Not signed in (Sign In)

Vanilla 1.1.9 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

Welcome Guest!
Want to take part in these discussions? If you have an account, sign in now.
If you don't have an account, apply for one now.

Games and Gaming: Hardcore Gamism and Dysfunction Within the Big "G"

Bottom of Page

1 to 80 of 105

  1. <
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. >
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 1
    Eric and I have been having a series of conversations lately about his preferred play style, partially in an effort on my part to understand where he's coming from. Eric's been a regular attender of SGBoston events for over a year now and we've had opportunities to socialize outside of gaming a fair bit. While I now find Eric's expertise and relatively unique views on competitive play to be refreshing and challenging as a player and designer, they were initially rather surprising and didn't see to interact very positively with my own background. But, since Eric's perspective brings up many issues for competitive / Gamist game design, I asked him if we could have a public discussion of these issues. I'm going to start by laying some things out and hopefully Eric will step in and help clarify.

    One of the folks who most clearly explains Eric's general approach to competitive play is David Sirlin, who summarizes the overall outlook in this article on Playing To Win.

    Sirlin has found that many would-be competitive players are restricted by "an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing." For example, certain effective combinations of moves are often labeled "cheap," when, in reality, they are integral to the way the game is balanced / designed, such as being able to throw an opponent who is blocking in Street Fighter. Or players might feel that it is somehow "wrong" or "unfair" to use the same effective tactic over and over again when their opponent seems unable to find a way to counter it. Sirlin finds this ridiculous:

    A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he’s again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic.

    Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.


    Sirlin discusses what high-level competitive play is like by invoking Yomi layers, where, as you go further and further up, have more and more complex interactions.

    Yomi 1: A knew what B would do.
    Yomi 2: B knew that A knew what B would do.
    Yomi 3: A knew that B knew that A knew what B would do.
    Yomi 4: etc.

    These high-level guessing games don't happen, though, if players are restricted by "imaginary" ideas about what kinds of tactics are fair game.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 2
    So, how does this translate into roleplaying? As Eric said yesterday:

    I use "gamist" as a term, but I always thought it was completely incoherent as a description of a monolithic group. Specifically, I think it was created by people who have never applied themselves sufficiently to win a serious tournament of a popular competitive game.

    ...Sirlin's notion of hardcore competitive play as a crucible of self-improvement that allows no excuses and makes no judgments other than success and failure is basically how I would like to approach every competitive game I play. I try to actually do so, but I sometimes can't due to what I perceive as bullshit social mores - and it's precisely in so-called competitive RPGs where this most often comes up, at least compared to, say, board games and video games.


    The problem is that, even in most Gamist-oriented play groups, Eric can't play as hard as he wants to without seeming like an asshole, since either the game or the social contract among the players isn't built to sustain the same kind of hardcore intensity as a chess tournament or Street Fighter championship. He's fairly adaptable and often tries to play competitive RPGs (or even more narrative roleplaying games with competitive elements) in a less intense way, but it's really grating for him and goes against his natural instincts.

    For example, we had this recent conversation about Dogs in the Vineyard:

    ME: In some ways, the pure Gamism you describe is interesting to me but I'd never really think of looking for it or expecting it from an RPG. I might find it distracting from the other roleplaying aspects, unless i was playing a character who was also tactically minded.

    ERIC: I have a strong tendency in tactical games to internalize basic rules precepts as the actual rules of the world. For example, a dragon "ought" to do this or that in fantasy literature, but in DnD the rules tell us what dragons actually do in this world. So, the lethality or safety of combat, the likelyhood of surviving a fall, and so on - because of my play to win background, I abandon my own preconceptions and embrace what the game says about these things very quickly. Hence my confusion over what the "point" of Dogs is. The game tells you that you are God's enforcer on earth, with divine license, right? So... I believe that and go from there.

    ME: And there's no problem with that, mechanically, you just end up with a limited picture of Dogs' range.

    ERIC: Exactly. Dogs becomes very confusing, because I have trained myself for years to allow no tension between what I ought to do as defined by the rules and what I ought to do as a good citizen. The game always wins, save when it might conflict with the standard code of sportsmanlike conduct. Even then, the game wins if expressly constructed to trump a rule of sportsmanship. For example, Baseball allows me to plow into the catcher when running home in hopes of him dropping the ball. So I do. Unless that particular game has a game-specific rule changing that. Dogs not only allows me to shoot anyone in the face to get my way, but tells me that I have divine license to do so. Plus, it's mechanics give me strong incentives to team up with others... So, my overwhelming first impulse is to do that. After playing indie games for some time, I can hop into another paradigm without too much trouble, but it always feels awkward if the game gives strong incentives for one thing but is "about" something contrary.

    ME: Right, but that tension is what Dogs is about. The mechanics let you shoot people, but the game's about... "So, what's worth shooting people over?"

    ERIC: But the game's a pretend world in which I apparently have infinite divine right to do that, so, in that context, "anything." I'm a bit too good at paradigm switching for the tension to be natural.

    ME: Right, the pretend world overrules normal paradigms. You don't have that "Omigod, you just shot someone for no good reason" thing.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 3
    Ultimately, it's not that Eric needs overwhelming complexity in competitive games. What he really needs is emergent complexity, so the rules could be as simple as chess or Go... or Agon, which he enjoys much more than some of the other stuff we've tried. In fact, some games he find to be degeneratively complex, in that, if you play them too hard, the strategic complexity actually decreases, because the options get narrowed down to a few optimal ones until there's little point in playing. You're choosing between one or two options.

    Perhaps more fundamentally, he also needs a play contract that enables him to play the game in the manner of hardcore competitive way that he wants to and someone willing to provide tactically interesting opposition. I can imagine Eric finding a degree of fun in seeing how quickly and thoroughly he can decimate inadequate opposition, but the high Yomi levels only happen if someone's actually willing to push back in a significant way, not just throwing some kobolds on a map and pushing them around. That kind of "button mashing" play is only amusing for so long.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 4
    NOTE: Can we avoid comments of the "clearly Eric shouldn't be playing Dogs" variety? Maybe he should and maybe he shouldn't, but that's not really the point.
    •  
      CommentAuthorMax Higley
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 5
    This is fascinating to me in a lot of ways, but particularly because of your observations about emergent complexity. While I do not identify as someone as someone with a hardcore Gamist preference, the thing about emergent complexity seems to apply to nearly every sort of preferred play style. Certainly, I want my narrative premises to be addressed through situations that emerge as the result of a number of factors. Similarly, those that I've seen approach play from a simulation angle seems to want to see what happens when multiple elements interact, and they want the results to be both plausible and somewhat unpredictable.

    It seems like there's a lot more thought that might be put into how to encourage emergent behaviors of different sorts, and also into how to achieve a delicate balance on the knife edge between too little and too much complexity.
  6.  # 6
    Is "perhaps roleplaying games are wasted effort for him" a valid tack, then?

    I'm asking because it seems to me that Eric is not deriving much enjoyment from the fictional motifs present in roleplaying games. The overwhelming majority of rpgs, however, are all about the Exploration. (So much so that the Big Model makes that the definition of roleplaying, even.) And that includes gamism-supportive designs; something like D&D actually derives a majority of its fun, not from winning the GM who is playing the dragon, but actually having this imaginary character in whose guise you can win the dragon. But if you're not interested in the feel and issues of winning a dragon, but are just interested in having a level playing field for tactical play with no significance attached to the imaginary motifs, then it seems to me that you're just wasting effort in constructing those motifs in the first place.

    Now, I spent several days playing 4th edition D&D with my younger brother Jari just now. Jari is not a very active roleplayer, and he wasn't even interested in playing the D&D roleplaying game. He just wanted to play around with the tactical game, make some broken characters and see if the Irontooth encounter in Shadowfell is actually survivable with 5 1st level characters when the opposition is played optimally. (It seems that it's not, barring luck, by the way.) I myself, on the other hand, am only mildly amused by the tactical side of D&D - I have better games for tactical skirmish combat, what I want is the fictional challenge, not the rules-challenge. So I guess I can see what you have here with Eric, we have that sort of tension with Jari all the time when playing D&D - Jari is just playing the tactical game, while I'm myself mostly interested in the fictional challenge and the dynamic parts not served by boardgames.

    Why do rpgs have GMs and flexible rules? The original war-gaming answer is that the players want to engage with the fictional challenge, not the rules-challenge. If a player wants to reduce the fictional issues into nothing, though, it seems that some other form of game would serve them better. This is the case even when the player derives enjoyment from the aesthetics of the game, what boardgamers call "theme": something like Descent or Arkham Horror would serve up the same exciting fantasy/horror/whatever color that you get from rpgs, but with exact and impartial rules with no soft spots concerned with fictional realism or whatever. Thus I find that while we can fiddle with D&D together with Jari, I wouldn't recommend it to him as a fantasy skirmish game - Descent does that without requiring that annoying GM and his annoying limited-information non-codified challenges.

    To frame that as a question: does Eric actively want to play roleplaying games? Is he interested in the genre of some particular game, perhaps? Or would you say that it's all same to him?
    •  
      CommentAuthorndp
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 7
    I also know and have played with Eric, though I don't think I've talked to him about this nearly as much as Jonathan. Um, I'm sure you'll end up reading this Eric, so feel free to correct my impressions below, but I have a response to Eero's post from my own perspective....

    I just wanted to mention that Eric is totally fine playing games that have no strategic/tactical complexity to them, or that are completely mechanically transparent. For example, he's told me that he doesn't feel the kind of tension that Jonathan describes while playing Primetime Adventures, because the rules are dirt-simple and completely non-tactical. He seems to have a great time focusing on the fiction for those kinds of games, as far as I can tell.

