Are these two things incompatible?

[Sean]

To reboot my other thread - here are two posts about something I'm trying to work out, one original, one in response to a clarification query by Alan:

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1. "You're in a cavern of undulating stone, with an ancient brass demon-idol hulking above its farther reaches. Three bestial humanoids stand guard before it, waving flails..."

(During the battle, a player says: "I race behind one of the stone ridges and get out my bow. using the stone for cover." The GM says: "The hyena-man stands on high ground, covering all approaches with his waving flail." Modifiers are imposed on this basis.)


2. "OK, I paid x encounter points for an Oil Slick up there on the slope. So it forces a roll to avoid slippage any time anyone crosses it, and imposes a movement modifier regardless."

(During the battle, a player says: "I want to ignite that slick." The GM says: "No-one put points into it as a fire hazard, sorry." The player says: "Not even with this fire charm I got from the Daughter of Flame?" The GM says: "Um, no, it's not in the description.")

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Like some other people around here I'm lately obsessed with adversity-managing games like Rune and DiTV. I disagree with the assumption of some around here that such rules are constraining; I, speaking as GM, find them intensely liberating. One drag of being GM in a traditional game is that you're not really 'in the game'; you're a facilitator and an imaginer par excellence, things I also find enjoyable, but you have to pull your punches. Making GM adversity/force a resource lets you be another player. I like it.

But I also like the endless, spontaneous freeform creativity of just riffing off each others' descriptions afforded by traditional games. This is something I still find alluring about the "system is the physics of the gameworld" approach. You make shit up and then the rules give you a toolkit for translating your riffs into mechanics. Sometimes this leads to huge imbalances, but playing well can involve exploiting just such imbalances.

So anyway, my question. Can you have both at once?

Here's an argument for 'No':

- On the first approach, the core reality of the game is what you're imagining. System gives tools for adjudicating that on the basis of the elements included in your imagination. On the second approach, the core reality of the game is a conflict resolution process, which is essentially managed at the human level. If your game is fundamentally determined by a resource management algorithm, it can't allow stuff to just emerge spontaneously out of competitive freeform imagination-riffing.

On the other hand, here's an argument for 'Yes' in the particular case above: you have a move for either side which is called something like 'transform an element'. When the group agrees that someone has creatively used an imaginative element, you get a 'break' in what's established so far: maybe someone gets to allocate some kind of resource to transform the situation, or whatever. One simply notes that such things come up in play and provides a mechanic or resource to adjudicate them as part of the overall flow of the game.

I guess I'm mostly interested in discussing this one way or the other.

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I'm asking about the difference between free-form negotiation of how elements in the SiS get used in conjunction with a ruleset which provides a 'physics' for such elements in terms of how they translate into game mechanics (the default assumption of traditional RPGs and the basis of the mistaken assumption that 'realism' is an essential component of good roleplaying - I'm sure I'm right that that's the work that the notion of 'realism' does for a lot of gamers but start a separate thread if you're interested in that) and systems which manage the game effect of player and GM resources up front (Rune, Dogs in the Vineyard - also by default systems that have players rolling against themselves (e.g. Trollbabe) to adjudicate everything).

I am struggling with a potentially incoherent desire and want to find out if it's really incoherent or if there's a compromise or fix. The desire is on the one hand to allow the boundless-feeling creativity I associate with early RPGs (after 1980 = not early for purposes of this discussion) and to give that creativity mechanical 'weight' (as it does when your first level characters can nail a wyvern by setting up a clever rockfall trap, e.g.) and on the other hand to constrain GM-force as a kind of fixed input in the way that the pNPC rules in Dogs and the Encounter design rules in Rune do.

To stick with D&D-like stuff for a minute, Rune allows you to design terrain, weird magic, etc. for your encounters in a straightforward way. But you design it in terms of the precise modifiers it introduces to a situation. (Could just as easily be die pools for purposes of this discussion; the point is that the encounter design forces your resource to work in a prespecified way.)

