I've got a group of players that all got into the hobby in the 80s, meaning that they all cut their teeth originally on some flavor of D&D, and much of our formative gaming experience was with games that relied heavily on early D&D mechanical design. Since that time we've had plenty of opportunities to broaden our horizons, and have played plenty of other games that have little to do with D&D in either story or resolution mechanics. As my own taste in game design becomes more refined over time, I, as the group's sole regular GM, have tried pushing the group toward a more collective narrative play style. The reasons for that involve plenty of game theory of the sort I've read here, but they're not relevant to this discussion, so I'll save them for another thread. My players have taken to this hesitantly, since they feel games are my stories and they are there to enjoy them, not write them. Again, a topic for another post.

So what's this post about? It's about what they do when they do take narrative control. For some reason, the one time they feel 100% comfortable describing the outcome of a situation resolved in part by rolling dice (or whatever other resolution mechanic the game in question uses) is in describing failure. And in this, it's the same every single time, regardless of what game we're playing or what they're character is like.

And it is universally dignity-stripping, ridiculous failure. Even when there's a fumble mechanic in the game (something I usually avoid), when my players fail, but don't in fact fumble, they feel the need to not only fail, but suck.

Fail a spot check? "I'm drooling on my shoes while trying to count my toes."

Fail a stealth roll? "I get my foot caught in a bucket and bang it against the wall while singing the stealthy song."

I've got lots of these, but I think you get the idea.

I've actually used my station as GM to overwrite this a few times, saying "No, you're just didn't notice anything," and have even outright said that failure need not reduce the character to a bad sidekick, but for some reason my players feel the need to utterly debase their characters. It's as if the only way they're comfortable truly captaining their own destiny is when making their characters into punchlines. Anything else is too dire. They won't narrate their actions in combat; they certainly don't embellish their successful rolls in this way.

And I should mention I have never run a campaign in which this kind of slapstick fits. The plots of my games tend to be serious, and I'm not at all shy about having bad things happen to PCs and NPCs alike to push buttons. Thus, introducing this kind of detail isn't for the sake of further flavoring the game. By all their other actions, no one wants to play a laughing stock, but they seem compelled to force the issue whenever their dice come up short.

While I have a pretty consistent group of people I game with, the games I run usually only have a sampling of the total group; tastes have rarefied and in some cases calcified to the point where I can't find a single game that all agree to play. So, depending on what it is I'm running, I'll have a different group composition. Everyone brings his own style, often radically different, but in this, it's absolutely consistent.

Now, I do have this half-baked idea that this might come from our one root commonality in gaming: early D&D, in which character viability was something you grew into rather than started with. I'd long since moved on from D&D by the time I met my current group, and indeed played Red Box (and Blue Box, and even Green once) with many different people. This kind of narrative control over failure seemed to be something that came out a lot in those games, specifically the early levels where failure was so much more prevalent. Maybe it's something we all learned early and they've been unable to let go of, or maybe I'm just seeing something that's not there.

Regardless, I find it exceedingly odd that the players are only willing to take narrative control to effectively pants their own characters. Has anyone else run into this? More specifically, have you found any technique that helps to break this reflex?

Welcome to the Forge, Cliff!

I confess you have baffled me. Not in the sense of making no sense - you described it perfectly, and I've seen the same thing in lesser, less group-specific form. But baffled in the sense of understanding it, at least not without a long think.

Anyone, help!

Best, Ron

Obviously I don't know your group, or the groups Ron referred to, so I could be way off base. But this strikes me as a pretty straightforward example of Creative Agenda in action. I'm not sure how versed in the CA concept you are, but the idea that CA is what you intend to do, or that CA is what a specific person prefers to do, are both common misconceptions. CA is how you use the medium of play to enjoy the game _together_. It doesn't matter how invested in Lothar the badass barbarian, and his epic struggle to avenge his fallen village a player is, its not a part of CA until its enthusiastically shared and reinforced by the group. If everyones eyes glaze over when you talk about Lothar (perhaps not out of fundamental disinterest, but because we all know it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference), but they all grin or laugh when you have him trip over his feet and fall into a hole when you roll a 2 on your spot check... Then thats what you are going to do.

