TheRPGSite

So, on the "Who is Capable of Becoming a Gamemaster?" thread, Sailing Scavenger said he'd love to see disagreements to something he wrote in a long post mostly about Apocalypse World. I accepted the invitation but my post got quite long, so rather than threadbomb the end of that long thread, I've started a new one here.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723Now, I'd love to see if someone disagrees with anything I've said or if they can offer another game which accomplished the same thing earlier.

Ok.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723Whenever a PC fails a roll, or when the table goes quiet, the GM makes a move. The list basically boil down to either foreshadowing or setting up a situation. The brilliant part of having a list is that it frees up mental resources and provides constraint to be creative in. The most often used move is "Announce future badness." this gives the players something to react to, and if they don't react, something bad is likely to happen. The apocalypse setting directs the GMs brain to typical bad stuff, the distant war cries of cannibals, the water reserve is almost empty etc. Another favorite of mine is "Separate them", someone has wandered off on their own and might have to deal with a situation their character is not good at, someone might be presented with treasure and have the opportunity to be selfish about it etc.

* I don't think GM meta-moves in response to every failed roll (or table-quietness) seems like how I'd want a game world to work.

* I don't like abstract situations driven by metagame conditions. I want there to be an actual game situation preferably with a map and pre-established characters or at least encounter tables that correspond to local populations, and to track what agents are where doing what and why, and give information on what's nearby based on logic and what the PCs are doing and their perception abilities and rolls. So you notice a threat if it makes sense there is a threat and I've been tracking where it is and what it's doing and in comparison to what the PCs are doing and their relative stealth and perception skills and rolls, they get some appropriate information if/when that happens.

* I don't want the water reserve status to be based on a metagame mechanic. If the GM thinks that's an interesting thing to happen, I want the idea to appear in the gameworld in a logical way, and then be resolved logically, not because the "table fell silent" and the GM therefore decided to have something go wrong.

* I think it's great when the game situation causes interesting situations such as reasons the party splits up... however in general I tend to be annoyed when something artificial and/or meta forces the party to split up. I can see it being useful to have a list of sorts of circumstances to check and consider whether they might apply, but I'd want them to actually happen only when the situation also has that make sense, and some appropriate random chance is consulted for how likely such a situation is to happen, and to happen in a way that makes sense.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723Putting all rolls in the hands of the players. The GM does not need to simulate the actions of his NPCs by rolling for them, he simply makes the world seem real by letting them do reasonable things. There is no need to roll an opposed strength check to see if a mutant brute can beat the malnourished midget in arm-wrestling, it simply happens, there is no need to see if the sniper can blow the head off a PC, you simply announce they see the distant glint of a scope and if they stand around they are shot.

* I get that some players like to make their own rolls, and it's an interesting extension to design a game where the players make all rolls, but as you asked for disagreement, yeah I think I basically dislike and am not very interested in this style of event resolution, except possibly for a brief experiment.

* I very much like what simulationist rules provide, and I want the GM to be making rolls and not showing the players a lot of them, because I want unknown stuff to be happening in a situation with some rational non-meta non-narrative substance and logic to it, and stats and odds and well-considered well-playtested rules to determine various events and what sort of awareness the PCs have of it. Sure some things don't need a roll, but eliminating all rolls just seems like a game designer trying to make a point that it can be done that way, or narrative-oriented people who don't like the sorts of games that I like) thinking that's great.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723The loop of setting up situations, putting the players in the situation to react and then following through with the to you most obvious outcome (or if they have a move that determines the outcome you don't even need to do that) takes up very few resources in your brain and is not incidentally the fundamental loop of improv theatre.

* My usual reaction to improv theatre is hatred.

* I already have enough resources to rationally resolve situations, and enjoy doing that, so what would I do with the extra resources it frees up to have players resolve things and handwave results?

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723You set something up, someone reacts and you do the most obvious thing next. What seems obvious to you will seem real to the others and sometimes, if its something they didn't consider, they will be surprised and delighted.

* What if from decades of playing simulationist games, the obvious thing to me is to assign a chance of different outcomes based on the details of the situation, and game them out?

* It seems to me this implies never assigning odds, and not using dice to fairly assess the odds of things happening or not, and this seems like quite a weakness. For example, how would you fairly assess the odds a volley of arrows finds a niche in someone's armor or not?

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723Playing NPCs is also helped with a list, each NPC is assigned a type and a primary drive. Through this you can easily determine their next action, the added bonus is the players will notice that this character is consistent. An example would be a warlord: collector. Warlords have their own list of moves (example: buying out an ally) and collectors have a specific drive (to own people).

* Sounds rather reductionist to reduce a person to a type/drive from limited artificial lists.

* I already have skills and systems that let me easily determine a character's next actions, taking into account much more detail and nuance.

* Adding a new vocabulary categorizing characters with types of moves sounds like it could be sort of interesting, but also possibly limiting, especially if it's a hard rule and the players can figure out an NPC is a "warlord: collector" and use that to metagame knowing what their allowed moves and motives include.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723So my thought process as GM might go:
Alright, the PCs a trekking through the territory of this warlord. It's a collector so it will want to own people. A warlord move is "encircle someone". I tell the PCs they have been surrounded by warriors, their demands are they enter the service of their warlord.

That sounds like annoying metagame at a level I don't want to play. I don't mind a character with an M.O. of trying to encircle and capture people, but it sounds like you mean the GM would just have "you're surrounded" happen, and that there is no game involving movement over an actual landscape, with PCs and NPCs using their skills, ways of doing things, movements, equipment, and so on, to determine what happens in terms of who is where when, who is aware of whom, when they sleep, etc to determine whether they meet and in what circumstances.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1023723To my mind no other game has explicitly taught its gameplay loop to the GM, at least not one which is this open and can produce a "true" roleplaying experience.

Have you checked out Microscope? It's very explicit about what its gameplay loop is, but it's also a rather different approach, which I actually sort of like, but it's so different from the type of RPG I like that I would only use as a different sort of game, or an experimental way to try brainstorming world background content.

You've got it.  AW and its kindred almost totally replace the referee as written.  Given a "Big Boys' and Big Girls' Big Book of Bad Things" and a "Big Boys' and Big Girls' Big Book of Bad People and Monsters" you could run Dungeon World without a referee at all.

Now, nothing in the rules PREVENTS you from deciding "If they are fighting this bad guy, and they get a Failure, then I roll on this table to see what happens next."

And your whole first block about referee metamoves "if the table goes quiet" I agree with 100%.

Again, you don't HAVE to play it that way.

Thanks for responding!

It seems like your gripe with the system is that it usually operates at one level of abstraction above a classic system (and that it's not challenge based even though it can be challenging for the players). That is completely fine, my argument is that the techniques are useful to know even in a system where you track the location, line of sight etc. of each creature and that all results are fallout of the simulation. Because you inevitably run into a situation that the hard simulation does not cover and the techniques help you come up with something fast. Most games rely on either preparation or procedural generation, huge parts of the setting in AW are created moment to moment.

As an example, in the case of the party travelling through hostile terrain and an enemy warlord is attempting to encircle them I trust you don't have a detailed map covering several square miles and then track the situation moment to moment to decide where everyone is when contact is made. The terrain is drawn either from a library of maps or you make it up on the spot, perhaps modifying it if the players say they're looking for a defensible position or a place with lots of cover or something.  

Regarding the arbitrary nature of the GM moves they are usually set up by foreshadowing a problem, or laying out the risks on the table (as the player characters would see them in the setting). If water scarcity is an established problem and the players don't pre-empt it hitting them with it is fair, the example of them being encircled would probably be preceded by telling them that the area they're trying to cross is patrolled by [warlord] and that since they don't know the terrain being caught is likely unless they are vigilant about scouting. Them being encircled would be the result of them either shrugging and taking the risk or doing the scouting but failing the roll.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248My usual reaction to improv theatre is hatred.

Not disagreeing here.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248I already have enough resources to rationally resolve situations, and enjoy doing that, so what would I do with the extra resources it frees up to have players resolve things and handwave results?

Speed of play and speed of generating situations and setting. If the players go somewhere (geographically or situationally) where you are not prepared instead of pausing to look it up or generate it you can do it by the seat of your pants and get decent results. Of course any GM can improvise, my argument is that it is easier when you know a procedure to do it by.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248It seems to me this implies never assigning odds, and not using dice to fairly assess the odds of things happening or not, and this seems like quite a weakness. For example, how would you fairly assess the odds a volley of arrows finds a niche in someone's armor or not?

By the book you would calculate the damage based on the number of archers, the damage of their bows and the armor of the target and then roll+damage taken to see if they take additional damage. But you would not roll hit location to see if an arrow pierces their brain through the eye, it is a hit point system after all

Quote from: Skarg;1024248Sounds rather reductionist to reduce a person to a type/drive from limited artificial lists.

* I already have skills and systems that let me easily determine a character's next actions, taking into account much more detail and nuance.