So Rune doesn't fit the bill (though it's a cool game and I'd love to play it). You can't figure out something clever to do with the oil pits in the description unless the runner pre-specified a potential effect. There's no negotiation of the imaginary elements in play.

DitV is somewhat better in this regard but shares with TSoY the assumption that only human/sentient adversity really matters. (When you bring in the flaming oil pits in DitV you get 2d6 for working them into your narration, or 2d8 if they're big - I assume they're excellent, being flaming oil pits and all). This is fine for both games because they focus on human drama, but less fine if you want clever manipulation of a game environment to be an important feature of play. Note also that, like good Narrativism, free-form manipulation of game elements (promises about forthcoming 'physics engines' notwithstanding) in the manner of classic RPGs is another thing that I don't think computers can do as well as humans, so it's another aspect of RPGs that may be worth focusing on from a 'developing the unique things your form can do and others can't' point of view.

[GB Steve]

Don't mechanics such as dramatic editing in Adventure! and drama points in Buffy allow for constrained creativity within a traditional RPG framework?

Or is this not what you're after? I'm finding the jargon a bit heavy.

[Sean]

No, those aren't it. My suggestion in the first post was that maybe you could make clever use of the environment/world accessible by a separate resource in a different kind of system, as a kind of 'bridge' between the two approaches. But what I have in mind isn't changing what happened, bringing in director stance, having players take over GM roles, or any of that stuff; it's about using imaginary elements in clever ways to achieve exceptional effects in the SiS.

What I'm wondering is if it's possible to have the game mechanics and system manage both player and GM force as a resource and for clever manipulation of the SiS to produce a superabundance of force on either side, but especially for the players. So you don't get systems that permit a GM to whack a first level party with a red dragon but do get systems where the players can go all A-Team in the garage putting stuff together and make a trap or special device or cool maneuver that winds up getting them advantages way beyond what the direct and literal application of the stuff on their character sheet would normally allow.

I'm going to back off for a few hours or days now and see if anyone resonates with this or has helpful ideas or if I'm once again off in my own little world on this one.

[contracycle]

Well the only idea I can proffer is that of the GM as super-player.  It seems to me that if you have one big game... a game, in the strict sense, that is bigger than the game, in the soft sense, being played by the people... then you might end up with something a bit like what I think you mean.

Essentially the driving engine of the action then is what amounts to player versus player conflict, except not.  That is, the system at one level operates as the physics of the world, possibly to the point of controlling or determining NPC actions.  This allows the sense of freedom that comes with that form of open play.  But then at a second level, the system also manages the GM as super-player, as pseudo-author.  The GM-player role is constrained by rules in much the same way everyone else is - rules are the physics of the game world.  But the second set of rukles allows exceptions and special cases with which, then, the actual action/story/adventure is comprised.

I think Dungeoneer is the only existing game that heads vaguely in this direction that I know of.

[Andrew Norris]

Okay, the goal would be that System regulates player and GM resources, while leaving room to riff off of the environment. I'm aiming for that in my current campaign; there are a few things we're doing to try to make it happen.

First, that riffing can provide an opportunity to spend more resources. I add in my fire magic to the "keep people off the slope" conflict, with the justification that I've lit the oil slick on fire. The benefit of being imaginative is that you can apply those resources in more situations than you could if you weren't riffing off the environment.

Second, it can give you a mechanical advantage transferred from someone else at the table. The "Ooh, that's cool, here have some more dice" approach. PTA Fan Mail could work this way. (I think traditional GM-imposed modifiers work this way, anyway; just replace "what's cool" with "what the GM thinks would be plausible and effective", and give them an unlimited "modifier pool" to draw from.)

You could have a "Physics Pool" and award bonuses from it based on environmental improvisation, but really it's just a special case. Depending on the people at the table, you could just as easily get bonuses for heartfelt emotion or cracking a joke. What you're trying to do is reward a certain behavior by apportioning more credibility (better chance of success) to the person doing it.

