RPGaDay 23&24

 


23. Fortune

Chance, randomness, the whims of things outside our control. One of the key elements in many TTRPGs is the way it brings random fortune into the game. There was a lot of talk about "fortune at the end" or "fortune in the middle" back at The Forge, I even remember some folks proposing an idea of "fortune at the beginning", but what does this all mean. Like a lot of my posts, I'm going to paraphrase based on memory as I describe this, and probably modify the original intentions to mesh with my current thoughts about game sessions. 

"Fortune at the end" reflects a system where players state their intentions for the upcoming events, perhaps focusing on their characters actions or some other element of the narrative, then they declare everything that will modify the potential outcome in some way. Beneficial factors, problematic ones, positive outcomes, negative results, then the cards are drawn, dice are rolled, tea-leaves are read, or some other random-oracle system applied. Once the randomiser is determined, the effects are filtered back into the story. Nothing else can be changed, and it tends to favour more gritty games...what is, is.

"Fortune in the middle" allows characters to set up the scene and provide some of the modifiers and contextualisers for the events unfolding, then the randomiser is applied, and finally the outcome may be modified with some other mechanism of play... perhaps fate/karma points, perhaps some other technique that enhances character agency in the story. This style tends to favour more heroic games.

"Fortune at the beginning" would be a situational system where the randomness comes first, then the players use the tools at their disposal to shape that randomness to their intended agenda. If anyone reading this has an example of a game that does this, I'd love to find out about it.

Regardless, the "fortune" in each of these examples is a direct way that the system impacts on the session rather than the players or the GM/Narrator. This is where game design is an art, different methods of influencing a session through the rules can result in vastly different play experiences.

24. Distance

Immersion. Bleed. Identity. Different players will have different psychological arm's length from the characters they portray. Some players like to minimise the distance as much as possible, to feel what their players might feel and make decisions purely based on the internal though patterns of the avatar they are portraying in the liminal space of the game session. Some players take a more distant perspective of their characters, manipulating them like a director might manipulate an actor portraying a character, or moving them within the story like a piece in a giant game. A lot of this distancing has been theorised in the idea of "stances", but that really simplifies the idea and most players actually drift between distances (perhaps getting closer in social scenes, while treating the exercise more strategically and distant when violent conflict emerges).

As long as everyone is accepting of how one another is interacting with the session, there's no "right" or "wrong" distance for players to direct their characters from.  

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