What is worldbuilding for?

Maxperson · Feb 17, 2018

pemerton said:
I have two players whose PCs, as those players have built and played them, are citizens of Rel Astra. One has the goal of world domination. Another has the goal of becoming a magistrate. I establish a situation that forces some choices: if you want to dominate the world, you'll hve to ally with Vecna; but that means betraying your city; if you want to become a magistrate, all oou have to do is join yuor freind and his new ally Vecna in betrraying your city.

What if there are other avenues of success that the Players/PCs see? Are they free to engage in those, or do they now have to follow he situation you set up that forces those choices?

Lanefan · Feb 17, 2018

pemerton said:
"In-fiction cause and effect" here means that the GM told you that the bouncers are angry and throw the PCs out.

Which in-game was caused by the disturbance around the attempted theft, and out-of-game was caused by - you guessed it - the disturbance around the attempted theft, as played out at the table. In this instance it's a direct mirror.

And "hidden elements" here doesn't mean hidden elements of the fiction. It means hidden elements of the actual play: the GM has pretended that s/he authored all this, but in fact it was a collaborative effort between the GM and Mary.

Yes, in this case it's both the DM and Mary doing the hiding rather than just the DM - I was trying to concatenate examples of two different types of hidden elements (those hidden by the DM and those hidden by another player) into one, as I'd already gone on long enough in that post.

What you describe doesn't sound like my sort of thing - eg Why is Mary not just playing her character?

Because Mary doesn't want the other players to take Keyes into the party just on the meta-basis of Keyes being her character; she thinks instead it'd be fun and interesting to see what happens if Keyes is presented as an NPC. (I've both done this same thing as a player and had it done in games I DM - it's not at all unheard of in our crew)

Why are the GM and Mary playing a game in which the rest of us seem to be primarily bystanders?

In the scene I presented it's in fact Mary who's the bystander...a role she would have agreed to as part of setting this up. She doesn't get to do anything except watch until the scene is resolved one way or another.

I'm not seeing very much agency on the parts of the players of Gutboy, Mialee and Falstaff.

The only time they don't have agency is where it's kind of locked in that during their conversation in the tavern Keyes WILL try to steal from one of them; and I think you'd call that scene-framing. After that they've got agency all over the place: the very fate of Mary's character is in their hands, for crying out loud; though they don't yet know about the "Mary's character" bit. The only further influence the DM can have on Mary's behalf (and in this instance would intentionally wield if the situation allows) is to try to at some point frame the four characters into a situation where they are more or less alone and can talk if they want to - the bouncers throwing them all out of the tavern together is an easy option here.

Lan-"another simple example of player-hidden information is bringing in a PC purporting to be one class where in fact it is another"-efan

Emerikol · Feb 18, 2018

pemerton said:
It depends what you mean by "is a real place" - some of my games are rather gonzo (eg Marvel Heroic; epic-tier 4e) and so in that sense could never be mistaken for documentaries.

But if you are talking about "immersion" or a sense of "inhabitation" then that it is a very high priority for me, and I think for most of my players. But the method of action resolution is rather orthogonal to that. If the player declares "I search the study for the map", that does not involve any loss of inhabitation of the character. If the roll is then made, that is no different from any other rolling of the dice that the player does in the course of play. And if it comes up successful and the GM affirms "Yes, you find the map" - well, that doesn't involve any departure from immersion, realism or verisimilitude either.

I assumed your players knew your style. That they knew you didn't have it written down and that the die roll would truly decide randomly if the map exists in that place. If you are tricking them and telling them you have it written down then of course your approach may work for a while at least.

In my games, the players truly believe I have things figured out in advance and on those rare occasions I have to determine the existence of something randomly I do so behind the screen and I never admit I didn't have it written down. Again, if I have to roll then it's something odd that I couldn't foresee that I do think is a distinct possibility anyway. Otherwise I say yes or no directly.

