[WHFR][CoC]Two experiences, both bad, where am I going wrong

[diadochi]

Hiya Rob,

Hope all is well.

If you went to the games club and asked them why they play, I dare say that "to have fun" would feature prominently among the responses. ....
That said, when I was at that club, a lot of the players seemed bored a lot of the time.

Yeah, it's obvious really. I guess they've either found their comfort zone or are too tired after a days work to care. I did try to say what I liked, but I think it went in one ear and out the other. I don't think they took me seriously, their view being this is the way we play, either like it or leave.

Whats Sword & Sorcery about? How does its mechanics work?

I've never considered a narrative game in the past due my fear it would end up as an acting contest or completion to see would can describe their actions most impressively, two things I would lose every time with my below-average English language skills, and yes it is my first language.

Dave

[James_Nostack]

Hi Dave -- Sorcerer & Sword is a supplement to Ron Edwards' game Sorcerer.  The main Sorcerer rulebook implicitly assumes a modern day occult sort of game, but Sorcerer & Sword adapts the game to Pulp Fantasy stories, like Conan and the Lankhmar stories.  It's pretty much at the top of my "want to play" list.

There should be some sample mechanics listed on the website under the "Apprentice" download, which should give you a feel for how the game works. 

Based on your criteria of --
(a) rolling dice where it actually means something very important, and
(b) having stuff actually *happen*--

Sorcerer might be a good fit for you.  It's the least "pointless" game I know.

[CPXB]

David,

Then mostly the problem is solved, if you found a group you synch with.  ;)  From where I sat, it just seemed pretty obvious that these guys weren't for you.  You had your thing that you wanted to do and they had their thing they wanted to do -- and there's nothing wrong with playing how you enjoy, but you want to have choices and get to the action and these people didn't, so it's good you found another group, I'm thinking.

Out of interest, I'm not sure what indie games are. What indie games do you like?

An indie game is a game designed and wholly owned by its designer.  Pretty much the Forge is dedicated to indie games, and a lot of the people here are (very talented) indie game designers.  If you go to the game message boards they're a slew of indie games.

Well, right now, my favorite game is Universalis.   The short description for Universalis is that it is a game where GM tasks are distributed over the entire group (there is no "GM" per se, but everyone does what the GM does) and no fixed player characters (anyone can play any character), with a unified rules set that allows the players to handle any conflict equally (a feature of many indie games, I should add).  I'm also playing The Puddle, which is a variation of The Pool, which is a very rules light game (you should look at it, because the odds are if you're new around here that what indie game afficionados think is rules light is much, much lighter than what traditional gamers think is light).  The Puddle is my default game system, these days, when I want to run a game as a GM, though at some point I'm sure I'll try running a game of Dogs in the Vineyard.

I also like HeroQuest a fair bit, but it's a little heavy for me these days.  You should also look at The Shadow of Yesterday -- it resembles a traditional game in some respects but is a very indie game slant on such a project.  It might give you a good idea, in terms of actual game design, what's going on with indie games -- tho' they're actually a quite varied lot of products.

[CPXB]

The Warhammer ref would give me grief for not "acting", which I felt was harsh, as it is the weakest part of my skills, and his strongest. If a narrative game means I can make decisions and choices that mean something that is good, if it means more competitive acting, that is bad (for me at least).

No, indie games aren't about competitive acting.  For Forge games and certainly, I think, in terms of Forge game philosophy, most of them actually revolve around the idea of making meaningful in game choices, which is still a gross oversimplification but, I think, largely true.  In my experience, they can also draw people out into doing more RP, because often the situations are often very character centered.

To give an example of what I mean, in my Puddle game -- which is set, and this is in fact as geeky as it sounds, in a Vice City Buffyverse setting -- one of the characters is very close to his grandfather.  His grandfather is dying of cancer, and is going to ask the PC to help making him into a vampire.  Will the PC choose to tell his grandfather "no" and watch him die of a horrible wasting disease, or will he help his grandfather become a vampire, lose his soul and become a bloodthirsty monster?  Or will he do something I haven't thought of?  We'll find out!

The player I am doing this to is, to be honest, the weakest RPer of the group (tho' he has vastly improved over the past year or so).  So he probably won't do the really intense RP -- but he'll still have to make the decision and live with the consequences of his character's actions.  Which is the driving point, here.

[diadochi]

Hi,

Thanks for telling me about indie games. From what I've read in the past games it seems that part of what indie games are about is achieving general (important) goals against specific tasks (which often are pointless). The strongest example I read was the difference between a lock picking roll to open a safe to recover some documents, against a general find the document roll. So with indie games or is that narrative games you can do a lot more, because a lot more can be condensed down into one roll?

