[Amber] Why won't you let me set stakes?

[Josh Roby]

Better, yes, but better still would be sitting down before roleplay begins and talking about the range of stakes people are willing to consider and accept.  For even better results, do so at the start of each session, cause these things change.

Unfortunately, this requires people to be open and honest with their intentions, which gamers are often incapable of doing even with themselves.  There was recently a thread about a GM who asked how he communicated to the players that they would save the world in the game without making them feel like they couldn't die -- which they pretty much wouldn't, because then they couldn't save the world, but he wanted them to think that they could.  If asked, I'd wager that GM would swear up and down that he'd kill a PC if "that's what happened."  We lie to each other and ourselves about this stuff all the time.  Taking the step beyond the smoke-and-mirrors and into real, interpersonal interaction is a rare thing, but I'm glad to see games that prompt it.

[TonyLB]

The thing is ... okay ... asking this stuff isn't likely to hurt anything.  But if the person doesn't know the answer, then asking them can't drag the answer out of them.  And people will, very often, just be flat out wrong in their answers ... they won't just not answer you, they'll lie.  But giving them a concrete choice, or (even better) a long series of small, concrete choices, can still reveal that information.  When they have to do something, they'll do what feels right, and it feels right because it jibes with what they really think.

It's like, years ago, if you asked me what kind of music I liked I'd have said "Oh, I like medium-hard rock, y'know, with the strong bass-line and all that."  And I really thought that's what I liked.  But when I look at my music shelf, I essentially don't have any of that stuff in my collection.  I've got (don't mock me here!) show-tunes and Bonnie Raitt and Clannad and a good chunk of Dixie Chicks and stuff like that.  Heavily melodic music, with an emphasis on a certain degree of intricacy, and a genre-leaning towards country/blues.  So what do I actually like?  Do you listen to my words, or listen to my actions?

There's a scene in a late-season episode of Angel where Wesley has the entire resources of Wolfram and Hart working on a disease Fred has contracted.  And this clerkish guy comes in and says "Hey, we need to look at these contracts on this other case ... you can't really expect all of us to be working on Fred."  And Wesley nods, pulls out a handgun and shoots the guy in the knee-cap.  "If anyone else feels they shouldn't be working on Miss Birkle's case, please send them to me."

I looked at that and I said "That's how I'm going to GM, from here on out.  I'm never going to ask 'Are you putting all of your resources on finding a cure for Fred?  Even if that lets other clients slip?'  I'm just going to have some stupid mook come in and yammer his opinion about how things should be happening, and see how the players have their characters respond."

So, see ... I don't actually think that open, explicit out-of-game discussion is better than open, explicit discussion grounded in the immediate reality of the game.  Does that make sense?  And what do you think?

[Mark Woodhouse]

So, see ... I don't actually think that open, explicit out-of-game discussion is better than open, explicit discussion grounded in the immediate reality of the game.  Does that make sense?  And what do you think?

It makes sense. From a certain perspective. The difficulty with that is always the character/player boundary. When I ask these questions out of character, I have to pry people out of telling me all about their character. "Well, my character would...." No. What do you, the real person at my table, want to have happen?

When you embed the "what matters? what do you want to have happen?" questions inside the fiction, most roleplayers I've encountered are going to be powerfully conditioned to answer from a character standpoint. Even though the player is going to be unhappy if what "the character wants to have happen" happens.

[Andrew Cooper]

It makes sense. From a certain perspective. The difficulty with that is always the character/player boundary. When I ask these questions out of character, I have to pry people out of telling me all about their character. "Well, my character would...." No. What do you, the real person at my table, want to have happen?

I think one way to move people towards this type of statement is to move away from deeply defined characters in chargen.  By deeply defined I mean character sheets that are 2 or 3 pages long and/or multiple pages of character history.  If, like in the Pool, the player has only 50 words to define the character before play, then any statements about what is important during gameplay (Traits in the Pool) is more likely to be a product of the player's desires rather than "what the character would want/do".  Mostly because the character hasn't been defined enough outside of play to actually determine what it would want/do.

[Josh Roby]

I don't actually think that open, explicit out-of-game discussion is better than open, explicit discussion grounded in the immediate reality of the game.

