I was more specific than that and I was was replying to a more specific comment from you.
<snip>
I am saying if you use the rule "they will get there on time" then it is absolutely true that no action will have any consequence against or for that.
Well, yes. That would more-or-less be a tautology.
In the actual post to which I replied, you said that it suggests there can be no "long term consequences". I took that phrase to have its natural meaning, not simply to be restating what I had said ie that the PCs will arrive in time so that they don't fail offstage.
I jumped in here when you very specifically made a comment critical of simulation and the point was about a fast hero. The context was calculating the speed of the hero to see if he could get there in time or not. I believe you called not getting there an off-screen failure. You declared it a bad thing and said the hero should always get there in time.
I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said that I prefer to play a game in which there is no off-screen failure. How others play the game is no concern of mine.
And because you present it as a perpetual guide for good DMing, it is clear that this will happen over and over.
I've said nothing about good GMing, perpetual or otherwise. I've talked about how I run my game. In particular, I've tried to point out why, for certain playstyles, "time pressure" is not a viable solution to the 15 minute day. (Hppily, there are many other conceivable solutions - such as changes to the PC build and action resolution rules - and there are some games, inlcuding at least one version of D&D, which adopt them.)
Thus when A:B.
Now, you point out that they may not save the prisoner and this has a long term consequence and claims that demonstrates that I am wrong.
It does not.
When A:B is still true and the implication remains that A is still very common.
But all you have said is "when not A, maybe not B". That doesn't contradict "when A:B". It just says that "getting there on time" was a goal for which you used A and saving the prisoner was a goal for which you didn't. I'm saying A is bad and you attempt to contradict that is to provide an example of how it isn't bad when you don't use it.
I don't follow your symbolism. Does "A:B" mean "If A, then B"? And what are the values of A and B?
Are you trying to show that, if no failure happens offstage, the PCs will never fail? I know that is not true, because I run a "no failure offstage" game, and the PCs have failed - as I have now mentioned multiple times, the PCs did not rescue one of the prisoners that they wanted to, because they chose defensive rather than aggressive tactics in the confrontation.
Are you trying to show that, by permitting the PCs to lose one of the prisoners, I disregarded my own maxim? In that case you are wrong - my maxim is "no failure offstage", and when the PCs faff around on stage and therefore lose - in the encounter that I am talking about, they adopted a very defensive approach of trying to clear out the bodyguards before confronting the gnoll demonic priest - that is not a violation of the maxim. The failure happend onstage. The players were playing their PCs, making decisions about how to tackle the encounter. And from the pont of view of rescuing prisoners, they made the wrong decisions.
This following is speculative, but I think it is fair. If you are the kind of DM that is going to use "they will get there no matter what" AND it was true that the prisoner surviving was really critical to the future of the campaign then you may very well also apply the same "they will... " control.
What do you mean "critical to the future of the campaign"? The only thing that is critical to the future of my campaign is that my players keep turning up, and are happy to keep playing their PCs, and that I can still think of challenges and encounters that willl engage those PCs.
So far from being fair, I actually think that your speculation suggests a failure to grasp the essence of the sort of play that games like Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling and similar "modern", narrativist games support. Because your speculation fails to distinguish between authority over situation and authority over plot.
In the sort of play I am describing, authority over situation rests firmly with the GM, and is settled at the metagame level, not at the action resolution level. This is why I regard 4e as the best version of D&D for supporting this sort of play, because it has the lowest amount of action resolution mechanics that bleed over from situation to situation. (In D&D terms, it is almost the opposite of Gygax's AD&D in this respect.)
In the sort of play I am describing, no one has authority over plot - which is the whole point - the story that emerges should be both engaging and unexpected. And the point of the action resolution mechanics - which distribute authority in various ways across the players and the GM - is to produce this sort of plot in an emergent fashion.
The fact that you didn't is a very good thing. The less you use a bad rule then the less the badness of the rule matters. But not using a bad rule in a given situation does nothing to make it any less bad on its own merits.
