Great! “Love thy newbies, and never tell them ‘no you can’t’ if thou canst possibly avoid it, for they are fragile, but they shall rock thy world with their creativity given half a frickin’ chance.”
Hi Paul.
I’m gonna jump in here, and hopefully this is good advice.
Try this formula: Intent = One task, One roll.
You get to do one basic thing. It can be rather large thing, but it’s still something that everybody at the table agrees is one thing.
Let’s take your examples -
Firstly, Mr. Vaylen has a secret base that the player wants to destroy. Do you really need to ask why he wants to destroy Mr Vaylen’s secret base? Dude, that should be obvious! It’s Mr Vaylen’s secret muthafukin base!
Okay, first question - does this base really exist? Did you introduce it during one of your NPC’s scenes? Or did you have a scene showing Mr Vaylen living out of his hovercar? Cause then he doesn’t have a secret base. So, if there is no secret base, then it has to be established somehow - by you the GM, or the players gonna have to roll Secret Vaylen Base-wise or something. I’ll get back to this point.
Secondly, the base is secret. Finding the base and destroying it are two seperate tasks, and two seperate intents. You can’t destroy a base you can’t find. Find the base, then destroy the base.
Now here’s the question - how do I find Mr Vaylen’s secret base? If it has been established already, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how - are you gonna get in your hammer cruiser and sensors the whole planet looking for secret bases or whatever threat you think there is? Does Mr Vaylen live under the sea? use Ocean-wise to find anomalies in marine life migration patterns, pinpointing his gigantic submarine.
In your example, the player wants to see evidence of vagrants being hulled, and track this operation down to Mr Vaylen’s secret base. If this is something that can happen - if you have already established the base in the story as being located where the vagrants are, then this should be one roll. Probably Vagrant-wise or Vaylen-wise. If there’s no base, then you got two rolls, basically - evidence leading to the base, and then another roll to bring the base into play. Investigative Logic is probably gonna get used here.
Since I’m the jackass who mentioned Vaylen Conspiracy-wise in the first place, allow me to say something about wises. Have you checked the Obstacle listings under the skill description? Bringing in information that only your character knows is Ob 8, basically. So, first-hand information about the secret Vaylen Conspiracy? Yeah, Ob 8. It might be easier to circles up a vagrant who tells you about his first hand knowledge of vaylens hulling vagrants. Then use Investigative Logic to track down Mr Vaylen.
The second example - you want a bunch of Kerrn to riot while you break into the building - that’s two things right there. Circles up the Kerrn, it’s a linked test for your Security roll to B&E. On the other hand, if you want the angry Kerrn mob to break into the building for you, that’s something different. Still probably two rolls, if you have to Circles them up. If you already have a squad of Kerrn, then it’s probably just one roll to raid the building - or a Firefight.
And then there is the information! Have you already established that there is some proof of wrongdoing in the building? No? Player gotta roll for it!
Can I take a second to comment on tactics here, though?
A] This aint a cop show! Why are they searching for “evidence”? You wanna bust out your Imperial Law-wise on a dude, FRAME HIM! Is the truth fucking up your plans? Use Propaganda. Political maneuverings do not rely on “facts” and you can always use Noble-wise to introduce “evidence” that another PC is a pedophile.
B] Did the players immediately start the game with “how can I fuck the Vaylen?” The GM scenes are there to introduce the bad guys and all their dastardly deeds - these give the players the ammunition to fuel their strategy. Unless maybe you started off in the Invasion phase, but otherwise, the players know nothing about the enemy - they are much better off introducing story elements that benefit the character directly, and waiting for the GM to inform them about the enemy.
Okay, anyways - I hope I addressed your problems directly, and I hope it helps.
Best post I’ve read all week! Thanks, Johnstone, for the straight answers. I’m sending my players here to read up.
p.
Advice like “don’t be a dick” and “collaborate to create a shared story space” or whatever is nice and all but not in a game where there’s a competitive element. It’s only a competition if everyone can agree to the ground rules. On both the intent and the task side, the slope is almost infinitely slippery.
I have to comment, because I can hear these very words coming out of my own mouth, talking about GW Epic!
