Where's your RP at?

[GangOfDolls]

I think there's a key element to the TWD scenario @ghost is also talking about and it loops back to the character death discussion. And that is:

With only a few core exceptions, most characters over the arc of TWD are dead or will die. I suspect that when the series ends (if it ever dies), there may be only one or two core characters out of the handful that have been steadfastly central to the narrative that will remain standing at the very end.

Survival tropes where successful are somewhat successful when you commit to two things:

1. Don't get comfortable, nothing is going to stay static.
2. No one is going to survive this, so don't get super invested.

[Ghost]

@WTFE Nope. Don't do that. I'm speaking specifically about the survival genre, where antibiotics are few and a bite from a zombie turns you into a zombie. The mortality rate on a survival/zombie game doesn't often result in "scraped knees" and in many ways, keeping someone from dying is far, far more difficult than keeping them alive.

When I run games in other genres, say Star Wars, I will allow characters to fail, which can result in all manner of other options. However, if someone decides that their story means that they run off on their own with an X-Wing to take on the whole of the Empire and go solo against an Imperial Star Destroyer, I will advise against it. If they persist, I will let them know it will result in dice. If the dice result in a critical hit to seventy-seven different points of their X-Wing starfighter because that's how the dice went...then to avoid cheesing the game for other players, that dude's making a new character.

That dude just got serial crushed.
Where's he goin?
No where.

[WTFE]

@Ghost Well, sure, when you take an obviously, ludicrously over-the-top speshul snowflake as your baseline metric you come across as reasonable.

But...

That's pretty much not the level of "don't kill me bro" I'm talking about. Notice the example with the fall and redemption? Did you see mention of stealing an X wing and going solo yadda yadda yadda there?

A character on the fall-and-redemption cycle dying shortly after the fall is just boring. It's a boring experience, with no payout. Sure it may be "realistic" for him to die at this point, but this isn't "reality". It's a "game" and meant to be "enjoyable".

So instead of killing the character, twist the screws. Make the fall harsher. Make the climb to redemption harder. Give the character more regrets in life; such that death is by comparison sweet. THAT is an interesting story.

And you know what? I can even be played out in a game.

[Ghost]

@WTFE said in Where's your RP at?:

@Ghost Well, sure, when you take an obviously, ludicrously over-the-top speshul snowflake as your baseline metric you come across as reasonable.

I get the sense you're being rude, and this isn't the Hog Pit. We can be constructive without the snark. So let's not do that and get back to the topic at hand.

Where are you roleplaying currently, @WTFE?

[WTFE]

Currently nowhere. The MUSH I was playing on has died off with absentee staff leaving a bunch of stuff hanging.

[Gilette]

@WTFE

Yeeep.

[Ghost]

Anyone have any suggestions to @WTFE as to where to find some good roleplay, then?

[WTFE]

This is MSB. The suggestions will be WoD, mostly. I don't do WoD.

[Ghost]

There's talk of "generic sci fi game" on another board that is looking to be promising. @Seraphim73 speaks highly of Star Wars: Fires on Hope. I've heard mention of some other Star Wars, Superhero, and a Galactica game. If you do those genres, those might be a good start.

I wish you the best of luck and may the odds be ever in your favor.

[WTFE]

The Generic SF one had my attention, actually, even despite the FS3 usage. Then the economic system popped up…

I have never been in a game, table top or MU*, where an economy system added anything I liked to the experience. Most of the time they turn into grinding to keep yourself barely afloat (while the friends of staff get boosts).

[surreality]

@Ghost Again, there's some extremes here. The extremes are, by definition, not the norm.

The dude in your scenario has a tiny chance of success. If he can't handle that, he shouldn't be pitching it -- and either way, somewhere along the line he'd have to be told, "Uhm, you realize... "

I wouldn't pitch a scenario like that and expect to come out of it alive IC; I'd call that one a 'blaze of glory exit' in my head, but damn it'd be neat if it could be pulled off.

Contrast with: my character's goal is to just go sit at a bar and chat up some random people. He gets his head blown off with a shotgun for taking the favorite bar stool of King Bad Day Jackass. There is no reason to expect death as a reasonable consequence of sitting down at a bar under normal circumstances.

Let's say, again, I'm going to a bar. A fight breaks out. If my character dives into the fray, yes, I should expect the character is likely to get hurt and I should be prepared for them to potentially die as a result. I also have the option of the character choosing to run for it if I don't want to deal with that risk in that scene.

Again, going to a bar. Everything goes swimmingly! ...and then on my character's way out, he sees a mugging going on in the alley. I shouldn't expect to have my character intervene and come out unscathed, and again, I should be prepared that they may die if they choose to interfere. I should be prepared, even if the character runs for it, to be pursued as a potential witness to the crime.