* Adding a new vocabulary categorizing characters with types of moves sounds like it could be sort of interesting, but also possibly limiting, especially if it's a hard rule and the players can figure out an NPC is a "warlord: collector" and use that to metagame knowing what their allowed moves and motives include.

It's meant as an aid and not a straight jacket. If the GM knows a course of action the NPC should take that is not covered by their type there is nothing stopping them. In traditional systems you usually plot the short and long term goals of an NPC beforehand or maybe roll vs. their passions to see what they do unless you know the character well, the drives in AW are meant as GM aids to highly unstable and dynamic situations.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248That sounds like annoying metagame at a level I don't want to play. I don't mind a character with an M.O. of trying to encircle and capture people, but it sounds like you mean the GM would just have "you're surrounded" happen, and that there is no game involving movement over an actual landscape, with PCs and NPCs using their skills, ways of doing things, movements, equipment, and so on, to determine what happens in terms of who is where when, who is aware of whom, when they sleep, etc to determine whether they meet and in what circumstances.

My example would probably be called out as bullshit by AW players, but it would be fair if the GM foreshadowed it or explicitly warned them that it would be the result of failed or no scouting in the area.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248Have you checked out Microscope? It's very explicit about what its gameplay loop is, but it's also a rather different approach, which I actually sort of like, but it's so different from the type of RPG I like that I would only use as a different sort of game, or an experimental way to try brainstorming world background content.

I have played Microscope once and didn't have fun. It has several things in common with AW (in game setting creation being the most prominent) but I'm not sure if it was the game text, the host or the group as a whole that was at fault.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024260You've got it.  AW and its kindred almost totally replace the referee as written.  Given a "Big Boys' and Big Girls' Big Book of Bad Things" and a "Big Boys' and Big Girls' Big Book of Bad People and Monsters" you could run Dungeon World without a referee at all.

Dungeon World sucks (imho) because it tries to emulate a game style the base game was not built for. If you want to compare the implicit campaign in AW with the implicit campaign in D&D, AW PCs start at name level and deal with name level problems. Attempting to scale it down damages the game and the designer of Dungeon World (and most other AW hacks) don't understand why. It's the modern version of people trying to design their own games using D&D as a base and then being confounded when the game plays like a crippled version of D&D.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024266Dungeon World sucks (imho) because it tries to emulate a game style the base game was not built for.

I have a copy of Dungeon World but have never seen Apocalypse World. Could you tell me a bit more about the difference in the two? I sort of assumed that all of the "World" rulebooks were pretty much the same, but I get the impression from your posts that they are different.

I say this as someone who loves Apocalypse World(at least 1st edition; 2nd is . . . not thrilling me) and a few of its derivatives - a lot of its supporters love to tout it as something it's not and present it as some revolutionary magic thing that's oh so different from what came before. I think this is because it's really simple to learn how to play well enough from the freebie documents they provide on the website and so a lot of people never really look at the book and what it says on various things.

From the SS quotes, I see things in a few categores.
1) Stuff that's not unique to AW at all, such as the quote that ends with him mentioning improv theatre for reasons that escape me. GM setup, player response, reference rules, repeat is . . . not improv theatre. It's just how RPGs have always worked, regardless of ruleset.
2) Incomplete info, such as what he says about GM Moves. For the record, making the Moves in response to failed rolls is a suggestion, not a prescription, and is meant more as a pacing mechanism than anything. And the list is there to help you and inspire you when you think something should happen but are drawing a blank. Both are great for new GMs, or GMs having an off day, but it's expected that as you become more comfortable GMing that you'll kind of grow past them.
3) Pretention. I mean, that last quote . . . damn. "True roleplaying experience" my ass.

Quote from: GeekEclectic;10242712) Incomplete info, such as what he says about GM Moves. For the record, making the Moves in response to failed rolls is a suggestion, not a prescription, and is meant more as a pacing mechanism than anything. And the list is there to help you and inspire you when you think something should happen but are drawing a blank. Both are great for new GMs, or GMs having an off day, but it's expected that as you become more comfortable GMing that you'll kind of grow past them.

You should try reading my original post in context because this is exactly what I'm arguing. AW is the best game ever written because it actually teaches you to GM it instead of relying on decades of oral history.

Quote from: GeekEclectic;10242713) Pretention. I mean, that last quote . . . damn. "True roleplaying experience" my ass.

What I was trying to convey when I put "true" roleplaying in quotes was the difference between a closed and an open system. An open ("true") roleplaying system allows the players to do anything their characters could conceivably do. A closed roleplaying system which is very common in narrative based systems are games like Fiasco, Primetime Adventures or 3:16 where the narrative is completely bound to the game system.

Quote from: finarvyn;1024267I have a copy of Dungeon World but have never seen Apocalypse World. Could you tell me a bit more about the difference in the two? I sort of assumed that all of the "World" rulebooks were pretty much the same, but I get the impression from your posts that they are different.

Ignoring all the GM procedures AW is very light on rules, it 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. The main thing to facilitate the PvP conflicts is making sure NPCs have a different relationship to at least two PCs.

DW tries to have its cake and eat it by marrying AW and D&D. You're better off playing either or, if you apply the design philosphy behind AW to DW the game would look completely different. Vincent Baker (AW designer) tried to make a low-fantasy version of AW but he also failed.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024278You should try reading my original post in context because this is exactly what I'm arguing. AW is the best game ever written because it actually teaches you to GM it instead of relying on decades of oral history.

I wouldn't say "best game ever written," but yes, it's great in that respect. I just don't like when people present its advice as prescriptive when it's not. I remember running a PbtA session once, and on a failure I had something happen that could technically fit into two categories, and one of my players was like "hey, that's this and this; that's like two things; you only get one thing; no fair!" I was speechless.

I was also trusting that Skarg wasn't taking you out of context in his replies, so there's also that . . .

QuoteWhat I was trying to convey when I put "true" roleplaying in quotes was the difference between a closed and an open system. An open ("true") roleplaying system allows the players to do anything their characters could conceivably do. A closed roleplaying system which is very common in narrative based systems are games like Fiasco, Primetime Adventures or 3:16 where the narrative is completely bound to the game system.

I'm not familiar with 3:16, but Fiasco and PTA aren't even RPGs. I've played both, and I love both, but they're just not. And I accept a pretty broad spectrum of games as RPGs, especially for this board. So if your point was to say that AW is actually an RPG, well . . . yeah.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024278What I was trying to convey when I put "true" roleplaying in quotes was the difference between a closed and an open system. An open ("true") roleplaying system allows the players to do anything their characters could conceivably do. A closed roleplaying system which is very common in narrative based systems are games like Fiasco, Primetime Adventures or 3:16 where the narrative is completely bound to the game system.

Son, in all kindness. [John Wayne voice] folks hereabouts don't take kindly to "narrative based systems," pilgrim.  [/John Wayne voice]

(SO I don't think "in contrast to narrative systems" is necessary, because about 90% of us have no interest in them)

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024278You should try reading my original post in context because this is exactly what I'm arguing. AW is the best game ever written because it actually teaches you to GM it instead of relying on decades of oral history.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024278Apocalypse World

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024278actually teaches you to GM

[video=youtube;ZqaCEPwWGtc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqaCEPwWGtc[/youtube]

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024285Son, in all kindness. [John Wayne voice] folks hereabouts don't take kindly to "narrative based systems," pilgrim.  [/John Wayne voice]

(SO I don't think "in contrast to narrative systems" is necessary, because about 90% of us have no interest in them)

[Lee Van Cleef]Read my post again, sober.[/Lee Van Cleef]

You're starting off on a tough foot here, Scavenger. My condolences. Don't feel like you need to be the champion of your favorite game or anything. I never played AW, but I played dungeon world, and like you found it somewhat lacking. As a direct response of your impassioned argument for the game, I'm giving it a serious look. So you've turned some heads, at least.

In any event, welcome to the board. I'm going to vent a day's frustration at a particularly annoying set of homework assignments directly into your post. No hard feelings, but be cautioned that I do get pretty harsh from here on out and I'm too lazy to soften the wording with another editing pass.

Consider it a spirited defense of the games and gaming style that I love, an attempt to match your candor, if you will.

Anyway, enough mushy stuff.

*Cracks knuckles*

Okay, my turn.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264It seems like your gripe with the system is that it usually operates at one level of abstraction above a classic system (and that it's not challenge based even though it can be challenging for the players). That is completely fine, my argument is that the techniques are useful to know even in a system where you track the location, line of sight etc. of each creature and that all results are fallout of the simulation. Because you inevitably run into a situation that the hard simulation does not cover and the techniques help you come up with something fast. Most games rely on either preparation or procedural generation, huge parts of the setting in AW are created moment to moment.

I'm going to respond directly to this argument.

