What does it mean to "Challenge the Character"?

pemerton said:

I'm happy to accept that it's malformed in the context of 5e D&D. But I don't see how that conclusion can be reached without giving some account of who has what authority over which bits of the the fiction. And saying that the player has authority over what his/her PC does, thinks and feels isn't going to do the job - because Hey, that's my old friend Frances - I ask her to let us through the gate! is an example of the player deciding what his/her PC does, thinks and feels.

Nor do I think it's enough of an answer to say that players have no authority over any aspect of the fiction except action declaration and associated bodily movements by their PCs. Page 33 of the Basic PDF says that "Characters are defined by much more than their race and class. They’re individuals with their own stories, interests, connections, and capabilities beyond those that class and race define." There are sidebar examples throughout the PDF of two characters (Tika and Artemis) who are distinguiished - as those sidebars emphasise - on the basis of non-mechanical details of the fiction. That seems an invitation to players to make up similar stuff for their PCs. Deciding on Ideals and Bonds seems also to invite the player to make up people and places that their PCs care about and are connected to.

In the context of this thread, I think that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has made it fairly clear that one reason he doesn't like the "goal and approach" method of action resolution is that it privileges the GM's conception of key aspects of the ficiton over possibly differing conceptions held by the players. Others obviously disagree, taking the view that exercising such authority is the prerogative of the GM. But upthread, [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION] gave an example of a player authoring shared fiction invovling the stories told to a young PC by trial elders. I don't think many posters regarded this as a usurpation of the GM's authority. The general response to my post seems to be that the player deciding that the gate guard is her/his PC's childhood friend Frances is a usurpation of the GM's authority. But in some other recent threads I've seen criticisms of a GM narrating failure as some sort of oversight or carelessness on the part of the PC as a usurpation by the GM of the player's authority over deciding what his/her PC does, thinks and feels. Likewise there's a widespread view that it would be usurpation for a GM to decide that a PC didn't do what the player has said s/he does, because the GM thinks it is inconsistent with the PC's stats.

These boundaries aren't crystal clear to me, and I'm a pretty experienced RPGer. I don't find them clearly articulated in the 5e Basic PDF. I'm sure I could get by in [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION]'s game playing a "man with no name"-type character, but nothing in these threads has given me any indication of how I might go about playing a character who is genuinely embedded in the social context of the gameworld - even though the Tika/Artemis sidebars, and the more general tenor of chapter 4 of the Basic PDF, all give me the impression that the game is focused on such embedded individuals.

Goal and approach is - as I understand it - all about engaging the fiction so as to mitigate the difficulty of the challenge (or, perhaps, aggravating it so as to earn Inspiration).

I'm not disputing that a boundary can be articulated which explains why I pull out my crowbar and use it to lever the door open is OK but There's my old friend Frances, one of the guards now - I ask her to let us through is not. I'm just saying that I haven't seen it articulated yet. And although you emphasise not carrying baggage from one game to the next, at the moment the only grasp I am getting on the boundary is by ignoring chapter 4 of the Basic PDF and instead remembering how most traditional RPGs allocated GM/player authority over the ficiton from the 70s through most of the 90s.

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I get what you're aiming at here, I just question why you're doing so, or maybe why you're coming at the issue so obliquely. 5e is not a system that can provide your preferred experience, although some pieces of it do well. Now that I see what you were aiming at with your example I think there's some daylight between being able to "control what the PC thinks and does" and your example. Fundamentally, this is on whether the thoughts and deeds of the PC are able to determine game fiction outside the character. In 5e, this is (baseline) untrue. The player is free to declare they think they know the guard and act accordingly, but the GM has no obligation to agree about the fictional state of the guard.

This last is the important distinction. Being able to determine what your PC does and thinks doesn't extend to establishing new functional avenues to current challenges. Let's contrast your guard example with the troll example. In the troll example, the player establishes the PC's uncle told the PC about trolls' weakness to fire. This is to "justify* doing so within the fiction. But, the ability to use fire on the troll isn't causally tied to this bit of fiction. This fiction does not enable previously unavailable actions.

Your guard example, though, does establish new actions that weren't available before the introduction. The player is now trying to establish fiction in the current gameworld to enable new casual paths to overcome the immediate obstacle. This isn't allowed in 5e -- it's outside the player's narrative authority because the player is now describing elements of the scene alongside their actions.

A 5e GM is free to allow this kind of play, but [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION]'s injuction about smoothness of play comes in. 5e has no mechanical systems or support for this kind of play, so it's entirely on the GM's continued approval and the table conventions. Perhaps this works well, but any such ad hoc system is likely to have more pain points related to it's ad hoc nature. In other words, absent mechanical reinforcement of this play in the system, exercising it is as reliant on GM approval as what you'd replace with it. Still can be an awesome game, though.

