decoupling Reward Systems from broad-scale Story Arcs
David Berg:
Filip,
Yeah, reasons abound for why this play style might not appeal to someone. At the same time, I believe Todd's accounts are accurate. I've had them corroborated by players. Perhaps in the chaos of a convention, sitting down for an unknown activity and being given clear structure and expectations is welcome to most players.
Personally, I find the unique appeal of the is play style to be the discovery of well-crafted plot, like reading a good page-turner suspense novel. Foreshadowing, dramatic timing, big reveals, etc. As a player, that's audience-style enjoyment but from a "closer up" point of view than I usually feel when just reading. As a GM, it's author/director-style satisfaction in presenting your vision to a receptive audience.
There are other appeals too, but for me, those are the most singular. I think a lot of people are actually drawn to GMing because they want to tell their stories. Wouldn't it be great for them if they were shown a way to do that that was not abusive to the other players?
-David
David Berg:
Hi Paul,
Here's my take on Trail of Cthulhu:
The GM prep of a "spine" of core clues, plus the system's automatic successes for attempts to find core clues using Investigative Abilities, is sort of compatible with "GM runs a story". I say "sort of" because the GM cedes control over timing, that is, when a player decides to use said Ability. The GM still has a fair amount of control over pacing and the ingredients that go into a big reveal, but there's a slight compromise to that. On the one hand, you could say this is cool because if a GM wants the dramatic timing to be just so, they need to get their players on board to make that happen. So, yay, communication, pulling together, etc. On the other hand, you could say that's half-assing this play style, compromising with a style with more distributed authorities.
Sanity and Stability tracks are totally compatible with Todd's style of game. Pay attention to how crazy you're getting, and roleplay that. Awesome. It's a group-approved aesthetic meter measured out in check boxes on the character sheet. Go all the way off the end, and the ToC book gives great options for how to represent amnesia, megalomania, and other forms of insanity at the table. Gaining and losing Sanity and Stability is all about encountering stuff the GM throws at you, so the GM has input without needing to make every decision about who goes how nuts when (thanks to the randomness of the die roll). Win-win.
Ability and skill rolls are totally not well-suited to Todd's game. While technically compatible, they orient the players to the game all wrong. My experience is that players get caught up in attempting to do stuff, and the intermittent rewards of the dice reinforce this. So now the Hunting Horror is coming at me, and what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about how difficult it should be for me to climb out this window, based on my Athletics and the GM's description of the window, which I will ask them to embellish as I grasp about for my most effective option. My sense is that when Todd runs Hollow Earth Expedition, he does in fact use the game's pass/fail task mechanics, but no one gets hung up on optimizing their in-character striving because it's light-hearted and pulpy and they know they're not gonna die. Cthulhu is the opposite of that. And, indeed, when Todd runs Unknown Armies, I think his players roll only for Stress Checks.
Frankly, I think the more the players think about effectiveness options, the more Cthulhu gaming suffers*. I think it's an ideal candidate to be run the way Todd runs Unknown Armies.
Ps,
-Dave
* Well, actually, that's an extreme simplification of what I think; longer version starts here.
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
In another thread, I linked to a recent write-up I did called Setting and emergent stories; it's pretty focused on techniques for using settings, but my breakdown of story creation and role-playing might be good here. It turns out I cited Trail of Cthulhu as an example of explicit Participationist design, too.
Unknown Armies presents an interesting case. I cited it in the essay as at least having potential to be used for setting-heavy Story Now play, but I admit that is mainly wish-fulfillment on my part. In practice, I've found it to be designed practically exclusively for short-term, highly colorful, and quite Story Before play. Ken Hite, on the other hand, has GMed years-long, many-many-session games of Unknown Armies, so he'd be one to ask as well.
Best, Ron
Dan Maruschak:
Dave, it seems to me that the tension in the type of games you're talking about is that the game's mechanics tell the players they can do one thing (e.g. shoot out the tires of a truck) but subtle and ambiguous social pressures tell them they need to do something else (e.g. "make a good movie", which apparently means "there must be a truck chase" if you have the right decoder ring). Is this the feature that you're trying to preserve or the bug that you're trying to fix? Games tell us all the time which things are valid and in-scope stakes for the resolution system, sometimes explicitly with mechanics and sometimes implicitly with setting or genre conventions (in DITV, nobody tries to travel back in time to fix the town before the problem began). It's perfectly possible to have pre-defined plot events as part of a game's design, too, as long as the rest of the game design doesn't conflict with that expectation.
David Berg:
Dan,
Agreed on your last point about when pre-defined plot is viable.
As for feature/bug, the subtle and ambiguous social pressures are the bug. Todd applies a fix that doesn't come from any game text or ruleset. I'm interested in creating a text & ruleset to provide such a fix, so people who aren't Todd can do it. What I'm asking now is what such a game should include.
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