anyway.

Being a good fiat GM is extremely hard and no one can tell you how to do it.

You need to read people and understand their personal psychologies.  You need to craft a story that entertains that psychology and you need to constantly react to their inputs and rapidly give them what they want.  Just thinking about it tires me out.

The bugaboo is not the story of breaking into the safe.  The bugaboo is experiences like this:

Player: I break into the safe
GM: you find nothing
Player: I hack his computers
GM: you find nothing
Player: I question his partner
GM: you find nothing
Player: I tail him for a day
GM: you find nothing
Player: I give up
GM: So soon?  Remember 5 sessions ago he mentioned his mother?  Why don't you question her?
Player: I question his mother
GM: She tells you he's the killer! You win
Player: ick

If the GM had included documents leading to the mother in the safe, the issue would not have come up.  But the issue can never come up if the game uses task resolution.

So on one hand a game that depends entirely on the memory, skill and talent of the GM and in the other all that is taken care of by a simple mechanic.

I don't want to interrupt your discussion too much, but I kinda got hung up on this bit: "I don't *want* the dice to have any actual power—they're just a psychological prop that build excitement by allowing me to pretend that an outcome is in doubt."

So, yeah, same as Vincent, I'm seeing a sort of glitch here. If the player's rolls have no impact, if we're just pretending, why are we rolling at all? If you want for players' decisions to have impact, how is that impact communicated and supported? If I decide to stab the orc and roll for it, if I roll well, I stab him. If I roll for shit, I don't. If I stab him, he's probably going to die. There's dice having power. Should we get rid of that, too? The GM just decides if the orc gets stabbed or not, regardless of how I roll? Probably not, right?

[If you're going to answer with "yes, but if the player kill the orc and the orc's survival is mandatory for a good story, so the GM should keep him alive" then it should be pointed out we're talking about two very different ways to game. Neither is "right" in any way. But it should be said, for clarity's sake, that Vincent's games (and others) rather explicitly forbid the GM for having big plans, so that "story" emerges organically. Why is it mandatory for the orc to survive? I see no other reason that the GM had plans for him, agree? If the player stabs the orc (and backs that action up with a good roll), the GM would (I'm not going to say should) abandon his plans regarding the orc, same as a player would have to abandon the plans about his cleric if he fell down a pit trap and died.]

Also, I think this really gets at the core of what I understand as the immersionism issue: The players don't create the fiction, instead they are abducted into a fiction being created by a third party. The GM is the "broadcaster" of the fiction, unlike the "reporter" in Vincent's games.

I hung up on the dice-as-prop bit too. It seems like there's a built-in assumption that there's only one good outcome from the roll, yes? One that makes a 'good story' or whatever?

If both outcomes are pretty much equally satisfying, but still distinct, would you enjoy rolling dice to determine between them?

GMing a PBmB game is easier, because there's no way for the players to tell whether I'm rolling dice or not.

If there's more than one satisfying outcome, than I'll roll the dice, and let them choose.

If there really is possible outcome for a particular action that keeps the story moving, then I just don't roll the dice - I'll always let the player succeed.

Players are none the wiser either way; but considering outcomes and rolling the dice makes it more engaging for me, as GM.

Vincent, should us non-Vincent, non-Rafael's be talking? If so, I'll push back a little on @Teataine's query that, since Rafael says the dice are "just a psychological prop":

If the player's rolls have no impact, if we're just pretending, why are we rolling at all?

If I unpack this apparently rhetorical question, I think I find an assumption that "a psychological prop" is of no moment: trivially dispensed with. Teataine, am I misunderstanding your implication? If I am, please let me know. If I'm not, it strikes me as not just not demonstrated yet but very nearly self-refuting. "Psychological props" are going to be crucial to our experience because they're a big determinant in how the experience feels.

If the rest of us AREN'T supposed to be talking now, never mind! :)

It's funny, because I don't want the dice to be a psychological prop - I only want dice to be rolled where they matter. This is exactly what the GUMSHOE system is about, and the safe example is exactly what it's there to deal with. It's fun to roll to see if you defeat the monster, but rolling to see if you find a book in a library? Not so much.

Just for curious, Vincent, but what's the game you're GMing?

Alexander: Apocalypse World!

Everybody: It's cool with me if we have a leisurely kind of conversation without Rafael, but of course I'd rather not draw conclusions about his points without him. Rafael, jump in!

Teataine, Jim: I'm a believer in dice as psychological props, that doesn't bug me or throw me. I know what Rafael's talking about there. Even when the rules have the dice contribute content and direction, as I prefer, still the dice serve as important psychological props.

Like, (a) it's cool with me that the player's roll determined whether the character's mom lived or died. I'm excited that the dice contributed that. But also (b) given that the character poisoned his mom, I'm very glad that I didn't have to decide whether she lived or died. My decision to say "your mom's dead" was much easier, psychologically, just because a die roll stood between me and it.

"My decision to say "your mom's dead" was much easier, psychologically, just because a die roll stood between me and it."

My early experiences with Puppetland confirm this by the absence of dice. As the GM in Puppetland, I felt naked before the players, because *everything* relied on my judgment. I missed having dice to help me out.

Hmm. It's been years since I've played Puppetland. I wonder if I should pick it up again....

Vincent, your description of dice as props and Rafael's don't quite match up for me. It seems like your version says "Dice can do important stuff, and they also take some psychological burden off." Where as Rafael pretty explicitly says that rolling dice is just a way to take some of the psychological burden, the outcome isn't in doubt.

Not that the two have to match up, I just want to make sure I'm not missing something.

I just wanted to comment—a bit of a sidebar, really.

I'm amazed at how far we've come in about 10 years. This is the kind of conversation that used to go all kinds of crazy directions. Sometimes, it resulted in polemics. Other times, it was evangelical or earth shattering stuff. And, you know, that kind of thing will squish around forever probably.

But, it's pretty damn cool that it's just a conversation now. And, that, we just don't see anything but "Yeah, sometimes it's like that, sometimes it's not" as the quick answer. Neat.

I'm with Vincent—I want dice to take some GM burdens off me.

I've been playing and GMing online RP games (chat and messages) since 1996, for a while there for 40+ hours a week. Most of that was diceless, either character ownership based (no GM) or pure unadulterated GM fiat. And GMing those without dice became horribly taxing.

On the surface, players either want fairness, realism, wish fulfilment or drama. That alone males GM decisions an exercise in social balancing. Underneath that are relationships that further complicate the matter.

Here's an example. I'm GMing an ancient Egypt game. A plague of (conjured) locusts attacks. The players are safe in a building but hear an NPC screaming outside. I thought that was mostly dramatic color, because going out to save him would be near-certain suicide. Now, all of the players decide their PCs charge out to save the NPCs. What do I as the GM do now? Realism says they get chewed up badly, either disfigured for life or even dead. That would also end the storyline. More dramatic would be to have just one of them severely hurt and the others saving that PC as well, then have to deal with that consequence. But who do I pick? And is that player still going to have fun? Did they even undwerstand the possible consequences of their action or assume that, as protagonists, they're gonna be ok?

If I had a dice roll available, I'd say: "anyone going out to save the guy rolls D6. 1, you're fine. 2-3, you're hurt. 4-5, you'll suffer severe, lasting wounds. 6 and you're dead." Now I have clearly communicated the exact risk involved and established a clear mechanism for determining who suffers what, avoiding social and fairness issues. At the same time, this not only preserves but emphasizes the dramatic severity of the scene. Big load off my shoulders and support for what the scene is about.

Sage: You're good, not missing anything.

Rafael's like: I want dice to serve as psychological props, not to decide things.

I'm like: I want dice to serve as psychological props, AND to decide things.

Because of the second clause, the psychological proppiness is different in its respective details, but nevertheless: both of us hold the dice to be valuable as psychological props.

Matt: I know it, right?

A couple of sessions ago, one of the PCs decided to poison his own mother, a powerful and kind of dreadful figure in the game world, but not, like, a villain. I don't really know why the PC decided to do it, although I could see the developing animosity between them. I hadn't planned for it in any way, though; it wasn't something I'd set up as GM.

Guess she gave him a motive, eh?

Guess so!

I think there's a pretty wide spectrum in people's opinions of how much impact randomization should have on the game state.

In the beginning, the default answer was: lots and lots.  You don't just get to decide whether you're a human or an elf—that comes down to a die roll in character generation.  You've been playing smart and hard for the last three years, and you fail your save against poison?  Start rolling another character.

Over time I think the general opinion, though still varying widely, has swung over farther in the other direction.  No one's character should die from a single bad roll.  Or maybe from a couple bad rolls.  Or maybe bad rolls shouldn't ever kill your character off.

It's something that puts some of my friends off Primetime Adventures—the high degree of randomness in any given test, and the relatively low impact of static character modifiers.

Also, heck, we can always dig out and dust off Amber, if we want to escape the tyranny of randomness.

Hey, :)

Wow. I was reading this, and my mind immediately went here...

Yes, it's old stuff, but it's my stuff, so it's sort of glued to the back of my mind... :)

If you care to, have Rafael take a look at that series of articles and respective comments. Might be interesting to him. Then again, might not...

Cheers,
J.

"I don't really know why the PC decided to do it"

I've been thinking about this recently. Is this a thing you can know? Does anyone have an authoratative answer to this question?

I guess the way I play, and the way I think about characters (and myself) is that there's no real authoratative account of why a character does a thing.

If that was my character who killed his mum, and you were like "I think he really did it because she knew what a screwup he really was." I'd be like "Yeah, that makes sense to me" or "Huh, I don't see it that way." But I definitely wouldn't be like "Yes, you're correct" or "Nope, he doesn't think like that."

Characters aren't real. They don't have thoughts and feelings, and so we can't know what those thoughts and feelings are. We can only interpret their actions (maybe the same is true of real people? Skinner thought so).

But maybe this is about how I play games? Maybe other people feel like they have authority over what their characters are thinking and feeling.

Super tangent though. Maybe I should take it to my bloog?

Hi everyone,

thanks for all the discussion! And sorry for the delay in my reply; Vincent's mail ended up among my many spam.

Q. What is wrong with the classic gamemaster / player division?
A. Just because the classic GM/player division doesn't fill the breadth of possible good design."

Ok, I'll rephrase my question then:
Q. What advantages does blurring the classic GM/player division bring?

In particular:
"1. Should the players be able to establish facts about things in the game world outside of their own characters' control? Your answer is that they shouldn't in general, I surmise."

My answer is that I anticipate a reduction in immersion if they can, and don't see the compensating advantage. Therefore, I don't see why anyone would prefer to play such games—but clearly, there are people who do, so I'd like to understand why.

I'm going to split (2) into a separate post, since it's generated so much discussion of its own.

Hey Rafael.

Me personally, I don't find immersion hard to get, so I don't value it super highly. I demand more than immersion from my roleplaying, and I'll happily go without immersion for a while if I'm getting other kinds of creative fulfillment. I hear sometimes from someone who (a) enjoys only immersion, nothing else, and (b) has a hard time maintaining immersion in the face of any distractions. It seems kind of sad to me—these people don't seem to find their roleplaying reliably fulfilling.

Anyway, so before I answer, I shrug, and "sure, if all you want out of your roleplaying is immersion, play immersive games." No big deal.

Co-GMing means that you can participate more actively in all parts of the collaborative process, instead of limiting yourself to immersion. It's creatively satisfying; it's a charge while you're doing it and at the end you're like, holy crap, look at the cool thing we did. Your engagement with your own character is (often) less intimate than with the conventional player/GM split, but it's still more intimate than, say, watching a movie or reading a book. You're still fully creatively engaged. Plus your engagment with the other player's characters is (often) more, and more active, than in a conventionally-split game.

Co-GMing is also easier on the GM. Do you GM? It's a different kind of work from playing, and some GMs find it a real relief to share the burdens.

"I don't *want* the dice to have any actual power—they're just a psychological prop that build excitement by allowing me to pretend that an outcome is in doubt" versus "I'm not saying that the GM should have the One True Story planned in advance. I believe that player decisions should have an impact..."

What I prefer is for the players' decision to have a non-mechanical impact on the story: the players make their desires and intentions clear through roleplay, and the GM uses that information to craft a satisfying experience.

