TRPG General Chat

10:00 AM

The more time we spend in actor stance, the more susceptible we are to metaphor shear and the more jarring it is when it inevitably happens.

vicky_molokh

I once ran a campaign in which half the party didn't bother reading even the basics of the system. They just described what characters did and said. One day I brought up the topic of the players learning some stuff and getting more control over the game as a result. One player replied: 'Why would I bother to do that? I just describe actions, I seem to always get plausible and statistically appropriate results!'

I found that reply very heartwarming.

@BESW Metaphor shear?

BESW

The sudden realization that you’ve been living and thinking inside a metaphor that is essentially bogus. A common example is that word processing programs tend to present the document you're working on through the metaphor of a physical sheet of paper.

But when your computer crashes, you're confronted with the sudden fact that the metaphor was completely inaccurate.

"Until the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed."

vicky_molokh

I'm not sure whether that series of statements is meant to be judgemental against actor stance.

BESW

I have no problem with the actor stance. I find that prioritizing it to the exclusion of other stances often creates game environments that are susceptible to struggles other game environments can deal with more effectively or never face at all.

If a group finds that the value they get from an actor stance priority outweighs those struggles, then it's good for their group. I generally don't, myself.

vicky_molokh

Ah.

BESW

10:05 AM

Sep 7 '14 at 12:44, by BESW

Here's my cardinal rule of gaming, for players and GMs alike: Make sure everyone is safe and happy, in that order, and talk with the group about what will help keep them safe and happy.

Prioritizing actor stance has not made my groups happy.

We're there to play games and tell stories together, so forgetting that we're playing a game together is not a value-adding practice.

By contrast, we like taking conscious control of the narrative and exploring the implications of our chosen metaphor (game system).

vicky_molokh

Personally, I'm open to different stances in general (and currently playing a game with a more OOC stance, as well as GMing one, than I'm used to). But I've seen a bunch of people who have their fun reduced by being forced to step outside the actor stance, some of which were my players, and I enjoy systems being able to support such players' preferences.

BESW

Specifically, the people I've played with over the last several years delight in taking up director stances to conspire against their characters in order to tell stories that delight each other (the audience) with complications that the characters are unaware of.

vicky_molokh

But I found that when talking to FATE folk, explaining the above, and the interest in actor stance, or the difference between associative and dissociative mechanics, tends to result either in blank looks, hour-long semantic discussions which barely clarify anything (e.g. 'dice are meta' - while true in a technical way, it misses the point), or disbelief that it's possible to run a game with mechanics 'hidden'.

BESW

Oh, I've done it. I've enjoyed it, to some extent, with the right group.

And technically it's something Fate can do but at that point I'm not sure why I'd use Fate.

I like game systems that do one thing really well.

So I play multiple systems depending on what we want to do that night.

It's a lot more fun for us than trying to force one or two systems to do everything we want. That's an unfair expectation to put on the system and the labor falls to the GM and players to force an unsuitable system into the desired shape rather than simply use an existing system that works out of the box.

I spent a lot of my time in D&D learning that lesson the hard way.

...I'd be curious to see where you ranked Lovecraftesque, A Penny For My Thoughts, and Cthulhu Dark on the immersion experience.

kviiri

10:39 AM

"Immersion" is a bit of a pet peeve, as a concept, for me as people tend to get and lose immersion from so many different things, yet the word gets thrown around as a sort of "obvious metric of goodness"

BESW

Yeah, it's one of those "everyone knows what it means but it turns out it always means something different" phrases.

Oct 19 '17 at 12:39, by BESW

True immersion is, practically speaking, impossible--even in a LARP there is always a distance between player and character. So "immersion" become a game of drawing lines in the sand and arguing over which side is better.

Oct 19 '17 at 12:46, by BESW

If there's anything like "pure immersion," APFMT is probably one of the games best capable of approximating it.

I wish we had better words, as a gaming community, to describe the variety and scale of things people mean by immersion.

Bleed (where players share the emotions of their characters to a greater or lesser extent) is a useful facet that might be good to popularize.

Off the top of my head I can't think of an existing way to describe that peculiar combination of the illusion of freeform play with reliance on an 'objective' ruleset to maintain 'fairness'--often by assuming that game rules approximate physical laws of the game world.