I do have a mechanical mind, so I'm not sure indie games are my only path to salvation. The idea of using specific skills to achieve do the little things appears to me. I do appreciate that such games can often give the player less choice, and trap his character in mediocry.

Finally, thank you to everyone who replied to this thread.

Regards,


David

[Victor Gijsbers]

So with indie games or is that narrative games you can do a lot more, because a lot more can be condensed down into one roll?

Well, it is true that most indie games use 'conflict resolution' instead of 'task resolution', which is the difference you describe here, but that is neither their defining characteristic nor necessarily what makes them suited to giving the players more narrative control. And it certainly hasn't got anything to do with how much you can condense in one roll: Dogs in the Vineyard, for instance, has an intricate dice mechanic (people roll lots of dice, then use these against each other in a kind of bidding contest) which will never win a prize for being 'condensed' - but it does help the players tell the story, instead of listen to it. So you've pointed to something that is important, but it's not as important as you make it out to be.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I do have a mechanical mind, so I'm not sure indie games are my only path to salvation. The idea of using specific skills to achieve do the little things appears to me. I do appreciate that such games can often give the player less choice, and trap his character in mediocry.

There's a funny preconception some folks have about Forge-gestated games: that somehow the mechanics are less powerful. In fact, the opposite is true. In fact, for most designers here (and truthfully, I can't think of any that believe anything else) is that the mechanics of a game system are implicitly understood to be extremely powerful, and therefore all the stuff that's usually dealt with by hazy social contract rules (dice fudging being an obvious example) is considered a violation of both the written rules and social contract of the players.

Dogs in the Vineyard has already been recommended, so I'll just elaborate that by saying that it's excellent for describing what matters to a player. It's a game about violence and the consequences of using or not using it, both in the situation and to the character.

For mechanically simpler (but no less rigorous) fare, you might want to try Primetime Adventures. It's simply the most accessible RPG ever created. It very reliably guides you to create excellent, excellent stories. It uses a television drama metaphor to make compelling stories about characters in crisis.

You'll note that this discussion has wandered over to games you haven't experienced. That's because the prevailing philosophy of game design here is that the game you're playing matters (which should be a tautology, but popular opinion seems divided on that rather obvious issue). It matters not only because of the genre, or "realism" or what-have-you, and not just because of stylistic differences, but in a very core way to what your story is about. There are games here for different themes more than there are games about different genres or settings.

Which isn't to say that the settings (like The Shadow of Yesterday) aren't equally awesome. Those settings are used to address human premises, which are, after all, the core of any good story.

Welcome to the Forge!

[CPXB]

To dissent slightly from Joshua,

A lot of Forgie games are pretty limited.  This isn't true of all of them, but (and this ties in to the issue I have with people willy-nilly suggesting the Game of the Month as the cure to troubled player's ills) many of them have an extremely tight focus that is very limiting.

Take My Life With Master -- it is about playing the minion of a Gothic monster where the minion breaks free of the Master, and is largely about fear vs. reason.  If you don't want to play a Gothic monster addressing those themes, well, tough.  Same with Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc., etc.  A lot of Forgie games are pretty limited because they are about very narrow character ranges, in very specific settings, and increasingly with pre-determined resolutions.  That does limit player choices a fair bit.

Others aren't, obviously.  A game like Universalis can be used in a large number of game types, obviously.  But I think it is fair to say that many Forge games can be quite limited.

[James_Nostack]

A quick comment about "Focused" Games---

A few years ago, I would never have considered buying a game like Sorcerer.  "What?  The game is only about dysfunctional relationships, and demons, and how far would you go for power?  What if I wanted to play a different kind of story?  Bah!  I have no desire to play such a limited game.  Give me something like D&D, or GURPS, where it's more open-ended."

But it actually turns out that it's hard to get a gaming group together sometimes!  It's especially hard to find 4-5 adult players who can commit to a fixed, weekly or bi-weekly schedule beyond 3 months.  Really, you're lucky if you can put a game together for six weeks before Real Life disrupts the whole thing.

So: in practical terms, you might only get a limited opportunity to do the story/scenario you had in mind.  For a lot of people, the "open-ended" aspect of D&D or GURPS will never get used--it's like winning a romantic getaway for two, when you can't get a date.  Not everybody has this problem--but I'd bet a lot of people do.  The major factor in limiting the growth of the hobby is the difficulty in finding committed players.