In the essays Ron talks about how Sim is easily supplanted by the more basic human activities of competition (gamism) and story telling (narrativism), but Sim-comedy seems to be just as basic and powerful.

Narration mechanics are a technique, that can support any agenda based on the context. In this game, they are supporting the Sim-comedy agenda. If you don't want to support it, I'd suggest removing or refocusing the mechanic. Honestly, what sort of failure narration would matter to the other players at the table? If the answer is none, then its not a useful rule.

Thanks for pointing me toward the Creative Agenda article, David. It's a term I've seen bandied about in the forum, but not something about which I've specifically read. I've got two weeks before my next session, so I'll have plenty of time to absorb the material, and maybe instead of a game next time we gather, we'll set a mutually agreed upon creative agenda instead (our games are on weeknights, and only last a couple of hours because of that).

As to the other point you reference, I'll admit that I'm still getting used to what games other than Gamist games are really like. I'm familiar withe the way games break down in the G/N/S model, but I myself never owned or read anything other than the standard sem-mixed but gamist-heavy design that many of the big titles tend to be. It's only in the past year that I've gotten a taste for what real narrative games are like, where the fortune mechanic is used not to determine the outcome, but who gets to determine the outcome.

However, as to how narrative tools are used in my own game, they're not specific to failure. In fact, there's no mechanic about narrating failure at all, but there is in regards to narrating success. I'm currently running a 7th Sea campaign that has some Cthulhian Mythos elements added (by request). For the most part it's by the book in terms of rules. However, I replaced the standard raise mechanic with the one John Wick introduced with Houses of the Blooded (I got tired of people forgetting to raise but still insisting on rolling out every last 10 and spending 3 minutes tallying up results as high as 60-somthing when a 15 would do).

If you're not familiar with it, in a nutshell you have a basic target number and a pool of dice. Roll your dice and add them up. If you beat the TN, you succeed marginally. You want to do better? You raise. To raise, you remove one die from your pool before rolling. You can raise as much as you like, removing as many dice as you like. For each die that you remove, you either increase the quality of your success by one degree, or, as in the case of many non-combat rolls, you get to add one detail to the circumstances of your success.

As you can see, this system gives much greater narrative control to those rolls that succeed, not fail. So it's not like I've introduced a new mechanic to the game that specifically encourages the players to make utter goofs of themselves. If anything, it allows them to be badass in the specific manner most pleasing to them, provided they play to their strengths and take the risk of raising.

This idea of a creative agenda however, that resonates. We did not sit down and mutually agree what the game would be like together, not explicitly anyway. We did agree to the system and the inclusion of Lovecraftian elements, which I thought did an excellent job of summing up what it would be like but this could be a prime example of the danger of assumptions.

Thanks very much for that tip. I'm off to do some reading.

I've seen this a bit, too. Here's the hypothesis I've been working with: Narrating slapstick failure is usually very safe and easy. Since you failed in trying to do something the scope of fiction that you'll affect with the narration tends to be small. Since there's little chance that you'll affect the status quo with your narration, you don't feel the pressure of authorial responsibility that you would if you were going to "move the story forward" like you would when narrating a success. Further, since you already know the negative mechanical result of what happened (i.e. one failed roll) there's little "danger" in narrating something bad happening to your character because the bad thing has already happened. With few other pressures operating, the draw of getting a cheap laugh is pretty compelling, so you narrate slapstick to get a chuckle out of your friends. Also, the common case in RPGs if for PCs to be hypercompetent, and failure in the context of hypercompetent characters is something that easily lends itself to comedy.

The essays are pretty interesting material, but I think Frostfolk and GNS aggravation is a much better resource for understanding Creative Agenda. At least, this was the thread that clarified the topic for me.