It seems to me that any attempt to model this form of player control mechanically can only limit that control (through failure chance or expenditure of resources), not expand it—and in addition will reduce immersion, as described in the top post.

one of the PCs decided to poison his own mother

This, and not the subsequent die roll, is the decision. It has no direct mechanical component, and it has an impact on the story regardless of the roll that follows—although the nature of that impact may depend on the roll.

The character brings his mom food, so yes, and makes the roll[....] When you say that you don't want the dice to have any power, do you mean this kind of power too?

The GM's job, in my view, is to ensure that, whether or not the poison succeeds, the game continues satisfyingly—and to fudge the roll if she can find no satisfying path leading on from a particular die result. That is, I'm willing to let the dice decide things, as long as they make an acceptable decision.

To be perfectly clear:

Sage: If both outcomes are pretty much equally satisfying, but still distinct, would you enjoy rolling dice to determine between them?
Yes—I overstated my position in the original post.

Vincent: (a) it's cool with me that the player's roll determined whether the character's mom lived or died. I'm excited that the dice contributed that. But also (b) given that the character poisoned his mom, I'm very glad that I didn't have to decide whether she lived or died.
Exactly.

On to the individual replies:

bg Josh: So on one hand a game that depends entirely on the memory, skill and talent of the GM and in the other all that is taken care of by a simple mechanic.

This seems to me to be the key point. I agree that being a good classic GM is hard. I don't see that the task resolution mechanic actually solves the problem, though. That seems like saying "describing a location evocatively is hard, so let's have the players pick some adjectives and then roll to see which one applies."

Teataine: What Jim said. :)

Simon R.: It's fun to roll to see if you defeat the monster, but rolling to see if you find a book in a library? Not so much.

I think that's because, in real life, we see the results of a fair fight as indeterminate, but the book is either there or it isn't. Therefore, rolling the fight makes the experience more real, whereas rolling the book makes it less real. That's exactly my beef with task resolution.

Christian Griffen: anyone going out to save the guy rolls D6. 1, you're fine. 2-3, you're hurt. 4-5, you'll suffer severe, lasting wounds. 6 and you're dead.

I understand you, and agree in principle about dice lifting the burden, but don't like this approach here; instead, I would use description and a crescendo of consequences to allow the players to make informed decisions and accept the results. Dice would be used for details or to decide between multiple acceptably dramatic and realistic outcomes:

When the players open the door, dozens of locusts fly in, stinging (or whatever) wildly. If the players slam the door shut, they are only lightly injured (roll dice for details). If they decide to go out anyway, ask who goes first. If no one wants to go first, you're done; otherwise that character is severely but not permanently wounded (roll dice for details) as soon as he steps outside. If he runs back, you're done; otherwise his woulds get progressively worse and longer-term over time. If you think it would violate realism or drama for him to save the NPC, make it clear in advance how hopeless that is ("you can't even see him for locusts; if you go any further you won't be able to find your safe building anymore"). If you think that, having chosen to take the risk, the only satisfying result would be having him save the NPC, roll a lot of dice and let the rescue succeed regardless of what they say. If you think that either outcome could be cool, by all means make a roll to decide the NPCs fate, but the injuries are permanent regardless.

Realism, drama, consequences clearly communicated to the players, and you didn't have to pick a victim arbitrarily.

Some history!

When this whole indie rpgs thing really started, back in 2002-2003, Rafael, questions like yours were a big deal. They were serious challenges and serious threats. I'd been playing a co-GMed game for years, for instance, so I knew that it was fun and could be done, but there were no games available to show anybody else how to do it.

Designing and publishing a game is already very difficult. In those days, designing a co-GMed game was really risky, too. Mostly when you talked about it, people would demand that you justify yourself, so you had to deal with that on top of the innate difficulties of the endeavor. It was no fun.

These days, whew. Someone comes along and demands that you justify yourself, like you have, and it's just not the threat it used to be! We already know co-GMed games can be fun. We don't have to fight for it anymore.

I never quite designed a co-GMed game. You may not know it, but I'm a big advocate of strong GMing, personally. A bunch of my friends did, though:
1001 Nights
Breaking the Ice (and the rest of her games!)
It's Complicated
Mist-Robed Gate
Polaris
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Universalis

If you want to know what's fun about them, the answer is different things for each of them, not any one thing they have in common. If you're really interested, the only thing I can possibly recommend is that you give one or another of 'em a try. You'll see what's fun about it, you'll see what's not fun, and you can make up your own mind about what you enjoy. If you aren't interested enough to try them, I dunno! I'll answer questions but I can't do any more than that.

Fudging rolls, huh?

The game I'm GMing, it's designed to positively eliminate the possibility of fudging rolls. The players roll dice for themselves, in public, and they know how to read the results. I couldn't fudge their rolls if I wanted to.

This works because the game's designed so that no die result can lead to an unsatisfying story. Not by coincidence, the game's designed so that as GM I don't plan a story, but instead participate in the creation of one, even though it's a game where I control absolutely everything but the players' characters.

So, um, with me? What do you make of that?

Co-GMing means that you can participate more actively in all parts of the collaborative process, instead of limiting yourself to immersion. It's creatively satisfying[....]

Ok, now we're getting somewhere! This is exactly the "compensating advantage" I was looking for. I can understand the creative satisfaction you describe; it's the pleasure of being a GM.

So there is a "GM-joy" and a "player joy", and if the players participate in GM-ing, they can have GM-joy. To get this GM-joy, they have to sacrifice some (immersion-dependent) player-joy; whether this tradeoff is worthwhile is presumably a question of taste. Ditto for GMs sharing the burden but giving up control.

However, it seems to me that task resolution only results in "look at the cool thing we did" if (a) success or failure are both interesting or (b) you always succeed; otherwise, dice failure can result in narrative failure that is hard to work around. In bg Josh's version of safe cracking example: if you roll badly for safe cracking, questioning the partner, hacking the computers, etc. then you're just as screwed as if you had a railroading fiat GM. Since you say the game's designed so that no die result can lead to an unsatisfying story, I guess you advocate (a), which is exactly the situation in which I was advocating following the dice, so maybe we just agree... but I don't grasp yet how you accomplish (a) in a task-resolution setting.

Plus your engagment with the other player's characters is (often) more, and more active, than in a conventionally-split game.

That's an interesting claim; can you expand on it?

Let me correct this, because I think it's a vital point:

the game's designed so that no die result can lead to an unsatisfying story

I don't grasp yet how you can do that in a game design, period.

If you're really interested, the only thing I can possibly recommend is that you give one or another of 'em a try.

Of course! But the context of my original question was "I'd like to get my gaming group to try some of these new wave games, but they are reluctant, and I don't understand the potential appeal clearly enough to convice them."

Rafael,

As a data point I haven't had to fudge a die roll to "save the story" in over 10 years.  Games like Sorcerer, Dirty Secrets, My Life with Master, and Vincent's own In A Wicked Age... and Dogs in the Vineyard are setup so that this is totally unnecessary.

The reason is that those games focus on clashes between motivated characters in action.  Assuming the two or more acting characters are motivated by sympathetic passion it doesn't matter "who wins" each clash.  You might end up with two vastly different stories but neither will be "unsatisfactory."

However, with that comes a price.  I've noticed a lot of gamers place their character's identity in a pre-game sense of how things should turn out for the character.  Failure to achieve that outcome is failure to have properly realized the character and a sense that the story is "ruined."

You have to be willing to let go of that.  You have to be willing to play NOT KNOWING whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy until the last die has been rolled.  You have to be willing to play NOT KNOWING whether this scene which might LOOK like a potential climax going in really IS a climax or just a serious turning point that suddenly opens up a whole new chapter on the other side.

The mechanics of the games I listed above do not produce unsatisfactory stories when properly applied but they can OFTEN "ruin" the story you were forcibly trying to tell.  I've run into this issue enough times with certain kinds of players that I feel it is worth pointing out.

Jesse

Rafael,

It sounds like you've only ever played games where dice rolls always have the potential to ruin the story or stop it short.

Is that so? Because, if that's the case, you can see how a natural consequence is that you always *need* the GM there to remove those glitches.

If THAT still rings familiar to you, can you see that a natural conclusion is that the GM ability to override the dice ' (or any other mechanical) result is vital for "realism", "good story", and similar things you may want out of a game?

Note that they all come from that original situation: you're playing games where die rolls (and other mechanical elements) have the potential to ruin verisimilitude, believable drama, and similar things.

The community of designers that Vincent is a part of are largely interested in developing games where the dice (and all other rules and mechanics) exist to move the game in directions that are *less fun* if left up to the GM (or the group).

From that point of view, if the dice are ruining the story, verisimilitude, or whatever, they shouldn't be there. The whole premise of this kind of design is that their presence is to inject fun, believability, or drama into the game. The idea that they would ruin it is anathema to this school of thought—we're starting from an entirely different assumption.

This is an awesome discussion.

Rafael, you said that you don't understand how both "success" and "failure" could always be interesting. This is a pretty crucial sticking point, and probably the basis of a lot of the confusion.

There are a lot of different ways you can do this.

To take one example: In the "burning" games (Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, Mouse Guard), you only fail a task if it's interesting for you to do so. If it's not interesting, then you succeed, but with some sort of cost or twist. Maybe your character is exhausted by the effort, or makes enough noise to attract an enemy, or whatever. The rules give you a lot of interesting options.

In Vincent's game "Dogs in the Vineyard", the interesting question is not about success or failure at all. Your character can almost always succeed, especially if the group is working together. The interesting question is whether he's willing to go to the lengths required to get what he wants. Is he willing to pull a gun on his brother to keep him from doing something stupid?

There's a game called Houses of the Blooded where the dice just determine narrative authority. If you succeed, then you get to narrate how you succeed or fail (it's up to you!). If you fail, then the GM gets to narrate how you succeed or fail, and he's bound to make life difficult for your character. If failing (or succeeding!) is boring, then neither player need pick it. They will just narrate other things to make the story go the way they want it to.

In short, there are lots of clever ways to do it, and lots of clever people who have been making it work. If none of these appeal to you, there is almost certainly another game that will. (Myself, I'm looking forward to Vincent's next game, Apocalypse World. It looks awesome.)

Following this discussion with interest, since I was in similar shoes to Rafael not too long ago, going "what's the deal with these wacky co-GMed games?"

Unfortunately, I have nothing much to add, other than that I've always leaned the GM way, so games where I get to be a player and a GM just sound great to me :)

Oh, and Rafael, your talk about immersion as *the thing* to go for is fascinating to me because *that's* a new phenomenon to me too. Until a few months ago, I didn't even know there were people who sought that out specifically, so it's cool to hear from that perspective.

Simon C: Characters aren't real. They don't have thoughts and feelings, and so we can't know what those thoughts and feelings are[...]. But maybe this is about how I play games? Maybe other people feel like they have authority over what their characters are thinking and feeling.

That is a fascinating perspective for me, because everyone I know is the opposite: what our characters are thinking and feeling is the only thing over which we have complete authority.

Is coming up with various interpretations of your characters' actions a central part of the game for you, or is your focus somewhere else entirely?

Is coming up with various interpretations of your characters' actions a central part of the game for you, or is your focus somewhere else entirely?

Good question. I think maybe yes? When we talk about the game afterwards, a lot of what we talk about is discussing interpretations of the characters' actions, motivations, and so on. Kind of like when you're talking about a TV show you like, and you're like "Jason's just being an irresponsible idiot!" and someone else is like "No! He cares about his sister and he's doing what he thinks is the right thing."

There's other stuff as well, but yeah, that's a big thing for me.

I think it'd be a mistake to say that everyone I play with is the same way though. I've had conversations with some people about this, and I think there are varying degrees, like, they'll "know" some things about their characters but not others, or sometimes know or sometimes not.

Rafael:

If the players slam the door shut, they are only lightly injured (roll dice for details). If they decide to go out anyway, ask who goes first. If no one wants to go first, you're done; otherwise that character is severely but not permanently wounded (roll dice for details) as soon as he steps outside

But these are mechanical impact of player decision, aren't they? If I shut the door, I'll roll less dice (or smaller dice) than if I go on, and the resulting difference in how much I'm wounded could impact heavily on the story.
I've not clear what do you mean exactly by saying that you prefer player's choises to have non-mechanical impact on the story; do you mean that the mechanic should impact after the choise, and not the choise itself?

