Here's my latest video:

[video=youtube_share;67KEbDpgn0M]https://youtu.be/67KEbDpgn0M[/youtube]

Pundy, are you a fan of the Birthright rules/setting? When you do high level political intrigue, what rules do you use?

I know Kevin Crawford's Godbound and his Exemplars & Eidolans has a social influence system, but I haven't used those in actual play yet.

Im a big fan of Lion & Dragon and Dark Albion in general.  Good stuff. Gritty, dark medieval game.  You wont be throwing magic missiles around.  Has a much different feel to it.

It's good advice and what I have always done. I find the main thing is to create the NPCs with very little initial detail, then think about who they are and what they want. Once I have that internal aspect on their characters the game flows naturally. If unsure I can use a d6 to help me decide. But I don't find random character trait tables useful, they need to develop organically.

I do find a good trick is to start with a picture or photo for the NPC - a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Sadly, I have to point out that almost everything in this video is wrong from my POV. I'll try to keep my objections short:

• Plain depictation of events is overall fairly unpopular in entertainment. Popular media instead depicts cleverly dramatized events ("Rains of Castamere" starts playing in the background), be their source historical or purely fictional. "Novels are inferior to history" is nonsensical.
• Of course, GRRM writes story and has certain pivotal events mapped out well in advance. Do you think Daenerys gathering an army and moving over to Westeros hasnt been planned all along??? Also, GRRM informed the showrunners how the book series would end in 2016. It stands to reason that he has known how the series would end for a long time now. Mapping things out in advance is very important in fiction writing, for proper foreshadowing. For example, the name 'Hodor' wasn't chosen randomly to see things how play out later - GRRM all but certainly always knew that the character arc would eventually culminate in a specific event tied to the name. So if you want your games to be like Game of Thrones, you need to plan important events well in advance and drop subtle clues way ahead of time instead. But merely "playing/writing it as history" won't do. That is too simplistic as an approach.
  
• Things can be predictable in fiction as well as in history (aka emergent gameplay). Things can be unpredictable in fiction as well as in history. These are two separate things you're mistakenly conflating here.
• You are planning things out in advance in your adventures as well, you're just formulating things with less certainty ("Then the PCs should..." instead of "Then the PCs will...").

I am glad to see, however, that trying to emulate fiction more closely is getting traction on gamers' minds these days.

Greetings!

Very good video, Pundit! I enjoyed it very much. Your commentary and advice is excellent.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1088962Sadly, I have to point out that almost everything in this video is wrong from my POV. I'll try to keep my objections short:

Let try this from a different angle.

What if you wanted to climb Mount Everest. And I had the connections and people to allow you to be trained properly and then later to go there to try to summit the mountain. I arrange for the training, transportation, supplies, and access to a store of everything you need to attempt the climb.

Or something less risk a visit to Antarctica, or Greece, or the Amazon River. Or perhaps, I arrange for you to get training, and have a week to race Indy Cars. Or to Sky Dive, to hike the Appalachian Trail.

Now what if you wanted to pretend to be a warrior visiting Hyboria. And I had the power to create such a place complete with all the character and locations described in Howard's novels. Along with more that would logically be there if Hyboria was a real place. Then I gave you a ticket, a time for a train ride, and access to a store of everything you need to outfit yourself as an inhabitant of Hyboria.

That doesn't differ than any of the preceding activities except for the fact that Hyboria is a fictional place imagined by R.E. Howard. Unlike all the aforementioned adventures, there is no way of actually sending you to on a trip to experience Hyboria like I can with Everest, Greece, the Amazon, or so on.

We could play Let's Pretend and imagine a trip to Hyboria but experience as shown, that this activity unsatisfying and doesn't lead one the sense that they had visited Hyboria or any other imaginary place.

Except Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax figured out how to get close to that by using use a procedure, imagination and the rules of a wargame i.e. tabletop roleplaying games.

So by following the procedure that Dave Arneson developed, that Gygax refined in the form of Dungeon & Dragons.

