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[Roleplaying Games] Thank God I Finally Have A Table For Cannabis Potency.
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But I've heard of examples where players want to look for a secret tunnel - and because they rolled successfully, find one (even if the GM did not plan for it); I take it NPC aspects are a different scenario than secret tunnels?
Basically.
You could do it either way. How much latitude is available depends on the situation, the npc in question and how much control the gm wants to give up.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
But it's not necessarily a shame from their standpoint, as long as you can keep things rolling. They aren't disappointed because they don't know what they missed out on (and really, who can say whether they would've loved that sequence more than what they ended up doing instead).
I understand the GM needs to enjoy themselves too, though.
W...
what game is this
The new edition of Paranoia. It's not super fancy or anything but the writings consistently funny and it's worth a glance.
The best part about showing them the book about you not being a dick is that you can then execute their character for reading things above their clearance level.
Also the book is probably lying about not being a dick. If you're not a dick while running Paranoia you are playing it wrong.*
Nod. Get treat. PSN: QuipFilter
Alright, noted thanks! I guess I'll allow it if their reason for doing so isn't for luls and/or will not frustrate the other players.
It has the opposite effect on me and at least some other players.
All of these are different from a character spending a narrative token to decide that the book is there.
Above that point though, saying that any one way is wrong is silly, and leads the conversation into repetitive loops of everyone accusing everyone else of having fun wrong.
I think the benchmark should probably be whether their declared Aspect changes an NPC in a way that isn't interesting or entertaining. "Recognizing" that the dastardly Lord Marshal is secretly pining for a lost love could be cool. Using a high Empathy score to systematically declare that every enemy is actually on your side deep down probably wouldn't.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
It's not "do we think there would be a book on botany at this library?" Which is a fine question if you are playing that sort of game. But in this case it's not asking that. If your initial thought is "I actually don't think there would be", that's fine. But maybe realize that just saying no doesn't result in a very fluid experience. And it doesn't really serve anybody's vision of your world but your own.
It is a shame for two reasons;
1) I'm a good GM and I create cool scenarios which my players will want to experience. I don't want to railroad them into the scenario if they can come up with an inventive way to solve the problem, and I always try to create various options and scenarios for them to explore and combine, but "I use narrative powers to create the solution that my character then can come across" is not inventive, it's boring. Which leads me to...
2) As a GM I get to have my fun too, and part of that is the protection of my niche as dude in charge of the story. I like coming up with plots and plans and cunning NPC machinations. I don't like players messing around with my setting on a narrative level. On a personal, direct, character level? Sure go nuts. Wreck it. They have done before, they will again, and I love it. But sitting there letting the players decide everything about the setting and narrative is booooring... for me.
Oh yeah this is the foundation of the Blades arc we just completed. The cast was:
Baszo Baz: ex-leader of the Lampblacks, now a ghost. She was killed by the crew when she tried to setup an ambush and it went (unsurprisingly) terribly wrong. She's showed up as a ghost before but the crew was merciful and ended up making nice.
Malista: priestess and former lover of one of the crew. She was initially marked down as an enemy, but she ended up being more of an acquaintance and complication.
Abigail: creepy occult lady. She was created as a contact by one of the crew when they needed to learn stuff about ghosts.
However, it was obviously more complicated than that. At one point the crew had gone to Abigail and I offered them a Devil's Bargain* to "reveal" that Abigail was Baszo's mother. They took it.
At another point, another of the crew was going to visit with Baszo's children** and I offered a Devil's Bargain that Malista was there as a counselor sent by the church. They took it.
So we had Abigail Baz, creepy-ass occult lady and mother of the ghost, Baszo, in search of some combination of power and vengeance, and a priestess that was either the crew's way in or a canary in the coal mine. This led to an epic infiltration of a thrall-infested mansion, a full-on flight, and an eventual long range assassination of Abigail Baz. The setup was done by me, but two of the characters were created by my players and while the connections between the three were my idea, they had to be confirmed by them. None of this was plotted out in any way, it was all just stuff that followed from previous events involving these characters.
As an additional note, this is the entirety of the prep I did for what turned into a two-session mission:
Baszo does not want to be shoved into a host. She’s furious with her mother for corrupting her house and scared for her wife and sons. This will not stop Abigail from binding her to a body (likely Malista, unless she is prevented from going to the household) at which point Baszo will be Abigail’s living tool.
There’s a lot of history here -- Abigail wanted Baszo to follow in her footsteps as a whisper, but Baszo refused. We can see how that ended.
*a rule in Blades that gives you an extra die on your action roll in exchange for a cost that the GM offers -- the key being that the Devil's Bargain has to be accepted by the player and happens no matter what the result of the action
**yeah it's a whole thing. My Blades crew doesn't actually kill that many people, so it has an impact when they do
... but won't that be the last thing you ever watch?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
The Disappearance of Inigo Sharpe: Tomas à Dunsanin
Sometimes it feels that way, but I've passed the halfway mark (ep. 27 now) so maybe it's possible!
(and yes I see what you did there)
Isn't Swan Song still going?
BITD- Artemus Harrison
nah it's long over
(he's not dead)
((he's actually been running the King Arthur Pendragon campaign on his own channel with a pretty fantastic cast that includes Luke Crane, designer of Burning Wheel! It's a good show))
This is why every adventure begins with a car chase in medias res, man. This is not accidental.
