this too shall pass
Feb. 20th, 2009 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reverancepavaneChange. Change is important in role-playing games. Both change in the characters and the universe. It's what drives a fulfilling story. And an important part of change, especially in RPGs, is the reversal of circumstance. For example, if a gamemaster introduces an escape-proof prison then they are almost guaranteeing that the players will be escaping from it or rescuing someone from it, negating the nature of the prison. Think of how unfulfilling the story would be if the prison really was escape-proof. "Nope. It's no use. Let's get a beer." But this technique also applies to characters as well. If a player has a powerful character then they are just asking to be humbled, to be brought down low, to be inconvenienced. That's where the good story is. [Of course, they can then get to change their status again, and regain their power. That too is change, and excellent storytelling.] It's when a player is unwilling to relinquish their power that they start to disengage with the game. The objective of the game changes from "continuing play" to "winning." And how exactly do you win a role-playing game? |
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Date: 2009-02-19 03:39 pm (UTC)i don't see them as a competition, or as having a win condition.
for me, it's about the roleplaying. the being someone/something else.
i like to take a character concept, flesh it out, and then try it out on a world concept. consensual, collaborative, and/or collective, storytelling ... live.
i abhor competitive games because they pull on the darker part of my nature - the impulse to crush, kill, and destroy obstacles - directing it towards fellow players and the dm/st ...
i prefer to build moderately powerful, rounded characters and see where they go. characters that can survive most scrapes and have enough tools and tricks to be able to be creative and get themselves into trouble ^_^
that said, a game can be a win. or full of winnitude. fun = win.
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Date: 2009-02-20 03:02 am (UTC)OK. Must remember not to make rhetorical comments in future. <grin>
Ok. I was using "win" in terms of whether it is a finite or infinite game, to borrow Dr Carse's definitions. Ideally the objective of an RPG is to continue playing (and a necessary ingredient to that is for everyone to have fun doing so). It's not generally something (tournament and convention games aside) that you can actually win. Of course, you can succeed in what you are doing, and succeed well, but there are no objective finishing-line to cross, which differentiates it from most boardgames or sports, for example.
Instead "winning" the game is entirely subjective and derived from within the context of the game.
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Date: 2009-02-20 12:54 pm (UTC)agreed! :D
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Date: 2009-02-19 09:31 pm (UTC)You can "win" a tabletop by successfully getting to the end of the campaign, but that's about it. Of course, the players "win" by having fun. Unless the player trying to "win" is the sort of person that has the most fun messing it up for other people. In which case, resort to the first statement, but substitute "character" with "player".
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Date: 2009-02-20 03:21 am (UTC)Mumble mumble. Rhetorical questions...
I agree that the only way to win an RPG is to have fun doing it. When it's not fun, you should stop or leave. But it really wasn't the definition of win I was using when I posed the question. <grin>
Mea culpae.
Although you do raise an interesting point in that it is possible to end a game by succeeding at all your objectives. Which is why, if I may borrow an example from a different genre, there are almost no stories about Conan whilst he is King of Aquilonia (except when he gets tired of it all and renounces the throne for one last adventure). It is possible for games to reach a natural end. Now the question is whether this is a "win" (since playing the game after this point becomes unsatisfying and therefore the game is likely to end there).
And in your last example the player is still having fun. It's just that the other players aren't.
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Date: 2009-02-20 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-20 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-20 01:23 pm (UTC)sadly, you only get to do it once O.o
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Date: 2009-02-20 01:51 pm (UTC)SET a man on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life :D
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Date: 2009-02-20 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-21 10:45 pm (UTC)Part of the reason is because you're making some assumptions I think about _why_ people play rpgs. Change and character growth is an aspect of some kinds of games, but not all of them. For example, if you're going to be playing in a Stargate inspired game, change does happen but... it's more of an action series than a drama. Action gets enough just enough change in order to keep the action pieces interesting. A drama gets change because you're explicitly looking at characters and watching how they deal with and react to circumstances.
I think there's also an aspect of how adversarial the GM is with their players. For example, having a powerful character doesn't mean (to me) that the character needs to be humbled. It means that they need to face some sort of challenge that's appropriate to their ability. Neither the character nor the situation has to change (immediately) for the game to be satisfying. The satisfaction can come from the struggle to create (or prevent) some sort of change.
