Ideas from Other Game Systems

[RDU Neil]

On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2019 at 7:38 AM, Doc Democracy said:

I think it is a half-way house.  The plan is hashed out by the players in a really sketchy way rather than sitting down coming up with a million details that might never be relevant.  There are some broad rolls that deliver a number of chits.  Those chits can be used to fill in details that become necessary during play (such as "we need heavier weapons, good job I stashed a cache on top of the lift").  Or at least that is the cool aspect that I think I will be stealing from this! 🙂

 

Yes... exactly.  Like, don't debate the million of pointless details or worry about your load-out... you choose to say "I have that" at the point where it would be useful to have it, or "we did that" at the point it is useful to the drama and flow of the action.

[RDU Neil]

On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2019 at 8:43 AM, Doc Democracy said:

OK.  To use Neil's example.  The players want heavier weapons. 

 

One of them suggests that the Plan should have included getting a cache of just such hardware on top of the lift. 

 

I say that this is eminently possible and for them to be there, they need to roll the Dice Pool (for this example presume there are 4 dice in that pool). 

 

The players decide if they want to use the Pool. There is no chance of the cache not being there. By rolling the dice they know there will be a cache.

 

What the players do not know is whether this will leave them with dice in the pool or not.  It is very unlikely (but not unfeasible) that they would roll 4 sixes. 

 

If they go ahead and roll the dice they might roll 6, 5, 3, 3.  That means the Pool is now 3 dice.  Next time they want to use the Pool to implement the Plan, they only roll 3 dice.  They can keep using the Pool until there are no dice left to use.

 

If they had wanted an EMP device above the lift then I might have said, yes, but only if you lose a dice from the pool if you roll 6s or 5s.  In the above example, that would leave them with only 2 dice.

 

I have only used it a couple of times myself and on both occasions it has added an element of tension to the table about decisions, without actually impacting the decision being made - even if they had rolled 4 sixes, the cache would have been there but they would have no Pool for the rest of the adventure...

 

Very cool... and I'll consider it. We're so used to the Chit system, that seeing the chits being used is the drama. Someone has an idea, but someone else is like, "Is it worth spending a Chit on that?" kind of thing. Adds to the drama, albeit in a different way. Dice pool is a fun idea though.

[Doc Democracy]

2 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

 

Very cool... and I'll consider it. We're so used to the Chit system, that seeing the chits being used is the drama. Someone has an idea, but someone else is like, "Is it worth spending a Chit on that?" kind of thing. Adds to the drama, albeit in a different way. Dice pool is a fun idea though.

 

Try it once as a pilot.  It worked really well at my table, the discussions were not as simple as "Is it worth spending a chit", it was what are the chances of us losing our pool, is this the thing we need??  It is interesting to watch them be very casual when they have a large pool (though this is when they have the real chance of losing lots of dice) and then become incredibly stingy as you get down below 6 dice.  In the last session, the last two dice went on the first roll - 2 sixes.  In the first session the last dice was used four or five times before they rolled a 6.

[Brian Stanfield]

41 minutes ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

Try it once as a pilot.  It worked really well at my table, the discussions were not as simple as "Is it worth spending a chit", it was what are the chances of us losing our pool, is this the thing we need??  It is interesting to watch them be very casual when they have a large pool (though this is when they have the real chance of losing lots of dice) and then become incredibly stingy as you get down below 6 dice.  In the last session, the last two dice went on the first roll - 2 sixes.  In the first session the last dice was used four or five times before they rolled a 6.

How do you determine how many dice are in the pool at the start? 

 

I like Neil’s idea of everyone making rolls to contribute to the Plan. In this case, maybe they’d add more dice to the pool with successful rolls. 

[Doc Democracy]

Just now, Brian Stanfield said:

How do you determine how many dice are in the pool at the start? 

 

I like Neil’s idea of everyone making rolls to contribute to the Plan. In this case, maybe they’d add more dice to the pool with successful rolls. 

 

There could be all kinds of ways of coming up with a base pool.  In Neil's example the rolls made by players to contribute to the Plan would add dice based on how well they made their roll.  The GM might decide to give them bonus dice for all kinds of things. 

 

You actually add fewer dice than you would add chits.  If you think about it one chit is good for exactly one intervention.  One dice could be used many times.  I would probably add one die for every two chits you would normally have added - and the first dice are often worth more than later ones.  When you roll 12D6 you might expect to lose 2 dice if not one or two more due to rolling so many dice.  12 drops to 8 faster than 8 drops to 4 (on average).  The last few dice can last a long time.

