World Tone / Feeling
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I think a game can have genuine dangers and consequences for losses other than unceremonious death. You can get injured, cursed, trapped, etc. I think you can also sit players down and set expectations that they won’t endlessly throw themselves into unwinnable battles just because they aren’t deleted upon a loss.
I also don’t see it as an issue of conflicting playstyles between mechanically-focused minmaxing and collaborative storytelling. What I’d like is firmly collaborative storytelling. It’s just not collaborative storytelling about tea parties and everybody being friends.
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@Juniper I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences. I think most people just want to be able to write a little angst/drama into their RP for a couple of scenes, get some attention, and then move on from it. There’s a very rare few that truly want their characters to die, or to suffer major long-lasting and/or permanent consequences as a result of their RP.
I do think that circles back to tone and what people are trying to play. I don’t think a grimdark game where consequences are char-death or extreme permanent damage would be very successful, because most people want to play consequences that they can overcome (if they want consequences at all).
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@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:
I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences.
I always get weird reactions when I tell people that I’m totally okay with my characters losing limbs, being disfigured, having their livelihood ruined, or straight up dying as long as it’s entertaining.
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@MisterBoring It might be a lack of trust thing? I can count on one hand the # of times I’ve been told that and didn’t have someone freak the fuck out when that exact same consequence became a Real Possibility. I actually don’t even need one hand, I could use one finger.
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@bear_necessities I promise I am that one finger. I enjoy stories where my character loses just as much as I enjoy wins.
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I think the issue is so often when the consequences come around those consequences are out of the player’s control. Which can be completely reasonable/logical! But they feel helpless and more easily feel slighted/pissed/unaccepting of the outcome. Especially if there is a hand behind the outcome such as a GM/Staff telling them what happened.
When bad results happen, I think you have to push it back on the player and let them make a choice. I was recently watching Critical Role’s new campaign and their use of their new system Daggerheart and I thought it was perfect for handling the scenario of a bad outcome/consequences in a MU*.
When a character loses all their HP in combat they are given three choices:
Blaze of Glory - They die, but they get to make an action that is an immediate critical success.
Struggle - They roll and have a 50/50 chance to either die or live.
Knocked Out - They live, are knocked out of the combat, but potentially suffer a permanent injury or setback.I think a pick your poison style of approach would reduce the negative feelings and encourage people to accept negative consequences. With some tweaking it could also be modified for non-combat bad outcomes.
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I think giving players mechanical agency over their potential bad stuff happening is a good thing. One of the GMs I have tabletop groups with has cribbed a Fate Point system out of… I think it was Zweihander, into every game he runs. Each player gets a pool of Fate points that replenish 1 point per session, up to a maximum of 3. You can spend one at any time to reroll a failure, or negate some minor negative thing, for example from our last session, our elemental summoning wizard suddenly found he had lost control of his fire elemental, and he spent a fate point to immediately retake control. On the other hand, if something majorly bad happens, such as a loss of a limb, or outright death, you have to burn a fate point to ignore those effects, and effectively remove yourself from the scene or combat in question. If you burn one, you effectively reduce your maximum by 1 for the life of the character, and if something majorly bad happens after you’ve run down to 0, then you just take whatever fate hands you.
In our tabletop group, having that mechanical agency over it has emboldened some of our usually more risk-adverse players into doing things that make the story more exciting and actually threaten their PCs well being.
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@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:
@MisterBoring said in World Tone / Feeling:
Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.
I had a similar idea for an anthology game I was thinking of creating. Basically you are in the tower and the only way to climb is to participate in virtual reality “simulations” where your goal was to amuse the people in the upper floors, kinda Hunger Game-y except you were a different character in each sim. The purpose was to die, repeatedly and violently and epically. I just couldn’t figure out what people would do when they were killed off and waiting for everyone else.
If I were doing this, I’d say once you die you get to take a character bit of one of the upper floor people and have decadent betting/backstabbing fellow richies/interfering with the poorer masses. Garbage fire on both ends.
