[Sorcerer] Cascadiapunk post-mortem
David Berg:
Right now I'm prepping a Trail of Cthulhu game. I've read most of the book carefully. I'm planning to say something like:
(Color:) "It's X-Filesy paranormal investigation in the 1930s, except your investigations lead toward mind-blowing cosmic monstrosity." (Point of play:) "The investigation is the framework that allows us to really explore and enjoy '30s Lovecraftian X-Files." (Large-scale Reward:) "When you complete an investigation, you uncover a nicely chilling Mythos plot or happening, and your characters will have travelled some distance toward madness." (Small-scale Reward:) "Each clue you follow exposes more of the GM's colorful story, and each harrowing experience the characters endure ticks off points on a scale of how crazy you should play them."
I could further specify that the task resolution system calls for depletion of finite pools, but right now that doesn't strike me as significant.
FWIW, my first instinct on "point of play" was to focus on the characters' goal: uncover the mystery. That's probably how I'd have pitched this with a little less thought.
Ps,
-David
Ron Edwards:
Thud.
There's no reward in your reward.
Try, "The more you understand, the more you're driven toward madness, as your increasing Mythos Lore skills and Sanity scores grind into one another."
Notice that I did not say, "Can you solve the mystery before you're a gibbering lunatic?" I left all strategy out of the reward statement so as to highlight the intended CA (the one I presume you were aiming at), and I left the door open for the player to enjoy the descent into madness or to try to resist it, either way.
I deliberately confounded player and character for the strong "actor/you" experience inherent in most Call of Cthulhu play.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Ah! So for describing Reward, don't bother with, "and this is why it's fun!" Just state "doing X produces Y" in terms of the fiction and the mechanics' effect on the fiction. Then let the players decide if "doing X produces Y" is something they find appealing.
In my friends' accounts of their ToC games (and the one game I played), it seemed like relevant Sanity decay happened too slowly to function as a regular reward for play, and that everyone was much more invested in finding out "what's going on here?"
What leads to your judgment that sating curiosity isn't a real reward?
It seems to me that perhaps, "My Sanity just went down by enough that I'm hallucinating!" is an instance of the game's large-scale reward cycle in action, while "we found out that Detective Tom is actually the cult leader" is an instance of the game's small-scale reward cycle in action. The mechanical enforcement of the smaller cycle is the game's instructions for GM prep ("define clues that advance understanding"), combined with the "investigative abilities always find the clue" rule. Does that work?
Thanks,
-David
P.S. Interestingly enough, I was already planning to jack up all the Stability and Sanity tolls of given encounters...
Joel P. Shempert:
Hi, Ron!
By the numbers:
1)
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 03, 2008, 08:37:25 AM
The trouble with your mermaids example is that it's Color only. I think that might be a major issue in the discussion. It worked in the Deathmatch case perhaps because the author of a game is often skilled at conveying understanding of Reward very quickly during play.
I was figuring my example would get a pass because it was an "off the cuff," silly hypothetical. But thinking about it, I think you're right to pick on it, 'cuz the sloppiness is comparable to the careless approach I described WRT the Sorcerer game, and my "RPG pitch" method in general. It's not that i only focus on Color all the time, it's more like it's haphazard; whatever comes to mind for me with a particular game, further subdivided into whatever I feel I can express succinctly. in some cases, like Shadow of Yesterday, it works well, because I am pretty jazzed and articulate about Color and Reward. In others, less so. For Sorcerer, I touched on Reward with the mention of Kickers and their resolution, but I don't think it was directed enough to take hold. Or maybe it's that the surrounding elements were covered poorly, so understanding Kickers meant little amidst our wasteland of Color, Resolution, and Short-Term Reward. In any case, I think the min take-away is that I need to be deliberate in developing a pitch, in part so I can make sure I understand the Color/Reward interaction myself.
By the way, I think I've caught the Handout Fever from you (I've seen you mention it for years, but when you actually showed some of yours, that did it for me). When I set out to retool my Cascadiapunk concept for a future game, I'm envisioning whipping up some handout hotness.
2)
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 03, 2008, 08:37:25 AM
I dunno. I suppose one should simply have the Color + Reward get-together at that point and see if it's possible to re-start in those terms, without having the fiction itself re-start. I haven't been in that situation because I'm typically willing to let the current game die and try something else. Then again, we usually start with that process anyway, so if we and the game aren't working out together, then we're sort of past that particular repair.
