PnP RPGs: videogames will never come close

[Saskwach]

Rule 0 of all RPGs: Any and all rules can be changed or disregarded as the DM sees fit. New rules can be attached and situations can even be resolved informally. If you're playing PnPs without Rule 0 then you're playing wrong.

The real point of rule 0 is to make sure that everyone has fun. That means you squash the latest thing that your resident rules lawyer has come up with that gives him an unfair edge because two splatbook writers didn't cross check whether they broke each other. Extensive house ruling just means you're playing the wrong system.

No, Rule 0 means you can change the rules as needed. That's it. Of course it can be needed when the rules lawyer is getting snotty, but it's just wrong to say that Rule 0 is specifically for countering the rules lawyers; that's just a nice bonus.
You're right that Rule 0 is for everyone's fun. I don't see how fun and my definition are mutually exclusive, though.

 

[Fenixius]

Tons of video games have a storyline where the player character lives to the end, but the player character is constantly getting killed while you're playing the game. They're totally both having their cake and eating it too.

That's the magic of save-and-reload.

What videogame can you think of that has actually not used that cheat? If you die, you have another life, or you get to use a continue. What game has omitted that, in your memory?

I can think of one. I never played it, but I heard about it. It was called Steel Battalion. It was a mech simulator for Xbox in the same vein as Gran Turismo is for racing. Super hardcore times one thousand. If your mech exploded, and you didn't hit Eject in time, it deleted your save. And it was in the pursuit of realism they did that.

No videogame I've played punishes you for true death like a PnPRPG can. To be fair, it can take a while to die in, say, DnD (which is the only PnPRPG I'm that familiar with), but it can happen if you're too careless. At which point, the convention is to screw up your character sheet, and reroll as something else. Of course, you could just not do that, but at the very least, you're excluded from the rest of the story.

I'd like to see a Singleplayer game try that though... I mean, GTA had you go to the hospital to be revived sans weapons and a cash fee, but it was still a scapegoat, since any wounds you might ever take just put you at the hospital. Death by headshot, explosion, 40 car pileup, drowning, they all just sent you back to the big white building with the red cross.

I wonder if there's a true middleground to be found here, where player failure can be used as a part of the story, in scenes other than the one where you're doomed to fail (like the opening of Megaman X, where you can't kill Vile no matter how good you are).

The "plot shield" thing itself is just a genre convention as well, after all -- it doesn't apply equally to all stories.

That's a good point that I didn't consider. Still doesn't happen though, in an action story. The closest I can think of is Code Geass, which had... wait, that's a spoiler. Hang on.

Spoiler: Ending of Season 1 of Code Geass

That's better. At the end, the protagonist (Lelouche) who used morally dubious methods to achieve his goal had a faceoff with the anti-protagonist (Suzaku), who sought the same goal through more moral methods which forced him to oppose the original protagonist, thus putting him into the wierd category of "he's a good guy, but I hate him". Anyway, they faced off and shot at each other throughout the series, and in the end, the series ended with them pointing guns at each other. So in the second series, they flash back to that scene and show that both of them failed to shoot each other, and the protagonist was captured and not killed, and they set up the next season.

I know it has no relevance to this topic, but it's still interesting. To me, at least.

 

[tobyornottoby]

Tons of video games have a storyline where the player character lives to the end, but the player character is constantly getting killed while you're playing the game. They're totally both having their cake and eating it too.

you're not having the cake here. Your death is not part of the ingame world, the story.

I wonder if there's a true middleground to be found here, where player failure can be used as a part of the story, in scenes other than the one where you're doomed to fail (like the opening of Megaman X, where you can't kill Vile no matter how good you are).

that

or in the case of the antagonist, how could you make a fixed story for a game in which halfway you encounter the badguy and either roll that d20 (headshot, killed) or do not?

 

[Alex_P]

Having your cake = the conventional action-movie-style plot, where the main character does a bunch of very risky things, but, through a combination of skill, luck, and pure coincidence gets to the end and wins.

Eating your cake = killing the main character, signifying some kind of challenge with real risk.

Most single-player video games have "storylines" that are all about action-movie-style big goddamn heroes, and gameplay that largely punishes failure by killing the big goddamn hero. They do this by allowing you to experience events that aren't part of the "reality" of the game world. Yes, that means the hero's death isn't part of the direct, scripted plot, nor of in-game "reality" (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time jokes about this); it is part of the wider narrative of play, however, because of how it colors your perception of that in-game "reality". And it is most certain part of the experience of play itself.