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@bear_necessities said in World Tone / Feeling:
I’ve always felt that while people say they want consequences in their RP, a vast majority of people don’t really want it. At least not permanent consequences.
You’re definitely right here and I think players could do more introspection about what they actually want before they commit to a less forgiving game.
I think I’m just scarred from previous experiences though because we’ve now said “consequences” so many times that it’s starting to lose its meaning to me.
I take “consequences” to mean “oh no I went adventuring without a light source and ran away from a bear and fell into a ravine and now I’m stuck until someone rescues me”.
But sometimes “consequences” means you pissed off someone with a lot of friends and they’re going to petition the admin to fire you from your IC job because you did not use the correct hand to wave to Ms Pennybottom at the annual fair. Sometimes “consequences” just translates to player infighting and yes people generally hate getting socially punished over made up minutae.
Breaking your ankle though, let’s do that more.
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@Juniper said in World Tone / Feeling:
Breaking your ankle though, let’s do that more.
Here’s the thing though - the game doesn’t stop while your PC’s ankle is broken. So a lot of the time, your character taking a serious injury means you can’t participate in the adventures for two months! (longer if we imagine realistic physical therapy / recovery periods! my friend dislocated a finger and was out of roller hockey and in physical therapy for ages).
I am the weird person who actually has put a character in a cast for six RL weeks. I also sent a PC off-grid for IC medical training for something like three? four? months RL months because it made sense for the character. But it sucked, and I don’t really fault anyone else for not wanting to deal with that.
There’s a reason TTRPGs mostly gloss over injuries and most MUs just use Hollywood wound physics.
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@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
longer if we imagine realistic physical therapy / recovery periods!
Any character over 30 now has to have “mild back/joint pain” as a mandatory part of their RP. And if you ever sustain an injury to a joint you get occasional stiffness, but as a bonus you get to tell when it’s about to rain and/or when your favourite sports team is going to win.
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@Pavel That 30 year body warranty is serious business. Also your post made me absolutely cackle so thank you for that.
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Wait. Y’all got thirty years? WTF?
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@Jenn What I saw/heard in my head:
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@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
I think the issue is so often when the consequences come around those consequences are out of the player’s control. Which can be completely reasonable/logical! But they feel helpless and more easily feel slighted/pissed/unaccepting of the outcome. Especially if there is a hand behind the outcome such as a GM/Staff telling them what happened.
When bad results happen, I think you have to push it back on the player and let them make a choice. I was recently watching Critical Role’s new campaign and their use of their new system Daggerheart and I thought it was perfect for handling the scenario of a bad outcome/consequences in a MU*.
As an OSR GM, when my players tell me what action they want to take, if the consequence of failure isn’t already clear, I try to make it clear and confirm that they still want to take the action.
"Player: My character is going to jump the chasm to get to the other side.
Me: That’s going to be a d20 roll under strength with a -2 for they length of the jump. If you succeed, your character will be on the other side of the chasm. If you fail, your character will fall into the chasm and, while your character can’t determine the exact depth, it’s enough that there is a strong potential for their death. Do you wish to continue?"
GMs should treat action declarations more like hovering over the options in a Paradox Interactive strategy game story event. Tell the player what the odds of success and failure or what die their going roll, the difficulty number or whatever, and whatever bonuses or penalties they have. Tell them what success looks like (because what they’re attempting may not get them what they’re actually after), and tell them what failure looks like.
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@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
if the consequence of failure isn’t already clear
I think this point here is often a point of contention. What’s obvious to the person running the story isn’t always obvious to those of us playing the story, especially if it hasn’t been communicated accurately. Sure, some of the responsibility is on the players to ask follow up questions, but I’d really advocate for those telling the story to go that extra half a mile in making hazards and risks more explicit.
Sometimes it can be exciting to be surprised by a risk you hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes being reckless does need to get a rap across the knuckles. But you really do have to work at framing the consequences as story beats and not the punishments they can so easily seem like.
