An RPG Optimised for Play-by-Post games.

[Callan S.]

I guess what I'd find fun- within the context of that example- is the usual simulationist/gamist agenda- following the internal cause/effect of the world to formulate a sequence of moves that are effective for the purpose while being plausible in 'realist' terms.

Wow, that's alot of emphasis on following cause and effect and being plausible. If you won, but it wasn't that plausible, would it be a matter of "Yay, I won - might try for a higher plausibility rating next time, but hey, got it!!!" or would it just be a failure? Or if your thinking "If I won? Wha? Win?" then I'm definately thinking there is no gamism inclination in this small sample and instead simulationism. If that's the case, what you'd call gamism is merely 'inclination to actually use the rules of a text'. Which is great! But it's not gamism as I know it.

I don't really know simulationist design terribly well. My primitive knowledge is that they move isn't a plausible one, it's usually what the people in the play group are inclined to think is plausible. The fun 'bubble' of play is that within that groups bubble, it isn't what they think is plausible, it IS plausible. This always seems to make it hard to talk about in terms of design because to support that bubble, you have to acknowledge it is a bubble and not the state of the universe. Or in short, way over my head. Umm, that's another reason I bit my lip - I might make posts, then it ends up not in my field of study at all. Or would it be "Yay, I won!" after all?

[soundmasterj]

Commercial Version of Bacchanal: http://www.halfmeme.com/bacchanal.html
Iron Game Chef PDF: http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/bacchanal.pdf

Actually, I think FatE ist stupid in general.

@ soundmasterj
Thanks for the clarification, but I'm not sure rules-consultation is the bottleneck here so much as people-consultation.  As I've mentioned, time is not at a premium here, because there are necessarily large delays between posts- player communication is.

I'm also worried the lack of any reliable initiative order could undermine FitM mechanics, because whoever narrates first is going to introduce changes to the shared-imagined-space that could undermine the intent of subsequent narrators, or simply introduce time-related dependancies that aren't really appropriate in this context.  On reflection, that's part of the reason why I favoured a scripting-of-intent simulationist approach- it disciplines player interactions with the world and other characters over time to insure they don't tread on eachother's toes.  To my mind, it's not so much a question of personal enjoyment as it is of being fair.

FitM and CR surprisingly allows for less people-consultation. That´s why I proposed it. CR is dead fair; I succesfully roll for stake X, I achieve stake X no questions asked, I fail the roll, I DON´T achieve it. And the earlier the fortune, the less small-scale details depend on symetrical interaction (in reverse: in FitM, decisions are legitimized by mechanics, not by fiat or any other kind of direct interaction establishing every step.)
Obviously, whatever kind of mechanic I proposed doesn´t solve all of your problems. Just some.

Mirroring Callan, I think now it´s the time to ask what game you actually want.

I had an idea that could thematically work in PBP - context: Mirror Universe! Every player does one Mirror World. You start narrating a conflict in your Universe (the ordinary world: Tina has to talk to the principal because she always roughes up little boys), I narrate how this conflict looks like in my Universe (fantasy planet: Taria the Barbarian is brought before the king because she killed some of his guards), now I consult some kind of mechanic and narrate the solution in one of the worlds. Next player translates the resolution into another Universe and frames the next scene in his (scifi - planet: the Cyberlord fails in his attacks on TI-99. Now TI-99 is on the run from the Cyberlords´ Elite Robot Laser Death Squadron!). And so on.

One thing I could imagine working is some kind of "I want a scene" - flag. A player throws the next scene to whoever (is this a who or a whom?)  set that flag first. And so on.

Yeah, and as Ron said, Gamism works just as well with a lot of color and free-form narration. I think I could make something up. Also, yes, I concurr with Callan.
Concerning narrativism, if it fascinates you at all, I´d just try it. For me, it worked just fine without anybody with experience around.

One last thing concerning "sim": I think it´s terribly stupid to model the rules as looking like cause-and-effect. Any free narration will do cause-and-effect. Any free narration will tend to be believable if the player doing it has fun with narrating believable.

But the main thing that needs to be done now is proposing an actual game, I think.

[Jill]

@ Ron

You're absolutely right that people do often use play-by-post simply as a form of collaborative storytelling with little or no rules beyond 'avoid godmodding.'  (I used to participate in these, essentially as a form of group fanfic.)  And when it worked, it was fun, no question about it.
But, as for whether this is generally a satisfactory general 'design solution'... in my experience, to be honest, no.  If you had several strong participants in the story with a good intuition for premise, sustained interest and decent writing skills, then things generally wound up nicely, but this was understandably rare.  As you identified in 'story now', without a clear statement of premise or delegation of authority, it tended to degenerate into ouija-board role-play, and the result was usually abandoned before arriving at any conclusion.