Makes sense, Tony, but I don't think either in-game, contextualized situations or out-of-game abstracted discussion will net you 100% of player preferences.  The in-game stuff won't always work because gamers who want to see their tough-as-nails character take a fall won't play their character into taking a fall (basically what Mark said). The out-of-game stuff won't always work because gamers lie, and gamers lie to themselves.  We need a two-pronged solution that incorporates both in-game and out-of-game input -- and preferably does so in mechanical and concrete terms.

Something like a "Danger Meter" for scenes -- in this scene, the Danger Meter is set to 20, so while the PCs might be roughed up, they won't be permanently hurt -- any damage will be cleared off by the next scene.  The next scene has the Danger Meter set to 80, so the PCs might have their characters rewritten by the events of the scene.  Now, at the start of a scene, give all the players input to what the Danger Meter will be.  In the scene, let in-character actions escalate and de-escalate the Danger Meter.  Most likely the Danger Meter also determines what resources/information/McGuffin the PCs can pull out of the scene, and whether or not they can defeat the baddies with finality.  Rough, but I think it gets the idea across.

[TonyLB]

The in-game stuff won't always work because gamers who want to see their tough-as-nails character take a fall won't play their character into taking a fall (basically what Mark said).

But ... wait ... that's not failing because it's in-game.  It's failing because it's asking the wrong question.  Yes, if I ask you "What will your character risk to achieve this?" then I'm going to get answers that have to do with your character, and that's obviously at a remove from any answers about you.  But if I ask you "What will you risk in order for your character to achieve this?" that's a whole different question, with different answers.

If you ask me "Will Harper risk being severely beaten, a very painful experience, in order to achieve this goal?" then you learn nothing about me.  Because Harper's severe beating has a cost of zip-point-zero to me, the player.  I don't feel the pain.  I don't have the bruises.  I probably don't even have to moderate my descriptions, given how quickly Amber-folks bounce back from injury.  He can be sneaking around, with "Ouch ... that hurts" thrown in for narrative color.

If you ask me "Will you risk Harper's death, which will mean you stop playing him, in order to have him achieve this goal?" then the answer is going to be about me.  Even if I go all delusional and say "Well, I don't want to take the risk, but I need to be true to the character, and he would ..." feh!  That's meaningless jibber-jabber.  You ask me, I answer, you now know something about me, the player.  And I would contest that if the question is "Will you risk X?" and I choose to either risk X or not risk X then I cannot be answering the question wrong.  Will I?  Let's try it and find out for sure.

[Andy Kitkowski]

I think people are spot on in their analysis.  But I don't think it ends there.  Take a look at what you guys are saying:

...

People don't say what they mean, they say what they think everyone will understand as a cue to what they mean.  Yes, that's fucked up in terms of social contract ... but, really, how many of our games have explicit channels for discussing this?  If this is a place that social contract breaks down, shouldn't we be paying attention to it, in order to provide ways of communicating to resolve it?

Heh, welcome to the theatre of human discourse, man.  Try telling your favorite aunt or parents, "No, I really don't need a Christmas present this year. Really. Let's just not exchange stuff, and save our money to do fun stuff together".  Now imagine how many little alarms that conversation will set off, how expertly you'll have to preface it with a narration that defuses every one of those bombs, otherwise auntie will think:

1) Oh, he's just being modest. He's doing the "Oh, no really, you don't have to" game.  Well, I don't have to, but I will anyway. Tee hee.
2) (darker) ...What's wrong with Tony? Is he having a money problem? Does he have a problem with me? Is this because of that incident with XYZ?

Sounds like the GM was getting trapped in one of the above. A brief, dismissive analysis of your behavior and staying the course, or a breakdown that involves overanalysis, overcompensation and leads to confusion and turmoil. That's what we get when we use our mouth-grunts to convey things other than Food and Mate. :-)

To create explicit channels for this kind of thing in a game (as a writer), you have to sit down and take a frank Luke Crane (FORCE) or Vincent Baker (MELLOW) stance on the issue that cuts the BS, tells you how you should play the game, make implications to the effect that other play methods may or may not produce desired effect, but are really not called for, etc.  Still, though, some GMs will blow through that. They'll miss the "Hold the roll for a scene" diatribe in BW, or how to build a town in Dogs, and do what they always do anyway.  That's just with stuff that's covered explicitly by the rules.

