[Pitfighter] SBP: is there anything better to roll for than success?
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey David,
Personally, I’m not too big a fan of that whole “hidden conspiracy” theme. As a player I hate, hate, hate it when I don’t really know what’s going on but am still forced to make decision on how to act. It doesn’t much help knowing that the GM is going to reveal what I need to know, eventually. I’m having a hard time contributing meaningfully. So much for my personal preference.
With regard to what the rules can or should contribute, I think your example highlights two different aspects:
1) Interaction of resolution mechanisms and so-called “social conflict”
As probably everybody knows, it’s a recurring discussion between trad gamers whether to roll the dice or “role-play it out” in what is commonly called a “social conflict”. Can I fast-talk the guard into letting me pass? Can I seduce the lady? This is a pretty complex topic but I think it’s enough to note, here, that it may well be, in an individual group’s case, that these “social situations” are mostly resolved by acting and good judgment, while “action scenes” are resolved by rolling some dice. If you’re interested, I got a little deeper into this topic in the thread Roll-playing Versus Roleplaying and the follow-up, [Reign] In-Character Acting and the Higher Level.
It’s always fun to think up interesting new ways for rules to handle this or that but on a purely speculative basis, I don’t know how worthwhile that is.
2) Amount of impact of character success or failure, the Fruitful Void
The way I run SBP games, the story isn’t planned blow-by-blow. It’s more of a general scheme with maybe a couple of bottlenecks and a staged “grand final”, but there is quite a bit wiggling space. So a genius idea or a lucky roll by a player will affect the course of events, it will be adopted into the planned story flexibly. On rare occasions, it might even break the planned story completely if it became too much of a stretch to still squeeze through the next bottleneck in a plausible way that wasn’t entirely blatant “my way or the highway”. This has happened maybe two or three times over the years in my games, but still.
When I explained Bass Playing to people over at the German forums, they kept saying, hey, that sounds pretty hard to do. And I said, it’s not a no-brainer, but good Bass Playing is way easier than good Railroading. To run an SBP game is an elaborate dance. You have to be elegant, you have to force the story with a light touch, you have to incorporate the players’ contributions without making them meaningless, you have to understand the players’ vision of their characters to provide them with the necessary stage to pursue that vision, and so on.
This elaborate dance, when done skillfully, is really fun and rewarding for both sides. If you are looking for game mechanisms which support it, I think you should mainly look at Reward System. You don’t want Resolution to take this out of the players’ hands. That’s the Fruitful Void, right there.
- Frank
Dan Maruschak:
I wonder if the term Participationist is clouding what you want to talk about, Dave. If you figure out ways to make the game system carry the load of making Story Before work then you don't necessarily need active "participation" to make that part of the game functional (as least that's what I usually assume is important about Participationism).
I think I mentioned it in the other thread, but my take on Mouse Guard's system is that you usually aren't rolling to succeed or fail, but rolling to avoid a cost (i.e. avoid becoming Angry, Hungry, etc.) or to avoid a deeper, involved focus on a related situation (i.e. avoid a twist, which usually turns into more skill rolls or a conflict, both of which will tempt you to use resources to win).
It's not exactly rolling, and I haven't played any of the games myself, but I think Gumshoe games guarantee the backstory revelation that's characteristic of a mystery story but lets you optionally get "extra detail" by spending a resource. (I've never really understood this design direction myself, since it seems like it's asking the GM to do a lot of work to make up details the players may not choose to pay to see, but since I don't have any direct experience with the games I may be missing something). I think Graham's Cthulhu Dark uses the same "guaranteed clue finding" paradigm, but has you roll for how much detail you get with the expectation that the GM will improvise at least some of it. The sanity rolls in Cthulhu games are another variation of the "roll to see if it costs you" idea.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Dan,
The term "Participationist" specifically refers to the players not being fooled by the GM's thorough authority over how the story turns out. That's all it means. Important secondary outcomes include the facts that (i) they don't feel railroaded because their authority over many character choices (at varying levels of subtlety) is ceded outright, (ii) there's no need for the GM to trick them into thinking they're really exerting control over "what the characters do" at certain levels, and (iii) intrinsic conflicts of interest between player announcements and GM goals are not assumed to be the default of play.
All of this is embedded in the sub-subset of play which includes explicit "make a story" as a goal, and one person having complete Outcome Authority.
I would not ordinarily be such a stickler about my jargon, but this thread is founded upon my recent essay, and David is working with it directly.
Best, Ron
contracycle:
David,
Just speculating about the pitfighter scenario - mechanical progress in understanding the conspiracies, just so we can maybe have something of a concept to bat around.
So, there is a precedent in the "tech tree" from sundry RTs games. Lets imagine you have a chart of the conspiracies and their interactions. Not just operational links though, also things like layers of doctrine and initiation. The tech tree example thing works well here - so, you have different trees for different conpiracies. Each layer has a number of points of "insight" you need to gain before you know it. So, knowing that a major bank is in fact run by the Freemasons needs like 8 points, knowing that the Freemason are controlled by the Illuminati needs 20 points, that sort of thing.
Now players take actions as you usefully defined them - theorizing, processing, fishing. Essentially, the first two amount to make guesses to the GM and, if correct, being awarded with a point of insight.... or something like that, its breaking down a bit. Fishing is presumably shoe-leather detective work.
Could that sort of thing work for you? I guess the idea would be to structure a set of (eight) clues to reveal to the players that this bank is controlled by the Freemasons. They can investigate, or guess, or whatever, in the course of actual play. That's the real action. When the get the 8 points the entry on the "tech" chart is opened and it is confirmed that they know this thing, and to express a visible form of progress. What is happening in the physical world the characters inhabit can be governed by some other set of rules or left to free play, or something.
Obviously, as abovem, this is not presented as a real game concept but as a sort of vague silhoette of what the features of such a game might be. How does it look to you?
Callan S.:
Quote
Frank's Star Wars game provides a perfect example, when the Han Solo clone sells out the Alliance. That player saw a Star Wars in which that can happen, and through her actions got everyone else to see it too.
I'm not sure I get this in relation to 'story before'. It seems to be 'story now', despite the assertions it's just regular simulationist genre convention breaking fun? It really seems to put the integrity of the character, however the character turns out (soley at the purview of one player(not the GM), the player playing the PC, regardless of any planning the GM might (or might not) have made), over and above the integrity of the setting and how the setting is 'supposed' to turn out.
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