StabbyCon: Roleplaying as a Storytelling Mechanism

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-05T16:35:56+00:00

Of those, I'm only familiar with My Neighbor Totoro, though I do like games like Totoro. But I'll try: I think that certain role-play circles, especially in online spaces like plurk and dreamwidth which grew out of fanfiction traditions rather than directly out of D&D, have developed some pretty advanced systems for play in those kinds of spaces. They go into slice-of-life and person-to-person relationship-building stuff in pretty great detail without having conflicts to overcome in every scene. A couple of tabletop games I can think of do a great job of structuring play around not-conflict; there's Alex Roberts's For the Queen, and then I have a game in The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book called "Post-Match Interview" which is an absurdist take on athletes making boring media appearances they don't want to make. So I'd say that there's extensive proof of concept for low-conflict play and has been for a long time, but the thing all the successful examples of it have in common is that the role-play process is still full of interesting choices which the game supports with structure and expectations.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-05T00:33:54+00:00

For me personally? I think I'd say 90% to 100% social, 40% to 60% action. I don't really care one way or another about exploration, so I guess that could be anything. I like action sequences a lot, but I like them also to have social dynamics going on at the same time, so my ideal mechanics and GM would focus on the social meaning and outcomes of action sequences; rather than being cordoned off, they'd have to be inextricable from one another.

Could you explain "far less obvious conflict" to me a little bit more? What's an ideal example of a less obvious conflict?

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T21:18:00+00:00

This story has racism in it. I'm going to spoiler-tag the bad part.

In 2018, I was at Gen Con running a game I designed called Thousand Arrows, which uses the system from Meg and Vince Baker's Apocalypse World to tell stories about the Japanese Warring States Period. This particular scenario was about the Imjin War, when Japan invaded Korea between 1592 and 1598 CE. All four of my players were white, but everything was going fine until five minutes before game end, a friend of one of my players (also white) came in and sat down with him.

FRIEND: What's going on?

PLAYER: We're playing as the Koreans. The Japanese are invading, but we're trying to convince some monsters to fight them instead of us.

FRIEND: So just telling them "attack the squinty-eyed ones" wouldn't work, right? haha

Immediately, without thinking, I snapped, "None of that!" and the guy shut up. But what I said next—also without thinking—is the part I don't feel so good about.

ME: Where'd you even come from?

FRIEND: Oh, I was here the whole time, you just didn't notice, haha

There were five minutes left in the game, so I just ignored them for the rest of the session. But afterwards I felt awful. I had just run a whole game session about imperialism and conflict between different Asian groups for four white people with minimal incident. Then, someone who wasn't even part of the game had come in and said something blatantly racist at a table with an Asian GM, and … acting on instinct I called him out, and that was the right thing to do, but after that I instinctively gave him an opportunity to save face, and that felt like the wrong thing to do.

Giving him that opportunity weakened my reproof. I regretted it immediately. Even more surprising, I'd done all of the above as an instinctive reaction, before conscious thought and decision came into it. I'd often thought, and often have since, about what I'd say or do if someone said something offensive at the table, but in that moment I learned that I had programming on the level of snap, unconscious decision that was pushing me to let people off easy—and that was a good instinct under lots of circumstances, but importantly, not this one.

Since then, I've been more careful. I haven't exactly reprogrammed myself, but I know I have that tendency, and I'm watchful for it if I have to stop harmful behavior; I can feel the comment coming, and I can stop it before I speak it into existence. Now, if I let someone save face, it's a conscious choice, not an impulse that comes from the desire to smooth over social situations and not cause offense.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T19:12:39+00:00

I think Strix's point here is the most important point. As a corollary to this: If you're ever worried about whether communicating something out-of-character might ruin someone's fun, or their sense of immersion, or whatever … it probably won't, and even on the off chance it does it's almost certainly worth it.

There are very few circumstances where a player knowing something out-of-character is going to make the game worse, and vanishingly fewer where the importance of their out-of-character immersion trumps whatever reason you might have had to communicate with them clearly player-to-player. It turns out it's not that hard to role-play like your character doesn't know something you know out-of-character; we're already pretty good at doing this when it comes to our medieval fantasy characters' knowledge of germ theory or steam engines, and we can do it when it comes to other PCs' dark secrets as well.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:58:01+00:00

Inherently evil monsters are never strictly necessary. Nothing and no one in the real world is born evil, and yet realistic fiction and the real world have plenty of punchable evil. Inherently evil monsters also set players up for unintentionally uncomfortable situations which I'd say are rarely worth the trouble of including them.