As far as the A-Team effect goes, we've done that kind of thing in games by splitting things up into multiple scenes or conflicts, and rolling over successes. So you're more effective if you kitbash together some weapons, a tricky plan, and a few cool maneuvers, but the System reason for that is just that you've invested more resources over time. We're used the same technique for, say, a lengthy seduction, which doesn't have much to do with physics. I think of it as having invested dramatic importance in whatever you're doing, and that investment pays off in terms of a better chance of getting what you want.

[TonyLB]

Sean:  When you're talking about "bonusses for dropping rocks on the wyvern" and such... are you talking about the GM-judged improvisation that can happen outside the system ("That oil should be flammable, even though there is no mention of any such flammability anywhere in any book, ever!"  "Sure... let's say it does 3d6 damage per round somebody's immolated")?  Or are you talking about the specific ability to maneuver granted by a game-map and movement rules (i.e. wargaming:  "I'm just out of range of its breath-weapon, but our long-bows still reach!  Rockin'!")?

[Sean]

Gareth: Isn't Dungeoneer a card game? How does it do this?

Andrew: Cool, yeah, I had some ideas along those lines. You could even make the 'physics pool' type resource open-ended in effect, so that how much you get for your improv is negotiated by the group in some way. Then it gets a little crazier than the Dogs standard bonus or fire magic augment examples, which is what I like.

Tony: The first, definitely, though there may be some interesting vagueness between the two kinds of case.

[xenopulse]

Sean,

I think this point strongly resonates with the discussions we've had in recent days and weeks on the address of challenge when people Step On Up. Because when players are figuring out clever ways to use the environment or self-designed traps, they are Stepping On Up to address that particular challenge. The question that your examples pose is the same we've been wrestling with, that is, who judges the address and how does that affect the in-game events?

What I've proposed is that there are two ways of handling this, which correlate to your examples. Either other players (GM or group decision) judge your address, or any address has the same mechanical effect.

In your first example, when the player thought it was cool to light something on fire, the GM can simply say, "That doesn't work," for whatever reason; feeling that it violates the causality of the game world, feeling that it imbalances the conflict, feeling that a different address would be more appropriate, etc. It's arbitrary.

In the second example, when everything is handled mechanically--as you noticed--you lose some of that ability to have your creative input directly appreciated (though it can still be socially appreciated).

So I think Andrew is on the right path. In order to preserve fairness, I personally suggest that we need a mechanic that is not arbitrarily judged, but that allows for rewards for Stepping On Up from the GM or the other players, most likely for later use or for different use altogether. PtA does this, as Andrew noticed.

Callan (IIRC) also suggested a mechanic like Universalis, where you can establish elements to use, and you get rewarded if other people use them as well (showing that you created something cool). That's also worth pondering.

[GB Steve]

In Buffy though, the Drama points are much more of a currency than merely for use by the players to get out of scrapes. The GM can also spend them to make things more interesting.

[Sean]

Xenopulse,

That's a great idea, but not as easy as it sounds.

One of the cool things about traditional games is that if I want to make a room where there are 12d6 pits of acid, then the PCs or monsters can push things into them, telekinese them, whatever, either for Step on Up purposes or just because it's an interesting way to deal with the conflict at hand. Likewise, one of the cool things about a fixed spell list is that you can use the spells in all kinds of weird and unexpected ways. I once used a lowly Pyrotechnics spell to escape from Asmodeus' throne room, which was anti-magicked against spells 3rd level and up, but not against 1st and 2nd level spells, by making a big cloud of smoke and running.

But what principle guides the GMs decision to put a 12d6 pit of acid in a room? None. And the GM can set up terrain, monsters, whatever which totally hose the players. This is canonical bad GMing: to create some totally idiosyncratic and non-discernible problem with nasty or lethal consequences for failure, and then to smugly say "You could have pulled the invisible lever behind the curtain" or something to justify his hosing the PCs. Sort of like a person forced into an arranged marriage always has the 'choice' of suicide or exile if they don't like it. Not Fun.

