The Forge Archives

Yesterday, my 4 players and I had our first meeting to decide what game I'll be running for the next ~6 months. And lo, it was good. I do have a couple of questions down the bottom of this excessively long post. Apologies. =)

I've mostly run Storyteller games over the last 5 years, with a mattering of satisfying narrativist one-offs like a session of Puppetland and Over the Edge. With the ST games, I've been confused about how to prioritise story. I've had difficulties communicating to my players what I now understand to be 'protagonism'. And over the last year or so, I've started three games which lasted just a few sessions before expiring. Last autumn, I encountered the GNS essay.

So for the last 3 months, I've been discussing my players' priorities in RPGs on a mailing list I set up. It took weeks of exploration and debate, but we agreed we were all interested in story. Not so interested in puzzles. Interested in relationships with well-drawn NPCs. Not so interested in combat. It felt really good to concentrate on these topics, rather than 'genre' or even 'which game?'. The forums here helped a great deal.

I then took each player aside and asked them more involved questions about their likes and dislikes. By slowly adding terminology from the Forge, I realised that one player was strongly Sim and his idea of story resembled the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1215&start=0&highlight=camping+trip">camping trip anecdote. Once we knew that, I could approach him with a slightly different view of story creation, and we agreed he'd try it. Two of my players were intuitively Narrativist. One of those disliked being labelled as such - for him, labelling removes the 'magic'. And one last player eludes me, but is a little more casual with gaming than the rest of the players.

Our first meeting went very well. I presented some priorities from http://www.geocities.com/devil_bunnys/mindset.html">The Narrativist Mindset essay to my players, emphasising what no matter what setting we agreed to, techniques such as Fortune in the Middle, and emphasis on protagonism and collaborative creation of a story would be vital to my enjoyment of the game.  And they were possible solutions to some of the problems we've been having. We agreed to try some of these strange, new things.

I was fascinated to see a couple of things emerge from the meeting. First of all, most of my players are drop-dead terrified of the idea of making their own setting from scratch (Sorceror was pushed as 'one of the games we might use to facilitate our exploration of narrativist techniques'). Three of the four players have been raised on a diet of Shadowrun and the World of Darkness series, and can't imagine not relying on sourcebooks and citybooks. The one player (the Simulationist) who was happy working on a setting is a little bit older, and was raised on D&D. Designing a setting from scratch just wasn't an option.

This really surprised me, as in previous games, I've had my players develop NPCs and locations during play, so I'm not sure what the difference is here. Design in play vs design at start?

As a GM, I feel my strengths are characterising NPCs and locations, so I was fascinated to hear another priority emerge - scenery. In a sense, the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1177&highlight=color+colour">Color of the locations the characters would encounter. I hadn't realised I hadn't focused on this before; I'd just assumed I did a reasonable job.

After 3 hours of debate, it looks like we have two options: Sorceror and Exalted. Sorceror appeals to everyone who's read it, but designing a setting worries them (and I'm not 100% happy running it in a modern setting). We have some interesting concepts for sorcery and demons, such as 'what if the demons are angels?' which would certainly be worth exploring. That said, Exalted is the front runner. It has a strong setting people can relax into, a heroic (but not godlike) scale that appeals to the group, a system we're all familiar with, and lots of scope for premise/setting. We're more than likely to run Exalted now, andd then ease into Sorceror in about 6 months.

We'll be using Kickers. My players love the idea, it made perfect sense to them (Bruce Willis just wants to protect his wife in Die Hard etc). I probably won't get a chance to use relationship maps this time round, as the PCs will probably roam the world a bit, but I'll likely present situations rather than scenarios, so that's something.

I'm hoping to promote Fortune-in-the-Middle, giving players the opportunity to narrate both their own successes and failures. The skill system is fairly limited - 25 skills - which will still allow for general actions to be declared, and general results to be described, I think. Am I missing something, or is FitM very incompatable with the ST system?

Exalted supports 'stunts' - suitably cinematic actions give a small dice bonus and also return magic points, so I'm thinking of ditching the dice bonus (which I can't see working well with FitM, despite a http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1044&highlight=stunts">thread on the subject).

