Borgstrom is still a Moron, but this thread is about my Law

[fonkaygarry]

Agreed.

If all I do all night is say "Sure.  What next?" to player suggestions, things get old.  Telling old stories, the stuff that comes up again and again are the plans that went horribly wrong (or horribly right: permanently fireproofing the Gnome thief and loading him down with potions of Fireball.)

Creative challenges, backed up with consequences for failure, demand creative solutions.  Creative solutions are often enjoyable and memorable.

[Warthur]

Okay, Pundit, I'll drop the Nobilis discussion and give the same answer as in the previous thread:

You should EITHER "Say yes or roll the dice" OR "Say no or roll the dice". And you should be consistent about it, because if you're inconsistent about it then the players will realise you are moving the goalposts around.

That said, I would prefer to roll the dice and see what they say rather than just say no. If the system in question is half-decent then impossible requests will lead to impossible rolls, after all, and just saying "No!" all the time is going to discourage players from coming up with new and interesting ideas: if they constantly get shot down, they're going to think "Hmm, no point trying to be innovative in this game."

Just Say No can also foster what people on RPG.net call pixelbitching - GMs refusing to acknowledge any solution to the problem the PCs are faced with that isn't the GM's preferred solution.

[Christmas Ape]

Except that ultimately, that game with your friends becomes more entertaining if you are in a game that provides a reason to keep coming consistently to play.

No argument here, but I'm not sure "Man, what's he gonna fuck us over with this time? Remember when Ted got maimed in that bar brawl and had to learn to clutch a bow in his hook?" is the best of reasons to keep coming back. 'Grim fascination' gets boring as quickly as 'instant wish fulfillment'.

I mean hell, if the game were chess, and because your buddy was coming over to your house just to have a good time, and you ALWAYS let him win; it would stop being a good time pretty fucking fast, and turn into a bore for both of you.

My players are my friends too. That's WHY I want to give them the best game possible.

Well...that's because chess is a competitive game, while GMing a game is not competing against your players. The act of playing chess - the CHALLENGE of chess - is in pitting your brain against the other player on an equal footing. Your mastery of the moves and gambits of chess, your poker face, your ability to think three or four steps ahead; these are your key weapons 'gainst the foe. In RPGs we make characters other than ourselves with different abilities, we play those characters as best we can through an imaginary situation, and between the players and the GM we create a collective kind of fun that relates to the rules, the dice, the friends, and the 'narrative' of the action. It's possible your definition of RPGs differs from mine, but if so I find it alien and strange.

What you're arguing seems to be "because they're my friends I should run a game that will end up getting boring faster". Doesn't make much sense...

No, but I'm honored you give my opinion enough credence to willfully misunderstand and overstate it. I'm arguing that, as my they're my friends, they don't need to sweat blood and shit fire to have a good time. They came to smash an imaginary monster or two, get some imaginary wealth, improve their imaginary characters, and tear apart a loaf of fresh-baked bread like animals to snack on. I'm suggesting that suffering doesn't need to be the over-arching theme of the session. If you disagree, maybe I could recommend you a nice session of Vampire?

[Blackleaf]

Related post: Never Say Never Again

[Imperator]

If you disagree, maybe I could recommend you a nice session of Vampire?

:D:D:D

Zing!

[TonyLB]

Why "wouldn't" I get such good results with you?

Because every "No, that's possible but not inevitable, so you don't get to do it" is going to make me get less interested in the game.  The way to get me (personally) engaged is to give me enough rope to hang myself with.  I'll do it!  I'm quite good at doing it!  But if you keep all the rope for yourself then I'll get bored.

Honestly, from my standpoint on GMing, your recommended law looks like mere butchery, just relentlessly hacking away at people with whatever tool comes to hand, at whatever angle you happen to hit.  It lacks finesse.

When I want to torture somebody (for, of course, the benevolent reasons of yadda yadda yadda ... torturing players is fun, and they seem to like it) I apply more of an artist's sensibilities.  To me that means two things:  One, paying close attention to your materials (in this case the minds of the players) and two, bringing a discerning creativity to the project.

So, what do we know about torture?  Well, one thing is that it is much more effective when the subject brings pain upon themselves through their own actions.  Suppose you set someone up in a shock harness and shock them horribly at random intervals.  Yes, that's torture, but they'll get used to it.  If you break them at all, it's going to be through exhaustion, not through getting into their head.

