ParanetOnline
The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: Wordmaker on March 23, 2013, 12:39:39 PM
-
This seemed to be something of a crux issue in another thread, so I thought I'd see what people generally thought about their characters failing in games.
Now, by failure I don't mean the whole group being wiped out or anything that might result in the campaign having to end. Anything that stops the campaign stops the story, and that's no fun.
I mean minor and major setbacks. A beloved NPC being killed. Maybe even a PC dying. Or just losing a conflict, or an enemy escaping.
Personally, I love moments like these, because they're an opportunity for interesting roleplaying and storyline that might not have otherwise happened. They also raise the stakes and make eventual victory not only more urgent, but also more satisfying. I find I get very bored very quickly if the players just succeed constantly, overcoming any threat as soon as it appears, resorting to immediate conflict and removing an opponent from play before they've even had a chance to play a part in the story.
This goes for whether I'm a player or a GM. I love the rise and fall of characters, seeing them at their lowest before their comeback and final victory.
One of the reasons I love FATE, and DFRPG, so much is that the system not only compensates failure by awarding Fate Points when the players lose a conflict or accept a compel, but the fact the players can use these moments of failure and weakness to build up their strength before the final act means the system encourages varying levels of success throughout the game. For me, that's essential to a good story.
What do others think?
-
I tend to agree. As I inferred in that other thread, I feel players who go I into a game expecting to succeed at everything and be an untouchable godling aren't actually interested in playing the game. They are more interested in playing some kind of power fantasy.
That being said, sometimes you need to let your players feel like bad asses. Getting screwed over at every turn is no fun. I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and how boring the shows would be if things didn't go wrong at the worst possible times.
-
Yup, I try and plan my games in the same manner. The players should always have agency and influence over events, and even when they fail, that failure should lead to an opportunity to find another solution.
And yes, they absolutely need to kick some ass regularly!
-
The secret is to do what Jim does: make the situation so bad that you have to pull as much creative badass as possible to succeed.
Sue comes to mind.
-
For my players, the mere fact that they survived the situation is the badass part.
-
When I play a game, I want my character to be able to succeed in his goal and anything that interferes with his reaching that goal detracts from the fun. I keep it simple, success is fun, failure is not. In DFRPG, however, failure before success seems to be the central idea. I find myself being disgruntled when setbacks happen. If I can finish the run, the adventure, the module in a certain length of time, I do not need my GM to throw the party for a loop and we have to overcome the setback and the game ending later.
I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and one chief gripe I have is how the shows often have things go wrong at the worst time and the characters manage to overcome the huge gulf or climb up out of the deep valley and succeed. I find that quite silly. If the characters could have gotten their badass on and overcome the major setback, then they could have simply got their badass on before the setback and avoided all the bullshit the writers feel that they needed to put in to justify their paycheck. In fact, to my view, if the characters got their badass on and succeeded all the time, I could watch more episodes worth of badass asskicking in the same time I watched a single normal (setback to be overcome) episode.
To me, Sue could have happened anyway and it would have been awesome even if the situation wasn't so bad.
Chocolate is good. I do not need additives to "enhance" the flavor. Being the simple person that I am, ass kicking is good, I do not need setbacks to kick ass.
-
That would be boring. I mean, part of the fun of plots is that the characters succeed despite the setbacks, despite the odds, despite their failings. It's boring to see success without work.
-
I think seeing failure and setbacks as "additives" might be looking at it the wrong way. For a lot of people, especially when it comes to fiction, that failure is part of the fun. And believe me, when it comes to making something marketable, constant success, with no setback, no escalation of threat, that's a gamble.
You enjoy success, Toturi, and that's fine. If you've earned that success, you'd rather win, and you want to see your heroes win too. But I think a lot of people like that element of danger. The chance that their heroes can lose it all. Those people find it exciting to see characters up against the ropes, pushed to the edge. The characters get their badass on not just because they can, but because they have to. Because if they don't, they could lose everything that matters to them.
That right there, that's drama. That's conflict. And for me, that's fun.
-
On a meta level, "failure" in an RPG is when the game stops being fun for those involved. "Fun" is highly context-dependent; there is no single definition that will apply to all gaming groups. For instance, most tabletop games are fundamentally cooperative--the game is structured around a mutually-supportive group of PCs that are trying to accomplish the same general goal. Conflict is supposed to happen between the PCs on one side (maybe with some NPC allies) and NPCs on the other; while some amount of in-group tension may exist, PvP is definitely a failure. On the other hand, nearly all LARPs operate on exactly the reverse principle--PvP (often social) is the primary conflict type, so when it happens, it's not failure. (Failure in LARPs is more commonly the result of rule-breaking and/or biased adjudication.)
Individually, no two individual gamers are going to have exactly the same definition of fun. A successful game relies on getting a group together that has sufficiently similar definitions, and then running a game that lives within the overlapping space as much as possible.
Problems often arise on the internet (where people are frequently wrong (http://xkcd.com/386/)) when a gamer with a successful career in one type of group meets a gamer from a very different and incompatible group, and at least one of the gamers insist that their own way is "correct" and the other guy is "doing it wrong." Even beyond the arrogance of the message conveyed, it is typical for "explanations" like "you're immature" or "you're incompetent" to follow along as part of the "you're doing it wrong" argument.
So long as everyone in the other guy's group is having fun, who cares? They may not be doing things the way you would, but that's not important--if you aren't part of the relevant gaming group, your definition of fun is not relevant to that group's collective definition of fun.
Now, if one or more people in that group is not having fun, yeah, someone is "doing it wrong." But here it's very important not to let your own preconceptions of "if I was in that group, then..." override. One of three things needs to happen: either the game needs to move into a more fully shared definition of fun, the people not having fun need to leave the game, or there needs to be some sort of payoff that convinces the people not having fun to suck it up and continue anyway. (I think the last option happens more frequently than I'd like, and I think it's inherently socially unstable--causing resentment--in the long run, but people have a LOT of reasons to pick it anyway, most commonly out-of-game friendships.)
Going to dinner with friends, I may have more to say later....
Edit: And I see my comments are immediately relevant while I was typing this up! Who knew. ::)
-
This post, right here, this is wisdom.
My original post was addressing the idea of characters in a game facing setbacks and failure, whether planned or at random through the fall of the dice.
But yes, absolutely, the only truly failure in roleplaying games is when people aren't having fun.
-
Well said, Vairelome. Hear! Hear!
If we stay inside the game, I don't necessarily think that failure is the right word though. Or maybe it's just how you look at things. This is not supposed to be a "this is right, this is wrong" sermon, if it sounds like this, please remember this sentence.
There are two ways to look at this, and I think those are the main issue in the other thread. For the one side, a character is a tool to overcome obstacles and reach goals. If you don't overcome the obstacle, therefore not reach your goal, that is regarded as a failure. On the other side, there are people who consider a character to be a vehicle for the story. If the character fails and it contributes to the story, it is a success in their eyes, the character's failure is secondary to this.
tutori and Wordmaker make the cases for each side pretty well. I myself like to go for the drama approach lately, but I still enjoy the occasional Shadowrun game that we tend to play by the goals approach.
Regardless of the approach, I think failure should be a matter of choice. I've been playing a bought TDE adventure lately, and there are some things happening in there that are disguised as choices, but the players are actually forced into acting a certain way, no matter if they actually want to or not. Failing like that, without even having a say in the matter is what usually bothers me most. Even if that say is only a little one.
Though a question appears, especially to tutori, since he's the only representative at the moment. Let's say there is a fight and you fail. For simplicities sake, let's say that the dice just fell incredibly unlucky for you, and you are defeated (your views on "the opposition was just too strong" would be interesting as well). What happens now? What would be your thoughts about the fight as a whole? Generally: If success is the only option, how do you handle failure, if it does happen?
-
Though a question appears, especially to tutori, since he's the only representative at the moment. Let's say there is a fight and you fail. For simplicities sake, let's say that the dice just fell incredibly unlucky for you, and you are defeated (your views on "the opposition was just too strong" would be interesting as well). What happens now? What would be your thoughts about the fight as a whole? Generally: If success is the only option, how do you handle failure, if it does happen?
The dice happened. And the dice will happen. That is why it is so important that the GM low balls the opposition so that failure is minimised. If, in spite of the GM cooperation in a collaborative effort to have a fun game, the dice happened, then I will be more willing to write off the bad experience to a fluke and I continue with the game and continue to work towards the objective.
If the opposition was genuinely too strong, then I expect to lose. And I would question why the opposition is too strong. If it is inexperience with the game system, then this is one reason to err on the side of caution and select opposition that the GM did not think was a challenge.