The other stuff that comes up to the table? Social contract, social contract, social contract. That is the motherfucking alpha and omega to addressing and stopping these problems, to make your words in play make sense in the context they were spoken, etc. "No, really, I mean it, I want this to be the stakes" will HAVE to be prefaced by the 2-3 page email or equivalent verbal diatribe, carefully explaining your position and deactivating potential landminds.  And again, it requires a lot of empathy, and no blind "What I SAY is what I MEAN, and how dare they think otherwise!" gameplay (cause it's not how people work).

Interesting topic, though.  Because I'm going to see the same issue after X-mas, when my Thursday group is run by Alan, and he does his heavy-Sim and light Nar Firefly-inspired campaign.  He wrote a lot of world history. We came up with our character types, which he fleshed out for us, both in stats and their place in the world (ie one guy wanted a religious dude, so he came up with the backstory of the religion and its place in the universe, etc.  Yeah, some Sim up in thar).  Now, Alan's games are fun, and I love to slip into amateur theatre time like I do in his games, but I do notice that, even a veteran gamer, he's not good (yet) with setting stakes, and really has a problem killing off PCs.  More often then not, we play loose by the rules, ONLY going over whatever rulebook back-and-forth with a fine tooth comb when it comes to a situation where one of the PCs is potentially dying, and will die without the help of that one rule or McGuffin.  I'm going to have to pull the same shit that you did with your Amber game, and I have a feeling that I'll be doing it early on (I like my character idea, but I want to be the First One Dead to show to the group that "it's ok, if it makes the story cooler and I want to go that direction" etc).  And I intend to do it basically by quoting from this thread here, talking about it to everyone before our first game for like 5 minutes or so, getting any questions out of the way ("Should I have an idea for the next character I want to play Now, or should I wait on that until Later?", etc). And bringing in cookies to break the ice a bit. Alan will definitely take what I say as what I mean if I tell him to, but on the other hand, he's the GM and a friend, I know the way he cooks adventures, and so I want to make sure that this kind of thing is no surprise to him, and that I don't come off as the Big Campaign Derailer guy.  About February or March you should start seeing the results in Actual Play threads. :-)

Back to the discussion of ways to convey the Social Contract on issues that lie outside the direct scope of the rules: Now, maybe a small sociologically-bent and imminently readable/accessible guide/pamphlet to effective ways to hammer out a social contract with your regular gaming group, be it at the beginning of the game or mid-game, with some real winning, helpful pointers?  I'd buy 5 copies for my Thursday gaming group. That would be something maybe worth thinking about designing, if these issues really bother you.  Could be like the "7 Habits of Highly Effective Gaming Groups: From D&D to Drama Queens, how to keep the fun at your table".

[Josh Roby]

What will you risk in order for your character to achieve this?

Just to be sure we're on the same page, the things that players can risk are what?  Is it just credibility methods (ie, keeping the character alive, keeping a stat on the character sheet, currency which expresses credibility)?  Can a player be said to risk elements of the fiction (ie, will you risk the destruction of the City of Jade)?  What if, as in Multiverser, the player has invested currency/credibility into that element of the fiction?

Cause yeah, most games have pretty poor options for things you can risk.  You want to risk some hit points?  You can go from 146HP to 10HP and still keep swinging like a pro, so those 136HP aren't really much of a risk.

The hard line is to say, "All stakes should impact the character sheet (inventory of credibility methods) for success and failure."  Is that going too far?

[Blankshield]

If you ask me "Will you risk Harper's death, which will mean you stop playing him, in order to have him achieve this goal?" then the answer is going to be about me.  Even if I go all delusional and say "Well, I don't want to take the risk, but I need to be true to the character, and he would ..." feh!  That's meaningless jibber-jabber.  You ask me, I answer, you now know something about me, the player.  And I would contest that if the question is "Will you risk X?" and I choose to either risk X or not risk X then I cannot be answering the question wrong.  Will I?  Let's try it and find out for sure.

The problem is that the same basic issue applies.  You could be lying, or just not know.  "Will you risk X?" and I say "Yes", and X happens.  Suddenly I'm all pissed off because I didn't actually want that to happen, or because I figured the odds were really good, so it wasn't "really" a risk, or I assumed the GM would fudge the (proverbial) dice.  Andy's Aunt example says this better.

Tony, I don't think this is easily solvable, except in the way we're already solving it.  Basically, what it boils down to is "communication isn't perfect, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not".  We need to write games with solid rules/system for communication among the people at the table.  Beyond that, if people follow the rules, and get burned, we can say "then this game isn't for you" or "Well, now you know for next time."