• I can describe a setting
• You can describe a character
• I then describe where your character is at the start of the campaign
• You tell what you do as your character.
• I describe what happens
• Rinse and repeat throughout the course of the campaign
• During which we are using rules of a wargame to resolve outcomes that are uncertain, and to describe things in terms that provide clarity and consistency.

By doing this we can pretend that you visited Hyboria in a way that interesting and engaging. Largely to due to the uncertainty generated by only the referee knowing all the details of the setting and the uncertainty generated by the use of dice and wargame mechanics.

All are your points relate to creating art like literature which is not the same thing as visiting another place even if that place is imaginary. Literature is passive, RPGs are active in the same climbing Mount Everest or visiting Greece is active.

What the Pundit is talking about is how one can use history to craft an interesting setting to visit or experience.

He also pointing out a technique that author are known to use where they start with a setting, characters with motivation and goals, then starting writing from that point with no clear idea where it all going to end up. A starting point very much the same as the referee before the start of the campaign. One that Martin is known to be a fan of.

This technique has the author choosing what their characters do, and then play out the consequences, then makes further choices based on those consequence. Looping this until some natural endpoint is reached.

The difference between RPGs and what Martin is doing, is that the outcome of subsquent events are not by authorial fiat, but shaped by the free will of the players involved, and the how the referee responds. So it is dynamic, interactive, and emulate real life to a far greater degree than reading a novel or watching a film.

Now from personal experience, some paths are obvious if all the choices work out an individual expects. However understand that Martin has dozens of characters interacting with one another. So he hasn't thought of all the interpersonal dynamics from the start. So the process of writing for him is undoubtedly filled with unintended consequences that causes to rethink what other character would choose to do.

But again for a Song of Ice and Fire is all about what Martin thinks. Tabletop RPGs are a completely different animal because of the players involvement in events. There is no possible way to predict an outcome of a RPG campaign, like there is no way of predicting the outcome of a Everest climb, or a trip to Greece.

The advantage of using historical events both for what Martin does and for running RPGs campagns is that there is a richness of detail in life that can't be found in completely imaginary worlds. Because history is a description of what hundreds, thousands, or even millions of individuals did and their choices. As a result history is an extremely useful tool to supply details one has not thought of or have the time to think of. Whether it is reskinned to look like something else i.e. Game of Thrones, or used directly like in Pundit's RPGs.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1088962I am glad to see, however, that trying to emulate fiction more closely is getting traction on gamers' minds these days.

It will flame out like it did every time this became vogue like with the Dragonlance. RPGs are piss poor at creating stories, but excel at creating experiences. In short, a Conan RPG is terrible at creating a Conan story, however RPGs excels at creating of an experience of you visiting Conan's world of Hyboria as a character.

I have two things to say.

Firstly, writing fiction from the perspective of a historian writing about fictional history is an extremely enlightening experience. History is a soupy mess of chaos that the people caught in it try to make sense of, not the actions of a few great men with oracular vision. The winning battles of a war will be fought far apart in time and space by completely different combatants, not the same recurring band of heroes as is typically the case in fiction. Very tiny things like single messages arriving too late can determine the fate of nations.

Secondly, I gave up on GoT after the fourth season. Considering that HBO turned Dorne into Porne, turned the Faith Militant into the Faith Taliban, and bent the plot over backwards to rape Sansa as soon as the actress turned 18, I made the right choice.

I quit the series after season 6. Caught up with it this past weekend for obvious reasons. I think it would be pretty hard to sustain what they had going those first 1-4 seasons. I remember seasons 1-3 being quite good. Not sure I even really needed the rest of the show, and it probably would have been a stronger series if they ended it around that period. But that said, I did enjoy the finale. My level of investment wasn't huge though because I had stopped watching for a while. So I probably wasn't as concerned about some of the details as more invested viewers. I will say, I liked where they went with Daenarys. It made sense based on her earlier story. But I think they should have focused more on dialogue and politics (so we could see it unfold naturally) and less on buildings collapsing and battles in the dark (I got very bored with the major battles this season).

