What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

So, exactly the same as real life but with "the world" replaced by "the GM"? In real life you can try and try to find foot prints all you want, but if they aren't there, they aren't there.

The absence of foot prints is a result of causal processes that actually took place in the world (eg the person didn't go there; or the earth was very hard; or etc, etc).

The absence of foot prints in a RPG mystery resolved in a "hidden backstory" style is because the GM decided not to author any such element of the fiction. Playing a game and having the outcomes of my moves stipulated by another participant is not remotely the same thing as actually carrying out an investigation.

It may make for good or bad game design and game play to give a participant such a power of stipulation. But comparing it to the reality of engaging with an independently and objectively-existing world gets us nowhere towards considering those matters.

So tossing questions at someone and getting responses back is totally different agency-wise if you're tossing questions at a suspect or a GM playing a suspect? That's close to the closest an RPG can come to literal realism.

Again, it's not remotely realistic. In real life, the suspect is (say) scared of <going to jail>, <being beaten up by his/her cohorts>, <betraying his/her loved one>, etc. The GM is not scared of any of those things. Presumably, if the game is going well, the GM isn't scared at all.

The suspect can be tricked eg maybe the investigator pretends to be someone else. The GM can't be tricked in that way: s/he knows who the player is, and why s/he is asking certain questions (ie because s/he is making moves in a game).

I know some GMs are very confident in their ability to "realistically" predict the causal consequences of social interactions, such that they can predict how and to what extent the suspect would be scared, or tricked, and narrate appropriate consequences. Personally I think that a simple reaction roll system is more likely to give more verisimilitudinous results than GM predictions of this sort. And in practice, the way those GM "predictions' tend to be operationalised is via simple descriptions or checklists: If the investigator asks X, the suspect replies Y; if the investigator threatens P, the suspect does Q; etc. That's not realistic - it's just stipulating the possible paths the fiction might take. Whether it's good or bad to stipulate such things is, as I've repeatedly said, an open question: but concepts of "realism" don't help us answer it.

 

[pemerton]

I think if you stop and look at your past character backstories, that if you were to remove *specific name* and *specific place* and replace them with generic terms, you'd find you had indeed written generic backstories. Doesn't mean you can't be detailed.

I mean, if I were to write a backstory for Frodo, it would be "Hobbit who has always lived at home but dreamed of running off on a great adventure."

I don't agree with this. Frodo's home is The Shire, which is a quintessential rural idyll. His uncle has been both a central figure in this place, and yet an outsider. His gardener has no real wanderlust but an obsession with elves. Etc.

Once you fill in the details of Frodo's backstory that matter to him as a character, you get something that is not especially generic.

I am generally against using a canned setting. I view those games with built in settings as flawed in some fundamental way. Now again if you love them that is cool and it’s obviously not flawed for you. I just don’t like them. As DM or player.

I often use pre-drawn maps for establishing basic details of geography; and settings often give names for historical figures, towns, gods etc which are useful - eg our "good" god in this setting is St Cuthbert; the town with the bazaar is Hardby; the hills where you spent your youth in a tower learning magic from your brother are the Abor-Alz; etc.

It saves having to set all this stuff up. And in terms of GMing techniques, if the important thing for the player is that his/her PC comes from a forest, or the hills, or whatever, then superimposing that over some pre-drawn map and loose backstory doesn't cost anything and just speeds up the process of getting started. One reason I like the centre of the GH maps is that it covers the full spectrum of default fantasy settings: forests for bandits and Robin Hood types; cities and towns (Dyvers, GH, Hardby); ocean (Woolly Bay); the Wild Coast for free cities and mercenary companies, as well as ports that pirates can sail from and dock in; the Pomarj for an evil empire; the Bright Desert and Abor-Alz for pyramids, nomads, and the like; Celene for an elven queen; etc, etc. All the tropes are there.

(The map on the inside cover of B10 Night's Dark Terror is fairly similar in this respect - it's really just missing ocean and desert; but it's got towns/cities, mountains, a lake, forest, hills, plains for riding across, etc.)

Of course, some campaigns don't really need this sort of detail - eg my Cortex+ Heroic vikings game happens in a generic "north" which I narrate as needed; and for Traveller random world generation has proved adequate to the task of establishing places for the PCs to be.

