If you look at most "action-oriented" stories, the premise is generally that some big bad attacks the good guys, and wins each battle, the heroes perhaps managing at best some small vestige of complete defeat, until the end.
But maintaining a plot line like this is hard, because there is a fair amount of railroading necessary. But the alternative can also get unsatisfying over time, as the heroes roll over the opposition. No good plot ever survives the efforts of some dedicated players :)
The last is utterly correct - but the rest is why there is a conflict resolution mechanic. Dice.
The entire (systemic) core of roleplaying is that the players must create an advantageous position to maximize chance, and then chance still decides. If they don't do enough maximizing, their chances are limited - if they get things right, success is all but assured. That's the paradigm we work from, whether we want to or not.
And... /that/ is the basis for the action movie sequence. The characters in an action movie start out utterly unprepaired. The more they learn, the more they experience, the more they're able to bring to bear - and then, in the final confrontation, they unleash everything and hope it's enough. That storytelling is very easy to do - it's the tabletop basic metric. Any GM has been doing it from the beginning without railroading anybody. :)
On the other hand - /forcing/ that series of confrontations /is/ railroading. All stories have a beginning, middle, and end - sometimes the players outthink you and jump to the end. S'okay. They get to do that. :)
The trick is presenting the scenario, using the rules well, dropping in twists to let them learn more (that's the point of twists!) and letting /them/ dictate where the arc goes.
Well, remember, I said, "Part of the problem here is trying to figure out what makes a good story, as opposed to what makes good play." "Stories" are written--the ultimate in railroading. When it's done rather obviously, the answer to "why did that character do X?" is "Because the plot demanded it." But you know, sometimes that's OK too.
The tension in RPGing is how far to lean towards plot construction as opposed to how far to lean towards simulating the virtual world. Generally speaking, I don't find that the fun is in the winning, but in the path to get there. Thus, I accept an element of railroading, as long as it takes my input and runs with it. It's when railroading becomes the previously mentioned "beat my head against a brick or rice-paper wall" that it becomes unfun.
To this end, various game systems have taken different approaches to this. While traditional RPGs used dice/randomization, this is not universal. In fact, the Amber Diceless system has absolutely no randomization in its conflict resolution system. In the MUSH space, some have none either (AmberMUSH followed the ADRPG rather closely), and some have no conflict resolution system at all, other than negotiation.
This is an area where player preference is probably quite varied. But for myself, I lean to cooperative storytelling than towards simulated conflict.
I prefer cooperative storytelling /combined/ with simulated conflict.
I don't /want/ to know the outcome of that battle before I set foot in it, or the outcome of my action before I try. For me, it has to do with failure - as you say, "the fun isn't in the winning, it's in the path to get there."
Unfortunately, my experience over the last... (holycrap, it's been...) 16 years is really that pure negotiation always breaks down. People don't like to fail, and very rarely will give permission for their characters to do so. On the other hand, they WILL fail, and fail fairly gracefully, if that element of chance built into the system doesn't quite fall their way, this time around.
I love negotiation first. Let's sort out what the situation's going to be, how we get into this mess - let's talk about consequences. It is, however, boring to win all the time - characters always and inevetably develop more from failure than they ever do from success. A conflict resolution metric that allows for a chance of failure for both sides is, oddly, pretty darned equitable over two players wrangling over loss.
Case in point - I was in a scene on Amber where a consequence was called for... and the character on the losing side of that consequence just... abjectly refused to take one. He was still Captain Awesome, utterly untouchable, posing amazing prowess on the field of battle /despite the fact that he lost/. In the end, someone else took that consequence for him... but it wasn't really theirs to take.
Consent works until it doesn't - at which point you need some sort of metric whereby players can fail when there is question over whether they will or not. In this, RTA has about the right balance, I think. The case above was isolated, and not my experience overall - in fact, it was a cheesing of the system as opposed to the intent of it. In RTA, you negotiate as far as you'd like, and when there is question in the outcome, you can test and see who gets to come out on top this time, in a fairly impartial manner.
Thus, I accept an element of railroading, as long as it takes my input and runs with it. It's when railroading becomes the previously mentioned "beat my head against a brick or rice-paper wall" that it becomes unfun.
As a GM, what I like to say is that, during a plot, my job is to set parameters and conseqences.
I lay out what's going on, what the bad guy is doing, and what resources he has. Then, I present it to the player characters to interact with (often with a goal attached, but I'm flexible). Sometimes the presentation is fairly constrained, as the last Perilplot involving a slaver and a bit of craziness, and sometimes it's just utterly wide open. Regardlesss, what I'm looking for is the player characters to tell me what they're up to - how they're setting about reaching that goal.
Then, I have the bad guy react to what just happened to him.
In the end, both sides reap consequences for their moves in the game, as it were. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other does - my plots are NOT foregone conclusions on the side of the players. Make a bad choice, do something that, given what you know, is crazy - well, you can lose. Sometimes you can lose badly. Sometimes, you lose simply because a random element gets away from you - this is why it is often presented to the dice, when we need to find that out.
