[IAWA] Prerequisites Shared Understanding
Jonathan Walton:
Hey Vincent,
Sorry to have emoted all over that last thread. I've just been really frustrated both times I've tried to play IAWA and have further frustrated by not being able to understand what the problems have been. Here's what I really want to ask:
I feel like there are unspoken (unwritten?) requirements for the kinds of players who will be able to successfully play IAWA together. I'd rather not talk about Creative Agendas at all, because I don't think that tells the whole story, but there's a certain kind of buy-in that I suspect is necessary, which goes beyond simply being excited about stabby, sexy Conan-esque stories. The folks I've tried to play IAWA with are all over those kinds of stories (or, at least, think they are). And it wasn't at all clear to me, the first couple times I read through IAWA, that there were these prerequisites for having a good time, much less what they were. And, so, consequently, it took my group failing to have fun twice, despite a large amount of enthusiasm, for me to figure this out. Which is what has led to my supreme frustration.
Here's some examples of what I mean, which I hope you can either verify or clarify.
1. Players have to be willing to focus on the fiction instead of the mechanics, despite several mechanical incentives.
By comparison, in Dogs, the mechanics point players at where (some of) the good fiction is. If you follow the mechanical incentives that lead you towards winning conflicts, it naturally leads you to escalation and fallout and all this other good stuff. You end up committing these violent acts in an attempt to keep the peace, which circles the Fruitful Void like water going down the drain. Very easy to follow.
In contrast, in IAWA, the mechanics don't really point at anything or, rather, they point at several different things that, when taken together, seem confusing to folks trying to find the mechanical incentives and follow them to the bloody story meat and don't lead to better fiction. For instance, there's a mechanical incentive to get on the We Owe List, but that can be done by rolling dice that don't necessarily give you much worse odds, so my players were trying to hit that sweet spot of "about even odds, but we get on the list," suspecting that there was story meat hidden there or, if not, that it would at least give them a mechanical advantage. It's not as if my players are always trying to hold onto the dice with their cold dead fingers, min-maxing games and playing them tactically, but, because there are some tactical incentives in IAWA (like getting on the list), they go into tactics mode hardcore instead of playing IAWA more like they approach PTA or another game that it would be nearly impossible to approach tactically.
This long question basically boils down to: how much should you pay attention to tactics in IAWA? There seems to be a pretty low limit, in my experience, where playing tactically ceases to increase the level of fun, but I'm not entirely clear where that limit is. Are you supposed to ignore tactics entirely and just get on the We Owe List largely by accident, when your dice turn up lower? Or are you supposed to be tweaking your play here and there to try to get on the We Owe List? Does doing that tweaking shape your play to be more like what you want it to look like, Vincent? Is that why the mechanical incentive is there?
Here are a few sub-suspicions that come out of this larger one...
2. Players cannot look to action sequences to generate interesting narrative complications on their own.
In many indie games, reaching for the dice generally makes things more interesting, without players having to do much. You set stakes, and so the status quo changes, whatever way things are resolved. Players are incentivized into invoking traits that they wouldn't normally reach for, bringing out characters' weaknesses and a wider variety of personal details than might otherwise be revealed. Plus, in many games, players are incentivized during resolution negotiations to cross moral or relationship boundaries, committing terrible acts or betraying people.
None of that necessarily happens in IAWA. Instead, most everything that happens during an action sequence is fully up to the invention of the players and there aren't really mechanical incentives that lead them towards making thematically appropriate choices. The action sequences provide structure to the ensuring maneuvers, but they don't really shape their narrative content, aside from determining who has the advantage. As such, you can't go into a conflict looking for what the conflict will ultimately be about, assured that you will find it somewhere along the way. You have to bring the narrative complications yourself, by actually doing stuff, without further support or mechanical incentives.
3. Players have to be willing to attempt things that their character will be bad at, accepting the consolation prize of being on the We Owe List instead of a strong chance at victory, but also can't view this as "playing to lose," since action sequences should still be hard fought and not entered into lightly, just to get on the List.
This basically means players need to roll forms that are less optimal, not rolling their best dice all the time, despite the mechanical incentive to always take the tactic that you're best at. Clearly, this is intended to be a learned behavior, as players who refuse to roll low dice don't get their characters on the We Owe List and become "villain of the week" types, but I had some players declaring that they were going to "throw" one conflict, to get on the List, and then roll their big dice in most other occasions. Unlike in Dogs, where there are mechanical incentives that keep people from relying only on certain tactics (like always shooting people to get what you want), in IAWA, there seems to be more room for abuse here, without social contract stuff in place to keep people from attempting to game the system.
All of which is to say that, this is what I suspect about IAWA...
In IAWA, the "core mechanics" are basically the Oracles and Best Interests, which provide inspiration for the bulk of play which takes place largely through freeform. The mechanics are there merely to provide loose support underneath the freeform, structuring and providing consequences to inter-character disputes when they do arise (though not really resolving them) and determining which characters are present in the next installment. This is partially why there's so much emphasis on negotiating rather than looking to the dice to resolve disputes. The mechanics themselves don't really "do" much, which may be why folks are so confused about them.
In a strong contrast to most roleplaying games, there is no mechanical basis justifying what happens in the story. The most important aspects of the story are likely to be non-mechanical and have no mechanical weight when invoked in action sequences (for example, the ring or your desire for it). The mechanics don't take into consideration what the players want to have happen or what will be most appropriate for the story. The mechanics simply give you an ultimate victor at the end of an action sequence, based on what you've "told" the mechanics about what happening in your fiction (by assigning form dice and such). There are no mechanical choices that players can make once the action sequence has begun (unlike, say, in Dogs, when a great deal of mechanical decisions are made in the midst of conflict); they can only negotiate for a different outcome that what the dice render. This leaves many players feeling trapped, like the outcomes are fixed and they can't affect them. They don't realize that this is meant to indicate that the mechanical outcome is secondary or even superfluous in the face of the narrative outcome, which can be anything the players agree upon.
How much of this is me finally understanding what you're trying to do with IAWA and how much of this is me getting it wrong?
lumpley:
Before I can answer, I have to understand something:
When your player declares that she's going to throw one roll, then roll her best dice from then on, which is she saying?
- "I'm going to have my character act for herself and covertly from then on, whenever possible;" or
- "I'm going to roll my 'for myself' and my 'covertly' from then on, no matter how my character acts."
-Vincent
Jonathan Walton:
The first one. Like, "my character is a sneaky, selfish bastard, but I'll do something else so they can get on the list and be in the next session."
lumpley:
Cool, that's fine. That makes good tactical sense.
So, you say that they're trying to hit that sweet spot where they're rolling a d12 and a d8 against my d12 and d10, for instance, right? Is that the same thing? Like, "let's see, I'm going up against the butcher's wife, so I'm going to want to act ... for others and directly. So I go straight up to her and I say, 'look, my people are hungry, and your husband has meat to spare...'" Is that what you mean when you say that they go into tactics mode hardcore?
-Vincent
Jonathan Walton:
Yeah, that's part of it anyway. The other part is framing scenes so that they can always roll their highest dice in all other cases, right? So, like aside from the scene with the butcher's wife, they'd make sure they had plenty of sneaky bastard scenes, or whatever their trope was. Which led to characters seeming really one-dimensional after a while, since they always used the same tactics, based on where their biggest dice were. It meant that, in most cases, characters might as well have one had two stats that they rolled in every conflict. It also meant that people were often rolling the exact same dice, meaning that no one got on the We Owe List.
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