[IaWA] Breaking Bad Habits
Mike Holmes:
Good answers, but we're getting caught up in minutia here. The question of where the line is drawn for uninvolved characters lies is one I'll leave for another thread. What's clear is that we can negotiate having accomplished some things as a result of narration. Not just rescindable promises, but actual acts that occur following the contest. That's good, because if it's just promises, then the problem is worse, that nobody really has anything that they can negotiate about.
Side question here... if we negotiate that I get the treasure, can somebody come in with an ONYDA? Or are negotiated results inviolable from being contested?
Anyhow, leaving out that case, we can see that we can position, not just promise position. But the question then is whether or not the positioning gets you any actual advantage. Let's say that we agree in negotiation that you end up on a desert isle, my idea being to try to prevent you from returning and killing my character or something. But then you simply declare that your character is returning. To which I have to declare ONYDA to stop it, right? And then I'm right in the fight that I wanted to avoid in the first place, no?
Maybe I'm being dumb, and not seeing an obvious counter-example... can you give me an example of an effective use of positioning? Where I actually give myself an advantage of some sort other than getting an object? Or where I disadvantage you somehow?
Mike
John Harper:
To do that, Mike, you win the conflict series, then you get the stick. Let's say you choose exhaustion.
"I leave you, dehydrated and scorched by the sun on this remote island. So long, fucker."
They lose two die sizes, and are one step closer to death. They're in a bad position in the fiction (marooned) and in a worse-off state mechanically (fewer die sizes, and thus closer to real death).
Now, yes, they can just say "I get off that island and I come and kill you anyway," (which would be super lame, but let's pretend that there's a little more effort there, in the fiction, to carry this off). So they show up, dehydrated and exhausted, and try once again to kill you. You can't make this impossible for them to attempt, no. But you have made it dangerous and pretty unappealing by winning the stick earlier and putting them into a weaker position.
lumpley:
Here's a whole category of examples. The rule is that you can say ONYDA only if your character's able to interfere. So by negotiating you onto a desert island, or locked in a cellar, or naked and in chains, or unarmed, or whatever, I set myself up to take action without your interfering.
Similarly, negotiating to my own advantage. If in negotiation I can set myself up to interfere with a future action otherwise outside of my ability, that means I get to, where otherwise I wouldn't.
(Are you worried about how we enforce those disadvantages and advantages? I'm not. When you agreed to be stranded on the island, you knew that it'd mean I'd get away with some shit without your interfering. That was implicit in our negotiation, sometimes explicit, and you knew it when you agreed to it. We don't need to enforce it because you bought into it up front.)
-Vincent
John Harper:
Er, yeah.
I like what Vincent said better. He's talking about negotiated outcomes and I was talking about "winner says how you're exhausted," so they're not exclusive -- but his point is more apt, I think.
Mike Holmes:
OK, now we're getting down to the crux of things.
If I understand correctly, positioning is advantageous because we expect the intent of the maneuver to be understood, and we expect that players understanding it won't find some way to circumvent it.
Hmm. Let me try to elicit the principle behind this in greater detail. Let's say that I maneuvered you onto a desert isle, but forgot that there's a ship that we narrated that stops there regularly, which gives a player an easy explanation for how his character might return. So do you narrate returning? It's plausible, and I just forgot about it. Or do you narrate that you miss the ship, because you're lost on the island, understanding my goal as a player in stranding you on the isle?
Does the player who has his character stuck on the isle have a mandate to reinforce the negotiated agreement? Or does he have a mandate to do what he needs to do to advance his character's position, still respecting the general limitations of the negotiated agreement? Are we competing, or cooperating?
This is, in fact, the problem. When playing it doesn't seem clear to me what the player's mandate is. Do I punish the other player for having made a weak agreement? Or do I try to support his play by reinforcing his intent?
I'd posit that the notion that you seem to have that everyone will understand implicitly the intents of the other players is problematic. Sure, sometimes it's pretty obvious. But if I were playing, I'd probably drone on and on explicitly about my intent, just to be sure that it wasn't misunderstood. Not because I want players not to "cheat" by feigning that they don't understand the intent. But because I'd feel bad if they accidentally violated my intent, because they didn't understand it.
If I don't make my intent understood, do I have a leg to stand on here? Or is it just my fault that I didn't make it clear, and I have to suffer from the fact that my move didn't accomplish what I wanted it to accomplish?
As a player on the recieving end of a positioning, I also have to be very careful, because if I maneuver my character such that it violates some intent that I don't understand, then I'm a great big jerk. But not being sure, this means that even if I think I'm doing the right thing, if my maneuver gets anywhere near yours, I'm going to feel uncomfortable. I might not understand your intent with the negotiation.