    I'll also mention a time that I played Contenders with Eric (and Malcom Craig). Contenders has a strategic element, both in the resolution of boxing matches and in how you arrange scenes for yourself. Eric ended up getting a really good end for his character, because he immediately figured out the optimal way to go about choosing scenes and managing his characters stats; I don't really care about the strategic implications of my character choices, and that, combined with some really poor card luck, drove my character right into the ground. I recall that we had a good time playing it together, but I bet we were playing in a parallel style, where we were able to appreciate and enjoy the decisions made by the other player without it impinging on the fun we were personally having. Eric may be able to tell me whether my impression in that game was correct!
    • CommentAuthorThor O
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 8
    I realize that this is skirting perilously close to your request that we avoid it, but Dogs is deceptive. There's just enough game there to make you feel that you can game it. But none of it matters if you don't care about the fiction. The conflict rules only have bite in as much as you care about the fictional outcomes. Any player that doesn't care about the fiction can stomp all over everyone else and their fun.

    I suspect that games that deliver the type of experience Eric wants must be designed with the same sort of clear focus that the early Forge innovators brought to their narrativist-supporting designs. I don't know that anyone has really done it yet, though games like Rune and Agon are probably the closest (and possibly 4e from everything I've read, though I haven't had a chance to play it yet). Ralph seems to be heading that way with Blood Red Sands, and Mike Holmes has also been talking about something like this.

    That said, the question in my mind (and I don't have an answer as of yet) is how far can you go in this direction while it still makes sense for the game to be a role-playing game rather than some other type of game? My instinctual response is that a defining aspect of the role-playing game is caring about the fictional environment of play to some degree. If so, then it follows that at some point your choices in the game can (and probably should) be constrained by that fictional environment in some way. I dunno.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 9
    Posted By: Eero TuovinenTo frame that as a question: does Eric actively want to play roleplaying games? Is he interested in the genre of some particular game, perhaps? Or would you say that it's all same to him?

    I'm eating as I read this thread and ponder, but I wanted to toss out something right off the bat in response to this, because it's both a good question and an important point to make: I like playing roleplaying games, and I actively want to find and play "good" ones - ones that deliver an experience that resonates with me.

    Agon is great. Primetime Adventures is great. I was really impressed by Mist-Robed Gate, because I "exploited" the hell out of the game's mechanics and the results were actually a feature rather than a detriment.

    So, yeah, I find value in RPGs, but I want to be firing on all cylinders when I play.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 10
    I had almost the identical conversation with my buddy Dave just a couple weeks ago. He's deeply dissatisfied with RPGs, and we agree it's because what he needs/wants -- hardcore GM-generated tactical challenges, and a play style that supports that -- is radically at odds with the hardcore group-collaborated narrativist challenges we serve up around here. It was an interesting moment, because with just a little guidance he actually agreed that he does NOT want/like unexpected twists, thematic exploration, etc. Some of the stuff that's generated our best play -- stuff like getting your own character into trouble -- had become so alien to him that he felt like we were participating in a completely unrelated hobby.

    p.
  11.  # 11
    Aren't the Burning Whatever games supposed to support this kind of fun. Where everyone including the GM can take the gloves off and not feel like an ass. This is just from reading the books mind you, I've never got anyone to play the game yet so I could be off the mark.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 12
    IME the BIT/Artha system requires you be deeply invested in the fiction.

    p.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 13
    Thor: Your post is totally within bounds and I agree with everything you just said, including the stuff about when an RPG would be better off just becoming Descent or another color-heavy strategy game. Still, I imagine, like you say, that we can get a lot closer to it than indie games have in the past before we reach that point.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 14
    Note, I have yet to play Riddle of Steel with Eric and I'm deeply interested in how that would go. I imagine it would do a better job than a lot of games I can think of, at least in regard to supporting Yomi layers, to an extent. We'd have to play it a fair bit (or let Eric run the game theory probabilities on various tactics) to make sure it wasn't degenerative, though.
  15.  # 15
    I'm not sure the fiction investment is the thing since he's saying "Primetime Adventures is great"... wouldn't the system's design in BW/BE 'work' or at least be worth giving a shot?
    • CommentAuthorMark W
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 16
    Yikes. Drawn out of lurkerdom again.

    It seems to me that this breed of hardcore Step On Up may actually not really be addressable by standard Big Model methods. Much like in other CAs' "degenerate cases", the object of the Step On Up is not actually (a) in the fiction or (b) at the table. The player is competing principally against the structure of System itself. The parallel case for S-oriented play is the total world-oriented cause-and-effect player, who focuses solely on the fiction and wants to exclude system & people-around-the-table considerations; for N, it's face-stabbiness taken to the extreme, where play is principally instrumental and addressed toward making an emotional impact on fellow players.

    I would go so far as to say that happy Step On Up has to be addressed toward the shared content and the other players. It is not *just* competitive play, it is competitive play *of a socially-mediated fiction-game*.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 17
    Mark: I agree that this sort of dysfunction doesn't seem to be described adequately by the Big Model, but I'm not sure your description matches the whole picture. I mean, yes, the system is the medium by which players compete in this style of play, but Yomi layers don't happen unless someone else is on the other side of the dice from you, right? Tactically outwitting the game is moderately fun for Eric but, once he's done it, there's little incentive to continue doing it; he's already won and the game is, effectively, "broken / solved" for his purposes. But if there's someone else who keeps trying different tactics and finding work-arounds for previous approaches, the excitement continues. So this type of play requires other human beings; it is inherently social, but social in a different way than most people are used to.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 18
    I'd like to frame a particular concept before responding to Nathan here, regarding the first thing I do when I encounter a new game: I try to break it. For example, I try to find a "move" or set of actions that I can perform repeatedly and trivially to "win."

    Some games fall apart under this sort of analysis quite quickly - in RPGs, this most often occurs when the game is nominally about X but has a rules set that clearly tells me that doing Y is optimal. So I do Y over and over and over, with infinite patience, because I'm winning - and completely undermining X in the process. This is amusing for one or two plays, and then I find a new game.

    Some games stand up to this analysis, and remain standing forever. This is glorious, and such a game can hold my attention indefinitely if it does anything else interesting at all.

    Posted By: hamsterprophetI just wanted to mention that Eric is totally fine playing games that have no strategic/tactical complexity to them, or that are completely mechanically transparent. For example, he's told me that he doesn't feel the kind of tension that Jonathan describes while playing Primetime Adventures, because the rules are dirt-simple and completely non-tactical. He seems to have a great time focusing on the fiction for those kinds of games, as far as I can tell.

    True, but actually the rules are slightly tactical: the rules give me incentives for coming up with Edges and Contacts that are "fluffy" and intangible rather than concrete, since they are more easily applied to a situation - "Grandma's Memory" is a contact that always works, while "Bob the Arms Dealer" is tricky to use if I find myself locked in a closet on the space station. That's a feature, though, since those kinds of traits end to also be more tied to a character's personality or issues. The other tactic that's rewarded is "getting fanmail," which is the game's killer app and requires little more comment.

    But overall, you're dead on the mark: PtA is dirt simple and I just can't break it - the few rules are completely in line with the play experience the game's trying to provide, and it flows beautifully from what the rules tell me to do to game play that produces a coherent TV show. And so I love it. I've run lots of one-shots and a whole season, and I'll run it and play it more.

    You're also right that games that have literally no tactical complexity at all have often worked well for me, because I never have to labor under the delusion that these rules are going to stand up to being hammered on. I don't have to worry about whether the car's a lemon or not if we're walking.

    Posted By: hamsterprophet'll also mention a time that I played Contenders with Eric (and Malcom Craig). Contenders has a strategic element, both in the resolution of boxing matches and in how you arrange scenes for yourself. Eric ended up getting a really good end for his character, because he immediately figured out the optimal way to go about choosing scenes and managing his characters stats; I don't really care about the strategic implications of my character choices, and that, combined with some really poor card luck, drove my character right into the ground. I recall that we had a good time playing it together, but I bet we were playing in a parallel style, where we were able to appreciate and enjoy the decisions made by the other player without it impinging on the fun we were personally having. Eric may be able to tell me whether my impression in that game was correct!

    Yup, I had a good time, and I think you're impression is spot-on. Contenders worked for me because charting an optimal path through the rules lead to a coherent story, so the game didn't break - like you mentioned before, there were tactical choices, but they're so transparent that I can just see them and move on, and the game has a sort of parallel solitaire thing going on that isolates our choices from each other.

    I think that's a pretty neat feature, actually, since it lets us play our own ways and not drag each other down. One person can charge for the brass ring while the other wavers and flirts with disaster, and you can tell those stories at the same without a problem. That's hard to do if we're on a team or something and our choices get lumped together into an average.

    I strongly suspect that Contenders would get old for me after a while, because I'd just be making the same choices every time - but that's more like how a repetitive sitcom gets old. I'm still going to enjoy watching it in the meantime.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 19
    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonMark:I agree that this sort of dysfunction doesn't seem to be described adequately by the Big Model, but I'm not sure your description matches the whole picture. I mean, yes, the system is the medium by which players compete in this style of play, but Yomi layers don't happen unless someone else is on the other side of the dice from you, right? Tactically outwitting the game is moderately fun for Eric but, once he's done it, there's little incentive to continue doing it; he's already won and the game is, effectively, "broken / solved" for his purposes. But if there's someone else who keeps trying different tactics and finding work-arounds for previous approaches, the excitement continues. So this type of play requires other human beings; it is inherently social, but social in a different way than most people are used to.

    Nailed it.

    To elaborate a bit more: I used to play Street Fighter with a friend of mine a lot. We were talking about it one day, and he described telling a story through the fight - how doing this move rather than that communicates different things to me, his opponent, via the game. He's having a kind of conversation with me. I was baffled, because I usually forget that there's another human in the room when I play. I usually forget that I'm in the room, as well, and that a room exists at all. I play to improve myself - but I desperately need him there if I'm going to do that. I'm never going to have another peak experience where I break past my own limits and become something more without a strong, skilled opponent pushing back at me. By playing hard against me, my friend gave me the chance to do something profoundly valuable to me, even if I forgot he was there while it was actually going on.