If I'm reading right, one of your notions is that given the long delays in communication, whoever communicates next actually gets to go next.

I'm sorry I didn't communicate this clearly, but my original idea was that-
1.  The GM would frame the scene, and divide up adversaries among the players (in combat.)
2.  Players have the next (e.g,) 24/48 hours to state their intent.
3.  Once all intents have been stated, the GM performs execution and announces outcomes.
4.  The players narrate what happened, possibly using metagame resources to tweak the outcome (e.g, artha.)

So that play would go in definite cycles of a fixed time interval.  You could effectively use either FitM, FatE, Karma+resource management, scripting + contingencies, or some combination thereof.
Thanks for the clarification on cause and effect re: narrativism, I'll definitely work harder on that, and take a look at Bacchanal.


@  Callan

I would say that if the rules were constructed correctly, grossly implausible outcomes would be either impossible or very rare, and combining implausibility with success, rarer still.  That's mainly my personal taste, though:  The important thing is to constrain cause and effect so that the players' sequence of narration for a given timeframe is largely irrelevant, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.


@  soundmasterj

Now that I think about it, I guess you could describe BW's approach to combat as FitM, or adapt it that way- after all, you're declaring an intent without specific guarantees about what goes down in practice, and there's a fair degree of abstraction involved WRT armour, movement, etc.  It's still task resolution, rather than conflict resolution, though.

I'm still worried that a pure conflict-resolution-based approach won't work when you don't have a reliable initiative order- whoever got to post last within a given 24-hour period would have to deal with all the accumulated changes to the shared-imagined-space introduced since their last post:  And that could be the product of 2N-1 previous posts or zero, where N is the number of (non-GM) players.  (If it were reliably N, that would be another matter, but it ain't.)

The benefit of a 'sim' approach to small-scale events is that it can automagically resolve situations where players' specific intentions overlap or conflict, without further conferences.  I mean:

Task resolution
A Technique in which the Resolution mechanisms of play focus on within-game cause, in linear in-game time, in terms of whether the acting character is competent to perform a task. Contrast with Conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution
A Technique in which the mechanisms of play focus on conflicts of interest, rather than on the component tasks within that conflict. When using this Technique, inanimate objects are conceived to have "interests" at odds with the character, if necessary. Contrast with Task resolution.

Because there's no initiative order to speak of, just in order to be fair everything needs to resolve simultaneously, and over the same interval- that's linear time.  And what if the 'inanimate object' in question is an aspect of a previous player's narration that you don't have power to override without further conference?  That's a symmetric conflict of interest right there.

Your Mirror Universe concept sounds fascinating, and it would certainly simplify things drastically, since players can't directly interfere with eachothers' narration, which would certainly solve most of the problems I alluded to.


Again, thanks for all the references and feedback.  I'll try to come up with a more specific example of possible system(s) and get back afterward.

[soundmasterj]

It´s weird. Why am I defending CR and FitM? This is the future, Obama is president, we shouldn´t talk about CR and FitM!

You are thinking all of these complicating thoughts about initiative and how it´s all messed up in PBP and CR and whatnot. Thing is, CR does this so nicely, I´ve more or less forgotten about how hard initiative rules in TR-semi-sim games is (that is, until I play shadowrun again). Look at Otherkind. I roll dice and they tell me I´ve won the conflict. Now I narrate HOW I´ve won it. Maybe because I shot fast than the other guy. Maybe because he shot first, but I hit first. I narrate character-accordingly; if the other guy is really fast and I am this old troll, I´ll narrate him acting first, but me acting last (and him not acting at all after I´m done with him). It doesn´t matter how we roll initiative because, well... Because CR is fair. I roll high enough, I win. In FitM CR, dice don´t mirror the linear order of the imagined acts they legitimize. Because why should they? Really, why? It´s completely fair this way. I win CR, I get what I wanted, nothing more nothing less.

