Jonathan, consider use of Fan Mail in PTA: you spend Fan Mail on conflict you care about, so if you run up into that fight with the big bad, but you want to lose, you don't spend Fan Mail and don't tap Edges/Connections and you rely only on your Screen Presence. In many situations, that is very close to buying the loss you wanted. Additionally, since you tend to roleplay right up to the decision point in the conflict, you can "play it to the hilt" and then only ask for your one or two cards.

However, I think the thing you're after is better expressed in stakes, and I think what you may be groping for is more complicated stakes. If there was, for instance, always three pairs of stakes in any conflict, and the conflict resolution determined each of them in a discrete but related manner? For example: lightsaber fight. Stake A: Jedi Defeats Sith/Sith Defeaths Jedi. Stake B: Hostages Escape/Hostages Don't Escape. Stake C: Sith Cuts off Jedi's Hand/Jedi Remains Intact. Now if you as a player had to spread your plot-resources out among those three sets of stakes and resolve them all concurrently, you could go for freeing the hostages and maybe defeating the Sith at the probable cost of your hand, or you could defeat the Sith first and foremost, keep your limbs together, and assume the hostages can be freed after the sith is defeated. (Whether your resources are used straight or turn into dice or whatever is a matter of specific implementation.) Hm. Sounds like Capes.

JBR, your ideas fascinate me and I want to subscribe, etc.

Three sets of stakes, non-mutually exclusive, sounds like an interesting space to explore.

This discussion is relevant to my current project, Acts of Desperation, which follows a 5-act structure. An explicit part of the structure is that in Acts 3 and 4 the protagonists are basically getting pasted. They have to make tough choices, give up things that are valuable to them etc. in order to make it to the triumph in Act 5.

I'm taking a three-pronged approach. Firstly, I have a kind of partial GM called the Opposition who provides pain for the protagonists.

Secondly, I lay out the 5-act structure and say "this is what should be happening in each Act, if you're succeeding too much at the wrong time here are some suggestions on how to make things worse", and instructing all the players to collaborate on coming up with complications.

But thirdly, what I'm attempting, and I may not succeed, is to build some of the creation of adversity into the system (which I think may be a good general answer to the concerns you raise about player-created adversity). My current approach is to set up the dice mechanic such that if you succeed a lot, you start failing, but if you fail a lot, you start succeeding. But I suspect I'll have to do something else as well.

I was suddenly reminded, while reading this thread, that Ron has said that in Sorcerer you don't roll dice to decide what happens when I am in conflict with you, you roll dice only when two characters in the fiction are in conflict.

If you secretly want your character to fail? So? It isn't about what you want, it is about what your character wants. If we both want out characters to win? Then it's much like interpersonal conflict, but its not really about us, its about what is happening in the fiction. If we both want out characters to lose and one must win? Well hell, that's hot shit because now the story is going to go in a different way than what we wanted.

Outside that, I have a question -- the Exalted game you describe. Where did the not fun come from? I mean, if everyone is really as excited and invested and into it as they sound like they are (AWESOME!!) then where is the not fun? Is it because they really weren't that excited, because they really wished something else would happen?

I mean, I have trouble seeing where if I'm playing a game and everyone is honestly, down to their bone, so jazzed about everything happening that they never have any reason to want anything different to happen, where that becomes not fun. Is it because it stops feeling like a game? Because there isn't any adversity between players? And why, then, do you need adversity between players?

Also, why would a player have to solve their own adversity in that situation? Couldn't you set up adversity (AWESOME!) for someone else who then resolves it (AWESOME!)? So that the whole 'set up and resolve your own' issue doesn't count? Is it because you were doing everything as a group, and so "our own" rather than "your own" came to dominate the way you handled all adversity?

I ask so many questions because this is some hot shit. I've long felt that there is both an over-reliance upon and under-understanding of the way that adversity works in the levels of game, story, and social arena (which are three very different levels that we constantly and mistakenly conflate), and so I think there is some real meat here.