That said, I'm pretty loose with player introductions in 5e because I strive to use my GM "no" as rarely as possible. Still, there's a limit in play and an understanding at our table because there are no mechanics available to resolve a conflict. This is different when we play Blades, as there are those systems in play. I clearly notice, though, that my overhead in running 5e is much higher than in Blades because I have to do more heavy lifting on the content side AND be careful to maintain "fairness" with that content. In Blades, I just have to GM within the clear constraints and don't have to worry too much about "fairness" at all.

Ovinomancer said:

I clearly notice, though, that my overhead in running 5e is much higher than in Blades because I have to do more heavy lifting on the content side AND be careful to maintain "fairness" with that content. In Blades, I just have to GM within the clear constraints and don't have to worry too much about "fairness" at all.

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This is interesting and really worthy of its own thread, about the burdens (or otherwise) of GMing.

Ovinomancer said:

I get what you're aiming at here, I just question why you're doing so, or maybe why you're coming at the issue so obliquely.

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Well, it started by just following some thoughts where they took me.

But one place they ended up taking me is that I think some of the constraints/rules that are being taken for granted in the 5e context aren't actually found in the rules but are imported from some more generic conception of RPGing.

To elaborate: in one of these recent threads, someone posted about GMing a couple of kids. Kid A, in character, tells Kid B (also in character) to scout ahead. B does so. A asks "What was up ahead?" B starts answering, without waiting to be told by the GM. And it's not only kids - the last time I introduced a new player to RPGing, he took for granted that he had a fair bit of liberty to establish context, background etc for his PC.

If all I know of RPGing is the 5e Basic PDF, I don't think I can fully work out how I'm meant to create and play a character like Tika Wayland, who (as advertised in the sidebars) has friends who care for her, a history and a home. The example of play - scoping out the gargoyles - gives some sort of indication that establishing the context is the GM's role. But the stuff in ch 4 strongly implies that establishing PC backstory is the player's role. I don't see much advice in the Basic rules on how to handle the interaction of these two things, and frankly it would just seem weird to be "playing my character" and yet to be having the GM tell me all about my intimate connections to the various NPCs I'm meeting, what our shared memories are, etc. Those look like player-side, not GM-side, elements of the fiction.

And so I guess I feel that, once it comes to light in this way that the game is in fact assuming people can bring some externally-generated expectation to bear on managing this aspect of it, then the claim that certain approaches are notably more consistent with the game taken on its own terms starts to look a bit weaker. To use a metaphor: if everyone has a bump in their rug, I find the claim to have identified the canonical floor covering a bit less persuasive than it might otherwise have been.

(Postscript: if everyone is playing "Man with no name" type characters; or characters whose backstory is all in the past, and/or somewhere else, and so not apt to actually come up in play; then the issue won't arise. But I don't think the 5e Basic PDF tells me that that's the sort of character I should create, or the sort of play experience I should expect. In fact, chapter 4 tends to suggest quite the opposite. Although maybe this is a case like the Foreword to Moldvay Basic, where the game text suggests one thing, but in its implementation very clearly delivers a different thing. But I don't see much account in 5e postings of playing "situated" characters, and how that works.)

Ovinomancer said:

there are no mechanics available to resolve a conflict.

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This probably could have been in the same post as just upthread, but I didn't think of it first time round.

Couldn't my example be done as a CHA check? With success/failure narrated along the lines you sketched upthread - success is fond memories and letting the PCs through; failure is either mistaken identity, or what about my poker money, etc.

Is the (or one) issue that it might be hard to set a proper DC? I'll admit I haven't thought that through, but it doesn't seem too big a hurdle.

I'll agree that table dynamics can get strained if the players push too hard in establishing fiction, but the same is true if the GM does: "rocks fall" is obviously at the absurd end, but I think most of us have heard stories of, and at least in my own case I've experienced multiple instances of, games failing because GMs couldn't get player buy in for the fiction they wanted to establish. In the player case just as in the GM case, I feel that this is something that robust table relationships should be able to handle.

And to respond to a possible question, namley, why bother, that is, why not just declare that the PC talks to the guard without adding in the extra fiction? For me, a major reason is that the tendency towards a lack of PC situatedness is in my view one of the suckiest tendencies in D&D. REH did it in his Conan stories for particular narrative reasons, but making it ubiquitous is something I really don't like. Oriental Adventures tried to tackle this in the mid-80s, and I'd like to think that D&D has made some progress in this regard in the intervening 30-odd years.

