It’s easy to think that when a character succeeds—whether it be an action from a successful die roll, discovering a great treasure, mission, or quest, or winning the heart of the prince—the player succeeds. In other words, it’s easy to think they are the same thing.
May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023Liked by Monte Cook
The joy and Despair system in Invisible Sun was the best attempt I’ve seen to mechanically incentivize players to allow their characters to fail and still see that it’s a“Win” for them. It’s great to have a player roll flux, have everything go to Red in a hand basket and hear the player squeal with excitement that they are ‘finally getting a despair” and can advance their character in some way the want. It subverts them and once they try it and see the fun complications they start engineering success and failure in service of the narrative.
If you want players to act suboptimally, which can be enjoyable, you should have a system like mutants and masterminds or fate that gives meta-currency for doing so. That stops the other players from getting mad someone is acting "wrong".
"Player-first", as you refer to it, is often illustrated using an example you did: social interactions. It does help illuminate the disparity between an in-game character being good at something and a player being good at something. But this is really a very poor example.
Another example you use of the monster being too hard to kill with the plasma rifle, so the player is encouraged to come up with some other solution. But that is still an in-game solution. We're not expecting the player to actually open an airlock or actually hide in the shadows in the room we're playing .... we're expecting them to narrate the intent of the character.
And for me, this is what player-first is really about: figuring out how to utilize the in-game actions, interactions, and responses of the character, using the character's abilities. The "but what about social interactions?" example is a strawman that is birthed from the RAW design ideology in order to justify greater reliance on mechanics.
In the social interaction example, if the player notes that the person they are negotiating with is someone they've collected information on, that their character has a very good idea of their vulnerable point, and simply narrates that "<character name> is going to use the information they have about <...> along with the diary of theirs we stole last week to push him into a corner ..." then that ought to, again, create success on behalf of the character.
It does not matter if the player is shy or ill-spoken, if they understand the game environment and play will enough skill, their in-game inventions can, and imho *should*, influence or even override the character's base mechanics.
At the same time, if a well-spoken and charismatic player is playing a character who is not and they try the negotiation, their character's inability to succeed should remain. That player can not apply their own charisma to the character any more than they can apply their own physical strength to the character's strenuous actions.
The most intriguing and engaging games I've played have used mechanics as a baseline definition of possibilities and allowed the people playing to.. well... *play* and have our ability to do so influence the game.
This makes it no different than board games or video games where we are limited by the game pieces in play, but our skill in moving those pieces about and utilizing them efficiently changes our success rate.
To take another of your examples, if I'm running a character good at acrobatics and climbing and am faced with an obstacle where those mechanics would be applicable, maybe I've noticed that there are purchase points at the top of the wall and I'd like to throw that grappling hook my character's been lugging around since the beginning of the game or I ask about the surface, maybe the referee even reflects that question back to me as the player and I answer: "smooth and glassy", and as we determine that the surface is indeed suitable for my suction-cup-climbing-gear I have my character don those tools. This is player-first in that it allows the player to interact with the game world in a way that modifies or even overrides the base mechanics.
And this is the real problem with "character-first" (aka RAW): it eliminates huge amounts of player agency. It doesn't matter if I have a clever idea to dispatch the enemy, if my character sheet doesn't provide a mechanic for that, it doesn't work. And how frustrating is that? The whole "it doesn’t matter what Theresa or Tom actually say in the negotiation" is a distraction from the real issue that, yeah, if the players are clever enough to have their character stuff their ears with wax they shouldn't be charmed by magic songs the sirens are singing ... even if that's what the rules seem to imply.
It's not a choice per se, but I think in the case of a long-term game (campaign style), I would usually prioritize a character-heavy approach, while in more one-shot or short-term games I would use a player-heavy approach.
This allows for characters to pick up skills and become known as "the strong character" or whatever, while making it feel natural.
