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

Ovinomancer said:

However, it's worth nothing that a sufficient GM answer to a Bardic Knowledge check is "nothing special."

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Sure, but only if the Bard picks up a rock or something off the ground, or uses it on some other mundane object. The vast majority of the time, the bard is going to use it on important/unusual things, which means that "nothing special" is not going to be sufficient. It's really easy to figure out what the important or unusual things are when you encounter them.

This is never a proper response to Spout Lore. If the player asks and succeeds, then the location is important by default.

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This is a difference. Yes.

Further, the different in fail states is massive, and that was the crux of my point.

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I'm not sure I would call it massive, but it's definitely a significant difference. In D&D if you fail the roll, you don't know anything about the thing in question.

Well, Legend Lore is a spell, If it was the Bardic Knowledge class ability, then my answer is even more apt because the spell has no failure state if the target is actually legendary.

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[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] confused things by calling it the Legend Lore Bard ability. Legend Lore is the spell. Bardic Knowledge is the Bard ability. I figured that since he tacked on the "Bard ability," that he was talking about Bardic Knowledge.



Dude. I'm running a 5e game right now. I'm on record saying 5e fights against a non-GM centered play, so I'm running a GM centered game. I like running 5e, it scratches certain itches very well, and my players enjoy it.

If you'd bother to read my posts, I've specifically called out MMI as degenerate play -- ie, what happens if you use the tools poorly. GM centered play requires saying no, and telling players what's in your notes, and the other things -- in moderation. Take any of those to extremes and you end up with MMI, or Railroading (which requires MMI). Do them in moderation and with principled play and you don't.

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Fair enough, though I don't think Railroading requires "Mother May I." All it really requires is a lack of options or forcing things behind the screen so that player choice is removed. Removing player choice doesn't equate to players having to ask to do things.

For example, if the DM has a forked path and down the right path is the hermit with the adventure hook, and down the left is nothing, it's railroading if when the players take the left path the DM moves the hermit there. He gave the illusion of choice, but there really wasn't any. Nor does that involve any players questioning the DM about something and being told no.

Neither style is better, they're just different. One can be better for you, though, and that's good for each person.

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Agreed.

Numidius said:

Let me try

Spout Lore is a standard Move (check) on Int, available to any Pc.
On a success the Gm says something interesting and useful on the subject, on a partial something only interesting (is up to the players to make it useful), on a failure it's the Gm's turn (to make something happen against the Pcs, following Gm procedures, moves.... etc).
The info provided by the Gm can come from prep or improv, doesn't matter, it's "true" either way.
The Gm may/should ask the player, in return, how the Pc knows about it (adding new content, background info, to be taken into account for the future).
(The Bard in DW, in particular, has also some Class specific Moves/powers to "know stuff" when she encounters that stuff/Npc for the first time)

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Right, the key is that the GM has to talk about the subject the player indicated his PC is spouting about. It also (may) have to be useful to the players (IE it gets them out of a jam or moves them closer to some goal, maybe allows a bond to be resolved, etc.) and it MUST be 'interesting'. Beyond that it could be anything.

Legend Lore (for specific types of subject) IS fairly similar, but given the lack of constraints on the GM that exist in DW (player advocate, moves challenge players, etc.) it often takes on a different sort of significance. For instance LL might simply relate some uninteresting information. It might even elicit "nothing legendary is known about this boring fork" or something like that. Spout Lore WILL produce a result, and it WILL be engaging the party, this is inherent. The player is also likely to be given an explicit chance to embellish the fiction in a specific way -how do you know this- which always adds something to character backstory.

I'd also note that you probably don't want to OVERUSE Spout Lore. Mechanically as a player you subject yourself to a DM soft or hard move on a 6- and in any case it is usually overkill since nothing prevents the players and GM from simply describing what they do and where they are without the need to make checks (though only to the extent that the state of the fiction doesn't change materially).

pemerton said:

What Aldarc said! In the scenario desdribed the players are using out-of-game knowledge (eg their knowledge that this is the second set of PCs to tackle the Caves) and are declaring actions based on that (eg trying to trigger certain GM-narration-via-NPCs).

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Yes, which means they're metagaming. I'm just trying to point out that in some cases - of which this is clearly one - a DM can take some simple steps to help line character knowledge up with player knowledge...