There's a few other narrative bits and bobs (like deciding on the premise), which I'll cover in future posts, as and when they happen.

Thanks for all your help. You're like little co-GMs sitting on my shoulder.

Joe.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)
This really surprised me, as in previous games, I've had my players develop NPCs and locations during play, so I'm not sure what the difference is here. Design in play vs design at start?

Not IMO, no - its the desire to Explore rather than Create.  Again, I think the camping trip analogy is misleading, or at best limited.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)
I was fascinated to see a couple of things emerge from the meeting. First of all, most of my players are drop-dead terrified of the idea of making their own setting from scratch (Sorceror was pushed as 'one of the games we might use to facilitate our exploration of narrativist techniques'). Three of the four players have been raised on a diet of Shadowrun and the World of Darkness series, and can't imagine not relying on sourcebooks and citybooks. The one player (the Simulationist) who was happy working on a setting is a little bit older, and was raised on D&D. Designing a setting from scratch just wasn't an option.

This really surprised me, as in previous games, I've had my players develop NPCs and locations during play, so I'm not sure what the difference is here. Design in play vs design at start?

As the Sim player, I think I might be able to offer a possible explanation (I've got enough qualifiers in there, yeah?).

It's one thing to take an existing world, with it's own flavour and mechanics and add things on which feel right within that world.  It's another to come up with a world from scratch, including the basic feel of the world and the way it works.  I know that I find it pretty hard coming up with the stuff entirely from scratch, and I've done it a few times.  

Look at (for instance) Exalted.  The amount of history and background there is fairly astronomical, and it feels like there's a vast amount more waiting in the background, holding up the bits we can see.  There's references to various things the Deathknights can do, for instance, which indicate that the writers have fleshed them out to a much greater degree than we see in the book.  I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there's 10-20 times the amount of source material in existence than has been published so far, to say nothing of the 100 time that which has been discarded because it didn't fit.

Unless you can persuade the players that the task they are going to undertake isn't on that kind of scale, they probably aren't going to be very enthusiastic about taking it on.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)
Sorceror appeals to everyone who's read it, but designing a setting worries them (and I'm not 100% happy running it in a modern setting).

I'd tend to agree.  I'd prefer to try Sorceror in an odd setting, as I'm starting to find modern-day settings a bit samey.  The idea of playing in a whole other world is more interesting to me at the moment.

I agree with Gareth that Creation has a totally different feel than Exploration. In each you have discovery, but in creation you discover something internal, and in exploration you discover something external. The difference between Michelangelo and Columbus. One way to handle it is to have the Michelangelos create stuff for the Columbuses to explore.

Anyhow, I think it's pretty easy to use FitM for any resolution system. To get FitM you simply have to use a non-traditional declaration of intent. So, in D&D, the player, instead of saying "I chop his head off." (which won't work anyhow, D&D is a prime candidate for FitM) the player says, I am attacking with my sword (which actually happens a lot in D&D anyhow). The difference then is that after the dice are rolled and damage is determined, the player simply descibes the result. Lets say the player rolled 3 points of damage on an ogre. The player considers the amount of damage as compared to the ccreatures likely total of hits and says, "The tip of Ragnar's blade draws a thin red line across the ogre's belly, enraging it." Which sounds cool, and makes Ragnar's conflict with the ogre more relevant. On a miss the player might say, "Ragnar shifts about staying out of the ogre's reach looking for an opening." Which sounds much cooler than the traditional, "Ragnar swings and misses" whigh makes mighty Ragnar look like a pansy after the fifth miss in a row.

How do you intend to keep the Simmy mechanics from messing with the players' focusing on the story? Other than FitM and relationship maps? What's the Narrative Premise that keeps the characters moving and participating in creating the story? Does Exalted present enough of one (If so, what is it; something about power and duty, IIRC)? Perhaps you'd want to make some new and extra mechanic to keep the players on that premise. Or one you could tweak to make it more Narrativist?

Mike

Quote from: Mike Holmes
I agree with Gareth that Creation has a totally different feel than Exploration. In each you have discovery, but in creation you discover something internal, and in exploration you discover something external. The difference between Michelangelo and Columbus. One way to handle it is to have the Michelangelos create stuff for the Columbuses to explore.

