symptoms of a scatterbrain @22degreehalo - Tumblr Blog

one part of my own artistic philosophy, which has real moral and political meaning for me, is that the most important task in depicting any human individual, no matter how horrifying, is to track an honest attempt to understand their own motivations and belief system and interior reality, despite how supposedly unaccountable or hard to understand or difficult to confront this may be, and then to communicate that with as much rigor as possible.

frontmansdefender

#hmmmmmm #prev reblog (as in. the post I reblogged before this.)

writerswritecompany

22degreehalo

As a writer, I can't help but notice that this problem could be solved by. Not harassing people who use AI.

#as always #'the worst thing about X is that innocent people are being harassed because people think they're X!!!'#is a bad argument #AI discourse

toroidalearthtruther

"less is more" is a lie perpetuated by big small to sell more less

#big if true

22degreehalo

I will say that I find 90% of criticisms of PBTA systems entirely incomprehensible, in a 'I genuinely can't figure out what you are trying to express' sort of way. (How do playbooks 'limit' the type of character you can play? And how are moves any more constraining overall than, e.g., skill checks...???)

However. I must admit that I do have some negative feelings towards the 'mixed success' mechanic.

It's true that RPGs are mostly storytelling generators, and that drama and conflict keep things interesting. But RPGs are also usually collaborative, and more often than not do involve the players trying to achieve some sort of goal.

Under those circumstances, I find it overly demoralising for the most common roll to be 'something else bad happens' - when 'yes, your helpful action makes things better :)' is genuinely difficult and rare. It makes me want to hesitate a lot before making a decision, because what if I only make things worse?

It's especially bad if the thing you're trying to do doesn't even help. It's not a 'mixed success' if you achieve what you wanted, but it doesn't in any way aid the group toward a goal, and also there is a negative consequence that hampers the group. That's just negative!!! And thing like that happen fairly often whenever there's any kind of ambiguity? Like, maybe when you're searching for a clue that isn't there, or investigating someone who has nothing to do with the crime. Yes, the DM should try and move the story forwards regardless, but that can put a lot of work onto the DM to balance these scales!

Because the thing is, some games really are based around just causing chaos and seeing what happens. River Bank, Monty Python, Good Society (though the latter doesn't have dice at all) - in those, this sort of mechanic would be perfect, because each character has their own idiosyncratic goals, and being able to make progress on their own selfish actions while also causing more chaos for other characters to react to would perfectly enable the kind of story being told! In a game like that, it's more fun if other people mess things up a bit!

But in something like, idk, Monster of the Week? If someone messes up a roll, it makes it harder for everyone to achieve the thing we're working towards. That just kinda... feels bad? And can even foster resentment, if someone isn't playing to their stats or is rolling dice on something unimportant. In those sorts of games, the primary goal is in itself such a big source of conflict that not much more needs to be added.

Admittedly, this last part comes more from listening to a podcast rather than experience playing, but... Listening to The Adventure Time's MotW playthrough, I found myself just kinda stressed out whenever people did anything. Rather than encourage big plays, it did the exact opposite. And it made it very rare to feel like actual progress was being made. Instead, it just felt more like problems were being shuffled around: one gets less bad, another gets more bad.

Obviously, a straightforward 'do x, then y, then z: hurray you win!!' sort of game, or story, would not be very fun. But there needs to feel like a certain sort of build up of actions and intentions for the ultimate result to feel earned, right? If the characters just keep messing up and then suddenly the enemy is defeated... it's not really satisfying. It just feels like it happened arbitrarily, or that they eventually lucked out despite their incompetence. I want it to feel like the heroes won because they did the right thing.

Maybe I'm taking too narrow a view of consequences; e.g., heroes allowing themselves to be injured so as to get a good shot on an enemy usually feels satisfying rather than not. But when you're playing a game as well and you need to make sure your character sticks around to help out others...

I don't know - maybe I'm just too risk averse, ahah. It's kinda funny to me that games which natively don't really have 'consent to die' mechanics can feel less stressful than PBTA can make me feel. Is it also because I'm stressed at the idea of being inspired enough? Coming up with creative enough solutions rather than being able to count on my character's chosen abilities coming through?

Maybe I need more experience with it all. But these are my feelings on the mechanic so far...!

22degreehalo

Side not but I also don't understand confusion with GM-facing tokens and the like.

'So I can do this when I have a token... but also I can do it any time, anyway?!'

Yeah! Just like absolutely everything a GM does, ever <3

Most people have no issue with the idea of a GM deciding when an enemy dies even if it doesn't perfectly line up with the HP provided for it. But that doesn't mean that HP is meaningless because GMs can just decide for themselves if an enemy feels hurt enough. HP is useful because it provides guidelines: a (hopefully!) balanced and play-tested number reflecting how difficult the enemy ought to be, taking into account its various abilities (so, e.g., a very defensive and tanky enemy intuitively should have more HP than a speedy, dodgy one).

Same with the tokens! Yes, if the timing feels right, the GMs can just choose to pull a hard move or whatever. But the accumulating tokens are like HP: given that the players have had these sorts of rolls and experiences, this is about how often and how many times you should be raising the stakes.

For many games GMs are just sort of expected to decide that sort of thing on their own, so experienced GMs usually feel fairly comfortable with taking that on. But that doesn't mean that guidelines like this are entirely useless. If it was the norm for monster stat blocks to not include HP - for DMs to decide for themselves when monsters die - DMs would tend to get a good intuitive sense for that, too. And might find it unnecessary when a new book does include that information 'officially'.

But for the most part, more aid to the GM is a good thing!! If you don't want to use it, don't! But GMs already face a lot of cognitive burden these days, especially in more narrative-focused RPG. These sorts of tokens seem, to me, a really good step in finding ways to allow for narrative-focused stories without putting the entirety of the responsibility for their content, pacing, and balancing onto one person!

#rpg