Bradd is saying that "story" is a poor choice to describe that because it has other connotations as well, but hasn't yet suggested a better word for that particular meaning.
Characters are the RPG's most common expression of a player's mechanical agency. The player's mechanical agency is definitional to the what-happens-ness of the RPG group's experience at the table.
@BraddSzonye Hence "most common," and then re-directing toward player agency.
You can probably assume that most participants in this chat know that for every RPG system which does a thing one way, another RPG will enact the exact antithesis of it.
@BraddSzonye Of course there is. But both of those systems use your character as the primary means by which you, the player, interact with the campaign world.
Even in games where you're not engaging in characterization - like the truly old-school D&D sessions - your character is the hand you reach into the world.
Exceptions to this trend are modern and still rare.
Even when a character is purely the player's sock puppet with no personality or story of his own, the player's agency is defined (and usually limited) by the capacity of the sock puppet.
Rules influence play experience, play experience influences the mood and social dynamic, which influences how characters get played, characters are the main components of the story.
@BraddSzonye At the point where you're saying, "I touch the door with my pole," and not, "The traps on the door are triggered and thus disarmed," your character is being used. Whether they're Kleenex or Shakespeare.
Talking about the contradictions can help understand the generalisation, but it's hard to tell if you're talking about individual contradictions or challenging its validity as a generalisation at all.
It is nigh impossible to make any statement about RPGs which is true about all RPGs. Does this mean that we should not make generalised statements about subsections of the RPG experience?
Like, for those styles the characters often aren’t the key thing, in a way almost entirely like and unlike the way characters aren’t the gameplay in Fiasco.
@BraddSzonye It might help if you talk more about that style of play because nothing you've said has seemed particularly opposed to said generalization thus far.
So clearly somewhere we're losing intent in translation.
It’s like, I wanted to talk about something, and I disagreed with LG’s paraphrase, and instead of talking about what I wanted to, I feel like I’m stuck here defending why the paraphrase doesn’t work for me.
And it still doesn’t work for me, because too much of the terminology is a stretch, or things in my experience influence things backwards from what he said.
I have very little patience for open-ended "guess what I'm thinking" games--largely because I had several teachers who would ask open-ended questions and not accept reasonable answers which weren't the one they were thinking of.
@BraddSzonye There's a different and more significant reason as well. It can take, especially these days, a lot of time and effort to get a group of players together. Schedules need clearing, gas needs paying, food needs to be made, bought, or stolen.
So when you treat the game and the investment people make in it the way that style does, it can come off as...rude. Dismissive of others.
But in D&D, although the individual PC is replaceable in the long run, it matters which skills and abilities and items he has access to because that defines the kind of "yes/no" questions he can "ask" by interacting with the puzzle.
@BraddSzonye I'm not sure what a computer game (which I haven't played) has to do with this. That'll need a lot of unpacking to be anything except a non sequitur to me.
I feel Eight Kinds of Fun is useful here. Choice of equipment and its usage are the tools of Expression in such playstyles, no less valid than personal drama.
@BESW Sure, and yet how fast do you get a flamewar if you try to tell somebody that this kind of “character sheet as your lever on the world” style of play is OK, let alone equivalent to a storyhobo character sheet?
Heck, how many people would roll their eyes at the very idea that a zorkhobo is a “character” in any sense of the word other than that it’s on a “character sheet”
I thought this was about differentiating the role of mechanics and equipment from the role of character in player agency, with a backdrop of the interrelationship between balance/legalese/clarity/complexity.
So you’ve got this old playstyle that I’ll call “zorkhobo” with very plain characters that are mostly about what tools they can bring to bear on a puzzle.
And most of the puzzles are of the freeform variety, where you lay out a scenario and it just makes sense that you can poke some things with a ten foot pole and other things will get you killed.
And if you do something dumb like go into a dark room without a torch, you might get a realistic result based on what your group believes about stumbling in the dark
Or you might get a snarky DM who just says you’re eaten by a grue for doing something dumb.
But in any case, you don’t have much in the way of actual rules about anything, because you’re all working toward a common goal of solving puzzles with a pretense or veneer of realism.
There are a lot of people proclaiming their chosen playstyle as the best and only kind. Such arguments are inherently useless: yes, a "zorkhobo" character would not satisfy someone looking for personal drama, thus they're not a true "character" from their point of view. At the same time, a character full of "drama" would be useless in the eyes of the "zork" player who's there to solve things.
@Magician Where I refer to them both as characters because they're both singular tools used in a paradigm where a player gets only one tool with multiple functions.
And they got expanded into the classic D&D adventures like the Slavers and the Giants and the Special series.
