The Forge Archives

Hey there. I saw a thread on non-gamers "challenging assumptions" and whatnot. It made me think of some recent experiences, but the ansuing discussion was pretty "meta" compared to what I was thinking.

My regular group sometimes includes one person who's an occasional, casual gamer. She only knows the games she plays and has no connection to online gamer culture or the industry/scene/whatever.

She often says some interesting and forthright things. She was describing her character's action during a game and I explained that she'd have to wait for her initiative to come up, and she simply said:

"Initiative's pretty stupid."

Naturally, she's right. Oh, and in case some of you are going to recommend a phase system -- well, she thought that was pretty lame too.

Basically, she thought that actions really don't have a coherent order apart from what the actions actually are. She wanted to do something (a grapple, I think) that wouldn't have made sense using initiative, but would have been fine in a simple exchange of blows (stuff/whatever).

Other targets of her scorn include damage rolls in most systems and rolling to hide from folks.

So, any similar experiences? Again, I don't mean larger issues like Shall We Have a GM. I mean standard mechanics that you see in a whole bunch of systems.

Hi Malcolm,

For me? Hit location rolls, as expressed after the roll-to-hit. It represents a kind of time-reversal, as in, we're not going to worry about what you were trying to hit until after we know it hits.

Then add the option for called shots to that, with penalties, and it moves from nose-wrinkling to toss-hands-in-the-air.

Best,
Ron

P.S. Not to de-rail the thread, so just an aside: order/announcement systems have come a long way recently, avoiding both "initiative" and phase-based mechanics. PM me if you want a list.

For me it's stuff where rules don't seem like "rules."

Systems where you say "I have X Skill" where X can be anything from "Viking Bad-Ass" (which presumably gives long-boat navigation, tactics and strategy, survival skills, all kinds of combat, revelry, etc.) to a specific school of fencing (where a character might be trained in more than one)--and the player and GM have to figure out when/where it's appropriate. I don't get that--it seems like you could bypass it by just saying "do whatever you want and I'll argue about it if I'm so inclined--and wee, there's no way to decide."*

I've seen arguments over "cool move bonuses."  Every move my character does is cool. If you want me to describe it, ask me. If you tell me my move isn't cool enough to get the bonus, go hang. Seems like extra handling time where it may not be wanted/needed (and, worse, if you have a buddy who's idea of cool is 180-degree yours you got serious issues: "I hit him with the wrench in such a way that now he's *inverted*" "hun?" "upside down." "How does that work?" "It's a special move." "Completely upside down, like hanging in air?" "yes. for a second." "hunh."** ;)

-Marco
* Risus gets around this sorta by having the skills be defined as "cliches." But because of they way inappropriate cliches can be used/must be used, it creates (for me) other problems.
** This is based (somewhat loosely) on an actual in-game dialog.

Hi Marco,

Quick clarification: Feng Shui does not have such a rule (even though for some reason people always cite it as doing so); Sorcerer does, Dread does, and Exalted does.

Best,
Ron

Heh. I realized that after I posted and edited it (I've never seen FS but it's top in my mind on the cool-move list for some reason).

-Marco

The only thing that has ever really bothered me about RPGs is hit points.  The concept that the first three bullets couldn't kill you, but this fourth one probably will just blows away any sense of realism other elements of the game might introduce.

Most other elements don't really bug me.  I realize that RPGs are just arbitrarily simplified models of the real world.  Thus, I expect a few cases where an elegant real-life curve has been mangled into a straight line.  

In fact, I don't want to shut newbie gamers down in situations like this, so I often politely recommend that they come up with a rule system that does things the way they expect.  More than once I've had someone either come up with this hideously complex monstrosity, or a decision that the original rules weren't so bad after all.  Either way, it's always an eye-opening experience for the newbie that helps them understand why RPGs are the way they are.

The most important "standard RPG concept" that I find newbie players have trouble grasping is mission selection.

Again and again, those silly know-nothings come in thinking that they can just pick whatever plot hook or adventure opportunity or character goal sounds most interesting to them and go haring off to it, instead of cautiously weighing the degree of challenge against their abilities.

