[Pitfighter] SBP: is there anything better to roll for than success?
David Berg:
I think that's a good segue to talk about rules-leading vs fiction-leading play as it applies to SBP resolution options. After all, what's a character going to do that changes the rules of playing the game?
I'm much more familiar with such changes being imposed by players acting from outside the fiction, as critics of it. "I judge that this point in our narrative is a good time to initiate, or invoke the mechanic that initiates, Endgame Mode!"
This seems like a valid way to play. Maybe some SBP GMs will love critical feedback on their plots!
Personally, though, I'm with Frank on this one. As a GM, I want to create an experience, and as a player I'd much rather live the GM's story than critique it.
Are the resolution approaches I'm suggesting in this thread a bad match for the experiential style of play, working only for the critical?
My first thought is that it depends on whether the resolution method is (a) triggered by fictional actions, and (b) continuing the fiction that preceded it.
If resolution meets both of those criteria, then we can go right on imagining stuff and enjoying the experience.
If it fails condition (b), we're going to experience a sort of "jump cut", which bothers some players more than others.
If it fails condition (a), that's where we might start feeling like we're playing the Let's Make A Story boardgame.
I'm not sure of any of that. It's just a working theory to get me to this example:
We're using a resolution rule where: player announces intent and action, rolls a d20, GM announces intent's success or failure, die determines whether character looks good or bad in the process. But! If you roll a 20 on the d20, then we shift from Discovery Phase to Fate Phase. Now the rule says: player announces intent and action, rolls a d20, GM announces intent's success or failure, die determines whether character is injured or empowered in the process. Enough injury kills them, removing them from the story, while enough empowerment makes them a major figure in the setting and likely the GM's plot.
So, let's say I'm in Discovery Phase, and my character goes to leap from a rooftop onto the badguys' moving truck. The GM wants to show me more about the badguys, so he decides I will indeed land on the truck. My character's boss watches him jump, and I roll the d20 to see if the leap will look bold and deft or insane and lucky. I roll a 20! Well, shit. Now it's not about whether I look good in my truck assault. Now it's about whether I survive it. The GM says, "As you fall toward the truck, you a hear a villain say, 'Time for the heavy ordnance,' and there's a click and a loud hum."
This sounds pretty easy and harmless to me. Is there anything I'm missing here?
Anders Gabrielsson:
I've been meaning to post about Smallville for a while now, but I keep getting behind on reading the discussions and the linked threads. I think I'm reasonably well caught up now, though. However, I'm also down with a cold so this might be a bit incoherent in places.
The reason I think Smallville is of interest in this discussion is that it accomplishes one of the goals quite well: giving the players meaningful things to do even when they can't steer or strongly affect the plot. (I should note that while Smallville isn't set up to do only Story Before, I think it can do it quite well.) It does this by having the players and characters be interested in different things. While the characters may be highly interested in solving or progressing the plot, the players are mainly interested in getting the characters into trouble, particularly by having them be at odds with each other.
To take an example, I recently played in a Smallville game set in the great opera in Castle Falkenstein Vienna. There was a murder plot going on with all kinds of mysterious events, and while the characters (or some of them at least) were quite interested in finding out what was going on, or at least make sure it didn't blow back on them, the players were much more focused on a love triangle and the musical director's plan to replace the orchestra with musical automatons.
It also helps that as a player in Smallville you often want your character to fail at things (because that gives you Stress, which is one of the two sources of the equivalent of experience points) and be mistaken about people (because that is the other main source of xp-equivalent).
Taking the previously discussed scenario with the escaping robbers, doing that scene in Smallville wouldn't be particularly controversial since the players a) know that they will get the story whether they succeed or fail at stopping the robbers, so failing to stop them won't deprive them of anything regarding the plot, and b) their main interest isn't in controlling or discovering the plot but in pitting their characters against each other in interesting ways. While Smallville characters might be performing the exact same actions as the characters doing the same scene in a different system, the game mechanics aren't very interested in those things but more in how they are using their actions to affect their relationships with the other characters.
To take a hypothetical example, if you were doing that scene using d20 Modern a daring detective might roll Jump to move from a racing car to the robbers' truck, while in Smallville he might be rolling Love (because he's showing off for Jane, his romantic interest) plus his relationship with someone he suspects is also interested in Jane, and the player isn't rolling to see if he successfully jumps to the other vehicle but to see if he does it with enough flair to catch Jane's eye.
