5 mars 2015
In Apocalypse World, why do the players get mechanical incentives (xp, progression) for doing (some selection of)...
In Apocalypse World, why do the players get mechanical incentives (xp, progression) for doing (some selection of) their moves, while the MC gets nothing for hers? What does this accomplishes? Is it just tradition? (This is an old question of mine, but AW gives me new words for asking it.)
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You mean that MC should have advancement by using her moves ? That's a bit weird ! But I like this idea !
RépondreSupprimerDon't the countdown clocks act as MC move progression?
RépondreSupprimerIt can, indeed ! Specially if you use custom move through them ! Well seen...
RépondreSupprimerRemember Prince Valiant, you gained access to moves/ sfx when you mastered an adventure. Quite identical to having the right of using a custom move after a certain amount of ( clockwork) time.
RépondreSupprimerI should not have mentioned progression, this muddies the issue I want to address.
RépondreSupprimerWhat I meant is that players get xp for using their moves, not the MC. Why do the players need incentives, but not the MC? We tell her what she should do, what is good for the game, and we trust her to do so. But we have to bribe the other players?(And BTW, Kalysto de la vacuité this is totally the follow-up of my rant after our MH game.)
Games with GM advancement? There is at least Robin D. Law's Rune. But I guess every game where the GM has to balance what he preps with the PC possibilities is a game with hidden GM advancement.
But here I'd like to talk about incentives.
The MC's role is explicitly to be a fan of the player's characters, and to see her own characters as made of tissue paper. So giving a reward that improves NPCs would be fucking with the MC principals.
RépondreSupprimerI'm sure there is, to a degree, a bit of
tradition / inertia, as well.
In my game*, The Authority doesn't progress per se, but his control over the world can extend if the Youthful Offenders don't win a particular session. But The Authority isn't seeking the win; he's supposed to be as much of an anti-fan of the characters he's playing as the YO players are.
* Misspent Youth
That's right.
RépondreSupprimerBut giving another reward? Even something as basic as video-game-style achievements?
Or to take the problem from the other side, why give (non MC) players incentives? Can't we trust them as we trust the MC?
(Coincidence, I was listening earlier today to the Bonus Episode of The Gauntlet podcast, where they speak highly of Misspent Youth.)
Yeah I was so flattered by that. I have to write to them about it. My only problem is it was such an entertaining show and I don't need more podcasts now!
RépondreSupprimerYou raise good points. I think that the players in AW have principles, right?
For me, I'm not sure an "achievement unlocked" would mean much to me as an MC, but I do like the idea of questioning how to give the GM-type-player rewards.
Part of it may be that the high degree of power and influence over the shared imagined space is reward enough. I know when I queried my brain with "Why do I GM?" that was part of the answer. But I'm curious what other kinds of rewards we can give GMs.
I will say that the reward aspect of playing to my highlighted stats in AW is a bit weird for me. It's like 50-80% that there are specific abilities I want my character to advance to, things I want to be able to do, with the bulk of the rest of my fun being about playing to what the other players want to see about my character. Someone highlights my skin-diseased, -2 Hot Savvyhead's Hot, I really want to play into that and have some gross sex.
Incentive/reward, for me as a MC, is a good game, and one that allows me to explore things differently or deeper than before.
RépondreSupprimerGMing is traditionally more work than reward.
The full game should be the reward, and following principles/agendas should bring it, with a tone varying with players' input and same players' will to see different things in the story, manifested by the stats they highlight on the others' playbooks.
Players' xp incentive is their reward for bringing to the story what others wished them to bring, or for bringing the kind of theme/situation their playbooks should bring in the case of xp moves.
"Traditionaly" indeed. And tradition isn't powered by the Apocalypse - so let's explore some ideas to explode those traditions!
RépondreSupprimerThere is a progression mechanic for MCs in AW. The fronts and countdowns.
RépondreSupprimerWhen the MC succesfully "play" a "move" that advances whatever a countdown represents, it advances. When the countdown is complete, the MC make the stuff irrevocable, ie. they changed something in the world in a durable fashion.
And since the fronts are something you, MC, are supposed to be interested in - it says so in the rules - you're happy that stuff happens.
