A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

AbdulAlhazred · Mar 21, 2019

pemerton said:
The big issue for me, in the setup @Maxperson describes, is how do we know how many children are eaten? In a skill challenge, this can be managed through failures - each failure is more children dead. But in other D&D versions, which have no rule for determining children eaten per orc-time-mile-unit, it becomes GM fiat. So the stakes and the action resolution become somewhat illusory.

Right. I kind of naturally thought of it in terms of 4e, but this is a really big problem with running games which focus on 'story' using classic versions of D&D (or 3e or 5e either). There is simply no framework for regulating what winning and losing mean. This is why projecting a 'combat like' system into all aspects of the game is so revolutionary in 4e. I found nothing more telling in the community than the prevalence of a profound inability to appreciate this point. Obviously the types of games you often discus, BW, etc. all have even more pervasive and robust features in this direction, though aimed at producing slightly different types of games.

HoML, my 4e hack, simply states this as an invariant game play process, ALL conflict is a challenge, you can't even roll dice outside of one.

Maxperson · Mar 21, 2019

Sadras said:
Max you realise given your above relationship between knowledge of character hit points and metagaming, players will inadvertently metagame. The only way to realistically (with assurety) say that your players don't meta on this issue, is if the DM was the sole bookkeeper of the characters' hit point scores.

Yes, mistakes will happen. Nobody is perfect and I'm not really concerned with accidents. It's the intentional act that is the issue for me. I don't claim to be perfect, so I'm not going to hold others to a higher standard than I hold myself.

pemerton · Mar 21, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
I never said it was.

Then why do you think a RQ rulebook admonition against using real-world chemistry in playing one's PC equates to, or implies, an admonition against using one's knowledge of trollish vulnerabilities in playing one's PC?

Lanefan · Mar 21, 2019

AbdulAlhazred said:
I have to agree with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], this IS meta-gaming. The players know that they need to work together in order to have an enjoyable game experience. There's no reason for it which arises within the game, except secondarily as a lampshade over the fact that it is driven by necessary table dynamics. This is why problems like thieves and paladins not being able to get along are an issue, because the game mechanics and necessary process of play actively conflict!

Everyone who's ever seen this happen at a table knows this is absolutely meta-gaming, and it goes on at a low level in every game. The characters get along, like, and trust one another in a way that is HIGHLY unnatural for real human beings, and it is utterly at the service of the table, something which does not exist within the game itself.

Agreed; which is why I don't object in the slightest if the PCs in fact don't get along or always trust each other etc.

The party composition piece, though, is very easily explainable in the fiction: in-character someone looks at the group assembled in the tavern and says "OK, we've got two sneaky-types, a wizard, and me: a bard. Guys, I think we'd better recruit ourselves a healer and a front-line tank or two 'cause if we don't you just know those'll be exactly what we find we really need once crap gets real out there."

pemerton · Mar 21, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
you shouldn't act on things your character wouldn't know, and he includes among those things like monster vulnerabilities.

But surely you can see that this begs the very question at issue: why would the character not know?

You are posting as if those who disagree with [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] are spinning nonsense out of whole cloth. But in my case I have the whole of the play tradition that I started with on my side: the rulebook told me to read it, so I did; articles in White Dwarf, by people like Lewis Pulsipher and Roger Musson, told me that a skilled player is aware of monster weaknesses and factors that into choices (eg use Charm Monster on a troll or an ochre jelly, because few monsters carry oil or torches); and nothing ever hinted that I was expected to play my character ignorant of these things that I learned as part of mastering the game.

hawkeyefan said:
Regarding trolls and fire....to me, once players know, the cat is pretty much out of the bag. I don't see the advantage of enforcing this ruling....I don't see what it adds to the game. Unless everyone likes the idea of pretending to discover a secret they already know.

So much this.

Lanefan · Mar 21, 2019

AbdulAlhazred said:
But he isn't, really. There is a lot more too it than that. How often do 5 random people meet in a bar and suddenly become an indivisible team of highly cooperating members?

They don't, which is why it's on the DM* to come up with a plausible reason that these people suddenly find themselves a) together and b) with a common purpose, no matter how temporary.

* - though the players can do it themselves too, as happened to start my current campaign (bless their little hearts!)

I am sure we can devise situations where the creation of a party does seem plausible BTW, but they are mostly not anything like the "the characters are nobody special in the world" sort of assumptions that are being tossed around here. Nor is such an arrangement likely to persist for long, nor fail to end in acrimony a high percentage of the time (heck, I have problems getting 5 software developers not to decide to kill each other before the end of a project, and they're not ninjas, paladins, and warlocks!).

