Hi

A while back I posted this,

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20909.0

Basically it was me bitching about the GM's style. I have since played a few games and exchanged a number of emails with the GM. These have all been copied to all members of our roleplaying group.

The problem lies in the differing views on how the characters should behave. For example, in one scene we took an enemy knight, who had attacked us unsolicited, as prisoner. Wanting to get on with the game we, as the players, said that we instruct the knight to go to out Lord and present himself as our vanquished foe, upon discharge of this duty he could return home. The GM said that the guy would not do such a thing.  Our next solution was to say we'll kill him then, which would have lost us honour. So there we were not really sure what to do. We then had a debate about dark age morality and interperatation of the literature, which carried on by email.

Whats interesting here is that we as a group (GM included) have difficulty in interacting in this game (which is unashamably sim) due to a lack of a coherent way in which to play our characters, assuming that playing them per 20th century western roleplayers morality is not in keeping with the setting/ rules.

Does this happen in other games?

Regards
Rob

Hi

My apologies, but for those interested in our solution with the knight in the example, we let him go after he made a promise not to bear arms against us for a year and a day. Pussies aint we? :^)

Regards
Rob

From my experience, yeah.  And it's a large part of what makes sim enjoyable when you can find a group agreed upon solution to that tangled up question of what would these (in your case) Arthurian Knights do that's correct for the source material and our take on it.  Trying to impose your own moral choices on it, or your view of what the characters choice would be rather than the group accepted view, would be a move towards narrativism. 

I think what you are experiencing is either the desire for narrativism in a sim game or possibly a conflict on what the group ideal form of being Arthurian knights means

A question for you Lamorak: Did you, or the GM, or anyone in the group, ever try to take this to the system? Was the arguing about what would happen abstractly, in terms of what the characters traits and passions were, or what?

Brand_Robins wrote:
A question for you Lamorak: Did you, or the GM, or anyone in the group, ever try to take this to the system? Was the arguing about what would happen abstractly, in terms of what the characters traits and passions were, or what?

Lamorak,

I wasn't looking at anything like a conflict between Sim and Gameist agendas. I was looking to see if the conflict was because you all had different ways of using the mechanics of the game, or if you weren't using them at all.

See, Pendragon is a great Sim game because it mechanically supports and underlines Sim agendas. Traits and Passions are wonderful things for getting play to follow a course close to the literature, and using them exactly as the book tells you to will often give you the experience that you are looking for.

However, it seems that your group doesn't want to do that. Rather than use the system to give your Sim coherence in the moments when people's interpretation of literature is different, you go to social arguments and negotiation in order to work it out.

In situations like that the things you are describing are completly at par. If you all have the game to help negotiate conflicts between visions of the Sim space (You to GM: "In the book it says this is an honorable action. Shouldn't he need to roll against his Honor/Valor/Just at this point?" GM to you, "Wow, if you want to murder him I think you need to roll against your Arbitrary") then the negotiations focus around the system, and put everyone on the same page once you work out how you interact with it. But when all you have to bring you together is your joint abilities to agree on something you don't agree on... that can be rough. It's like herding cats.

Trust me, I know of what I speak here, and I know with Pendragon specifically. When I started playing Pendragon (um... 15 years ago, I think) I hated Traits and rarely used Passions. I only really used the system for traditional task resolution (combat, impressing the princess with your dance, etc), and avoided using Traits and Passions as a tool to determine exactly what people would do in situations where we were unclear about what "was right to the literature." The result was the arguments your group is having, almost exactly. When I started actually using the system Greg had given us, and making Traits and Passions the point of play and the thing rolled most often to drive play, all of a sudden the group tightend up and we started getting stories much closer to the literature.

Pendragon is a great sim game because when you use the system it simulates its source material. The problem you guys are having is that you are not using Pendragon's system, you're using your own social preasure to try and simulate the source material with no guidance or mediation. That's cool, but be aware it is a much rougher course.

Brand's completely right.

I've run many successful Pendragon campaigns (including a recent one that's been on hiatus for too long) and that discussion never should have happened.

What I would have done* is give the player knights all checks on Honor for releasing the knight, maybe even a check for Loyalty (Lord) for their acknowledgement of his Lord's status and sending him to report to him (i.e. a check to their own loyalty for their own Lord as their action reinforced the duty to one's liege).  Checks for Merciful or other Traits / Passions may have been appropriate for different knights depending on their own pre-decision interaction.

I'd have then made an Honor Roll for the prisoner to see if he'd actually follow through, and if not an Honesty Roll to see if he'd come clean about it.  If he'd failed his honor, I'd probably have made a Loyalty (Lord) roll for him as well to see if he'd follow through anyway since his Lord's reputation would also be at stake.  If either had been 16+ I wouldn't even have rolled. 