If you think that, having chosen to take the risk, the only satisfying result would be having him save the NPC, roll a lot of dice and let the rescue succeed regardless of what they say

What if the player thinks that another outcome'd be more interesting? Some time ago I was discussing with a friend of mine, and while in a game he'd have preferred his character to die (because he chose to risk his life to save another character, and he was willing to die for that), the master made him survive thinking it was the only satisfying result.

it seems to me that task resolution only results in "look at the cool thing we did" if (a) success or failure are both interesting or (b) you always succeed; otherwise, dice failure can result in narrative failure that is hard to work around

Do you know Play Passionately, by Jesse Burnenko (who replied above)? If not, I suggest you to read it, especially, with regard to the quote above, Play Passionateli #5: You Can't Ruin The Story.

I'm starting to get it, I think...

Jesse Burneko: I've noticed a lot of gamers place their character's identity in a pre-game sense of how things should turn out for the character.

I've seen that too, but it's not what I mean.

As a data point I haven't had to fudge a die roll to "save the story" in over 10 years. Assuming the two or more acting characters are motivated by sympathetic passion it doesn't matter "who wins" each clash. You might end up with two vastly different stories but neither will be "unsatisfactory."

It hardly ever comes up in my groups either, for exactly the reason you mention, except that in my case, the GM rather than the game system sets up the situations so that all outcomes of a clash are satisfying. The exception is instructive, though: PC death without dramatic justification is usually unsatisfying. Therefore, if a mook in a skirmish would suddenly kill a PC with a lucky shot, it is better to fudge.

But precisely this is a situation that can be avoided through different game mechanics! In Fate, for example, you never die unless you, the player, have volunteered to risk death, presumably for a dramatic payoff.

That's one example that I understand in which system design allows more "consequential" use of dice. So far, so good. It still requires a skilled GM to ensure that pointless death is the only potential "drama-breaker", though.

You have to be willing to play NOT KNOWING whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy until the last die has been rolled.

This is interesting and something I will have to try... but is that in any way superior to having a skillful fiat GM, or is it just a way to allow good play without such a GM?

Paul T.: [Y]ou're playing games where die rolls[...] have the potential to ruin verisimilitude, believable drama, and similar things[...T]heir presence [should] inject fun, believability, or drama into the game.

That you for that clear statement. As noted in my reply to Jesse, I am playing games where a certain subset of die rolls can ruin everything, and I now see how "new wave" techniques can help with that (thanks!). My original "psychological prop" comment was, however, based on the fact that we also use dice to "inject fun", etc. into the game, albeit apparently in a different way.

The community of designers that Vincent is a part of are largely interested in developing games where the dice[...] exist to move the game in directions that are *less fun* if left up to the GM (or the group).

Like what?

PeterBB: Lots of good examples, thanks! The first two sound like formalizations & mechanizations of what I think of as good GMing. The last one sounds just like what I'm having trouble accepting: it sacrifices a sense of narrative authority to avoid the chance of narrative failure through dice whim—but such failure is an extremely rare situation in my world, as I mentioned above.

I guess my current position is:

I now see that a game system that carefully chooses the situations in which (e.g.) die rolls are used and the effects they can have can preserve their psychological value while avoiding their classic pitfalls.

I can believe that a game system can ease the burden on the GM of creating satisfying drama, although I don't yet understand how in practice.

I don't yet see what, if anything, a good system can offer that a good GM can't.

P.S. As far as testing these with my group goes, I may have a solution: we have a good GM who is happy being GM, and players who are happy being players—but occasionally I have to GM something, and I'm not particularly good, so the other players might be more open to experimentation in that context. Those "Dogs" won't hunt, alas, because the setting leaves everyone in my group cold, but maybe I can talk them into something "Burning".

@Rafael
Simon R.: It's fun to roll to see if you defeat the monster, but rolling to see if you find a book in a library? Not so much.

I think that's because, in real life, we see the results of a fair fight as indeterminate, but the book is either there or it isn't. Therefore, rolling the fight makes the experience more real, whereas rolling the book makes it less real. That's exactly my beef with task resolution.

For me it's not that the result is indeterminate, it's that it lacks dramatic tension. A half-hour fight I'm interested in. Who will win? A half-hour search in the library. Will he find the book? Not at all interesting. Will randomness leave me on the edge of my seat - concerned about the result?

Do you find the book? Yes.
Do you win the fight? Roll the dice.

You have to be willing to play NOT KNOWING whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy until the last die has been rolled.

More on this, in conjunction with http://playpassionately.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/passionate-play-5-you-cant-ruin-the-story/ :

The most I think about this, the more it excites me... but it's never going to be mainstream. :) Most people, most of the time, want a story which doesn't change radically at some random point—that may occasionally be cool for an art film, but in a blockbuster, even the plot twists have to happen at "the right time". If setting up conflicts of interest and rolling to see how they play out were enough, being a novelist would be a lot easier and involve more dice, and computer RPGs could be both open and dramatic.

Do you agree, Jesse, that your approach, however cool, is always going to feel experimental and strange, or do you think that (pen & paper) roleplaying differs from other media in some way that makes narrative uncertainly satisfying?

Jeff Russell: Until a few months ago, I didn't even know there were people who sought that out specifically, so it's cool to hear from that perspective.

Despite the relatively small number of roleplayers, there seem to be many ways to roleplay, each of which feels like the only (or at least best) possibility to its partisans. Really, it should be divided into a few dozen subhobbies, but then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because it wouldn't occur to me as a "soulplayer" to discuss things with "goalplayers", "lolplayers", or "moleplayers" :)

@Simon R: Of course—I guess I just assume that the GM won't make you role the dice in uninteresting situations.

I have to revise again:

I can believe that a game system can ease the burden on the GM of creating satisfying drama, although I don't yet understand how in practice, except by redistributing the burden to the players.

And add:
I can see that distributing some or all GM authority to the players can lead to new kinds of fun, while diminishing old kinds. I don't think the trade would be worthwhile for me, but that's just personal taste.

One of the things a good set of rules can do is make something you value, or something you consider fun, easier to achieve. Or easier to achieve more consistently.

Most (or at least many) games, and most/many GMs, struggle with certain aspects of gaming. Maybe Julie finds it hard not to railroad the players in her group whenever she GMs, and Bob just doesn't have enough time to prep enough for a satisfying session every week. Sue's group, on the other hand, has a lot of fun pretty much all the time, but they have trouble making sure everyone in the group is getting an equal share of spotlight time.

A good set of rules can help you achieve these things. In much of the roleplaying world, the attitude is that a "good GM" is all that's required. With the corresponding years of experience, training, and failures. But not everyone is a "good GM". And no one's perfect. So, a set of rules or procedures can help you achieve your goals more easily or more consistently.

For instance, say you have a group that goes out to dinner once a week. You're interested in making sure that the majority of the people enjoy the restaurant that's chosen every week. Group A says, "Bob knows the most about restaurants in this area, and knows all of us well. Therefore, he'll choose for us." That's trusting a "good GM", right? Group B says, "How about we implement a procedure for this: everyone can suggest a restaurant, and then we vote." For group B, that may be more reliable than trusting one person's judgement. And in any group that doesn't have a good, impartial, well-informed "Bob", the voting procedure will probably work better.

Same goes for: dramatic concerns, tactical challenge, or whatever else you want to enjoy in your game. If it's hard to achieve, you may benefit from a well-tested structure that helps you get there every time. For instance, most people can't just invent a good tactical challenge off the top of their heads, and arbitrate it fairly, while giving the people playing through it lots of equally good choices. But if you play a game where that's built in (I don't know, the latest version of D&D, say), you have a structure that lets you do that even if you don't have those skills.

Likewise for preparing for a game, or coming up with "the next plot". There are many great "no prep" games out there now.

This comes back to this issue you mentioned:

"If setting up conflicts of interest and rolling to see how they play out were enough, being a novelist would be a lot easier and involve more dice, and computer RPGs could be both open and dramatic."

I disagree with you here. Most creative artists (whether authors, composers, or visual artists) struggle with "writer's block" or similar problems. They get "stuck" doing the same thing over and over again, or maybe they run out of ideas, period. Many, many good writers use some kind of procedures to break through that: they may draw random words out of a dictionary, pull a story out of a random newspaper, or even roll dice (there are whole schools of "aleatoric composition", for example, in the classical music world).

A good set of rules (or a new procedure) can help you, or your group, break through an established "creative rut" and turn to some new unexpected creative ground. That's another thing many people need help with, and major reason a lot of people buy "sourcebooks" or new games: to get their games to go in a different direction, to explore something new and different. That's not easy (at least not for most people) to achieve on their own.

Rafael: "I can believe that a game system can ease the burden on the GM of creating satisfying drama, although I don't yet understand how in practice, except by redistributing the burden to the players."

It's easy! Since satisfying drama comes from passionate characters in action against adversity, all a game system has to do to ease the burden on the GM is to (a) make sure that the characters the players create and play are passionate, (b) make sure that there's adversity for the characters to act against, and (c) make sure that nothing then interferes with the characters' action against the adversity.

Now, that's how, but my saying so doesn't show you how it works in practice. In practice means game design and actual play, not conversation. You won't see how to do it in practice until you try it, either by trying to design it or by trying to play such a design.

I meant to ask before! What game or games do you usually play? How many people in your group? Is your group kind of open and flexible, people come and go, or is it closed and set? How old are you, generally—are you grown ups with kids, students, or what? Have you all been roleplaying forever, or are any of you new to roleplaying?

I'm always curious about these things and it'll help me understand where you're coming from.

Oh hey, Rafael, come to think of it I have an rpg theory question for you about your game.

The GM gets to fudge dice when required to make a satisfying story, yes? Do the players get to fudge dice when required to make a satisfying story?

Presuming they don't, why not? Is their opinion about what makes a satisfying story not as true as the GMs? What's going on there?

But these are mechanical impact of player decision, aren't they? If I shut the door, I'll roll less dice (or smaller dice) than if I go on, and the resulting difference in how much I'm wounded could impact heavily on the story.
I've not clear what do you mean exactly by saying that you prefer player's choises to have non-mechanical impact on the story; do you mean that the mechanic should impact after the choise, and not the choise itself?

I phrased that poorly: I mean that the narrative effect of the choice shouldn't be determined mechanically, even if it is modelled mechanically.

In the scenario we described, if the player chooses to shut to the door, then the GM (and to some extent the players) know the broad narrative results before any dice are rolled: the characters will be slightly wounded and the NPC will die.

What if the player thinks that another outcome'd be more interesting? Some time ago I was discussing with a friend of mine, and while in a game he'd have preferred his character to die (because he chose to risk his life to save another character, and he was willing to die for that), the master made him survive thinking it was the only satisfying result.

Poor communication! Explicit stakes negotiation (as described in the very helpful Mother May I article) could have avoided that problem, at the cost of some loss of immersion, but doesn't seem necessary if the group communicates well.

Vincent: Is their opinion about what makes a satisfying story not as true as the GMs?

Certainly; in fact, in a good game, there's a consensus about what would make a satisfying story!

The players give up the power to shape that story directly in exchange for having it be "canon" (see my original post) and therefore more powerful ("player joy").

The GM doesn't get that "canon" feeling, because she knows she's just making stuff up, but she gets more creative expression in exchange ("gm joy").

Do you claim that allowing players mechanical means to shape the story will allow everyone to enjoy the game even if there isn't a consensus of what a good story would be? Because that seems unlikely; we've discussed rolling dice to decide between equally satisfying outcomes, but that presupposes that they are equally satisfying for all.

Here's a cool set of resolution rules you might find interesting: Otherkind Dice. Here's a followup about them in play: Salt River.

Rafael re fudging: Oh no, you're very right. I'm all about the consensus about what's a satisfying story and the equally satisfying outcomes.

Player joy vs. GM joy is a good answer for why only the GM gets to fudge dice. I get it.

Paul T.: Your points are well taken. I guess my skepticism and that of my friends arises from having a reliable "Bob"... but to be fair, I have, in my entire life, only found one such "Bob"!

I have a quibble, though:

Most creative artists (whether authors, composers, or visual artists) struggle with "writer's block" or similar problems. They get "stuck" doing the same thing over and over again, or maybe they run out of ideas, period. Many, many good writers use some kind of procedures to break through that: they may draw random words out of a dictionary, pull a story out of a random newspaper, or even roll dice (there are whole schools of "aleatoric composition", for example, in the classical music world).

