the material conditions of fudging

So I was just thinking, when you're running a game, why on earth would you ever fudge the dice or check your swing?

I think part of the blame lies in the module system, and here's why:

- if a module is mainly about the puzzles and the monsters, and not about a story (least of all a time-sensitive one), then players are just there to be challenged and clever and explore lots of stuff. They die? Then I guess they aren't good enough, mwah haha! A challenge here for the DM is to think about what content is likely to be experienced and what content is likely to remain hidden or unknown - - you don't want to put too much work into an amazing set of traps if it's unlikely the players will choose that path in the first place.

[- - Being able to re-visit a given dungeon can reduce the "unseen content" factor, but of course in one-shots and the like, this just isn't a realistic goal]

- OTOH, if a module has a strong component of setpieces (things that are time sensitive and maybe sort of "mandatory" to get the "full experience"), then there's an incentive to make sure at least some of the players survive long enough to see them. And if we put our fancy hats on and try to design puzzles or "experiences" that require a certain minimum number of (living) players, or a particular class is required for some reason to get through it, then the DM is going to feel that much more of a squeeze to let everyone live, always.

[- - Setpiece-focused design is all about the performance. It's like being on a ride! Ultimately, the priority of showing off the module's content supersedes the priority of no-holds-barred exploration. When you start to figure out that the DM isn't going to let you die, it changes the dynamic, and not always for the good.]

You know which side of the fence I'm on! But that doesn't make it any easier - just because you're committed "ideologically" (so to speak) to a particular play ethos doesn't mean you can just snap your fingers and make it happen - apparently that takes practice.

Cases in point:

1- I didn't really think very tactically about how to play Ishigiri the Ogre Mage (homebrew: Dwarf Troubles Lv 1), and instead of him using his 1/day cone of cold on the healer, he used it on a henchman. The dice roll was pretty epic, nonetheless: I ruled that, due to extreme overkill, the henchman's feet broke off and remained frozen to the floor while the rest of his icy corpse went skidding along the tunnel, only to shatter against a door.

2- I did make sure that people had appropriate warning about the pit trap in the opening hallway (homebrew: Lair of the Cyclops Lv 1) - - "the floor's creaking", "the dwarf senses a trap", etc. Once you are given a warning, and you keep walking on the creaking tile floor, it's on your head ^___^ There's a trick to it - imo, in order to be a reasonably likable and trustworthy DM, you can be cruel, disgusting, and vicious, but only insofar as you have established reasonable credibility (a highly localized phenomenon) regarding your ability to be fair.

What is fair? I think it's a fairly simple matter of establish-then-execute. AW & DW talk a lot about this: do what the fiction demands. How do you know what it demands? Well, kid, the MC/DM moves tell you what you can put into the fiction and when, but the players do a lot of that for you and you just wait til they screw up a dice roll.

Creaking floor? OK, the pit trap is good to go.

Glowing eyes? The cultist's magic powers are good to go!

In the case of Ishigiri, I think a frost theme around his lair could have signaled that that's one of his signature powers. That, or fog-breath, or something. Hints like that are big, loud, alarm bells to the veteran adventurer, and something subtle really can establish your credibility enough (adventurers like to blame themselves for dying...)

gm style flowchart/eulogy for a PC

Yes, this chart has some age to it. but you don't come here to read new ideas, do you? haha

The full image doesn't fit in this space, but the format in that link there is pretty good.

[below is x-posted at Story Games also]

So! Different topic: last night's AW session. One of our protagonists died.

Keep in mind that this PC was nicknamed the Ronin, took potshots at Mudflat villagers kind of "just because", and never fully backed down from a fight, not once.

Let's explore this a little more. His name was Rue Wakeman, a Gunlugger. He had bad, bad scars from when his boss, Diamond the Chopper, beat him up and left him in the desert, where his wounds went bad and exposure did its thing, and made him really hard to look at.

He lived in a drainage tunnel that fed a semi-toxic river outside of Adobe-town; hallucinogenic mold grew inside the tunnel, which Rue ate to open his brain to the Maelstrom. Doing so got him in trouble a couple times, like the time the Mudflatters finally arrested him for deadly assault and he ended up thinking his captors were dog-headed monsters serenading him, so he shot one and ran away.