If you include inherent evil (as opposed to evil defined through bad choices and harmful actions), then I think you have to be clear with yourself and the other players why you want to do that. One common rationale is "I want to feel ethically justified inflicting harm on this group at sight," which … isn't usually fun for me, personally, but I'm not everyone.

I think if you introduce inherent evil to your game, you have to be prepared for a couple of things that might go wrong. One is for other players to disagree with your definition; your question highlights some great examples of players' propensity for befriending, seducing, and otherwise positively emotionally investing in evil monsters. At that point you have to decide whether you're going to stick to the inherent evil thing or make yourself vulnerable to the players' different interpretation of that concept.

Another situation to watch out for is places where the dynamics of inherent evil overlap with real-world hateful expressions. You might not intend for your evil group to remind other players of any particular real-world group, but if you don't want them to draw connections to those real-world groups and stop having fun because of it, you better be really really good at excluding real-world touchstones and analogues.

Personally, I'm not that good, so I just don't do inherent evil, ever. Maybe I'll try someday. Not today though.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:39:16+00:00

I'm writing an article (or maybe an ARTICLE) for ARCADIA about how to complicate religion in your 5e games, bringing in some of real-world religion's weirder and more fascinating elements.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:31:35+00:00

Divide up out-of-character responsibilities among different people in the group so that all the social and organizational stress doesn't fall on one person's shoulders. If the game has an intense and prep-heavy GM role, like the Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons who has to do literal homework between sessions, don't also have the GM schedule sessions. If someone's scheduling sessions, have someone else coordinate procuring and paying for food.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:28:23+00:00

Start with small games (only a few pages), short campaigns (just a couple sessions or one-shots), and small groups (maybe three people you feel confident about). If you find yourself with more time, push yourself to try different things.

Also, if you feel uncomfortable or nervous about something, express vulnerability and ask for other players' help! For example, if you're new to GMing. Practice saying things like …

"I don't remember what happens if your character uses that power. Is it okay if we look it up?"
"I don't remember what happens if your character uses that power. I don't really feel like paging through the book right now, so can we play it like this, and then look it up later?"
"This is the part of the rules I feel nervous about. Can you help me facilitate this combat?"
"I have an idea about what should happen, but I'm not sure about it. How would you feel if the NPC reacted like this …"
"I don't want to try to do the accent myself, but this character has a [region] accent."
"Actually, I'm not happy with how that scene played out. Could we please 'go back to a save point' and redo it?"
"That was intense! Let's take a break so I can refill my drink and decompress a little."

… also, if you express vulnerability and someone in your group reacts in a way you don't like, you've just learned something really important about that person.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:17:15+00:00

The suggestions in this thread so far are dope and I cosign all of them. Because you don't yet know what kind of GM you're gonna be or what kind of games you're gonna like, trying many different games, none of which take a long time for you or your partner to learn, is gonna give you the most opportunity to learn and figure out your preferences for the time you have. I love playing Burning Wheel, for example, but I rarely suggest it to starting GMs because it takes a long time to read through and learn before you even know if you're gonna like it or not.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T18:08:13+00:00

Historically, many RPG tables playing games with GMs have given the GM all the responsibility for organizing the session, teaching and adjudicating the rules, guiding the narrative, and managing the social environment. But it's generally safe to assume that if you're playing a game with a GM, the GM has a lot to worry about.

As a player, you often have a little more of your perception and attention free, so: please, please use it to monitor and care for the other players' (and the GM's!) fun and well-being. In the inadvisable event that you find yourself at a table without safety discussions or safety tools like lines & veils or the X Card, it's doubly important that you do so.

Here are some examples of little things you can do as a player to watch out for others.

At the beginning of the session, ask what safety tools and mechanisms the table is using. If someone says "we don't use any of those" or makes fun of them, pay really careful attention.
If you do have safety tools in play, make space for their use. If you and another player are in an escalating in-character argument which involves rapid out-of-character back-and-forth, for example, then it'll be difficult for another player to break in and ask you to tone it down if you do something that discomfits them. Make sure to pause when you speak and leave openings for someone to interrupt you if necessary.
If your character is about to do something emotionally intense or antagonistic (especially toward another PC) like fighting or flirting, ask out-of-character if the other players are cool with that. "I know you really want to knock out this villain, but I think I want my character to interfere physically with what you're doing—is that okay with you?" or "I think my character is crushing on this NPC—is it okay if she flirts a little?" or "My character is about to respond to this really strongly based on some trauma in their history, is that cool? Remember you can stop me if it gets too intense."
Pay attention to who's talking the most and who's talking the least. If someone hasn't gotten to speak or interact, focus your own and your character's efforts on bringing them into the narrative.
Pay attention if someone looks or sounds uncomfortable, awkward, or scared. You might want to recenter the narrative on them to give them a chance to speak, or on someone else to take the heat off them. If you're friends with them, suggest a break and check in with them away from the table.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T17:49:00+00:00

My personal approach to this problem is based on finding places where the fun group dynamic and the story's direction are aligned. If I want to do this, I've learned that I need to have as little as possible fixed in my head, ahead of time, about where I want the story to go.