AbdulAlhazred · Feb 18, 2018

Saelorn said:
As far as the players are concerned, playing in a world where the backstory is authored by the DM is identical to playing in a world where the backstory is generated through internal causal processes, in every way that matters. In both cases, the agency of the player is limited to what the character can actually accomplish through their own means, and they don't have to worry about accidentally authoring backstory as a result of actions they take in the present.

If you can't understand that simple fact, then you will never understand the point of worldbuilding, or the concept of actually roleplaying as a character rather than telling a story about a character; and as such, this entire thread is a waste of time.

I would argue that there is no such world, even fictionally. That is to say, no GM is capable of creating consistent backstory. GMs may create backstory which is suitably consistent for the purposes of play, where it isn't going to be rigorously examined by most players who simply want to suspend disbelief and get on with playing. However, there are infinite ways in which GMs attempts to generate backstory that could pass as 'internal causal process' are doomed to failure.

Thus the whole argument falls. The REAL argument is aesthetic, and it is merely being cloaked in some other argument at times. It is always plainly evident to the players that the story isn't plausible, and its plausibility, and maybe more importantly their possession of enough information and understanding of the putative causal relationships to draw conclusions, is so limited to non-existent that any facts revealed by GMs via hidden backstory are simply arbitrary. If players DO predict them it is merely by knowledge of the GM, or perhaps due to conventions based on genre tropes, etc which the GM is following.

I would argue that any agency of the players which is predicated on this basis is exceedingly limited at best.

Kobold Boots · Feb 18, 2018

AbdulAlhazred said:
I would argue that there is no such world, even fictionally. That is to say, no GM is capable of creating consistent backstory. GMs may create backstory which is suitably consistent for the purposes of play, where it isn't going to be rigorously examined by most players who simply want to suspend disbelief and get on with playing. However, there are infinite ways in which GMs attempts to generate backstory that could pass as 'internal causal process' are doomed to failure.

Thus the whole argument falls. The REAL argument is aesthetic, and it is merely being cloaked in some other argument at times. It is always plainly evident to the players that the story isn't plausible, and its plausibility, and maybe more importantly their possession of enough information and understanding of the putative causal relationships to draw conclusions, is so limited to non-existent that any facts revealed by GMs via hidden backstory are simply arbitrary. If players DO predict them it is merely by knowledge of the GM, or perhaps due to conventions based on genre tropes, etc which the GM is following.

I would argue that any agency of the players which is predicated on this basis is exceedingly limited at best.

Any argument pivoting on an absolute in order to make a point is flawed.

AbdulAlhazred · Feb 18, 2018

pemerton said:
For instance, a person reading Hound of the Baskervilles forms ideas - such as the idea of a super-capable detective called Sherlock Holmes - but does not (unless s/he has mistaken it for a documentary report) form the belief that there exists, or once existed, a super-capable detecitve called Sherlock Holmes.

The causal process whereby those ideas are formed invovles not only the person's brain, but their eyes. But it is not confined to the brain and eyes of the reader. The causal processes also involves the use of physical materials (ink, paper) to create visually perceptible markings (writing) which - due to other causal processes around language learning - are apt to cause certain ideas to arise in the brain of the reader.

One thing that should be reiterated here in this excellent essay is that there IS NO CAUSAL PROCESS WITHIN THE FICTION. The fact is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, no person with characteristics similar to him, can exist in the real world. This isn't even limited by just ordinary physical constraints (IE nobody can focus their attention well enough or remember things so reliably as to perform the feats attributed to him). It extends to LOGICAL POSSIBILITY as well, fiction need not even abide by the basic tenants of logic. Things can both exist and not exist, be in two places at once, have mutually exclusive characteristics, etc. within fiction. Not only that, but this HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. Mostly we don't notice. We suspend disbelief and we simply accept the fiction's conceits as given.

