Failure-bias in the die-rolling convention was almost as big an issue as I feared, particularly outside of combat. It was . . . interesting to be playing a game with no "conflict resolution" (as opposed to task resolution) elements again for the first time in awhile. As a matter of personal preference, I felt some anxiety. At one point we were falling back down an ice crevasse from a wave of Woolly Scorpions toward the door to an abandoned research station where we hoped to take shelter. My desire to "keep sweeping my sword in front of me to keep the scorpions at bay and keep them from getting past the front rank of PCs" simply did not translate meaningfully into FS mechanical terms, apparently. And we did much more than I'm used to of rolling for information. On the other hand, I enjoyed not having narration rights up for grabs, and the table developed some nice low-key but real intra-party dynamics. Our GM was a nice guy who took an active interest in the players' enjoyment.
I don't think that I would play Fading Suns by the book long-term, but the experience did renew my interest in - what would we call it? Decadent, post-Scientific, far-future SF as a roleplaying setting? Should I just boil all that down to "Science Fantasy?" That doesn't seem precise enough. And I did conceive a quick way to reduce the failure bias in FS without changing much else about attributes and skills and benefices. So, hm.
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marcochacon's . . . Technical Agenda is more or less what you say, Lee. It's like "I won't play diceless" or "If I can't immerse it's not worth playing" or "Goldarnit do I love contesting for narration rights using explicit mechanics!" You could have an Explorative Agenda - frex, I have no interest in SORCERER but a huge interest in SORCERER & SWORD because of personal genre preferences - or a Social Agenda ("I prefer IRC play because I have mobility issues"; "I want to play in public spaces because I hate having visitors in my house and fear going into someone else's") etc.
But I've become convinced that what people really have are Ephemeral Agendas. In TBM, the actual address of premise or up-stepping or seizing of narration rights or celebration of inputs happens at the level of the ephemera. Immersion is Ephemeral. Ephemera is the actual experience of gaming. The diagram secretly acknowledges this, since "Creative Agenda" is an arrow pointing from Social Contract TO the Ephemera layer. The other layers, and CA itself, exist to produce Ephemera that please us.
Narrativist A wants to "address premise" and so does Narrativist B. Each of them also wants numerous other things out of a game. Narrativist A abhors "GM fiat," likes instant-messaging, has no use for "amateur theatrics," believes in "getting right to the nub of the issue" and has a strong competitive streak. Narrativist B loves in-character dialog to the point of character-immersion, loves being with other people, finds competitiveness annoying and places a high value on platforming and giving issues time to come to a boil. Each seeks to arrange the elements of their gaming to produce opportunities to Address Premise, Create Theme, Test Passions, Make Ethical Choices or your favorite way of saying "Nar" for yourself. Each wants those Story-Now jewels in strikingly different settings.
This, btw, is also a theory of functional "incoherent" play, since Narrativist B's "Ephemera Salad" may be compatible with the Salad of RTDer C, and Narrativist A's bowl may mesh with that of Gamist D. It means discarding the old "Creative agenda is a group thingie" precept, but that was bullshit anyway.
My id is onomasticator. The icon is the same. My theme is surpassingly ugly - I believe they may be saving the bearable themes for the paid accounts and I haven't bought one yet. Tomorrow I will start Circling people or however DW people say "friending." I think this means I have invites if someone needs one.
zdashamber kindly provided me an invite to Dreamwidth. Now I'm stuck on the user name! I'm taking advantage of the move to reanonymize myself slightly. But how? Since my journaling focuses a lot on RPGs, I could go with my default game-community handle of Supplanter (which is just "James" onomastically). Various Borgesian names are open like "Uqbarian." I've also felt a sudden pull toward one of two Frostian options, Toffile_Lajway or Arthur_Amy (departed menfolk from either section of "Two Witches"). These might be a little long for people. It's a puzzle!Unless my not having an invite is the attraction of the place . . . ;)
Mostly cause I'm lazy and partly because I may well not enjoy playing it anyway, but, for the ambitious:
I don't like the Social Conflict rules in SotC/Fate 3.0. Mechanically they're sound enough but they don't feel right to me. Whether you're trying to sweet-talk, fast-talk or tough-talk your way to success, you're still rolling "damage" and causing Stress and inflicting Consequences. And whether the other party wants to put you in your place, let you down gently, just be left alone or overcome their own inner reluctance, they're doing the like to you - Stress and Consequences: "damage."
Sometimes this makes fictive sense, but often it just feels wrong. So, my general replacement idea uses the preexisting Zones concept. Only now the Zones are metaphorical. Zones are probably set up along one dimension. You and the Other Party start out a certain number of zones apart based on the fictional situation: Are you enemies, strangers, old friends? Are you asking for a lot? Are they asking for a little? There's at least as many zones on the far side of the other party as there are from them to you. And each of you starts in your (literalized) Comfort Zone. Maneuvers can move either of you off your comfort zone, and either closer or farther apart. Intimidation works like a Force Blast: It knocks the Other Party away from you. Seduction is a tractor beam, drawing them closer. Either of them move the object (you or them) off their Comfort Zone, though, and assume that every party has Comfort-Zone tropism to some degree: You always want to get back to your Comfort Zone.