Jonathan,

You said: "But that also leads to weird situations when characters can fail when all the players agree they should succeed"

So its a situation where the mechanics lead the story more towards the "other" end of the I/other spectrum? As in "it isn't my story, or your story. Sometimes it isn't even "our" story -- it is simple "the story."

Because I think that is the point of play in a lot of those games. I used to have a narrative writing prof whose favorite quote was "No surprise for the author, no surprise for the reader." So those systems are ways of getting you to be surprised by the story even when you both thought you knew where it was going. It's pretty much the band that Vincent was talking about in his essay on anyway about those who want to know what kind of story they're telling before they start vs those who want to be honestly surprised by the story at the end.

Edit: http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=259 -- link to the Vincent thing I was talking about

Posted By: JonathanWaltonPaul: However, if you set stakes that you're willing to give up, I find that it destroys the power of resolution, because they don't feel like sacrifices. If I want my character's hand to get chopped off, then choosing it as one of the negative stakes is weird, because then OF COURSE I let that one fail and focus on the other two. There's no hard choices to make after the dice are rolled.

Jonathon, that's just plain bad stake-setting. I thought one of most useful things that came out of the conflict res thing is the idea that a conflict is only a conflict if we want it to be a conflict. If you want your hand to be chopped off, and I want your hand to be chopped off, then fine, it's chopped off! It's Vincent's "say yes or roll the dice". You just said "yes", where's the conflict?

In a recent-ish game of tMW, one of the ronin said, "I want to seduce that woman-spirit". I said, "I have no problem with that---But!... If you do, I want her to bewitch you." The player didn't want that, so we rolled to resolve the bewithing, not the seducing [edit] the seducing was just a given [/edit].

This idea is kinda fundamental to conflict res.

I think an issue of confusion here is players like defining the arena of conflict, but not the conflict itself. Again, if I may bring up tMW, Fates (and I'm talking about the stuff the player actively makes up, not the description on the card) don't define conflict, they define arenas of conflict. So if I narrate that my father has an allegiance with the Witch, that's not defining a conflict, that's saying that I want some sort of father/son conflict.

Are you following me?

Jonathan,

Cool. So let me see if I can get at a part of what you're wanting. You want a system that lets you tell the story you want to tell, coperativly with other players, that still manages to make it difficult for (Players/Characters/both?) to get what they want all the time in order to build a sense that you've earned the story you wanted to tell/story you ended up telling? and that doesn't use resolution based on disagreement between players about what the story should be as the primary mode of resolution and drama formation?

Tell me all the places that I'm wrong, and maybe I'll be able to shoot you back some ideas. (Because, you know, Mo would love a game like that, I'm thinking.)

Firstly and most importantly, I have to mock Brand for mispelling "our" as "out" not once, but twice. Haw haw!

Secondly, and to the point, I was thinking about Otherkind as I wrote my prior response, but Otherkind manipulates broad categories of outcomes rather than specific stakes. Jonathan, is it specific, concrete things that the players/GM are fighting over that you want, or would rolling Otherkind dice and having the GM tell you your guy loses a hand satisfy what you're looking for?

Fan mail isn't the solution to what you want, no, but I think it may be something of a sign post. One of the bits I was getting at was the division between character effort and player interest, and how they are represented. Character effort is played out in narration; player interest is played out in the number of cards you take. If you wanted to heighten that dynamic, you might allow players to even take "negative cards" so they could intentionally screw themselves (and prevent the GM from doing so to prevent the double-reveal problem you propose).

Actually, I have a clarification question, Jonathan: are you looking for all that tension and excitement in the narration and the things that are described happening, or do you want that tension and excitement in the mechanics that control what's happening? Cause I can't quite see how those things are interrelating in your head. Do you want a situation where the players are trying hard to 'win' but take losses and turnabouts in the process and they feel "right" to the player's aesthetic sensibilities?

Joshua RamaGupta,

Fuck you.

Did I spell that write?

Jonathan,

But if you get your surprise from what the others add to the fiction can't that lead to you getting into a position where, if you want their story and they want theirs, that whole "interpersonal conflict" issue raises its head. Or, would you, when confronted with someone doing something surprising to the story that is really not what you thought should happen, let them have it because in so doing they give you the surprise.

