Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse
contracycle:
Quote from: Alfryd on March 27, 2011, 11:03:33 AM
Of course, this ideal raises all kinds of practical difficulties, and gets even uglier when you toss in the insistence that players must know, and have control over, nothing the characters wouldn't. Because then the GM has to keep the machinery of an entire universe in their head, and the players have to essentially take it on trust that he or she is some kind of Mentat paragon always capable of maintaining a perfect separation between (A) what would genuinely seem most likely to happen on the basis of pre-established knowledge of the world, and (B) what he or she would personally like to happen as a real human being. (I would personally contend there is such a distinction, but the temptation to mix the two is perfectly real. And of course, depending on your overarching goal, may not be a bad thing. But it ain't Sim.)
Uff. I dispute that. First of all, I think the logic of "what would happen" is weak. All too often that means "what would be the most probable outcome", but reality is more complex than probable outcomes. What if the odds between two outcomes are 51% and 49%? To assume that Sim MUST take the former when the two are so close is very limiting.
Second, I don't think that individual preferences are ruled out. If "what would happen" was all that was inviolved, most FRPG sim play would be reduced to peasants harvesting their fields. After all, that's where you'd most likely be born, thats the limited world you would most likely encounter, and maybe if you're lucky one day you'll get to go to the town fair 10 miles away.
So, I think there is a lot of personal preference type choices being made in sim, and this is not inherently flawed. As long as it maintains the integrity of causality and consistency, there is room for a lot of improbably, atypical, and unusual sorts of outcomes, which are frankly necessary for play to also be fun. At any rate, I don't beat myself up over it.
The issue of holding universe in the head is I think a problem that is potentially mechanical. We've got all sorts of sim type mechanics for how far someone can jump or how fast they can run under a heavy load but very little that deals with things like sociology and politics. And I don't mean "persuade" rolls and the like, I mean things like how bodies of people act and react. One could rather flippantly argue that Jan Huss wasn't burnt at the stake because his Persuade roll failed, but because it succeeded. Dealing with the probablities of physical things is all very well, but the absence of mechanics for social things means that these are left to the GM by default, not because it is a necessity of the form.
Caldis:
I cant say I've ever experienced this kind of play but maybe that's because I just tend to see all the dials and knobs being turned and dont worry about it.
Take your post apocalyptic game for an example, there are literally hundreds of choices you have to make in determining what is 'realistic' in the game world and in a whole lot of these choices what may be most realistic would likely end up with a pretty uninteresting world. How the characters will interact with the game world is a huge question. Do you want the characters fighting zombies or should they be to dangerous to fight and the characters should run and hide? Will their be constant masses of zombies moving around hunting for the characters or can the characters settle down and try and grow food and create a new society. Can animals become zombies? Do zombies move fast or slow? How badly injured do you have to be to become infected? What's the chance of characters becoming infected?
You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out. Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play. Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading. Some people may not accept it, others do, I cant accept that it is anathema to sim play.
Roger:
Quote from: Alfryd on March 26, 2011, 07:17:22 AM
...the thing is that- while I agree there needs to be an 'emotional connection' in the sense that the players do care about how the characters feel, that doesn't mean player feelings equate with character feelings.
Oh, absolutely -- you'll notice that I asked exclusively about player feelings. I don't think character feelings have any relevance here.
Quote
So, in that sense, focusing on player responses as opposed to character reponses could be misleading.
This look very interesting, but I'm finding too many ways to parse that to have a good sense of what you're saying. So far I'm between:
1. Focusing on a player's emotional response to the fiction, as opposed to a character's emotional response within the fiction, could be misleading.
2. Focusing on a player's response to a situation, where the response is deciding to leave someone outside to die, could be misleading as opposed to focusing on the character's response to do so.
Or possibly you mean both. Or neither. Anyway, I'd really like to hear more from you about this; I think it'll be important.