The guard lived, but only just. Thanks to Boo the Angel on that one, I think.

Anyway. So Rue forged his nemesis when he was walking past the Mudflatter work-camp in town (across the river from the Mudflatter village of Northside) and a couple of guys stopped him to ask if he'd be up for making a little money.

Rue: Sure, what's the job?

Roy (Mudflatter): There is a ... forgive me, but a child we wish for you to assassinate [the playgroup started telling John, Rue's player, that this must be a reference to Dr. Last, a semi-immortal warlord from down south whose current form is that of a 6yo boy.]

Rue: A child, huh?

Roy: Regrettably, sir. Will you take the job?

Rue: *shoots Roy* No.

Roy's friend runs away. When Rue is eating, later that night, Roy and two buddies jump him. Rue manages to kill two of them and send Roy packing again, but this time the Mudflatter camp all saw what happened and formed a big old gang to hang him and put an end to this.

Ol' Rue got away that time, but after Diamond's boss, Havok, ate it in a gunfight down south (Boo got him), and things started to settle down a bit, Rue made the error of robbing some Mudflatters playing dice in an alley. Well, Rue had been sleeping in the desert for a bit, ever since the first near-lynching incident. Now that he was back, and they sure knew his face, about fifty Mudflatters got together to stop him for good.

They chased him out of town, throwing rocks. The elder of Northside sees what's going on, sees Rue's defensive counter-fire, and sighs. He was in the middle of a visit with Diamond and Vega (the Operator, old boss of Adobe-town), and apologized before giving the order for the village guards to shoot Rue on sight.

Diamond: Honestly, I helped him get out of town last time a mob came after him. I'm done.

Vega: He'll probably be okay.

Elder: ...

So the gunmen from the village go charging out into the desert, and soon enough they intercept the mob and a tiring Rue. He turns to lay a little cover fire before taking off down a nearby dune, and flubs the roll. So he doesn't get away, and they get him with small arms fire (2-harm; Rue has 2-armor), and he rolls a natural 11 on the +harm move.

I tell him he's incapacitated.

Right before Rue dies, A. (playing Vega) turns to me and says, "Is Rue gonna die? That's harsh."

Me: "I mean, it's what the fiction demands. I have mixed feelings about it, but I can't not do it."

A brief discussion of "be a fan of the PCs" vs. "look through cross-hairs" ensues.

This is when I get a little nervous. I've hardly killed any PCs in my time, so I feel kind of bad. I describe Li, one of the Mudflatters, a guard who's got a thing for Vega, coming up and delivering the fatal back-of-the-head shot himself. He then goes to throw up.

Later, we're packing up to go, and John (ex-Rue) says, "Maybe I'll play a Faceless next. I really want to do something that's noticeably different from Rue, though." Clearly I got worked up over nothing. I did have to sit with it for a couple of hours (I have anxiety; what can I say?) but I got over it, and Lord knows, John got over it in about sixty seconds. Next week, onward and upward!

tolkien and class politics

[inspired by a Michael Moorcock essay on the success of the nursery-rhyme motif in the fantasy genre, found here]

Orcs are the working class. The Tory vision of the working class, at any rate.

While hobbits and Men and Elves and Dwarves all come from storied ancestry and can recount the names of their forefathers and the grand halls (or grand burrows) from which they hailed, Orcs have no fathers. Orcs have few names, and of course the Black Tongue is nasty, brutish, full of short, sharp sounds.

Orcs toil; we never see the Free Peoples toiling, except for a bit of farming now and again.

Orcs build. Orcs make engines that spurt flame; Orcs raze whole forests and dig deep, disgusting pits where they breed! Orcs, ironically, are the only race of Middle Earth whose breeding habits are put (mostly) on display; they are the only race that is growing, that is rising, that is gaining in strength. All around them are declining princes and listless civilizations. The Orcs have plenty of room to expand, and their industrial masters are happy to oblige.