Of course, I'd be remiss in my GM duties if I didn't set them straight real quick when they get too big for their britches that way. A dozen or two dice of dragon breath or a barrage of autofire ranged killing attack work wonders for teaching these kinds of careless idiots to fear the consequences of their actions (or half the time, to give up on playing altogether).

Just kidding about that last paragraph. Put me down as a very very remiss GM.

- Walt

Heck, I'm a relatively experienced gamer, and "mission selection" is almost totally beyond me.

QuoteHeck, I'm a relatively experienced gamer, and "mission selection" is almost totally beyond me.

I assume that you mean you don't understand what mission selection is, or why it might become an element, let alone a troublesome one, of RPG play. That, on reflection, is understandable even though it initially came as a surprise to me. It's largely an old school phenomenon, though clear vestiges of it do persist in some current systems and techniques.

To really get a big dripping mouthful of mission selection in its original concentrated form, though, I'll have to take you back in time to the early 80s at an amenable college campus -- MIT's was the one I was exposed to (though at the time I was actually an undergrad at a little-known liberal arts school further up the Charles). Enter the GM, who's carrying a large carrying case in each hand. Each case is at least two cubic feet in capacity and is as heavy as the GM can possibly carry. One of them's actually a tackle box filled with lead miniatures and dice, which we can ignore in the present discussion. The other is a mass of solid paper, containing setting notes of sufficient scope and detail to make Tolkien's life's work look like a page of haiku. This, he assures us, is only a small selected portion of the complete material he's developed, because the whole is far too much to carry, but he's pretty sure it includes everything likely to be needed in tonight's session of play. (If this GM also uses a homebrew system, the system notes will be another two cubic feet of solid paper, carried in a knapsack.)

This GM, you see, has worked out a very effective solution to the problem of authoring during play. Which is, how do you authoritatively GM a game once the choices available to players extend beyond the scope of a dungeon? Player authorship was a totally alien concept for all concerned, but any form of GM authorship during play was also frowned upon, being either railroading if a plotline for the upcoming adventure were in any way pre-planned, or "making it up as you go along," the epitome of GM inadequacy and buffoonery, if the GM were forced to do any creating on the fly. The expectation of not having to railroad the players while also not having to make things up as you go along were learned in dungeon crawls and dungeon modules. In fact, those expectations were quite reasonable in that context, because a dungeon as setting is sufficiently constrained that it can be entirely planned out in all relevant detail in advance.

For most GMs, getting out of the dungeon meant confronting the problem of creation of elements and authoring (shared or otherwise) of plot during play. This is because as the fantasy world became more complete, the paradigm shifted from the rules system being a complete description of a limited world to the rules system acting as a limited window into an essentially open-ended world. At that point you have to either invent stuff along the way, or railraod the players, because creating the whole world in advance, so that anything that can possibly explored by any character decision is already laid out, is clearly impractical.

But not for this GM species. For him, the entire world was just a really really big dungeon, to be designed in advance region by region, city by city, building by building, room by room, just like a dungeon map. And then, never deviated from during play.

Hence, the importance of mission selection. It's a big world, and designed for characters of all conceivable effectiveness levels. The GM isn't going to trailblaze let alone railroad. It's up to you where and what you want your character or party to go and do next. But the GM isn't going to adjust anything for you either. So if the course you freely (perhaps too carelessly) choose your character to follow happens to take your character within range of an oppositely aligned (or just hungry) creature whose attacks require the roll of all the d6s in the GM's thirty-pound dice box, well, you can just kiss your character goodbye, sorry, thanks for playing. And if, God forbid, you sought out a confrontation with said creature on purpose (or were successfully lured by the prospect of obtaining one of its possessions), the result is similar, but without the "sorry" part. More like, "well what did you think would happen, dumbass?"

The "what did you think would happen, dumbass?" reaction is, in my experience, the ultimate newbie-killer. And I don't mean their characters. I mean their interest in ever playing role playing games again.

