[ Okay, I am arrogant enough to think that what follows is a whole separate topic from Advantages/Disadvantages.  They are clearly linked, in mindset if nothing else, but they seem to be distinct, interacting elements.  Then again, maybe I'm wrong, and I'm just looking at the same thing from two different angles. ]

Players have a choice, always, about their attitude regarding character success.  You can chose to try to make your character to succeed.  You can choose to try to make your character to fail.  Yes, if you're wholly immersionist (and your character has zero self-destructive tendencies) then you want your character to succeed 100%.  Bully for you.  That's still a choice.

Many (perhaps, all) systems try to create interesting game-play and conflict when you want your character to succeed.  You play your tactics, and other people play their tactics (usually aligned with the idea that your character will fail) and one or the other of you gains the authority to narrate your outcome.

Theoretically, there is no difference if you (the player) are trying actively to make your character fail.  You play your tactics, and other people play their tactics (aligned with the idea that your character will succeed) and one or the other of you gains the authority to narrate your outcome.  But, practically speaking, very few systems even try to create interesting game-play and conflict when you want your character to fail.  Indeed, most of them let you fail unilaterally, simply by not bringing any of your resources to bear.  I think that is, on some pretty fundamental levels, screwed up.  Players should not get carte blanche to have their characters fail at will.  It shuts out the contribution of other players at the table.

What I offered over in Advantages/Disadvantages is the notion that when players drive to failure they are expressing their judgment that (in these circumstances) some of their character traits are bad.  When a player drives their character toward failure they are saying that the character should fail in this instance.  There is plenty of room for other players (by means of their characters) to dispute this position.  The player is not (IMHO) the final word on their own character or that character's worth or destiny.  So, imagine:

Joe:  I'll roll Seth's Crude, Reckless and Stupid against "Seth impresses Mary."  He yells at her, not understanding what she wants from him but knowing in his heart that he can't give it to her.  "Just get away from me!  I don't deserve you anyway!"
Horace:  Okay, I'm rolling Seth's Sincere and Hurting, and Mary's Sad on "Seth impresses Mary."  I win.  Mary sees that Seth is crude, reckless and stupid... and she likes him anyway.

Tony, for clarification's sake, in your example Joe wants Seth to fail, but the character Seth is actually trying to impress Mary, and the character wants to succeed?

Heya,

What I offered over in Advantages/Disadvantages is the notion that when players drive to failure they are expressing their judgment that (in these circumstances) some of their character traits are bad.  When a player drives their character toward failure they are saying that the character should fail in this instance.

Oh, and let me just add that I am not speaking of "advantage" in the way you used it in your other thread.  What I'm talking about is not a rules mechanic but the character's potential in the game and how players push to increase it.

Peace,

-Troy

Players (and people) drive themselves towards advantage.  Advantage takes the form of scarcity of resources.  If we see "ability to effect the story" as a resource, then if a player's only power to effect the story is via the character, we will see players driving their characters towards positions of power.

yrs--
--Ben

Joshua:  Pick whatever motivation you want for Seth.  He's fictional, after all.  If you want to add some details to the example, in order to make a point, do so.  But if you're asking a question about my point, I don't get the relevance and so I really can't give you a solid answer.

Troy and Ben:  You seem (from your tone) to be saying something you think is important.  Please elaborate, because I'm not seeing it.  You may be trying to be more subtle than I can manage to parse.

What I can see is you saying "Players come to the table to do something (which we'll label X).  They will take actions that increase their ability to do X."  Which I'll agree with, but I don't see it shedding a whole lot of light on the questions I asked.  If you have a stronger statement (like "Players will only take actions that increase their ability to do X," or even "Your question is trivial in light of the fact that players will take actions that increase their ability to do X") that would probably help me understand.

Building a bit on Troy and Ben's excellent points (which, Tony, I take to be that the advantage-outcome of a player-decision is more important than the character success/failure outcome) . . . let's say what we care about is affecting (or maybe effecting actually is better usage here) "the story" (meaning that advantage with regard to story-impact is what we're looking for).  Setting aside issues with exactly what that word Story means in RPG play, that might be awful close to a declaration of Nar CA intent, so maybe we have to agree that we're only talking about Nar play here.  I'll continue on that assumption.

