System Transforms Situation... And Situation Informs System?
jburneko:
Ron,
I agree. But that's why I want a way to discuss that. Hell, people probably, much like stance, bounce around in a fairly sophisticated manner between using the mechanics to probe the next bit of fiction and leaping from the fiction to grab the next bit of mechanic.
But I feel like there should be someway to break that process down and discuss how various games approach it, how to design for it and how to playtest it.
I mean Dogs in the Vineyard generally can survive the blackjack dealer approach to GMing. Where as It Was A Mutual Decision can not. Why?
Quote from: Marshall Burns on December 08, 2008, 02:46:46 PM
I just get mad at people who don't assume responsibility for the way they use a system (especially if they then blame the system for it).
Yes. And while I regretfully, resentfully and reluctantly admit that there's nothing I can do to *make* them take that responsibility it bothers me when I can't even adequately describe something to myself.
Jesse
JoyWriter:
On the "climb checks when there's no wall" thing;
System-light games often don't specify a lot of the causality of the world, they tend to leave that up to player's internal feels for how those things work, and then adjudicate between them.
This means that when people see a situation, and say "what is the implied future of this situation?" it's their own one. Now when you have flat conflict with systems that do specify you get "that's not realistic" or people just compartmentalise this world as one where different things happen.
But sometimes you can run out of implied future; this place doesn't go anywhere for you.
In system-heavy games you can just go back to the rules. In certain collaborative ones you can throw it open; "Woah, I don't have a clue how this guy would deal with this." soliciting ideas with final veto. But in other games you are required to provide some kind of adversarial position and so it's all on you. In this case you sometimes have to go deep into the situation, inventing/exploring stuff until it gives you a handle, something that ties to experience or other stories you know of, and gives you a set of places to go.
Now some people take the heavy-rules approach in all their games; the role of the rules to them is to provide possible futures for them to choose between, and if there aren't any, they think it's a bad game. Some people can look at their sheet and see it as an expression of the dimensionality of their world, the routes to choose between set in stone. I believe these people simply have not discovered the other solutions to creative block, or are not experienced with them. Either that or they don't have enough authorial control to expand the situation like that; they can't say "This guy had a disagreement with his father" because the game or DM tells them their character is an orphan. (Ok there can be other reasons, including pride and false ceilings, but you get the point)
GreatWolf:
Quote from: jburneko on December 07, 2008, 07:54:42 PM
I went and read Seth's posts about that "It Was a Mutual Decision" game. Interesting stuff coming from the guy who later went on to write "A Flower For Mara," a FAR more dangerous game than "It Was A Mutual Decision." But yes, what Seth was doing so were the players in that second game I played. Only, I had two, one on each side of the table, and neither came to the realization that Seth did. The attitude of, "Wererat? I want a wererat! Let's get a wererat going!" was present and unchecked the entire run of the game and was met with extreme disappointment when it didn't actually happen.
So, I'm reading this thread and discover that, lo, my name is invoked. Oh no! And it's about that game of It Was A Mutual Decision. Oh no!
And so, I'm dealing with angst. There's a part of me that wants to be defensive. There's another part of me that wants to explain how the social dynamics of that particular game of It Was A Mutual Decision had significant impact on me, and how I see that as a different thing from A Flower For Mara....
And in the middle of all that, I think I actually figured out something useful and germane to this thread, beyond simply protecting my ego. (Grin!)
And it has everything to do with the social dynamics of a particular game, and the repurposing of mechanics.
Quote from: jburneko on December 08, 2008, 03:54:41 PM
But I feel like there should be someway to break that process down and discuss how various games approach it, how to design for it and how to playtest it.
I mean Dogs in the Vineyard generally can survive the blackjack dealer approach to GMing. Where as It Was A Mutual Decision can not. Why?
Because the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard can be repurposed with interesting effects, while the mechanics of It Was A Mutual Decision cannot.
Right now, we're doing beta playtesting on Ralph Mazza's latest game Blood Red Sands. For those of you who don't know, it's an over-the-top macho swords-and-sorcery competitive roleplaying game. It is the heavy metal apocalypse, if you follow me. And, at the heart of this game, in the conflict system itself...sits the Dogs in the Vineyard dice system.
Oh, it's been seriously monkeyed with. Now, dice also have aspects, which have special powers. You don't take Fallout; rather, your dice are Battered or Devastated as a result of Taking the Blow. But, the basic "I advance a pair, and you have to deal with it" mechanic is in full effect.
Why?
Because it's a fun system to game. It's a blast to engage this system, to figure out how to come up with clever dice moves, to try to draw out your opponent's big dice while conserving your own. It's a little wargame that you play with dice.
And so is Dogs in the Vineyard.
My point is that there's nothing inherent about judgment or morality in the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanic. That's all attached to the mechanic by the players. If the players don't connect any emotional weight to "going for the gun", then escalation won't have any emotional impact. It'll just be a matter of logistics. But it'll be fun logistics.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that certain Dogs in the Vineyard Towns are really just elaborate Call of Cthulhu scenarios with PCs that won't go insane. We ride into town, poke around a bit, and then we get to lay down some Righteous Judgment of the six-shooter variety. There's no deep engagement with the moral context. We're Dogs; ergo, we're right and you're wrong. Shooties!
And the game will do this just fine.
Now, is it what the game is "supposed" to do? Not really. Rather, the game has been repurposed. You might even call it thematic Drift. The mechanics stay put, but the purpose is altered. What is left is still fun, because the mechanic that runs it is fun in the repurposed context.
Constrast this with It Was A Mutual Decision. I'll admit to being a little hazy on my recollection of the rules right now, but, basically, apart from the fiction, what mechanical choices are there? Basically, you choose your stat, burn Trust for a bonus die if desired, add black dice if you want, and roll the dice. High roll wins. It's simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact, and functional.