Now, on the one hand there are a great many literary devices wrapped up in Orcs that make them easy to dislike, especially in the films: they're smelly, slimy, cannibalistic, unpredictably violent, and vaguely simian. Tolkien, at once, rolls dark skin, primate features, and spontaneous generation (they apparently "grow" in pits and come forth fully muscled and fully grown) into an altogether unpleasing whole.

At the same time, many fans of the trilogy find a certain pleasure in Orcs: they are dangerous, they are serious, they wear the coolest/scariest outfits, and they hang out with Wizards who do more than light fireworks and talk to bugs.

But again, Orcs are Tolkien's very Tory image of the working class. They're a dark-skinned, foreign-tongued horde of builders and soldiers and ruiners who eat anything and everything, are a threat to all (even themselves), and, most tellingly, are constantly under the yoke of powerful, singular demagogue intellectuals who dwell in not-quite-literal Ivory Towers.

Compare that to the Istari, who are angels in the shape of old men (a creative choice I can't recall seeing anywhere else but in It's a Wonderful Life). One Istari in particular is deeply fascinated by the middle-class, status-obsessed Hobbits of the Shire, and seems to like nothing better than spending time in their twee, half-size pavilions and houses and so forth.

The Orcs come to despoil the natural world, and cannot stop themselves. Their actions are not truly their own; truly, Tolkien's chief Enemy is the future, industrialization, science; Orcs, not being exactly scientists (beyond an offhand comment that they "made many clever things, but no beautiful ones"), are nonetheless the Industrial Army, ready and willing to build, destroy, and kill in the name of hated Progress.

While pretty much every major character among the Free Peoples is the descendant of some king, the Orcs, as I said, breed in holes in the earth. Ironically, Tolkien has painted us a world where dark-skinned, violent humanoids would probably be called Mudbloods if the opportunity came up, and in which the Wizards must save us all from the dangerous, disgusting creatures of the earth that seemingly live only to breed and to build. Old men in hats will save us from those dirty workers, wot wot?

Apocalypse World, session 9ish::

so Diamond the Chopper leads his gang and his friends to the city of Bluesquare, to confront his employer, the warlord Havok.
and by confront i mean kill. there's a big old battle in and around the town hospital - - we see some fancy gunplay, diversions, and decoy tricks from Rue the Gunlugger. Diamond drives his gunjeep right into the hospital lobby, and runs dudes over like Brock Samson.
Boo the Brainer (former Angel) uses a six-gun and a little psychic force to corner Havok in the darkened upper level of the hospital, where zhe shoots him and his bodyguards dead.
it doesn't really sink in until they're burning the corpses of Havok's crew that anyone thinks to ask, "So, did we kill Havok back there, or what?"

i laugh (they've been hunting this guy for like 6 sessions, and then he dies almost off-camera) and nod my head.

somewhere in there, Diamond opens his brain to the weird to find out how the good townspeople are holding up after all the carnage, and he rolls like a 3. he pops, taking 1-harm (ap psychic silent). he becomes semi-vegetative for a little while, very suggestible but generally calm and mindless for about 30 minutes or so.
around that point, what's left of his gang appoints itself a new leader named Clarion (sarcastic blond dude). the gang goes home to Adobe.

anyway, it's a few days later and Diamond is living down in the city instead of up in the fortress. and he's ok with that. returning late one night, the gate-guards pretend not to recognize him, and he doesn't get mad. an anthropologist in a scramblesuit (he is known as a Shifter) comes by to interview him about, you know, stuff.

Diamond's player, Biff, has taken upon himself to become a sort of commie paladin - - he never starts a fight, he set up communal medicine and food supplies in Adobe, and he ruthlessly crushes saboteurs and opportunists. now that he isn't in charge, he's trying to fill out every last improvement slot in his playbook before he's forced to retire, and he plans to watch the new boss (that Clarion guy) like a hawk until then.

i'm so excited about our apocalypse world game!

- Diamond, the Chopper, just picked the advance "get a holding (detail) and wealth", meaning that sleepy, spy-ridden Adobe Town is gonna become a bustling city soon, and that's the coolest!

