Quote from: Sommerjon;936963Complete and utter horseshit.

Yeah cuz careening from RNG to RNG is rpg nirvana?  wtf ever.

Only because you are on your back showing them your belly.  You took a stand for a brief moment then capitulated for some reason.

The advise was given in a respectable and logical tone. I mentioned later that I couldn't buy it full tilt but when presented that way its much easier to at least consider. Theres nothing to "stand" for here, all opinions are equally valuable as far as Im concerned. The only time I get riled is when someone dismisses mine outright.

Quote from: Nexus;936964I'm not familiar with the term: RNG. What does it stand for?

"Role Naying Game."  It's where you refuse to play a role and build a story instead.

(The above definition may contain satire, humor, irony, flatulence, or any combination.)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;937003...

(The above definition may contain satire, humor, irony, flatulence, or any combination.)

I'll take a 16oz satire with extra flatulence please.

Quote from: trechriron;937013I'll take a 16oz satire with extra flatulence please.

That's what makes it fizzy!

Quote from: Nexus;937031That's what makes it fizzy!

Christonastick, man, TMI!

Quote from: CRKrueger;936941You've been getting more vocal lately, sounding a bit annoyed with our Story Brethren. You running into some proselytizers down in LA, or is it just companies snapping up every classic IP worth anything to publish using a narrative Jay Little system?

Modiphius...just agony. I know they're gonna get Star Wars, probably Alien and Blade Runner too. They shitsauce all my favs.

As for LA, I'm getting asked to run Conan, Mutant Chronicles and Star Trek...

I'm - mulling - the Star Trek playtest.

Quote from: Spinachcat;937082I'm - mulling - the Star Trek playtest.

Using a houseruled SW:EoE, no doubt;)?

Quote from: Spinachcat;937082Modiphius...just agony. I know they're gonna get Star Wars, probably Alien and Blade Runner too. They shitsauce all my favs.

Modiphius can license Star Wars, but they will never get Star Wars. Star Wars was grokked in the WEG d6 RPG version so well that it still exists today! Don't believe me? Look at my attachment! Content is still being created for that "dead game".

Quote from: Nexus;936970Oh, ok. In hindsight, the meaning should have been pretty clear.

Well...  There's actually a little more nuance to it than that.

Literally, yes, it just means "Random Number Generator", but the abbreviation is most often used by people bitching about computer games that have random elements plus a significant level of difficulty (e.g., X-COM, Darkest Dungeon, etc.), generally in arguments that boil down to "this game is pure luck, with no skill or strategy at all, because even if I have a 99% chance to succeed, I still fail if the computer decides it wants me to fail!"  I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it a pejorative term, because I do also occasionally see it used in the technical sense by mathy people, but it definitely has connotations in that direction.

Quote from: CRKrueger;936779Grove here's something to mull on a bit (or not)...

See, RIGHT HERE is why Tenbones is calling your style Basic and suggesting there is more for you to learn.  It might seem condescending, but bear with me.

For many of us, we found ourselves in similar situations, and we handled them pretty much the way you say might be a weakness - control the chaos by restricting options.  Grab the reins and start steering.  Get things under control again.  The "advanced" method Tenbones is advocating is to not control the chaos by turning it to order, not ride the chaos like a horse and grab the reins, but more surf the chaos, stay on top and see where it goes.  When you do that and succeed, you'll find out that even though you were still GM the whole time, the players had more freedom than ever before, and the plot might have ended up nowhere close to what you originally had planned, but Goddamn, what a run.  

Once you get really good at that, and do it enough times, then you'll notice something.  Your players, consciously or not know that you control the chaos, they know you railroad at times, grab the reins, whatever, and they play accordingly.  Once they Ride the Lightning a few times because you have Let Go, then they will adjust their play subtly and then more confidently.  As you keep GMing and Playing together it becomes a new cycle of reinforcing behaviors.  Once this happens enough, you'll find you're no longer prepping Plots, you're prepping Situations.  Your characters are no longer in a Story, they are in a World of a hundred simultaneous events that result organically from the setting and its NPCs which have a life of their own, which the PCs are free to become entangled in...or not.

We do know what you mean, but your evaluation of the results of past is constrained by context - you're still evaluating it based on the rules of Story and Drama as if you were directing a performance.  You are not.

Once you move Beyond Story, you'll find you really are taking it to another level. It is much harder to deliver a good game this way, but you have an advantage in that you are a Mad Prepper, so there are probably thousands of details floating around in your head about the setting that don't immediately apply to any given structured plot you have.  But when you're running the World in Motion, any of them could potentially come into play.  Your shit has to be quicker, your setting has to be tighter, your planning and logic of how NPCs and the world who aren't present are going to be affected by PC action has to be quicker, sometimes in Real.Time.  It's an absolute cast-iron bitch to do.  But when it fires on all cylinders...Holy Christ it's awesome.

Will there be anti-climaxes along the way, easy victories and surprising defeats?  Yes, that's what Chaos gets you, Chaos.  But the game will be alive in the way a controlled Plot can never be.

So anyway, that might explain the "Basic" idea in hopefully a way that makes sense.

Your words make me want to fire up a game right here at work. CHAOS indeed. Beautiful chaos.

This was ultimately a good thread, so I dumped my resolution to stop reading 400+ post threads. Since Nexus loved lit classes, I offer a quotation: Treplyov critiques his writing compared to the conventional and more successful writer Trigorin:

Quote from: Anton Chekhov, Act IV of The Sea-GullI'll start with the hero waking to the sound of rain, and get rid of all the rest. The description of the moonlit night's too long and contrived. Trigorin has perfected a technique for himself, it's easy for him ... He has a shard of broken bottle glisten on the dam and a black shadow cast by the millwheel -- and there's your moonlit night readymade. But I've got to have the flickering light, and the dim twinkling of the stars, and the distant strains of a piano, dying away in the still, fragrant air ... It's excruciating. (Pause.) Yes, I'm more and more convinced that the point isn't old or new forms, it's to write and not think about form, because it's flowing freely out of your soul.

