Hello all,

I've had one character-making session with my players for our spanking-new Sorcerer game, and it went really swimmingly. The players surprised me with their innovativeness, not to mention with just how really disgusting they were willing to make their Demons, without much prompting from me.

But, that's not what I want to discuss; Actual Play looms large on my horizon, and I find that my years of Simulationist play have left me with a deep habit of "roll to hit, roll defense, roll damage, mark it down" as the Way to Do Stuff. I often hear Fortune-in-the-Middle talked about, and it's a favored mechanic for Sorcerer, but that book and the mentions I read are not very detailed about what this looks like in play. The "whiff factor" in FUDGE's usual dice mechanics has been a major cause of my being dissatisfaction with it and finding a happy home with Sorcerer, but I'm anxious that my description not reify it in a game that doesn't encourage it.

Could someone post examples, or pointers to them, of Fortune-in-the-Middle in combat, magic, and more ordinary tasks? They can be quite brief, I just want a handle on it before I go inflicting it on myself & my players.

With thanks,

--TQuid

It's pretty simple.

Instead of task-oriented resolution (do I pick the lock), go for conflict-oriented resolution (do I get past this door).

Then, to use FitM, figure out how/why the conflict was (or wasn't) dealt with.

So I pick the lock and I fail. Rather than a "You fail" result, the GM allows me to pick the lock, but makes it a trapped lock -- the door opens but I feel a sharp sting and look down to see a needle coated with green ichor.

Or I swing my sword at the troll and rather than missing, the troll grabs my sword arm and sinks the blade even deeper into its chest, making it really tough to pull out.

That kinda thing.

My Alyria game makes use of a Fortune-in-the-Middle mechanic. (BTW, folks, the first draft is done and I hope to be finished transcribing by the end of the week!) I know that you don't know the system, so I'll speak in generalities.

Let's say that two characters are going to fight. They both pick the Attribute that they want to use and do other fun system things. Finally, both make a roll against a target. The three basic possibilities are these:

Character A makes his roll, Character B fails.
Character B makes his roll, Character A fails.
Both make their roll.

Obviously, these translate to Character A wins, Character B wins, tie. However, that is (almost) all the system tells you. The details are up to you to narrate. So let's say that Character A wins. What does that mean? Did he chop off Character B's head? Does he disarm him? The possibilities are wide open. However, the system has indicated the direction of narrative flow (Character A wins).

Obviously different systems have different inputs. Alyria does include some more details that provide guidance, but I didn't want to muddy the water too much.

Is this helpful?

First I'll say that waht Jared responded with seems to be more the conflict resolution and modified failure tactics than FitM per se. Both strong tactics that work well with FitM, consider using them. What Seth describes is more the classic FitM technique, though.

A lot of FitM seems to me to be a feel thing. Instead of just stating what the outcome of a success will be in complete terms, you leave it hanging somehow. Then you decide on the specifics afterwards. What this prevents is the standard, I try to hit, you succeed/you fail description of the result that can be anticlimactic. See also whiff-factor.

So, in implementation, simply encourage players to say I'm trying to hurt him, or I'm trying to disarm him. Then on a success the player can embelish within the limitations of the result, and on a failure can describe how the failure occured (which can be protagonizing itself), instead of just getting a result that it didn't happen.

Mike

To clarify even more (because both of the previous examples read like Sumerian to me - no offense, guys), here's two examples:

Combat
GM: Ok. You're in a cave, and you see a large troll up ahead. What is your goal for this scene?

Player: Hm. (Some example goals would be get away, sneak past the troll, kill the troll, reason with the troll, etc.) I think I'm going to have to kill the troll and get past him.

GM: Fine by me. Roll. (They roll dice, and the player wins by a moderate margin. Degree of success is usually quite important in FitM systems.) What did you do?

Player: I ran at the troll, unsheathing my sword and leapt upon his chest. He managed to slam me against a wall with one arm, but I drove the sword through his eye, killing him.

Magic
GM: You see a large crowd up ahead, and they seem quite angry. Your friend is up on a stage, and it seems they are thinking of hanging him.

Player: I think I need to get past this crowd without having them rip me to shreds. I'm going to use magic to do that.

GM: Ok. Roll your Magic stat. (Player gets a high degree of success.)

Player: All right! Hm. What do I want to do? Ok. I cast a spell, "Puffin's Ineffable Contention," on the crowd, causing them to argue with each other. While they're distracted, I walk right past them, leap on the stage, and steal the prisoner from under their noses. (Note the player could had the character cast a flying spell, or invisibility, or whatever else he felt like.)

That's FitM again all right, but like Jared I think that you're also confabulating it with scene resolution. Ron! You made up this term! What's the definition, dammit!

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote:
That's FitM again all right, but like Jared I think that you're also confabulating it with scene resolution. Ron! You made up this term! What's the definition, dammit!

