Posts made by Misadventure

Gumshoe doesn't guarantee you will solve anything. It guarantees you won't miss the necessary clues to enable you to make decision on your courses of action, be that to solve a mystery, or expanding the model, approach the negotiations table with the most pertinent facts, or decide on how to best wage a war given the current situations.

The particular model GUMSHOE has breaks the typical rolls run everything approach many games have. This "universal approach" isn't, there are many many ways players and GMs modify that approach to suit the actual results they want. Allowing only one roll or many, one chance to find info, or many, requiring rolls to interpret something or not, allowing player decisions to overrule (or not) what the dice say, the ways to customize a roll are endless. Many weigh the results towards many rolls to fail, or many rolls to succeed without realizing it.

If you are trying to break the usual way the game system runs things, you usually look at what the players do that is FUN, engaging, and that enables RP at whatever level (from in character acting through narrative to basic table talk description of game mechanics choices) and focus on getting to that, and making IT more important.

If you want a pure sim, you will end up with the muddy results of reality, and a lot of dead ends and unresolved events, and you'll get to play through every unrewarding hour of it. I love nodding to those realities, but I want to get to the stuff that is interesting for my players and I.

There is a page in Powers: Who Killed RetroGirl? that shows frame after frame of legwork. It gives the nod, then the story moves on. That's what Gumshoe is trying to, except instead of summary of many non-interesting but necessary events, it's about moving quickly through the parts that won't lead to interesting stuff in a game system.

Imagine making an alertness check, a perception check, and empathy checks every single turn of a game to represent your actual perception of everything. Could lead to awesome moments, but most likely it leads to a million rolls we fear are needed, but never go anywhere. Best to roll when the situation is complex, more complex than it appears, or MAYBE when it might highlight your characters shortcomings (like they hate the Irish).

Yes, I have not personally seen any Kinfolk/Wolfblooded abuse other than in a house rules sense, and feeling left out of play. Mind, abuse isn't the critical thing here, I use it as it's a variant on a common RP bit, the friendship or romantic relationship.

My topic, the direction I am going in, is trying to get players to at least sometimes explicitly approach a scene as a chance to portray something specific, hopefully in a mindset where displaying an IC negative is still seen as an OOC positive. Show off that alcoholism, flakiness, cowardice, bullying, anger, caprice, arrogance, lack of direction, addiction, misplaced anger, and everything else! If you don't like playing that way forever, then makes scenes about explicitly trying to over come it, failing sometimes, backsliding, and still coming out better on the end. Meanwhile the players had something good to play through. Hopefully waving that giant flag (thats actually a game design term) will let others KNOW the player is portraying negative traits on purpose, and respond with their own less than perfect in character actions.

Anything to get players to stop trying portray perfect characters, who put up with nothing negative from anyone ever. (BTW the I don't put up with any shit" is a great trope to prove wrong, to backslide on, and so on). Anything to get people to stop worrying about coming out on top, or that others will shove them down if they stop trying to come out on top.

Unless Mary Sue RP is your thing. Usually can't do that with multiple perfect stars, but of that floats your boat ...

What I wonder about being asking too much is players being willing to share their scenes and the outcomes. Public logs, or hints at good and bad events in other scenes without it becoming a pride or pity party. A black eye and some dark looks, post-high jitters, just some signs so people see whats going on, again without invite the whitehat brigade.

ETA: if one player shows negatives things off ICly, and others don't go for a perfection based response, then maybe players will also get used to portraying characters who deal with non-ideal situations often, and they won't feel the need to KILL someone just because they don't toe a line utterly.

I think most settings could benefit from a similar departure from hoping that a combat and skills use model will produce scenes or a story that are interesting. It's all about the characters, and their personalities, and their choices (and subsequents). It is not interesting, beyond a gambling point of view, that you rolled a 6 on a D8.

Good to know. I've not seen it in my Werewolf experience, but that experience is limited. Maybe what I am looking for is not just the players in a scene aiming to portray some specific thematic or personal element, but that it gets shared beyond those in the immediate scene.

That may be asking too much.

Reminder, how you perceive someones actions, and their intent as well as the actual merit of the actions are not all the same.

"You are being a dick."

"I see this as dickish behavior, and here is why."

One requires someone else to perfectly and telepathically coddle your way of thinking and hot buttons, the other does not.

They will play it, though I notice that it usually comes with some sort of OOC relationship that can easily be damaged by the "wrong" activities, such as spending time with another ghoul etc. To me, that is basically just social RP, just like sex RP, or hanging out being bitter in a bar. It's just the player more or less.

