Can someone explain the true reason behind "traits" (PtA style) to me?
Callan S.:
Aye! Just like a poet could use words very, very effectively to convey their message, someone can use a system very, very effectively and yet still be like the poet, rather than a gamist player.
I wonder if naming traits is a matter of practicality (like turn order based on seating, or whatever) or if it's an authorship tool (like making thematically significant choices, or naming spiritual attributes in 'The riddle of steel' is)? Or can only the designer say?
Markus:
Hi Ron, Callan,
thanks for your replies. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I don't understand them. Well, most of it makes perfect sense to me, but I have this strange feeling that what Ron described is only part of my problem.
I have this example in mind: let's say that I favor story now over everything else, and all the people playing with me share this mindset. No agenda clash whatsoever. In a lot of systems, I'll have at least two items from my previous list jumping at me from my character sheet. Let's say that this particular system tries to do both #1, #2 and #3. I think there is a good number of systems doing just that, to different degrees.
If I understand correctly, basically you're saying, 'drive towards your goal with whatever means the system gives to you'. I'm not thinking about gamism or sim or anything else: my goal is 100% story now. Regardless of my goal however, the system is saying this to me: "do *this* and you'll roll more dice!" "Do *that* and you'll roll less dice!" (or whichever effectiveness-bumping mechanic is at work).
So my question basically remains the same: do you really find that just any kind of "this", in the sentence above, can be a functional narrativist tool? Because I'm completely, utterly failing to see how Ron's "improved initiative" example is a functional "this" in this context.
I care about your answers a lot, because once I understand your point, a whole lot of games that now are just accumulating dust on my shelf could become interesting to me again. Thanks in advance!
PS: I'm noticing that very few people tried to answer to my previous questions about traits. So I'm planning to tackle this problem from a different angle, but I'd like to hear your comment on this before actually doing it. Basically, I'd like to start a new thread here in Actual Play, asking people for examples of successful use of 'traits' in their games, with the largest possible amount of detail down to the very words spoken at the table. I'm interested in all those 'real' events going on at the table, that in most AP reports get summarized with 'I used trait X'. I suspect I could learn a lot from this. Would that be an OK thing to do here in the AP forum, given that it's more an actual play 'request' than an actual play 'report'?
thanks again!
m
Callan S.:
Quote
So my question basically remains the same: do you really find that just any kind of "this", in the sentence above, can be a functional narrativist tool? Because I'm completely, utterly failing to see how Ron's "improved initiative" example is a functional "this" in this context.
Damn, yes, I see what you mean, I think! I usually spot the disconnect your seeing...didn't this time, for some reason.
Okay, I'll describe how I engage the situation. I watched a documentary once on people who make scupltures out of wood. One craftsman described the start of the process it as looking at the block of wood and seeing what sculpture was in the wood, waiting to be made. Then it was a matter of carving it out.
So they'd see something in that block of wood that they could shape it into (you get what I mean?). The same goes for the improved initiative (in terms of how I engage this situation) - rather than Ron telling you what it means when he uses it in game, its about you seeing or trying to see what's in the 'block' so to speak. This includes the possiblity of not seeing anything at all - it might be too abstract (number nine syndrome is an example of high abstraction). Also, to see something in the 'block' requires creativity from you and creativity cannot be demanded (I could go on for a few paragraphs about that).
For example, what I could see in the improved initative 'block' instead is a character who doesn't necessarily have a problem with family or love. I think maybe he likes being a fast warrior, and like a workaholic, while he might try and placate family and love, it's potentially all token. If the character faced this, he might snap out of workaholism, or he might say in terms of whats important, hes doing it already and will keep doing it. I wonder which?
Pure invention on my part. It's not 'there' in improved initiative at all. It raised a question, a good question, in my mind. But there's nothing in the actual mechanics of improved intiative. Ron attached an issue to it(and I used part of that in forming my question), but its an attachment - its not inherant to the mechanics. It's the emotional attachment that matters.
