"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

[Emberashh]

Good because that’s what I said. Maybe I didn’t say it well, or maybe you didn’t understand me well but that’s exactly what I was talking about when I first responded to you on this.

Well, I might go one tiny step further. Sometimes a design is implicit in another.

And thats fine by me. I can see the logic in it even if I don't put any stock in the idea.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As an example. Setup to roll downhill would be propelling things in a downhill direction.

OK, but it isn't like there's SETUP that is pushing things into a certain path. We really don't know, when we play, what is going to happen, AT ALL. We know there are certain elements, and we do make up things that happen (the GM particularly).

So, like the other day when we played, Yorath failed a check for something. I forget what it was, but we were out on a mission to lay our fallen comrade to rest. Back in town we'd left Unirra the special child with Branwyn the Ranger (who's now a retired PC, being disabled). The GM decided that the consequences of Yorath's failure were that a threat would emerge to attack Unirra and Branwyn. Yorath and Vahid had also left some of their followers to ensure nothing like this happened, so that played out as a scene without any PCs directly present.

I don't see where we made up the direction of things, certainly not collaboratively. It was more like possible threats to Unirra were already hinted at simply by her nature (established by the GM and some dice rolls a couple sessions ago). So, the GM making that hard move was pretty much the rock bouncing in a certain direction due to the randomly generated shape of the terrain, along with a dose of GM fiat that was HIGHLY constrained by principles and practices. The GM needed to make whatever happened 'follow from the fiction', it needed to be 'interesting', and it needed to be fairly coherent with the current story. The fact that our PCs were present at Branwyn's Hut in proxy (our followers) made it an excellent choice. Our followers were threatened, and potentially an all ready hinted at and partially materialized threat to Stonetop was involved.

So you can see how 'downhill', while not entirely arbitrary, isn't set up in the sense of we got together outside the narrative and decided on where that would go. We knew things would move, the story would logically carry itself forward in SOME direction, but not really which.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The WHOLE point was that you won’t see that because trade offs exist for adding in more realism and people aren’t willing to trade too much of those other things for more realism. That doesn’t mean they don’t want more realism. It means they don’t want those trade offs.

Well, that presupposes that no further progress of any sort is possible in terms of game designs that are both realistic and playable. I'm not convinced that's the case. In fact I am simply not seeing signs that people WANT to go in that direction at all. It seems very odd to me that such a thing would be wanted by any appreciable part of the gaming community and yet NO progress is made on delivering it in over 50 years of RPG design activity by thousands of authors. Given a need to explain that observation I appeal to Occam's Razor, and what I get is "the premise is flawed" as a likely way to reconcile observation with theory. Ergo I conclude: People don't really seem to want more realism in their RPG play, though they obviously want SOME, and some people want more than others.

 

[thefutilist]

As I’ve said before, you are way over specifying the term. Writers room is when writers get together to decide anything about what’s going to happen in the show. It often includes all the things you listed but it need not do so, which is analogous to what happens in BitD when players and DM collaborate over consequences.

Does negotiation over consequence happen in Blades? I don’t really like the system so I’m not that familiar with it. You can clarify stuff about position to clarify consequence, this happens in all role-playing though and it happens very frequently in all good role-playing.


I throw the petrol bomb at them?

To distract them?

Hmm. No I want to burn them.

Ok you can but going to blatant violence like this is going to make you a target for the police snipers on the roofs


I assume some version of the above is continually happening.


Blades has the whole devil’s bargain thing, which I dislike but I don’t think is negotiation over consequence. The reason I don’t like it is because I ALSO don’t like suggestions and mostly think games are better off without them. When it’s your turn, you do your thing and I don’t get a say.

The two are related and can become the same thing but aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Although if you’re mostly playing more traditional games it might not seem like a huge difference but I think clarifying these differences is important for people playing a lot of Narratavist games. Changing up some of the fundamental game structures can introduce really unfun and lame stuff unless you’re clear on what’s happening as regards reincorporation, blocking and authority.

 

[FrogReaver]

Well, that presupposes that no further progress of any sort is possible in terms of game designs that are both realistic and playable. I'm not convinced that's the case.

No. It really doesn’t presuppose that at all. It presupposes that there are currently trade offs in realism and other things people want, but the door remains open to some novel method of eliminating those tradeoffs. Which is why I said that unless we can remove those tradeoffs (or lessen them) you can’t really say whether people don’t want realism or would prefer it without those tradeoffs.

In fact I am simply not seeing signs that people WANT to go in that direction at all.

There are no signs they don’t want to either.

It seems very odd to me that such a thing would be wanted by any appreciable part of the gaming community and yet NO progress is made on delivering it in over 50 years of RPG design activity by thousands of authors. Given a need to explain that observation I appeal to Occam's Razor, and what I get is "the premise is flawed" as a likely way to reconcile observation with theory. Ergo I conclude: People don't really seem to want more realism in their RPG play, though they obviously want SOME, and some people want more than others.

it seems very odd to me that the conclusion isn’t that people don’t want the current tradeoffs associated with more realism. To show they don’t want more realism would require showing the elimination of those tradeoffs and them still not wanting more realism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As I’ve said before, you are way over specifying the term. Writers room is when writers get together to decide anything about what’s going to happen in the show. It often includes all the things you listed but it need not do so, which is analogous to what happens in BitD when players and DM collaborate over consequences.

