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How to balance in- and out-of-universe dialogues?

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Wed, 2013-05-22 08:59

#1

CloudiDust CloudiDust's picture

CloudiDust's picture

How to balance in- and out-of-universe dialogues?

Greetings everyone! I came across Eclipse Phase recently on my quest for some solid cyberpunk setting, and got more than I asked for. Frankly, I have zero experience playing tabletop RPGs, and for various reasons I won't have the luxury of doing so in the foreseeable future, but the unlimited narrative potential of this genre fascinates me, and good narrative is something I value most in games, be them tabletop or digitalized. In my humble opinion, during a tabletop game session, all the dice-rolling and stat-tracking has little "direct" meaning in-universe, but they are an integral part of the game, without which the game would simply collapse. As a result, out-of-universe dialogues between players and GMs are inevitable, which when handled poorly can hurt immersion, or worse, turn the session into a long-lasting vocal math exam. On the other hand, if we exchange too much "explicit math" for "tasteful" in-universe narrative (like hiding too many enemy stats from players because "what in the mesh is a Moxie Point anyway?!"), the descriptions would be too "vague" and impede the players' abilities to derive workable strategies, turning intellectual challenges into prayers to the dreaded Random Number God. So where on the Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Brokenness should we be? Or, how should we balance in- and out-of-universe dialogues in EP? Please forgive me if this question sounds somewhat self-important from someone with zero experience. Here's the context: I am playing with the idea of creating a piece of Interactive Fiction (or "Text Adventure") based on EP, which won't be in English at first, and won't materialize anytime soon. (Facepalm!) Essentially the computer would be the GM, doing all the bookkeeping and outputting convincing narrative based on player actions. For a programmer like me, this is an interesting area to explore. In theory, IF can hide almost every bit of out-of-universe information behind the scenes, or flood the player with walls of calculated results in a matter of milliseconds. Thus it can be anywhere on the scale, and we have more freedom when choosing an approach to fix the fourth wall or break it further. A hard decision to make indeed. So would you please share your wisdom with me on this one? Thanks in advance!

Thu, 2013-05-23 08:07

#2

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

Baalbamoth's picture

whatever your smoking, I want some!

I guess I dont understand the question... its a little too out of my universe. 1) what are you trying to do? 2) what is the problem you percieve?

—

"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Thu, 2013-05-23 09:43

#3

CloudiDust CloudiDust's picture

CloudiDust's picture

I'm wondering how much

I'm wondering how much "detail" about the rules and calculations should a GM put into the dialogues? Say when some player encounters an enemy and passes Perception Test, does the GM say something like this: "You see the guy in the shadow, holding an automatic rifle in his hand. Though he failed to notice your team, you can tell that he's no easy target from the look of his eyes." Or this: "You see the guy in the shadow, holding an automatic rifle in his hand, who has SPD 2, DUR 40, Kinetic Weapons 70 and 2 Moxie Points. He failed to notice you." The part about this guy's stats is out-of-universe and somewhat hurts narrative, but may still be useful information for the player to work out his plan. So should the GM expose the details or not? If not always, then when? Thanks in advance.

Thu, 2013-05-23 10:23

#4

hhexo

hhexo's picture

My rule of thumb

My rule of thumb (which I'm not claiming to be correct or genius, it's just a suggestion) is that there are three types of information: 1) Information that a person could see/perceive anyway without actively looking, or that is common knowledge; 2) Information that a person could get if they looked hard enough or researched freely available sources of information; 3) Information that a person could know only if they're explicitly told. You should reveal the first tier immediately, ask for (or wait for the players to propose) skill rolls to reveal the second tier, and never reveal the third tier unless in special circumstances. Generally you should do this in narrative terms, but you can use actual stats if the player characters have a realistic way of estimating them with a very small error. In your example, I would say the three tiers of information are: 1) There's a lot of shadows here, anything could be hiding in there. 2) Perception roll: yes, there's definitely a guy in the shadows, he's there, he's got a rifle, he's quite bulky. Kinesics roll: he looks confident and competent, he's probably got a high score with his weapon; he's twitchy so maybe he can move fast. Interest(Morphs) roll, or something like that: his morph is quite tough, definitely tougher than a normal human. It's a high quality morph, well manufactured. Research roll: ok, his morph is manufactured by Eishundo Corp, it's tough, the specs online say it has 40 DUR. 3) The actual values of the ego stats, and the Moxie points. There's no way a PC can know those. In this example, Durability has been revealed because it can be estimated very efficiently from the available tech specs of biomorphs and synthmorphs: you can get your Muse to look up the manufacturer data on the mesh, the same way you as a 21st century person look up the specs for, say, a laptop on the internet. However, you wouldn't say "he has a Weapons skill of 70" if the players have never seen that person fire a shot. They can think he's competent from the way he behaves (so you can say "he's probably got a high score"), but even after he fires a few shots there's too much uncertainty to actually determine the value. Speed 2 is revealed when the combat starts: the players were probably expecting him to be fast at that point, but because the mechanic affects how the combat is played the numeric value becomes evident. This is a rather simplistic reply, but does this help?

