As you may have gleaned from posts I’ve made on various forums of late, I’m writing the kewl powerz for Demon: The Spearmint. I’m also co-developing, but that’s neither here nor there for purposes of this entry.
What I want to talk about here is “Storyteller discretion,” in a very specific context: that of supernatural powers.
In cWoD, there were a lot of powers that relied heavily on Storyteller discretion. Hell, Mage: The Ascension was pretty much a whole game that relied on it. The rules gave you some guidelines on what you could do with various dots and spells and so on, but what that actually meant in terms of game play – and game mechanics – was very often left vague and up to the Storyteller.
Now, I think that was a good thing, at the time. Coming to gaming from D&D (or, as I did, Marvel Superheroes, also from TSR), the systems were pretty tight, insofar as everything had one. If something had a game effect, it was pretty well-defined. It was additional damage, a column shift (that’s a Marvel thing), a sneak attack, and so on, but these all meant something in terms of numbers. Not much “up to Storyteller’s discretion.”
One of the things we tried to do with NWoD, and something I enjoy about games like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (Margaret Weiss Productions), is that there’s a lack of leaving things up to the GM. Sure, putting game effects into narrative terms is often the GM’s responsibility (though in fairness, MHR advises you to make the players do it, which I think is great advice), but the number-crunching is pretty straightforward. In NWoD, everything really cooks down to adding or subtracting dice, since target numbers don’t really change (though I’m hearing rumors about Mummy…). As such, instances of “the Storyteller defines this” have become much rarer.
Looking back at Demon: The Fallen, the powers (Lores) were almost entirely in the hands of the Storyteller. What the powers were supposed to do was defined in narrative terms, but not really in mechanical terms. That made DtF something of a bugbear to run; I ran a year-long Demon game (it was actually the last time I’ve run a cWoD game, to date), and it asked a lot of the Storyteller. You could, of course, always fall back, as cWoD games so often did, on “the rules don’t matter, do what’s fun,” but I don’t like that style of game writing anymore. It feels lazy. Plus, nWoD works, so why not use the system (especially given the revisions you’ll see in the God-Machine Chronicle).
So for Demon: The Cherimoya, as I’m writing the powers, I find myself occasionally saying “up to Storyteller’s discretion.” But that’s not because the game mechanics are ill-defined, at least I hope not. It’s because the powers in question are flexible enough that the Storyteller needs to exercise some discretion, and decide what exactly the character is capable of doing, where the limits are, and above all, whether the use of the power attracts any attention. (Attracting attention is a big thing in Demon: The Picabo. Not human attention, so much. Humans are OK, as long as you don’t overdo it.)
I’m going to get more into the open development thing with Demon: The Judybats than I have with other books I’ve done, mostly because I have access to this blog and a lunch break. Along the way, maybe you get to see the kewl powerz evolve and see links to playtests and so on. I don’t want to post too much, though, because you don’t want to buy the book and discover you’ve seen it all already, yeah?
So I’ll use my discretion.
Comments
14 responses to “Storyteller’s Discretion”
I am a very big fan of Storytellers having such a strong creative influence over the games they run so I applaud the direction you are taking with Demon: The Boogaloo.
I like giving Storytellers some creative control, but I also think that WoD is not the kind of game that works purely on narrative. It’s actually pretty crunchy, so I try to be sparing with powers that don’t have a game mechanic other than “what the ST says.”
Hopefully I can post an example soon and put some of this in context.
As a Storyteller I have things to do. The reason I’ve never run Ascension is because it put a huge amount of work on me to try and create guidelines for the players when it came to magical effects. I love Awakening because I have great guides already in place for the effects and many examples for ease players in.
If Demon: The Rubber Chicken can replicate the kind of guidelines I got in Awakening with it’s mechanics while giving me and my players freedom to make up more effects for the powers, I’ll be very happy.