Wouldn't it just be quicker if the GM told the players As you travel to the Caves, you past peasant and tinkers travelling two and from the Keep. They all shake their heads when they see you, muttering about a similar group who headed off a fortnight earlier and never returned.

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...such as this; which is even more efficient than what I'd suggested.

When D&D was invented, players were expected to use the skill and information they acquired the first time the played. That was how players got better. That's part of what Gygax had in mind when he advocated "skilled play".

This is why early D&D is characterised by so much new content introduction (new monsters, new traps, etc), and sharing of these items among referees. Referees needed a constant supply of new puzzles to keep challenging their players.

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Yet when a DM changes things up e.g. with red dragons that breathe gas or trolls that can only be perma-damaged by cold, players cry foul.

The idea that a player who has skill would, in the course of playing the game, pretend not to have it, is one that post-dates the origins of D&D. It's certainly not the only way to play D&D, and frankly to me it seems rather degeneate - no one in this thread has even explained how it would work.

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How it works is really quite simple: as a player you have to put yourself strictly in the mind of your PC and think as your PC would think while using only the knowledge that your PC has, and as far as possible forget what you yourself know as a real-world player. Sometimes it's easy to do this, other times not - personally I find it's easier if the character I'm playing has a personality more similar to my own, and more difficult if my character's personality is very different than my own.

And yes, when done right it can on occasion mean playing your PC straight into its grave in full awareness that you-as-player have knowledge that could have saved it.

The two of you are just making this up. I"ve quoted the rule. The rule says nothing about when a check is or isn't required: it explains how to adjudicate a check if one is made. Obviously if a player already knows, s/he won't seek to make the check

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As you're pretty good about using player when you mean player as opposed to character, then I'll come back with this: it's on the GM to force the check if she feels player knowledge is being used in place of character knowledge to avoid making a check.

But if the character already knows then of course there's no check.

and there is nothing in the rule that suggests the GM is to use checks to gate players' use of their knowledge.

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Other than the overall suggestion to players that they think like thier characters - but now I can't remember whether I saw this in the 4e or 5e PH, I glanced though both last night and saw it in one of 'em.

How does this even work? Do you just let your PC be killed by the trolls?

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If it comes to that and there's no out-clauses or escape hatches, then yes.

And I'd consider this excellent play.

pemerton said:

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] perhaps doesn't understand some of my posts (and some others') because he seems not to appreciate the difference between a player move that obliges the GM to reveal some pre-established backstory (eg Bardic Legend Lore, a Commune spell, etc) and a player move that obliges the GM to author some new, immediately relevant, fiction (eg DW's Spout Lore move).

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I don't appreciate the difference because in my view there is no difference, or at least none that's at all relevant to anything.

Here's what both of those examples really are:

The player makes a move that obliges the GM to narrate some fiction relevant to that move
The GM narrates that fiction.

I'm not good, for two reasons.

(1) In DW, a player doesn't declare Spout Lore (either -as-player or -as-PC, whatever exactly that means).

Here is the relevant rule (DW rulebook, p 18):

Moves are rules that tell you when they trigger and what effect they have. A move depends on a fictional action and always has some fictional effect.​

So players don't declare moves in DW. They describe what their PCs are doing in the fiction. And this can then trigger moves. For instance (as per p 66), Spout Lore is triggered if a player declares that his/her PC "consult [his/her] accumulated knowledge about something".

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Though I got the terminology wrong, in the end the mechanic still gets invoked.

(2) In DW, the information provided is new to player and GM, and is authored by the GM based on a sense of current narrative trajectory: in particular, it should build on past GM moves as well as player intent (that is what makes it interestingand useful).

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The information provided is new to the player. My whole point is that it doesn't matter a rat's behind whether it's new to the GM or not, from the point of view of the player receiving the information.

In D&D, the assumption is that the information is already established by the GM in advance of play. And if the GM find him-/herself having to ad lib, the assumption is that this will be done as much as possible as if it were an organic outgrowth of what is already recorded in the GM's notes.

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Yes...and then eventually you might find that for most of the time the GM hasn't had any notes at all and pretty much ad-libbed the whole thing! Been there, done that, cleaned up the mess afterwards.

For the same resaon that plagiarism is academic wrongdoing.

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Plagiarism might be academic wrongdoing but to me the end reader (analagous here to the player at the table) it makes no difference whether what I'm reading is original or plagiarized as long as it's a) new to me and b) correct.