In relation to the discussion about WHAT you do vs. HOW you do it, Smallville is much more on the HOW side with regards to the plot, but also WHY you do it.
stefoid:
Anders: cool!
David Berg:
Good call, Smallville's an excellent example to look at here!
The relationships between player characters make for a perfect example of what I meant by #2: resolving fictional positioning. Those relationships (1) are easy to link to whatever's going on in the fiction at the moment, (2) they're always there, (3) they foster interaction between players, (4) they provide orientation and motivation moving forward, and (5) it's easy to make a GM plot that doesn't depend on them going any particular way. Fantastic!
On the other hand, Smallville's combo of requirements and rewards really highlights the relationship stuff, to the point where I wonder if a GM plot would fade to relative insignificance (which would defeat much of the point of playing SBP). What's your experience been with this? I've only played 2 one-shots.
Also, are the evolving relationships unsatisfying if they don't follow a good dramatic arc that concludes when the game does? If it's just sort of a meandering, "now I like you more, now I like you less", I could see how that could fade to insignificance.
The way Smallville connects positioning changes with task resolution also seems worth looking at, though I have nothing useful to say on that now.
Anders Gabrielsson:
My experiences with Smallville are still fairly limited but I'll tell you what I've got so far.
1) The Third Wave
This was a fairly straight-forward game of teen supers, lasting two episodes over four or five sessions of three to four hours each. (That's excluding character/setting generation, which was another full session.) At this point we didn't really get the system so the players made characters who mostly got along and were on the same side, with all the big conflicts being with the NPCs. The group was me as GM and three of the core players from our main group.
This was intended as a test run and with the issues we had discovered we decided not to push it forward.
2) Tortona
For this game we added another player from the main group. It lasted one episode over three sessions. The setting was a small city state in northern Italy during the late Renaissance/early Enlightenment, with a little bit of magic and a little bit of da Vinci-type supertech (though none of that showed up much in the game). The characters all belonged to the circle closest to the prince - his uncle, his younger son, his mother-in-law and his spymaster - and while they were a lot more adverserial with strong wills and conflicting interests they were still mostly cooperating. Part of that was because the plot I had put together involved a group of republican revolutionaries whom everyone but the younger son opposed, and while he was sympathetic to their cause he was strongly opposed to their methods in this case.
This was another test game, and while I think we had the start of something solid the new player felt the game system was harsh on her light asperger's - having to constantly try to figure out what the other players and other player characters were after so she could position herself right in the conflicts was a heavy load for her.
3) The Great Opera
This game was run by another player from our main group for me, two of the ones who had been part of the previous two games, and one other, and it lasted for about six sessions which was how long it took for the GM's plot to run its course. It was set in the Great Opera in Castle Falkenstein Vienna, and the GM's plot centered around a murder mystery. As a player I was pushing hard to put myself "out there" in the sense of getting into conflicts, getting into trouble and looking for emotional triggers for myself as a player, though with limited success. I think some of the reasons were that the GM and one player were new to the system so there was quite a lot of rules talk (and those of us who were new to the game were still not sure about everything), and at least two of the others were playing much more defensively.
The GM remarked at the end of the game that she had expected us to be more interested in the murder plot. In the games I ran I felt the players were interested in the plots, but then I'm not sure how much we were playing the game as intended so I don't know how representative those are.
Speculation
I think it's quite possible to run a fairly tight SBP game using Smallville, provided the GM uses the right techniques. Aggressive scene framing (which is what the book recommends) in particular will let the GM put (some of) the characters into situations where the players get to experience the plot, while the game mechanics will encourage them to get into conflicts with each other so that they have meaningful actions to take. I should also note that because of how the conflicts are set up, it's always possible for the GM to prevent the PC:s from killing or otherwise incapacitating an important NPC (and the same is true for the players regarding their PC:s).
I think having an arc planned out for your character, or at least a theme to the type of emotional changes you want them to go through, is a very good idea, since it will let the other players (including the GM) know how to get you into conflicts, though I also think you have to be open to other opportunities.
(We're still struggling a bit with the game because it's so different to what we're used to. The GM-player, player-player and player-character relationships are quite different to the games we typically play, and I think it has highlighted some Creative Agenda issues that haven't been very relevant before, as well as some related social contract questions, but that's for some other thread some other time. I know there are some things with how the game is set up that hasn't worked very well for us and I was working on some changes to get around that, but now I think it's more due to issues with the player group rather than the rules themselves. However, I don't want to threadjack so please ignore this as other than a caveat for the previous.)
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