Quote
Again, I would say this is predicated on the assumption that (A) the player-characters are all perfectly rational and (B) that large-scale outcomes are deterministic (which is to say, you can forecast in advance what the 'optimal' outcome would be without, as it were, 'experimenting' with different courses of action.) I don't think either of those assumptions actually accords with observations of reality. Which means it is, at best, a rather selective application of Sim principles.
Looking back over what I wrote, I was definitely unclear about how the players and the player characters each relate to the Premise. Let me take another stab at it:
Players address Premise through the lens of the player character. However, there's no requirement that they reach similar conclusions about the Premise; indeed, it's quite common for them to reach opposite conclusions.
Considering a Premise like "Is a ruthless selfishness necessary to survive in a crisis?", I might personally be predisposed towards the opinion that No, it's not at all necessary and in fact dooms the ruthless person. In order to address it within the game, I may very well be inclined to play a character who is of the opposite opinion -- he believes that it is necessary, and quite possibly he'll believe that right up until the moment of his death. Or if I'm personally predisposed to believe in ruthless selfishness, I might play a character who actively pursues selflessness, and who is likely to do so up until the moment of his death.
I think this approach appeals to me because it makes it a little easier to avoid Anvilicious Aesop play; I mean the characters sitting around and telling each other "You know, I've learned an important lesson. In such troubled times, we cannot pursue our own ruthless selfishness at all costs, lest we lose our humanity and become little more than the monsters we are fighting." That's enough to turn anyone off Story Now.
So, yeah, there's no need for the player-characters to be at all rational, or to resolve the dilemma of the Premise in the same way the players do.
That being said, is there any requirement for the Right to Dream player to be rational? Hmmm. Deep question, this. I would suggest that it is a fundamental feature of Right to Dream play. The enjoyment comes from Exploring the rational cause-and-effect System. As the Right to Dream essay proposes, "Internal Cause is King". I can't think of any examples of irrational play that would persist beyond a short-lived superstition, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.
Of course, there's no inherent requirement for a player, having rationally reached an optimal plan, to make his character equally rational. Indeed, I suspect there's a strong mode of Right to Dream play that I might characterize as Guinea Pigging -- intentionally sending one's character into harm's way as an experimental way to Explore System. I suspect this may be what's happening in the description of play at Does chance favour a good story? but perhaps extensive discussion about this point belongs in its own thread.
Anyway, that feels like quite a lot already to respond to, so I'll wrap it up there.
Alfryd:
Quote from: stefoid on March 27, 2011, 03:59:24 PM
I think the general understanding of improv is that the GM reacts to the players during play, and the 'plot' arises from that interaction on the fly, as opposed to preconceiving a plot before play and walking the players through it. (to some degree or other).
Your definition of improv seems to me to be : introducing a situation into the fiction for reasons other than in-game causality. Is that a fair understanding?
If so, I would use another term for it. It seems to me that using 'improv' as I define it is going to help simulation play because you are reacting (with 100% causality) to what the players are doing, rather than trying to direct them back to the pre-conceived plot which may result in you ignoring/lessening causality of player actions because it would take the game away from the preconceived idea of where it should go.
If you want to phrase 'improvisation' in that way, sure, yeah I can agree with that. And, yes, being 100% faithful to in-world causality does not have to entail that PC choices are insignificant, because PC choices are an in-world event that should have some repercussions. The trouble with Sim is that everything else that happens in the world would also, logically, have repercussions, so in order for player choices to be significant, they would have to be expressed through control of characters who are powerful/influential enough to give the environment a run for it's money. Otherwise, you have to resort to metagame.
In other words, I consider railroading/force to be a misrepresentation of in-world causality to the same extent that, say, heavy use of Director stance would be. The former completely poisons Nar play, the latter can enhance it, but I would argue that Sim properly rejects both, or occupies some kind of middle ground.
Going further- and I realise that a lot of folks don't really see the difference- I would distinguish between-
* "Player choices don't always matter because the GM spontaneously invents stuff that negates the consequences of their characters' actions", and-
* "Player choices don't always matter because the world's internal logic had consequences which cancelled out the effect of PC actions."
