Somebody who groks Bangs (in Sorcerer and elsewhere) help me out, here.

A Bang is a situation which requires the player to make a thematically significant decision.
The GM prepares Bangs out of player Kicker/Flags.
The GM then gets the characters to the Bangs and lets the players make their decisions.

Now, the whole point of the Bang is to let the players make their big important decisions without GM interference, and that I get. But doesn't the GM have to employ a little or a lot of Force to get the players to the Bang in the first place? Is this just an acceptable amount of GM Force? Is this one of those Indie 1.0 things, where Sorcerer, state of the art at its time, was three steps away from Illusionism, and now from my vaulted position of five steps away I'm looking back and wondering why the decade-old game is back there?

Isn't the key difference that bangs give the player a meaningful choice, while illusionism is about guiding the player to a predetermined choice?

If I bang, I don't know what will happen next. If the bang isn't in fact giving the player a meaningful choice, it's not really a bang at all.

Ben, you're developing this cognitive relationship between RPGs and man-love that's starting to get disturbing. ;)

Max, yes, certainly, and that's the point of a bang: the players get to decide how the go from there, and that's great. I'm just confused why the GM getting them there isn't illusionist to some extent. Whenever I've seen Bangs discussed, it's all been preplanning bangs and getting the players to them. Which sounds illusionish to me. Which isn't, I should point out, a bad thing. It may be an acceptable amount of guidance to get to the juicy bits. Mostly I just want to confirm that my understanding is correct or hear how I've got it wrong. ;)

Thomas, right, and that's how I understand bangs. But if one of your prepared bangs is to have my character's sister used as a sacrifice to the harvest god, how do you get my character to the altar to decide whether to cut her down or let her blood water the soil?

Josh,

I think Bangs might be a more subtle concept than you're thinking it is. I've played Dogs with you. You use Bangs as Sorcerer intends. Some dude falls half dead out of a second story window at my feet? That's a bang. Oh his wife did it because he was with another woman? That's another bang. Crap, there's some woman in town setting up arranged marriages. That's yet another Bang.

Note: These are "clue" bangs and see how they're very very different from Call of Cthulhu style: "Best check out the manner house at 1221 Miskatonic Avenue!" type clues.

I think you might be confusing Bangs with really agressive Scene Framing. Really agressive Scene Framing *can* be (doesn't have to be) a form of GM Force. I can use Scene Framing techniques to reduce the number relevant choices you have within the scene or worse to indirectly imply significant decisions your character must have made in between scenes.

Jesse

Actually, Josh, I think you're hitting the cognitive nail on the head for me. Bangs were one of the non-starters for me in Sorcerer, because in illusionist play that's pretty much what I'd always done: given my players the illusion that they had a choice until the moment where what would be termed a "Bang" came up. But it takes a bit of cat herding to drive players to the point where they decide between hitting a defenseless woman in the face with a sledgehammer and doing their own damn legwork. If it's not a choice, then the results aren't anything like as profound.

But, and here's the point that seems to be missed, to get them there you do need to do quite a bit of steering. Unless, as Ben suggests, you just go around banging your players. Er, rather, their characters, right? For that, though, it seems like you'd need really vaguely hashed out bangs in order to drop them whenever they come up. Which almost seems like it'd be more reasonable to just improvise.

Nathan, destabilizing events I can grok. But you can't plan those, can you? That's where my disconnect occurs.

Jesse, when I ran Dogs for you, I opened the game with you coming down the road into town with a farmhouse looming above you. Then the guy came crashing out of the window. But I couldn't have the guy come out of the window without having used at least a little bit of Force in that scene-frame. Otherwise, he goes crashing out the window and you're, you know, not there. I liked the results and all, so really, I'm nitpicking the finer points here to understand how it ticks. Why wasn't that scene frame to put you in the right place Force on my part?

Marco, I think you and I are working along the same lines. There seems to be a sort of acceptable level of GM Force, which differs from game to game (as in, my Sorcerer may require more or less than your Sorcerer which may require more or less than Judson's TSOY, etc). There's also some touchy territory concerning over which decisions the GM can use Force -- the GM may plan a bang for a player who's actually more interested in some element of the lead-up to the bang. If the GM tromps on what is for the player a thematically significant decision, even if the GM is unaware or has simply misjudged the player's interest, then there is some level of transgression on the part of the GM.