There are other ways to run into mission selection issues than via an old school mega-setting GM. Old school mega-modules will take you there too. Does City-State of the Invincible Overlord ring any bells? Let's just say that the results are likely to be lethal if you don't consider your tactics carefully and weigh your resources and capabilities against the dangers before doing anything reckless like buying groceries or getting your money changed or, well, walking down the street might not be a good idea if you're already down a few hit points.

And even dispensing with all that old school stuff, mission selection issues still pop up. What do you do when your newbie Vampire players, who don't know the game mechanics yet but do know their Lestat movies, decide that the obvious first move for their new coterie is to find the oldest most powerful vampire around and drink his blood? You can railroad them out of trying it, or you can let them get killed. But you probably don't do either of those things. You probably find a way to change their minds in the course of pursuing their goal, or retcon a reason that makes it plausible for them to succeed, or turn their failure into interesting complications other than immediate destruction. Because it's not the early 80s any more and you're comfortable with play that involves actual authoring. But that's not true for all GMs.

Some online MMRPGs still have a high "what did you think would happen, dumbass?" quotient to them, but this has been changing. Perhaps due to the slow realization that players who lose interest in ever playing again don't earn the game developers any money. Some LARPs are on the same learning curve, but generally a little farther ahead. (NERO, last I checked, was still pretty harsh on newbies who overreached their severely limited powers.)

This is ultimately a Coherence issue. The problem stems not from mission selection as an element of play per se, but from players or promoters inadvertently misrepresenting what's important in the game. Lots of game systems have it more or less hardwired into them that caution and patience are the keys to success. Husbanding your resources, not overreaching, managing risk, all that good stuff. Which many gamers enjoy (more than a few, perhaps, being cautious patient people by nature). But if a newbie comes in believing, having been told, that the game is about adventure and heroism and defying the odds, they're not going to make optimal mission-selection decisions. They're going to do what sounds like the most fun instead. They're being set up for "what did you think would happen, dumbass?" ridicule and disappointment.

Did that all make any sense, Alexander? That is to say, does this connect with anything in your own experience as a gamer? I'm curious, because it's quite possible that I'm ranting about a problem that's really not a very frequenty encountered problem any more. In fact, I rather hope (even though I also rather doubt) that that's the case.

- Walt

100% of that rings home for me Walt.

I do tend to think that this method of play has declined somewhat.  But I think the primary reason for that is simply the demographics of 80s gamers getting older and not having the copious free time of underchallenged undergrads to create such monstrous tomes any longer.

For those groups that continue to play this way, and I suspect that its a non trivial number, the majority are almost certainly using and relying on that same tome of information...now likely scattered between several binders, a couple spiral bounds, their PC hard drive, and a mess of lost information now irretrevably found only on outdated diskettes that can no longer be read.

I don't think we hear that much about this culture because by and large they have everything they need.  They aren't likely to frequent internet sites where the majority of the discussion is about recent releases because they aren't about to upset the apple cart and have to try and restat their work to a new system.

Since their game (whatever it was originally) has probably been houseruled into near unrecognizability and their world is almost certainly unique (and likely a pastiche of whatever novels, movies, and history books attracted their attention at the time) they have little in common with other groups doing the same thing and so tend to be fairly insular.  New members may come and go, but the campaign is never ending.

I've known groups like this.  I've quit groups like this (the main campus RPG group at Penn State was exactly like this, with a core of 3-4 adults who played and a legion of rotating students.  It was the adults group.  The students were there solely to 1) round out the party, and 2) serve as an excuse to spend university resources.

A lot of that connects with my experiences as a gamer.

"Mission selection" is only beyond me as a skill.  One one level, as a gamer, I should be able to look at things, weigh the risks, and go "hmm, that looks right for my level."  But for whatever reason, I've never been able to successfully develop that skill.

That's all I meant.  :)

Hey Walt,

Enter the GM, who's carrying....setting notes of sufficient scope and detail to make Tolkien's life's work look like a page of haiku....It's a big world, and designed for characters of all conceivable effectiveness levels....So if the course you freely (perhaps too carelessly) choose your character to follow happens to take your character within range of an oppositely aligned (or just hungry) creature whose attacks require the roll of all the d6s in the GM's thirty-pound dice box, well, you can just kiss your character goodbye, sorry, thanks for playing.