Oct 19 '17 at 12:43, by doppelgreener

There's a lot of people for whom immersion means "forget I am a person at a table and be a character instead", and for whom "only ever do in-game stuff, never talk about the game on a meta level" is how to get it. For me, immersion means being able to buy into the story and feel out my character and portray them effectively as an exercise of self-expression, and I am most happy and most able to do that in games like Fate which require stepping out of character constantly.

kviiri

11:08 AM

Getting back to DnD after a long break made me realize I can't really "step into character". I'm always second-guessing my GM's motivations and plans

So a GM who maintains that tight veil of secrecy feels like a novelist to me, especially when things happen contrary to expectations (eg. I roll high, but still fail to achieve things)

It's not because I think my GM's after blood or something. More like, I know they aren't infallible and perfect and I know not every course of action results in a fun game for all

BESW

Yeah, similar.

I had a lot more "immersive" (in the sense of going long periods largely ignoring the system and considering the game world to be an independent Thermian construct) experiences, both a player and GM, when my experience with RPGs was limited to doing mostly just that.

vicky_molokh

@BESW Yes, it'd be good to have better words. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/137758/…

Trying to get better words tends to hit all sorts of obstacles, ranging from people hijacking a term (e.g. 'but I feel associated!' in place of the technical meaning) to just giving up at attempts to get clear definitions and hoping others give up too.

BESW

@kviiri have you ever tried APFMT?

vicky_molokh

@BESW I should check those out some day.

1 hour ago, by BESW

It's a lot more fun for us than trying to force one or two systems to do everything we want. That's an unfair expectation to put on the system and the labor falls to the GM and players to force an unsuitable system into the desired shape rather than simply use an existing system that works out of the box.

In a perfect world, we would all play systems specialised for each one's specific campaign. But in reality, there are multiple broad reasons why the dream of always having a system which does one task and does exactly what one wants is just a dream:

kviiri

11:26 AM

@BESW Nope

BESW

@kviiri It's a game where the rulebook itself is an in-game object, so you don't have to deal with translating character action into table-level mechanics, or confusing player and character knowledge.

And your character doesn't know anything about themselves and you don't know anything about your character: the rulebook is the guidelines for the collaborative therapy session the character is using to try to remember important things about themselves--which the players will be discovering at the same time their characters do.

vicky_molokh

First, specialised systems are not necessarily good enough at the thing they claim to be specialised for. For example, Exalted has been criticised ceaselessly for failing to live up to maintaining the over-the-top heroic feel it claims to be about on a mechanical level out of the box. In practice this means that decently playtested and edited general system will end up being better than a meh-tested and meh-edited specialised system.

Second, often there just isn't a system to support a given type of setting-and-campaign combination one wants to run.

BESW

...and? It'd be silly to not look for the systems that best fit my needs just because it's impossible for everyone to always find a system that perfectly fits their needs.

vicky_molokh

Oh, I stay on the lookout.

I look into systems I've not looked into before every now and then.

BESW

You're doing that thing again where you shift from our practical conversation about what works for us, to debunking an idealized absolute that nobody would argue needs debunking.

vicky_molokh

11:30 AM

Sorry. Will try to backtrack.

doppelgreener

I also find actor stance to be disabling, because I need to be able to address the narrative and game from an OOC perspective.
For an example: During 13th Age, a hybrid D&D/narrative game, my group was in combat and pestered by some relatively inconsequential bat monsters. The game says we should be able to narratively frighten them off with fire and have them flee the combat; the GM said "okay, so, now you'll be dealing damage like normal but we'll narrate it as fire." I was unhappy, the player who proposed it was visibly unhappy, the third player (out of four) was visibly unhappy. Because…

BESW

@doppelgreener That's a great example!

Sounds like it's also a good example of a case where the system's mechanical focus on one kind of problem-solving created a scenario where the default mechanics were being used despite being obviously ill-suited to the task.

doppelgreener

An example of how I get to enjoy director stance: there's a game I've been playing the past 4 Sunday afternoons that I'm enjoying. A few times we've had conversational scenes where the characters and NPCs are talking or doing things together that aren't of any actual real importance, aren't interesting, and aren't moving the plot forward.
Because we are in stances like director stance, I and other players are able to speak up and say "Hey, so, there doesn't seem to be much happening. Is there something we're angling for in this scene? How about we cut this scene here and move on to the next…

BESW

Yeah, that sort of freedom has been very helpful to me as a GM too.

