I'm a newbie to this forum and have been interested in Narrativist styles of play for quite some time ever since I stumbed on "the Window RPG" one dark night.

Low fantasy, lots of bloody skirmishes, bringands, cutthroats thats the sort games I like running.

I very much like the idea of FitM and would like to introduce it into the games I run.

I want to keep things very simple would like to use a FitM like system that is able to resolve the outcome of entire scenes with minimal use of fortune.

i.e.
Describe scene and attitude and likely actions of NPCs.
General statement of intent from the players.
Fortune takes a hand via some sort of simple resolution mechanic.
I (and players) narrate the outcome which best fits.

One thing that has me scratching my head though is using that very simple method of scene resolution to combat scenes where success or failure can be a matter of life or death.

i.e Assailed by 5 brigands (resonable fighters) fortune brings success to our Wily protagonist Tyrus (a formidable swordsman). Using whatever mechanic essentailly Tyrus beats them all. Four are easily dispatched, the third quickly finds himself at Tyrus's mercy and he willingly spill the beans on who had sent them to kill him.

FitM is easy enough here. The consequences of success in a melee are easy for virtually any player to grasp.

But what if Tyrus had failed? What if he had only done enough to best 2 of his assailants?

What is the best way of dealing with situations where a character has been bested in combat.

Sure, I could say that Tyrus is captured. Or I could say that Tyrus dispatched 2 of the assailants causing the others to flee fearing that they would be next.

Can you do that all the time though when characters are bested in combat and still maintain the belief among the players that combat is a matter of life and death?

Death is very final and direst outcome of combat and I feel needs to be a possible outcome if I want to maintain the drama and tension of a life and death battle scenes.

What is the best way to handle this in a simple FitM system?

Let's first ask a very important question; Who's in charge of characters dying? The GM, the players, or an arbitrary set of numbers/rules? All three have been used before, successfully for different purposes.

You may want to take a look at the Torchbearer/Death thread, over in Design which puts when and how characters' die completely in the players hands. Likewise with Jared Sorensen's octaNe and Inspectres. If you're playing Narrativist games, the threat of death isn't a motivating factor in gameplay, Premise is.

Death is very final and direst outcome of combat and I feel needs to be a possible outcome if I want to maintain the drama and tension of a life and death battle scenes.

Cassidy wrote: I want to keep things very simple would like to use a FitM like system that is able to resolve the outcome of entire scenes with minimal use of fortune.
...
FitM is easy enough here. The consequences of success in a melee are easy for virtually any player to grasp.

If you only have one combat, ever, in your game, would it matter that in the one that the character failed and was captured?

The idea of death as a negative consequence of combat is a result of RPGs having a combat system bias, and being combat oriented.

Now, I realize that you want to play a genre where derring do would seem to be a regular subject of play, and combat seems likely. But consider the source material. How often does Conan actually get into fights? Really. About once a story, on average, I'd say. Some stories he doesn't fight anything. No, really, check it out.

Because fighting is only one sort of conflict. And it gets dull quickly if it's overused. Why? Because either the charcters have to win every battle, or get captured, or the like. There are only so many believable outcomes to battle, and you can use them up quickly.

So, first thing, have less combat. There are several ways to go about this (enough to fill a whole thread).

Next, make sure that the PCs mostly win. That is, if they are heroes getting into combat a lot, then play should mostly be about them winning. Just stack the odds so that they do.

Then, on the few times the character does fail, they will be far enough between and few enough that getting captured or whatever negative result will not seem cliche. The "failure means conflict" principle then comes into play. Failure in any FitM resolution gives you the opportunity to create further problems for the character. Failure should never mean inability to continue. So, failure in combat does not mean death. Failure in research does not mean that nothing is found, but instead the information found is fallacious or something. Failure in romance does not mean that the character makes a fool of himself, but that the girl in question turns out to be more unobtainable than thought.

In all these cases, the player still has options. They may be bad options, but they are options. The drama con continue to unfold rather than just being stuck and unable to continue.

Other negative results of combat that don't kill a character:

They are left unconcious, and the magic whatsis is stolen.
They awake with a shaved head, and a strange scar where the baddies implanted a neural control device.
They awake to find themselves in bed with a drunk hooker, and evidence of photography having occured in the room.
The bad guys cut off an arm (for their ritual), and let the character go.
The bad guys outmaneuver the good guys and take a DNPC as hostage and leave (who says that a negative combat outcome even has to leave anyone wounded?).
The bad guys give the character the smakckdown, and then a talk about how their god is the best and how the character should convert.

Just leave the character worse off than before. Playing Synthesis the other night, I rolled this outstanding success against one of the players. They were all waiting for me to just kill him off. Instead, I didn't even wound him, but instead ruled that he went catatonic with fear. First episode will be all about getting poor Father Ramos' head back in shape.

