I was going to make an actual play post about the Middle Earth Puddle game I'm running at the moment, but one of the players (Chris - CPXB here) made a post about the game on RPGNet that did such a good job of describing the session, I thought I would just include a link to that post. I hope this isn't a Forge no-no. I also wanted to ask people's opinions on a couple of rules questions, which I'll include below the link.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=137628&highlight=puddle

As we sat down to begin our first session of play, the two players had a couple of questions for me. First, they wanted to know how the rules would handle player vs player conflicts. My immediate thought was that, given our pre-game situation discussion, this probably wouldn't come up, but my decision was that if it did become an issue, I would have both players roll and whoever got the most successes would get to narrate first.

The second question was, what happens if two PCs are involved in the same event? In this case, I decided that both would roll, and the outcomes of the individual rolls would determine who narrated. The only thought I had on order of narration was that successful player narration would occur before any GM narration. This came up in the first session when one player rolled a failure and the other a player narrated success in a combat scene. In play, this worked out fine and the successful player did his narration after which I narrated the outcome for the unsuccessful player.

I find it somewhat ironic that purely by chance our game turned out to be set in the same setting and time period as Cassidy's example game in the Puddle rules. One player (Adrienne) expressed some trepidation before the game about the level of player narration and directorial control expected of her, but since both players are recent (and enthusiastic!) converts to Universalis, I knew this would not be a problem. I told her that if she could handle (and enjoy) Universalis, the Puddle would be a breeze because her narrative responsibilities were actually less in this game (no player scene framing, no narration of negative or neutral outcomes, more existing GM-created backstory and NPCs to work with, etc.) than in Uni.

Anyway, we're doing our second session tonight and I think the game is going great. My first attempt at a Puddle game last year ended in disaster due in part to my poor pre-game prep along with a group of players with no experience with player-empowering systems like this one. This game has reassured me that the great potential I saw in reading the Pool and Puddle was actually real.

John Marron

Hey John,

The relevant historical conversation.

Paul

Paul Czege wrote: Hey John,

The <A HREF="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=787">relevant historical conversation</A>.

Paul

Hello,

John, linking to the RPG.net discussion is A-OK and vastly preferred over mirroring it here. So that's all good.

I'm interested in any comparison you can make between this session and the "failed" one. What made the difference?

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote:
I'm interested in any comparison you can make between this session and the "failed" one. What made the difference?

Best,
Ron

I am finding games that focus on player empowerment and narrativist control to be a lot of fun. Adrienne, I am sure, feels the same way. I'm sorta getting an urge to do something crunchier, but it is very likely that I will be doing Extreme Vengeance, next, hehe, which I think is a great game for bringing traditional, crunchy-system, fortune-at-the-end gamers into a more description and narration oriented games with fortune-in-the-middle. The crunch will likely have to wait a while. :D

Indeed, since Adrienne and I will be moving in about two years, I think it is quite likely that I will try to lure gamers into our group with a game like Extreme Vengeance. It will have a broad appeal (hey, who doesn't like action movies?) and I'll be able to slip some of this stuff in under the table at them, weeding out the ones I know won't "fit in" with my gaming style.

Hi John,

Thanks for trying out The Puddle, happy to see you seem to be enjoying it.

In answer to your questions, heres what we do...

With Player vs Player events whoever rolls the most successes gets the opportunity to "Guide the Event". If there is a tie then whoever has the most dice left in their dice pool after rolling gets to "Guide the Event". If all players roll the same number of successes and they all have the same number of dice left in their dice pools then the GM gets to "Guides the Event".

With multiple events in the same scene (A big melee scene for example) the GM usually asks for a roll from each participant treating the outcomes as sub-events to the main event.

Preperation as you've found is essential. Sometimes there may be a lull in play and the players will look to the GM for inspiration and guidance. Having a few roughly formed ideas, scenes and potentially interesting events at the ready is a great help. Be prepared though to ditch your ideas and preparation in an instant if they don't make sense in the context of the developing story. Be prepared but be flexible.

Regards,

Cassidy.

Here are a couple more rules issues / questions that arose in our second session of play (documented in the RPGnet thread linked in the first post of this thread).

The first involves what I'm calling an "idea roll". This is a common situtation in my experience in which the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information. This would normally be handled with some kind of perception roll, and may be an artifact of traditional style games that doesn't really have a place in nar type games. One thought we had was for the GM to give the player a single die to roll to see if they get the information. If this die comes up neutral or positive, they get to keep it an add it to their pool (we've had serious pool depletion in our games, so I'm not very concerned about pool inflation). However, the more I think about it, the less I see the need for this rule. I think I just need to get past the old "perception check" mode and find a way to work in information that moves the story forward and ignore info that isn't particularly relevant.