There's nothing remarkable about this when we're talking about a fixed passive form of story where the reader simply participates by reading and imagining what is told by the author. However, when we get into RPG THEORY then its VERY VERY IMPORTANT to understand this! What it means is that the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS is who, by rule/convention/whatever, is able to assert elements of the fiction. There is no 'fictional causation', it doesn't exist, it is, at best, a convention to pretend that it exists, and that only certain participants are bound by it. It is this convention, the practice of RPG game play, which is the subject of RPG game theory, which is what we are discussing here.

Every time people talk about what is 'in the fiction' except as it pertains to how they will relate it to play procedures, is just not significant. What is significant is 'what are those procedures and how do they work?' In particular how does pre-authoring content work, why is it done, and what effect does it have on play processes? (since that was the question of the OP).

AbdulAlhazred · Feb 18, 2018

Imaro said:
Hmmm... I guess my question would be if scenario 2 has instead of an orc...a monster the PC can't beat, no matter how well the dice roll in his favor (Let's say an ancient red dragon and a 1st level PC who can't hit it's armor class). Is that example then comparable to the map that can't be found in the study?

In the example I'm presenting... the only thing that stops the PC from defeating the dragon is pre-written stats, correct? Do these take away player agency in the same way a GM with secret backstory does (is this determined by whether the player has knowledge of the creatures stats or not?)? Or are you saying in the type of game you play the PC's could never run into something that they couldn't overcome... that there is in fact never a situation where they can't beat or do something with a high enough roll?

Do you think its a good idea to put an unbeatable monster into a combat with a PC? I doubt it (granted that there can be some particular cases where this may be acceptable, but as a general concept its frowned upon by all), right?

So isn't that an indication that there's an agency problem associated with creating no-win situations where a character will presumably die? I would say they DO take away player agency (again accepting some cases where this may actually be a price that a player accepted as part of stakes). In classic D&D a player would of course not be upset by the appearance of an unbeatable monster if they had deliberately put themselves in a situation where this was known/likely to come up. For example if a level 1 PC in OD&D insists on trekking into the mountains and gets eaten by a 10HD dragon that would provoke nothing but shrugs, but if that dragon appeared on level 1 of the dungeon and simply ate the character without any possible recourse, then it would be considered not 'kosher'. The player had no chance to exercise skill in saving the character, thus the cost extracted was against conventions of play.

So clearly the overwhelming majority of D&Ders would IMHO think that an unkillable monster violated player agency, though they might arrive at that conclusion by different routes.

pemerton · Feb 18, 2018

Lanefan said:
in this case it's both the DM and Mary doing the hiding rather than just the DM

My point was that they're not hiding any backstory. There is no hidden backstory, no unrevealed fiction, in your example. What the GM and Mary are hiding is that the thief in question is Mary's player character.

Lanefan said:
Mary doesn't want the other players to take Keyes into the party just on the meta-basis of Keyes being her character; she thinks instead it'd be fun and interesting to see what happens if Keyes is presented as an NPC.

<snip>

In the scene I presented it's in fact Mary who's the bystander

<snip>

The only time they don't have agency is where it's kind of locked in that during their conversation in the tavern Keyes WILL try to steal from one of them; and I think you'd call that scene-framing. After that they've got agency all over the place: the very fate of Mary's character is in their hands, for crying out loud; though they don't yet know about the "Mary's character" bit. The only further influence the DM can have on Mary's behalf (and in this instance would intentionally wield if the situation allows) is to try to at some point frame the four characters into a situation where they are more or less alone and can talk if they want to - the bouncers throwing them all out of the tavern together is an easy option here.

As far as I can tell, the only interesting thing about the episode you describe is that the NPC is, in fact, a PC. Mary is the one who has sent that up - so she is not a bystander, she is the instigator of the whole thing - and the players don't actually know what it is that it is interesting about the scene. It's an in-joke between Mary and the GM.