Quite often, it is this dogma that the GM has to provide a challenge to the players and it is not fun without a challenge; if the players don't work for the win, then they won't appreciate win. Perhaps. Perhaps not, take a look at the character sheets. Min-maxed/optimised (in this case, I think either term may be used interchangeable, provided you do not attribute degoratory intent) characters? Yes? Good. Then the players have already worked for the win. The players have already worked to shape their characters, they have hone the characters to a fine edge. If the GM looks at the character sheets and selects his opposition to match, then I think this is where things go wrong. The GM is invalidating the hard work the players have put in pre-game. Prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. In the case where the GM feels that he needs to challenge his players in spite of his players doing their homework so to speak, the prior preparation not only is invalidated, it may well be the cause of failure.
-
So basically you are saying if you are on par with the level of a dragon, you shouldn't face it because you could lose? It would be better for you to face a rabbit because you could beat that?
Edit: I'm not trying to be insensitive; I'm just trying to grasp what you feel an appropriate challenge is. If you are sent on a recovery mission and the item gets stolen while you are on your way to get it is this a bad thing? What if it is stolen on the way back while the PC s are sleeping?
It just seems like you don't like conflict in which case I don't understand what the motivation is.
-
I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and one chief gripe I have is how the shows often have things go wrong at the worst time and the characters manage to overcome the huge gulf or climb up out of the deep valley and succeed. I find that quite silly. If the characters could have gotten their badass on and overcome the major setback, then they could have simply got their badass on before the setback and avoided all the bullshit the writers feel that they needed to put in to justify their paycheck. In fact, to my view, if the characters got their badass on and succeeded all the time, I could watch more episodes worth of badass asskicking in the same time I watched a single normal (setback to be overcome) episode.
Except that would mean you get one episode. Because heroes who always win without difficulty are incredibly boring unless they're just being a straight up parody of themselves. Being an unstoppable badass that nobody can challenge is fine for the first five minutes of the episode, but the drama and entertainment for the rest of the hour is about the challenges the characters face.
If the characters are badass and avoid setbacks, there is no plot. Then you're just watching someone's power fantasy about how awesome their character is, and that gets really irritating really quickly (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodmodeSue).
For a lot of us, gaming is about some kind of accomplishment. It's not an accomplishment if you didn't have to work for it, and really, no, just statting the character out isn't working.
Why have dice at all then, if you think that you've already "earned it" just by filling out the character sheet? If you think the GM is doing something wrong by making losing even a possibility?
Winning's fun, but it's more satisfying to earn it. It sounds like you don't really want to play, so much as you want to win.
-
So basically you are saying if you are on par with the level of a dragon, you shouldn't face it because you could lose? It would be better for you to face a rabbit because you could beat that?
If given the choice between a dragon and a rabbit, all other factors remaining the same, yes.
-
Can you please GM a game in the play by posts? I am very curious as to what situations you would put PC in
-
Let me get this straight, Toturi. You don't ever want to even come close to losing. You want the GM to low ball everything so the chance of failure is minimized. You want your character to be awesome and badass all the time, never face a major set back, and basically win at everything without having to face real adversity and challenge. You think the GM is doing you some kind of disservice if he fails to lob softballs under hand for you to belt out of the park...
...and in the other thread you said you think other players were being self-masturbatory?
-
For a lot of us, gaming is about some kind of accomplishment. It's not an accomplishment if you didn't have to work for it, and really, no, just statting the character out isn't working.
Why have dice at all then, if you think that you've already "earned it" just by filling out the character sheet? If you think the GM is doing something wrong by making losing even a possibility?
Winning's fun, but it's more satisfying to earn it. It sounds like you don't really want to play, so much as you want to win.
Of course statting the character out isn't earning the win. You earn the win by statting the most optimal character you can come up with. That is the work. That earns the win.
You don't earn it by filling out a character sheet. You earn it by sculpting, by chiselling that block of stone into a masterpiece. By optimising, by min-maxing. Losing in a game with dice is almost certainly a possibility. That, per se, has nothing to do with the GM.
True. I want to have fun. Winning is fun. I can't have fun if I do not play. Hence I play to win and that is fun.
-
Can you please GM a game in the play by posts? I am very curious as to what situations you would put PC in
Sure. Are you interested in playing in a game I GM then?
-
I would play it. I want to understand your play style more and feel this may be the best way to do that.
-
Let me get this straight, Toturi. You don't ever want to even come close to losing. You want the GM to low ball everything so the chance of failure is minimized. You want your character to be awesome and badass all the time, never face a major set back, and basically win at everything without having to face real adversity and challenge. You think the GM is doing you some kind of disservice if he fails to lob softballs under hand for you to belt out of the park...
...and in the other thread you said you think other players were being self-masturbatory?
I want everyone's character to be awesome and badass all the time, not just my own. The players (plural, not just myself) should never face a major setback and basically win at everything despite their characters facing adversity and challenges that less optimal characters are unlikely to overcome.
I understand that I would not always get what I want in a game. Some players like to be challenged. But assuming I get what I want and my character succeeds, does my character's success hold back the other players enjoyment of the game? If my character gets the thingmajig that your character wants or manages to get the group pass an obstacle, will it adversely affect your enjoyment of the game? I do not think so. I hope not. So yes, spin it however you wish, I still do think that those other players are being self-masturbatory.
-
I would play it. I want to understand your play style more and feel this may be the best way to do that.
I'll see if I can come up with an interesting city concept and a campaign direction.
In the mean time however, do you have any preferences? What type of game do you usually enjoy and find fun?
-
Of course statting the character out isn't earning the win. You earn the win by statting the most optimal character you can come up with. That is the work. That earns the win.
You don't earn it by filling out a character sheet. You earn it by sculpting, by chiselling that block of stone into a masterpiece. By optimising, by min-maxing. Losing in a game with dice is almost certainly a possibility. That, per se, has nothing to do with the GM.
So you're saying you earn it by...filling out the character sheet optimally.
If I'm reading this right, Harry shouldn't succeed in the books because he's determined, clever, and has to figure out a way around obstacles. Harry should succeed in the books because he can roll a 4 in fire spells, and the author never throws anything at him that can dodge better than a 2, never gives him an Investigation roll that's going to take him real time, and has him figure out everything right off the bat?
True. I want to have fun. Winning is fun. I can't have fun if I do not play. Hence I play to win and that is fun.
I find it hard to consider what you're describing as "playing" except in the technical sense. You seem to want it to be that you don't play so much as be rewarded for finishing character creation. Because, honestly? It's really, really not hard to make a good character in this system. If there's anything my discussions with Sanctaphrax have taught me, is that it's laughably simple to make a character who's got high skills in several applicable areas.
So really, what you're "sculpting," this work-of-art character that you feel should be an 'I win' button? is probably along the exact same lines as thousands of other people have made.
"Winning" isn't about just having the best character stats. It's about what you do with them. You aren't "playing to win," you're expecting someone to hand you the win just for showing up.
I want everyone's character to be awesome and badass all the time, not just my own. The players (plural, not just myself) should never face a major setback and basically win at everything despite their characters facing adversity and challenges that less optimal characters are unlikely to overcome.
If the characters never face the chance of losing, they do not face adversity and challenges. If they never face a major setback and basically win at everything they do not face adversity and challenges. What they're facing is boring. What they're facing is softball validation.
Adversity and challenges mean the characters have to work to beat them. Otherwise it's, to put it as bluntly as possible, one big circle jerk. Fanfiction is filled with this sort of "We're all awesome and nobody can beat us ever" stories, and except for the ones that are parody, they generally suck.
I understand that I would not always get what I want in a game. Some players like to be challenged. But assuming I get what I want and my character succeeds, does my character's success hold back the other players enjoyment of the game? If my character gets the thingmajig that your character wants or manages to get the group pass an obstacle, will it adversely affect your enjoyment of the game? I do not think so. I hope not.
It's not about your character succeeding. It's about your character always succeeding without there being any chance of failure.
Your character never wins a pitched battle because they never face anything that challenges them. Your character never makes a daring escape because there are no obstacles for them to dare. Your character never has to make a clever plan because nobody even comes close to outsmarting him. Your character never has to make a tough choice because there's no risk.
In short? The character never has to make an effort.
So yes, spin it however you wish, I still do think that those other players are being self-masturbatory.
My point wasn't that you shouldn't consider them self-masturbatory. It was that this playstyle you're describing seems to be even moreso.
-
self-masturbatory
If he's doing it in a group and everyone's having fun, I think "masturbation" is not the right metaphor. Surely we've moved on to sex, yes?
-
The last page and a half of debate largely turns on one of the more significant differences-of-opinion that many gaming tables may have with one another: what is your group's tolerance for character death (or functional equivalent)?