Most RPGs don't do that, and for good reason (it would make the game real slow, for one). BUT... games like D&D have a problem because they have cake-eating mechanics that try to give you "fair" or "realistic" mini-simulations of the probability of dying, while most players are using them to tell cake-having big-goddamn-hero action-movie stories which are all about the hero defying probability. Some groups play it that way and just expect the "story" to fail to come together a lot. Other groups take away the probability, through fudging/fiat, "fate point" meta-mechanics, or simply using cakewalk scenarios where the risk of failure is very low. In this setup, you can either have a "story" that follows the group's narrative expectations all the time or a real "challenge" that you can credibly lose, but it becomes difficult to do both.

(Another solution, of course, is not to use D&D-like games for action-movie stories and not to expect action-movie stories from D&D, but then you're bucking the game's style, which is just as hard as bucking the game's mechanics.)

Most groups seem to take the middle ground, resulting in watered-down challenges (the 3rd Edition game book flat out tells the GM to make most encounters easy, and has a rating system for encounters where the default, "level-appropriate" encounter is easy) and uneven story -- sometimes it's awesome, sometimes it just kind of fizzles.

-- Alex

 

[tobyornottoby]

Having your cake = the conventional action-movie-style plot, where the main character does a bunch of very risky things, but, through a combination of skill, luck, and pure coincidence gets to the end and wins.

Eating your cake = killing the main character, signifying some kind of challenge with real risk.

it is part of the wider narrative of play, however, because of how it colors your perception of that in-game "reality". And it is most certain part of the experience of play itself.

Yes that's a very powerful thing games have, that overall experience! What I'm meaning is that because it isn't part of the game world, it's purely gameplay, not narrative. But because it can shape your state of mind as a player, it does do something to that experience. I still wouldn't call that having the cake though... gameplay and narrative are still 100% seperate in the SYSTEM, which we're discussing here

If I pick up one of the big-name games and try to build a good framework on top of that, either formally or informally, that's actually even more work because I'm fighting the assumptions embedded in the system -- this is actually what a lot of "good GMs" are doing with all their GM techniques, in effect, and it's a big waste of their time.

This is where I'm still trying to get at. So I'm a D&D GM and you're saying I'm wasting my time. What should I do then?

 

[Fenixius]

So I'm a D&D GM and you're saying I'm wasting my time. What should I do then?

Noone said that DnD was a waste of time. We're simply discussing the difficulties required for a good narritave to come out of it. Of course it's doable, and of course you don't need a narritave like the one we're aiming for to have fun. So you're not wasting your time, as long as you're enjoying it. In fact, if you disagree with that, tell me why you're a DM, and then we can discuss it.

But I doubt that you are wasting your time. DnD can be great fun with a DM who knows what they're doing. But it's not necessarily the best way to write a story. That's all.

 

[Alex_P]

This is where I'm still trying to get at. So I'm a D&D GM and you're saying I'm wasting my time. What should I do then?

You could be wasting your time, yes, depending on what your overall goals are. You aren't necessarily wasting your time. That said, if you want "story" above all else, I think you are.

Also, If your group has already taken some random system and turned it into a structure that ideally supports the kinds of play you all like (I'm talking more about play procedures established through informal agreement than "house rules" here -- the former are actually a lot less portable than the latter), then you're done. Maybe your initial choice was, indeed, a bad one and you had to waste a ton of time to get where you are now, but that wasted time is in the past, whereas the good gaming is in the future.

If you're not there yet (and I suspect that most roleplayers aren't -- moreover, people and play groups change over time, so nobody will be there forever), then understanding your individual and group goals and starting with a set of good tools that directly address them will make it a lot easier to get to that sweet spot of comfortable, established structure and good play.

There is the more mundane kind of time-wasting, too, that you should watch out for. Time spent prepping for a session. Time spent flipping through the book trying to find a rule. Time spent playing out uninteresting scenes. I think about that factor a lot when I choose a game, too, but it's a pretty trivial thing conceptually.
 

Now, going back to goals: what I really want out of a roleplaying game is shared, collaborative storytelling.

I think that's the thing that pen-and-paper RPGs as a medium do best. I've got access to tons of other media that handle challenge-focused or tactical gaming quite nicely. I love the social experience of pen-and-paper game-playing, but if I just want to socialize in a relaxed environment without accomplishing anything else, I can put the game away and just hang out. If I just want to enjoy someone else's story, I can turn to any of the older "traditional" media. If I want to enjoy someone else's story and kinda half-pretend I'm contributing, I can get that playing an RPG video game.