The difference between the latter two scenarios and the first are glaring.

Reasonability is a factor in all of these situations, and arguing the extremes and trying to set precedents based on those things alone completely ignore the real complexity of the issue and the ways in which it's going to actually crop up on a day to day basis on any given game.

The extremes are rare by definition.

Basing principles and practice on the extremes is a good way to do a lot of policy-creation and game planning that is not going to address the core issues, is ultimately going to be a waste of time since they're not the kind of scenario that typically arises that requires attention, and as the only realities that anyone has defined? Players in the normal middle ground dealing with any given situation are now tagged as being necessarily unreasonable in their glory-hounding story goals (solo hero), or as unwilling to accept that anything bad of any kind could ever happen to their character (objecting to bar stool headshot).

[faraday]

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

Then it's not a game. I don't say this to sound combative, but there are people who approach this hobby like playing a tabletop RPG, using the tabletop RPG systems, but with more fleshed-out roleplaying features, and others who approach this like RP without the G.

But why is the latter not still a game? Kids playing cops and robbers don't have dice or strict rules, but it's still a game. Fully consent-based MU*s are still games. There are lots of different, equally valid styles of play.

Storium, for instance, has challenge cards, but even a "weak" outcome doesn't derail the story. If you fail to defeat the pack of wolves, you don't get eaten, you just suffer some kind of complication/setback.

Is that style of play for everybody? No. No more than TGG's "prepare to die - a lot" style was. But you can set up a game to your preferred playstyle(s) without thumbing your nose at other ones.

[Ghost]

@surreality Well, yeah, a good GM doesn't go:
"You went to go break up the mugging outside of the bar and he was hiding a sawed-off shotgun in his pocket ROLL INITIATIVE, FUCK YOU YOU DIE."

I always like to approach GMing as finding ways to feed entertainment to the players. Entertainment isn't always this huge degree of risk. Risk ebbs, flows, and doesn't always involve death. One of my favorite playbook options is to avoid a TPK (total party kill) if group combat goes bad and have them wake up in a cell, or in a strange hotel room, or somewhere else. It's like playing with a beach ball. Keep it in the air as much as you can, but let them be prepared for the risks when they decide that it's time to strap up with weapons and take on a hive of vampires. Even then...being captured is an option.

@faraday I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm not. Where my head is at in this discussion is that "people that enjoy the dice/rpg style of risk with xp who view the dice-assisted risk experience to be thrilling because the outcomes are not predetermined or railroaded, up to and including character death" don't necessarily mesh well with "people who want to tell a story and want to control the risk via story intention, but ultimately be in control of the outcome."

You're right, there are equally valid styles of play.

It's just that when you have one population of people who believe that the game is about risk, character sheets, and dice rolls, and another population of people who believe that the game is about what they decide the outcomes to be, then stuff gets awkward.

One crowd won't agree with the "never rolls dice" crowd deserves the rewards.

The other crowd doesn't want their characters or story risked to dice rolls, and doesn't want to be forced to do so to move the story along.

So my point is: Figure how it's going to work going in, make it clear to your players what kind of game it is, and draw in your target audience. Don't leave it vague. Put it in the "news" or "policy" articles. Just...whatever you do, don't let the players figure out what kind of game it is after they've become invested in it.

Edit: And it is probably very obvious, at this point, which style of play I think balances fairness across the playerbase. Dice tend to put everyone on the same, weighable odds. The more free-form approach, which I prefer in certain kinds of settings (but not all), runs a greater degree of risk in terms of dispute/story resolution turning into a nightmare where you need to find out what everyone wants on the pizza, who doesn't get their favorite topping, who does, and who gets stuck eating the crappy salad.

[Misadventure]

So how would people get across the survival aspect of a survival game?

[WTFE]

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

@faraday I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm not. Where my head is at in this discussion is that "people that enjoy the dice/rpg style of risk with xp who view the dice-assisted risk experience to be thrilling because the outcomes are not predetermined or railroaded, up to and including character death" don't necessarily mesh well with "people who want to tell a story and want to control the risk via story intention, but ultimately be in control of the outcome."

This is a VERY different statement than, and I'm quoting here:

Then it's not a game.

[Ghost]

@Misadventure All Flesh Must Be Eaten has a very brutal firearms combat system, but guns are scary and I somewhat approve of it. One thing that I do love about it, is that it allows you to design your zombies. Is it "one bite equals dead", or "one bite and there's a chance" or "multiple bites and there's still a chance"?

That's one method. When I ran it, tabletop, I would pretty much always have a zombie grab in one turn, then try to bite the next, which usually left ample time for other players - even the player who was grabbed - to wrestle free or save the others before a bite was attempted, and even then, there were save rolls made against the zombie infection.