In other words, are we back to the whole "I want a game with no way to say "no"" issue?

Because I think there is part of the crux of the issue somewhere around there. If you want resistance then someone, somewhere, has to be able to block or redirect. So if you are getting your surprise from others, maybe you don't want to be able to block them. And if they are getting their surprise from you, maybe they don't want to be able to block you.

So where, then, do we get the ability to make it feel like we aren't all just working together when we actually are? That leads us back to Breaking the Ice or Shadows Over Camelot, and mechanically imposed adversity. But, as you point out, that can lead to the mechanics making both you and I wrong about what the story is going to be about.

As for the players/characters split, that seems like another I/other thing. You, yourself, want to feel invested in the story via the mechanism of the game mechanics making it difficult for you to acheive something in the same way that the rules of the world/story make it difficult for your character to achieve something. So it isn't about what happens to the character, or the story, or even what happens to the game in a real way. It is about what the adversity to you makes you feel vis-a-vis the adversity faced by your charcter/story element.

Which means... I dunno. Are we dealing with a need to make a self-imposed illusion of adversity where there isn't any?

Posted By: JonathanWaltonthe shot-framing system I was working with earlier...

Ooo, shiny. Consider it stolen.

I mean... um... your influence is gratefully acknowledged.

Jonathan,

Okay, I am becoming clearer. I hope.

I think that example conflict sounds mighty cool, and the system mighty neat.

But I don't see it adding any real adversity. Its still me losing and you winning. I can say whatever I want to and look as cool as I want in my 4 shots... but if it isn't going to make a difference, it isn't going to make a difference. Its still just illusion of me making it harder when we all know it doesn't, really. The only way to make there be tension is if in my shots I have a chance to change something you might not want changed.

Dogs style fallout wouldn't even work for that, as you get to chose your own fallout. Of course, if you just twisted that around... You take fallout that I chose? Would that violate the "but we don't want things to turn out in ways we don't want" clause? Because we know how the conflict is going to end, but not how much price will be involved nor what the price is. I get to surprise you with what it is, and we both get to be surprised by how much there is.

Or, even if we set what it was before, we could both be surprised by how much, and perhaps I can have some say over how it comes about? Like we know your wife is going to have an affair before we roll and that the fallout will be that you stop trusting other people. We use the system to shot out how it happens, and I brutalize you with the fact that she actually has an affair with your Circle's Zenith -- and the fallout is massive. Not only does your wife have an affair (not adversity, we knew it was going to happen) but it happens with a friend, and not only does it stop you from trusting people, but it causes problems in your circle too.

Would that work?

Yes, is this a "we know going in how this will turn out, but not what it will cost" thing?

< minirant > "cost" is only one aspect of significance. The question "What cost are you willing to pay to get what you want?" is also already well addressed by Sorcerer and Dogs. I'm way more interested in seeing new games that ask "Why do you want what you want?" or "What made you want that?" or "How is what you want not what you need?" and so on. < / minirant >

Quick suggestion: It's not really about personal cost. It's more about "why does this matter?" or "why do we care?" Which is why I think it doesn't necessarily matter that the undead pirate king can't change his fate. He can still change what his fate MEANS by the way in which it occurs. Does my character kill a heartless monster or a noble hero in his own right? Does the pirate king's ghost haunt my character for the rest of eternity? Maybe my character once knew the pirate king in a previous incarnation. Etc. Some of these might be considered "costs" but some of them are clearly not.

So, are we talking about systematizing meaning?

Because, while I'm sure it could be cool, something in my brain went screaming into the night at the thought.

I don't know if this is systematizing meaning so much as Fruitful Void, kinda. Like, with the pacing mechanic I posted earlier, the open question is clearly "What does this mean? Why do we care?" But the mechanics don't determine that. The players do.

Even in Shreyas and JBR's examples, I don't think they're "determining player interpretations of game events" which would seem to be the big scary part of "systematizing meaning," as well as downright impossible. I think they're just giving different degrees of narrative weight and consequence to different aspects of a conflict.