Hey,

Damn, I go off and do some real work for a while, and y'all start yellin' for me.

The key to this concept is that you do not have to announce the character's specific, actual, choreographed action prior to the Fortune mechanic (e.g. the roll). You do state the general intent, but you do not state the actual, physical, detailed action. That waits until after the resolution.

Let's take my favorite example, the elbow strike. OK, Fred is the character, squaring off against Fritz.

TRADITIONAL
Fred's player announces the precise move in question: "I [Fred] try to hit him with an elbow strike." Note that this announcement carries with it the actual move, so Fred is really and truly in action, throwing that particular attack.

If the roll succeeds: the elbow strike hits!

If the roll fails: the elbow strike goes "whiff."

FORTUNE IN THE MIDDLE
Fred's player says, "I [Fred] close with him, I really want to mess him up and knock him straight out, no frills." Note that this announcement is goal-oriented, not action-oriented.

If the roll succeeds: the player picks whatever technique appeals to him, say, an elbow strike.

If the roll fails: Fred does not have to whiff his strike! The player and/or GM decide that the opponent simply fended him off with a weapon, or a push-you-off move, or something similar. Thus the strike never got attempted, thus it never missed.

Therefore, this method permits the precise action to be generated following the roll, which allows the player and/or GM to choreograph the events using the roll as raw material, not as the finishing/concluding clincher.

MORE
Now, you will be correct to note that Sorcerer does not enforce Fortune-in-the-middle. It permits it, at best. Check out some threads in the Sorcerer forum about this. Games that enforce Fortune-in-the-middle are rare; Hero Wars is probably the best example.

I also recommended my answers to Manu regarding Intent, Initiation, Execution, and Completion, somewhere in the GNS forum.

Hope this helped.
Best,
Ron

Alright I'll take a stab at this. As I agree there is seems to be a confusion between granularity of resolution and FitM.

Fortune-In-The-Middle works like this: State general intent. Apply resolution mechanic. Describe details of action based on mechanic result.

Specific Example:

The PC and a Ninja are facing off.

GM: The Ninja is going to try to restrain you. What do you want to do?

PC: I want to try and disable him somehow.

Roll Dice. PC wins with high success.

PC: I duck and weave attempting to stay clear of the Ninja's grasp. Then at an opportune moment I scoop up some sand and throw it in his face.

GM: Okay, the Ninja is blind. He takes a moment to center himself but is still coming after you using only his hearing.

PC: Alright, I'm going to try and render this guy unconcious.

Roll dice. PC wins but only by a little.

PC: I pick up a nearby board and whack him hard on the back of the head.

GM: Okay, you've hurt him but you weren't successful enough to fully render him unconcious. Instead he grunts in pain and falls to his knees on the ground.

And so on....

Jesse

Hello,

Reading Jesse's post and some of the other ones above, I want to emphasize that Fortune-in-the-middle is more noticeable, and has more operational differences from the traditional method, in regard to failed rolls. We all might do well to remember that in generating examples.

Best,
Ron

Clinton R. Nixon wrote:
You're right. Of course, I think FitM works better with scene resolution, so I was biased.

Clinton R. Nixon wrote:
A non-scene resolution FitM example of combat
Player: I'm going to hit the bastard.
GM: Roll. (He rolls and succeeds.) What happened?
Player: I pistol-whipped the guy across the nose, stunning him.

This is different from Fortune at the end because the action and effect were stated after resolution. In traditional Fortune at the End, you would state the action first, roll, then state effect.

Hey,

Regarding how Fortune-in-the-middle applies to Sorcerer, check out this thread in the Sorcerer forum.

Best,
Ron

Hey TQuid,

I guess I'm more concerned about examples specifically of whiffs, because the "whiff factor" is a significant part of what put me off Simulationism....
So, to be specific...what does FitM look like in a vanilla-Narrativist whiff?

For the longest time, the definitive post on whiff syndrome and FitM was on the "Augmentation" thread in the Gaming Outpost Hero Wars forum. Ron wrote it more than a year ago, and he's written better stuff on the topic since then, some of which appears in his brand new Sorcerer & Sword supplement for Sorcerer, but I'll paste and annotate his original post a bit for you right here:

Historically, Simulationist event-resolution in RPGs has always been to resolve game events at the table in the same order they are resolved in the game-world. (I am discussing event RESOLUTION, not ANNOUNCEMENT, although you'll see announcement necessarily figures in to what follows.)

For instance, the player announces, "I'm going to attack that guy with a knee-strike," rolls, and then hit/not hit is determined, then how-much-damage is determined. There are lots of ways to tweak this (how many rolls are involved per step, e.g., or the way announcements are handled around the group), but the LINEAR quality remains consistent: (1) full intent, negating all other intent; (2) resolve success/failure; (3) resolve full and complete effect. Only then do you move on to the next event resolution.