You can see a lot of evidence in the old modules.
And in old Dragon articles and such.
So old D&D looks pretty rules heavy but a lot of it is sort of random and obsessive-compulsive wargame rules tacked onto this essentially very rules-light and judgment-based Zorkhobo game.
(And actually Zork had the combat rules too, they were just hidden from you and only used in like three places in the game.)
I don’t know whether D&D influenced Zork more or vice versa, but they have a lot in common.
So you have this essentially zero-rules game with a wargame and a magic system bolted on.
And because of the zero-rules and judgment-oriented aspect of it, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, although in practice it’s mostly about this exploration and puzzle solving.
Then later parts of the hobby get more into other things like acting and intrigue and politics.
So, I've been writing this thing after some rants in the chat. And it's not finished yet, but it's way too fitting for the current discussion. So here's the draft of the first... two-thirds, I want to say.
Maybe you can find something useful there, or give me feedback. Stuff.
This is a fairly modern conceit, but what I've found these days is that the culture around a game has been divorced, judgment-wise, from the mechanics. The 'zero-rules' aspect you're talking about is a cultural aspect; it's a way the game was played. And people see it that way - a way.
@BraddSzonye new gamer: well, why the heck have rules for anything then? right, combat, let's throw this book out, it's just complicating things. the goblin stabs you in the shin, what do you do?
@Lord_Gareth I think it's pretty obvious, just looking at anyone who owns more than, say, six D&D books for one edition, that "Will I use this in play?" is not the only reason people buy RPG stuff.
Also, a lot of gamers have the conceit that they have all the tools they need in their heads for things like social interaction and puzzle solving, but you can’t swing a sword around the dining room table.
So a lot of RPGs only have rules for the things that the designer thought you couldn’t do around the dining room table.
And everything else is a matter of cooperation and debate among the players.
For some folks, that’s a feature, for others it’s a bug.
Because some people want the RPG to get out of their way when they think they don’t need it.
And other people think the RPG isn’t doing its job if it’s not telling you how to resolve things.
Thus you can get arguments where the former group thinks, “D&D can do anything you want it to!” and the latter group thinks, ”Lies! It hardly tells me how to do anything useful!”
@AlexP I believe it does, and I agree. I think I'm in a different position to a lot of other gamers thanks to the experience and perspectives RPG.SE has shown me (e.g. the variety of games available and what they do and do not do well), but I buy RPGs when I can use them to help me do things I want to do.
The reason I moved away from 4e was because the most important bits had no rules support, so why was I using it?
@BraddSzonye "D&D can do anything!" isn't busted because the book doesn't cover everything. It's busted because it's tacitly saying that the rules it gives you don't create structure.
@doppelgreener Which is cool, and yet there’s a valid point of view that says “D&D doesn’t interfere with the important bits, plus it helps you out with the stuff you can’t act out around the table.”
@BraddSzonye This can be related back to folks that like acting in their roleplaying; that is, if a socially awkward person wants to make a socially suave character, they shouldn't be forced to rely on their sub-standard real life skills to fulfill a concept.
@BraddSzonye In my case that doesn't fly even a little as a valid argument; it did interfere directly and palpably due to what it did and did not support.
It's the classic "if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem: If your character creation and advancement is mostly about combat, and your character sheet is more than 70% combat features, and the lion's share of the 300 pages you just read in the PHB are about combat, it's not reasonable to then say "Well, why didn't you just ignore all that and do something else? The game didn't stop you."
@BESW That’s what happens if you learn the RPG from the rulebooks rather than from play though – when you learn from play it can be entirely different.
@BraddSzonye This is not a good thing. Your RPG should talk about and enable the style of play you want out of it. New players are a thing. They need to be a thing, if you're gonna sell books.
@BraddSzonye [raises hand] Not I. I'm a first-generation gamer who taught nearly everyone I ever played with, based on my own reading of the books in a vacuum.
@AlexP And I’m not sure what “problem” you’re referring to, as the Zorkhobo style I’m talking about is not considered a problem by the folks who played it.
The advent of the Internet means more and more groups are spawning on their own from multiple interested people who have never played before, or barely played before.
I've learned to run roleplaying games in 2000 in a small town in Russia. There were rpg communities in the country, but not really around. And man do they have weird ideas sometimes.
The onset of D&D, popular in USA beyond wildest dreams of current games, was a very specific environment. It was dense enough that a culture of play could spread and become a norm. It's simply not the case anymore.
I suspect that a lot of disagreements in RPG theory arise between people who’ve been forced to play with jerks, or forced to play with people who hate your playstyle, and those who don’t.
Like half of all the OSR people have stories about "we picked this up when we were twelve and had no clue what to do and here is the weird thing that happened."
