anyway.

Well that looks like exactly what I was asking for, cheers! I'll ponder up some responces for you.

I still have more than half a million billion words to go, but since you asked about the things we see as curious, I thought it was very interesting how you decided to come up with a rules "on the spot" to deal with the dragon in the "Further More Adventures in Improvised System" thread.

My first thought on this was that this eventually became the advanced chapter in Apocalypse World (is that right?). My second thought was that, while having creative freedom to mess with the system is important, having the rules remain the same may help exploration not seem arbitrary. But then I was reminded of Storming the Wizard's Tower and I guess that is one of the things you are trying to do there, right?

Anyway, there seems to be a lot of interesting insights in these links. Heck, Vincent, you make great posts even when you are just recycling! I think I am beginning to understanding what you mean by principled play, but here is a doubt I am still struggling with. Principles aren't hard rules, right? For example "To do it, do it." is a hard rule and not a principle? Or can hard rules be principles too?

Meg wrote about the process of ending the game here, which is often overlooked in long term campaign play.

I have a question!

Would you say that the system you were using here was preserving in-character conflicts of interest agaisnt the unity of interest of the players?

If yes, how? If no, didn't that kind of suck?

THAT'S a question gets up my nose. Look out.

Yes, it did, duh. Hello.

How? Simon, I've given you 8 thorough and self-aware descriptions of what we did, plus 8 threads' worth of pretty solid analysis. I've already been about as forthcoming and self-critical as you can expect a person to be.

How about you choose a time when it looks like it did, or a time when it looks like it didn't, exercise your critical faculties, and say something about it?

Oh man, Simon, I'm sorry! I don't need to be a cranky head about it.

I would invite you to choose a time when it looks like it did or didn't, though, and bring it up for discussion. I think that could be pretty interesting.

Hi! No need to apologise! I am a big boy!

I kind of assumed that it must have, since it was fun for a long time, but I can't really understand how.

For example, escaping the Dragon. I don't really see how the fictional conflicts are being maintained.

In the thread you say: "Once we'd gotten the whole dice mechanism in place, it was obvious that our characters couldn't lose in the long run, not with Emily's d20.  Which was just fine, which was ideal in fact: none of us wanted our characters to lose.  We wanted to see how they survived, and what it showed us about them.  Knowing that the dragon wouldn't kill them didn't hurt the suspense at all."

So the conflict with the Dragon isn't really being maintained, yeah? Because it's not what matters? The dice are stacked in your favour, and even if you lose there are no stakes attached, so it's just pacing.

I assume that this is because what really matters is the conflict between the characters. It's their conflict of interest which needs to be maintained against the players' unity of interest. I can't see how that is achieved. Inform me!

According to these links, that Ars Magica game you played had a really staggering scope. So many characters, story threads and details! Did you plan this beforehand? Did you expect this from the way you set up the game? I think that studying what principles helped you keep the game going for that long without it losing its appeal would really be invaluable. I usually have problems keeping a group together for very long, even when everyone seems to be enjoying the game, so this is something I am particularly interested in.

Also, another question (sorry for being nosy). The links you posted describe a game that didn't use much dice. The game seems to have a lot of "points of contact" (I hope I am using the term correctly), but on these points you were mostly either using principles to guide you or some kind of cue that needed no random elements. Yet many of your games make a heavy use of cues. Mediating cues figure strongly in Apocalypse World (at least, if I understand the term correctly). Even when you are not throwing dice around, cues in the form of MC moves help lead the game.

What I want to ask is, is this out of necessity? Do you use cues because you can't teach people directly how to play like you three played in those games? Or do you think cues are also useful in themselves?

Having such a small group helped keep us going for that long I think. Especially since there were so many characters and so many plot threads. But we did play with another group that had 8-11 players long term. I think they hit different issues than we did.

Our main issues, in the end, were around providing long-term adversity. We ended up leaving a lot of that job to Vincent. Part of the reason we ended (for me at least) was to go play other games to learn how to be a better GM.

Teaching other folks how to do this is one of my holy grails. For certain.

