New World of Darkness, GNS analysis?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Trevis,

While I might be wrong about this, in general:

I think game play might or might not be disfunctional.

Game texts might or might not be incoherent.

Thus, a group might take an incoherent game text, drift it as a group to the group's needs, and create functional play.

On the other hand, even a tightly built game like Dogs in the Vineyard would most likely become disfunctional if one player in the group wanted to micromanage the speed of bullets during a Conflict if the other players wanted to play the Conflicts the ways the rules are written.

I suspect you know these differences, but because the terms incoherent and disfunctional are so loaded -- and so misused and misunderdstood -- for so many people, I just wanted to make the distinction clear.

Best Regards,

Christopher

[Marco]

I suspect you know these differences, but because the terms incoherent and disfunctional are so loaded -- and so misused and misunderdstood -- for so many people, I just wanted to make the distinction clear.

Best Regards,

Christopher

Good point. Agreed in full.

I haven't seen the new rules, but I suspect that my analysis of them might be less incoherent than what's been suggested here.

I think there's a basic layering issue wherein some people/readers decide what role they want certain mechanics to play in the story and where that falls will have a lot to do as to whether a given rules-set delivers "what it sets out to" or tends to produce functional play with a given group.

-Marco

[Trevis Martin]

Chis,

Agreed.

Hence my reluctance to call them incoherent at first before examining the game text a little more.  I can say that I think the game is an improvment over its predecessor.  I'm aware that the terms incoherent and dysfunctional get bandied about a bit loosley sometimes and that's not what I'm intending to do. At least in that particular instance, the issue of Humanity that I discussed earlier,  a certain amount of incoherence is demonstrated.  All this said, I think I could have a good time playing it.  Because, damn it, I like the World of Darkness.  At least I did when I first bought Vampire.  It all got a little silly after that.  This feels like I felt when I bought first edition Vampire back in 91. I have an unfortunate suspicion that I will end up  tweaking things, but I plan to give it a go without changing anything first.

I want to add an interesting note to this.  I"ve been playing with a group all of which had never played before they played with me.  Most of them aren't into reading gamebooks, they just like to play.  We've played a LOT of indie games since we've been together and no Big press games I can think of.  (Well we played Witchcraft, but we just used the setting, we used the Pool for the system.)  The production values for the new Vampire book are fantastic, the book is a work of art and oozes atmosphere.  It's sexy.  All my players got excited about it just looking at the cover.  I don't want them to be disappointed by bad gameplay due to rules not delivering on that promise.  I've talked to them some about my past experiences with the game's previous incarnations (I played WoD for 8 years.)  So we'll try to avoid the pitfalls.

Marco, I'd be very interested to hear your analysis.  In fact I'd be intersted to hear anyone else's analysis who has read or played the game under the new rules.

best,

Trevis

[Marco]

Marco, I'd be very interested to hear your analysis.  In fact I'd be intersted to hear anyone else's analysis who has read or played the game under the new rules.

best,

Trevis

I haven't read the game much less played it so I can't do any analysis save for looking at what I've read here which is certainly going to be incomplete. My observations are only that. I have two:

1. Very few games "say what their objectives are" in the sense of a real design specification. When designer's notes are read on that matter, even if the designers employ Forge specific terminology there's plenty of room for more than one interpertation or outright disagreement.

2. The fact that one can't lose one's PC to humanity doesn't seem to, IMO, preclude one making a choice concerning one's animal nature. The fact that one could get limitations put on their character's portrayal doesn't, IMO, preclude Narrativist choice either--not in a meaingful way across a spectrum of possible Premises.

This is especially true, IMO, if one risks acquiring such defects during the game. The lack of a terminal condition might even be a bonus for some people.* Caveat: I don't know what the effects are or how severely they circumscribe roleplaying so I'd need to see the book to really have a good idea of what they're doing there.

But the idea that any game-effect on character choice precludes Narrativist play--or even doesn't facilitate it--seems like synechdote to me. It simply removes choice in one potential area on one particular topic. I believe that the presence of mechanical-force, if know to exist by the player (i.e. the player isn't surprised by the GM invoking the rule but rather plays consciously knowing it) could be a powerful aid to raising the stakes against a given premise.

-Marco
* When we play, mostly, if you die, you are out of the game for quite some time. This is because there are priority issues over how new characters are introduced and how time will be split (it isn't out of meanness--everyone is working to get you back in--but it could take like 40min to 4 hours). The presence of terminal conditions against that social contact takes a lot of the 'choice' out of play. I wouldn't risk that last point of humanity unless I was ready to be done with the game. That's something I bring to the table apart from any rules but it certianly has a powerful impact on play.