 

Do a couple of practices, just roll the pool until you have no dice left and see how many throws it takes to get to zero.  Do it several times for 12 dice, 8 dice and 4 dice.  You would need to get a feel for how many to give out and players need to get a handle on what the probabilities are of a pool suddenly vanishing on them.

 

Doc

[ghost-angel]

Wrath & Glory has a really cool system of Bennies for players to use; first you have a Player Bennie, and then there's a group Bennie that anyone can use with group permission, and of course there's a GM Pool.

The group pool is added to when awesome things happen, players can earn personal bennies through story actions, and the GM pool is based on the number of players, and if really bad things happen (IIRC) they can add back to their own pool.

[RDU Neil]

On 6/19/2019 at 12:59 PM, ghost-angel said:

 

Oh this whole thing is good, this is fantastic. Please let me know if you how this all works in play.

 

Ok... so we used "The Plan" mechanic (process?) in actual play again tonight. It was mostly successful, but still a bit awkward in implementation.

 

The good:

1) It felt really correct and natural to begin when the game naturally entered a stage of "Ok, so we want to do a, b & c and find out..." from the players (the determined they wanted to implement a physical hack of a cartel's server farm to determine routing and transactions of finances and who they were working with)... and I was able to say, "Ok, this is clearly time for "the Plan" so let's structure this discussion.

2) The structure of determining "What are you trying to achieve" and "what is your general strategy" worked out, though, as noted below, the goal they were trying to achieve kept shifting throughout the plan. The general strategy, "We want to find their information infrastructure and get a hard line hack into it without them noticing" was enough to get to "Ok, so what kind of prep do you need, and what actions do characters take to make this possible?" and this didn't take long at all.

3) The actual prep dice rolls and then "The Plan" roll worked well, and enable me as the GM to provide key information that they learn along the way, so the players and PCs are clear about what they are up against.

4) The "We planned for this" chits were used in a different way that was just as effective. The Plan roll earned them two such chits. They chose to spend one to say, "We create a distraction that pulls the majority of the guards away from the server farm so there is a window to infiltrate." By spending a chit, this was a given, the distraction works, and we could start the moment by moment actual play with the professional thief at the door and picking the lock.

5) the player with the thief character who was primary driver of this plan, really felt it was a chance to "show his stuff" and have the professional thief in his environment and really shine. (The op went nearly flawlessly, with the one major monkey wrench overcome with a 3 on a perception check and a 4 on the stealth roll to avoid discovery by a seriously bad guy.)

6) It was a good combination of "prep rolls" and "plan rolls" that are more meta... and traditional task resolution skill rolls like "Lockpicking" and "Stealth" etc. and they felt different enough, even though both used skill rolls to resolve. 

 

THe not so good:

1) Again, it was difficult for the players at first, to get to the idea of "What are you trying to achieve." They tend to think in term of tasks, "Pick this lock" or "Sneak by X guys" or whatever... the specific actions, and they needed to be prompted to really focus on "Why? What are you hoping to achieve with these actions? What is your desired outcome"  It was up to me as the GM to say "Hey, back to what we are trying to achieve. No need to get bogged down with all the actions you could take, until we understand what all these actions are supposed to accomplish. 

2) Once established, the goal kept changing. This isn't inherently bad... the planning is fluid and the goal can change as the talk about it, but I needed to explicitly call out "Hey, it sounds like originally you wanted to shut down this server farm and really hurt the cartel, but now you want to install a hack and leave it running so you can siphon information over time? Am I understanding this? And we have to start over on the tactics, because you now have a different strategy."

3) The players can struggle a bit with prep rolls and ideas, as they aren't used to simply getting to state director stance "X is true and that means Y" as traditional games the players state a task resolution and look to the GM to tell them anything meaningful. Here the players say, "If I succeed, a, b and c are true and I know about thej, etc." The philosophy of "Yes... and ..." isn't intuitive at first.

4) Not all the PCs had a clear way to contribute to the plan, or the players felt that way, but that was ok as it just limited which PCs could contribute a possible plus to "The Plan" roll.

5) The more strategically minded/also GM type of players dominated the conversation, as other players can really prefer to react to specific threats a GM throws at them. This process asks for pro-active imaginations by the players.

6) GM needs to be able to give clear guidance on the minuses and such that indicate the difficulty of the task in general. It was a struggle at times to provide clear guidance on "Ok, this is what you'll get with a successful "The Plan" roll vs. what will happen if you fail it. 