 

[pemerton]

in the DM-facing game the proper fictional positioning needs to be achieved for the action to be resolved successfully, is focused on because the knowing of that positioning isn't open. However, it is open if looked at more broadly, the DM-facing game is open that you must overcome challenges to find the correct fictional positioning to locate the map. That multiple such locations may exist is part of that presented challenge.

I don't see how this is different in any fundamental way from my description: the goal of play is to make moves that will trigger the GM to relate/narrate the relevant bit of fiction which is (actually, or at least notionally) recorded in his/her notes.

In DM-facing games, that declaration doesn't contain the same amount of agency, because the agency the players have is more diffused through how they approach the challenge of finding the map.

The "diffused" agency that you describe here is, as best I can tell, the capacity to choose between narration-triggering moves. Depending on past such moves, the players may or may not have a sense of how different such choices are likely to trigger different narrations (eg a past move may have yielded a rumour, which suggests that the map is actually lost in the cave and not in the study at all).

The capacity to influence the sequence of narrations (and perhaps whether or not they occur at all) isn't agency over the content of what is narrated. That is, it's not agency over the content of the shared fiction.

In player facing games, the play is focused on achieving the fictional positioning necessary to stake finding the map as the outcome of an action declaration.

The GM controls the scene framing so that achieving this fictional positioning is difficult.

That is not going to be true, in general.

Eg the very first scene in my BW game presented the PC whose goal was to find magical items to help him free his brother from balrog possession with a chance to acquire an angel feather. The "challenge" in the scene was to determine the nature of the feather, whether it was worth trying to buy, whether instead to try and steal it, etc.

In my 4e game, the most notable constraint on fictional positioning is the tiers of play ie 1st level PCs simply can't be framed, in any meaningful way, into direct conflict with Orcus. Instead it's undead and cultists. When the PCs were finally ready to confont Orcus, it wasn't hard (in mechanical terms) to establish the relevant fictional positioning; though they had to make some story choices which involved risks.

The purpose of framing in "player-facing" games is pretty simple:

One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . .

The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.​

How this should all be paced, and how to choose what sort of framing to start with or to progress to, etc, is all completely contextual.

Depending on the nature of the challenges, and the results, the map may become unable to be found. This is pretty much the same as in the DM-facing game

If a player stakes discovery of the map, and fails, that is losing at a move in a game. That is actually quiet different, I think, from the GM stipulating failure. I don't see them as "pretty much the same" at all.

Player-facing games can become degenerate, too, although the use of Calvinball tropes are not something that's possible without serious distortion of the play concepts. The degeneracy in player-facing games are weak DMs that don't push consequences or frame useful challenges

A long way upthread I said that a game run in accordance with the "standard narrativistic model" can suffer if the GM's framing is weak or misjudged, so that it fails to provoke choices as it is meant to.

I don't really see how that bears on the issue of player agency: the problem with such a game is not that the players have no agency, but that it's boring and so they have no reason to exercise it.

Please, don't return to the 'fiction doesn't exist' argument

You keep equivocating on the word "fiction". I have not asserted that fictions (= stories) don't exist. I have asserted that fictional things - fictions in the sense of imagined entities - don't exist.

Novels are real. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a real thing, a composed story. But Sherlock Holmes is not a real thing. He doesn't exist, and he exerts no causal influence on anything (although in the story he is imagined to do so). Asserting otherwise makes it almost impossible to analyse processes of authorship.

To reiterate - deciding, as an author, that character X has killed the orc you just mentioned is no different from deciding that character X has found a map in the study you just mentioned. I just proved it, in fact, by writing the two sentences! The process was the same in both cases - conceiving of a change in the fiction, by introducing a new event (a killing, a finding of a map) that links character X to the previously mentioned element (the orc, the study).

It's only by treating the authoring of a killing as if it were actually a killing, and the authoring of the finding of a map as if it were actually a discovery, that one would be led to think that they involve different processes of authorship.

But that would be a confusion; the same sort of confusion that leads to things like the suggestion that a GM deciding how a fictional person responds to an imagined threat is a realistic model of how an actual person might actually respond to an actual threat.

