What is *worldbuilding* for?

Maxperson said:

A character declaring he is searching for a secret door is exercising the authority to declare an action for one's PC. A player creating a secret door via a roll is establishing backstory, as that secret door is now a part of the history of the scene. It now has existed PRIOR to the search for it and is backstory.

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Lanefan said:

To me on a success it is, as it's directly adding something to the backstory (in this case, the scene as framed) that wasn't put there by the GM.

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Obviously, you can use words however you want.

But I'm explaining why [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] is making an error in reading Eero Tuovinen. When Eero Tuovinen refers to "backstory", he is not talking about the outcomes of action resolution.

Lanefan said:

pemerton said:

The backstory was established by the GM in framing the scene.

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But the GM didn't know there was a secret door there until the player/PC found it, so how could she have already framed it into the scene even in her mind?

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The GM didn't frame the secret door. It's not part of the backstory. It's presence or absence is being established by way of action resolution.

Backstory is not being used by Eero Tuovinen (or me) to denote stuff that, in the fiction, existed. It's being used to denote stuff that, at the table, is already established as part of the shared fiction. In the context of a check for a secret door, the backstory - which is part of the framing - might include that there is a stone wall in an ancient castle built by a people well-known for their cunning engineering.

This is another case of being misled by not distinguishing stuff that doesn't exist (imaginary walls, imaginary secret doors) from stuff that does exist (events of narration that refer to a PC being near a stone wall of the sort that might have a secret door in it).

Maxperson said:

We're discussing Tolkien's story and then trying to see which style of play best fits.

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Maxperson said:

You have to assume Story Now agendas in order to call Tolkien Story Now, but you have to make no such assumptions to apply my style to it.

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This doesn't make any sense. Tolkien was not a RPGer. LotR is a novel.

"Story now" is not an approach to literary composition. It's an approach to RPGing.

What I do claim is that "story now" RPGing can produce episodes of play that have the drama, pacing etc one might find in a literary composition without this needing to be written in advance. The traditional way for GM-driven play to do the same thing is extremely heavy railroading (Dragonlance and Dead Gods would be classic examples of this in D&D modules). If the GM is not railroading in that fashion, but nevertheless is exercising strong control over the fiction of the sort that you advocate, then I contend that the prospects of achieving the pacing and drama typical of a literary composition are slight, because much of play will consist in the players making moves to learn what the fiction is (such as your example, upthread, of the players having to make moves so their PCs can find somewhere where an angel feather might be on sale). I took this to be confirmed by you in your remark that you might have to play for many hours to have things happen which - if edited appropriately - might resemble JRRT's Moria sequence.


EDIT: I will elaborate on the above by reference to the following:

Maxperson said:

In my style hard character choices happen all the time, which results in character growth.

<snip>

I never even implied that I couldn't see the arc of the hobbits. I only said that it didn't have to be an agenda picked out in advance and that it could in fact happen through my style of game play, which it can.

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For Pippin's arc to happen in a RPG, here are the necessary things that have to occur:

After it is established (presumably via the mechanics), that Boromir, Pippin's protector, dies, it then has to be the case that (i) Pippin meets Denethor, Boromir's father, (ii) in circumstances where it makes sense to swear fealty to him, (iii) in circumstances where that fealty is called upon (eg a war), (iv) in circumstances which also lead Pippin to love the other son, Faramir (eg Faramir's leadership in said war), (v) with Denethor then going mad, such that (vi) fealty and love can come into conflict.

Every example that has been posted in this thread of "going where the action is" (to once again borrow Eero Tuovinen's phrase) has been criticised by you: the actual play example of starting things in the bazaar; the imagined example of eliding travel through the Underdark via quick narration and perhaps a brief skill challenge; etc.

But to make the Pippin arc happen, the GM repeatedly would have to go where the action is. If the GM never frames Pippin into a meeting with Denethor; does not then establish an attack upon Minas Tirith as an element of framing; has Pippin's presence when Denethor tries to burn Farimir depend upon the outcomes of random rolls (say, a roll to see which soldier Denethor asks to accompany him), then the arc doesn't happen.

If the GM does all this and Pippin's player is not interested, then we have a fairly hard railroad. So for the above to work, Pippin's player has to signal some sort of agenda - eg, following Boromir's death, formally (as might happen in Burning Wheel) or informally (as might happen in 4e) signalling that I will repay the debt I owe to this man. Which is the agenda you are denying needs to be enunciated in advance.

This is why I am asking for play examples: I want you to show me how you do this without either using "story now"-type methods, or else using heavy GM force.

Lanefan said:

Both the Cortex+ Heroic version and your version are to me different ways of saying "handwave it", and - more tellingly - both take it out of the player's control.

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Tracking ammunition doesn't put ammunition under the player's control.