Think of it this way. There is no combat, only Conflict. Conflicts can have any result.

Mike

Hey Cassidy! Welcome to the Forge! One thing you should be aware of, in case you aren't. There's some very specific terminology used here, mostly taken from Ron's GNS essay. It's good stuff. If you haven't read it, check it out in the articles area. Somewhat unfortunately, IMO, many of the terms are specialized, and do not mean what they might initially appear to mean.

In othe words, if you start talking about Narrativism without having read the essay, people might think you mean something other than you actually do. This happened to me a couple of times when I first started coming here. So, fair warning. :)

Anyway, to deal with your question.

FitM isn't about making binary decisions that you might find on a flowchart. That is, FitM doesn't neccessarily decide whether or not your PCs live. You decide, or the players decide, depending on how you have your social contract set up. If it's important that the characters live, or that the door be unlocked, or that the earthquake be averted, then that's what happens.

One way to think of it is that the fortune mechanics determine whether or not something is generally cool or generally uncool for the players. Whatever happens, the game continues. A failed roll when a character tries to unlock a door can be:

"You can't get the door open, but seeing you struggle, the master theif finally has pity and does it for you."

"You can't get the door open, but there's an open window nearby."

"You can't get the door open, but suddenly it springs ope on it's own. Uh oh! It's Mr. Janocek himself!"

"You get the door open, but there are twelve ninjas waiting on the other side."

etc.

Mike wrote:
Just leave the character worse off than before. Playing Synthesis the other night, I rolled this outstanding success against one of the players. They were all waiting for me to just kill him off. Instead, I didn't even wound him, but instead ruled that he went catatonic with fear. First episode will be all about getting poor Father Ramos' head back in shape.

Welcome to The Forge, Cassidy!

Hey, Nathan. I'm going to disagree with some of your examples to make a point, here. Sorry.

Paganini wrote: One way to think of it is that the fortune mechanics determine whether or not something is generally cool or generally uncool for the players. Whatever happens, the game continues. A failed roll when a character tries to unlock a door can be:

"You can't get the door open, but seeing you struggle, the master theif finally has pity and does it for you."

"You can't get the door open, but there's an open window nearby."

"You can't get the door open, but suddenly it springs ope on it's own. Uh oh! It's Mr. Janocek himself!"

"You get the door open, but there are twelve ninjas waiting on the other side."

Thanks for both your replies, much appreciated.

Bankuei wrote: Let's first ask a very important question; Who's in charge of characters dying? The GM, the players, or an arbitrary set of numbers/rules? All three have been used before, successfully for different purposes.

Bankuei wrote: You may want to take a look at the Torchbearer/Death thread, over in Design which puts when and how characters' die completely in the players hands. Likewise with Jared Sorensen's octaNe and Inspectres. If you're playing Narrativist games, the threat of death isn't a motivating factor in gameplay, Premise is.

Bankuei wrote: Realism is not a requirement of Narrativism, although its not necessarily excluded from it either. If you're concerned about when or why to include death, perhaps you should look at some options:

•Metagame mechanics-Hero points, luck points, whatever. Serves as limited plot immunity from death.
•Players are informed of the potential of death("This guy is serious!")
•Best 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5 rolls, allows players to switch tactics if it looks like they're about to bite it.

Bankuei wrote: In all honesty, though, death mechanics do nothing to enforce Narrativist play in any fashion, you might want to try out some of the games listed above and see the difference. I suspect that your concern with realism in combat might just be a holdout from previous gameplay experience.

Bankuei wrote: A second, larger issue you may want to think of, is with conflict resolution, it more or less boils down to, things get better, or things get worse. In your example, the character may have defeated all 3 foes, only to have more spring up as reinforcements. Sure, you beat 3, but you still haven't won the fight...

I highly recommend you check out some games that will rock your socks off... Check out the Pool, Inspectres, octaNe, Donjon, and Trollbabe. All of these games really do cover the types of play you might be looking for. The theory side of it is all in Ron's GNS etc. essay, and several threads on Stance.

f the player decides to narrate Tyrus swiftly killing the 2 he beat then more than likely the other 3 will take brutal retribution on Tyrus. As a GM I'll put myself in the shoes of the assailants and they'll likely be thinking an "eye for an eye".

In Actor stance, a person determines a character’s decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have.
*

In Author stance, a person determines a character’s decisions and actions based on the real person’s priorities, then retroactively “motivates” the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)
*

In Director stance, a person determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character’s knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character’s actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters.

Mike Holmes wrote:

Paganini wrote:
"You can't get the door open, but seeing you struggle, the master theif finally has pity and does it for you."