To me there's a big difference between "I have contacts in the city, does Bob happen to be one of the guards on duty?" and "I have contacts in the city, in fact Bob is captain of the guard so of course he'll let us in."

The former is establishing a background and history (even if it wasn't explicitly written) but the latter is altering the game world beyond what the PC could do.

5ekyu said:

"you have to assume that the first thing I'm going to try is reductio ad absurdum. "

No, you dont.

I can assume that if we all agree to play a game where the players have a lot of freedom or even total freedom to create the fictions around their character scenes that we are not then trying to game that angle.

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You have subtly moved the argument. Now we are talking about how you play the game. And regarding that, my assumption was not that you immediately tried to find the most absurd declarations that you could make within the letter of the law. There may be players like that, and actually, I've probably ran games for a couple of them, but I wasn't making the assumption that because the game did not prevent absurd situations that you played it absurdly.

What I do assume is that any game which allows absurd situations and has no barriers or remedies other than social agreements to prevent it is one that is quite fragile, requires a very particular group of players, and which is likely to go wrong and cause table conflicts in more subtle ways - and by conflicts I don't merely mean juvenile temper tantrums. My expectation is such games are played rarely, and often abandoned after a short time, for many of the same reasons that once a person reaches a particular age, they are no longer content with games of Make Believe and gradually lose interest in them and cease to play them.

As for the belief of it not being an RPG or not, well, I like to leave those to the officially ordainded keepers of the universal definitions.

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Well, do as you like, but you will note that I have never said that a game which allows player authorship is not an RPG. Quite the contrary, I've admitted to knowledge of several, and apparently "Blades" is also one.

Nevertheless, there are things which are RPGs and things that are not. Merely in and of itself allowing player authorial control doesn't mean the game isn't an RPG, and the people that have made that claim regarding what I've said are simply dishonest.

*Deleted by user*

Now i need to find a punch bowl.

Oofta said:

To me there's a big difference between "I have contacts in the city, does Bob happen to be one of the guards on duty?" and "I have contacts in the city, in fact Bob is captain of the guard so of course he'll let us in."

The former is establishing a background and history (even if it wasn't explicitly written) but the latter is altering the game world beyond what the PC could do.

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There is a difference, but it is a finer and yet more important distinction than you make here. What you say about it being something that PCs cannot do is true only for most traditional RPGs and most traditional processes of play. There are a variety of games where there are processes of play that validate the PC making calls* of the sort, "I have contacts in the city, in fact Bob is captain of the guard so of course he'll let us in."

(*As I'm using the term, assertions or potential assertions about the myth of the game world. These differ from propositions, which are assertions about the actions or intended fictional positioning of the player in the game world. A call helps establish what the situation or problem is. A proposition offers some way to solve it, often one that involves a certain amount of risk. Note that a call is not part of the normal action resolution cycle that others in the thread are referring to as "goal-method", although calls of various sorts are allowed in most games through some process.)

But if you examine those games, you'll find that they still share something in common with traditional RPG play - the power of the player is limited. If the player character has chalk, then chances are the have chalk because the game gives the play some limited resource to acquire chalk. The same is true of every one of the player characters resources - they had a cost and are finite.

The first call refers to the players limited and defined resources and clearly recognizes that they are limited and thus may not apply. Every RPG limits the resources of the players, for the reason that it - being a game - requires the players to have limits. All games are defined by their limits, and thus have illegal moves or propositions. The limits are actually what makes a game fun and challenging. If a game doesn't have limits, it's not a game but a form of play. (Yes, I recognize the words play and game are controversial and people that study these games argue over what they are, but close enough for us amateurs, and better than some of the pros.)

But the second call is, sans context, a call that suggests the power of the player is basically unlimited. That sort of call suggests the player has the power of fiat - that Rule Zero applies to the player as well - and if the player can declare things by fiat then they can resolve pretty much any situation. The reason that the GM of an RPG is not called a player, even though they are participating in the game, is that they have no limits and thus cannot (or should not) play the game any more than a referee can or should play in a game of soccer that they are officiating.

Now, in clearer context, we might find that there are actually limits on the second call. Some RPGs allow calls of that nature within a framework that places limits on the their effectiveness or on how often they an be made and so forth. But unless those limits exist, its probably not even a game.

As for the declaration that if there exists some call you can make about the fictional world, which will not be validated by the GM as true, that the GM is somehow playing your character for you...

