Hi,

I'm working on the purpose of fortune mechanics in RPGs. I'm basically trying to address the question "Whý people use fortune in their play?" One of the sub-questions I have come up is "Do fortune mechanics add to the narrative suspence experienced by the players?" By narrative suspence I mean the exitement felt by players when they are faced with the question "What will happen next?" typical of climaxes of action adventure movies. (Will the cavalry arrive in time? Will the hero rescue the heroine before it is too late? etc.)

Does the use of fortune add narrative suspence to _your_ gaming experience? Is there a differnce in the level of suspence experienced if _you_ use karma or drama instead?

I'm also interested in any other insights or comments you might have.

Cheers,

Johannes wrote: By narrative suspence I mean the exitement felt by players when they are faced with the question "What will happen next?" typical of climaxes of action adventure movies. (Will the cavalry arrive in time? Will the hero rescue the heroine before it is too late? etc.)

Hello,

Johannes, I think discussing "suspense" at the outset is assuming too much. What we are dealing with are events that cannot be controlled by personal agenda, which play very differently roles in different modes of role-playing.

In Gamist play, Fortune varies greatly. It may be incorporated into either of two general approaches, one of which I'm calling "the Gamble" and the other I'm calling "the Crunch." They are not exclusionary, but play does tend toward one or the other. Neither of these has been discussed before on the Forge, and I'll be presenting them in full in my upcoming essay.

Briefly, in Gamble-heavy play, a lot is at risk and a lot of unreliable chanciness is involved, thus Fortune plays a big role in final outcomes. In Crunch-heavy play, chanciness may be present but it modifies or sets up relatively reliable contexts for strategy.

To make all this even more confusing, an enormous amount of in-game material can be covered by a single roll in Gamist play, if the issue at hand is only setting up for the Gamble or Crunch of interest. For example, "initiative" in many 70s games represents dozens of physical and perceptive events in-game, handled usually by a very arbitrary single die roll.

In Narrativist play, Fortune also varies greatly, and for many of the same reasons. However, outcomes in this mode of play are about different things than in Gamist play and reflect differently upon the people involved. The underlying principle is that posing adversity is fun, and resolving adversity is fun, but doing both for a given conflict is boring for Narrativist purposes. I think of Fortune methods here as "springboards," or contributing arbitrary, or almost-arbitrary material that the authors use as inspiration and constraint (which are practically the same thing when creating a story).

Fortune-in-the-middle is extraordinarily effective in generating a usable, dynamic relationship between springboarded input (what the dice say) and author-type decisions. I consider it vastly more effective than unstructured Drama systems, which is what people most often mean by the term "diceless."

In Simulationist play, Fortune is historically very different - it almost always falls into two exclusive categories: "physics," which I think most people understand easily, and another one that's hard to name or even to recognize, but "situating" or "arranging" might be stating it adequately. This latter notion includes things like rolling on birth tables or for today's weather - it is, essentially, extending and including the process of character or setting creation directly into play.

Best,
Ron

Johannes Kellomaki wrote: Do fortune mechanics add to the narrative suspence experienced by the players?

Ron Edwards wrote: The underlying principle is that posing adversity is fun, and resolving adversity is fun, but doing both for a given conflict is boring for Narrativist purposes.

M. J. Young wrote: I hesitate to disagree; my gut feeling is that in game play this is true. However, I also write novels, and in doing so I often find that I am posing adversity with no clear knowledge at that moment of how I'm going to resolve it, and a good deal of the fun comes from finding my way to that resolution. I am not at all bored by the process; sometimes I actually jump out of my chair and rush off to try to find someone to tell about how the character solved the problem. Maybe that's entirely different--a matter of creating problems for yourself that you don't know how to solve (within the limits of a particular character's ability and identity) and then working through to the solution; but maybe it's not so different after all.

Johannes wrote: "Whý people use fortune in their play?"
"Do fortune mechanics add to the narrative suspence experienced by the players?"

Does the use of fortune add narrative suspence to _your_ gaming experience? Is there a differnce in the level of suspence experienced if _you_ use karma or drama instead?

I don't mean to be difficult, but I don't think in movies the questions you list generate all that much suspense. Of course, the cavalary will come in time, and the hero rescue the heroine before it is too late. Typical action adventure movies all answer these questions in the typical way. There may be some directors/writers that play with the basic formula, but you usually know that before watching one of their movies, and so anticipate that as well.