So, some of the basic supporting structure for story-as-I-like-it...

You get the best play experience when every person at the table is thinking and acting like an equal contributor, seriously taking ownership of the game and responsibility for the other players' fun. (This does not preclude a GM in the sense of a player who runs the supporting cast; it does preclude a GM in the sense of one guy who's "in charge.")

Filter ideas relentlessly. Don't use any system that results in outcomes your group doesn't consider fun. For example, I personally don't much like the typical task resolution system found in most games, which is a flat success-or-failure roll with a "failure" often meaning "nothing happens" -- boring! A common method is "stakes"-based resolution: we define a conflict between two characters, agree on interesting results beforehand, and then bring out the game mechanics to determine which things happens. That "game mechanics" thing could be anything from a simple die roll to an elaborate cycle of piling on side consequences until one side is broken or gives in. The big idea is to make sure that a crappy, not-fun-for-anybody outcome is never on the table to begin with.

I believe very much in a strong player "veto" as a social-level tool that preempts any game mechanics -- and, consequently, something you can bring into almost any pen-and-paper game. If you really don't like something, you can just say so and the group should respect that and remove the offending element from play. This is a very effective tool for maintaining the integrity of your story (e.g. preserving a set of mutually agreeable genre conventions). It's much more important, though, as a way to maintain mutual comfort. Think of it like a safeword: the group is freer to explore risky, sensitive issues in their fiction because there's an emotionally safe way to back out. (As with safewords, though, it's not a substitute for making sure everyone is on the same page before you start.)

As should be slowly coming clear from some of the stuff I talked about above, a lot of the standard boundaries you're used to from D&D or Vampire don't apply. Simple example... Almost anyone who's roleplayed knows about "metagaming" (usually defined as using out-of-character knowledge) and how it's bad. Forget that! Everybody should be thinking like an author. Use your awareness of stuff your character shouldn't know to drive that character towards interesting situations. Let the other players in on your characters' inner monologues and secret plans. Throw your ideas in even if a scene doesn't involve your character. Always think about how what you narrate affects the other players rather than just the game world. Don't just use "What would my character do?" to drive all your play decisions. Think "What do I and buddies want to see next?" as well!

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

More interesting than all my talk:

"Heart Ripper [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=250634]," an actual play report from a Conan-themed Trollbabe session. "Story games" at work!
(Context that might help explain things a little: if you lose a roll, Trollbabe lets you accept a greater risk and roll again, and if you lose that roll you can roll a third time to try to gain the ability to narrate your own defeat.)

-- Alex

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

More interesting than all my talk:

"Heart Ripper [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=250634]," an actual play report from a Conan-themed Trollbabe session. "Story games" at work!
(Context that might help explain things a little: if you lose a roll, Trollbabe lets you accept a greater risk and roll again, and if you lose that roll you can roll a third time to try to gain the ability to narrate your own defeat.)

-- Alex

Holy Frackin Hell, that's an awesome example of what PnP roleplaying can accomplish.

 

[stompy]

Pen and Paper RPGs are great fun with friends... but I mean, I'm still an avid electronic videogamer, and this ain't gonna change. I treat them as seperate things, and they are both good in their own right. I look at them for different things, and I get different things from them.

 

[Alex_P]

I wanted to go back to the original point about choices...

Yes, pen-and-paper games can offer a dizzying variety of choices. However, not all of them should. A lot of the "tactical" play in games is really all about constraints. You have a fixed set of things to work with and you have to juggle how you use them. A truly free "sandox" experience pretty much kills that because you can find something that'll make most of the tactical decision-making moot. One classic D&D example is "Okay, I'm going to stand next to the entrace of the dungeon and slowly flood it from outside" -- that's a player decision, and perhaps even a very clever one, but it invalidates the tactical challenge of the whole scenario. Something as simple as scouting ahead can ruin the setup of a whole series of fights in an adventure.

If you're really interested in playing the skirmish wargame side of D&D 3e or D&D 4e to the hilt, you end up imposing constraints that pretty much turn the game into a series of computer-game battles. If you really want that open-world feeling, you pretty quickly end up having to mangle lots of rules and make up many, many more.

Some forms of "interactivity" come at the expense of others.

-- Alex