Yeah, I played with this guy once back in 1985. It was a pick-up game of AD&D¹ in an open gaming room at the King Con comic book convention on the campus of Eastern Michigan University. Chargen took nearly three hours, and featured some pretty exotic chart-based randomizations. Had I rolled 00 on the chart for psionic ability, I would then have rolled on a second chart. A 00 on that chart, and then another one on a third chart would have made me the ultimate power in the universe. And of course, it wasn't all gravy. If I recall, my actual roll on that chart was one percentage point away from some kind of ambulatory vegetative state or narcolepsy condition or something.

And yeah, I was dead in under fifteen minutes of play. I don't remember the exact details, but some half-human/half-phoenix person took a disliking to me in the very first scene. It was in a tavern, of course. The half-phoenix used a fire breath ability to incinerate me at the bar.

And I was out of there...the first dead character of the game, and I couldn't have been more thrilled. I recall being generous, "Cool game. Thanks for running it." The player to my right, who'd kindly shared his bag of pistachio nuts with me during chargen, looked pretty forlorn as I packed up my stuff.

Paul

¹ purportedly

Oops, sorry about the misintepretation, Alexander. But since we're now on the same page, I'm all the more curious about your perspective on this.

Lack of mission selection skill has obviously not prevented you from gaming. How has it affected your play experiences, particularly your choices of game groups and game systems?

Would it be a stretch to intepret this lack of skill on your part as at least partially due to lack of inclination? After all, weighing risks can amount to buying into self-enforced restrictions on your decision-making freedom, which can range up to de facto railroading. Not everyone's idea of fun.

Which (getting back to the real thread topic) has been my whole point; my sympathies obviously lie with those darned reckless ("dumbass") non-gamers who are just trying to do what the game copy tells them they can do.

Paul, yup, that's the guy all right. But it sounds like you already had gaming experience at the time (it was at a con, after all). And it doesn't sound like mission selection ability or inclination was really a factor in that instance. But imagine if you were a freshman who'd heard about D&D and went to try it out in that guy's regular campus game.

The real damage isn't the character getting killed for overreaching, it's when that's compounded with the scornful reaction. This happens because a non-player taking on a too-difficult challenge and suffering the consequences is misinterpreted, through the acclimatized players' lens, as greed getting its rightful comeuppance.

- Walt

[edited to adjust for Paul's post that I cross-posted with]

I'm curious; while what you describe here is clearly disfunctional - do you think a similar style of play can ever be functional? GMs with whom I have e-conversed have esposed such a style as the 'True Way of GMing', arguing that an extant world with its many dangers and potential player-killings offers more versimilitude (sp?) with an encompanying depth of emersion.

It's not something I've ever attempted or experienced so I'm kind of in the dark.

IME you can do missions without the "dumbass" factor, even with a GM a lot like the one described above.

Question asked by me to GM: "My character is an experienced ranger what does he think about that section of the map? What does his professional woodland and monster hunting experience tell us about our chances."

GM: "Umm ... make a roll [rule checking]. He thinks there are orcs there but in [checks pages] smallish numbers usually. Six to Eight."

Me: "What's an orcish ambush like? Do they ... use bows--or just come charging out?"

GM: "Charging."

Me: "Make sure you tell me when we are reaching an area that is constrained enough to be ambush worthy. I think my character would recognize that."

GM: [considers] "Okay."

No dumbass. And I can't tell how to factor character strength either especially (and certianly not in the version of D&D we were playing). IME GM's usually respond well to "my character's an expert but I'm not--let's figure out what he would know." After all, they can't very well tell you that you've lived 18+years in this world and don't know anything (1st level characters might not get much data in a level based system, yes--but presumably you still had a mentor and were still trained).

I'm not saying that the mission based thing doesn't happen or shouldn't--but the fairly (IMO) mean "what did you expect, dumbass" bit doesn't have to.

-Marco