I think there's definitely something to be said for making a clean break if things aren't working. As I've said, with the Sorcerer game I think we were right to do so. I also feel, though, that it'd be good to have some tools in the box for evaluating and facilitating the possibility of fixing rather than abandoning.
What draws me to such a possibility is: A) when I get invested in a fledgling SIS it's painful to see it cut off in mid-stream and whither away, never to be fulfilled or resolved. I just read the collection of Young Gods from Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller, which petered out without concluding due to various creative and publishing issues. It was a great read, but so frustrating! I want there to be more, I want it to fulfill itself, but it will now never be. If anything, this feeling is even more intense with in a roleplaying setting (at least one that I really like), since it's our shared creation, not someone else's, that's stillborn.
The other draw is: B) I deal with this issue often in my longstanding game group, where a venerable campaign is out of juice (or maybe never had it), and nobody knows how to correct for it, instead continuing to slog on an hope to "make it better" by, I dunno, sheer brilliance or force of will. Not a functional way to play, I know. I wanted to explore methods of re-orienting to use in that context. In any case, what you're saying makes sense to me: do the same thing you'd do with a brand-new game. I have had a few of those "whoa, time out, can we talk about how things are going?" talks, but always with limited success. What this Color/Reward discussion is giving me is an awesomely focused framework for discussing buy-in.
3)
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 03, 2008, 08:37:25 AM
Interestingly, I have no idea what you're talking about. To me, "totally grooving on" means actually doing it with everyone else doing it too, which negates your point entirely, so that must not be what you mean by it. Do you mean "anticipating" or "hoping," or maybe do you mean "individually/privately?" I'd like to know about one of your many times in detail in order to understand what you mean at all, especially the inverse principle.
"Anticipating/Hoping" sounds about right. When I wrote that I was actually thinking of a passage that I thought was somewhere in the GNS Essays, but I can't find it. Something to the effect of getting hung up on prep and nursing a pristine vision of what this character "is," and how hes so great and you love him and everything, but in play you're paralyzed, not knowing how to make the character be as cool in action as he is in the realm of Platonic Forms.
For illustration, I'll give two contrasting examples, one that wasn't like this and one that was:
First Example: In early high school I played a Rogue (well, Scout, technically) in Middle Earth Roleplaying, who I consider really to be my first character. Before that we'd played Marvel Superheros as a mere boardgame, and my technically-first MERP character was a generic Ranger named Nathan who died on his first adventure from a random critical. That event flipped a switch in my brain, I think, as I tried to make some sense out of the senseless loss. I went "aha!" and rolled up Alex, Nathan's ne'er-do-well older brother who forsook is calling as a Ranger, but who hears of his brother's death in a foul den of orcs and vows to make good and venture forth against evil. Alluvasudden I was playing a person, with a personality and a past and all kinds of drives and issues he was wrestling with and everything. It set the mold for my entire career of roleplaying endeavors. I had a general framework for playing the character, and he by-god did stuff. He didn't just tromp around with the party like part of a damn amoeba, he split off and had his own shenanigans. He acted in surprising but character-consistent ways, seeking a kind of redemption for his brother's death, being drawn back to his old, carefree, thieving days, pissing off petty tyrants with his insolence, setting his own course through the world, not just going "so, GM, where we goin' now?" The effort was awkward, lurching, adolescent. But never passive or paralyzed.
Unfortunately I was jerked around quite a bit by the GM who, most of the time, had no interest in supporting what I was doing (supporting including meaningful opposition) I didn't get a lot from the other players, either, though there were a few memorable times. So I didn't get the kind of "arc" I might have wanted with Alex, but I still enjoyed playing him quite a bit, and what I was doing was honestly pretty revolutionary for our group. And of course nobody knew how to talk about Color, Reward, or Buy-In.
Second example: When I found a new roleplaying group in college, I joined an AD&D 2E campaign and, being obsessed with all things Celtic, made an Irish-ish Bard named Dorian. He had a tragic history: the younger son of a Chieftan, who was happy with his lady-love, until his older brother picked a fight over her from jealousy, she came between them, and Dorian accidentally killed her. So now he is self-exiled from his native land, wandering the earth in penance seeking to learn to heal rather than destroy.