The GM can narrate an encounter with a fire lizard who breathes on the PC. The GM can declare that there are no arrows for sale at the town weapon shop. Or whatever.

A GM may choose not to do those things. Likewise a GM may choose not to activate a limit in Cortex+ Heroic.

You also seem to be ignoring that, in Cortex+ Heroic, if the limit is activated and the power shut down, the player can declare an action to restore the power (in the fiction, this means picking arrows up from the ground, or scavenging them from enemies, or whatever else might make sense in the imagined context). In the sort of D&D that you prefer, however, if the GM has decided that there are no arrows available in town there is no action that the player can declare which might produce a different fictional result.

pemerton said:

Obviously, you can use words however you want.

But I'm explaining why [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] is not making an error in reading Eero Tuovinen. When Eeor Tuovinen refers to "backstory", he is not talking about the outcomes of action resolution.

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I'm not talking about action resolution, either. Action resolution is different from backstory authority, but can result in changes to backstory as I demonstrated above. The resolution to the action was only to find a secret door or not. Nothing else. The backstory authority comes from a secret door appearing where there was none in the backstory prior to the action resolution.

Below is the quote from Tuovinen on backstory.

"Backstory authority

Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time. For example, if the GM has decided in advance that the butler did it, then that is part of the backstory – it happened before the player characters came to the scene, and the GM will do his job with the assumption that this is an unchanging part of the game, even if the players might not know about it. Similarly a player character’s personal history is part of the backstory in a game that requires such. Backstory is specifically separate from what might happen during play itself. We say that somebody has “backstory authority” if he is allowed to determine something about the backstory, simply enough."

When Eero Tuovinen talks about backstory, he's talking about anything that was authored prior to game play or simulates pre-authoring. A Story Now game creates int the moment those things that would have been pre-authored in a more traditional game. If you author a wall in the moment, that's a heuristic creation. You have established something physical and long lasting in the moment, which qualifies as backstory since it is a real time creation of something that would have been pre-authored in a more traditional game.

When one of you players resolves an action to find a secret door and succeeds, in addition to resolving the action, he is exercising heuristic backstory authority by adding in the secret door, which is also something that would have been established prior to game play in a more traditional game. [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] is the one using Tuovinen correctly here.

pemerton said:

After it is established (presumably via the mechanics), that Boromir, Pippin's protector, dies, it then has to be the case that (i) Pippin meets Denethor, Boromir's father, (ii) in circumstances where it makes sense to swear fealty to him, (iii) in circumstances where that fealty is called upon (eg a war), (iv) in circumstances which also lead Pippin to love the other son, Faramir (eg Faramir's leadership in said war), (v) with Denethor then going mad, such that (vi) fealty and love can come into conflict.

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Agreed. That sort of things happens all the time in games of my style.

Every example that has been posted in this thread of "going where the action is" (to once again borrow Eero Tuovinen's phrase) has been criticised by you: the actual play example of starting things in the bazaar; the imagined example of eliding travel through the Underdark via quick narration and perhaps a brief skill challenge; etc.

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If by "going where the action is", you mean "instantly(in real world time) appearing where the action is", you are correct. If by "going where the action is", you mean "showing up where the action is", you are incorrect. It's only the travel portion where we disagree.

But to make the Pippin arc happen, the GM repeatedly would have to go where the action is. If the GM never frames Pippin into a meeting with Denethor; does not then establish an attack upon Minas Tirith as an element of framing; has Pippin's presence when Denethor tries to burn Farimir depend upon the outcomes of random rolls (say, a roll to see which soldier Denethor asks to accompany him), then the arc doesn't happen.

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So what. This is not dependent on Story Now. In both your style and mine, the DM and players can establish through game play that Pippin meets Denthor, an attack upon Minis Tirith happens, etc. The arc can both succeed and fail in both styles of play. And I've already established my style also "goes where the action is", even thought it takes longer to get there than in your style.

If the GM does all this and Pippin's player is not interested, then we have a fairly hard railroad. So for the above to work, Pippin's player has to signal some sort of agenda - eg, following Boromir's death, formally (as might happen in Burning Wheel) or informally (as might happen in 4e) signalling that I will repay the debt I owe to this man. Which is the agenda you are denying needs to be enunciated in advance.

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This is incorrect. No agenda has to be established formally. All that is required are game choices to be made at each point in the process. Pippin arrives at Minis Tirith. Pippin through game play meets or does not meet Denethor. When invited, if the player does not want Pippin to meet Denethor, he may feign sickness. If he does, then he goes to meet Denethor. The next decision point is whether to swear fealty to Denethor when offered. When the pre-authored attack happens, Pippin's fealty is called upon. And so on at each point in the process. If the player makes certain decisions, it plays out as written in the books. If the player makes other decisions, it does not. At no point is any sort of agenda required for the result to be the same as it appears in the books. At no point does my style involve a railroad to get there.