I still have hangups about it as a player but I'll get there.

doppelgreener

Correct. So, a couple of us had been attacking the bats, but it was getting pretty boring. One of them said "I'll wave my torch to frighten them off, they should run away right?" I wanted that outcome as well so I said yeah that sounds great.
The GM said “okay, so now they're frightened, so they'll still be there but all your damage will be narrated as torch-waving and fear now”, so we had to keep hacking away at the bats, which was boring.
The GM's hangup was that in a game long beforehand, they as a character took several turns in an exciting fight to set up for an awesome climactic momen…

trogdor

11:41 AM

I feel like I have more hangups as a GM than as a player

BESW

@doppelgreener From my understanding of 13th Age, I might have offered/called for a background roll, because it'd be a good character moment to explain why the PC knew to do that.

But otherwise, yeah.

doppelgreener

(Ok, now I'm done editing that.)

@BESW I agree! No rolls were asked for with that, the GM just announced the narration change. The player was then invited to make an attack roll representing their torch-waving.

BESW

(I really like backgrounds, they're my favorite part of 13th Age.)

vicky_molokh

@BESW (OK, I admit I don't trust myself to pick up at the correct point before me going off the cliff of discussion.)

doppelgreener

@BESW They were pretty cool.

BESW

11:49 AM

@doppelgreener The 13th Age approach to processing d20 rolls was the cleverest bit, but not something I'd want to use a lot.

doppelgreener

A friend of mine actually has a bit of a reputation in their OSR game circles, apparently, as that player who will actually put their foot down when something crosses their lines, and say "I'm not OK with this" and address a problem from OOC. I think that's a good thing they do that, and a bad thing it stands out as fairly remarkable that they do that. Other players just go with it when they're unhappy and uncomfortable and don't feel the freedom to speak up, surely that's a problem!?

@BESW The thing where rolling even/odd numbers, or multiples of 5, or stuff like that could matter?

KorvinStarmast

@nitsua60 I thought I'd remembered you mentioning that. Have a safe trip.

BESW

@doppelgreener Yup! How you could derive as many as three or four different outcomes from a single d20 roll depending on your choices and context.

trogdor

@BESW do you have a link to that story where spoons as in "i'm out of spoons" comes from?

BESW

12:09 PM

@trogdor "The Spoon Theory," by Christine Miserandino for ButYouDon'tLookSick.com

trogdor

yeah I just found it a minute ago but thank you

goodguy5

not an origin, but related
https://i.imgur.com/vHKY3hJ.jpg

KorvinStarmast

12:24 PM

@trogdor If you look at the meta I posted in response about ownership, recently, do you think your view on that will change? One of the things it took me a bit of time to get a feel for was the way the "edit often" policy helps all of us make the content better. It's an odd form of collaborative creative activity.

trogdor

@KorvinStarmast I don't think it would change the pressure I almost automatically put on myself if I try to post no XD

KorvinStarmast

@trogdor Fair point, we all have that little voice in our head.

@trogdor yes, you make a good point. Our Chivalry and Sorcery groups, and our Traveler groups (late 70's) ran into that problem. Having enough people who wanted to adapt to a new game when gaming time is finite.

trogdor

@KorvinStarmast yeah I feel like it can be a very universal experience

The Oracle

12:46 PM

1

Q: Is there something like Worldbuilding's reality check tag here?

On Worldbuilding we have Reality Check tag. Someone can put his idea or small creation in the question, and ask if it is consistent, accurate, easy to understand etc. Is there any way to ask such question on RPG? I made a "cheat sheet" of Pathfinder rules my group has hard time remembering and w...

BESW

Jan 15 '18 at 0:55, by BESW

Oh, worldbuilding.

BESW

1:23 PM

→ 108 messages moved to Not a bar, but plays one on TV

→ 1 message moved to Not a bar, but plays one on TV

doppelgreener

→ 1 message moved to Not a bar, but plays one on TV

BESW

1:38 PM

Question: in a game like APFMT which treats the manual, props, and players as diegetic game elements, what modifications if any would be necessary to change its "everyone in the same room" assumption to accommodate online or mixed IRL/online play?

Rubiksmoose

@BESW APFMT?

BESW

A Penny For My Thoughts.

Rubiksmoose

gotcha.

BESW

It's a game where the rulebook itself is an in-game object, so you don't have to deal with translating character action into table-level mechanics, or confusing player and character knowledge.
And your character doesn't know anything about themselves and you don't know anything about your character: the rulebook is the guidelines for the collaborative therapy session the character is using to try to remember important things about themselves--which the players will be discovering at the same time their characters do.

Rubiksmoose

@BESW huh. that sounds extremely interesting.

doppelgreener

1:48 PM

@BESW Diegetically some people are teleconferencing into this meeting.

