Before Stakes: What is your intent?

[Josh Roby]

For me it goes like this: First you need to know what it you want to acomplish, then you have to know how, then you have to know what the opposition is, and then you have to know what happens if you fail.

I like this formulation better than the one that required "GM Intent".  In my experience, the GM Intent is more or less irrelevant.  It's not the GM's story, it's not the GM's character.  The GM is providing opposition which is not the same as intending the character to fail.

[Judd]

For me it goes like this: First you need to know what it you want to acomplish, then you have to know how, then you have to know what the opposition is, and then you have to know what happens if you fail.

I like this formulation better than the one that required "GM Intent".  In my experience, the GM Intent is more or less irrelevant.  It's not the GM's story, it's not the GM's character.  The GM is providing opposition which is not the same as intending the character to fail.

Tomato vs. Tom-ah-to?

I don't think the GM's intent is irrelevant at all.  The GM is a player at the table, an equal participant and a leader.  I think their intent is driving the story to cool places.

[Josh Roby]

I don't think the GM's intent is irrelevant at all.  The GM is a player at the table, an equal participant and a leader.  I think their intent is driving the story to cool places.

Yes -- but the GM's desire to push the game to interesting places is not expressed in the consequences of failure -- or not exclusively expressed there.  Ideally, both success and failure stakes should take the story to cool places.  I'm just saying that describing failure stakes as "GM Intent" implies that the GM is in an adversarial position where he wants to make the characters fail -- when really, the GM just wants to push the players to risk and address.

[Judd]

-- when really, the GM just wants to push the players to risk and address.

The GM wants to push the players to risk and address

&

Facilitate the discussion of intent and stakes setting so that both success and failure are fun.  If the success and failure outcomes are given by the player in the conflict or a player not in the scene who chimes in with good feedback, who cares.

Players who aren't central to the conflict chime in with good feedback all of the time in PTA and quite often in BW's Duels of Wits.  But if everyone was dead silent and the player turtled hard, unsure of what to do, I'd feel it was my responsibilty as the GM to hold that player's hand and walk them through the process so that they were comfortable with stating the intent.

Does that make sense?

When I'm at the table, I don't say, "Your intent is X and my intent is Y."

I say, "If you succeed, X and if you fail, Y."

I think we are caught on a semantic rusty nail sticking out from the overall structure here.

Are we cool? 

[John Kim]

From my point of view, a common problem that I have is that I know that being truthful about intent is often going to make things harder for me as a player.  This is an old issue.  I recall in particular an early rgfa thread, where Mary Kuhner described that whenever she made her plans known to the GM, the GM would arrange for the plan to run into difficult trouble -- either because that was more dramatic, or because he genuinely believed the aphorism "no plan survives contact with the enemy".  However, if she didn't state her plans but instead kept them secret, they would usually work.  Unsurprisingly, she was driven to keep her plans hidden and act more as if she was coming up with things on the fly.  

In a game with freeform stakes based on intent, chances are that if I am deceptive (or at least cagey) about my intent, then I can get what I want more effectively.  This was illustrated for me clearly in one of the games at AmberCon, "Amber's Watchdogs", which used a variant of the DitV mechanic -- though it bore very little resemblance in general to Dogs.  Short situation: my character is a princess of Amber who has appropriate magical powers.  If I stated my intent as: I want to get alone with the leader of the opposing army to talk with him privately, then I can accomplish that without much problem.  Now that I have him alone, though, I have established the circumstances and can easily kidnap him by teleporting away via Trump.  The GM tried to make the latter a difficult conflict, but it because increasingly impossible to justify why I couldn't do what I stated given the circumstances.  

That's just one example, but there are endless variations of this.  Often, the system means that the one thing which is most difficult to achieve is your stated intent -- whereas if you stated something else, you could get that thing easily as part of narration.  For example, ask for something bigger than what you expect, then declare your gains as part of the process at some point when you can force the opponent to Take the Blow (using the DitV mechanic).  Now, maybe this is just a natural consequence of intent-based stakes-setting.  It's not a game-killing problem, after all, but it does give me pause, at least.  

[Judd]

Often, the system means that the one thing which is most difficult to achieve is your stated intent -- whereas if you stated something else, you could get that thing easily as part of narration.

I don't think this is systemic but a sign of GM dysfunction but I don't see it as a system problem.

Maybe it deserves an AP thread of its own, though.  It sounds big, bigger than one part of this thread. 

[Myrmidon]

This is a fantastic thread that has helped clarify things in my mind as well.

I just want to offer a thought.  This discussion of stakes is strongly reminiscent of a variant I've seen that limits the structure of arguments in a Matrix game.

How it relates is that after someone makes a declaration of what occurs (i.e. Protagonist setting stakes), two of the optional arguments you can make in response must be in the form of:

(a) "Yes, But.."
(b) "No, Actually..."

I know it's been touched on before, but I think this solidifies it even more.  As I see it, when someone offers stakes your stakes can either (a) Confirm with Consequences or (b) Negate with Consequences.  Does anyone else see other options that don't result no conflict (GM Says yes)?