There is a world of difference between occasionally using an oblique strategy to break writers block and randomly generating your entire plot. The former is no doubt common, but not what we're discussing here. The latter is fringe (see comment #36); not even my New Music buff friends listen to aleatoric music all or even most of the time.

Rafael: Explicit stakes negotiation...

I didn't think the games/style you are advocating had anything resembling pre-roll stake-setting. The GM is just supposed to know what everyone wants (somehow facilitated by "good communication," even though the rules are not assisting them on that front), and then figure out what makes for the "best" outcome.

If you add explicit stake-setting, you are stepping away from the immersion-focused, GM-as-God style towards the "story games" style where narrative authority is typically shared. This can't really be reconciled with your original statements, as I see it.

Vincent is right, though. The best way to understand this is to go play some of the games he mentioned. These games work, and work great, and I find them far more rewarding than I ever did the trad games of which I've played so much. You might as well, but you can't know until you try.

Personally, I don't have any interest in the question of relative fringiness. More people want games where the story's laid out before them? Okie dokie! They're already well-served by existing games, and blessings upon them.

It's evident that the market for my kind of games is in the tens of thousands of people, at least, which is plenty to sustain my business plan. I don't expect a million sales, I'm ambitious but I'm not nuts.

If you all want to keep discussing it here, that's fine, I don't mind hosting it.

Now, that's how, but my saying so doesn't show you how it works in practice.

Yes, I think we've reached the point where I need to experience it—I agree that a system that did what you say would work, but I don't see how such a system is possible, and probably won't until I try it.

Now, to wait until "Bob" goes on vacation and then talk my group into a leap of faith!

The group consists of two players and a GM who have been playing together for twelve years, plus an additional player who plays with us for a few years, has to move away, and gets replaced. We're all in our thirties, some with babies, and started roleplaying between the ages of eight and twenty.

We have played H?rnmaster, D&D, Warhammer, Mage, Vampire, DSA (German) and Shadowrun, mostly with homebrew settings, plus a little bit of Paranoia, Toon and TMNT. The least mechanically mainstream games I own (but have never had the chance to play) are Ars Magica (no game balance), Pendragon (mechanised emotions) and My Life with Master.

buzz: Sorry—I didn't mean to imply that my group was doing explicit stakes negotation, but rather to compare that approach to dealing with the problem Mauro mentioned with the approach I'm used to.

Vicent: By fringe, I didn't just mean "not for everyone", I meant "no one's favourite style" (which I think applies to aleatoric music, although it obviously doesn't apply to your games).

Do you claim that allowing players mechanical means to shape the story will allow everyone to enjoy the game even if there isn't a consensus of what a good story would be?

I would.

If the players (GM included) all reach consensus in advance as to what the "story" should be, why are they playing? The story is already done. There's nothing left to do but look at the (imagined) scenery. I don't find that a particularly compelling reason to play an RPG, much less master a ruleset.*

What participants need to reach consensus about is the *situation*, not the story. "Story" is what you get at the end.

* Which, in this style of play, tend to be massively complicated affairs like GURPS and HERO.

Rafael, do players explicitly signal their opinions in your games, or is it by implication; in other words does the GM try to mind-read the players from what they do to work out the implicit story structures, or do you have a chat at the end of the game and actually give "that was good/that wasn't" feedback? I wouldn't be at all surprised if what you call good communication contains some useful strategies specific to your group.

Vincent: It's easy! Since satisfying drama comes from passionate characters in action against adversity, all a game system has to do to ease the burden on the GM is to (a) make sure that the characters the players create and play are passionate, (b) make sure that there's adversity for the characters to act against, and (c) make sure that nothing then interferes with the characters' action against the adversity.

I'm sure this is true, as a description of satisfying drama.  I'm less convinced that "satisfying drama" is axiomatically valuable in RPG.  I've often seen characters that are motivated by drives that are decidedly non-passionate, being curious, explorative, mercenary, cynical etc.  It is certainly true that they can subsequently become passionate through play, but the idea that characters should be created in this state from the get go feels alien to me, a sort of playing before you play.  Also, I can easily imagine/remember instances of play that never achieved such an emotional pitch and which were nonetheless satisfying.

cc: Sure. I've got no beef with any of that.

Except that maybe I'm using "passionate" to mean something more broad than you are. Have you seen the Apocalypse World character playbooks? (The easiest way to see them is in the players' refbook, not the individual files.) Check 'em out, tell me if they seem like playing before you play. They're exactly the sort of passionate character creation I'm talking about.

It's really not rarified, theoretical stuff. At base, I'm saying "interesting characters are more fun to play, and more fun to GM for." So, game designer, make sure your game makes interesting characters. This shouldn't startle anybody.

Well, the thing is, solitary authors and composers are not a good analogy for roleplaying games, which are 1) a group endeavour, and 2) linear. By linear, I mean that you start somewhere and you go somewhere, without (usually) the option to go back and edit, or write the end first and then the beginning, and then rewrite the end. It's in "real time", not a product you go back to finalize and then present to an audience.

So, a better analogy might be improv theatre, or other collective improvisation, like improvised jazz. If you question adherents of any such artforms, you will find they use all kinds of rules and structures to make their collective improvisations make sense and to make sure they don't step on each others' toes. Both as a group (rules like "Say yes, and" for improv actors, deciding on a song form and key for jazz musicians, etc) and individually (many performers will set personal challenges for themselves, creative constraints to work with).

Those have powerful parallels to roleplaying games.

Consider this: in a lot of roleplaying circles, there is talk of "GM burnout". That's when a GM just gets too tired of running a game and needs to play for a while. The game typically suffers heavily, and many groups are on the lookout for ways to minimize that.

Now, why would this happen, if a game was fun and easy to play? The players in those groups typically do not experience "creative burnout". Just the GMs.

Carefully chosen structure helps there, too. I, personally, don't think any game should push its players to "burn out", assuming they're having a good time and want to keep playing. Spreading around responsibilities and demands is helpful there, as well as making the duties we carry out more easily performed.

Does that help? I don't know if I'm just blabbering into the wind, or making sense.

Vincent,

I'm actually surprised by your statement that "passionate characters" are fulfilled by Apocalypse World character creation. Can you say more about that?

Is the term "passionate" fulfilled by being merely interesting, or is there a sort of "gap" that becomes filled in indirectly (through, for instance, your advice for the first session of the game)?

Paul: Of course there's a gap! My job is to get the players to create passionate characters, not to create passionate characters for them.

With rare exceptions, an interesting character is interesting precisely because of her passions. Sometimes her passions right now, in full action; sometimes her as yet potential passions, just waiting for that spark. Apocalypse World creates interesting characters by creating characters loaded with potential passion. Often it's active passion by the end of Hx, often by the end of the first session, sometimes later—but even if it's later, you can see the passion waiting, ready to ignite, from the first moments of play.

Then it's on the player, of course, to play the passionate character with passion. I can't make that happen. But show me an Apocalypse World character, I'll show you a character loaded with potential passion.

I guess I'm not sure at what point that passionate drive becomes developed in an Apocalypse World character. Let's say I pick the Brainer. I choose a name, clothes, body type, and my starting moves and equipment. Is that a passionate character?

I'm guessing no—there's no situation yet, is there?

So, what's ready to ignite, and how does it become visible in the first moments of play?

(Since this is the internet, let me specify that I'm asking because I want to peer into your designer brain, not because I'm criticizing or angry or frustrated—imagining me saying those lines up above with a happy smile, a face full of curiosity and they'll make more sense.)

Rafael,

I wanted to address the few points you said to me directly.  First I want to mention that the game I play are pretty consistent in tone and subject matter.  It's not like I have a game that starts out as a comedy heist film and suddenly turns into a deadly serious spy thriller.  So I'm not sure the "art film" comparison is really apt.  Though I'd say my games probably resemble stuff you see more in written media such as novels and short stories which are a bit less formulaic than most typical Hollywood blockbusters.

The reason for the consistency in tone is because usually the only thing the system is really "deciding" is the resolution of points of tension.  The real people at the table still have to setup those points of tension and they still have to decide the consequences of the outcome.  So there's still lots of room for human creative input.

Your point about mooks is very interesting and worth attention of its own that might illustrate something about the design of the games I play.  I never use mooks.  Why?  Because mooks aren't about real tension. They're about exposition.  They exist SOLELY for the character to "show off" what they're capable of.  Since there exists no real tension there's nothing to resolve.  Since there's nothing to resolve there's no rolling of dice at all.

For example, if I were running a big battle scene with hundreds of guys the REAL point of tension is between the PC and likely some other really important named NPC on the other side.  I wouldn't bother with the hundreds of guys fighting the battle.  We'd narrate a moment of the PC hewing his way through the battle field until he reached the named NPC.  Then we'd fight the battle between the NPC and PC using the raging battle around them as narrative color that justifies certain actions.  But otherwise, mechanically, its as if the other guys just don't exist.

You asked about "superiority."  I think that depends on your creative goals.  A hammer is a superior tool if I want to hammer nails and a pretty lousy tool if I want to wash my dishes.  If all you care about story content being present in the game and you're not too picky about who is generating it, how it comes into play, what is and isn't acceptable material then, no I don't think it's a superior tool.

I DO think that the more you want the *process* of play to generate story (rather tagging along in the GM or some other player's story) the more tools like the one's found in Vincent's games become "superior."  Since you already linked to one of my Play Passionately articles, did you see the one I wrote about adversity and emotional safety?

I think the tools we've been talking about here increase in "superiority" as the content of play becomes more and more emotionally unsafe.  To pick an extreme example imagine we were playing a game where the PCs were homicide detectives tracking a serial killer.  As GM I decide that the killer has decided to target one of the PC's 10 year old daughter?  Do you really want me "fiating" whether she lives or dies?

If I fiat AGAINST the player and kill the girl for sake of drama then I dis-empower the player to have a chance to do anything about it.  If I fiat on the side of allowing the player a "heroic rescue" then the risk/tension was never real.  I'm pulling my punches for the sake of emotional safety and it was just a psychological trick as you put it earlier.

I don't want to have to make that call.  I WANT to play with emotionally charged and unsafe material but I don't want to be personally responsible for the emotional safety of those playing with me.  That means we need tools that make sure that everyone involved with this material is adequately represented.  I have all the tools to push unsafe adversity with real risk and tension and the player has all the tools to adequately push back such that he feels like at least this was all "fair."  Then we roll.

Maybe the girl lives.  Maybe she dies.  But because we played it straight and fair no one feels *socially bullied* even if they feel emotionally hurt.  It's the content of the fiction that hurt them, the way a good tragic movie can hurt you, and not the social environment around the table that hurt them.

Jesse

I read thre AW playbooks, and interesting they were, but I'm not seeing how this produces passionate PC's either.  Further, if thats the sort of passion you meant, then I also don't see how it answers the point about easing "the burden on the GM of creating satisfying drama".

Maybe there are further implications in Hx, about which I know nothing, but it still seems to me that the prep work I would expect a GM to undertake for this game is much the same as any other.

As as player, I think the 'passionate character' comes roaring out as soon as the MC starts making those PC-NPC-PC triangles, or giving the NPCs clear directions that make my PC's life more interesting. Sure, there might be a moment of flatness, when it's just a name, clothes, body type, and my starting moves and equipment, but as soon as the MC says "Mox, these pregnant women you are supposed to be looking after? They are doing this really weird thing in the main room, where they move like dolls and don't seem entirely self-aware. They look at you unnervingly. What's up with that?"

buzz: We have a misunderstanding. I didn't mean to suggest that the story should be constructed in advance—by "a consensus of what a good story would be" I mean, on the one hand, some shared values on the nature of a good story, and on the other hand exactly what you said: consensus about the situation.

Josh W: I'll have to observe, in our next sessions, how this signalling occurs exactly, but I think it works like this:

The GM and players know each other well, both through long years of mutual play and non-gaming friendship. This means that the GM has a good sense of how the players think and feel even before the game begins.