Mine is fairly low. I don't enjoy Call of Cthulu-type settings where knowledge causes insanity, and I don't like your-character-could-REALLY-die-at-any-time game assumptions. I put a lot of work into building characters that I like playing and want to see develop over a significant arc. Cheap death isn't something I find fun at all.
There are entire games built around exactly the opposite concept (Paranoia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)), which I've actually played once as a one-shot). Since Paranoia has seen multiple editions, obviously there's a player base that has different preferences than I do.
That's not to say I don't enjoy challenges and even in-game lethal combat. The key here is "willing suspension of disbelief," and the idea that failure may result in less-than-lethal consequences that you still care about preventing. Also, some players have a slightly unrealistic idea of their own tolerance for character death, and most GMs try to advertise a more lethal setting than they actually run (largely to enhance the "willing suspension of disbelief"). If you want to check your own tolerance, ask yourself when was the last time you had a character die in game, when was the last time another PC died in game, and as a fraction of sessions played, how often does it actually happen? Also, how did you feel about the death?
I get a bit suspicious when I'm told "character death must always be a realistic risk for me to have fun!" and "I haven't lost a character in the past 10 years of play." Seems to me there might be a difference between the actual and perceived risk, in that case--not that there's anything wrong with that, so long as everyone is having fun, but if you're discussing game-related ideology on the internet, I prefer looking at actual risk over unrealistic perception.
In short, I think I fall on the "lower tolerance for character death" end of the player preference spectrum, but still in a relatively heavily-populated region.
-
"Winning" isn't about just having the best character stats. It's about what you do with them. You aren't "playing to win," you're expecting someone to hand you the win just for showing up.
If the characters never face the chance of losing, they do not face adversity and challenges. If they never face a major setback and basically win at everything they do not face adversity and challenges. What they're facing is boring. What they're facing is softball validation.
Winning is as much about having the best character stats as what you do with them. Having the best tools is no use if you do not know how to use them, but to have the best odds of success, you'd want to use the best tools. The characters nearly always face a chance of losing in DFRPG, no matter how good the character. This is a fact of a system with dice. Hence the characters do face adversity and challenges, just that a well built and optimised character reduces that to a mere possibility instead of failure being probable.
Adversity and challenges mean the characters have to work to beat them. Otherwise it's, to put it as bluntly as possible, one big circle jerk. Fanfiction is filled with this sort of "We're all awesome and nobody can beat us ever" stories, and except for the ones that are parody, they generally suck.
It's not about your character succeeding. It's about your character always succeeding without there being any chance of failure.
Your character never wins a pitched battle because they never face anything that challenges them. Your character never makes a daring escape because there are no obstacles for them to dare. Your character never has to make a clever plan because nobody even comes close to outsmarting him. Your character never has to make a tough choice because there's no risk.
In short? The character never has to make an effort.
I disagree. I like fan fiction. Most of the time, I do not think they suck. Well they may suck, but in a good, enjoyable and fun way. It's about your character always succeeding with there being a minimal chance of failure.
Hopefully, yes. No effort is good. No effort is fun. And this is one thing I like about DFRPG, and as you have pointed out yourself, you can build a good character with a little effort. But I think you are wrong. The character has to put in effort, but if I had built the character right, I do not.
My point wasn't that you shouldn't consider them self-masturbatory. It was that this playstyle you're describing seems to be even moreso.
I like Vairelome's comment and I think it bears repeating that the playstyle I am describing is a group thing and everyone's having fun.
-
This has been pretty enlightening. I can honestly say I've never met any gamer who wanted their GM to lowball the opposition in order to try and ensure success.
As a GM, I root for my players. I want them to succeed, but I also want them to have to put some effort into it. My group, and all groups I've been a part of, don't want success to be a foregone conclusion just because we made the right choices at character creation.
To answer your question, Toturi, yes, characters always succeeding in a game would spoil my fun. If one or more characters are always beating the bad guys because the GM won't let them fail, then there's no point in my being there. If the group is always going to succeed, then there's no story. Going from A to B killing monsters and solving every puzzle right away, that isn't a story. That's a series of successes being handed to you. If that's what you love from a game, then I'm honestly glad you have a group who shares that feeling and loves the same kind of game.
Me? To use the previous example, I'd rather fight the dragon, lose, get stronger, and then come back to beat the dragon.
-
Me? To use the previous example, I'd rather fight the dragon, lose, get stronger, and then come back to beat the dragon.
What if your character is eaten and there is no come back? Given the choice of utter defeat and total success, which would you choose?
-
Why does defeat have to result in death? That's dull. Anything which ends the story prematurely should be avoided, if possible. An interesting, engaging defeat is not the end, no more than success should mean that there is never another challenge.
Given the choice between utter defeat and total success, I would want whichever one provided the most satisfying end to the story. Sometimes a tragic defeat can be a great thing.
In general, I want to win. But I don't want that victory to be a foregone conclusion. And I want to be able to enjoy the story that goes with defeat just as much as the one that goes with success.
-
What if your character is eaten and there is no come back? Given the choice of utter defeat and total success, which would you choose?
Well, in SOME cases, a middle ground is possible (DFRPG concessions are made for this).
Me? To use the previous example, I'd rather fight the dragon, lose, get stronger, and then come back to beat the dragon.
But in truth, rather a large percentage, maybe even a significant majority, of the antagonists I've faced in my gaming career weren't interested in negotiated surrenders that let you live. We're talking about D&D 2nd-4th Ed and oWoD, mostly, not DFRPG/FATE. In that context, losing a fight might very easily mean permanently losing your character, so this does go back to my post above concerning how much tolerance a player has for character death. Certainly, in a system that has concessions and a GM who is willing to use them, player tolerance for losing may increase a bit as the stakes go down.
I am curious as to how much character death shows up in the games you've run.
-
Well, in SOME cases, a middle ground is possible (DFRPG concessions are made for this).
I am curious as to how much character death shows up in the games you've run.
I'll be honest. I have never killed a character that the player did not want to be killed. (OK, fine. The characters did not die but fell to the Dark Side. It was a Star Wars game.)
EDIT: But the players chose the Corruption Destinies, not me.
-
I'll be honest. I have never killed a character that the player did not want to be killed. (OK, fine. The characters did not die but fell to the Dark Side. It was a Star Wars game.)
EDIT: But the players chose the Corruption Destinies, not me.
Well, the character death question was for Wordmaker. I already figured out that character death wasn't something you liked. :)
-
Very little, actually. I've been gaming for close to 20 years and in that time I've only killed about 6 PCs, and 3 of those were in the climax of a campaign where they decided to stand their ground against an enemy they knew would kill them.
Defeat doesn't have to equal surrender. It's a great option for keeping PCs alive, though. If the villains won't offer the chance to surrender, that's the choice of the GM who created them.
But there are countless ways for defeat to mean something other than death. Not all confrontations with the villain will be a straight fight, and nor should they be. And the goal of every fight will not be to kill your opponent. Sometimes the villain wants something the heroes have. Sometimes the villain has a different target altogether. Sometimes it's a mass battle where the PCs are just one part of a larger conflict. Somtimes it's a chase, and the villain's goal is to escape rather than to kill anyone.
The assumption that death is always on the line is erroneous.
And as you said, DFRPG is great for this sort of thing, because if the player is worried about losing a conflict and doesn't want to take the chance of their character being killed, they can concede, accepting defeat but controlling how their character is defeated.
-
If the characters never face the chance of losing, they do not face adversity and challenges. If they never face a major setback and basically win at everything they do not face adversity and challenges. What they're facing is boring. What they're facing is softball validation.
Adversity and challenges mean the characters have to work to beat them. Otherwise it's, to put it as bluntly as possible, one big circle jerk. Fanfiction is filled with this sort of "We're all awesome and nobody can beat us ever" stories, and except for the ones that are parody, they generally suck.
It's not about your character succeeding. It's about your character always succeeding without there being any chance of failure.
Part of the problem here is that the vast majority of game designers and GMs do not understand compound probability.
An example:
What base chance of success does the character need to have on any give roll to succeed at 8 rolls in a row with a 75% total probability?
More in depth coverage of the example: the adventure has 8 'critical points' the the PCs have to succeed at. Everyone wants to PCs to succeed at adventures at least 75% of the time, or even higher, because the stakes of the adventure are often something like "and the city blows up if you fail".
So, what percent chance of success at an individual test would the characters need?
If the PCs succeed on an individual test 90% of the time, they'll succeed at the adventure only around 43% of the time. To succeed at the adventures 75% of the time, the PCs would need a success rate on an individual test of around 96.5%. But books and cinema tend to support the characters only succeeding by the narrowest margins. And that's the feeling that game designers often try to emulate, which means that they set the expected PC success rate to maybe 67% and the whole adventure goes off the rails the first time the dice hit the table.