Cliff wrote:
As my own taste in game design becomes more refined over time, I, as the group's sole regular GM, have tried pushing the group toward a more collective narrative play style. The reasons for that involve plenty of game theory of the sort I've read here, but they're not relevant to this discussion, so I'll save them for another thread.

God this is interesting.

OK, here are some disconnected notions and observations. First, one thing that always struck me in 1980s play in particular was how savagely various GMs narrated failed actions. It was supposed to be part of the fun.

One of the most influential moments of my gaming history came in ... um ... 1986, I think; we were playing Rolemaster,* and the GM's fiancee had been convinced, against much reluctance, to be in "his story," cast as the heroine. And so in our first big all-together-now fight scene in some muddy fantasy-city street, she goes ahead and rolls regarding her character doing some kind of acrobatic tumble across the fighting, and fails. Now, this was Rolemaster, the king system for exquisitely maiming and humiliating your character, but I don't recall that an egregious failure-upon-fumble-upon-critical combo occurred this time. I do recall that the GM described how her character stumbled, prat-fell (prat-falled?), hit the mud face-first, and skidded in a glorious spectacle of fuck-you-stupid. He described it in detail. With pleasure, including how ridiculous her character looked when she stood up with mud all over her. With fun, as if this were the kind of thing we all should be living for. I clearly saw hatred of this game, of role-playing, and of the rest of us collectively appear on the player's face, in that order, and without the successive layers obscuring the earlier ones.

Yet just a couple of years later, we** were playing Champions, with me GMing, and the villain Raptor was confronting the heroes, and this was the session in which Chris, a new player, had brought his new character into the game, the intriguing Insecto. During the fight, the speedy and agile hero Runaround tried to leap across the river of cockroaches surrounding Raptor, as I recall to attack. Matt, the player, rolled an 18 on 3d6, the worst roll in Champions. The system has no fumble mechanic, but we often used 3's and 18's as cues for extra-colorful narration. Also, we narrated more-or-less ad-lib, i.e., whoever spoke first and/or best saw his or her words cemented into the fiction. Matt looked at the three 6's, groaned and laughed at the same time, and said, "I trip so bad that it looks like I lie down onto the cockroaches, and Raptor walks across my body to the other side." We all cried out in joy and accepted that narration.***

Why was one so fucking horrid (for everyone, except the oblivious boyfriend/GM) and the other so perfectly fun? There are a lot of factors. For one thing, in the Champions game, we were accustomed to seeing Runaround routinely succeed in classic comics-speedster and Jackie-Chan like moves, so the failure brought out a certain human element to the character. Whereas in the Rolemaster game, this was literally the first roll made by that player; it was at that moment the sole context and by default, the characterizing introduction, for the character.

For another, it tied into Insecto's successful entry into the story and game as a whole, pointing out that the newcomer had done something rather tactically sound whereas the veteran screwed it up. Whereas in the Rolemaster game, again, it lacked all context except for the idea that this character is simply a goofus. I mean, her action didn't relate to the other characters' actions particularly.

For yet another, as I'm sure many of us here are familiar with, there does occur a strange association between the number you roll on polyhedra and your personal qualities as a ... I dunno, as a person, as a player. I have myself chortled, "You suck" to fellow players upon their rolling poorly. Yet, and I don't know if my experience matches others', this association seems restricted to classic gaming fantasy and doesn't crop up as much, or as severely, or even at all, in other genres. It didn't show up in our Champions play at all. Now, we as a group did not respond like that when Ann (the Rolemaster player) rolled poorly at that moment. But maybe the GM was operating from that school of thought/play (Social Contract, actually), and it makes sense in terms of socio-gaming history - you couldn't get more old-school original D&D(s) than him.

I'm holding off on the Creative Agenda talk, mainly because I'd like to know more about the group and the game before going there. But so far nothing has been said about it that I disagree with; in fact, David's summary post about CA was wonderful to read.

Best, Ron

* My character's name was Asrovir d'Ursini, a black-clad, outlawed nobleman with a rapier, specializing in darkness and pain magic. Can you stand it?

