[Solar System] Rules question: spending advances
JMendes:
Ahey, :)
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on July 21, 2009, 10:41:27 AM
In TSoY I absolutely adore the idea that a player pushes his resources to the limit to get the Transcendence at the right moment, and then fails; it works for my sensibilities there. Were I playing something more television-like and stylized, something of the sort games like Primetime Adventures produce, then I would totally expect to have a great degree of freedom from fiction-based realistic sensibilities in favor of shaping the fiction to fit the style.
Ah! This! This, QFT. Makes total sense. I shall have to pondermore on it, but yes, I totally see where you're coming from.
Cheers,
J.
Ralek:
There is a lot of interesting stuff in this thread, especially in Eero's last post, which pushes my buttons in a lot of different ways, but discussing it here would be a huge derail. I may end up posting about it in AP if I do get the time to actually write something coherent.
Back to the thread's original point...
First, I just re-read the spending advances chapter of the Solar System rules and they don't really forbid advancing an ability more than once, but rather discourage it. The use of word should is where I get this from, in contrast to the pool advancement rules where it is strictly forbidden (may not is used there). This may be a semantics discussions or it may have been intentional.
In any case, I digress. I still stand by the notion that removing any and all limitations on character advancement is better overall. If those limitations have been put there so that players don't play the game the "wrong" way, by tactically gaming advances so that they can overcome any challenge thrown their way, then instead of limiting them mechanically so they are unable to do it, just tell them how to play "right", by stating that the game is not about overcoming all challenges your character will face, but which challenges he chooses to address, how and why he chooses to address them and how he is changed by those challenges and choices. By limiting players in that fashion, you are also inadvertently limiting the players who are trying to play "right".
It is a matter of system philosophy, but in the Solar System rules, that philosophy is definitely not consistent. In this specific case, you have actual mechanical limitations to try and guide play in the correct direction, but for example, the pool refreshement rules make no mention whatsoever of any mechanical limitations and instead focus entirely on instructing players on how to use the pool refreshment mechanics "correctly". This lack of consistency is what prompts threads such as this (and the pool refreshment thread posted at the same time).
Quote from: JMendes
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen
In TSoY I absolutely adore the idea that a player pushes his resources to the limit to get the Transcendence at the right moment, and then fails; it works for my sensibilities there.
Ah! This! This, QFT. Makes total sense. I shall have to pondermore on it, but yes, I totally see where you're coming from.
Makes total sense... except it doesn't. Quoting the rules:
Quote
Transcendence is the natural end-point of a character's story... It is a combimation of mechanical and narrative pressures telling the player that it is time to make some final decisions over who and what this character is about.
I've written at length about character transcendence here. So I have all this pressure, both mechanical and thematic, to end my character's story, I setup myself mechanically to end it, I maneuver my character into a scene where I want his story to end and then.... it fails. Now what? Normal play (looking for thematic material and exploring character growth) at this stage is no longer fun so all I have left to do is transcend. I continue trying until I am able to. It's like watching a great movie getting ruined by the fact that it should've ended 20 minutes ago. What exactly is so great about having an attempt at ending the character's story fail?
Some AP. My most memorable transcendence happened in this story arc. My character entered some peace talks between two warring maldorite kingdoms and convinced them that he was the true descendent of Absolon and went on to rule the two kingdoms, now united, in an attempt to rule all of Maldor and bring back the glory of the old empire. What if I failed to transcend in that scene? Where would play go on from there? Would I really have to drag on in scene after scene until another opportunity presented itself?
The reason this didn't occur to me before in TSoY is because the possibilty of failure (as in failing to roll a 7) is somewhat small in TSoY if you setup yourself right for it, but it is still there and that really feels wrong now that I think about it. Due to the limits present in Solar System, the possibility of failing to transcend is bigger here, kind of exacerbating the problem.
Now, there is something I would like to see in transcendence and that is the possibility that things don't go exactly as the player intended them to go, but not that the character's story didn't end. I would much rather have a structurally different scene type to deal with transcendece, much like pool refreshement and "normal" scenes are structurally different. The moment you try to transcend, you reach a point of no return. No matter what happens, your character's story will end there.
You can include the same pacing mechanism to determine if a transcendence is possible and whether or not it is sucessful (meaning things go as the player intended them to go). In order to setup a transcendence scene, you have to come to a point in a "normal" scene where a conflict will involve an ability you have at grand master level (you can always spend the advances right before the conflict to set it up if you have the advances required) and then declare that your character's story is at an end - you are going to transcend. Whatever happens next will depend on the conflict result. If you do happen to achieve a transcendent result in the conflict (rolling a 7) transcendence would proceed pretty much as before, if you fail, things didn't go exactly as planned. How far off from the plan would be determined by the actual result, whether or not the character actually won the conflict and a comination of input from the player, the SG and the rest of the players at the table.
Drawing back from the above AP example, my character failed to achieve a transcendent result when he presented the forged proof that he was the true descendent of Absolon and failed to convince the rulers at the peace talk. The character would've been arrested and taken away. But there are some among the present that believed the character and a secret following would eventually emerge to free and put in power the true descendent of Absolon. As time goes by the exact location or who exactly this person was is lost to time and a cult dedicated to finding him spreads. And so was born the legend of the return of Absolon...
PS - Gah... this ended up being a much larger post than originally intended. Expressing one's views on these matters is a rather non-trivial pursuit, so apologies for the wall of text.
-- Rogerio
Eero Tuovinen:
I don't disagree with any of your points, Ralek, except insofar that the way you prefer it is objectively always the best rule. Not everything needs to be rules, some things need to be method. These things are method, not rules; part of the skills of playing the game.
Particularly, if I were viewing Transcendence as a pro forma issue of good story structure, I would indeed make it a matter of declaration: get an Ability to the right level and declare your character transcendant. Actually, I think I'll put that into my TSoY book as a Secret now that you pushed me into verbalizing it, that's completely fine if a player thinks it's a good idea. Anyway - the point is, I don't consider Transcendence as a necessary thing you have to get exactly right or the game is ruined. I just don't frontload my expectations that much. Rather, the Transcendence comes when it comes and we retroactively adapt to the necessity of having the story end here and now; it's not perfectly controllable. I mention this in the second to last paragraph of the Transcendence chapter in the SS booklet. It's supposed to be an exciting and surprising creative constraint, and I like it that way. If I wanted a game that didn't set mechanical constraints on my story-creation and allowed us a perfect, non-biased environment for any story, I'd play something like Universalis or Primetime Adventures or such, games with much more fluid narrative controls.
Compare with character death, by the way - that's entirely pre-meditated in the Solar System, can't happen accidentally. I like it that the two ways for the story to end are mechanically different.
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