Roll-Playing Versus Roleplaying
Ron Edwards:
Hi everyone,
Those are great posts, but I think we need to let Nick respond and act as the thread leader.
I'll post just a little based on what y'all have written.
Nolan, that technique you're describing is not "free form" at all. Or perhaps it's better to say, if we want to use the term "free form," we need a better definition of it than merely "not using dice." As far as I'm concerned, as soon as we reference the quantitative/comparative features of the two characters to frame how to resolve this situation, then we've entered mechanics-land, and are well out of anything called "free form," whatever that might be.
All of which is to say, yes, I think your earlier point and my big posts above are compatible. Let's not argue because we agree; that's silly.
Frank, your post addressed Nick specifically, and I mainly agree, so I'll only say I do want to try to avoid the pitfall of saying the "higher level" of play you mention is predicated on abandoning dice. But I think I hit that dead creature a few times already with my keyboard, so I'll leave it.
Callan, my "fuck them" can apply both to play and to design. As it happens, I try to play games without doing that, by instead acknowledging and tolerating the parameters of the pretense in order to discover what might be excellent in some other part of the game. But that's just me in research + fun mode, and it seems unreasonable to ask others to do it, when they're in fun mode alone. So for anyone who's not inclined toward analysis of the game, then yeah, my advice is in fact, fuck the dice or fuck the talking or fuck some specific combination of them, if any of those things is generating Murk. Life's too short to play in that stuff, ever.
So, over to Nick.
Best, Ron
InkMeister:
Thanks for all the replies!
Frank absolutely hit the nail on the head with his post. That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Why did the GM bother to act in character to accuse we, the players, of attracting trouble to the caravan, if my own in-character response was not sufficient, but would instead depend on a die-roll (which did, in fact, succeed, Ron)? Just as you say, Frank, we could just as easily skipped the roleplay and settled the whole situation with dice, or, as I would have prefered, simply acted the situation out in character. Even though I succeeded with my die roll, I would have preferred merely acting the thing out, and failing.
Ron, your posts are both interesting. I'm not sure I've adequately processed everything, but I do very much appreciate your idea of murky versus not murky. So, from my perspective, the murk is in the fact that I'm not sure what a negotiation skill means in a game, and a lot of my post is really about trying to figure this out. So returning to my actual play example involving the caravan leader, am I to 1) roll my negotiation skill and then roleplay with the guard based on what result I get? In other words, if I succeed, is the fun of the roll the fact that I get to act out a successful negotiation? Or 2) do we not act out the negotiation at all, but instead let the roll determine what happens, possibly by deciding BEFORE the roll what the stakes are? (in which case, maybe it was simply bad play for me to invest myself in trying to act out the encounter in the first place) Or 3) do we roll only if we don't feel like acting the situation out in character?
I mean, when I made the post, I had in mind which option I prefered. But it's not clear to me how these mechanics are supposed to work. When do we use them? When don't we? What place does in-character roleplaying have in a system where there are skills and mechanics for everything? THIS is where the murk comes in for me. I'm genuinely not sure when one should roll and when one should not. If a game has a negotiation skill and some mechanic to utilize it, then am I wrong for wanting to act out my negotiations without dice? Does it mean I should be using a different system? So far, my preference is to not roll for a lot of this stuff, since it feels like rolling overrides whatever effort I put into acting the part of my character. And I say this as a person who genuinely is not interested in using roleplaying as a way to gain some advantage; I have no interest in making a character that is a total combat machine, and then using free-form roleplaying (as opposed to formal mechanical procedures) to circumvent that same character's weaknesses. I'm interested in the free-form because it feels more fun to me, thus far. But I'm interested in how rolling the dice CAN be fun, which is a big part of why I made this thread.
AS to rails and whatnot... I will gladly defer to Ron's far more extensive experience and concede that free-form is potentially more easily turned towards GM manipulation and so on.
I don't intend for this thread to be entirely about me. I started the thread with the hopes that I could get some insight into why one would prefer rolling dice to settle negotiatiosn versus acting out a negotiation free-form. As far as all that goes, I appreciate the notion of niche protection and game balance. I also happily concede that I don't really want to free-form my combats, and I'm not sure why I feel that way. Also, I am uneasy about free-form magic. Am I hopelessly oldschool? I am very familiar with the rhetoric of old-school D&Ders, but I'm not an evangelist for that style of play, though I find it attractive in some ways. I am genuinely drawn to what I know of games beyond the D&D world. I'm wanting to expand my horizons. But I'm not sure I'm at all sold on the benefits of having negotiation rolls in a game. My experiences of these sorts of mechanics seem to cheapen my own experience of a roleplaying game. As my actual play example points out... having to roll the dice was kind of a jarring, unpleasant thing. Why invest oneself if you can roll instead? And is rolling really that fun? For me, in situations like my actual play example, it's not. If the main benefit of having negotiation skills and the like is to prevent some kind of munchkinism or the overwhelming power of DM fiat, I'm not sure that's enough for me to be sold on them.