And boring. By itself, there's nothing fun about this mechanic. As Jesse noted, trying to make the wererat appear is not all that mechanically interesting. Rather, the mechanic gains its impact from how it structures both the SIS and the ongoing conversation about the SIS. I'd put Spione in the same category. The mechanics (strictly speaking) are just an abbreviated game of Accordian Solitaire. It gains its impact by structuring the conversation.
See, at its heart, a roleplaying game is a structured conversation about a particular topic. The mechanics are how the conversation is structured, but that simply won't matter if the people at the table don't want to talk about the topic. Spione fails if the players don't care about The Cold. It Was A Mutual Decision fails if the players don't care about the characters.
But here's the tricksy bit. Using this definition, it's possible for the "structured conversation" to become about the mechanics. That's why Dogs in the Vineyard still works without the moral context.
So, what am I saying? One thing is I wonder if the "interesting mechanic" can become a problem if it isn't intimately tied to the conversational topic: e.g. The Cold, a breakup, etc.
Jesse, I know that you are familiar with my games, so here's how I evaluate a couple of my designs, in this light.
I think that Dirty Secrets limps along in the middle here. On the one hand, if there isn't a dedication to "the mystery", then the game will flop. However, between the Crime Grid and the Liar's Dice, there are enough "fun" mechanics that a group can play through a story of a single-minded investigator, beating confessions out of people and crawling through gunfights. The game doesn't actively require that you engage the deeper issues of judgment, power disparity, and corruption. Now, I think I'm okay with that. Some people will enjoy the game on that level, and they will be happy. However, they will also run into odd edges of the System that simply don't make sense to them. The comments in this blog post illustrate this point.
A Flower for Mara doesn't have any "interesting mechanics" that are fun to poke at. Therefore, if someone decides to play, it's because he is attracted by the topic of conversation, not by the nifty mechanics. And, really, who is going to get into a game, saying, "I really just want to play with the mechanic of confessing a personal grief of mine to everyone"? My goodness, at that point, you're halfway to being interested in the game.
So, this is perhaps a cynical conclusion, but I wonder if part of the answer to "How do I design to engage my players emotionally?" is by removing other means by which players engage. If the only way to engage with your game is through resonance with the thematic material, then potential players will self-select out.
Whether this is a good thing or not, I'll leave to others to decide.
GreatWolf:
Hey, I think that my last post needs a clarification. Here it is:
System is bigger than just mechanics.
Yes, this is probably a "well, duh" moment for most of the people reading this thread. But I wanted to make sure that I pointed it out. My discussion in the previous post was about mechanics as commonly understood (i.e. the manipulation of Effectiveness and Resources by players to affect the SIS), not System.
The reason that this is important is that most of the games that I mentioned push a large amount of their design into the social realm. The rules give clear direction; they simply aren't about the manipulation of Effectiveness and Resources. For example, in Spione, one of the rules is "During Maneuvers, every player must narrate the principals further into The Cold". That's not play advice; that's a rule. If a player isn't doing that, he's breaking the rules. As another example, in A Flower for Mara, one of the rules is "During a Spotlight Scene, if you are still holding your flower, you must play out how your character is still struggling with his grief." Again, that's not play advice; that's a rule. If you don't do that, then you're not playing the game correctly.
Of course, the problem is that we're not used to seeing these sorts of things as being rules. Instead, we tend to think of the mechanics as being the "rules" and the broader social dictates as merely being advice. But that's not accurate, and I think this idea has led to a lot of confusion about a number of quality games. Personally, I think that this is pretty nifty design space, and, honestly, I learned a lot of it from Ron's games, especially Spione. (For example, the Demographics from Dirty Secrets and the Griefs from A Flower for Mara were directly inspired by Spione.)
And so maybe this is a better way of putting my point from the post: If you're wanting your players to engage emotionally, then you need to design the social structures to encourage that engagement, not just mechanics. Part of that is being aware of how your mechanics could be repurposed by the players of the game, and then deciding how to work with that issue.
Hopefully that helps explain where I'm coming from.
Also, here's an interesting question: is the ability for mechanics to be "repurposed" a strength or weakness? I'm raising the question, partly to get a ruling from Jesse if he considers that to be off-topic for this thread. I seems relevant to me, but I wanted to see Jesse's thoughts before continuing.
jburneko:
Seth,
That is absolutely not off topic. In fact, that's the very kind of "line in the sand" I'm trying to draw. I don't think mechanics that can be re-purposed are necessarily a bad thing. It does bother me when (a) people re-purpose them with trying them out in their original form and (b) when people re-purpose a mechanic and still assert they're playing the same game.
Like, to me, the phrase, "We played Dogs in the Vineyard set in the Firefly Universe" is an absolute false statement. You can not play "Dogs in the Vineyard" without Town Creation, without The Faith, without understanding sin and the King of Life. You can use the cool Rasie-See-Raise mechanic to resolve conflicts in a Firefly Universe inspired fiction, but you are not playing Dogs in the Vineyard.
Which is odd when looking at something like Sorcerer which is infinitely customizable but not easily re-purposed. Although, CK is in the process of trying to do it using Traveler, so perhaps the operative word there is *easily* since the level of analysis and careful consider on CK's part goes above and beyond the simple knee-jerk, "Ooooo, I could totally use this to play X!" you see so often.
All that said even I've thought up "escalating" It Was A Mutual Decision to be about full on divorce and replacing the wererat with a ghost. And I've similarly considered the social ramifications of allowing Mara to be a ghost in A Flower For Mara as well. But that's cause I love ghost stories not the "Boo!" scary way but in that cool "I'm haunted by something" way.
Jesse
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