It's a MC reward mechanism that way.
(I am held from the net right now and need a bit of time to properly process your very interesting input... Also: drunk.)
RépondreSupprimerOoookay, I’ve been held away from the interwebs far longer than I anticipated. Sorry about that.
RépondreSupprimerRobert Bohl, part of why I GM and like to GM is that I like to give my friends a nice rpg experience. Just as I like cooking a good meal for them. I never thought about the high degree of power and influence over the SIS, but I now believe this is also part of my answer.
The rewards xp-advancement is weird to me in almost every rpg.
Kalysto de la vacuité, a good game, the opportunity to explore farther, aren’t these as much incentives for players as for MCs? Would you say you know players for whom these would be lacking?
You made me realize the importance of the other players choices in a way I hadn’t before It is more than incentives. It is almost coercion. You have to obey or your character will become irrelevant. I need time to think about this. Not just a few days, but longer.
Pierre M, let’s do a hack where players vote on which category of moves the MC will get xp from, where players don’t get xp and where playbooks have tailored principles and agenda ;)
Grégory Pogorzelski , I my brain understand what you say, but my guts don’t agree. I just don’t feel it that way when I play. But maybe I just never saw it. I’ll keep my eyes peeled to my inner feelings next time around.
(Also: not so drunk anymore.)
Gherhartd Sildoenfein - Well, you already have as much control of the SIS as you could want in most games. Maybe the way to incentivize that is to restrict some traditional GM SIS control in the core design, then give it back discretely as rewards.
RépondreSupprimerAs to incentivizing the making the meal for people, I'm not sure how to address that.
Gherhartd Sildoenfein it took me a few sessions for the countdowns to really click but if I may go full exegesis for a moment, I think what I describe is the emergent property of
RépondreSupprimerCreating a front means making decisions about backstory and about NPC motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care.
(Binding, as in "you stick to it") and
Choose the things you’d just fucking kill to see well done on the big screen
(p. 136)
(Those are the things you want to see happen in the story, even if you don't know how it will turn out.)
When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock.
(p. 143)
Also, the way clocks work : before 9, preventable - just like wounds are getting better. 10 and after, it's inevitable, but PCs can still mitigate a bit. After 12, full, active expression.
So, in play :
- you list things you wish to see. Since it's things in motion, it will almost certainly have a countdown clock.
- to write your clock down, you divide the thing you want to see happen into "PCs can prevent this", "PCs can't prevent this but can still mitigate" and "PCs can't do shit about it, it comes to pass as I want it."
- in play, either the PCs don't do shit about it and I check a quadrant and make a move, they're actively triggering it and I check a quadrant, or they manage to interrupt the whole thing and I just cross the whole thing off.
- so, when I check everything up, the thing I want to happen in the fiction happens, exactly as I wish it to.
Seems like a rewards mechanic to me, but I'm a strange guy about RPG stuff.
Aren't we all? I know I am.
RépondreSupprimerI understand what you say. (Or at least I believe I do.) But I don't feel that way when I MC. Maybe I don't choose the things I'd just fucking kill to see enough...? In order to leave as much liberty to the players as possible, to be able to look at everything through crosshair, I am rather detached (zen-like?) from the fronts. So no reward for me.
That's the problem with *W for GMs.
RépondreSupprimerThe more freedom you give your players, the less likely it is they'll perform the story you'd kill to see.
And GMs rules / agenda / principle really want you to do both.
(ping JC Nau )
RépondreSupprimerGiving your players as much freedom as you can isn't one of the MCs agendas.
RépondreSupprimerI mean, it happens, and you might want it, but if it interferes with your real agendas, don't worry about it.
Interesting stuff happening to the PCs should trump players freedom every time. Players freedom and the limits thereof are taken care of by the players rules. Don't worry about them.
"That's the problem with *W for GMs.
RépondreSupprimerThe more freedom you give your players, the less likely it is they'll perform the story you'd kill to see.
And GMs rules / agenda / principle really want you to do both."