Rubiksmoose

(and now I think I remember you having talked about this before)

Colin Gross

@BESW Is this describing a theatrical stage performance and a script?

BESW

@ColinGross Nope. It's an RPG.

doppelgreener

The company organising the meeting and teleconference has mailed out additional copies of the manual to people remoting in, as well as a parcel of props. Participants of course may have to show props on their end to people remoting in.

Does that make sense?

Colin Gross

Now I'm thinking of a point system for theatrical plays. Are plays a subset of rpgs? I ponder peculiar ontological organizations of topics sometimes.

@doppelgreener That's clever. So the same props in two different rooms.

Rubiksmoose

1:59 PM

@ColinGross I would say plays wouldn't count because no choices are made. It is all a script. I think a core concept of an RPG is that there are meaningful choices made by the players and/or DM.

Sir Cinnamon

So youre saying improv is an rpg

doppelgreener

Let's all remember freeform roleplay exists!

But games are usually defined approximately as something with a goal, rules, and agency.

BESW

APFMT revolves around the idea that everyone is an amnesiac with a slight psychic connection to each other, to help each other remember our pasts. We write words or short phrases on slips of paper, and take turns drawing slips which are prompts for remembering a scene from our past. When we come to an important choice in the scene, we ask two other participants what we did, and they answer, and we pick the one that's right.

The Oracle

1

Q: Is this question a duplicate?

My question: Can unconscious creatures be unwilling recieved a bit of debate on its status as a duplicate of a couple different questions: Can unconscious creatures be willing and Can you make unwilling creatures willing? In other words what defines willing? This debate eventually led to most ...

discussion specific-question duplicates

BESW

After we've remembered three scenes each (guided by the session material to slowly edge closer to and finally reveal our traumatic instigating event), we finish the game by choosing if we want to keep our rediscovered memories or if we want to forget again.

There's variants where we're spies who have to remember a crucial detail about a recent mission, or survivors of an ongoing apocalyptic event who have to remember something that will help reverse it.

But usually we're just ordinary people who had something terrible happen and we'd like the option to remember it again.

The entire game is framed as the therapy session for accomplishing that.

Rubiksmoose

2:08 PM

@SirCinnamon Sure, improv is a lot like freeform RP I would say. but as doppel said probably missing the G.

BESW

The edges of the medium are fuzzy and un-pin-down-able and I like it like that.

Rubiksmoose

Yeah and I think a lot of really interesting design likely happens in those spaces.

BESW

Speaking of which I should really do a new beta release on LLKM.

mmmm fuzzy.

Rubiksmoose

warm and fuzzy and safe and squishy

a poem by Rubiksmoose

BESW

@Rubiksmoose @Ash: your kind of poem.

Rubiksmoose

2:21 PM

Business related: I am thinking about changing this question to only talk about elves

50

Q: Is 4 hours long enough for a long rest for Elves and Warforged?

The Long Rest rules read as: Long Rest A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which you sleep or perform light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours of the rest period. If the rest is interrupted by a str...

dnd-5e unearthed-arcana rests elf warforged

1) Only one answer mentions warforged and only one line (and not the accepted answer even)
2) it should have been separate questions to begin with
3) warforged were UA at the time so it is basically irrelevant anyways.

BESW

2:41 PM

PSA: Anyone can ask for a conversation to be moved to the Not A Bar at any time and I, nitsua60, or doppel will re-locate it as swiftly as possible. It does not reflect poorly on the topic, the conversers, or the asker; sometimes there's just a need for stuff to not be in the main chat and we'll never ask for justification.

7

@Rubiksmoose You have a business related to elven naptime habits?

Rubiksmoose

@BESW Yeah it's a D&D B&B.

;)

BESW

Will you be holding a press conference about it? We could use a D&D B&B Q&A.

doppelgreener

@Rubiksmoose looks fair to me

Rubiksmoose

@BESW Sorry I've been asked by my lawyer not to comment on future public announcements.

BESW

...is that a D&D B&B Q&A C&D?

Rubiksmoose

2:49 PM

@BESW hah!

doppelgreener

@DavidCoffron FYI in questions and answers, links to a question automatically expand to the question's title.

Glazius

@BESW Yeah, the toughest part of doing it online would be a "slips from a hat" chatbot. The second toughest part would be pointing at someone, saying "or did I" and then finding out twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door.

On the Internet, nobody knows this is Farandath Gathariel's dying breath, sort of thing.

Rubiksmoose

@doppelgreener thanks!

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