With that in mind, a "tightly focused" game is less of a problem.  You've got 5, maybe 10 sessions, before schedules change, interests fade, etc.  The fact that a single campaign of Dogs in the Vineyard would get predictable after 50 sessions isn't an issue.  But for the 5 or 10 sessions you do have, and for the story you might want to tell--Dogs is perfectly designed for that.  Not a single wasted word, not a single pointless rule.  (Who cares about rules for drowning?  Seriously.  In all the D&D games I ever played, the issue never came up.)  Absolutely everything in the book is completely, totally relevant.  It flawlessly delivers, "Holy policemen in the Old West."

The trick with Forge games, is that you have to figure out what you want, ahead of time.  Once you know the kind of experience you're looking for, a well-designed game will give it to you every time, frequently with minimal effort on your part.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

You guys are not helping David. This isn't about representing other games, or talking about Forge this or that. This is about the experiences with Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu, and talking about why they did't work well.

Please help David with that. Use terms from the Glossary, that's what they're for. Explain that he walked into broken social and creative situations, and that satisfaction cannot be gained from the processes he saw there.

That's what this thread is for. I can't do all this by myself. You guys have to do it too.

Best,
Ron

[James_Nostack]

All right, so, back on track, and this is me trying to be a good Forge citizen:

The scenario left me feeling numb. Not at one point did I feel I had a meaningful choice. Our characters knew nothing about the city, had no contacts, and were physically pathetic. The referee enjoyed every minute of it, describing everything in glorious detail. He made no attempt as far as I can tell, to give us clues about what was going on, choices or opportunities to do anything different. It felt like everything turned out exactly as he had planned. I never got a sense of him giving us opportunities to make an impact in the world. It was more like we were expected to gap with awe at the world, love the world, and thank him for letting us intrude in his beautiful world. The few time where was conflict it was either meaningless, the thugs, or we were defeated extremely quickly, the vampire. I basically felt disappointed and used.

The referee is a really nice guy, and as I said his acting and knowledge of the world is superb. His campaign didn't last long, in the next scenario; the party was killed, cut to pieces in our first real fight.

Okay, several things to identify here:

* Socially - this is a GM who isn't good at "servicing" his players.  That's not all that uncommon, but it can be frustrating, especially since he's a nice guy, has some talent at providing color, and obviously is enthusiastic.  In a way, having a friendly, talented GM can sometimes make a bad situation worse because you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.  Still--you're there to play, not to be a spectator.

* Systematically, what you've got here is probably a "task resolution" system.  In which, rolling the dice tells you if you perform the task or not, but not whether you solve what's really at issue.  Hence: "Yes, you hide the body from this guard.  Yes, you hide the body from that guard.  And, let's see... you drop the body, but the third guard doesn't notice..." etc.  Task Resolution can be fun if handled the right way, but that's not always the case.  Notice, by the way, that the GM could keep calling for rolls/making up situations until the dice did what he wanted. 

Task resolution also has an impact on the pacing of the game--if you're rolling for Objective A, and then rolling for Sub-Objective B, and then for Sub-Sub-Sub-Objective C, then really it's kind of hard for the story to build momentum, and it might feel like you're wandering around uselessly.

There's really no help for this, unless you talk to the GM about frequency of rolling, and the effect it has on the game.  It would probably be best to roll for "larger scale" stuff ("do the guards notice us?" as opposed to, "does guard #47 notice us"), and then just let the dice fall where they may.  Just roll, deal with the consequences, and move on.  This might be a hard concept to sell.

* Regarding wimpy characters-- this may be an artifact of Warhammer rules.  I haven't played, so I can't comment constructively.  I know that D&D has elaborate rules to construct "equal" battles, so that in theory every roll makes a difference.  Does Warhammer do that?

While I like action films, I do watch many different genres. I find that in the stories I enjoy, things happen, people don't necessarily have to die or suffer violence, but things do happen, people's lives do change. In the short time I was part of that Call of Cthulhu campaign nothing happened, and I was bored.

* Again, I haven't played CoC, but from what I hear it's a game where rash action is rewarded with horrific death.  So, it sounds like you've got players who are deeply attached to their characters--not just the personalites (mannerisms, accents) but also the raw numbers on the paper--and therefore don't want to risk all that work.  Of course, the whole fun of reading Lovecraft's stories is that you know these poor, over-educated W.A.S.P.'s are gonna die horribly, and I would think that the most fun way to play CoC is a little bit like Paranoia--"Ooops, I'm dead again.  Okay, let's roll up someone else." 

So, it's possible that maybe this crowd gets something different out of Lovecraft's stories than you do, which could be the ultimate root of this problem.

