Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024404Making shit up is an entirely different experience from discovering shit somebody else made up.  I play because I want to discover fun shit somebody else made up.  I referee because I want other people to discover fun shit I made up.

Woke.

I'm not as entirely militant against getting my chocolate in my peanut butter, but here at last I understand the defining difference in the two.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024280it is essentially a free-form game where all the content creates an implicit campaign of at first struggling to thrive in a very unstable world. The players use the instability to reshape the world and eventually create stable relationships and institutions, the conflicts in the late game arise from internal disagreements on the direction of the new civilization rather than fighting external threats.

Does it really? My impression is that Apocalypse World (and it's more successful offspring) thrives on conflict, and when (if) the game reaches a point of stability, it's time to wrap everything up and start a new one with new characters. It never worked for us as a "civilization building" kind of game. Bringing some temporary peace to the shithole that is your town? Fair game. Making it progress into this orderly society and going from there? Don't think so. But then the hack we played the most was Sagas of the Icelanders, which, true to the literary sources, is this constant stream of shit and blood.

There is this one called Legacy: Life among the Ruins, which seems to be about that precise point - building and leading a society through the apocalypse. Don't know if it succeeds, though.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024322What is wrong with improv or "going along with what people did"? I feel like being against that is kind of a bad idea in the spirit of playing a roleplaying game. It makes it almost feel like one views the game as a sort of power struggle between the players where more realistic mechanics are needed to "fight" it. Why not just go with the flow.

Along with what others have written, what's wrong is when things get conjured by players that mess with the game situation in one or several ways.

Some improv can be no problem:
* Roleplaying a character and speaking for them and deciding what they do is a sort of improv.
* Someone invents some minor details about their character or equipment or even a plausible consistent detail about a minor NPC if the GM has no problem with it.
* Perhaps adding some detail as a suggestion to the GM about how the results of some non-crucial action by their PC goes.
* Perhaps adding some other suggestions to the GM about other ideas, to take or leave.

Other improv can change the nature of the game and/or gameworld in overt and/or subtle ways:
* As others pointed out, "everyone makes up what exists and what happens" is fundamentally different from "the GM makes up the world and determines what happens, while the players play their PC inside that world".
* If the GM knows things about the world that the PCs/players don't know, and much of the game is about exploring and discovering and working with imperfect information, and that's a big part of creating the experience of playing a PC inside that world, then the players dreaming up details of that world on the spot, or even determining the results of actions, can conflict with what they don't know (and don't know they don't know) and on top of undermining the experience for all the other players of relating to consistent GM-sourced world, also can put the GM in problematic situations that otherwise wouldn't happen, where the GM needs to work in whatever the players dream up, or even if they're forced to reveal meta-knowledge to the players by overruling things the players dream up.
* Smart/crafty meta-players (or just creative players accidentally improving in certain ways) can game improv-style suggestions or actions to put the GM is a position where they're forced to reveal meta-information in ways that don't happen without such improv, for example by revealing whether an improv suggestion conflicts with the GM's world or not. e.g. Is it important to know about a character's heritage for some reason? Try improv-ing that that character has relatives of a certain descent, and see if the GM corrects you or not. Or just suggest lots of random details about things you're curious about, to fish for GM-pushback and find out what he's prepared or cares about or not. Etc.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1024373I have never understood peoples' issue with 'luck points' or the equivalent with a different name. They are an arbitrary, mechanical, ablative pacing system within the game rules that mediate between a characters 'active' state and some form of failpoint/failstate, and with only forced relationship to any real world effect, narrative device, or other thing which enforces verisimilitude. I do not see why these are considered significantly different from another oft-discussed, but in the end accepted, arbitrary, mechanical, ablative pacing system within the game.

Ah, Hit Points that supposedly represent something other than damage and injury (yet are "healed"). I don't like those either. I like explicit combat with literal hit/miss/avoid and literal damage and injury (and fatigue, and equipment damage, and positions/facings of everyone in the field, etc). And one of the main reasons I prefer those, is that they are not ablative, so there is no weird cushion-of-not-getting-hurt where you know you're not going to have something awful happen, but then it gets used up and suddenly it's very likely you'll get hurt. The same goes for "luck points" IF they are used that way, where the player knows how many his PC has, and/or gets to choose when to use them, and/or they definitely make good things happen (not just tweak the odds).

I don't even like Luck in GURPS, but there it's just like once per time (session or time period or whatever), some roll gets re-rolled in your favor. I prefer it if it's up to the GM, and he doesn't tell the player when it happens of if his luck has "run out" or not (in fact, I'd rather it just be a constant GM-hidden chance that sometimes you get a re-roll). Or in the "it's a blessing" version, the PC can try to pray-to/call-on/whatever to hope for aid on a specific action (with whatever religious/spiritual explanation how/why/when that works). For me, it's important that those make it more of a thing-with-some-reason IN the game universe, and not a gamey gameable "I know I have 3 luck points left, so I base my PC's actions on that" sort of thing.

Really though, I prefer actual luck, as in no luck points, and people are lucky and unlucky when they actually are. I also tend to think of this as actually accepting the game situation and playing it without fudging results for no in-gameworld reason.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024322What is wrong with improv or "going along with what people did"? I feel like being against that is kind of a bad idea in the spirit of playing a roleplaying game. It makes it almost feel like one views the game as a sort of power struggle between the players where more realistic mechanics are needed to "fight" it. Why not just go with the flow.

