[s7s] A Question: Player Narration of Success and Failure (longish)

[chadu]

Occasionally when doing game design, I come up with a mechanic or a take on a mechanic that seems really obvious/intuitive/easy/fun for me, but that some readers just don't get, some readers get (and decide whether or not they like it), and some readers really really groove on.

Comments

[whswhs]

I don't tend to approach such outcomes in that way.

On one hand, there are outcomes with hard physical consequences: you get a broken leg, you lose consciousness, you die. I do not consider those to be negotiable. Player characters are narrated as physical entities that exist in a physical world, and one of the traits of physical worlds is intractibility. It's the GM's job to maintain the ongoing sense of the world, including that intractibility

[chadu]

Player characters are narrated as physical entities that exist in a physical world, and one of the traits of physical worlds is intractibility. It's the GM's job to maintain the ongoing sense of the world, including that intractibility.

I think we've had something like this discussion before, Bill, previously about superhero games. ;)

Let me try to summarize to provide a basis for further discussion, and please correct me if I misrepresent:

* You like enumerating the rules of the setting, and then hew to them in a hard, simulationist sense.

* I like enumerating the rules of the genre/media underlying the setting, and I hew to those in a strong, verisimilitudic sense.

Fair characterization?

Framing it as a choice between GM control and player control treats it as an adversarial or zero-sum situation, and in doing so completely fails to grasp the shared interest of both players and GM in maintaining a believable world in which a credible narrative can emerge. It seems from your detailed comments that you do in fact envision an

[whswhs]

You say that "S7S swashbuckling PCs are STYLISH and AWESOME. When something goes wrong, it should be in a STYLISH and AWESOME way. It doesn't even have to be the character's fault." But "the character's fault" isn't a necessary explanation in any game system. I mean, say we're playing GURPS, and I have a character with skill 20 in something. They'll still fail on a rolled 17 and critically fail on a rolled 18. But that's not going to come across as "the character's fault"; it's the irreducible minimum of bad luck and unfavorable situations that anyone can run into. Very few game systems let you build a character who has a zero probability of failure

[chadu]

But "the character's fault" isn't a necessary explanation in any game system.

I would agree that it isn't necessary, per se, but it's an entertaining explanation.

I mean, say we're playing GURPS, and I have a character with skill 20 in something. They'll still fail on a rolled 17 and critically fail on a rolled 18. But that's not going to come across as "the character's fault"; it's the irreducible minimum of bad luck and unfavorable situations that anyone can run into.

In my play experience, the majority of players ascribe failures and critical failures to the fault of the character, not bad luck or crappy situations.

Different gamers and gaming environments, I reckon.

You've just defined a situation where a character fails 42% of the time!Success 58% fits my definition of "slightly slanted towards success

[whswhs]

Chance of failure is respectively 17%, 3%, and none