 

[prosfilaes]

The only fiction that is established is that one of those people is harder to defeat in combat than the other. Which is equally a property of a skill challenge once DCs are set in accordance with the guidelines.

We don't know that one of the creatures is "easier to hit" in any in-fiction sense: the higher AC could be due to DEX (harder to hit) or armour (harder to hurt) or (in 5e) barbarian CON bonus (tough skin), etc. And the different hp don't mean that, in the fiction, one is weaker than the other: in AD&D the 20 hp being might be an ogre, and the 50 hp being a 13th level thief with CON 15. The ogre clearly is bigger and stronger than the thief; the thief's higher hp reflect nimbleness, luck, divine protections, etc.

So if you disconnect the numbers from the fiction, then it's the same as something else where the numbers are disconnected from the fiction? We've long since discovered that we see HP differently, and apparently we see AC differently as well. If having a better AC doesn't mean something in fiction, then why are we wasting all this time on a silly dice game?

This is no different from a skill challenge. If I make notes that, on a failed Endurance check in the course of the challenge to cross The Barrens, a PC loses a healing surge due to dehydration, that is establishing fiction.

No, this is a "Level 7 Complexity 5" skill challenge. This is not a "Level 7 Complexity 5" with a note that a failed Endurance check to cross The Barrens, a PC loses a healing surge. You can make anything work with enough kludges like that, but at the same time, you're making it more complex and less predictable.

 

[Maxperson]

As far as exploration is concerned - uncovering the mystery in a module like B10, for instance - what you describe in this and your previous post does sound like the GM establishes the content of the shared fiction, and the players declare moves that will enable them to learn that content, by obliging the GM to tell it to them. The agency of the players, in respect of this aspect of play, seems to consist in affecting the sequence in which that material is learned (and perhaps whether or not it is learned, if they never declare the right moves for their PCs), and in drawing inferences from what the GM has told them.

The difference from, say, reading a novel seems to be that you can't just turn the pages as you wish: rather, you have to declare certain game moves in order to get access to those "pages".

I don't think it plays like a novel at all. Nobody is forced to find out the mysteries that are involved, nor are they required to do so in any set manner. The party might very well decided to not bother with the mysteries, fight off the goblins, and then try to set up one of their number as mayor, with the rest as of the PCs being advisers. That's very different from a novel of any sort. Just because the DM is running pre-authored content, doesn't mean that the players are constrained to run a rat maze.

"I search the map for the study" is not an act of collaborative storytelling. It is a declaration of an action for my PC. It can be done purely in the first-person perspective. This is what makes mystery possible. Eg in my Traveller game, there is a bioweapons conspiracy whose originator and motivations are unknown, and which the PCs (and players) are trying to work out. The answers to these mysteries will be generated through a combination of outcomes of skill checks and material introduced as components of framing. No one will have to engage in "collaborative storytelling", any more than they have to to resolve a D&D combat. Just as game rules can tell you whether or not your roll is good enough to kill an orc, they can tell you whether or not your roll is good enough to (eg) locate a supplier of drugs, befriend said supplier, etc.

Those things do involve a collaboration to create a story. You can say that rolls tell you whether you can kill an orc, but those rolls fail to tell a story. When you add in DM and Player collaborating you end up with...

Player:Grog runs up to the orc screaming, "By Vishira's foul breath, you will die!(no roll can do this)" and swings his two handed sword at the orc. <Rolls a 15> Hit for 10 damage.
DM: The orcs attempts to dodge to the right(no roll can do this) and fails. You sword bites deeply into its chest(no roll can do this) and it falls to the ground dead(result of the damage).

Without the collaborative story created by the player and the DM, no story exists at all. With it, there is a story to be told at the next tavern. The same goes for finding things.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't see how this is different in any fundamental way from my description: the goal of play is to make moves that will trigger the GM to relate/narrate the relevant bit of fiction which is (actually, or at least notionally) recorded in his/her notes.