I’ve been pretty clear that I’m not married to the term. Don’t really care about the jargon just the concept. But it seems you are trying to focus on the jargon to not talk about the concept.

No, I am simply concerned, because this happens all the time in threads here, that if I adopt your special jargon version of this term, then loe and behold tomorrow I'm going to be getting beat over the head with the conclusion that all of Narrativist play is just a big hoaxy railroad where everything is decided off to the side in this mythical 'writers room'. An argument which IS CURRENT RIGHT NOW and has been presented in this very thread more than once!

Now, if we want to talk VERY SPECIFICALLY about a certain element of BitD play, then we can talk about that, but I warn you, I don't really accept the premise here either. The player and the GM work out position and effect, along with obviously WHAT the character is doing, and thus which attribute is being rolled. While the immediate stakes should be fairly clear, GMs toss in unexpected consequences from left field all the time.

Takeo was battling a nasty opponent, and about to lose. He asks for a Devil's Bargain (a consequence for an extra die) and gets "you see the face of the girl you are looking for in the window of the abbatoir across the alley." That sure wasn't decided in some sort of negotiation of consequences. It followed from things Takeo was doing and wanted, but not in any predictable linear way.

You tell me things as if I disagree. The suggestion isn’t that the whole narrative in BitD is being preplanned in a writers room. That would be absurd!

Not going to talk dungeon world. Been down that path before and it goes nowhere.

1. As I noted I’m not against using writers room sparingly.

2. I think d&d has moments that sometimes trend that direction, but the game doesn’t mandate this or even recommend and it comes up in my experience much less frequently.

Well, we do obviously play differently, but I don't think that what you are talking about comes up that much in Narrativist play either. I mean, some of us are OLD hands at this by now, and so we do sometimes digress and discuss our play and analyze things a bit more than is needed in order to just play, but nothing gets decided ahead of time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’d push back here. I think they were out to make a realistic and dangerous world. I don’t think it has anything directly to do with the unwelcome. What i would say that in making a dangerous world there is implicitly the concept of the unwelcome present in that.

Gygax absolutely and explicitly eschews realism as a motive or design goal though. He SAYS he's approaching the design of the game purely from a gamist perspective. Now, all RPGs must rely on a level of realism that insures some coherency or else nobody would be able to play at all (Toon is the poster child exception that illustrates this perfectly, as the game is pure nonsense).

 

[FrogReaver]

Gygax absolutely and explicitly eschews realism as a motive or design goal though. He SAYS he's approaching the design of the game purely from a gamist perspective.

Gygax said alot of stuff. Alot of it was contradictory or didn’t match his actions.

Now, all RPGs must rely on a level of realism that insures some coherency or else nobody would be able to play at all.

Which directly disputes Gygax’s claim above, right?

 

[niklinna]

I don't think this is true. This is a rule of law question. The law should treat everyone equally. To pull an example entirely out of thin air, if someone appears to have committed certain crimes, they should face trial and sentencing like everyone else, even if (hypothetically) they were a past and/or future leader of that country.

Well, @Old Fezziwig said if the purpose of laws was to introduce the welcome. As in, specifically. Not laws that require refraining from certain behavior, or requiring certain (civil) behavior, however unwelcome that may individually be (taxes, say), or punishments for violating them (which most people being convicted find unwelcome).

Have you read "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson? Imagine that scaled up a bit. I think that's more what he was getting at.

 

[Emberashh]

Gygax said alot of stuff. Alot of it was contradictory or didn’t match his actions

I don't actually see that as contradictory at all. I think what Gygax was looking to create as a game experience just happened to also be relatively realistic.

Its something I've noticed in game design that realism actually lends itself well to being gamified if you lean into it. Like, for example, getting lost in hex crawls. Its pretty common that the usual take, randomizing it, is lackluster and doesn't make much sense.

However if one looks to how people travelling can get lost in real life, the concept of navigational drift will pop up, which was something I was personally already familiar with from travelling off-road in real life and playing games where there's a lot of similar travel.

Because it isn't typically possible to travel in a true straight line, especially the rougher the terrain is and the longer the distance traveled, the traveller is going to drift off course, and if not regularly compensated for, this can result in pretty huge disparities in where you end up.

This naturally lends itself to a much more organic feeling means of getting lost, and I did it as a question of balancing the time you take to travel with the distance crossed in one go. Eg, you roll to move, and if you don't stop periodically to readjust your course (which means taking another round), your course can drift into other directions. It could still do with iteration as I haven't worked on Traversal stuff in ages, but the idea is there and it works as a less arbitrary way of doing it.

Particularly because the Players have full control over it and it doesn't impose itself on them unless they throw all caution to the wind and embrace getting lost, at which point the game rewards them with my Exploration stuff.