Thu, 2013-05-23 10:35

#5

Ranxerox

Ranxerox's picture

Generally

Players are allowed to know everything about there characters stats and abilities but are given much less information about the NPCs and the environment. The actual amounts of information, however, vary from GM to GM and group to group. You aren't going to be able to keep your players immersed in the story at all times. The clunkiness of the rules, the need for players to sit and wait while other players make their actions, and the fact that you are all in reality sitting around a table and not actually having an adventure all conspire against immersion. However, while you can't always keep immersed, you should try to keep them engaged. Letting them have an occasional look behind the curtain can help keep them engaged. For instance, lots of players like to know what number their dice roll needs "to beat" before they roll. This might include letting them know some of the stats of the mooks they face, though I would never tell them their moxie and would only tell them skill levels after they had seen the mook use the skill at least a few times. With non-mooks be a lot more stingy with information and exsurgent threats tell them nothing at all about their stats and abilities. Since your players will have unconsciously become accustomed to knowing a little about their enemies suddenly having no information will give them a sense of menace, and help you get them immersed in the story when it really counts.

—

[img]http://i1111.photobucket.com/albums/h469/Jefferson_Watson/IU.jpg[/img] [img]http://i1111.photobucket.com/albums/h469/Jefferson_Watson/TC.jpg[/img] [img]http://i1111.photobucket.com/albums/h469/Jefferson_Watson/AU.jpg[/img]

Thu, 2013-05-23 11:20

#6

CloudiDust CloudiDust's picture

CloudiDust's picture

hhexo wrote:My rule of thumb

hhexo wrote:
My rule of thumb (which I'm not claiming to be correct or genius, it's just a suggestion) is that there are three types of information: 1) Information that a person could see/perceive anyway without actively looking, or that is common knowledge; 2) Information that a person could get if they looked hard enough or researched freely available sources of information; 3) Information that a person could know only if they're explicitly told. You should reveal the first tier immediately, ask for (or wait for the players to propose) skill rolls to reveal the second tier, and never reveal the third tier unless in special circumstances. Generally you should do this in narrative terms, but you can use actual stats if the player characters have a realistic way of estimating them with a very small error. In your example, I would say the three tiers of information are: 1) There's a lot of shadows here, anything could be hiding in there. 2) Perception roll: yes, there's definitely a guy in the shadows, he's there, he's got a rifle, he's quite bulky. Kinesics roll: he looks confident and competent, he's probably got a high score with his weapon; he's twitchy so maybe he can move fast. Interest(Morphs) roll, or something like that: his morph is quite tough, definitely tougher than a normal human. It's a high quality morph, well manufactured. Research roll: ok, his morph is manufactured by Eishundo Corp, it's tough, the specs online say it has 40 DUR. 3) The actual values of the ego stats, and the Moxie points. There's no way a PC can know those. In this example, Durability has been revealed because it can be estimated very efficiently from the available tech specs of biomorphs and synthmorphs: you can get your Muse to look up the manufacturer data on the mesh, the same way you as a 21st century person look up the specs for, say, a laptop on the internet. However, you wouldn't say "he has a Weapons skill of 70" if the players have never seen that person fire a shot. They can think he's competent from the way he behaves (so you can say "he's probably got a high score"), but even after he fires a few shots there's too much uncertainty to actually determine the value. Speed 2 is revealed when the combat starts: the players were probably expecting him to be fast at that point, but because the mechanic affects how the combat is played the numeric value becomes evident. This is a rather simplistic reply, but does this help?

Thanks for the reply! It is quite detailed and of much help. So basically, GMs should maintain convincing narrative whenever possible but "leak" reasonable explicit stats when the players are looking really hard, or when it must be done. (Like when calling for a test, the target numbers will be exposed.) Not leaking much explicit information means that players have to place much trust in GMs and GMs must live up to that. "The specs online say ..." Oh, I now get the idea that we can establish an convension which assigns in-universe meanings to the stats, so DUR can mean "Standard Durability Index" or something. Is this "cheating"? ;)

Thu, 2013-05-23 11:33

#7

CloudiDust CloudiDust's picture

CloudiDust's picture

Ranxerox wrote:Players are

Ranxerox wrote:
Players are allowed to know everything about there characters stats and abilities but are given much less information about the NPCs and the environment. The actual amounts of information, however, vary from GM to GM and group to group. You aren't going to be able to keep your players immersed in the story at all times. The clunkiness of the rules, the need for players to sit and wait while other players make their actions, and the fact that you are all in reality sitting around a table and not actually having an adventure all conspire against immersion. However, while you can't always keep immersed, you should try to keep them engaged. Letting them have an occasional look behind the curtain can help keep them engaged. For instance, lots of players like to know what number their dice roll needs "to beat" before they roll. This might include letting them know some of the stats of the mooks they face, though I would never tell them their moxie and would only tell them skill levels after they had seen the mook use the skill at least a few times. With non-mooks be a lot more stingy with information and exsurgent threats tell them nothing at all about their stats and abilities. Since your players will have unconsciously become accustomed to knowing a little about their enemies suddenly having no information will give them a sense of menace, and help you get them immersed in the story when it really counts.

Thanks for the insight! If I try too hard to maintain "immersion" I would be forgetting the fact that we are playing a game, not reading a book (or just rolling dices randomly) after all. And "fun" is all that counts, not any other metric.