Simon: Mmm. The purpose of system isn't to prolong in-character conflicts of interest against their own resolution. It's to preserve them so that they escalate and resolve, instead of letting them evaporate in a cloud of player-level good will. What you see in that particular writeup is just the conflict between the dragon and the 3 wizards escalating and resolving.

The dice provided not just pacing but a structure for decision-making within the conflict. We set it up (on the fly) so that the 3 wizards would survive, but also so that they would reveal themselves under pressure. Ash helped Bloris before she helped Frantiska; Frantiska attacked Bloris and didn't attack Ash; when the dragon came upon them, Ash and Bloris fled together and Frantiska fled a different direction alone. We wouldn't've learned any of this about them without the dice.

Here's a funny thought! We'd never played those characters before. It'd make sense to think of that episode as their character creation. Instead of buying them with points or rolling up their stats or whatever, we put them through this episode with the dragon. It was like initiation in Dogs in the Vineyard in a lot of ways.

Ok. I guess I still don't get it.

In your essay on the subject you talk about the players needing to be able to point to the rules and say "hey! why did you let my guy off the hook?".

What do the players point to in your system here? It's not the dice, clearly, since they're essentially task resolution - the consequences for the conflict are left to the discretion of the players.

What stopped Emily, the first time she rolled higher than the dragon, from saying "Ok! Problem solved! I hide us all and the dragon passes us by!"

I mean, I can see that there is something stopping her from doing that, but it's not the dice system you were using, it's some unstated principle that you use to decide when a scene is "done".

In other words: "What pressure?"

> What stopped Emily, the first time she rolled higher than
> the dragon, from saying "Ok! Problem solved! I hide us all
> and the dragon passes us by!"

Why would Emily want to do that? It'd be stupid. That's not what she wanted out of the episode at all.

There's no earthly need for rules to stop people from doing what they don't want to do anyway.

It seems like we're talking past each other.

Maybe it would help to be more specific about what I'm asking?

The players, you, Emily and Meg, are all interested in seeing what these characters do under pressure. For that to work, you need the pressure to be actually real, right? It doesn't work if you can back off of them whenever you like. You need the rules to create the unwelcome and the unwanted.

It seems to me that the dice system you're using in the example doesn't do that, yeah? What's doing that is some other, unstated principle.

I want to be clear that I'm not being obtuse or trying to prove a point, I just genuinely don't understand what the deal is.

I have to say, these are some of my favorite threads, and it's nice to have them all collected like this so I don't always have to hunt for them.

One key thing you point out in the first thread, that I hadn't really thought about, is the keen necessity to collaborate in other people's characters doing the things that they find character-defining. In Sol Invictus, I think this has come up multiple times as characters unintentionally push on each other and expand to fill available space—which obviously makes it harder to identify what's actually character-defining! This is one place where less (capability) is more (clarity).

(Imagine a game of Dogs in the Vineyard where you could only get dice by calling on the attributes of other people in the conflict.  Maybe you'd get em by calling on them positively, or calling on your own attributes negatively. I dunno.  As you point out, Universalis already gives you dice for this.)

More later after I sleep and work!

Just came back to mention that your description of your game's evolution out of Ars Magica 2nd, and out of GURPS, into an unspoken collaborative game more or less parallels the movement of Sol Invictus away from the rules detritus of Exalted and into a more or less "covertly" negotiated freeform framework.  The lengthy non-acknowledgement of the fact that the game was, in fact, collaborative; the ostensible GM authority but practical delegation of domains to the players; the existence of collaboration outside of the game; these are all things that are specifically present in SI.

Oh, I forgot my actual point. The thing I find fascinating about this is that, without actual primary research, it becomes impossible to judge how "freeformy" a game is—even asking the players themselves won't always give you the real answer, because they're not necessarily consciously aware of it!  In fact, as soon as I brought up the fundamentally negotiated nature of play, we discovered all sorts of holes in our consensus that we were letting slide before, but now, with sovereign authority, we ended up discussing appropriate responses and even writing new mechanics for places where we couldn't easily agree! So blatantly acknowledging the freeform nature of a game can sometimes set it back.