Judson, we've talked along these lines before. I'm open to the possibility that I'm either not seeing something or my conception of bang is slightly skewed. Nathan and Ben's bangs, for instance, sound like a different but related concept to what I seem to remember reading in Sorcerer. Which is why one of my suspicions is that it's a first-generation indie thing that has since been elaborated and improved upon.

Fred, I get that, and I think that bangs as specific instances where the GM lets go and the players do their thing and the game progresses is a very good thing to hammer into heads. I think the concept of the bang has improved game design. Et cetera.

What I'm getting at is that first arrow between the pawn and the starburst in the third illustration. Between the 'g' and the 'n' of Progression, decisions are being made and roles, they are being played. And it seems to me that there's some GM Force being applied in there, getting the player to the starburst.

It's like a scope of inquiry thing, where if you zoom back, bangs are an alternative to illusionism for the reasons you cite. But zooming in, there is space between bangs, and those spaces seem to require some GM Force to operate. Or else I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.

Ack! Thomas said something and I cross-posted and didn't notice!

Posted By: Thomas Robertson1. Don't be so specific.
2. Have a lot of Bangs.
3. Remember that NPCs are proactive too.

Okay, I'm hearing a lot of 'don't be specific' and 'don't really plan too much' sort of responses, so perhaps I've been making bangs into a much more concrete sort of plan than they are intended to be. Thomas' scatter-shot have-lots-of-bangs strategy, where each bang is sort of loosely defined (and therefore less work) seems to support that, as well. So can I get some chatter from the rest of the folks? Are bangs just not as specific as I've been making them?

The #3 gets me, though, because this seems to me to be supporting the GM-uses-a-little-Force thing. The NPCs are proactive, too, and they massively outnumber the PCs, so the GM can arrange the pieces on the board, so to speak, to get the players to the next bang.

Now, sidestep time to personal view of reality and such. To me, a decision is entirely determined by its context. Which is why I love Dogs: it takes any number of "black-and-white" decisions (don't shoot your grandmother) and then puts human, hurting faces on the participants and suddenly the decision isn't so simple any more. It's all about the context. So in large part, #3 sounds to me like it's putting the GM in control of the context, and therefore in control of the decision. When I run Dogs, I'm very damn careful to leave some ambiguity to the NPCs and their motivations so that players have some room. I could see running Dogs where I don't leave that ambiguity, and I think it would kill the game. That little dance where I let myself complicate things but not be too didactic about it, that's me using judicious Force.

I think I should also note that I don't really plan bangs. I might have a list of ideas that I write down, but I dunno, man. I come up with them on the fly. Okay, player is doing X! Given X, there might be a hard choice Y! Okay, so the game presents Y to the player! Bang!

Fred,

This is exactly the missed communication I'm talking about. My experience with anything like a bang was that there was some of the illusory choice happening in order to lead up to the bangs that had no plan after them. The image I have is of a railroad reaching the end of the line, and the cabbie asking "where to?" I consider this a hybrid of the either/or relationship proponed in this discussion and neatly illustrated by your diagram.

My intuition is this: the universe of possible story is infinite, on a transfinite order at least with the real numbers, and possibly up there with all possible curves. Bangs are necessarily finite regions within that universe, and if the paths of the characters are going to intersect those fields, there has to be some guidance. To a limited degree, Kickers provide that in Sorcerer, by designating a start point, and a wise GM structures his bangs in a shell around the kicker.

But other legitimate alternatives include guiding the path of the characters to bangs, but not afterwards, or improvising bangs in the path of the characters.

Jesse, who decides what's a relevant choice? It seems to me that the bang-structured game is perhaps not the GM deciding what is the right answer, but the GM is deciding what the right question is.

Fred, I get what you're getting at, but... I don't buy that the GM is really that hands-off between bangs. Does the GM not actually speak? Does the GM not introduce new fictional events and details that might change the players' course of action? I have trouble buying that the GM is even capable of not influencing inter-bang travel, as it were. Or -- and maybe this is a missing part of it -- is the bang-structure dependent on player buy-in that, once they decide on a course of action, they ramp it up to the max until they hit something? So the GM throws stuff out there and the players dig on it cause it's foreshadowing the mystery thing that they know that they're going to smash into?

Posted By: hamsterprophetIf the GM has a bandolier of Bangs, and (f'rex) the game is meandering, him framing a new scene to introduce a Bang is just part of his job.