Now suppose, instead, you set someone up in a shock harness and give them a button.  The button delivers a pretty bad shock, but not as bad as the one that comes at random intervals.  And ... important! ... pushing the button forestalls the worse shock.  Sometimes.  Still random, after all.

Now that, my friends, is torture.  That person will break inside their own head.

That kind of control is the discerning creativity that goes together with knowing your materials.  People engage more when they bring on the suffering of their own characters.  That requires giving them options, and that requires getting past the mentality where you Just Say No.

"No" on its own is a dead-end.  It stops a conversation in its tracks.  It is the opposite of give-and-take.

"You could, but it would mean ..." is a nice little fork in the road.  Interchange continues.  Players get to tie a nice noose and slip their neck in.  Whichever choice they make, they're still screwed, but they're screwed by their own actions and that makes all the difference.

Scenario:  The world is burning.  Demons run rampant in the streets.  A player says "My guy wants to whirl through the entire city like a dervish of justice, killing all of the demons with his bare hands!"  Compare:

   "No!  They rip your arm off."

"Yeah, that's well beyond your current abilities, right?  Of course, there is that vial of angel's blood in the armory.  Potent stuff.  You swore never to drink such an unholy brew, but ... "

I like the latter a lot better.  And that kind of thing is why I think you wouldn't get good results with me using your law.

Make sense?

[Christmas Ape]

:jaw-dropping: :eyepop: :emot-flowers: Tony, will you run for me? I'll start plugging things in.

You've framed a deeper objection in words I didn't have on hand, because the end of a work shift makes me sleepy. "Everything fails, except for that glimmer of hope that maybe something will, someday, go right for a couple hours before it fucks you over again" is...lazy, like the death of a PC. I've beaten my head against the brick wall of "PCs want to suffer and lose" enough times that I'll only engage in certain games of some GMs (because my Rokugani samurai really do want to suffer and die - it's samurai opera!).

Or, in summary:

By all appearances, Pundit's moron law dooms the PCs to failure.
By Pundit's appraisal, Borgstrom's moron law dooms the PCs to success. They're both moron laws because they propose absolutes, and game sessions are composed of too many variables for absolutes.
But this Tony guy...Tony is gonna sit there, smile his demon's smile, and make you take them both.

A winner is Tony, man.

[RPGPundit]

No, but I'm honored you give my opinion enough credence to willfully misunderstand and overstate it. I'm arguing that, as my they're my friends, they don't need to sweat blood and shit fire to have a good time. They came to smash an imaginary monster or two, get some imaginary wealth, improve their imaginary characters, and tear apart a loaf of fresh-baked bread like animals to snack on. I'm suggesting that suffering doesn't need to be the over-arching theme of the session. If you disagree, maybe I could recommend you a nice session of Vampire?

Players are MORE entertained, not less, when their characters suffer through difficult challenges and get screwed over.  One of the brilliant parts of Wujcik's DMing advice in Amber can be boiled down to "don't kill off your player's characters; just make the characters wish they were dead".

Put them up against nearly-impossible odds, make them face opponents that are clearly more than something that they could just beat the shit out of with pure force of arms, make the characters go through suffering at the hands of a villain they will later sincerely hate, all of this makes for way better play than the "mollycoddling" of making them face safe opponents that they know they will end up beating; and WAY better play than the mollycoddling of giving them what they think would make them cool.

Its the same as the old Monty Haul days. Just about everyone who started playing RPGs as a young teen either played in or ran a campaign where the GM was really really er... generous. Gave your first level characters +5 swords, or gave your mecha jockeys command of the SDF-1, or whatever. Of course, the problem with these kinds of games is... where the fuck do you go from there? The players will always want more, and after a while replacing the +5 sword with a +10 sword with a +15 sword very quickly gets old.

I'm not against giving the PCs power, I'm against giving them unearned power. And my position is that a game where its HARDER for the pcs will be better than a game where its easy.

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

:D:D:D

Zing!

Vampire is just as much ersatz suffering as Nobilis or Exalted are ersatz protagonism.

Vampire is to suffering what a teenager's depressed poetry is to real suffering.

Just like Nobilis is to protagonism what the "everyone's a winner, everyone gets a prize" school of thought is to real accomplishment.

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

My law does posit the eventual success of the PCs. Its not saying that the GM should smack down the players and defeat them; its saying that victory is something they should be forced to drag out of the jaws of defeat.