7) It generally had some awkward moments as it can feel odd for some to "go meta" with the discussion which this demands.

 

Ultimately it worked really well, and a potentially quite complex and time consuming planning session fit right into our regular four hour play session, and the scenario was resolved by evenings end. It definitely helps structure and speed up "op planning."

 

All in all in worked

[ghost-angel]

Thanks for that rundown of how things went, always interested in alternate ways of getting a game running.

[Cancer]

On June 20, 2019 at 8:25 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

As such, I am not here for the story. Story is what happens after you finish the game. what I am here for is the problem.  I have a tactical mind, and for me Each game presents for me a problem to solve, within the framework of the rules, with the resources we have been given.  As a GM that's how I plan.  I figure out what the opposition thinks of the Player characters, and what the relative strengths and weaknesses are between them, then figure out where, and when, and present that to the players , then i sit back and listen. Loads of fun. But this focus on genre conventions and story structure to me, is not fun. I love to roleplay, but I prefer that the characters have internally consistent reasons for them to behave the way they do, rather than external reasons focused on "collaborative storytelling".  Just give me dice, Miniatures and a mat. I will be quite happy to write something up.

 

[Game-ist- Simulationist]

 

 

Yeah, that last points to an unacknowledged issue in tabletop RPG design and industry: individuals have different experiences that are most rewarding to them, but usually the system creator overlooks this and assumes that his/her/their goals as a player are universal.  This leads off to Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist considerations, and Robin Laws's taxonomy of Butt-Kicker/Power Gamer/Tactician/Storyteller/etc. for RPG players and their proclivities.

 

As a GM, I am an appalling Simulationist... my game-worlds have to hang together logically and flow clearly from first principles and cause-effect relations.  (The players in general never see those; it's that I have an overwhelming preference for top-down universe creation.)  As I learned twenty years ago, you can easily end up with a world in which there's no place for player characters that way.

 

As a player, I'm a Tactician; I try to exploit the opposition's weaknesses, and arrive as quickly as possible at the situation where I and my cohort not only can't lose, we can't even take losses.  I need a rigorous rule system, I want to master it and exploit the pinch points, and use them to manipulate the enemy into a position where they are quite vigorously doing ineffective things and my side's victory is entirely inevitable. As it turns out, this can frustrate the crap out of my fellow players; the Butt-kicker absolutely must get out in front and kick butts, and the Power Gamer absolutely must get out there and do his White Lotus Secret Decapitation Strike With +3 Vorpal No-dachi to whichever bad guys he chooses, and my suggestion that now that we have the enemy boxed in we just wait here and lob fire blasts and thunderbolts into them for an hour until they're all dead makes my buddies go into open revolt.

 

But ... I also have a strong latent Narrativist streak, in that as a player I really want to feel like there's an overarching plot and that we can, ultimately, end the evil we have to contend against.  Unlike my Butt-Kicker and Power Gamer buddies, to me a game world which is just a cornucopia of beatable bad guys with loot ... looks a lot like a humdrum miserable Hell whose underlying nature is in the global sense, nothing you do actually matters.

 

Creating a game and game system that scratches everyone's itches is really hard.  Especially if you don't know those often unarticulated basal desires your players/market have.

[RDU Neil]

10 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

Yeah, that last points to an unacknowledged issue in tabletop RPG design and industry: individuals have different experiences that are most rewarding to them, but usually the system creator overlooks this and assumes that his/her/their goals as a player are universal.  This leads off to Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist considerations, and Robin Laws's taxonomy of Butt-Kicker/Power Gamer/Tactician/Storyteller/etc. for RPG players and their proclivities.

 

As a GM, I am an appalling Simulationist... my game-worlds have to hang together logically and flow clearly from first principles and cause-effect relations.  (The players in general never see those; it's that I have an overwhelming preference for top-down universe creation.)  As I learned twenty years ago, you can easily end up with a world in which there's no place for player characters that way.

 

As a player, I'm a Tactician; I try to exploit the opposition's weaknesses, and arrive as quickly as possible at the situation where I and my cohort not only can't lose, we can't even take losses.  I need a rigorous rule system, I want to master it and exploit the pinch points, and use them to manipulate the enemy into a position where they are quite vigorously doing ineffective things and my side's victory is entirely inevitable. As it turns out, this can frustrate the crap out of my fellow players; the Butt-kicker absolutely must get out in front and kick butts, and the Power Gamer absolutely must get out there and do his White Lotus Secret Decapitation Strike With +3 Vorpal No-dachi to whichever bad guys he chooses, and my suggestion that now that we have the enemy boxed in we just wait here and lob fire blasts and thunderbolts into them for an hour until they're all dead makes my buddies go into open revolt.