Your fear of other people touching inanimate objects (or animate objects!) isn´t a problem with CR, but with director stance. You could as well make up CR rules where you´re only allowed to narrate your character and what he directly is in conflict with (semi-author stance). But why? Let players set flags in some way about what they´d rather not have other players touch or only touch in certain ways and all is fine.
One idea I just had was how you could change the narration rights - die from Otherkind to a "stance die". A high number, I narrate director stance (... how I win or lose depending on the other dice), mid number, I narrate author stance, low die, I state some intended tasks and the GM narrates how it gets solved. This is fair because everyone who gets the right to touch things other people might care for paid for it.
Personally, I LOVE throwing my character and whatever I made up into the hands of other players; because I try playing with people I trust in narrating something cool. if I wanted complete control, I´d write fiction. It´s really suspensefull seeing how other players interpret your character. I wouldn´t see it as a problem, but as a chance. I think the less RPG play is wish-fullfilment, escapist power trip, the more it is shared narration of really good stories, the less of a problem restricted character or story ownership becomes. Shadowrun? You ain´t touching my guy, it took me hours to get him this cool! Narr play? Here, touch my guy, I trust you to have some great ideas.

I play this dude and I don´t know really what he looks like and suddenly my friend says how my character scares the little kids with his smallpox scars. Now I know what my character looks like and why I played him this grumpy all the time! Clear as day, that´s his face.
I would hope for full-scale character sharing, not fear it. Remember, Obama President, future, hope not fear!
YMMW though.

Or maybe a picture says more than a thousand words. Luke Skywalker, hitting Darth Vader with his light sabre, trying to kill his own father - we don´t care what initiative they rolled. We care WHY he´s trying to kill his own father and because we know why, we care if he succeds. That´s were the fun as well as the true problems seem to be.

[Callan S.]

@  Callan

I would say that if the rules were constructed correctly, grossly implausible outcomes would be either impossible or very rare, and combining implausibility with success, rarer still.  That's mainly my personal taste, though:  The important thing is to constrain cause and effect so that the players' sequence of narration for a given timeframe is largely irrelevant, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

I think I have a useful suggestion. But let me first say, its like I asked if your house was on fire and you could either save your cat or a van gough painting you own, which would you save? And you've responded "Well, my preference is to have a well built house that wont catch on fire". It's fence sitting! If you won the game in a horribly implausible, realism breaking way, would you go "Yay! I won - though I'd like to improve my realism score next time as well as winning" or would it be a big failure? It's a hard choice, like the cat/van gough choice is. Maybe too hard or personal to come out with on the post and I respect that - but still worth mulling over in private none the less.

Onto my suggestion. Looking at your first problem I think initiative order is really your problem. People will do things that affect other peoples actions - who goes first?

My idea is that players have a initiative points. They can spend these when they make a post. Whoever spends the highest amount has his action go ahead of someone who spent less, even if the other person posted first.

A further idea on top of that is that the player, in his post, can set himself to auto out bid any other player (until he's spent all his initiative points). So he could write "I will spend enough initiative points that I go before all other players". Clearly if two players do this, whoever has the most init points stored will be the one who goes first.

Also players who post after get a feeling of who will be going first and what the order of actions will be (depending on what they want to spend) and will be able to shape their post more according to what posts are already there.

Side note: If you want to get all simmy, to represent characters who are fast or slow, you can have a limit on how many initiative points a character can spend on an action.

[Jill]

@ Jona (I think)

Okay.  I'm sorry if I came across as insensitive or dismissive in some way, but perhaps we're miscommunicating here.  There are two points to clarify:

Your fear of other people touching inanimate objects (or animate objects!) isn´t a problem with CR, but with director stance. You could as well make up CR rules where you´re only allowed to narrate your character and what he directly is in conflict with (semi-author stance). But why? Let players set flags in some way about what they´d rather not have other players touch or only touch in certain ways and all is fine.

Yes- but the order in which those flags is declared hands significantly greater freedom to whoever posts first in a given period- which is exactly the kind of situation I'm trying to avoid.  The last player to post in a given 'round' would have to avoid all the flags declared by all previous players before him, whereas the fist player to post would have a lot more freedom.

Personally, I LOVE throwing my character and whatever I made up into the hands of other players; because I try playing with people I trust in narrating something cool.

I agree, this could be fun, but, because (I presume) you all take turns around the table, the important thing is everybody has an equal chance to have fun with other people's characters.  Again, this doesn't necessarily hold if posting happens at unpredictable times.  Every other player might have posted twice, or none.


@  Callan
That actually sounds like a very interesting solution.  In particular, it might be easier to adapt to social conflicts with multiple characters involved, if there was an explicit mechanism for revising 'subsequent' narration.  I'll think about it further and get back to you.

[soundmasterj]

Mh.

"Hello thar!", intonated a stereotypic barbarian from the northern lands who suddenly appeared from somewhere out of the woods. "This sounds like exactly the kind of situation were my aid would be required!" And with a playfull song on his lips, the northman started hacking the band of orcs to a bloody pulp.

