Quote from: Ghost Whistler;511463I am wondering if my system should work thus:

If a player fails at a roll for an action the player still succeeds, but less effectively and with some element of misfortune. A sting in the tail.

As opposed to the player fails the roll and things...stall.

Or is that too easy?

I alter this for D&D by including Degrees of Success as a cost. This way I have two demarcating lines to determine pass/fail. I'll give an example of what I do, it's a roll under system and DoS are counted as each 2 points (10%) above or below the pass/fail lines.

i.e. Roll under system. The character has a value of 17 in a particular check. I modify the challenge in that I need 2 Successes. This means that I require 20% more than expected effort for a clear success (or 4 under 17). So rolling over 17 is Failure, rolling over 13 is Incomplete Success, and rolling 13 and under is a Success -- and each 2 point difference under adds another success.

Now one should really be sparing with this technique, however. I find it works best with an easier task, something you'll succeed 75% of the time or more, but want to make it a bit more challenging. Usually I only add the challenge if the player wants to add more detailed success --  basically like taking raises in L5R -- or if I have extra detailed information that could help but is not crucial for the game to progress.

I just find it hard to justify letting the dice stall out game progression, so required knowledge is rarely rolled for. And if it is necessary, the Failure pass/fail line is generally within very easy reach. The Incomplete Success pass/fail line is there to dole out bonus detail more piecemeal.

Quote from: Rincewind1;511984For disliking a game you like, because it's one of the main banners for suggesting that GMs can be replaced by mechanics? Yeah, bizarre.

yep, that's exactly what those rules suggest.
don't worry though, not you; you're a people person.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;511908GUMSHOE games have gotten better in the advice they give and never mechanically required you to railroad your players. But the entire "you have to auto-find the clues because otherwise the scenario will stall" thing is entirely predicated on the scenario being designed as a fragile railroad.

Agreed. I like some aspects of GUMSHOE actually, just not the "fixing stalling investigations" premise, which I find just as ludicrous as you do.

What I do like for instance is the idea of spends. The idea that you find clues that are necessary for the resolution of the investigation is fine (and can be done just as well in a game of Call of Cthulhu, really). The idea that you can spend points to get some more insights or some other clues that inform the big picture or allow you to make connections that you didn't see before is interesting. The resource management that posits is intriguing to me.

My only problem with this mechanic is one of (here we go again) immersion. The management of spends in entirely up to the players, and I'm not seeing any way in which I could actually "role play" spends from the point of view of my characters. You can have dramatic/narrative OOC explanations for it (my character tries to search harder, it's just what the character would do in a movie), but the caps on spends is arbitrary in the same fashion that dailies for fighters in 4e are. There's no justification for it in-game. So me deciding whether I spend this point now, or later, because I have six of them at my disposition on my character sheet doesn't translate in the game world at all.

Now, with all that said, I would still try to run/play GUMSHOE. I might just be able to ignore that metagame aspect of spends.

Quote from: Rincewind1;511984For disliking a game you like

No. For claiming that either:

(a) You don't like RPGs in which players can do things. It's hilarious.

(b) You don't like RPGs to use terminology that OD&D uses. (Not extensively, but it does. Gygax talks about characters "using their move" to do things.)

(c) Both.

Quotebecause it's one of the main banners for suggesting that GMs can be replaced by mechanics

But, okay, yeah. Your illiteracy is pretty hilarious, too.

Quote from: Benoist;512078My only problem with this mechanic is one of (here we go again) immersion.

Ditto. Completely dissociated.

The system also seems to be problematic in actual play. From a longer discussion that you can find here:

For example, in designing the investigative portions of a scenario you have two ways of dealing with the GUMSHOE hard limit:

(1) You can budget the number of "bonus clues" available in the scenario to make sure that the PCs will always have the points required to buy them. This avoids the problem of running out of points early in the game and then being forced to only engage the scenario at the most passive level available, but it raises the question of why the pools exist at all: It's like sending you to a typical garage sale and then enforing a strict budget of spending no more than $1,000,000. Theoretically that's meaningful, but in practice you've got all the money you need to buy everything on sale so it's not a limitation at all.

(2) On the other hand, you can include more "bonus clues" over the course of the scenario than the PCs can afford. This means that the PCs will have to budget their points and only spend them selectively.

But here's the problem: The players don't know which of these scenarios is true in any given scenario. (Particularly since most GMs aren't going to read this essay and, therefore, aren't going to make a deliberate decision in either direction. In practice, it'll be a crapshoot from one scenario to the next which of these true. And which is true for which pool of points.)

And, furthermore, the design of the system is such that you often don't know what you're buying.

So either I'm giving you a million bucks and saying "buy everything at the garage sale"; or I'm giving you $5 and telling you to buy a random grab bag of stuff. It's a feast or a famine and you don't know which it is until it's too late.

