[D&D4E] Some WOTC encounters
Callan S.:
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For hobbyists, though, I think both usually co-exist in varying degrees.
They can't co-exist if one isn't actually physically enabled. You can't cross a finish line that doesn't exist, no matter how much that enables the people who like pottering around and meandering. The funny thing is people can and do putter about in chess games with each other, even though it's structure is set in stone. Setting in stone doesn't disable that sort of activity.
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Even for people who totally play to win, there must be some means to choose between this game and that, and I expect that is the play experience. Which I think is an adequate explanation for why competitive players are still found in games like RPG's with fuzzy conditions.
Perhaps, like myself for quite some time, they think they are learning a structure, when all they are learning are others moment to moment whims glased over with a veneer of genuine rules, but which are mere fragments and are easily co-opted to any end those whims feel like from moment to moment.
And I think often the fuzzy conditions are treated as having to be there (or perhaps otherwise it's 'not a roleplay game') not as a choice, but like it's a law of nature, like gravity and you just accept it and never think about it as if it were a choice. So if one is sticking around with fuzzy RPG's trying to design ones way out by removing the fuzzyness, one can only leave by oneself. Which conflicts with the idea of having multiple players and so on and so forth, blah blah blah ugh.
contracycle:
That seems a little OTT to me; as already discussed, you can measure a whole bunch of things in order to determine relative success.
Which would take more competitve pleasure in, as a player of countersrike? A game where you won, but in which you didn't even fire your gun and your team-mates did everything, or a game in which your team was gunned down in the first 3 seconds, and you alone hunted down all the opposition and got within half a second of defusing the bomb? I think the second is a much better demonstration of ability, even if it was ultimaterly and formally a loss. Thos other measures, especially peer respect, are not trivial and insubstantial things.
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Perhaps, like myself for quite some time, they think they are learning a structure, when all they are learning are others moment to moment whims glased over with a veneer of genuine rules, but which are mere fragments and are easily co-opted to any end those whims feel like from moment to moment.
I'm not ruling that out. There may well be people having that experience, it seems perfectly plausible to me. As for fuzziness, I'm still not convinced that is a solveable problem, but itmight be. Hence it seems to me a bit early to talk about being a choice, because at the moment there are no obviously available alternatives. I'll mention, though, that Rune, which is about as clearly competitve a game as ever seen in RPG, doesn't seem to have attracted a significant following.
Come to think of it, Rune encounters might be interesting to you as a comparison against the WOTC ones, here are a few:
http://blewer-d.tripod.com/runemain.htm
Callan S.:
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Which would take more competitve pleasure in, as a player of countersrike? A game where you won, but in which you didn't even fire your gun and your team-mates did everything, or a game in which your team was gunned down in the first 3 seconds, and you alone hunted down all the opposition and got within half a second of defusing the bomb? I think the second is a much better demonstration of ability, even if it was ultimaterly and formally a loss. Thos other measures, especially peer respect, are not trivial and insubstantial things.
I think if you want to learn how to always be a half second short, taking the possitive feedback for that will do it. I'm not against taking pride in small, made up victories - in quake live (vs bots, mostly) when I started I would congrats myself for even hitting the bastards once. But it was always made up and most importantly, not sufficient.
There was a David Sirlin article about a player in a mmorpg who got a bad name, because he would teleport the other sides groups into unkillable robot NPC's who would ahnihilate. And alot of people, even on his side of the game (the hero's side in city of heroes) hated him. They'd gotten used to 'not doing that' and 'that's not how you play'. Which is exactly what happens when you count peer approval higher than any particular win condition. You basically start making up and adhering to taboos. Superstitions. Or Sirlin would more bluntly just call them scrub players.
And If your constantly doing relatively nothing while winning, you've pretty much mastered that game (or atleast that team role). There, done, another notch in the belt! If you think it's notch worthy, of course. But your asking is it satisfying enough to keep playing? But all I can say is it isn't a matter of satisfaction and instead it appears I have mastered the game. Whether I enjoyed myself or not, I am done?
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I'm not ruling that out. There may well be people having that experience, it seems perfectly plausible to me. As for fuzziness, I'm still not convinced that is a solveable problem, but itmight be. Hence it seems to me a bit early to talk about being a choice, because at the moment there are no obviously available alternatives. I'll mention, though, that Rune, which is about as clearly competitve a game as ever seen in RPG, doesn't seem to have attracted a significant following.
I have looked at pages about Rune before and I may have read it wrong, but it seems to employ no 'imagination couplers' as I call them. It's all a hard flowchart.
In current design trends, they always seem to go absolutely for one end of the spectrum or the other. Either the GM can call for any difficulty he wants and is only constrained by made up taboos (see above) as well as golden rule BS all over the place, or the flowchart of the game is utterly dominant like chess or Rune.
