GCG

I've noticed a great deal of confusion and struggle regarding playing the Solar System, particularly using the Near setting.

In preparing to play the German game DeGenesis, I decided to summarize my thoughts on using complex settings and more-or-less accidentally wrote a whole essay about it: Setting and emergent stories.

I welcome any thoughts or questions.

Best, Ron

I'm responding to the question that was directly posed to me.

where I can find such playfulness? During games? Check. During phone calls with -Spiegel-? Check. On the forum? Uhm, I don't know, how does it work on GCG, if it's present?

That issue is clearly still in flux for this forum, as it matures. The situation is very similar to a phase of the Forge's development. In 2001, a number of people became very emotionally invested in being considered "real game designers," which as far as this current discussion goes is at least recognized as an issue by the people here. However, another problem developed soon afterward and really poisoned the Forge until about 2005: people who specialized in esoteric and hyper-intellectualized critique, and who seemed determined to avoid conclusions through discussion. This is why I closed the old forums called "GNS Discussion" and "RPG Theory," because we saw 5-page threads about the tiniest and most abstract bullshit; and I then insisted that all such topics be grounded in actual play.

I don't think that problem has developed here in exactly the same form. The community here has its politics and personality clashes, but the most prolific and authoritative posters are already committed to the actual-play foundation. What is happening here, though, is indeed similar in that the intellectual atmosphere of talking about game design is not yet fully established. What the Forge discussions at that time lacked was a sense of whimsy and fun, the ability to stay on-topic and to be productive, but also the ability to share fun.

Here, the "fanmail" convention seems like it might be turned toward that end. As I see it, fanmail is most often expressed to declare solidarity with an intellectual point, which is potentially a great thing, but carries the risk of establishing turf over identity politics, like all the women in Oprah Winfrey's audience clapping when the stupid cow on stage is sniffling about her husband not listening to her, and then the admittedly-unattractive guy receives silence when he retorts that she's refused to sleep with him for ten years. It's also used to express amusement at jokes, which is also a great thing, but carries the risk of fun and laughter being reserved for trivia.

I think it would be nice to see these things combined: that posing an idea or possible game design concept can receive fanmail here on the basis of its genuine attractiveness to someone, without such a response becoming a referendum-vote, and without being subject to immediate criticism merely because someone dislikes it on the basis of personal preference. It's related to one of my moderating points at the Forge, which is that if you don't like someone's idea strictly on the basis of personal taste, then your criticisms are not relevant to the discussion about the idea.

Best, Ron

Hello,

I wrote the book to be read by anyone who wants to play, without the common assumption that the GM will read it, and then talk to the players. When you receive your copy, you will see that the prose is directed towards "you," and I always specify what "you" means, either player or GM. My hope is that everyone will read all of it, so that if someone is a player, he or she will know what the GM is supposed to do, and vice versa.

Thanks for your interest in my game!

Best, Ron

Since my diagram is NOT based on direct influences from each designer's point of view, but instead based on particular variables which interested me personally, I want to present this as well: Jonathan Walton's tree of RPG influences using networking software, which IS based on designers' accounts of what influenced them.

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/indie-roleplaying-game-design-influe-3/versions/5

Use the "relationship" option to visualize the diagram, then you can play with it by moving "around in" the diagram. I think it's very illuminating as well.

Best, Ron

Hello,

I would like to respond to this thread, because some of the answers have caused more problems than the original question. However, I am tending three small children at this moment and I have to write my answer a few words at a time. I am not a moderator but I ask that people wait for my post.

(Is this what the "slowdown" tag is for?)

Best, Ron

Hi Niccolo,

Yes! When I am GM for this game, I tend to be quite generous about this.

Hi Moreno,

You are probably closer to the correct solution that you fear. Recovering from incapacitation does not necessarily heal wounds, but it might. It depends on what the nature of the recovery is.

Example 1: the trollbabe is injured and is then incapacitated by a blow to the head. In this case, the way the next scene gets framed, she recovers from being knocked out by simply waking up. That isn't going to heal her wound.

Example 2: the trollbabe is injured and is then incapacitated by a terrific surge of released magical forces. The way the next scene gets framed, she recovers from that incapacitation by being re-born in a mystic vat, literally re-created. This is going to restore her fully, unwounded.

Neither of these is intended to operate like a table of "incapacitations vs. recoveries" with a little third column telling you whether she's wounded or not. I'm trying to indicate that the solution will arise from the fiction - or more accurately, from how the scene framing proceeds, including the implied forces at work and the implied actions of NPCs.

If I were to try to put it systemically, I would say, "The default rule is that recovering from being incapacitated does not heal wounds. However, if a given instance of recovery does imply healing the wound as well, then go ahead and let it do so."

