Okay Philip, I tried for the last time. Something is wrong with you and I am done.

Little fucking hint: I have not said the things you think I have. And yes, "What is narrated is what happens" is the very most narrative principle of all. But I fucking talked about this shit.

Harangue away.

Quote from: Phillip;884363A decent simulation of Batman or Tarzan is more likely to die of old age than bullet wounds.

Totally off topic Funfact: Tarzan was made immortal by a pill made from freshly squeezed virgins. So hes not going to die of old age. :eek:
Other fun fact: They gave a dose to Jane and Nkima the monkey too... :jaw-dropping:
No. Im not making this up. It happened in Tarzans Quest. To their credit though it was more a pragmatic choice at the end after having put an end to the cult. The pills were made. Why waste them?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884367@manzanaro

again, I need to catch up with the whole thread, so apologies if this is a retread...

What I think phillip might be getting at is that the things you've sort of alluded as being part of a good story (early in the thread) are directly negated by the death of a protagonist. That is, unless you're taking a longer view of story than can be afforded when you're only playing one protagonist.

The only instance that I'm aware of in media of a good story where the protagonist dies early on is Psycho from Hitchcock. And that essentially changed the story from being about the heroine to being about the villain.

So, in my view, the only way to allow for the possibility of death yet maintain a "good" story would be to take a more meta view of the story where if your PC dies, you have another one ready in the wings to take over. I don't really see any other solution that would not involve taking out death as a possibility, at least in the early going.

Take a look at Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Malazan... Death by no means rules out a good narrative, especially when there is an ensemble cast of characters. I'll also note that at least 2 of the authors of the above have extensive experience with RPGs, and that all 3 works aspire to a sense of simulation in which genre conventions are frequently undermined (back to that genre deconstruction concept).

The trick is making those meaningless deaths meaningful. Making the players feel something instead of just being like, "Guess it's time to go back to town and get a replacement character for whatshisface."

As far as catching up with the whole thread, a lot of it is a semantic argument, which kind of might make it feel like you are digging for quarters in a pile of shit... But if you skip all that stuff I think there are some good bits from a bunch of different people, and the tail end seems to be getting on better track.

Other than the crazed ranting of Philip who seems to have awoken to a burning hatred for me. I just have that effect on some people.

Doc Savage is probably close enough to immortal, too, one way or another. Denny Colt (the Spirit) apparently gets to get beat up and shot far into the future, probably a side effect of Doctor Cobra's serum.

But this is really a binary dichotomy: Either Batman (or whoever) CAN or CANNOT get killed, defeated, or whatever. If our interpretation is that he can, then that's part of a decent simulation. A comicbook is not a simulation, or even a game; it's a story told.

Different things are different.

Quote from: Manzanaro;884373The trick is making those meaningless deaths meaningful.

That's the key disagreement here. A lot of us prefer actually meaningful situations, not a load of lies dressing up the tawdry as grand.

As we've said repeatedly, that for us is what makes for real drama. It comes from having stakes one really cares about put at real risk.

Quote from: Manzanaro;884364Philip, if you can stop fucking haranguing me and just have a normal discussion I think we would get along better.

What I mean by that is that in setting there is nothing keeping Batman from being shot in the head. He is not magic. He is not faster than bullets.

So why has he never been shot in the head? Because of the narrative rules that govern Batman stories. He has plot protection.

But raw simulation is not governed by narrative rules like characters having plot protection. In a simulation of any level of realism, Batman can get killed by guns.

1: Phil can go off his rocker now and then on a subject to obsession. Other times he has a point. It may get lost in the shuffle but the point stands.

2: Actually hes trained from some of the best martial artists on the planet and is probably at the upper limits of what is possible and not be a meta. While he cant dodge a bullet point blank. He can bring to bear predictive and trained skills to guage where the bullets are going to be. And so on. He also usually stays moving, making him a much harder target, and his suit is bullet resistant. Especially that emblem. Its deliberately a target. He doesnt have plot protection. He has continuity overkill.

3: If you are simulating a comic book realism and the player is playing Batman at full advancement then Batman probably wont get killed by guns. Theres still a chance. And to deconstruct your example. The Question, a street level character thats been around quite a while, was shot and killed.

x: Ive done a few indie comic based RPGs now and knowing your reality settings is important when arguments start up over who can do what and how. Or in a bemusing example. TORGs Nile Empire cosm has different axioms than say the Living Land. Odds start to tip in the heroes favour the more, well, heroic and dramatic they are. That is the reality of that cosm. Whereas the same hero walking into the Living Land may find their guns starting to rust and break apart, their costumes rot as that cosms reality rules break down all non-living materials.