A better tool for improvising things not covered by rules is a clear understanding of the reality that the game is creating. You don't need a doctorate in the physical sciences to know how, say, rope works, or a simple pit trap. And you don't need detailed rules for these things, either. You need a functional understanding of physical reality, which the majority of us are equipped with as we live in it.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264As an example, in the case of the party travelling through hostile terrain and an enemy warlord is attempting to encircle them I trust you don't have a detailed map covering several square miles and then track the situation moment to moment to decide where everyone is when contact is made. The terrain is drawn either from a library of maps or you make it up on the spot, perhaps modifying it if the players say they're looking for a defensible position or a place with lots of cover or something.

As a matter of fact, I do have a detailed map, and I do track the movement of armies. It's not just for grins either; it's so the players can do things like predict where large armies are going, sabotage their efforts, or otherwise interact meaningfully with the game world.

This is important; the game world doesn't respond to my sudden whim OR to the "needs of the story" OR to the player's wishes, OR anything else that wouldn't mystically alter reality.
There's a map; there are details on it. This is the reality of the game world, understood through my description of the player's sense information. Characters interact with this the same way you or I interact with our world; as established facts, as a real, tangible thing.

I've heard it termed both "shared mindspace" and "tactical infinity", both cover the same ground: they describe a shared, imagined world which is real to the characters that inhabit it.

This is why the people of this board scoff at the limited range of "GM moves"; they're culled from a brief, insular period where storygamers decided they were the newly christened and anointed Gods of Roleplaying and their Words were Divine Wisdom.
They weren't, they didn't, and they aren't. These people missed the bus on RPGs, largely coming from a post-3.0 world, drawing inspiration from Vampire and it's ilk, and completely failing to learn once-essential lessons for GMs and players.

The playbook/moves, and the entire legacy that spawned them, fundamentally failed to grasp both what motivated different groups of roleplayers and the things they had made to fulfil those needs. The shared mindspace, which was so universally understood as to not even warrant mention in almost any RPG product, was simply never learned by these "visionaries".

Oceans of digital ink were spilled trying to cover the hole left by this ignorance, and that resulted in idiotic paradigms like "Simulationist /Gamist /Narrativist" and similar misguided game "theory"

The whole goddamn hobby has had to deal with that poisoned koolaid ever since. And if we don't get to somebody at the party before they've drank some, we get posts where uninformed jackasses bite their thumb at guys like Gronan, who've made contributions to this hobby so lasting and profound that it's like a high schooler taunting Nikola Tesla.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264Regarding the arbitrary nature of the GM moves they are usually set up by foreshadowing a problem, or laying out the risks on the table (as the player characters would see them in the setting). If water scarcity is an established problem and the players don't pre-empt it hitting them with it is fair, the example of them being encircled would probably be preceded by telling them that the area they're trying to cross is patrolled by [warlord] and that since they don't know the terrain being caught is likely unless they are vigilant about scouting. Them being encircled would be the result of them either shrugging and taking the risk or doing the scouting but failing the roll.

I don't actually have any substantial beef with anything said here. It is good advice to be transparent with players, to tell them the stakes clearly, and to use established setting facts consistently when delivering consequences. I mean, this is really basic stuff, covered by having a functional human brain and almost any game you'd care to name, but that doesn't mean it's bad advice. It's just pretty obvious.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264SKARG>>My usual reaction to improv theatre is hatred.
Not disagreeing here.

I've laughed at improv more than a few times. Spontaneity can lead to fun.

 

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264Speed of play and speed of generating situations and setting. If the players go somewhere (geographically or situationally) where you are not prepared instead of pausing to look it up or generate it you can do it by the seat of your pants and get decent results. Of course any GM can improvise, my argument is that it is easier when you know a procedure to do it by.

You may be underestimating just how much we tend prep old school games (My typical map is 400 6-mile hexes to a side, each keyed with content, three megadungeons, between 3-5 cities, a dozen or more smaller dungeons, and several random content generators. This is an area that is geographically nearly twice as large as the united states, and has more dungeons and creatures than the entirety of both the Conan stories and the Lord of the Rings, including the Silmarillion and the Hobbit)

I don't typically take more than a minute to either generate random content, and when you know what you need, making something up is basically instantaneous. So you're solving a non-issue, for starters.

But the trouble is that the AW stuff shoves "drama, now!" down your throat, not content, and not any sort of approachable realism. It takes the adage of "if it gets slow, men with guns bust down the door" and effectively makes it a law of the universe. Look AW, there are lulls, deal with it. It's like the guy that's constantly whistling and screaming at a concert, even when the band is intentionally getting it quieter. It's impatient, and honestly poor advice.

It doesn't generate new content, it orders you to keep things it's version of entertaining and it needs to shut the hell up; I know fun and so do my players and we'll fucking decide how this game runs.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264SKARG>>It seems to me this implies never assigning odds, and not using dice to fairly assess the odds of things happening or not, and this seems like quite a weakness. For example, how would you fairly assess the odds a volley of arrows finds a niche in someone's armor or not?
By the book you would calculate the damage based on the number of archers, the damage of their bows and the armor of the target and then roll+damage taken to see if they take additional damage. But you would not roll hit location to see if an arrow pierces their brain through the eye, it is a hit point system after all

Well, this depends on the game in question. WFRP would have you roll a hit location, if memory serves.

But assuming that you're using an HP system like D&D, your roll would be modified by the armor and cover of the target, the range of the attackers from their target, and their skill as archers. These elements are not considered in AW; roll 2D6, outcome based on playbook.

That's not a satisfying answer for some of us (Oh god especially Skarg the human calculator)

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264It's meant as an aid and not a straight jacket. If the GM knows a course of action the NPC should take that is not covered by their type there is nothing stopping them. In traditional systems you usually plot the short and long term goals of an NPC beforehand or maybe roll vs. their passions to see what they do unless you know the character well, the drives in AW are meant as GM aids to highly unstable and dynamic situations.

Another thing, you can use? For roleplaying a character in a dynamic, unstable situation? Fucking. Roleplaying. It's literally the name of the game.

Your game is once again, solving a problem that has been solved by
1) understanding what a roleplaying game IS (A game in which your play the role of imagined characters)
2) Having a functioning human brain

So... Thanks?

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264SKARG>> That sounds like annoying metagame at a level I don't want to play. I don't mind a character with an M.O. of trying to encircle and capture people, but it sounds like you mean the GM would just have "you're surrounded" happen, and that there is no game involving movement over an actual landscape, with PCs and NPCs using their skills, ways of doing things, movements, equipment, and so on, to determine what happens in terms of who is where when, who is aware of whom, when they sleep, etc to determine whether they meet and in what circumstances.
My example would probably be called out as bullshit by AW players, but it would be fair if the GM foreshadowed it or explicitly warned them that it would be the result of failed or no scouting in the area.

I'd call it bullshit if I, as a GM, created an entire massive army and then made it impossible for the players to reasonably determine and respond to its movement as a comparatively tiny group of individuals, yeah.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024298[Lee Van Cleef]Read my post again, sober.[/Lee Van Cleef]

* shrug * Fine, when Pundy breaks both your legs, don't come running to me for sympathy.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264Thanks for responding!

Sure! Thanks for inviting me to disagree and elaborate, one of my favorite things to do on a forum. ;-)

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264It seems like your gripe with the system is that it usually operates at one level of abstraction above a classic system (and that it's not challenge based even though it can be challenging for the players). That is completely fine, my argument is that the techniques are useful to know even in a system where you track the location, line of sight etc. of each creature and that all results are fallout of the simulation. Because you inevitably run into a situation that the hard simulation does not cover and the techniques help you come up with something fast. Most games rely on either preparation or procedural generation, huge parts of the setting in AW are created moment to moment.

I'd say my main reaction is about the way the gameplay operates, and what it is about. I like games that try to let players interact with the situation that the game is supposedly about. They play from their characters' limited perspectives, using their limited abilities and resources and say what they try to do and then that gets played out according to the situation. Not the meta-situation. The GM gives the players information about potential problems if/when there are potential problems and their characters happen to notice them based on what the players have the PCs do and how, the PCs' skills, etc. The players don't take over the narration, or know more about the situation than their PCs do.

I'm sure there are some interesting suggestions in AW, and you've made me a bit curious to browse them though I expect I'd use them like I do most RPG books, as enthusiasm sparks and idea seeds.

I don't really have a problem with running into situations I can't come up with some way to handle, though I prefer to have nice rules for things that can be interesting when modeled with rules.

QuoteAs an example, in the case of the party travelling through hostile terrain and an enemy warlord is attempting to encircle them I trust you don't have a detailed map covering several square miles and then track the situation moment to moment to decide where everyone is when contact is made. The terrain is drawn either from a library of maps or you make it up on the spot, perhaps modifying it if the players say they're looking for a defensible position or a place with lots of cover or something.

Well I love maps, and will have a map at some level of detail, and will add detail as needed. I try to generate at least as much detail as is needed before it is needed when possible, to avoid weird meta-effects such as you describe, where the world effectively might shape itself to create a feature because the players say they're looking for that. I don't mind a fair amount of abstraction at some scale, but I try to make it as impartial and fair and objective and logical as possible. It doesn't generally require tracking everything moment to moment or every single detail.