Shreyas' example sounds a lot like the tomb is playing Mridangam with the players. I find this amusing.

JH: Does said awesomeness have a title yet, so I can reference it by name as I salivate?

(I made a thing inspired by this thread. Please add to it. Shreyas' talk and others made me imagine a game with a deck of But cards.)

Jonathan, I think this is an incredibly important thread. It's getting at some of the real crux of what RPG play is about.

But it sounds to me like you're asking for a paradox. That is, if you're still not thinking that the pacing mechanic is perfect, I'd understand that, because what's happening is that you're right back to the original problem. It seems to me. To put it into some context, Paul's quote was in relation to the game "Chalk Outlines" in which the player created his own adversity. I think the problem isn't so much that the player creates the adversity as that, in doing so, he can select two options that he wants to see. Meaning that there's no tension.

This is in part because of two things. First, it's because there's nothing to lose. The player is going to get his way A, or his way B. Tension comes from actual player risk. In drama, it comes from not knowing if the protagonist will win or lose in the current effort.

Second, this sort of stake setting is the sort of problem that Ron and I have been saying lately is problematic because it's "playing before you play." That is, you say, "We're going to get to X" and then you head there, get to it, and think, "Well, gee, we really didn't create anything that we didn't create before.

The whole "how do we get there?" or "what's also risked along the way?" can be interesting creatively, but if you make the destination known, you're just filling in blanks, or dodging the main issue.

Basically you're asking to have your cake and eat it too. You want to always get where you want to go, but also have that be a source of tension. I really don't see how that can happen.

Yes, sometimes the game tells you that the character failed, when you want to win, or win when you want to fail. And that's a good thing, because it means the tension is real. If there's no real risk to the player about getting to see what they want, then everything else is skirting the issue.

Again, this is a good thing, and what we expect from drama. We want the protagonist to win, but we're OK with the story making him fail, because we know that it's part of the dramatic cycle, and that it'll make the events of the story have more meaning.

This is why Ron says that resolution in these cases are a "Dramatic Springboard." They don't give you what you want. They give you material to work from.

Here's a key fact. Resolution systems don't create theme. At all. Resolution of conflict is about the dramatic tension of surprise. But the dramatic tension that comes from "What will the character decide?" - that comes from the player making decisions for his character. Often ones that lead him into the resolution system.

This is key. Because it's the resolution system that then decides if the character "pays" for what he's decided to do. Sometimes it rewards him, some times it punishes him for what he's decided. Being able to decide that before hand...yeah, that reduces the tension to nothing.

At the risk of people thinking I'm pimping by bringing up my own game, what you have above in terms of a pacing mechanic is quite a lot like Universalis complications, with the solve exception that in Universalis you don't decide before hand what's cool to happen. All the resolution system does is to decide who gets to decide what happens. The players, being the creative sorts you note them to be, then decide on fun stuff, and you're surprised. This was, in fact, the single most surprising thing to myself and Ralph. We thought that if the players were creating their own adversity as a group, and resolving it themselves as a group, that there'd be no surprises. But, since there's more than one person making the action up, in fact, it's always surprising.

The key is to simply put fate into the hands of some other participant than yourself, and to let them make a decision that you may or may not like. The apprehension about the outcome is where the player tension comes from. Because we have methods for ensuring that players are trying to narrate in ways that are pleasing to the other players, the results tend to be ones that we appreciate anyhow. But, until we actually see the results, you have the tension.

I completely agree with you that the idea that it's a conflict between player A's interests, and Player B's interests is bunk. And, yeah, players do want their characters to fail - that may even be their goal in putting their character in a situation where failure may occur. But that's not the same thing as saying that players want to know what's going to happen to their characters before hand.

I think the essential act of RPG play is in coming up with the result of the current action on the spot. What does my character do? What happens when my character is in danger? I recall one design long ago, well thought out (can't remember the designer), but where the idea was that you created the entire storyline up front, and then just went through the paces of filling in the "how did we get from scene one to scene two." And I recall my ideas being somewhat incohate at the time on the subject, but protesting that I knew that playing the game would blow. Because I don't want to know what's going to happen next.