This isn't a useful description of play, though, except in narrow circumstance. The key difference between the styles isn't that the DM reads notes in one (you read your notes when you introduce prepared fictions in play, for instance), it's that the distribution of narrative control -- in DM facing games, the DM retains most narrative control; in player-facing games, the players have some to many rights regarding narrative control. I say some to many because the actual effect of player narrative control is not authorship of the narrative, but constraints on the DM's authorship of the narrative. If a player declares "I search for the map" and succeeds, the DM is constrained that the next bit of narration they provide must accommodate that success and not negate it. This is really, though, just a rules convention that enforces a manner of good play present in both styles: if a check succeeds, the DM should not act against that check and narrate failure. This is readily apparent in that most DMs will cite overriding check results with DM fiat to be bad play.

The "diffused" agency that you describe here is, as best I can tell, the capacity to choose between narration-triggering moves. Depending on past such moves, the players may or may not have a sense of how different such choices are likely to trigger different narrations (eg a past move may have yielded a rumour, which suggests that the map is actually lost in the cave and not in the study at all).

The capacity to influence the sequence of narrations (and perhaps whether or not they occur at all) isn't agency over the content of what is narrated. That is, it's not agency over the content of the shared fiction.

Of course it is. If I control what's introduced into the shared fictions by my choices, then I have agency over the content of what is narrated.

I believe that you're again failing to effectively make your argument by being unclear. I believe your actual argument is that unless the player can introduce entirely new elements of the fiction through action declaration, they lack agency over the shared narrative. I believe your argument is that "we go left, is the study there?" is different from "we go left and enter the study!" And it is, but these kinds of declarations don't really exist in the same way in both styles. They may exist in a DM facing game, where the decision as to which way to turn at an intersection is one of the many kinds of player choice offered, but neither would occur in a player-facing game that isn't being degenerate. This is because the GM in a player facing game isn't going to frame a scene where such choices are made -- if something like this happens it's an error in framing and it will likely be glossed as 'say yes' because it's so unimportant; ie this isn't a choice that has any agency because it shouldn't be a choice at all. Instead, the GM is going to 'go to the action' and frame the scene in the study to begin with. This is the element I'm pointing at - the player-facing game wraps up all of the agency into the 'search for the map' declaration because that's the only real choice the players make in the scene -- everything else is provided by the GM (possibly according to notes prepped and found useful for this situation) as framing, framing that points straight at getting to this kind of declaration. The GM isn't even offering the ability to choose which hall to turn down to find the study, so claiming you increase agency because the GM forces situations onto players that go straight to those declarations that stake objectives is being myopic -- it's intentionally ignoring that agency is lessened by the fact that the players have no way to avoid or mitigate circumstances prior to the frame where the big question is thrust upon them.

In DM facing games, the players make many small choices over a longer period that lead up to the crux questions, and those crux questions can be repeated in multiple situations. The scene the DM frames here isn't the study, it's the building that contains the study among other challenges. How the players ultimately engage those challenges is up to them, and they still have the ability to go off map and introduce new states to the fiction that aren't in the DM's notes. They can set the building on fire as well.

That is not going to be true, in general.

Eg the very first scene in my BW game presented the PC whose goal was to find magical items to help him free his brother from balrog possession with a chance to acquire an angel feather. The "challenge" in the scene was to determine the nature of the feather, whether it was worth trying to buy, whether instead to try and steal it, etc.

In my 4e game, the most notable constraint on fictional positioning is the tiers of play ie 1st level PCs simply can't be framed, in any meaningful way, into direct conflict with Orcus. Instead it's undead and cultists. When the PCs were finally ready to confont Orcus, it wasn't hard (in mechanical terms) to establish the relevant fictional positioning; though they had to make some story choices which involved risks.

The purpose of framing in "player-facing" games is pretty simple:

One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . .

The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.​

How this should all be paced, and how to choose what sort of framing to start with or to progress to, etc, is all completely contextual.

You completely defeated your own argument by proving what I said. The scene you describe opening with does not address the primary goal of play for the character involved. That goal is saving his brother. You didn't introduce a scene where saving the brother was at stake, and any declaration of 'I save my brother from possession by a balrog!' would not have the fictional positioning to succeed and would automatically fail. Instead, you introduced a scene who's primary purpose was establishing a challenge that had to be overcome in order to move towards gaining the fictional positioning to save the brother.