The problem becomes more severe for non-investigative tasks. Here the players need to spend the pool points in an effort to boost a random die roll above a target number that they don't know. And they have to make that decision without any real knowledge of how many more die rolls of the same type they might be called upon to make.

So you're bidding in a (frequently life-or-death) silent auction in what may (or may not) be a long series of silent auctions, the exact number of which you have no way of guessing.

Quote from: Rincewind1;511984For disliking a game you like, because it's one of the main banners for suggesting that GMs can be replaced by mechanics? Yeah, bizarre.

I'd really like to see this version of Apocalypse World, that only exists in your head.

Whether or not this idea works, I do not like seeing in rpg:

Rule Zero - yes I can make changes, why do I need to be told this? I own the book, I can do what I like with it. I didn't sign a contract saying otherwise after all! I find it incredibly patronising.

More importantly, nad perhaps the issue is simply one of poor GM advice within rulebooks, but I don't like having to fudge dice rolls to keep things moving - regardless of PC success or failure. To me that is an absolute failure of game design. To say 'you must be a shit gm/have shit players/play shit games/write shit adventures' or whatever is missing the point. Why not, after several decades of the hobby now, is there not a language for explaining to GM's reading their new game (whether they are experienced or otherwise) how to design adventures and, specifically, how to deal with 'problematic' dice results.

Quote from: Ladybird;512153I'd really like to see this version of Apocalypse World, that only exists in your head.

Read AW then?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;512126No. For claiming that either:

(a) You don't like RPGs in which players can do things. It's hilarious.

(b) You don't like RPGs to use terminology that OD&D uses. (Not extensively, but it does. Gygax talks about characters "using their move" to do things.)

(c) Both.



But, okay, yeah. Your illiteracy is pretty hilarious, too.

LoL. Classic Justin "Ur a Pleb" argument. I love that players can do things. But as a GM, I also love to do things, and invent my own, not to be mechanic's bitch. You fine with that - your problem, not mine.

Quote from: Ladybird;512153I'd really like to see this version of Apocalypse World, that only exists in your head.

Read AW again, then?

Ah yes, classic Justin argument. "Ur a dirty pleb & don't understand TEH GENIUS, also I am teh rightorz". Whatever. I don't care enough shit about AW to bother arguing about it again.

I love it how people who always defend AW go with the "Did you even read the game" argument.

I did, and it's a shitty game that tries to "fix" GMs. But whatever. Keep on blaming all failures of GMs on bad mechanics and old GMing advice. So far, GW, you show classic traits of another "indie" RPG author - blaming your faults on mechanics & "bad" advice given in the book, rather then taking a look at your own game. Btw Justin - still waiting for those mysterious GM powers. I see you still roll with the "ur a pleb" argument, glad to see you back in form.

GUMSHOE mechanic is convoluted as fuck. I still do not think I played even 1 game by the book, even the games I tried playing by the book. Oh well - I still like it. The spends are definitely weird, and probably in most cases can break immersion, but - if you limit the ability of "Spend as introducing something new to the "scene"", it stops being a problem. My players usually do that to introduce new NPC contacts - stuff that they could/should've written in the character backstory anyway. And after a few contacts introduced this way, they use a spend to just visit them and get their help on the subject, rather then introduce new guys.

And hey, Benoist - you can always manage all spends as a GM. I end up doing that, if I am playing with less narrative players, so to speak. I usually say "Also, you had blah blah blah blah blah. Mark a spend of X on your sheet, please". I think of spends more like character resources and resolution, then screentime potential - there are only so many times that your criminal contacts will help you this week, after all. Try phoning them another time, and they may just tell you to go screw yourself.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;511473Any game to be honest. Noone wants the narrative to stall because someone rolled the wrong result, but at the same time we are playing a game so there needs to be a mechanical answer rather than 'fudge the dice'.

This statement contains a couple of assumptions that I do not think are universally true because they are not true for me.  If you don't expect or count on there being a particular result, then there is no "wrong result".

Quote from: John Morrow;512360This statement contains a couple of assumptions that I do not think are universally true because they are not true for me.  If you don't expect or count on there being a particular result, then there is no "wrong result".

Again, there's a vast difference between "narration" and "action" in a book/film/RPG whatever.

Some people consider the Ent Council in LotR superb, others find it a terrible bore. I for one liked the Ent Council, because I generally like to talk, and see how others talk - that is why I also liked Feast For The Crows more then A Dance With The Dragons. In fact, my favourite moments in RPG are when we, the players, just sit around the table, drink and talk, rather then chase around shit, risking that we'll be killed.

Also- I have at least one player, who's really a quiet person. And I mean by that that he is not "closed" so to speak, but he prefers to think a lot before he says anything. I, on the other hand, am terribly fearful of silence as a GM, as I think it means that player are bored - so you can imagine my relief when I talked with him about that later. You need to take such stuff also in the account - don't try to force people to talk at the table with mechanics, so to speak.