If the knight had a Passion of "Hatred (you guys)" or something then it would have been a roll off...passion vs. trait...hatred vs. honor.  I probably would have let a player roll on the side of the guy's honor, just because rolling off vs. myself would be kind of lame. 

Boom, done.  No discussion of "would he" or "wouldn't he".  The numbers are there defining his character. That's what they're for.
 
Sometimes there's a gray area (like what exactly consitutes "hospitality") but the texts do a pretty decent job of defining the scope of those things...and in this case, with an action that is so clearly in line with the literature, there isn't any gray at all.

Unless perhaps your campaign was not "Mallory's Britain" but one of the other flavors of Arthur.

* and here "what I would have done" I think is pretty much in line with how the game is meant to be played.

Hi Rob,

Was there any talk about this knight taking an honour hit, for not doing the honourable thing you demanded and presenting himself to your lord? I don't think it would change the basic situation much, but it might make it more interesting - yeah, this night would rather lose honour than do as he should.

Hi Brand, Hi Ralph

I always reference my character traits and passions. I can't speak for the GM. I do think that most of the problem is probably interpretation of the genre.

Regards
Rob

Hi Callan

Callan wrote:
Hi Rob,

Was there any talk about this knight taking an honour hit, for not doing the honourable thing you demanded and presenting himself to your lord? I don't think it would change the basic situation much, but it might make it more interesting - yeah, this night would rather lose honour than do as he should.

Lamorak,

So you'd check your scores and be like "I've got a Just at X, so I'd do Y" right?

But do you use them to mechanically solve dillemas like this? Like did anyone ever say "I want to roll my Just against his Deceitful and if I win he has to go, if he wins he can sneak off?" Was there any time at which the numbers on the character sheet were used not just for your reference, but as actual elements of the game that had power to resolve the conflict?

Because just looking at your honor score is just using the scores as a sort of suggestion. Getting into with opposed rolls and full mechanical resolution is what I'm looking at.

Lamorak33 wrote: The GM ruled that it was not a matter of honour because our request was not appropriate. The dumb ass (joking) :^)

Hi

Brand_Robins wrote:
Lamorak,

So you'd check your scores and be like "I've got a Just at X, so I'd do Y" right?

Hi

Callan wrote:

Lamorak33 wrote: The GM ruled that it was not a matter of honour because our request was not appropriate. The dumb ass (joking) :^)

Hmmm, I think if it's always his turn to deciding if it's appropriate - well, perhaps suggesting some sort of turn system to decide that instead (could still be heavily favoured to the GM, like 10% chance a random player decides). I'm not sure him deciding all the time is going to add any spin to your game/take it anywhere new.

Lamorak33 wrote:
I don't really have a problem, its very cool to be playing.

Hi

Brand_Robins wrote:

And if it isn't good enough, maybe you should try engaging a little harder with what we're telling you. Because honest to God, I don't think you've actually understood anything I've asked you.

Lamorak33 wrote:
What I wanted to find out is whether other people have encountered this in a game. I have been playing for over 20 years and its a new one on me. So, has anyone else experienced a genre in a game that they have completely been at a tangent to other players/GM's interpretation of that setting?

That was an awful spelling mistake back there, now I have an image of a rogue knight stalking priests down dark church aisles.

Hey Lam,

I really hate trying to critique a GM's GMing in-abstentia.  Perhaps if he was interested in popping in we could actually have a valuable discussion on Pendragon GMing techniques.

Your analysis of the issue as a genre difference doesn't seem to ring true to me.  If you were picking up the dice to roll with X idea and he were picking up the dice to roll with Y idea...then maybe the clash between X and Y might be a genre thing.  But niether of you are picking up the dice to roll.  That tells me its most likely a mechanics thing.

Pendragon was my all time favorite game back in the day.  I didn't know why at the time, but now I do...because it actually gave rules for how to do stuff other than fighting, and it expected both player and GM to follow them.  Both of those seem pretty ho-hum by current Forge standards, but back then...dang revolutionary.  The worst Pendragon experiences I've ever had were when playing with GMs who treated Pendragon like D&D or Runequest or any of the other main games of the day...which involved alot of ignoring rules, and alot of GM fiat to cover situations where there were no rules.

Your description of how the GM handled your idea and the defeated knight's response is classic D&D DMing.  There are no rules in D&D for determining whether or not that knight would do what you told him to do...so the DM would resolve it by fiat...usually coming down on the "sounds like a sneaky player trick to me...I'm not going allow it" side of things.

Thing is Pendragon does have rules for resolving that situation.  Rules the GM is expected to follow.