    Paradoxically, I'm still aware of an opponent while this is going on, but it's an awareness abstracted from all the things I might normally associate with that particular person. I forget if I"m happy or annoyed with them, if they like chocolate or vanilla. But, at my best, I know whether or not they're going to do a tech-roll after a knockdown.
    • CommentAuthorThor O
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 20
    Posted By: Saint&SinnerI'm not sure the fiction investment is the thing since he's saying "Primetime Adventures is great"... wouldn't the system's design in BW/BE 'work' or at least be worth giving a shot?


    Maybe. It's hard to say. There's a lot of tactical meat in the games, but the pumping heart--the cycle between Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and Artha--is all driven by investment in the fiction.

    Also, many parts of the game, especially Advancement, push you to make suboptimal choices.

    Some tactically minded players love it. Some hate it.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 21
    Posted By: Thor Olavsrud...suspect that games that deliver the type of experience Eric wants must be designed with the same sort of clear focus that the early Forge innovators brought to their narrativist-supporting designs..

    I can certainly agree with that - I think we can all agree that clear and sharp focus is going to be a boon to any design project that seeks to accomplish a particular thing well, be it a game or a sports car.

    Posted By: Thor OlavsrudThat said, the question in my mind (and I don't have an answer as of yet) is how far can you go in this direction while it still makes sense for the game to be a role-playing game rather than some other type of game? My instinctual response is that a defining aspect of the role-playing game is caring about the fictional environment of play to some degree. If so, then it follows that at some point your choices in the game can (and probably should) be constrained by that fictional environment in some way. I dunno.

    There's a sort of hierarchy here: when what the rules support contradicts what the fiction supports, I side with the rules almost every time (I've occasionally been explicitly asked to go along with a fiction despite the rules, such as in playtests where the rules are known to be half-baked and still under heavy revision). I'm still interested in a good fiction, but I'm more interested in shedding my preconceptions and acting out of the consequences of the rules.

    When there is no conflict, I happily add further constraints according to the fiction.

    Games that are so arranged that I could potentially act in ignorance of the fiction, operating only based on rules incentives and support, and still contribute to the fiction coherently have my highest respect.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 22
    Eric, can I float something by you?

    So I was playing in this Riddle of Steel game set in Japan, where I was playing a heretical Buddhist nun who trained her peasant followers in stick-fighting. And she was operating out in the boonies of the rural provinces. But eventually she got the attention of the authorities, who sent some conscript soldiers after her, led by a moderately experienced mercenary thug, since they didn't see her as a huge threat.

    I'm fighting conscripts and doing pretty well, right? In TROS, the attacker declares how many dice from their limited pool they're using on an attack and reserves the rest for defending their opponent's counter-attack. So the conscripts have 10 dice, say, and frequently attack with 6 while keeping 4. I block with 8 of my 16 and keep the other 8 for beating the shit out of their crappy defense. I can do this all day.

    Then I come up against the mercenary captain. He has 14 dice and plays a cautious defensive game, attacking with 6, keeping 8. So I go, okay, I'll block with 8 and keep 8 still, waiting for the opportunity to get a slight wound on him that lowers his dice pool and tips the balance more my way.

    The Auston, the GM goes, "Okay, he's a pretty decent swordsman, being a war veteran, and knows how to do things with a sword that you've never seen people do before, out here in the fields. He's feinting. That lets him spend his defending dice 2-for-1 to add additional attack dice, so he'll go all in and roll 10 dice to attack."

    "Fuck," I said. Luckily I survived that fight, but it only got worse once I got into urban areas and was fighting real samurai who knew their way around a sword. Even when I knew about the kinds of things they could do and could consider those possibilities when preparing attacks, I couldn't do all those moves myself, not with a stick. And, sure, I had some tricks with the stick that most samurai weren't used to dealing with, but they were samurai and could usually make up for it in other ways (armor, swords that cut people's limbs off).

    Would that kind of game, where all of the tactics weren't known to players at the beginning, where you played beginning characters with relatively little combat knowledge, but gradually learned new techniques over the course of play, would that be more likely to sustain your interest, since the optimal tactics would keep shifting as you gained more information and abilities?
    • CommentAuthorMoreno R.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 23
    It seems to me that the issue is the "breakability" of systems. Tactical subsystems inside a rpg attract you, and you try to "break" them. Then you have (for example):

    PTA: little tactical choices, that don't distract much from the rest of the game, are Ok.
    Contenders: tactical choices have a bigger piece of the pie, but they are "in line" with the premise. Until you find and optimal strategy (and are bored by it) the game work for you.
    DitV: much of the game is based on the tension between character effectiveness and player morality (and investment in the integrity of the game fiction). The conflict subsystem encourage violence and escalations, that contrast with the player's morality. It's a completely different interaction than the one in Contenders. In DitV the thematic element is based on that contrast inside every character, in Contenders the contrast is BETWEEN characters: if you are very good at "playing the game" in DitV you should horrify yourself, in Contenders you should be a tough adversity to the other characters.

    I would be curious to know if you have ever played My life with master, In a Wicked age, Sorcerer or Carry. If I did get the root of the issue right, you should have no problem (from that specific element, I don't know about others) with MLWM and Sorcerer, and be really at odd with IAWA and Carry (both of which have the tactical sub-elements at odds with the premise, and are subject to breakableness)
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 24
    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonEric, can I float something by you?...

    Would that kind of game, where all of the tactics weren't known to players at the beginning, where you played beginning characters with relatively little combat knowledge, but gradually learned new techniques over the course of play, would that be more likely to sustain your interest, since the optimal tactics would keep shifting as you gained more information and abilities?

    That sort of setup has the potential to be awesome or lame, depending. Let me break it down a bit:

    1) Fairness. One of the core ethos of competitive play is a level playing field, and it's important that escalations in the power of my opponents not feel like a simple act of revenge or retaliation against my own skill. It's completely fine if the game gets harder or my opponents get tougher, but it's best if I clearly understand how that's happening and why. In the scenario you've described, I think I can understand a basic progression of opposition from the boonies to the capital, and that works pretty well. I think we've all heard horror stories of teleporting super-ninjas that drop in to beat up the players whenever the GM gets annoyed, though.

    2) "Fake" complexity. There's a big difference between rules that add genuine tactical or strategic depth and rules that just change one mathematical equation to another. In the scenario you describe, I can pretty quickly derive an optimal offensive or defensive dice setup when fighting that veteran. Adding feint... just changes the calculation. Just making the same option better or bigger doesn't add depth, it just makes me write multiple versions of the equations I have in my head.

    Teleportation changes both the tactical and strategic landscape of DnD 3.X profoundly. Buffs that add +4 to a stat... don't.

    3) "Fake" difficulty. As with fake complexity, fake difficulty doesn't add any real challenge to how I think about the game. If the Guards of the High Tower are twice as tough as regular guards, then I can just get twice as tough myself before fighting them, then proceed as before. If I've already "solved" the regular guards with a clever ploy that makes me win every time with no risk to myself, the Guards of the High Tower aren't going to fare any better just by having bigger numbers.

    Real difficulty might force me to deal with a new complication that has a powerful impact on the tactical landscape, for example, that close new doors and open others. That's a lot harder to do than just changing numbers.

    If you can avoid these pitfalls, then yes, that could seriously rock. It might come off a lot like, say, Magic: the Gathering, where new mechanics are regularly introduced that have a profound impact on play.

    There are a number of considerations beyond this, but those are the ones that I regularly see derail games for me.
    • CommentAuthorJDCorley
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 25
    This is a cool thread. Don't have much to add at this point other than that.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 26
    Moreno: Eric destroyed IAWA, as I tried to tell Vincent.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 27
    Eric: Very cool thread, and you've done a fantastic job of explaining your tastes/desires. I'd have you playtest my games without hesitation.

    p.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 28
    There's lots more in this thread that I'd like to respond to (including some whispers!), and still more that I'd like to go back and forth on - for example, is a parallel-solitaire setup like I described in our Contenders play rewarding for other playstyles, too? I need to get some more work done, though, so that will have to wait a bit.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 29
    I should note that playing with Eric has made me generally more careful about having competitive elements in games that don't align with what the game is trying to accomplish. When, as in the case of Dogs, you're drawing a clear contrast between the mechanics and the morality of the players/characters or some other central narrative concern, I think it's still likely to work for most players, those who don't play "hardcore" in the manner Eric does. But there are dozens of other cases in which playing the "game" of a particular RPG actually moves people further away from what the game is about, without much internal tension to pull players back, and I think this operates to the detriment of these RPGs and the play that results from them.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 30
    Totally agreed, and some (many?) RPGs simply don't work with a strongly competitive ethos. But if you want to go there, and real competition is important to the vibe you're trying to create, it'd be awesome to have an Eric on your side to suss it out.

    p.
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 31
    Definitely, and the competitive bits of Geiger Counter, which are based on cooperative board games like Betrayal at House on the Hill and Lord of the Rings, have definitely benefited from Eric playtesting. But I'm still not sure I'm prepared to actually work on a truly hardcore competitive game. Maybe at some point. Emergent complexity I think I could handle, but not intricately balancing a Magic- or D&D- or Exalted- or even SOTC-sized set of crunchy rules exceptions. Even with Eric's help, that sounds like a nightmare, but maybe he'll eventually design one himself.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 32
    I know in my local play groups, obviously exploitable tactics are often a distraction to the other stuff the game is trying to accomplish. One prominent case was DitV, which is so transparently gameable that the players tended to try and rationalize their narrative around their game choices, rather than making game choices that reflect their desired narrative.

    p.
    • CommentAuthorJono
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 33
    Can I just say, this thread shows exactly why I love this forum? In a lot of places, people would have jumped all over Eric for being a "munchkin", "power gamer", "bad roleplayer", etc etc. But not here. Here everybody is interested in understanding what he likes about gaming and what it means for game design, and it leads to an extremely constructive discussion.

