps up in a couple of weeks, is either a Heroquest game run by Adrienne or an Exalted game using the  Extreme Vengeance rules run by Chris, so I'm a very happy gamer these days.

John

[CPXB]

I am finding games that focus on player empowerment and narrativist control to be a lot of fun.  Adrienne, I am sure, feels the same way.  I'm sorta getting an urge to do something crunchier, but it is very likely that I will be doing Extreme Vengeance, next, hehe, which I think is a great game for bringing traditional, crunchy-system, fortune-at-the-end gamers into a more description and narration oriented games with fortune-in-the-middle.  The crunch will likely have to wait a while.  :D

Indeed, since Adrienne and I will be moving in about two years, I think it is quite likely that I will try to lure gamers into our group with a game like Extreme Vengeance.  It will have a broad appeal (hey, who doesn't like action movies?) and I'll be able to slip some of this stuff in under the table at them, weeding out the ones I know won't "fit in" with my gaming style.

[Cassidy]

Hi John,

Thanks for trying out The Puddle, happy to see you seem to be enjoying it.

In answer to your questions, heres what we do...

With Player vs Player events whoever rolls the most successes gets the opportunity to "Guide the Event". If there is a tie then whoever has the most dice left in their dice pool after rolling gets to "Guide the Event". If all players roll the same number of successes and they all have the same number of dice left in their dice pools then the GM gets to "Guides the Event".

With multiple events in the same scene (A big melee scene for example) the GM usually asks for a roll from each participant treating the outcomes as sub-events to the main event.

Preperation as you've found is essential. Sometimes there may be a lull in play and the players will look to the GM for inspiration and guidance.  Having a few roughly formed ideas, scenes and potentially interesting events at the ready is a great help. Be prepared though to ditch your ideas and preparation in an instant if they don't make sense in the context of the developing story. Be prepared but be flexible.

Regards,

Cassidy.

[johnmarron]

Here are a couple more rules issues / questions that arose in our second session of play (documented in the RPGnet thread linked in the first post of this thread).

The first involves what I'm calling an "idea roll".  This is a common situtation in my experience in which the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information.  This would normally be handled with some kind of perception roll, and may be an artifact of traditional style games that doesn't really have a place in nar type games.  One thought we had was for the GM to give the player a single die to roll to see if they get the information.  If this die comes up neutral or positive, they get to keep it an add it to their pool (we've had serious pool depletion in our games, so I'm not very concerned about pool inflation).  However, the more I think about it, the less I see the need for this rule.  I think I just need to get past the old "perception check" mode and find a way to work in information that moves the story forward and ignore info that isn't particularly relevant.

The second house rule we instituted was a change to the "At Death's Door" rule.  As stated in The Puddle, when you get a negative outcome to a potentially lethal event, the GM gives you a die and you roll your entire pool (including the "gift" die).  If you get any positives (+ or 5-6), you live, otherwise you die, and in either case the player narrates the outcome.  Given the phenomenally bad rolls my players were making, we ammended the rule to say that if you roll a neutral outcome, your character lives but is in very bad shape, and the player still narrates the outcome of any "survival" roll.  This discussion came up after one player rolled 5 negatives and one neutral on a combat event, and was about to roll for survival with his one remaining die and the GM gift die.  He got two neutral results, and the player narrated his severe beating at the hands of a Giant.  Suddenly our overconfident warrior character was reduced to relying on the non-combatant female character for survival.

I like the fact that there is still a strong chance for character death in potentially lethal situtaions in the Puddle (it keeps tension up very nicely in a non-crunchy way), but I also thought it might be a bit too lethal (we've had one survival roll in each session, mainly due to very bad die rolls and low pools, and I thought it would be pretty anti-climactic for one of the two protagonists to die so soon in the story).

Thoughts?

John

[Sean]

I had that issue too, running Sorcerer. I thought: well, maybe they should get some extra information here, have them roll Will or Lore vs. an arbitrary GM difficulty score. These rolls were definitely experienced as pointless and/or irritating during play by my players.

One way to look at it is like this: a request for information is a request for the GM to introduce more material into play. If both of you want that material to be there, then just give it out. In the normal situation where the player requests it, this decision defaults to the GM.

But when the GM is just thinking 'ok, here's some information, do they know it or not?' the players' desires are not being consulted except in the abstract. So really what's happening in this situation is that the GM is rolling against himself, maybe using a player's score (or having a player roll the dice) to inform his decision.