But, both fiat-plots, where what the players do has no bearing on its outcome, and easy wanders through the garden of bad guys to stab - well, they're both not good, I agree. Instead, it should be about mutual storytelling - the panopoly of possibilities and outcomes and twists and turns that makes any story worth participating in.
This part:
If you look at most "action-oriented" stories, the premise is generally that some big bad attacks the good guys, and wins each battle, the heroes perhaps managing at best some small vestige of complete defeat, until the end.
But maintaining a plot line like this is hard, because there is a fair amount of railroading necessary. But the alternative can also get unsatisfying over time, as the heroes roll over the opposition. No good plot ever survives the efforts of some dedicated players :)
The last is utterly correct - but the rest is why there is a conflict resolution mechanic. Dice.
The entire (systemic) core of roleplaying is that the players must create an advantageous position to maximize chance, and then chance still decides. If they don't do enough maximizing, their chances are limited - if they get things right, success is all but assured. That's the paradigm we work from, whether we want to or not.
And... /that/ is the basis for the action movie sequence. The characters in an action movie start out utterly unprepaired. The more they learn, the more they experience, the more they're able to bring to bear - and then, in the final confrontation, they unleash everything and hope it's enough. That storytelling is very easy to do - it's the tabletop basic metric. Any GM has been doing it from the beginning without railroading anybody. :)
On the other hand - /forcing/ that series of confrontations /is/ railroading. All stories have a beginning, middle, and end - sometimes the players outthink you and jump to the end. S'okay. They get to do that. :)
The trick is presenting the scenario, using the rules well, dropping in twists to let them learn more (that's the point of twists!) and letting /them/ dictate where the arc goes.
So I think, anyway.
Reply
The tension in RPGing is how far to lean towards plot construction as opposed to how far to lean towards simulating the virtual world. Generally speaking, I don't find that the fun is in the winning, but in the path to get there. Thus, I accept an element of railroading, as long as it takes my input and runs with it. It's when railroading becomes the previously mentioned "beat my head against a brick or rice-paper wall" that it becomes unfun.
To this end, various game systems have taken different approaches to this. While traditional RPGs used dice/randomization, this is not universal. In fact, the Amber Diceless system has absolutely no randomization in its conflict resolution system. In the MUSH space, some have none either (AmberMUSH followed the ADRPG rather closely), and some have no conflict resolution system at all, other than negotiation.
This is an area where player preference is probably quite varied. But for myself, I lean to cooperative storytelling than towards simulated conflict.
Reply
I don't /want/ to know the outcome of that battle before I set foot in it, or the outcome of my action before I try. For me, it has to do with failure - as you say, "the fun isn't in the winning, it's in the path to get there."
Unfortunately, my experience over the last... (holycrap, it's been...) 16 years is really that pure negotiation always breaks down. People don't like to fail, and very rarely will give permission for their characters to do so. On the other hand, they WILL fail, and fail fairly gracefully, if that element of chance built into the system doesn't quite fall their way, this time around.
I love negotiation first. Let's sort out what the situation's going to be, how we get into this mess - let's talk about consequences. It is, however, boring to win all the time - characters always and inevetably develop more from failure than they ever do from success. A conflict resolution metric that allows for a chance of failure for both sides is, oddly, pretty darned equitable over two players wrangling over loss.
Case in point - I was in a scene on Amber where a consequence was called for... and the character on the losing side of that consequence just... abjectly refused to take one. He was still Captain Awesome, utterly untouchable, posing amazing prowess on the field of battle /despite the fact that he lost/. In the end, someone else took that consequence for him... but it wasn't really theirs to take.
Consent works until it doesn't - at which point you need some sort of metric whereby players can fail when there is question over whether they will or not. In this, RTA has about the right balance, I think. The case above was isolated, and not my experience overall - in fact, it was a cheesing of the system as opposed to the intent of it. In RTA, you negotiate as far as you'd like, and when there is question in the outcome, you can test and see who gets to come out on top this time, in a fairly impartial manner.
Reply
Thus, I accept an element of railroading, as long as it takes my input and runs with it. It's when railroading becomes the previously mentioned "beat my head against a brick or rice-paper wall" that it becomes unfun.
As a GM, what I like to say is that, during a plot, my job is to set parameters and conseqences.
I lay out what's going on, what the bad guy is doing, and what resources he has. Then, I present it to the player characters to interact with (often with a goal attached, but I'm flexible). Sometimes the presentation is fairly constrained, as the last Perilplot involving a slaver and a bit of craziness, and sometimes it's just utterly wide open. Regardlesss, what I'm looking for is the player characters to tell me what they're up to - how they're setting about reaching that goal.
Then, I have the bad guy react to what just happened to him.
In the end, both sides reap consequences for their moves in the game, as it were. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other does - my plots are NOT foregone conclusions on the side of the players. Make a bad choice, do something that, given what you know, is crazy - well, you can lose. Sometimes you can lose badly. Sometimes, you lose simply because a random element gets away from you - this is why it is often presented to the dice, when we need to find that out.
But, both fiat-plots, where what the players do has no bearing on its outcome, and easy wanders through the garden of bad guys to stab - well, they're both not good, I agree. Instead, it should be about mutual storytelling - the panopoly of possibilities and outcomes and twists and turns that makes any story worth participating in.
Reply
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