I've read most of Adventures in Principled Freeform.  That Ars Magica game sounds super fun to me.  The example of it using the Dogs resolution rules (Vincent's first 12-31-04 post) sounds infinitely less fun.

I like Dogs, but I hope the spectrum of play experiences that game texts can offer me isn't limited to formal conflict resolutions.  I want a book that can tell me how to play Ars Magica the way this group played it.  Not the way they could have played it; the way they did.

So, Vincent, I hope that list of concrete example principles is forthcoming!

Alex: I create rules to play how I can't play without them. My games give you good things that our Ars Magica game didn't have.

I wouldn't design a game to give you what we got out of that Ars Magica game. If you want that stuff, you can just have it, you don't need a game to help you.

Simon: Since it did create real pressure, what do you think the unstated principle (or principles) might be?

William: When we started the Griffin's Aerie game in 1998, Meg, Emily and I, one of our founding principles was to be overt in our negotiations. We'd done covert negotiations for years, in our various groups and various games, but Griffin's Aerie was specifically and intentionally a break from that. We wanted to play together as equals, not manipulate one another.

It didn't entirely work out. We stopped playing because, over the last couple of years of the game, what we wanted had developed to the point where only genuine rules or covert negotiation again could give it to us.

Vincent! I don't know! That's why I'm asking!

Thanks Vincent. Sorry for the dumb question by the way. The books you wrote (at least the ones I read) make this stance you have toward game design pretty clear. I guess I was just surprised to see play without cues like the one you described work so well.

By the way, I think the answer to Simon's question may be so simple you are missing it. It seems to me the principle he wants might be as simple as "Make most of your game choices thinking first as a story creator" as opposed to "Make most of your game choices thinking first as your own character" or "Make most of your game choices thinking first as a strategist".

Alex, your surprise makes sense to me.  As far as my own experience, and virtually all the gamers I've spoken to on the topic, freeform is fraught with all sorts of perils that this group avoided.  There's clearly something to their success, and I hope we can tease those principles out.

Simon, you're asking Vincent about informal system, specifically principles, right?  Not about formal rules?  If that's so, then I think "Hiding us all and letting the dragon pass by isn't what Emily wanted out of the episode" is your answer for that example.

From that, we could maybe extend to some principle like "Character tests are more important than character success."  Or, I dunno, come up with something better based on your own reading.  I'm just suggesting that working from your understanding of the group's priorities in action in that example might be the way to go here.

David,

I'm not sure. Maybe? In that case I'm hopelessly confused about all this. But I don't think so.

What I'm asking about is what puts the characters under real pressure in this scenario?

I guess that the principle is "don't let up until we've got to what we wanted", where "what we wanted" is communicated both explicitly and non-explicitly.

But I really don't know!

Maybe using a different example might help?

Vincent: The first link above, with the kind-of-sucky Certamen. I read that as an example of the system (at first) not preserving the in-fiction conflict of interest between the characters, and things kind of sucking as a result (so you changed the system to make it work better). Am I reading that right? It's not what the thread focused on at the time, but it's part of the issue, yeah?

Simon: why isn't "the risk of death" what puts the characters under real pressure? Sure, they'll eventually win, but they don't know that! In the narrative, the dragon is a mortal threat.

Why isn't the imaginary threat of death a real pressure? Because imaginary things are not real things? I hope?

It's only as imaginary as the characters that are being examined, though.

As Vincent already explained, death was never at stake here. The characters weren't going to get killed right after they were introduced. The stakes were about how they acted under pressure, what kind of personality they would show and how they cared for each other.

To do so, they used a small system they thought up on the spot, one that determined who had the upper hand. As I understand, this helped create a sense of tension in the game. The players couldn't simply do whatever they wanted, for if the dragon rolled more than they, they were "beaten" by it.

Now, I think that Simon's problem with this is that this system keeps certain pressures from the player. For example, suppose Emily was making all her decisions as if she was inside Ash's skull, seeing the world through his own eyes. The dice are thrown, and Emily's come up higher than the dragon's. Well, she has the upper hand, what should she do? If she could do anything, she probably should kill the dragon, right? I mean, from the story perspective, it is probably a crappy thing to do, to introduce 3 fresh characters we know nothing about yet and then have them kill a freaking dragon, right there before he even shows up. But from Ash's point of view, if he could kill a dragon, it probably would be crazy not to.