This is key: narrativist GMing is an adaptation to the workload involved in determinative world building. Veteran GMs would do this even before it was codified; OSR was basically all about GMs going "that sounds cool, let's roll with that." The idea that RPGs-as-collaborative-storytelling is some newfangled mumbojumbo is asinine.
Good news, everyone! It turns out you can actually use every prepared thing you have as long as you're not playing in a rigidly determinist setting. Those sweet kobold sorcerers you were going to throw at your players for trying to loot the dragon's lair but they instead went to rob the skytrain? They're now birdman sorcerers who are totally against skytrains being robbed.
That crazy puzzle you designed that would require everyone to use their special skills to overcome to enter the Dark Laird Lair of Darkness? Well, they went to the Happy Unicorn Oasis instead, but you can still use that very same puzzle!
It's about re-skinning your encounters to match whatever narrative the players are interested in pursuing. It's a basic GM survival skill, honestly, and it stuns me that more people don't talk about how to do this, when to do this, and why you absolutely should be doing this all the time.
BITD- Artemus Harrison
"We have to get the spotorcycle working to catch that guy who stole our spoogle maps" was a legit phrase I heard at one point.
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
But you're just palette shifting this quantum ogre over to another context and robbing the players of having any real choice or agency and they will grow to resent you for it
if you have the time to spool up hours and hours of content and it works for your group more power to you
that would burn me out real quick tbh
Wow, that's a huge strawman there about the bandits (and be extension the Ogre.) Once the players encounter the bandits or the ogre you don't keep shifting it around. If they pack up and decide to not engage than that's the ogre/bandit encounter. He basically said "It's ignoring player agency when you add on ignoring player agency to your plan."
Edit: Actually I love the fact he uses the word "Quantum" to try and sound fancy and knowledgeable and then completely ignores that context. Once you've detected tracks/ESP'd/whatever the encounter the waveform is collapsed and it has become determinate! If he actually knew the science he would understand the role of observer effect and why the term is fitting and his example is horrible.
Nod. Get treat. PSN: QuipFilter
That's been my thinking on the subject. You don't follow the players around. "2 bandits and 2 bandit archers." "We run!" "In town you find 2 thieves and 2 thieves with bows." "Uh...we run?" "In the mountains you stumble onto a camp with 2 orcs and 2 orcs with crossbows!" "...I guess we fight..."
The problem is when you get railroady situations where the GM goes "Alright, there are two paths, and only one of them leads to the thing you want, choose wisely." And the players do what they think is due diligence to make the right choice, then the GM just puts whatever he wants at the end of the path the players choose.
That is problematic to a lot of players, because the GM is lying to them about whether or not their choices matter. Just don't give me a choice if you are just going to plug your content at the end of whichever choice I make, etc.
The two things are not the same. A good GM doesn't need to trick the players and make them feel like they are making choices that matter. It's remarkably easy to just actually put situations in front of your players and let them decide how to approach them. It's less work for the GM and more fun for the players. Sure it requires more improv chops than planning everything out ahead of time, but it's a skill you need.
It's more like this: I made two cool encounters, one of which I put on path A and one I put on path B. My players chose path B so they ran into that cool encounter. But my other encounter was really cool, so later when they were in a completely different area I put that encounter in front of them.
The idea that the ogre is somehow quantum because it appears wherever the players go is dumb; it's not quantum, it's an ogre that shows up to keep the game moving along. Once the players have dispatched the ogre, it's dead. Quantum dead, if it makes you feel better.
It has nothing to do with player choice; players are going to decide what they want to do based on either completely arbitrary or completely predictable paradigms. "It's what my character would do" being the most (hopefully) predictable paradigm. In which case Mr. Quantum Ogre doesn't go anywhere because you've successfully divined where your players will be.
Palette shifting is a ridiculous strawman not even worth addressing. If your players choose to flee from an encounter, they've still had the encounter. They chose to lose it, so now something bad happens, and your monsters are effectively gone until the players opt to re-engage.
Also I will never say "illusionism" with anything other than a stupid grin. Because that word, and the attached concept, is the height of comedy gold. Sometimes you wonder how there can be people who think this badly, and then you remember The Big Dig. "We couldn't account for all of the water IN THIS DRAINED SWAMPLAND NEXT TO THE OCEAN." Sure, buddy.
I prefer actual choice
If the PCs go down one path, they won't find what's on the other path. I know what's down each path and they're not the same, not even reskinned because they go to different places, and what is in a place is based on what's I've written and planned to be there.
Harder work but a more complex world, and besides, the stuff in both places is still there, they can go back to either.
And so, indeed, both paths led to encounter B (although one of them contained encounter A first), no?
EDIT: Oh, I should note that I understand that "encounter B that the players ran into later" in this case can mean "elements of encounter B but in a different time, location, and with a different coat of paint on top".
You find yourselves at the metaphorical fork in the road; the tunnels split here and run in two divergent directions. On the left the slope declines slightly and to the right it inclines ever so much. There is moss sticking to the wall on the left tunnel, gently luminescent beyond the pale glow of your lantern. To the right the sound of rushing water reaches your ear.
Which way do the players go?
IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. Either way you're going to have an awesome time because on the left you have a sweet moss slide ride down deeper into the dungeon and to the right you have a sweet river ride down deeper into the dungeon.
But the players feel like they had a choice and literally will never realize they didn't have a choice.
Unless you're the kind of asshole who says "hahaha I totally railroaded you, get rekt" at the end of a session or something.
BITD- Artemus Harrison