I feel some of the comments are pretty strongly stated... so let me be super clear here; my intention is to better understand this stuff, not to step on anyone's toes. Sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes. I'm not trying to tell anyone else how they should enjoy their games.
Nick
contracycle:
Weeellll.... I can suggest some reasons why the role might have been made. They may or may not have any relevanece to the actual event in your game, though, but let me throw some ideas out there.
The GM isn't playing one character like you are; the GM is playing every other character. So while your thoughts can intuitively align with your characters thoughts, this isn't true for the GM's characters; otherwise they will all be the same. In this context it's quite dangerous for the GM to simply rely on what they personally think is reasonable when it comes to portraying NPC's; after all, there are multitudes of people who fervently believe things I think are quite ridiculous, and vice versa. In this sense, some kind of randomisation serves as a check on the GM falling into the habit of making all their NPC's think along similar lines.
The second thing is that the result of the roll might not have mattered that much in terms of content, but rather only in subjectivity. Let's say for example that the GM recognised your point was good, and yet you failed the roll; now whatever happens happens, and you can go away with the feeling that the caravan master was unjust. Does that make a big difference? It provides you with a motivation of sorts. And the same may apply the other way; the GM may interpret the result as meaning that the caravan master was unconvinced there and then - blinded by anger, say - but later comes around to see your point and regrets whatever decision they made. Or the GM could decide that while the caravan master was not convinced, other people in earshot were and intervene or talk him down.
In this way, the roll can add to play, and produce events that were otherwise unexpected or unlikely if it were just an argument made player to player, and therefore be fun.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Nick,
I'm going to do something I rarely do and choose part of your post for bit-by-bit dissection. Please double-check me on whether I've disrespected the bigger picture of your post.
Quote
I'm not sure what a negotiation skill means in a game, and a lot of my post is really about trying to figure this out.
I think I understand you. I want to stress that the problematic issue on your end is what I've bolded: "in a game." Because there is no answer to this question if it's applied at this very general level that's strongly implied by that phrasing. The posts so far have been good, but limited to the necessity of saying "If this, but not [/i]this, then rolling is good," or "not good." All the ifs seems to me to be unproductive.
So what must you do, conceptually, to frame the (excellent) question in a way that can be answered? I think there are two basic approaches, both of which are good but have little traps in them too.
1. Talk about this particular application, i.e., this very exact group and set of characters and moment in the session and overall series of sessions. I often recommend this because then we can say whether the use of that rule/roll had any utility for the aims of play, and how that particular game was being used toward those aims. The pitfall here is armchair psychology, guessing and possibly accusing regarding the GM's motives, which I think lends itself to projection and self-justification. Although Gareth (contracycle) is providing a good example of how to avoid that trap, thankfully.
2. Talk about the textual game as a system and how social skill use relates to the rest of its parts, and see whether the game design itself favors the use of its own rules about this issue I often favor this approach, although in this case, huge traps await us. D&D is the Torah of role-playing discussions, with people feverishly and defensively referring to its contents but not willing actually to look at them and read them. My own threads about skill use in D&D 3.0/3.5 were quite instructive in this regard.*
My questions about the success of that roll were aimed at these issues. Telling me only whether it succeeded isn't helping much, though. I asked a number of questions about its result, including whether it was plot-consequential or not, and how people responded socially.
Quote
So returning to my actual play example involving the caravan leader, am I to 1) roll my negotiation skill and then roleplay with the guard based on what result I get? In other words, if I succeed, is the fun of the roll the fact that I get to act out a successful negotiation? Or 2) do we not act out the negotiation at all, but instead let the roll determine what happens, possibly by deciding BEFORE the roll what the stakes are? (in which case, maybe it was simply bad play for me to invest myself in trying to act out the encounter in the first place) Or 3) do we roll only if we don't feel like acting the situation out in character?
All right, let's see. I'll go by my 1 and 2 above. The part 1 has two bits to it.
1 i) You're focusing on the integration of "acting" with "rolling." Bluntly, this is not a very interesting issue. How that's done is clearly a matter of what kind of acting you want to do, and when, and how much the other members of the group feel like paying attention to it. If it really matters to you, then ask them, and I mean collectively and in person, not just the GM and for God's sake not by email. There's not much for us to say.
1 ii) I recommend going back to my questions about the roll. OK, you succeeded. What I don't know is, in terms of both the fictional events and the real-world experience of play, what happened?. Did or did not the characters leave the caravan? If they didn't, then did they get bumped off it later in order to get into the pre-planned material? What I'm driving at through these questions is, was calling for the roll a desperate move on the GM's part in order to keep you on the rails, or not? And if it was, then there's no point in talking about how it could have been done "right" or "fun."