    Woot!
    • CommentAuthorJ. Walton
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 34
    Jono: True, but it definitely helps that he's familiar to some folks here, like myself and Nathan, and that I was able to introduce his play style to everyone else. Otherwise, who knows how it may have gone down? There have definitely been folks who've stopped by SGBoston, including game designers that I respect, who've been completely turned off by Eric's approach and aren't really interested in playing with him or learning more about what he wants out of roleplaying. And the SG crowd here has definitely run off people with different play preferences before, so patting ourselves on the back only goes so far. I only wish we could invest this kind of time, attention, and respect in everyone.
    •  
      CommentAuthorndp
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 35
    Eric, I'm glad I wasn't off-base in my thoughts about Contenders, in particular. I'm looking forwards to your further thoughts on it.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 36
    Posted By: Paul BSome of the stuff that's generated our best play -- stuff like getting your own character into trouble -- had become so alien to him that he felt like we were participating in a completely unrelated hobby...

    Quick thing I'd like to mention here to start off my second wave of posts: I know this feeling exactly, but there's an aspect to it that's a bit complex.

    I won't throw my character into needless trouble willingly in, say, DnD, because that game has a lose condition where you jolly well stop playing if you die. I also won't do it willingly in Agon, since I'm trying to maximize my glory and getting into fights that I won't win is a bad way to do that. "Getting into trouble" has mechanical weight and corresponding incentives and penalties.

    In contrast, I'll do it all the time in PtA, because character risk in PtA - mechanically speaking - is completely fake. I've had marvelous luck when running PtA for people new to storygames by pointing this out: you can't lose PtA in the way you can lose lots of other games. The risk might have narrative weight, but your character isn't going to arbitrarily die or turn to the dark side or whatever because you opened a chest without searching it first or dived headlong into a pack of stormtroopers.
    •  
      CommentAuthorT-Boy
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 37
    Posted By: JonoCan I just say, this thread shows exactly why I love this forum? In a lot of places, people would have jumped all over Eric for being a "munchkin", "power gamer", "bad roleplayer", etc etc. But not here. Here everybody is interested in understanding what he likes about gaming and what it means for game design, and it leads to an extremely constructive discussion.

    I give credit to Johnathan for that, actually. He actually framed the differences between Eric's and his style of play in a very clear, non-hostile and neutral manner, and made it very clear, from the start, that Eric wanted to engage with people who did not necessarily share his play-style, and was not stereotypically a "Real Gamer" who looked down on "scrubs".

    I've seen conversations like this on the Internet devolve into wank very fast, because, as good as Sirlin's point about competitive gaming is, I've rarely seen any of the supporters of Sirlin's play style do very well on Internet discussions with people who do not necessarily share the same views.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 38
    Posted By: hamsterprophetEric, I'm glad I wasn't off-base in my thoughts about Contenders, in particular. I'm looking forwards to your further thoughts on it.

    A bit more on Contenders: thinking about it more, I'm pretty sure this game could sustain my attention for a very long time.

    So, there's clearly better and worse choices at any given point regarding what scene you want next, right? So, let's assume everyone at the table knows that and does it. This is kind of like optimal build order in Real-Time Strategy games: there are just right and wrong ways to build. Sure, sometimes you're rushing and sometimes you're booming, but within that plan you do some things and not others.

    Okay, we all know that, and now we fight. Contenders has an asymmetric-payoff paper-rock-scissors game at the core of the fighting mechanics, and that's one of the most robust competitive designs ever created. It's a pure Yomi game with actual strategic depth, and those stay interesting so long as my opponent and I continuously adapt to each other.

    So, I'd say the "real" Contenders game, from a hardcore perspective, looks a lot like an RTS: people decide to boom or rush or whatever (one of these might be just better, so this might be a fake choice), go through their "build order," and then you get to the "actually playing" bit of asymmetric-payoff rock-paper-scissors. So long as everyone is building their characters at about the same rate, this stays interesting.

    This might suffer from slippery slope, though - just like in most RTS games! - where an early loss basically hoses you for the next 3 hours of play.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 39
    Posted By: T-BoyI give credit to Johnathan for that, actually. He actually framed the differences between Eric's and his style of play in a very clear, non-hostile and neutral manner, and made it very clear, from the start, that Ericwantedto engage with people who did not necessarily share his play-style, and was not stereotypically a "Real Gamer" who looked down on "scrubs".

    I've seen conversations like this on the Internet devolve into wank very fast, because, as good as Sirlin's point about competitive gaming is, I've rarely seen any of the supporters of Sirlin's play style do very well on Internet discussions with people who do not necessarily share the same views.

    Yeah, I really appreciate Jonathan acting as a bridge, not only here but over the past several months. We had some rather awkward bits in our play at SGBoston early on, but he's always been interested in discussing with me what he's after in gaming and curious about what I'm after. We're both just generally interested in exploring other cultural perspectives, as well, be they distant or local.

    One thing to keep in mind about Sirlin's disciples, though: this has a real religious character to it. Not religious as in a cult of personality, but in that the experiences that you can get by playing this way can been deeply transformative, even transcendental. I have had things akin to religious experiences during tournament play, where time seemed to stop and reality unfolded for me in stunning new clarity. It's hard to brush up against that and not be passionate about it, and this naturally tends to lead to shouting when you put it on the internet.

    Of course, some people also just like saying "I'm right, and this authority guy says so!" really loudly and often.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 40
    The shortest path.

    Posted By: Eero TuovinenIs "perhaps roleplaying games are wasted effort for him" a valid tack, then?

    I'm asking because it seems to me that Eric is not deriving much enjoyment from the fictional motifs present in roleplaying games. The overwhelming majority of rpgs, however, are all about the Exploration. (So much so that the Big Model makes that the definition of roleplaying, even.) And that includes gamism-supportive designs; something like D&D actually derives a majority of its fun, not from winning the GM who is playing the dragon, but actually having this imaginary character in whose guiseyoucan win the dragon.
    *snip*
    To frame that as a question: does Eric actively want to play roleplaying games? Is he interested in the genre of some particular game, perhaps? Or would you say that it's all same to him?

    I think you've confused your own motives for being the only possible ones. It's not about winning in the guise of some character, it's that that guise is an obstacle itself, just like the dragon is obstacle. There is no interest in guise or genre for its own sake, there is interest only in the sort of massive obstacles they present. Just like a cliff face is obstacle to a climber, the GM's imagination - how he imagines the dragon, how he imagines your guise, is an obstacle. That's why gamist players often don't add to their characters guise - they are only interested in how the GM imagines it. And how to beat that. To add to the guise would be a stupid move.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 41
    Posted By: Thor Olavsrud
    Posted By: Saint&SinnerI'm not sure the fiction investment is the thing since he's saying "Primetime Adventures is great"... wouldn't the system's design in BW/BE 'work' or at least be worth giving a shot?


    Maybe. It's hard to say. There's a lot of tactical meat in the games, but the pumping heart--the cycle between Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and Artha--is all driven by investment in the fiction.

    Also, many parts of the game, especially Advancement, push you to make suboptimal choices.

    Some tactically minded players love it. Some hate it.

    I've played BW once, actually, just an introductory adventure - "The Sword." Before talking a bit about it, though, I need to introduce someone else: my wife, April.

    April shares my hardcore "play to win" mindset. She's a bit more entrenched in the mindset, to the point that she has a hard time understanding why certain creative agenda sub-schools are even vaguely fun, but she also knows she's entrenched, so she freely grants that this might be fun to somebody else even if it baffles her.

    If I break games on my own, April and I are a wrecking ball together. Many games, for example, rely on all-versus-all PvP elements in their theme or premise while giving strong mechanical incentive for cooperation. For example, the Order of the Stick board game assumes that players want to stab each other, but has a completely unbalancing reward for teaming up.

    So, you're playing this with a table of four. If you go lone-wolf, you can expect to have about a one in four chance of winning. If you team up, you can utterly crush not only every other player, but all the game-generated opposition. There's still only one winner, but this simultaneously increases your individual odds of winning from 25% to 50% - Richard's strategy in season one of Survivor is based on this same insight.

    So guess what we do?

    Back to Burning Wheel. So, there's this Sword. My dude's sheet says that I'm supposed to get it, and this is, in fact, a defining life goal and my society totally supports getting it by any means. April's sheet defines her as basically in it for money - she wants to sell the thing or something, I dunno. So, we're in the cave or whatever, time to argue. I ask the other players, with Elf characters if I remember right (I was a dwarf, or maybe it was the reverse) if there's anything in the world that we can possibly negotiate that will end up with me taking the sword back home with me.

    They say "no."

    This is now super-easy from my perspective, and April's. We have non-conflicting agendas, so I immediately offer to pay her in compensation for the sword, she accepts, and the stabbing starts.

    45 minutes after "game on!" we had basically finished the adventure, and were genuinely puzzled to find another group was still in the cave arguing over the sword. April and I were also kind of curious as to what the whole point of the affair was supposed to be.

    That's my entire experience with Burning Wheel. The game told me I was apparently supposed to do X, I promptly did so, April did the same, and it kind of fell flat.

    I caution that this is a single short experience, and the fellow running it was rather unfamiliar with the system himself, so I can only comment on the game in a very narrow context.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 42
    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonDefinitely, and the competitive bits ofGeiger Counter, which are based on cooperative board games likeBetrayal at House on the HillandLord of the Rings, have definitely benefited from Eric playtesting.

    Like, for example, I did a rigorous analysis of the game's old Dog's-inspired dice system that proved that, in that incarnation, Jason finds it basically impossible to kill the cheerleader. That was a problem for a survival horror game :)

    Geiger Counter is actually another good example of a game that lets me invest in the fiction without compromising my desire to do what the rules tell me is proper. It's still a little wonky in terms of pacing and some edge cases of resource collection, but it stands up well to a good swift kick in the mechanics.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 43
    Posted By: Mark WYikes. Drawn out of lurkerdom again.