Secondly, for example, many of the games I play are structured as one-story-games. Although it's not like none of our players care about XP, in 50% of our gaming it isn't relevant (Xp is 'given out' at the end of the scenario as per the rules--but the characters will never be played again)

[Robert Bohl]

Caveat: I don't know what the effects are or how severely they circumscribe roleplaying so I'd need to see the book to really have a good idea of what they're doing there.

Most of the effects are on the order of losing a die or two for social interactions and being asked to play a certain mental illness that is known in the real world.

[Valamir]

Couple of points.

1) I agree that from what I've heard of the new edition that I get much more of a First Edition vibe from it.  I was a First Edition whore.  I had every Vampire book up until they ruined it (an even I peg  chronologically at about the time Mage was first released).  I may actually consider picking this up.


2) From what I've heard so far the folks at WW still don't have the cahones to take the plunge and actually make the game they really want.  Case in point, the text on awarding the "roleplaying bonus" above.

Sure its a trivial matter to change or ignore it, but embedded in those few lines are some SERIOUSLY major insights into the sort of thought process that went into the game's development.

Consider "Nothing was out of character" combine this with the text listing the range of behavior relative to different humanity levels and you pretty much have a clear indication that the designers vision is to keep characters in a pretty tight box.  You may have more control in this edition over the shape and size of that box but there is still the assumption that these parameters are necessary (or even helpful) for good play.  

Consider further that both this and the restriction on out of character information are required to earn the "roleplaying bonus".  In other words, this is their definition of "good roleplaying".  They are coming right out and saying that using OOC information is bad roleplaying and if you do it you don't get this bonus...this bonus is reserved only for good roleplayers.  That highlights pretty dramatically the extremely narrow range of behaviors that the designers of this game consider to constitute desireable play, and those fundamental assumptions...regardless of how easy it is to throw out this particular rule...will continue to pervade their entire design.


This quote kills me:

So how can a Kindred survive the Requiem? How can he preserve some shred of Human conscience when the Beast never tires? What limit can he set to his own monstrosity?

The characters must answer that question for themselves. That's what Vampire: The Requiem is all about. (p185)

What a potentially amazing mission statement.  Until you get to the part about "characters".

The characters decide for themselves?  Characters can decide nothing for themselves.  Characters can decide only what their players decide for them.  Yet they don't have the cohones to put the word players there.  They can't bring themselves to actually say "The players must answer that question for themselves".  Because if they said that they'd have to throw out all of that nonsense they wrote in the Roleplaying bonus about OOC knowledge and playing "in character".

Yet that's what they REALLY want.  The game they REALLY want to play is the game that puts "PLAYER" into that sentence in big capital letters (like Sorcerer does).  It what they've wanted since the beginning.  Its what all of their pompous meanderings about "story telling" have been despirately seeking.  But they can't get past their antiquated roleplaying dogma long enough to see it.  Until they do their games will continue to be written incoherently.

WW designers are wise in many ways.  But where they have failed from the beginning and continue to fail today is that they can't recognize that you can never (save by happy accident) get the sort of gut wrenching "fight the beast" stories they want consistantly until you turn control over to the players.  And turning control over to the players is what they fear most (even the "golden rule" is about GM control in the end).

[Robert Bohl]

Consider "Nothing was out of character" combine this with the text listing the range of behavior relative to different humanity levels and you pretty much have a clear indication that the designers vision is to keep characters in a pretty tight box.  You may have more control in this edition over the shape and size of that box but there is still the assumption that these parameters are necessary (or even helpful) for good play.

Ethan Skemp, the Werewolf: The Forsaken developer has had some stuff to say about the Morality system that leads me to believe he doesn't intend it to be proscriptive, but they do want it to model some of the elements in horror fiction.

(in reply to the question: if you had a Humanity of, say, 3, doesn't that mean that your character wouldn't plausably return a lost baby to her mother? Wouldn't it be more "in-character" (as humanity dictates) for the Vamp to eat said baby?)

Depends. Do you need to get something out of the mother? (Am I honestly making a fetch-quest reference here?) Are you the sort of creature that's amused by outbursts of emotion, and therefore are somewhat curious to see just how worked up the mother might be? Humanity determines the level of your moral degradation, but it doesn't define your personality beyond that. It would even be possible to have a low-Humanity monster who is really trying to be virtuous, but who doesn't really understand how to do it right — maybe he really wants to take the baby back, but winds up shaking it violently so that it's nice and quiet when it's returned to the mother, so she doesn't have to worry any more. Your Humanity trait can be interpreted into different personalities, just as a high Stamina can equally mean a big Brock Lesnar-sized slab of beef or a lean and wiry outdoorsman who is just plain tough as nails.