- Biff, owner of Diamond, is gonna take over as MC sometime soon. I get to be a player soon! yayyyy

I need to decide between:

Battlebabe

Driver

Hocus

Not sure which I want. Maybe make a sample pc of each and see what the haps.

- Vega, the Operator, has joined our ranks. She's an ex-Hardholder hoping to get back at her former lieutenant, the infamous Lord Havok.

more to come! this game rocks :)

Re: Callan, snakes and ladders

I assumed that Ron meant something like, "following the carrot of reward [in whatever game he was talking about; i forget] does not actually incentivize exploring the game further."

In Chronica Feudalis (a historical-medieval adventure game that stole Aspects from the FATE system), there are only two sources of currency or character improvement. One of them involves Aspects: if you let your character's Aspects be turned against him/her, you get a reward which can only be spent to activate OTHER Aspects, yours or that of the scene (like weather and stuff) or that of other characters.

So, it's basically a zero-sum game for the players: every time they let themselves be kicked around a bit, they can do the exact same thing to someone else. It's all very GM-led (the GM has infinite Aspect tokens), and this isn't to say it's not fun, but you don't really change or develop from this - you're just poking and prodding at what's in front of you. Pure Exploration of character and situation, no inherent moral or ethical dimension at all (so no "native" support for Narrativism), and honestly the fact that the GM has infinite Aspect-tokens (or whatever they're called) means that there's no way in hell this game is "battle-tested" as a good supporter for Gamist play, as GM/player competition is hopelessly one-sided -- the GM can spam your Aspect: Self-Defeating til the cows come home.

So - second reward system: skill training. This one is actually a very different sort of Simulationist logic - - while Aspects are actually a pretty neat way to chew the scenery and Explore being a medieval person, skill training relies on the logic of "game-system-as-physics" - that is, the idea that the rules must accurately reflect the way cognitive, physical, and institutional processes *actually function* inside the game-world.

Going off to a trainer does fuck-all to add to your Exploration of being a medieval person other than to give you ... Exploration of what it's like to go to school as a medieval person. Given that there is very little focus as to what one "does" in Chronica Feudalis, I suppose a game that centered around training facilities, or at least featured them meaningfully, could play to the game's apparent natural points of focus. But this is meeting a good-but-uninformed design a good deal more than halfway :)

[EDIT: my bad! Turns out I had only read the advancement rules about halfway through. Here's how it works:

1- you train with a mentor or by yourself, turning one of your skills into an "in-training" skill.

2- you go out and use that skill in a scene "where something is at stake" (quoth the rules)

3- either make a skill check for that skill, or make a skill check of your trainer's skill - - ChronFeud skills use a die-step system, so your skill's rating is in the form of a d-whatever. Thus, improving a d6-rated Swordsmanship skill would require a 6 or higher on whatever skill check you use, so training with a.. trainer who is better than you would make more sense than training alone, especially when you get to higher levels of ability.

4- once you successfully improve a skill thus, it is no longer "in training" until you do this all over again

I admit, that actually makes some good sense, from the perspective of a Sim-style "game-rules-as-game-physics" approach.]

At this moment, it seems that I have a much better idea of what Reward Systems are: they are the system's internal structures that encourage you to play the game a certain way (design intent made manifest). If you want to play the game a different way, it usually goes one of two ways:

1- the game fights you, actively hampering your ability to play the game you were "hoping for". Such games cannot be Drifted without extensive reworking of existing rules. White Wolf games come to mind; I'm no fan of the Humanity system, the Paradox system, any of it, because it doesn't do what it's trying to do in a way that actually helps me explore the themes I see lying dormant in that content. Sorcerer does Humanity better by a country mile than Vampire could ever hope for.

2- the game just lies there, forcing you to bring your Creative Agenda with you in a suitcase, so to speak - that is, the rules are open or sparse enough (in terms of what CA you were hoping to engage in) that you can work entirely on the level of the fiction to make things happen. That is, in the case of ChronFeud and Narrativism, if you write up a few leading questions for PC creation in order to tease out a Kicker or two and some intra-party juiciness, you can use these answers (much as Apocalypse World does) to "kick off" play in the right direction for what you want. AW, however, does it a fair sight better in that it combines the leading questions with a LOT of tools for the MC to keep things moving. Without those tools (present in the system or present in the group's skillset), there may be a fair bit of difficulty keeping things going once the initial "steam" of those Leading Questions runs out.