That's pretty much it, yeah. NB: we're playing Dungeon World these days, and DW is weird that way. Dungeon crawl aesthetics mess with me: I sometimes can't help but fall back on my old school ways (hey, let's get them into narrative arc A rather than narrative arc B, I like it better!) and I suddenly feel I get dangerously close to the "impossible thing before breakfast". Yet when I simply use fronts and countdown clocks, I grow increasingly frustrated with some players' murder hobo ways and yearn to take control again.
Yet I think I haven't given the game enough time. Now that several fronts are in place, seeing them unfold should be satisfying no matter what. I hope.
You can also get a completely uninteresting story by the way, because players don't know the tropes or see how to use them, or always make soft moves in the fiction.
RépondreSupprimerThat's why I made full settings for OS of Monsterhearts, to explore themes that will probably never happen randomly at my table.
And Gherhardt what do you think of the oriented questions the MC has to ask ? They are already a kind of player/story 's coercion. But without it, on what do you rely to have an interesting and "realistic" setting that pleases everybody at the table, including the MC and that have the necessary elements to start a story (Hx, bonds,... being insufficient) ?
And in the end, if the objective is full freedom for players, why need a MC ? Better try Dream askew, but even there, there is incentive: play a weak move and then you'll be able to play a strong one
I overstressed freedom, Grégory Pogorzelski? I meant from the MC overly protecting the fronts. Players are the show's stars. But they have to address the fronts all right. And all the moves the MC uses. These are 'fair'.
RépondreSupprimerKalysto de la vacuité, if you mean oriented questions like "why are you poisoning the hold's water supply?", I don't do them because they aren't part of AW. And yes they are player coercion.
I find fronts and MC moves are efficient enough to get a good game, but this way the MC can't really choose what themes are explored. It's part of AW.
I suppose players who restrict themselves to soft moves will see the situation worsen quickly to an unbearable state. But it never happened to me. (Not that I have that much AW experience.) And I'd probably stop the game to explain.
Dream Askew I only heard about it's qualities recently, but it's definitively on my radar. Even more so now.
JC Nau and Pierre M I still never played nor MCed DW, so I can't say.
I overstressed freedom, +Grégory Pogorzelski?
RépondreSupprimerMaybe ? I dunno man, I wasn't there ! ;)
Oh cmon, in this conversation.
RépondreSupprimerYeah, DW is clearly different. Watching Vicent Baker MC Apocalypse World really give you a sense of the importance of1) the unity of space and 2) the Hx in the MC experience. Just watching the mayhem unfold is a pleasure in itself. I feel like it requires more work in DW. (It may just be a matter of personal taste; AW might be the game for me).
RépondreSupprimerMaximum freedom - as the game allows, no more.
RépondreSupprimerJC Nau
RépondreSupprimerI promise you!
We will play it. Oh, yes — We will play it.
Gherhartd Sildoenfein sorry. I think that with a game built around protagonization like Aw you shouldn't worry at all about deprotagonizing your PCs (which is often what we worry about when we talk about players' freedom).
RépondreSupprimerYou should strive for your agendas as hard as your principles and moves allow you to, first and foremost, and don't worry about anything else.
In my experience, my best games happened when I did, and my most dissapointing ones happened when I was chasing something else.
Not that it's an easy thing to so, mind, or that you couldn't chase something else without you knowing it until after it sucked. Those games demand mastery.
Grégory Pogorzelski
RépondreSupprimerBTW, do you know where I could find a printed french version of AW on the internet?
Pierre M nowhere alas.
RépondreSupprimerOne can hope a new french edition would be published later this year. But one can't promise anything nor have more solid information about it.
Grégory Pogorzelski
RépondreSupprimerI suppose I could buy (?) an electronic version and print it via lulu.com ?
I'm not aware of an official, digital french version. You can try to contact Ludovic Papais about it. He might still have a handful books with faulty binding at a discount.
RépondreSupprimerI am with you Grégory Pogorzelski. Players' move protect them very much. I know I can (and must) hit them hard. I obviously miscommunicated, but I will try once more. I have to look at everything through crosshair. I must give players what their moves say. So I know my fronts are transient. I push them as much as I can and should, but still I don't root for them. So advancing the clock isn't an incentive in itself for me.