2) The various forms of D&D prior to the mid-1980s had no skill system to speak of. Certain highly specific abilities came with certain classes, but that was it. The notion that each character's complete range of competency across a complete in-world menu of skills was absent. It didn't show up in the rulebooks until 1989. Historically, it's worth pointing out that neither the Champions-based trajectory of game design nor the D&D-based trajectory were skill-oriented for their most productive design phases, and that when the BRP model became very popular in the early 1980s, both of the other "schools" of design incorporated skills - and not, in my view, particularly well. Social skill rolls in particular were totally opaque. The AD&D2 attempt to do so was particularly badly shoe-horned into the already-existing design parameters. What did you do with them, relative to the other activities of play? To put it very bluntly, no one knows when to call for skill rolls in this game or those influenced by it. Nor does anyone know what to do with a success or failure in those rolls. The 3.0 and 3.5 material is especially contradictory and confused about this, simultaneously calling for and moderating against DM override of results.
Let me know if any of this helps or makes sense.
Best, Ron
John S:
I've been watching this thread and it is churning up flashbacks of similar problems I've had as a GM.
When I was a teenager, I had a long-running GURPS campaign with a couple friends, and we all thought very highly of "good role-playing". The "social skills" in GURPS didn't make a lot of sense to me apart from adding color, and I never used reaction rolls or the reaction table. As the GM, I just went into the shared imagined space, and when social conflicts came up, we always handled it "in character" through dialogue and narrated actions, unless someone was using a mind power or similar. I just couldn't see how social skills and reactions could be quantified without stripping out a fun and meaningful dimension of the game; it seemed like using the social skills and reaction rolls reduced rich narrative interaction and dialogue to a pass-fail die roll, and I knew nothing of Fortune In The Middle or other methods of tying the narrative interaction to the dice.
My friends were gifted thespians, which made the game come alive. For the most part, not only did they get away with role-playing social skills that weren't listed on their sheets, I probably awarded them Character Points (GURPS's XP) for it. But not having a formal system to deal with social conflicts created a lot of trouble too, for reasons already mentioned in this thread. Because we had no rules, the only methods I had to push back were acting and GM fiat. Clever manipulators (which was probably part of our social contract), the players could usually get me to say "good point" and twist my NPCs' wills around their plans. As a reaction, I basically kept most of the main NPCs out of their reach, except for a few encounters in carefully-controlled environments; sometimes these scenes were driven toward preconceived outcomes (so that the NPC could escape alive), which was both alien to the rest of our game and uncomfortable.
The other problem this created was that it eroded meaningful scene-framing. I had no concept of GM authority over the beginning and end of scenes. GURPS had an interesting system for tracking character time between adventures, which could be used for training, employment, travel, or other things. But we almost never used that system, since the players knew they could get more Character Points and social resources in the game by role-playing every single interaction. This led to some dramatic, vivid, and life-transforming events in the fiction, but it also created hours of banal, mundane, aimless scenes and pointless conflicts. While it kept the players in the driver's seat as far as exploring the fiction, it often degraded and deprotagonized their characters. To put it another way, we often played scenes where nothing interesting was at stake, just in case something interesting might come up. Is that what people mean when they talk about "sandbox"-style roleplaying?
I recognize that last part as bad prep: there probably should have been more overt stakes in the fiction generally, so that character choices in any scene will bang. On the whole, we had fun in spite of our lack of meaningful scene-framing, but so much simulation burned me out. After that, I didn't role-play again for years, not until my daughter was born. It was then that I discovered games like Sorcerer and Trollbabe that really illuminated me on the role of systems in role-playing social conflict, particularly how dice rolls can be combined with narration to creatively enrich the role-playing experience rather than emasculate it.
Nick, you mentioned a few different ways to deal with social conflict in the fiction: A) Make a skill roll and role-play the result. B) Determine what may happen and roll for a result. C) Just roll, and note whether you succeed or fail. D) Just role-play, narrating the actions and dialog without using dice. My sense is that A, B, and C would feel artificial and knock you out of character immersion, and out of the fiction, and I can see why; hence my strong preference for D in the GURPS campaign I described. Reading Sorcerer helped to knock my brain open about the use of fortune mechanics in social conflict:
"Rolls force the situation to CHANGE and victories describe the DIRECTION OF CHANGE."
I recommend you read Jesse's article on social conflict in Sorcerer, and if that speaks to your condition, share it with your GM. The fact is, most role-playing texts are not clear on the role of narration in any kind of conflict. D&D 4E allows the GM to assign a +2 or -2 modifier to a roll based on favorable or unfavorable circumstances, but that's about it. GURPS goes into much more arcane detail, but it doesn't deal with these issues as squarely as Sorcerer.
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