** Editing this in: "we" in the Champions group included some overlap with the Rolemaster group, including the GM (who was a player), me (the Champs GM), and Matt, who had un-enjoyed the Rolemaster game as much as I had. But not the fiancee, no indeed. The two groups were so different in Social Contract and general aesthetics that the Rolemaster-GM guy might as well have been a different person.

*** Note that Matt included the villain's actions in his narration, including movement which was "free" in what is otherwise a very strictured system regarding movement. In other words, to him and to us, the poor roll and opportunity for colorful narration overrode the movement rules as well as any assumption or assertion that the "players play their characters and the GM plays everyone and everything else." Not that we noticed it at the time.

Hi Cliff,

"I get my foot caught in a bucket and bang it against the wall while singing the stealthy song."

"I trip so bad that it looks like I lie down onto the cockroaches, and Raptor walks across my body to the other side."

Ron wrote:
OK, here are some disconnected notions and observations. First, one thing that always struck me in 1980s play in particular was how savagely various GMs narrated failed actions. It was supposed to be part of the fun.

I do recall that the GM described how her character stumbled, prat-fell (prat-falled?), hit the mud face-first, and skidded in a glorious spectacle of fuck-you-stupid. He described it in detail. With pleasure, including how ridiculous her character looked when she stood up with mud all over her. With fun, as if this were the kind of thing we all should be living for. I clearly saw hatred of this game, of role-playing, and of the rest of us collectively appear on the player's face, in that order, and without the successive layers obscuring the earlier ones.

I'm holding off on the Creative Agenda talk, mainly because I'd like to know more about the group and the game before going there. But so far nothing has been said about it that I disagree with; in fact, David's summary post about CA was wonderful to read.

Callan wrote:
That or if you can't narrate extra good stuff onto a pass, what's the point of narrating at all? What, narrate about how good your characters hair looks? Bah!

What's worse for you is that you kind of don't seem to want this - ironically this gives the ideal stage for this stuff.

Why my group doesn't do this all the time? Because the GM would leap upon the details like a hungry raptor and D: Take over the narration (bah) and E: use the details to screw you way more than you said (much like D; bah!). While you, because you don't really want these pratfall narrations, don't do A or B - and so in leaving them untouched, actually empower the players in completing D and E.

I get a sort of cringe feeling from when you say 'I've moved on from D&D', because it sounds like your working in terms of what is superior, rather than what you find fun (I'll totally grant one could cease to find D&D fun, but that's different from 'moving on' from it).

Are you absolutely sure the players like the setting? Slapstick seems to be an opposite to Lovecraftian.

NN wrote:
Are you absolutely sure the players like the setting? Slapstick seems to be an opposite to Lovecraftian.

One of the players asks to make a perception check to see what it is, and blows his roll. Instead of peering at whatever it was that the villain was looking at, he decides to stare directly into the sun for as long as he can without blinking.

Once a die roll comes up crap though, it trumps everything. It's as if consistency isn't as important to them, which is entirely possible.

Callan wrote:
I think it might be worth considering that your perception roll and it's attendent looking at the sun without blinking - it doesn't have anything much to do with "hard choices and character growth through pain".

It really doesn't.

The perception roll doesn't involve any hard choice or character growth. It's just this rolling to see how events occur, regardless of character choices. It's almost the anti-choice! In a way your actually breaking the mood to begin with, then they are following your lead. Well, mood might not be the word for it, but what your there for.

Here's an idea to add hard choices, to a degree, to the roll. Add something painful they can do if they fail the roll, to pass it. Like BEFORE you roll, you say that if they fail, they could go climb a wall nearby for a better vantage, but it has shards of glass embedded at it's top to keep people out (I've seen that done in RL), and they will cut up their hands in getting the info. Remember, say it before rolling, because it's part of the rolling process.

Now there's a painful choice to either take, or avoid because it's too painful. But it's there. It's not just rolling about stuff that happens whether someone makes a choice or not. Anyway, it'd be easy enough to try just the once, atleast.