    It seems to me that this breed of hardcore Step On Up may actually not really be addressable by standard Big Model methods. Much like in other CAs' "degenerate cases", the object of the Step On Up is not actually (a) in the fiction or (b) at the table. The player is competing principally against the structure of System itself. The parallel case for S-oriented play is the total world-oriented cause-and-effect player, who focuses solely on the fiction and wants to exclude system & people-around-the-table considerations; for N, it's face-stabbiness taken to the extreme, where play is principally instrumental and addressed toward making an emotional impact on fellow players.

    I would go so far as to say that happy Step On Up has to be addressed toward the shared content and the other players. It is not *just* competitive play, it is competitive play *of a socially-mediated fiction-game*.

    Or, that's making up ficticious rules ala the article. So it'd be the scrub-core. Hey, don't look at me that way, I didn't take offense at the hardcore adjective, and the term 'scrub' is pretty clinically defined by the article.

    I think Ron Edwards may have simply been wrong. What his article calls hardcore gamism is just plain, vanilla gamism. While what he defined as gamism is scrub-gamism. Probably the damning evidence of that is that gentleman 'hardcore' gamers can agree on adhering to a certain condition. I'm sure if you challenged Sirlin to a SF match with no throws, he would consider the challenge gracefully. While scrub gamers don't feel they need to ask for an agreement - they just say throwing is cheap, for example. Such rules are fictitious in that they are not actually agreed on. While a gentleman 'hardcore' player can agree to any genre convention you care to mention - if you actually care to ask. To me, that makes it the vanilla version of gamism, not requiring some adjective.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 44
    Posted By: Paul BI know in my local play groups, obviously exploitable tactics are often a distraction to the other stuff the game is trying to accomplish. One prominent case was DitV, which is so transparently gameable that the players tended to try and rationalize their narrative around their game choices, rather than making game choices that reflect their desired narrative.

    Yup, that's the all-purpose fallback position for April and I when the rules are clearly pointing us one way but we're supposed to do things because we "want" them or "character desires" dictate it or whatever - this is a very common situation, in my experience, in play-by-post traditional games. We decide what we're going to do from tactical or mechanical considerations, then we make up some justification for why we were going to do that. This is only required in games where you're not "supposed" to play tactically or do math.

    If playing to win is aligned with the story, then this isn't an issue.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 45
    Posted By: Callan S.Probably the damning evidence of that is that gentleman 'hardcore' gamers can agree on adhering to a certain condition. I'm sure if you challenged Sirlin to a SF match with no throws, he would consider the challenge gracefully. While scrub gamers don't feel they need to ask for an agreement - they just say throwing is cheap, for example. Such rules are fictitious in that they are not actually agreed on. While a gentleman 'hardcore' player can agree to any genre convention you care to mention - if you actually care to ask. To me, that makes it the vanilla version of gamism, not requiring some adjective.

    That's pretty accurate, I think. I mean, April and I do this all the time in one-on-one DnD games. She just got done running the "Whispers of the Vampire's Blade" Eberron adventure for me, and the genre agreement was "James Bond." Specifically, Roger Moore-era goofy Bond, like Moonraker.

    She limits herself to providing opposition that makes sense in that sort of Bond movie, with the additional limiter of using only the oppositional resources provided explicitly by the adventure (this allows fairness by strictly defining what "pieces" she has on her side), while I limit myself to using Bond-appropriate solutions.

    Of course, it's not immediately obvious what's in-genre when you port Bond to a world governed by DnD rules, so we allow the option of discussing what might or might not be in-color. Also note that we're playing to win as hard as we can within these confines.

    It works wonderfully. As usual, I did all kinds of stuff that the module writer neither expected nor planned for. I won when I used clever methods to find the eponymous Vampire's coffin while on a train - I wasn't "supposed" to be able to, but the game's bullshit cockblocking failed to account for a few attack vectors, and author's intent is irrelevant once the game starts. I then... tied it shut and sealed it, and brought it back to Sharn for the reward.

    I'm not sure if that's actually Bond-ish, but Bond's solution to a lot of stuff is pretty out-there.

    Anyway, April and I both had a grand time. Note that my victory occurred with zero risk to myself - it was impossible for the Vampire to get to me while I was sealing the coffin before I could make it into the sunlight. That makes the victory more awesome to us, not less. Winning with a sheathed blade is superior to overpowering the enemy in a heated fight.

    So, yeah, April and I and every serious tournament player I've known are totally willing to make agreements up-front and official-like before the game. But the rules are a sacred thing to us once the game starts, and they must be inviolate for us to really have this sort of fun.

    **Extra note regarding staying in-genre: we can't use genre to force shitty tactical options onto each other. If April wants to do X, and X isn't Bond-esque, I can talk about modifying color, but under no circumstances can I change the substantial tactical nature of what she was going to do. This goes both ways. So, we both do our best to stay in-genre as a gentleman's-and-gentlewoman's agreement, and we largely do it well, but there's no veto on either side for what's properly in-genre.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 46
    Hi Eric,

    One surprise thing I found about Dogs in the vineyard is that there is no god. The divine right to kill is simply superstition.

    You might want to consider narrativism as super extended yomi. Eg

    "Okay, I kill you cause I can and want your stuff. But then someone else is stronger than me and decides they can use the same principle to kill me. But I don't want to die...so, perhaps I enslave them and take their stuff. Wait, then someone stronger does that to me. Okay, I become their king and tax them. Wait, someone might topple me. Okay, perhaps I start a democratic government, where I can use shady backroom deals to get their resources...'

    You can see I just raced through several million years of human cultural development. All of it bouncing between what the opponent, other men, will do. I've skipped alot of the complexity. Narrativism might be simulating being trapped in this very thought process - of never being able to escape the yomi. There is no end to the game, where one strategy proves supreme. The game goes on forever, and so too does the yomi's dance.

    Why play a game to enter into a madness that never ends? Because it is our mortal lot in real life - to play nar is a method of stepping back from the madness and trying to make sense. Narrativism is a layer of yomi in real life. That it imagines the moves of imaginary men means little when those imaginary men are drawn from real life experience.

    Eh, that's my glib description. Whether dogs in the vineyard meets the requirements of such an activity, I have no actual play experience to test it by. Also I use alot of moving, emotional words. But its more fun that way! ;)
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 47
    And hi Eric, again! Cross posted before - hope it didn't seem odd I just started talking about dogs!

    And your example: You both agreed on those limits with each other, didn't you? Yeah, it's good. You may not confer with each other constantly about what the boundry is, but in the interests of good sportsmanship, you try and follow the limit as best you can assertain them. Really good example! I'd talk about a comparision with simulationism, but that'd muddle my post and I'm mostly writing it to be possitive (I agree with your post - what else can I do but give a thumbs up post!? :) )

    Oh, I'll be picky on one thing
    "Winning with a sheathed blade is superior to overpowering the enemy in a heated fight"
    You mean winning without having to unsheath your blade, don't you? To not even use that resource, yet still accomplish so much! The elegance!

    Just being picky because I've got a feeling someone is going to think your refering to genre convention rather than personal accomplishment.
  48.  # 48
    Just based on what you wrote, it sounds like the BW "The Sword" scenario fell flat for you guys for one big reason:

    No one has enough resources on their own to pay the roden, and the roden shouldn't allow anyone to leave until he gets paid. It's definitely optimal to team up with someone in that scenario - and the roden makes a good ally because, as you said, he cares about getting paid, not the sword. But if resources get overlooked, that would make that conflict waaay too easy.

    Hee - not to steer the interesting conversation off coarse, though. I've just run it a couple of times and my eyebrow arched a bit at this mention of The Sword.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 49
    Posted By: Callan S.
    Oh, I'll be picky on one thing
    "Winning with a sheathed blade is superior to overpowering the enemy in a heated fight"
    You mean winning without having to unsheath your blade, don't you? To not even use that resource, yet still accomplish so much! The elegance!

    Just being picky because I've got a feeling someone is going to think your refering to genre convention rather than personal accomplishment.

    That's right, it's referring to winning without drawing your blade or even needing it. It's a reference to Sun Tzu, who was extremely antagonistic towards the notion of "actually fighting." From a strategic standpoint, if you're in a position where you're opponent can do something to you that you actually care about - forcing you to draw your blade - you've already messed up.

    In this sense, the whole notion of "Step On Up" is completely crazy. The whole point of playing to win is to try to win perfectly, without any chance of defeat. If you need someone to hit a home-run in the bottom of the ninth, simply being in that situation in the first place constitutes a failure on the part of the team as a whole. The scouts didn't deliver good information, the statisticians didn't make accurate predictions, the coaches didn't mold the team properly, the offense didn't produce, and the defense wasn't tight enough.

    Of course, as you're trying to do this, the other team's trying the same thing. But at no point does a competent head coach of any professional team ever actually want to be in a situation where they desperately need a cluch play to save the game. It'll make headlines, sure, and the press will laud you - but a 10-run blowout would have been vastly safer.

    There's a specific baseball example that I really like to illustrate this. During game 2 of the 2007 World Series (this is baseball, for those of you who aren't required by law or local custom to follow such things), in the eighth inning, the Red Sox relief pitcher Jon Papelbon caught the Rockies Matt Holliday leading off of first, intending to steal, and managed to throw him out. That sounds impressive - a dramatic race between pitcher and runner - except it totally wasn't.

    The Red Sox knew days before the game that Holliday would try to steal, because a scout or statistician on the Red Sox had made a point of including it in his report: Holliday is very likely to steal late in the game under certain conditions. The situation met those conditions.

    The drama here is completely fake. Holliday was out the moment his team fell behind in the intelligence and counter-intelligence arms race - they were destroyed in the yomi game before the "real" game even started, since they didn't know that the Red Sox knew.