I think I was surprised by my group's reaction because in the past, they've all had a hand in creation. I was surprised they didn't want to go the next step and create an entire setting (or a kingdom, as in Sorceror and Sword). Thanks, Mike and Gar for your explanations.

I think Andy explained this well, though. He wants the created world to feel solid and consistently 'real', and for our narrativist players, that's only one of many priorities, along with dramatic resonance, for example. I suppose he's worried we might focus on 'cool' settings, without being certain that, say, there are enough farmers to support the populace, or a solid reason why a certain country is democratic rather than feudal.

Quote
How do you intend to keep the Simmy mechanics from messing with the players' focusing on the story? Other than FitM and relationship maps? What's the Narrative Premise that keeps the characters moving and participating in creating the story? Does Exalted present enough of one (If so, what is it; something about power and duty, IIRC)? Perhaps you'd want to make some new and extra mechanic to keep the players on that premise. Or one you could tweak to make it more Narrativist?

I'm going to ignore most of the Simmy mechanics, that's how. =) I can just allocate a difficulty from 1-5, and Bob's your uncle. I don't pay a lot of attention to the system at the best of times (fudging a lot of the modifiers), so it won't be much of a step. Eesh.

We haven't settled on a premise yet - we have a meeting next week to hash this stuff out - and IMHO, Exalted doesn't present a satisfying one. In fact, the game is entirely lacking a section on example premises, which WW is usually quite good at. The setting is very broad though, so I recognise the need for a strong premise for the game. No more leading them into lame stories.

(Exalted is sort of... "you have demigod powers, the world hates and fears you, you may have heard of this before". It is, however, a game dedicated to change - the characters can twist the world, and the developer has some firm opinions on avoiding including a metaplot, which he mostly manages.)

I see what you mean about an actual Narrativist mechanic, much as I've been reading on the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1285">Vampire thread, and that's a tough one; it really is a chicken bone in my craw at the moment. If we were to settle on a premise like 'Can one perform a heroic act and avoid fame?' or 'Can one act heroically for political aims?' then some statistics like 'Infamy' or 'Status' might be interesting to play around with. Something like that.

Our group is still a little scared of non-Sim games, though. I'd imagine that we'll play Exalted for a few months, with some Narrativism (kickers, FitM). Ideally, I want all the players to start to realise they're not playing in my story. Then, perhaps, Sorceror, with an established, comfortable rules system we can all agree to, relying less on 'adventures' and more on pro-active exploration. And then, perhaps after that, a home-made system, designed to cope with whatever premise we want to explore next.

Thanks for your responses, all.

Joe.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)
I think Andy explained this well, though. He wants the created world to feel solid and consistently 'real', and for our narrativist players, that's only one of many priorities, along with dramatic resonance, for example. I suppose he's worried we might focus on 'cool' settings, without being certain that, say, there are enough farmers to support the populace, or a solid reason why a certain country is democratic rather than feudal.

Noooooooo.

Despite saying that I wasn't going to comment, I am going to.  I don't worry too much about farming communities and suchlike (although, if we were designing a village, I'd want it to be surrounded by fields of corn, or something similar).  It's more the thematic unity that worries me.  Any kind of background we produce has to work on multiple levels, and it needs to be coherent.  The thought of designing a whole world and making it coherent is fairly daunting.  If you asked people to design a village and some ideas for how the world worked, they'd probably find it a lot easier.  But coming up with a magic ideology that works and fits in with a particular world sounds a lot trickier than that.

QuoteThere's references to various things the Deathknights can do, for instance, which indicate that the writers have fleshed them out to a much greater degree than we see in the book. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there's 10-20 times the amount of source material in existence than has been published so far, to say nothing of the 100 time that which has been discarded because it didn't fit.

I wanted to comment on this bit . . . I recall some posts on the L5R and/or 7th Sea mailing lists where a number of developers (among them John Wick, I think) "admit" that this is in fact mostly not true (for their games - but I find it hard to believe WW is that different).  The developers in an RPG line like this are essentially making it up as they go.  When they're good, they have a guiding vision, a skelton to stay true to, some coherence to the whole thing.  But based on what I've heard (and a little common sense about production schedules and the like) . . . this perception (10X-20X the published material, much less 100X) is Illusionism writ at the published game-line scale.