In the end, after someone was bitten, he/she was kept under observation, and the stamina rolls were made in private to leave the players with a sense of drama until signs of sickness did, or didn't, settle in.

I made ammunition and gas supplies that needed to be tracked. I incorporated conflict resolution when coming across certain bands of other survivors, and other groups of survivors were antagonists. There. Would. Be. Risks. The risks weren't insurmountable, though. Social/leadership skills could be used to sway the opinions of even the worst raiders. It wasn't "they're bad guys, so you're screwed". Everyone has a price, wants, needs, etc. Negotiation was a thing.

I presented certain options with degrees of difficulty and let the players determine whether or not it was worth the risk. If they decided not to run into the zombie-infested Wal-Mart, I gave other opportunities to find food and supplies with lesser difficulty, but those lesser options yielded less bountiful gains.

Most importantly, I kept introducing problems. Sure, they could wall up an area and try to make things comfortable, but just like TWD, I'd keep throwing things that would require them to exit their comfort zone. INSULIN IS LOW. Strangers come by. Zombies approach. Food is needed. The crops aren't growing. Someone comes by begging for help.

If I got the idea that the players were just content to go "No thanks, I'm gonna stay back behind this wall where everything is safe, where I've got a small farm and plenty of security." Then, eventually, storms would come, or a long winter, or and npc would hide a killing bite, and throw a monkey wrench into the whole goddamned thing.

Survival games are about an inability to secure lasting, meaningful resources, and just like TWD, the likelihood of the majority of the starting cast making it to the end of the show is low.

To ensure that the proper sense of risk/reward matched the setting, I would require the use of dice. Sometimes you cannot convince people. Sometime you can't shoot a zombie through the eye from a hundred meters out with a compound bow to save your girlfriend.

The bitch of the survival setting is that you must place yourself at risk to place yourself in a state of well-being, but that state of well-being isn't going to always last forever, so the job of the GM is to keep the genre relevant. Give them survival. Make them fight to survive.

(Sorry about the potential tl;dr)

[Ghost]

@WTFE said in Where's your RP at?:

This is a VERY different statement than, and I'm quoting here:

Then it's not a game.

Games do not have predetermined outcomes. They require skill, tactic, risks, and some luck.

Stories do not require the player to invoke skill, tactic, risk, and luck. They merely require telling. When the winners and losers are predetermined, or decided with a handshake, then it's not a game. It's a story.

Stop scratching and trying to twist things.

When Mike Tyson and his management work out a deal before the prize fight that his opponent will go down after one punch and quietly collect a predetermined dollar amount, it's not a game.

When Mike Tyson has zero goddamned clue whether or not he's going to win or lose, but goes into the ring anyway and hopes for the best, then it's a game.

[Misadventure]

Anyone else, perhaps with a differing approach?

For my money, an alternative approach would be the very system light PrimeTime Adventures. You don't get stats. Everyone has an idea of what is possible in the given setting, and thats it. The "stats" and "game" come in when the players think someone is doing something that either shouldn't happen, or conflicts with someone else's idea.

So a completely OOC or meta-fiction game.

While it would do well to create tension between players, I suspect there would be no tension about death or loss for the players. Maybe there doesn't need to be. If the players can carry it for more than a session or two. Or perhaps agree that everyone will go through a certain number of PCs in a campaign, as a group or individually.

I was sorta fond of Strikeforce Morituri's method. They wrote action scenes and personal scenes, and threw a dart at a board to see who died next, whether they were long lived and beloved, or just introduced. That had no tension per se, but it did have unpredictable loss. But that was a group of authors writing about a group of characters, not a 1-2 characters per player setup.

[Auspice]

@WTFE

I have once, and only once (in 18+ years), been on a game where the economy system worked. You're right, most of the time it fails miserably. And a lot of it comes down to time.

That game? Was in the early days of my MU*ing. So probably around the 16? years ago mark. When a fair number of us in the hobby were in high school, college, or didn't have kids yet (not all, obvs, but a good number). We had more time to devote to that shit.

Hell, I made tons of money because I was working part-time and homeschooled, with terrible insomnia. The '2-4 hours RL time flying from point A to point B' was no big deal.

Nowadays? Fuck that noise. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Economy systems are cool in theory, but finding the balance is hard. You have to be willing to throttle it hard... or else risk the people that have little to no RL demands dominating the entire game.

[Goyim]

If I was playing a game that advertised itself as survival only the struggle to stay alive was superficial then I'd be disappointed. These sorts of settings where it's made clear from the start it's a story of how you died only appeal to a specific and hip audience anyway: textual masochists that love to suffer. It's hard for a story to feel meaningful when you know failures aren't going to make a ton of difference in the long term, but sometimes that doesn't matter when you just want a typical feel good adventure.