For the same reason that I enjoy playing mediocre guitar, but don't really enjoy listening to others play mediocre guitar.

For the same reason that people got to life drawing classes on weekends.

Creativity is a human talent , and creating things is a human pleasure. And for this reason (perhaps others too, but it's the one that I'm focusing on at the momennt), creating a fiction togehter with your friends is different from having one of them tell you a story.

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And creativity can take many forms, even just around an RPG table. Creating the in-game fiction is just one aspect of it. Creating the setting is another, creating characters and personalities is another, and never mind the poems and songs and artwork and so forth that are inspired by the game.

Ovinomancer said:

I'll start a bit differently from the other responses: in your given example, there's no difference. Yup, I agree there's no difference in outcome and the source of information is largely irrelevant.

But.... (come on, you knew this was coming)...

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Bracing myself...

There's still a big difference in how you get to the outcome, and to illustrate, I'm going to change a bit of your example. I'm going to say, "what happens if the check fails?"

In the Legend Lore case (yes, I know the spell cannot fail if the statue is the Statue, but you also referenced mechanics that can fail), if you fail, the statue still is the Statue of Adonis, you just can't tell right now.

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Legend Lore isn't a spell, btw; it's an at-will ability for old-school Bards. The main limitations on use is that it's a bit time-consuming in the fiction, and you can only use it once on any given thing until you gain a level.

And for all that, the statue might be a fake - you still don't know that either.

In the Spout Lore case, if you fail the check, the GM gets to make a move against you. This may be to 'state an unwelcome truth' that this is NOT the Statue of Adonis. Or it may be that some other calamity looms because of the time you spent examining the Statute, possibly putting the Statue at risk of destruction. Or, some other bad thing.

The point here is that while success states may look very similar, the means to get there is pretty different and failure states look very, very different. In your Legend Lore case, the characters are risking nothing by making a check to tell if this is the Statue they seek -- failure just means knowledge is delayed. However, in the other case, failure can mean that this isn't the Statue after all, or that you think it is, but it's a fake, or that it is the Statue, but now it's at risk of destruction! The tension and story importance of the checks is wildly different.

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Depending on in-fiction circumstance, Legend Lore isn't always no-risk largely because of the time it takes (and because it's a Bard singing and-or playing, it can't really be done all that quietly); wandering monsters etc. can happen by or be attracted by the noise, or whatever. And there's nothing stopping a GM from introducing other complications, though DW seems better at encouraging and mechanizing that process.

Add onto this a few things others have said -- that knowledge that you're just getting more information that the GM decides is less thrilling for some (although it can be very thrilling for many others, as evidences by GM centered games being, by far, the dominate playstyle) vs knowledge that this roll will mean that the searching part of the Quest for the Statue has concluded and now we're moving onto the recovery part or it will mean that we must continue searching. The difference is in the import of the roll, and this is a very big difference. Outcomes may look the same, but how you got there, what you risked, is the crux, here.

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From the player side, even in a GM-driven game learning this is the real statue would still mean the searching part of the Quest is done. The outcome is just as important to the PCs in the fiction (which in theory is what's important) in either system.

AbdluAlhazred said:

True, there are a bunch of such items. Universally reviled by players and often panned as things that should probably not be used exception in some pretty specific situations. I guess old school classic D&D also is envisaging an environment where buying a 'remove curse' is not super hard (just expensive, haha, you got dinged!).

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You're assuming alignment change is a simple curse that can be removed.

Well, sorry, friend; but now you've seen the error of your previous ways why would you ever want to go back to that?

Manbearcat said:

Before this gets away from us, here is the thing.

When you shout an ally’s hand back on, it’s important to understand that gorges are Shrodinger-ey, hit points aren’t meaty, Fire effects are flame-y, and misses and Wizards are damage-y and overpowered-ey respectively.

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How did you not get alignment in there somewhere?

* 1275 posts and we’re somehow still roughly on target!

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Yeah, we're still aiming for that big target in the middle of the field but if the damn parachute doesn't open soon we're going to hit it a lot harder than recommended...

Maxperson said:

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] confused things by calling it the Legend Lore Bard ability. Legend Lore is the spell. Bardic Knowledge is the Bard ability.

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In 3e maybe. In 1e - which is what I was referring to - Bards didn't have their own spells. They had certain abilities, of which Legend Lore was one*; and could cast a few Druid spells.