Because after I've spent a year creating my game world, I am not going to have the Count of Faucigny be the great uncle of some peasant blacksmith just because some player said so.

People say dumb shit off the top of their head all the time.  Rarely is it actually a worthwhile idea.

Quote from: Azraele;1024374Because HP are abstracting actual measurable in-universe properties, like stamina and defensive fighting skill. They're only "abstract" in the sense that the elements that compose them aren't individually, painstakingly tracked.

Fate points et al aren't abstracting physical reality, they're intruding on it by giving out-of-universe authorial powers to narrative actors.

It kind of depends on genre.  In Star Wars, "Force Points" hit me as a perfectly cromulent solution to the needs of a game.  In CHAMPIONS you could buy "luck," and that kind of fits in genre too (Hell, Donald Duck's cousin was notoriously lucky.)

Other places, yeah, I agree; not so much.  "Luck" is what happens when you roll the dice.

Quote from: Skarg;1024599Ah, Hit Points that supposedly represent something other than damage and injury (yet are "healed"). I don't like those either.

Hit points are gasoline.  You run fine until you run out.  Wounds puncture your fuel tanks and make you leak, and once you get back to base they not only have to refuel you, your crew chief has to patch up the airframe.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024606Hit points are gasoline.  You run fine until you run out.  Wounds puncture your fuel tanks and make you leak, and once you get back to base they not only have to refuel you, your crew chief has to patch up the airframe.

Alternately this: http://basicredrpg.blogspot.com/2015/02/hit-points-are-kung-fu.html

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024602Because after I've spent a year creating my game world, I am not going to have the Count of Faucigny be the great uncle of some peasant blacksmith just because some player said so.

People say dumb shit off the top of their head all the time.  Rarely is it actually a worthwhile idea.

What do you do if someone decides that's part of their backstory?

Quote from: Skarg;1024599Ah, Hit Points that supposedly represent something other than damage and injury (yet are "healed"). I don't like those either. I like...

Those are all good reasons, and I can get behind that. However, I feel that those luck points, whether one likes them or not, are really just ablative pacing mechanisms, and not some bizarre narrativistic conceit within a non-storygame TTRPG. You can make your saves a little more deadly in Beyond the Wall because your PCs can get two chances to make them a certain number of times, etc. You're character is 'just that good' or whatever. It is a mechanical alternative to having a better save or lowering the consequence of a bad save.

If you can instead use your "luck+etc." point to do something like save your character because when he fell off the cliff he was wearing a parachute no one mentioned, that's a different thing in my mind. That breaks my verisimilitude (unless that's a known character trait, GURPS has something like 'gadget,' or 'utility belt' I think that does that, and it's for a superhero campaign). But I think there's a difference between the two.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024615What do you do if someone decides that's part of their backstory?

If the PC wants to role play a character with a serious delusion, who am I to say no?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024615What do you do if someone decides that's part of their backstory?

They can't. Maybe they can start with a "minor noble" background, or have a uncle Count Faucigny, but that Count of Faucigny's family tree is designated 'property' of the GM.

Well, my point was that when a player creates their backstory they're essentially taking part in the "making stuff up" part of the setting. Like if I make a character who has a noble family, I have now put a noble family in the GM's setting.

Of course the GM can disapprove or whatever, but isn't it basically the same thing, except it's happening before the game instead of making up little flourishes during it.

And when I said "improv" I was talking about small things like just assuming there's a "sharp guy" in a tavern or something about your past that may have not been clarified before, not wholesale editing the GM's setting.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024615What do you do if someone decides that's part of their backstory?

Like on the spur of the moment? during a session? Remind them who GMs this game, for starters. "You don't get to declare facts about the setting; that's my job".

If they WANT that to be an element of their backstory (not that we do much backstory at my table, mind) then they can damn well talk to me about it during character gen, or between sessions, or during play if they recognize that they're asking permission, not usurping referee authority.

This is why I draw the line in the sand between roleplaying game and storytelling game. If you both play a character and have a degree of authorial control over the universe: that's a storygame. What degree of storygame to roleplaying game is debatable, but that is the line. Storygames are fine fun things, that are clearly and meaningfully distinct from roleplaying games. Neither is bad.

But saying that one is the other, or that by liking one you like the other, that is bad. It causes arguments. It obfuscates the relatively simple matter of discussing taste in our hobbies. It resists developing useful language to describe clear differences which are extremely important to people.

So let's not. Let's assume that storygames and roleplaying games are similar but distinct, perfectly valid and fun activities that share the broader umbrella of gaming culture, and share it very closely. That way, we can talk about similarities and differences meaningfully, clearly, and constructively.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024615What do you do if someone decides that's part of their backstory?

You play D&D 5e and take the Noble background per the PHB.

But that is where 5E let's you mix some of your chocolate story gaming with your peanut butter RPG.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1024632You play D&D 5e and take the Noble background per the PHB.

But that is where 5E let's you mix some of your chocolate story gaming with your peanut butter RPG.

A great thing about 5th is it's modularity; if I felt that was too "storygame-y" for my taste, it's really not hard to excise it.

Where 5th fails for me is where it bakes storygame and roleplaying elements into mechanics inextricably.

There's a lesson here.