In terms of gaming, I tend to agree with the premise of the video. Early game of thrones is a better model for RPGs than later seasons. I think you see that particularly in the last season because it is mostly plots landing. Even if they had nailed the season and pleased everyone, because it is the destination, that would make it a bad model for an RPG. It would be the 'it has all been building to this final confrontation' railroad as the players watch the dragon queen (spoilers) annihilate a city and its civilians so the GM can do his cool reveal.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1089021not the actions of a few great men with oracular vision.

Except when it is, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Napoleon, etc.

Quote from: estar;1088981Except Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax figured out how to get close to that by using use a procedure, imagination and the rules of a wargame i.e. tabletop roleplaying games.

So by following the procedure that Dave Arneson developed, that Gygax refined in the form of Dungeon & Dragons.

• I can describe a setting
• You can describe a character
• I then describe where your character is at the start of the campaign
• You tell what you do as your character.
• I describe what happens
• Rinse and repeat throughout the course of the campaign
• During which we are using rules of a wargame to resolve outcomes that are uncertain, and to describe things in terms that provide clarity and consistency.
  

By doing this we can pretend that you visited Hyboria in a way that interesting and engaging. Largely to due to the uncertainty generated by only the referee knowing all the details of the setting and the uncertainty generated by the use of dice and wargame mechanics.

Emphasis mine. It indicates that isn't about just visiting foreign lands. You're generally not playing traveling merchants that don't encounter any conflict, just exploring the flavour of the current locale and having a friendly chat with the local NPCs. You're playing to experience a certain type of story within that setting. Most likely adventure stories roughly similar to those of Conan, which is where the wargame rules for conflict resolution come in.

Quote from: estar;1088981All are your points relate to creating art like literature which is not the same thing as visiting another place even if that place is imaginary. Literature is passive, RPGs are active in the same climbing Mount Everest or visiting Greece is active.

I think you're misreading me here. The subject of the thread is making D&D more like Game of Thrones (not like Westeros, btw!). It's not my subject. Mr Pundit recommended implicitly an emergent style of gaming, which is fine, but it is not the panacea he seems to make it out to be. It certainly is not the panacea in bestowing an early Game of Thrones feel to your games - for the reasons mentioned above.

This is not Pundit/active/visiting Westeros versus Alex/passive/creating art like literature. This is Pundit/emergent gameplay is all you need for early Game of Thrones vs Alex/early Game of Thrones includes plenty of foreshadowing, planned well in advance.

Quote from: estar;1088981One that Martin is known to be a fan of.

Yes, Martin has described himself more gardener than architect. But being a gardener means planting seeds and knowing what type of seeds are being planted. Martin surely does a fair amount of planning, even at early stages. As I read it, he's just adaptable about the details. (Note: I am not advocating against emergent gameplay. It certainly has its place in gaming.)

I should add as a caveat that GRRM certainly at times drops foreshadowing clues retroactively. Lets's say he rearranges the end of a given part of his book series, then he is likely to make changes to the text prior in that part to foreshadow the changed ending. But when you foreshadow over multiple books - that cannot be emergent but needs to be planned, at least roughly.

Quote from: estar;1088981It will flame out like it did every time this became vogue like with the Dragonlance. RPGs are piss poor at creating stories, but excel at creating experiences. In short, a Conan RPG is terrible at creating a Conan story, however RPGs excels at creating of an experience of you visiting Conan's world of Hyboria as a character.

I think there's a misunderstanding here about what emulation of fiction entails. It is about both making the game world behave fairly faithfully to the fictional world(s) (see damage rules in Knights of the Black Lily) as well as possibly including mechanics that induces player behaviour that conforms with the target fiction (examples: Shadow in LotR RPGs or Humanity in oWoD).