Hi,

Ron: Thanks for the valuable insights on the nature of foortune. They will be useful to me. Thanks for the biblographic info as well. (refering to a private message) I'd still like to hear your subjective take on fortune and suspence.

M.J. and Jack: My intuitive view on mechanics and suspence is similar to yours but I'm pretty inexperienced with other than fortune systems so your insights are valuable to me.

I'm still interested on reading how people experience the relation between suspence and fortune in their play and hou does it compare to drama and karma. Keep them coming.

Alfred Hitchcock once explained suspense like this. Suppose you have some people sitting around a table, in a room. A bomb goes off, under the table, and kills them all. That's surprise. If you show the audience that there is a bomb, and that it's ticking, and then you have the people around the table start having a conversation, you've got suspense. The point is that the audience knows that something big is likely to happen, and soon, but they don't know exactly when, nor whether the characters will figure it out in time.

I think fortune mechanics are usually quite different from this. You have a situation that could go lots of ways, and you roll dice (or whatever) to find out which way it does go. What's suspenseful about this? It seems to me that real suspense depends on a determined situation, not on random factors. In fact, taking Hitchcock's suggestion, you could argue that random factors eliminate or undercut suspense.

One way you could imagine the suspense working with random factors is if (to take the bomb example) the characters do find the bomb, but then they have to make skill rolls to turn it off (James Bond does this a lot). Will they roll well enough? But again, the suspense comes from the situation; the rolls are simply a way to decide how to resolve that situation.

To take an alternative extreme, suppose there's a hidden bomb, and the characters have to do well on their "spot hidden" skills to find it. They fail, unfortunately. Boom! That's surprise, not suspense. If they succeed, they flick the off switch. Click! Where's the suspense in that?

I think fortune mechanics can certainly be useful, but I don't see that they have anything particular to do with suspense in a formal sense.

clehrich wrote: I think fortune mechanics can certainly be useful, but I don't see that they have anything particular to do with suspense in a formal sense.

Ron Edwards wrote: I consider (FitM) vastly more effective than unstructured Drama systems, which is what people most often mean by the term "diceless."

Jonathan Walton wrote:

Ron Edwards wrote: I consider (FitM) vastly more effective than unstructured Drama systems, which is what people most often mean by the term "diceless."

And I really wish people would stop making comments like that, because it futher supports the belief that "diceless" means unstructured. Come on, Ron, throw us Fortuneless designers a bone here...

I don't want to derail this thread, so I'm not going to respond to M.J.'s comments as thoroughly as I'd like. Suffice it to say, I knew Ron wasn't seriously making the claim that all diceless/Fortuneless games were unstructured, but the Fortuneless systems that would be most useful to this conversation (in my opinion, that means structured ones) were seemingly being swept aside by his throwaway line. That's what I was objecting to, not the points that you brought up. I also take exception to this:

M.J. wrote: Ron is only saying that those people out there who are constantly saying you should get rid of your dice are the same people who say you don't need any rules...

Hi Jonathan,

You've mis-read me, badly. I am referring to unstructured Drama systems, just as you quote. But Nobilis, and Amber for that matter, use Karma-based systems. They are completely out of the purview of my comments.

This is exactly what "diceless" is such a rotten term. Not having dice really doesn't tell you what the game actually has, whether it's an alternate Fortune system, or whatever - and in this case, whether it's Karma or Drama primarily.

As for your somewhat snide challenge, I wrote a Fortune-less system in 1998, called Fantasy for Real. You have two values: a base, and a pool. You can choose to use your base alone in a Karma resolution, or you can pump a point from your pool to increase it, which is a resource that has to be re-filled by carrying out some specified act.

Sound familiar? Yeah. It's Nobilis, basically.

I cannibalized so many parts of Fantasy for Real for Elfs, though, that I never completed it. Some of its magic system has shown up in Clinton's Donjon.

Oddly enough, I agree with you about Drama, Karma, and suspense. But that's not what Johannes is asking about. Perhaps your "Must ... Defend ... Nobilis!" defense-mechanism can be put on hold while we discuss Fortune.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Perhaps your "Must ... Defend ... Nobilis!" defense-mechanism can be put on hold while we discuss Fortune.