Now, it's never actually true that the only way you can influence story is via your character, but it is often assumed that that's the "right" way to do it (silly one-wayism or valid creative choice as appropriate to the exact situation).  And even when you explicitly have other tools available to use for story-influence, most RPGs (certainly DitV, not Universalis unless you've added a PC Gimmick) want you to use your character as a key tool.  But when we can see the character as, first and foremost, a tool for influencing the story, then anything that describes that character is also a tool.  We may say that the character "has Advantage/Disadvantage X", but what that really means is that X can be used to impact the story.  Who uses it, when and how, are details of the specific design and actual system-in-play use of the tool - but it is a tool.

I have not yet developed any skill at including discussion of my own games into these kind of posts, so appologies if this comes across as self-promotion, but I thought about this issue a LOT in SNAP.  Character Traits are always and only cues about what this character does to impact a scene - "Clumsy around powertools" and "Uber-mercenary training" are both (potentially, depending on the fictional situation and with some effect from the numeric value associated with 'em") equally useful in influencing the story.  Driving a Characteristic (what the character is, as opposed simply to what he or she (or it) does) down to zero has the same "value" as advancing it to 20.

So yes, if we want to see both success and failure for particular characters being pursued by "their" players, both should provide equivalent advantages.  Though "equivalent" by no means has to mean "absolutely identical."

TonyLB wrote:
What I can see is you saying "Players come to the table to do something (which we'll label X). They will take actions that increase their ability to do X."

Yeah, absolutely.  The character is an avatar through which the player affects the story.  The choices you'll willingly take using that tool are the ones that will help you to achieve that goal.

I guess my point is that you can affect the story as easily (often more easily) through character failure as you can through character success.  For instance, I've been watching a lot of House.  There's a medical drama where they never succeed in any of their early attempts at diagnosis.  But the process of their failures is what makes the show great.  If you want to play something like that, shouldn't the players be trying to fail in spectacular ways at the beginning of a session?

I don't see many games (and I don't think I've ever seen deliberate, explicit rules) that encourage the players to both choose that character failure and have fun fighting for it under the mechanics against adversaries who want the character to succeed.  Either there's no sensible reason to want the character to fail, or it's a choice that is reasonable and important but mechanically uninteresting.

So is this just a blind-spot of designers, or is there a reason why player effort and character success should be aligned as often as they are?

TonyLB wrote: Theoretically, there is no difference if you (the player) are trying actively to make your character fail.  You play your tactics, and other people play their tactics (aligned with the idea that your character will succeed) and one or the other of you gains the authority to narrate your outcome.  But, practically speaking, very few systems even try to create interesting game-play and conflict when you want your character to fail.  Indeed, most of them let you fail unilaterally, simply by not bringing any of your resources to bear.  I think that is, on some pretty fundamental levels, screwed up.  Players should not get carte blanche to have their characters fail at will.  It shuts out the contribution of other players at the table.

Heya,

Building a bit on Troy and Ben's excellent points (which, Tony, I take to be that the advantage-outcome of a player-decision is more important than the character success/failure outcome)

I guess my point is that you can affect the story as easily (often more easily) through character failure as you can through character success.

I don't see many games (and I don't think I've ever seen deliberate, explicit rules) that encourage the players to both choose that character failure and have fun fighting for it under the mechanics against adversaries who want the character to succeed.

Ooh! Ooh! I have a good example from actual play. Here in Sheckleton's Sacrifice.

-Vincent

I guess my point is that you can affect the story as easily (often more easily) through character failure as you can through character success.

From the Sheckleton thread:

xenopulse wrote:
So... is the adversary's job then to always work against your cool story reasons?  That seems kind of weird... unless the adversary has their own cool story reasons for wanting things to turn out the other way.

Also, Tony, please check me on topic relevance. I don't want to wander off with your thread here.

-Vincent

Tony, my clarification about divergence between player and character goals is this: if the character is trying to "screw up" and the player wants him to succeed at screwing up, then there's no real divergence, and the character's competencies should determine his chances for succeeding in screwing up.  On the other hand, if the character really wants to do something (in a fictional, in-character sort of way) and the player doesn't, then we have a topic to discuss.