The fact that the players can declare attacks against Keyes strikes me as really neither here nor there. Presumably they could have declared attacks against the people in the bar, too, or gone on a rampage in the town committing arson on all the buildings and taking on any NPC who tries to stop them. But if that's the measure of agency, then every RPG grants every player unlimited agency. When I refer to "agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction", I've got in mind more than just declaring actions more-or-less at random until your PC is killed.

Lanefan said:
pemerton said:

The players have an infinite number of ways of provoking the GM to tell them new stuff.

Click to expand...

And it's that infinte number of ways which gives them their agency.

<snip>

the players have all kinds of agency, starting with the 'fluff' and 'crunch' of the characters they create and continuing with the - as noted above - infinite number of run-of-play choices they can make once the puck is dropped and play begins. And while the DM may have some ideas as to what story she'd like to see grow out of her game and can have input and influence in various ways, the end decisions here all rest with the players no matter what the DM does or says short of running a hard railroad. This side of the fiction largely belongs to the players and this is where they have their agency over the shared fiction; though they still need a DM (it's what she's there for) to help bring it to life.

Having an infinite range of ways to provoke someone else to author stuff doesn't mean that you have a lot of agency.

I've bolded what I think is the key phrase in your post where the point I've just made is hidden: the players need the GM to help bring it to life. There are a very large variety of techniques available, across the corpus of roleplaying games and roleplaying approaches, to a GM who want to "help the players bring it to life". Some of them are more conducive to player agency than others.

Your example, upthread, of a GM establishing a whole lot of unrevealed consequences playing out "behind the scenes" and resulting in the PCs (and, thereby, their players) suffering consequences which the players never contemplated, intended or deliberately put into play in the game, illustrates the point. The players took advantage of their freedom to make moves in the game. The GM helped them "bring it to life". But what agency did the players exercise? None that I can see. All the significant choices were made by the GM.

pemerton · Feb 18, 2018

shidaku said:
Fundamentally YOU and only YOU had the authority to include something that would play to their backstory. The fact that it came player recommended is largely irrelevant.

I think you're misunderstanding either on purpose, or something. Because I can't be much clearer with what I wrote, and nobody else seems to have read my post and been confused by it.

I don't know that anyone else has really responded to your post, have they? (If Saelorn has, then I can't read it because he's blocked me again.)

In any event, I don't think accusations of insincerity are very helpful. You think I've misunderstood you. I think you've misunderstood me.

For instance, you say "YOU and only YOU had the authority to include something that would play to their backstory". But I think it was the other PC, not Vecna, who offered the would-be magistrate PC the prize of a magistracy in return for joining with the attack on Rel Astra. Earlier in the campaign it was the player of the would-be magistrate PC who came up with the idea of a PC whose aspiration was to be a magistrate - I can't remember now if he suggested Rel Astra as the place for this, or if I did, or if the action of the game was already based in Rel Astra and we both just took it for granted that Rel Astra had a magistracy along the lines of classical city states in Greece and Italy. And it was the player of the world-domination PC who made contact with Vecna to try and establish an alliance, and hence brought what could otherwise have been a throwaway PC into front and centre in the game.

You think there is something you can clearly see which makes the setting "my broth". I'm not seeing it.

shidaku said:
The fact that it came player recommended is largely irrelevant.

To me, it seems that this may be a reason that you're misunderstanding me. (To you, this may be the reason why I don't get what your point is.) Because, far from being irrelevant, the intertwining of player-authored backstories and PC motivations, various elements of the fiction introduced by the GM, and the sbusequent role those play in player action declarations, GM decisions about framing, etc, is at the heart of the game. It's not largely irrelevant - in fact, it's nearly everything in RPGing.

AbdulAlhazred · Feb 18, 2018

pemerton said:
@chaochou - I don't think I agree that all "let's pretend" is lying. I'd rather call out lying as one particular case of pretence.

...

(For completeness - what I've suggested above isn't the only theory going around of how fictions and pretence work. It just happens to be the approach that I favour.)