So, Simon's question is, I think: what did the players agree to that meant Emily couldn't do whatever she wanted when her dice came higher? From Vince's description, it looks like just a mutual understanding between the players about what was at stake and how they should go about it.

Emily never thought things up only from her character's point of view. Instead, she had a broader view of what the scene was trying to accomplish. When she rolled higher than the dragon, she didn't end the conflict because she knew ending it then would feel "rushed up", unsatisfying. So, I think that in the end this is just a stance issue.

The game didn't need real constraints for lots of things because the people playing it weren't going to challenge them. In the dragon example, they saw clearly what the conflict was about, and putting forth rules for what it wasn't about (like the dragon killing the party, or the party escaping without breaking a sweat) would be counterproductive. Instead, they used rules to arbitrate what it was about (how the characters escaped from the dragon) because that was something they couldn't solve well with agreement alone.

Now, I am making a lot of assumptions here, and I am really sorry if I am off, but I am hoping this helps you communicate. I think I understood both Vincent's and Simon's points, which is why I wrote this post. But if I am wrong, please, correct me.

We stopped playing because, over the last couple of years of the game, what we wanted had developed to the point where only genuine rules or covert negotiation again could give it to us.

I think what happened was that we unknowingly went covert again. Because we didn't have proper tools to deal with the issues we were hit by. Also, we'd played out a lot of the plot stuff we had to play. 6 years is a bit of time.

Why isn't the imaginary threat of death a real pressure? Because imaginary things are not real things? I hope?
Simon, are you asking why we would be concerned about that if the risk wasn't mechanically enforced? If so, that's something we can talk about.

Hi Emily,

I think so? I'm asking what it is that the players can rely on to not let their characters off the hook when they want them to be under pressure.

I so don't understand! When we want our characters to be under pressure, we don't let them off the hook. We need external pressure when we want to let them off the hook. When we want them under pressure, we need the opposite - a way for them to survive it.

Vincent,

There's a post of yours that I'm trying to refer to here, but I can't find it. Can you help me out?

It's the one where you talk about how sometimes there's a particular thing you're trying to get at with your character, and to get to that you need them to be under pressure, and you want to be able to point to the rules and say "hey! why did you let me off the hook!" Do you know the one I mean? Am I remembering it right?

Sure. It's here: Re: What can rules actually contribute? from way back in October 2004.

Have you played Primetime Adventures, Simon?

"We want to let our characters off the hook, but we want rules that won't let us" sounds like "we don't want to do what we want to do".  I think that's the source of the confusion here.

I've been assuming that the rules are there to prioritize our Overall Wants (e.g. juicy game with conflict that tests and reveals characters) over our Immediate Wants (e.g. be nice to the beloved character).

Thanks Vincent!

I have played a little PTA, but not really in ideal circumstances. In the game I played there was a lot of arguing over whether the rules were there to adjudicate differences between the players' desires for the story, or to resolve conflicts between the characters (as it says in the book).

Is it better if I keep trying to explain what I'm talking about, or are you going somewhere with the PTA thing?

The PTA thing is: sometimes surviving the dragon is given, and the dice or cards are there to deal with what's really at issue. PTA is really good for this, if you've played it to its specs. Buffy's issue is love, not killing vampires, so we play cards to find out whether she can kill the vampires in time to keep her date with the handsome boy, not to find out whether she can kill the vampires (because of course she can).

Same with the dragon episode.

Now there IS an important piece to the dice we used that we haven't talked about, which is escalation. Each round of rolls was an escalation, with (a) no backing out and (b) no jumping ahead allowed. The escalation wasn't mechanical like it is in Dogs in the Vineyard, say; it was informal, principled only. But we three have the skills and outlooks necessary to make principled-only escalation reliable.

Where you see only pacing, I see orchestrated escalation.

Ah! That's what I'm looking for!