If you wanted to do it like that, yeah, you look at the system use and you 'see' something in it (which is really just inventing something in it). This can be impossible to do if it's just too abstract - I don't have any answers for what to do in this case, except suggest rules can be written that have considerably lower abstraction levels. Also if someone else is insisting there's something in the trait, it kills the ability to creatively see something in it. Because they keep telling you exactly what to see. I don't know what to do about this at all.
From what you describe of the pools trait mechanics, it's just too abstract for you (too abstract for me as well). And it sounds like a valid system move to plug any old thing into a trait. Doing anything beyond suggesting they do something else would apply force*. There really isn't much to be done except give up on that particular system.
So yeah, it's really up to whether you can see a narrativist tool in any particular "this". If you can't, its doesn't work and that has to be accepted rather than trying to force you to see it. It's like looking at abstract art - sometimes you just can't see anything in it but blocks or lines. Some people might see all sorts of wonderful things, but sometimes it's just blocks and lines and vectors.
Or maybe I see the whole thing the wrong way or something. But that seems to be how it all works, to me.
Does that produce atleast one practical outcome for you, on how to cover this and move on? It might not be a happy one - those books on your bookshelf might be include a large amount of abstraction. But it is one way of moving on, I think.
* To do the full bookwork on this for the sake of general reading: Once in play, anything beyond suggestion is force. And if you just suggest, well they can decline a suggestion and still use Bobba Fett, leaving you at abstraction again. Finally, if you think 'Oh, maybe I didn't suggest in just the right manner' it's heading back over to force. Suggestion means genuinely accepting they might decline - its not suggestion if it involves figuring out how to get them to do something next time.
Marshall Burns:
I'm thinking that the main thrust of Ron's "improved initiative" example is that he made the character such that fighting would not be an issue at all -- such that fighting would not challenge the character, which means that A) the character will look cool in fights, and B) effective (and therefore interesting) challenges would have to come from other arenas. Arenas which, in this case, Ron was interested in exploring. I'm not familiar with the game in question, but I am familiar with that technique. In fact, in my game The Rustbelt, in chargen you set your scores arbitrarily to whatever value you want, for exactly this purpose. This also strikes me as a potential use for traits in the Pool.
-Marshall
Ron Edwards:
Hi Markus,
I'm glad you brought up the issue of "when does this Trait apply" in the [Space Rat] Femme babe action at GenCon thread, and I'll address that there. Here, I'd like to follow up on my L5R character Kakita Gan and bring this thread topic into the very important concept of Positioning.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Positioning is one of the three conceptual features of a role-playing character (yes, any character; this is high-level theory stuff). Rules for character creation, use, and change only make sense insofar as they play into these three things. Resources are like the battery for the character; if they are brought too low, the character cannot be played. Some games set them as "always on," like PTA, and recently some games have set them to fail at specific stages of play, like Polaris, but most of us are familiar with them through hit points, wound levels, energy levels, and similar. Also, in many games, lowered resources places limits on what a character can do. Effectiveness is about the impact a character can have on any aspects of play - the quintessential Effectiveness mechanic is a damage roll for a successful attack. But it applies to all rolls to do stuff, or for that matter, rules to do stuff including things which do not require mechanics like rolls or card draws. Positioning is about how the character relates to everything else in the game, both fictionally ("Loves animals, Extreme," "Hunted by his villainous grandfather") and procedurally ("spend a Story Point to say that this just-encountered NPC is a relative").
In this construction, many games use rules and points to combine and relate specific aspects of the three things. It's more typical to blend them, mechanically, than to render them distinct. So Experience Points in Champions, for instance, may be spent to increase a character's Strength or Energy Blast (Effectiveness), to increase Endurance or Stun or Body (Resources), or to modify what in that game is called a Disadvantage, e.g. reduce the harm intended by a designated enemy (Positioning).