At the beginning of a campaign, each player creates a character, and the GM gets a description of their personalities and backgrounds. These include explicit or strongly implied beliefs, passions, and goals, plus "hooks" such as beloved NPCs, dark secrets, etc. These all point the way to situations that would motivate or provide dilemmas for each character. We generally ensure that the PCs also have some pregame deep connection (siblings, lovers, last survivors of a dead race...) so that, while they may have quite distinct passions & goals, each has an interest in the others' dilemmas.

During a play session, much—often most—of the time is spent in conversations between the PCs. This reveals further details of the characters' psychologies, plus, often, explicitly declares their immediate desires (if you've just spent two hours agonizing about whether you have the moral right to sink a civilian ship to save, indirectly, the lives of your family in a coastal village, and then another hour on how, exactly, you'd manage to sink it, you don't need to tell the GM your story opinions or negotiate stakes for her to know what's going on in your mind).

At the level of individual actions, the intent is usually either clear or stated explicitly (without a formal structure to enforce that), e.g. "Hmmm, we need to find the diamond [for reasons that have been made clear through one of the means already explained]; I'll try to crack the safe and see if it's inside".

First, Rafael, you're right that there are techniques or procedures that can help in the situation I described. Sometimes they'll work great, other times they'll slow the game to a crawl. I prefer using a quick die roll there, but that may just be a matter of taste.

Now, in support of what Paul T. said. I do improv theater these days. My teacher recently said: "just go out there and be your character. Don't worry about being funny; the games we play on stage will take care of that." And he is 100% right. If I bring a strong character into Forward/Reverse or any other game, the game's procedures make it hilarious.

I demand the same from RPGs these days. That the players and GM simply focus on playing interesting characters, and the game's procedures will ensure that we get a satisfying story and experience out of it.

Apocalypse World, so far, is my favorite in that regard. And I think it would be right down your alley, too, from what I've read in this thread. :)

Josh W: One more thing: When all of the above fails, and a player feels misunderstood or narratively dissatisfied, then he will, in fact, discuss it with the GM and other players after the game session ends.

Paul T: I accept that novels aren't a perfect analogy for RPGs, but neither, I believe, are improv and jazz. Group endeavour, yes. Linear, only sort of: in most RPG sessions, not everything the players say is part of the narrative in the way that everything an improv dude says is part of the performance; roleplayers tend to switch fluidly between a planning / discussion and performance / action modes. I think is reduces the number of rules required to make sure we don't "step on each others' toes".

No argument as to individual creative constraints or challenges, though; I'm all for those!

What you say about a good system reducing the burden on the participants and avoiding burn-out makes sense and is appealing—see comment #37.

Jesse: The reason for the consistency in tone is because usually the only thing the system is really "deciding" is the resolution of points of tension[....]

I think I get it, but I'm going to have to try it out to be sure.

I never use mooks. Why? Because mooks aren't about real tension. They're about exposition. They exist SOLELY for the character to "show off" what they're capable of. Since there exists no real tension there's nothing to resolve. Since there's nothing to resolve there's no rolling of dice at all.

I don't think that it restricting die rolls to situations of "real tension" is the One True Way (traditional RPG rules, I think, are based on the assumption that what the players want is to feel like cool pulp heroes, which means focusing on "showing off", which is more satisfying if modelled by the rules; just saying "I kill all the mooks" doesn't feel like an accomplishment, whereas if the rules tell you that, after much struggle, you killed all the mooks, it does), but it's certainly a way that makes sense to me and that I'd like to try (see comment #37).

I think the tools we've been talking about here increase in "superiority" as the content of play becomes more and more emotionally unsafe.

This is an excellent exposition of Vincent's "your mom's dead" / "psychological prop" point.

Most of the time, I think my group avoids this through implicit consensus on either the narrative logic or player psychology. In your serial killer example, given highly detailed characters, there is likely to be a "natural victim"—either because one of the characters has a ten-year old daughter and the others no correspondingly innocent loved ones, or because one character has particularly antagonized the killer, or because one *player* obviously enjoys brutal twists of fate, where they might spoil the enjoyment of another. Randomness in that context would feel arbitrary and false.

However, I see that what you say could work and be valuable, and it's also something I'd like to try.

I need to try out a game now; the question is which?

Can someone recommend a system with the following qualities, as gleaned from the discussion thus far?

1. Dice are used (only) to resolve dramatically meaningful conflicts with narrative consequences, yet a roll will never "break" the story.

2. Shifts some of the burden of creating a meaningful play experience from the GM to the system.

3. Does not involve players directly manipulating anything other than their own characters (e.g. you can say "I try to circle around so the sun is in his eyes", but not "suddenly, the clouds open and the sun shines right into his eyes").

4. Allows player decisions to affect the narrative signficantly (in My Life with Master, the result of a minion's encounter with his Connection is rolled; it seems incredibly disempowering that no amount of heartrending roleplaying is going to make the little flower girl love you if the dice say otherwise—this really feels like "looking at the scenery", as buzz puts it, or improv theater, rather than roleplaying as I know and love it).

5. Allows for a variety of stories to be told (MLwM restricts theme and narrative structure such that I can't imagine playing it more than once every couple of years).

Christian: other times they'll slow the game to a crawl

You're right, and this is a question of taste.

One quality of my group that I think is unusual among classic and new wave roleplayers alike is that the story progresses glacially because we savour absolutely every possible detail.

That is one reason why using the dice only for dramatically significant points seems radical to me. Suppose we're trying to cross the river. No one is trying to stop us. The story so far seems to point to our crossing the river; there's certainly no narrative reason why we shouldn't. So should we bother rolling to see if we cross? I think most people here would say "no". Many classic groups would say "yes", but if the roll failed, then you'd take d6 damage and try again until it worked. My group might well roll, and if it failed we'd spend half the session dealing with the immediate consequences, and there'd be long term character development as well, so it would turn out to have been a dramatically significant moment that no one anticipated (and that wouldn't have been significant if we had just said "ok, we cross the river, what happens next", or if the roll had succeeded).

For example, the roll fails. Alice gets swept away. Christine gets swept away trying to save Alice, and the Don has a terrible dilemma trying to decide who to save first. Alice end up with a permanent fear of rivers, Don realises that he's actually in love with Alice, and Christine never really trusts Don again.

With your criteria, I would actually suggest just waiting for Vincent to release Apocalypse World (which'll happen soon... right?). It seems to fulfill them all.

I think Poison'd fits in your criteria Rafael. It's much like a traditional RPG from the outside, the theme is appealing and it's very easily read.

Your 5th criteria is also fulfilled, even if the starting point of the story is fixed.

Rafael Posted:

Most creative artists (whether authors, composers, or visual artists) struggle with "writer's block" or similar problems. They get "stuck" doing the same thing over and over again, or maybe they run out of ideas, period. Many, many good writers use some kind of procedures to break through that: they may draw random words out of a dictionary, pull a story out of a random newspaper, or even roll dice (there are whole schools of "aleatoric composition", for example, in the classical music world).
(snip...)

I think an important point here (sorry if you already figured out), is that many of the rules about when and how rolling is interesting aren't based on "rules stuff".You still need a human to interpret the rules and decide whether a rule should be applied in a situation. For example, setting the stakes for a roll in Burning Wheel still requires the people involved to understand what would make a good stake. What the system does provide, however, is a good idea of how to do so.

Rafael Posted:

Do you claim that allowing players mechanical means to shape the story will allow everyone to enjoy the game even if there isn't a consensus of what a good story would be? Because that seems unlikely; we've discussed rolling dice to decide between equally satisfying outcomes, but that presupposes that they are equally satisfying for all.

I wouldn't claim this. Even people playing for the same kind of stories and who have similar literary taste may not mesh well together in an rpg and I doubt there is any kind of system that can change how all these people interact (though it might be possible to find a common ground between some of them).

But I think you are looking at this by the wrong angle. For example, if I said that the stories created by games with shared authorship are good, you will think they probably aren't better than ones created by the best storyteller in the group, as the people who aren't so good will just pollute it. I think (sorry if I am wrong) that you are specifically looking for things players might want to do but the GM wouldn't allow them.

The way a good rpg with shared authorship works, however, is a little like culinary. I, for example, love tomato sauce. But to make a good tomato sauce, you can't use just tomatoes. You need other ingredients, like garlic, onions, salt, etc. So, these games try to find a way to mix the people playing, all of which have unique qualities as a director for the story, to create a play session they wouldn't be able to create if only one of them took the GM duties.

Vincent Posted:

cc: Sure. I've got no beef with any of that.

It's really not rarified, theoretical stuff. At base, I'm saying "interesting characters are more fun to play, and more fun to GM for." So, game designer, make sure your game makes interesting characters. This shouldn't startle anybody.

Are you talking about characters that are in a dynamic situation, Vincent? In other words, are you simply talking about characters who have some issue that needs solving right now (basically the kicker for Sorcerer)?

As for a good system that fits your criteria, I am a big fan of Burning Wheel. It may be a little more "rules heavy" than other systems, but I really like it. You can also play it without the advanced conflict rules if you don't want to understand all rules from the get go.

I think you could also use Dogs in the Vineyard, just changing its theme so your players won't complain. There are a few suggestions in the book itself of possible other themes that fit well with the mechanics.

Also, I think sorcerer too matches all of your criteria.

Rafael, this doesn't fit your criteria.  But I think, given the questions you're asking, you should play Universalis a couple times.  I have no doubt that this will not become your new go-to game.  But I also think it will light up some dark corners about narrative authority and satisfying games.

Not to be too much of a fanboy for Vincent here on his site or anything, but I'd say that a) all of Vincent's games meet those criteria you've given in differing ways, and b) In a Wicked Age is the first game that comes to mind for me because it's quick and easy to set up and play, there's a huge focus on player decision making, and since you only roll for concrete actions, everybody's characters can agonize over dialogue as much as they want to and only break out the dice when someone tries to stab someone else in the eye :)

I'm here just to suggest playing DitV "as is". The setting is more cool than you can guess by reading it, and watching a good wester movie or two easily puts a group of frinds in the right mood to play. If you can get your friends to "bear with you", than adapting it to another setting will become soo much easier than starting with a new setting without prior experience of the game.

Annnnd... sorry for the typos. Never write something so soon after a Chemical Brothers concert, i'm telling you!

What a bunch of new messages! Some short (really, not) consideration about points I think could be focal:

Rafael:

Explicit stakes negotiation (as described in the very helpful Mother May I article) could have avoided that problem, at the cost of some loss of immersion, but doesn't seem necessary if the group communicates well

If you mean explicit communication: the player doesn't know if the master is saving his character (and some games, like D&D 3.5, explicity say to the master to keep that hidden from the players), so he can't be able to know if the master is chosing an outcome he doesn't like; in addition, if the player says "I would prefer my character" this doesn't cost some loss of immersion?

If you mean explicit communication (i.e., the master has to understand what the players want without them saying it), this bring me to a question I'd like to ask to you:

The GM and players know each other well, both through long years of mutual play and non-gaming friendship. This means that the GM has a good sense of how the players think and feel even before the game begins

Couldn't it be an advantage of non-traditional games, that people are able to play them satisfactory also without years of mutual play and friendship?
I'm not claiming, I underline it, that years of mutual play and friendship are not important, and I'm sure they improve also non-traditional games' sessions; but if I know a new friend it would be difficult to play with him, if I need the reading ability coming from years of play and friendship, wouldn't it?

traditional RPG rules, I think, are based on the assumption that what the players want is to feel like cool pulp heroes, which means focusing on "showing off", which is more satisfying if modelled by the rules; just saying "I kill all the mooks" doesn't feel like an accomplishment, whereas if the rules tell you that, after much struggle, you killed all the mooks, it does

The point here is, I think, "Why is he trying to kill the mooks?".
If it's color, he could not care if dice are not rolled.
If it's because he cares for something other than the kills themselves (he wants to save his daughter? he's obsessed by revenge?), it doesn't matter if he managed to kill them, because the focal point is the struggle itself towards that "something other", struggle that is fulfilled whether he kills them all or not.
If it's because he's a cool fighter that definitely would be able to kill them all, dice rolling could be more satisfying, but failing to win the battle could ruin player's fun. And if the master fudges the dice to make him win... the thrill in winning by rolling the dice is because player doesn't know if he'll win or not. Knowing that you'd have win for the master fudging the rolls you wanted to do, that you'd have win despite the rolls, doesn't shrink the satisfaction of winning by rolling them?