Systems like Dogs and Rune avoid this problem and thus put the GM (or current Runner in Rune) back into the action in the conflicts without having to pull her punches. Cool! But then by managing force in the way they do they also seem to make tactical creativity kind of empty. Not completely empty - there's a challenge in figuring out how to work something into your narration convincingly in a Dogs or Heroquest type setup, and nested events in Rune allow the GM to present puzzles for the players to solve with effects on later events, etc. - but it's still not the same thing as remembering that the GM described a crumbling ledge in the last room, running backwards, and using some cheesy little item or spell to dislodge a rockfall on the pursuing purple worm. Or whatever.

What it's all about is the interaction between the imagined stuff and the effects on the game. One approach leaves the 'force' (in my broad sense) that any player, but especially the GM, can bring to bear totally open, but also allows wide-open consequences for imagining cool shit. The other approach constrains the force and thus generally makes for better games, but in so doing seriously constrains the potential consequences for imagining cool shit. At least of a certain kind.

So I guess my 'holy grail' for this thread would be something that allowed you to do both. I think Andrew's list is a pretty good start but a lot of it feels sort of 'klugey' to me in the way that hero points/fate points/artha/whatever do (I'm not a big fan of that kind of mechanic although I like BW Revised's implementation better than any other I've seen to date). You can do it with a force-moderating system plus appropriate system breaks plus some kind of either big ruleset or group/subgroup consensus process to determine what the special effects are, and if I were patching something to achieve such effects that's the route I'd take, but I guess I'm looking for something wilder.

Maybe just something like what Rune does but with more open-ended use modifiers would be the goal. But that's harder than it sounds. Way harder. The whole attempt that 3e is making with the CR system to have defined challenge ratings for entities like monsters and traps, etc., even if expanded in some Rune-like ways to terrain and all other features of an imagined environment, seems to me doomed to failure, because clever contextualization of such items can always create unwinnable situations, which means we still have the problem that the GM has to police himself not only at the always-present social context level, but in the context of designing his game setup and playing her creatures as well.

[TonyLB]

I once used a lowly Pyrotechnics spell to escape from Asmodeus' throne room, which was anti-magicked against spells 3rd level and up, but not against 1st and 2nd level spells, by making a big cloud of smoke and running.

Except (and I really don't want to undercut the wonderful memory of your foiling Asmodeus with a mere cloud of smoke) all of that works only, and exactly, when the GM allows it to work.  There are no rules either forbidding or denying Asmodeus to see through smoke... or, more likely (I don't remember all that well) there are many, many rules that show that Asmodeus absolutely would see through the smoke, and the GM seamlessly ignored those rules in favor of your creativity. 

So it seems to me that what you're asking is "How do I get that thrilling feeling of having my ideas validated by the GM, who judges whether they're worthy of success, in a game where the GM has his own agenda?"  Does that sound just about right?

[Sean]

Tony, let's not get hung up on my example. In D&D 1e there weren't any 'see through smoke' special abilities except maybe X-Ray vision, which Asmodeus did not have IIRC. (Or if he did, the GM might have missed it. These problems have to be solved by real people in real time.) I suppose you could say that infravision could detect heat traces through a little smoke, but Pyrotechnics makes big billowing clouds of the stuff - I wouldn't have allowed that.

On the other hand, you're right that there weren't any rules governing it in another sense - this is why old hands get hung up on 'realism'. The default assumption is that creatures can do what real world creatures can do except where a rule says otherwise. Real world creatures can't see through smoke (except maybe with sonar), so neither can any monsters which don't have the special ability. I also don't want to get hung up on the realism issue in this thread though.

Another way you're right to say that there's no rules governing it is that the GM designs Asmodeus' throne room and could put in motion detectors or whatever if he wanted to screw the players. This is why it was a Really Big Deal for some early gamers that the GM actually write out whatever dungeon etc. he was running, so that the GM could prove he thought of stuff in advance when the players got hosed, and didn't just make things up when the players didn't do things his or her way.