Which is pretty much exactly what I'm asking. That sounds, to me, like that game has an acceptable level of GM-Force-towards-Bang. Which, again, I'm not saying is a bad thing. If that's the way it works and it produces awesome play, rockin.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyFred, I get what you're getting at, but... I don't buy that the GM is really that hands-off between bangs. Does the GM not actuallyspeak? Does the GM not introduce new fictional events and details that might change the players' course of action? I have trouble buying that the GM is even capable of not influencing inter-bang travel, as it were. Or -- and maybe this is a missing part of it -- is the bang-structure dependent on player buy-in that, once they decide on a course of action, they ramp it up to the max until they hit something? So the GM throws stuff out there and the players dig on it cause it's foreshadowing the mystery thing that they know that they're going to smash into?

Well, here, you're conflating "GM speaking" with "GM force", right? Is it your experience that every sentence a GM speaks, whether bangs are at play or not, constitutes a force? I think this is at the crux of the trouble you're expressing with bangs. And as to any of the rest of this, I gotta point at Ron's earlier post and leave it at that.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobySo when the GM says to herself, "Man, it'd be cool if the Baron was waiting in the treasury when they get there," and so moves those proactive NPCs or otherwise contributes to the ongoing story, how is that not GM Force?

My very quick, not overthought answer is: Because that does not take away a relevant, meaningful choice from the player. It just creates a situation of tension.

Edit: Er, THE PLAYER, not the GM. Bad Fingers!

Well, I talked in the context of my experience of Sorcerer play, which has largely been actor-stanced players with a GM making story-sensitive choices about when and where to place bangs. So my answer still stands; you didn't provide a context when you posed your question.

If the player's not in actor stance, and you're using a game like PTA? Then, yeah, the player should be deciding the baron's in there. At which point the player has provided a kicker, instead of the GM providing a bang, and I'm kinda fine with that. If your game's supporting that sort of player input, the GM shouldn't be dictating bangs unless he has the narrative control and authority to do so, right? Instead, the GM should say "Wouldn't it be cool if..." and then the guy with the narrative authority to do so can author a kicker (i.e., player-bang) that fits that. Which, also, isn't a force.

Fred's answer is 100% correct.

I strongly suggest saying to yourself, "I am using the word 'Force' in a way which Ron [who invented the term with some help from Mike Holmes] is not using it. Therefore we are talking about two different things."

I GMed a not-very-successful session of Sorcerer at GenCon 2005 - a short game, not a demo. Judd was playing a near-homeless, conspiracy-nut character. My best moment that evening was responding to his announced action, "I'm going straight to the mayor and telling him this is fucked up!!", by having the mayor meet the character, reply to him with respect, and offer to hire him as city manager for all such complaints. Judd's jaw dropped. He accepted in a kind of shell-shocked way, and kept staring at me as I described his character getting steam-cleaned, shaved, and dressed in a nice suit.

That was a Bang. I had no idea how Judd would like to play his character in response to the mayor's offer. Any response ("I strangle him!") would be OK. But this is where we all, as a group, found out whether there was a reasonable core to Judd's character, not to mention whether people were interested in learning more about this surprisingly casual/powerful mayor.

Where's the Force? It's not there. Was there GM input? Hell yes. I popped Judd's character straight up to the mayor (framed the scene). I played the mayor as a non-trivial character in the fictional situation. I posed a direct challenge to the player-character's written concept as a homeless weirdo. I did stuff with this scene and with my character in it.

But I didn't fuck with a single iota of what Judd's character wanted to do in response. I didn't even anticipate any response in the sense of having a contingency plan or any sort of "and if he does this, I'll do that" frame of mind. Hence, no Force.

GM-input has no special name in Forge jargon. It's a contribution to the shared fiction, that's all, with or without special privileges or responsibilities depending on the game. Force is something highly specific, highly defined. When you ask questions like "But if I say the character is now on-board the ship, isn't that Force?", I can only shrug and say, "Did you forcibly, i.e. without consent, take over the player's choices in doing so?" If you didn't, then it's not Force. The cat ain't a duck.

Best, Ron

Posted By: Ron EdwardsHe accepted in a kind of shell-shocked way, and kept staring at me as I described his character getting steam-cleaned, shaved, and dressed in a nice suit. ...

Where's the Force? It's not there.

So Ron, steam-cleaning Judd's character wasn't Force? What if he wanted to be City Manager but remain shabbily pseudo-homeless? What if he wanted to make a point of being that scary-to-look-at guy but be invested with municipal power?