A simple example of an imagination coupler more in between is that the GM has a set amount of points per session and the ruleset itself calls for certain skill rolls, but the GM spends his points to determine the difficulty based on his own responce to the prior spoken fiction (or the shared imagined space as it's usually called here). This couples the spoken fiction to actual concrete numbers, converting one into the other. Yet since it works from a budget and the skill call is determined by rules instead of the GM, the GM's influence on the outcome is much more muted. But without becoming an absolute boardgame. Oh, and this happens in play. I know with Rune you build encounters before the event. But that's before the moment. Probably what makes Rune seem rpg like to it's developers is where the designer actually spent his budget mid play, after hearing spoken fiction. Which makes it a clumsy imagination coupler, since it takes time to spend that budget and as I understand it not really how it's designed to be used.
Anyway, I'm always surprised at how binary the designs go - either the GM is incredibly dominant, only held back by social taboos (which really have nothing to do with the game and are simply the silly things we do as people), or they go straight to full on board game in the design.
contracycle:
Quote from: Callan S. on August 07, 2011, 12:13:54 AM
I think if you want to learn how to always be a half second short, taking the possitive feedback for that will do it. I'm not against taking pride in small, made up victories - in quake live (vs bots, mostly) when I started I would congrats myself for even hitting the bastards once. But it was always made up and most importantly, not sufficient.
Well I think that's a bit overstated. I don't think silver medallists in an Olympic event are thereby conditioned to seek silver medals in the future. I think they'll take away from that a sense that they were "nearly good enough" and that with a little (lot) more training and effort they could have the gold. But in that regard it's also much more enouraging than coming dead last.
As for your City of Heroes example, I think you're assuming a bit too much about what is going on. I suggest that much of the objection could easily have derived from exactly the motive I suggested - that people want to play a certain kind of game, and that was what they signed up for. Winning in a manner that prevents them from having the play experience (fun) they want does indeed totally defeat the purpose, for them. To dismiss them as "scrub players" is to hold them to some presumed standard which may well be a totally false expectation of what they "should" be doing.
In a similar light, there's a large community of players of Battlefield 2 that eliminate vehicles in the game. They find the fun of running around as infantry more entertaining than the game being full of vehicles; and one of the main reasons for that is that specifically the aircraft were so powerful that if you chose or had to play as infantry it could get into a boring cycle of spawn-die-spawn-die ad infinitum. Under those circumstances, the only people having fun were the pilots, and everyone else was grinding their teeth (there were other negative consequences, such as people killing friendlies to get planes). This was recognised by the designers who introduced a server switch to remove vehicles, and lo and behold it was very popular.
I don't think that it is valid to argue that such preferences amount to excessive regard for peer approval, or an insufficient commitment to victory. There is an aesthetic choice about what kind of game they want to play based on the content and the experience it offers. And that, I think, is a point relevant to why people choose to play one game or another, or to play with certain "restrictions" or whatever you want to call them.
As for Rune, I'd have to read it again to be sure, but I vaguely think there is some kind of limited budget for introducing new problems in play, with the significance that unspent points can be carried over as XP to the GM's character when they rotate into a players seat. But I don't recall with any precision.
Callan S.:
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I don't think that it is valid to argue that such preferences amount to excessive regard for peer approval, or an insufficient commitment to victory.
I don't think I'm arguing 'insufficient'. I'm saying they are not playing to win. I'm not saying people have to play to win. It is, however, difficult when someone demands they are a 'play to win' guy, but avoids perfectly legitimate and intended game elements - ie, as Sirlin example, the guy who says 'Throws are cheap!'. It's about as different as a nar/sim agenda clash.
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that people want to play a certain kind of game, and that was what they signed up for. Winning in a manner that prevents them from having the play experience (fun) they want does indeed totally defeat the purpose, for them. To dismiss them as "scrub players" is to hold them to some presumed standard which may well be a totally false expectation of what they "should" be doing.
Gareth, I don't think I've drawn the 'should' gun first? Are your example players, who have had their purpose defeated, about to draw the 'should gun', as in what the other guy 'should' do? To me it sounds like using victim status to determine others actions. They've had their purpose defeated - this implies that someone else must do something other than what they were prior doing, as I read it? A new taboo?
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but I vaguely think there is some kind of limited budget for introducing new problems in play
Yes, but this is introducing a new problem. What I'm describing is simply introducing material. Maybe with my coupler example the players, from their subjective position, will see the difficulty introduced as easy, or hard, or whatever. The GM just depicting, without any real intent. As opposed to traditional GM'ing where the GM thinks 'Oh, they skipped having a short rest, should I tone down the next encounter - I really must decide my intent on this! And that's actually an example from the 4th edition dungeon masters guide.
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