Quote from: AsenRG;881725As a Referee, I have three rules for doing that:).

• Create interesting NPCs and require the players to do the same.
  
• Put them in interesting situations with either no easy or no obvious answers, or both.
• Play out what the characters would do and adjudicate impassively.

Players say it works;).

The hilarious thing is... that this is EXACTLY how a lot of gm-less "story now" games work. Believe it or not, it's a design technique. The only difference is that the rules, and not the GM, achieve this result.

Quote from: Manzanaro;881722That is like talking painting technique and worrying that not all painters have the level of skill neccesary to paint well so all painting should be done in color by numbers books.

The problem is that in this way there is only one who participates actively in the building of drama, tension, etc. etc. The GM. Everything about "style and atmosphere" is on his shoulders. If you are ok with that, there are gazillions of GM guidelines scattered in almost every good GM chapter in rulesbooks.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881728The problem is that in this way there is only one who participates actively in the building of drama, tension, etc. etc. The GM. Everything about "style and atmosphere" is on his shoulders. If you are ok with that, there are gazillions of GM guidelines scattered in almost every good GM chapter in rulesbooks.

Not neccesarily. There are ways to conscript the players into the effort without pulling them out of immersion, as Asen notes above.

As far as the... Hold on, are you telling me to shut up and go read a gazillion GM notes sections?

Seriously though, I've read more than a few, but don't recall a lot of them having this particular focus. Even many games expressly designed for genre emulation totally miss any kind of discussion of tone, style, or other narrative qualities.

Quote from: CRKrueger;881672Let me stop you right there.

If you're running a one-shot, then the narrative way of doing things is probably what you want.  Stories begin and end.  Lives continue until they are ended.

You can pack a whole lot of narrative satisfaction into a book or movie too, but that's not necessarily a satisfying life, even if you read or watched several thousand.

You're not gonna get much payoff of the IC immersive roleplaying way of doing things in a one-shot.  As a result, convention scenarios tend to be tightly plotted and players kind of agree to not color too far outside the lines, we all know we're here for one night only.

Also maybe you don't see an interesting point - you were the GM who designed and ran the narration and it happened even better than way you planned.  Ok, but the satisfaction of a GM is completely different than the satisfaction of a player to begin with, so, while sounds like a helluva game, not exactly on point.



Jesus Wept.  In an IC immersive campaign, action is not driven mechanically, it's driven by the choices of the characters being roleplayed by the players.  Mechanics are Task Resolution.  That's it.  They are only there so that when I go "Bang, you're Dead!" and you say "No, you missed." we have a better way of doing it than Rock, Paper, Scissors every single time (not knocking the LARP crowd).

Stop me? Right there? But I'm just getting started!

You're not gonna get much payoff of the IC immersive roleplaying way of doing things in a one-shot.

Well, no. That's not right. I'm going to guess you're assuming your personal experience (maybe? is that where you're getting this from?) is universal.

It's not. My experience running both long-term games and shorter or one-shot games is that both can give a powerful IC immersive experience.

If this hasn't been your experience, that's a shame. Maybe you need a better GM?

Player v. GM's Experience
Playing and GMing in a traditional game are different experiences, but the PCs had a blast in the game I wrote about and found it incredibly satisfying both from an immersive standpoint and from the literary structure of the post-hoc narrative.

Without any screwy mechanics and without any railroading or the GM dramatism.

As someone who both plays and GMs, I've personally experienced games run with this appraoch from both sides of the table.

Again, I'm not sure why you'd make the assumptions you're making but absent some explanation, I have to assume you're going on personal experience...

Fine, of course, but what would make you universalize it?

action is not driven mechanically
I have to admit this confused me.

Aside from the ah... high-drama red text and the image macro (emotive, which I appreciate, but not very solid communication-wise) you seem to think you disagree with me, but maybe you didn't read my (admittedly long) wall of text very well?

I agree that mechanics in a simulation type system -- the only kind of system I play, are exclusively task resolution.

My whole post was about how I think mechanics don't need and in fact shouldn't do anything else -- you don't need them for anything but task resolution.

Was that somehow unclear? Or what? Maybe I'm misreading you?