I say this not to denigrate the style - the fact that Exalted makes you feel this way indicates that they've done their job well.  And they may well have some of the details you mention (Deathknights?) planned already.

But I *do* mean to "de-mystify" the depth of a world, especially one created by a company and revealed over time.  What they do is NOT fundamentally different from what you could do with your play group.  Some people find that having the company develop the world is enjoyable, and it may somewhat reduce the "work" your group would have to do, but . . .

Again, de-mystify.  The writers of most RPGs in this style (maybe Tekumel and Glorantha are exceptions) are typing the new material into source books almost as fast as they're inventing it.  They have skill in making it SEEM otherwise, and there is value to that skill (and techniques that facilitate it, like really pre-creating some bits), but in the end . . . we tend to over-estimate the amount of pre-existing substance in this situation.

Of course, Exalted developers (or others) are free to step forward and say "we created a 10,000 page bible before we even published the core rulebook" and prove me wrong, but I'd *still* defend the de-mystification bit.  In my experience, most people - certainly most gamers - are more than capable of "developing" a world in play.

Gordon

Certainly if WW was creating style bibles we wouldn't have 3rd editions, now would we? :P  A lot more background work did go into Exalted than the other games, simply because it didn't have a cultural reference to come off of.  Whereas Ann Rice gives you the feel of Vampire, and many new agey books can help you with Mage, Exalted is a reality that no one has a reference on.  

This has always been the hardest part for me to really get a hook on the background of Exalted.  It seems like a lot of nifty ideas got put together, but no overall theme to hold it.  Unlike the Final Fantasy games which have traditionally played on a unifying theme for its vast array of characters, Exile hasn't set up an immediate conflict, which is something that WW has traditionally been very good at.  Certainly there's room for lots of cool beasties and undead monsters, but fighting isn' t the same as conflict.  

I'll be very interested to see what Premise you go with, and how well it runs in the Exalted world.

Chris

We had our second meeting yesterday.

I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first session. In fact, I'm ranting loudly at my group for how lacklustre the meeting was. Whee.

First of all, one of my players decided that Exalted wasn't for him, and as our group is quite small already, we still need him to play. I greatly prefer the dynamics of 4 people to 3 people. We then discussed a few other settings/premises, but I felt like a lot of the work we've put into discussing Exalted has been wasted; whiff indeed.

We had a couple of interesting problems. As one of the group had not read one of the http://www.geocities.com/devil_bunnys/mindset.html">essays I'd posted to our gaming list, he was surprised when I reminded him that getting deep into character was not a primary goal of our new game. The entire group's enjoyment, and the collaborative creation of a story are our stated primary goals. I think his confusion came about because in most RPGs I've run in the past (and played in), there's no emphasis on the enjoyment one can have in different stances. Usually, Actor stance is the Holy Grail, and other stances are rarely recognised as worthy approaches. I'd like to see a published RPG that emphasised this; do any?

Ultimately, I think I might push for a more formal gaming contract to be written up, and I'm about to do some searches on the Forge to see if that's been tackled before.

Our group seems scared at the idea of developing a setting from whole cloth, so http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=4">Paul Czege suggested that our group could run a Narrativist game with a setting from an already-published RPG. At the moment, there's support for Fading Suns, which I'm having a hard time appreciating; the setting seems awfully bland and obvious to me. So we're all taking the next week to get familiar with the Fading Suns book.

This means we're going to have to pick a system, so we might try Sorceror. Has anyone run the Sorceror system with a published setting from another RPG? I know it's a bit of a kludge, but the rules are speedy and clean, and reward in-game cleverness well. They'll also support FitM, which I've never tried.

One possible problem I can see is that the setting and system of established RPGs are tied together, so we might have problems using another system while trying to promote a Fading Suns 'flavour'.

Joe.

Hi Joe,

I'm responding at long-distance, of course, so all of the following should be understood as a projection based on my previous experiences, rather than as a presumed observation of your group.