Actually, as far as "absolute" goes, the level of crime is detailed, but not the specifics. For example, if you kill someone in self-defense, is that an "impassioned crime?" The Storyteller has all reason to rule otherwise, as befits his interpretation of what "impassioned crime" means.

3. The rewards for being good are miniscule and fleeting,

Whether this is factual or not, it is probably worth remembering that in a World of Darkness, presumably there aren't many rewards for being good. Otherwise, more people would be good.

See also: Real life.

The greater point here is that one of the major tropes of a horror setting or horror literature is degeneration — experiencing terrible things doesn't make you more badass, it tends to make you worse off than you were. The "I'm evil, I shouldn't be subject to any degeneration rules" defense is more appropriate to an action game with horror motifs, something like Blade or Van Helsing. Now, admittedly that's how a lot of people like to play World of Darkness games — but we try to build the rules so that there's more to it than that.

I realize "more to it than that" is a value-judging statement, but I think that's a knowing indication of bias rather than "this is what's right."

If it were me, and a player really wanted to play an evil character, I'd let him start with a lower Morality than usual; just make a few degeneration rolls, and we'll get started. Vito isn't a character who is morally upstanding according to the morality system of his peers (though he might have the mobster equivalent of Status or Renown); he's an experienced character who has already undergone the loss of Morality so that he is hardened enough to accept that he kills and brutalizes people for money. Maybe Vito has a mild derangement when he begins play; it'd be appropriate. (I like Suspicious for a potential mobster character.) A low-Morality made man is interesting, and a mild derangement doesn't destroy the character's functionality or plausibility. If anything, it makes Vito more interesting than Generic Lawful Evil Antihero #652.

Consider further that both this and the restriction on out of character information are required to earn the "roleplaying bonus".  In other words, this is their definition of "good roleplaying".  They are coming right out and saying that using OOC information is bad roleplaying and if you do it you don't get this bonus...this bonus is reserved only for good roleplayers.

That "good" and "bad" stuff is certainly non-GNS talk, but don't you think it could be interpreted to be a character-stance (if memory serves and that is the antonym of actor-stance), simulationist focus?

The characters decide for themselves?  Characters can decide nothing for themselves.  Characters can decide only what their players decide for them.

Couldn't that be an artifact of not paying as close attention to the difference between character and player?  A difference that is underlined by the GNS philosophy?  And betraying a simulationist stance?

I seem to remember reading that it is considered non-destructive/dysfunctional to try to incorporate more than one play style in a game.  That is, what if this makes narrativist-type statements, but functionally is a Narrativist/Simulationist game?

I will also note that they changed the name of their game from the Storyteller system to the Storytelling system.  They explicitly state that they've done this to encourage the view of the game as participatory Storytelling by the entire group, rather than one person telling a story to a passive table.

[Marco]

Couldn't that be an artifact of not paying as close attention to the difference between character and player?  A difference that is underlined by the GNS philosophy?  And betraying a simulationist stance?

I would say more "Immersive" than "simulationist." Specifically, I'd guess Actor Stance. From a certain standpoint characters do indeed make decisions all the time and, in fact, play can be designed to 'create the story' wherein the decision the character makes is important.

This is an immersive playstyle and could be Narrativist, Sim, or Gamist depending on how the player relates to the decisions he has his characters make.

-Marco

[Robert Bohl]

Couldn't that be an artifact of not paying as close attention to the difference between character and player?  A difference that is underlined by the GNS philosophy?  And betraying a simulationist stance?

I would say more "Immersive" than "simulationist." Specifically, I'd guess Actor Stance. From a certain standpoint characters do indeed make decisions all the time and, in fact, play can be designed to 'create the story' wherein the decision the character makes is important.

This is an immersive playstyle and could be Narrativist, Sim, or Gamist depending on how the player relates to the decisions he has his characters make.

Understood.  Except I thought that the Actor Stance was acknowledging the player as the primary issue in decisions made by the character.  I thought there was a name for that other stance, the one that involves thinking character-first.

[Marco]

Understood.  Except I thought that the Actor Stance was acknowledging the player as the primary issue in decisions made by the character.  I thought there was a name for that other stance, the one that involves thinking character-first.

Unless I am making mistakes here, Actor is an immersive stance and Author is the player-first stance.

