Yes, I don’t think there are any examples in-genre of a demolition charge failing. Or of someone trying to take a surveillance photo and it turning out not to be good enough. Beyond the immediate physicality, people either have a skill or they don’t.
I can give an example of Climbing being more complex than “you have it or you don’t” – the intro sequence from The Living Daylights, where another agent isn’t good enough to survive having his rope cut, and JB is.
(The genre in my head is basically “the James Bond films up to about Die Another Day, because I haven’t seen any of the later ones”.)
I think there is a definite something to be said for your dictum that RPG adventures are a peculiar form of storytelling, and that they require narrative structures, genre conventions and so forth of their own, which may overlap but do not coincide with the forms and formulas that work in authored fiction.
Well, I’ll say that though Chekhov’s rule does have relevance to rpgs, it can’t be followed rigidly. An rpg works better with surplus foreshadowing, introduction of elements that are possible leads to storylines if the players react to them; and that seems to mean leave some guns over the hearth, unfired.
And for another thing, spectacle and cheesecake are a lot easier to use effectively in James Bond movies than James Bond 007 RPG adventures. Not seeing is disbelieving.
For that matter, in the actual 1960s casually going to Jamaica by jet plane, or travelling on the Orient Express from Istanbul, is spectacle, in a way it isn’t now even in the same medium. When Dalton!Bond goes to Bratislava it’s not exotic in the same way.
Having just finished a campaign of FATE (which we finally decided didn’t fit either my style of GMing or my player’s style of having fun) I can say that nowadays that many aspects is only likely at the end of a very long sequence of play and that number of Stunts would leave the character with One (1) Fate point a session as his default level.
This is the best generic Core FATE character sheet I can find. We actually used the Roll20 character sheet (and probably will go the same route with the RUNEQUEST game that’s replacing it) which looks like this (part of the sheet only shown).
Though I found myself too old and lazy to adopt FATE as a system it has a lot to recommend it as a tool for groups that do more shared creation than my lot seem happy to undertake. (At my time of life, ‘find yourself a new gaming group if you want to play this one’ seems like hard advice to undertake.) It can do both the narrative effects of a particular character’s backstory and (less well) the mechanical and simulationist strands of particular situations. It can certainly handle the sort of peculiar backgrounds that the Fields of Experience and Profession rules were intended for in JB007.
(Which reminds me that something like Professions are available in the new edition of UNKNOWN ARMIES and that takes my mind off into the more arcane areas that James Bondd only occasionally found himself inhabiting.)
But as I say I will not be returning to FATE any time soon. I didn’t click with it and I’m hoping that I can overcome my laziness to run a decent RUNEQUEST: GLORANTHA game for my Wednesday night group.
Speaking of character sheets, Agemegos’ “Remind the GM who you are” design strikes me as an interesting side line that I’m amazed didn’t occur to anyone sooner. When we met around a table my players would put up folded cards with things they felt I needed to know on them. Their character’s names, for one thing, and any special abilities they had that I really ought to be bearing in mind: Danger Sense, Luck, Common Sense, to speak only of GURPS. Unfortunately if I took my glasses off I often couldn’t see them any distance away and if I closed my eyes and went off on a moment of improvisational brilliance (as I am wont to do) I would only react with irritation if I had it pointed out to me that the whole event wouldn’t have worked because the Shaman can sense approaching spirits or the robot character is immune to all mind control.
Nowadays, this whole effort ought to be rendered unnecessary because as GM I have instant access to their character sheets during on-line play. But in practice I still ought to have “Martin’s Character Has Danger Sense” splurged across the top of the screen. And I really ought to invest in a second screen I can show character sheets on…
Back when I was first playing Runequest, the GM used what he called a “triptick” (from “trip ticket”): A sheet of paper filled out with character names, perception scores, and other information that would be relevant in tense situations. It seemed to be a help. If you set it on your desk next to the keyboard it should be accessible enough.
I like FUDGE, but I wouldn’t use FATE as a version of it; its mechanics doesn’t suit me as well as plain FUDGE. But I don’t think that’s an issue of shared creation, because it seems to me that most of my long established players were happy with shared creation. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to say that I want the narrative aspects of my games to emerge from the game and simulation aspects, rather than to exist as primaries.