My first thought concerns a kind of ... what, over-sensitivity, perhaps. So one fellow wants to stop playing? It doesn't seem like a big deal to me, and your apparent rejection of three as opposed to four seems kind of reactive, rather than critical. Wouldn't it be better to see whether play-with-three is so disastrous, before chucking it?

My second thought concerns all this painful contracting and pacting. Think about the band metaphor - sure, these four guys swear on the cover of Led Zep's fourth album "never to break up the band, man," in their garage. But two years later, one guy's fronting some other band, another guy's been replaced, and the new guy and the remaining two have changed the name. This is normal, and I have yet to see a long-term functional game group that did not undergo some version of this shake-up at one point or another.

[Given that the fellow who wants to quit did not enter into the pre-game dialogue anyway, it would seem straightforward that he is not that interested. Why not stick to your guns and forge ahead? Everyone was interested in the first place is still there.]

To continue with the contracting & pacting thing: isn't that a bit high-pressure? To the extent that if one run is a bit flat or mellow, the whole thing has to be chucked out, because "we failed?" One thing about a functioning band is that they understand that not all practice sessions are great, not all cuts turn out well, and not even all gigs or concerts are absolutely fabulous. It seems to me that a blood oath to "play this way" puts a lot of performance anxiety into the picture. Let people find their feet with how they like to play, before grading yourselves rigorously.

Anyway, I suggest - bluntly - that y'all lighten up a little. Enjoy playing, give credit to one another for cool scenes and ideas, don't sweat either a session or a scene that doesn't fly too well. Consider hitch-hiking: you can't get mad about the cars that pass by; the only thing to do is be happy about the one that picks you up.

Again, forgive me, but it all reminds me of some dating scenes from the bad old days, in which one partner demands many and varied specific things about the relationship very early on, and then is hyper-critical (of self and other) at every moment, thus guaranteeing an ugly breakup.

Best,
Ron

P.S. I seem to be on one of my metaphor kicks today.

Hey Broin,

Wow !! Another illuminated soul who tries to play Narrativist Fading Suns ! I'm the local FS freak, so don't be afraid to ask if you have any questions on the setting; I am myself in the process of coming up with a variant of Sorcerer to use with FS; I'll probably add some attributes to reflect the settting and themes, like Alien, Tech, Church, as well as subdividing the attributes into Qualities, Equipment and Troupe - but it's still in the works. I'd be very interested to hear what you guys come up with if you settle for FS.

Manu

Hey Mike,

...but in creation you discover something internal, and in exploration you discover something external. The difference between Michelangelo and Columbus.

I don't know how I missed reading this when you wrote it on the 25th, but I apparently did. So now I just want to say that it's an awesome and incisive analogy.

Paul

Quote from: Ron Edwards

I'm responding at long-distance, of course, so all of the following should be understood as a projection based on my previous experiences, rather than as a presumed observation of your group.

Oh, absolutely. It's just like with movie reviewers. After reading Ebert for a year, one can get an idea of how much one agrees with Ebert. I absolutely respect your opinion as an experienced gamer and would really only get irritated if you insulted my cooking. As for gaming, forge ahead (as it were).

('Forge Ahead!' - good t-shirt logo?)

You're absolutely right. I'm really sensitive about gaming at the moment. I feel excited with what gaming can be, having read through The Forge for the last few months, and simultaneously disapointed with some of my players and their lack of commitment. My high hopes may be set a little too high, I admit, and I am prone to forgetting people are only human.

I'll have a think about the band metaphor again, as it's a good one.  

Best,

Joe.

Ron,

I think that you may have a slight misunderstanding of the situation (or perhaps I have). It sounds to me like they haven't even played yet. Both sessions were to decide what to play. Am I right, Joe?

Paul,

Thanks, I thought of that becuse I ran a session last summer that was a historical replay of some of the events of Isabel and Ferdinand's court just before Columbus sailed. I noted that Michelangleo was just getting started at the time as well. In fact they have a jillion interesting contemporaries, but have stood out as icons for certain sorts of persons.

Mike

Mike,

You're right, it was our second pre-game meeting. I hadn't even realised Ron might have thought we'd started playing.

Yup, we're deciding on what to play. Starting with 'Narrativism' and working 'down' to things like 'premise', 'setting', etc.

Joe.