Golden Sky Stories: letting go of immersion · 10:09am Jun 15th, 2019
I GMed another RPG session a few weeks ago. Once again, no anecdotes (for privacy) but I had some thoughts on theory.
The game's called Golden Sky Stories, and it involves NO dice rolling...
It's like a spiritual successor to Witch Quest, which I ran last time. It's a game about henge, magical animals that can take human form, who live around a rural town and help people (and gods and spirits) with their mundane problems. It's not about epic conflicts, and violence is impossible. It can almsot feel like you're not really a main character who has their own arc, but a supporter who appears at the right time and place to offer a little help.
a slice of life for furry weeb loli fans
I mentioned already that this is a game without dice or any kind of randomness. To put it simply, during each scene of a session you're given an allowance of points (Wonder and Feelings) based on your social links, and those can be spent to use magical powers or alter your attribute scores. It's a little weird, because the player is outright asked if they want to succeed or fail at something.
The points accumulate, which serves an interesting social balance. Active players can constantly do stuff and take the spotlight, but shy players (or someone roleplaying as a shy or aloof character) will build up points and can spend them all at once for an expensive ability, creating one huge moment where they shine. It's kind of adorable.
Why create a game with no randomness? I should note here that this game is designed by Ryo Kamiya, the creator of Maid RPG -- a wacky, chaotic game where everything is based on the whims of the dice. 
Going back to Witch Quest, there's a dichotomy there in which Witch spells depend on random chance to succeed, yet can do anything you imagine. Cat spells are limited to a pre-written list (and most of them don't even appear useful, just silly), but they have no chance of failure because they cost points. Witches are encouraged to use magic as much as possible to solve problems, because there's little at stake. Cats are comic relief who have to ration how much they want to derail the plot.
The translator of both these games had an observation from his experience, where some Dungeons & Dragons-type games tried to replace randomness with a limited resource system. Players in those games tended to not have fun, because they were incentivized to hoard instead of spend. They're epic action games where your character's life is on the line. In D&D, you generally roll dice as much as possible, because doing something is better than doing nothing.... and no matter how bad the odds are, you could always roll a natural 20. With a basic grasp of probability and tactics, you can to roll when it's to your advantage, or change your surroundings to get a bonus.
The games do have limited resources, such as magic spells and scrolls, but those tend to be quite powerful. They're trump cards so you can avoid a terrible dice roll, therefore you want to keep them for when they'll save your life. You see the same basic strategy in Roguelikes as well. The invincible dragon powers in Dragon Quarter which irreversibly consumes your humanity. (For a rather bad example, I played Gloomhaven once, which combines limited resources with random modifiers for every action. I felt completely miserable every time I whiffed an attack.)
So the translator noticed while testing and demoing Golden Sky Stories that the game somehow worked despite limited resources and no randomness. You don't strictly need abilities and powers to solve a friendship problem, but they can still spice things up. The important thing was to get involved and learn something, because friendship isn't about "winning" or "losing" in the traditional sense. And most importantly, it's okay to allow players to choose pass or fail on an action, because survival is never an issue here. Maybe you'd want to fail just to make the story more interesting or funny (it's the only game I've seen where you can spend points to lower your skills if you want to fail).
It takes an interesting adjustment to get used to that last part. Don't do what's best for your character, do what's best for the story...? Most RPGs don't ask for that.
There's a lot of RPG advice drifting around on the internet. Even when I know much of it is humorous or satirical, I can't help but receive this ugly stereotype of RPers as angry sociopaths. I blame the advice. Anyway, much like WRITING ADVICE (yeah I'm going there), almost all of it is trivial and useless.
The following links, actually felt so insightful and practical:
- 11 Ways To Be A Better Roleplayer
- Six Questions That Will Help You Make A Better Character
- Stanislavski Vs Brecht In Tabletop Roleplaying
The author takes an interesting approach to these tips, focusing on capturing your character's agency and showing the character through action instead of backstory (good writing tips too -- all good advice is applicable to writing). The first two articles, you don't need to read the comments. But the third article, I would recommend reading through all the comments. It proposes an interesting mindset, and it's funny how many people reply to it saying they had the same problems in their game groups, but couldn't identify what it was until now.
Stanislavski vs Brecht reminds me a lot of the Hot & Cold Media topic I brought up a while back, and it fits almost too well. The former is about total character immersion, sitting back and letting the GM provide the world which you let the character naturally react to. The latter is coolness, it's up to each of you to make an effort and connect the events of the game and figure out what's happening, connect the players so everyone's having fun, and requires thinking holistically. Immersion is amazing when it works, but like the article argues, it can lead to situations where no one has the power to fix problems when they come up... unless the solution is to kick out incompatible friends and replace them. (It's like Libertarianism applied to games, amirite?)
(Observation: immersive acting/roleplaying is also like what they call "pantsing" in writing, where you get in the heads of the characters and let them act naturally. That too can sometimes lead to problems where the characters would rather avoid conflict, play it safe, and not provide an interesting story.)
