Heroic Sacrifice

[Thenomain]

@faraday

Isn't this kind of ironic for someone who runs/ran a BSG game? In the five year run did they have one single unmitigated and unconditional success? There are RPGs out there where this is baked into the system.

I will say, though, that every death on the show was notable and dramatic. I think this can be mitigated through the hobby think that we are telling a story and not I am telling my story.

Not saying this is going to be easy, but it does mean that you're not letting go of the story when a character dies. Hell, even D&D players know how to do this: "Hey, there's a mysterious guy, let's invite him into our party because he's a PC." (AKA the Purple PC Aura.)

Too often we sacrifice enjoyment in the name of the story.

[Cura]

SPAM INC

I love this thread. I love risk-taking players. I love thinking about how to make people more comfortable with risk. I have a buncha thoughts, but I feel like @Tat and @Sockmonkey drilled into the heart of the problem, at least as I see it.

I honestly think at the end of the day this comes down to you (and your storytellers) knowing your players and your game, and understanding how to engage with that. That's going to look wildly different, depending on the game you're talking about -- not even just the TYPE of game, but the specific game. Because so much of a game's culture, IC and OOC, is the product of its community of individuals, and I feel like the culture of the game will always define expectations and tone, and therefore how things happen in practice. And it's cyclic, too. Your players generate your game's culture, which defines what kind of players like your game, and etc.

It's almost impossible to make a system that works for everybody when it comes to motivation. @Faraday and I have talked about this elsewhere, but: everybody rps for different reasons. What people get out of RP, what they find satisfying, it's always spread across a wide spectrum. You can lump people into broad categories like 'story-driven' or 'system-driven' in an effort to figure out how to create incentive for them, but that seems inadequate to me. There are self-motivated story-driven players and people who don't generate plot. Of those self-motivated players there are people who like (for instance) grey ethical areas of rp, and people who do not. Of the people who like grey ethical rp, some (like me) love to be surprised by curveballs in story, while others (like some dear friends of mine) are a little uncomfortable with that, and might actually be nervous having that come at them from a staff direction in particular. So not only can you not say, broadly and without thinking about an individual's interests, 'I'm going to reward risk-taking and failure by giving more story to story-driven players' -- because you've got some players who are more into running their own stuff than being GM'd for, or who may not share your interests in types of story -- you may actively deter some of them. And you've still got players who aren't going to be motivated by story, anyway, particularly if you have a crunchy stat/combat system. Probably that'll be true even if it's as lightweight and RP-supporting as FS3.

I think my main quibble in the thread is that I really don't like the idea that success ought to be paired with a negative consequence. I think the idea is actually really intriguing and fresh as a mechanical concept, but as a storyteller it feels a bit skeevy and railroady to me. Ideally, a storyteller's job is to make an arc challenging, presenting players with problems to solve en route to some desirable end. That challenge is what makes the victory (if it comes) satisfying for the players in the first place, so those things are the price of success and they're already built in to the story. Sometimes there are more, when the victory is not unqualified. Often, even. But it's not assumed. A good storyteller is already thinking about the players involved, their unique preferences, and the kinds of hurdles that will be interesting for them, so tacking on a victory tax or making it impossible to succeed without some additional penalty feels weird and forced to me. The karma system @Seraphim73 suggested -- credit from past failures permitting future victories -- cushions that a little and it's a good thought, but still feels artificial for me personally, and shifts things on-balance toward being a mechanic. ('I haven't had a lot of time to play lately, and I don't have a failure-generated point to use for a victory, so I just decide, hey -- I'm not gonna get involved in this plot that's happening while I'm actually around and able to play, because I would want to lead the charge and I know I can't, so I'll just save this point for later.')

Players come up with surprising, creative ways to beat the odds all the time, and I feel like storytellers should respect that when it happens. You don't want your risk-averse players to feel like they can never win at anything because they don't want to gamble in order to do that -- plus, you wind up in a situation where you now have to incentivize them to eat the cost of succeeding, whenever that's not enough on its own. You don't want your bold players to know, going into something, that there's a going exchange rate on success, and that they're going to have to buy a win somehow. And for players like me, who like to be surprised by organic developments in RP and are already not risk-averse, it kinda saps all of the interest for me -- this thought that I know something bad is going to happen because something good is going to happen. Or that something good can't happen unless something bad already did.

None of this accounts for PRPs, either, if you want people to run those. Do your player GMs now have to figure out a way to tax success? Should there be limits to what they require people to sacrifice..?

I'm way more about incentivizing the behavior you WANT to see, and I love this thread so hard for making that a subject of conversation, especially when it comes to players being comfortable with failure. I just think how you wind up doing that is going to depend on the players you have, and trying to build a specific model, while it's interesting as an exercise, is probably not possible. It's still hugely useful to think about, granted, because your preferences there (do you want to reward with story, xp, karma, some combination of the above?) are probably going to play a big part in defining what kind of game culture you try to create.