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@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:
@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
if the consequence of failure isn’t already clear
I think this point here is often a point of contention. What’s obvious to the person running the story isn’t always obvious to those of us playing the story, especially if it hasn’t been communicated accurately. Sure, some of the responsibility is on the players to ask follow up questions, but I’d really advocate for those telling the story to go that extra half a mile in making hazards and risks more explicit.
Well, my example was from OSR D&D. What I was meaning was cases like “I attack the orc with my longsword.” In that scenario, the player, unless they’re new to D&D, should know the roll and what the consequences of failure are (not hitting said orc). Basically, anything that isn’t a standardized action in the rules should be clarified between the GM and the player. For MU*s, pretty much every action is not standardized, so the GM should always be informing the player what failure looks like. I will note, though, there are cases where there is no GM but failure is still possible. In a L&L game, a PC might make a speech or whatever and staff reviews it later, makes them roll, and decides because they did a terrible job a mob has formed, and this decision takes place obviously after the player has already taken their action. I’m not sure how to address that.
EDIT: Drunken spelling and grammar. Then again, this is a drunken edit, so maybe the spelling and grammar were right the first time.
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@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
For MU*s, pretty much every action is not standardized, so the GM should always be informing the player what failure looks like
To be honest, most of the consequences I’ve experienced in games haven’t involved dice rolls at all. They’ve been the result of stupid decision making, some of which was because of stupid players trying to win stupid prizes, but plenty of others could be chalked up to a misunderstanding between players, or player and storyteller. So there’s often no ‘I am going to attack him with my longsword’ pre-action discussion time. Someone calls the Prince of Vancouver an American and suddenly there’s a blood hunt, all because of a lack of communication or clarity.
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@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:
To be honest, most of the consequences I’ve experienced in games haven’t involved dice rolls at all. They’ve been the result of stupid decision making, some of which was because of stupid players trying to win stupid prizes, but plenty of others could be chalked up to a misunderstanding between players, or player and storyteller. So there’s often no ‘I am going to attack him with my longsword’ pre-action discussion time. Someone calls the Prince of Vancouver an American and suddenly there’s a blood hunt, all because of a lack of communication or clarity.
Same. Most of the serious drama I’ve seen has resulted from “I didn’t expect your character to react that way”, not “I didn’t expect that falling into a deep chasm might result in a broken leg.”
But this is all getting down to the age-old story vs. game continuum. It’s not one or the other, but every game and every player falls somewhere along the scale, sometimes variably.
On the more “story” end of the scale - I don’t care how much you as GM warn me about the chasm. A story that has a main character die because they slipped and fell into a chasm is dumb IMHO. It’s just ridiculous. (unless it’s a comedy then maybe being ridiculous is the point) Story absolutely can have setbacks, even deaths, but those setbacks should fit organically into the story and do something to propel either the plot or characters forward.
On the more “game” end of the scale - the unpredictability is a feature, not a bug. Not knowing if any die roll can result in tragedy can be exciting. That time when your PC failed his athletics check and flew his jetpack straight into a wall? Telling that story never gets old.
Neither is superior or inferior, they’re just different. I favor story when I MUSH and game when I play tabletop, but YMMV. The important thing is to set expectations.
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So, as I was riding home from my Friday happy hour binge after a completely shit week, (God, I hate laypeople who think they can argue law. Which is hypocritical, because I am a layperson, a well trained layperson, but still a layperson who argues law) and I came up with a “rule.” It’s kind of like some states where you have to inform a home invader you’re about to blow their head off if they don’t leave, before you’re allowed to blow their head off. I drunkenly call it the Duty of Informed Consequences. If your character is going to take offense, hold enmity against, try to ruin, whatever another PC because of something they just did or posed, you MUST OOCly inform them that their character has “done fucked up” and give them the chance to retcon, repose, whatever. You do not have to specify what the exact problem is, but you have to go “Hey. You done fucked up. You get one re-do.” After that, if they go “Nah, I am good,” or the try to make a new pose but still do the fucked up thing again, you get to ICly hammer them or at least try to hammer them for their shit.