In the attempted NPC encirclement scenario, I'll have some sort of useful terrain map and describe and/or sketch the lay of the land for the players. I'll ask them how they deploy, what they're doing as they march, tell them what they notice taking into account their relevant skills. I'll track the same thing for the other agents in the same area, including the NPC encircler's forces and who/whatever else is around, and determine who on which side detects the other or not. If the players don't engage the NPC forces during the day, I'll ask them where and how they want to camp, how/when they post guards or patrols, etc. Again, I game it out, possibly pretty abstractly until details become important to fairly and logically resolve what happens, and doing my best to keep all meta elements out of it.

I even hate intentional meta-events in fiction. One of my least favorite parts of The Force Awakens is when, Han Solo gets caught by bounty hunters on his own ship (two groups of them IIRC), because it seems zero thought has been given to this sort of thing, and it's just being done because it's considered funny and entertaining, and also because the action and consequences are also going to be fake-as-fuck, so it ends up not actually mattering. But if I were GM'ing that (heaven forbid), I'd have a map of all ships involved, and I'd have noticed that Han Solo is a legendary smuggler who has survived to old age and so even if my players hadn't already specified the heck out of their ship's security and warning systems (which my players certainly would have), I would prompt them to do so because it makes no sense that such a character would leave their ship wide open, not notice they were being docked with, etc. Maybe there's some chance that he gets surprised like that, but if I play it out fairly, I bet the chances would be extremely low, and I would want the game to include the reasons why, including the floor plan, security systems, hearing, character talents, where people are, etc.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264Speed of play and speed of generating situations and setting. If the players go somewhere (geographically or situationally) where you are not prepared instead of pausing to look it up or generate it you can do it by the seat of your pants and get decent results. Of course any GM can improvise, my argument is that it is easier when you know a procedure to do it by.

I can see how that could be helpful for GMs who don't know how to improvise yet and want to play that way. I do know how to generate things quickly, and I also know what things I want to pre-gen and what I am willing to conjure on the spot, and how I want to do that and how I don't. I would be interested to see what they offer in AW.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264It's meant as an aid and not a straight jacket. If the GM knows a course of action the NPC should take that is not covered by their type there is nothing stopping them. In traditional systems you usually plot the short and long term goals of an NPC beforehand or maybe roll vs. their passions to see what they do unless you know the character well, the drives in AW are meant as GM aids to highly unstable and dynamic situations.

Oh interesting. I'll have to take a look some time.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264I have played Microscope once and didn't have fun. It has several things in common with AW (in game setting creation being the most prominent) but I'm not sure if it was the game text, the host or the group as a whole that was at fault.

I mainly mentioned it because you wrote you thought AW was the only game that had an explicit procedure.

I like Microscope for being interesting and suggesting a new sort of game that has an interesting byproduct of generating a game world background.

However I also struggle to really want to play it because as I said, I kind of hate improv, especially the part where everyone can make up practically anything and you're obliged to go along with it. Because of that, me playing Microscope seems very likely to run into that sort of issue unless I somehow stay liking what everyone else generates.

Which is also why I tend to avoid games where players can do more than say what their characters attempt to do. It's surreal to me, and not the thing I know I like and am interested in, which is interacting with a consistent world from the perspective of someone inside it, not also a metamagical weaver of reality and narrative.

What 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.

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.

Nothing? "Enforcing a consistent shared mindspace" is not the enemy of player agency or creativity; it is, in fact, the single most liberating thing you can do for your players.

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 it's not roleplaying, it's storytelling/worldbuilding, etc.  The player is declaring/creating/discussing things outside the character from an authorial point of view, essentially GMing things on a micro level.  You may enjoy it, I enjoy it sometimes myself, but it's not the same as roleplaying.  So...if you all got together so the players could just roleplay...PbA might not be for you.

Now some sort of Improv is really just the same thing as what might happen in roleplaying, but the difference is the authorship.

For example:  My character is a rogue, born in the city the campaign is in, we're in an area of the city I know well and we're in a tavern my kind of peeps hang out in:

In a traditional manner, I might ask the GM "Are there any guys I know in here that are sharp enough to go along with a quick con?"
The GM decides or rolls some dice and says "Sure".
Then I act drunk, go over to him and start a fake fight, so the guards that just walked in break up the fight and the barbarian with me they are looking for can slip out the back.

In a narrative manner, I either spend some metacurrency to make sure there is a guy I know in here sharp enough to go along with a quick con, or I just assume it and the GM allows it because, Why Not?  It makes sense.

The difference is, in the first example, the GM is still authoring the particulars of the setting and I am simply responding and reacting to that information as my character only.

In the second example, I am also acting as the player and authoring the scene as well as roleplaying the action as the character.

Quote from: Skarg;1024321I'd say my main reaction is about the way the gameplay operates, and what it is about. I like games that try to let players interact with the situation that the game is supposedly about. They play from their characters' limited perspectives, using their limited abilities and resources and say what they try to do and then that gets played out according to the situation. Not the meta-situation.

Quick aside: I play a game with Fortune Points (Beyond the Wall) and it felt a little meta-gamey. So we placed within our setting the following conceit: the players choose prayers, incantations, the names of loved ones, ki,  oaths or superstitions as a trapping for their Fortune Points and they know/feel when their luck/elan/grace is running out (a sense of guilt/doom/karma-za-bitch) when they reach zero.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1024341Quick aside: I play a game with Fortune Points (Beyond the Wall) and it felt a little meta-gamey. So we placed within our setting the following conceit: the players choose prayers, incantations, the names of loved ones, ki,  oaths or superstitions as a trapping for their Fortune Points and they know/feel when their luck/elan/grace is running out (a sense of guilt/doom/karma-za-bitch) when they reach zero.

Some of my players aren't too keen on Luck Points either, one thing that helps ground them is to tie them to something as you have done, for example in Mythras a Passion or Religious Devotion.

Something else that works is to remove the choice.  Keep them only as a "get out of death" card and don't tell the players how many they have.

Scaling Scavenger, welcome to forums! A tip from another PbtA fan: it's great if you like what it does, but what it does has nothing to do with "true" roleplaying or anything. It's just a very good genre-emulation game, specially of the (melo-)dramatic sort. That's why most fans consider the original and Monsterhearts it's best iterations, and Dungeon World the worst (I would say Fellowship is much better at emulating D&D, even if it's not the declared goal, but that's me ;) ).

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.

Totally agree with you here, but some members here dislike it. It supposedly breaks their immersion or something. Don't know.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024315* shrug * Fine, when Pundy breaks both your legs, don't come running to me for sympathy.

:D

Quote from: Itachi;1024344Totally agree with you here, but some members here dislike it. It supposedly breaks their immersion or something. Don't know.

Yeah, to prevent us all talking past each other, it's probably very useful to post this article by the esteemed Justin Alexander (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1545/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanic). It very accurately and specifically describes the general consensus on the dividing line between "roleplaying game" and other games, like genre-emulation or storygames.

A lot of words have been wasted trying to say that the one is the other (they aren't) or that liking one means you should also like another (not necessarily).

EDIT: What do you know, that was the wrong article! (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games) Turns out he writes about this a lot.

Azraele, I don't know, that article feels pretty biased to me, because it ignores the players that, like me, think if you're playing a game while assuming a role and exploring fictional situations that entail from it, it's a role-playing game (be it of the narrative sort, physics-simulation sort, electronic sort, or something else). Thus I suggest we avoid electing arbitrary definitions and letting the field open to discuss each game on its on terms. I think its more productive and less conflicting this way. In the end, its all about fun anyway. ;)

*Edit: remade parts of the text to better reflect my position on the matter.

Quote from: Itachi;1024353Azraele, I don't know, that article feels pretty biased to me, because it ignores the players that, like me, think if you're playing a game while assuming a role and exploring fictional situations that entail from it, it's a role-playing game (be it of the narrative sort, physics-simulation sort, electronic sort, or something else). Thus I suggest we avoid electing arbitrary definitions and letting the field open to discuss each game on its on terms. I think its more productive and less conflicting this way. In the end, its all about fun anyway. ;)

*Edit: remade parts of the text to better reflect my position on the matter.

I didn't say it; Justin Alexander did. It's not the final word, but it's a good basis for dialogue. Otherwise we're just chasing our tails, unable to come to a consensus about even the most basic definiton of what we're even talking about.

I'm with Confucius on this one: we need to start by rectifying the names. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names)

It is all about fun; but a storygame is not a roleplaying game, just like chess isn't backgammon. This isn't 'Nam, there are rules.

[video=youtube;WiQmQhA-OrM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiQmQhA-OrM[/youtube]

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1024341Quick aside: I play a game with Fortune Points (Beyond the Wall) and it felt a little meta-gamey.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1024343Some of my players aren't too keen on Luck Points either, one thing that helps ground them is to tie them to something as you have done, for example in Mythras a Passion or Religious Devotion.