I can't play early GoT Sandor Clegane or Bronn if I constantly need healing potions or a cleric to recover my lost hitpoints. I'm no longer self-reliant.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1089028I quit the series after season 6. Caught up with it this past weekend for obvious reasons. I think it would be pretty hard to sustain what they had going those first 1-4 seasons. I remember seasons 1-3 being quite good. Not sure I even really needed the rest of the show, and it probably would have been a stronger series if they ended it around that period. But that said, I did enjoy the finale. My level of investment wasn't huge though because I had stopped watching for a while. So I probably wasn't as concerned about some of the details as more invested viewers. I will say, I liked where they went with Daenarys. It made sense based on her earlier story. But I think they should have focused more on dialogue and politics (so we could see it unfold naturally) and less on buildings collapsing and battles in the dark (I got very bored with the major battles this season).

GoT was initially interesting because it defied expectations of the fantasy genre (although the world building still has huge flaws, like Westeros having nonsensical demographics and Essos being a shallow exotic playground for Dany's story arc). Dany's baby was foretold to be the "great stallion," only for this to be a red herring as her one act of kindness ultimately results in the destruction of all she loved. Stark falling into a trap of his own making and dying for his mistakes despite being presented as the protagonist was fairly novel. But as the major character deaths piled up and interesting plot threads were callously severed and narrative steadily lost steam, the novelty wore off and Martin's writing became more grating and plodding than anything else.

It's a perfect example of why more authors don't defy the traditional conventions of the fantasy genre. The reason why authors don't defy convention more often is because "grimdark" fiction (or whatever GoT's genre is) has a completely new set of problems to deal with. Butchering the main characters willy-nilly only to replace them with a new set of characters has the side effect of destroying your narrative's steam and disengaging audience interest. That may have worked for Dune, being a millennia-spanning multi-generational saga in the most extreme sense of the word "saga," but it doesn't work if your story only happens over the course of a few years.

It certainly doesn't work if you don't know exactly what you're doing. In the time it has taken for Martin to lose control of his own story, fans have written many dozens or hundreds of bazillion word fanfics exploring their own takes on continuing the story. As well as alternate history versions of the story, like "what if Robert died at the Trident?", "what if I made a GoT mod for Crusader Kings II in order to explore alternate timelines?", "what if I threw Joffrey into a groundhog day loop?", "what if the Starks were part-White Walker?", "what if the corporation from Avatar invaded Planetos?" and so forth. And continuations of the story, like "what if the White Walkers won and Melisandre and Bran had to work together to travel back in time to prevent this horrible future from happening?"

There's really no excuse for Martin not finishing his own story besides fatigue. I would be surprised if he wasn't fatigued after writing those door stoppers. He should really hire a ghostwriter or three.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1089028In terms of gaming, I tend to agree with the premise of the video. Early game of thrones is a better model for RPGs than later seasons. I think you see that particularly in the last season because it is mostly plots landing. Even if they had nailed the season and pleased everyone, because it is the destination, that would make it a bad model for an RPG. It would be the 'it has all been building to this final confrontation' railroad as the players watch the dragon queen (spoilers) annihilate a city and its civilians so the GM can do his cool reveal.

I think a concise way of putting it is the difference between plot-driven and character-driven narratives. An RPG creates a narrative as an emergent property of the PCs interacting with the setting created by the GM, not unlike improvised theater or certain party games. Attempting to "railroad" a collaborative narrative like that can easily run into problems because the PCs aren't under the GM's control.

So Pundit's video feels more to me like an indictment of railroading. Nothing original, but the problem still comes up often enough to require PSAs like Pundit's.

Adventure Paths are a perfect example. By definition they are going to have a large degree of railroading unless the writer was some miracle worker who could think of every way to prevent the PCs from derailing the story without it feeling like a cop-out. Perhaps the single most important part of writing an Adventure Path is making the players feel like their PCs have free will and the ability to change the course of events, even if that is nothing more than an illusion. In other words, you need to convince the players to move their PCs in narrative directives that allow the pre-made plot to continue rather than come to a screeching halt as the GM tries to improvise, all without alerting them to this fact. Probably by charting the Adventure Path with a flow chart that accounts for every way that you can think the PCs could screw it up.

Quote from: estar;1089032Except when it is, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Napoleon, etc.