For stuff like opening doors where there's a chance to fail a roll I usually just handwave it since d20 can be swingy (D&D has low modifiers compared to die variance, PF2e does better in this regard).
The joy and Despair system in Invisible Sun was the best attempt I’ve seen to mechanically incentivize players to allow their characters to fail and still see that it’s a“Win” for them. It’s great to have a player roll flux, have everything go to Red in a hand basket and hear the player squeal with excitement that they are ‘finally getting a despair” and can advance their character in some way the want. It subverts them and once they try it and see the fun complications they start engineering success and failure in service of the narrative.
If you want players to act suboptimally, which can be enjoyable, you should have a system like mutants and masterminds or fate that gives meta-currency for doing so. That stops the other players from getting mad someone is acting "wrong".
"Player-first", as you refer to it, is often illustrated using an example you did: social interactions. It does help illuminate the disparity between an in-game character being good at something and a player being good at something. But this is really a very poor example.
Another example you use of the monster being too hard to kill with the plasma rifle, so the player is encouraged to come up with some other solution. But that is still an in-game solution. We're not expecting the player to actually open an airlock or actually hide in the shadows in the room we're playing .... we're expecting them to narrate the intent of the character.
And for me, this is what player-first is really about: figuring out how to utilize the in-game actions, interactions, and responses of the character, using the character's abilities. The "but what about social interactions?" example is a strawman that is birthed from the RAW design ideology in order to justify greater reliance on mechanics.
In the social interaction example, if the player notes that the person they are negotiating with is someone they've collected information on, that their character has a very good idea of their vulnerable point, and simply narrates that "<character name> is going to use the information they have about <...> along with the diary of theirs we stole last week to push him into a corner ..." then that ought to, again, create success on behalf of the character.
It does not matter if the player is shy or ill-spoken, if they understand the game environment and play will enough skill, their in-game inventions can, and imho *should*, influence or even override the character's base mechanics.
At the same time, if a well-spoken and charismatic player is playing a character who is not and they try the negotiation, their character's inability to succeed should remain. That player can not apply their own charisma to the character any more than they can apply their own physical strength to the character's strenuous actions.
The most intriguing and engaging games I've played have used mechanics as a baseline definition of possibilities and allowed the people playing to.. well... *play* and have our ability to do so influence the game.
This makes it no different than board games or video games where we are limited by the game pieces in play, but our skill in moving those pieces about and utilizing them efficiently changes our success rate.
To take another of your examples, if I'm running a character good at acrobatics and climbing and am faced with an obstacle where those mechanics would be applicable, maybe I've noticed that there are purchase points at the top of the wall and I'd like to throw that grappling hook my character's been lugging around since the beginning of the game or I ask about the surface, maybe the referee even reflects that question back to me as the player and I answer: "smooth and glassy", and as we determine that the surface is indeed suitable for my suction-cup-climbing-gear I have my character don those tools. This is player-first in that it allows the player to interact with the game world in a way that modifies or even overrides the base mechanics.
And this is the real problem with "character-first" (aka RAW): it eliminates huge amounts of player agency. It doesn't matter if I have a clever idea to dispatch the enemy, if my character sheet doesn't provide a mechanic for that, it doesn't work. And how frustrating is that? The whole "it doesn’t matter what Theresa or Tom actually say in the negotiation" is a distraction from the real issue that, yeah, if the players are clever enough to have their character stuff their ears with wax they shouldn't be charmed by magic songs the sirens are singing ... even if that's what the rules seem to imply.
It's not a choice per se, but I think in the case of a long-term game (campaign style), I would usually prioritize a character-heavy approach, while in more one-shot or short-term games I would use a player-heavy approach.
This allows for characters to pick up skills and become known as "the strong character" or whatever, while making it feel natural.
For stuff like opening doors where there's a chance to fail a roll I usually just handwave it since d20 can be swingy (D&D has low modifiers compared to die variance, PF2e does better in this regard).