This is why I am asking for play examples: I want you to show me how you do this without either using "story now"-type methods, or else using heavy GM force.

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I just showed you very clearly above how it is done. There was no force or story now method employed, and yet the same exact result can be accomplished with my playstyle.

pemerton said:

The OP contends that this approach to worldbuiling, and its use as an element of fictional positioning used to resolve action declarations by way of "hidden" or "secret" GM-preauthored backstory/fictional elements, makes sense in classic play because a big part of the point of classic play is to learn this stuff. It's a puzzle-solving, maze-solving exercise, where the principal reward for learning the stuff that begins as unrevealed is gp which translate into XP.

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Specific to 1e D&D this makes sense, though I take issue with describing it as reduced to no more than "a puzzle-solving, maze-solving exercise". More broadly and less system-specific, the game is in part about exploring and learning about the setting through the eyes of your PC, whether that setting is provided by the DM or by something pre-published e.g. Greyhawk, Golarion, whatever. This exploration largely assumes a setting that is more or less in place waiting to be explored.

The OP also contends that most contemporary RPGing is not this sort of puzzle/maze-solving play; that it's more focused on "stories" about interesting characters doing narratively interesting stuff.

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This is the contention with which I disagree: I don't at all think "most" contemporary play has moved far from its classic foundation at all, but has rather added the bits about interesting characters and story on to what was already there.

(A further but to some extent secondary contention is that, once you start playing in non-dungeonesque "living, breathing worlds", the puzzle/maze-solving approach to play becomes rather impractical, as there are too many parameters potentially unknown to the players to prevent them drawing the sorts of inferences that classic play depends upon.)

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It puts some more work on to the DM, but it's not impractical in the least. The players just have to realize that they're quite realistically almost never going to have all the information they need, and that now and then this lack of information (or flat-out inaccuracy of information) is going to mess them up. On a broader scale, the players have to accept that the GM is going to be keeping secrets from them only on a bigger scale than simple dungeon-crawl play would expec, and that the GM is going to be informed by these secrets when determining the results of PC actions.

The PCs (and players at the table) won't always know why some action or other resolved the way it did...just like real life, that way...and this is not a problem unless the players at that table feel they have some sort of right or entitlement to know everything about anything that affects their PCs including things their PCs have no in-game way of knowing - at which point those players can find another table, 'cause they ain't playing at mine.

The OP then asks, in this contemporary style of RPGing, what is the point of worldbuilding of the classic sort? - ie of the GM establishing fictional elements that serve as unrevealed fictional positionioning which therefore (i) constrain success in action declaration, and (ii) produce a dynamic of play where a significant amount of the play experience is declaring actions which will oblige the GM to reveal some of this hitherto-unrevealed stuff (many RPGers describe this using in-fiction rather than at-the-table language like "exploration", "gathering information", "scouting", etc).

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Yes - exploration of the game-world or setting in which the PCs find themselves. It's one of the three pillars of play that have always been there but weren't clearly defined as such until 5e D&D came along.

In effect, as this discussion has gone on, it's become evident that the OP is asking whether this pillar is worth keeping.

Lanefan

pemerton said:

Obviously, you can use words however you want.

But I'm explaining why [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] is making an error in reading Eero Tuovinen. When Eero Tuovinen refers to "backstory", he is not talking about the outcomes of action resolution.

The GM didn't frame the secret door. It's not part of the backstory. It's presence or absence is being established by way of action resolution.

Backstory is not being used by Eero Tuovinen (or me) to denote stuff that, in the fiction, existed. It's being used to denote stuff that, at the table, is already established as part of the shared fiction. In the context of a check for a secret door, the backstory - which is part of the framing - might include that there is a stone wall in an ancient castle built by a people well-known for their cunning engineering.

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Ah, so the word we're looking for isn't backstory by your definition, it's setting (or game-world).

An action declaration is an attempt to change or add to (or in rare cases subtract from) the setting, and on success does so. The reason I and others call it backstory instead is that backstory includes the setting as part of itself (I don't care what Eero calls it). One could say there's two parts to a setting - the "physical" part which is the actual buildings-cities-mountains-etc. and the "cultural" part which is the history-people-societal bits. The "backstory" interweaves these two together to produce everything that's happened up until the PCs get involved and also everything that's happening concurrent to what the PCs are doing.

Adding something to what the GM has framed (e.g. successfully searching for a secret door or a container for blood) is in fact changing the physical-setting part of the backstory. That this change comes about via a successful action declaration rather than by any other means is absolutely irrelevant to the fact that a change was made.

The same can be said for a player fleshing out a village in a pre-authored setting - that player is changing the backstory.

I took this to be confirmed by you in your remark that you might have to play for many hours to have things happen which - if edited appropriately - might resemble JRRT's Moria sequence.