Quote from: Manzanaro;884373The trick is making those meaningless deaths meaningful. Making the players feel something instead of just being like, "Guess it's time to go back to town and get a replacement character for whatshisface."

Good points on that, but I think there's a bit of a difference between killing someone from an ensemble who is an important character and killing a protagonist. For all intents and purposes, killing Rick Grimes right now, even with a meaningful death, would probably kill the show as well. It would essentially kill the story everyone has been following, since he's pretty much the focus of it.

I mean, in many ways, you really can't kill the protagonist until the story itself has concluded. Otherwise, you really didn't have a protagonist, I think.

Full disclosure, though, I have not gotten into GOT, so I'm not sure if there is the equivalent of a Rick Grimes/protagonist in that show.

Quote from: Phillip;884376That's the key disagreement here. A lot of us prefer actually meaningful situations, not a load of lies dressing up the tawdry as grand.

As we've said repeatedly, that for us is what makes for real drama. It comes from having stakes one really cares about put at real risk.

Yep. This is a big point. The great hero may go down to a simple pit trap. Or go out swinging at Orcus to the last breath. We dont know what will happen and the simple end can be as interesting as the grand.

Of course different players put different values on whats important or not. But in the end many wont particularly enjoy having things allways dramatic or the feel that things are a sham. Riding the awesome train to awesome town for some is the diametric opposite of awesome.

Others of course thrive on no risk play. Over on RPGG a year oe two ago was a thread where a DM described a player handing him a list of things that werent allowed to happen. Like PC death or any overall risk of failure. Sounds boring to me. But different tables field different styles.

Am I off my rocker in observing that CAN and CANNOT exhaust the domain of possibilities? If some genius has a third alternative, please do share it!

That's Manzanaro's routine, just denying everything while offering nothing in exchange. When we tell him what really works for dramatic games, he dismisses that and goes back to quibbling over definitions of "narrative" and insisting that we must deliver something so incoherent that he can't even tell us what he wants. And he has the hubris to tell us that a "simulation" game is impossible!

Baloney. Unlike his Catch-22, it's a known real thing.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884386Good points on that, but I think there's a bit of a difference between killing someone from an ensemble who is an important character and killing a protagonist. For all intents and purposes, killing Rick Grimes right now, even with a meaningful death, would probably kill the show as well. It would essentially kill the story everyone has been following, since he's pretty much the focus of it.
.

I don't think I agree with this. It would definitely cost them some viewers, but there is a serious debate going on among fans whether killing him would be okay. Not all books or movies follow one character from beginning to end. Many have a character die, or simply become less important, as the focus shift's to another. Having Rick die and focusing on what he built (and the people who followed him) would be an interesting plot twist in my view.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884386Full disclosure, though, I have not gotten into GOT, so I'm not sure if there is the equivalent of a Rick Grimes/protagonist in that show.

Part of the point of Game of Thrones is you really don't know who, if anyone, is the protagonist. There are a group of characters, some seeming more important than others, but you always have the sense that any could die at a given moment. It reads a bit more like a history book in that respect. It seems to be emulating more of a real world flow of events (in terms of who lives and dies).

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884386For all intents and purposes, killing Rick Grimes right now, even with a meaningful death, would probably kill the show as well. It would essentially kill the story everyone has been following, since he's pretty much the focus of it.

Spoiler

Just sayin'.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd get his own off-shot series, or a full biopic (with DiCaprio playing the main role, because why not?).

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884386I'm not sure if there is the equivalent of a Rick Grimes/protagonist in that show.

Not really, but so far it seems that Jon Snow might be the Stark least hated by G.R.R.Martin and this is helluva promising.

Quote from: One Horse Town;884365RPGs are not literature! Neither are they movies, comics, tv programmes or computer games!

RPGs are a media unto themselves and traditionally are poor (and shouldn't in my opinion) at emulating other forms of media. However, emulation of genre is certainly possible, especially if your end goal is immersion.

And that would be it.

What works great in a book or movie, might be a disaster in RPG and the other way around. I don't know why there's a discussion beyond this point.

Quote from: Phillip;884389Am I off my rocker in observing that CAN and CANNOT exhaust the domain of possibilities? If some genius has a third alternative, please do share it!

I didnt say you were on a rampage all the time.