So as much as I don't like critiquing other GMs when they're not here...if he did not roll any dice during that scene to determine that knight's response...then he's frankly breaking the rules (with a few caveats I won't bother listing here because they probably aren't pertinent).

Similarly if he did not award your knight with checks to Mercy and / or Honor and / or Loyalty to Lord or some similar variation for your act, regardless of the knight's response...then he's frankly not following the rules.

Don't know what else to say there. 

If your GM is interpretting things with a gritty medieval sensibility then he'd better have done some major renovation on the Pendragon Virtues and Passions system because the rules are very clear about the central place of Mallory as the prime source material.  And if he didn't tell you about any such alternate world view, then again...he's not following the rules, because as I recall the GM section is pretty clear on establish which Arthur you're playing up front.

Hi

Valamir wrote:
Hey Lam,

I really hate trying to critique a GM's GMing in-abstentia.  Perhaps if he was interested in popping in we could actually have a valuable discussion on Pendragon GMing techniques.

Your analysis of the issue as a genre difference doesn't seem to ring true to me.  If you were picking up the dice to roll with X idea and he were picking up the dice to roll with Y idea...then maybe the clash between X and Y might be a genre thing.  But niether of you are picking up the dice to roll.  That tells me its most likely a mechanics thing.

Valamir wrote:

Pendragon was my all time favorite game back in the day.  I didn't know why at the time, but now I do...because it actually gave rules for how to do stuff other than fighting, and it expected both player and GM to follow them.  Both of those seem pretty ho-hum by current Forge standards, but back then...dang revolutionary.  The worst Pendragon experiences I've ever had were when playing with GMs who treated Pendragon like D&D or Runequest or any of the other main games of the day...which involved alot of ignoring rules, and alot of GM fiat to cover situations where there were no rules.

Your description of how the GM handled your idea and the defeated knight's response is classic D&D DMing.  There are no rules in D&D for determining whether or not that knight would do what you told him to do...so the DM would resolve it by fiat...usually coming down on the "sounds like a sneaky player trick to me...I'm not going allow it" side of things.

Thing is Pendragon does have rules for resolving that situation.  Rules the GM is expected to follow.

So as much as I don't like critiquing other GMs when they're not here...if he did not roll any dice during that scene to determine that knight's response...then he's frankly breaking the rules (with a few caveats I won't bother listing here because they probably aren't pertinent).

Similarly if he did not award your knight with checks to Mercy and / or Honor and / or Loyalty to Lord or some similar variation for your act, regardless of the knight's response...then he's frankly not following the rules.

Don't know what else to say there. 

If your GM is interpretting things with a gritty medieval sensibility then he'd better have done some major renovation on the Pendragon Virtues and Passions system because the rules are very clear about the central place of Mallory as the prime source material.  And if he didn't tell you about any such alternate world view, then again...he's not following the rules, because as I recall the GM section is pretty clear on establish which Arthur you're playing up front.

Rob,

Some people have told me that I have "angry sounding post disorder." This is a terrible disease in which I sound very angry in a post when, in fact, I'm not at all.

I wasn't meaning to piss on you. I was just meaning to clarify where we're all coming from. Because if I'm thinking the thread is about X and its actually about Y, then responding like you're talking about Y is the wrong response. So I was just trying to pointedly get us all on the same page. If it's a bitch thread, I'm cool with that. If its a "has this happened to you" thread, I'm cool with that too. If its a "help me fix this" thread, then I'm good with that as well. I just need to know which it is, and I think a lot of others do as well.

So: for the bitch thread response: Yea, that sucks. Sounds like a lot of time got wasted.

For the "does this happen to others" response: Yea, used to happen to me all the time. Then I got to the things that Ralph and I have been talking about and it stopped happening (as much) because we realized there were actually rules to avoid this.

For the "help fix this" response: Yes! I don't know what magic Ralph has to say things more clearly than I could, but that is what I was talking about. By the rules of Pendragon when a conflict like that comes up you should be rolling dice to solve it. That's one of the main things Traits and Passions are for -- so you can roll dice to solve conflicts, rather than having to argue them out. They are guides to "how to play the character" but they're also much more than that, they are powerful mechanical system bits that let you make the way the game runs respond directly to the character and the character to the game.

Valamir wrote:
Pendragon was my all time favorite game back in the day.  I didn't know why at the time, but now I do...because it actually gave rules for how to do stuff other than fighting...

Greg wrote:
Traits & Passions are the primary indicators that you will use to determine "correctness" in  the Arthurian setting. If your character gains the proper traits and passions, then your character will be doing just exactly those things which constitute correct behaviour in Aurthurian society.