Ironically, the best system I can think of for the second scenario is Capes.  Conflicts are declared by the players, not the characters, and there's no reason why you can't have Captain McBlasty's Blaster powers "overload" and start shooting school buses full of nuns.  And if the other players set their good-guy characters to help overcome McBlasty's little problem, then you-the-player end up getting Story Tokens out of the deal.  Sounds like a lot of comics plots I've seen, actually.

As Emily implied, I think this only really works with Conflict Resolution, or at least it doesn't work with any Task Resolution that we've seen.  There aren't many games that describe negative character competency or have mechanics for manipulating such in specific tasks.

The reward system is the sticky point.  As long as reward systems focus on increasing character competency with the "in-character" justification that the character is growing and learning, you'll have sincere disconnect with any behavior that isn't bent towards that goal.  Capes escapes that by using Story Tokens, which have many diverse uses, most of which are completely uninvolved with the character and give their advantage directly to the player instead (if I remember the rules correctly).

Troy, as far as GURPS and DnD go, if you're playing them "straight" with focused and objective-oriented scenarios, this sort of question doesn't even come up.  The point of these games isn't to explore character faults, it's to express character competencies.  If you really want the character angst and you're doing it with GURPS, you're hammering in nails with a wrench.  That said, I've seen character failure totally rewrite GURPS scenarios -- it's just never been the player's intention to do so.  The point is still the same: character failure did more to the "story" than the endless iterative successes ever did.

Vincent:  Check and double-check.  Your example from Sheckleton is dead on.  The apparent ease of rearranging character vs. player interests is dead on.  I say "apparent" because I'm uneasy... there's got to be some reason why so few game support this, doesn't there?

Joshua:  Interesting.  I'm digesting that.

Heya,

I read your example, Vincent.  To me it seems your goal was to do something awesome through your character.  Your adversary prevented you from doing so.  Therefore your character failed to provide you the advantage you were looking for: an instance of something AWESOME happening rather than an instance of nothing happening at all.  In my eyes, she didn't help him succeed, she helped him fail.

Now, I am very ready to admit we could argue in circles about this over and over, and I do think your point is certainly valid to the way you're thinking.  My big issue with all of this is I'm just not grasping the whole point of the discussion.  The whole idea that a player would drive their character to fail at providing a more fun instance of play seems antithetical to all that we are doing here.  

Peace,

-Troy

TonyLB wrote:
Vincent:  Check and double-check.  Your example from Sheckleton is dead on.  The apparent ease of rearranging character vs. player interests is dead on.  I say "apparent" because I'm uneasy... there's got to be some reason why so few game support this, doesn't there?

Troy_Costisick wrote:
I read your example, Vincent.  To me it seems your goal was to do something awesome through your character.  Your adversary prevented you from doing so.  Therefore your character failed to provide you the advantage you were looking for: an instance of something AWESOME happening rather than an instance of nothing happening at all.  In my eyes, she didn't help him succeed, she helped him fail.

Now, I am very ready to admit we could argue in circles about this over and over, and I do think your point is certainly valid to the way you're thinking.  My big issue with all of this is I'm just not grasping the whole point of the discussion.  The whole idea that a player would drive their character to fail at providing a more fun instance of play seems antithetical to all that we are doing here.

Well, Vincent, I guess you answered the particular question I asked in the AP thread here instead :)

It seems to me that I can think of instances in which one outcome is cooler for all involved than another; I actually thought that's one reason you introduced the "say yes or roll the dice" rule in Dogs--if you suggest something, and I just totally like it, I'm not going to oppose it. There was an instance in one Dogs AP thread where the players played out certain things without using the conflict rules, and it was all good, exactly for this reason (though some people argued that they should have used the rules anyway).

So, my follow-up question is this: is there something to be had from opposing players even if I thought your proposal was way cool? Does the suspense of whether it actually comes about add something to the game intensity, for example?

