[3:16] Does It Encourage "We didn't roll the dice for three sessions!" Behavior?
greyorm:
Ron, that is definitely 180 to what I was thinking you meant. Thanks for clarifying!
On the topic of the thread: it seems, maybe, that the design is so lite, or rather the structure of the use of rules in play, it could encourage the "RP only sessions" depending on how one runs with the rules and where and how they use them, or choose not to. It doesn't necessarily "encourage" it the way I was originally thinking it might, but I'm not seeing any particular discouragement, either. Especially with the lack of any non-mission supporting mechanics.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Raven,
If we're strictly talking about "what it seems like to me," then what it seems like to me is, one could only arrive at that conclusion through being determined to do so. As I see it, the out-of-mission mechanics are rather easy but never vague: the NFA roll. There is nothing in the book that says or to repeat, as it seems to me, even implies that out-of-mission play would not use dice.
None of that is written as refutation of or confrontation with your last paragraph in your post. My goal here is to try to demonstrate what kind of reading, or mindset while reading, results in my take on the rules text.
When I was in Italy last week, I described people who had trouble with 3:16 in unflattering terms to three people who'd had trouble with it, and then clarified my point as follows. I asked, Do you personally agree with and support the mission of the 3:16 ship, the ideology of the military it serves, the actions taken under orders by its crew/soldiers, and the basic behavioral hierarchy of that military? They said "no" without hesitation. I suggested that being distracted by the missions as missions was tantamount to precisely such agreement and support. If they did not in fact agree with and support such things, then their characters' behavior should be quite directed and, from a GM perspective, wonderfully disobedient.
Some suggestions: hacking into the ship's computer to find out what's really on the planet as opposed to the obvious lies they were told in the briefing, blackmailing the sergeant or whatever he is that gets everyone up in the morning to let the character get an extra half hour in the rack every morning to jerk off in peace, stashing a grenade in the commanding officer's suit's tailpipe so it'll go off the next time he powers up the suit, breeding up a crop of the little alien-armadillo things smuggled in from the last mission and organizing a tournament of bets on racing them up and down the corridors, getting the uptight loot stoned on hashish and spectacularly laid by the alien prostitute similarly smuggled aboard some missions ago ... and so on and on.
In other words, as I see it, the setting and situations of 3:16 are screaming out for subversion, rebellion, or good old-fashioned malingering at the very least. Perhaps a little more so for me than for other readers, but even from others' perspective, the "hatred for home" option may be seen as a golden opportunity to foreshadow for it.
I hope it's clear too that if someone does want to play a true-blue patriot, or as is more likely from my experience with the game, a stolid careerist or a scheming rank-climber, then that's all the more fun in the context of one or more characters doing what I'm describing.
The folks I was talking to had, at this point, developed wicked expressions which I can only describe as especially Italian. Smiling, they said, "I think we're going to have to play again."
Best, Ron
JoyWriter:
I'm basing my analysis on stuff pulled from reviews and summaries about the game, but this feels like a case of people outgrowing the system but otherwise staying in the same game/world.
So you have a game system, which is supposedly a subsystem of a much larger game. That larger game must be built by the players, both in terms of some obviously system-y stuff, like making the decision Ron did about how NFA's work outside of missions, and also to do with that whole larger architecture about when we set scenes for what and what our main focuses will be, etc etc.
The game can take the pressure of that by making it "between missions", and pulling back to the track of straightforward killing, which should be fairly robust given the setting; the danger of court martial etc and the focused military life mean that the game is lent the same kind of discipline.
Of course if all your guys run away and don't fight during a mission, and then use NFA to make diplomacy with the aliens to hide them in return for intelligence that will allow them to fight off earth, then in a sense you have transcended the rules, and made it "not about the missions", but isn't that too 90-degree and abrupt a subversion?
Not necessarily, if it's what the players (inc. GM) want to do, it just means they're not going to benefit from any of Gregor's playtesting or design. It can be a dead end, if players are not ready to make such a shift in terms of game stability, (ie they can't do that and make it fun) even though they've burned their bridges as far as the original is concerned, or it can be amazing, if they are ready to do it, and they start coming up with the culture of those creatures and what intelligence they feed them, or using the abilities of the creatures and running the fight system backwards etc etc.
