Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

[Agemegos]

For some reason I had fallen a couple of months behind in listening to Ken Hite's and Robin Laws' podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, so yesterday I took a few hours to catch up on my podlistening. Hite's and Laws' articulateness, erudition, and thoughtful comments seduced me into considering their Gumshoe genus of games. I broke out my copy of Trail of Cthulhu with a view to starting up some 1920s horror adventures. I mentioned this to a potential player who has been known to GM The Dying Earth and Trail of Cthulhu himself in his spare time. He sent me links to bits and pieces of material on the web that he thought I might find useful. I read the first in his list and remembered why I decided not to run Trail of Cthulhu back when I first bought it.

In Gumshoe and the genus of games related to it characters have ratings in skills and abilities in just the sort of way you expect. The thing you don't expect is that your character's rating in a skill is not a bonus to all attempts to use the skill. The characteristic mechanic of the Gumshoe genus is that a character's rating in a skill forms a pool of points that the player can spend on attempts to use that skill. The pools do refresh from time to time, but within the interval between refreshes the player has to husband those points, spending them where he or she reckons they will be decisive and accepting at all other times mediocre and chancy performance at things the character is supposedly good at.

This seems very strange to me. I can't figure out what it is supposed to represent when, for example, a character with a high score in Guns shoots inaccurately to conserve points for later. And I can't figure out what it represents when a character with high Guns has used all the points in his or her Guns pool and is now unable to shoot better than a tiro until the next adventure. What's happening in the game world?

There is of course a possibility that this game mechanic is not supposed to represent anything at all, that it is supposed to force some outcome such as each adventure having only one gunfight, only one fistfight, only one chase scene, one infiltration scene etc. If so, ugh! I hate it when a story depends on characters making choices that are unjustifiable in their supposed circumstances, and I very much dislike it when game mechanics force me to make a significant choice that does not correspond to a choice that my character makes: that forces me out of identification with the character, suspension of disbelief, and immersion in the story—and it usually does it at exactly the point where the adventure is most exciting and enthralling. What's more is that most of my players seem to feel the same, and that is what ended our flirtation with FATE.

I'm reluctant to conclude that Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite have blundered. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps they were aiming at and hit a target other than the one I expect. So I think I will still give Trail of Cthulhu a bit of a go and see how it actually plays. If anyone has advice or pointers, or if anyone can point me towards Robin Laws' exegesis of the ability pool mechanic, what it is supposed to achieve and how to drive it, that would be very handy.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

I'm reluctant to conclude that Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite have blundered. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps they were aiming at and hit a target other than the one I expect. So I think I will still give Trail of Cthulhu a bit of a go and see how it actually plays. If anyone has advice or pointers, or if anyone can point me towards Robin Laws' exegesis of the ability pool mechanic, what it is supposed to achieve and how to drive it, that would be very handy.

Can't help you, I'm afraid. I've read more than one game that Laws was heavily involved in—Dying Earth, Feng Shui, and Hero Wars—and I've totally bounced off of them. Sometimes it's the mechanics; sometimes it's the world modeling—or the lack of world modeling, in FS, which seems to be intentionally designed to look like a series of sound stages. I want to suppose that Laws must be doing something intelligible, but I can't process it, if so.

Bill Stoddard

[RogerBW]

My position: I'm not a huge fan of the GUMSHOE system, but I think there are things I get about it that possibly you don't yet. So take this as coming from a sceptical explorer rather than a committed enthusiast or naysayer.

The thing that made pools and expenditure make sense for me was narrativism, specifically the idea that everyone should get his turn in the spotlight. In a typical RPG, the guy who's specialised in forensic pathology will end up dominating a pathology-filled adventure and taking a back seat at other times, and one hopes that it balances out over the campaign; in a GUMSHOE game, that balance is meant to happen per adventure, so he'll always get his pathology moment and someone else will always get her legal-expert moment.

Normally the only abilities that have pools are the investigative abilities, and this raises another point: having the ability at all is enough to let you find the clue. The pool spend is to learn something extra, something that lets your character look good and move the adventure forward, but it should never be an essential thing. Not all GUMSHOE GMs seem to keep to this; I've certainly played in games where spending pool points was essential to achieve anything. But as far as I can see it's the way the game is intended to be run.

The problem I have with Robin's approach to narrativism is that he spends a lot of effort designing RPGs to produce the sort of narrative found in other media: books, film, TV. That's not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but what gets lost by playing such a game is the sort of narrative that's native to RPGs - much as the sort of narrative that arises in film didn't show up until people started writing original material for film, rather than converting books and stage plays. I am not a fan of films-of-the-book, and similarly I'd rather play a conventional RPG and let the emergent narrative form on its own than have it pushed on me by structural rules that insist on up and down beats, a climactic scene, and so on.

(As usual, I should say that this is what's true for me - some people love these games, and good for them.)