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Date: 2009-02-23 01:32 pm (UTC)If a character has a high status, then in many role-playing games I suggest there is an implicit invitation to wrap that aspect into the storyline. And in this case the only valid direction of change is usually down, which naturally puts the status at risk. Similarly, the same thing applies to low status characters, where the valid direction of change for a low status character is to increase their status. It's not so much being adversarial as wrapping the aspect into the story. The player doesn't have to engage with the plot-aspect, but then they miss out on the story possibilities inherent in it.
Just as you can accept the possibility that the prison really is escape-proof and not do anything about it.
[One of the things I like doing is, as Joseph Campbell put it, the "Call To Adventure," which puts the player-character on the initial path to adventure and heroism. Usually something that knocks the character(s) out of their normal life. Of which a reversal of circumstance is often the easiest, but not necessarily the only, approach.]
But yes, it's not the case in all games, or even in all that many of them. And many players will object vehemently to that particular example (whereas the same players almost certainly won't object to the reverse situation [which is admittedly the default situation]).
And yes, I am a definite fan of growth in a character over the course of a campaign (and in that I don't mean the increase in the character's capabilities). Which is probably why I am such a fan of Dead Inside.
Does that help make the idea as clear as mud?
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Date: 2009-02-23 01:40 pm (UTC)Or perhaps a better term is to "put at risk" the aspect.
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Date: 2009-02-23 07:42 pm (UTC)I'd say that up until recently, that really hasn't been the case. Almost all of the old games were about acquiring some sort of marker to show improvement. XP, Gold, Items, Status... that sort of thing.
The improvement isn't exactly related to "change" as a driver/motivator of play though. Yes, change happened but it's occurring in the context of "when you start play, you're a zero. As time goes on and the character survives, they get stuff."
In other words, "change" was something that happened as an outcome of the traditional "zero-to-hero-heroic-journey" style of play that still dominates the rpg scene.
So a character gets status. Often a (traditional) GM knocks them down at least a few notches, if not all the way down. Why? It's not because they're saying, "What's going to be a good story about change for the character and how are they going to respond?" Instead, it's re-playing that "heroic journey" thing that people are obsessed with.
Supers is an rpg genre that definitely gets less play compared to fantasy. Why? I think a large part of it is because of the style of story and what happens with the characters. Players are hooked on a reward cycle of constantly getting more things for their characters. They've been trained into that in part because of fantasy games. The problem is that the genre isn't really about characters continuing to improve.
It's about change.
Usually it's personal things, such as relationships with team members, other agencies, loved ones or rivals in personal lives, that sort of thing. There's a chunk that are about _preventing_ change of a sort that the super feels would be bad, either in their personal lives, their hero lives, the world at large, and so forth. A much smaller chunk of stories relates to how a supers' power changes or disappears. You could argue that this sort of story is still about change, because it relates to how a super views themselves and relates to the world.
All of that taking place against a background of beating the stuffing out of other people and saving the world.
The thing is, a lot of people are stuck on doing the "heroic journey" thing like you see classically portrayed in Star Wars. That _might_ work as the beginning of a supers game, but you can't keep going back and drinking from that trough. At least not the way that fantasy games do it.
A lot of the older games and even a fair amount of the newer ones are still struggling with this. Like many industries out there, people (consumers as well as producers) are reluctant to take a chance on something new. And if it is "new" it needs to resemble the old enough that people don't feel like it's "too" new, just new enough to be different.
It's only in the relatively new small press games where you're starting to see people pick apart the game and try and make these bits of a character actively drive play, instead of passively counting coup.
It's possible to retro-fit some of the new small press/indy games ideas, applying some of the principles and methods to older games. But that winds up being more the "houserule" territory as opposed to an explicit or even implicit approach to the older games.
I'll note that I'm painting with a pretty big brush here. I'm sure plenty of people over the years in their small groups here and there played around with this sort of thing to a greater or lesser degree. There's always some monkey out there that starts screaming about how he run massive and sprawling political games using AD&D that lasted for years back in the 80's.
But the thing is that rpgs are a product.
As a product, they wind up catering to their target market and their goal is to get the most amount of money that they can. The majority of product producers take the conservative approach, offering an already proven formula and simply reflavoring it slightly in order to distinguish it from the other stuff out there. It's the rare product producer (or the niche market) that is going to step forward and take a genuine risk of failure.
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Date: 2009-02-23 08:08 pm (UTC)Again, I don't think that games implicitly or explicitly really went for targeting things like this as a matter of course. GMs often would, but that stems from the traditionally adversarial role that GMs have had.