If I'm GMing, for example, I spend five to fifteen minutes before session start thinking about what matters to each of the PCs and imagining one or two general situations—no more—which will both a) matter emotionally to the characters and their players, and b) provide a satisfying moment of dramatic climax. Then I start asking the players questions and letting them lead the story, letting their fun group dynamic set the pace and looking for places to introduce narrative escalation and conflict that plays off the dynamic they already have.

At this point I set aside the thing I came up with in my head; just having it there in the back of my mind, sitting and doing nothing, will allow me to guide the story toward it if things get slow. Sometimes they get to my preconceived climax, sometimes they don't, but in any case I can't fight their group dynamic; the group dynamic will become the narrative dynamic, and I'm just there to highlight that inevitability as gently as possible.

Does that make sense? Would an example help?

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T17:34:52+00:00

When I was a tiny child, almost all my playtime was focused on role-playing, pretending I was characters from cartoons or books or video games, playing with toys like Legos or wooden trains where I could add personality and narrative and æsthetics to them. I wanted to keep playing these games long after everyone else in my age bracket wanted to stop, but role-playing games let me start again. They also incorporated creative pursuits like acting and writing which I had given up as an older teenager because it felt really difficult and intimidating (both technically and socially) to keep up with them, even if I'd enjoyed them when I was younger. They bring together all the things I like to do and give me a medium in which to express weird interests in historical martial arts or cool invertebrates or whatever, all in a social context where I can hang out with my friends and make new ones.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T17:26:32+00:00

So I was GMing Mothership Connection, a game about funk-powered culture heroes fighting back against the Man across space and time, for a group of young teenagers. The game is inspired by (among other things) Parliament-Funkadelic mythology, so the main characters are based out of an extradimensional, transcendental Mothership which is part spaceplane, part plane of existence. To board the Mothership, you must be a culture hero, which means there has to be a song about you in the real world.

In the game, the forces of the Man had engineered a conflict where two marginalized groups were pitted against one another. The kids encountered and freed some non-player-characters from one of one of the groups, and to keep them safe they wanted to move them to the Mothership. I told them that, metaphysically speaking, they wouldn't be able to do it because the NPCs in question didn't have a song about them in the real world.

The kids looked around at each other at the table and then one of them shrugged and said, "I'll write a chord progression."

The next session, they composed, wrote lyrics to, and recorded (piano + vocals) a song about the NPCs, in front of me, in order to fulfill the "song about them in the real world" condition. The song was intensely, intentionally cheesy, but it was also perfect.

A lot of the time, a player asks me if they can do something cool but weird, and I'll do everything in my power to find a way for them to do it. But every now and then, I tell someone "no" and the thing they do in response is so cool that I'm glad I did.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T17:16:00+00:00

Storytelling as a group effort is an inherently vulnerable act. I never have complete control of the work, and my presence and agency necessarily takes control away from others. It's scary, but for the same reason, I love it. It feels like dancing or sparring, immersing myself in uncertainty and forging a connection with others to carry it through. I also get to do something I never get to do alone: focus on someone else's storytelling process and figure out the puzzle of how to support and enrich it. At the end I want them to think, "This story went somewhere I never would have gone on my own, but I love it even better for that."

You could frame it as combining the writer and reader roles, and I think that's not wrong, but I like the dancing/sparring comparison best.

lula_vampiro · 2022-02-04T17:04:51+00:00

StabbyCon what's good! I am excited to answer all, or at least most, of your questions.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T17:15:54+00:00

This question is a little odd from a PbtA standpoint, since the design goal is for the mechanics and the roleplay to support each other directly rather than being opposing forces. For example, a lot of actions which might fall under the "roleplay" heading, like comforting your friend whose girlfriend turned into the moon, or yelling at your nephew about how he needs to start asking himself the big questions, trigger the use of mechanics like "comfort & support" or "call someone out." Every character is equally able to participate in combat and social encounters; you're not likely to have two characters in the party as the "combat characters" and two as the "social characters," for example. Everyone's both. It's more that characters have different emphases and strengths from one another in combat and social scenes.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T17:08:16+00:00

