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 ^__^]

[Chronica Feudalis] Not what I expected

Today I had an adventure in close-reading, and I think I've learned some important things in the past couple of days about how games work.

I used to flip straight to the "standard task resolution" rules in a new game book, trying to get a sense of the very core of a system right away. For some reason, my high school and college days were a time when knowing this solitary thing, and nothing else, was quite important.

Of course, there are lots of games out there that would be much poorer for it if they were stripped down to only the basic "mechanic" - imagine Polaris without Zeal and Weariness, for instance, using only the Key Phrases all the time without any kind of superstructure "around" them to elaborate them and provide the downward arc for Heart characters. Kind of sucks away half the game and forces the players to just kind of grope in the direction of that sort of play, doesn't it?

Segueing... playing Chronica Feudalis tonight with Chad, a college friend, was good and surprising. I prepped about as much as I needed to, with a little cheat sheet and a good online dice rolling program. I could definitely use a physical copy of the book, but not so much so that I'd buy one just yet; I'd hold out for a campaign or something, or just beg someone to print out the .pdf. Yes, perhaps that makes me a terrible person, but... okay, I have no justification other than poverty, and when my promotion goes through in January, I'll no longer have that excuse.

Anyway, that stuff about Polaris above connects strongly to my initial bafflement at Chronica - the basic resolution seems really, really straightforward and flat until you start learning more about Aspects - freeform traits with mechanical weight that you can switch on and off. Aspects make all sorts of things about *every* character come to life - tonight's best one was definitely "My son is a sodomite", which my lone player inflicted on an archbishop's assistant to blackmail him. Very nice.

Another thing that's changed about how I read is how I sense things like GM/player agency, and how a very close reading of procedural text is key to minimizing unintentional hand-wavey play. This edition of the game (the first edition, I reckon) is a little vague in places, but it's pretty awesome how it throws Aspects all over the place, giving and demanding Ardor (metagame points that manipulate Aspects). If you let the GM tell you one thing that one of your Aspects makes you do, and you do it, you get Ardor. If some equipment you're carrying interferes with a task, you get Ardor. Basically, if you surrender a little authority, or make your life a little harder, you get more narrative pull.
It's interesting, though - the exact procedural text falls on one side of causality: certain things that make sense in the fiction are going to trigger an Aspect being Endured, but the player decides whether or not to have an Aspect Compelled (eliciting a particular, unwanted behavior).

You can spend Ardor to introduce Aspects on other characters, temporarily turn off one of your negative Aspects, or resist the causality of your equipment thwarting your efforts - your heavy armor will surely count against you when diving in to save the duchess, unless you spend some Ardor to ignore its weight.

Our session tonight was one scene: Chad's priest, a bastard son of the duke, forced into the cloth to keep him out of the line of succession, learns that the King of France will be coming through the city (Troyes at Champagne, in France) and supping with the duke and the archbishop. The priest espies the archbishop's assistant at midday Mass, and confronts him afterward with (true) rumors that the man's son is a sodomite.
We used the social conflict rules - the "Parley" - and Father Luc threatened to release his list of suspected sexual degenerates to the wider Church - risking a general inquiry in northern France - unless the assistant could promise that he'd
get the archbishop to look into a supposed (fictitious) heresy brewing in the nearby countryside. Details were fuzzy, of course, but the assistant agreed, belatedly remembering that the imminent Royal Feast would then divide His Grace the Archbishop's attentions. [I made the assistant an Agent, a level two (of three) opponent, only to realize how much tougher this made him as an adversary than a Simple, or level one foe. A level one opponent might have broken too easily, though, and we were constrained by time, so I simply had the assistant back down more readily than he really had to, which fit the severity of the threat against him.]

Father Luc, naturally, offered to represent the Archbishop at the feast. If the offer were rejected, he'd be forced to sit at a lower table, away from the duke and Luc's noble half-brothers, and stew in the shame of his low birth. But if the Archbishop goes for it, and agrees to have the bastard priest sit at the high table in his stead, then Luc could rub it in his father's face!
Of course, there are a few pieces to this plot, and only the first has been laid, thus far. I'm pretty excited about where this will go, and I'm going to read up on some rpg.net actual play reports that suddenly got a lot more interesting to me ^_^

Last thing: we used gchat, wikipedia, random.org's dice roller, and .pdf's of the game. Hurrah for 21st century gaming! Incidentally, I rolled actual, meatspace dice, out of an old, repurposed bag of Royal Salute whiskey. Good times.