* - some others were Charm, Item Knowledge, Suggestion, Sonic Attack Negation, and Morale.

Lanefan said:

it doesn't matter a rat's behind whether it's new to the GM or not, from the point of view of the player receiving the information.

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By the player you mean @Lanefan. I can tell you that when I'm the player it matters to me how and why the GM is establishing the information. It makes a very big difference to my play experience.

Here's a post from you that illustrates the point:

Lanefan said:

then eventually you might find that for most of the time the GM hasn't had any notes at all and pretty much ad-libbed the whole thing! Been there, done that, cleaned up the mess afterwards.

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What you call "a mess" is what DW calls playing the game. That's the difference, right there. It's a real thing that really matters to play.

Lanefan said:

How it works is really quite simple: as a player you have to put yourself strictly in the mind of your PC and think as your PC would think while using only the knowledge that your PC has, and as far as possible forget what you yourself know as a real-world player. Sometimes it's easy to do this, other times not - personally I find it's easier if the character I'm playing has a personality more similar to my own, and more difficult if my character's personality is very different than my own.

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By itself, this doesn't explain what a player who knows about trolls and fire is meant to do when playing a supposedly-ignorant PC.

Lanefan said:

pemerton said:

How does this even work? Do you just let your PC be killed by the trolls?

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If it comes to that and there's no out-clauses or escape hatches, then yes.

And I'd consider this excellent play.

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Maxperson said:

Or I escape. Or I discover the weakness through other means. If I didn't know about trolls and encountered one, I'd beat it down into the negatives and then run my rear off to get away before it gets back up. No need for my PC to die. Then I would research how to kill them and go back for revenge, or at least be able to kill the next ones I come across.

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Two comments:

(1) This produces the odd result that a newbie player, whose PC encounters trolls for the first time, might be able to beat them (getting lucky with an attempt at using fire); whereas the veteran player's PC never accidentally discovers that fire works against trolls.

(2) Personally, I find it absolutely baffling, this pretending that a puzzle is still a puzzle when, in fact, you already know the answer. And there is nothing traditional about this way of playing D&D. It is virtually the opposite of what Gygax describes as "skilled play" in his PHB.

Lanefan said:

the overall suggestion to players that they think like thier characters - but now I can't remember whether I saw this in the 4e or 5e PH

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From the 4e PHB (pp 9, 18, 24):


The question of what knowledge a player is able to impute to his/her PC is not explicitly addressed.

Maxperson said:

There's no rule that says the players can use the knowledge that they have as players to avoid a check. That's a fiction you are perpetrating here.

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Huh? I'm not making anything up. Here's the 4e PHB (p 269) on declaring attack actions during a combat:


This is entirely consistent with the fact that 4e D&D is a game, in which players use their cognitive capacities to make "moves" in the form of action declarations. If a player believes, based on his/her accumulated knowledge, that a good move to declare against a troll is a Fire-attack, because s/he knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire, then s/he can declare such a move. Conversely, if a player is uncertain about what would be a good move, s/he is always entitled to attempt a monster knowledge check (which does not require an action). If this is successful, it may help the player choose an action which s/he believes will help him/her and his/her allies achieve victory.

As I said, the 5e rules on this are not something I'm very familiar with, but the 4e rules are crystal clear: the player character is the player's "piece" in the game, and the player gets to decide what his/her PC does, and when it comes to declaring attacks is expected to consider how a declared act will lead to victory in combat.

Lanefan said:

it's on the GM to force the check if she feels player knowledge is being used in place of character knowledge to avoid making a check.

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The GM doesn't get to "force a check" in these circumstances.

Knowledge checks are used "to remember a useful bit of information in [a skill's] field of knowledge or to recognize a clue related to it . . . [or] to identify certain kinds of monsters" (4e PHB p 179). That is (as I've already said), knowledge checks are a mechanical device that a player can use to oblige the GM to provide more information; they are not a gate on the player's use of information s/he already has.There's simply no such rule in 4e. It's not a game in which the GM is allowed to gate player action declarations in the way you are advocating for, and in the way that [MENTION=6888436]sd_jasper[/MENTION] appears to suggest here:

sd_jasper said:

in a hypothetical situation where a player tried to do something that I felt was based on player knowledge, I'd stop the action, ask them to explain how they character can justify that action, hash things out, then resume.

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