Odd Narrative Habits
Cliff H:
Quote from: NN on January 03, 2011, 07:52:32 AM
Are you absolutely sure the players like the setting? Slapstick seems to be an opposite to Lovecraftian.
Totally true, and my mail reason for not wanting to see it in the game. It's not that I object to goofiness out of hand, but it seems wholly inappropriate in this case. However, the players absolutely love Lovecraft, and have been begging me to include something mythos in a campaign for the better part of a year. Prior to this we were playing Shadowrun, and one of the players kept sending me private email about how well the Great Old Ones could serve as the returning horrors of Shadowrun, and hey since I love the post-apocalyptic genre so much I might as well wreck it all with their return. Come on. Please?
Additionally, the verve with which this same player has launched himself at any text that seems heretical, all in an attempt to pump his Mythos lore in the game, and has wholly embraced the madness mechanic I wrote to deal with the side effects of such study, says that he's quite into it.
It's odd. When I think about it, the group is perfectly capable of recognizing when things are taking that turn for the horrid. I deliberately change my language to use some of Lovecraft's phraseology when it happens. With that cue, they often respond "in atmosphere" the whole way through. Once a die roll comes up crap though, it trumps everything. It's as if consistency isn't as important to them, which is entirely possible. Of everyone, I'm clearly the one most concerned with seeing the game as an exercise in character exploration heavy with whatever mood happens to be appropriate. The more I think about it, The rest seem content to keep it at arms length, engage it certainly, and sometimes have moments of brilliant play, but still ultimately look at it as a vehicle for fun. If fun means confronting a slithering horror from beyond the stars, awesome. But if there's additional fun to be had by shitting yourself when confronted by such a thing, well, fun's fun. That's a guess, mind you, but it does seem to reconcile the eagerness people have to gather juxtaposed with their reluctance to take it truly seriously.
aleric:
Quote
One of the players asks to make a perception check to see what it is, and blows his roll. Instead of peering at whatever it was that the villain was looking at, he decides to stare directly into the sun for as long as he can without blinking.
Perhaps the problem is in setting how tightly bound the player's statement is with the characters 'reality'. Players have a need to blow off steam, make exaggerated statements..., but instead of letting this cause a gap in the game you could join in the laughter (or at least wait for it to settle) and push back gently - ask the player something like: So that's what your character feels like what happened - does it make sense for them literally?
The goal is to expose the characters interior world as a buffer between player statement and game narrative - so that players can free associate while avoiding sliding into either the gutter of stupid deadly (GM: OK, your character is permanently blind now), or the gutter of silliness.
Callan S.:
Quote
Once a die roll comes up crap though, it trumps everything. It's as if consistency isn't as important to them, which is entirely possible.
I think it might be worth considering that your perception roll and it's attendent looking at the sun without blinking - it doesn't have anything much to do with "hard choices and character growth through pain".
It really doesn't. The perception roll doesn't involve any hard choice or character growth. It's just this rolling to see how events occur, regardless of character choices. It's almost the anti-choice! In a way your actually breaking the mood to begin with, then they are following your lead. Well, mood might not be the word for it, but what your there for.
Here's an idea to add hard choices, to a degree, to the roll. Add something painful they can do if they fail the roll, to pass it. Like BEFORE you roll, you say that if they fail, they could go climb a wall nearby for a better vantage, but it has shards of glass embedded at it's top to keep people out (I've seen that done in RL), and they will cut up their hands in getting the info. Remember, say it before rolling, because it's part of the rolling process.
Now there's a painful choice to either take, or avoid because it's too painful. But it's there. It's not just rolling about stuff that happens whether someone makes a choice or not. Anyway, it'd be easy enough to try just the once, atleast.
Cliff H:
Quote from: Callan S. on January 03, 2011, 03:06:31 PM
I think it might be worth considering that your perception roll and it's attendent looking at the sun without blinking - it doesn't have anything much to do with "hard choices and character growth through pain".
It really doesn't.
Absolutely, inarguably correct.
Allow me a very brief sidebar here. I used to think I had a pretty wide exposure to RPGs. Of all my gamer friends I certainly had played a wider variety than the rest, sometimes by a wide margin. But then I found this place, and started scanning the Actual Play threads and discovered that not only had I not played the bulk of the games discussed, I hadn't even heard of most of them.
The reason I bring this up is that while I do prefer to run games in which the characters have to make hard choices, the idea that the game mechanics have anything to do with said choices is quite new to me. I discovered The Forge by reading Sorcerer, which is absolutely nothing like any game I've played previously. I've been involved in games that have mechanics that might tweak behavior: arcana in 7th Sea, honor in L5R, even something more crude like fear checks in Ravenloft. But these games have, by and large, still provide a basic resolution engine and leave matters of personal drama to the realm of role playing.