There was an exchange early in the thread with @Ganymede and @Faraday about whether or how it's possible to make failure more appealing than success. I think it's true you can't do that for every player with one system...and you'll probably get a player or two whose needs you're not willing to cater to. All you can do is try to curate a game culture that draws/retains players with what you feel is a reasonable threshold of willingness to take risks when you offer them 'x' kind of incentive, and the others will just kinda weed themselves out. Then you stay consistent, and with time and experiences that don't leave people feeling burned, I think they gradually acclimate. But if you have a game, particularly a small game, where the bulk of players don't care about the incentive you want to offer them and you just try to ram that into practice, it's never going to work. It has to start as something based on what you have, and move toward being what you want to have.

[faraday]

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@faraday
Isn't this kind of ironic for someone who runs/ran a BSG game? In the five year run did they have one single unmitigated and unconditional success?

I don't see the irony personally. I can think of many victories throughout the course of the series, and only a few "wow sucks to be you" outright botches on the part of the main characters. And even when there were failures, those failures were part of a bigger arc leading to something meaningful, not just "wow, bad day for the Viper pilots I guess" randomness. So for me it's not about having unmitigated successes, it's about having the right level of challenge and meaningful failures that dovetail into a bigger story.

RL has the Olympic failures @WildBaboons mentioned, but we generally don't write novels or movies about those people (unless it's the punchline in a comedy). Nobody wants to tune into American Sniper and have him just randomly miss the critical shot in the movie for no reason whatsoever.

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

I think this can be mitigated through the hobby think that we are telling a story and not I am telling my story.

Theoretically yes. In practice, I see that as a bridge too far for people. Because there is no "the story" in the game except insofar as it comprises the sum of the individual parts. And if that's the case, who's to say which individual story is the one that should end at any given moment?

I think it's a game industry problem more than a MU problem. You see it in tabletop, where players are often reluctant to part with their characters. There are rare souls who play all games like they would Paranoia (character death? bring it ON!), but those are the exception rather than the rule in my long experience. You see it in video games. How many have permadeath any more? Almost none right? Because it sucks.

I agree with @Cura that players are complicated, and I'm likewise uncomfortable with incentivizing failure as a form of victory. That just seems like an extremely slippery slope to me.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

And again and again and again, I say that there are several games out there, popular games, where failure is baked in, where sharing story is baked in. Saying that it’s the industry is not all that correct, and more of what we hang onto.

Nobody likes losing a character, but...

[faraday]

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And again and again and again, I say that there are several games out there, popular games, where failure is baked in, where sharing story is baked in. Saying that it’s the industry is not all that correct, and more of what we hang onto.

So talk about them, and what you think makes people more willing to accept failure in those games. What makes them into group story as opposed to individual story? I'm going by based on what I've observed across countless games and hundreds of players, even in the face of me trying to steer the game in other directions. Your experience doesn't invalidate mine; it runs parallel to it. So - in all seriousness - let's hear more about it. If there are transferrable lessons here I'm sure folks would like to hear them.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

I’m okay not trying to hold a debate about this in this environment.

[Ghost]

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So the question becomes, as a game creator, how do you tackle this? How do you encourage your playerbase to step back a little from their need to play heroes? From their need to avoid obstacles, reject risks/stakes, and inhibit progression or complexity in a story?

I don't think that this can be done on any MU.

For the most part, MU culture doesn't flock to mushing because they want a lot of complication that they won't be able to control. They're looking for complication and conflict that is titillating, but not frustrating. You're talking about a lot of people who are going online to write and roleplay fantasies with a strong emphasis of escaping the elements of their daily lives where they cannot control the outcome.

I've mushed for over a decade, and if you look close enough you'll see this forum (and I've seen its predecessors) touch point on this every few months or so. This will never, ever, ever, ever be resolved due to the general pulse of the MU community.

In short: For a number of people, this is gaming. For a larger number of people, this is writing.

I personally advise you find, keep track of, and do your best to maintain positive relationships with people with similar mindsets, but understand that you're going to be surrounded by players with this hero concept that you described. You'll often hear it as the "My Story" concept, where when they make a character, their concern is for my story, and they want to ensure that my story is fulfilling for them. The general idea is that whether they're reasonable about it or selfish, it's that losing (pc death, failure, etc) isn't fun, and that others should be willing to find ways to also accommodate resolutions to the story that are fun for everyone (in the way that some people argue on behalf of everyone when it really is arguing for their own characters).

So in the least negative way possible, I'm advising you to just let it go.

Now, from a GM perspective? If you want to show people that their OOC desires aren't going to run the show, the best way to do so is by mandating dice rolling. Dice rolls ensure that it isn't the will of the OOC personality that mandates pass/fail. Without dice, many mushers have learned that OOC tactics work best for cutting the red tape: Making friends, roleplaying within cliques, character assassination, being difficult until they're given what they want, manipulation, schmoozing with staff, etc.

Not intentionally being negative, but as a musher what you're asking will be something you will struggle with for your entire time mushing.