This technique is not completely useless, but I think it is vastly over-used in most RPGs, including non-Narrativist-facilitating ones. An alternate technique, which also shows up in very traditional RPGs, is for the GM to think of a way to give a player a hint without rolling which does not obviously reveal everything that's going on, but which might allow a smart player to either figure it out upon reflection, or request a more specific sort of perception/idea on their own, which can then be adjudicated by simple response or die roll depending on the needs of the situation and/or the plausibility of the request.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi John,

I agree with your conclusions for both of your questions - in a way, those aren't questions at all, are they? You provide your own answers pretty solidly.

Anyway, you asked for thoughts, so I think that:

the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information.

is one of those phrases that seems reasonable on the face of it, and certainly accords with experiences and procedures that we're familiar with, but upon examination sort of evaporates. What remains includes:

1. The GM wants to impart information. If this is the case, it should be imparted. Many a classic film or novel is notable for a supporting or even bit character who arrives, blurts out crucial information, and then leaves. Even a newspaper blowing over a character's feet counts.

It's also worth considering that information imparted to any single character in the imaginary situation is now available to every person at the actual real play-situation. You've probably already discovered that if character X "needs to know," but character Y is the one who finds out, that the players will most enthusiastically engineer some way for the information to be transferred among the characters, or equally enthusiastically withhold it, whichever yields the most exciting and engaging circumstances.

2. The GM doesn't want to impart information. In which case, it shouldn't get imparted. This is actually vanishingly rare, in my experience - except in a kind of weird psychological way, in which the GM would say he wants to impart it, but his behavior is intensely protective or obfuscatory, making imparting the information nearly impossible. I think it's usually a fairly messed-up play-situation which yields this behavior, and worth avoiding from the git-go rather than trying to figure out how to resolve it.

3. (This is perhaps the "missing link" that a lot of people are looking for) Is acquiring the information part of a conceivable conflict? If so, then ah-ha! The dice return full force to the picture, and the information's role and context suddenly become clear as day in a system like The Pool/Puddle. Just run it as usual - who is the character in conflict with, whether present or absent? Then ask these questions: What will immediately change given the outcomes of the conflict? What information is available given specific outcomes, and what information is available just because the conflict occurs at all?

I think that #3 provides the Fortune-based uncertainty that people are often looking for in providing information without it being the weird and messed-up power struggle that #2 often becomes. Sean, I strongly recommend that you consider this option carefully when GMing Sorcerer.

Your second point, about death's door, seems perfectly reasonable to me. Fatality is one of those dials that Pool/etc play tends to have to set per group.

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

Hi Ron -

Just a quick note on your #2. In that case I tend to allow rolls for the information. If the player wants something and I don't, then that's what the dice are for, to decide who gets their way.

Your #3 is important for me though. If you're not sure what to do with a potential information-introducing situation, consider the consequences of success and failure, what's at stake. If there are any, then it's just a regular ol' conflict. If there aren't any, then default to yes, no, or roll. But if you're the GM and you're the only one who knows that some information-introduction is at stake, then 'roll' should almost never occur - you should just make a decision. Maybe that's why you worded #2 the way you did, in the light of #3.

So I'm flowcharting it like this:

player requests information - GM decides yes/no - if yes, give it out - if no, roll, unless the request is beyond the pale for some reason

GM considers whether to give out information or ideas - is there anything at stake here? - if yes, initiate conflict as usual - if no, just make a decision quickly, probably giving it out most of the time (since if you thought of it that probably means you think it's important).

If I had been quicker to process the presence or absence of information in terms of stakes and consequences up front those less-satisfactory play moments wouldn't have happened in the Sorcerer game.

[Cassidy]

Interesting questions John.

Pretty much agree with your two points.

If you're the GM and you want to impart an idea or convey information to the players then it's easier to just do it, no roll needed. I guess you pretty much play that way in any case.

Player initiated ideas seem a little different though. Player ideas are usually prefixed by out of game statement from players like "What if?" or "What would happen if?". When they crop up I will usually ask for a roll. If the player gets enough +'s then away they go and their idea becomes part of the story. If not, then I'll take their idea and run with it myself or try to put an (hopefully) interesting spin on it in some way.

Tweaking the "At Death's Door" roll is a good idea if it helps moderate the "lethality" of the game.

"Deaths door" events occur regularly in our games also although the players have a tendency of escaping the grim reaper time and again. In the game I'm running at the moment I think we must have had 5 or 6 "deaths door" events before we had our first fatality. The player in question rolled 3 dice and he actually held 1 dice back so confident was he of success. He failed to roll a + and the shock was palpable (and quite funny) because he and the other players had begun to think that cheating death wasn't too difficult.

On a side note, regarding dwindling dice pools. As GM I reckon I hand out an extra dice 7 times out of 10, and most dice rolls made by players are only 2 or 3 dice. Players usually end a session with at least 2 or 3 to spare. For sure, unlucky rolls do occur, but thats part of the game, thats the gamble.