Best, Ron

Hello,

I will address one question that I think was asked but not answered.

When describing the action during the dice mechanics, I deliberately wrote Sorcerer to be neutral. This was in direct contrast to the way every single role-playing manual had been written before that. In those manuals, all narration was either provided by the GM or was subject to editing and veto by the GM. Even when such concepts were not explicitly stated, they were implied and illustrated through the examples.

Therefore the neutral phrasing in the Sorcerer rules brings equality to the table. I had observed in practice that many groups were capable of unconstructed narration, permitting anyone to speak first regardless of whether they are the player of that character, another player, or the GM; and that whatever they said was subject to group approval, sometimes so subtle that the people involved were not even aware they were doing it. The GM did not have final authority - their statements were just as subject to this approval as anyone else's. Sorcerer is written to accomodate this sort of play, in which whoever is inspired to talk and describe as soon as the conflict mechanics appear, simply does so. If what they say doesn't appeal to someone at the table, or if someone would prefer to speak instead, then that gets resolved. A group whose members cannot understand the normal, human, conversational processes involved is not encouraged to play Sorcerer.

Modern day internet discussion has obscured all these points through a variety of idiot readings. One of them is a mis-reading of "narration" to mean "monologue," another is the notion of approval as some kind of explicit committee consensus process, and yet another is the unfortunate perception that RPG design begins and ends with Primetime Adventures, a game that derives its formal narration mechanics from The Pool, Dust Devils, and Trollbabe. Regarding that third point, PTA is a fine game but its toolbox is a limited and specific thing which should not be mistaken for the refined essence or even functional range of role-playing mechanics.

To get back to Sorcerer, there is nothing wrong with the players providing most of the narrations relevant to their own characters and the GM providing most of the narrations relevant to the NPCs. Nothing stops you from treating this distinction as the default. However, it is not set in concrete.

Let's say I am playing a character who is shooting at somebody, and the dice are rolled; my shot arrives before the target character's action, and that player or GM chooses to abort the character's action and roll full dice against my shot. They succeed; I fail.

I might say "The carpet rolls under your feet," or "The gun misfires," or "You simply miss," or ... anything. Or you might say it. Or the GM might say it, if that's a different person. Or someone else.

The key in Sorcerer is to make use of existing knowledge. "The gun misfires" might be exactly the right narration because we know that particular gun has been dropped and kicked around extensively before my character picked it up. Or it might be a boring narration because it was merely sitting in my character's pocket until this moment. Whether a narration is good or bad in Sorcerer is always, entirely specific to that moment and the conditions of the objects and people in the fiction. If you are fully engaged in play, then your ability to find that perfect narration is quite high. Ideally, it shouldn't matter who narrates because everyone is so entirely engaged that anyone is capable of eliciting the "oh that's perfect!" response from everyone else.

Incidentally, the above point applies to announcing actions in slightly more limited form. Although the player of a character has authority over the character's announced actions, good play in Sorcerer is full of informal suggestions made of sentence fragments and significant looks and gesticulations, because in many cases, the people near you are almost as excited about your character's current choice as you are.

Therefore be ready to narrate for your character as the default. But be ready to listen to others' excited narrations as well - sometimes they know your character or are inspired by the immediate circumstances better than you.

All of the above points may seem risky, especially in comparison to the formal narration mechanics that the readers of this forum encountered in games like InSpectres, Primetime Adventures, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Polaris. For these readers, however, I have a thought to present to you.

The thought is, that the authors of these games (Jared Sorensen, Matt Wilson, Vincent Baker, and Ben Lehman) were deeply influenced by Sorcerer. In order to make the games you are familiar with, they had to overcome the GM-only, GM-centric foundational thinking and to learn to permit everyone at the table to speak. I am not saying that they had not managed some distance already. Vincent, for instance, had been playing in an open-group narration context for years. But none of them had ever seen a game text which explicitly removed all mention of GM narration as the gold standard for the fiction, tacitly opening the talk at the table to ordinary human creative inspiration. Nor had any of them ever seen that idea intimately linked to dice before, in this case, both the bonus dice rule and the choice to abort or defend.

They went through a door that Sorcerer opened for them. Formalizing what they found on the other side of that door is a fine thing, and the pride for recognizing that belongs to Jared and also to James V. West when he wrote The Pool. But what they found does work, even before formalizing it into turns or mechanical signals.