The article writer was influenced by techniques of Improv Acting, as opposed to Script Acting, and it reminds me of a loose "RPG" called The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It's basically an improvised tall-tale storytelling game, yet it provides a few simple game rules to regulate player interaction. Everyone has some coins, and during another player's story you can give them a coin to "correct" their story to something you prefer. That player has to accomodate that change, UNLESS they return the coin along with one of their own, then they can keep the original version. So unlike Improv Theater (since you don't have an audience, just the other players), you are allowed to be stubborn and insist, "no, trust me, I'm going somewhere good with this." Regulating these choices with limited coins makes it fair: accepting others' suggestions means you have more coins to interrupt them later, and those who stick to their own vision get fewer chances to interfere.
Meta-game to improve the story and connect the characters. You (usually) don't have an audience, but you do have a responsibility to help the other players find the fun. I find the viewpoint fascinating, because it's exactly what Golden Sky Stories aims for. When the stakes are very low, it's okay to detach from your character and improve the holistic experience for all involved. In other words, you're playing almost like a GM does.
Here's another game I bought, but haven't actually played yet. It's another Japanese RPG called Ryuutama (Dragon's Egg). It's about the non-heroic people in a fantasy world -- farmers, nobles, merchants -- going on an epic journey together. It's sometimes described as "Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail"
I've heard of a few games where everyone's a player and there's no GM. And maybe a few where everyone's GM, and nobody's playing a role. Ryuutama takes the traditional player/GM arrangement, and then blurs the lines between the two. Atsuhiro Okada, the designer, works as a GM as his day job (weird story), and his main inspiration for this game was to introduce more players to how fun GMing can be.
In Ryuutama, the GM gets their own character, a Ryuujin (dragon-being) who secretly follows the travelers and records their stories. They rarely get involved, but can serve as a deus ex machina. Their powers do meta-gaming things that most GMs end up doing anyway, such as rewinding an accidental death, adjusting battles to be easier/harder, etc. Like Baron Munchausen it's regulated by a limited resource, and unlike D&D the players know exactly when it's happening. The Ryuujin is not a mary-sue, nor a chessmaster adversary, but a presence who only interferes to make the story more interesting. They gain EXP and levels, growing in power just like player characters.
For the players' side, it took me a long time to grasp what the rulebook wanted them to do. The game flow seemed to be a long string of dice rolls as they travel on the road, with not much input from the characters. So it's just Oregon Trail, with no roleplaying? Not quite. The idea is to use the dice rolls as context for reacting, and the players have a much greater say in what the rolls mean. It's not always immersive roleplaying, where the GM engages your senses. It can be something like "you failed the navigation check today. roleplay how and why that happened." As an example, battle scenes have environmental objects lying around (like a fruit stand, fountain, etc.) and using one gives a bonus to your attack roll, IF you explain how and why that fruit stand helped. There's no wrong answer, as long as you try! Is this making sense?
On a more meta level, the world-building itself is shared between both the GM and players. The GM can declare certain things they need for the plot, such as the population of a large city, but everyone gets a turn filling in that city with whatever they think of. Even a regular stop along the journey means visiting locations that everyone finds interesting, because they all helped create it.
(Reminds me of the fun parts of playing Legacy board games like Seafall, where giving names and identities to the world and characters was much more fun than the actual gameplay, which was extremely tedious)
I honestly picked out games like these because they were different, and I was too intimidated to run a traditional RPG because my GM screw-ups would be more obvious, but I could probably hide them if everyone's distracted by an unusual game system! But I really do like these non-violent approaches to RPGs, and they've really changed some ways I look at both storytelling and gameplay.
I'm still scared of GMing, but also kind of addicted and want to try it again.
I kinda wanted to modify Ryuutama into a MLP-themed setting, because the game is flexible enough with theme and setting that it could easily work. Probably won't get a chance to run that anytime soon, though.
One of the supplement books for Golden Sky Stories allows ponies as henge characters, and yes it's specifically designed for MLP fans.
Ooh. I might need to check this out. Thanks for writing about it!
I've been thinking a lot the past couple weeks about potential systems for a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure RPG--the premiere interesting feature so far has been players having multiple characters and taking different sides in different conflicts. (I'm not sure if you're familiar with JoJo's, but) In the manga/anime, battles are usually limited to 1-on-1's or maybe 2-on-2's, which begs the question of what all the players are supposed to be DOING while these small battles are going on. The interesting answer, to me, seems to be letting players play against each other (as opposed to having the DM run the 'enemy' characters) and have the way the story moves forward be dictated by which characters win in each conflict.
5074570
Hope you enjoy it!
5075127
That reminds me of an old internet RPG a friend was invovled in, where fights between characters were tongue-in-cheek pro wrestling matches. It was all about being entertaining and theatrical, rather than adversarial. I wonder if those are still around.