You can certainly aver as a player that your character is the ultimate author and ruler over reality, but if you do, it's no more likely to be true of the fictional universe than it is of this one. You are free to assert that your character believes this to be true, and as the GM I cannot overrule you. But I'm not obligated to affirm that the belief is true. If you claim something delusional, you may be ill at ease if I don't affirm your delusion is true, but that is not interfering with your thoughts or your play. Indeed, it is impossible to interfere with your thoughts - that's what makes a delusion a delusion rather than merely a false belief. Your character can certainly try to be the ruler over reality, just as your character may try to leap over the ocean in a single bound. But you cannot assert that anything you wish to be so is so, even perfect agreement between your character's mental image of the world and what the world actually is. You cannot in the real world assert that just because you think something is so that it is. You should have no expectation that you can do so in a game, unless provided for by the game.

pemerton said:

Goal and approach is - as I understand it - all about engaging the fiction so as to mitigate the difficulty of the challenge (or, perhaps, aggravating it so as to earn Inspiration).

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What some have decided to call "goal and approach" is about more than that and what you're specifically stating here is really more from the perspective of the player.

pemerton said:

I'm not disputing that a boundary can be articulated which explains why I pull out my crowbar and use it to lever the door open is OK but There's my old friend Frances, one of the guards now - I ask her to let us through is not. I'm just saying that I haven't seen it articulated yet. And although you emphasise not carrying baggage from one game to the next, at the moment the only grasp I am getting on the boundary is by ignoring chapter 4 of the Basic PDF and instead remembering how most traditional RPGs allocated GM/player authority over the ficiton from the 70s through most of the 90s.

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The rules are clear on who gets to say what. The player gets to write a background during character creation. The DM helps him or her tie various elements of the background to the campaign, saying yes to the player's ideas if the DM can and suggesting alterations when the DM can't. This is laid out in the DMG under "Master of Worlds," as if the title alone was insufficient to tell us who gets to decide what.

During play, the player gets to describe what he or she wants to do. To that end, saying that the guard is Frances, an old friend, is a valid action declaration. But the DM is under no obligation to accept that the guard is, in fact, Frances or an old friend or both because the player has no control over this aspect of the game. Non-player characters are controlled by the DM, as per the chapter on NPCs in the DMG.

If you want a D&D game that overtly endorses a "Yes, and..." approach, where during play the DM accepts ideas from the players to change or add to the world, adventure, or NPCs in it, you're going to have to look to D&D 4e. (And notably, I took a lot of heat for suggesting DMs do that in D&D 4e on the WotC forums - despite it being plain as day in that edition's DMG. People coming from D&D 3.Xe or older editions simply would not have it, another example of carrying baggage from one game to the next.)

Celebrim said:

You have subtly moved the argument. Now we are talking about how you play the game. And regarding that, my assumption was not that you immediately tried to find the most absurd declarations that you could make within the letter of the law. There may be players like that, and actually, I've probably ran games for a couple of them, but I wasn't making the assumption that because the game did not prevent absurd situations that you played it absurdly.

What I do assume is that any game which allows absurd situations and has no barriers or remedies other than social agreements to prevent it is one that is quite fragile, requires a very particular group of players, and which is likely to go wrong and cause table conflicts in more subtle ways - and by conflicts I don't merely mean juvenile temper tantrums. My expectation is such games are played rarely, and often abandoned after a short time, for many of the same reasons that once a person reaches a particular age, they are no longer content with games of Make Believe and gradually lose interest in them and cease to play them.



Well, do as you like, but you will note that I have never said that a game which allows player authorship is not an RPG. Quite the contrary, I've admitted to knowledge of several, and apparently "Blades" is also one.

Nevertheless, there are things which are RPGs and things that are not. Merely in and of itself allowing player authorial control doesn't mean the game isn't an RPG, and the people that have made that claim regarding what I've said are simply dishonest.

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You can assume whatever you like about other games, but for me, I have seem plenty of conflicts in games without authorship by players.

To me, honestly, my experience says the fsctors that lead to conflicts and campaigns bring abandoned over them are in the vast majority not actually related to the rules of the game system, it the personalities and social dynamics.

Fragility on the basis of these conflicts is not a rules problem.

There is no game rule that stops folks from getting into conflicts in they are inclined to.

My players and I font need rules yo tell us to not be absurd st the table or to work together to resolve conflicts.

Like I said, such games are not for all players... no game is.

As for you wanting to keep focusing on your choices in the "RPG or not" test, that's fine and dandy. I hope it yields for you some useful or beneficial results.

For me, worrying over whether or not someone else's style if play "counts as an RPG in my eyes" is a pursuit with no payoff at the end. I get nothing by doing so, no benefit, no gain and the only possible effect is ticking off somebody else if they for dome reason give a whit what I think.

So, I dont make that pursuit one I care to take.

As for me takingbyime to "take note" of what you didn't say... why in the world would I try and note all the things you didnt say?