That's why most stealth systems in games are completely useless. They ask you to succeed several times in a row to get anything done with stealth, and unless you've really cheesed out your stealth skill, you'll fail one of those rolls sooner rather than later. Which means planning for succeeding in sneaking isn't something you do. Sneaking is just something you plan to do to let you get as close as possible to the enemy before you switch to the combat engine.
-
But the issue here isn't even 75% chance. It's the difference between any chance and complete and total success every time
-
If he's doing it in a group and everyone's having fun, I think "masturbation" is not the right metaphor. Surely we've moved on to sex, yes?
He's the one who started using it, I was just borrowing his terminology.
Winning is as much about having the best character stats as what you do with them. Having the best tools is no use if you do not know how to use them, but to have the best odds of success, you'd want to use the best tools. The characters nearly always face a chance of losing in DFRPG, no matter how good the character. This is a fact of a system with dice. Hence the characters do face adversity and challenges, just that a well built and optimised character reduces that to a mere possibility instead of failure being probable.
That's really not what you said, though. You said by building the character, you had already "earned" the right to win, and it was the GM's job to lob softballs at you so that the possibility of losing was remote at best--and that if the GM had been so callous as to make something that had a real chance of defeating you, they were doing it wrong.
"Adversity" and "challenge" implies the character has difficulty. Adversity is something that has to be overcome--i.e., you're starting out with some kind of disadvantage. Challenge implies the character is...well, challenged--not doing something that he's all but guaranteed to succeed at barring a freak accident of the dice...which you can mitigate or outright undo with a single fate point in a lot of cases.
I disagree. I like fan fiction. Most of the time, I do not think they suck. Well they may suck, but in a good, enjoyable and fun way. It's about your character always succeeding with there being a minimal chance of failure.
...To each their own, I guess. While I enjoy a character being awesome, it just feels flat if they don't have to work for it.
Hopefully, yes. No effort is good. No effort is fun. And this is one thing I like about DFRPG, and as you have pointed out yourself, you can build a good character with a little effort. But I think you are wrong. The character has to put in effort, but if I had built the character right, I do not.
If you're not putting in any effort, though...what's the point? Why show up? Why play? It just seems so...empty of the game's basically decided in your favor without you having to do anything.
How do any of your games last more than a session of there's nothing even slowing your characters down?
I mean, imagine this applying to...well, just about anything else, really. The Devils and the Rangers are playing, but statistically speaking, Martin Brodeur is one of the best goalies of all time. Therefore, the Devils win and the rest of the game's a formality? Granted, as a Devils fan I'd be largely in favor of that, but what's the point?
What if your character is eaten and there is no come back? Given the choice of utter defeat and total success, which would you choose?
I feel like a lot of people either forget about concessions or don't understand what they mean. A concession is a gameplay term and mechanic, not a plot term and mechanic. When someone takes a concession, that doesn't mean that the characters stop fighting to negotiate (in most cases), it means the players stop fighting and negotiate.
A Concession and a Taken Out might well be narrated in the exact same way. Going with the dragon example, the combat ends with the dragon smacking the character out a window, then leaving with the macguffin. If it's a Taken Out, then yes, maybe the dragon kills you. But if it's a concession, it might be that you landed in a tree which broke your fall. Or you grabbed something on the way out and didn't fall.
The most important thing to remember about resolving combat in Dresden is that not every fight is to the death. In fact, the vast majority aren't going to be. Concessions exist to give you an option to end combat beyond, "Everyone on one side or the other is dead."
Failure doesn't mean death in DFRPG. It might, but there are tons of other options.
Anything which ends the story prematurely should be avoided, if possible. An interesting, engaging defeat is not the end, no more than success should mean that there is never another challenge.
This needs to be highlighted, because I think it states my point well--I consider "We're awesome at everything and never face a real challenge" to be something that will end the story prematurely.
-
The most important thing to remember about resolving combat in Dresden is that not every fight is to the death. In fact, the vast majority aren't going to be. Concessions exist to give you an option to end combat beyond, "Everyone on one side or the other is dead."
Failure doesn't mean death in DFRPG. It might, but there are tons of other options.
This needs to be highlighted, because I think it states my point well--I consider "We're awesome at everything and never face a real challenge" to be something that will end the story prematurely.
'Failure' that doesn't result in failure isn't failure.
To expand:
If there isn't any point in the adventure where 'failure' will result in actual failure, then your chance of success at the adventure is 100%, and you are dressing up the narration of that 100%. And if there are places where 'failure' then you need to look at how often they actually happen and what the PCs chance of avoiding them are.
Also, how well are the lines between them communicated? Will losing this fight result in the city blowing up, or not? If it will, I'd prefer not to lose. Will losing this fight make it more likely that the city will blow up? If yes, I'd still prefer not to lose because the city blowing up is such a bad result that even a small increase in likelyhood of it happening is a terribad result.
-
I'd say, generally speaking, a good campaign should be mostly small failures leading up to one big success, with progress being made toward that success as they go along.
I mean, which sounds like a more interesting and satisfying campaign?
Campaign A:
The PCs fail to prevent a murder of a public official, but in the process are made aware there's some kind of plot to foil, and the public official was in on it.
The PCs, while gathering evidence, fail to apprehend one of the villain's goons, but in the process the type of goon--of what the goon was doing--gives them some kind of lead to look into.
The PCs outright lose a fight to the goons, and survive by the skin of their teeth, and have to stop and recover for a bit while the villains move ahead. The PCs learn some of their limitations, and now have to account for them in the future.
The PCs follow up on a lead, and mitigate some part of the villain's plan, but can't stop the villains from getting away.
After several days of cat and mouse, hit and miss, getting beaten but sticking with it, the PCs finally track down the villains right as their plans are coming to fruition, and have a knock-down, drag out fight to the finish to stop them.
Or, Campaign B:
The PCs stop the politician from being killed, and capture the goon. They beat both of them easily in social conflict, convincing them to spill the beans, everything they know.
The PCs know where the villains are, what they're planning, and what they need to do it. They easily beat the villains because they're just that good through their own natural talent. The PCs do not have to learn anything, and don't have to make any kind of meaningful sacrifice.
-
So for you, failure where the characters have an opportunity to try again isn't really failure. That's okay, let's call those moments "setbacks" or "minor failures."
But there is a marked difference between that and a situation where the heroes win the first time, every time. Those temporary setbacks, minor failures, those are what make a story compelling and interesting. Seeing how the heroes have to rethink a plan or act on the fly when a situation goes from bad to worse.
What I understand of Toturi's position is that he doesn't want even those setbacks to happen. He wants to win, first time every time. And he would prefer if the same applied to books and tv shows. However I believe that to be a minority opinion.
In the Dresden Files books, Harry gets his ass handed to him constantly. Just about every conflict he goes into, he would be conceding his way out of them right to the end when he's finally able to beat the bad guy.
And I agree with Mr Death. Winning constantly is just as quick a way to end the story, and therefore the game, as is wiping the whole party out in a single battle. For players like Mr Death and myself, both would be examples of poor GMing, because we want the ups and downs. We want to take our knocks and come back fighting.
-
And to make people 'able' to play in these sorts of games, you really need to do one of two things:
--------------------
Be able to explicitly communicate to the players that the loss in this encounter isn't really a loss, which very few games actually do.
Were we to play a game 'naively' we'd have two things to guide us. What the rules say, and what the game fiction says. That is, if we get into a fight with people who want to kill us, we'd normally expect the consequences of losing that fight to be death. And we'd expect the rules to model the winning or losing of that fight to agree with the fictional presentation of the fight.
So, for example, if the dice say we won the fight, we'd also expect the fiction to say we won the fight. Though it's possible to have, say, the fiction say that we lost of fight, were captured, and learned more about the villain's plans by listening to his henchmen talk before we made our daring escape.
I don't know any games that have meta rules that explicitly say things like: the stakes of this fight are a minor advance or setback. So you probably don't want to spend too many of your metagame tokens on the outcome of the fight. You want to save your metagame tokens to influence a more important conflict later.
[edit] whoops, Dogs does do this.
----------------
Or two, separate the game fiction layer from the dice results.
---------------
There are a few games that try this, I can think of Dogs in the Vineyard as an example.
Briefly: you roll the dice and describe what you do, but the success or failure of the dice roll doesn't need effect your description. So, if you want, your character can actually always succeed in the vast majority of stuff that happens in the fictional layer.
Example: your character is in a struggle with one of the villains henchmen. You want to find out more about the villains plans.
