Sode 27: Payouts

[Meg]

Part 1 of a 2 part series.
Part of the "Jargon" series: Terms, Words, and Concepts to game by.

This system episode discusses Payouts- what you are trying to get out of a game, to help define it for yourself to be more cognizant of why you game and for GM's to understand what their players need to have fun. 

We add something new into this episode- a weekly trivia question.  We give a fact about one of us and you have to guess which one of the Gameologists this tidbit belongs to!

It has been recorded and will be released on November 17th. 

[Meg]

The episode is up!

http://brilliantgameologists.com/blog/61

Some more changes with this sode including a Trivia question of the week.  Enter your guess by voting in the poll.  Feel free to discuss in this thread as well.

[AfterCrescent]

I'm about to start listening. The answer isn't in the actual 'sode is it?

Because I hope not. Although just guessing, I would have to say Zeke.

[X-Codes]

I just started the recording up.  So far the sound quality seems good, but I really want to hear more details about your warm up.  I can understand why you wouldn't want to talk about some of us to our faces, but I'm really interested in what Zeke yelled at your neighbors. 

EDIT: Nevermind, it's in the show. lol...

[Talen Lee]

Dude, I want gossip.

Downloading now.

[bhu]

It sounded just fine to me.  Wish you coulda recorded the yelling.  That would've been funny.

Is the tabloid you're referring to the Weekly World News??

If so they still publish, just online only.

[Talen Lee]

I'm vaguely annoyed! I was hoping to hear someone saying "Elennsar is a douche." But I'm petty like that. Plus I was hoping to hear my name said on the podcast, so that way I could giggle at how you mispronounced it.

That said, more coming once I've percolated my thoughts overnight. There's some stuff to discuss.

[Darth Krzysztof]

I hear Captain Hank Murphy saying "There go Meg's nipples again" in take after take.

[Zeke]

That is probably my second favorite Sea Lab episode.

[AfterCrescent]

So yeah... I do play online games, but I have no idea what German-site-that-Meg-can't-pronounce you were talking about. Any chance you could post a link?

[Shoggoth]

Just finished listening to the episode, and I liked it.  Good stuff.  Did your choice of categories for the breakdown come from anywhere in particular, or did they originate with you guys?

I'm vaguely annoyed! I was hoping to hear someone saying "Elennsar is a douche." But I'm petty like that. Plus I was hoping to hear my name said on the podcast, so that way I could giggle at how you mispronounced it.

Yes, why didn't anyone mention me in particular, with special emphasis on how amazingly insightful, intelligent, and handsome (you can posit this from my diction) I am?  I would especially like to hear the phrase "Gosh that Shoggoth is amazing!  He really deserves a reach-around!".   

[Meg]

So yeah... I do play online games, but I have no idea what German-site-that-Meg-can't-pronounce you were talking about. Any chance you could post a link?

That's right!  Knew I forgot something in the show notes:

It's BrettSpielWelt.  And it's a bitch to navigate but let's you play awesome games online with real people.  The defaults are all in German so it also takes multilingual navigating.

Go here to download the client (much prefered to the java game option): http://www.brettspielwelt.de/Hilfe/Tools/Spielverwaltung/

But then read how to use the site here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/77942  That tells you everything you need to know.

I've been playing Dog on the site- if anyone wants to schedule a time to play together (it's for 4 people) let me know (not in this thread)!

[MilwaukeeJoe]

I'm confused on something... why do you play an explicit clip right at the start of the episode... and then warn about explicit language afterward?

[Meg]

I don't think just saying the word penis and sperm count is explicit, personally.

We only recently started adding the warning.  There is one in the info for the file as well and on the entry for the podcast, so there was plenty of warning. 

The clips in the front are new too- a brief statement that is in the episode somewhere to give you a clue as to the tone of the episode.  There is a clip at the end as well- something that was cut from the episode. 

[TheChrisWaits]

The clips in the front are new too- a brief statement that is in the episode somewhere to give you a clue as to the tone of the episode.  There is a clip at the end as well- something that was cut from the episode. 

I had meant to mention on the last episode that I think this a great idea.

[jimmersault]

This episode is for you...no, not you...you...you....YOU!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCx-M8dcDhk

[Talen Lee]

"I love you all, except for you and you and you and DEFINITELY YOU."

[justchuck]

I think it's a trick question.  I think someone helped Josh ot braid his hair some days. 