This whole idea has seen some major changes in the last few years. I think that only really hard-core Narrativist games have explored the possibility of the following sequence: (1) announcing general intent or outcome of an exchange; (2) rolling or otherwise applying Fortune, often for everyone involved; (3) working out the details or fine-tuning that outcome by NOW figuring what specific actions happened, up to and including altering certain outcomes.

So in Hero Wars (or several other games), the announcement is not anything so specific as "knee-strike," but rather "take him down with close-in, brutal power techniques." The rolls then designate general degrees of success for everyone. Finally, IF you end up on the successful end of things, ONLY NOW do you (player + GM, usually) decide that it was indeed a knee-strike or head-butt or whatever.

See, in the old way (which I think is basically a Simulationist way), the knee-strike DID get attempted and DID go "whiff." In the new (Narrativist) way, the knee-strike didn't even get attempted (retroactively speaking) unless the general intent was successful.

And that's where I think a lot of unhappy players are, they've had their characters systematically deprotagonized by resolution mechanics. Their characters have been undermined and made stupid. And it's not just combat. Ron has a great example in Sorcerer & Sword of a suave character fumbling a seduction roll. The traditional "whiff" outcome is him spilling his glass of wine on the girl or something equally pathetic. I wrote a post recently about how I think players keep making the same kinds of characters over and over again because consistently, each and every incarnation of the character gets conceptually ruined, and fails to emerge as a serious protagonist, and I think this is often in large part due to the whiff syndrome.

One of my friends, worse than anyone else I've ever gamed with, has been the most frustrated by the whiff-whiff-whiff-whiff syndrome associated with simulationist combat mechanics. It's telling that when he ran a few sessions of Werewolf a couple of years ago, one of the players acquired the nickname "Get of Wuss". It makes you think just how much table humor during RPG sessions is an outgrowth of the whiff syndrome. So I'm not surprised to hear you have some players with the same whiff syndrome frustrations. Consider the example that Ron uses about the knee strike, and imagine that the player is dramatically not successful. The awesome thing about the fortune-in-the-middle method is that there's never a knee strike that goes whiff...the dramatic failure is interpreted as the opponent grasping the character's wrist, twisting his arm behind his back, and disarming him...or whatever resolution seems appropriate. It's still a dramatic non-success, but it advances the narrative in a way that the whiff definitely does not.

And with the seduction attempt, the suave character doesn't drool or spill his wine. The GM, or GM plus player, decides that the target of the seduction talks in private about the come-on to the host of the party, who happens to be a suitor of hers, thereby creating conflict and consequences for the player character that advance the story, without undermining and deprotagonizing the character.

Make sense?

Paul

Ron Edwards wrote: Reading Jesse's post and some of the other ones above, I want to emphasize that Fortune-in-the-Middle is more noticeable, and has more operational differences from the traditional method, in regard to <i>failed</i> rolls. We all might do well to remember that in generating examples.

Another approach ot the "ehiff" factor is that adopted by Theatrix, although I'm not sure how to classify it. The idea is to seek dramatic outcomes to actionsaccording to plot needs - this puts a loty of power in the hands of the auteur GM, but their breakdown of results need not necessarily be used that way. They break down possible results like this:

For task resolution, the GM decides whether the plot demands success or failure and then what sort of outcome it is:

IF Failure THEN Realease the tension or let them struggle?
IF no THEN give them false hope
ELSE Inflict real damage?
IF yes THEN limit damage to suit lesson
ELSE Let them know they were lucky


Success -> Release the Tension and tell them now?
IF no THEN let victory be uncertain
ELSE give them breathing room?
IF yes THEN let them know they've done well
ELSE keep the pace, present a new dilemma

Essentially, this is a guide to scene framing, especially when employed with scene resolution mechanics. It helps the GM have in mind what sort of outcome they want to engineer, which they can employ during the actual description of in-game events, and the full version also includes some stuff on what KIND of success or failure it was. On the down side its pretty heavy-handed, although hopefully not conspicuous.

Theatrix also has a marvellous single page outlining four outcomes of scene/task resolution in 4 panels of illustration (I reaslly like this sort of thing). This shows a western style gunfight with 4 possible results:

skilled success: shooter hits opponentes gun, belt and hat
skilled failure: shooter ambushed by new opponent
unskilled failure: shooter does not clear the holster in time and is winged
unskilled success: shotter fires wildly and a lucky ricochet kills opponent

In none of these cases is the character actually at risk of death through the immediate resolution, although of course this is at GM's discretion. But it demonstrates pretty clearly how the GM can influence a resolution according to their intent; even the skilled failure was not a whiff - the character was ambushed. By contrast, the unskilled success almost was a kinda whiff. I like this whole concept and would like to see more use of this sort of technique.