Play consisted mainly of me, in-character, soliciting buy-in from numerous participants in serial fashion, and being turned down, often in bewilderment. I made my grand entrance in the campaign singing (for real) a ballad I'd been working on in my voice lessons), and people were kinda like, "ehh, OK, can we get back to the game now?" I wandered around with the party, and vacillating during characters' downtime between "oh woe is me, isn't my tragic past tragic?" and "hey, everyone, aren't I so very poetically wise and bard-y?" The GM was invested in how cool my character was, and committed to supporting his development, but damned if either of us actually knew what that meant. Mostly she just had me play through disturbing visions (a favorite device of hers) based on my past trauma, and tried to work Dorian into the "main story" of her major NPCs.
Now: in neither case did we have group buy-in to Color and Reward. The contrast I'm drawing is between the condition of me, myself, being bought in to a character such that I can actually play, and the condition of, well, not being so.
Anyway. . .hmm. Reviewing all that, it looks like what I'm really getting at (or fumbling towards) is just what you've been trying to drum into my head: that buy-in to just Color isn't sufficient, you've got to buy in to Color and Reward.
Peace,
-Joel
JoyWriter:
When dealing with buy in, it seems like there are two ways to look at it; either the players are not working at it enough, or they don't get it. To some extent the second can be reformed as "the game doesn't get them", or less judgementally by saying that the game and players are miscalibrated, they're not matching.
Now I hope you see that this problem can essentially be stated as, "the game wasn't right for your group as a whole". This is why buy-in characterises what you feel happened so well; it's just saying that what each player wanted to do did not produce (as a whole system) the game you expected to be playing.
Now you can say "tough, work at it, you'll enjoy it eventually" or just "tough, do it or the book says your wrong", but that I think is a foolish task. Something already drew you together. They have enough investment in "something" to come to your house.
I don't think it's a failure that you didn't clearly define your preferences and expectations before you started; even in more logical fields like software design a perfect specification is hard to see without actually trying to use the softwear, and people have developed proper language for expressing that kind of stuff, a language you proabably won't share. The tricky thing is that you tried (as most people do) to find out in play what you wanted from the game. Now sorcerer is not set up for this, most games aren't, excluding the common game "constantly changing house-rules for all"! (sounds a bit like universalis actually, maybe that's why I love it so much)
Now onto the bard story, why didn't people buy into your stuff? When you interact with someone, you can expect or imply a certain response: You have an idea of "how this conversation should go", and obviously someone else's perspective is probably different.
One important part of this can be reciprocity; people feel encouraged to respond in kind, so you invest time in handouts and setting structure, and they invest time in them too. This can have two parts, in that they can be in a sense paying you back for the stuff you did that they enjoyed, either through duty or gratitude, or it can be through modelling, as they see how much you enjoy a certain action, or how much cool stuff is produced by it, and they get pumped up to do the same. This kind of bouncing off one another can amplify, if the stuff you do builds into the stuff they do and vice versa, so you don't just get two good things but a continuable process! A virtuous circle.
Now obviously we want that one, right? (Some people just want applause, but I suspect that is not what you want) The trouble is that when you bring something to the table, it can imply all these different circles of positive feedback; all sorts of different responses from them would feed back well into you and lead to you two going somewhere. But that might not be where they want to go. Or perhaps one circle does go that way, but neither of you can see it. The hard part is finding responses that are not identical but complementary.
So fitting this back into practical, your playing this Bard and people hear you make this song and say "cool, but I don't know how to respond to that, so is it just for applause?". They don't know how to react in a way that fits what both of you want. So people do what they can do, and switch. Their alternative to changing the subject would be to find a way to plug what your doing into what they are doing, as with the "disturbing visions" stuff.
So to recap, as I currently understand "bye in", it's about player investment, or in other words how much their natural self expression matches up with the game, either by forcing it to, or by clever embedding (if that doesn't make it clearer stick with the above!). For a game to be self-sustaining it needs to give out to the players as they give in to it. Or the more they force themselves to comply, the more benefit they should be getting out of it.
Now these things don't have to be synchronised, and I think this is where the reward cycle comes in; people put up with using dice and letting people take over parts of their character and all sorts of other things because of the unique benefits that are supposed to come from it. Now in the perfect world people will like every inch of the system, sometimes they'll just like kickers. But reward points in the system allow you to focus on just getting that bit right, so that whatever else happens there will always be that constant plug of positive feedback to keep everything ticking over, as you solve the harder problems of getting everyone's purposes and feelings about their characters to embed nicely, not necessarally so they agree, but so they all get somewhere better.
Now in this context it seems like a reward cycle for any particular person is the guaranteed frequency of the stuff they like turning up in game, and colour is stuff that hints at stuff they will like, but is not mandated. What's the difference between colour and everything else people make up? Is it the creative content that comes ready with the game book?
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