[Talen Lee]

You know... it's kinda sad, but listening to this actually made me think more about the games I've been in that wound up failing to give me my payouts than anything else. I had one character, a real diplomacy-and-bluff-based shenaniganser bard who eventually was made more gishy and eventually lost the bard altogether because the GM continually made the thing I'd built him to do (Calming Voice) unusable (something to do with the power being brutally, brutally overpowered). So once that avenue was resolutely closed off I instead focused on making the character a really good combat type, going into Warblade and picking up bluff as a thematic choice when I rebuilt him. I wound up remaking him so I could do a trick with Wraithstrike, Power Attack and Avalanche of Blades. I also picked up stuff that meant when I scored a crit, I could automatically confirm it, and wielded a mercurial greatsword.

Every single time I scored a crit with that greatsword, the creature had 25% fortification, and successfully avoided the crit. Every time I fired Avalanche of Blades, I rolled a natural 1 on my third attack (at level 16, this meant I'd have been better off just making a full attack action). This is a statistical aberration - across such a large number of dice rolls, surely this would not have happened. But it did happen.

It really siphoned away the payout I got from that character. He had been built to have so many different avenues to pay out and never did. His mechanical payout - extremely large crits, lots of damage - had been stifled by decisions the GM had used, as late in the game he introduced a template to monsters to keep them from being completely screwed against our Dervish who was wielding a pair of scimitars, and critted a lot, which had the unfortunate side effect of making my crit work completely pointless.

There were other options for nonmechanical payouts: My character had been laying plans through the whole of the story to have an impact on the Big Bad Guy at the end, and none of them came to fruition despite what I think was a great deal of cleverness. My character was a hopeless romantic who used sex as a way to avoid his fear of commitment and was hiding behind another person's name because he was afraid of being himself, two angles that I never worked through because the GM was uncomfortable dealing with NPC relationships like that, and he wound up instead falling into a (sweet, but) fairly simple relationship with the PC played by my wife.

He was made to do amazing things with diplomacy, which were kept from happening because they'd defuse the combat for the rest of the group. In the first climactic battle, suspended above a burning arena, with the bad guy standing in front of a big open window, he won initiative, bullrushed and successfully got enough distance to throw the bad guy down to his screaming death thirty feet down, but the GM ruled it didn't work, so as to give the others a chance to do stuff to the bad guy (rather than just let me, with two lucky rolls, remove an NPC wholesale). When he graduated sideways to bluff, his attempts to bluff opponents were flauted by the fact that even with a +38 to bluff, the GM wasn't comfortable letting full-blown, Baron Munchausen style bluffs do anything, even with a lot of manufactured corroborating evidence.

In the end, I had fun in that game and I enjoyed it, but looking back I realise how few payouts I had given the enormous amount of payout options I had given the GM. Still, he was a great GM in a lot of ways and I'd recommend him to anyone, but... yeah. Very depressing and sobering little train of thought here and I'm going to try to stop it.

Meg touches on sex in the game, which degenerates into the guys talking about orgies. Brilliantly done, very good for a mature podcast*. Sex is a wonderfully potent tool because in general, there is a very small portion of the population who do not understand, recognise, or appreciate sex in some way or another. I've had a long history of characters for whom sex could have been an amazingly useful motivating factor or indeed, an awesome payout, but I've never pressed GMs to employ it, and those who have tried to, with the exception of my current GM, have never successfully used it. Sex is payoff because there's a little bit of a thrill in hearing that your character, an extension of you or a creation of yours, your guy, just got laid with the princess. You don't need the details (that comes under atmosphere, which is much more of a general thing), but to act like getting handjobs under the table as a payout kinda diminished the section. This is moreso because the rest of the podcast really was great! It really, really was, even with Zeke's music**.

I game with two mechatronic engineers, a neural biologist, an artist, two computer programmers and an economist. I have Smart People around the table. Making them feel smart is good.

I feel you guys could have keyed into, at least a little bit, stuff about how people compare and enjoy things, but hopefully you'll do that in Part 2. If you need some references for the topic, contact me and I'll send you a podcast that Daniel Gilbert did on the matter which really helped me understand a lot more about psychology and a lot more about how players work to get them to smile and enjoy themselves.

* Don't imagine this in quite so snide a tone as you probably might.

** I dislike it, I don't think lots of other people do. Though Meg, you're melodic, can't you at least teach him some of the basics?

[Zeke]

I actually can sing. I was in choir, and  all that. I think you should look into this thing called humor, some people quite enjoy it.