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.