When we first started playing the players tended to roll 3 or 4 dice almost all the time, even for non-crucial or trivial events. They got a little "dice drunk" looking at their pool dice and couldn't resist the temptation to roll them at every opportunity. Consequently players started running out of dice but over time they began moderating the number of dice they roll, choosing to save their gambles for what they perceive to be the key events.

[johnmarron]

Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts on these issues.

Ron -

As I typed in my last post my thoughts on why I was wanting the players to make the "perception roll" became clearer (it's basically an old habit), but your three options really clarified this for me.   If the information helps the story along, give it out, if not, ignore it, and if it leads to a dramatic conflict, roll it like any other conflict.

Sean -

I think my problem with an information giving event will be solved by considering Ron's three options and deciding which applies (hopefully not #2...)  I guess I feel that my games (particularly the Puddle) are about cooperative story-telling, so I shouldn't see the handing out of information as any kind of "reward" or "contest" between me and the players.

Cassidy -

Thanks for your thoughts.  It's good to hear from someone who (obviously) has a fair amount of actual play experience with The Puddle.  My players have tended to make large die rolls (one player has rolled all of his pool for almost every combat scene), and consequently have suffered some serious losses of dice (and in lethal situations, no less).  We'll see if this behavior modifies as the game goes on.  We've come very close to losing characters on both Death's Door rolls (one player rolled 2 dice and got 1 + and 1 -, the other rolled 2 dice and got 2 blanks, which technically should have killed the character).  

Do you and your group still play The Puddle on any kind of regular basis?  I'm curious about what other genres or settings you have used the rules for.  I'm aware of your ME game, as well as the X-filesish supernatural agent game.

John

[MarcoBrucale]

Just two quick side-notes:

JohnMarron wrote:
I like the fact that there is still a strong chance for character death in potentially lethal situtaions in the Puddle (it keeps tension up very nicely in a non-crunchy way), but I also thought it might be a bit too lethal (we've had one survival roll in each session, mainly due to very bad die rolls and low pools, and I thought it would be pretty anti-climactic for one of the two protagonists to die so soon in the story).

1) IMHO changing the death door rule won't solve the very specific issue you address here. It would change the probability distribution of death door rolls, making it easier for the characters to survive; but an anti-climatic early death is still possible.
No matter how simple the system is, some sort of 'drama' resolutions traditionally tends to creep in the game in situations like this.
And now for the controversial bit: in the Pool and its variants, the player can be allowed to exert a sort of 'meta-control' on the flow of the game that is only partially linked to the actual presence of her main character (e.g. TQB idea rolls). This doesn't happen in 'traditional' RPGs. So, in a traditional RPG you would have to cheat slightly here and there to prevent an early death of a character that could ruin the link between the player and the game being played. If your D&D thief dies in disarming the first trap only 10' into a session, the player is in for a rather dull evening.
But with the Pool, you could just narrate the early, dramatic, unexpected death of a main character and go on with the story (literature is full of moving examples, from Homer's Iliad onwards). The player could continue to be involved in the game by adding crative input via her pool, and could even create her next main character via a MoV...
So my point is, I only played the Pool once, but I doubt that I'll ever reject any result of a dice roll. It's part of the fun.

the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information.

2) What to do? I'm happy this is being discussed, beacuse I always regarded this very situation as a crucial, almost 'diagnostic' one. It's very interesting to ask this question to GMs and players, and discuss their answers, because they will reveal to you a lot of things about their approach to role-playing. Ron Edwards' answer, for example, could be regarded as the 'perfect Narrativist answer'. But ask the same question to a Gamist or a Simulationist and their answers will be extremely different.
The trick here is that the question refers to the very essence of roleplaying, i.e, the continuous, mutual exchange of 'new' information among players. I think that the mechanical, social, even ethical restrictions on the sharing of information during an RPG session is what defines the type of role-playing being played. But perhaps I'm going a bit off-topic now...

Let me say again that all of the above is strictly MveryHO.

Marco Brucale

[Cassidy]

Do you and your group still play The Puddle on any kind of regular basis?  I'm curious about what other genres or settings you have used the rules for.  I'm aware of your ME game, as well as the X-filesish supernatural agent game.John

Yes we do. One of the other guys is currently running a paranormal/supernatural cross over game based on a UK Television Series called Ultraviolet (Sort of Anne Rice's Talamasca operating as a sponsored government agency with guns thwarting the plans and designs of Vampiresque antagonists), click here for an overview.

Everyone saw the original TV series so there was a good baseline to launch from. It's been running about 8 sessions now and I guess there are perhaps another 3 or 4 left. Characters and plot are well established, the story is whizzing along at a furious pace and everyone is really into it. I can see us running it again at some point.