So their progression is: (1) GM-centric, "GM says," as the first and only standard; (2) Sorcerer, opening narration to the table, inspiration-first; and (3) the games I just mentioned, which also include my own Trollbabe. Therefore if you were mainly used to (1), then you responded to rules in Sorcerer for what they were, a tool for liberation. But here in the Italian community, the experience seems to be (1) to (3), skipping the "liberation" step. The result unfortunately can lead to playing one of those games (Primetime Adventures, et cetera) in a way which is not especially fun or interesting at all - merely trading one boring and stupid procedure for another just like it, merely distributed among more than one person. And when you see the liberation rules, you react to them as if they were incomplete.

Best, Ron

Hi everyone,

I am unsatisfied with parallel conversations between the Forge and GCG. It seems wrong to me that a few people can scurry from a complex conversation here over to there, engage and enlist me through a necessarily limited summary of the issue, and then take whatever I say back here as a kind of Pronouncement of Mass Destruction to use in that conversation. The implied notion that some few people are "close to Ron" and others are not is especially obnoxious, and I can tell from some threads here at GCG that resentment about it is already understandably rising. I know that people posting at the Forge have not necessarily intended for this effect to occur, but I think the negative side of the result is nearly unavoidable. That's one of the reasons I'd like to become active at GCG itself in the first place, because the community and audience there should be respected.

So this particular thread is the last time I'll answer a GCG question at the Forge, or at least, when the question is already the subject of a complex thread there. Individual questions from Italians (or anyone else) are perfectly all right at the Forge from now on, but if it has to do with some thread of that kind, please let me know and I'll participate here.

I've posted this at the Forge as well and we can continue the discussion here.

Magic and Conflicts, part 1: the rules

The single concept which makes the entire four pages at GCG a hundred times easier is this: conflicts in Trollbabe are not fixed into a relationship with the fiction prior to any single instant of play. You cannot say, "She magically flies through the air," and look it up on a page in the rules and find a table which lists all the fictional magical things which require the conflict mechanics. Instead, conflicts are called when someone says they apply. Always. Period.

There are some obvious reasons why this point hasn't been properly applied in the CGC discussion and some subtle reasons. One obvious reason is what Moreno referred to at one point, "Are you playing GURPS or Trollbabe?" To say that Trollbabe operates differently from a game in which every action and effect is effectively pre-played by the mechanics, rendering the people speaking effectively mouthpieces for those mechanics, is true - but it's not sufficient. A more subtle and more important reason - i.e. a way to understand my point - is that the rule says, "someone" - not the GM, for instance. That is crucial. It means, among other things, that what makes a conflict in Trollbabe is not "judged by the GM" in the way such things are judged in, say, Primetime Adventures or Dogs in the Vineyard. Both of those games are a bit retrograde for this variable compared to their "parent," Trollbabe, although they too, unlike GURPS, allow certain things to occur without going to direct mechanics, under certain circumstances.

I will try to clarify. We'll start with the easiest case: the player states something the trollbabe does and says, "Conflict!" All done. It's a conflict. We figure out her goal and the Action Type, and go into fair-and-clear.

Now for the more interesting case. The player states something the trollbabe does and happens not to say "Conflict!" This does not necessarily mean the player does not think it is a conflict - maybe he or she does, and hasn't said it yet, or doesn't feel the need to say it because the conflict seems obvious. Or maybe, alternatively, the player does in fact intend it as Color and didn't have the mechanics of conflict in mind for play at that moment. Or maybe, in the heat of the moment, that particular level of abstraction isn't on the player's mind at all.

As you know, the GM is now perfectly legally permitted to say "Conflict!" in which case, it's exactly the same thing as the easy case except that the GM chooses the Action Type and sets the Pace.

All of the above works perfectly in reverse for a situation in which the GM states the actions of an NPC and might or might not happen to say "Conflict!" Just switch "player" and "GM" in the above three paragraphs and consider it to be three more paragraphs in this discussion.

With all that in mind, I hope you can see my point: a stated action in Trollbabe must get through a filter composed of two people's views on whether that action carries with it an inherent conflict to be addressed by the mechanics. It doesn't matter which one states the action. It doesn't matter which one says "Conflict!" The hard, fast, concrete, never to be ignored rule is that when someone does say it, it is.

And here's a key factor in that rule: it is never negotiated. You never, ever!, ever!!, ever!!! discuss this as an issue in play. The rule does not require agreement. It is in fact built to ignore, bypass, and obviate any need to arrive at agreement. It is not a consensual rule. That is why I do not support the idea that this issue is a dial to be "set" in the sense of pre-play discussion or during-play discussion. You do not "set" the dial in a deliberate way. You find out as you go along.

So a lot of that GCG conversation is completely beside the point. "I say she does X! Would that be a conflict?" The only answer is to ask, in play, do you say it is when you say that? And if you don't, does the other person say it is? Because if so, then it is. There is no other possible answer. "Would that be" is an inadmissible concept when discussing the conflcts in Trollbabe.