 

But ... I also have a strong latent Narrativist streak, in that as a player I really want to feel like there's an overarching plot and that we can, ultimately, end the evil we have to contend against.  Unlike my Butt-Kicker and Power Gamer buddies, to me a game world which is just a cornucopia of beatable bad guys with loot ... looks a lot like a humdrum miserable Hell whose underlying nature is in the global sense, nothing you do actually matters.

 

Creating a game and game system that scratches everyone's itches is really hard.  Especially if you don't know those often unarticulated basal desires your players/market have.

 

You are hitting on all the big time issue of game design and actual play. Your admission of "... end up with a world in which there's no place for player charaters..." is so very true and probably a very hard lesson to learn. I know I have a strong, similar streak, and often struggle to go along with events in play that seemingly don't make a lot of sense to my very analystical brain, in the context of the SIS as defined. 

 

Your last point is where I tend to enjoy a lot of the indie games and let myself explore the experience, realizing that some/many of them may not be for me, but that's ok. The trend of more specific game designed with clear, focused intent of a certain kind of play experience... not that others are bad, but this game in particular is what the designer wants it to be... if you don't like it, cool... many other games to choose from you don't have to play. Gone are the days where being a "gamer" means you play everything and everything is for you. Many experiences are simply not what certain players want... and that's ok. Those games aren't for them, and no reason they should be. 
 

To me it is about maturing as a "gamer" and being willing to being open to different experiences, get out of our ruts. Some will be better than others from our very personal preferences, but hey... the idea that every game must be exactly what you expect and the best experience ever is a horrible level of expectation to try and live with. I mean, I gave a D&D 5th Edition game six or seven sessions, and ultimately chose to step out. I wasn't angry or calling it stupid... but the play experience that others seemed to be really into, I simply found tedious and pointless. Not for me. Cool... I'll find something else.
 

It is the odd (well I find it odd) expectation where people seem personally angry and affronted because a particular game or session or system didn't work for them... as if it was wrong or bad... not just "not their thing." 

And as I've stated in other threads, I personally know that my role playing preferences can be at odds with each other. I prefer more and more Nar style, system light experiences... while at the same time, desiring the intricate, simulationist crunch of a HERO martial arts fight or gun battle. These two things do not line up very well, but I want them both. I've just learned not to get frustrated (usually) if it doesn't work out all the time.

[Brian Stanfield]

20 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

And as I've stated in other threads, I personally know that my role playing preferences can be at odds with each other. I prefer more and more Nar style, system light experiences... while at the same time, desiring the intricate, simulationist crunch of a HERO martial arts fight or gun battle. These two things do not line up very well, but I want them both. I've just learned not to get frustrated (usually) if it doesn't work out all the time.

I've toyed with the idea of getting my simulations fix by running single-session, single-scene simulations, such as a single gun battle, with pre-gen characters. No story needed, just set the scene with "shoot the bad guys," and then go. You could do something different every time, and you get your simulationist fix without having to worry about all the other requirements for a more narrative game.

[Scott Ruggels]

Sounds like a good introductory session at a convention!

[Spence]

1 hour ago, Brian Stanfield said:

I've toyed with the idea of getting my simulations fix by running single-session, single-scene simulations, such as a single gun battle, with pre-gen characters. No story needed, just set the scene with "shoot the bad guys," and then go. You could do something different every time, and you get your simulationist fix without having to worry about all the other requirements for a more narrative game.

 

One-shots can be a lot of fun. 

 

There are some games where the PCs will lose and everyone knows it.  It is how long they last and how well they die/go insane.

[RDU Neil]

On 6/28/2019 at 6:59 PM, Brian Stanfield said:

I've toyed with the idea of getting my simulations fix by running single-session, single-scene simulations, such as a single gun battle, with pre-gen characters. No story needed, just set the scene with "shoot the bad guys," and then go. You could do something different every time, and you get your simulationist fix without having to worry about all the other requirements for a more narrative game.

 

I actually did that for one session of my ongoing Secret Worlds game (action conspiracy game using HERO). I gave the players three generic Deputry U.S. Marshall's (allowed them to spend a few points to make them individual) that were part of an elite operations squad. I ran an adventure where they had tracked three escaped Bosnian gangsters to a bad neighborhood in Houston on Aug 25th of 2017... the day Harvey made landfall. They were cut off from support and had to hit the house as the storm came beating down, while running into more than they bargained for.

