I was thinking about an issue regarding using director stance to describe combat events.

Let's say player A is fighting a monster. Now the GM is really running a sim game here and for the most part the story decided by the GM, but the actual combat events are, in this system, narrated by the winning side. Now player A wins and declares he as a finish he plunges his sword through the skull of the monster.

BUT what if a big plot point is that the monster has a diamond hard skull,
and what if that plot point shouldn't be directly revealed to the players(maybe they're looking for some legendary diamond treasure that is actually this monster's skull?)?

What to do? If the GM interrupts the player by saying, "you can't do that because he has a diamond-hard skull, do a different finishing move", he's spoiling things by giving the players info they shouldn't know.

If the GM overrules the effect by stating the action by the player isn't going as intended "You try to plunge your sword to his head only to find it is rock hard!" he overrides the rules which states the player gets to narrate.

One way out would be to allow the player to make an amended narration "because I can't get the sword through his head I instead swing around and stab my dagger deep into it's eye"

Anyone running into this sort of problem?

Pale Fire wrote: BUT what if a big plot point is that the monster has a diamond hard skull,
and what if that plot point shouldn't be directly revealed to the players(maybe they're looking for some legendary diamond treasure that is actually this monster's skull?)?

What to do? If the GM interrupts the player by saying, "you can't do that because he has a diamond-hard skull, do a different finishing move", he's spoiling things by giving the players info they shouldn't know.

This has nothing to do with director stance. What if I, playing in Actor mode, have my character swing at the creature, and the crit chart says "Pierce skull, killing monster"? The odds of a player stomping on your plot using director stance are no greater if using directory stance than when using any other. Perhaps in a Gamist game where the player could abuse the power, but then why would you be using abuseable director stance in that case, anyhow?

What would you do in the actor stance case that I outline above? Whatever you would do, do the same for the director stance case.

The other option is to remain flexible as to the plot. Blow through the skull? OK, then suddenly and known only to the GM, the skull is no longer diamond, but the heart is instead. Or it turns out that the sword is an ancient blade called gemsplitter because of it's miraculous ability to cut through such substances. Or this wasn't the right monster, it's his bigger brother just now coming down the hall. Or whatever; make it work. In fact these are often opportunities for the GM to improve his plot onthe spot.

What I've never been able to understand is GMs who insist that there can be no changes to their objective world before it is revealed to the characters. In fact from a philosophical POV everything that the PCs might encounter is only a Shroedingers Cat, existence to be verified upon it's actual encounter. I highly suggest abopting this attitude. The only concern is that the players don't feel this effect. To them it should all be consistent.

Or, IOW, what Gentry said. Hi Mike, long time.

Such behind the scene manipulations are a staple of good Illusionism.

Mike

Two main choices exist...both enable the player's decision-making in some way:

The player decides the outcome and the GM narrates what happens.

GM: You rolled a crit! What happens?
Player: Uh, I wanna kill him...
GM: Okay, you slice open his belly and the monster's guts come tumblin' out. Roll damage and double it.

The GM decides the outcome and the player narrates what happens.

GM: You rolled a crit! The wound the monster suffers is fatal...
Player: I sweep his legs out from under him and stab him through the eye with my dagger!

Then other games have the player decide the outcome and speak the narration...but this isn't a suitable option because of the reasons you cite.

When choosing between A and B, if A is an undesired outcome, then B must be chosen. In other words, if the GM intends for the story to go a certain way, then remove the ability to choose an alternative (rather than saying, "Er...you can't do that" or "Er...do something else"). But don't give the player a false hope of decision-making and then decide to go another way...(or fudge die rolls because you didn't like what you rolled).

- J

All the solutions here are good.

I think the real problem is that you
have a piece of info you don't want the players to find out (The monster has a diamond hard skull), and then put them in a situation where them finding it out is plausable(combat). It's a bit of a stretch to imagine players fighting a bunch of these and never hitting one in the head. (if they only fight one, it's sorta plausible).



(Actually, a fight is a good way to reveal this info about the monster, esp if the damage rolled is low. Also in this case, you could use director stance against them. 'Your killing blow bounces off the monsters head. It looks stunned, but not out. ' and just let the player kill it next round. (I wouldn't let this actually change anything, make the monster miss if it actually has a chance of doing significant damage, but it's very dramatic and the look on your players faces will probably be priceless.Of Course YMMV, depends if you think this will disincline your players to use director stance. Of course they found out something they might not have otherwise. )

Hiya,

This discussion seems to be missing an important point, I think. It's that the "right to narrate" is always conditional upon what has been established already.

Is it established that the creature was killed by the character's blow? Then the whole diamond-hard-head thing becomes a trivial detail. Is it established that it was not? Then now is the time for the GM to provide the information that its skull was mighty hard. All of this is prior to the narration-issue.

