[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

[lordpeers]

I really, really like this aspect of the rules. It's an excellent way to give players more narrative imput without a sense that victory or failure is arbitrary and meaningless.

[chadu]

Coolio. That's the way I see it, too.

[bruceb]

Put me down for "get and am profoundly apathetic about, with occasional annoyance both as player and GM". It feels mostly like the answer to a question that I'm not asking, and of only marginal utility to questions I AM asking, and while I've not checked the S7S presentation, in general the triumphal tone in which such things are presented just pisses me off.

Yeah, I'm grumpy about it.

[drivingblind]

The "triumphal tone" part -- that's "trad player got touched in the bad place by the hippie gamer" baggage, I suspect (which isn't a judgment -- I've lugged around the same bags myself on more than one occasion). So I'd like to set that part of the observation aside on the proposition that you and I are inclined to view Chad as less likely to gloat in the text about how clever he is than the average bear

[bruceb]

Pretty much.

What I really want - need, probably - is the advice on making failure interesting and rewarding to the player. That's the practical revolution that I'm really interested in, and probably the single biggest thing that's changed about my play style this decade, putting that as an active priority everywhere I can.

For me, narrative authority is a side effect of that. I don't especially care about it, to be honest. I don't lie awake at night worrying about. I have lain awake at night worrying that bad luck with the dice left my players stranded without much fun to have, and wishing I could think of more to make the failures at their intended efforts lead to something more rewarding.

As nearly as I can tell, my players feel about the same, or at least many of them do. They like narrating. Some like it a lot. Some end up explicitly GMing scenes while I just watch sometimes. :) But narrative authority doesn't seem to be the answer to their concerns about failure, either.

[drivingblind]

Yep -- that's why Fate has the element of aspects that when they work against you, you get a reward.

Which actually exists, in some ways, in S7S/PDQ# as well. The "players narrate failure" bit is just one element of several, IIRC.

[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

[bryant]

For the last couple of years, informed by the indie gaming player narrative tendencies, I've been explicitly reserving failure narration to myself as the GM in order to create and maintain the illusion of a world that the players do not control. Both as a GM and as a player, I prefer the worldbuilding that has a singular vision at the head of it. I'm in favor of player contributions and ideas and suggestions, and I totally get and approve of player narrative techniques -- I just also recognize that I want a different effect

[chadu]

Games that explicitly talk about both options and how to use them in play are superawesome and mostly nonexistent, alas.

Well, I hope I do that implicitly, if not explicitly, in S7S.

If/When you read it, let me know what you think.

[inkylj]

Hmm, my take as a player is generally that if my character fails a lot, then he (or she or it or whatever) is incompetent. You can narrate a failure or two away but if it happens a lot, eventually people run out of inspiration and it just comes down to "well, I guess you miss. Again."

So, uh, narration doesn't really help with that. (And actually the same tends to apply to successes too -- eventually both the GM and I tend to run out of ideas and fall back on the defaults of the system.)

The other points are fine, I guess. Everyone I play with is playing for style all the time -- this is the main reason we play -- so point 3 doesn't matter much. Points 4 and 5 seem to contradict each other to some extent; if the player narrates something unusual the GM'll have to do more work to fit it in, not less.

[chadu]

Hmm, my take as a player is generally that if my character fails a lot, then he (or she or it or whatever) is incompetent.

I disagree, having recently -- along with a co-player -- had a HUGE RUN of crappy dice luck in the last D&D4e session we played. Both of us were 7th level characters, with plenty of bonuses and nifty gear... and couldn't roll over a 5 on a d20 (both of us!) over a period of nearly an hour.

Points 4 and 5 seem to contradict each other to some extent; if the player narrates something unusual the GM'll have to do more work to fit it in, not less.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast; I contain multitudes. ;)