icosahedron152:
If any game is going to be successful, it needs to accommodate as many people as possible. No game will ever be acceptable to everyone, people are just too different, but it is interesting to discuss how people feel about a particular type of game, and to check out whether certain modifications might make it more or less acceptable, so I think we're still on topic here.
There's no saying that Steelsmiter will ever join one of csroy's games (or one of mine) but it is constructive to discuss whether certain adaptations may make that possible. Not least because I'm sure he is not alone in his views, and there is fresh blood out there for the taking. :)
Steelsmiter, I'm still not sure of your thoughts regarding engine's observation:
engine:
Most systems leave it up to the GM's interpretation of when it is appropriate to roll, and even to ignore the outcome of rolls.
You claim to hold dice and rules in high esteem because of their objectivity, yet any game that is not fully automated is subject to the whim of the GM to some extent.
More to the point, I don't want any game to be fully automated. There are some games that will be ruined by bad dice rolls, and there are a number of systems that make a point of telling you to ignore rolls in the circumstances where it'll be a bad game. Fail forward systems are nice in that they make a point of saying that you should have the failure mean something, but leave you to decide what. And I've caught lots of inspiration from a fail-forward mentality over the years. Inspiration that would never have struck if
everything were automated.
quote:
In fact, Rpol (and all RPGs for that matter) has a degree of Black Box-ism already built in. Even with the crunchyest system imaginable, the GM still has the option to roll or not roll, or to fudge the outcome of a roll, on his or her whim.
I can't stop other people from using them, and I don't intend to try. But
I won't roll on behalf of a character I didn't create unless their player explicitly asks me to. In a game where I use precision as Perception, I had my players make a roll because I said I had a list of things and wanted to divvy bits they individually noticed base on their individual rolls. I could have made them roll passively, or yes, rolled for them. I just didn't want to.
I have baked in "passive rolls" into the systems I wrote explicitly to point to a rule and say "this is what we use if you don't want to/can't make a roll". Sure, if I need something to happen, it just happens, but that's really rare, and more often than not only used to prevent game stalls. The narrative system I play says to do that without bothering with rolls.
quote:
You seem to be willing to trust the GM, any GM, with making those decisions, yet you don't trust them to put all the rules/decisions out of sight, or to ride bareback without rules at all.
I'm curious to know where you draw the line, and why. :)
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say I would need more than 85% of the core mechanics of the game, and maybe a change up on how things work once every few weeks if it's obvious a core rule isn't working "because I want to actually play the game".
Some games are all about story, and that's fine. Sometimes I want that, but the circumstances are more narrow. In violent stories I have an explicitly narrativist system preference but the system still has a 400 page core book and a 500 page supplement on a different way to build classes. I mostly stick to the supplement, but keep the book around for all the moves and stuff.
quote:
Your statement:
steelsmiter:
I'd trust 1shinigami with my actual life. But I won't be in a freeform game if he ever decides to run one :D
is completely alien to me. You would trust this person to make decisions affecting your own life, but you don't trust him to make decisions affecting the outcome of a game? Why is that?
I trust more in his understanding of how responsibility works than I trust in anyone's ability to keep anything fair. In a setup with everything subjective I can't guarantee he won't favor people he lives with over me. The thing is, he can't trust himself with the second one either. He uses one of the systems I'm not fond of
because he thinks it's easier for his friends to make a pile of fair(ish) characters.
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steelsmiter:
I aim for a combination of rules and verisimilitude.
Likewise. I like to keep some chargen numbers and some dice rolls to assist with objectivity, I'm not a hardcore freeformer, but I keep them to support me in my job as a GM, not because I think they're essential for a good game.
IMO, what you have in a Black Box game is effectively a Turing Test.
The players are challenged to determine whether the GM is using a set of mechanical rules that are hidden, or whether the GM is actually running a freeform game using pure human imagination.
Having system transparency helps me inasmuch as it removes a doubt I'd rather not have. I would rather have a game that admits it's freeform, or one that admits it's a system game, and is system transparent so I can pick and choose. I don't want to be told "Ok, make this (system) character at this value"
and never roll for anything.
quote:
As you say, Steelsmiter,
steelsmiter:
I only care about gameism inasmuch as it aids the simulation I need for a fair(ish) narrative.
But of course, life itself is seldom fair. Sometimes, the whim of the GM can be fairer than the dice.
Right. Sometimes the GM can be fairer than the dice, but sometimes the opposite is true. I like having the system so there's a mix that results in a fair-er(ish) game. And I come at it from the hurtful place of knowing how life isn't fair, and how very specific events in the context of freeform reflect that on an exponential level. I have an aunt that didn't get to have a negotiation with how a car accident went down (she got to
navigate how she went into it, but not negotiate what actually happened). I had a cousin that didn't get to have that same negotiation (or any choice in the matter). Lucky for the aunt, she's still around to get weepy every November.
If I'm telling a story with a pre-defined end point, or there are no such negotiations, I don't need any system.
If I am doing anything with an element of risk, I want system to help with the checks and balances, which is not entirely possible to do completely objectively, but it's far and away more possible to do with a system that keeps the GM in check (hopefully) and vice versa. And when a game goes bad, it's not always the GM's fault, or it's not always the players' fault, but it's
never the increased subjectivity of the game's fault. At least not so much as anyone's aware who goes into a game expecting to deal with a particular stat breakdown and a particular set of dice rolls.
And given the choice between having death that sometimes just happens over one you have to negotiate because you have decided everything needs to be subjective, and everything should be talked out in PMs, I vastly prefer the one where death just happens sometimes, because that's how reality works.
And it's just not familial experiences changing how I perceive life, it's also about freeform experiences changing the appreciation I (er... don't) have for subjectivity. Like how if you're a god in a game that will become a system game, and other people aren't supposed to touch your domains, and you get heavily chastised for it, but then someone gets to rape yours because they've been in the group for longer, and now you can't play the actual system portion because someone's subjectivity ruined the race you wanted to play. Or how if you wanted to play 1989 Martin Riggs in an alternate timeline but weren't allowed to propose an alternate course of history because "Someone might want to play Renee Russo's character".
Say what you want about freeforms. Other than the ones that run on rails and/or Slice of Life--which are very pointedly not about high risk (usually)--you won't find me in a place to agree. And that last bit is relevant, because if I don't feel
any sort of system crunch, there may as well not be one.
I guess in a way, rolls make random flukes and death a thing I don't have to think about, and occasionally ignoring a roll, or not calling for one keeps it from being cheapened. Also to me, if a player has an opportunity to roll at the right time, even though they planned for a death, they have a hope they can cling to that the dice turn up nice rather than some boring conversation about it.
Dice being chancy adds emotional investment for me (or at least changes it in a relevant way) because when the stakes are high I can put the feels on 'em,
but then release them when I find out what happened, whereas when the stakes are high in freeform I'm stuck having to make a negotiation in a situation where I have an emotional stake in it and I don't argue well when I am in a particularly emotional place. I argue with the intent on causing others emotional pain.
This message was last edited by the user at 08:38, Sat 18 Nov 2017.