But I don't think there's anything in the 1e Asmodeus that gave him a special see through smoke ability, since infravision doesn't count. Send me a private message if you have a counterargument so we don't get hung up on that - if you convince me I'll even put in a note in the thread saying I was wrong.

If you're saying early D&D was all really GM fiat I disagree. The GM may have unlimited environment design power (except where a functioning social contract constrains it) but once he chooses to put certain things in certain future choices are constrained by them. But let's not argue about that either.

Going back to the point of the thread, I don't accept your paraphrase in the last sentence. It could be group consensus or stuff printed in a book or something else that 'decides' as far as I'm concerned.

What I want is unlimited player creativity to use stuff that's pre-established in the SiS with arbitrarily high amounts of game-force consequent upon them (maybe even in some cases by players taking director stance and establishing their own stuff) AND a constraint mechanism for how much force the GM or person-taking-the-environmental-management-role gets to directly express. Which may be impossible. Actually, it would be cool if it were impossible. Or, if it is possible, I'd like other ideas besides Andrews', which essentially involve taking a general force-managing mechanic and then allowing breaks in it for cool ideas involving exploitation of certain resources, sort of like a 'realism'-constrained hero point mechanic if you like. That's a decent idea but I'm interested in others.

Essentially, if it is impossible, the reason is that you can't anticipate every possibility for creative reinterpretation of imagined stuff, or putting it to new purposes, and if you can't, then there's no absolute currency to manage force in every case. I think.

By the way, on the jargon thing, I don't mean to be using any, though I know I am. Apologies and I'm happy to try to explain what I mean.

[M. J. Young]

A referee I knew allowed skill in something he called "Magyverism". I never saw it used, but I can imagine a way of using it. If the player chooses to do so, he can roll a skill check on this. If it's successful, he found something at hand from which he could fashion a solution to the current problem; within the bounds of what is known about the situation, someone has to narrate what that is and how it helps. If the roll fails, he wasted a lot of time trying to work out something that didn't work. Effectiveness of a Magyverism can be managed by whatever mechanics already exist for the effectiveness of other skills, e.g., if the choice is to design a weapon, it would be a weapon of appropriate force dependent on how good the rolls are.

--M. J. Young

[xenopulse]

Sean,

I don't think we need to get hung up on one example. The pure fact of the matter is that if you try anything that's not explicitly linked to a mechanic in the rules, you have to establish your authority on it (you've already explicitly agreed to give the rules authority by playing that particular game). In most games, including OD&D, the decision about that lies with the GM. I've seen uncountable moments of play between players and GM where the players try to argue certain points to their advantage based on how "realistic" or "logical" their argument is, but in the end, if the GM says "No," that's it. I think that's what Tony was pointing out. Your "default assumptions" are a social contract issue and may help you argue your point, but the buck stops with the GM, period.

I don't know what else I can suggest without getting into either Actual Play or Actual Design. Maybe we need to start a groupdesign Gamist project :)

[Sean]

In D&D the buck stops with the GM, but the phenomenon we're talking about here doesn't require that. It's not about D&D, it's about interesting (as judged by who? By an authority or by consensus, or whatever other forms of judgment there are - I know of many) reinterpretations of the shared imagined content. Which are by their nature open-ended; but mechanics cannot be open-ended in this same way. Hence the 'need' (given the assumption of a certain motif of play) for a 'physics of the game world', a translation manual; but how can this manual in turn be quantified as a resource?

We can make consultations of the manual a resource.

The wine is making me talk like a humanist. Gotta stop for now. That's another good approach, MJ, but it still has the feature about Andrew's I'm not crazy about: admitting that certain events are breaks and providing a method for accessing the breaks. Maybe that's the best that can be done though. There is no valid general inference from intelligence to sanity.