[EDIT: despite my corrections above, I stand by this second point, here. The only thing that the training system adds to the game is a sense of explicit, in-fiction cause and effect for improving your character's abilities. Many, many other games get by just fine without approaching char-improvement in this way, even games that are "fiction-first" like Apocalypse World.

I think a group's time and energy are better spent paying such close attention to the consequences of their actions with regard to the fiction and its internal "logic"; I know that this attitude reflects my own play priorities, though, and if you like this sort of thing, go for it, but I will politely decline any invitation to join in ^__^]

Reward systems - are we getting anywhere, or..?

Thinking about this thread at the Forge, which mentioned RPG "reward systems".

I think a reward system could be a "hamster wheel" if the way to earn gimmes and Currency doesn't actually encourage people to engage in the point of the game, nor encourage them to "drive towards" it. Basically, your Exploration of the game system should promote the Exploration of "what play is all about" (be that competing for glory in Agon, or wading through moral quandaries in Dogs, or making tough choices in ApocaWorld) by-way-of Exploring character, setting, and situation.

For instance, some games have it so that the rules for advancement (a common avenue for Exploring the game system) are detached from the "presumed" content of the game - - maybe you MUST seek out a trainer in order to improve your abilities, but the majority of the game is dungeon-crawling, far from the academies and gymnasia (where the trainers are), then people have to go outside the normal fictional "play space" in order to "earn" the encouragement to buy into the activities of the game.

"Gold=xp" editions of D&D have a pretty clear, intentional reward cycle, especially if you can't level up until you leave the dungeon: you need to explore "efficiently" and try to use all your cleverness and care to maximize your gold-haul and minimize your exposure to danger. Dungeon crawling, using gold=xp/exit-to-levelup, is different than dungeon crawling that's defined as kill=xp/levelup-down-here. Not better or worse, but one is more of a puzzle game with a combat element and the other is more like a combat game with a puzzle element.

Specific reward systems do more than just encourage Creative Agenda; they also encourage a particular taste or style of play. Each reward system has its own particular take on elements like competition, exploration, and theme, serving as different varieties of play of a particular sort.

In D&D0e, the emphasis is on coordination, detail-inspection, and careful rationing of resources. We could say 0e rewards Attention to Detail.

In Agon, the emphasis is on inter-player competition, individual acts of heroism, and exciting, bombastic command of resources. We could say Agon rewards Chutzpah.

These are related types of gaming, but they are nonetheless distinctive enough (due to their respective systems and the style thereof) as to make playing them each a very different experience.

Polaris vs. Dogs in the Vineyard is good, too - - in both games, your character is powerful and in a position of authority. But the crushing weight of world's end (in Polaris) means that, logically, to advance your character is to hasten the apocalypse - - you have to lose Zeal and gain Weariness to get better on your dice rolls. Each advancement pushes you closer to the end of the game. You can avoid this by being "weaker-willed" against the Demons - - be more agreeable with your Mistaken, more willing to compromise and let things go, and you will last longer. But you will also be giving the Demons more of a foothold in your world. Fighting your battles is the only way to prove your worth, but fighting ALL battles only hastens your inevitable doom. Sort of a gloomy, Ragnarok take themes of fate and destiny.

Meanwhile, in Dogs, your character is always right. People may disagree and try to block the execution of your judgment, but you know they're just demons or idolators. The big question that helps to twist this theme is: how far will you/must you go to get your way? You have to be very tactical when crushing heresy, all the while wondering if you really deserve the authority given to you - - sometimes your judgments ruin lives unfairly. It's much like running an actual religious institution: handling dissent and disagreement proportionately, deciding how many administrative resources to dedicate to handling a problem, and of course wondering all the while whether any of it is worth it, ultimately.

Huh.