-Marco

[Robert Bohl]

Understood.  Except I thought that the Actor Stance was acknowledging the player as the primary issue in decisions made by the character.  I thought there was a name for that other stance, the one that involves thinking character-first.

Unless I am making mistakes here, Actor is an immersive stance and Author is the player-first stance.

I think you're right.

I want to thank everyone for being patient with my shakiness on the terminology here.

Is an Actor stance considered to be more illegitimate or dysfunctional?  Or was Valimar expressing his/her opinion?

[Marco]

Is an Actor stance considered to be more illegitimate or dysfunctional?  Or was Valimar expressing his/her opinion?

No. And I don't think that's what Ralph was saying at all (although I did feel that his assessment of the game was a bit of a personal point of view stated as an objective measurement).

What commonly happens (although not, I think, with Ralph) is that immersive play is seen as being non-narrativist or maybe weakly narrativist. This isn't anywhere in the definition or essay unless you decide Story Now is 'Story on Purpose' and 'On Purpose' means Actor or Director stance.

But that's an interpertation that, IMO, gets pretty far away from the core issue of Premise which is as powefully addressed from any of those three stances.

-Marco

[Robert Bohl]

So then the root of the problem is it's coming back to "claiming" to be a narrativist game but having too much simulationist "noise" to make that claim credible?

What about the issue of games that try and use more than one play style?  Would it be most accurate to define World of Darkness 2.0 as a simulationist game with Narrativist color?  Is that a problem?

[Eero Tuovinen]

[edited to note the crossposting]

Is an Actor stance considered to be more illegitimate or dysfunctional?  Or was Valimar expressing his/her opinion?

No, he was saying that in his opinion the WW folks really try to make a nar game, but due to historical reasons are stuck with only sim-inducive tools. The issue of stance was used only as an indicator and example; what Valamir meant was that the way they come back to Actor stance indicates their confusion about how to go about in pursuing their design goals.

Actor stance is a valid and powerful tool, but like all tools, it's only suitable for certain kinds of game. It doesn't entail narrativism, but neither is it completely agenda neutral: historically the breadth of games designed have tended to use Actor stance for sim and gam, and the other stances solely for narrativistic play (and GMs, of course). There is, however, plenty of counterexamples that prove that ultimately you can use any stances in combination to pursue any agenda.

Anyway, that's another discussion. From what's been said in the thread the WW rpg paradigm hasn't really moved anywhere since the last round of updating; the stuff I've read from them has always been a confused mismash of legacy system stuff combined with genre-emulative sim priorities with no real sense about how to apply system to achieve the desired goals. Apparently the new game's not an exception, not that I expected it to be.

That being the case, I find evaluating WW stuff GNS-wise somewhat useless; as the system and paradigm are organically developed, it's much more illuminative to recognize and classify the notions of Storyteller system in a historical manner: track the individual impulses and their origins, and therefore understand why the system is what it is.

GNS analysis of systems outside play is rarely useful, as most systems still are not simple and unambiguous enough to really force any agendas or deal with them in any way. A statistical analysis would conseivably be possible if one were inclined to analyze enough individual groups to find out how the system is applied in average. But asking about the Storyteller system in abstract, the best answer I can give is that it's an incoherent design: different people drift it in different ways to come to a working compromise, and that might well be under any of the agendas.

[Marco]

So then the root of the problem is it's coming back to "claiming" to be a narrativist game but having too much simulationist "noise" to make that claim credible?

What about the issue of games that try and use more than one play style?  Would it be most accurate to define World of Darkness 2.0 as a simulationist game with Narrativist color?  Is that a problem?

I don't like the descriptor of "Simulationist with Narrativist Color." I think that making statements like that boarders on one-true-wayism and doesn't hold up to analysis when the set of players and player priorities are changed (i.e. that's a vaild descrition as to how group A interacts with the ruleset but not group B).

Basically there has been an observation that some rulesets cause problems for some people in ways that follow a trend. That's the phenomena that is described as Incoherent.

The usual rejoiner from the group that the ruleset does not cause problems for is "you don't get it." (I speak historically here from posts on The Forge and RPG.net and my own experience--not from any greater breadth of knowledge).

I suspect that for a group that 'gets it' the game will play coherently.* For a group that doesn't like the way mechanics intersect with themes it'll cause problems--but that's a group thing, IMO.

-Marco
* The possiblity of drift does make this cloudy. I think that as soon as characters and a situation are created with a traditional system the game has been in some sense 'drifted.' There's clearly some room for discussion there.