My take on it is that there are competetive games where the mechanics are rigorous enough to support full-on, competetive play and still function correctly - games like Chess, Euchre, and so on. I’ve decided that this isn’t true for Epic, and I doubt it’s true for BE.
The thing is that the mechanics are meant to be evocative, rather than definitive. In this kind of game, the mechanics are constantly being evaluated from all kinds of perspectives, like whether the events they’re evoking are believable, realistic, entertaining - all subjective.
A good counter-example is Magic the Gathering, which is rigorously competetive. It’s evocative of a sorcerous duel with monstrous henchmen, but the mechanics never defer to notions like plausibility. Contrast this with a typical RPG, where you’re constantly deciding which mechanics to use, to fast foward to the interesting parts, etc. Basically, the mechanics alone are insufficient to accomplish the goals of the game. In fact, a huge portion of the game’s “state” (if that term works for you) isn’t quantified at all.
So, as a BE GM, I suspect you’ll be unsatisfied if you look for specific criteria for how you can use mechanics.
There’s a strict delineation between the competitive part of the game, and the part that’s a framing story for that competition. That delineation? The Infection mechanics. Don’t be a dick, period. I think we all know what that means. Do you blow smoke in your opponent’s face when you play chess? No? So don’t do it here.
Now. Collaborate and all that BEFORE and AFTER maneuver choice and infection rolls. That means after the first five minutes, and before the last five, you collaborate. But in those moments, you fight, same as chess. The rules that are designed to hold rigorous competition ARE tight enough to do so.
The rest of the time, I think Michael is exactly right. It’s a competitive story, but to make it a story you have to keep in touch and hang with each other on that.
Sorry, guys (Fuseboy, zabieru), but I have to disagree here.
Even though BE has a “competitive element”, it’s still NOT valid to compare it to chess or card games.
In chess, or Magic da G, you absolutely CAN sit down with somebody you hate, blow smoke at them, trash talk all through the game, spit in their coffe, etc. and still have a clear winner and loser. Enjoying the game is in NO WAY connected to a win/lose outcome. This is because the rules are (relatively) simple, and the conditions for winner are clear-cut and set in stone.
BE on the other hand, has the narrative element. You’re not just competing, you’re telling a story as well. In both situations, yes - winning or losing is not connected to how much fun you have, and yes, everybody who sits down to play agrees on the rules, and YES - doing everything you possibly can (including trash talking) to win can and will cut down the fun factor.
But it’s not enough to just agree to playing BE. Because it’s a story, it’s made of a string of conflicts, and every conflict - every time the dice are rolled - the stakes have to be agreed upon. In chess or cards, the rules encompass everything possible in the game, and nothing needs to be negotiated. In BE, the rules - all six and a half HUNDRED pages of them still can’t cover everything with definitive answers. The rules are going to be adapted by any given set of players, how they are used will be shaped by each group and evolve into a shared language. The key here is that the GM and the players use the same rules. Anything a player can do with his scenes, rolls and conflicts, the GM can do too. Anything the GM does can also be done by any of the players. Once you use a particular tactic and the group agrees it’s legal, it’s fair game for everybody. It’s flexible, in other words.
And you can’t constantly negotiate and re-negotiate that string of conflicts if you aren’t working together to tell a good story. In chess or cards, it’s enough to say “I won fair and square and you know it.” In BE, you gotta make the loser admit it. If he thinks you jerked around the rules to win (ie cheated), then your win means nothing (unless you got some sado-masocistic dysfunctional game goin’ on and that’s a different issue), cause the game’s over, and there won’t be another. If he says “damn, I totally wanted to win that, but DUDE that game was rockin! Maybe I’ll win next time” then you win for sure.
It’s not enough to just have the rules saying you won, you gotta have all the players saying you won.
Johnstone, I agree completely - I think I may have thrown you off with my convoluted post!
Agreed 100% with everything that’s been said here.
A big part of my posts all over this board is to suss out not only the intent of the rules-as-written but also to suss out how other people have interpreted them. I get there’s a layer of interpretation between how BE was written and how BE is being played. It’s also readily apparent through LC’s writing style that he works really, really hard at every turn to ensure the game is being played according to a certain style. In no other game have I had such a strong sense of the designer looking over my shoulder and saying, “No, that’s not right. You’re not using the rules as they were intended.”