I wanted to drop a quick thank you to everyone for the advice and especially for pointing me toward certain theories and the resources that explain them. Having gone over creative agenda more, I'm pretty well convinced, looking through these very green shades of mine, that the lack of one is really at the root of everything here. And I point to an episode that happened just before we began play a couple months ago as the definitive proof.

People were arriving, pulling out characters, assembling dice, and spending xp from last session. While doing so, we usually chat until everyone's ready. I remarked that there were countless times when I tried to run something like Lord of the Rings but wound up with Royal Highness instead. There were nods and agreement all around.

That seems like a textbook example of a lack of uniform creative agenda, if I'm understanding things right.

I've got a small group of guys that are going to get together regularly outside of this campaign to help me playtest a game I've been developing. There's a good chance I'll talk more about that in the Development forum sometime, but I mention it here because even though it's a playtest we're still going to try playing a campaign, just with the rules open to more scrutiny and adjustment. However, this time, by my insistence, before anyone even thinks about who they're playing, I've asked we begin by agreeing on what we're playing, i.e. state and set a creative agenda. I expect some pushback on it, but I really think it'll help our play immensely. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I have a suggestion from experience.  Don't have a big theory talk.  What I would do is something like The Same Page Tool that Chris Chinn has on his blog.

Cliff wrote:

However, the players absolutely love Lovecraft, and have been begging me to include something mythos in a campaign for the better part of a year.

....

Additionally, the verve with which this same player has launched himself at any text that seems heretical, all in an attempt to pump his Mythos lore in the game, and has wholly embraced the madness mechanic I wrote to deal with the side effects of such study, says that he's quite into it.

It's odd. When I think about it, the group is perfectly capable of recognizing when things are taking that turn for the horrid. I deliberately change my language to use some of Lovecraft's phraseology when it happens. With that cue, they often respond "in atmosphere" the whole way through.

People were arriving, pulling out characters, assembling dice, and spending xp from last session. While doing so, we usually chat until everyone's ready. I remarked that there were countless times when I tried to run something like Lord of the Rings but wound up with Royal Highness instead. There were nods and agreement all around.

David wrote:
When the enthusiastic player is launching himself at this stuff, do the other players respond positively? Do any of the other players initiate this sort of content themselves (Including via character creation/advancement options)?

I don't know what royal highness is.

But really this doesn't sound like a creative agenda issue at all. You could shoot for narrativist lord of the rings but end up with a bunch of clowning around, perhaps at a princess bride level and...it'd still be narrativist.

You might be holding onto the idea that perfect (until it's almost tangible) genre emulation is critical to CA. Well, in a simulationist CA it's pretty critical. Otherwise, it's not vital or indicative of CA issues.

Hi Cliff,

Taking this from the glossary, which is in the articles section.

Creative Agenda (CA)

    The aesthetic priorities and any matters of imaginative interest regarding role-playing. Three distinct Creative Agendas are currently recognized: Step On Up (Gamist), The Right to Dream (Simulationist), and Story Now (Narrativist). This definition replaces all uses of "Premise" in GNS and other matters of role-playing theory aside from the specific Creative Agenda of Narrativist play. Creative Agenda is expressed using all Components of Exploration, but most especially System.

All are perfectly valid ways of interpreting the setting, but they can't all exist in the same game. We need to pick one version and all of us make characters and play according to that specific tone.

Cliff, you say in post 10 that the players recognise and respond to mythos elements and situations that are particularly evocative of the setting etc, and in post 18 that your two old hands are highly defensive players, goiong to lengths to protect themselves from risk.

So these are your hardened adventurers; they know what the game is, what they are supposed to do, and how to follow your lead when you give it.  The one thing that doesn't appear here is the desire to assert control over the narrative in any proactive sense.  So I'm not sure that outcome narration is suitable for this group, or if it is, it will need to come in some other, more radically distcint form.  Playing a game familiar enough that it allows them to fall back on their veteran habits will reliably prompt them to do so, I think.  Inasmuch as you are attempting to demonstrate a new way to play, you need to make a much sharper break with the past, I think.