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881727The hilarious thing is... that this is EXACTLY how a lot of gm-less "story now" games work. Believe it or not, it's a design technique. The only difference is that the rules, and not the GM, achieve this result.

Yes, I actually happen to have read a few GMless games:). And I've read the root texts they're based on, too - I mean stuff like "Writing 101", "How to write an entertaining plot" and stuff like that (and I've carefully discarded what I didn't need:p).

And still, it makes no difference to whether the technique would work or not. I've taught it to a new GMs who started off as new to RPGs, played with me for a time, then either tried Pathfinder in another group, and returned, or outright started their own groups.
All of them got the rule just fine.

And yes, "have interesting characters" is a rule of writing. They just have codified it in GMless games.

Me? I have codified it, but it's not codified in the task/conflict/whatever resolution rules (BTW, I find the distinction only to be of value when thinking about designing your own game).
It's codified in my "setting up the campaign" rules, though:D. And they're rules just as much as "roll 2d100, take better" for an advantageous action. I mean, if you don't roll 2d100, I'm going to block your action, if you don't create a character to specifications, I'm not going to let you play - not for longer than a couple sessions (I'm making an allowance for Develop In Play gamers who just need longer to "get a feel" for the PC). Both are very real consequences, if you ask me.
So I still have it codified, it's just front-loaded before the game begins, or off-loaded for between the sessions;).

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881727The hilarious thing is... that this is EXACTLY how a lot of gm-less "story now" games work. Believe it or not, it's a design technique. The only difference is that the rules, and not the GM, achieve this result.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881728The problem is that in this way there is only one who participates actively in the building of drama, tension, etc. etc. The GM. Everything about "style and atmosphere" is on his shoulders. If you are ok with that, there are gazillions of GM guidelines scattered in almost every good GM chapter in rulesbooks.

When I first encountered story-oriented games with non-sim mechanics I was intrigued:

Clearly these are for people who want a story-like outcome in their games, a goal that I (and I think quite a few rpg-gamers) share.

However, I found the mechanical solutions completely the opposite of what I was looking for. They seemed to break immersion (putting non-GM players in a role of telling a story or having narrative concerns) for PCs and for the GM, they seemed to  eliminate a lot that I like about GMing.

In my view, tension should arise naturally from the character decisions and things that happen in the world. I don't like it when movies or books "raise tension" for obvious plot reasons, and games where tension is likewise raised for by mechanical techniques seems like that.

I have the same reaction to mechanics that try to enforce things like atmosphere -- in most games (Toon would be an example of an exception), I want a fairly generic set of rules and have the GM bring the style and atmosphere.

That's especially true for long-running games where things can change, sometimes radically. I don't want to change systems for horror-focused scenarios run around Halloween, or the Boot Hill cross-over or whatever.

A system that enforced horror tropes mechanically or had cards and playing chips might in some way feel more horror-y or cowboy-y, but I'd prefer the flexibility of a generic system and a GM who can tell a good ghost story or spin a yarn.

And as a player, I want a GM who is sharing his vision with me. I want him to want to do that work.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: CRKrueger;881672If you're running a one-shot, then the narrative way of doing things is probably what you want.  Stories begin and end.  Lives continue until they are ended.

I had been thinking along a similar line. The open ended continuation of the player character is a significant difference between the history of playing a character in an RPG and reading or viewing a finite story about a character.

A three act or five act story structure with rising tension, climax, denouement, doesn't apply to the open ended continuing series of events that makes up the history of a PC.

Quote from: Soylent Green;881685I wonder how much of the "story as an emergent property" is predicated on the notion of an ongoing campaign?

Likewise I wonder how much the focus on dramatic pacing with a view towards building up to satisfying conclusion is tied to shorter or even single-session games?

I've been thinking lately that there is often a connection. I'm not sure about cause and effect though.

It could be that people who tend to a story view seek out one-shots and short campaigns with a definite end in their gaming. But it could also be that people whose play has consisted of those two situations end up with a story view.

I suspect there is mutual reinforcement so it's probably a bit of both.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881708This is, I think, the really controversial point. Because all the rest of your concerns are easily addressed with intra-diagetic rules, that is rules that only leverage "events that happen in the fictional world" and thus do not require jumping out of one's character to "director stance". Thus they create no friction or opposition between the experience you are looking for and what is advocated by Krueger, estar, nDervish or others: RPG as the in-world, in-character experience.