    This is winning with your sword still sheathed: Papelbon is fast and skilled, but you don't need to be that fast or skilled if you know beforehand what the runner is going to do. It was a no-risk, huge-reward move, and it's that level of skill that I admire the most.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 50
    I'd like to toss a question out here, actually, for anyone who wants to weigh in: is Monopoly a functional game? Jonathan and I have discussed this briefly, and I'll post a bit of relevant chatlog on the topic:

    JONATHAN: ...because games don't have to be perfect systems to be functional, especially if you consider them more like literature and less like computer programs. There's definitely a focus on creating complex mechanical systems in some forms of design, but because they are manipulated by people who can make choices, rather than machines that execute them, you also have social mechanisms that can be relied on.

    ME: Hmm... do you consider Monopoly to be a functional game? I don't. I think many people do, though, so this might be a point of differentiation.

    JONATHAN: Yeah, I do. I think it depends on how you view games. I view games as a way of structuring enjoyable social interaction.


    So, I don't think Monopoly is functional because there's only one viable strategy. Playing it is thus just a distraction from my perspective, a meaningless exercise in dice rolling and non-choices. It is functional from Jonathan's perspective, since it structures social interaction in a fun way for him. As Jonathan mentioned above, I'm also very interested in social interactions as part of gaming, but this interest doesn't cover what Monopoly provides.
    • CommentAuthorLogos7
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 51
    I would say its functional, even if there is only one viable strategy (i'm not sure I agree with you on this, besides in the sense of buying property and building things but that's the point of the game not the strategy in it) because there is always the possibility of you not being able to impliment the one true way better/faster/stronger than others. Monopoly might be dysfunctional if you did A, then B, then C = profit=win but i've never been able to do that.

    As for the comment about exploration above, does exploration of the rules not count. God knows I've done more than a little stuff in rpg's for the fact that somebody put these rules in here, so I thought i would try them out. The exploration is maybe internal to the character as apposed to picking daisies and psycological treaties but i'm still poking the game world and stuff ain't I?
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 52
    Just one quick thing for the night:

    The notion of a "scrub" is a lot like the notion of a "fish" in poker, and these terms only make sense in the context of serious competition. If the activity is non-competitive, it's meaningless, and if the activity is deliberately and openly non-serious (like most drinking games), it's meaningless. There's a lot of value judgment tied in with "scrub," judgment which Sirlin himself tries to avoid by repeatedly pointing out that the whole notion of hardcore competitive play is a pretty niche thing.

    So, yeah, I've been really happy about being able to address these issues despite the minority status of my playstyle around SGBoston and, I would assume, on these forums. I want to keep that up, and thus I want to really make sure that I'm not conveying any sense of value judgment about people who don't approach games the way I do. I appreciate greatly the lack of the corollary judgment towards me.
    • CommentAuthorJDCorley
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008
     # 53
    I've always said there's a huge continuum of competitive play, and this thread is pointing out a lot of different directions that continuum extends.

    If I shoot hoops with my dad at the park, we are competitive.

    If I sign up for a city league, that is competitive.

    But the word means very different things in the same game in very different situations. (Also there are different house rules!)
    • CommentAuthorMoreno R.
    • CommentTimeJun 12th 2008 edited
     # 54
    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonMoreno:Eric destroyed IAWA,as I tried to tell Vincent.


    Ah! I love being right! :-)

    I am not so hardcore playing rpgs, but I played chess in tournament, I know what Eric is talking about, about being passionate about winning, excluding any distraction from that single, pure objective. And I always had some problems with rpgs that worked only if you did some sub-optimal choices only to make the game work (it was the principal point of my old critique of Carry, for example). (Interestingly, DitV doesn't have this effect on me because in that case you do sub-optimal choices because you care for the people of the city, it's not "only to make the game work". ).

    But, at the end, If I want to play thematic games, there will be a point of tension, a place and a moment where I will have to choose between engaging the premise or doing the optimal strategic choice, even in the ones that avoid that problem in the rules. These two objectives can't co-exist at the same time.

    interestingly, I have seen that, not these two objectives, but two (or more) people with these different objectives, can co-exist in the same game. I have seen this more often in LARPS, and from the actual play I have read it can happen in Contenders. What happen in these cases is that, "playing to win" without caring too much for the premise (for morality, for love, for friendship, for what the game is talking about) the "gamist" players become opposition, "the bad guys", and push the intensity and drama of "the story" up a notch. And, at the end, usually the "hardcore gamist" win the game, and the people who played for the story get a very dramatic story (that usually end with the gamists' characters killing them and destroying everything they hold dear... ;-)

    (I think Vincent wanted a similar effect in IAWA, but it's not exactly the same one: in IAWA you can't really play hardcore gamist with that conflict system, you would break the group consensus in five seconds, top. Even I have to reign my gamistic tendencies when I play it...)

    Jonathan, this can describe what happened the times Eric enjoyed playing a narrativist game (as Contenders), or I am going in a wrong direction?.

    To get this effect, I think that what it's needed it' a rock-solid game system underneath that can be played hardcore gamist without breaking, and a game that allow playing these kind of characters. But I have too little personal experience in these kind of situations to go too far in describing them.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008 edited
     # 55
    Eric: Yeah, I see what you mean by the red sox winning before the moment occured. Kind of not my fave, because it's almost 'play before play'. It's kind of why I hate making characters and especially equiping them before play. I'd rather go in and lose cause I didn't buy 20 feet of rope than spend an hour browsing gear lists and trying to buy my way out of every challenge I can guess. Sure, next time I'll buy 20 feet of rope during char gen, but I prefer to suffer my lessons at the moment of play. I wonder if that's scrubby of me, to not want to optimise before the game starts? (edit: No - I prefer not to draw my sword, so to speak, until play begins - and even then, not at all if possible). Anyway, the red sox example is still good since I imagine the rest of the game would still involve 'at that moment' tests of skill. I mean, that's what you turn up to see. Those moments! The scouting in the background is interesting, but by its nature is hidden. That's good for the team, but not much use for me as an observer until the facts come to light.

    In this sense, the whole notion of "Step On Up" is completely crazy. The whole point of playing to win is to try to win perfectly, without any chance of defeat.

    Are you refering to the forge essays? I thought 'step on up' did refer to trying to win perfectly, with no chance of failing (specifically, having the guts to try and win perfectly, even though in situations like the first try of a game, for example, that's often impossible). Then again, I may have missunderstood it (see my post to Moreno)

    On monopoly, yeah, I don't see it as much of a game either. I see it as a high handling time version of snakes and ladders. Not that I don't like an occasional game of snakes and ladders, even though it's pure gamble. But the extra handling time monopoly adds is just a waste of time. I like my pure gamble hard and fast!



    Moreno:
    And I always had some problems with rpgs that worked only if you did some sub-optimal choices only to make the game work

    The worst thing? I think for a long time I've thought people I played with had, through a series of non verbal cues, asked me if I wanted to keep to certain sub optimal choices. Ala the gentlemans gamist agreement (Like Erics "Bond" example). But I think I was just deluded - they weren't asking me to take on a difficult challenge, it was just doing it that way for the sake of doing it in just that particular way. Shesh. I thought I had had an understanding with them.

    Eric might be interested in this too: In terms of gamist mechanics, I always thought capped resource choices were a fairly strong, basic way of taking an imagined space and making it tangible. For example, say an encounter has from 1, up to 3 goblins. A GM decides how many. Now this could take into account all sorts of imagined action - the players might describe their sneaking and sniping, or how they would try to intimidate the gobo's, or poison their food. In the end, at worst, three goblins might turn up. If your description hits the nail on the head, two or perhaps even just one.

    But most RPG's seem to have to leave it completely open either way - either as many goblins as the GM sees fit, or worse, no opportunity of risk at all. That last one is how simulationists often sucker gamist players, I think. Gamists do aim to win with no risk of defeat. So when they get through without a scratch, wow, a win! But really the simulationist was bending the worlds risk back because the gamist was genre correct or some such. It can be treated as a win, but it's kind of like an adult playing against children sort of win. An 'Akuma' win, to refer to Sirlin's article :)
    • CommentAuthorTablesaw
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 56
    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonMoreno:Eric destroyed IAWA,as I tried to tell Vincent.
    I side with Eric and Vincent. I've been mulling a lot of IAWA tactics in my head, and I can already see that the game has a fantastic tactical depth. The risks are always high, and the values are always shifting. The only places where you can run into problems are letting the dice drift away from the story ("I stab you in the face! I'll be rolling Covertly and With Love.") and letting the Best Interests become boring. If I can resolve both of my character's Best Interests and the other Best Interests directed against me exclusively by exhausting and injuring others, there could be a problem. Otherwise, I'll still have to engage the story in tandem with my system-level tactics.

    (I'm not sure if Vincent has clarified who narrates a character's exit from the game from injury of exhaustion. If it's the injured, then this isn't as much of a problem. If my best interest is to kill you, I will still have to negotiate your death, otherwise you can live on--very badly injured, but still mocking me.)

    And because there's so much negotiation, violations of social understanding of the group (I'm not saying "social contract" because I don't entirely think it's appropriate in this case) is to an extent wrapped into the tactics. The stick only goes so far; if I piss someone off too much, I can damage negotiations. Pushing too hard too early can get players to value certain aspects of the story more highly, to the point where I say, "No, you know what, I'd rather die than marry you. So if you're going to stab me through the heart, get on with it and face up to the fact that you'll never be able to meet your Best Interest of our wedding." Layers upon layers.

    What's more, IAWA's "win conditions" (such as they are) are very malleable. Entering a game with tragic or self-destructive goals has been loads of fun for me. If a player is still going at the game too hard Vincent's advice about not creating driven characters should provide some new interest.
    • CommentAuthorTablesaw
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 57
    Posted By: EricSo, I don't think Monopoly is functional because there's only one viable strategy. Playing it is thus just a distraction from my perspective, a meaningless exercise in dice rolling and non-choices. It is functional from Jonathan's perspective, since it structures social interaction in a fun way for him. As Jonathan mentioned above, I'm also very interested in social interactions as part of gaming, but this interest doesn't cover what Monopoly provides.
    I don't much like Monopoly myself, but I did once do some reading on tournament play. As I understand it, the main challenge in Monopoly is to mitigate the risk of uncertainty that the game holds. The other aspect of Monopoly is correctly determining the value of everything on the board, which randomness also effects. You need this to know how to correctly negotiate between players and how to decide whether to auction properties and what price to pay.