A few comments I thought of while reading the thread:

Quote from: The Butcher;936169What does it avail the players if I decided their next encounter on whim, or on a dice roll?

People are bad at choosing random numbers that are actually random. Common multiple choice testing advice is to eliminate every option that is definitely not right, and then choose the first of the remaining options, because "choosing one at random" ends up being influenced by plausible but wrong answers and people do worse when they pick without being random. (The "first" strategy depends on the test setters ordering the answers randomly, of course; it does have the counter intuitive result that there is never a point to reading the last choice, because it would only be selected after eliminating all of the preceding ones.)

In an RPG, I expect that a GM choosing on whim will not actually get a random result; the players will over the long haul notice any pattern, and very unlikely events will either be too common or never occur. Even if it does turn out to be random, some players will find patterns in the randomness and start trying to use those patterns to influence decisions, leading to what are from the point of view of the character illogical choices, which damages the game for me. Better from my point of view that any decisions be: determined in preparation, a nearly inevitable consequence of what has happened, or a purely random roll, or a combination of the latter two (e.g., the inevitable consequence of what has happened so far is "there is a 30% chance of a guard showing up" and then rolling that chance).

Quote from: cranebump;936339Well, sure. But I subscribe to the no bullshit theory of writing. Not just what the Poetics says, but modern interpretations, aka David Mamet's True and False. Detail can be a smokescreen for a flimsy plot or premise*, like an effects-driven movie with little in the way of anything else. I guess the litmus test is, "Am I driving the story here, or am I just showing off?" If it's the latter, I shouldn't be doing it, unless, of course, I expect an audience of one.

*actually, fuck premise--everything comes out of action, and anything that doesn't logically drive the action is simply bullshit, no matter how well it's described.

But there has to be some room for red herrings, or it would be difficult to have a mystery of any sort, and occasional irrelevant detail makes good camouflage for what is significant.

Quote from: Spinachcat;936614If there are any regional game cons near you, I highly suggest attending. It's a good way to meetup with the local RPG scene, as are actual Meetup groups.

Go for it. When you have a rocking table again, you'll skip being old and tired.

I would suggest local gaming stores if they have space for gaming (most do, and would be happy to have you run stuff there to fill their schedule and attract players who will buy whatever goes with the game, be it rule books, miniatures, dice or just snacks). A convention, even if it is right where you live, has people who want to try one-shots and new things that they are unlikely to continue doing on a regular basis, or who may just come from farther away than would work for a regular table, so I would think it would be easier to find more new players from a game store. If you have no such game store, consider running a game at meeting rooms in a library or community center where you can publicize it.

Raw: I think the Red Herring idea still fits in with "nothing that isn't essential to the plot." Misdirection, or misinterpretation could be a step on the road to Discovery. If my litmus test is, "it must drive the story," then a red herring will still drive the story toward the inevitable conclusion, because it's a part of paring away the non-essential.  Given the genre you mentioned, the false lead is simply another part of the plot, imho.  

On the whole, I'm not arguing against description, because description is often a matter of style, as indicated in the quote you've offered. I suppose, on that score, if you've still got a solid story within all your window dressing, then, on the whole, I'd say you're doing it right, from an author's perspective.

Quote from: cranebump;938147Raw:

It's rawma, please.

QuoteI think the Red Herring idea still fits in with "nothing that isn't essential to the plot." Misdirection, or misinterpretation could be a step on the road to Discovery. If my litmus test is, "it must drive the story," then a red herring will still drive the story toward the inevitable conclusion, because it's a part of paring away the non-essential.  Given the genre you mentioned, the false lead is simply another part of the plot, imho.  

On the whole, I'm not arguing against description, because description is often a matter of style, as indicated in the quote you've offered. I suppose, on that score, if you've still got a solid story within all your window dressing, then, on the whole, I'd say you're doing it right, from an author's perspective.

Obviously a story is different from an RPG, since what the players do will not always be driven by details that the GM includes, so some of what would have driven the plot in a story and was justified thereby ends up being extraneous. But I think "nothing that isn't essential to the plot" is too much even for a story; the skillfully applied misdirection may exist only to make the final plot twist both surprising and inevitable, and manipulating the reader's reaction to the plot is not itself part of the plot.

But I agree it's a matter of perspective, and skill in writing is perhaps the ability to break rules successfully. Consider these competing Chekhov quotes:

"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." (Chekhov used Trigorin's description in the previous quotation in his own short story and as an example in a letter.)

To follow the first would require that someone get cut by that broken glass. Even if you limit the first advice to memorable elements of the story, I have to observe that I remembered that broken bottle from reading "The Sea-Gull" 35+ years ago (although I had to search a bit for the exact quotation).

But anyway I would be more than satisfied if the box text in published adventures would simply be free of typos, even if they had no other virtue as writing.

Quote from: rawma;938161Obviously a story is different from an RPG . . .

Full stop.

Quote from: rawma;938161To follow the first would require that someone get cut by that broken glass.

Whereas in a roleplaying game it may become a hazard to avoid or a resource to use by the adventurers.

Stuff in my game-world is there because it's there, not because it's a fucking plot device.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;938163Full stop.


Whereas in a roleplaying game it may become a hazard to avoid or a resource to use by the adventurers.

Stuff in my game-world is there because it's there, not because it's a fucking plot device.

Anything in your world can become a plot device, which you just noted in your own (fucking) example.