Hi,

Your comments have been very interesting. When I started this thread I had this hunch that many gamers defend the use of fortune because they think that it provides narrative suspence. I also thought that this line of thinking was too simple and wrong.

The thing about fortune is that you cannot predict it which means that use of fortune provides the game with a degree of unpredictability and surprise. Surprise is not suspence as clerich showed with his/her Hitchcock example. The possibility of surprise can be a part of suspence but its not necessary. You can have suspence without the possibility of surprise (watching the same thriller movie twice for example).

The consensus seems to be that there is no necessary connection between fortune and suspence and I agree. It is also a very good point that fortune CAN work towards more suspence and that the contextualization of the die roll (or what ever) is perhaps the key issue on this one. By contextualization I mean things like plot functionality and dramatic rythm.

However it's interesting that this (fortune = surprise = suspence) fallacy is so common. Maybe it's because gamers easily mistake something else for suspence or maybe it's just because they haven't tried anything else than fortune. I'll take a look on the mistakes now.

1. Mistaking game suspence with narrative suspence. By game suspence I mean the kind of suspence spectators of a football game (that's soccer for you Americans) feel. You really don't know for sure who will win the game. It is different from narrative suspence because the object of the emotion is real/actual. I can easily imagine that this is one reason why fortune and not cheating are often an important part of gamist experiences (which can emerge in any GNS-style of play).

2. Mistaking the general unpredictability of human life with suspence. Here the fortune represents those variables of a character's life which are beyond his/her control.

Pleas don't equate these with GNS-categories even if the connections seem obvious. I believe thay can be part of all three styles of play.

Fortune and surprise are more important to these forms of suspence (surprise is imortant to games like football and the feeling that you cannot control all the variables of your life is important to simulating life) than for the narrative suspence. So this could at least in part explain the fallacy.

I don't think that such a fallacy exists. Yes, for those who may claim that dice are the only way to get suspense, that's an overstatement. I would go so far as to say that amongst commonly played games played in the most common modes of play that dice are the method that most players think of in terms of what does provide suspence.

What we have here is a false dichotomy. That you either have dice and suspense, or no dice an no suspense. There are, of course, other ways to get suspense.

That said, I think that fortune is a great way to get suspense. For some people like myself, it is, perhpas, superior to most other methods. Dice do not surprise. That's just not true. A surprise comes from having no prior knowledge of the impending event. As in the example of the bomb just going off. In all cases of rolling dice, I have at the very least that part of suspence convered. We know that several things could happen, and we await the outcome. In that dice in fact enforce suspense to the extent that it can be.

Now, whether tying your shoes successfully is suspenceful is not in quesiton. It's not suspensefull using either fortune or any other resolution method. The issues of pacing and context are crucial to suspense no matter how things are decided.

Perhaps for you, Johannes, there is some difference between the suspence of a Footbal game and the suspense of a hitchcock film. But for the life of me, the feelings are functionally identical. I'm not sure what making a differentiation between them would enhance.

Human life can be very suspenseful. Opening that letter to be accepted to a university, or waiting for news about a missing relative. Makes my heart pound. Again, what's the difference, and why shoud I care?

No, I think that this is entirely a straw man issue dealing with the Fortuneless agenda. Why can't peole just have preferences, and leave it at that? There has to be a single way that's superior for all? If not, then this is just an opinion.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: No, I think that this is entirely a straw man issue dealing with the Fortuneless agenda.

Jonathan Walton wrote: I can't believe you just said "the Fortuneless agenda." :)

Hi Mike,

Mike Holmes wrote:
Perhaps for you, Johannes, there is some difference between the suspence of a Footbal game and the suspense of a hitchcock film. But for the life of me, the feelings are functionally identical. I'm not sure what making a differentiation between them would enhance.

Hi Johannes,

From a sociobiological point of view toward humans, stories are "thought-experiments" - imagined fitness-investment conflicts under a variety of different circumstances. This idea supports your idea about suspense (although I think that this word is being used in many different ways).

However, bear in mind that evolutionary psychology (a branch or application of sociobiology) suffers badly from a lack of rigorous research. Many of its practitioners extend the excellent writings of E.O. Wilson or Timothy Goldsmith into very dubious speculation or poorly-conceived experiments. Therefore the strength of your claim is questionable; it's theoretically consistent but not yet tested.