This comment seems to reinforce your apparent failure to distinguish between authority over situation and authority over plot, because you seem to see no difference between a rule about scene-framing ("no failure offscreen") and a rule about scene-resolution via action resolution mechanics ("if the PCs happen upon the priest in the middle of a ritual, and spend too much time dealing with the minons, they might fail to save all the prisoners the priest is intending to sacrifice").
Getting there on time is the apples. Saving the prisoner is the sugar. You are saying you still have sugar, therefore your apple pie is still fine. I'm saying that your sugar is very nice, but without apples, you don't have apple pie.
And what is "apple pie"? A game of D&D? I know what the brand is on the cover of the rulebooks I'm using, and I have a very good sense of how far I am drifting the game from how it is written (ie not that much).
Or is "apple pie" a game that you want to play? I already know that I run a game that is different from yours. Your post has reinforced that - your game must be very different from mine, if it does not make salient to you the difference between authority over situation and authority over plot.
For example, if saving the princess later required that the prisoner be saved now then failure to save him now would be an off-screen failure with the princess later on just the same as not getting there on time is an off-screen failure now.
Why would you say that? I'm not entirely sure what sort of scenario you have in mind, but suppose (i) the players (and their PCs) know that the princess can't be rescued without a password, and (ii) the players (and their PCs) know that only a certain prisoner knows the password, and (iii) the players try to rescue the prisoner and fail, well I guess now they failed to rescue the princess too. And where is the offscreen failure? It all happened onscreen.
The fact they they were unable to get there on time now is the result of on-screen actions taken before, just as whether or not the prisoner lives is the result of on-screen actions now. If the actions now should have long term consequences, such as being unable to save the princess, why shouldn't actions that happened before have long term consequences such as not being able to get there on time?
There are a couple of differences. One difference is significance, climax, pacing and so on. If the earlier thing that happened onscreen was rescuing a cat from a tree, or taking three rounds rather than two to deal with some muggers, and as a result of
that the PC doesn't get there in time, and the city blows up, that is (typically) hugely anticlimactic.
Another difference is knowing the stakes. In the "just in time" case, it is rare for a player to have a perfect grasp of the times and distances by refrence to which a GM adjudicates ingame movement. So when the player decides to have his/her PC rescue the cat, how is s/he to know whether or not this will cost his/her PC the chance to stop the bomb? Of course, this idea of "stakes" relates back to the idea of climax - in the real world we make all sorts of decisions in ignorance all the time, and sometimes suffer for them - I mean, in the real world it really can be the case that stopping for a red light means that you don't arrive at the hospital in time to be by the bed of your dying loved one. But I'm not interested in GMing (and not really interested in playing, either) an RPG that replicates these narratively unsatisfying elements of real life. The
point of narrativist play is "Story Now", which includes the deployment of techniques - in scene framing, action resolution, etc - to ensure satisfying narrative.
Applying the same thought about "stakes" to the prisoner/princess scenario: if the players
don't know, when they're rescuing the prisoner, that the prisoner is the only one who knows the password, then that would be an instance of offscreen failure (because the players would fail without knowing that they had done so, and without being able to play their PCs in full knowledge of the stakes). But I personally wouldn't run such a scenario. To me it smacks of excessive pre-plotting by the GM.
You've probably seen my produce
the following quote before, and for me it is the single best guideline for GMing my game (although I think I'm much less hardcore than Paul Czege - as is shown by the fact that I'm GMing D&D rather than My Life With Master!):
Let me say that I think your "Point A to Point B" way of thinking about scene framing is pretty damn incisive. . .
There are two points to a scene - Point A, where the PCs start the scene, and Point B, where they end up. Most games let the players control some aspect of Point A, and then railroad the PCs to point B. Good narrativism will reverse that by letting the GM create a compelling Point A, and let the players dictate what Point B is (ie, there is no Point B prior to the scene beginning).