And, for the record, I'm a big fan of giving my PCs enough rope to hang themselves. Ask Jong.

RPGPundit

[droog]

I once ran an RQ game set in the chaos-infested land of Dorastor. By the fourth session, every one of the original characters was dead (nasty place, Dorastor). My mate Luke wanted to  keep playing it, even after his second character had been raped by a harpy. "It's the challenge," he said. Ultimately it was me who got sick of the game.

As often, the Pundarg has a point. For instance, I just wrote several posts arguing that the GM in Nicotine Girls needs to be a harsh master. But I just think the point needs more nuance, and some grounding in specific games and real play. By all means let's talk about conflict and challenge and how best to present it.

[Warthur]

My law does posit the eventual success of the PCs. Its not saying that the GM should smack down the players and defeat them; its saying that victory is something they should be forced to drag out of the jaws of defeat.

How does the "Say yes or roll the dice" attitude differ from this?

In practice, under "Say yes or roll the dice", you tend to only say "Yes, absolutely" if something is either definite or sufficiently easy that it's not worth spending time rolling dice for it." Otherwise, you either resort to the system or say "Well, you could do that, but you will have to go fight for that victory."

And in practice, under "Say no or roll the dice," you tend to only say "No, never ever ever" if something is stupid or impossibole, and otherwise you either resort to the system or say "Well, you could od that, but you will have to go fight for that victory."

In both cases, it's the latter part which is exciting. The approaches simply differ in the extreme cases.

[Kyle Aaron]

Both Borgstrom and Pundit do not GM as I do.

I don't give the players everything they want, nor do I try to fuck them up and congratulate them when they outwit me. Instead, it goes like this,

• Before the new campaign, I ask them what sort of game they'd enjoy.
• I then propose half a dozen game worlds which might match this, and they pick one.
• We sit down to play, and make characters together, each with their own abilities and personalities and backgrounds.
• Things are happening in the world, people are making choices, and the things that are happening and the choices made tie into things the characters have in their personalities, abilities and backgrounds; so the PCs want to get involved in events.
• The PCs get involved, and this changes events.
• Along the way, the PCs will talk to, get information from, ersuade and intimdate NPCs; they will fight people and animals and monsters and the environment.
• Eventually it becomes plain that something which happened in the beginning has now reached an obvious conclusion, and the campaign ends, a complete, if a bit wandering and crazy, story. Then we go back to the first step.

When the player wants to use a character's skill, they can just roll, or they can give an elaborate and/or amusing description of what they're doing, which gives them a bonus to their roll.

The players' decisions about their characters determine the level of challenge they face.

This Borgstrom or Pundit-style thing is just alien to me. The focus on level of challenge, I just don't do things that way, nor do many GMs I know. It's a bit like the D&D Challenge Rating system, seems rather wargamish.

Oh, and Pundit is not necessarily a moron, but certainly a bad writer, because he puts something in the title of his piece, then wonders why people talk about it. If you don't want people to talk about Borgstrom, then don't put her in the title, or the piece itself. That the "law" is a year old should not be an objection to changing it, unless of course you really are Mirror Ron. "Damnit, I had a stupid idea and I'm sticking to it!"

[The Yann Waters]

This Borgstrom or Pundit-style thing is just alien to me. The focus on level of challenge, I just don't do things that way, nor do many GMs I know.

Eh, you do realize that the difficulty of the actual challenges which the PCs face in Nobilis has nothing to do with the Monarda Law? It doesn't render defeating enemies or investigating conspiracies any easier.

[James McMurray]

Vampire is just as much ersatz suffering as Nobilis or Exalted are ersatz protagonism.

Vampire is to suffering what a teenager's depressed poetry is to real suffering.

Just like Nobilis is to protagonism what the "everyone's a winner, everyone gets a prize" school of thought is to real accomplishment.

What the hell? Why is everyone else's posts aiming the thread towards Nobilis deleted but this asshole gets to break the rules in the OP?

Oh, nevermind.

--

My response to the law: I'd much rather have events occur based on logic then some silly law that can't apply to every situation, whether it's Monarda's Law or The Moron's Law. A good GM will maintain all his options at all times, and use whichever is best for the situation:

I tend to say "ok, but..." and "how?" a lot more often then I'll say "No!" My players prefer it that way. Or at least, they keep coming back over and over again, and I'm not the only game in town.