Sample story outcomes of a failure in the dice layer:
1. you manage to beat the henchmen down, but he has a poison capsule and you learn nothing.
2. you manage to beat the henchmen down, but "he'll never talk!" and your character won't use torture.
3. you manage to convince the henchmen of the moral superiority of your cause and he's about to tell you everything, when another of the villains henchmen shoots him.
Sample wins in the dice layer:
1. you are defeated by the henchman and taken prisoner. While you are tied up, you hear the henchmen talking about the villains plans. Then you make a daring escape.
2. The henchmen gets away, but you use your investigative skills to deduce what the villains plan is.
3. You defeat the henchmen, and the threat of getting his remaining teeth knocked out is enough to get him to tell you everything he knows.
4. You convince the henchmen to be a proper and moral nihilist, like yourself. In a fit of feeling for his fellow man, the former henchmen tells you everything.
---------------------
So we could have a loss in the fictional layer just be the 'interesting' way of narrating our victory in the dice layer.
But that takes some careful rules design and writing. Notice how often the 'concessions are metagame constructs, not something that the in game players have to agree to' keep coming up. The fact that you are in a fight with people that want to kill you, but a concession where you don't die is a perfectly valid result to end that fight seems to be something totally unexpected to a lot of people because the vast majority of game are driven by what happens in the fiction layer.
-
That's not true. The difference with your second example being that all those things are concessions in fate, if the bad guy feels he is going to lose he can do any of those things as a concession. The main difference though is how concessions are handled in fate is by the group instead of by the GM
-
No, because my 'stakes' or desired end condition of the fight was to learn more about the villains plans. So any fight outcome where I don't learn about the villains plans is a loss for me. So, even if the fiction layer has me 'winning' the fight, it the outcome is me not learning anything about the plans it's because I lost in the dice layer, and the fiction layer comes around with a description that matches that outcome.
And on the winning side, as long and the outcome is that I learn about the villains plans, the fiction layer can say whatever I think is most interesting about what the outcome of the 'fight' was.
Sample things this lets you do
play the incompetent protagonist, that somehow still succeeds in the end.
play the guy who brings words to a gun fight, and still 'wins'.
---------------
Or, in a slightly humors example where I explained potential victories in Exalted shaping combat:
Your opponent stabs his sword though your heart. But the beauty of your death poem and your obvious moral superiority have made him have a change of heart. He abandons his old ways, and takes up your equipment and philosophy, trying to emulate you as best he can. In fact, he plays you so well that all your friends and allies treat him as you.
Outcome: you win the fight, and your character is exactly the same as before; but if this were a television show, you'd now be played by a different actor.
-
Right but the concession is a group decision so it stands to reason that whatever makes sense in the current scene is how the latter part will play out. Even if the guy kills himself he could have a pack of matches from the hotel he is staying at, or an address scrawled on a piece of paper (both these things being declarations in most cases) just because you failed to have him give you information directly does not mean you have failed to find anything out
-
Defeat doesn't have to equal surrender. It's a great option for keeping PCs alive, though. If the villains won't offer the chance to surrender, that's the choice of the GM who created them.
Ultimately, sure, but genre expectations also factor in. For example, lethal combat is the rule in D&D. There are very few instances where an enemy that the PCs are trying to kill should plausibly spare their lives unless he failed to read the Evil Overlord List (http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html) and insists on monologuing, complicated James Bond death traps, etc.
The assumption that death is always on the line is erroneous.
And I certainly never made that assumption. However, death is frequently on the line in rather a lot of games, so the assumption that death is rarely on the line is equally erroneous.
There's a good reason lethal combat is fairly typical in most game systems: drama. As crusher_bob put it, "the city will blow up!" If those are the stakes, then it's pretty easy to get a group of players pointed in the same direction and more or less working together. You could also run a game where the goal is to have the local paper write a glowing review of the PCs' brand new restaurant, but I bet there would be less player interest because the stakes are lower (though if you botch badly enough, there's still the chance for explosions!).
-
So for you, failure where the characters have an opportunity to try again isn't really failure. That's okay, let's call those moments "setbacks" or "minor failures."
But there is a marked difference between that and a situation where the heroes win the first time, every time. Those temporary setbacks, minor failures, those are what make a story compelling and interesting. Seeing how the heroes have to rethink a plan or act on the fly when a situation goes from bad to worse.
What I understand of Toturi's position is that he doesn't want even those setbacks to happen. He wants to win, first time every time. And he would prefer if the same applied to books and tv shows. However I believe that to be a minority opinion.
In the Dresden Files books, Harry gets his ass handed to him constantly. Just about every conflict he goes into, he would be conceding his way out of them right to the end when he's finally able to beat the bad guy.
And I agree with Mr Death. Winning constantly is just as quick a way to end the story, and therefore the game, as is wiping the whole party out in a single battle. For players like Mr Death and myself, both would be examples of poor GMing, because we want the ups and downs. We want to take our knocks and come back fighting.
Agree, agree, agree. I keep coming back to tv shows I like. I'm going to make a wild assumption that there's a lot of cross fandom between Dresden Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and use that as an example, since I've been watching it again recently.
In the very first season, what if Buffy had found and killed The Annointed? This would of caused a chain reaction through the entire series. She never would of fought The Master, so the entire giant battle at the end of the season would never have happened.
It would of thrown the introduction of Spike of track in the next season, who ends up being a hugely important character throughout the series (as well as in the spinoff show Angel).
Kendra would have never become a Slayer, which means Faith would never have become a Slayer. This would of totally derailed season 3 and 7 (as well as several episodes of Angel once again).
One little failure led to several events that ended up saving the world multiple times over. It demonstrates that failure can be the road to success, and that by handing out success and never failing at anything ever you're drastically inhibiting what you can do with your story. It's incredibly single minded, and you're basically railroading yourself.
-
One little failure led to several events that ended up saving the world multiple times over. It demonstrates that failure can be the road to success, and that by handing out success and never failing at anything ever you're drastically inhibiting what you can do with your story. It's incredibly single minded, and you're basically railroading yourself.
Problems often arise on the internet (where people are frequently wrong (http://xkcd.com/386/)) when a gamer with a successful career in one type of group meets a gamer from a very different and incompatible group, and at least one of the gamers insist that their own way is "correct" and the other guy is "doing it wrong." Even beyond the arrogance of the message conveyed, it is typical for "explanations" like "you're immature" or "you're incompetent" to follow along as part of the "you're doing it wrong" argument.
So long as everyone in the other guy's group is having fun, who cares? They may not be doing things the way you would, but that's not important--if you aren't part of the relevant gaming group, your definition of fun is not relevant to that group's collective definition of fun.
And the specter of "you're doing it wrong" raises its head once again.
-
I very much enjoy minor setbacks, unexpected complications, twists and turns that throw a wrench into my character's plans. I enjoy needing to improvise and keep my wits about me if I'm going to succeed. It makes the ultimate victory much more fun if I had to go through several setbacks to earn it.
Major setbacks - it depends on how major we're talking about, and how much agency I have as a player. Anything that's going to have a permanent or particularly long term impact on my character, I'd want to be able to talk over with the GM to ensure that any changes to the character are ones I'll enjoy roleplaying. Moreover, I feel that most if not all major setbacks should come about because of the actions the players have taken, rather than by GM fiat. I've seen major setbacks handled well, and they've been some of the most fun gaming experiences I've had. On the other side of the coin, though, major setbacks that have been handled poorly by GMs have been some of the worst.
One of the things I love about the DFRPG is that the rules give the players creative control over both major and minor setbacks in the form of concessions. It encourages me to take more risks as a player when I know I can always concede the fight and have a hand in choosing how my character loses a conflict, and it basically eliminates my worries about the results of IC failure.
-
And the specter of "you're doing it wrong" raises its head once again.
Not so much "you're doing it wrong" as Turing to say that the road to success doesn't have to be a giant blinking neon arrow that always points in the same direction.
Though I will say that if someone seeing failure or setbacks in any way as total failure, and thus not only expects to never fail but would say it's the GMs fault fr putting them in a situation where failure was even possible? Them yes they are definitly doing it wrong.
-
I'm used to life and death combats where you have to work for every inch. Getting the occasional session where you "kick butt" reinforces that your characters are bad-assed. I've actually, literally, cried out in both joy and frustration depending on how games have gone - that's how intense things were.
My longest standing DM would lay things out like this:
Here's the world...these mountains are renown for their danger. If you go there before you're ready, you'll die.(and he would kill us if we went there and weren't ready...or at least give us a solid beating and send us running with our tails between our legs) Other areas would tend to be safer - like populated areas etc...