We got what you describe about, say, 25% of the time with PTA, and the game was pretty average as a result. But I understand what you mean. The system is about resolving what the characters care about (and thus what the players care about), not what might be the most apparent threat or whatever.

So with the understanding of a and b, I totally see how the Dragon-escaping system works. It's like "now describe how your guy deals with this! Orchestrated escalation, absolutely.

Can you talk more about this? I'm guessing that a lot of this was implicit, yeah? With a little wiggle room?

In your posts, there's a few times where you describe people looking a bit suspicious, like they're thinking "Are you breaking the rules, or are you going somewhere that will make this worthwhile (and therefore rules-legal)?". Is that an accurate description?

Also, above where I talk about the sucky Certamen thing, is it right to describe it as a time when this system broke down?

Just read a load of writing advice by an old murder novelist, and he observed that suspense can appear in a novel even when the character involved is someone you know will survive. Providing;

the expression of the scene is so graphic and vivid that you can imagine being in the situation, and you can imagine that feeling of being in danger well enough to suspend your broader view of their survival chances.

But if you're going to do that in a game, you're going to need to outsource the job of survival chances. A pacing system can allow you to get out of rationally assesing how close they are to death, and into what it feels like in the moment, so long as it can reliably handle them surviving.

And plus, there's my conception of a good cliff hanger; you're not worried about whether they will get out of something, you're wondering how on earth they will get out of it.

In game terms there's a creative challenge there, formed by the tension between investment in characterising the danger heavily, but also to pull back just enough. A pacing mechanic can turn that tension into a series of buildups and inversions, it can mean you don't know if any of your changes are going to stick, so you just go for it then land yourself in more difficulties.

Of course that's not exactly the suspense you want to focus on all the time, as it's basically tension formed of pushing your ability to keep things running!

Let's see, a busy week put me pretty far behind here.

Alex at 28: I don't hold much with "looking at the story" vs "looking through the character's eyes."

Instead I'd say that Emily WAS looking at the situation through Ash's eyes, which naturally included an understanding that Ash simply was not capable of killing a dragon. When Emily rolled better than the dragon, it meant that Ash was free to act within her own capabilities, not that Ash was able to transcend them, and certainly not that Emily got to say anything she wanted.

> So, Simon's question is, I think: what did the players
> agree to that meant Emily couldn't do whatever she wanted
> when her dice came higher?

We agreed that dragons are gigantic, wicked, and very difficult to kill. We agreed that some little magus who hasn't studied dragon-killing, hasn't studied the nature and particulars of this dragon itself, hasn't prepared herself for the confrontation, and is meeting the dragon on its terms, not on hers, can't possibly kill one.

You can see it again later on, when Lucere tells his son Clarus Sol to go to the dragon and call it to heel, and Clarus Sol comes to our wizards and tells us that Lucere wants him to commit suicide by dragon. Everybody knows that Clarus Sol can't call a dragon to heel! Everybody knew that Ash couldn't kill one.

To generalize this point: the integrity of the fiction we were creating was always a big player in our system, absolutely overriding any player's momentary interests.

In your posts, there's a few times where you describe people looking a bit suspicious, like they're thinking "Are you breaking the rules, or are you going somewhere that will make this worthwhile (and therefore rules-legal)?". Is that an accurate description?

Breaking rules? The issues I remember us struggling with were: 1) does this break my concept of the world? (re the Ret-conned murders in the winter) 2) does this break my concept of this character? (re the sexuality of the shared play character Avis) 3) does what you did violate our shared contract of what information I had or needed before you whomped me with that grief? (re my character Trey "helping" Murinus Mus with her Twilight by bringing in the unscrupulous doctor) and 4) Can I make this decision on an outcome given that I play this other character who will also be affected by it (re various internal conflicts of interest).

I may be mis-reading your question, but the rules, as Vincent just said, were always secondary to the integrity of the fiction. These four issues (as well as many others, I'm sure) were places where the sticking points became clear. The rules we adopted were to help us avoid being caught by them, I would say.