I 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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_(gaming)).

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_(gaming)).

Because 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.

Quote from: Itachi;1024344Totally agree with you here, but some members here dislike it. It supposedly breaks their immersion or something. Don't know.

Making 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.

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.

Dude I've only got so much room in my signature, and I've got to keep the plug in there.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024404Making shit up is an entirely different experience from discovering shit somebody else made up.

Why not a bit of both? :)

I don't like ice cream on my mashed potatoes.

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_(gaming)).

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.

I thought the backgrounds in 5e were just making official what everyone already does anyway.

Quote from: Azraele;1024634A 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.

Maybe the story game parts are baked into the mechanics so that it remains an"RPG". Isn't that the point of Jason Alexander's articles, the story part has to be related to the mechanics so that even though you have some more slack in character creation, the character can still only interact with the game in a prescribed manner according to the rules.

In other words... if they had done it any other way than baking them in; the rest of the grognard army on this website would have declared 5e complete story game shiite and marched on Seattle. (probably including me) but as it is 5e seems to be fairly well regarded for the way it was worked.

Otherwise, I'm naught but a humble pirate and you are going to have to explain your words further to me in order to comprehend.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024638I thought the backgrounds in 5e were just making official what everyone already does anyway.

I think for a lot of folks, yeah. I wouldn't call it universal though. To give a contrasting example, the character gen in my games begins by rolling 3d6 in order. this is followed by a discussion of available classes (we do a race-as-class version of D&D) and a brief discussion with the player about how their character fits into the gameworld. This entire process ideally takes between seven and fifteen minutes, is requires strong communication and cooperation between the player and myself as GM.

One of the responsibilities of old school style GMs is making certain to properly set expectations quickly and firmly. This allows people who don't even roleplay to pick up and sample the "good part" of the game, lowering the threshold for entry and getting them in the mindset of cooperative adventuring.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024638I thought the backgrounds in 5e were just making official what everyone already does anyway.

If there's any one lesson we can impart to you through all these threads you participate in where you ask about other people's opinions on gaming, I would have it be the knowledge that the is no such thing as something everyone already does, and never has been. Since the very beginning, there have been people who have done wildly divergent, wildly incompatible thing with the Lego set that is this hobby.

Ah, that's another thing. What do you like about 3d6 in order over point buy or swapping the numbers around after you roll? Is there something about it that's less "story gamey"?

As for myself, I pretty much just let my players loose and let them make a character and tell them to let me know when they're done. Then I review it and as long as the stuff they made up isn't ridiculous I will just incorporate it into my game world. A noble family, for instance.

I never had backgrounds in BECMI and we never used them in 3.5 (if they were on offer, can't remember). We may have given some sort of thought to background in 4e but we had to use a computer to generate those characters.  So no, that is not how I played.

We didn't even give our characters last names until after 1st level. And despite the "background" rules in DCC character generation, I still don't recommend my 0 levels last names.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1024641If there's any one lesson we can impart to you through all these threads you participate in where you ask about other people's opinions on gaming, I would have it be the knowledge that the is no such thing as something everyone already does, and never has been. Since the very beginning, there have been people who have done wildly divergent, wildly incompatible thing with the Lego set that is this hobby.

Oh, I know. I just meant I thought it was taking the standard process of character creation -- "the player decides what's in their backstory and then the GM incorporates it into the game if it's not dumb" -- and just made it part of the rules. I figure most people do this, but not everyone naturally.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1024643I never had backgrounds in BECMI and we never used them in 3.5 (if they were on offer, can't remember). We may have given some sort of thought to background in 4e but we had to use a computer to generate those characters.  So no, that is not how I played.

We didn't even give our characters last names until after 1st level. And despite the "background" rules in DCC character generation, I still don't recommend my 0 levels last names.

See, I'm familiar with this kind of gameplay. But isn't this "improv" too? You're making up names after the fact, along with presumably whatever else you decide about the character later on.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024642Ah, that's another thing. What do you like about 3d6 in order over point buy or swapping the numbers around after you roll? Is there something about it that's less "story gamey"?

I don't think that is part of the "story game" issue so much as what type of challenge you like. To a lot of (particularly old school) gamers, part of the fun is the challenge of playing the hand you are dealt. Now, right from the start the official D&D (I have to remember this isn't a D&D specific thread), there have been swapping mechanisms, so there never really was a pure instance of that until OSR games. As I've always said, there's no such thing as hard or easy games, only DMs/GMs who go hard or soft on their players--since if you start with more favorable scores (or at least the option of making a more-favorable-for-you build), the GM/DM can just put you up against (/populate the sandbox with) stronger opposition. It is just a challenge, just like tracking encumbrance or any other challenge some groups like and others find annoying. One that seems to me to be completely orthogonal to storygaming issues.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024645See, I'm familiar with this kind of gameplay. But isn't this "improv" too? You're making up names after the fact, along with presumably whatever else you decide about the character later on.

Well sure. And let's be clear, there's a whole lot of mixed purity in all this. Lots of people do allow all sorts of backstory (we tend to decide on it around 3rd level when it looks like the characters might be around for a bit)--specifically so long as it doesn't really matter. Sure, you can be a minor noble... from somewhere far away and who don't have the funds to bail you out if you get in trouble. Sure, Joe and Tim's characters can retroactively been cousins this whole time... as long as it doesn't effect the game/constrain the GM.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1024639Maybe the story game parts are baked into the mechanics so that it remains an"RPG". Isn't that the point of Jason Alexander's articles, the story part has to be related to the mechanics so that even though you have some more slack in character creation, the character can still only interact with the game in a prescribed manner according to the rules.

In other words... if they had done it any other way than baking them in; the rest of the grognard army on this website would have declared 5e complete story game shiite and marched on Seattle. (probably including me) but as it is 5e seems to be fairly well regarded for the way it was worked.

Otherwise, I'm naught but a humble pirate and you are going to have to explain your words further to me in order to comprehend.

Hey my dood, carefully explaining stuff is my thing. No worries :)

My reading of Justin's articles was that he was growing frustrated with what was a simple category error that a lot of people refused to correct (or even recognize).

The error being that games which are designed for one to "play a role" (player-focused mechanics directed and limited to "piloting" said character through an imagined world) are somehow NOT distinct from games whose mechanics focus on "telling a story" (player-facing mechanics which directly altered the "narrative" dimension, usually meaning authorial control over the shared imagined universe). His argument was merely that they are meaningfully distinct.

That's also my only argument. For real; I can waste a novel's worth of words making that point, but that's really all I typically try to say.

There was an unfortunate perception (I can't speak for the degree of its veracity) that the term "storygame" was meant to denigrate or "no true scotsman" these games. I don't use the term that way, although I don't prefer storygames. I imagine that lingering negative connotation is why folks are hesitant to adopt the nomenclature. I find it extremely useful, as you can probably tell.

(Also, I don't know and don't assume your gender. Dood is my repurposing of Prinny-speak from Disgaea in an effort to make my current favorite meme phrase gender-inclusive)

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1024648Well sure. And let's be clear, there's a whole lot of mixed purity in all this. Lots of people do allow all sorts of backstory (we tend to decide on it around 3rd level when it looks like the characters might be around for a bit)--specifically so long as it doesn't really matter. Sure, you can be a minor noble... from somewhere far away and who don't have the funds to bail you out if you get in trouble. Sure, Joe and Tim's characters can retroactively been cousins this whole time... as long as it doesn't effect the game/constrain the GM.

Pretty much this.

I look at "Zero to Hero" campaigns as, the world wouldn't know anything about you until after you had made some sort of name for yourself anyhow.

And from a more practical point of view, it let's you jump right to the action of the campaign. And it gives the GM time to lay out their campaign and therefore the campaign is informing some of those future background decisions coming later on.

Quote from: Skarg;1024248

This.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024264It seems like your gripe with the system is that it usually operates at one level of abstraction above a classic system (and that it's not challenge based even though it can be challenging for the players).

At least for me (though I suspect also for Skarg) the gripe is not with the level of abstraction. The gripe is with having in game effects (encircled by warlord's troops) being driven by out of game causes (the players are quiet and the GM is bored right now).

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.

This distinction really shouldn't be difficult to make. Yet it somehow seems to elude some folks. :rolleyes:

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024642Ah, that's another thing. What do you like about 3d6 in order over point buy or swapping the numbers around after you roll? Is there something about it that's less "story gamey"?

As for myself, I pretty much just let my players loose and let them make a character and tell them to let me know when they're done. Then I review it and as long as the stuff they made up isn't ridiculous I will just incorporate it into my game world. A noble family, for instance.

The 3d6 thing for me is purely a matter of taste. It sets the tone that the game is "unfair" and rejects "balance", but that I am essentially an impartial arbiter, not a "storyteller". That's important stuff to establish, and it does so effectively and well.