The problem is that pacing, drama and suspense are not qualities of the world that the fiction describes. They are qualities of the fiction itself. Thus they cannot stem from rules that only leverage intra-diagetic interactions. In order to create something that only exists in "the narrative", you need techniques that leverage the narrative itself, not the world described by the narrative.

Because pacing, drama and suspense are not something that the character experiences: they are something that you, as the reader of the novel or watcher of the movies experience. Pacing is not the result of what happens in the fictional world, it is the effect of the director's cut of the scenes. No character experiences "drama", at most he experiences "fear" or "suffering". Drama is something that you, the reader/co-author of the story, feel. Not your character.

All the rest, authenticity and sense of wonder, is definitely easy to obtain by simply leveraging the internal consistency of the game world. If the world feels living and plausible, the sense of wonder and the willingness to avoid useless combat will come on their own.

Very well said.

Okay, so let's look at this concept of "interesting characters". I agree this is key. I often tell players to imagine they are creating a character for an ensemble TV show or superhero team comic and that their goal is to create a character that the imaginary audience is fascinated with and is fun to watch other characters interact with.

But my questions are, "What constitutes an interesting character to you?" and "How do you make use of this in generating a compelling narrative?"

As mentioned, for me personally, an interesting character is not one that is interesting in isolation so much as one who is interesting in terms of making me want to see how he interacts with other characters, as well as having strong internal motivations of one sort or another.

Quote from: S'mon;881468There are resource systems that promote a dramatic narrative of rising tension without threatening immersion too much. Ablative hit points are a good example; they can help ensure the PCs probably make it as far as the final battle with the BBEG, while keeping the outcome of that last fight uncertain & thus tense however many hp the PCs have going in to it. Contrast with Fate Points which are (a) anti-immersive and (b) may ensure there is no chance of PC death in any one particular fight, including the climax.

Putting it bluntly, that's simply untrue.

Quote from: Manzanaro;881476EDIT: Let me try and give a specific example of what I mean. Let's say that as part of the interesting (to me) world that I create, there is a powerful evil dragon living in the mountains west of the city where the PCs live. The PCs get wind of this dragon and march to the mountains and directly into the dragon's lair. For some reason they thought this was a good idea, but they all end up being killed very quickly by the dragon. Is this a good satisfying narrative? Are there ways to make what feels like essentially a random TPK into a satisfying narrative experience?

Well, depends. Did they kill an ogre first, and then the ogre's mother? Did they kill the dragon, and then die from the wounds;)?

Quote from: CRKrueger;881489So yeah a group of players waking up one day and for shits and giggles decides to attack a dragon because they think "If it is there, it is killable." then yeah that's not a very satisfying life and afterwards it won't make a very satisfying story except for the Dragon who is probably going to be a hit at the next Dragon get-together as they all laugh their asses off.

So, to make this into a good story, you just need to change the viewpoint character. That's a time-honoured narrative technique:p!

Quote from: Manzanaro;881493But again, what I am asking about isn't "How do you get an experience from rules of simulation that will make a good story later" but "how do you get an experience that makes for a good narrative AS IT IS HAPPENING". If you don't want to call the experience of game events a narrative, call it what you want. But certainly we can describe this experience in terms we would use for the narrative of a book or movie or any other narrative form. A game can be compelling, tedious, immersive, dramatic, anticlimactic, etc.

Get the players onboard, and make them do the work.

Quote from: flyingmice;881508I was thinking it would be an awesome set up for the children of the PCs, years later.  

Well, if there were 12 PCs, all dwarves, one of them had two sons, and they ran off to the Shire...

Quote from: Manzanaro;881562Honestly? Not even so much that... I just get tired of combat as being a reflexive and largely unexamined problem solving tool. I am totally down with a good combat... but I want it to mean something. I want it to have a context that makes me feel invested in the outcome.

It's like a lot of 80s action movies. So full of violence that you just stopped giving a crap after the 1st 15 minutes. Especially if the risk of battle ends up being largely illusory.