Alternatively, if you have instant access to their character sheets, could you go over each character sheet and put the things you have to know in bold face, so that they’ll jump out at you when you scan each character sheet?
It’s a thing I’ve said in the podcast, but this isn’t the podcast section so I’ll say it here: some game mechanics push my viewpoint as a player from “I’m running a mental model of the way this person thinks” into “I am one of the collaborators on this shared work of fiction”. I find that distancing: I don’t want to step outside the character to think “what would be an amusing setback for him at this point”. FATE seems to have quite a bit of that; Hillfolk is as far as I can tell is all about it
(See my previous comments on RPG-native narrative forms: I don’t want to play through an episode of (favourite series) even if I really like that series.)
(Weirdly, I don’t get this effect when Genesys asks me to do the same sort of thing, which I think may account for why I like it.)
Strangely enough, I didn’t experience that distancing when I ran a Buffyverse campaign with Drama Points, or a Discworld campaign with FUDGE points. It seems as if I can cope with a little narrative causality in a setting where narrative causality is a native feature. But too much of it and the campaign doesn’t work for me.
Do you think this is because the narrative intervention comes out of the die roll rather than affecting the die roll?
I’m no FATE expert by any stretch but it seems like in FATE the effect is in calling on aspects but in Genesys the effect is baked into interpreting triumph, advantage, threat, and despair.
There are some GURPS traits (Intuition and Luck come to mind) which aren’t things the character is aware of using, at least in most models of how they work, but are things the player has to decide to use. Those don’t distance me, perhaps because they are quite small and immediate excursions from the character’s mind. I’ve played in games with some sort of hero point system and again they’re fairly immediate in their effects even if they aren’t something the PC is aware of (except in Torg where they explicitly are). Maybe it’s being asked to make big narrative decisions?
Perhaps – and perhaps again because it’s fairly small and immediate. Also I just admire that two-dimensional result scale, distinguishing (not perfectly) between “how well you did the thing” and “how well related things happened while you were doing it”.
It doesn’t slow play before the roll (activating traits), it doesn’t slow play by interrupting narrative flow (danger sense), it does not have to slow play after the roll (I can’t think of anything directly relevant, I’ll just bank some blue dice for what happens next).
That FATE character layout was meant not only for the GM, but also for the other players, who in FATE 3 can (in theory) invoke or compel each other’s Aspects. It was also meant to allow the GM and player to dicker over Fate Points and beg for self-compels without interrupting the flow of the narration by silently placing poker chips on or indicating spaces in the layout.
When I tried GMing FATE I also experimented with a layout on the middle of the table for setting and campaign Aspects, with spaces for scene an location Aspects to be written with erasable marker or on 3"×5" cards.
When I am GMing I have always — well, since 1987 — filled out a little table listing each player, their character’s name, in some campaigns occupation or rank, and a few data that I need either to guide NPCs’ behaviour or to perform secret checks against characters’ abilities. In ForeSight that was Age, Perception score, Empathy score, Appearance score, Scan PCS, and in some campaigns habitual dress. That was always the most important part of my reference notes, front and centre on the table in front of me while I was GMing.
That being Spirit of the Century the character started with ten Aspects and the refresh rate was equal to the number of Aspects with no deduction for Stunts.
It was often hard to come up with or remember ten Aspects for a character, and the large refresh rate meant that you hardly depended on Compels.
Ten aspects is a lot especially as FATE wants you to provide (ideally and if you can) a double edged sort of aspect, one that can give you setbacks as well as benefits.
On the other hand I never found writing ten or so traits for a HEROQUEST (now excitingly renamed QUESTWORLDS for goodness sake!) character. Perhaps because they can be shorter and simpler. Or maybe that was just the way I approached them.
And all this talk of ‘good practice’ reminds me that I have been very lazy and very improvisational in recent years. I need to brush up my basic GMing skills and not worry so much about the fancy stuff. The fancy stuff can come off the top of my head or out of my arse (as it so often does in the podcast): I need to re-emphasise preparation.