    The only real exciting part of Monopoly is the middle game, when players have amassed a collection of properties and they need to negotiate with each other to move forward. Before that, the options are too limited, other than auctions which develop asymmetrical values. After that, you've got a few players waiting to see who lands where and what rents and fees will decide victory. But in the middle, even when all players understand the relative values of the properties, it's pretty interesting.

    So I'd say it's functional for what it is. It's certainly a good simulation of real-estate development, where fate is a greater enemy than rival developers. Of course, most house rules completely destroy the game. I was well into my teens before I ever knew that the auction rule even existed, which explained why the games I'd been playing went on so long. And the infusion of cash from "Free Parking" keeps the pressure off of mortgaging and negotiating.
    • CommentAuthorMark W
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 58
    I withdraw my objections. Based on Eric's D&D-Bond example, I can clearly see that fiction and players are relevant to his play - it is not pure me-against-the-rules play as I'd inferred from earlier descriptions in the thread. I have seen the latter in operation, though, and it's clearly "out there" - although I suspect more as "lonely fun" than actual play, because it tends to be rough on social relationships. CharOp can be this sort of thing: the objective is maximizing results, and fiction-be-damned, let alone giving your fellow players any chance to contribute to play.
    • CommentAuthorThor O
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 59
    Posted By: EricThis is now super-easy from my perspective, and April's. We have non-conflicting agendas, so I immediately offer to pay her in compensation for the sword, she accepts, and the stabbing starts.


    As EarthenForge noted, it was actually impossible for you to fulfill your promise to pay her for the sword. You simply didn't have the Resources to pull it off.
    • CommentAuthorMoreno R.
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 60
    Tony (Tablesaw), I am not dissing IAWA. I am able to play it, thank you. I am playing it with my group right now. But I can assure you that if I would go full-mode hardcore gamist on its conflict subsystem, the entire game would crash in debates about the acceptability of my declarations. And seeing that the rules of IAWA don't give anyone the right to narrate anything without passing through the group's consensus, that consensus would be challenged at every turn.

    IAWA works if I stay well inside of what I know it's acceptable by the people at the table. "play nice". Even if that "nice" is narrating the beheading of their characters, you must do it in a way that they find acceptable.

    "playing to win" REQUIRE getting the most you can get, skirting the rules, going on the edge. If nobody at the table goes "whaaaaaaat????" when I narrate what happen, it mean that I didn't go as far as I could.

    But this is not the thread to talk about IAWA, I cited it only as an example. If you want to argue the point with me, please start another thread.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul B
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 61
    One last note to Eric, because I totally get where he is and would happily have him in my game group:

    I think one reason this thread is doing so well is that you've been exceptionally clear about why you play the way you do, and your explanation doesn't come across as defensive. So, mad props for that (or whatever the kids are saying these days).

    I have a player in my group that's very Eric-like, but he immediately shifts into deep defensive mode whenever we talking RPGs. For whatever reason, that shifts the entire tone of conversation away from creating true understanding, to trying to "win" the conversation.

    p.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008 edited
     # 62
    Posted By: Mark WI withdraw my objections. Based on Eric's D&D-Bond example, I can clearly see that fiction and players are relevant to his play - it is not pure me-against-the-rules play as I'd inferred from earlier descriptions in the thread. I have seen the latter in operation, though, and it's clearly "out there" - although I suspect more as "lonely fun" than actual play, because it tends to be rough on social relationships. CharOp can be this sort of thing: the objective is maximizing results, and fiction-be-damned, let alone giving your fellow players any chance to contribute to play.

    No, I'd say your right the first time about this. It's still against the rules play. It's just that there can be a rule about keeping to a bond theme, or such. An agreed upon rule, that is.

    It's not a celebration of genre, it's using genre as an interesting obstacle.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 63
    Posted By: Paul BI have a player in my group that's very Eric-like, but he immediately shifts into deep defensive mode whenever we talking RPGs. For whatever reason, that shifts the entire tone of conversation away from creating true understanding, to trying to "win" the conversation.

    True, but from your wording it appears you resist his attempt to 'win', at the very least by being dismissive of it, which is what someone would do if they were trying to win themselves. What is his win condition? Have you asked about it? You have to admit, if you keep trying to steer away from his 'win', never asking about it even, it's the same sort of thing an opponent would do. My estimate is that your playing the opponent, whether you intend to or not.

    Eric, in my estimate, isn't so much trying for true understanding - it's just that he's going to do what he's going to do, regardless. He's never been watered down, it seems - I wish I could say as much for myself.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 64
    Posted By: Thor Olavsrud
    Posted By: EricThis is now super-easy from my perspective, and April's. We have non-conflicting agendas, so I immediately offer to pay her in compensation for the sword, she accepts, and the stabbing starts.


    As EarthenForge noted, it was actually impossible for you to fulfill your promise to pay her for the sword. You simply didn't have the Resources to pull it off.

    Okay, this was a while ago, so bear with me; April and I have been chatting trying to remember details.

    So, a bunch of people want the sword. Only one person can actually get it.

    April's character (the Roden?) wants the sword for money. As far as we recall, nobody at all has the money to pay her off. So, holding out for a bag of money is pointless. That option is irrational, so April ignores it.**

    My character offers money for the sword. There are three ways to interpret this offer:

    1) I'm lying: I can't pay her now, and I won't pay her later.
    2) I'm telling the truth: I can pay her now, and her belief that nobody in the room can pay her is false (unlikely).
    3) I'm asking for credit: I cannot pay her now, but I'll pay her later

    If it's 2) or 3), she's golden. If it's 1), then she should still ally with me, since teaming up with me gives her better odds of surviving and achieving her goals. She can always backstab me once we're the only two standing. Of course, this is symmetric - I might do the same to her - but that's all moot unless she manages to get to a 2-left-standing scenario.

    So, the simple fact that I'm willing to team up and might be able to align our goals makes teaming up with me a superior choice to staying a lone wolf.

    Epilogue: I didn't survive the fight! April wound up teaming with someone else after I went down. The game still promptly ended, since all but two of the original 5-6 players were dead.

    **note: even when we make or are given characters with irrational goals, we still pursue those goals with rational means.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 65
    Posted By: Logos7As for the comment about exploration above, does exploration of the rules not count. God knows I've done more than a little stuff in rpg's for the fact that somebody put these rules in here, so I thought i would try them out. The exploration is maybe internal to the character as apposed to picking daisies and psycological treaties but i'm still poking the game world and stuff ain't I?

    I was talking with April about this, and it feels kind of like Exploration of the Rules is what, for us, the notion of Gamism, Sim, and Narr are embedded in.

    This is kind of hard to describe, but sometimes I think an audio recording of our play would be indistinguishable from Nar play, and sometimes a recording of our play would sound like Sim play, and sometimes the "conventional" notion of Gamist play. In all these cases, we happen to be following where the rules point to and incentivize. So, the Bond game looks Simmy to the extent that the rules (the gentleman's agreement) incentivized that, but we were hammering each other with the rules to make that happen.

    My character could engage in cinematic horseback battles, for example, because I CharOp'ed to make them good at it. Car chases and automotive combat happen in Bond as a matter of course, and Bond's good at it, so I make sure I'm good at it to the greatest extent practicable under the rules. Jumping off my horse and diving through a centaur's legs, then jumping back on my horse on the other side and attacking, was seriously a super-strong tactic for me due to how I brought my rules-fu to bear on the problem. The fact that I'm grinning while telling you about it is a sort of emergent property :)
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008 edited
     # 66
    Posted By: JDCorleyI've always said there's a huge continuum of competitive play, and this thread is pointing out a lot of different directions that continuum extends.

    If I shoot hoops with my dad at the park, we are competitive.

    If I sign up for a city league, that is competitive.

    But the word means very different things in the same game in very different situations. (Also there are different house rules!)

    I think this is a really good touchstone for talking about one dysfunction within Gamism. See, personally, I don't think I compete differently in those two situations (mind you, this is self-diagnosis!).

    Two weeks ago we played House on Haunted Hill at SGBoston - a very low-key and easy going setting. I asked April if she could recall whether I had my game face on while taking my turns, and she told me that I did - the same game face that I have on when I'm playing for money.

    I try to apply myself to the greatest extent possible when playing competitive games - but that's a very internal thing. I'm trying to bring all my faculties to bear on the task at hand and really understand what I'm looking at and what's going on.

    I have the sense that different levels of competition are often associated with other factors beyond how hard you try - emotional investment in winning, maybe? Emotional relationship to the competition? I've always been rather unclear as to what makes casual play casual beyond "don't use your best character" - and I still play as hard as I can with my lousy character. I only really stop when, for example, I stop competing and enter teaching mode ("...okay, I'm going to jump at you and kick. Try to hit me out of the air. Good...").

    Anyway, I've seen you comment on this before, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, and anyone else's. There have already been some good comments in this thread touching on this. So: what makes the difference? What happens in when you compete in one sense versus the other?
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008 edited
     # 67
    Posted By: TablesawThe only real exciting part of Monopoly is the middle game, when players have amassed a collection of properties and they need to negotiate with each other to move forward. Before that, the options are too limited, other than auctions which develop asymmetrical values. After that, you've got a few players waiting to see who lands where and what rents and fees will decide victory. But in the middle, even when all players understand the relative values of the properties, it's pretty interesting.

    This is also my understanding: only the middle game really matters. My basic thinking, though, is something like: "I can do the math, and so can everyone else. Right now property X is worth $Y over the next 4 turns, player 2 is in the lead, and... that's it."

    Now, of course, it might have a lot more depth than I give it credit for, but for my part, I've looked up the math and I just don't see much beyond "waiting for someone to mess up" in terms of tactics. I don't really enjoy perfect-knowledge games in which I feel like my only real choices rely on my opponent being ignorant of their's.