@Magician I’ve noticed that a lot of people discount learning the game from the adventures, which is one good way to get a feel for how it’s actually supposed to be played.
I picked up some basics about D&D from, like, three or four sessions in a university gaming group, and didn't understand a damn thing because 3.5e was incomprehensible to me.
My early 3.5 play was marked by some (thankfully minor) toxic experiences which arose from having learnt bad habits about GM/player roles from the 3.5 manuals. We were friends, we tried not to be jerks, but we also tried to trust the rules to be good teachers of the RPG experience.
@BraddSzonye I think too many people learn rubbish habits from looking at published adventures. Which are inherently designed around things like pre-planned storylines and big empty voids where the protagonists should be.
Like, how many times do I see someone going, "Here are my adventure hooks!" and I'm like, "Okay, but you know who the PCs are and you know what the players like, so why are you making up generic hooks like this??"
@Lord_Gareth Sorry, didn’t mean to be prescriptive, because I’m not. I just meant to say that the adventures are often a better sign of the designers’ intended focus of play than the rulebooks are.
Because the rulebooks are usually aimed at clarifying the most tricky and confusing and difficult stuff, rather than the stuff that is actually most common in play.
@BraddSzonye Hmm. I can't think of a game that doesn't explain its basic purpose and structure well that actually does explain tricky stuff well, either.
Which is also consistent with the idea that you don’t need (many) rules for the most important stuff, if it’s obvious to everyone.
@AlexP Even just the idea of exception-based rules means that the vast majority of your rules are going to be about the exceptions than the meat of play.
And that’s a very popular approach to writing rules.
@AlexP Do you want to cringe a lot? Because that's how you cringe a lot.
Barely passable understanding of English language, lack of "culture" in the vicinity, lack of any kind of deeper understanding, D&D 3.0, stock adventures of "go kill things". Need I say more.
I recall at one point, a year or two into our RPG foray, a friend had invited a Big Name GM (in very small circles) from Moscow to run a game for us. It was a very AD&D adventure made in 3.0, plot being something along the lines of "there's an enemy army marching on the city, we know where their commander is, go do something." We were level 1 or 2. We made the best of the situation, tried to draw out enemy soldiers, fought valiantly, died.
Apparently, we were supposed to go in and try to bluff them into not attacking the city (or something, it's been ages). It was a clash of expectations of epic proportions.
One thing it taught me is the necessity of communication. When handing 3.0 character sheets to an unknown party, an experienced GM really shouldn't have expected an unfamiliar group to do something other than use those character sheets.
@doppelgreener - We're reaching a closing window on your opportunity to be involved in [REDACTED]. I don't suppose you'd be up for discussing availability?
I would like to join, but I have found myself getting very busy with sorting important life stuff out, like exercise and study and other personal projects and etc.
By all means I am interested in helping, and have no intention of slamming the metaphorical door shut. It's just a matter of you are offering me a project to join in with, at a time when I suddenly have a lot of important stuff going on.
(Either because it is necessary, like developing my budgeting techniques and so on, or because it is personally important but would have to give in order for me to join [REDACTED].)
Speaking of which, I need to ask a question about GM fiat in CD.
So much in the Mythos doesn't allow success at all.
So, for example: there's a thing so wrong, so malevolent to reality that simple proximity to it imposes horrific visions or terrible mutations. In CD, the Investigators are unlikely to ever experience that if they're allowed to roll against it in any capacity.
(Even with a failure die, the chances of failure are very slim.)
So do I simply tell them it happens and demand an insanity roll? That seems like undesirably removing their agency.
@BESW So far you've done stuff like say we see {horrific sight I won't describe} in a boat in a shed. Then we say we're rolling insanity or you suggest we maybe should.
Also, I think I figured out part of why this Castle Bravo adventure has so much stupid padding.
It's a time-sensitive adventure, but not in the "pressure's on!" way until the end: instead it's got to delay the Investigators by any means necessary until the plot goes critical.
If they figure out too much too early, they can stop it undramatically.
[fiddles with]
Still, I think that with the right tweaks it can be a great investigation-heavy story.
@Lord_Gareth Honestly, I'm a little concerned about the context of the adventure anyway. It's set around the biggest fallout disaster in American nuclear testing history; seems a little tacky to add horror to that.
@BESW Americans have this habit of adding horror to tragedy. It's a great cultural failure of ours. Whenever anything bad happens in the USA we assume it had to be the work of great and terrible evil.
@Lord_Gareth To be fair, the adventure does not blame the Castle Bravo disaster on any fictional evil. Instead, it has fictional evils taking advantage of that human horror.