 

It honestly was a brilliant rain-lashed, storm battered shoot out, with a bloody fight with a juiced up psychopath, bullets ripping through walls and doors, blood and death and bodies everywhere. Too much fun. 

I'm not so sure I'd have the same luck at a convention doing something so generic, but if the players were in the right kind of groove...

[Spence]

13 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

I'm not so sure I'd have the same luck at a convention doing something so generic, but if the players were in the right kind of groove...

 

You'd be surprised. A good rousing gun battle always goes over at a con. 

[Doc Democracy]

5 hours ago, Spence said:

 

You'd be surprised. A good rousing gun battle always goes over at a con. 

 

I agree, one of my most enjoyable games was a recreation of the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  The GM parcelled out Sundance to one player, Butch Cassidy to another and the other four got a squad of Bolivian lawmen.  The first problem for the outlaws is to get to the stables - they are in the cantina with two pistols and 12 bullets each, their rifles and ammunition is on their horses and then they have to get out before reinforcements arrive, the Bolivians have taken up positions on the walls in cover but the outlaws are MUCH better shots.  Bolivians go down more quickly and fire less often but the outlaws are hugely outnumbered.  The GM was simply there to adjudicate and timekeep.

 

Fantastic game for a convention, used a custom system that recognised the difference in class but still made it dangerous for the outlaws simply to run for the gate to the compound and freedom...

[Brian Stanfield]

18 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

I'm not so sure I'd have the same luck at a convention doing something so generic, but if the players were in the right kind of groove...

I think more people ought to put in their convention description: “This is about combat, not character development.” It would help people know what to expect, and then you could get right down to the dice rolling. 

[Spence]

58 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

I think more people ought to put in their convention description: “This is about combat, not character development.” It would help people know what to expect, and then you could get right down to the dice rolling. 

 

Things like this always puzzled me.  A one shot con game run in a 4 hour game slot is not going to have character development.  Are there really people that expect otherwise?

[Brian Stanfield]

3 hours ago, Spence said:

 

Things like this always puzzled me.  A one shot con game run in a 4 hour game slot is not going to have character development.  Are there really people that expect otherwise?

It depends on the game. Some games are nothing but character development and role playing. I should have said “combat, not nuanced role playing” instead. But in all honesty I’ve been in some really horrible game sessions where we spent the first hour learning about the characters’ histories, and then were railroaded through some “role playing” in order to get to some fight scenes leading up to the big climactic confrontation. Totally bogus. My point was simply to cut through to the fight. Forget all the other fake role playing, and get to what the session was obviously designed for: the final combat. 

[Spence]

43 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

It depends on the game. Some games are nothing but character development and role playing. I should have said “combat, not nuanced role playing” instead. But in all honesty I’ve been in some really horrible game sessions where we spent the first hour learning about the characters’ histories, and then were railroaded through some “role playing” in order to get to some fight scenes leading up to the big climactic confrontation. Totally bogus. My point was simply to cut through to the fight. Forget all the other fake role playing, and get to what the session was obviously designed for: the final combat. 

 

I've seen the same thing in some games run by either very new GM's or really bad GM's.  But that fits a lot of con games where there simply is no time to meander around as well.  The reality is that a con game is a very short game with somewhere between three and a half to three hours of actual play time.   The initial time from start to as much as an hour is spent explaining play.  I prefer investigative games such as the various Gumshoe games or Call of Cthulhu these days, but putting together a short investigation is HARD, so I tend lean to more action oriented Nights Black Agents or Fall of Delta Green for cons.

 

But back to the main point. 

Character Development and Role Playing are two different things.  They affect each other, but they are different.

Role Playing is playing out the roles, morals/ethics/beliefs and personalities of the character in question.

Character Development is the evolution of a character over time for the character in question.

A con games' characters are given a prebuilt role/morals/ethics/beliefs/personality either by the GM as pregens or as hasty builds by the players for the game. 

A four hour slot is generally not enough time to get a feel for the character let alone do any development.

 

A con one shot is enough to get in a fun brawl/fight or some basic generalized role play.  But unless it is a one-on-one game the other players are going get enough "stage time" that development will be at a minimum.  Over the years I have seen con game sessions where one player pushes their attempt at "character development" at the exclusion of the rest of the players.  It usually ends badly because the development bubba is disappointed that they couldn't get through their entire mini-drama and the rest of the players come away from that new game they were trying believing it sucks and was boring. 

 

There is a time and place for everything. 