People seem to be under the impression that the "right to narrate" sort of appears out of nowhere. In most of the systems that are incorporating such things, that's not the case (The Pool, InSpectres, etc). In such a game, the creature would be Mighty Damn Hard to hurt, and in exactly the moment when the players realize this, it's the GM's job to say, "It's head is diamond-hard."

Really, it's no more than establishing that the creature is green. In that case, the GM says, "It's green," when they see it. In the case of the skull, the GM says so when the mechanics of the game, in action, reveal that it's got a hard head. I don't see the problem at all.

Best,
Ron

Hey Christoffer,

I think I'm personally keenly aware of your concern here, and can maybe offer some insight into what provokes it, and when in fact you don't need to be concerned.

There was a scene in last Monday night's session of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, where my girlfriend's character, a drug runner named Rob, was sitting on a plastic lawn chair, in front of a hotel room, waiting to have a conversation with Dutch mafioso Mies van Pamel, listening while the man tortures a boy prostitute for working an area belonging to a pimp who pays van Pamel for business protection. Wiping blood from his hands with a towel, van Pamel emerged to have that conversation with Rob, during which he tried to convince the boy that he could have a bright future if he were to kill an upstart drug dealer, that ended with him gifting Rob with a "this way it's untraceable, not to you, not to me" gun-shaped package wrapped in newspaper.

In subsequent scenes, the player made comments like, "maybe I should just shoot him," and other players referred to the "gun."

When things got tense during a drug pick-up, turning into a Mexican stand-off, I described an NPC tearing open the package to reveal not a gun, but a bomb, marked prominently with a nuclear symbol.

This was an act of GMing desperation, fear like you describe with your diamond skull example, that significant detail I'd prepped would be de-authored by player use of directorial power, without them even realizing they'd done it. The contents of the package would have become a gun, rather than a miniature nuclear bomb. And under the circumstances, it was hardly an unfounded fear. Consider that the identity of the boy being tortured by Mies van Pamel was another such significant detail that I'd prepped, one of a number of others, that went unrevealed only from a lack of player curiousity.

Don't make no sense, eh? Here's the deal. I've been thinking about this a lot. Unregulated directorial power doesn't mix well with lack of a sense of narrative direction. And as I've written here, my game is suffering from lack of player character protagonism in a bad way. That scene with Mies van Pamel was nowhere near as significant as the scene with "Whisper" Von Eldred when I ran The Pool last summer, for instance, a game that didn't suffer from the same problem. Not only does The Pool regulate directorial power with its mechanics, but that game had a shared premise and strong audience interest in the player characters.

So what has happened in my current game is an almost compulsive directorial gulping and gasping, with details going unsavored. Huge chunks of substance are gulped, fueled by assumptions, in an attempt to get at an ever-elusive meaningful scene, at something that catalyzes an individual PC's protagonism.

I can tell you that protagonism is built on a layered foundation. When I ran The Pool, that foundation was common Premise, group character creation, and regulated directorial power. I suspect there are other formulas. But when you've got the foundation right, you've got no worries about excesses of player directorial power. When scenes are meaningful, substantive, and protagonizing, the details of those scenes are meaningful, and players attend to them, and inquire before making assumptions. That's how it worked when I ran The Pool. When scenes are not meaningful, the details are gulped.

Paul

Wow, Pale Fire, you are on a roll tonight!

I agree with Mike, I don't see this as a problem with Directorial Stance either. I see it as a problem with Propietorship; who 'owns' the monster's head? The gamemaster created the monster, he put it into play; I pretty much see it as his. Much like someone declaring that they slice your character in half when you know you have an adamantium skeleton; the character cut is yours.

This is why Scattershot has no rule saying that the Speaker can do whatever they want with other people's Proprietorship (pretty explicit about being the opposite too). What I'm struggling with is a technique to afford the mystery of what's in the critter's head. I see a lot of value in maintaining that Mystique, both when the gamemaster is the Speaker as well as when the player is.

Have you given any thought to how Ygg might prevent that kind of 'directorial invasion?'

Fang Langford

Interesting insights. Actually my question is the most relevant in games which mainly relies on a GM driven story augmented by small bits of directoral power given to the players.

I think different people pluck out different problems here. What I mainly was thinking about is the scenario where:

a) Players have limited directoral power or some other way (like Mike suggest, by a crit table) the result is determined.

b) This result is incompatible with GM determined facts.

c) Revealing the source of the incompatibility would reveal facts to the players the GM finds unsuitable for the players yet to know.

Basically the rules or the player says A is happening, however the GM knows that A can't be happening. But the GM don't want to reveal to the players that A can't happen.