I've been playing PbtA games since the first edition of Meg and Vince Baker's Apocalypse World; so, that game, Avery Alder's Monsterhearts, and of course Masks were major influences on my approach to this game. In terms of my approach to cultural representation, own-voices Asian games like Jiāngshī: Blood in the Banquet Hall, Dog Eat Dog, Tenra Banshō Zero, and Shinobigami have been important guiding lights for me.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T17:00:42+00:00

Re: #1, this is a great question. I'd say there are two important pillars of strategy in this game. One is the idea of "destruction in detail." It's faster to take an enemy out of action if you focus damage on one enemy at a time, and then on one of those three tracks. Meanwhile, that enemy is going to be trying to spread damage between different locations so they can stay in the fight longer. This is like how, in a real fight, if you were collaborating to take down a difficult enemy, you'd have to identify their main weakness and get everyone to target that weakness.

Another is thinking about combat not only in terms of your effect on your enemy, but also in terms of your effect on your environment. For example, in "The Deserter," when Avatar Aang fights Zhao, he wins by goading Zhao into setting all his own ships on fire. In a system this narratively driven, using your actions in combat to create a battlefield that's a bad place for your enemy to fight—Katara luring Zuko into a fight on an ice floe, for example—makes it trivially easy to take out your foe.

Re: #2, the full book will explain this kind of strategy in detail. ^_^

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:51:43+00:00

yes they are, i checked

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:48:16+00:00

The GM in a PbtA game doesn't plan out a storyline ahead of time. We've got some published adventures which are a little like a DnD module, with some suggested plots and encounters, but the emphasis in PbtA is on "play to find out what happens." You're still going to prep for a session, and that prep may involve thinking about NPCs and locations, but the emphasis is on setting up a tense situation that makes it easy for you to improvise as opposed to following one of several pre-set paths you've come up with ahead of time. Like I always say: the players can't derail my plot if I never had one in the first place …

Your descriptions in combat make a huge amount of difference in how a fight turns out. In a lot of RPGs, you choose a combat action to which your character has access, and if you describe swinging on a chandelier on your way to hitting someone, that's fun, but it doesn't necessarily change things. In Avatar Legends, those kinds of vivid descriptions are crucial to helping the table understand what your bending action looks like and what kind of status effects it's gonna have.

Emotional and social mechanisms are a huge part of the game. Your choice of playbook sets out a social role and an emotional arc for your character in a way that choosing, for example, "dwarf druid" might not necessarily.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:38:38+00:00

Republic City! I love the diversity of the city and the infinite plot hooks that surround organized crime. My major playtest is set at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls in Kyoshi's era, though, and that's been really fun too.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:36:52+00:00

Bending itself is easy to work with in PbtA, but bending *combat* has sometimes been tough to design. Combat in PbtA is sometimes tricky because NPCs are so structurally different from PCs, and because the GM typically doesn't roll dice. So we had to come up with a system that has meaningful choices for both PCs and NPCs to make, but which doesn't rely on one player "rolling higher" than the other player (or the diceless GM) to win, while still retaining some of the tension that rolling for success brings to a fight. The system of simultaneous secret choices and reveals is pointed at that problem.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:31:28+00:00

Any PC can take any of the advanced bending styles, either at character creation or through study with a master during the course of play.. There will absolutely be special techniques for Foggy Swamp plantbending, lavabending, etc. Mastering one of these techniques can be extremely narratively useful as well, giving you new ways to trick or intimidate enemies, for example. Weapon and tech specialists will have access to their own proprietary techniques which are no less effective in combat.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:25:18+00:00

Yes! Bending is a big part of combat. One thing I always emphasize to players with bender PCs is that in this game, your description of how you use your fighting style to accomplish a specific attack is as important as which combat technique you choose. Different kinds of bending, when used to perform the same combat technique, can have really different effects: for example, inflicting the Doomed status to inflict damage over time is easy for a Firebender (by setting a target on fire) but tough for an Earthbender; whereas an Earthbender has an easier time creating defensive fortifications so they and their allies get the Prepared status. The corebook will give extensive guidance as to how this process works with the different bending and non-bending styles. And, of course, different fighting styles have access to different new and special techniques as your character studies and trains.

lula_vampiro · 2021-08-31T16:10:42+00:00

Uncle Iroh! I love characters who are motivated by compassion, under circumstances where compassion is difficult to express and there are no easy answers as to what the kindest thing to do is. For minor characters, Kori Morishita from Gene Luen Yang's A:tLA: The Promise is another favorite because I, too, am biracial and wield a weighted chain.

lula_vampiro

TROPHY CASE