OOC: Hey guys please don´t have this guy be gay ok. I call dibs on him. I know you all want him to fall in love with the bard and have a drama story on brokeback mountain but please don´t ok? If you narrate him, narrate him as kicking orc but or being chauvinistic. Think Conan. Here, I spend 1000 Plot Points on him, he´s mine, he´s like Conan for 1000 Plot Points, whoever wants to narrate him as being not like Conan has to spend 1001 Plot Points. Thanks everybody.

That´s what I meant by "flags". Another example would be what you wrote about your character at character creation; you write, for example, "He is a gentle and nice person" so nobody narrates him as creepily hitting on nuns.
I think you could cut the Plot Points bit though.

Concerning your take on equality: I don´t get it. So what if somebody posted twice? If what he posted is cool, that´s fine. Say he posted twice and introduced two new NPCs and solved two conflicts. Now I post once, solve one conflict and introduce 5 new NPCs! I´d think quality, not quantity. I don´t care how many orcs my Conan Carbon Copy exactly slays, I just want him to do nothing but slay orcs. If everybody respects that, it´s fair. If you narrate him thrice as being exactly as cool as I imagined him to be, I should be happy.

Yes, I´m Jona, hi Jill, no, you didn´t come across as insensitive or dismissive and why should I care anyway, it´s just that I fundamentally belive that TR is stupid and CR is the future:)

[Callan S.]

@  Callan
That actually sounds like a very interesting solution.  In particular, it might be easier to adapt to social conflicts with multiple characters involved, if there was an explicit mechanism for revising 'subsequent' narration.  I'll think about it further and get back to you.

How do you mean, 'subsequent'? Do you mean 'Oh, if he's doing that then I would have done X'?

Okay, they can post after that, stating the new action and paying a certain amount of initiative points to replace what they posted with something else, assuming they can afford it. I think perhaps one and a half times the amount the person paid who actions they are making a subsequent narration about.

Perhaps double. Because frankly actions should come to a crunch at some point, not end up in alot this stuff which frankly just avoids ramifications and takes up time.

[Jill]

Jona- again, not to be dismissive- but I'm not sure that the attitude you suggest is neccesarily the most productive take on the problem.  Hopefully Ron can tell me if I'm taking things out of context here, put 'pitfalls of narrativist design' includes the following:

5.  Going "no system," especially for IIEE aspects of play, combines the undermining aspects of both of the above two approaches, especially when the author idealizes story as a product rather than Narrativist play as a process. Don't forget, all role-playing has a system; turning it over to "oh, just decide and have fun" merely makes the system crappy and prone to bullying.

6.  Fleeing to Social Contract to solve everything. Some designers, enthralled by the idea that input does not have to be restricted to or filtered through a central person, rely on the hope that everyone feels like contributing extra-protagonist content at any given moment. Unfortunately, this creates a "dead ball" effect in which one must create, on the spot, both adversity and its resolution from whole cloth. People apparently prefer a fair amount of context and constraint in order to provide input instead.

I will also say that I believe no player should ever have to worry about other players taking their character in a direction that they don't approve of- to me, that amounts to extreme deprotagonisation.  No player should have to expend in-game resources to enforce what should be a fundamental rule of courtesy.  I can believe that other players might be entitled to define things that happen to your character, or even, on occasion, things that character will do- but never what that character is, and anything that the character does should, ideally, reflect that.

Callan, just one point-

But let me first say, its like I asked if your house was on fire and you could either save your cat or a van gough painting you own, which would you save? And you've responded "Well, my preference is to have a well built house that wont catch on fire". It's fence sitting!

I suppose that if you were to twist my arm, I would say that 'winning' in a grossly implausible fashion on a regular basis would indeed be a sign that the System is broken and needs fixing, by way of personal preference.

I don't want to go any further until I can come up with a more concrete suggestion for a specific system, so I'll just leave it there...

[Callan S.]

It's cool, Jill. I meant it when I said its just something to mull over. But I am curious about what you meant by "an explicit mechanism for revising 'subsequent' narration" and whether my suggested solution above applies to that? I'm rather keen to know if I hit its bullseye, or atleast near it?

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Jill, that's a decent and fair request to Jona, and I as moderator am OK with it.

A helpful person reminded me of these older discussions:
Designing for a PBeM Format
Play-by-Post roleplaying and the order of events

See what can be mined there for your purposes, and let me know.

Callan, it's up to you, as I'm not moderating in this part of the sentence, but as a thread participant, I suggest that we slow down and let Jill work it through to where she wants. I mean, full-scale Creative Agenda challenge is a big monkey to hug, never mind instant discussions of techniques as well.

Best, Ron