[martinl]

I suspect the idea is to model the source material in some way, since IME lots of Robin's stuff is attempting to emulate an artistic story medium rather than reality.

On reflection, it might be trying to duplicate the cinematic convention that the solutions the heroes are awesome at are the last, not the first, resort. (Edit: On further reflection, I like Roger's explanation better. (*%*&^#$_* Cross posting...)

In any case, I hope you asked them - the Gaming Hut is not as good as Ken's Time Machine, but it is still one of my favourites.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by martinl

On reflection, it might be trying to duplicate the cinematic convention that the solutions the heroes are awesome at are the last, not the first, resort. (Edit: On further reflection, I like Roger's explanation better.

I didn't think of that one, but I suspect that's also something Robin's aiming to emulate. It's not such a good system for that, though: if you need to save points but don't know for how long you'll need to save them, the result is usually that they get under-spent. A better mechanic for that sort of thing would be to build up a positive modifier as you conduct the investigation, so that your early answers are likely to be misleading or wrong and your later ones will put you on the right track.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

A better mechanic for that sort of thing would be to build up a positive modifier as you conduct the investigation, so that your early answers are likely to be misleading or wrong and your later ones will put you on the right track.

I like it. Certainly fits the TV genre convention. And it gives you an incentive to interview many people, to build up a higher modifier.

Since the bad guy is traditionally someone you interviewed earlier, only to think they were innocent, how about a rule that if you take a negative modifier against a subject, you can (later) take that, or double that, as a positive modifer against that same subject once, later. This should incentivize players to interview the likely candidates early, before they have the modifer actually to nail them, chase some red herrings and run down intermediate leads to build up their positive modifer, and then come back with that plus their one-time bonus to nail the real killer.

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

I like it. Certainly fits the TV genre convention. And it gives you an incentive to interview many people, to build up a higher modifier.

Since the bad guy is traditionally someone you interviewed earlier, only to think they were innocent, how about a rule that if you take a negative modifier against a subject, you can (later) take that, or double that, as a positive modifer against that same subject once, later. This should incentivize players to interview the likely candidates early, before they have the modifer actually to nail them, chase some red herrings and run down intermediate leads to build up their positive modifer, and then come back with that plus their one-time bonus to nail the real killer.

This is brilliant.

[Agemegos]

I really despise stories (and movies, plays, and TV shows) in which the characters do things because that's "what they have to do" when there aren't adequate reasons for them to do those things either in the world or in their own characters. I do not accept that they are doing these things for the sake of good plot, because I don't accept that it is good plot if it consists of spontaneous incident and characters taking inadequately-motivated actions. A good plot has tension rise steadily to a crisis in each scene and act, and overall, and it transitions from the positive to the negation of the negation through the contrary and the contradiction and all that. But it does so with consistent fathomable characters responding to incident with well-motivated action; a "tightly-plotted" story is one in which the plot is a tightly-spun thread of causal strands, in which even the most unexpected development seems inevitable in hindsight. Satisfaction comes from previously-established elements coming together in a thrilling conclusion, not from a god out of a box*.

I want to identify with my character, I want her or him or it to act consistently at maximum capacity, steadfast to a core motivation, I want his environment to be consistent and manipulable. If we get rescued by the cavalry at the crisis I want that to be because someone send a desperate message at the end of the second act, not because I managed to work the Tension Level up to seven and was holding a "Rescue in the Nick of Time" card.

So I find that mechanics that force or encourage player-characters to take actions for reasons that do not correspond to any constraint or motivation in the story don't work for me, nor produce the satisfaction of having co-improvised a good story.



* One of the clever jokes in Lawrence Kasdan's brilliant script for Raiders fo the Lost Ark is that it was resolved by a literal (but not figurative) god out of a box.

[Mailanka]

It is indeed the sort of mechanic you're complaining about, Brett. It's a narrativistic mechanic, one where the mechanics let the story shape the world, rather than the world shape the story. Fate does much the same thing.

This is sort of the polar opposite of GURPS, where one expects story to naturally unfold from the rules of the world.

I think both approaches are fine, but they're very different, and if you greatly prefer the latter, the former will, indeed, irritate you.

(At the risk of sliding back into a GNS discussion, this is one of the reasons I dislike comparing "Dramatism" to "Narrativism." The latter is about the sort of scenario you describe, which isn't very immersive. It requires a sort of meta-thinking about the story, while most Dramatists actually want deep immersion, which narrativism tends to harm.)

[shawnhcorey]

"Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." -- William Archer

"Stories are inevitable but not predictable." -- Andrew Stanton

The difference between Dramatists and Narrativists is that Dramatists want (and expect) uncertainty. In most RPGs, the players provide the anticipation and the GM, the uncertainty. Balance is providing enough uncertainty to make things interesting¹ but not too much so as not to ruin the anticipation.

¹ Interesting as in the Chinese proverb: May you live in interesting times.