RépondreSupprimerI... think I get it better this time. To compare with my experience : we hit a dry run in the middle of our campaign where I didn't care one way or another about my threats and fronts. We had a second "first session" to solve that, and it worked pretty well, but this time I actually cared about my threats.
RépondreSupprimerFor countdowns to work as a reward mechanism for the MC (and I think it's their point), I think you need to care. You need to have fronts you care about, filled with NPCs you find fun and engaging to play and countdowns listing stuff you actually want to see happen and stakes you really wonders about, in your guts.
So yeah, looking at everything through crosshairs seems to be a problem with that, but there's a method to it I think. It's not that you're supposed to shoot everything down at first sight all the damn time. It means, I think, that when the moment comes, when rules gives you the opportunity and the situation demands you press the trigger, you should. And you know when you have to.
Robert Bohl the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that players get mechanical incentives before we can, and MC not because we can’t (yet?) (in an efficient, really interesting way).
RépondreSupprimerIncentivizing the making the meal for people, I don’t know about mechanical incentives, but giving attractive cooking utensils, efficient equipment and nice flavorful ingredients sure works.
I wonder how many player would like a game with no xp-advancement incentives? Not their a priori reaction, but if they would enjoy it when they play it.
My game doesn't have XP. In fact, arguably, you don't get better over time, you get worse. And I've literally never heard a complaint about that.
RépondreSupprimerIn Undying you don't get xp, you only try to keep your Blood and the amount of dbets owed to you high
RépondreSupprimerOk, I'll check those two. Kalysto de la vacuité you mean Paul Riddle's Undying PbtA Vampire?
RépondreSupprimerGrégory Pogorzelski, we finally are getting through :) I don’t think I have a problem with all that as a MC. I was very satisfied, if exhausted, of my AW sessions and I believe the players were also (seeing it is AW they are clamoring after).
Obviously we do not experience the same thing when we MC, you and me, but I am perfectly satisfied. I do not find I lack mechanical incentives. I was just wondering why there were some overt ones for players and not for the MC.
And, as a player, the reward-xp-advancement-incentive just feels weird, weirder with the stat. Which just reopened an old wound question of mine : wtf xp?
Gherhartd Sildoenfein (and everyone) - you can see a free version of MY at http://misspentyouth.robertbohl.com/see/
RépondreSupprimerLet me know if you like it or have any questions.
Also,
RépondreSupprimerI was just wondering why there were some overt ones for players and not for the MC.
I bet if you posted this question on the Powered by the Apocalypse Community you'd get a ton of smart answers.
Thank you Robert Bohl.
RépondreSupprimerYes, there or at Barth Forth Apocalyptica. Initially my question was wider then PbtA games, just using PtbA vocabulary. But a specific answer might very well be a better goal.
Gherhartd Sildoenfein what I'm saying is, if the MC's character is the whole world-that-isn't-the-PCs, and if "reward mechanics" means "rules that govern how characters change and grow (and gives you new gameplay options along the way)", the countdowns fit the bill perfectly. And they're quite overt about it. I get it's not the answer you're after, but I don't quite get what you're actually after.
RépondreSupprimerLet's try this: why aren't you satisfied with "countdowns" as an answer? What's missing here?
Grégory Pogorzelski the explicit when you do this (kill monsters, use your higlighted stat), you get this currency (xp) that allows you to buy that (a level, an advancement move).
RépondreSupprimerSo not rewards as mechanics that govern how characters change and grow, but as... payment, I guess.
Got it.
RépondreSupprimerBut don't ask me why.
RépondreSupprimerGM budget systems, perhaps? Though it's indirect and PC-dependant.
RépondreSupprimerI really can picture a way to make it work, honestly. I mean, the closest thing I can picture is what I did for machinations in Rup:ture and it's basically a variation on countdown clocks : as a GM, there are some things you're not allowed to do until certain things come to pass, and whether they do or not depends on what happens at the table - ie. what you're doing and how PCs respond.
Why are you looking for this ? Is it speculative curiosity, or more like a problem you're trying to solve?
But don't ask me why
RépondreSupprimerOops. Sorry, too late.