Basically if you put in any game, the disclaimer, "the value of this game is not in the bits I tell you how to do", then you are not determining the creative agenda long term within the game text. The reason for sitting down to play in a coherent way is that you will just start with the game as it is, but over play turn it into something else. There are all kinds of reasons people might want to go off piste, eg the reasons Paul suggests.
"We didn't roll dice" smugness is the smugness of someone who succeeds at that endgame in some fashion, who builds a diceless consensus of causality that expands the game, drifting the game by filling in the blanks and then possibly staying in those blank areas. It's a real achievement, the creation of a game system for themselves, but it's also annoying to a lot of people who like the game they've supposedly transcended.
Ok, with that as the background, if you are gently pushing people to expansion-pack your game, and be game designers, then the next question is how you help them. In other words if people sit down to play your game in the hope of moving from bug splatting to "something more" how do you help them work out what kind of something more they want and how to get it?
One cool thing about the system is that the NFA stat is defined as a negative, which is something I can't remember seeing. Surely someone has made a system where they say "for everything else, roll ___", and a few games try to fit all of possibility within a stat structure, but a negative definition is interesting because of the way it doesn't quite answer the question about what it actually does, allowing people to put in all kinds of possibilities the game designer might unknowingly preclude by the structure of their stats for skills/save rolls.
Gregor, how much more specification do you put into NFA? Do you give prescriptions for use or just examples?
For me the second important feature of that kind of game-making gameplay is to produce features that allow players to scope out other player's preferences (the mission flexibility Paul suggested can probably be used in this way) and to clue at least one player into the possibility that the game could go this way, so they will at least be looking at those cues and have information to help people recognise their commonalities and differences in play.
Ideally also I'd like some kind of scaffolding of heuristics to help people continue to design beyond the game, but I'm not sure how to express that practically in this context.
I think I've overstated the extent to which the game is intentionally designed to be incomplete, as it probably works fine as just mission + commentary, ( eg with the commentary forming a sort of "waiting for godo" critique on commentary itself by it's own ineffectualness) which could also bring inter-mission interludes into their own in a completely different way, or just as blowing up aliens all the way to a cliffhanger on hatred for home, but if I was playing it or designing an improvement, this is what I'd be focusing on.
greyorm:
Ron, I see where you're coming from given -- going back to D&D again -- there is no similar directive in the rules there about "and for stuff in town you do it this way", whereas the process and rules for playing in "the dungeon" (whatever that happens to be for any given game) are cleanly and neatly detailed, and well-understood by the group via an entire book of supporting text.
The only thing you get from the rules is that "town" is a place to rest at the inn, heal at the temple, buy/sell at the store, or find missions. There's more beyond that you could do that isn't dealt with well (or even really at all) by the text. Hence, I'm thinking, the propensity of players to enact the entirely traditional bar-fight: it's a way to bring the rules and game structure from the dungeon into the town, lacking anything better.
Afterwards and once the play group realizes being murdering, looting thugs in town is either a) limited or b) fun, you get either "we role-played like crazy and didn't touch the dice" where they abandon the unsupportive structure completely or "so we ran an evil campaign and robbed or killed everyone and everything" where they embrace it in the only fashion it can be.
Unlike this, in 3:16 "ship missions" are fundamentally just like "planet missions": Set a scene. Try to do something. Roll fighting or not-fighting. Repeat. And if there are alien bad guys around, you drop into the mission "fight the aliens" sub-system. Interestingly, I think this might be 180 to what Joy is seeing above in terms of the system and NFA.
And I thought about that earlier today, too: "Aren't the missions the game? Aren't they the core system?" But after consideration, I don't think so. Which is why I tagged it as a subsystem to the main system of play in the game. But I can also see that might be completely cracked.
I say that because: is D&D's combat system core to the game and the experience of the game, instead of just an integral subsystem? I would argue "yes", given that D&D is a game about killing monsters and the entire system is built on that.
The combat system and everything around that IS the game: not skill checks, or Attribute rolls, or something else. Because: Explore a dungeon room. Fight a monster. Roll fighting. That's the core gameplay right there, and anything else that might be involved is subservient to it.
And there is no "out of the dungeon" system/ruleset/ideal for play, play is supposed to take place entirely in the dungeon, with "town" being this between-sessions thing.
Isn't 3:16 the same, though? That's where the idea gets trippy for me, because it feels like: yes, but no. Not in the same way. Possibly because it is so much simpler in 3:16, with just the two types of checks? Or is it more? Or maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page