Which brings us to the last wrinkle: Comfort Zones themselves move. With the right maneuver, you could move my comfort zone closer to yours. With the wrong result, I could move yours further from mine. (Picture a mini riding a green poker chip on a grid-map. The green chip is the Comfort Zone.) The difference mechanically would be that in those cases I'm "attacking" the zone rather than the other party, which may feel more fictionally right. So let's say my character wants to get your character in bed, against your character's better instincts. I can either draw you toward me against your better instincts by rolling against you, taking you closer to me and further from your comfort zone as I succeed, or I can draw your comfort zone closer to me with maneuvers and let you follow it. In either case, if I achieve my aim we end up in bed, but the feel of the two approaches should be different. Or maybe you'd secretly like our characters to sleep together despite your character's Horrible Past. Now instead of rolling against each other, we're both rolling against Mom's Divorce: trying to get our CZs together in time.
Somehow this all needs to interact with Border and Block rules in the SRD, but like I said, I won't be doing this, so, whatever.
kate_nepveu.) The question, I suppose, is whether a bunch of social networks can transport themselves bodily across, assuming Dreamwidth turns out to be "better."spaceanddeath writes, elsewhere:"I wanted to add, as I forever do, that neither is a better option objectively. I enjoyed my play when I was doing it live on stage as much as I do these days when it's one-on-one by candlelight. But the me then would have scrunched up her face thinking about playing the way I do now and the me now gets tired thinking about what I used to do back then."
which gets to the heart of a bunch of different things I've read lately. It's not just that "different people like different things." The same people like different things as their lives go on.
Amber did surprisingly well (to me) in the voting, so I'm that much closer to playing Amber again.
Meanwhile, I spent the last week in Illinois and Gary is spending last week and next week in New Zealand, so no improv class. By the time we get back to study in another two Tuesdays, I'll probably misremember it as the "Yes, Or" rule . . .
Vincent continues his adventures in diagramming, coming around in the last message to "the point" - the role of the GM in old-school play. Links:
1. The Prelude - two dialogs, the second of which is the "baby with the bathwater" one;
2. The one I linked the other day, for completeness sake;
3. "Scale, Depth, Clouds, Dice" - a guest-post by losrpg. Kidding! But a propos discussions downjournal here.
4. "Cloud-to-Cloud" - On the materiality of "the fiction" in RPGs.
5. "A Moment of Judgment" - Where the rubber meets the road, where Vincent tries to bring the baby back in, and considers that, you know, keeping a baby clean may involve a certain amount of bathwater after all.
A few comments.
a) As a side issue, Vincent's series makes me more nearly able to articulate what I don't like about his current changes to the monster rules in Storming the Wizard's Tower. When you move to
"2) When a monster attacks, you no longer declare which PC it’s attacking. Instead, by default, a monster’s attack hits everyone within its reach with a lower defense. When you create a monster you can choose this option (per attack ability): this attack hits the one person within its reach with the lowest defense."
you are attenuating the Cloud. I'm pretty sure you're replacing some Cloud-to-Cloud and/or Cloud-to-Dice steps with pure Dice-to-Dice and maybe some Dice-to-Cloud. (See, in the revision thread, kingtonC's advice to just "treat it as Fortune in the Middle." I'm pretty sure FITM always prioritizes Dice-to-Cloud.) If my monster has a Bite attack and has to pick a target, that honors my sense of what a bite attack is. It's a thing where a Boojum lashes out at a specific victim and goes *Chomp!* If the "Bite attack" instead might damage anyone and everyone in close range, then the declaration, "The Boojum attacks" loses its integrity. The Boojum goes from a sharply silhouetted, slavering nightmare with fangs I can see to this blurry thing that whirs around like the Tasmanian Devil. And if My Guy, with my sword, still has to pick a single target - honoring my sense of what a sword attack is - I'm now dealing with an "asymmetry of honor" with regard to our shared commitment to the fiction: My Guy and the Boojum are almost in different games.
The "FITM Solution" is just advice that I defer constructing the basic elements of my fictional picture until the results of the rolls are known. At that point I pretend that the monster didn't even try to bite the PCs it failed to damage. This is dice-to-cloud in a pretty pure form, I think, replacing what had been a set of cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-dice steps.
b) It's very much worth keeping in mind the target audience for these posts. It's not people who already appreciate mimesis as a gaming principle and the value of the GM as neutral arbiter. "Some things that should not have been forgotten, were forgotten," as the lady says in the voiceover in that movie. These posts are pretty clearly for the forgetters.
1. On the way back from the Expedition.
2. During play, everyone describes beating a Hazard in a way that could, later, prove to be fatal. "Only nicked by that spear-point, but days later Sepsis . . . "
3. During an epilogue, as characters are revealed not to have survived, the Opposition prompts the character with, "But that's not quite how it happened, is it?" about a previous encounter. The character reveals how, in fact, he died in that encounter. At the very end, it's revealed that the sole survivor has been talking to the others by seance, or the dead characters are reminiscing on the Zeppelin to Hell and have conjured up a simulacrum of the sole survivor.
4. A character can voluntarily turn a Hazard into his death scene during play.
To keep spirits generous and the Acclaim awards flowing, let it be understood that the "winners" will be not just the sole survivor but the player with the best death scene and so on.