So, while I'm trying to work matters of personal conflict into the game, the die rolls themselves have not, historically, been part of that process. As I read up on some of the games discussed here, I begin to wonder if maybe I'm just trying to make a game do something it's not meant to do, which is perhaps part of the problem. The only way to know is to grab up one or more of these titles and give them a shot. Sorcerer, Riddle of Steel, Dust Devils, and Dogs in the Vineyard sound like especially good candidates for this, though if anyone has any other suggestions, I certainly welcome them.
Quote
The perception roll doesn't involve any hard choice or character growth. It's just this rolling to see how events occur, regardless of character choices. It's almost the anti-choice! In a way your actually breaking the mood to begin with, then they are following your lead. Well, mood might not be the word for it, but what your there for.
Also quite true. This is another case of old habits and mindsets. I'm actually moving away from calling for die rolls for lots of things, especially search/spot checks. Not only does not rolling save us some time, but as you note, rolling to see if something occurs (and in this case, seeing if I hand them plot information) comes off as an impediment. If they blow the roll, they don't get the information I want them to have, so I need to contrive some alternate way of them getting their hands on it. Kind of shitty from my side of the screen, but I've found that:
1) My players like to roll dice
2) They feel like I'm cheating by just handing things over to them when a more traditional game would have them roll
Mind you, I'm a part of that too. My habits accumulated over decades have left me calling for certain kinds of rolls just because I've learned I should. So yeah, there's lots of times dice clatter on the table to determine small events that have no emotional weight. That spot check is a perfect example.
Quote
Here's an idea to add hard choices, to a degree, to the roll. Add something painful they can do if they fail the roll, to pass it. Like BEFORE you roll, you say that if they fail, they could go climb a wall nearby for a better vantage, but it has shards of glass embedded at it's top to keep people out (I've seen that done in RL), and they will cut up their hands in getting the info. Remember, say it before rolling, because it's part of the rolling process.
Now there's a painful choice to either take, or avoid because it's too painful. But it's there. It's not just rolling about stuff that happens whether someone makes a choice or not. Anyway, it'd be easy enough to try just the once, atleast.
I like this idea. I like it a lot. As a general mechanic it seems absolutely fascinating to me and rife with a ton of potential. I don't think tying it to wounding will work with my particular group, since members seem to either not care about taking damage or do everything possible to avoid it, and 7th Sea's damage mechanics are intentionally quite forgiving. However, I have noticed there are things they're less willing to endure. For example, the second failed roll I cited was actually a tense moment, since they were faced with the possibility of having to kill someone they'd come to like quite a bit in order to fulfill a bargain they made with someone they most certainly did not. They dealt with the devil, and if they couldn't get their friend to shut up, they were going to have to kill him. That actually made them quite uncomfortable (until the one player started asking if the man's mother was "bangable").
Now, how to work some sort of accepted pain into that situation (since failing would put them in a personally painful situation) eludes me at the moment, but perhaps abstracting it into something as simple as a complication point, which gives me license to make something go wrong in the character's life, might be a way to go. This way, I don't need to figure it out right then and there if nothing comes to me, but it's still something that they know is coming. Accept a complication point, and you get a boost to the roll. Maybe even you automatically succeed, but fate's going to even the scales eventually.
Thanks very much for this. I'm going to try introducing that into the next session and see how it goes. Giving the players something mechanical to ponder in the context of a failed roll might redirect their attention from the gags to the consequence, and the choice presented to them. The more I think about it, the better this sounds. I'm really excited about the possibilities. Thank you again.
Cliff H:
I wanted to drop a quick thank you to everyone for the advice and especially for pointing me toward certain theories and the resources that explain them. Having gone over creative agenda more, I'm pretty well convinced, looking through these very green shades of mine, that the lack of one is really at the root of everything here. And I point to an episode that happened just before we began play a couple months ago as the definitive proof.
People were arriving, pulling out characters, assembling dice, and spending xp from last session. While doing so, we usually chat until everyone's ready. I remarked that there were countless times when I tried to run something like Lord of the Rings but wound up with Royal Highness instead. There were nods and agreement all around.
That seems like a textbook example of a lack of uniform creative agenda, if I'm understanding things right.
I've got a small group of guys that are going to get together regularly outside of this campaign to help me playtest a game I've been developing. There's a good chance I'll talk more about that in the Development forum sometime, but I mention it here because even though it's a playtest we're still going to try playing a campaign, just with the rules open to more scrutiny and adjustment. However, this time, by my insistence, before anyone even thinks about who they're playing, I've asked we begin by agreeing on what we're playing, i.e. state and set a creative agenda. I expect some pushback on it, but I really think it'll help our play immensely. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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