Solution, make the risk of battle non-illusory:).
Seriously, when it's non-illusory, players start getting inventive. And good battles have their own pacing.
They might die, but then see my notes above about the dragon preceded by ogres, or the sons of the PCs...

Quote from: Phillip;881582Try playing a courtier in 11th-century Heian-kyo,  a gentleman in 19th-century London, or a middle-class entrepreneur in modern Shanghai, and bandit attacks are not likely to be common.

Actually, I'm not sure that part is true to history...but whatever. I very much agree with the point.
Of course, I'd also point out that while staying in a city, who is picked to be a target is a non-random, or rather, a heavily weighted process that you can and should roleplay.

Quote from: Manzanaro;881679Because, unless you DO play out every single moment of their lives? You are making choices about what scenes to focus on, describe and play out, and this kind of scene framing and skipping over things that don't interest you is based on your personal feelings for what makes a good narrative, whether you realize it or not.

Then simply apply the rules for when you make a skill check.
"Only make a skill check if the action is dangerous, important, and/or the outcome is in doubt (and can change something)". Now, apply this to scenes.
Only frame and play out those scenes.

Quote from: CRKrueger;8817101. Interesting setting - The characters have lots to do, lots to choose from.
2. Interesting NPCs - Whatever they decide to do, there are people who they can interact with that seem actual personalities, not stereotypes or cliches.
3. Interesting Enemies - Gangsters, cultists, corporations, nobles, people who have their own agendas, own resources and probably will conflict with the PCs at some point.
4. Pull no punches - They play their PCs, you play the world. Play it straight and play it hard.

Done.

It almost seems we're from the same school of Refereeing:D!

Quote from: CRKrueger;881715If you meant you singular, I don't advance the game at all.  

If the players somehow found out about Blackskull Castle in the Ghostmourn Wood, then they're going to go about finding maps, guides, supplies, rumors, which is going to entail them meeting with a lot of people and/or making various skill rolls, at which point I enter the picture to play the NPCs and determine what the skill rolls accomplish.

Ask yourself, "If I was a person living in this world, and I wanted to travel to Blackskull Castle in the Ghostmourn Wood, what tasks would I need to accomplish to get there?"  Bathroom visits aside, much the same thing will occur.

Along the way, depending on the specifics, there may be road wardens, coaching inns, farmers, gypsies, gamblers, crazy men, brigands, ferries, tolls, etc... or not, depending.  

If the players pass by everyone they encounter along the way it could take a short amount of game time.  Knowing my players, it's going to take a couple sessions, because along the way, the setting has interesting casts of characters who are going to be fun to interact with, so they will.

Entering the wood, the characters will be more cautious and careful, like you or I would in their situation.  The Ghostmourn Wood is probably dangerous, maybe there is A ghost, maybe the players will actively seek it out.  Maybe they spent time researching all the legends of the place to see if maybe they can put the ghost to rest.  Or not.

Finally, if the sources they found were correct, they get to the Castle as planned, if not it may be a while before they find it, or they may encounter some inhabitants outside the Castle and track them to the place.  What's there, who knows, I think we should hopefully have the point by now.

No scenes were framed, no paces were set, no tension was consciously built, no beats were struck.  The players do all that for themselves, organically and intrinsically, by simply roleplaying their characters without any relation at all to how they would view a movie or read a book.

1. Interesting setting - The characters have lots to do, lots to choose from.
2. Interesting NPCs - Whatever they decide to do, there are people who they can interact with that seem actual personalities, not stereotypes or cliches.
3. Interesting Enemies - Gangsters, cultists, corporations, nobles, people who have their own agendas, own resources and probably will conflict with the PCs at some point.
4. Pull no punches - They play their PCs, you play the world. Play it straight and play it hard.

Done.

Yes, totally the same school of Refereeing.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881716Like anything in an RPG such rules cannot override a sucky GM (the rules cannot fix stupid, as Gronan uses to say), but there is a huge difference between "the game is based on the presence of this mythic figure, the Good GM" and "the rules clearly explain what are the GM's responsibilities on this subject".

I just felt this is worth repeating.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;881708This is, I think, the really controversial point. Because all the rest of your concerns are easily addressed with intra-diagetic rules, that is rules that only leverage "events that happen in the fictional world" and thus do not require jumping out of one's character to "director stance". Thus they create no friction or opposition between the experience you are looking for and what is advocated by Krueger, estar, nDervish or others: RPG as the in-world, in-character experience.