People may like to pretend that's the case, but it's really not.

Did these men truly control the course of history, or were they slaves to it? They were products of their environment. They were flawed, only human. They certainly couldn't foresee the outcome of their actions beyond the immediately obvious. Furthermore, they've been dead for centuries and their accomplishments have been filtered through the lens of the victors. The scientific study of warfare and humanity in more recent times paints a vastly different picture of what actually happened and continues to happen.

Military leaders don't exist in a vacuum. They contribute to a war machine, to logistics, to economics. They can turn the tide of battle in their favor, but they can't see the future or avoid the omnipresent chaos factor. They certainly couldn't predict what would happen a few years later, much less decades or centuries.

Did you happen to notice that there are vastly fewer such "great men" in recent times, despite the largest human population in history? Isn't it odd how this correlates with the increasing number of historians in recent times and the wider availability of information and communication?

The "great man" theory has been widely debunked by historians and scientists. It's a useful shorthand, but it's ultimately a vast oversimplification of reality.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1089033which is where the wargame rules for conflict resolution come in.

There are wargames that are about merchant trading for example SPI's Star Trader or AH's Stocks and Bonds. The category is more expansive then "Games about war".

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1089033]You're generally not playing traveling merchants that don't encounter any conflict, just exploring the flavour of the current locale and having a friendly chat with the local NPCs.

What one does while pretending to be a character is a personal preference. Combat is not an requirement nor it is always desired. One can enjoy roleplaying playing a basket weaver as they could Conan. Although if I had to bet on an individual hobbyist I would put my money on Conan. However boring it sounds to you and me, it works for a segment of the hobby.

Likely what you will encounter are hobbyist deeply interested in life of the setting. You find them among those playing campaigns involving Glorantha, Ars Magica, Harn, etc. For example in Ars Magica, I read about, refreed, and experienced multiple successive sessions where what happened can be described as "I fiddled in my lab and dealt with personnel issues in my covenant." Things that some people I know would find singularly boring and other utterly fascinating.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1089033but it is not the panacea he seems to make it out to be. It certainly is not the panacea in bestowing an early Game of Thrones feel to your games - for the reasons mentioned above.

You stated numerous times you want to emulation literature and film. Fine do that. Do as much metagaming you need to make something that is fun and interesting in pursuit of making something that feels like you are in a novel about X.

But realize your goal is not the same thing as what Pundit, I, and others do. Nor the material you produce in pursuit of that goal is likely going to be useful to those who run campaigns this way. What interesting to me are descriptions of how and why characters behave. Descriptions of locales, and the environment. How the physics of the setting works and so on.

All of this will be pulled together by myself and other to bring a setting to life in a way that it  is an interesting place to have adventures in. Not to emulate how the story of a novel or film went. And many of us has had considerable success with this approach. To the point where people told me that they felt they really were in the setting as described by the author.

If you don't believe me ask Adam and Brendan about the difference they felt between playing my Majestic Wilderlands and Middle Earth. I have no doubt I could have done things better but for something that is a hobby I thought I did a good job.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1089039The "great man" theory has been widely debunked by historians and scientists. It's a useful shorthand, but it's ultimately a vast oversimplification of reality.

The inverse is also vast oversimplification though. There may be more forces as work than single great individuals. But there are also times and moments when individuals can make choices that affect the course of history. Caesar may have been a product of lots of things, but unless historical analysis demands that we all be determinists, he still had choices along the way. He could have presumably made the choice not cross the Rubicon for example and instead face his fate in Rome. True, that might not have settled the underlying issues that gave rise to the conflict in the first place. But history still could have played out very differently.

Quote from: estar;1089047If you don't believe me ask Adam and Brendan about the difference they felt between playing my Majestic Wilderlands and Middle Earth. I have no doubt I could have done things better but for something that is a hobby I thought I did a good job.

All I can say is Rob was a master GM in both cases, and I would not ignore Rob's gaming advice, even in cases where I don't agree with him. Everything he says I've seen work out at the table with him running a game.