The second house rule we instituted was a change to the "At Death's Door" rule. As stated in The Puddle, when you get a negative outcome to a potentially lethal event, the GM gives you a die and you roll your entire pool (including the "gift" die). If you get any positives (+ or 5-6), you live, otherwise you die, and in either case the player narrates the outcome. Given the phenomenally bad rolls my players were making, we ammended the rule to say that if you roll a neutral outcome, your character lives but is in very bad shape, and the player still narrates the outcome of any "survival" roll. This discussion came up after one player rolled 5 negatives and one neutral on a combat event, and was about to roll for survival with his one remaining die and the GM gift die. He got two neutral results, and the player narrated his severe beating at the hands of a Giant. Suddenly our overconfident warrior character was reduced to relying on the non-combatant female character for survival.

I like the fact that there is still a strong chance for character death in potentially lethal situtaions in the Puddle (it keeps tension up very nicely in a non-crunchy way), but I also thought it might be a bit too lethal (we've had one survival roll in each session, mainly due to very bad die rolls and low pools, and I thought it would be pretty anti-climactic for one of the two protagonists to die so soon in the story).

Thoughts?

John

I had that issue too, running Sorcerer. I thought: well, maybe they should get some extra information here, have them roll Will or Lore vs. an arbitrary GM difficulty score. These rolls were definitely experienced as pointless and/or irritating during play by my players.

One way to look at it is like this: a request for information is a request for the GM to introduce more material into play. If both of you want that material to be there, then just give it out. In the normal situation where the player requests it, this decision defaults to the GM.

But when the GM is just thinking 'ok, here's some information, do they know it or not?' the players' desires are not being consulted except in the abstract. So really what's happening in this situation is that the GM is rolling against himself, maybe using a player's score (or having a player roll the dice) to inform his decision.

This technique is not completely useless, but I think it is vastly over-used in most RPGs, including non-Narrativist-facilitating ones. An alternate technique, which also shows up in very traditional RPGs, is for the GM to think of a way to give a player a hint without rolling which does not obviously reveal everything that's going on, but which might allow a smart player to either figure it out upon reflection, or request a more specific sort of perception/idea on their own, which can then be adjudicated by simple response or die roll depending on the needs of the situation and/or the plausibility of the request.

Hi John,

I agree with your conclusions for both of your questions - in a way, those aren't questions at all, are they? You provide your own answers pretty solidly.

Anyway, you asked for thoughts, so I think that:

the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information.

Hi Ron -

Just a quick note on your #2. In that case I tend to allow rolls for the information. If the player wants something and I don't, then that's what the dice are for, to decide who gets their way.

Your #3 is important for me though. If you're not sure what to do with a potential information-introducing situation, consider the consequences of success and failure, what's at stake. If there are any, then it's just a regular ol' conflict. If there aren't any, then default to yes, no, or roll. But if you're the GM and you're the only one who knows that some information-introduction is at stake, then 'roll' should almost never occur - you should just make a decision. Maybe that's why you worded #2 the way you did, in the light of #3.

So I'm flowcharting it like this:

player requests information - GM decides yes/no - if yes, give it out - if no, roll, unless the request is beyond the pale for some reason

GM considers whether to give out information or ideas - is there anything at stake here? - if yes, initiate conflict as usual - if no, just make a decision quickly, probably giving it out most of the time (since if you thought of it that probably means you think it's important).

If I had been quicker to process the presence or absence of information in terms of stakes and consequences up front those less-satisfactory play moments wouldn't have happened in the Sorcerer game.

Interesting questions John.

Pretty much agree with your two points.

If you're the GM and you want to impart an idea or convey information to the players then it's easier to just do it, no roll needed. I guess you pretty much play that way in any case.

Player initiated ideas seem a little different though. Player ideas are usually prefixed by out of game statement from players like "What if?" or "What would happen if?". When they crop up I will usually ask for a roll. If the player gets enough +'s then away they go and their idea becomes part of the story. If not, then I'll take their idea and run with it myself or try to put an (hopefully) interesting spin on it in some way.

Tweaking the "At Death's Door" roll is a good idea if it helps moderate the "lethality" of the game.

"Deaths door" events occur regularly in our games also although the players have a tendency of escaping the grim reaper time and again. In the game I'm running at the moment I think we must have had 5 or 6 "deaths door" events before we had our first fatality. The player in question rolled 3 dice and he actually held 1 dice back so confident was he of success. He failed to roll a + and the shock was palpable (and quite funny) because he and the other players had begun to think that cheating death wasn't too difficult.

On a side note, regarding dwindling dice pools. As GM I reckon I hand out an extra dice 7 times out of 10, and most dice rolls made by players are only 2 or 3 dice. Players usually end a session with at least 2 or 3 to spare. For sure, unlucky rolls do occur, but thats part of the game, thats the gamble.

When we first started playing the players tended to roll 3 or 4 dice almost all the time, even for non-crucial or trivial events. They got a little "dice drunk" looking at their pool dice and couldn't resist the temptation to roll them at every opportunity. Consequently players started running out of dice but over time they began moderating the number of dice they roll, choosing to save their gambles for what they perceive to be the key events.

Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts on these issues.

Ron -

As I typed in my last post my thoughts on why I was wanting the players to make the "perception roll" became clearer (it's basically an old habit), but your three options really clarified this for me. If the information helps the story along, give it out, if not, ignore it, and if it leads to a dramatic conflict, roll it like any other conflict.