Our adventures range from easy to challenging depending on the plot. As we got higher level (D&D, I'm talking about), we'd seek out harder challenges either because the plot lead us there or because we wanted to explore. We fully knew the dangers, for the most part.
If we survived an encounter because the DM fudged the dice, we'd consider it a "hollow" victory. So, in general, I want to be challenged and earn victories.
Of course, in a game like that, you learn when to run away. I find in most games the PC's always fight until it's too late. We could usually see failure looming....usually...
Which brings me to the part where I mentionned "frustrating".
There was a little stint of campaigns that died because the challenges were soo close that the dice rolls killed us. Total Party Kill. That's the nature of D&D, though. These were incredibly frustrating because despite our best efforts the dice decided our doom. (like I said, if the GM fudged the dice we still wouldn't be happy).
This is where Concessions would have been perfect. Everything was life or death and I think if we used some kind of concession rule, the campaigns wouldn't have needed to end. Having the enemy capture you (despite being at -10) and waking up imprisonned at -5 HP's would have allowed us to refocus and change our goals(get our gear and escape, for example) and come back from the loss.
So yeah...I like to know that everything is on the line...but I think there needs to be some alternatives to "your character is dead roll up a new one".
As long as that concession doesn't feel like a "get out of jail free" card. The loss still has to hurt, otherwise I'd rather have the GM just kill off the character.
I like it gritty, I guess.
-
Double-post:
To add to what I just said,
I've also had GM's, that after a few sessions, I realized there was NO WAY to die, regardless of what stupidity happened - all in the name of their perfectly crafted story. I find that, for the most part, completely boring. For one campaign it got so bad(not just for me, but the group) that I started entertaining myself by seeing what lengths the GM would go to keep my character alive.
-
Right but the concession is a group decision so it stands to reason that whatever makes sense in the current scene is how the latter part will play out. Even if the guy kills himself he could have a pack of matches from the hotel he is staying at, or an address scrawled on a piece of paper (both these things being declarations in most cases) just because you failed to have him give you information directly does not mean you have failed to find anything out
No, I'm saying that one way of doing 'success' or 'failure' is to make the fiction layer say whatever you want 'after' the dice determine that result. And as long as you get what you were after, 'success' can be narrated in whatever way you find interesting.
So, as long as the dice give me victory, the fiction layer can give me a victory in whatever narrative that the players find acceptable, and if the dice give me failure, then my failure also happens in a whatever narrative way people find interesting.
Example:
GM, this fight will end up with you captured by the villain. The stakes are how much you find out about the villains plan.
So:
1: the characters aren't risking death, even if the in fiction layer of the game says that the villain wants to kill them
2: even a victory by the players here will result in their capture.
3. what the PCs get for winning is finding out about the villains plans, but how their winning actually happens in the fiction layers can be described in whatever way people find entertaining.
This allows things like the fictional layer describing narrow margins of escapes and skin of the teeth victories without needing the dice system to promote the 'you die now!" mathematics that that tends to require.
-------------------
Example, in the game, any contest you get into with a black court vampire is going to be a big deal. They can deal large amounts of damage with a lucky hit, so you may need to have a lot of fate points in reserve to deal with them. So, if we'd expect the characters to want to avoid fighting them, wherever possible, and prefer to do things like burn down the building they are in and stake anything that manages to crawl into the sunlight.
Bur we, the players, might prefer our characters to get into fights with black court vampires, to show how awesome we are. But that's a pretty (eventually) lethal thing to do if we the fiction layer drives the game.
------------------
So, how can all this be applied within the scope of a DFRPG game?
You can set the stakes of the contest to be something other than the stakes that appear in the fiction layer.
For example
1 the stakes in the fiction layer are 'the city blows up!'
2 none of the players in interested in 'the city blows up!' outcome
So, if we let the fiction layer drive things, we need to arrange things so that the dice don't allow the city to blow up, because no one wants that. This can lead to the players being able to crush the end villain like a bug, because eve a 10% chance outcome of 'the city blows up!' in that fight is unacceptable to the players. They want to keep playing in the city, after all.
-----------
But if we set the 'actual' stakes as something other than 'the city blows up!' then we can have a lot more flexibility in how much chance of 'failure' the dice system allows.
For example, at the end of Fool Moon, the fictional layer says the stakes are "Harry dies horribly" if things go wrong.
But instead, if the set the stakes as something like "How much Marcone respects Harry when this is over" then the players can allow for 'failure' because it doesn't end the game. After all, there's plenty of interesting stories to tell when Marcone doesn't respect Harry.
[edit]
Some edits for spelling, and stuff.
-
Major setbacks - it depends on how major we're talking about, and how much agency I have as a player.
I also agree with the other stuff you said, but I wanted to repeat this for emphasis. In my experience, one of the major constant concerns that players have is agency. It's why one of the common complaints about certain GMs is railroading. On a meta level, what you usually have is a failure to get everyone on the same page, where the players have bought in to the plotline and the direction the GM is trying to nudge the group appears to be interesting and rewarding.
Though I will say that if someone seeing failure or setbacks in any way as total failure, and thus not only expects to never fail but would say it's the GMs fault fr putting them in a situation where failure was even possible? Them yes they are definitly doing it wrong.
Not your game; not your business. You are not the target audience for entertainment for games that you aren't in. What people find fun in a game is a matter of taste. So long as laws aren't broken and puppies aren't tortured, it is rude and disrespectful to tell another gaming group that they are having fun wrong.
I find in most games the PC's always fight until it's too late.
Isn't this usually a failure of communication, though? From what I've seen, a lot of players assume that the DM wouldn't put a challenge in front of them if it was unlikely--or worse, impossible--for them to succeed. So while the DM is thinking, "I was expecting you guys to run for it two rounds ago!" the players may be thinking, "Man, this is an epic fight, it will be awesome when we finally nail this guy!" Five minutes later, half the party is dead and everybody is unhappy.
This is where crusher_bob's dice layer vs. fictional layer could be very useful. The DM can be clear up front that a particular result necessary to the plot will happen, but that good or bad plans and dice rolls can affect several surrounding circumstances that are themselves interesting and worthwhile--the stakes still have to be worth putting in effort. I think it might be a hard sell, since most groups are very much used to the fictional layer and the dice layer being enmeshed with each other, but the concept sounds intriguing to me.
-
It also allows you to play for different stakes that those that the fictional layer seems to provide.
Consider a game where the PCs are the knights of the cross. The game is the events of Death Masks and the stakes are Harry's soul.
So it's possible to play the game, have the events in the fictional layer exactly as they happen in the book, and the only 'variable' part be when happens after Nicodemus throws the coin out the car window. The outcome at the climatic moment of the adventure rests on the actions taken by an NPC, when none of the PCs are even on screen. But it's still possible for it to be emotionally satisfying becuse that's what the players have been struggling the whole adventure to determine. And all the narration with sword fights and plagues and trains and holy relics and stuff, while not entirely unimportant, only described the actual stakes of the adventure in the most roundabout way.
-
I dont see why you would play it that way but I do understand what you mean. If it works for you I guess, and it does make sense, though I dont think it works as well in this system. I can see doing this in other systems for sure and may very well adopt it but I dont think that fate works with this IMO
-
Thing is there's a huge difference between failure and Failure. For the most part, yes, Failure--the bad guys win, you die, the world ends, etc.--is going to be a remote possibility. But failures--getting your ass kicked, failing to stop a murder, losing the macguffin to the villains temporarily--should happen reasonably often. Or at the very, very least, the PCs shouldn't be able to win everything right off the bat.
If they must win every fight, then they should start off against goons who can't tell them anything useful. There has to be some reason for them to put in effort rather than just coasting along.
-
Bingo. Much as I believe everyone's entitled to enjoy their games their own way, I honestly can't see any fun in breezing through the game, confident that unless the GM made a mistake in creating a challenge, I would overcome it without any real work on my part.
-
Creating an optimized character can only be considered the beginning of earning your happy ending, because no matter how powerful you are if you don't use it right you're toast.
-
I'm down for failure. In our recent FATE Core game (Think Steampunk Three Musketeers) out two PCs brought back the Tzarina of a nearby empire to seal a treaty in marriage. Problem: turns out she's an automaton and the Cardinal wants the wedding called off, which will plunge us into war. We square off in an argument against against an NPC that's a social monster, and both of us get schooled. Morgan's automaton soldier is able to use a free invoke to prevent being taken out, and concedes with a mild and a moderate consequence. I stay in the fight, taking a Moderate and then get taken out completely. It was glorious!