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyA game can't be composed exclusively of bangs, for instance; there is space between them, and that space is filled with... what?

The activity (and by 'activity', I want to conjure the furor of movement that arises within a kicked anthill) that results from the player's reaction to that Bang; whatever that reaction and resulting activity is, and however long it takes.

BANG:
GM: "Your sister isn't home, there's a note on the door saying she went to talk to Big Shiv."
Player: "Fuck. Umm... Okay, I head down to Big Shiv's pool hall."
GM: "... interesting. Okay, you head inside, and it takes your eyes about the same amount of time to adjust to the gloom as it does for Shiv's thugs to recognize you as the guy that Shiv specifically ordered 'never to come back to my place, again, evah.' They're heading your way."
Player: *sigh* "Yeah... I figured. Damn..."

Now... the fallout from THAT scene might be one or six or seven or fifty-eight following scenes where 'what we're framing next' is clearly obvious, resulting activity from that Bang... during that time:

1. The GM is going to have piles of NPCs in those scenes, and each of those guys WANTS something, and they're going to try to get what they want in some way, and playing that is the GMs job -- it's not *automatically* GM Force to say "there's fifty guys in the bar, and when Shiv says 'kick his ass', 25 of them get up to do just that." (It *could* be, yes -- if, for example, the GM is doing that to negate the player's legitimate choice of coming to the Pool Hall, because the GM doesn't want the player to 'ruin the plot' by talking to Shiv or the PC's sister right now, or something -- but it is not automatically Force.)
2. The setting itself has some 'physical laws' (gravity, air pressue, inertia, magic, super technology, sorcery) that the GM is obliged to 'accurately' reflect, by which I mean 'according to the tone of the game'. It's not GM Force to say "if you stand in the middle of the busy highway, at midnight, you're gonna get hit by a fucking car."

Eventually, all that furor of activity will start to tail off, and somewhere before everyone starts thumb-twiddling, you drop another Bang.

... that's what's in between.

So, Josh... what's the alternative? That you determine how your character addresses the issue and resolves the problem without any input from the GM?

And then, did the way the GM set up the issue in the first place infringe on your ability to thematically address the problem?

It seems the solution to your issue is for you to write a story all by yourself.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyBut I want to peaceably settle matters with Big Shiv, doyce. All this fighting is not what I'm interested in. So I back out of the pool hall to avoid the fight. Later, I head over to Big Shiv's home, and the bodyguards advance on me again and I back away because I don't want to crack skulls. And the next day I find him at his yacht, but there's a bruiser at the front of the docks, so I swim around but some other bodyguard comes running and... how is the GM sending thugs at me not affecting my significant thematic choice to resolve the problem without violence?

What level of resistance should a player expect to their goals in play?

-Rob D.

Okay, guys?

I'm not saying that GM Force is a bad thing. I'm not saying that the GM using Force to get at a Bang is a bad thing. I'm not saying that the GM having input into how a theme is addressed or resolved is a bad thing.

I'm saying that the GM uses Force in order to contextualize and pace Bangs, that the GM therefore has input to those Bangs, and isn't that fucking awesome?

So my 'alternative' to Big Shiv is not that I should get some sort of carte blanche to do whatever I like, but that I can't resolve the Bang/issue/premise without some buy-in, contribution, and interpretation on the part of the GM. As Ross very neatly put it, the GM gets to frame the question. And I'm saying, "Hey, lookit that, the GM uses Force in a productive manner!"

Am I making sense, or are flying donkeys pouring out of my mouth?

Couple funky things about that game. We were sharing characters between me, JJ and another guy we had just met but seemed swell.

We were all just shocked and were really into it. We all took turns describing his "cleaning up" as I recall it and how incomplete it was, how the madman was still under there but now he had a desk.

The game wasn't going well until that moment and when that bang hit, I wanted to play that character, who suddenly was a surprise instead of just another shell-shocked vet with an END IS NIGH sign on a street-corner.

What if you gave that madman on the streetcorner a position in city government?

What kind of mayor does that?!? What the fuck is up with that Mayor and...WHAT IS HIS DEMON?!?

It wasn't force because Ron wasn't banking on any one response from us, he wasn't forcing us into one spot, he responded to our response from the mayor, we responded to the mayor's offer and it wasn't forcing, we were surfing off of each other's input.

And despite that game not being particularly successful, I really wanted to know where that wave was going.

That's still not force, though. Which decisions are presented to you is a different matter. cf. Chris Chinn's 'flags.'