And I don't want to put other players in that position, so I'd probably not do any real positioning myself.
Worse, work this all back to the negotiation phase itself, and how comfortable am I negotiating? I have to try to understand your intent so that I know what it is that I'm really agreeing to in terms of limitations on my character or advantages for yours. If I'm at all hazy on this, I'm simply not going to agree to your negotiation terms, and make my decision solely on whether or not I feel like taking the punishment of injury or exhaustion. If the object of the contest is valuable enough to me, I'll simply fight till I'm reduced on dice to being out.
Or, again, that's an impetus I feel when playing. Instead, since I don't want to make the aesthetic faux pas of forcing my opponent to beat me up again to get what he wants, I may actually agree to the negotiations, and have to feel iuncomfortable that the other players don't understand the intent of what it is that I've agreed to. Knowing that it might be violated immediately, and that I don't have a lot of recourse.
Or do I? Is there some mechanism by which I can protest if I feel that my positioning has been violated? Do I just speak up and let the other player know how I feel? And then he explains that this isn't what he agreed to in the negotiation? And then we have to negotiate all over again? Or... what?
I'm sure that your urge at this point is to respond, "But this hasn't been an issue in actual play." Again, no, I don't think it would ever get to these theoretical points. But that's because players are uncomfortably agreeing to things that they don't feel are going to be honored, or at least don't have a way to enforce.
Again, this is not a theoretical observation, this is precisely what John was saying that he was feeling, and precisely what I agreed that I was feeling, and what I'm going to hazard that others have felt, too, from their responses (which, though less pointed on the subject, seem to confirm what I'm talking about).
What I'm doing here is, in fact, trying to understand things about the system that will get rid of that uneasy feeling. But what you're telling me, it sounds like to me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, is that if we just have faith that it'll work out all right, it will, and we won't have those bad feelings?
I, for one, would prefer a mechanical explanation of how the system supports this stuff.
I think that the problem goes back to precisely what I indicated before. Basically I'm feeling a gam/nar incoherence here. I'm feeling that I should compete, driving my character to where I as a player "win" against the other players. But then all of the aesthetic notions are telling me that I'm supposed to be collaboratively creating a story, and I'm a big jerk if I let my competitive spirit get in the way of that. Or if I feel uncomfortable because I don't feel that the rules are supporting my maneuvers.
Now, that said, I don't know that I have a solution to the problem. That is, I could propose that you come up with rules for maneuvers that define the outcome mechanically so that everyone knows what it is that they're agreeing to. Like, for instance, you could have one negotiated outcome be that the other player has to spend his next "turn" so to speak, defining how his character gets out of the situation into which I put him. Meaning he can't affect anything else, he just negates that maneuver... mechanically the player "loses a turn" so to speak. Or the player might get some sort of penalty dice (or I get bonus dice) that come into play if you as a player attempts to overcome the situation that was negotiated, and goes against me.
These examples are all slanted toward our actual play example, and I'm sure I could come up with a dozen more rules options if pressed to do so. The point being that there can be a fine detail in coming up with mechanical support for negotiations that would allow them to remain very versatile in supporting the color of the negotiations. But that's the point, isn't it, that we worry that, if I have a lot of definition for types of negotiated outcomes that the players will forget the fiction and only negotiate the mechanical outcome, perhaps tacking on the color after the fact.
What you want is for the narration not to be color, but to have the effect that it "should" have in play. Yes? And that is a conundrum. How can I have strictly regulated competitive play, and also have all possible in-game effects accounted for, and yet not have to be playing Rolemaster to accomplish this, and thus have the fiction handled by the system, and not by the players?
Gamism is a splippery slope to narration being reduced to color. I can understand if you back off from that. But then I'm feeling very uncomfortable in my gamism.
I'm suspecting that I'm not supposed to be playing gamism at all with this game. That, in fact, the way y'all play is very narrativism, and all the ONYFDA is all just fun posturing, and not actually trash talk regarding the competition. What might be most effective, instead of going with more mechanical definition of maneuvers to support gamism, is a modification of things so that people aren't propelled into gamism, like I've observed folks doing. Basically when Em saw us playing, and got the impression that we were playing it "wrong" what she was seeing is gamism, as opposed to the narrativism that your groups brought to the game.
As an independent player of the game, coming in with no preconceptions of what the game was like (I had heard it had these things called Oracles, but didn't even know what that meant), I'd think that the data that I'm presenting you with should be more indicative of what most players will do with the game than what your own play of the game produces. But, who knows, maybe I'm a raving gamist, who applies that standard to every game I play.
I'll leave that for you to decide.
Mike
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