My Life with Master, the result of a minion's encounter with his Connection is rolled; it seems incredibly disempowering that no amount of heartrending roleplaying is going to make the little flower girl love you if the dice say otherwise

The little girl can love you also if the roll failed: it's not a Charisma test, it decides if the scene is successful or not. You failed the roll? The little girl does love you, but her father shows up and beats the crap out of you, calling you a monster and carting away the unwilling girl witht tears in her eyes.
Do you see how it works? The little girl does love deeply you, but you failed the scene. Next time? You win the roll, nothing bad happens, and maybe the little girl kisses you.

Me:

If you mean explicit communication (i.e., the master has to understand what the players want without them saying it), this bring me to a question I'd like to ask to you

I meant, "If you mean implicit communication".

Mauro:
traditional RPG rules, I think, are based on the assumption that what the players want is to feel like cool pulp heroes, which means focusing on "showing off", which is more satisfying if modelled by the rules; just saying "I kill all the mooks" doesn't feel like an accomplishment, whereas if the rules tell you that, after much struggle, you killed all the mooks, it does

Also, I just thought of this (and apologies if someone else has had this insight), but if a GM only fudges rolls to make the player succeed (not to make them fail), isn't this a form of "Say Yes or Roll the Dice" in a slightly rearranged form?

See it as "Say Yes or *Use* the Dice", and then "Roll the Dice, then Say Yes or Use Them".

Vincent, do you see this as accurate? Is this old news?

Also, I just thought of this (and apologies if someone else has had this insight), but if a GM only fudges rolls to make the player succeed (not to make them fail), isn't this a form of "Say Yes or Roll the Dice" in a slightly rearranged form?

I don't think so. "Roll the dice or say yes" means "go straight to conflict" or, in short, "cut the crap", not "let the player win every time"

If you decide if the player win or not after rolling the dice, YOU decide if the player win. Period.

P.S.: well, I did read in a old comment, but I never tried it before: it's true, the board accept comments even if you write "cylon" instead of "human"...  ;-)
The player could stay at home and let you play by yourself, at this point.

I'm afraid I must disagree Moreno... rolling dice first is clunky and keeps the fact that you're saying "yes" hidden, but I feel the two are equivalent.

Let me put this another way: GM fudging to allow a player to win is the Trad equivalent (and perhaps a predecessor of) "Say Yes or Roll the Dice".

Alexander D.:

the reasons I see [...] is that difficulties, uncertainty, and failure can be interesting

Yeah, sure, I didn't want to deny that; my doubt was, rather, if the knowledge that the master can fudge the dice can shrink that interest.
I completely agree that the mook can do some harm to the hero, maybe also winning; but if the master can fudge the dice that "can do", that "maybe", depends on what he'll choose; is this still interesting? is rolling the dice still interesting? or it makes the interest decrease?
This is important, I think, also because if the master and the players know each other enough to let the former know what the latters like, then the players are likely to know in which situations the master'd fudge a die; so, there is not (or there is less) uncertainty than with the dice.

"Say yes or roll the dices"
If the GM choose to roll the dices, the player immediately recognize that NOW he can fail, and has no doubt about it

That's the big difference with "Roll the dices and if you want fudge them". With this approach I don't know if this "rolling" is really interesting, I don't know if my PG is really fighting for his life... I'm in an illusion, always asking myself if I'm in an intersting and unpredictable situation, or the GM is simply driving me somewhere

"Say yes or roll the dices" means that you have to roll the dices only when it's REALLY interesting for the partecipant to have an unpredictable outcome... and if you roll, the outcome is unpredictable, FOR SURE

"Roll the dices and if you want fudge them" means that the GM simply choose if you succed or not, because he choose after seeing the outcome

Thanks for that Rafael, and I'll be interested to hear more whenever you can.

One interesting underlying choice underlying that is presumably that the GM confirms the impressions that the player has about how things will go? In other words if the player starts anticipating a big battle, then the GM will give him one, rather than pulling out a ceasefire? In other words the player character's planning and moral decisions, where they include assumptions that were not previously stated, are broadly confirmed. Is that right? I imagine if the GM does contradict this, he is expected to "sell" the changes in terms of plausibility given the forms of cause and effect that the players agree with. So if someone is expecting a war because of the pride of the local king, then some other feature of the king?s personality that the players are also aware of is the reason it doesn't happen.

This gives the GM a similar role to old-fashioned story tellers, having final choice of the supremacy of one factor driving the narrative over another: If someone interrupts a story teller to say "but the king was proud, he would not back down before anyone!" then the teller might go into another scene where he says "Ah yes but in the evening before the battle, as he drew up his final plans, one of the generals came to him and told him that the men were weary, and felt their blood was becoming worthless to him. He realised that his strength was the strength of his men, and he would not loose that." and then it goes in to how at the last minute he finds a way to turn it around without loosing face etc.

If you compare that to Simon's way of playing, and it seems more like the patterns of cause and effect are hidden and unknown, rather than where they are suggested and then confirmed or subverted. I don't know if you do play this way, but that might be a part of the difference between your play styles.

There's a third possibility too, which is something I love shadowrun for; first you plan, creating the setting semi-collaboratively by active searching, then the GM looks at what you have prepared and looks for flaws, and then when you play the mission it is subverted just enough that your improvisation skills are extremely tested, with a margin of safety/outs to avoid total wrecking. The thing I love about this style is that you play out the planned section of the game twice (or more), once as you expect it to be, and once as it actually is (and nest that for twists and turns during planning etc). This is similar to how I guess you play, but rather than being sold the changes in a way that smooths you into them, a compromise of expectation, GMs blindsiding players and then them working out what's going on is a big part of the fun.

One thing I would caution when people talk about mechanics that do not spoil "the story", is that spoiling can be pretty relative; if you don't like certain stories, then certain mechanics tailored to those stories will leave you cold. And even more importantly, playing those games and trying to push them along with your standard habits could lead to frustration of both types of story.

Mauro, I would be cautious about suggesting that it is the goal and not the mook killing that is important: Ever watched an action film with the sound off? Probably not, but with many of them it hardly lessens the experience at all. They are visual kinetic things, and the mental visuals of a game can be just as good although sometimes they need support in that which some Sim engines can provide. Now mostly they do it badly, because people didn't actively seek out that goal, but I'm sure you can find games that provide detail to random mook attacks that makes things very interesting.

Josh W:

I would be cautious about suggesting that it is the goal and not the mook killing that is important

I wasn't suggesting this; Rafael said that ?just saying "I kill all the mooks" doesn't feel like an accomplishment, whereas if the rules tell you that, after much struggle, you killed all the mooks, it does?; my point was that it depends on why someone is trying to kill the mook: because wants revenge? because simply wants to kill them? because the player is enjoying the fight despite what the character "thinks"?
The answer is not trivial, in my opinion, because whether just saying "I kill all the mooks" feels like an accomplishment or not depends on it.
If for example there is a challenge between the players (let's say Agon) what really matters to them is to kill the mooks to earn more Glory (or what it's called) than the others.

Thanks for all the game system suggestions! I'll pick up as many as I can (does anyone know of a Europe-based shop, so I could save on shipping?) and try them once we finish our current campaign.

Alex Abate Biral: many of the rules about when and how rolling is interesting aren't based on "rules stuff".You still need a human to interpret the rules and decide whether a rule should be applied in a situation.

Fair enough; this is another "I'll have to try it" point.

these games try to find a way to mix the people playing, all of which have unique qualities as a director for the story, to create a play session they wouldn't be able to create if only one of them took the GM duties.

That's a significant advantage that I don't think had been mentioned yet.

It still seems to me that players must be willing to sacrifice some "player joy"(tm) to get a richer story, and whether that tradeoff is worthwhile depend on what the players value, but I certainly see the potential benefit.

Mauro: If you mean explicit communication: the player doesn't know if the master is saving his character[...], so he can't be able to know if the master is chosing an outcome he doesn't like; in addition, if the player says "I would prefer my character" this doesn't cost some loss of immersion?

It depends on the details, and the boundary between explicit and implicit is subtle. Sticking to the PC death example: We start with the implicit assumption that the player would rather that the character didn't die. Suppose that, in a given situation, the player would accept his character's death. If he, in the critical moment, says "feel free to kill me", that would cost immersion. If he, in that moment, reports the thoughts of his character ("I make my peace with my gods"), that's pretty explicit but still pretty immersive. If his character says "I will lay down my life to save you", that's semi-explicit (maybe the character is lying) and doesn't damage immersion at all. If the players know that the situation is coming at the end of the previous session, then they can discuss it fairly openly, as players, without immersion issues ("fairly openly" because they still wouldn't say "you don't have to fudge the die rolls this time"). Note that in no case would the player state his wishes after the die roll, because that would just make the role of fudging too obvious. :)

Couldn't it be an advantage of non-traditional games, that people are able to play them satisfactory also without years of mutual play and friendship?

The techniques I mention above could be applied to groups of strangers, but of course they work less well. I can believe that non-traditional games are better at generating good play from less intimate groups, especially in the light of the "social bullying" issues that Jesse mentioned. That would indeed be an advantage.

Mauro: [on minions in My Life with Master] You failed the roll? The little girl does love you, but her father shows up and beats the crap out of you, calling you a monster and carting away the unwilling girl with tears in her eyes.

I am really unsure how to feel about that. It certainly answers my objection, but it divorces the mechanical structure of the story from the narrative content to the point that we might as well be doing free-form storytelling while playing snakes and ladders; when someone wins the snakes and ladders game, the story is over. Maybe it doesn't feel like this in practice, but I'm pretty sure it would if I tried to run a MLwM game—which brings me to another point:

Are new wave RPGs self-explanatory for old-school gamers? My feeling is that it would be very helpful to play them for the first time with people who already know them, and that if I just try them out, my group and I will feel like the system failed us, while in fact we were just using it wrong. Does anyone have experience with this? I assume that most of you started out in trad systems.

Mauro: The point here is, I think, "Why is he trying to kill the mooks?"[...]If it's because he's a cool fighter[...], dice rolling could be more satisfying, but failing to win the battle could ruin player's fun. And if the master fudges the dice to make him win... the thrill in winning by rolling the dice is because player doesn't know if he'll win or not.

For purposes of this subdiscussion, it's because he wants to be a cool fighter. ;)

First of all, as Alexander D. said, "difficulties, uncertainty, and failure can be interesting". In fact, this is an example of how trad systems can also support the GM in generating a satisfying story that no one anticipated.

Secondly, I said at the beginning that dice are a psychological prop. Yes, if the master constantly and obviously fudges rolls, there is no thrill in victory. But in practice, fudging is both subtle and very rare. This allows players to pretend it isn't happening (something that some of the posters here seem to find bizarre, but I think is very human and similar to other forms of suspension of disbelief).

the players are likely to know in which situations the master'd fudge a die

True, but that actually works for us if the answer is "almost never".

If you decide if the player win or not after rolling the dice, YOU decide if the player win[...] The player could stay at home and let you play by yourself, at this point.

True in theory (this is the argument of the second "mother may I" article), but ridiculously oversimplified in practice. A lot happened to get to the point where a roll was fudged, and the player determined much of that. Also, the point of playing isn't just to generate a story; therefore, even a die roll that doesn't change the story can change the player's experience. The player's reaction (let's say excitement and (undeserved) pride in this case) in turn affects the GM's experience, even though he knows that the roll was meaningless.

Let me repeat that, because it's a critical point for me, and one that many posters here seem to see differently: my roleplaying isn't about the objective artefacts that emerge from play, whether story or experience points—it's about what happens in the minds and emotions of the participants.

P.S. If it's color, he could not care if dice are not rolled.

Can you link me to an explanation of color in this sense? Mother May I also uses the term, and I don't understand it.

It's a bit intimidating if you use the whole system, but Burning Wheel might fit what you're looking for, Rafael. A lot of traditional RPG stuff (swords! sorcery! faith! elves!) but some very small things that drive it a lot closer to what you're wanting. I'm not sure it completely satisfies #1, it kind of implies some of the solutions to that but the real answers don't show up till Mouse Guard.

Also, don't go to overboard with it. Really. Make characters, use basic resolution. I know it feels cheap to not mess with the subsystems that take up about 2/3rds of the core book, but it's really alright.

