Is there a cure for the "cool" player? Aka the fake narrativist?

[hyphz]

You know the guy I'm talking about. The guy who wants to play Luke Skywalker and have a cool lightsaber duel with Darth Vader.

Ok, so you say, you stat Luke and I'll stat Darth and we'll fight.

No, he says. Then Luke could lose on unlucky rolls. Not only could he lose, but he would suck.

Ok, you say (notwithstanding the fact that Luke _did_ lose the first time he fought Darth...) we'll use a tactical system so that you can win via tactics.

No, he says. Then Luke has to do what's tactically best, not what's cool.

Ok, you say, then you can just do whatever you like and I'll let you beat Darth.

No, he says. Then it's a foregone conclusion and a "masturbation exercise" since it's just "I say I'm doing stuff and you tell me how cool I am" (quoted because they're, um, quotes).

I call him the Fake Narrativist because he often winds up glomming onto "story" for an explanation. See, look, he says - when you actually watch the movie, you know Luke's going to win because it's the final encounter, but at the same time, the fight doesn't come across as a boring foregone conclusion. Wow, he says, it must be the story.

Nuh-uh. The _story_ is, "Luke finally meets up with Darth again, fights him even though he's using an artificial hand, hacks off _Darth's_ hand in revenge, but then has enough discipline to spare him." All else is staging/choreography.

So... if it's not story, what the heck _is_ it that these players want? Because, you know, he's right. You know Luke's going to win in the end, but at the same time, the fight isn't boring. What is it that they actually, really, want from the play experience (and it isn't just Luke Skywalker, of course, it's Neo or Morpheus or Gandalf or FFS Magic Trixie - no kidding, I had a gal player say she wanted to play her, YouTube the name if you don't know what I mean, I'm still shaking my head at that one, if she hadn't been a girl I would have been so tempted to just slap.. uh, him (in that case).. upside the head) and - the really important bit - is it something that intrinsically can't be delivered by something you control? Is it something that you can _only_ get by being an observer?

Sorry if I sound a bit gruff. I've had a lot from these players recently. And the real bugbear is that I sympathize, since I guessed long ago that roleplaying Just Couldn't Do That.

[InkyHat]

There's no curing them, unless you can get them into the whole "Failure is Fun" mindset. There is, however, a way to let them enjoy themselves. Use FATE/FUDGE and give a stunting bonus. The Player can say "I don't want to suck here, I'm pulling in my favor from the writer."

Of course, you could use Exalted or World of Synnibarr. No sucking for the PCs.

[TheMouse]

I myself would kill them and take their stuff.

[gatharion]

I've never come across the situation/player-type that you are describing.

In any case, the solution to the Luke/Vader is to use a system that encourages stunts and narrative descriptions of your actions and some sort of Fate Point/Hero Point system.

SotC would probably work.
I know Savage Worlds would work.
I know less about them, but from what I've heard Feng Shui or Wushu might work.

[The Eye]

Mostly, I'm struck by how contradictory the guy's statements are. "I don't want the chance of failure, but if I know that I can't fail, then it's boring."

Well, it sounds like he might like Wushu. You succeed at your actions regardless of what you roll on the dice, being "cool" is the only tactic (and by tactic, I mean, "this is how you play"), and the outcome is predetermined but there is a chance that things don't exactly work out how the player thought.

Having said that, it occurs to me that Wushu was made for exactly this kind of person; they want to be cool all the time, and they want to feel like there is risk, but they don't actually want any risk at all.

[Jeremy Keller]

I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, because I'm not sure I've ever met anyone like this.

But Wushu seems to me built in such a way that it almost handles exactly this. The Principle of Narrative Truth ensures what the players say happens, happens. But what's variable is how what happens contributes to the resolution of the scene. Plus, in Wushu it's usually fairly weighted so that the players will almost always win. The resolution system is more of a pacing system and a vehicle for the players to describe cool shit.

[gatharion]

I also suggest staying away from liscenced settings.

[Halloween Jack]

Luke didn’t go back with the goal of beating Darth Vader in a fight. He was hoping to “save” him. Darth went in with the goal of turning Luke to the Dark Side. Palpatine went in with the intention of corrupting Luke and replacing Vader, or failing that, kill Luke.

Luke accomplished his goal after being baited into a duel, beating his father, getting his ass kicked by the Emperor, and Vader deciding that letting his terrible boss kill his son was even worse than killing younglings.

A narrative system would be built around resolving the characters’ attempts to accomplish their goals rather than looking at the events from the mechanistic point of view of a sword duel followed by two brief ass-kickings.

The goal of a narrative system isn’t to satisfy a player’s desire for the GM to lead him to a foregone conclusion in a way that tricks him into thinking it wasn’t one. That’s bad action movies. (Of which Return of the Jedi isn’t one, because I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect that scene to play out the way it did. Granted, I was like 6 years old.) And eventually, that stops working anyway.

[hyphz]

Originally Posted by The Eye

Mostly, I'm struck by how contradictory the guy's statements are. "I don't want the chance of failure, but if I know that I can't fail, then it's boring."

Well, he's touching on a paradox that applies in the movies too. In the movies, you often know the hero's going to win, but if it's a good movie you are not slumping in your chair waiting for the inevitable. So what's keeping you interested, if not risk? It isn't "the spectacle", because a computer game with sophisticated graphics would still be torn between those two stools.

[Nick the Nevermet]

What did he WANT to happen again?
I read the OP a few times, and I couldn't figure it out. I saw that he rejected several arguments, defined an end goal rather loosely, and offered zero suggestions on how to get there.

Is that accurate?