[TSoY] I fought "The Party" and "The Party" won
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi,
Absolutely. Which is why I said upfront I didn't know all the details. There was of course a great deal I don't know about that happened at the table.
I was only addressing the details I was provided.
My only other point -- to reiterate -- is that sometimes Players (whether new to these games or not) don't always know how to articulate their character's motivations. Especially if they've been playing games that required taking guesses at the GM's plot for years. So that feeding the player dollops of, "Oh, you want to protect the Zar, cool... here are some Zar, protect them as you see fit" and letting them find their way in this manner let's them find their way in a very different set of behaviors.
I've seen this slow process myself -- both in myself and in others.
So, while the Player might have been confused, sometimes being patient is all you get. I know it was a convention game, so it feels like the clock is on. But giving a player who is struggling dollops while letting him watch how other people are seizing forward motion is sometimes the key.
But that word "sometimes" is important. Different people, different circumstances. I was only pointing out that details provided by Joel, she was in fact doing what she said she wanted her character to do.
CK
Joel P. Shempert:
Hi, Chris!
You're making a lot of good points. I don't think there's many lessons I haven't heard before, but there are a lot that I haven't quite internalized. Hearing your story, I'm tending to conceptualize it as my being a few years behind on the same exprience track that you're on (more or less).
For instance, my first new-fangled game was Primetime Adventures. I looked at it and said, "Hell, the Producer doesn't do anything." So I tried to run it GMless so I could play a Protagonist, and it was problematic as hell.
So anyway, I've learned a lot since then, but I haven't (due to some frequency and regularity of play issues) actually played that many Indie RPGs, and certainly not in a sustained manner. So I do fall down a lot on a lot of stuff, including "putting pressure on the PCs moment by moment."
Looking back I see that lack in both my TSoY and HQ games at the con (the Heroquest session I'll write up in due time; it went pretty well, in fact, but then I didn't actually get a mixed group of Lunars and Heortlings). I had an OK conflict web for the TSoY game, but I didn't really do much with it, except "this group is attacking that group!" If I had done exactly what you describe, it could have been a much stronger game.
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on April 07, 2008, 06:42:47 PM
No player can "create her own story." I'm being very blunt and literal about this, just stating a fact. So I'm not trying to "catch" anyone here in a misstatement. I'm just stating a fact.
[SNIP]
I want to clarify that the GM of these games never feeds anyone a story. A story is the accumulated events, and if we're making them up as we go along, there's nothing to be gained by expecting any character is going to have one kind of story or another. All the GM can do is keep putting pressure on the PC with fictional elements. If these fictional elements are call backs and heightening of ideas, NPCs, events and so from earlier in play, all the better.
So, when you wrote you "fed" Petrea a story I get a little jumpy. Now, you might think you didn't mean it that way.
Well, I didn't mean it that way in fact. I meant to say "story elements" (still probably not the best choice of phrase), and the practice I was getting at was no more than giving a player a situation: "This thing is happening, right here, right now! What you do?"
In a word, Bangs.
Still, though. . .you make a good point about getting sloppy with our concepts and terminology. I got caught up in Gilbert's phrasing and repeated it, and as we both used and reinforced that phrase it distorted the concept we were talking about, and in my case at least caused a slide in my thinking about the concept as well. I used to refer to the games I played that way when talking to non-roleplayers, as in: "We play my friend Colleen's story one week, then switch and do my story the next week." it seemed useful shorthand at the time, and I hate the term "campaign." But in the end it really distorted my thinking about the fundamental act of RPGs and whose "story" it is.
So quite right, I shouldn't let myself fall into a habit like that.
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on April 07, 2008, 06:42:47 PM
So, when you wrote you "fed" Petrea a story I get a little jumpy. Now, you might think you didn't mean it that way. But let me point something out:
Petrea declared that her character was about Protecting the Zar. And then, later on, when the Zar enter combat she makes a tactical decision to stand back and heal as needed. And this disappointed you for some reason. I don't know why. What did she say she wanted her character to do? Protect Zar. What was she doing? Protecting Zar.
Now YOU as a player might have made a different choice. But you weren't the Player. She was.
Moreover, I'm a little confused as to how the battle played out. Were there other PCs involved, or just NPCs against NPCs. I ask, because the way you spoke of it, it sounds like NPCs vs. NPCs, and yet -- you "wished" the battle had gotten bloodier. To which I can only ask (if that was indeed the case), "Why didn't it get bloodier?" I mean, it's your choice, right?
OK, I should clarify what was actually happening in the game at this point. I'm sorry you're having to jump at shadows on account of not having been there and relying on my incomplete description.
It wasn't a huge, massive battle with whole armies arrayed against one another. It was a small, struggling outpost in the jungle raided by a modest war-band of tribal fighters. SO while I never nailed down exact numbers, the forces were measured in terms of "a band of raiders," or "a handful of Zaru, or "a squad of soldiers."
I broke the action into chunks in terms of location around the camp, with separate contests all around as we jumped from location to location. Wind, Duval and Griskin were in the makeshift manor house on the southeast side contending with guards in there, Thag and the Chieftan battled in the center of the camp, and Long-Whiskers was in the northern quarter seeing to the Zaru's safety. WHen a motley force of Zaru rose up, they rushed to the center of camp where the Ammenites had the Chieftan surrounded, and a small part of the Ammenite force broke off to put them down. So for that engagement we were talking about total combatants that you could probably count on your fingers. A sningle Ratkin could definitely (especially TSoY) do some good.