OK, no result should be bad for the Player, ever, if you can prevent it. No, really.

"You can't get the door open, but suddenly it springs ope on it's own. Uh oh! It's Mr. Janocek himself!"

But here's the best. "You fail to open the window, and set off the alarm." Now the character has a whole new set of problems. :-)

You know, it ocurrs to me that probably the best example of FitM is what we had in the Shadows indie-netgam the other night. It didn't even hit me until now, but that's exactly what Shadows has. Two outcomes are proposed (a postitive one and a negative one) and the dice are rolled to select one. Then the selected outcome is narrated fully. The dice may be modified after rolling them by token expenditure. Does this not meet completely the definition of FitM?

Cassidy, I should have told you about Shadows a long time ago. If you like the Window, you're going to go nuts of Shadows. I did. ;)

Check it out:

http://www.harlekin-maus.com

four willows weeping wrote: Well, I'm not so sure about this. I mean, you could simply define failure as "the success of the other party to the exclusion of my own". First, is this resolution system of yours task-resolution on a scenic scale, or conflict-resolution on a scenic scale?

four willows weeping wrote: If the second, then you have one roll governing a conflict of some amount of mutually exclusive outcomes, which can be your stated goals: "Defend myself from the brigands, but not so handily as to lose the opportunity to question them", vs. "Rob this rich-looking dude Tyrus". Then, the conflict resolution decides which of the stated goals comes to pass. This doesn't have the added layer of complexity of the (in this case, finer-grained) task resolution setup; this can be a feature or a bug.

four willows weeping wrote: Then you raise an entirely different question about character death, and the sacred cow Danger lurks around every corner. I solved this in Torchbearer by making character death entirely a matter of player fiat; danger of that sort simply isn't an issue. I won't hijack the discussion by going on further about that. Maybe, though, this is what you want: Does any participant in a combat have the authority to attempt to cause, or even simply decree, the death of another?

Nice to see you here Pag, thanks for your feedback :)

Going to go check out the games you guys have suggested and crawl the other forums.

Given the wealth of information I expect I'll be back in a year or two :)

Paganini wrote: You know, it ocurrs to me that probably the best example of FitM is what we had in the Shadows indie-netgam the other night. It didn't even hit me until now, but that's exactly what Shadows has. Two outcomes are proposed (a postitive one and a negative one) and the dice are rolled to select one. Then the selected outcome is narrated fully.Does this not meet completely the definition of FitM?

Cassidy wrote: In Shadows task/scene resolution isn't really about success or failure at all. It just about deciding outcomes, whether it be the outcome desired by the character or the outcome desired by their shadow.

There doesn't seem to be any real need for the "exchange token to reroll" mechanic at all since whatever the outcome of the initial roll it the outcome is going to be once which is designed to drive the game on or make it more fun. Either of the outcomes should really be just as nteresting to the advancement of the game and fortune is simply directing which outcome takes precedence. Which one does take precedence really shouldn't matter should it?

Fortune is just needed to provide a "cue" to the GM and players on which way a certain scene is likely to play out. If fortune doesn't favour the character then it just means that the scene plays out in a different way to what the player would have liked.

The "Pick a lock" example is for me just one small event which is part of the larger scene that is being played out.

No roll/test would be made to specifically pick the lock since the outcome of the event would already be known.

As a general statement of intent saying something like...

"I'm going to try and break in Mr Hyde's laboratory after dark to see if I can find out anything more about these experiments he has been conducting."

...is really all thats needed to set up the scene.

Fortune just determines whether or not the player is able to achieve their stated goals.

I like reading a good book and not knowing what's going to happen next until I turn the page.

When I'm running a game I would scenes to be like that also. Describe the scene, get some general idea of the players intent, then let fortune be the guide in determining the most probable outcome. Although I may have a general idea of possible outcomes I really don't know which one will occur until the scene begins to unfold.

I really like NOT knowing what's going to happen at the start of a scene.

Often with FitM players are allowed to modify the outcome of an scene or task after the initial roll typically by spending karma, luck, etc and rerolling dice.

...

Is this a defining trait of FitM? Or is it just a quirk of some systems. If this is a defining trait of FitM then the question is why?

To me it would certainly make more sense for players to spend karma, luck, etc before they roll any dice of start to resolve anything. Essentially they state that they are attempting to influence the probable outcome of an scene before the resolution process begins.

Maybe it's a little picky but rolling once, spending karma if you don't do so good then rerolling seems like a bit of a fudge.

Cassidy wrote:
In Shadows task/scene resolution isn't really about success or failure at all. It just about deciding outcomes, whether it be the outcome desired by the character or the outcome desired by their shadow.

