Turfster

Turfster

@Turfster

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Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser

Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes

(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)

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Turfster
@Turfster
Scampir
@Scampir
Scampir
@Scampir

Here's the question I ask if a fight in a ttrpg is interesting.

  1. After everyone has taken action (like in a round), has the state of the board changed drastically enough that we cannot simply repeat what we did last time?
Scampir
@Scampir

This happens in PbtA too! Players will just say the name of the move and go through the motions without understanding why the fight isn't engaging.

And like! It's so frustrating to be in a PbtA game where people are just going through the motions. It actively saps my enjoyment when the camera pivots to them and they just announce the move they want to do. Why the fuck are you here if you're not going to play the game we picked out?

Fiction-first games don't have an exclusive grasp on interesting fights, but because they have a more natural approach to language (instead of communicating actions through moving through spaces, or using stuff on your character sheet, or referring to rules and edge-case rules, you primarily just say what you want to do), you can finally go buck wild and the GM can make use of their input on 7-9 results and the hard moves coming our of 6- rolls to change the context of the fight and really change "the state of the board."

Go watch a fight in a movie. Go watch an Errol Flynn sword fight. Go watch Inigo and Dread Pirate Roberts duelling on the cliffs. Go watch the climactic lightsaber duel of Phantom Menace. Those fights move. They give and take ground until they're on stairs. They swing off of trees or leap across chasms. They might tear away at a banner hanging on the wall to throw at their opponent. But the context is always changing every 6 seconds so we can see how the duelists match up in different circumstances, different micro-scenarios.

I feel like this is all just an extension of the fail-forward principle. It's not enough that damage is applied. The fictional positioning of the victor and loser has to adhere to that outcome. We should be taking advantage of PbtA games to make sure that when we have to determine how the fiction pivots because of a move that it's as evocative as possible.

Turfster
@Turfster

Yeah

RPGs are like sharks.
Things need to always be in motion in an interesting way, or they just... die.

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in reply to @Scampir's post:

xinjinmeng
@xinjinmeng

There's a youtuber named Seth Skorkowsky who gets mad if you take more than six seconds to play out your game turn in a combat. And I often think about how most TTRPGs assume that everyone is playing out their turns that quickly, even in 2023. That it's expected that you'd go five or more rounds without anything significant happening.

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Scampir
@Scampir

I am not the kind of guy who wants to get on peoples case for time taken during turns. Sometimes people are new to the game, are having trouble making sense of a really complex situation, or are at a table to tag along. That said, I am with you on this idea that there isn't enough scrutiny about the moment-to-moment timeframe it takes to execute what you want to do in play.

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xinjinmeng
@xinjinmeng

I would agree with the sentiment that after each turn, something significant should have happened in the narrative.
Many TTRPG designers are in love with rules, and it's not hard to do the math. If the typical character dishes out 10.5 HP of damage on their turn, and you have four characters, and your single monster has 120 HP, then on average this hullabaloo is going to take about 3 rounds to play out ... If each player takes 5 minutes to play out their turn, this "simple combat" is going to take an hour. And that's the average — half the time it will take over twice that long!
And it only gets more complex from there! Add the overheads of initiative, rules questioning, theater-of-the-mind descriptions, cracking-wise, etc. — you know, the fun — and it's going to take longer. So you're right to ask, how can we cram the greatest meaning into the smallest amount of time.
It's not just a skill issue. Many players want to do something fun. It's their turn, after all, they've been waiting patiently for it. Everything about TTRPGs encourages you to "be descriptive", "role-play not roll-play", to ham it up and to have fun with it.
We need games that have the maximum amount of emergence in the minimum amount of execution time.

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in reply to @Scampir's post:

manwad
@manwad

This stuff is why I'm enjoying LUMEN games, and old OSR stuff.

When the numbers are low, and accuracy is nonexistent [either through mechanics like Shock from Worlds Without Number, or LUMEN's guaranteed damage], and HP on enemies is low enough that most are 2-3 shottable, then the party can do meaningful shit every round.

This also intersects with level design, enemy design, and enemy placement. Focusing on the last one:

There's a problem I think a lot of fledgling GMs have where they stumble into like, fair-and-balanced wargame-esque placement. All enemies on one side, in a line. Sometimes, too far away from a melee PC.
Or, alternatively, too close for ranged PCs to use their range.

and also

this is why knockback is the funnest mechanic.

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Scampir
@Scampir

I wouldn't frame it as level design but like, I agree that knowing what the fictional space the action is taking place in is a huge lacuna of ttrpg discussion. I'm taking small steps right now with ICON, and it's helpful that what's in that book is just like "put a pit in the middle of the room. Put some elevation in the room." so I can start small.

But even when you're not working with a "battlemap" understanding each element of a scene's "landscape" is important right? You want to know why it's different to be fighting in knee-deep water vs fighting on the thick tree roots of a magical mangrove. Knockback sings there because it's the ability to displace someone from favourable terrain into unfavourable terrain.

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manwad
@manwad

Something I've been doing is studying this book called One Hour Wargames wrt map design.

It's a simple war game, have your units be in range then throw a d6, sometimes a 2d6 take highest, to see how much damage you takes. 15 hits kills.

But it has this impressive array of scenarios to really make a simple game shine.

It fucks with deployment procedures, with who's deployed where, most of the time one side just has an advantage and you, on the other side, has to either work with that advantage, or exploit it the best you can.

Its fascinating, and rather easy to find if you're searching around.

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noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

I’m begging everyone to read Apocalypse World (any edition). Every single version has the rules “to do it, do it. If you do it, you must do it.” Which is to say, to do a move, you gotta perform in fiction the trigger. And if you perform the fictional trigger, the move happens and can’t not happen.

I know PbtA technology has grown a lot since then, even for the Bakers, but so many times it feels like folks never actually read the original books and think PbtA is just 2d6+stat with gradual success.

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Scampir
@Scampir

You really need the MC to be on the ball with this one. If the MC is not holding everyone to that principle and engaging with people on them, then someone can just start phoning it in.

It's one of those things that when people talk about how play culture is independent from rules, the principles of play are a really important part of the "play culture" when they should be maintained in play like policy.

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SiFSweetman
@SiFSweetman

A thing that really helped some of this click with me as well, is that it is partly on you as a player to sell that an obstacle or enemy is dangerous. Even when you get that 10+, it is sometimes much more dramatic and narratively satisfying for you to describe struggle you have overcome than for you to see that you got a complete success and describe blowing through it like it's nothing.

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Scampir
@Scampir

there's definitely this snit in PbtA where player control is taken as license by players for complete discretion, which I think is unfortunate because it keeps the principle of "respecting the fiction" just for the GM. It's tough to have the conversation about how even if the dice are setting you up, you are still beholden to some stuff the GM said.

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Scampir
@Scampir

I never thought about it that way! Lancer has some good stuff for this because the NPCs have a few tricks that players will see and then prioritize, so once they handle one problem one turn then can move onto the next.

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fools-pyrite
@fools-pyrite

Armour Astir has been interesting to run because responsibility for "doing something interesting" as the result of an action is so distributed - everyone at the table is constantly writing dangers for themselves and for other players' characters. A well-written risk can drive home how cool someone's contribution is; a poorly written one can no-sell someone else's action.

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in reply to @Turfster's post: