World Tone / Feeling
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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.
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@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
The important thing is to set expectations.
Agreed. Even the most well-thought-out story-based consequence can feel like a capricious punishment rather than an interesting story moment if there’s no communication and the player is blind-sided.