The simplest example of the difference I can give is as follows: The GM rolls dice and compares the result to a table to determine the weather appropriate to the local climate and current season. Turns out a Force 10 hurricane is headed the players' way, and wipes out the irrigation system they were working so hard on. I think it's clear that, however much it sucks for the PCs, this wasn't an arbitrary decision to impose some predecided plotline on events.
Why would you want to include this? Because it can increase the accuracy of the simulation to incorporate certain forms of random event. After all, weather happens, and chaos is fair.
Quote
Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying. If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.
I still incline toward the view that if it looks like address of premise, walks like address of premise, and quacks like address of premise, it's address of premise. I'll freely concede that premise-addressing moments-of-decision may arrive with somewhat lower frequency than dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-sprinkles narrativism, but if stories are about (Moral Choices)X(Consequences), this simply strikes me as a question of tradeoffs between how strictly you model Consequences versus how reliably you hit with Moral Choices. But how, exactly, do you walk out of this game without player actions producing a theme? Where is the ostensible boundary condition between Sim and Nar?
Alfryd:
Quote from: contracycle on March 27, 2011, 04:40:35 PM
Uff. I dispute that. First of all, I think the logic of "what would happen" is weak. All too often that means "what would be the most probable outcome", but reality is more complex than probable outcomes. What if the odds between two outcomes are 51% and 49%? To assume that Sim MUST take the former when the two are so close is very limiting.
Yup- this is indeed one of the 'practical difficulties' one might mention, and I absolutely agree that this is exacerbated by a lack of well-defined techniques for handling large-scale social outcomes (wars, famines, revolts, etc.) The result is that the players not only have to trust that the GM is calculating the odds fairly within his/her head, but in some sense rolling internal mental dice to see how those odds translate to specific events, and also without any inclination to 'load' those dice. Which, again, rather strains belief.
So yes, I would absolutely agree that having express, up-front mechanics for resolving large-scale events in a fair and plausible fashion would greatly benefit Sim play of this type.
Quote
Second, I don't think that individual preferences are ruled out. If "what would happen" was all that was inviolved, most FRPG sim play would be reduced to peasants harvesting their fields. After all, that's where you'd most likely be born, thats the limited world you would most likely encounter, and maybe if you're lucky one day you'll get to go to the town fair 10 miles away.
I would argue that this is a question of the 'initial assumptions'- namely, it's fine to assume that the PCs will be characters who will, in likelihood, get up to 'interesting' stuff (in this case, powerful nobility.) I mean, just from the perspective of a Simulation's purpose being to determine 'how events could really turn out', there's justification for focusing on those individuals whose actions would have the largest impact on events. It's the most efficient allocation of 'processing power' when it comes to computing final results, because it gives each player responsibility for modelling aspects of the world that are likely to be roughly equally influential. From that perspective, it's fine and dandy not to dwell too much on the hapless peasantry, precisely because they have almost no voice in the proceedings. (Again, shitty system of government.)
Quote from: Caldis on March 27, 2011, 08:21:35 PM
You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out. Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play. Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading....
I understand your point, but one of the points I'm making is that, by ensuring the PCs genuinely have a level of mechanical power/influence/information that's commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation, it's possible for their choices to have a dramatic impact on final outcomes without having to distort the strict modelling of in-world causality. An example I gave was influential nobility within a feudal setting- the idea that their decisions could have major historical ramifications doesn't hinge on some fluke perturbation of the odds, but is entirely expectable. (With that said, the result would quite possibly be a form of Blood Opera.)
In the case of the zombie scenario- sure, the PCs are only a handful of guys/gals, but there's only a relatively small number of other guys/gals left in the locale regardless, so again, it's entirely reasonable that a handful of survivors could tip the balance of whatever conflicts are underway in the setting/situation. And the various questions you raise as to how the zombies react/behave, how vulnerable, persistent, contagious and numerous they are, etc., would all be part of that initial calibration with respect to PC influence/ability.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page