Oh, and the reason I'm not directly recommending Mouse Guard: I'm not sure if the setting for that is too narrow for your #5 criteria. If mice with swords solving problems for mouse communities is broad enough for you (I would say it is, but your tastes might be different).

Rafael:

If his character says "I will lay down my life to save you", that's semi-explicit (maybe the character is lying) and doesn't damage immersion at all

I'd say you're quite right; "quite" because it's possible (in my experience it happened) that the character was willing to die for something, but the player would definitely prefer his character to survive. Has this ever happened to you?
Anyway, I was wondering: in your experience, doesn't what you say still costs some immersion? If the players is willing to accept the death of his character and wants to communicate this to the master in play, he has to consciously decide this; and to think "I'm willing to let my character die, I had to communicate this" is outside the immersion, isn't it? Or I've not understood your point?

it divorces the mechanical structure of the story from the narrative content to the point that we might as well be doing free-form storytelling while playing snakes and ladders

I'd say story and mechanics are still strongly linked, only they link not a specific NPC behaviour, but the outcome of a situation: the roll only decides whether the Approach is successful or not, not why it is; you fail the roll (mechanic), the story must go on with a failed Approach (narrative content). How it fails is on the master.

It would divorce the story from the mechanical structure if it wasn't that way: let's say you approach the girl and win the first roll; the girl accepts you.
Next, you speak with her and win the roll: the girl listens to you and comforts you.
Next, you try to kiss her and win the roll: you kiss her.
Next, you give her a flower, but you fail the roll; suddenly the girl dislikes you?

Are new wave RPGs self-explanatory for old-school gamers? My feeling is that it would be very helpful to play them for the first time with people who already know them, and that if I just try them out, my group and I will feel like the system failed us, while in fact we were just using it wrong

Yeah, it happens: sometimes, simply the players (GM included) fail to follow what the rules say, and out of habit apply "Mother, may I?" and GM fiat.
Some RPG is quite self-explanatory (Dogs in the Vineyard, for example, explain how to play and GM it), while others are not so clear.
Having someone that already knows the game is definitely positive.

Can you link me to an explanation of color in this sense? Mother May I also uses the term, and I don't understand it

I didn't used it as technical term; what I meant is... I think I can explain myself better with an example: in comics, if Superman has to break in a jail, obviously he meets guards, but assuming they're normal humans nobody thinks they'll stop him, and he beats them in a couple of frames.
I had in mind a fight like that: sometimes it happens, and it'd be simply narrated how the PCs win, if no one is interested in rolling dice.

Rafael,

Are new wave RPGs self-explanatory for old-school gamers? My feeling is that it would be very helpful to play them for the first time with people who already know them, and that if I just try them out, my group and I will feel like the system failed us, while in fact we were just using it wrong

I'd build on what Mauro said and just point out that a lot of the stuff that looks like "advice" and you're used to ignoring out of RPG books is actually rules, and you really do have to play that way for the game to work right. But if you do, it'll be great! Vincent's games tend to be pretty explicit about this stuff (from Apocalypse World to the GM "Do not pre-plan storylines. I'm not fucking around about this"). If you're going to be the one introducing the new game, I'd recommend you read it through real carefully and maybe check out some actual play reports or the like online so you can get a feel for what a session might look like and how it'll be different from a traditional game.

Secondly, I was going to suggest that to *really* save on printing costs, you could go for PDFs. I don't know because I've never tried it, but buying the PDF and printing it yourself might be cheaper than buying the book and shipping it to Europe. Most of the games recommended above are available as PDFs, so I'd take a look at that.

Rafael,

This is funny:

That's a significant advantage that I don't think had been mentioned yet.

I suppose no one has, but to me (and I'm sure I'm not alone), the benefit of a more collaborative game is precisely this! So it's a funny omission.

There is a powerful creative synergy fostered by many of these "new" games that is rare and difficult to achieve in a game where the GM holds all the reins. I think that's a major, major part of the appeal of these games—at least, for me, it's one of the biggest points.

For what is my mind, the bigger advantage isn't the one you pointed, but the fact that the GM can now focus on playing the game, instead of paying attention on "what the players really want"

As an example, palying Dogs in the Vineyard, the GM cannot beat the players... there's no way the GM can "win" and "kill the party"... he hasn't enought dice to do that... So he can be as evil as he want.. the GM can play the game with all the strenght the system concede, without worry to make mistakes, stressing the sistema as much as he can and obtaining from it always all that it can offer

I'll pick up as many as I can (does anyone know of a Europe-based shop, so I could save on shipping?)

What's that one that Eero Tuovinen runs out of Finland? He's got most of these games. I can't find it on Google because I can't remember the name. Somebody help?

http://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/solarsystem

I personally recommend playing The Shadow of Yesterday, I think it's a great game were you can incorporate some of the things being discussed here.

Also it has a sort of post apocalyptic medieval fantasy setting that can appeal to some D&D fans. It has enough juice to create interesting initial situations for the game, at the same time giving you more than enough room to introduce your own elements as you see fit.

All the best,
D.

Rafael:

does anyone know of a Europe-based shop, so I could save on shipping?

Have tou tried Leisure Games?

Josh W.: the player character's planning and moral decisions, where they include assumptions that were not previously stated, are broadly confirmed[....] [I]f the GM does contradict this, he is expected to "sell" the changes in terms of plausibility given the forms of cause and effect that the players agree with[....] There's a third possibility too, which is something I love shadowrun for; first you plan, creating the setting semi-collaboratively by active searching, then the GM looks at what you have prepared and looks for flaws, and then when you play the mission it is subverted just enough that your improvisation skills are extremely tested, with a margin of safety/outs to avoid total wrecking.

I think these are two ends of a spectrum rather than two alternatives, since even in the "Shadowrun version" the GM is expected to justify the points in which the world didn't behave as the players expected (or at least to have a justification—the players may not immediately be told why there were twice as many guards as expected, but then they want to be able to investigate and discover a reason).

I would agree that we play like this, tending towards the "more surprises" end of the scale.

If you compare that to Simon's way of playing, and it seems more like the patterns of cause and effect are hidden and unknown, rather than where they are suggested and then confirmed or subverted.

Interesting suggestion. Simon?

when people talk about mechanics that do not spoil "the story", is that spoiling can be pretty relative; if you don't like certain stories, then certain mechanics tailored to those stories will leave you cold.

Ok. This is what I mean by the game occuring in the minds of the partipants; it doesn't matter if the story is "objectively" cool, or even one that the players would find cool if they read it as a story, if they lose their engagement with it as players (although I understand the Jesse's argument that you can practice rolling with story changes and learn to enjoy shifts that might have left you cold at first).

playing those games and trying to push them along with your standard habits could lead to frustration of both types of story.

This is why it would be helpful to have someone in our group with experience in a successful new wave game.

Mauro: it's possible that the character was willing to die for something, but the player would definitely prefer his character to survive.

Sure; that's what I meant by "semi-explicit (maybe the character is lying)". I could have added "lying, self-deluding, or the character and the player disagree". As a rule the people in my group tend to want for their character what their character would want for himself, but there are certainly exceptions.

doesn't what you say still costs some immersion? If the players is willing to accept the death of his character and wants to communicate this to the master in play, he has to consciously decide this; and to think "I'm willing to let my character die, I had to communicate this" is outside the immersion, isn't it?

To the extent that the player is immersed, he isn't making a player-level decision to accept the death, but a character-level one, or rather identifying the two levels. And he isn't going out of his way to communicate the decision to the GM; the point of my examples is that the most immersive communication is (a) in character and (b) to other characters. If (a) or (b) weakens, so does immersion, giving rise to various levels of metaplay, as I described above.

the roll only decides whether the Approach is successful or not, not why it is; you fail the roll (mechanic), the story must go on with a failed Approach (narrative content).

But the definition of "failed" seems like it could get so broad as to be meaningless. This wouldn't be a problem for systems in which the player sets the stakes, of course, but it seems like it could be in MLwM, since "failed" is defined purely in terms of mechanical attribute changes.

It would divorce the story from the mechanical structure if it wasn't that way: let's say you approach the girl and win the first roll; the girl accepts you.
Next, you speak with her and win the roll: the girl listens to you and comforts you.
Next, you try to kiss her and win the roll: you kiss her.
Next, you give her a flower, but you fail the roll; suddenly the girl dislikes you?

This is a pretty contrived example. In practice, you would only roll for things that could plausibly go wrong; if you think that her accepting the flower is the only plausible outcome, you wouldn't roll. If you don't, you'd roll and have a plausible explanation for failure ready (e.g. she hates flowers and is insulted that you didn't know that—ok, not very plausible, but neither is the scenario).

if Superman has to break in a jail, obviously he meets guards, but assuming they're normal humans nobody thinks they'll stop him, and he beats them in a couple of frames.
I had in mind a fight like that: sometimes it happens, and it'd be simply narrated how the PCs win, if no one is interested in rolling dice.

Ok. If there's really no risk (Superman vs. normal humans), we wouldn't roll, just as you say.

Jeff Russell: ok, thanks for the advice.

Paul T: Sometimes people forget to mention the obvious, I guess.

Rafael:

To the extent that the player is immersed, he isn't making a player-level decision to accept the death, but a character-level one, or rather identifying the two levels

Let's take an actual play: I was playing Dogs in the Vineyard and my character died trying to stop a lynching (he'd have died outright only by rolling at least two 10s on three d10; indeed...).
Now, my character was willing to die, but'd have preferred not to; while I, as a players, preferred him to die because I choose to be in that situation, to take that risk; I didn't prefer the master saving him, so there was a difference between what the character'd have said, asing to be saved, and what I as a player wanted.
This is what I was thinking about, and I'm wondering if the needing of communicate this difference could in your idea ruin immersion.

This wouldn't be a problem for systems in which the player sets the stakes, of course, but it seems like it could be in MLwM, since "failed" is defined purely in terms of mechanical attribute changes

It's defined also in narrative effects: "the Approach fails" has an heavy impact on the story (remember that Minions think of themselves as monster, but wants to be loved: "fails" means they are treated as monster, and not as the humans they are).
In addition, I failed to stress a thing: the rules say that NPCs reaction to a fail has to... humble? (I'm not sure about the exact wording) the minion. "Failing" doesn't mean "A cart passes nearby and she doesn't see you", "failing" does mean "Someone made it fails by humbling you and beating on your convinction to be a monster".

"Fail" is surely broad, but given an Approach I think the players'd be able to understand what a meaningful failure is.

So, in the flower example I will definitely roll, because the roll doesn't say whether her accepts the flower or not, but whether the Approach itself is successful or not; maybe she's willing to accept the flower, but her father shows up and cart her away insulting you. Has the Approach been a success? I'd say no.
Maybe accepting the flower is the only plausibile outcome from the girl, but there is a whole village outside, most of which thinks the Minions are monsters; any approach could fail thanks to them.

these games try to find a way to mix the people playing, all of which have unique qualities as a director for the story, to create a play session they wouldn't be able to create if only one of them took the GM duties.
...
That's a significant advantage that I don't think had been mentioned yet.

Part of the question, though, must surely be whether it really is an advantage?  I'm sure they would be different, but whether they would be better as a result of that difference is not at all clear to me.

Improv gets mentioned upthread, but it demonstrates precisely the sort of thing that bothers me; in improv I have often see stock phrases or developments because of the needs of the format and the limited time available in which to think.  That's not something I find particularly appealing.

But on that note, I disagree that players interested in this sort of thing are "well served" by existing, conventional games, becuase virtually none of them are able to say anything about story design at all.

In the OP, Vincent says of co-GMed games, "Why not design them?", but I would ask the same of single GM games.

When you design a game, you do it because you have insights you want to express. Insights into the game's subject matter, like "oh hey did you notice this about adventure fiction?" or "horror means this!" or whatever. Insights into real live human nature or behavior, like "I think that people under stress act like this" or "a person can do this alone, but to do this she really needs the help of her friends" or whatever. And insights into roleplaying as a practice, like "whoa, I bet that dice can be used for this" or "players can do this and a game can still be fun!" or whatever.

A well-designed game coordinates all of your insights, and here's the crucial point: some games demand that you have a GM, and some games demand that you don't.