GMs have been told "you have to give players stuff, so they can see their character improve and 'change'." and they have to balance this with "you must challenge a character."
In life, the acquisition of stuff often makes life easier. In rpgs, it's similar although it tends to be on a much more massive scale in the usual fantasy game.
Therefore, if you're going to want to challenge the character, you need to take away their stuff.
Also, taking away things, and people in a character's life count as "things" in this context, is an easy way to jump into yet another round of the "heroic journey", or at least what a lot of people think the heroic journey is.
Again, I think one of the key things to understanding people's approach to the "heroic journey" is to realize that for many people it's tied very strongly with zero-to-hero play. As a game progresses, there's a tendency to reset that "zero" level. So a fantasy game might go along and the original story arc or campaign finishes off at 7th level. Players are still digging things, so the GM starts a new arc. And right at this point, the reset happens. 7th is now the new zero and the characters are putzes once again.
Occasionally a GM will allow the characters to feel strong in comparison to the rest of the world, but it doesn't happen too often and it's usually of a pretty short duration. It's as if all that's happened before might as well not exist.
I always felt like Star Trek: The Next Generation had a lot of this going on. Stories were pretty self contained, and while changes might happen in the setting, they really only seemed to happen at that one point, and then it's as if it were always that way.
Like LaForge getting a promotion. One episode he gets the promotion, and then from that point on it's as if nothing's really changed and it's always been that way. He just gets a slightly different form of address.
Games like SotC and PDQ do reward players for having things happen to their characters. For incorporating some risk that things will go against the player's and/or character's goals. But they have a reward mechanism built into the game to reward players for doing this. The fact that they have to tie the reward mechanism to the risk, to me means that they recognize that as a whole, players are in fact not keen on having things at risk.
Older games like Gurps tried to do this, with giving you points for taking disadvantages.
The idea might have been for players to develop a more nuanced character, and to introduce an element of risk to some aspect of play, but the practical reality is that it just was a source of extra power for players to pump up their character. Playing of faults/disadvantages was something that a player often had to be reminded of, and most GMs knew that their players were going to pitch a fit if they tapped those disadvantages too often.
I think where games like PDQ, SotC, Hero Quest, and others of a similar nature really succeed, is because they force a player to invest in their character. They're explicitly pulling out what is interesting and valuable to their character to begin with.
This means that GMs don't have to scrabble around on the character sheet, looking for some way to challenge a character, or figure out some way to engage the player's interest. It's on the sheet, put their by the player. They're telling you what's important to the character, and what the player is looking to mess around with.
In _that_ context, yes you can seriously start pushing buttons and see what happens when change or the possibility of it is introduced.
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Date: 2009-02-24 01:54 am (UTC)Personally I don't really like the adversarial position of the "traditional" gamemaster. I'd much rather attempt to enable the players. This is probably connected to the idea that I want to discover the story written by the players, rather than the player's reaction to my story.
There are different schools of thought on the reward/disadvantage mechanism. When redesigning Bushido (in which eventually became Sengoku) I was roundly castigated for suggesting that I really liked the original games reward mechanism for committing seppuku in the appropriate circumstances. Everyone else believed that the players should not need any reward to role-play properly (however losing a character is a profoundly different experience from playing a disadvantage). Still reward mechanisms do serve to put the disadvantage front and centre before the player, which is good.
A bit problem with disadvantages is that they are usually part of a point-based system (ala Champions and GURPS). Since these games are designed to be zero-sum games they simply serve as a reservoir of extra points and are often ignored during play by most players (although once you get one player in a group that absolutely glories in revelling in their disadvantages things definitely change and the other players tend to join in I find). The solution I use (for GURPS at least – Champions is too breakable so I actually design the player's characters based on their description of who they want to play), is to allow the characters to design whatever characters they want to without a point limit. You can specify general skill ranges and skill requirements. You then add an Amber-style "good/bad stuff" to characters who are above or below the median point value.
And I've found that playing disadvantages is fun and there is usually no need to force a player to do so or hit them with it. At least among many of the people I play with. Although there is the other school that believes the disadvantages should be pushed as far as possible ("megalomania is free points because every player is at heart a megalomaniac").
But basically the purpose of the game is to have fun. Some groups play competitively and try and eke out every possible erg of advantage that they can (both against the universe and – at least in comparison if not outright conflict – the other players), and some play much more cooperatively. And some players, as mentioned above, cannot help but try to "win," even if doing so spoils the game for other players.
<shrug>