Christian:  I think that topic (which I read as "How do you benefit from invoking the rules when the rules aren't strictly necessary?" sub-classification: "Disagreement, hero or menace?")  is drifting a little far from the rest of the thread.  Your question seems pretty much purely in the player-sphere, whereas what we're addressing here is (I think) the interface between the player-sphere and character-sphere.  That having been said, it is a topic very much near and dear to my heart, so I really, really hope that you'll split off a thread to discuss it.

Vincent:  Yeah, I'm not real keen to design a game where you can only oppose your own character.  It might be cool, but I don't have a message for it.

But... but... right now we seem to have flexibility mostly in games where opposing your character and supporting your character are identical under the mechanics.  What is being addressed is purely what you, the player, want.  In that case, the rules are not a tool for meaningfully communicating anything about you (the player) in relation to your character.

Actual play example of a glimmering of something beyond that:

I was playing the young Vanessa Faust, going on her first murderous rampage.  I played "Goal:  Vanessa feels completely justified in her actions."  Let's say that there is a black side (Vanessa would do it again, without regret) and a white side (Vanessa thinks that slicing people to ribbons is probably not something she should be doing).

I staked Vanessa's Justice Debt on the white side, then proceeded to roll up the black side with her various character faults.  What I'm saying, right there, is something like this:  "Vanessa wants to regret this, she'll feel unworthy if she doesn't regret it, but everything in her character and situation says that she won't actually regret it.  She doesn't have that strength of character in her."

Eric and Sydney jumped in on the white side, and ramped it up to a decisive victory.  Vanessa wins (despite my efforts against her).  She is not, actually, as unredeemable as I believed.  Other players see something in her that I (by choice or by belief) didn't see.

TonyLB wrote: You can, in short, hurt the character deeply (and communicate that hurt with mechanics) without reducing the player's ability to use them as a tool to affect the story.  If you give players that option then they can make statements-in-action about what they think their character deserves.  They can play a character they think is scum, for instance, and try to steer him to the doom he deserves.

So, let me check:  Am I making any sense?

Tony, you're making sense.

Two of the elements of the Old Paradigm of Gaming were (a) that the only tool a player had to affect the events in the game was the character, and (b) hurt characters were less effective.  Combining those together, a player wanted to avoid having their character hurt at all costs because that would reduce their ability to affect events in the game.  Both of those axioms are coming under scrutiny and being changed.  The first is easy to see, with games like Polaris and Capes and others that parcel out powers and rights beyond the finite keyhole of the player character.

I think the second bit is what you're getting at in this thread, however.  Can we make games where hurt and pain and loss actually empower the tool of the character or the controlling player to affect the story?  Negligent's soon-to-be-renamed Carbon Soul allows players to inflict Trauma on their characters, which increases character effectiveness temporarily.  I think Orkworld did the same with Trouble (it's been a while), but these are both currency issues.  Taking it a step further, having a stat for 'Reckless' or 'Hurt' and letting that forward the story (specifically as the player understands it, not the character) in ways that aren't necessarily pleasant for the character.

Emily: your second paragraph, exactly.  How many times have we played characters who we wanted to tough it through something to earn something else, and the GM never supplied us with the opportunities to do the toughing it through?  Empowering the players to create their own opportunities will give them one more tool for characterization and story development.

Back to Tony --
You are also, on a parallel track, disentangling the absolute control of the character normally attributed to the player.  The player rarely actually has this absolute control, of course, but it's an assumed, if incorrect, "truth".  The player supposedly always knows their character best, and there are no real surprises -- very rarely can the player be said to "discover" new information about the character, and if the player does make this discovery, it's usually an artifact of his creation.  (Sidenote: the been-done-a-thousand-times thing where the PC is amnesiac and the GM decides to make them the Prince of Abuwhateverizan is an example of the player explicitly giving that "control" to the GM.)  This actually reminds me of the How To Host a Mystery games, where the players portray murder mystery characters in a set of four scenes; one of them is the murderer, but doesn't know that until the start of the fourth scene.  Surprise!  Similarily, you seem to be advocated a systematic method for creating these revelations for player characters -- incorporating this new information to the character concept should provide for some interesting roleplay, indeed!