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Of course you'd have to play for many hours. That's several sessions worth of exploration in there, along with a few combats and the whole Gollum-is-following-us distraction...why wouldn't it take many hours, and what's the problem if it does?

pemerton said:

Tracking ammunition doesn't put ammunition under the player's control.

The GM can narrate an encounter with a fire lizard who breathes on the PC. The GM can declare that there are no arrows for sale at the town weapon shop. Or whatever.

A GM may choose not to do those things. Likewise a GM may choose not to activate a limit in Cortex+ Heroic.

You also seem to be ignoring that, in Cortex+ Heroic, if the limit is activated and the power shut down, the player can declare an action to restore the power (in the fiction, this means picking arrows up from the ground, or scavenging them from enemies, or whatever else might make sense in the imagined context). In the sort of D&D that you prefer, however, if the GM has decided that there are no arrows available in town there is no action that the player can declare which might produce a different fictional result.

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I can still try to steal some, or commission a fletcher to make me some..there's always another option.

Lanefan said:

It puts some more work on to the DM, but it's not impractical in the least. The players just have to realize that they're quite realistically almost never going to have all the information they need

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This is the difference from classical play. In B2, it is expected that thie player eventually can get the information they need to make reasoned choices. The artificially austere nature of the environment is one underpinning of this possibilityu.

Lanefan said:

On a broader scale, the players have to accept that the GM is going to be keeping secrets from them only on a bigger scale than simple dungeon-crawl play would expec, and that the GM is going to be informed by these secrets when determining the results of PC actions.

The PCs (and players at the table) won't always know why some action or other resolved the way it did

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This is why I call it GM-driven play. It seems obvious, from your description here, that it involves only modest player agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction. Even the fiction that the GM actually narrates at the table is going to be opaque to the players!

Lanefan said:

Yes - exploration of the game-world or setting in which the PCs find themselves. It's one of the three pillars of play that have always been there but weren't clearly defined as such until 5e D&D came along.

In effect, as this discussion has gone on, it's become evident that the OP is asking whether this pillar is worth keeping.

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Not at all. There's no particular connection between exploration and worldbuilding. See, for instance, this actual play report.

Exploring the gameworld is something that the PCs do. That doesn't have to mean that the players are learning stuff the GM already wrote down. (Or is making up uliaterally in the course of play.)

Lanefan said:

I can still try to steal some, or commission a fletcher to make me some..there's always another option.

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In your preferred style, those things are also subject to GM adjudication and independently-established backstory.

What I mean is: in (say) Burning Wheel, it is the player's Scavenging check which will reveal whether or not there are any arrows available to be stolen; in your approach, the GM gets to decide that first, and if s/he decides there are none then the player's action declaration will fail.

This is why I say that tracking ammunition doesn't actually give the player agency at all in respect of the availability of ammunition.

Maxperson said:

The backstory authority comes from a secret door appearing where there was none in the backstory prior to the action resolution.

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No. Resolving an action declaration is not authoring backstory. A secret door whose existence is discovered in the course of play, by way of action declaration, is not an element of backstory.

Maxperson said:

Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”.

<snip>

When Eero Tuovinen talks about backstory, he's talking about anything that was authored prior to game play or simulates pre-authoring.

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Yes. Discovering a secret door by way of action resolution is not pre-authorship, nor a simulation of pre-authorship. It is playing the game.

I know that you think you know more about "story now" RPGing than me, even though you've never done it, and never played or even read the rules for any of the RPGs that Eero Tuovinen references (Sorcerer, DitV, Primetime Adventures, HeroWars/Quest). But that doesn't make you right - just oddly hubristic!

Lanefan said:

An action declaration is an attempt to change or add to (or in rare cases subtract from) the setting, and on success does so.

<snip>

Adding something to what the GM has framed (e.g. successfully searching for a secret door or a container for blood) is in fact changing the physical-setting part of the backstory. That this change comes about via a successful action declaration rather than by any other means is absolutely irrelevant to the fact that a change was made.

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A PC killing an orc is also changing, by addition, the situation the GM framed: it goes from having a live orc to a dead one.

Just as, if the declared search is successful, the situation now includes a discovered secret door.

That's generally the point of playing a RPG - to add to the scenes the GM declares. Otherwise the players needn't bother turning up!'

(Of course you can try and say there is something different about finding a door from killin an orc. But from the point of view of establishing elements of a ficiton, they're not any different. So whatever difference you're pointing to, it would have to be something else.)

Lanefan said:

Of course you'd have to play for many hours. That's several sessions worth of exploration in there, along with a few combats and the whole Gollum-is-following-us distraction...why wouldn't it take many hours, and what's the problem if it does?

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Many hourse of play, with lots of searching for secret doors, worrying at intersections, etc, is not the Moria sequence. And is not story now.

Obiouvsly That isn't a problem if you're not wanting to play "story now".