* There are a bunch of games out there where there's "in-game downtime."  Like, Ars Magica does that.  The wizards devote a season or two of their year to mastering spells, building new gadgets, etc.  This might be fun for long-time players... but it's a terrible way to introduce a new player to the game.  "Um, we're gonna do nothing tonight.  Is that fun for you?"  I don't know who was behind that thing, but at the very least it sounds like it was bad scheduling. 

* Spending a long time making plans, and double checking the plans, and arguing about the plans, etc., is usually what happens when the GM isn't beating the holy hell out of the players with dangerous situations.  "We know we're in trouble, but nothing urgent right now, so let's hold a Board Meeting and argue pointlessly about the most minute matters of tactics, and every conceivable possibility."  My general policy when that happens is to smack myself for not being sufficiently adversarial as a GM.  Then I smack the players with the worst thing I can think of. 

Generally, players should have an idea of what their general objective is, and should have a good 5 minutes to discuss strategy--and then the fun begins, whether they're ready for it or not.

=====
Ultimately I think you've got two fairly common social problems here:

1.  in the Warhammer game, you've got a GM who has problems letting you rush out and accomplish things.  This may be implicitly supported by the rules' use of Task Resolution, and the general lameness of low-level characters.  Since this GM sounds like a good person, you might want to ask him about increasing the "scale" of the Tasks being resolved, and see what he says.  If he allows the dice to irreversibly decide important things, then it might make the game more fun for you.

2.  In the CoC game, you've got pacing issues of the worst kind, reinforced by the "punishment" of character death  (I would see character death as the pinnacle of the reward system, personally, but I'm strange) and the system's advancement mechanic.  Also, it sounds like the GM doesn't want to rush or freak out the players, perhaps because he wants to respect their investment in the characters, and in the meantime the players have taken this indulgence to invest more heavily, which creates a feedback loop.  I don't know what to say here, except that maybe you should find a different group.  Or offer to run a single session, with a different bunch of characters, and just run them through the wringer so they can see how much fun it is to be scared (this is possibly a terrible idea, based on social dynamics, but I'm throwing it out there.)

[Callan S.]

On the way we got attacked by some thugs, who we defeated, but the fight felt arbitrary, rather than exciting, with victory going to those with the luckiest dice rolls.

Dude, I know what you mean. But what if, rather than the GM deciding that you enter into battle with the thugs, you as a player had the choice to and decided to enter into it. What I mean is, if you were protagonised to choose to enter the battle, could you decide to treat the arbitrary randomness as a risk your willing to take on?

If it became your choice to enter the fight, would that change your perception of the arbitraryness?

I'm probing at what system means when the GM foists it on you Vs when you choose to take it on yourself.

[Bankuei]

Hi David,

Welcome to the Forge!

First, I wanted to put out there that this isn't where "you are going wrong".  There's a lot wrong here, but it's not due to any action/inaction on your part.  In fact, you did something right in all of this- you recognized that this wasn't fun for you and you decided to stop- something a surprising number of people in this hobby don't seem to get.  "If the milk is bad, don't put it back in the fridge..."

Fundamentally the experiences you have described are the result of several fallacies common in mainstream gamer culture, which add up to lots of not-fun for many people.  Let's just start with some fundamental concepts, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

A.  There are many different ways to play and have fun (even with the same rules)
B.  Many of these different ways are different enough that they do not work together.

In contrast, most gamers believe that if you get a willing group together, and decide to start playing, it "ought" to lead to fun.  Which is like gathering a random assortment of "people who like sports" and deciding to play a game.  Without any indication of which game it will be, or what the rules are until you're already playing...  A trial and error recipe that will end up in more not-fun than fun experiences.

Can you describe what game experience(s) were exceptionally fun for you, in contrast to the not-fun you've just had?

Chris

[Rob Alexander]

Regarding wimpy characters-- this may be an artifact of Warhammer rules.  I haven't played, so I can't comment constructively.  I know that D&D has elaborate rules to construct "equal" battles, so that in theory every roll makes a difference.  Does Warhammer do that?

Not in the older edition that I've seen. In fact, D&D 3 is the only system I'm aware of that has a fully developed system for doing that.

[rafial]

Regarding wimpy characters-- this may be an artifact of Warhammer rules.  I haven't played, so I can't comment constructively.  I know that D&D has elaborate rules to construct "equal" battles, so that in theory every roll makes a difference.  Does Warhammer do that?

Not in the older edition that I've seen. In fact, D&D 3 is the only system I'm aware of that has a fully developed system for doing that.

WFRP2 adds something similar to the D&D challenge level (It's called the Slaughter Margin or something suitably grim and perilous, I'm going from memory) but it's a bit more handwavy than the more detailed D&D system.