-
I'm down for failure. In our recent FATE Core game (Think Steampunk Three Musketeers) out two PCs brought back the Tzarina of a nearby empire to seal a treaty in marriage. Problem: turns out she's an automaton and the Cardinal wants the wedding called off, which will plunge us into war. We square off in an argument against against an NPC that's a social monster, and both of us get schooled. Morgan's automaton soldier is able to use a free invoke to prevent being taken out, and concedes with a mild and a moderate consequence. I stay in the fight, taking a Moderate and then get taken out completely. It was glorious!
I'm glad your group had fun. Are you trying to make a more general case that people often enjoy failure? I certainly do not; one of my most recent games had frequent failures that snowballed into catastrophe, and it ranks as one of the least enjoyable games I've been involved with--I seriously considered walking out of the game three different times. In another game from some years back, I was running a PC that ended up with legendarily unlucky dice, and despite being a reasonably optimized melee combatant, was an epic failure at combat largely due to dice--his very first action in his first combat involved rolling a 1 on a d20 four times in a row--and this trend continued through his existence as a PC. It wasn't fun.
One of the reasons I game is the feeling of achievement that comes from successfully overcoming obstacles. The games I've been involved with have usually had reasonably significant fictional stakes attached to conflicts, such that failing on any non-trivial level had unpleasant consequences. I think this is broadly typical across most games played to the point that a story where "the PCs failed, and it was awesome!" is part of a tiny minority of all awesome gaming experiences. Anecdotes such as the above don't disprove the trend; they merely point out an exception.
-
I'm glad your group had fun. Are you trying to make a more general case that people often enjoy failure?
Nope.
One of the reasons I game is the feeling of achievement that comes from successfully overcoming obstacles.
Trust me, I'm going to get my due from the Cardinal soon!
-
One game I was in I had entered one on one combat with an NPC who had attacked anther PC. This was unknown to my character as he was just trying to find out some information from this NPC. My character won but when he did the other PC saw him. The GM gave him a compel to kill the NPC and he took it. It caused complications and even though I had won the battle I had lost in my goal. This was still fun because it opened up new story line (such as getting arrested for taking the NPC's head and strolling down the road as police and firefighters start showing up). I find that as long as the story progresses and I am able to move forward I dont much care whether I win or lose. If I am constantly dying and having to make new characters thats not fun for me, but always getting the perfect win seems trivial and boring. Why should I bother fighting him when I know for a fact I will win and he will tell me everything I need to know.
-
I'm glad your group had fun. Are you trying to make a more general case that people often enjoy failure? I certainly do not; one of my most recent games had frequent failures that snowballed into catastrophe, and it ranks as one of the least enjoyable games I've been involved with--I seriously considered walking out of the game three different times. In another game from some years back, I was running a PC that ended up with legendarily unlucky dice, and despite being a reasonably optimized melee combatant, was an epic failure at combat largely due to dice--his very first action in his first combat involved rolling a 1 on a d20 four times in a row--and this trend continued through his existence as a PC. It wasn't fun.
One of the reasons I game is the feeling of achievement that comes from successfully overcoming obstacles. The games I've been involved with have usually had reasonably significant fictional stakes attached to conflicts, such that failing on any non-trivial level had unpleasant consequences. I think this is broadly typical across most games played to the point that a story where "the PCs failed, and it was awesome!" is part of a tiny minority of all awesome gaming experiences. Anecdotes such as the above don't disprove the trend; they merely point out an exception.
Constantly suffering failure after failure is no fun. Be it through bad dice rolls, unbalanced encounters, or just bad decision making. No one will argue that. Though I still say failure can still be used as a means to move the story forward in a way that keeps the players interested and entertained.
Though this is almost squarely the responsibility of the GM. They need to have a good sense of narrative tempo. Knowing when to challenge the players, and knowing when to give them moments to feel empowered and bad ass.
-
Absolutely. I'd no more want constant failure in my games than I'd want constant success.
-
I'm glad your group had fun. Are you trying to make a more general case that people often enjoy failure? I certainly do not; one of my most recent games had frequent failures that snowballed into catastrophe, and it ranks as one of the least enjoyable games I've been involved with--I seriously considered walking out of the game three different times.
I'm curious. Was it the failures themselves or was it the circumstances of those failures? I know games you talk about, and they usually force an outcome on me, and I have no say about whether I would want it or not. That, to me, is more troublesome than failure itself.
Trust me, I'm going to get my due from the Cardinal soon!
That's another good point, I think. Failure and defeat give a sense of personal investment. I don't just go after the villain because he's the bad guy and I'm the good guy, I do so, because be personally wronged me, and I want to return in kind.
-
I'm curious. Was it the failures themselves or was it the circumstances of those failures? I know games you talk about, and they usually force an outcome on me, and I have no say about whether I would want it or not. That, to me, is more troublesome than failure itself.
Short answer: it was both. Long answer...we'd be here a while, because a full examination of everything that went wrong in that game would involve long ranty walls of text. The group was completely split in and out of character and I think the DM was trying to ramp up the opposition at several points in order to push the PCs into working together--and if that was the intended strategy, it failed HARD. In the epilogue, my character ended up as a mind-controlled minion of the Big Bad...and that's just a few of the specifics.
One of the initial red flags should have been that the DM wanted "a game where the characters weren't optimized for the important skills." I hate this idea with a fiery passion, and will never EVER play in that type of game again. In DFRPG terms, it translates directly to "I'm going to make sure your Aspects and apex skills aren't relevant." A major part of the plot was a murder mystery, and none of the PCs were particularly good at investigation. My character's skills were probably closest, but he had no Empathy, so NPCs could just lie to him all day and he'd have no clue (I was proud of the design of that character; in his normal operation, he'd be working with good investigators, but he wasn't one himself). The reason none of us were designed for mystery-solving is because we lifted the characters from a one-shot game another guy was running nearby in the same universe.
Absolutely. I'd no more want constant failure in my games than I'd want constant success.
Constant failure is obviously no fun. A fair number of people find constant success to be quite fun. The extremes aside, in my opinion, the vast majority of players would be best satisfied by a general theme of success spiced by a few comparatively-minor setbacks here and there. The cases aren't symmetric.
-
A) that sux, I don't think I would want to play in that game either, not would I ever run a game like that.
B) that's pretty much the point. I like minor setbacks and a chance to win every round. I don't want to have an ensured victory every time I battle
-
Absolutely. In the end, I want to defeat the bad guy, and I want to do it by my character's own ability rather than have someone else do it for me. But I want it to be a dangerous road.
-
Ok, that sounds totally fubar. I've had games like that before, it's not fun.
I'm kind of trying to find a way to formulate what exactly I think about this, thus those questions. I think Lavecki's put it quite well. The player characters are the heroes, which means it is kind of implied, that - ultimately - they will win the war. However, that does not mean they will win every battle they are in. I think that sums up my view pretty good.
I've just started reading "reality is broken", by Jane McGonigal. I'm not very far in, but so far it seems to touch on quite a few things in this topic. For example, she points out, that the body reacts in the same way if you are in danger or if you are playing a game, regarding adrenaline and such. The only difference is the state of mind, which makes one of them fun and one of them not.
"Being in peril isn't fun. Pretending to be is." I kind of like that.
-
"Being in peril isn't fun. Pretending to be is."
Now you just have to make a character with that as an aspect ;)
-
"Being in peril isn't fun. Pretending to be is." I kind of like that.
This is an excellent point, and one I want to expand on, because I think it has implications on two different levels in this discussion.
The first and more trivial level is that a tabletop RPG is a game, and while our characters may face mortal peril, the worst thing a player has to confront is the possibility of a papercut in terms of physical danger. So in the most obvious sense, a game is often about pretending to be in peril.
The second level, though, is the one the characters are on. I think most of us agree that a certain amount of in-character danger heightens the experience of the game by adding dramatic tension and fictional high-stakes action. We need antagonists, and those antagonists must threaten something we care about in order to motivate our characters to action. Let's call the stakes something like "little Suzie will be eaten by vampires." (And for the sake of the hypothetical, rescuing little Suzie is the point of this game.)
It's pretty clear that preventing little Suzie from being eaten by vampires is a good and noble goal, worth pursuing. But for there to be proper dramatic tension, we must also believe that interrupting the vampires' midnight snack will be a hazardous mission with perils aplenty--how else would our characters demonstrate their heroic attributes? If one PC can solve the issue with a phone call, or everyone knows that these vampires turn to dust when you merely brandish a crucifix at them, the outcome probably won't be very exciting. To be sure, you still want little Suzie to stay topped up on her blood supply, but there's not much drama if no effort is required.
The key word in the above is "believe," however. The vampires in question could be paper villains that the PCs have a 95%+ chance of defeating (assuming reasonable competence on their part), but the action will be every bit as satisfying for those involved so long as the players' willing suspension of disbelief isn't violated. Therefore, it is beneficial for all involved if the DM talks up the potency of those vampires and the risk of failure for the PCs--and for the most part, the bigger disparity between perceived threat and actual threat the better, as long as the players continue to buy in to the perception.
