What this adds up to is...

Well, it's flow. Flow for the whole table. A solid, tangible _rightness_ to each and every chaotic, messy, gorgeous plot twist.

I teeter, you totter.

I stumble, you catch me.

I swing wide, you anchor me like a fulcrum.

I lied. There's a fourth requirement. It's trust.

We are absorbed in the activity. It is often intimate. It is a vulnerable kind of play. I must trust you if we're going to jump.

So jump with me.

I'll catch you.

An addendum. Plot twists are not necessarily the thing. It can also be small consequences. Reincorporation. Reactions and coincidences. Literally anything that develops or changes the fiction.

The only requirement is that it's a delightful surprise. The significance can be entirely tonal.

@JacobSKellogg Sure, but that's not going to get push the play style.

Better is incentives to develop details that appear mosaic -- implied to have definition but not defined until we choose to explore it. Like a superhero game that asks you to create a scar that they got from their origin, but stops short of telling you to define the origin itself. The character creation equivalent of Draw Maps & Leave Blanks.

And better than an action resolution system would be a question resolutions system.

@JacobSKellogg The important thing is that the mechanics pull their weight. If they're not helping the fictional facts to flow then they're dead weight.

@June_Shores Color me curious: what do you mean by "a question resolution system"?

@JacobSKellogg So, basically what that is, is a change of focus.

Action resolution systems answer a question: Do they succeed or fail? Sometimes they also say at what cost.

The sort of thing I'd prefer for this is a certainty of outcome. You fail or succeed by, say, spending a token, or you mark a countdown to resolution. The tension comes from what question you answer and how.

The question resolution system would step in and give constraints to the how.

@JacobSKellogg Sometimes this includes success or failure, but the thing of it is interpretation. "How or why did this happen? Are there any additional constraints on what that can be?"

@June_Shores I am very intrigued, but not quite getting it yet. Mind if I keep picking your brain?

Okay, so let's say the PC comes to an obstacle: they need to cross a river. It's small, but rocky and fierce. In the game I'm working on, the player would decide how they would like to handle the situation: maybe they try a running jump across, maybe they strong-walk through the rapids, maybe they navigate to a better crossing.

How does a "question resolution system" handle this event?

@JacobSKellogg I'm thinking of Spookybeans, where you gain points by putting your character through slapstick misery at the end of each action, regardless of success or failure.

Crossing the river is beside the question. The mechanics in this case decide who narrates the outcome, the player or the GM, not what exactly happens.

The player and GM implicitly agree that the character crosses the river, but they see the opportunity for something dreadful, even though they might not know what. [...]

@JacobSKellogg Player wins the roll, his character crosses the river... but Player saw crabs fighting on a rock in the river before. So Character emerges first despite his weak swimming skills, running with crabs nipping at his heels.

They have knives.

@JacobSKellogg The core here is the setup earlier -- a player put this here, but doesn't know how it's going to come back -- the opportunity -- an action to solve a problem -- and the payoff -- the crabs are back, but changed (now they have knives) and reacting to the character in an in-genre fahion.

@JacobSKellogg Spookybeans can be played without Delightful Surprise, but it would feel like the laziest lolrandom humor of the mid-00's. When you add setup and payoff it becomes a Delightful Surprise game.

But if the setup and payoff is not democratized -- placed in the hands of the players as a whole -- it's fruitless.

@JacobSKellogg hmmm. I shouldn't say fruitless.

Flatter, I should say. If it's just the GM doing it then that's a lower energy game.

@June_Shores I've never played Spookybeans. Is that why I can't follow what you're saying? It seems like you're jumping from abbreviated point to abbreviated point without actually explaining the gameplay processes. I'm also seeing a fair bit of pronoun juggling, plus an entire post that consists of a single sentence broken up with five dashes which I have no idea how to parse.

About all I caught so far is the idea that success is a given (except when it's not?) and that's about it.

@JacobSKellogg Sorry! Let me back up. I'd edit the previous posts for clarity, but Mastodon won't let me.

And to be honest, the whole explanation has gotten away from me.

I'm still figuring out what the playstyle really needs, myself.

Delightful Surprise is centered on setup and payoff. The more players setting things up and paying off other players' setups, the more energy there is at the table. [...]

@JacobSKellogg With clarity, caring, and synchronization, you get three things. Everything that's been set up is easy to hold in your head; you have a good idea about the characters and the things you like about them; finally, you have a sense for how all of that lines up.

Where a game can actively enhance Delightful Surprise where action is concerned is when it filters the payoff through a question. In Spookybeans's case, it's "How does this course of action cause my character pain?" [...]

@JacobSKellogg The success of an action isn't a primary concern. How it shapes the way you pay off the setup is what matters.

@June_Shores Okay, so the mechanics are about resolving payoffs for previously-established setups. "Payoff" sounds like a positive term, but I think you suggested earlier that it could be negative as well?

And the individual game would establish parameters to which the "payoff" must conform (i.e., cause your PC misery in Spookybeans), yes?

I think I'm getting closer, but I think I could benefit from an example of how a game handles the "setup" phase. When and how does a "setup" happen?

@JacobSKellogg You're overthinking it.

Setup is just when a player asserts something is true about the world.

Then, the players see an opportunity for a payoff. Alternatively, the system tells them.

Payoff happens when something that was setup comes back and does something that is consistent with its nature.

Delightful Surprise is payoff, plus a new development added on. [...]

@JacobSKellogg

Setup: the GM describes crabs fighting on the rocks upstream.

Opportunity: the player's character must cross the river.

Payoff: the crabs give chase.

Delightful surprise: the crabs also have knives.

@June_Shores In that case, literally every piece of setting description and narration is a "setup". Even future payoffs would also be setups.

Which is fine, it's just that I don't see a need to codify that into mechanics; it sounds instead like instructions for roleplaying or advice for how to engage the narrative regardless of what game you're playing. Heck, I've seen this in D&D.

But earlier, I thought you said you'd like to see mechanics for it. What would that look like for you?

@JacobSKellogg Thus is the eternal struggle of serialized fiction.

Yes, this is a pragmatic style. It is adaptable to most games. Setup and payoff is available in D&D.

But in Delightful Surprise play, everybody participating in the playstyle needs synchronicity. [....]

@JacobSKellogg In salkfngan (deep character immersion) that style of play is disrupted by meta currencies.

In Delighful Surprise, this style of play is disrupted by mechanics that do not immediately feed back into the fiction. These cause desynchronization.

This isn't just moments of setup and payoff sprinkled through a session. Delightful Surprise play is characterized by *constant* setup and payoff, with twists that feel exactly right each time, coming from multiple participants. [...]

@JacobSKellogg Payoff is positive for the player. It may not be positive for the character. This is a play style where the player does not inhabit the character or their goals most of the time.

They play to those goals, but for the purpose of seeing what happens, not to see them succeed without hardship.