Having too much up to the storyteller can be a bad thing. I mean, it can be a very good thing, too. I’m sure we’re all clear on the positive aspects. But one of the major negative ones is that there is a tendency for the ST to slowly get more and more defensive in applying his discretion. This is a normal side effect of having a player run with a mechanical and/or narrative bomb. He’s gonna drop it once or twice. He might get really invested in his character’s conflicts and start figuring out how to solve them. So he’ll figure out Correspondence might teleport sunlight from the other side of the globe straight into a vampire lair. Or maybe Matter might make a block of concrete turn into plutonium and detonate. So there’s a tendency to start putting up your guard every time your discretion as an ST comes up. Because you have a duty towards other players but also towards the story itself.
So clear rules that don’t rely on any kind of discretion are a good thing. The social contract remains clear and no one has to carry a terrible burden of being the final arbitrator of fun. And besides, the reason RPGs are games and not collaborative stories is because of the rules. There’s a whole rant about how avoiding rules in RPGs lessens the experience but I’ll skip it.
And besides, while we’re on the subject of discretion – why not player’s discretion? Why always ST’s? Because players can get too emotionally invested in their characters, that’s why. But STs can get invested too. And one does not always realize he is abusing a privilege when the root cause is a deeply emotional one.
Sorry to hear that you didn’t enjoy Awakening. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. 🙂
While I agree with almost all of what you’re saying, I don’t think I’d describe leaving things up to the storyteller as “lazy”. If you’re writing for a game that does that, or the parts of a game that do that, there are two possibilities. First, you’re writing for experienced storytellers. In that case, you need to provide something that won’t strike them as obvious, and that will enhance their game. That’s hard work, because they’ve had a lot of practice at doing this. Second, you might be writing for novice storytellers. That’s possibly even harder, because you need to provide lots of guidance on how they should use their discretion, without taking that discretion away.
It’s certainly easy to be lazy while leaving things up to storyteller discretion, but that just means that you’re writing bad material. You can also be lazy while writing mechanics, and produce broken mechanics.
I’m in favour of mechanics providing a solid framework, so I like the nWoD approach. FWIW, while I really liked MtAs, I prefer MtAw. It takes all sorts.
So, you just described one of the core reasons I tend to prefer cWoD over NWoD, but a bias pointed in the opposite direction and had a different final summation.
To each their own, and both core systems have merits I’ve found.
If you’re going to have defined effects and mechanics and then have some wiggle room for interpretation are the powers going to be presented as Mage Arcana? Vampire Disciplines? Geist Manifestations? Something entirely new?
Well, my problem is that the powers are still being written (like, literally, I was just working on them), and so I don’t want to say too much because there’s so much potential for change. Let’s say, for the time being that demon [powers] bear more resemblance to Werewolf Gifts than to Mage Arcana.
One of the things I loved about Mage: The Ascension was the pure flexibility any mage brought to the table.
One of the reasons I love Mage: the Awakening is that it put a framework around the flexibility, gave some examples, and allowed Storyteller’s Discretion to handle the gaps.
I will play either, any day. I run Awakening, because that framework gives the rules lawyer in me to occupy itself while my creative gets its game on.
It makes me very happy you’re willing to leave some appropriate dark spaces even while working with the tighter rules system.
Will demons have any ability to nerf other supernatural’s powers, like “Sour Grapes” from Inferno?
I haven’t written any. Actually, the one power I did write that has a chilling effect on supernatural powers pretty specifically only works on angels and other demons (it has a slight effect pn other magic, if you get an exceptional success, but still not a total shutoff).
It just wouldn’t be Mummy if it didn’t crap all over what makes the rest of the World of Darkness good. In the old World, that was the setting. In the new World, it’s sthe rules.
And, by Jove, Mummy is still Mummy.
Cheers to this. I do appreciate a lot of the system fixes between Ascension and Awakening. But Ascension had perhaps one of the best meta-plots in the oWoD setting. The whole Atlantis / Dragons / Towers thing was such a huge shift from Traditions v Technocracy that it was incredibly hard to swallow. I know quite a few people that just scalped the mechanics out of Awakening and slapped them into the Ascension meta-plot.