The problem is that pacing, drama and suspense are not qualities of the world that the fiction describes. They are qualities of the fiction itself. Thus they cannot stem from rules that only leverage intra-diagetic interactions. In order to create something that only exists in "the narrative", you need techniques that leverage the narrative itself, not the world described by the narrative.

Because pacing, drama and suspense are not something that the character experiences: they are something that you, as the reader of the novel or watcher of the movies experience. Pacing is not the result of what happens in the fictional world, it is the effect of the director's cut of the scenes. No character experiences "drama", at most he experiences "fear" or "suffering". Drama is something that you, the reader/co-author of the story, feel. Not your character.

All the rest, authenticity and sense of wonder, is definitely easy to obtain by simply leveraging the internal consistency of the game world. If the world feels living and plausible, the sense of wonder and the willingness to avoid useless combat will come on their own.

So you need to train yourself, as a GM, to recognize scenes with potential for pacing, drama and suspense, and play it that way.
Not necessarily an easy task, but I find it worth the time investment.

Quote from: Manzanaro;881722But techniques does not equal rules. I am specifally interested in narrative techniques and how they apply to RPGs as opposed to rules which directly constrain possibilities and dictate outcomes in a formulaic fashion. I am not worried about some hypothetical GM and his or her shortcomings.

That is like talking painting technique and worrying that not all painters have the level of skill neccesary to paint well so all painting should be done in color by numbers books.

Yes, they don't equal rules in the RPG sense. If they did, writing classes would study probability theory.
They still study rules, though.
My rule? "Have or develop a flair for the dramatic. Play characters that share that trait!"

Quote from: Manzanaro;881730Not neccesarily. There are ways to conscript the players into the effort without pulling them out of immersion, as Asen notes above.

As far as the... Hold on, are you telling me to shut up and go read a gazillion GM notes sections?

Seriously though, I've read more than a few, but don't recall a lot of them having this particular focus. Even many games expressly designed for genre emulation totally miss any kind of discussion of tone, style, or other narrative qualities.

Well, that's because the majority of GM advice sections suck donkey balls. And that's me being polite, here:).
Read Apocalypse World's GMing section. Read the way Unknown Armies 2e sets up the characters. Read Atomic Highway's GMing section. Read LotFP and LotW's gming sections (and for LotW: pay total attention to how all of this interacts with Deeds and Entanglement). Read the advice on scene framing in Maid and Tenra Bansho Zero, and pay attention to the aiki-kiai-karma cycle and how it shapes play.
Read Sorcerer, the annotated edition. Read Crimson Exodus' GMing section. Read the Referee advice in EPT, Classic Traveller, and in Scarlet Heroes. Read the advice in Savage Worlds: Mars and Savage Worlds: Thrilling Tales. Read the whole of A Dirty World and Monsterhearts. Read the campaign advice in Price of Power (a supplement for Fates Worse than Death).
Read all of them with a grain of salt, and looking for the common ground, though...
With two grains of salt, read some Referee advice in Pendragon, too;).

Most of the rest I've read, and I've read literally hundreds of games, aren't worth the time spent on reading them. Seriously. Consider the above to be saving you lots and lots of reading:D!
Hope you enjoy the reading list!

OMG, 8 pages of discussion since yesterday! I'm skipping most of it, but here's a contribution to the original question.

I love detailed simulation games, and tactical combat in particular. I run GURPS plus house rules, on a 1-yard/hex map. 1-second turns, the works.

I often play with players who don't even know the GURPS rules much at all. I translate almost everything to English descriptions and maps and counter positions. I also do many silent/hidden roles and calculations, but only mention what the PCs are aware of, and how they are aware of it.

e.g.: You see the silhouette of a seemingly-shaggy humanoid carrying a long pole or something. You hear metal on metal as he moves, and sloshes and squishes as he steps. He's heading slightly away from you.

If their character has more experience and knowledge of tactics than they do of the combat system, then I give them some ideas for what might or might not make sense to do, and what the tradeoffs and general chances of success for different approaches are, until they learn those, again in English rather than in game terms when possible.