Magic and Conflicts, part 2: social creativity

i) All of the above means re-evaluating the entire context of how you talk when playing this game. In older RPGs, when you say X, it's effectively assumed that mechanics X must be applied. Since a lot of the time that led to problems in terms of Creative Agenda, people found a number of ways to violate that idea, most of them deceptive, passive-aggressive, or both. Trollbabe does something different; it simply uses a different idea. The idea is that whenever you provide input into the fiction, you have to be prepared for the other person to make it a conflict, if you haven't done so yourself. If you can't accept that, and want to have 100% control over whether you will go to dice or not (by being the table's rules-expert or by being the GM of a traditional game, for instance), then this isn't the game for you.

As a more general point, I wonder whether a great deal of talking about RPGs is really an exercise in generating a complete and thorough model of what play will produce, before you play. This kind of talk - or what I think I see, anyway - is a symptom of not having any confidence that the entire activity will actually be fun. It's a way to know exactly what the game will do before you commit to it. However, it's also counter-productive for the kinds of games I write. There are a lot of indie games available for which this kind of talk is well-suited, although I frankly dislike these games intensely and consider them intellectually and emotionally trivial. My games are built to prompt emergent properties of play which simply cannot be anticipated. You will not be able to know "how Trollbabe will go" by working out exactly what will happen if you say X, or if you say Y, or if you say Z, prior to play.

ii) If I were a gamer, which I am, then I would read everything in part 1 and the first thing I'd say would be, "That means if no one says it is, then it isn't a conflict! Wow! I could play Trollbabe and never go to the dice!" However, that is actually the one thing not to do. It's why I made all those diagrams in the section about scenes. Given the opening of the scene, the people at the table must make the characters do things, say things, and move around. This must be occurring long before anyone starts talking about conflicts.

Let's take a look at what that is like for the people playing trollbabes. It means that if at any time, someone thinks his or her trollbabe wouldn't like something or would be disadvantaged by something or wants to overcome or change something, that person shouts out "Conflict!" Let me ask you now: if you are playing your trollbabe, and you have gone through the whole process (hair, horns, et cetera), and if you are in fact engaging with a scene by having the trollbabe move through space and talk with people and do things ... then do you think you could stand to have her accept everything she wouldn't like, tolerate every disadvantage, and pass up on overcoming or changing things? This woman? Do that all that way through an adventure?

Let's also look at what that is like for GMs, who don't have the visceral and imaginative fire of a conceived trollbabe in their mind - instead, the GM has the Stakes. That means one or more NPCs, probably more than one, who wants those Stakes and what is more, wants them the way they want them. In the same way I challenged the player above, I will now say that you are the GM, and I challenge you: if the trollbabe does anything assertive, will that very act upset the calculations and desires of one or more NPCs? Do you think you could say "no" to that question throughout a series of scenes, all the way until the end of fhe adventure. (Small but useful side point: This is especially useful for the GM because, although he or she cannot introduce new information, he or she can in fact use information that is unknown to the player.)

Both of these are directly related to magic because (i) doing it is very, very assertive; and (ii) someone in a location who can do magic is very, very noticeable and relevant to anyone interested in the Stakes.

Magic and Conflicts, part 3: aesthetics

If I were more oriented toward anime and 1990s gaming-fantasy than toward underground comix and Norse sagas, which I'm not, I would also say, "So my Trollbabe can shoot fire from her magic tiara! She can turn 50 meters tall! She can have magic lasers rotating on her head! She can turn into a hippogriff and a Japanese ogre!" None of this is true. And I claim that the rules say it isn't true.

Again, this isn't about setting a dial. You have a very limited, very specific text which provides exactly what everyone at the table may treat as known information. This is the opening piece about trollbabes and the setting material, including the map. Simply treat that as "known information" and use it. Going outside of those parameters is "new information" and the player has no authority to do this. Also, in the section about magical content and monsters for the GM to use when preparing an adventure, the rules are more restrictive than you may realize. The GM is not allowed to create extravagant monsters and magic all over the place as pure Color.

In conclusion

I hope you can see that parts 1-3 above are intended to reinforce one another. 3 supports 2 because the genre enhances and specifies that kinds of conflicts that people will intrinsically spot (and create) in situations. 2 supports 3 because the role-played interactions and the narrated outcomes of conflicts make the setting and genre more vivid and specific for that group. And 2 and 3 together reinforce 1 because one person's every statement becomes a window of opportunity for the other person, and 2 and 3 together create what statements are most likely to do so.

I hope this was a helpful post. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best, Ron
Fanmail to everyone!!