My preference for establishing the facts of the setting before play begins stems from the fact that I want my players to be focused on interacting with the game world, not on authoring it. I wouldn't reject the request for this backstory revelation/addition/edit out of hand, even during play. I would, though, make certain that the role of GM and player isn't blurred when I approached it.

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.

Yes. Especially if they are just saying it for the first time during play, and expecting it to suddenly be true in the gameworld even though the GM just heard about it for the first time.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024604It 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.

Yes. I agree Force Points seem cromulent (? not Crommulent?) for Star Wars, though how I'd make the mechanic work would be significant and could be interesting. Like Han Solo might have some Force points but not know he has them, and the GM applies them secretly. Meanwhile someone developing their conscious use of the Force might slowly develop awareness of their Force point status, and some control of when/how it gets used.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024644Oh, I know. I just meant I thought it was taking the standard process of character creation -- "the player decides what's in their backstory and then the GM incorporates it into the game if it's not dumb" -- and just made it part of the rules. I figure most people do this, but not everyone naturally.

In my experience almost nobody does this.

I limit my players backstory to 25 words or less.

Also, nothing is free.  You want to be a noble?  Okay, what do you give up to get that?

Quote from: Skarg;1024655cromulent (? not Crommulent?)

No idea, honestly.

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.

The main thing I don't like is the effect where experience gives so many hitpoints a character is relatively immune to danger for a while, and then very vulnerable when low on hitpoints. And the part where it's all abstract and unclear what that means, compared to the games I'm used to where attack and injury effects are more explicit, an experienced person might possibly get injured or killed by the first unskilled attack of a fight, and it's also possible to defeat serious foes without getting hurt, and as you've read me harp about on other threads, I like games about the details of how all that happens.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1024623Those 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.

Sure. It matters (to me) what such mechanics represent, and it matters (to me) how the mechanics work, whatever it is. To some people, it doesn't matter. And different games (and groups of games) have different conventions about all of that.

So, if someone took a game with luck points and said they represented something which seemed to me to fit the mechanic (such as the notion Gronan mentioned of Force points in Star Wars) then I could relate to them as an in-gameworld ability. Or in a game about martial arts masters, maybe it could be something about mastery.

In contrast though, I like a crunchy game system where there are carefully designed skill levels and game mechanics that are about applying specific skills to specific situations and having appropriate chances of results that make sense. Adding too much of The Force or woo woo mystic powers or "Bob's just super-lucky" or plot armor or "it's no fun if PCs die" points or "players are authors of the story" points tends to be at odds with that type of game that I like, unless the point of the game is to see if some Jedi Knight can use his in-universe event-manipulation powers to defeat 50 stormtroopers, or something.

Quote from: Skarg;1024655Like Han Solo might have some Force points but not know he has them, and the GM applies them secretly. Meanwhile someone developing their conscious use of the Force might slowly develop awareness of their Force point status, and some control of when/how it gets used.

I think there are two reasons the designers didn't do this.

1. Doing it that way entails more work on the part of the GM and may be less satisfying to the players since by design they really wouldn't ever know that they were getting some benefit from those Force points.

2. Having the player control the points is not only logistically simpler, but it also enables something that plays like a space opera based on a Saturday afternoon matinee serial where the PCs are heroes that do amazing things despite the ridiculously overwhelming odds against them.

However if you did decide to treat Force Points that way than the GM should have a rule in place that a Force point can only be used to help a PC like Han Solo if said PC doesn't know what those overwhelming odds against him are before applying the Force Point. "Never tell me the odds!"

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024628Well, 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.

Character generation and describing a backstory is a different stage of play, where it's more appropriate and where there is more time to specify things about your character's background. Different GMs and systems have different ways of handling it, and disapproving or modifying or charging points for advantageous ones etc are all ways of responding that are about addressing the issues that can happen when a player wants to create things in the GM's world.

If a player can declare such things during play and expect it to be true, that's more likely to be weird and disruptive and to give the GM reasons to stop play and think about what you're suggesting and react appropriately.

For example, even though it was done between sessions, one player whose character had survived for a while decided to write up various relatives of his PC, without telling me he was going to do that. He put in a bunch of work and specified their skills, relationships, abilities, wealth, locations, some positions of power... That cause all sorts of interesting considerations. How much is reasonable? Should having friendly relatives who are wizards or constables or lords be allowed? Be balanced with some negative stuff? Should the player know the stats and abilities of these NPCs, or should those just be what the PC think they're like, or should I veto and change various things? In this case, he specified one uncle as a leader of a certain location he knew about from a map the PC had, but he assumed it was a different sort of place that I already had it specified as, and in fact there was quite a bit of detailed content at that location. If I tell him that some details about locations have to be changed, it could give the player some meta-information about whether I had designed something interesting at that location or not. In other cases, other players in other sessions had played extensively where one of the new relatives was now described as being, but of course that NPC didn't exist before then - again, how to resolve these things? It can be fun and interesting to deal with, and/or it can be a complicated pain. It's often ok, but not so much if dumped on a GM during play "My uncle knows the sheriff here!" GM: Oh really?

Also for all the other players, even if the GM and one player are ok with some invention of a player, it can be annoying when the GM is letting another player just invent convenient circumstances for themselves that they think is clever, when other players are trying to play from the perspective of mere PCs in the world, with no such powers, who have to ask the GM whether or not they know a "sharp guy" in a tavern or not before executing a plan that depends on such coincidences.

Quote from: Azraele;1024314As a matter of fact, I do have a detailed map, and I do track the movement of armies. It's not just for grins either; it's so the players can do things like predict where large armies are going, sabotage their efforts, or otherwise interact meaningfully with the game world.

This is important; the game world doesn't respond to my sudden whim OR to the "needs of the story" OR to the player's wishes, OR anything else that wouldn't mystically alter reality.
There's a map; there are details on it. This is the reality of the game world, understood through my description of the player's sense information. Characters interact with this the same way you or I interact with our world; as established facts, as a real, tangible thing.

This is not spelled out in the game text but something you do because it makes the world more real, you could do this in AW too, same with making sure players don't use a 19' rope to cross a 20' chasm.
 

Quote from: Azraele;1024314You may be underestimating just how much we tend prep old school games (My typical map is 400 6-mile hexes to a side, each keyed with content, three megadungeons, between 3-5 cities, a dozen or more smaller dungeons, and several random content generators. This is an area that is geographically nearly twice as large as the united states, and has more dungeons and creatures than the entirety of both the Conan stories and the Lord of the Rings, including the Silmarillion and the Hobbit)

I don't typically take more than a minute to either generate random content, and when you know what you need, making something up is basically instantaneous. So you're solving a non-issue, for starters.

But the trouble is that the AW stuff shoves "drama, now!" down your throat, not content, and not any sort of approachable realism. It takes the adage of "if it gets slow, men with guns bust down the door" and effectively makes it a law of the universe. Look AW, there are lulls, deal with it. It's like the guy that's constantly whistling and screaming at a concert, even when the band is intentionally getting it quieter. It's impatient, and honestly poor advice.

It doesn't generate new content, it orders you to keep things it's version of entertaining and it needs to shut the hell up; I know fun and so do my players and we'll fucking decide how this game runs.

I'm quite aware how detailed the prep can be, the folder for my current campaign over a gigabyte.

AW plays very intensely and I've found putting a break on things in necessary for a campaign to develop and not just burn out, by forcing players to adhere to travel times, preparation times, speed of communication (having a radio is essentially a super power when most people don't have it) etc. they get the time to develop an attachment to the setting and the people in it and not just burn everything to the ground right away. I think this is a flaw where the game works against itself as there is no natural pacing mechanism apart from healing times.

Quote from: Azraele;1024314Another thing, you can use? For roleplaying a character in a dynamic, unstable situation? Fucking. Roleplaying. It's literally the name of the game.

Your game is once again, solving a problem that has been solved by
1) understanding what a roleplaying game IS (A game in which your play the role of imagined characters)
2) Having a functioning human brain

So... Thanks?

I'd call it bullshit if I, as a GM, created an entire massive army and then made it impossible for the players to reasonably determine and respond to its movement as a comparatively tiny group of individuals, yeah.

It cuts down prep to almost zero. In other games I can spend more time on prep than actually playing, in AW I've ran 10+ session campaigns with a couple of hours of prep in total. Don't get hung up on the examples I listed, if the campaign demands fair realism you can do that, if you play D&D raw you could roll a random encounter with 300 orcs with the party failing the surprise roll, the result would be similar I imagine.

I read what people write, if I don't respond to a paragraph of text it's either because I agree or because I didn't find anything in it to discuss (such as personal preference).

Quote from: Skarg;1024321[using maps etc]

I believe this is something you either learned on your own or absorbed through other roleplayers, the game text you're using did not spell out the procedure. If I remember correctly the text in AW says to draw maps if the situation is unclear, specifically during large scale battles, but it doesn't provide a procedure for how gangs move or what their field of fire would be, I imagine a professional soldier GMing a battle situation would be very different from how a civilian would do it.