. . . [A]lthough roleplaying games typically feature scene transition, by "scene framing" we're talking about a subset of scene transition that features a different kind of intentionality. My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about.
"Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. . . Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. . . By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. And like Scott's "Point A to Point B" model says, the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.
I don't run a fully
"no myth" game, but as Czege describes I keep the backstory somewhat unfixed so that I can use it and adapt it to keep presenting new situations. I adopt the same approach to princesses whose rescue is likely to be a focus of play somewhere down the track, but who are at the moment are mere background elements.
At best you are saying that the long term consequences of actions at at the DM's whim.
I don't follow this at all.
Some long term consequences are at the GM's discretion. For example, will the family of the prisoner whom the PCs failed to rescue react badly? Seek revenge? This is a matter of GM discretion in the way I play - it is one element of the GM's role of confronting the PCs with adversity, and so I wouldn't decide if via a reaction roll, for instance. But it is a consequence that, if brought into play, the players could try and change - they could have their PCs try and persuade the family to forgive them, for example.
An example of play a bit like this is when I GMed The Bastion of Souls (a 3E WotC adventure, that I ran in one of my Rolemaster games).
*SPOILER ALERT* (for a 10 year old module)
The module proceeds on the assumption that the PCs will want to make contact with an imprisoned god. And when I ran the module this turned out to be true. The gate for the god's prison is in fact a powerful angel (a planetar, I think, in the D&D version), and the only way to open the gate is to kill the angel.
As written, the module states that the angel will not talk to the PCs, and therefore the PCs must fight her. Not being a big fan of that sort of nonsense, I was quite happy to adjudicate my players' attempts to have their PCs talk to her (although the RM rules for social resolution are not particularly robust, they aren't completely hopeless either). And one PC, in particular (in a nice piece of emoting by the player, at least by my table's standards) persuaded her to let herself be killed because the greater good of the world required that the PCs deal with this imprisoned god.
So that is one example of how players might change consequences to be different from those which the GM initially presents to them.
But there is another dimension to consequences as well. One cosequence of the PCs' failure to rescue the prisoner is that
as heroes, they failed. (Or, at least, failed to fully succeed.) This is a consequence that is not at the GM's discretion at all. It is the result of the application of the action resolution mechanics to the situation with which the GM confronted the players. It is a consequence that emerges out of play, and that no one participant dictated.
Perhaps you think that that is not a very significant consequence. In the absence of a mechanical alignment system, it is not an operational consequence of any sort. For me, it is just about the most important sort of consequence that can flow from playing the game. It is precisely to generate that sort of consequence - a thematic consequence - that I play the game.
Failure to save the prisoner doesn't have a consequence because it has no more implicit consequence than whether you were able to get there on time or not.
I hope I've made it clear that I don't agree with this at all. Failure to save the prisoner
while being in the same room as him, trying to rescue him is absolutely a different sort of consequence from failing to make it in time because you got stuck in traffic at a red light. One is dramatic. The other is prosaic. One is the stuff of romantic fantasy - the sort of game I am playing. The other belongs in a certain sort of ultra-modernist or post-modernist RPG with a nihilistic bent (
Nicotine Girls, maybe, although it is perhaps not cynical enough).
And the consequences also differ in thematic content. Failing to get there in time reveals little about the PC - that s/he's a bungler, perhaps, or unlucky. Whereas failing to rescue the prisoner because you were too scared to charge in until all the minions were defeated shows something much more dramatic about the PC, especially in the context of a heroic fanatsy RPG. It shows something about the PC's failure of heroism.
it is simply logical that in a game in which the players actions control whether or not they got there on time they have more credit for saving the one prisoner than in a game in which getting there on time was predestined.
Credit from whom? The inhabitants of the gameworld? - the fictions are no different. The players at the table? - it depends on whether or not they are impressed by, and care about, clever operational play. The gods of RPGing? - well, I like to think that they are aware that different RPGers have different playstyles and are looking for different things from a game.