The distinction is, I think, between creating the necessity of a choice and constraining a choice. There's a lot of overlap there, but there are some practical distinctions between creating the situation which calls for a choice (Thugs show up) and limiting the range of responses ("Do you fight, or jump out the window?"). In that any choice is based on a limitation on options, it might very loosely be called a force, but at that point the definition gets so gauzy as to be meaningless.

-Rob D.

Oh, and just to indulge my testiness for a second ...

Sorcerer is still the state of the art in this matter. As it is with many role-playing things.

Best, Ron

Ron, this is where I get all editorial and nitpicky about diction and phrasing. The definition, with which I am familiar, says "a technique of control" whereas you are using it here as "taking control." The latter is exclusive and absolute; the former is not. There's a big difference between the GM taking control to the point at which the player no longer has any control whatsoever and any number of control-sharing techniques where different players have different control over different aspects of the fiction/story/setting/situation.

If we're talking about the GM taking control, or to put a finer point on it, the GM taking all control, then Force becomes such a narrow phenomenon as to be almost useless. How often does the GM take full control of a player character? More importantly, how often does a player come back to such a GM if he doesn't like that? I think what's more likely is that Force, which is a label applied to an identified phenomenon, as you say, is more accurately the player taking umbrage at the level of control that the GM has claimed.

Because, really, the GM has some control over the players, just as the players have some control over the setting/situation/world/whatever. If we didn't have overlapping and intersecting control, there'd be no interaction; there'd be no game. There's a broad spectrum between "GM exerting almost no influence over player character actions" and "GM dictating all player character actions." Somewhere along that spectrum, you've drawn a line and said that one side is Force and the other isn't. Where that line is drawn is determined by whether the decision is "significant" which is hardly a black-and-white affair. What is significant to one person may not be significant to another; what seems significant now may not be significant later (and vice versa). The criteria of the definition is incredibly vague. I find this a little naive and not incredibly useful.

What benefit do you see in defining "Force" in such terms? Perhaps I'm not seeing it. Or maybe it's not as widely applicable a concept as I thought it to be.

As one of the people who got strongly involved in Force discussions, I think I agree with Ron about the limits of its applicability. As a concept it pretty much, as far as I can tell, only applies to an explicit, for-real, character hijack*. Even telling the player the character will face certain death if they choose a course of action may not be Force since the character could decide "X is worth dying for."

That said, I think the concept of Force--even at that level of specificity--is problematic.

For one thing, it's problematic because there is *so much* other stuff the GM can do to exert pressure that singling out one of them (the character hijack) for discussion creates a false sense of emphasis. I'm less interested, in general, in the GM who says "Your character feels fear and runs from the Black Knight!" than the GM who simply creates the character, stats and rolls on the table, in such a way as to ensure that I cannot beat the character in order to force me to resolve the plot in the way he wants (in this example, I think not illusionism).

So I think that 'Force' as a term (and illusionism, which is problematic because it is both a technique and a mode of play and means different things in both cases) actually confuses some discussions (and man, did it confuse discussions I was in).

But I would say this: if we assume that the GM is allowed to generate bangs and still allow for thematic, player-driven play, then we have to acknowledge that the shape of that play is still largely shaped by the GM. The question is as imporant as the answer, IMO--and if the GM is posing most/all of the questions--and can follow up one question with another, that's an awesome amount of control over the narrative and the direction of the story.

In that sense, while not "illusonism" or "force," I think it is reasonable to say that bangs represent a powerful tool for GM authorial input into the game and may even constitute a form of story control depending on how the participants wish to define such a thing.

-Marco
* Ron suggests there are sneaky ways to do this manipulatively. I'm not sure what those are or what that would look like--Ron? Maybe you can expound on that?

Posted By: Judson Lester
But the Forge definition of Force is different, even though there's some overlap.

Makes me sad, if only because I'm a huge fan of the con, and how it applies to gaming. :) So it goes.

-Rob D.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyhow is the GM sending thugs at me not affecting my significant thematic choice to resolve the problem without violence?

... the GM isn't ...

Okay, either Shiv is sending bodyguards at you, or the GM is, to block the PLAYER. Which is it? Because Shiv sending bodyguards after the player -- that's the game, man, and it doesn't in any way detract from the awesome of your choice. The *GM* sending thugs after your character is him blocking you.

If you're in the former situation, you sit down with the GM and say "so is there a way I can do this, or is Shiv just totally unreachable, they way he lives?" If you're in the later, you sit down with the GM and say "dude, what the fuck's up?"