So there is, in fact, a very high level of rigor in the rules – way more than, say, D&D3.5. That game is mathematically rigorous but there’s hardly any discussion of the “right” way to use those rules. In BE, there’s an entire philosophical agenda attached to its rules and concepts. At least to my ear as I hear the rules, there are certain best practices that make them work the best, and that’s what I’m looking for.
End of rumination.
p.
BE is collaboration through competition. There are very few purely competitive RPGs in the way chess is competitive. Arguably Capes is one and it is different to BE.
Competition and cooperation aren’t binary opposites, anyway: They’re more like opposite ends of a continuous spectrum, neither of which is often (if ever) encountered in a pure form.
Think of the Arab proverb, “me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the foreigner.” Or think of little kids, especially siblings: “I want that!” “No, it’s mine!” “I’ll take it!” “No, I’ll tell Mom!” “Okay, crybaby, what if I let you have my…” Or think of business, where one unit of Corporation A may sell products to Corporation B, which competes with a different unit of Corporation A; or where rival companies will jointly fund a lobbying campaign with Congress on an issue affecting the whole industry.
Even chess or professional football has a cooperative element: We’re both agreeing to play by a given set of rules and not, for example, determine the winner by who brings the most expensive equipment to play with (a favorite alternative among small boys and certain middle-aged men), or by one player shooting the other five times in the face. During the “total war” of World War II, the Nazis allowed American POWs’ families to send packages through the Red Cross and refrained from escalating to chemical weapons (against troops, that is: They were happy to use them against unarmed people stripped naked and locked in a gas chamber). And now, in Iraq, it’s widely reported that the US is negotiating with leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
In roleplaying, the synergy of competition and cooperation is always present. Even a purely “cooperative” game (say, pure freeform, with no written rules) tends to involve an element of “Hey, your idea was cool! But look at my idea – top that if you can!” Even as self-consciously competitive a game as Capes explicitly requires you to engage and amuse the other players in the conflicts you set up, or they won’t bother to compete with you to win those conflicts, and you won’t end up with any Story Tokens.
That Burning Empires combines competition and cooperation is nothing revolutionary. But BE’s a lot clearer about it than most games, where the writers seem to think “compete” is a dirty word. If we roleplayers have trouble seeing the synergy between competition and cooperation, it’s because of years of bad social and intellectual habits, not because the synergy isn’t there.
Sydney, I like how you made this point here. As for myself, a player/gm who has gone from traditional RPGs straight to BE (do not stop at Dogs or anything else), the ideas in this game are like fireworks in my head. It’s taken me some time to wrap my mind around them.
I like how BE opens up so many possibilities, but grounds it in mechanics.
Thanks. When you first come over from traditional “GM is God” games, it can be easy to think, “Oh, so there are no rules? Anyone can say anything about the game world they like?” And a lot of people reject new-style games on the basis that this can’t possibly work, and they’re right, it couldn’t – but they’re also wrong, because the new-style games do have rules and restrictions about who can say what, they’re just very different rules and restrictions.
Ron Edwards put together a very helpful post about this a while back:
Content authority - over what we’re calling back-story, e.g. whether Sam is a KGB mole, or which NPC is boinking whom
Plot authority - over crux-points in the knowledge base at the table - now is the time for a revelation! - typically, revealing content, although notice it can apply to player-characters’ material as well as GM material - and look out, because within this authority lies the remarkable pitfall of wanting (for instances) revelations and reactions to apply precisely to players as they do to characters
Situational authority - over who’s there, what’s going on - scene framing would be the most relevant and obvious technique-example, or phrases like “That’s when I show up!” from a player
Narrational authority - how it happens, what happens - I’m suggesting here that this is best understood as a feature of resolution (including the entirety of IIEE), and not to mistake it for describing what the castle looks like, for instance; I also suggest it’s far more shared in application than most role-players realize.
…
There is no overlap between those four types of authority. They are four distinct phenomena. …[and] any one of these authorities can be shared across the individuals playing without violating the other authorities.