You're damn right I didn't like the choice she made. Yes, it was hers to make. I still have the right to judge it, which is what this discussion is about. There's a fairly narrow set of parameters, I think, for when a choice of "I do nothing" will be satisfying to me. There were certainly a lot of options she could have gone for that didn't consist of "nothing." She didn't even boost the Zaru with "Zu."
It seems (though I can't speak for Petrea) that she wasn't impressed with the drastic immediacy and sheer crisis of the situation. This wasn't "a bunch of people are fighting, including these people fighting those people." This was "the pacifist slave laborers armed only with artisan tools are desperate enough to attack trained soldiers."
The reason I didn't just have people start dying was. . .well, I felt like I needed to roll for it. I had a Contest between the two NPC groups (Scrapping Untrained (0) vs. Spear-fighting Competent (1) plus bonus die for better weapons), which both groups failed. In hindsight (again with the hindsight!) I could and maybe should have just said what was happening and only brought in the dice when a player took action. I definitely could have introduced the strife I wanted that way, and I think that's an interpretation within the scope of the rules. Just like in Heroquest--which makes it ironic that later that day I reviewed Mike Holmes' HQ Heresies in preparation of the next day's game, too late to save TSoY. I just got stuck in that old habitual thinking, like the mechanics "model" the world or whatever, and if something of questionable outcome is happening, you "gotta roll for it."
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on April 07, 2008, 06:42:47 PM
If you describe the battle about to be lost and then offer up some prize that can save the day, my guess is she would have jumped at it. If you say there's a wizard wiping them all out, and she's seeing the Zar fall, and if that wizard falls the Zar have a chance, there would have been a narrative focus that would have given her direction in her action. Now she's got pressure -- can I get to that wizard before the Zar are killed. And what will I do to make that happen.
Was there anything like that? Or was it two armies fighting. Because if you had removed the plot shenanigans from The Lord of the Rings and dumped Frodo into a big battle between Gandalf and Morder -- sure Frodo would have participated in the War of the Ring... but he would have lasted two pages and it wouldn't have been much of a story.
Honestly the reason there was no One Ring or Holy Grail or whatever was. . .I didn't think to put it in, for no good reason. I was so focused on setting up the network of conflicting people 9good in itself), that I didn't think to have anything wondrous or powerful in the fiction. . .or anything pivotal or sought-after at all. I guess in trying to avoid the traditional "quest for the McGuffin!" trope I over-compensated. Even though there was plenty of awesome stuff lying around to pick up and run with. I came to the game really jazzed about the sheer cool of stuff like Zu words and Moon Metal. . .but without the faintest idea how to bring them interestingly into play. So that sie of things kinda fizzled. Blegh.
So there you go; I'm not sure if that clears up your puzzlement, but i know your posts have been enlightening for me. We probably don't need to harp much on these issues (I've already written about the problems and hangups of the game at a length that sort of distorts their magnitude in my memory), but I'll be interested to see what you make of my conclusions and discuss any directions that folks want to take from here.
peace,
-Joel
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Joel,
I want to move on... I really do. But it's stuck in my craw. And now I'm being an obsessive ass. But I can't help it....
The Player did not say she was doing nothing. She said she was waiting to help the slaves if they got hurt. That is a choice. She might have been passive in her body language, she might have spoken softly. I don't know. But I do know is that she made a choice for her character that was active.
The ability to see that as active and to go "Ah! I'm close!" is vital to spotting the cues and clues the player is giving.
Now that you're past the "rules mimic reality/roll dice to determine every effect" issue, you can have NPCs drop like flies in such circumstances. My guess is (we'll never know) the PC would have taken the next small step of healing the slaves... and as the crisis grew she might have done more.
But the key would be to follow her choice instead of saying, "Can't she see how cool this is?"
This kind of play requires a good deal of back and forth. The Player tosses the ball to the GM, the GM tosses it back. And you catch the toss you're given.
Not all tosses will be genius, and certainly not all tosses will be what anyone at the table expected.
You might thing I'm trying to discuss parallel time streams that never happened, which isn't my point.
I'm layering on the words in an attempt to make you see there are opportunities in choices that we might not see yet as GMs, and part of our job, beat by beat, is to take that catch from the player and see where our next toss leads.
The fact that you're saying she chose to do nothing makes no sense to me. She said she wanted to heal the slaves if they suffered -- and they never went down! I now understand why they didn't.
But the important point I'm trying to make for future circumstances is that she tossed the ball to you, and you didn't toss it back.
Christopher Kubasik:
And here are some game prep threads you might enjoy:
This is the four thread Sorcerer Prep Ron did with some folks online to show how he sets up a game:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=753.0
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=770.0
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=828.0
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=876.0
And this is the prep I did for a Sorcerer & Sword convention game:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24800.0
I bring them up because both preps show what kinds of details a GM can add (in terms of objects and situation) that give specific fictional elements that the Players can grab onto and focus on to help move forward in the fiction -- both in character creation and during the course of play.
CK
Joel P. Shempert:
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on April 09, 2008, 12:48:52 AM
And here are some game prep threads you might enjoy:
Thanks. I'd already hunted up the Art Deco threads and I'm on the third now. It's really inspiring, helpful reading. I'll read yours next.
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