thread: 2005-05-03 : Creating Theme
On 2005-05-05, GB Steve wrote:
One of the things I've picked up on here and that is very apparent if you play octaNe is that conflict failure is an important part of the game and should not be discounted.
It's very easy in octaNe to always narrate conflict success because the players generally have narrative control but if this happens the game becomes, as Ron Edwards discovered, very flat.
If you look at task resolution systems, conflict resolution usually depends on the overall success in a series of task resolutions. At any point you might encounter heroic success or dismal failure through a fumble or critical. In effect, task conflict resolution is always in the balance. This is part of what makes task resolution so exciting.
In octaNe in particular where you could just take your narrative control and narrate a resolution to the entire game it's important that the players and the GM be aware that a good narrative involves some kind of failure along the way to make it interesting.
So how can conflict resolution stay as exciting as task resolution? There are probably a number of ways of doing this.
You can break down the overall conflict into smaller chunks so that there's no global resolution in one go. (Players tend to do this naturally anyway but I've been seeing some strange results in the Capes game examples where players deliberately choose conflicts that break the natural idea of storytelling.)
You can institutionalise failure. I've written a system called the token system. It's narrative and based on the structure of film narratives. There are two parts to this.
The first is that you can't get a success until you've had a failure (when you fail you take a token which you can later pay back to succede). The second is that the scope of failures and success has to become bigger as the narration progresses (typically as things progress in a film the stakes become higher) so you need to fail ever more spectacularly to earn a token. You could introduce dice to make the use of tokens less certain if you like.
You can introduce some kind of overall threshold for success. My Life with Master does this. The endgame is not triggered until Love>Fear+Weariness. It's quite easy to export this to other types of game so in a Cthulhu game you might say that the endgame starts when Knowledge>Corruption+Fear for example.