First of all, some insights into roleplaying as a practice call for games with GMs—"if the GM does this, then this happens"—and others call for games without GMs—"you can have no GM if all the players do this." But it's not only that straightforward, that 1-to-1. Some insights in combination demand GMs and others demand none. "If this player does this, and that player does that, it gets exactly at what I mean to say about people under stress, and coincidentally there's nothing left for a GM to do, so no need to have one."

Compare, for instance, Emily's game Shooting the Moon with my game Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant. In Shooting the Moon, one player plays a character called the beloved*, and in Rock of Tahamaat, one player plays Rock of Tahamaat, and they're broadly similar roles. They provide adversity, direction, and enticement to the other players and their characters. However, because of the details of the interactions between the beloved's player and the other players, versus the details of the interactions between Rock of Tahamaat's player and the other players, Shooting the Moon can't accommodate a GM, and Rock of Tahamaat demands one.

The question of "why have a GM? Why not have a GM?" isn't even a whole question, absent a game in development and its specific, particular design goals. It's a question for every game to answer individually, not a question with one answer in general or in theory.

*I think the character's called "the beloved." It might be "the intended" or something else like that.

That can all be true, and still be somewhat beside the point.  For whatever reason, the GM'd game landscape remains a blasted waste with very few green shoots (3:16 probably being the poster child).

One of two explanations for this is likely to be true: 1) there are no insights to be had which require singular GMing, or 2), it's currently an unfashionable motif to explore.

I think the latter is more likely than the former.

CC: Here's a brief list of games with interesting insights and GMs:

Dogs in the Vineyard, Poison'd, Apocalypse World, Bliss Stage, Sorcerer, S/lay w/ me, My Life With Master, Blowback, PTA. For a start.

yrs—
—Ben

I recommend 3:16 as a good "gateway" game to help players see more interesting options.

I play with a mixed group, some busting to play DitV some not seeing any benefit of this over D&D 4e. We've played a few games of Mouse Guard as an experiment, but not everyone got "it" from that. But I think a few recent games of 3:16 are helping us to explain amongst the group what we feel the potential of RPGs can be.

Now looking to try out Poison'd with this group tomorrow!

Note: I'm not recommending sneaking a new way of playing up on people. You definitely need to talk this through as a group.

Ben, I don't think those designs really come up to the kind of thing I was thinking of; frex DiTV specifies no story I understand planning and Sorcerer is similar.  I'm not seeing any progress in this field.

cc, I get that you're looking for something and not finding it in those games, but I haven't caught on to what you're looking for. Say it again?

A good discussion here.

Rafael: I have made a small hobby of collecting and retailing small press games here in Finland. I usually only sell to Finnish customers (the store being in Finnish and all), but if you find something you want in the store, feel free to let me know and I'll set you up. I'm currently out of Vincent's stuff and most of the Luke Crane things, embarrassingly enough, but I have many of the other favourites, ranging from Sorcerer to Primetime Adventures and many underappreciated gems that tend to get produced by this prolific community with more game design than time to play.

Also, The Shadow of Yesterday, which was mentioned up-thread, seems like it might fit your purposes in many ways. The important thing is whether you believe that a gradualist approach to learning about this school of game design is the way to go, or if it would be easier to throw yourself and your group to the deep end. TSoY is a true hybrid in that it retains many of the things you've mentioned as typical of traditional play, such as a true GM role, players acting solely through their characters and everybody having lots of character development options, while also instructing and requiring the full range of "story games GMing" techniques that have been discussed in this thread. That is, I find myself that TSoY is a reliable tool for playing a game where the GM does not preplan a plot, nobody fudges anything, the characters and their passions are expressed passionately, and story consistently results merely from interaction of the forces in play rather than constant overview by an authority figure. Best of all, the game is quite free: the classic edition and the most recent one are both available for your perusal as HTML texts. (I'm the author of that new edition, so I'm clearly biased in how much I like this game.)

Vincent, when I first the phrase "system does matter", what I assumed it would address was story structure and development.  It doesn't, of course, but that illustrates my preoccupations then and now.  It seemd to me, and still does, that RPG's are different because of their story-like aspect, and yet this is not addressed by the systems of play.  Frankly, resolution systems as such are of little interest to me;  I don't need to know how to do stuff, I need to know what to do.

cc, what is it that 3:16 gets right (or starts to get right) that you want to see more games explore? "Story structure and development" could mean just about anything.

Just a quickie for Eero Tuovinen and others: When you talk about avoiding the need for the GM to "preplan a plot" are you talking about planning a whole story from beginning to end, or about planning what possibilities are likely to arise in a given session? Because we don't do the first one either, as I have remarked; I think our GM's usual technique is to come up with some NPCs whose goals don't match the PCs', an initial situation, and possibly a MacGuffin, and then see what happens.

Misuba, the way the game structures the deployment of threat tokens into scenes automatically creates a pattern of play, and the sequence of planets and related character development and escalation of opposition all provides asssistance in determining the direction of the game.  Even if things don't work out as you anticipated, that skeleton provides information on how to extemporise from the results arising in play.  It is a structured approach to creating a certain kind of 'war story'.

cc: Are you sure that Dogs in the Vineyard doesn't do that?

Shock: does. Polaris does. ...Oh holy crap, all the games I'm about to list are co-GMed games. Holy crap! That's interesting. I'm going to think more about that.

...and also Primetime Adventures, for a single-GM example.

Hey, :)

Can you link me to an explanation of color in this sense?

Rafael, I did use color as a technical term. I was referring to its meaning in the Big Model, which is a model of what RPG sessions are about, as developed at The Forge.

You can check out the Forge glossary here, although some of that stuff is possibly outdated, by now...

I'm glad you enjoyed my articles. :)

Cheers,
J.

PtA though has diced narration control and scene framing.  So it may have a GM role of a sort, but it doesn't have real central story authority; that's distributed.  I don't think the Producer could, say, plot a sting-in-the-tail structure and actually expect to pull it off.

cc, the only structure you need to have a story is to have an arc of conflict that starts somewhere and escalates towards a climax, after which it is resolved. In other words, you need a situation that perpetually changes *and can't go back* until it reaches a point where it's tenable.

Resolution systems that you don't care about? They're how you move from one situation to the next.

> Just a quickie for Eero Tuovinen and others: When you talk about avoiding the need for the GM to "preplan a plot" are you talking about planning a whole story from beginning to end, or about planning what possibilities are likely to arise in a given session? Because we don't do the first one either, as I have remarked; I think our GM's usual technique is to come up with some NPCs whose goals don't match the PCs', an initial situation, and possibly a MacGuffin, and then see what happens.

That's the basis of it, yes. You also need to know how to establish conflict and resolve it reliably without running into dead ends in the fiction, but in my experience that tends to follow once you're able to think of GM prep in terms of open scenarios instead of plot trains.

Doesn't seem like it follows on to me.  To my eyes they look like totally different skills.  I think the reason that people resort to plot of any kind in the first place is precisely because "just letting the situation play out" produces, for them (certainly for me), excruciatingly dull and uninteresting play.

cc: It's interesting! All the designers I know who are interested in strong GMing aren't interested in proceduralizing story structure, and all the designers I know who are interested in proceduralizing story structure aren't interested in strong GMing.

There are some who aren't interested in both, but none who are interested in both.

It's not just that one is fashionable and the other isn't, it's a polarity. It's surprising me how consistent it is. I don't know what's up with that.

Hi Vincent,

Have you checked out Mouse Guard or Burning Empires?  Luke's a pretty big fan of strong GMing, though both of those games are definitely about proceduralizing story structure.

(Granted, those are exceptions, it certainly seems to fall into that division in most other cases).

Also, Bliss Stage and My Life With Master both have strong GMs and a strong story structure (not surprisingly, since MLWM is a direct ancestor of Bliss Stage.)

yrs—
—Ben

Oh, good! Good.

That'd mean that of my own games, Poison'd is the one with the strongest story structure. That makes sense to me.

Chis, I've played single sessions of Mouse Guard, and I wouldn't've said that it has a proceduralized story, but I might be looking at the wrong parts and there's presumably a whole lot in long-term play that I haven't seen.

cc, are any of these examples getting at what you're talking about? My Life with Master seems like the clearest, strongest to me.

An interesting notes along these lines: I've occasionally joked that My Life with Master is a GMless game; it's just that one player has a different kind of character to play.

I say that because I noticed that when I GM My Life with Master I spend more time simply playing the Master than I do almost anything else.  And when I'm playing the Townsfolk/Connections I play them largely in terms of their (fearful) relationship with the Master.  Almost like how PCs treat their Relationships in Trollbabe.

I've noticed that trend in my own designs.  I actually prefer GMed games over GMless ones.  However, I also like games with strongly defined "topics."  I've noticed that when I try to design a game around a specific topic I have to put in mechanics to make sure the topic doesn't drift too far.  When I do that the role of the GM either drops out entirely or morphs into a more specialized roll like in My Life with Master.

Jesse

I can certainly see that there is a pressure in co-GMed games that doesn't necessarily apply to single GM games, because it less clear what it is that you do, and therefore it needs to be explicated.  Whereas single-GMed games already have a well established principle that the GM owns story.

I don't know enough about either Bliss Stage or Poison'd to comment much, but MLWM seem to me more about proceduralized relations between the characters than proceduralized story.  Or maybe it would be better to describe it as stylised; after all the GM figure doesn't seem to have discretion over the stages of play (i.e. there will be opportunities for love to develop, there will be a revolt of the locals etc).

I guess a difference I see is that there seems to be a greater possibility variety of play in something like 3:16.  The elements I have referred to - deployment of threat tokens, sequentual planets - seem like they could be put to other uses.  The specific thematic content of 3:16 gives it its own character but seems detachable; I don't think that's the case for MLWM.

The way I usually view this GMless thing is that the presence of a GM is not nearly as important to the overall game as whether the game is predicated on a creative focus provided by the GM: a traditional design is a game that will not "go" unless the GM gets excited about the source material and spins it into a personal vision he's willing to referee for the rest of the group come hell or high water, while something like MLwM provides this creatize zeal in-built, allowing the GM to have a less comprehensive passion, more closely resembling the attitude the players bring to the table.

Strong-GM, story structure games for cc:

How about Misspent Youth? Each episode is a pattern of rising/falling action skeleton that the Authority Figure can totally hang the skin of his story over. Obstacles, twists, "sting-in-the-tail" totally in the hands of the AF. The Youthful Offenders do make a plan, but the AF then makes sure the plan goes all cross-eyed, and the YOs' job then is just to say who's stepping up to meet each threat, and decide whether to sell out.

That fit what you're looking for at all?

Ben Lehman:

Bliss Stage and My Life With Master both have strong GMs and a strong story structure

I can be wrong, since I read Bliss Stage some time ago, but it seems to me players handle some PNGs and some enviroment description (while in the dream and while it's not a nightmare).
If I'm right, even if it has a central GM figure it has also relevant shared GMing, doesnt' it?

I'm going to have to say "maybe" for Misspent Youth.  I can't find anything discussing the scene framing structure right now, and AP accounts are fairly sparse.  It also seems to have alternating narration and collaborative setting creation, which, while not strictly relevant to the story structure issue, are thing's I don't much like and that may be why I disregarded it.  Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think of all shared narration as co-GMed.  As I meant to say about MLWM, I agree that there are significant similarities, but at the time they were actively discussed, neither made me go "aha".  Neither are quite the sort of thing I want specifically, but I would agree that they are examples of designs that touch on it.  I'm looking for something a bit broader, perhaps; instead of marching through fixed scene types A to B to C to produce a highly focussed story effect, I'm interested in thing that say if you want effect X do this, if you want effect Y do that.

There's one clear reason for games with proceduralized story structure to be anti-correlated with games that encourage a strong GM.

It's similar to how groups that put a lot of focus on their constitution or charter tend to be anti-correlated with groups that are run by the leader's force of personality.

There's a limited amount of power at the table.  Power may not be exercised, and thus the net power at the table may decrease, but you can't go up past a certain point.

Procedure plot takes the plot-framing power and puts it in the hands of, usually, the players, mediated through mechanics.

Strong GM systems tend to trust that the GM knows better than the system, and can do things well that the system can't, or can only do clunkily.

It's fundamentally feature of the social contract which way a group leans—from democracy to plutocracy (for some resource) to autocracy to constitutional monarchy.