On another level, except during a major combat, or a pure battle scenario, there is always a larger situation usually two or more levels deep, which involves many NPCs with different objectives and concerns and their own perspectives, doing different things in different places at different times, and like combat, I let the players know what their characters do as the characters perceive things, and let whatever happens unfold. I find that quite interesting and compelling, even if the situation is fairly simple, such as people skulking around a location with different interests and goals. I tend to find that more interesting than most non-interactive narratives, not less.

The game plots that interest me less are the traditional railroad ones, where the GM mainly just leads the PCs through a series of pre-planned scenes pretending they are happening naturally.

Quote from: -E.;881747When I first encountered story-oriented games with non-sim mechanics I was intrigued:

Clearly these are for people who want a story-like outcome in their games, a goal that I (and I think quite a few rpg-gamers) share.

However, I found the mechanical solutions completely the opposite of what I was looking for. They seemed to break immersion (putting non-GM players in a role of telling a story or having narrative concerns) for PCs and for the GM, they seemed to  eliminate a lot that I like about GMing.

In my view, tension should arise naturally from the character decisions and things that happen in the world. I don't like it when movies or books "raise tension" for obvious plot reasons, and games where tension is likewise raised for by mechanical techniques seems like that.

I have the same reaction to mechanics that try to enforce things like atmosphere -- in most games (Toon would be an example of an exception), I want a fairly generic set of rules and have the GM bring the style and atmosphere.

That's especially true for long-running games where things can change, sometimes radically. I don't want to change systems for horror-focused scenarios run around Halloween, or the Boot Hill cross-over or whatever.

A system that enforced horror tropes mechanically or had cards and playing chips might in some way feel more horror-y or cowboy-y, but I'd prefer the flexibility of a generic system and a GM who can tell a good ghost story or spin a yarn.

And as a player, I want a GM who is sharing his vision with me. I want him to want to do that work.

Cheers,
-E.

I agree with the above post.

Quote from: Bren;881748I had been thinking along a similar line. The open ended continuation of the player character is a significant difference between the history of playing a character in an RPG and reading or viewing a finite story about a character.

A three act or five act story structure with rising tension, climax, denouement, doesn't apply to the open ended continuing series of events that makes up the history of a PC.

Bren, that's not quite true:).
Frex, Thrilling Tales has a plot generator for episodic play that uses...a three-act story structure. You can adapt it without railroading, though.
How? Create all the characters and locations required. Plop them in your setting.
If the PCs are good, and you managed to connect them, they'd find them and follow the structure. They might get them in the wrong order, but they will, IME.
Of course, you'd also need good players;).
And of course, it's not going to work every time. Sometimes, they're going to get to the Big Antagonist in another matter.
That's fine. Jason Bourne and Rambo also have different approaches, one of them being much more low-key. The same might apply to different parts of the game, too;).

Quote from: Manzanaro;881749Okay, so let's look at this concept of "interesting characters". I agree this is key. I often tell players to imagine they are creating a character for an ensemble TV show or superhero team comic and that their goal is to create a character that the imaginary audience is fascinated with and is fun to watch other characters interact with.

But my questions are, "What constitutes an interesting character to you?" and "How do you make use of this in generating a compelling narrative?"

As mentioned, for me personally, an interesting character is not one that is interesting in isolation so much as one who is interesting in terms of making me want to see how he interacts with other characters, as well as having strong internal motivations of one sort or another.

Not just for you:).
And now compare to my "rules for setting up a campaign".

• Write a motivation on your character sheet.
• Write a vice.
• Write a short-term goal, related or not to the motivation.
• Write a friend.
• Write an enemy.
• Write a teacher or someone else who influenced you in a major way.

Curiously how that intersects with "have strong internal motivation and interaction with other characters", right:D?

Quote from: -E.;881731It's not. My experience running both long-term games and shorter or one-shot games is that both can give a powerful IC immersive experience.

Yeah but no matter how good it is, it's one session vs. a campaign filled with such sessions.  How is it even arguable that the payoff would be greater in a campaign full of such sessions?  That's what I meant by payoff of a long-term campaign.

Quote from: -E.;881731Was that somehow unclear? Or what? Maybe I'm misreading you?