I suspect that what is happening is that as defensive players, that surivivalist element is important to them.  And so to fail, to really fail in a serious and meaningful way, would be a threat to their competence and effectiveness.  And the solution to that is take the failure and draw its sting, to make it comedic rather than harmful or bitter, so exaggerated it cannot be taken seriously.  That way they can even gain applause (laughter) from what would otherwise be a threatening outcome, and their self perception as effective and competent is preserved.

Short of radical shifts in system as suggested above, I'd be inclined to just deny them failure narrations.  You've got a system which allows them narration outcomes on success, it would be perfectly consistent to claim that failure puts the outcome in your hands.  As long as this is done with justice and mercy, and not the vindictiveness Ron described, it's perfectly viable, and will allow you to keep the tone in check.  But it is moving in the opposite direction to your aspiration to change the style of play overall.

The thing I find interesting about this whole conundrum is that it happens only during a failure. The players don't seem to be interested in adding much detail at all to their successes. So the question is: why embellish a failure, especially in such a self-debasing fashion?

If you’re playing 7th Sea, then I assume you’re using task resolution. The players tell you what they are doing, they roll, and then either succeed or fail at the one particular task they were trying to accomplish. From the players’ perspective, especially if they have no experience narrating the results of their own rolls, the narration may seem obvious to them. Why add additional, even superfluous, detail? This happened to me the first time I tried to encourage players to narrate their results. There was a bunch of floundering until someone added a few things like, “After I hit him, he falls down the stairs… I guess.” No one knew what to do because they were so used to the traditional GM/Player division. Under that traditional division, the only way a player exerts control is through narrating character actions. It’s the GM’s job to decide outcomes.

So what I’m saying is that it sounds like you’re players simply haven’t gotten used to the idea of narrating outcomes for themselves. This may resolve itself with practice. Or you may need to change to a very different system (per contracycle’s suggestion).

As for the exaggerated failures, it may be that the players don’t know what to narrate, but sure has hell don’t want to make their failure appear to be an example of actual incompetence. Comedy is the obvious out (again, per contracycle’s suggestion).

The other alternative is that the players are looking specifically for a bit of comic relief. I’m thinking about this:

They dealt with the devil, and if they couldn't get their friend to shut up, they were going to have to kill him. That actually made them quite uncomfortable (until the one player started asking if the man's mother was "bangable").

Tim wrote: If you’re really throwing a lot of uncomfortable situations and choices at them, they may want a break just to blow off some emotional steam.

A whole lot of great stuff came in, I see. I find myself left in the position of agreeing with many of the details posted, but at the same time feeling like there's an element of mutual exclusivity to much of it. At the moment I'm thinking I'm missing the forest for the trees. But let's start looking at those fine specimens of wood and leaf.

Callan wrote:
Except if your playing for nar enjoyment, you toss in say a choice between an easy job robbing a little old lady or a hard job robbing some nasty stock broker and suddenly all these utterly tone broken characters are arguing with each other over which to do (if not both). And that arguements fun...but how can it be fun, eh? Surely tone is all there is and it's wrecked? Well in sim, yeah, tone is all there is. But in nar, there's that argument fun, still fit, fat and functional. That argument fun sits on top of the tone. Sure it's nice to have coherant tone, but it's not needed. Unless your playing sim.

Tim wrote:
If you’re playing 7th Sea, then I assume you’re using task resolution. The players tell you what they are doing, they roll, and then either succeed or fail at the one particular task they were trying to accomplish. From the players’ perspective, especially if they have no experience narrating the results of their own rolls, the narration may seem obvious to them.