It is speculative curiosity. I wonder why we still have xp for players while we know that it works without them for MC. I also wonder why every time I say, hey players have xp and we don't need them for MC, wtf? people always look at ways to add xp for MC and very rarely at ways to have no xp for players.
RépondreSupprimerGherhartd Sildoenfein
RépondreSupprimerBecause players. I mean, really, because my players.
Tradition?
RépondreSupprimerOne of them started tabletop RPG with us, another one only a two or three years ago (with me and other players). They have known RPG from video games, and they don't really seem to care about consequences; they care only about their own actions and power.
RépondreSupprimerWe try to make them change - and XP incentive is a good way to go.
If you want to GM AW, you are probably in the mindset for this game, you don't really need reward to do this; having fun is the only one you'll ever get, as usual. Now, a player for this game might be in a pretty different mindset, and the rules, somehow, are there to show them how they are expected to behave.
RépondreSupprimerOf course they are. But seriously, bribery !?
RépondreSupprimer;)
Okay, riddle me this: from where I stand, reward mechanism say nothing about what's fun or not. And fun, per se, has nothing to do with reward mechanism.
RépondreSupprimerSo the sentence "you don't really need reward to do this; having fun is the only one you'll ever get, as usual" is a bit... meh?
Technically you don't need anything to make a move in a game. If it's an option in play, you can choose to do it - or not. It's your prerogative as a player. But doing "it" provokes some in-game consequences - if they didn't, they wouldn't be part of the gameplay. If those consequences are positive, ie. it helps accomplish your goal in the game as a player, by enhancing the effectiveness of a move or giving you more "good" options, it's a reward mechanism.
It's a behaviorist thing. As a designer, you want the players to do certain things in your game under certain circumstances. So you make those things beneficial in those circumstances.
Wether the whole thing is fun or not is, as I understand it, a whole other can of worms.
(Why the designer want those behaviors to happen or not is yet another can of worms.)
Xp as rythm
RépondreSupprimerIn Monsterhearts you stop your season one session after a player bought its fifth advancement, because to get to this moment you should have had some exciting and hard moments (no pun intended), and it's time to cut, play something else, and maybe come back later, refreshed, for a season two.
Grégory Pogorzelski I don’t know the answer to your riddle. But incentive should be positive things, usually in games that translate as fun. Incentive are used to orient the players’ behaviors. Maybe toward something that isn’t immediately fun, maybe toward something that isn’t manifest or distinct enough. But toward another source of fun. Could they be incentive if they weren’t fun in themselves? I would say no.
RépondreSupprimerNow I find xp are a very crude incentive. Expecting payment for doing something might even ruin the fun of it (so says science, but how much of it is transferable here is anyone’s guess).
I wonder if in AW xp aren’t a kind of dicentive. You follow the prescribed behavior not because of what you have to gain, but because of what you have to loose in game relevance, hence in fun. Maybe that’s appropriate for the apocalypse.
Kalysto de la vacuité I do not have your experience with MH. Does this generally happens at an dramatically appropriate time? (This is an honest, sincere question.) Should the MC and/or the players try to prepare for the end, or does it works out by more or less by itself?
For me, more or less by itself. Last try, which was voluntarily short and aiming to be short, 4 sessions and 4 advancement for the "best" player, who plays a lot of boardgames and uses to play according to rules. She expresses her skin, she follow the incentive, she earns xp and pace the game. At the end of those 4 four sessions, she died on the final scene, even if she was, based on xp, the most powerful of the PCs, and she died because of the fiction and a few 6-, giving us a really convincing end of season with PC dead in her case or radically changed.
RépondreSupprimerIn Sagas of the icelanders, xp is based on "did you interact (with a move) with the PC/NPC you said you wanted to interact with at the start of the session". At the start, each PC normally has listed 4 PC/NPC they want to interact with, and they earn a bond with each of them. They can change 2 names per session. When they make a move with them, approximately as hard as being on the same scene, they earn a check, with 4 checks, they get an advancement, and in most cases you can't increase your stats, so xp or not, you have the same stats. More advanced PCs will have more moves , so they have more "fiction triggers for something to happen". More story options, not necessarily more power.
Niiiice!
RépondreSupprimer