But yeah sometimes you do overfocus. But then so do I.

I think at this point we are out of the main problem zone and down to actual discussion of techniques that can be applied to a session from various angles. Sounds like Manzanaro may, or may not, have a slightly more narrow, or literal?, idea of what a simulation is than we normally apply. Sorting that out will help.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884390I don't think I agree with this. It would definitely cost them some viewers, but there is a serious debate going on among fans whether killing him would be okay. Not all books or movies follow one character from beginning to end. Many have a character die, or simply become less important, as the focus shift's to another. Having Rick die and focusing on what he built (and the people who followed him) would be an interesting plot twist in my view.

I think that the fact it's being debated in TWD shows how hard it is to pull this off. How many movies and books have successfully done it? IMO, it's a hard trick to perform, because it messes with the audience's identification with a protagonist-- when she dies, like the heroine in psycho, you now have to look for someone else to identify with.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884391Part of the point of Game of Thrones is you really don't know who, if anyone, is the protagonist. There are a group of characters, some seeming more important than others, but you always have the sense that any could die at a given moment. It reads a bit more like a history book in that respect. It seems to be emulating more of a real world flow of events (in terms of who lives and dies).

Maybe here lies the way for how to do it in an RPG, but I'm not sure, because then, if you're looking for a "good" story, you can't really think of it as the story of your PC. You'd have to pull back and look at it the way you might look at a multi generational saga where there isn't a single character you identify with-- but this is kind of weird when playing an RPG where I think you're supposed to identify with your character, not an NPC or your buddy's PC.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;884396

Spoiler

Just sayin'.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd get his own off-shot series, or a full biopic (with DiCaprio playing the main role, because why not?).

No way. He's a great supporting character, but killing off Rick would be very jarring. I am pretty sure that something similar to what happened to the X-Files when Dogget came in would happen here.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884152I hate to bring this up again, but equivocation. At this point I am not even paying attention to individual positions on the issue, but if you are taking definition A, Definition B and Definition C of a word, to tie the idea back to Definition B of another word, to show something like all X are Y, then that is again equivocation. This is one of the reasons why these arguments from definition almost never work when you are talking about tastes in gaming. If you think narrative technique are cool and want to see more in play, that is fine, advocate for them. If you think RP and Immersion is key, then that is great too, advocate for those things. But arguing the definition of narrative or role-play just to make a case for that approach seems like it never goes anywhere (because no matter how much you argue that a word means a thing, people still want to play the way they want to play).

That's the absolute last reply I'm going to give on that topic, and that only out of respect for some of the posters that have been arguing on the other side:).
When talking about equivocation, you (seem to) assume that I'm trying to prove an idea. Except I'm not. To me, the idea that something must be X and Y and Z at once, merely in order to exist, isn't controversial, in need of proving, or anything else.
What I did was express the idea in terms that seemed natural to me. They might not be natural to you.
Yes, words do mean stuff. But words also have more than one meaning, especially verbs and concepts. And here's the thing: different people assume different meanings as the "default" one. As an example, to me, the default meaning of "biography" is the one I've used in the thread.
If to you the default meaning is "a book", I see how things might seem different. But then when you point that "what you say assumes a story", I can only tell you that that's not what I meant. Because, you know, that's not what I meant.
I hope you don't need proof that people have different ideas what words mean. Just mention the words "gun control" to different people (or read a thread about gun control). You'll see what I mean.
It also doesn't help that English actually has regional variations. As an example, I just checked the meaning of the word "story" in Oxford's dictionary. The translation "a floor" isn't even included, because Oxford's dictionary only lists British English.

So: apology for what looks like equivocation to you. I'll make sure not to engage in some arguments, with certain people, from now on. Everyone's got their weak spots, no need for me to trigger people:p!

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884211Thinking about this some more: if you find that Tarzan dying early precludes it from producing a good story, there is really no way around that without giving plot armor to the protagonist.

Or you can work by assuming that Tarzan dying early doesn't preclude the game from producing anything.

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;884238And I wanted to address your example. Why do they tend to die early on? Sure, there is a chance that they fail (and/or die), but that's the prerogative of a good narrative too!

Even if they die, their deaths affect the world, thus building a basis for a good narrative. New characters can take their place, avenge them, etc. Of course, if you're trying to follow an existing narrative, that has its limitations. But if you're running your players through the Fellowship of the Ring as a game campaign, and *gasp* Frodo dies, or the ring gets returned to the Dark Lord in the beginning, you have strayed from an existing narrative, but your NEW narrative is just as good, if not better, because the players experience something they might not have expected.