I'm coming back to Ben's Five Games article from a while back.

Specifically, this bit:

1: The expectation that the game will be played to the fullest extent that the rules allow, and no further.
-The expectation that people will not be anti-social within the context of the rules. By which I do not mean not taking advantage of rules loopholes. These games have no rules loopholes.
-These games have no rules loopholes. (Possible exception: Polaris.)

and later:

Furthermore, absolutely none of the above things is regarded as special within the game text. Nothing says "in this game, which is different from other role-playing games, we do ____" It just says "As long as you are not playing a scene, any player may start a scene for..." We, the designers of these games, have played enough of the other games that none of this is important anymore. Of course you can have a game that does these things. I think it is because of this that a lot of folks, like Ken Hite, are going to call these "not quite games." The rules aren't any further from a role-playing game than in the previous texts, but since we don't apologize for it, we're not really quite right.

What we are (in general) doing in our games is the only really good way to address social communication issues: give clear rules for how it works in this game, and when someone says "Yeah, but [gamer baggage]!!!", shrug and say "Not part of this game."

James

[TonyLB]

Back to the discussion of ways to convey the Social Contract on issues that lie outside the direct scope of the rules

Andy, I do not want to talk about this matter in those terms.

The things I would like to talk about are:

• the structure of what people are trying and failing to communicate, and what commonalities exist in the way it is expressed across various groups, and
• the ways in which the direct scope of rules can be expanded to contain and clearly communicate this specific issue, so that it no longer qualifies as "an issue that lies outside the direct scope of the rules."

I hope that makes my position with regard to "rules vs. non-rules social contract" clear.

[TonyLB]

The hard line is to say, "All stakes should impact the character sheet (inventory of credibility methods) for success and failure."  Is that going too far?

I don't think it's going "too far" in order to achieve this particular function of an RPG.  It is possible that going that far will, in turn, compromise some other function of an RPG such that it is to be avoided:  for instance, when you do this you lose the ability to actually say things about what your character will risk, independent of what you as a player will risk.  That very well might reduce your ability to build up the sense of separation and "otherness" that lets you have empathy toward your character as a fictional being rather than a pawn of your personal expression.

Is there a balance to be struck there?  You need some ability to say "This is just about the character" before the character takes on enough life that saying "I'll risk this of my character" has a context that makes it more than ... a commodity.  That sort of "about the character" talk is what lets you say, later, "Oh, yeah, I'll risk my character's Life (mechanical value 5) but not his Pride (mechanical value 5), because they have associations above and beyond the mechanical value."

I don't know.  It strikes me that a game that let you actually say "I'll risk this about the character, in order to develop the character and build empathy with them" and then say "I'll risk this about me, the player, in order to answer important questions for myself and others," ... well, that'd be a very different game from anything I've seen.  I can't think of ... well, any game that has those two states clearly flagged.

[Josh Roby]

What immediately springs to my mind is to use Karma for "merely character" risk and use a special add-on Fortune system (think Bringing Down the Pain) for "true" player risk.  When the character does something, you just compare stats; maybe things like fictional resources (cash/gear/job/relationships/health) are at risk.  When the player does something, you roll dice / draw cards, and you risk one of the credibility methods listed on the character sheet.  In other words, when the character risks, he's risking the things he's got, but when the player risks, he's risking who the character is.

[Thor Olavsrud]

In other words, when the character risks, he's risking the things he's got, but when the player risks, he's risking who the character is.

I think this is close, but not the whole. I'm not sure I can refine it into an axiom either. But here are some examples from recent actual play that point to it:

I'm playing a Justiciar who's investigating a conspiracy. Thor, the player, knows who is behind it all (a baron), but the character is subordinate to that guy and respects him. I am angling play in order to bring my character into conflict with that superior, at which points all my beliefs explode.

My current lead is to a sergeant who was responsible for some weapons that fell into the hands of the enemy. He's been captured by his military (controlled by the baron), and "commits suicide" before he can be transferred into my bailiffs' custody and I can interrogate him. This leads directly to a conflict, in which I pull out my character's interrogation skill.

My Intent (stakes): If I win, I catch the guy responsible for this guy's murder and get a direct lead to my superior.

The GM's stakes: If you lose, the guy responsible for the murder is going to try to assassinate you before your investigation zeroes in on him.

