But if planning is going to be a more common occurrence, then yes, having mechanical support for it is better than not.
Not necessarily. Thats why I pointed to the issue of mechanizing what humans are good at doing. You don't need fantastical traits to do something like planning a heist, even in a fantastical context.
This is why I've said in other discussions that things like Social Combat are complete dead ends as mechanics. You don't need rules to
talk.
Human beings are much better at hindsight ("we need to deal with this problem we now know about") than foresight ("we need to come up with all potential risks, assign chance of happening and cost of failure, and work out mitigation plans if it's worth it"). I've done the latter professionally. And the former.
Except human beings in heist fiction don't rely on hindsight in their adventures.
Thats a very important distinction to keep in mind when we are talking about gamifying some sort of activity. As Clearstream likes to bring up, you can have a mismatched ludonarrative.
And to be perfectly clear, that mismatch sticks out like a sore thumb if one is familiar with the fiction being emulated at a structural and procedural level.
I know you meant this the other way, but a flashback mechanic has such session time efficiency results, meaning you can pack more into the same amount of wall clock time, that a "given enough tools" basically requires it for a Heist-moderate game to be "enough tools".
Sure, if time efficiency is absolutely critical I can buy that for a dollar.
But at the same time, when I'm talking about tools I'm not referring to overly complex Planning procedures that have to be followed in X way every single time.
I'm referring to having your basic "controls", to simplify, having the right cross section of depth and simplicity that people have the freedom to act in the way they want to accomplish whatever task they set themselves.
If one takes to rulings over rules, you can typically get there with just Ability scores if you want to go super minimalist.
I think, though, not just for ensuring fidelity in Planning, but fidelity in
all supposed activities Players could get interested in doing, that more is worthwhile. Not to shoehorn my game into the convo, but look at this list of Skills:
32 split up into pairs of 4 under 8 of the 9 Attributes in the game.
While on first glance one might jump to the conclusion that its bloat, that's not the case; they're all there for a reason, as there's a core set of experiences I wanted to foster in the game, and this is what I've pared down to the most essential to deliver the fidelity I want for those experiences. (And they pull double duty as they govern progression and a number of other things)
I have, by no means, critically examined heists in particular in fostering this list, but from what I know of heist fiction (at least in a medeival context anyhow; obviously we're not talking high tech stuff here), I can't think of anything that somebody couldn't explore doing to support a heist that isn't present.
And when we take this, and consider both my take on 1d20+x
and a decent resolution Degree of Success system (-10,-5,0,+5,+10)? There's a lot of ways to make any bonkers plan work just on the power of skills alone.
When we take that and put it into a more concrete gameworld that isn't entirely made up on the fly? And then we start talking about Classes and Professions and all that?
Yeah, you can get there.
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And as a caveat, yes, even with improv standing behind much of that (ie rulings), we obviously are talking about a game you can't knock out in an hour. But thats not unintentional. Time efficiency isn't really a given as a need, even if its easy to find an anecdote that says its a want for one reason or another.
Deep committal isn't just for teenagers.
No more than hit points. In real life, someone hit by a giant's axe isn't springing around and fighting at full potential. But in the heroic fantasy genre they are. HPs give an ablative ability to ignore getting dropped by attacks to better emulate the genre -- until it's too many and you drop anyway. Flashbacks do the same thing, a limited resource that lets you work around some complications in a heist to better emulate the genre. To be honest, a lot less than HPs because you don't also have to spend HPs on other things.
Sure, but HP isn't really a good comparison because then we're talking about
realism.
I'm not talking about realism. When we're talking about maintaining a harmonious ludonarrative in a mechanic, we're talking about three things:
- The mechanic feels like its doing what it should.
- The mechanic is described as doing what it should.
- What the player perceives of the mechanic is identical to the other two.
What that means is that, if we think of a Fireball, using it should feel like you're blowing something up (ie, big number go brrr).
When we look at how the game themes that Fireball, it should match what it does; don't use Fireball when you're talking about a candlelight.
And when the player goes to interact with the mechanic at several stages, what they perceive, or in other words
intuit, as what it should do, it should be synchronous with the other two. The Fireball should do, look, and be felt as doing exactly what the Fireball ought to do.
So when we come back to the flashback, it hits the mark as a mechanic on the first two, but it doesn't reliably do so. You could say otherwise, but then I can counter, as can anyone else whose never particularly liked the mechanic for similar reasons.
Thats the sticky business of game design, I'm afraid.
(And to be clear, HP is still problematic from that perspective, but it doesn't have to be. How I personally solved that issue is a whole other topic tho)
As mentioned above, they do solve the exact same issue as HPs. Spending a currency to allow your character to do things they couldn't otherwise is a very well accepted part of every RPG. It's not a defendable argument that it's not acceptable since we see for a fact in game after game that sort of thing is acceptable.
Again, bad comparison, because you're comparing a mechanic that lets you conjure things into the gameworld with one that simply governs how close to a death state you are after sustaining X damage.
Sometimes you see things that will use HP as a resource to do things, but that isn't the standard. As a resource its only purpose is how many points of damage you can absorb.
That doesn't let you do anything you couldn't have, unless we're reaching really hard and trying to equate death vs non death as equatable to conjuring things into the gameworld.
First, there is a cost in the currency of Stress for all but the most mundane, which is something you use both to fuel other cool things, help others, resist dying and imparements - it is meaningful to spend it.
In the gamey sense sure. In terms of fiction, it has no real connection to anything, and especially not in any sense of A->B->C sort of logic. We call mechanics like this metacurrencies for a reason, because even ones that try to be more diegetic don't always work to establish synchronicity.
Second, because it's a cost, it's important to the story when you choose to use it or not, so it's never superflous, it's at worst an opportunity cost.
The story of playing the game, sure. Mechanics are always tellng stories, and this isn't an exception.
That doesn't make it important to the story of the characters, however.
And if you can square the difference there in a way that isn't just dismissing it, you'll probably be the first person Ive ever had an argument with over these games that I can see eye to eye with.
Third, it's can't change anything that's hit the table. Want to have known about the pat-down to the poker game and hidden your weapons? Sure. But once your weapons are found that can't be reversed by a flashback. It's still a tool for planning, it's just one you can use in the short term. It can't do anything for things that have happened.
Sure, but it doesn't have to. The mechanic fundamentally works on the basis of conjuring things into the gameworld after the fact; thats the issue with it.
And, again not to shoehorn my game into it, but I have a really good example of how such a mechanic
can work from a ludonarrative perspective, which was actually
inspired by the flashback mechanic.
To keep it short, in my living world system, I have story lines that, after a certain amount of time, backfill into the canon. Eg, its been a week, the Quest's Act triggers, and now a whole bunch of events and plot are considered to now have always happened.
What makes it work ludonarratively is that this only happens like this when the players are entirely absent. They never participated in the events, not even as far as witnessing them. Under any other circumstance, those events unfold as part of play.
This was my way to square the idea of the Gameworld solving its own problems if the players don't want to get involved for whatever reason, and is what allowed the system to evolve into the living world concept, as the same idea, in tandem with other new tools I came up with (quest blocks) can be used to act as a sort of "AI" for special kinds of NPCs.
So taken together, even though the timeline and gameworld are being changed arbitrarily without player or Keeper input to do so in game time (eg realtime), it works ludonarratively because its intuitive that if the world is alive, stuff is happening all over the place and you're not going to have a say in it if you don't get involved.
(and because of this we also see why things like leading armies or building things are in the Skill list; if players want to get involved on a larger scale, they can)