Now, in your example, I sense a good amount of GM-dickery, and start to agree with Ron a little, but that's my take on it.

It's a decent example--but I'm not sure I agree with it.

1. In the hard-force example so long as the GM will actually start rolling dice for the PC, that's fine. I agree: Force.

2. In the "sneaky" example, though, I have some problems. I remember an example of a GM framing a character in a horror game to a graveyard. In the graveyard, there's an attack by a ghoul. Now: it is probably possible that with sufficiently paranoid tactical play the horror-player could get into the graveyard in such a way as to not be attacked by the ghoul (but it's not clear how). Otherwise, the attack happens: the ghoul will not negoitiate and while the player might be able to escape, I would not presume it is "all good."

Rather, I would presume that in the functional-framing example, an attack with no clear way out is still possible and still valid.

I'm not sure that the GM in the third example is necessarily more committed to player-choice than the second. He may just be using different langauge assuming the GM in the second. If the third GM blocks the character's attempt to escape ("Well, you go for the door--but hey, the guy rolled a 24 Initiative!") then I don't know it's different at all (unless the difference lies in the mind of the GM).

Now, if the idea is that as the player continues to try to run (taking the hit from the 24 Init guy to keep going) and the GM will continue to invent obstacles to keep him in the room, I can see it being manipulation. Certainly.

But even then I'm not sure I'd call it Force. If the player decides to simply get beat-up/killed, he may be able to "force" the pacificist outcome as well (with the same power, even: threatening the death of the power and the end of the game*).

-Marco
* It may be that the game will go on without the player--but that's not always a given. I've seen games stop because a PC got slaughtered. I've seen players use that to negoitiate in games with GMs who wanted to keep the game going. I wouldn't call this "Player Force," however.

And I'll chime in that this discussion hasn't been about my original post for some time. I know what a bang is. I know that the GM isn't invested in how the player reacts once the bang happens. My point was that the GM is invested in getting the player to the damn bang in the first place. I'm really, really, profoundly tired of being told what a bang is and what an entire illusionist game looks like from a bird's-eye view. If anybody wants to go back and read the OP, I might be interested in discussing the topic. I'm not interested in rehashing the definition of bang again.

Holy, this is throwing off a lot of heat.

Joshua: If I understand your question right, you're asying "don't I need to indulge in Force in order to pose the question?" To which I respond with another question: "are you overriding other decisions which your or the players regard as thematically important in order to get to the question?"

If the answer is "yes", you're not playing a "pure Bang" type of game, you're playing "Bangs-with-Illusions", where you have stretches of Illusionism guiding the characters from one Bang to another. (If the "destination Bangs" are designed in response to decisions made at earlier Bangs, then that's one thing, but if you are pushing the players from predetermined Bang to predetermined Bang then, er, you're not using Bangs at all.)

If the answer is "no", you're playing pure Bang style.

To engage with your DitV example of a man walking into town to find an old friend falling out of a window at him: plonking the character on a road going into town, and having the house his friend falls out of on that road, isn't using Force, it's posing the "opening question" (which is inherently going to require a bit more GM input than usual unless the character is following up a Kicker, or a previous Bang, or whatever). However, you would be using Force if you let him get into town, make a decision about where he wanted to go, and then had his chum fall on him anyhow, because you'd be effectively ignoring his decision and going with your pre-planned event.

So, this is a Bang:

Context -> Event -> Decision

(Context: "Here I am walking into town."
Event: "Holy smokes, that's Fred falling out that window!"
Decision: "I swear by all that's holy, I will not leave this town until I avenge you Fred!")

Force doesn't come into play because you are not meddling with previous Decisions of the player in order to get the Context you need for the Event. The next Bang will come along when the Context produced by the player's Decision leads to the Event the Bang is structured around.

This is Illusionism:

Context -> Decision -> Event

(Context: "Here I am, in the middle of town."
Decision: "Think I'll swing by the barber's and get a haircut."
Event: "Hey, Fred's falling out of that window!")

Force has been used here in order to plunk down the Event right after the player's Decision, regardless of what it was. If the player had gone to the barber and gotten chatting to him, found out that his friend was in town, and decided to go visit him, that would not be using Force - the player's decisions have established a new Context in which the Event you've planned for the Bang can happen.