So what I’m saying is that it sounds like you’re players simply haven’t gotten used to the idea of narrating outcomes for themselves. This may resolve itself with practice. Or you may need to change to a very different system (per contracycle’s suggestion).

contracycle wrote:
So these are your hardened adventurers; they know what the game is, what they are supposed to do, and how to follow your lead when you give it.  The one thing that doesn't appear here is the desire to assert control over the narrative in any proactive sense.  So I'm not sure that outcome narration is suitable for this group, or if it is, it will need to come in some other, more radically distcint form.  Playing a game familiar enough that it allows them to fall back on their veteran habits will reliably prompt them to do so, I think.  Inasmuch as you are attempting to demonstrate a new way to play, you need to make a much sharper break with the past, I think.

I suspect that what is happening is that as defensive players, that surivivalist element is important to them.  And so to fail, to really fail in a serious and meaningful way, would be a threat to their competence and effectiveness.  And the solution to that is take the failure and draw its sting, to make it comedic rather than harmful or bitter, so exaggerated it cannot be taken seriously.  That way they can even gain applause (laughter) from what would otherwise be a threatening outcome, and their self perception as effective and competent is preserved.

Still thinking...

After the whole pick up line thing, what happened in terms of keeping him quiet or not? Or did you already describe that and I'm recalling badly? I think you said they didn't need to kill him in the end. But what changed the NPC's mind to not publishing the article?

I'm thinking one issue is that the dice roll, which seemed initiated by the player, was a bit 'premature ejaculation'. Ie, no one at the table talked about how dire the ramifications would be on a failed roll, or whether there would no ramifications at all in the short term (ie, rolls, fails "Please don't publish!" "Sorry, I'm going to! Goodbye my friends! Catch you at the party next week! :)" leaving plenty of time for other plans...). Just suddenly he rolls out of nowhere and nobodies internalised what significant context a fail will have (if any).

I mean, imagine if he rolled to persuade, fails, then just grunts 'Oh, failed it'. Seems a bit non climactic. So perhaps he's trying to make it somehow climactic on his own. Mainly because he rushed to dice and everyone else was left behind?

Perhaps if it becomes an informal rule that if a player picks up dice like that, he has to turn to the group first and go 'So...how bad is it if I fail' and actually wait a bit to get some feedback and back and forth on the matter? I'm not saying determine it in fine detail, just an overall sense of bad result?

Callan wrote:
After the whole pick up line thing, what happened in terms of keeping him quiet or not? Or did you already describe that and I'm recalling badly? I think you said they didn't need to kill him in the end. But what changed the NPC's mind to not publishing the article?

I'm thinking one issue is that the dice roll, which seemed initiated by the player, was a bit 'premature ejaculation'.

Perhaps if it becomes an informal rule that if a player picks up dice like that, he has to turn to the group first and go 'So...how bad is it if I fail' and actually wait a bit to get some feedback and back and forth on the matter? I'm not saying determine it in fine detail, just an overall sense of bad result?

David wrote:
Obviously I don't know your group, or the groups Ron referred to, so I could be way off base. But this strikes me as a pretty straightforward example of Creative Agenda in action. I'm not sure how versed in the CA concept you are, but the idea that CA is what you intend to do, or that CA is what a specific person prefers to do, are both common misconceptions. CA is how you use the medium of play to enjoy the game _together_. It doesn't matter how invested in Lothar the badass barbarian, and his epic struggle to avenge his fallen village a player is, its not a part of CA until its enthusiastically shared and reinforced by the group. If everyones eyes glaze over when you talk about Lothar (perhaps not out of fundamental disinterest, but because we all know it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference), but they all grin or laugh when you have him trip over his feet and fall into a hole when you roll a 2 on your spot check... Then thats what you are going to do.

In the essays Ron talks about how Sim is easily supplanted by the more basic human activities of competition (gamism) and story telling (narrativism), but Sim-comedy seems to be just as basic and powerful.

Narration mechanics are a technique, that can support any agenda based on the context. In this game, they are supporting the Sim-comedy agenda. If you don't want to support it, I'd suggest removing or refocusing the mechanic. Honestly, what sort of failure narration would matter to the other players at the table? If the answer is none, then its not a useful rule.