Just read a load of writing advice by an old murder novelist, and he observed that suspense can appear in a novel even when the character involved is someone you know will survive. Providing;

the expression of the scene is so graphic and vivid that you can imagine being in the situation, and you can imagine that feeling of being in danger well enough to suspend your broader view of their survival chances.
This gets to the heart of it. Instead of relying on weighted mechanics that we've agreed ahead of time will allow us to mutually accept outcomes that may lay grief here there and everywhere, we committed to creating and finding ways through the fiction that gave us the needed feelings, experiences and dramatic satisfaction to let the events ride. Good, bad and indifferent! Not an easy road to walk.

And, damn! I forgot that we intentionally shared play of most of the npcs. Such young radicals we were. :)

Breaking rules? The issues I remember us struggling with were: 1) does this break my concept of the world? (re the Ret-conned murders in the winter) 2) does this break my concept of this character? (re the sexuality of the shared play character Avis) 3) does what you did violate our shared contract of what information I had or needed before you whomped me with that grief? (re my character Trey "helping" Murinus Mus with her Twilight by bringing in the unscrupulous doctor) and 4) Can I make this decision on an outcome given that I play this other character who will also be affected by it (re various internal conflicts of interest).

Cool. I meant "rules" in a pretty broad sense, like in the other post where Vincent is talking about "things which change our normal social interaction", of which "content" is clearly the most important.

So what you describe here is pretty much what I was thinking about.

The reason I brought all this up is that I've played games where it's just people describing what their characters do, with no expectation of conflict or resolution or rising tension or escalation, and it is dull as shit. What you guys were doing was clearly very different from that, but I couldn't see how.

The missing piece in the dragon example, for me, was the escalation. That's the bit that turns it from "let's describe our characters doing some stuff" into something that's actually going to put the characters under pressure and reveal something about them. I suspect that there was a similar pressure in other scenes, but possibly arrived at through different means?

Hooray! Simon, I can finally answer you about the certamen episode. That was a time when we didn't know the two wizard's relative capabilities going into the conflict, AND we didn't use dice or any other formal structure to manage pacing or anything. Escalating became a matter of player will and imagination; the only way for the damn thing to end was for Meg or me to back down to the other.

Hooray!

Certamen: Yup. Makes sense to me.

It occurrs to me that the escalation thing is what makes the game support a Story Now agenda, and why playing without it is so dull. Is that accurate? That implies that as a group, you guys would probably find a way to bring escalation and resolution into play, even if there was no explicit systemic support for it, right?

Well, we'd try to, and we'd work to. Our instincts-in-the-moment aren't always compatible.

The reason I brought all this up is that I've played games where it's just people describing what their characters do, with no expectation of conflict or resolution or rising tension or escalation, and it is dull as shit.

Was that all they did? No world building? No plotting? No research or discussion on how the characters might accomplish something? No dissection of how characters think, their motivations, corruptions, or aspirations? No exploration of long term goals and frustrations in the short term? No clashes of characters whose synergies you could never predict?

Does sound boring. :)

Emily, it's interesting to me you put it that way, it seems a very different tack to my own:

"We don't use A, we use B"
"What? I use A to do B!"

So if I've got this streight; it's not the fact that you roll for stuff that makes it suspenseful, it's the patterns of dramatic build-up, the important stuff involved, and all the specifics of event discription.

It's not the uncertainty, it's the content. So if you do use dice, it's not before you roll that you start to go "ooh", it's afterwards, the moment someone has turned it into game events.

And that's because the roll doesn't count for anything but inspiration, because the point of resolution is at when you propose something for the fiction and everyone agrees.

Now if that matches how you go about it, then I tend to drift broken games that way myself. The difference is that I almost always want a set of dice rolls or pacing rules to help me keep things within certain bounds, so that I can assure plausibility when I'm looking back at it later, keep events in a general reason that doesn't muck things up to much, so I can just get into the moment.

Whereas I take it you three had different requirements in that game of what implausibilities to roll with, and at the same time, were happy to take a view closer to an author, associating with the character in their situation while trying to keep half an eye on the arc and scene potential you want to keep open.

Just wanted to say it's awesome that this was posted; I was just looking for all these threads about a week ago. :) Thanks!