I agree this is not so much a problem with director stance, I just see it being more acute here.

In the case of rules dictating certain results the players ought to be used to the GM modifying these. However, if the game explicitly states that the player can narrate an event and they might pause and wonder why it the GM suddenly disallows it.

Hmm.. any clearer? Maybe it's something of a pseudo-problem, but I could easily see some problems here in Ygg where the players meet monsters with unknown special abilities. If players have chance to narrate combat moves those narrations might frequently clash with special abilities already determined by the GM. If it happens fairly frequently I could see it taking away some of the advantages of ygg incorporating a director stance.

Ron Edwards wrote: This discussion seems to be missing an important point, I think. It's that the "right to narrate" is always conditional upon what has been established already.

Is it established that the creature was killed by the character's blow? Then the whole diamond-hard-head thing becomes a trivial detail. Is it established that it was not? Then now is the time for the GM to provide the information that its skull was mighty hard. All of this is prior to the narration-issue.

Pale Fire wrote: ...the actual combat events are, in this system, narrated by the winning side. Now player A wins and declares he as a finish he plunges his sword through the skull of the monster.

Pale Fire wrote: I think different people pluck out different problems here. What I mainly was thinking about is the scenario where:

a) Players have limited directoral power...

b) This result is incompatible with GM determined facts.

c) Revealing the source of the incompatibility would reveal facts...

Le Joueur wrote: Either the players have "directorial power" or the gamemaster has 'unrevealed facts,' I don't see how both could work concerning a single 'thingie' in the game.

My solution to this problem is, hopefully, interesting.

In the new version of Donjon (which I'm actually working on again, thankfully), both the player and the GM get to state facts after each roll. Basically, you roll a pool of dice (10-siders) and everything that's 7 or above is a success. Let's say on a swing at this monster (which would have extra dice for its diamond skull), the player gets 3 successes and the GM gets 2.

Each success equals one fact you get to state. The person with the highest number of successes goes first, and then you alternate.

Player: I bring my sword-point down into the creature's skull!
GM: You hear a 'ring' as it bounces off.
Player: Um. Ok. It slides down the skull into his throat.
GM: You can see the flash of diamond from beneath the ripped skin.
Player: With a dagger, I tear open the skin to see that the entire skull's made of diamond.

It's a little more complicated than that, but basically I distribute the amount of power each side has in each action. By giving both the player and GM discrete amounts of power, the GM can reveal previously hidden facts without nulling the player's directoral power.

Basically the rules or the player says A is happening, however the GM knows that A can't be happening. But the GM don't want to reveal to the players that A can't happen.

Clinton R Nixon wrote: My solution to this problem is, hopefully, interesting.

In the new version of Donjon (which I'm actually working on again, thankfully), both the player and the GM get to state facts after each roll. Basically, you roll a pool of dice (10-siders) and everything that's 7 or above is a success. Let's say on a swing at this monster (which would have extra dice for its diamond skull), the player gets 3 successes and the GM gets 2.

Each success equals one fact you get to state. The person with the highest number of successes goes first, and then you alternate.

Player: I bring my sword-point down into the creature's skull!
GM: You hear a 'ring' as it bounces off.
Player: Um. Ok. It slides down the skull into his throat.
GM: You can see the flash of diamond from beneath the ripped skin.
Player: With a dagger, I tear open the skin to see that the entire skull's made of diamond.

It's a little more complicated than that, but basically I distribute the amount of power each side has in each action. By giving both the player and GM discrete amounts of power, the GM can reveal previously hidden facts without nulling the player's directoral power.

Seth L. Blumberg wrote:

Le Joueur wrote: Either the players have "directorial power" or the gamemaster has 'unrevealed facts,' I don't see how both could work concerning a single 'thingie' in the game.

For once I gotta agree with Fang. If the players are licensed to use Director Stance with regard to a particular game-world object, the GM can't readily reserve control of that object.

Vermin wrote:

Seth L. Blumberg wrote:

Le Joueur wrote: Either the players have "directorial power" or the gamemaster has 'unrevealed facts,' I don't see how both could work concerning a single 'thingie' in the game.

For once I gotta agree with Fang. If the players are licensed to use Director Stance with regard to a particular game-world object, the GM can't readily reserve control of that object.

Is anyone else reminded of memory protection, unix file permissions, and database locking?

Thanks folks. Interesting comments on the problem. At least I feel satisified with your analysis, is there anything more to add or should we leave this thread for now?

Vermin wrote:
Is anyone else reminded of memory protection, unix file permissions, and database locking?

contracycle wrote:

Vermin wrote:
Is anyone else reminded of memory protection, unix file permissions, and database locking?

Yes, IMO thats exactly what it is.