Now, is there some activity that's essentially collaborative fiction writing? Yeah, and I suppose some might like it. But it's not a RPG, or at least not what I signed up for at the door.

And, I'd hazard from what you've said, not what you signed up for either.

I think that if you want to give players the power to create the interesting things that they come up with, that this is trivial to do - there are lots of systems that simply do it by saying "You're turn to narrate now." Take the Pool, for instance. We don't give the right to narrate to the player one moment, and to the GM the next, because there's some tension to be found in conflicts of interest between those players, but simply so that we're not always resolving our own action, and, more importantly, because we don't know who will resolve the action. So we don't know what'll happen.

Seems really simple to me on that level. But you guys have debated this pretty deeply above. So I'm willing to accept that maybe I'm not seeing some element of the debate. If so, let me know where I've gone wrong.

Mike

Okay, I don't want to dwell on the shot system if it's not that exciting to people, but I think, Mike, that it does the same thing as Universalis. It determines who narrates, but in a more complex way, not "you narrate the results of this conflict" but a back-and-forth pattern of freely narrating shots. What does my char have to go through to defeat the pirate king? Well, that's partially up to Brand to decide. Actually, you could argue that more if it is up to Brand to decide because he has 7 shots to my 5. There's plenty of room for surprises and extra costs in there, but it's partially a reaction to my feeling that outcomes should also be partially negotiated and not arbitrarily left up entirely to one person. Here, the outcome is still arbitrary, but negotiated.

Also, I tend to agree with Brand. Watching a lot of good movies or TV, you can anticipate how a scene's going to end, or at least the general character of it, right as it starts. Char A walks into a room with Char B, her ex-boyfriend. Boom, you can probably guess that things are not going to be good and you can use the things you know about the characters to guess some of the issues that might get brought up in the scene. Genre conventions help in this too. You're not watching for the outcome, which is largely predetermined, you're watching for the details, the little surprises. You're watching largely to see what you know is going to happen actually happen. It's that love of familiarity and predictability. We wanna see Buffy acting like Buffy or Spike acting like Spike. It makes us go "Oh, Buffy, why are you so X?" and giggle to ourselves.

I don't know, though, if discussing things in this abstract way is really going to get us anywhere, though I agree these issues are really important. Perhaps I'll try to do some actual play on IRC over the holiday weekend and post a transcript here. Because I wonder if we're really disagreeing or just talking past each other.

Hey Jonathan,

However, if you set stakes that you're willing to give up, I find that it destroys the power of resolution, because they don't feel like sacrifices.

So have the player choose whether the conflict is about 1) what the character wants to achieve, or 2) does the outcome have meaning. Choosing the former mandates that success or failure, the outcome is meaningful. Choosing the latter mandates the specific outcome, but lets the dice determine whether it's materially relevant.

Paul

Sure. Again, tension is not about win/lose. It's about just not knowing what's going to happen in terms of meaningful outcome.

Put another way, if your original system above is simply saying that we really don't care about whether or not the pirate gets beat, but only what happens along the way, then the conflict is not about beating the pirate. It's just hard to imagine that beating the pirate isn't an interesting question, or that failing wouldn't be potentially cool, too. But if that's what the system is about, that's just player framing a good conflict.

I was going to say this before, but thought it might confuse things to present this alternate side of things.

In any case, I'm of the belief that, with good enough mechanics, that a game can provide good results sans pre-determination of outcomes, even with players who don't play along well together. The easiest example is D&D. In D&D we don't know who's going to win when we start. And yet the system produces expected results that, even when failures, are generally acceptable to the players.

What happens is that people start trying to play wanting player control of story with a system like D&D, and then, predictably, the results provided by the system aren't good ones for that style. Often the response to this is illusionism. The response to illusionism can be that you have to have a system where you pre-plan the outcomes so that they're sure to be good ones. When you don't have to at all. All you need is a system that allows players the appropriate control of the outcome, instead of the system incentivizing something else, or informing the GM that he should do something else. And you get good outcomes.

Mike