[Pitfighter] SBP: the GM's role in resolution
Anders Gabrielsson:
Quote from: David Berg on January 02, 2012, 10:35:49 AM
If that latter, what happens when the evil NPC walks up to me to taunt me, and I want to shoot them?
If the GM does this, isn't he just being a dick? I'm not sure this is a system-level problem.
JoyWriter:
Gareth that sounds to me a rather unusual solution; partially dissociating the mechanics the players have access to from the game world for the sake of making use of that fuzy link for plot protection:
How does that compare to say, creating a game in which HP and character health are tenuously linked, and going to 0 may have little negative effect unless specified by the games master?
It sounds like I'd start to feel like someone in a satelite above the game world, or an experimeter on the other side of glass. I would talk proactively about what I did in the space station, and see how the planet responded.
I made a wushu hack a while ago that played with this kind of distance thing; you roll to see if the GM will sideline your contribution with new information. Sounds harsh, but it was a way to get around the strange abstract resolution wushu uses while retaining clear fictional logic links. Basically you say what your character does to a certain level of detail, within the context of a GM defined conflict, and you do whatever you say you do, but whether it matters depends on how high you roll. It was also a bit of a psychological experiment/training exercise, about dealing with being shot down.
Anyway it occured to me that the resolution system in the second post seems to be doing the same kind of thing; succeed and your action is impactful, even if it is responded to and counteracted by others. The GM will spend some time affirming it, even as he counteracts it. Perhaps at the scene level in that example, you would have one of the pirates intentionally scuttling the ship, rather than random chance burning it down.
But I think in order for that kind of thing to work, you would have to constantly elide descriptions of the distributions of forces in the situation: Knowing who is on top politically, socially or militarily, and people's regions of influence, is always off the table, blurred over and obscured. How many pirates are there on that ship really? If you have that, then you can alternate between using a GM's ability to contextualise player action and the actual forces of the story, depending on dice rolls.
If they win a roll and you don't want them to succeed, escalate the power of their opposition, if they fail and you do want them to succeed, have some other faction/coincidence help them out. What people are rolling for or making decisions toward is how much of their success is of their own making, and how much of their failure is due to things outside of their control.
The nice point of this is that players who know this don't need to worry about assessing the danger levels they are in; if they want to they can enjoy the ride and emerge winners due to luck. There's a few downsides associated with that too though, like accidently slipping into tone damaging over-casual character actions etc.
contracycle:
Quote from: David Berg on January 02, 2012, 10:35:49 AM
Gareth, I just realized I have a major question here:
...
Does token presence/absence simply describe scene framing? ("This NPC's too far away for you to shoot.")
Or does it describe possible outcomes regardless of scene framing? (This is what I assumed in my previous post.)
The latter, as I understand it, although I'll confess I'm working more or less at second hand. But the systematically important things in 3:16 are: 1) whether or not a threat token is removed, and 2) how many enemies your character kills off. So you roll in an attempt to damage or destroy a threat token, and one of the outputs is a kill count.
From this it follows that killing of this or that specific enemy individual is purely a matter of narration. As long you are not cheated out of removing a threat token, it's perfectly reasonable for the GM to narrate in such a way that a villainous NPC survives.
Quote
If that latter, what happens when the evil NPC walks up to me to taunt me, and I want to shoot them?
Well the point is that system doesn't really work at that level, of resolving attacks on individuals. Enemies come in swarms, the weapons are powerful, the scale is expressly set at military firepower rather than small unit tactics. A weapon doesn't do "damage", it kills 1d10 enemies, or whatever.
So one of three things would have to be going on: its not a battle scene, and just down to narration, in which case it can be assumed that the NPC can just be killed; or it is a battle scene, and the NPC either has sufficient, indeed indefinite, minions to absorb the damage, or it is a full scale monster that can absorb damage as if there were minions, like tentacles or hydra heads or something.
In a sense, named individuals don't really matter to the system. It wasn't designed to do the kind of thing I'm describing, its just coincidentally a way it can be used. The abstraction that the system governs doesn't bother to say you shot this person, you did so much damage, and that leaves scope by default for narration to step in, without the system having to be fudged, or forced, or suspended.
Which leads me back to the bidding idea. I don't really like these, becuase either you do allow players to overrule the GM or you don't. Cost and so on is not an effectove deterrent; you just end up hoping that the players will "realise" that they shouldn't, say, commit all their story influence points to shoot your pet villain in the middle of his villainous monologue, which is pretty much back to square one.
Joywriter wrote:
Quote
Gareth that sounds to me a rather unusual solution; partially dissociating the mechanics the players have access to from the game world for the sake of making use of that fuzy link for plot protection:
How does that compare to say, creating a game in which HP and character health are tenuously linked, and going to 0 may have little negative effect unless specified by the games master?
Well the only unusual part is using it for plot protection. In fact your latter example is a good one, because early D&D did just that: losing hit points did not imply bodily wounds, they could be position or a sort of running out of luck. It would be perfectly within the rules to narrate every hit that caused HP to be lost as a near miss, and the last one that finally kills as a single, clean, stab to the heart. I don't think its that weird.
David Berg:
Ah, okay, I guess 3:16 doesn't answer the question "How do we integrate plot protection smoothly into the fiction?" Perhaps I was jumping the gun with that line of inquiry.
Returning to my Pitfighter example above, I guess an abstracted system might concern some sort of direction or progress? "No, don't hijack the pirate boat!" could be signaled by either a "No Plot This Way" token or a "Next Destination: the City of Haven" token. The former would have to be played responsively, while the latter could be played during scene framing. Or perhaps some text-based computer adventure game logic could be used in scene framing to express possible directions ("forward"/"back"/"anywhere"/"subplot A"/etc.)?
Or perhaps destinations could be like 3:16 Threats, with tokens put down to indicate they are accessible (and perhaps how challenging they are to reach). So any destination the players propose that doesn't elicit a token from the GM is a no-go.
Was there some other application you had in mind?
Separately, are we agreed that we might well want modelling pending the determinations of the abstract system? E.g., GM drops a Kill Me token on the Saxon army so now we go to the Formation Fighting rules.
contracycle:
I don;t have any other specific applications, the idea with raising 3:16 as a jumping-off point was to suggest that a useful approach is in framing the "moving parts" of the game, distinct from what the imaginary space implies.
The distinction in your Pitfighter case is essentialy between the implicit nature of the boat as a vehicle, and its functional relevance to the game as terrain. Some computer games, even like Streetfighter etc, have used that sort of thing; you jump back on forth on a sinking ship or what have you.
I'd be inclined to suggest something like "publishing" a list of chapter headings and objectives. So this scene would have been explicitly labelled as a ship fight, and the next scene as, say a caravan journey. Or maybe, in each discrete scene, the GM provides a list of "exit conditions", which in this case says stuff like defeat the minions and head west to the caravanserai. Both of these make it quite clear the taking off with the ship is not a feasible option.
As for the modelling thing, I'm not sure that applies to all cases. I just want to be do-able in the cases which need it, ratrher than moving on to assuming that an inherent step for SBP is to eliminate modelling of reality in exchange for modelling psychological states or whatever. You could use chapter headings alongside physics modelling easily enough, for example.
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