If we want to maximize the perceived threat, and there's only so far we can talk up a differential between perception and in-game reality, why not just make the opposition very powerful, on a par with the PCs if not surpassing them? If the antagonists and the PCs are on an actual par with each other, exactly balanced in skill and competence, then the actual risk of failure is 50%. Nobody really wants to see little Suzie drained to a husk like an old Capri Sun juice packet, so making the actual chance of that happening 50/50 is rather harsh on both Suzie and the PCs, and a series of games where the overall PC failure rate was 50% is going to lose player interest quickly.
For that reason, I'd bet actual PC failure rate is closer to 5%, and in many groups, probably lower than 1% with stakes like little Suzie wishes she had. You only have to actually throw little Suzie to the wolves (different campaign: she's very unlucky, really) once in a great while to get a lot of perceived threat the next time she's in trouble--and it's even better if the failure can be used to motivate more competent effort on the part of the players next time.
TL;DR Part of the fun is pretending that make-believe characters are in more peril than they're actually in.
-
If we want to maximize the perceived threat, and there's only so far we can talk up a differential between perception and in-game reality, why not just make the opposition very powerful, on a par with the PCs if not surpassing them? If the antagonists and the PCs are on an actual par with each other, exactly balanced in skill and competence, then the actual risk of failure is 50%. Nobody really wants to see little Suzie drained to a husk like an old Capri Sun juice packet, so making the actual chance of that happening 50/50 is rather harsh on both Suzie and the PCs, and a series of games where the overall PC failure rate was 50% is going to lose player interest quickly.
I find that talking up the villains doesn't do much--especially if, when the fur starts to fly, the players are rolling 5s, 4s, and the occasional 6 or 7, while the vampires are rolling 3s. The best, "Well, we're in deep trouble now" reaction I've ever got from them was when I had a villain rolling 8s to dodge and then pointing out that said villain had beaten the party tank to within an inch of her life on nothing but straight rolls.
That said, equal skills/abilities between PC and NPC doesn't make the chance of failure 50-50. The PCs will have a built in fate-point pool and are likely to have had several compels before reaching the confrontation--something that likely can't be said for the vampires--which can be used to nudge the right rolls in their favor.
-
My group just had their 1st Epic fail after I felt I hadn't been challenging them enough. Sent to rescue a student couple from a militia led by a WCV that fed off Fear, they discovered they intended to set off a 2000 pound car bomb, compliments of Nicodemus. Too bad they missed a few clues and failed to follow up a lead or two regarding the ultimate target.
Good news: They rescued the student couple and helped kill the WCV.
Bad news: They totally botched the target of the car bomb.
Result: They got a phone call from Father Forthill, reporting Harry Dresden intercepting a car bomb bound for the Carpenter's house. He managed to get it to Lake Michigan when it exploded--far enough to avoid collateral damage to innocent civilians, not far enough for Harry Dresden.
Oh, and Donald Morgan (who's alive and kicking in my game) is now in charge of all Great Lakes Wardens in my game.
And yet, while the players understood that they lost and how they lost, they were okay with it and still said they had fun and enjoyed themselves. Yay me.
-
I find that talking up the villains doesn't do much--especially if, when the fur starts to fly, the players are rolling 5s, 4s, and the occasional 6 or 7, while the vampires are rolling 3s. The best, "Well, we're in deep trouble now" reaction I've ever got from them was when I had a villain rolling 8s to dodge and then pointing out that said villain had beaten the party tank to within an inch of her life on nothing but straight rolls.
To an extent, this was why the traditional DM screen existed: to keep the players from knowing exactly how tough the opposition was immediately. In the DFRPG, where a lot of Aspect-bidding happens after the dice are rolled and everyone knows the margin to beat, there's more transparency. That said, things like mid-fight reinforcements, unexpected abilities, and other shenanigans allow the DM to keep the players on their toes.
That said, equal skills/abilities between PC and NPC doesn't make the chance of failure 50-50. The PCs will have a built in fate-point pool and are likely to have had several compels before reaching the confrontation--something that likely can't be said for the vampires--which can be used to nudge the right rolls in their favor.
In my hypothetical, yes, it does. It wouldn't be equal if one side had an advantage (like a stocked FP pool) that the other side lacked. This is primarily the point of FPs (and specifically the PCs usually having more than the villains): it gives the PCs an edge that starts off at +2 per FP and can go higher depending on the ingenuity of the players' invokes.
-
See, my games are usually a series of successful bad decisions. The players make a misguided choice because they're under pressure. They succeed with their plans (or their plans modified after wrenches are thrown at them repeatedly), but their plans themselves have unintended consequences. Police investigation, awakening great evil, pissing off one accord party or the other, getting an ally killed, starting ragnarok, or losing a really good bottle of scotch. This was a theme we established when we started playing (based on our groups affection for The Dresden Files, Hellboy, and Hellblazer).
On the rare instances they come up with a plan to avoid these consequences, they do. And I don't come up with the consequences until after their plan has succeeded, or they've at least come up with the plan.
-
Complications are fun.
I also enjoy NPCs who don't feel they need to fight to the death.
-
"little Suzie will be eaten by vampires." (And for the sake of the hypothetical, rescuing little Suzie is the point of this game.)
I would even go a step further. I would say "the result of this adventure will be that you rescue Suzie". Then, you can see how you make an adventure of it. That's kind of where I was going with that quote. If you agree on something like this, you shift the focus of the game from the goal to the way to get there. There is no longer the peril of failure, there is only "pretend peril". Suzie can be abducted in the first attack of the vampires, there will be a way to get her back. Suzie has already been transported to another town when you storm the vampires headquarters, but you find an address. And so on.
You could even go and throw everything around at the end (if all players agree on that), have her taken and turned, but you find a cage full of children that you can rescue instead, and with a new vampire, you have a focus for the next game.
On the other hand, if you do not agree on something like that, every player will have a different view on those things. Most often, that will be "if we don't rescue Suzie from that first attack, she will be dead, so there can't be any failure". Like what tutori had said earlier in this thread.
I don't think that you have to have paper villains. The peril for the characters can be quite real, as long as the players are in agreement of what are acceptable outcomes, and what is off limits. Character death, for me, for example is off limits, if it just comes from bad luck on the dice. Sacrifice is absolutely possible, as is stupidity. Though I usually tell the players, that their action is stupid and will most likely end up with their character being dead. The players then need to find a way to beat a more powerful villain, find his weakness, and so forth. If you kill off the characters left and right, you'll end up with a group of characters that don't really have anything to do with what you are doing, because they are simply the 5th generation of replacement characters ("would you care to join our noble quest?").
-
As a point of clarification, I wasn't meaning to suggest that the villains must be paper villains; I was trying to emphasize the importance of player perception over mechanical reality here. In most cases, adding to a villain's mechanical challenge should also add to its perceived threat, though you still need to play that up--the flipside is that a brutally tough godmode boss (on paper) won't make much of an impression if his threat level isn't sold to the players.
-
There's so much I could do with that goal beyond just "Suzie dies if you fail."
I'd be more inclined to rule that the worst-case failure scenario would be that Suzie is bitten and part-turned. So the PCs do rescue to her, but now they have to deal with someone on the verge of becoming a full vampire, and figure out how to handle this, which can be an especially emotional event if Suzie is a character they've known for a while and care about.
-
There's so much I could do with that goal beyond just "Suzie dies if you fail."
I'd be more inclined to rule that the worst-case failure scenario would be that Suzie is bitten and part-turned. So the PCs do rescue to her, but now they have to deal with someone on the verge of becoming a full vampire, and figure out how to handle this, which can be an especially emotional event if Suzie is a character they've known for a while and care about.
For something like this I would have degrees of failure: Suzie is okay. Suzie is emotionally traumatized and no longer trusts you/thinks you're dangerous. Suzie is badly injured and now you have to protect her in the hospital. Suzie is partially turned and you have to deal with the consequences, but you rescue her. Suzie is completely turned and you have to deal with the consequences, but you rescue her. Suzie is completely turned and is now a powerful enemy, whom you may or may not try to save or redeem. Suzie was used to fuel a powerful ritual against you, which you manage to survive but must deal with the fallout from as her ghost haunts you.
My players usually end up somewhere between options 2 and 4, possibly up to option 6 or 7 if their plan is especially inane.
-
That's a great idea.
This where failure can get really interesting, and why I love DFRPG's use of Consequences and the ability to concede in a conflict. You don't need to go all in for one extreme or the other. There's so much more to failure, and success, than killing someone.