Another thing: I get the impression, reading some of your responses, that you're wondering whether GMs can sneakily engage in Illusionism by posing a Bang in a particular way. I think that they can, but a) if they do it no longer qualifies as a Bang and b) a GM can pose a question to rule out certain solutions whilst still being open to any other answer the player comes up with.

In a situation where only one course of action is sensible, you've not got a Bang. You've only got Illusionism if you pretend to your players that there's a decision to be made there. If you're being particularly aggressive about the scene framing, this is precisely the sort of situation you wouldn't include in a game, although some players may prefer to play through it anyhow. ("Hey, just because there's only one path here doesn't mean I don't want to admire the view along it.")

In a situation where multiple course of action can be sensibly adopted, even if there's only two of them, in my view you still have a Bang - again, assuming that you don't pretend to the players there are more courses than actually exist. "I only have time to save one person - do I save the little girl or the President?" is an important thematic decision by anyone's standard. Furthermore, one thing I've learned is that if a GM thinks there's only two ways a situation can go, the players will come up with a viable third option. And again, I don't think it's Force to phrase a question in a way which restricts the number of viable answers, because Force is "deciding the answer" not "posing the question". (It would be Force to set up a situation which looks like a binary decision and then make one of the choices Clearly Wrong.)

Last point: while "I walk away from the situation and forget all about it" is always a legitimate answer, I kind of regard it as evidence that the Bang has failed. The point of a Bang is to provoke an important, thematic decision from the player character, and if the PC doesn't get involved in the situation the Bang presents then they're not deciding anything, they're abdicating responsibility.. (This isn't always the case, of course - choosing to spare the life of the man you've been hunting down for years is an important thematic decision, after all. Choosing not to chase after him in the first place would have been an abdication.)

Your DitV example highlights this for me - sure, the PC could very well have just walked away from the corpse of his friend like a cold-hearted bastard, but then, er, he'd be a cold-hearted bastard. Presumably, the player decided that his character was not that kind of guy, and had him act accordingly. In this case, making the guy important to his PC wasn't using Force, it was just sensible Bang construction. There is a certain onus on the GM to make sure that Bangs are actually interesting enough to merit the characters' attention, after all.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyDone now.

Err, just a point of order and all: Folks CAN still post to this discussion. There's no "Thread's Closed" here, no locking of non-admin threads. Joshua opened it and I guess he got what he was looking for out of it and hence slapped the "Closed" label on it, and I guess people should feel encouraged to take any followups to another thread if they want to and all.

There's nothing wrong with politely requesting people take further discussion to new threads and the like, but there's no self-closing threads here.

Edit: And thus I'm changing "[Closed]" (which is the tag when a topic is closed via the forum tools) and changing it to a softer "(Done)".

Thanks!
-Andy

Posted By: Judson LesterTo be honest, I personally don't find either the narrow diagnostic (from the Forge Glossary) "force" definition, or the broad civics-y colloquial definition very useful. But I do like using the magic-trick version, because then it's a trick you can teach to other GMs, maybe even put it in an advice section somewhere, and talk about when it's useful, and when it is and isn't okay to use.

Lemme just toss in an Amen. Magician's force is too potent a tool to _not_ be in every GM's toolbox, whether they intend to use it or not.

-Rob D.

Posted By: LxndrThere's no implicit "ah, I have this Bang, therefore I must guide play to get this Bang out there" in the process as I understand it.

Yes. That is my understanding as well, and how I use the tool, and why I disagree with the idea that the GM is moving events, ouija-board style, to 'get' to a prepped Bang.

I never meant to imply that anyone didn't understand the definition of Illusionism or Bang -- it's just that, based on my use of Bangs, I don't see where illusionism or Force is used to 'get' to a Bang -- it's like saying I'm trying to steer a hiking trip to the point where I can 'get' to something in my pocket... I mean, it doesn't *matter* where we go or what we do -- I can pull whatever that item is out of my pocket whenever I want... but I'd be better served if I waited until (or if) we get to a point in the hike where whatever's in my pocket is actually useful.

Apologies if my chiming in wasn't helpful.

Continued from above...

Now, different groups are going to have different rates of acceptability. My groups are quite lenient, because I may only present them with one real bang every two sessions of IRC play. Sometimes less. What often saves play is that players will create bangs for each other spontaneously. Last session, using a lot of director stance related authority, Adrienne decided that the Dueling club that Fred's character had joined, was run by a man who was the brother of a man who her character had been involved in murdering many years previous. Her character and Fred's are married. So when her character revealed this information to his character, suddenly Fred is hit with this huge bang about how his character will react. He had his character become melancholy, saying, "I never do anything right." Which is, in some ways, very radically off from what you might expect his character to do. So he got to be very thematically creative, and we all enjoyed it.