Backing up a bit to the question of why don't support this---Tony, I think you're overlooking a whole class of games that do support this. Games where the players compete for narration rights rather than strict success/failure. For example, The Pool. If I remember right (not like I've played the game, admittedly), A Monologue of Victory simply grants narration rights, and as such, the player can simply narrate whatever they want, success or failure.

What Tim Said, and Dust Devils.  In my very firstest-ever trip to GenCon - firstest-ever time playing a Forge game with the designer - I had an essentially unbeatable hand, for both narration and "victory", in the final round of a demo for Dust Devils.  I used the narration to get my character shot - probably killed - and everyone else gets away.

Now, these are devil-driven characters - maybe the "best" thing for him was to die somewhat(almost accidentally)-nobly.  Does that mean I was driving for or against "character success"?  As an over-arching rule, damn if I know - of such stuff is Narrativism made.  In this particular case, what I the player decided I wanted, once I knew I had about all the rights the game text could grant me, was get "my guy" shot.

Now, that moment was also a driving factor in my design thinking - I've found too much fuzziness between "what we say the fictional things are attempting to acheive" and "just EXACTLY how much that can be twisted by 'narration rights'" is a big barrier for some folks in playing Nar-ish games.  I tried to provide some tools for this in SNAP, but as usual, a group of well-communicating players dedicated to having awesome stuff happen no matter what will generally be able to overcome any fuzziness issues.

Tim, Gordon:  Granted.  There are games that allow you to work against your character in narration.  I didn't give them the credit they deserved.  Mea culpa.

Right now I'm focussed on a more specific issue.  Very few games let you back up your character failure with importantly different (but still workable) mechanical outcomes than you would get with character success.  Certainly the Pool and Dust Devils do not appear to do that, unless I'm misunderstanding.  Does that make it clearer where I'm focussed now?

Pace is a game where you can drive for short-term failure to make you stronger in the long term.
IIRC With Great Power works this way too.
And there are many tales of Trollbabe players seeking conflicts that they hope to lose, so they can hose their characters but in so doing get control of the SIS. This isn't purely an example of narration-rights style game, it's a game where failure, specifically, can be sought after. It's an exemplar of a game which provides different but still workable mechanical outcomes than you would get with character success.

I'd like to see more of these games - I agree it's a very interesting subject.

Just a small note (I agree with what's being said):

Failure is often, not always, associated with escalation of a conflict.  If you want rising action then failure is important to encourage.  Of course, success can escalate as well, but usually seems to do so as a partial failure (complication).

This is opposed to the outright success that is so important to de-escalation and the anticlimax that is the heart of Gam.

Emily wrote: We can also make statements in action about what the character needs to suffer to become the kind of person the player hopes for:  an artist who suffers, a slave who overcomes, a warrior who lives through horror.  In the past, it's been the gm's role to do this stuff (well, if if was anybody's), if we are committed to moving into ways of cutting up the game task distribution pie, we've got to find ways to make it easy & fun to do it ourselves, and to each other.

Here's what I wrote in Wandering Monsters High School:

The most important part of student enrollment is not buying your grades or choosing your classes; it’s setting your goals.  Why?  Because this is what you’re going to play out in the game.  You’re not really playing this game just to simulate taking tests or playing in the marching band; that’s just window dressing.  The real point is to advance toward your goals.

You’ll notice that it says “advance toward” and not “achieve.”  This is because achieving your goals is actually pretty useless in WMHS; all it means is that you have to choose another goal, and keep playing.

Here’s how it works.  You choose one primary goal for your student – something like “I want to find a girlfriend before the end of the term.”  And you roleplay your student as trying to achieve that goal.  You also choose a backup goal.  “I want to make the swim team,” for example.  You don’t actually play out the backup goal – it’s just there in reserve.

If you ever do get a girlfriend – thus completing your goal – you cross it off your list goals, and your backup becomes your primary goal.  And you’ve got to choose a new backup goal now.  See?  You’ve just made more work for yourself.  It was easier back when you were just trying to reach your goal, because at least you knew what it was.

If this gives you the impression that maybe you should actually try to sabotage your student whenever she’s getting close to meeting her goals…well, you’ve got the right idea.  See “Plots and Complications” later in the rules for more on this notion.