Quote from: Itachi;1024590Does 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.

Two game mechanics create stability, one implicit and one explicit. The implicit one is that nothing is safe, the GM is not allowed to protect anything, the consequences for passive or failing PCs is that their things are destroyed or corrupted (via the fronts and threats). The explicit is when you advance your moves you unlock the endgame, advanced manipulation can turn people into true allies which are protected from being destroyed off screen, advanced siezing by force will mark territory at the metaphysical or social level when it is siezed.

Depending on just how destructive the apocalypse was even repairing the basic human condition might be necessary. I think all the transexuality et cetera implied in the setting by being options on the character sheets are not merely to be "inclusive" but to point out how all norms were destroyed in the apocalypse.

As I wrote in a post above this, one way in which the game design sabotages itself is how campaign play needs lulls and stability, but the speed of the action and the initial power of the PCs can lead them to quickly engaging and destroying all tangible threats.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024683This is not spelled out in the game text but something you do because it makes the world more real, you could do this in AW too, same with making sure players don't use a 19' rope to cross a 20' chasm.

I want you to hold on to this notion; the idea that the process of playing a game isn't necessarily detailed within the text of that game. It's a sentiment on which we both agree, and it will be important later.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024683I'm quite aware how detailed the prep can be, the folder for my current campaign over a gigabyte.

That's not congruent with the point to which I was responding. Your prep is not what is being called into question; it is your assertion that I don't prep in the way that you specified. I do. It's actually very important to me.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024683AW plays very intensely and I've found putting a break on things in necessary for a campaign to develop and not just burn out, by forcing players to adhere to travel times, preparation times, speed of communication (having a radio is essentially a super power when most people don't have it) etc. they get the time to develop an attachment to the setting and the people in it and not just burn everything to the ground right away. I think this is a flaw where the game works against itself as there is no natural pacing mechanism apart from healing times.

There is a naturally arising pacing mechanism that D&D has that AW lacks; difficulty. More powerful monsters, larger armies, more dangerous dungeons, more frequent "random" encounters... These things serve to naturally limit the player's ability to spread beyond the immediate horizon without acquiring the mastery necessary to survive these dangers.

Now, you can overcome this without simply leveling up. That's the glory of the tactical infinity; you can leverage your actual charisma (not the game stat, your ability to persuasively negotiate with NPCs via roleplaying), or your actual knowledge of strategy, or whatever inventiveness you posses within the boundaries of physics (and magic, if we're sticking to D&D) and use that to overcome challenges.

I've had players raise armies so that they could travel further or bring them into dungeon raids. I've had players create elaborate traps based on real-world physics. I've had them set fire to fields to "smoke out" an evil king.

These things don't exist within the specific text of the rules; they're not "moves" that "are allowed"; they are a blend of rulings, Gm-applied rules, and a disciplined interpretation of the shared imagined world's reasonable consequences.

When a game constrains both player and GM actions into a defined list of "moves", it sacrifices this versatility in favor of... Balance? Clarity?

Reading your posts, you clearly introduce elements outside of AW's narrow game structure. My question is; why are you then advocating for it? It trains you wrong, as a joke

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024683It cuts down prep to almost zero. In other games I can spend more time on prep than actually playing, in AW I've ran 10+ session campaigns with a couple of hours of prep in total. Don't get hung up on the examples I listed, if the campaign demands fair realism you can do that, if you play D&D raw you could roll a random encounter with 300 orcs with the party failing the surprise roll, the result would be similar I imagine.

Okay, so you cut down prep time to zero, but you've got loads more prep than me? Which is it?

Anyway that's beside the point. Remember earlier when I was talking about how, when a game narrowly defines what actions can be taken, it's bad? That's true of playing ANY roleplaying game ever written, if you play it without a tactical infinity.

Do you really imagine that I roll on a random chart, conjuring 300 orcs ex nihilo, then force my players to roll a die to determine if they can see them? You certainly have gotten the wrong impression of how I run this.

Allow me to clarify:

When players are traveling overland, this is represented by the time of the gameworld moving faster (hours pass in seconds, and I describe the details of their journey, making certain to allow them to react and change the course as they will).

While they travel, there is a chance that they will run afoul of some of the inhabitants of the area through which they travel. Because this is effectively a blind chance (I'm not so myopic that I'm constantly tracking travel through trade routes) it's determined by the roll of a die. A lower target of course representing a greater chance of encountering an inhabitant, based on that abstracted traffic and the aggressiveness with which it's trying to encounter something.

If an encounter is rolled, I consult an encounter chart which is an appropriate representation of creatures or other elements that might be reasonably encountered. This is stereotyped as "random encounter materializing out of thing air" but is actually just an abstraction allowing a GM to gameably represent a complex world and its inhabitants.

The next roll is the encounter distance; this is important. Prevailing weather conditions (darkness, fog) increase or decrease this distance. It can number in the hundreds of feet, allowing ample reaction time from characters. There is no need to roll to "spot" anything; if an army of orcs is an encounter which can reasonably happen in an overland area, they are visible for miles before you encounter them in broad daylight.

Again, newer editions (and the way that new players sometimes misinterpreted how to play them) don't specify things like "you reasonably see everything that your character would, and the GM honestly describes this in a detailed fashion". Your character being able to rely on their eyes was considered common sense, which stemmed from the fact of the imagined reality.

So, in brief: no. you and I generate, frame and run this encounter in radically different ways. I'm not even saying mine is better, simply that it's not the same.

Quote from: Azraele;1024692Okay, so you cut down prep time to zero, but you've got loads more prep than me? Which is it?

I was refering to the game I'm currently running which is D&D.

AW too has tactical infinity though as the PCs start at name level (one playbook is the leader of a small town including its militia, another a warrior who could take on a small army by himself etc) their survival usually doesn't hinge on cleverness. I suspect lowering their HP from 6 to 4 (so a single round of gunfire could be lethal) would change that.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024697I was refering to the game I'm currently running which is D&D.

AW too has tactical infinity though as the PCs start at name level (one playbook is the leader of a small town including its militia, another a warrior who could take on a small army by himself etc) their survival usually doesn't hinge on cleverness. I suspect lowering their HP from 6 to 4 (so a single round of gunfire could be lethal) would change that.

See now I feel really good about my decision to check it out. I don't know that I'll be able to actually try it out, but I'd like to think that a lot can be gleaned by reading and critical thought.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024684...
I believe this is something you either learned on your own or absorbed through other roleplayers, the game text you're using did not spell out the procedure. If I remember correctly the text in AW says to draw maps if the situation is unclear, specifically during large scale battles, but it doesn't provide a procedure for how gangs move or what their field of fire would be, I imagine a professional soldier GMing a battle situation would be very different from how a civilian would do it.

Well, my first RPG campaign book was In The Labyrinth. It does spell out a system whereby everything can be mapped in a hierarchical hexagonal scale system that suggests and gives examples of 12.5km hexes for campaign maps, 20m hexes for local maps, 4m hexes for detailed locations, and 1.3m hexes for combat. It spells out all sorts of details, from detailed encumbrance and how much a person, animal or wagon can carry and how, how far different types of noise travels through what terrain/obstacles, how to GM exploring locations, rules for determining who might surprise whom based on group organization and what talents the characters have, overland map travel by terrain, how likely a group is to get lost when not following a road or major terrain feature, etc etc. It's all based on logic and is more or less the same simulationist way I still prefer to run and play RPGs with. But we refined the system a lot, added the stuff from GURPS and various other sources and so on, experiences from play, etc. But ITL is a great starting place for logic-based GMing IMO.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024685Two game mechanics create stability, one implicit and one explicit. The implicit one is that nothing is safe, the GM is not allowed to protect anything, the consequences for passive or failing PCs is that their things are destroyed or corrupted (via the fronts and threats). The explicit is when you advance your moves you unlock the endgame, advanced manipulation can turn people into true allies which are protected from being destroyed off screen, advanced siezing by force will mark territory at the metaphysical or social level when it is siezed.

Depending on just how destructive the apocalypse was even repairing the basic human condition might be necessary. I think all the transexuality et cetera implied in the setting by being options on the character sheets are not merely to be "inclusive" but to point out how all norms were destroyed in the apocalypse.

Hmmm your implicit factor seems to be a source of instability. But you have a point with the advanced moves. I never got to that stage in my games, so maybe that colored my opinions. Or maybe Sagas work differently in that part? I'll take a look at my book later.

QuoteAs I wrote in a post above this, one way in which the game design sabotages itself is how campaign play needs lulls and stability, but the speed of the action and the initial power of the PCs can lead them to quickly engaging and destroying all tangible threats.

Yep, players characters start really powerful in PbtA, more so than in any other game I know.

Quote from: Itachi;1024709Hmmm your implicit factor seems to be a source of instability. But you have a point with the advanced moves. I never got to that stage in my games, so maybe that colored my opinions. Or maybe Sagas work differently in that part? I'll take a look at my book later.