A four hour con slot is there to give players a taste of a new game system.

Or it is there for players to get a chance to meet new players.

 

What a four hour con slot is not for is developing a long term personality for a character.  

[assault]

On 7/1/2019 at 12:47 PM, Spence said:

 

You'd be surprised. A good rousing gun battle always goes over at a con. 

 

If it works for Raymond Chandler...

 

"When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

 

 

[Brian Stanfield]

13 hours ago, Spence said:

What a four hour con slot is not for is developing a long term personality for a character.  

If only you had been there to save us! I had a couple of sessions, two years running at Origins, where the GM's goal really was character development of characters he'd been using for 20 years. What we did became part of the running story that he had spent an hour relaying to us before we played. Maybe it was only low grade character development, but it was really, really not fun! So when I say "no character development, combat only" in the description, I'm dead serious. Although you bring up a good point: my claim really should have been "no role playing, combat only." Regardless, my experience has run the gamut, not always for the best.

 

I think that what @RDU Neil suggested about "The Plan" would make for a perfect one shot at a convention. Start with the backdrop, describe the scene, let them do the "montage" version of setting everything up, and then get right to the combat (if that's indeed what you're looking for). It also works perfectly for one shot simulations. How would a samurai stand against a Medieval knight? Let's set it up! James Bond vs. Jason Bourne? Do it! This is one of the reasons I was drawn to HERO in the first place back in the '80s. As everyone started to figure out the "universal" nature of the rules, and more games came out to flesh out the "system" with more games (Justice Inc., Danger International, Fantasy HERO, etc. ), the possibilities became limitless. Perfect for "roll playing" simulations.

[RDU Neil]

13 hours ago, Spence said:

What a four hour con slot is not for is developing a long term personality for a character.  

 

I actually disagree with this. I can tell a novel worth of character development in a short gaming session, while combat and guns are blazing. The problem is, people think "character development" is some drawn out thing that "happens over time" like just trying to live inside the skin in some simulated way. Character development is really about demonstrating some core, fascinating aspects of a character within a narrative arch, and can be done in ten sentences spread out across a game. Hell... in ten minutes of a demo of Protect the Queen, I created a character out of thing air who went from "some guy accompanying the queen" to "the tragically fated hunchback gardner who died for the queen after years of psychological torture, knowing only the love of her cold touch" and had people going "oh my god!" in his final scene... and that was like six sentences in four quick scenes in ten minutes (with three other people doing their thing as well in that time.)

 

Character development is critical, or it is all pointless.

13 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

How would a samurai stand against a Medieval knight? Let's set it up! James Bond vs. Jason Bourne? Do it!

 

This kind of thing is not at all what I'm talking about. This is about arguing stat blocks and such, and if you want this, you need to do systems programming to actually create such a simulation.

What I did with my Harvey Storm Shoot-out... had three PCs and two NPCs, and by the end, everyone, including the dead ones, had stories and personalities and moments of pathos... even though 95% of the evening was rolling dice and shooting and stabbing stuff. When one PC got his hand nearly chopped off and had to hold it together with duct tape while gutting it out and trying to cover his friends... when another got shot through the kidney and was bleeding out, and the third had to make a desperate play to finish off the badguy before he died, it was tense and felt emotionally immediate.

 

I had not desire for "simulation" as an objective program... I want to know who that samurai is and why he is fighting the knight, and what will it cost him to win or lose... AND at the same time, the clash of swords is detailed and unique and intense... because when one of those blades bites deep, everyone at the table cares what happens.

 

Without that... without pathos... none of it matters.

 

[Brian Stanfield]

23 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

Without that... without pathos... none of it matters.

Understood. Upthread I was really just responding to your confessed simulationist tendencies. But I’m totally with you on this. Storytelling is the point, otherwise we’d be playing tabletop war games. 

[RDU Neil]

7 hours ago, assault said:

 

"When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

 

I always paraphrased this as "When in doubt, kick open the door and spray the room," but yeah! One of the things I really like about PbtA in particular and games like it (Blades, etc.) is that it is hard crafted into the game "Make your characters lives interesting" and the whole idea of "hard moves" by the GM... initiated because of how a player rolled/failed a roll... is just great. The GM doesn't have to be a master paragon of directorial timing and imagination... the dice provide the impetus... "oh... rolled a 4 on your Infiltraion move? ok then... as you are hiding behind the desk, you hear a flurry of running feet, an "In here!" and the office door flies open and two of Bronski' men start spraying the room with sub-machine guns!"