Sean -

I think my problem with an information giving event will be solved by considering Ron's three options and deciding which applies (hopefully not #2...) I guess I feel that my games (particularly the Puddle) are about cooperative story-telling, so I shouldn't see the handing out of information as any kind of "reward" or "contest" between me and the players.

Cassidy -

Thanks for your thoughts. It's good to hear from someone who (obviously) has a fair amount of actual play experience with The Puddle. My players have tended to make large die rolls (one player has rolled all of his pool for almost every combat scene), and consequently have suffered some serious losses of dice (and in lethal situations, no less). We'll see if this behavior modifies as the game goes on. We've come very close to losing characters on both Death's Door rolls (one player rolled 2 dice and got 1 + and 1 -, the other rolled 2 dice and got 2 blanks, which technically should have killed the character).

Do you and your group still play The Puddle on any kind of regular basis? I'm curious about what other genres or settings you have used the rules for. I'm aware of your ME game, as well as the X-filesish supernatural agent game.

John

Just two quick side-notes:

JohnMarron wrote:
I like the fact that there is still a strong chance for character death in potentially lethal situtaions in the Puddle (it keeps tension up very nicely in a non-crunchy way), but I also thought it might be a bit too lethal (we've had one survival roll in each session, mainly due to very bad die rolls and low pools, and I thought it would be pretty anti-climactic for one of the two protagonists to die so soon in the story).

the GM wants to give the players an opportunity to gain some in game information, but also wants there to be a chance that the characters miss the information.

johnmarron wrote: Do you and your group still play The Puddle on any kind of regular basis? I'm curious about what other genres or settings you have used the rules for. I'm aware of your ME game, as well as the X-filesish supernatural agent game.John

Since I'm one of the players, here, I'll chime in, again.

I like dice rolls. I like the feeling of gambling they provide to a game; I think it heightens tension. So if my character had died, I would have shrugged and worked on another. After all, John killed my TROS character and that's what I did, hehe. I understand that when you play tough guys, you'd better be prepared to make a lot of characters. ;)

However, one of the things I'm feeling reasonably strongly with The Puddle is a pretty potent whiff factor. The reason I throw all my dice on martial exploits is because I'm playing a martial character. It doesn't take too much thinking on the odds to realize that to "save my pool" requires my character being real so-so in a fight. While I'm enjoying the game a great deal, I am finding the whiff factor slightly off-putting.

Hi CPBX,

Do you have a couple of whiffy like examples from play?

Regards,

Cassidy.

First, I often feel ambiguous about whether or not to give info. That is, I like to randomize things where not getting info is potentially as interesting as getting info. If not getting info brings things to a screething halt, then, of course it comes out. But if one bit of info not percieved won't cause that, then that's what the dice are for.

Springboard, right, Ron?

So I try to have a lot going on in terms of what the characters are noting, and then have them roll to note even more. It's the combination of what they're currently imput that, IMO, produces interesting results. Per rolls just mix that up, IMO.


In any case, in terms of the whiff factor, there are a couple of ways to look at this. In one interpretation of the original pool, success or failure wasn't at all determined by the rolls. Only who narrated. Also, even when one does fail, this is conflict resolution - meaning that you don't have to narrate the character being bad, just not losing.

So, in a case where your character is trying to kill someone, instead of:

"Jorn son of Jirn swings his axe and misses his opponent by a mile."

Narrate,

"Jorn son of Jirn swings his axe with tremendous skill. And it's only his opponent's amazing agility that he manages to retreat madly from the assault, trembling with fear. But Jorn is too good, and manages to maneuver him into a corner, preparing to cleave his opponent in twain. Suddenly a door opens in the wall, and Jorn's foe falls back through it out of site as it just as suddenly snaps shut again."

Example one, Jorn is a wimp. Example two, Jorn is a scarry badass, and the opponent was extremely lucky to get away with his life. Kills the whiff factor dead.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote:
In any case, in terms of the whiff factor, there are a couple of ways to look at this. In one interpretation of the original pool, success or failure wasn't at all determined by the rolls. Only who narrated. Also, even when one does fail, this is conflict resolution - meaning that you don't have to narrate the character being bad, just not losing.

[good example deleted]

Mike

Mike is right on the money. As far as The Puddle is concerned the outcome of the dice roll merely determines who gets to narrate, not what they narrate.

If no +'s are rolled at all the GM narrates. The GM can narrate a good outcome for the character, a bad outcome or anything in between. The fact that the player failed to roll any +'s does not necessarily indicate that the character "failed", although that may indeed be the outcome the GM chooses to narrate. The GM can just as easily narrate a successful outcome if they wish.

If two or more +'s are rolled then the player gets to narrate. The player can narrate any type of outcome they wish, good, bad or indifferent. Rolling two or more +'s does not necessarily indicate character "success", although that may indeed be the outcome the player chooses to narrate. The player can just as easily narrate an abject failure if they wish.

The only caveat to the above rule is that when only a single + is rolled the GM narrates and is required to do so in a way that creates an outcome that is generally beneficial or favorable for the character in question.