I hope that all makes sense.

This is really an unappreciated advice, but it's key.
Don't assume the genre in advance. Decide on what physical laws work in your universe. Go from there.
Play it out and see what happens. It might fit a genre's structures, or it might be deconstruction, or it might sound like criminal report. Whatever.
What do I do? I focus on the impact of the event, of course?
Someone shot Batman? Robin and Batgirl have to hide the body. If they do, Robin can become Batman.
If they don't? Here's the newspaper titles next morning...
Gotham Times: "Playboy-billionaire Bruce Wayne found shot in Batman's costume". ("Did the real Batman shoot him,angry for usurping the title? Did he try to play a game and a robber freaked out?")
Gotham Weekly, special release: "The Secret Life Of Batman Was...Bruce Wayne". ("Now socialites know why he never dated anyone for long!")
Gotham Post: "Bruce Wayne: Did He Really Fight For Social Justice, Or Was It Just A Game To Him?" ("Police refuses commentary, but a source who wished to remain anonymous confirmed that yes, Bruce Wayne really used to give a new meaning to fighting for social justice").
Police Report on crime trends: "The Scum Is Out Of The Gutters, trying to sense where the wind is blowing from and whether Batman is really dead. The Threat Who Shot Batman Is Selling The Gun Online To Saudi Sheikh").
In short, a new wave of crime is incoming. Associates are trying to weasel out of contracts arguing that Bruce Wayne was obviously insane and couldn't conclude binding contracts. His empire is crumbling. What do you do?

Since I assumed this approach, I've never had a problem with the unexpected. If it's unexpected, I'll just roll with it, and see where it goes.

Quote from: Manzanaro;884291Bolding mine.

Yeah, pacing has come up a few times and I kept meaning to get back to it.

In a pure simulation, you don't do time skips. You might compress time, but even when you do so a simulation still models everything that happens. It just does it faster.

The act of, as a GM, saying (whether outloud or not) "Let's skip to the next good bit," is what I have to consider an act of narrative editing for effect.

What difference do you see between "skipping" and "compressing"? Of course everything would happen, but not playing out the time of a four-month trip is generally considered standard practice. The oxen pulling the cars would still shit on the road, but I don't think we need to mention that:).
Or do you mean something else?

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;884346I wanted to separate this paragraph and address it in particular. I don't think I've run any character through that many battles without a death or some serious maiming/crippling. The way that some GMs deal with this risk of killing PCs is simple: they cheat. They fake their rolls.
It drives me absolutely nuts. I would rather have my beloved character die horribly rather than have the GM protect it (happened last Friday, I rolled poorly, and it just so happened that the NPC rolled one less than me). That's just me though. Apparently breaking the simulation and keeping the illusion of appearances is a time-honored practice among many GMs.

Unrelated, but... Another thing I can't stand: players who cheat. It's ok to fail! It's ok to die in the game, dammit! You're not a loser if you're in a situation where a roll is needed and your character fails. Mini-rant over.

This happened to my second character ever. And it happened to my third character, too. Both died in the first round of their first fights, due to a critical (the GM was rolling extremely well, given that criticals are rare in a 3d6 system).
He also wanted us to replay the battle, because he felt bad for the new player;). I told him no and started working on my fourth character ever, third for the night.

Quote from: Phillip;884352In any event, Manzanaro has made clear enough with the "Star Wars" example what he really means by "satisfying narrative." It's all Story Time, and the answer to how to do it with "simulation" rules is well known -- and deprecated both by Forgistas and by Trad RPers: IGNORE THE RULES. Just "fudge" the outcome into whatever you've decided is satisfactory.

That's if you have a pre-determined plot. If you do, please let me know before play begins, so I'd be able to skip it.

Quote from: Phillip;884361Tolkien's heroes time after time take precautions, and the reckless do not expect to be invulnerable; they are willing to accept the risk of death in the pursuit of glory. This was pretty much the norm in heroic literature until very recently; someone who faced no risk, simply taking success as an entitlement, was typically not regarded as heroic.

That is, however, a very good point and something that struck me as odd before. I mean, why are you a hero, if you weren't actually risking your life?
Trying to explain the same logic to some people has proven an exercise in frustration, though (while others grasp it intuitively). At the end, I didn't change my opinion, butI gave up on discussing with people that start ranting about "Doylist vs Watsonian"!