The only base assumption underlying the process is that the PCs have either chosen to become adventurers or for whatever reason have the skills and abilities for it anyway.

Whether the arrangement persists or crashes into acrimony, I don't care. All I need to worry about is getting 'em together in the first place; after which if they all want to kill each other that's fine by me.

And parties go FAR beyond that, the PCs are expected to work with others of races they are culturally hostile to, sublimate their own best interests ALWAYS to the best interests of the group, often take long digressions from their own primary interests and motives to assist these others, trust them with their wealth and shares of vastly valuable treasures, etc. etc. etc. Many people wouldn't even consider treating their own families so well in reality.

The work-with-hostile-races (or cultures) piece bugs me too, and if any of my PCs find themselves in that situation there's usually a problem before too long. (e.g. my upstanding small-p paladinic 3e Ranger finding himself running with a nasty half-dragon PC in the same party: "I've spent half my adult life training up on how to kill these things and now you expect me to run with one?!". Yeah, that didn't last long.)

Always working in the best interests of the group? Not always so much; more often it's merely going through the motions of working with the group in order to better fulfill one's own agenda and plans. But it looks good from the outside.

Lanefan · Mar 21, 2019

Maxperson said:
Troll #1: What are those things approaching us?

Troll #2: Those are PCs! My uncle once met an Elmo in the Temple of Elemental Evil, and he said the trick to killing one is...

Troll #1: Do they taste good with salt? I heard yes, after 3 hours over a hot open fire....

pemerton · Mar 21, 2019

Lanefan said:
this sort of thing would bug the hell out of me as a player as well because I'd still be asking the same question: does something only just now being learned or introduced, that in theory was present all along, possibly cause any retcons or change any previously-done actions and-or roleplay?

Which also means that were I playing in a situation where players could introduce major elements of the fiction, one top-of-mind consideration for me would always be whether anything I was planning on introducing on the fly would cause these same issues - an example being the "my PC is a high noble" declaration - and if it would I wouldn't introduce it.

Huge red flag goes up the second someone says "Had we known this earlier {xxx} would have been done differently!", where what's just now been revealed is something that should have been known earlier. The noble isn't the best example here as there may be valid reasons to have kept it secret (though the noble PC's player and the GM should still have known all along), so I'll use an example that happened to me way back when:

A friend was writing an adventure module - great big thing - and I was DMing it kind of as it got written*. Party is out in the wilderness following a road (the only road in the area) to an important assassin's hideaway. Eventually it comes out in the module that the assassins use wagons to get their supplies in from civilization - and on hearing this the players quite rightly ask me "Well, why didn't we see any wagon tracks in the dirt, all the way along the road? Things might have been different if we had!". The meta-game answer, which I openly told the players, was that the wagons hadn't yet been written into the module at the time and so I couldn't read ahead and factor them in. They were understanding, if a bit annoyed, and on we went; but it stuck with me as something both as player and DM to watch out for and never to repeat.

* - at one point about halfway through I told my friend he'd better do some serious writing that coming week, as the previous session had played to within 9 words (!) of where he'd left off writing!

But this is just poor management of the fiction: introducing an element which contradicts what's already established (in this case, the absence of tracks on a muddy road). (And as per [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]'s post, without introducing something else - like a magic spell or charm of traceless passage - to explain away the seeming inconsistency.)

If a player is going to write in new bits of fiction, it shouldn't be too hard to reconcile it with what's gone before. To reiterate a point made by [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] upthread, the established fiction of most RPG campaigns is pretty thin, meaning that the reconciliation task is not normally going to be that demanding.

pemerton · Mar 21, 2019

Maxperson said:
Troll vulnerabilities are not even remotely as common knowledge as crossbows, or as easily reasoned out as "Look, it's a spear trap."

How do you know? I have no idea how to reason out either of the things you mention; and I certainly know more about troll vulnerabilities than some of the polearms listed on Gygax's weapon table.

This is what I mean when I say you are making arbitrary assertions. Nothing in the rulebooks of any version of AD&D supports this claim. It's purely a table convention for your game.

pemerton · Mar 21, 2019

Sadras said:
Max you realise given your above relationship between knowledge of character hit points and metagaming, players will inadvertently metagame. The only way to realistically (with assurety) say that your players don't meta on this issue, is if the DM was the sole bookkeeper of the characters' hit point scores.

And this idea, of the player keeping keeping hp scores secret, was a widely-discussed technique around 40 years ago. But I don't think it's much in vogue anymore.