In this day and age of RPG design, I think Positioning might rightly be recognized as the most central aspect of one's character, but as we all know, historically, the reverse has been the case. A good example: in the 20+ distinct in-setting magic "systems" in Talislanta, all of them feature a Bolt, Shield, and Wall spell, regardless of the absurdity of an "Alchemical Bolt" spell among others. This illustrates that effectiveness in the standing paradigm of combat as previously-established by Champions and RuneQuest, is more central to play than how thematic or flexible magic is. To be clear, by "absurd" I am referring only peripherally to in-game metaphysics and far more to an aesthetic, thematic standard.
OK, so what does all this have to do with Kakita Gan's traits? In this game, there are many detailed features of a character, in addition to the basic attributes and skills: Clan identity, Advantages, Disadvantages, and a list of 20 questions. My point is that most of them are very easily identifiable as Positioning, but that I am also choosing to regard all of them as Positioning, even indirectly. I suppose I could simply have chosen the +2 to inititative for its own sake, but as it happens, I chose it in tandem with many, many features of character building which maximized formal, speed + precision sword combat. On casual or raw inspection, that particular advantage is Effectiveness, but I have chosen to regard Effectiveness and Resources as expressions and reinforcements of Positioning - I took pains to make Positioning central even though the various rules of L5R are a bit of a mess in helping to focus on it, and, if I really had to pin it down numerically, tend toward Effectiveness as where most of character-building effort lies.
How about in play itself? Fighting in this game is pretty risky, so the Traits and stuff I took aren't guarantees of constant combat success. However, as far as one important element of successful fighting is concerned, speed and precision hits, Kakita Gan is about as maxed as one can get for a starting character. (There are other such elements, like going for massive damage or maximizing the interesting Void score.) My point is that the build-philosophy and choice of Traits is not about guarantees or walling off the character from one kind of problem, but it does establish him, in system terms, of having no defect whatsoever regarding a particular take on combat.
One of the most important points about this Trait discussion issue is always to keep in mind the other aspects of character design as well as whatever resolution mechanics are used. Doing so brings up crucial insights - for instance, whether the Traits affect resolution very much, or whether the Traits in question matter in a special way due to their relationships with other things, like attribute scores. For a simple example of that latter, in some systems, a Trait permits an increased attribute score which can ignore maximums arising from other factors. So one character might take the Speedy Trait and get +2 to an attribute called Speed because the character otherwise has poor Speed, whereas another character might take the same Trait to pop his high Speed above the maximum.
I hope that this shows how Traits were one piece of how the mosaic of this character comes together as a Premise-type question. Markus, you specified that we are indeed talking about Narrativist play as the straightforward goal, and I'm saying that if that's the case, then Positioning is the point of character construction, with Resources and Effectiveness not being ignored, but rather utilized as reinforcers of that Positioning.
If that element of character creation is well-understood by everyone at the table, then the rules-extent of Traits isn't a deal-breaker. You can use Traits which are extremely high-powered in how they affect the resolution system, and if the whole point of such Traits is understood to be directed toward Positioning, that's a fine thing.
That's why I tried to emphasize how, when playing The Pool, the importance of Narrativism cannot be overlooked. Not because "story is more important than rules," but rather the opposite: because if story creation is a top priority, then rules like the difference between a 1-die Trait and a 3-dice Trait can be a big part of Positioning for that character.
Bluntly, I do not see that in your account of play at all. As far as I can tell, the player saw no particular reason to use a Trait except for the dice; or if she did, then she was given no credit for that by everyone else. I can name a thousand ways for "My father is Boba Fett" to be a fantastic Positioning trait for heightening the Premise-y presence of a character in play - but unless the player, you as GM, and the rest of the group at the table want to do this and trust one another to do it, then it won't happen. That's especially important when a Trait is a relationship, because that means that the NPC is jointly played by player and GM, and so they must both be committed to its Positioning power. If they are, then the 2 dice (as opposed to 1) contributes to Premise, rather than distracting from it, which is apparently what really happened in your group's case.
Best, Ron
edited to fix initial link - RE
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