Now, I can't actually say that this was narrativism for Fred. Fred claims to channel this character, so, for him, it may have been the "obvious" thing to do, and he was simply satisfying a sim agenda. I'm not too concerned, personally. I think he got to satisfy some creative agenda either way, and the revelation to the rest of we players as to what Okhfels is now like with his wife was fun to watch. So it created theme for us, and suited our narrativism agenda just fine.

OK, so there's my Actual Play example.

The point is that Adrienne used a lot of authority that players in other games often do not have (there's nothing in HQ to suggest that they should have this sort of authority - we've just agreed that these techniques are all valid coming from my suggestion that we use them). And she created a situation that gave Fred a thematic choice.

The flip side of the coin on failed bangs are "overrun bangs." Yes, in using his authority, a GM can actually miss an opportunity for a bang, and manipulate the situation such that it eliminates this potential bang. In that case, the player may feel that Force has been used. Indeed, technically it has been used. So, yes, sometimes force (even the Ron/Mike definition) is used in setting up bangs. Heck, in some cases this may even be intentional. I may well overrun some small bang, in my rush to get to another that is much larger and which seems more fun or important to me.

As a GM, I have to estimate the value of each and every bang. And, as a human, I'm going to fail. A lot. There is one technique by which this can be greatly ameliorated, however. Allow players to challenge your authority when this happens. "Hey, let's go back a bit, to where my character has to decide whether or not to even go to the tavern." I think most of my players are aware that this is kosher, and will do it if they see me overrunning some bang that they want to play out. In this way we share "control" of situation and create bangs collaboratively, by getting the player input on what they do consider to be important bangs.

Heck, when I say, "Hey, anybody got an idea for a scene?" what I'm largely saying is, "I don't have any strong bangs prepared...can anybody come up with a situation to have the characters in that is likely to lead to a bang?" Even if the scene set-up isn't directly a bang itself, it's often a flag (or even flag-set) that points towards the sort of bang that the player wants. So even more collaboration there.

Here's an interesting thing. In Sorcerer, one assumes relatively short arcs of play. Compared to, say, the 60+ session arcs that I've been running in HQ. So the text suggests that you'll need to always refresh your bangs when they're used. What I've found is that after a character has been in a couple dozen sessions, you can stop planning entirely. Oh, I think about things to throw at characters, but I find just going over the situation in my head is plenty enough prep. The bangs that I create these days for long running characters, I just come up with on the spur of the moment. And, again, not very often. Because between me hitting the PC with bangs, the other players hitting the PC with bangs, and the player of the PC hitting their own character with bangs, and the players and I collaborating on setting up situation to lead to bangs, I only have to do a relatively small part of the work.

Continued again below....

Mike, that just about sums up everything I was getting at. Thanks. ;)

Posted By: Rob DonoghueJust to clarify, I was apparently altering the forge-official definition of force rather than the defintion of bang, but I'm ok with that. :)

-Rob D.

And I still like "hijack" to mean what the Forge Glossary defines Force to mean. Cuz force is too useful in terms of "the authority that the GM wields" and "a clever magicians trick that every GM should know."

Posted By: rossYes, but each side more strictly defining their terms they became clear. One of the hardest issues for me as an indie-games idiot is that people throw around a lot of jargon and are generally huffy when everyone doesn't "get it". This is most true on the Forge, but somewhat true here. As terms are introduced they need to be defined. Right now that means, generally, in each thread.

In my opinion.

I'll go you one better: if a concept is important enough to need a name, and anyone makes it clear by misuse they don't get what the term is supposed to mean, maybe we should consider coming up with a new name for the concept.

Oh, and I've complete got your back on huffiness as an issue.

Posted By: Judson LesterI'll go you one better: if a concept is important enough to need a name, and anyone makes it clear by misuse they don't get what the term is supposed to mean, maybe we should consider coming up with a new name for the concept.

My favorite example of this is the use of the term cinematic in RPGs dating from about 1989. The first time I heard the term I thought it was used as the antithesis of of what we call gamism -- again, I thought. What the author was really trying to describe was a reaction to the term romanticism. To this day cinematic is used everywhere by people who clearly have no idea of any real meaning or definition of the word.