Bam! Now it's going to get interesting either way it goes. It's definitely Thor, the player, risking something. But I'm not sure that I'd consider it risking who the character is. I'm agreeing to how my character's pursuit of that conflict is going to be complicated by failure.

Here's another example:

Chris is playing the son of a bandit lord, who has gone "clean" and is now working for the king's chamberlain. The chamberlain is having trouble with some smuggling operations that are connected to the family, and Chris has been charged by the chamberlain with putting a stop to it. Chris's character is all about his ties to his family and his desire to protect it. He's also about his eventual right to control the family.

Chris gets into a conflict with his character's brother, whom he is fairly sure is responsible for the stuff the chamberlain is pissed about. Chris breaks out his character's Persuasion skill.

His stakes: If I win, I convince my brother to tell me what he knows about this situation and to back the family out of it.

The GM's stakes: If you lose, your brother convinces your father that you're working at cross-purposes to the family, and you get cut off.

Again, we're gambling about which way the story is going to go. Getting cut off from the crime family doesn't risk who the character is. But it creates a new complication to resolving the character's Beliefs, Kicker, Issue, or whatever marker/flag the game you're playing uses.

That's not to say that what you proposed above is not valid. It definitely is. It's just not the whole picture, IMHO.

[Josh Roby]

Certainly there are other ways to go about it, Thor.  I'm not trying to propose the only way.

I don't see a lot of thematic statements being made by the players in your examples, though.  With your justicar, you were certainly manuevering your character into a situation where he would be called upon to make such a thematic statement -- law versus loyalty, for instance.  But investigating some guy getting gacked doesn't say much about your character outside of the fact that he's an investigator who investigates these things.  What happened when you got to the face-to-face confrontation with the baron?

As for Chris, what kind of complication was "getting cut off"?  To me, this sounds like what I'd staked out as the karma-based character decision.  His stakes are that he loses his useful relationship with the crime family.  Would Chris have lost the ability to enter into the fiction details of the crime family, "oh, my cousin Alfred is into gun running" and the like?  Was he risking his credibility, or his character's resources?  Unless the very fact that he was investigating his own family was a sort of thematic statement -- I value the law over family -- I see more set-up to the real Bang.

Or am I way off?

[Thor Olavsrud]

Certainly there are other ways to go about it, Thor.  I'm not trying to propose the only way.

I don't see a lot of thematic statements being made by the players in your examples, though.  With your justicar, you were certainly manuevering your character into a situation where he would be called upon to make such a thematic statement -- law versus loyalty, for instance.  But investigating some guy getting gacked doesn't say much about your character outside of the fact that he's an investigator who investigates these things.  What happened when you got to the face-to-face confrontation with the baron?

As for Chris, what kind of complication was "getting cut off"?  To me, this sounds like what I'd staked out as the karma-based character decision.  His stakes are that he loses his useful relationship with the crime family.  Would Chris have lost the ability to enter into the fiction details of the crime family, "oh, my cousin Alfred is into gun running" and the like?  Was he risking his credibility, or his character's resources?  Unless the very fact that he was investigating his own family was a sort of thematic statement -- I value the law over family -- I see more set-up to the real Bang.

Or am I way off?

It's all in the Beliefs. My Justiciar's all about being loyal to his superiors. But he's also all about rooting out corruption that is eating the empire from within. And that creates this character's tension: what's more important: loyalty or rooting out corruption? This example was all about the second belief. It was me making the statement that this character is so much about rooting out corruption, that he's going to walk straight into what I, player Thor, know is a nest of vipers, without any protection, to do what he feels is right.

Outside of play, it's me really ramping up the "root out corruption" thing so that when the character discovers that his loyalty (which had also been ramped up steadily in play) ties him to a source of corruption, it becomes a really tight conflict.

Unfortunately for me, I don't know how the conflict with the baron would have played out. I lost the roll, Luke got the assassination attempt, and it went badly for me. I died. But I died making a statement.

As for Chris, who had beliefs about loyalty to his family and his eventual leadership of the family, getting cut off meant that he no longer had the ability to use family resources without conflict with his brother. He still had to pursue his goals of protecting his family and establishing leadership, but now he has to develop new ways of approaching it because the direct route is no longer open.

This scene was all about Chris choosing to protect his family (going forward with the conflict) at the risk of jeopardizing his eventual leadership of the family. Chris would later have that brother thrown in a dungeon by my justiciar as part of his plan to get back into the family, an act which left the family wide open to its enemies...