Nope, that was me completely screwing the pooch and misreading your last paragraph. :hatsoff:

Quote from: CRKrueger;881753Yeah but no matter how good it is, it's one session vs. a campaign filled with such sessions.  How is it even arguable that the payoff would be greater in a campaign full of such sessions?  That's what I meant by payoff of a long-term campaign.

 Nope, that was me completely screwing the pooch and misreading your last paragraph. :hatsoff:

What's this about admitting the when you made a mistake? I mean, who does that:D!
We're still on Internet, right;)?

Quote from: AsenRG;881752I agree with the above post.

Bren, that's not quite true:).
Frex, Thrilling Tales has a plot generator for episodic play that uses...a three-act story structure. You can adapt it without railroading, though.

Allow me to clarify.

A 3-act or 5-act play has a clear beginning, middle, and end. The continuing history of an RPG character has a beginning (whether prehistory, start of play, or a bit of both), but it has no end (since it is continuing on) and it has no middle (since it has no end). An individual play session has a beginning and often has a predefined end (based on a pre-agreed end time for play) and thus a middle (of sorts). But what applies to a single session does not apply to an open ended campaign.

In addition, the session time midpoint and end point won't correspond to any particular literary structure without considerable out of game effort by the participants to follow a literary structure instead of just playing to see where play leads. Depending on the interests of the participants what the GM may have thought would have been a short interaction with the bartender to get a lead on the current location of Big Mike and then a confrontation at Big Mike's headquarters may lead to an extended conversation with the bartender (may fail to discover the current location of Big Mike) and may even lead to an extended detour or side activity that delays any intended rising action and climax.

As far as plot generators, I would imagine that the Thrilling Tales plot generator creates a plot/adventure (and probably a plot/adventure hook) for a session or a few related sessions. I'd be very surprised (astounded actually) if a plot generator were able to generate a plot for the open ended, continuing history of multiple PCs that by intent has no set end point.

Quote from: Bren;881766Allow me to clarify.

Sure, go ahead:D.

QuoteA 3-act or 5-act play has a clear beginning, middle, and end. The continuing history of an RPG character has a beginning (whether prehistory, start of play, or a bit of both), but it has no end (since it is continuing on) and it has no middle (since it has no end). An individual play session has a beginning and often has a predefined end (based on a pre-agreed end time for play) and thus a middle (of sorts). But what applies to a single session does not apply to an open ended campaign.

The idea is that in Thrilling Tales, which is a pulp game, you'd have a large number of sessions as episodic adventures, like in the old pulps. So yeah, you're right, it's a "prepare the session" generator.

QuoteIn addition, the session time midpoint and end point won't correspond to any particular literary structure without considerable out of game effort by the participants to follow a literary structure instead of just playing to see where play leads. Depending on the interests of the participants what the GM may have thought would have been a short interaction with the bartender to get a lead on the current location of Big Mike and then a confrontation at Big Mike's headquarters may lead to an extended conversation with the bartender (may fail to discover the current location of Big Mike) and may even lead to an extended detour or side activity that delays any intended rising action and climax.

See, that's where we disagree:).
I am playing to see where the session leads. But most sensible approaches to the development are already used in some literary structure or another...
So they negotiated a lot with the bartender, but he talked them into dealing with his girlfriend's abusive brother instead of telling them where Big Mike was? That's fine: heroes in pulps are also prone to detours. Sometimes, they might even let a personal enemy escape to help someone!
What I'm doing here is taking notes on the theme and mood of the game (I think that's the term, at least). As long as I keep to it, I still get a pulp story. It might not be the pulp story I had rolled with the generator...but as long as it provided me a set-up that lead to adventure, it has done its job anyway.
Whether the brother is a secret Nazi, is something I'm probably just going to roll some dice for. But I'm not even going to roll for him being a Big Mike's man. If they want to go after Big Mike later, they've gotta find some other way. Maybe the bartender would trust them more now, maybe not. We'll see if and when they talk to him:D!

Last time I ran Thrilling Tales, I had the PCs in Shanghai in the 30ies. They had an opportunity to foil a weapons delivery for the Green Gang, and failed it. It still ended up looking as a pulp story, according to the players, though I admit they weren't experts on the genre;).