Hi there,

I apologize for not posting to this thread yet. The Forge seems to have experienced one of those bizarro-moments when a variety of threads and issues apparently explode at once. It's also a brutal time in terms of non-Forge activities.

Cassidy, I think this thread, Task vs. conflict and scene vs. action?, will yield some good points. You can also check out the very first time I introduced the concept in my Hero Wars review.

So far as this thread goes, I'd like to call attention to Mike's post above, which I think nails some key points. I also want to emphasize that Fortune-in-the-middle does not necessarily include modifying the quantitative results following the roll, just as Mike says. For comparison, in Hero Wars, you can do so by spending Hero Points, but in Sorcerer, you cannot.

Best,
Ron

Paganini wrote:
The exchange token to reroll mechanic is *very* important. In fact, I'd say it's the core of the system. Basically what it means is that, if all the players are in agreement, the die they want to win will win. Everyone can spend tokens until it does. But if some players want the shadow die to win, and other players want the good die to win, there's a bidding war. This is why it's very important to summarize both results before rolling.

The shadow rolls by themsevles are about *individual* narrative power. With the token mechanic added in, it ensures that the game will proceed in the direction desired by the *group.*

Ron Edwards wrote: Hi there,
Cassidy, I think this thread, Task vs. conflict and scene vs. action?, will yield some good points. You can also check out the very first time I introduced the concept in my Hero Wars review.

Hi Cassidy,

I'm glad those threads were helpful. This is a topic very near and dear to me, so I want to make sure it's clarified and if necessary, hashed out a bit.

Let's see ...

I agree with you that your (b) describes the situation best. Let me break down the options that exist among all the permutations of "in the middle."

1) How much is a "roll" resolving? This is an in-game-time issue.

2) How many characters' actions is a roll resolving? GURPS = 1, AD&D = 2 (think about it), and Story Engine at its most abstract is "everyone."

3) Is it a conflict or a task? I stress that this issue is independent of #2 above.

4) When is the "attempt" narrated for sure, in detail? Here, and only here, is the "in the middle" part. Again, I think my Hero Wars reviews breaks this down in detail. If we have established all the details of the attempt to hit right up to the point of impact, and then we roll, then it's Fortune-at-the-end. If we make a general statement, then roll, then use the outcome of the roll to help figure out the attempt from the beginning and its conclusion, then it's Fortune-in-the-middle.

5) Is a metagame tweak permitted following the roll? (Note that this is independent of #4; plenty of at-the-end games permit re-rolls with metagame points, for instance; see D6.)

I think that pretty much lays out my thinking about the whole thing, except Cassidy, you raise a very important issue regarding who gets to do the narrating. This varies too. In Hero Wars, it's explicitly the GM (called, incidentally, the Narrator). In Sorcerer, a certain amount of democracy occurs due to the importance of bonus dice; in Story Engine, too, a certain amount of democracy is necessary or it falls apart. In Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Otherkind, or octaNe, it's formally transferred according to some element of the Fortune method.

Best,
Ron

I have mostly been skimming this thread; but Cassidy caught my attention with what I take to be a misstatement of a situation:

Cassidy wrote: Question for anyone: Given your "ideal" game, and assuming it uses the FitM idea in some fashion, would you...

(a) On occasion allow the players to guarantee the desired outcome to a given test, event or task?

(b) On occasion allow the players to influence (but not guarantee) the chances of the desired outcome occuring?

(c) None of the above.

Personally, I'd be inclined to go for (b).

(a) would seem to negate the whole "fortune" aspect of FitM. Fortune? What Fortune?

(c) might make FitM appear to be a too rigid for some players tastes.

M. J. Young wrote: I have mostly been skimming this thread; but Cassidy caught my attention with what I take to be a misstatement of a situation:

Cassidy wrote: Question for anyone: Given your "ideal" game, and assuming it uses the FitM idea in some fashion, would you...

(a) On occasion allow the players to guarantee the desired outcome to a given test, event or task?

(b) On occasion allow the players to influence (but not guarantee) the chances of the desired outcome occuring?

(c) None of the above.

I think you have discounted the value of option (a) by making an unwarranted assumption about it. The question is whether players can ever guarantee the outcome of a given situation; the objection only really applies if they can always do so.

Cassidy wrote:
Exchange of tokens doesn't guarantee that the die the players want to win will actually win, although it does make it more likely and on occasion virtually assured.

Question for anyone: Given your "ideal" game, and assuming it uses the FitM idea in some fashion, would you...

Is this DitM? (Democracy in the Middle) :)

Cassidy wrote: My objection to the prospect of players being able guarantee a successful outcome (either always or sometimes) is because for me the act of guaranteeing that success would negate the whole fortune aspect of FitM.