We aren't going to get anywhere by relying on internal sensations as data. Johannes, if you could provide a recognizable and broadly-applicable definition of suspense as a behavior, then that would help the discussion greatly.

Best,
Ron

Johannes wrote: When I started this thread I had this hunch that many gamers defend the use of fortune because they think that it provides narrative suspence.

The consensus seems to be that there is no necessary connection between fortune and suspence and I agree. It is also a very good point that fortune CAN work towards more suspence and that the contextualization of the die roll (or what ever) is perhaps the key issue on this one. By contextualization I mean things like plot functionality and dramatic rythm.

Hi Ron,

Nice that my line of reasoning was not "in the woods" as we Finns say (well I guess it precisely was in a way). I agree that evolutionary psychology as it is now has many problems along with its obvious strenghts. I also recognize my thoughts as speculation only. It was not an empirical truth and I doubt it will ever be because of the enormous time spans involved. I am not equiped to argument rigorously on this field so I'll have to leave this branch of discussion as it is.

Ron Edwards wrote:

We aren't going to get anywhere by relying on internal sensations as data. Johannes, if you could provide a recognizable and broadly-applicable definition of suspense as a behavior, then that would help the discussion greatly.

Johannes Kellomaki wrote: I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "suspence as a behavior". Could you please explain?

I deny the possibility of discussing role-playing games objectively in a meaningfull way. If we stick to measurable properties like natural scienses do we will never get above the dogs of Pavlov in our discussions. Most of the confusion around GNS is because it tries to describe objectively something that is inherently subjective. RPG will be flattened out of existence if we reduce it to its material aspect.

Instead of objectivity we should aim at intersubjectivity hermeneutic understanding. This is what all my threads are about. It will usefull to describe our mental processes even if there will never be a divine judge who tells who's right. Discussing the difference of suspence between a spectator of a football game and audience of a RPG will tell us more about who we are as human beings and more about our hobby as an form of fiction than defining suspence as a certain pattern of electron movement in the brain. What is interesting to me in that patter is how do I experience it.

I sense that this is about to proceed to the insoluble problem of behavioralism vs. personality theory. At which point we'll have to agree to disagree, right?

Mike

Yes something like that - and I don't think any of us are on this forum to have that discussion. We spend our time better here discussing RPGs than philosophy of science.

I'm glad everyone is acknowledging we're up against a tough issue here. I'm gonna try and provide a clarification to the "suspense as a behavior" bit, to see if that provides a way for the conversation to go forward. But first - I'm not Ron, nor am I an expert on scientific - or any other - philosophy. I have been down this road before, and I *think* the tricky issues don't *really* matter for the discussion . . . so here goes:

The standard line is that GNS is about "observable behavior." So "what is suspense as a behavior?" means "what is it that I as an observer see when suspense is happening?" NOT objective observer vs. subjective observer/participant, just observer vs. internal mental state. How does an observer know when suspense is happening? What kind of things happen in the game play, what words are said, what kinds of interactions occur? E.g., we might say that the group becomes more alert, and is more tense as each die roll is made. We say that becasue we see the attention become more focused, and hear the sighs of relief/annoyance when the result of a die roll is revealed.

The point of this is NOT to say the internal state of tension isn't important, real and/or valid - some people might have one of those opinions, but that's not relevant to the issue at hand. It's just much easier and useful to work with these observable things.

And (best as I can tell) that's what Ron's asking - by what observable things are we going to know that suspense is happening? Because that's something he can work with, and the internal sensations are (for GNS and Ron) not. The first step beyond an internal sensation is the external report of that sensation ("Wow, great suspense during that session!"), but I think the hope is we can get even further than that. I'd really like to see how folks would say they know suspense is happening, as the observer - I bet a lot of interesting stuff would result. And I don't think we have to go into objective/subjective (terms I've found less useful than I once thought they were) philosophy of science issues in order to have that (much more useful to RPG design, IMO) discussion.

Gordon

I appreciate your try Gordon but I don't see what we would win. Whats so much better in registering tha physical symptoms of the players and then taking some combination and labeling it suspence and then trying out what techniques of play produce that combination to directly asking them when they feel suspence and how would they describe it? In the first option we will have to resort to the second (my) option anyway if we want to make sense of the empirical observations.