It seems I didn't finish my thought. The way I see it the constant threat against and from all NPCs means unless the PCs fight to keep someone or something around it will be destroyed. If the threat is an allied NPC who acts out fighting means creating and enforcing rules that keep the peace. Many institutions (like cults, gangs and hardholds) start with inherently savage tendencies that come into play in times of want or prosperity, simply accepting them will lead to repeat problems, channeling them into something productive or curbing them mitigates this. In practice I've found players usually fall in two camps, some revel in the savagery and keep scrabbling in the Mad Max-level of society, others are aggressive about reforming their own institutions and will later graduate to attack the institutions of the PCs who keep the savagery going.

I haven't played Sagas so I don't know how they compare.

Quote from: Azraele

Quote from: Scaling ScavengerAW plays very intensely and I've found putting a break on things in necessary for a campaign to develop and not just burn out, by forcing players to adhere to travel times, preparation times, speed of communication (having a radio is essentially a super power when most people don't have it) etc. they get the time to develop an attachment to the setting and the people in it and not just burn everything to the ground right away. I think this is a flaw where the game works against itself as there is no natural pacing mechanism apart from healing times.

There is a naturally arising pacing mechanism that D&D has that AW lacks; difficulty. More powerful monsters, larger armies, more dangerous dungeons, more frequent "random" encounters… These things serve to naturally limit the player's ability to spread beyond the immediate horizon without acquiring the mastery necessary to survive these dangers.

There is another pace mechanism in AW that you guys are forgetting: characters own stuff. By that I mean the start of session moves that force characters out of the main fronts/threats to deal with the crap that's intrinsic to their playbooks: the Hardholder community, the Operators crews, Hocus cult, Maestro'd establishment, etc. It's useful to break the usual frenesi and make players re assess their goals and relationships.

Also: external threats are the main motivators in D&D but in AW it's the internal threats that really matter. So the point about difficulty doesn't fit AW. Ultimately the biggest challenges for a player character in AW is another player character. Not the fearsome warlord from the north, nor the cannibals in the hills or the mindfuckers from the tunnels - chances are the group will wipe the floor with these guys and there is nothing the GM can do - but your own "teammates" Bish the angel, Jane the operator and Wolf the chopper.

Quote from: Azraele;1024692Now, you can overcome this without simply leveling up. That's the glory of the tactical infinity; you can leverage your actual charisma (not the game stat, your ability to persuasively negotiate with NPCs via roleplaying), or your actual knowledge of strategy, or whatever inventiveness you posses within the boundaries of physics (and magic, if we're sticking to D&D) and use that to overcome challenges.

I had a debate with another player about this recently. He felt that if you let non-character mechanics influence the results of the game, that: 1) it wasn't a "real" win because the GM only "let" you do it, rather than something in the rules making it happen, and 2) that you're then playing the "player" rather than the "character," for the IRL charisma example.

This hits on two separate issues, one being that the player believes "wins" only count if they are pulled out of the GM's hands by an "objective" thing like the rules, and two that you should be playing as your character rather than using your own wits and personality.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024714I had a debate with another player about this recently. He felt that if you let non-character mechanics influence the results of the game, that: 1) it wasn't a "real" win because the GM only "let" you do it, rather than something in the rules making it happen, and 2) that you're then playing the "player" rather than the "character," for the IRL charisma example.

This hits on two separate issues, one being that the player believes "wins" only count if they are pulled out of the GM's hands by an "objective" thing like the rules, and two that you should be playing as your character rather than using your own wits and personality.

"How dare you think your MERE ROLEPLAYING can influence my beautiful RULES"

I encounter the attitudes you're describing with distressing frequency online. In person, it doesn't take much convincing to explain how I roleplay to someone, and because I have the advantage of being able to quickly demonstrate how I do it, I can give folks the grand tour. Online, you basically have to type until your fingers cramp for the same effect.

It's a worthy cause though; the way I game is fun, and people deserve to get a chance to know "classic" roleplaying techniques. It's a shame that even the notions of them have become a rarity nowadays.

Quote from: Azraele;1024719"How dare you think your MERE ROLEPLAYING can influence my beautiful RULES"

I encounter the attitudes you're describing with distressing frequency online. In person, it doesn't take much convincing to explain how I roleplay to someone, and because I have the advantage of being able to quickly demonstrate how I do it, I can give folks the grand tour. Online, you basically have to type until your fingers cramp for the same effect.

It's a worthy cause though; the way I game is fun, and people deserve to get a chance to know "classic" roleplaying techniques. It's a shame that even the notions of them have become a rarity nowadays.

I agree, and have argued similarly. It just seems like they have an ideological bent against any sort of "GMing bias" even though the GM can literally do the same things with the rules anyway.

I do think the point they're driving at though is that it's not "roleplaying your character" if you're using your own intellect and charisma and not the characters. What is the character's intellect and charisma represented by? Skill checks... or so they say.

But from there the path eventually leads to "I don't want to think, just have me roll an INT roll for my character."  Which I have seen people claim they want.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024729But from there the path eventually leads to "I don't want to think, just have me roll an INT roll for my character."  Which I have seen people claim they want.

I know, right. Why even play the adventure. "Roll to complete quest."

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024638I thought the backgrounds in 5e were just making official what everyone already does anyway.

You thought wrong.

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024710It seems I didn't finish my thought. The way I see it the constant threat against and from all NPCs means unless the PCs fight to keep someone or something around it will be destroyed. If the threat is an allied NPC who acts out fighting means creating and enforcing rules that keep the peace. Many institutions (like cults, gangs and hardholds) start with inherently savage tendencies that come into play in times of want or prosperity, simply accepting them will lead to repeat problems, channeling them into something productive or curbing them mitigates this. In practice I've found players usually fall in two camps, some revel in the savagery and keep scrabbling in the Mad Max-level of society, others are aggressive about reforming their own institutions and will later graduate to attack the institutions of the PCs who keep the savagery going.

From my reading and play experience, those institutions (hold, cult, gangs) progress in power, not in order/stability. The Hardholder is the iconic example: it's managed through Hardness (not Sharpness nor Hotness) and this will never change. The ruler is a despot, not the president of a democracy. The same goes with the cult - the Hocus is a weird egothistic bastard that milk the followers for profit and power, and nothing can change that. So ultimately, by evolving their playbooks players get more leverage on the wasteland at a large scale. The hardholder will go on to conquer neighbours, the Hocus spreading the cult in all directions, the Chopper making his gang into notorious and fearsome raiders, the Operator turning into this economic power through his gigs of drugs and whores, the Gunlugger turning into an one-man army, etc. The exception (maybe) is the Waterbearer and it's peaceful oasis, but even so it comes with it's authority attached (agan, no democracy here).

Take that as you will. My take is that the game is promoting constant violence and conflict through those, not rebuilding order/stability.

QuoteI haven't played Sagas so I don't know how they compare.

I just consulted the book, and indeed there is a factor of stability in the christian religious moves (while the pagan ones make players stronger in keeping the cycle of violence). So yeah, Sagas totally adheres to your idea of endgame stability.

I don't see how a hard ruler would be less orderly or stable than a democracy or a leader ruling by their wits or charisma. A society on the scale of AW will function very differently from a modern despotic state with millions of citizens, a large hardhold starts with a population of 300, it is likely the hardholder knows everyone by name and nothing says he doesn't have the consent of the governed or wasn't elected at some point. The starting drawbacks of the hardhold are things like disease, drug use and obligations to an external power, not revolt or assassination.

Well, if such a society don't bother in being eternally ruled by a despot, then no problem. Not my idea of an evolved society, though.

QuoteThe starting drawbacks of the hardhold are things like disease, drug use and obligations to an external power, not revolt or assassination.

Actually, you start with a gang of "unruly bastards", and have starting options as "lucrative raiding", "protection tribute", "decadent and perverse population", and turning your gang into a "pack of fucking hyenas" (+savagery). All this besides the already cited drug- and disease-laden ones. There are a couple options that could be read as stability/progress promoting, such as "bustling market" and a "manufactory". But it's clear the options for promoting the Hard part of Hardholder are more abundant than those. Making such a comomunity civil would be even a challenge, I imagine. And we didn't even count the other fuck-up weirdos that may be around like the Hocus cultists, the Chopper's pack of wolves, or the Brainer with his violation gloves. :D

Have you looked at Mutant:Year Zero or Legacy:Life among the Ruins? I think a group interested in rebuilding society and improving human condition could be better served by those, as this aspect seems more pronounced in them. The former even provides community options such as "Suffrage", "Tribunal", "Collectivism", "Free Enterprise", "Museum", etc.

Mutant: Year Zero also provides the option of institutionalized cannibalism.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1024638I thought the backgrounds in 5e were just making official what everyone already does anyway.

They're a rehash of 1e Secondary Skills. :D

Quote from: Sailing Scavenger;1024802Mutant: Year Zero also provides the option of institutionalized cannibalism.

Well, it's a post apoc game, not a hippie community simulator. :D