[Judd]

This is a fantastic thread that has helped clarify things in my mind as well.

How it relates is that after someone makes a declaration of what occurs (i.e. Protagonist setting stakes), two of the optional arguments you can make in response must be in the form of:

(a) "Yes, But.."
(b) "No, Actually..."

Polaris does a really interesting job of making this part of a ritual.  I only demo'ed it briefly at Gen Con but it reminds me of the structure you describe above.

[Tim Alexander]

Often, the system means that the one thing which is most difficult to achieve is your stated intent -- whereas if you stated something else, you could get that thing easily as part of narration.  For example, ask for something bigger than what you expect, then declare your gains as part of the process at some point when you can force the opponent to Take the Blow (using the DitV mechanic).  Now, maybe this is just a natural consequence of intent-based stakes-setting.  It's not a game-killing problem, after all, but it does give me pause, at least. 

This stuff needs to be resolved in the process of intent leading to stakes. Intent can frame and inform stakes, but what your talking about seems to be one of two things:

a) Stuff is getting put into the stakes that the player doesn't want to see as an option, which is a bad thing.
b) Too much stuff is getting layered onto the stakes, making the conflict one sided.

In practice A and B result in the same thing, the player doesn't feel like they can lose the conflict. That's bad news, since the whole point of conflict resolution is that both outcomes are interesting to the player. When one is so much more interesting that the other isn't an option then it all breaks down. This is subtly different from being willing to go all the way to win stakes, where doing so and failing can still be interesting to you as a player.

If I stated my intent as: I want to get alone with the leader of the opposing army to talk with him privately, then I can accomplish that without much problem.  Now that I have him alone, though, I have established the circumstances and can easily kidnap him by teleporting away via Trump.  The GM tried to make the latter a difficult conflict, but it because increasingly impossible to justify why I couldn't do what I stated given the circumstances.

This is a perfectly acceptable way of lowering the stakes. In Dogs, this screams conflict, followup conflict to me. It's exactly the sort of thing Vincent explicitly advocates in the text.

-Tim

[Josh Roby]

I think we are caught on a semantic rusty nail sticking out from the overall structure here.

Are we cool?

Probably.

Also, I vote John splits off his concerns into another thread; I'd be very interested in talking about it at length, but I wouldn't want to derail this thread further.

[hix]

Because I am a pedant:

First you need to know what it you want to acomplish, then you have to know how, then you have to know what the opposition is, and then you have to know what happens if you fail.

Seems like after you first know what it is you want to acomplish, then you need to know 'why' you want to accomplish it. That seems to be the key to getting to the intent.

And I'm finding these 2 threads extremely useful.

[Brand_Robins]

Because I am a pedant:

First you need to know what it you want to acomplish, then you have to know how, then you have to know what the opposition is, and then you have to know what happens if you fail.

Seems like after you first know what it is you want to acomplish, then you need to know 'why' you want to accomplish it. That seems to be the key to getting to the intent.

And I'm finding these 2 threads extremely useful.

Ah ha! You have clarified the unclarity in my language.

Which is to say, tha "what" in mine should be the "why" in yours. I meant what as in "what in the long term end result" not the what as in the "what naturalistic action you are trying to undertake at the moment."

So, yes sir, you are correct. You need to know what you are doing, and why you are doing it -- in terms of the result you hope to accomplish.

[Callan S.]

I think stakes are overlooked in gamism as well. Things go into particular tasks, like in a game I ran once where a player had killed a shelled monster. He then starts declaring tasks that revolve around starting a fire. In the end we find out he wants to burn out the meat and make armour out of it (a good idea). But it was the wrong way around to discover it, drama wise. The drama of gamism starts at the declaration of the objective, then builds up towards a climax as the player makes any sucess toward that. But in this case, we didn't get that build up because the very thing that builds it up (the fire making tasks) had already happened, when we found out the objective.

Also, conflict resolution is awful for this. Gamism thrives on the player drawing on all the resources/tasks he can perform, in order to pursue his objective. In games like nar, doing that just gets in the way of the next address so it's understandable that you'd want to skip it with conflict resolution.

[Josh Roby]

Yes, Callan, which is why I'm hopeful for Christian's Beast Hunters game, which addresses just that issue (and uses CR).

[Callan S.]

Yes, Christian was good enough to introduce some ideas in a thread I started about address of challenge. The ideas grew into the beast hunter game (and good on him for getting out and doing it!).

The game has three different phases and mechanics to go with them, all related to the same general challenge. I think it's more than just getting something out of the way with one roll, despite conflict resolution being included. Perhaps one might think of it as mechanical examination of the challenge, but for a change it isn't by task resolution (but at the same time, not defaulting wholey to conflict resolution).

I always seemt to have a hard time understanding PDF's. But from the ideas he posted/PM'ed and from the PDF, that's what I see happening. What do you think, Christian?