    There's almost certainly something deeper here, but I'm not sure what.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008 edited
     # 68
    Posted By: Moreno R.Ah! I love being right! :-)

    I am not so hardcore playing rpgs, but I played chess in tournament, I know what Eric is talking about, about being passionate about winning, excluding any distraction from that single, pure objective.

    Sweet!

    Posted By: Moreno R....What happen in these cases is that, "playing to win" without caring too much for the premise (for morality, for love, for friendship, for what the game is talking about) the "gamist" players become opposition, "the bad guys", and push the intensity and drama of "the story" up a notch. And, at the end, usually the "hardcore gamist" win the game, and the people who played for the story get a very dramatic story (that usually end with the gamists' characters killing them and destroying everything they hold dear... ;-)

    You know, I do that quite often. Our two most recent playtests of Geiger Counter involved me self-consciously jumping into an antagonist role while simultaneously powering up and gobbling up resources.

    I also set myself up as an antagonist in Mist-Robed Gate - the first scene I was in, I cut off a kid's hand, though (amusingly, in retrospect) I don't think I was self-consciously a villain until a bit later. I'm still impressed by how much playing "optimally" in that system churned out good story and thematic antagonism.


    Posted By: Moreno R.(I think Vincent wanted a similar effect in IAWA

    I've speculated about this with Jonathan. Regarding the We Owe list and one-dimensional characters not coming back, I pointed out that it's only a disincentive if I want to play that character again. If I just want to compete and win, it's not a relevant deterrent. Now, maybe that's a _feature_, since I have then effectively volunteered to take the "villain of the week" role in perpetuity.

    Posted By: Moreno R.To get this effect, I think that what it's needed it' a rock-solid game system underneath that can be played hardcore gamist without breaking, and a game that allow playing these kind of characters. But I have too little personal experience in these kind of situations to go too far in describing them.

    You'd be surprised how far you can get with asymmetric-reward rock-paper-scissors. It's the core of virtually all fighting games.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 69
    Posted By: Moreno R."playing to win" REQUIRE getting the most you can get, skirting the rules, going on the edge. If nobody at the table goes "whaaaaaaat????" when I narrate what happen, it mean that I didn't go as far as I could.

    I think the IAWA side of things has been pretty well covered, but I just wanted to toss in agreement with this: clearly, the optimal first move in IAWA is something like "as the clock strikes noon, my Far Reaching plans come to fruition and I gain immortal mastery of reality."

    That's likely to end badly in real life, though, so you have to tone it down to something more palatable. I guess. Or maybe you can sneak it in when nobody's paying attention? This is when I start to feel shafted in terms of competitive play.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
     # 70
    Aye! Yes!
    •  
      CommentAuthorndp
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008
     # 71
    Hey Eric, what about games that have no winning? Do you find that they just aren't interesting for you? Or are you able to slip into a different mode of play?

    Here I'm thinking of, say, Wushu, where there really isn't a way to "win" anything, mechanically. Which I think we've played, back in the day. If not, ummm....other examples welcome.
    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008 edited
     # 72
    Posted By: hamsterprophetHey Eric, what about games that have no winning? Do you find that they just aren't interesting for you? Or are you able to slip into a different mode of play?

    Here I'm thinking of, say, Wushu, where there really isn't a way to "win" anything, mechanically. Which I think we've played, back in the day. If not, ummm....other examples welcome.

    Games with no winning work very well for me, actually - especially when there's also no losing!

    Going back to PtA as an example, you can't win at PtA, and you can't lose at PtA, either. I mean, maybe I could come up with something that I could treat as a win or loss condition, but the rules certainly don't have anything like that in them.

    If there's no winning or losing (on a macro or micro level!), then there's no true competitive aspect in the sense that I've been talking about. So, those parts of my brain just kind of never turn on. I understand that some people actually do see PtA as a kind of competition to impress the table, measured in fanmail - I'm given to understand that this is a major part of Nar play. I like it when people respond well to my input, of course, but it's very different for me than Playing to Win-type competition.

    Playing to Win, for me, is fundamentally a competition against myself. A skilled opponent and a well-designed game provide me an objective yardstick to measure myself against and improve myself.

    I'm completely fine with not doing that at on any given evening. I've enjoyed freeform RP with consensus-based decision making, and that's as non-competitive an arena as my worldview can imagine.
    • CommentAuthorJDCorley
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008
     # 73
    Posted By: EricAnyway, I've seen you comment on this before, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, and anyone else's. There have already been some good comments in this thread touching on this. So: what makes the difference? What happens in when you compete in one sense versus the other?


    I think you hit on all of it:

    * social expectation, i.e. I don't let anyone down when I don't throw an elbow into my dad or run as hard as I can up the court every single time.
    * relationship with other competitors, i.e. known and loved dad for 34 years, just pals with the city league fellas
    * purpose of my participation, i.e. killing some time and laughing with dad, playing tough basketball with the city league

    I don't know that I agree that chasing fanmail in PTA is Nar play, that's less making your own moral statement with your play than it is chasing the approval of others. Not that either one is a bad thing...
    •  
      CommentAuthorBrandon A
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008 edited
     # 74
    I am going to return to an issue that was brought up at the beginning and it is the one that bothers me the most.

    I am firmly in Eric's camp when it comes to play style. If a victory condition exists within the game and there is an optimal method of achieving, then I will take that path. Even though a game states that there is no winner, in most games, there is a loser. The tactical element of the game is actually about not losing (or as I see it, winning). Let me caveat this by saying that when I played PTA (The Line), we had a whole bunch of fun, but as was previously stated, there is no winner, there is no loser, and fanmail is the best RPG currency ever created.

    The conflict that occurs for me is in the interaction between my fun and the other player's fun.

    Posted By: Jonathan WaltonThe problem is that, even in most Gamist-oriented play groups, Eric can't play as hard as he wants to without seeming like an asshole, since either the game or the social contract among the players isn't built to sustain the same kind of hardcore intensity as a chess tournament or Street Fighter championship. He's fairly adaptable and often tries to play competitive RPGs (or even more narrative roleplaying games with competitive elements) in a less intense way, but it's really grating for him and goes against his natural instincts.

    We just started a D&D 4th edition campaign. But what I experienced here has been mirrored in one form or another by games I've played of TSoY, SotC, or basically any other game where the players are cooperating. I should say that when the characters are antagonistic, it all bothers me a lot less.

    Anyhow, we are all making up our characters and I realize that one of the other players is making, a "sub-optimal" character choice. This is compounded by the fact that he is a new player and that his character choice will impact my character's effectiveness in combat. If I speak up, then I am stepping on his fun. If I don't speak up, then I perceive my fun as being stepped on. This leaves me in a very uncomfortable position. I find myself in this type of position often while gaming and it is a difficult one.

    Posted By: EricPlaying to Win, for me, is fundamentally a competition against myself. A skilled opponent and a well-designed game provide me an objective yardstick to measure myself against and improve myself.

    I agree with this statement, but what happens when your ability to not lose (i.e. win) is also determined by your team mates and they are not really playing the same game that you are?
    •  
      CommentAuthorJohn Harper
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008 edited
     # 75
    Great post, Brandon. I just wanted to comment on one thing:
    Posted By: JudaicDiabloIf I speak up, then I am stepping on his fun.

    Actually, you're not. You can say what you have to say without stepping on anyone's fun -- assuming that we are all mature adults who can hear dissenting opinions without getting upset. Which is a very safe assumption, given our game group.

    In other words, Ryan can hear what you have to say, and 1) make his own judgment about what to do, and 2) you can accept it with grace if he decides to make a sub-optimal choice anyway. No one gets hurt, unless I'm wrong about that second part.
    •  
      CommentAuthorJohn Harper
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008 edited
     # 76
    (My post here with the Poker analogy was a mess, so I'm re-thinking it.)
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008
     # 77
    Hi Brandon,

    I don't know Eric's responce. But mine is that all team mates are opponents as much as the goblin's are. Their mistakes are obstacles to overcome as much as a pit trap is. A bad team just increases the difficulty level (which is another reason I laugh at the idea of 'balanced' gaming. Atleast in gamist terms).

    However, if you mean he's not really playing the same game, like he's doing something sim or nar, then your boned! You just can't celebrate any accomplishment together. Well, it is possible if you both talk, realise your don't have the same goals BUT still can appreciate each others goals, decide you will appreciate each others goals, then manage to juggle that in play.
  78.  # 78
    Sub-optimal teammates are increased game difficulty! That's brilliant, Callan.
    • CommentAuthorMoreno R.
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008
     # 79
    About teams and teammates, I had a thought.

    In narrativistic games these is a strong trend to shared creation of characters. The characters should be created by the players all together, giving and receiving advices from each other (or even creating directly a part of the other's characters, as in Carry and Best Friends foe example)

    I thought that this wouldn't work in gamist games, because the ability to create the best character is often part of the "step on up". But this talk of teams made me think about the players creating THE TEAM all together, using a finite amount of resources, to "fight" against the perils and adversity created by a GM and to reach a common objective. If you avoid any inter-party competitiveness and do a game where it's the team that win or lose (so, you can even sacrifice your character, it's a good move if it made the team win), should not be the team the "lean and mean fighting machine", not every single character by himself? The amount of resources would not even have to be equal to every character (in something akin to old AD&D, ot would made sense potentiating the Cleric, for example)

    Thinking how much team-based is the AD&D I remember (I don't know about the newer edition), I think that method like this to create teams would be the ideal solution to the problem of the difference in player's ability.
    • CommentAuthorCallan S.
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2008
     # 80
    I don't think it's the difference in player ability that's the problem.

    Brandon, what sort of fun was the player cutting off? Was that the sort of fun you think the game is supposed to provide? I won't argue with what fun you think it provides. But yes, if his choices cut that off, that's a design fault. When a game is supposed to provide fun X, if the design grants choices which can kill fun X, then it's a flawed design.

1 to 80 of 105

  1. <
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. >