I'd love to see people step forward with a purpose, a type of thing they want to portray and have change over time (maybe the abusive relationship gets better, maybe someone learns something and that changes the dynamic, maybe it ends with an attempted murder, at least it went somewhere). To exercise their character and a theme, for themselves and other players to enjoy. I wonder if the rate of change that would include would mess with the rate of play done online by people with more than a few hours a week.

In short: even in LARPS you don't play to just hang out being someone else. There is something going to happen, and that should affect your character.

At least with Ghouls, the spectrum of standard relationships includes many negatives. If you asked someone "Hey want to portray the destructive effects a vampire has on a ghoul even when they appreciate something specific to that ghoul?" they would be likely to think that's okay. I'm not sure you could even ask that easily for a Kinfolk/Wolfblooded and a werewolf, even with such being in the books, and in werewolfy type movies and books (it was even in Twilight, over in a corner, cuz domestic abuse even in the service of a spiritual duty isn't romantic).

Do you think it is the real time nature of MU* play? I know some folks sit waiting for play by post stuff, but ... I feel like many folks hold the mental/emotional state of their character in their mind as they await a reply when its real time.

Lying etc is great for stories. The question is re the players playing to make a story, or are they playing a game to win still? I think that a large potion of RP game play is still unconsciously shaped by the war game origins.

I like using the terms "to exercise" (as in put through their paces) and "to portray" for characters and their situations. Suddenly if the goal is to portray a troubled relationship, having lies that are believed is a good thing, and not a failure. The idea of playing through a bad relationship sounds dumb, why put IC stress into my OOC fun time?

We need to move the idea of success and fun to full on experiences where we see the IC bad as a good thing to portray, as a necessary thing even. We really shouldn't be trying to outsmart one another, and rather be enjoy each others creativity and differences.

Investigate or research. It's always good to see how something is being used, to try to improve its usefulness.

In my mind, mini games may be great at suggesting theme, but they should have a limited resource used to track efforts, and be used during off screen time unless something sparks an idea for a scene.

If its important enough for records, then sure, make a stress load meter, and let folks recover from various things. Allow that sometimes concurrent processing slows it all down, and sometimes processing through a major issue can relieve or eliminate stress from many minor things.

Some folks love pressure from the system telling them how tough they have it. Some folks hate being intruded upon. If it's important to your game, intrude anyway.

Yup.
My approach is to try to replace something that is problematic rather than just point it out.

I hear you. I am even a player who sometimes has characters who are that. Almost always they've been swimming in whatever they are facing from their background on wards, but people don't usually know that. It's meant to be a tell of a sort, but in the end it's still I made a character that is less fazed by horrific things than usual.

EG soldier whose job was to commit atrocities, a character that killed the way most people eat, and a zealot who felt that the stakes were worth killing for atop that they were more than powerful enough to do so.

RL horror isn't always paralyzing. There are so many moments where people find themselves continuing down a path of action that they don't like, unable or unwilling to stop, yet horrified at the time, and scarred for life. This makes you an active, no matter how reluctant, participant in some aspect of the horror. People will question their ability to have chosen otherwise, or wonder at what is inside them (or all of humanity) for the rest of their lives.

Sociopathy is go.

Thumbs up!

Reading what another might do in reaction to what you do and acting to best maximize your desired results (Yomi in head to head video game terms) starts at social interaction and continues all the way through to actual player versus player (not character vs character) tactical decisions, contained in a game system, in a local (read game) social contract, and the larger world social contracts.

It's hard to draw a line.

Gotham etc plays into creating uncertainty and isolation. The apparent rules aren't the rules. While it's all about who you know, and what favors you can grant, you are also alone at times, not just alone in a crowd where your bodyguards can be bought, but physically alone where a single psycho can take you out.

I find D20 far too reductive, which means that the players fill in the details, which is terrible for an online game where you may have different mixes of players, and therefor different DMs, judging how to play through a scene with the D20 system present. One will be like make a single roll, I don't care what you pose, another will want rounds of poses matched to rolls or creating modifiers, some will be all for making it fit their vision of the genre, others will be all about the game system defines what happens.

I dunno, having the Joker in town in sorta like having the bad guy from Saw in the neighborhood.

Eh, MU's rolled from RPGs which were expanded war games. In (most) war games the time for negotiation has past.

Be happy your wizard can pew pew pew at all. Now roll a morale check.