To contrast to the map in the study example, if you start that game with a scene having to bypass the guards stationed outside the building with the study in it, this is the same -- it's part of the GM's job to introduce challenges to obstruct the player's goals and provide interesting story. The guards must be overcome to gain the fictional positioning (being in the study) to find the map. A success with the guards may move the positioning to the study, or it may move to a new challenge -- you're now talking to the captain of the guards or the building's owner or whatever -- prior to achieving the necessary positioning. This is how the game progresses, but this progression is inserted by the GM as needed to make the positioning difficult to obtain, else the game is too easy and the big questions are too quickly resolved. Of course, successes will move rapidly towards the completion, but failures will cause additional complications and too many might cause possible outright failure of the objective.

If a player stakes discovery of the map, and fails, that is losing at a move in a game. That is actually quiet different, I think, from the GM stipulating failure. I don't see them as "pretty much the same" at all.

Well, one, congratulations on the strawman. You separated that statement from the context and answered it in a way opposite it's context. I wasn't talking about failure on the check to search for the map, I was talking about repeated failure in attempting to achieve the necessary positioning to even attempt that declaration. A skill challenge in which the party accrues too many failures before necessary successes fails at their objective prior to being positioned to ultimately succeeed. A player that searches for a mace may find evidence that his ultimate goal -- rescue his brother from possession -- fails because it's discovered his brother is a willing ally and not actually possessed against his will. This is the failure I'm talking about. And, in a DM-facing game, this can accrue by too many failures prior to obtaining positioning for success as well. The party may be killed. The party may run out of time. The party may take actions that cause the map to be destroyed (setting the building on fire) or moved (alerting the enemy to the objective). All of these things can happen in either style, and that was the point I was making.

As far as the point you've made, it depends on the situation. If, in a player-facing game, you say when facing the guards outside the building prior to entering, "I search for the map", the GM has every right to negate this declaration as not appropriate for the current fictional positioning. This is not different from the DM in a DM-facing game denying success when the fictional positioning is not right, either. The only difference here is that the positioning contains a hidden element, but, just like an invisible opponent, that element is discoverable through play.

If you're again discussing negation of a check, we're back to bad play examples that aren't useful in analyzing the difference in playstyles. And, again, I say the difference in playstyles revolves around how challenges are presented -- player-facing challenges go straight to 'single big move' play while DM-facing challenges are more 'multiple small move' play. The framework in which player decisions are made is different -- you don't have as many choices to make in player-facing games because the game drives straight to 'big question' moves. You have many choices to make in DM-facing games, with many fewer being the 'big question' moves, and most of those occur outside of a concrete scene framing (ie, broader, higher level decisions).

A long way upthread I said that a game run in accordance with the "standard narrativistic model" can suffer if the GM's framing is weak or misjudged, so that it fails to provoke choices as it is meant to.

I don't really see how that bears on the issue of player agency: the problem with such a game is not that the players have no agency, but that it's boring and so they have no reason to exercise it.

Then there's as much agency in choosing which way to go at an intersection as in finding a map? The former is boring, and you don't want to exercise that kind of agency, the latter is something you care about and want to exercise agency over. The difference here is one of preference, not agency, then.

And that's great -- I fully understand that some people really prefer a style of play where everything is 'big decision' moves, the ones that really move the game along. Other's prefer a game where small choices are often made and the frequency of big decision moves is lesser, but that doesn't necessarily mean that agency exercised by the players in these two styles is different. This my point -- claiming that since your style of play focuses on big moves and so gives more agency fails to account that such questions still occur in DM-facing games, just mixed in with many more smaller moves. You continue to compare a single declaration -- finding a map -- in each of the two styles as if they are the same kind of move in both. They are not. The framing is different. The focus is different. The outcomes of success and failure are different. Therefore, you cannot compare the levels of agency available in the two styles by comparing different moves that have the same grammatical structure.

You keep equivocating on the word "fiction". I have not asserted that fictions (= stories) don't exist. I have asserted that fictional things - fictions in the sense of imagined entities - don't exist.

I assure you that I have never once equivocated on the word fiction. You're equivocating here that fictions that contain fictional characters and fictional events that are called stories exist but the fictional characters and fictional events do not. This is ridiculous -- how can things that do not exist individually ever gain collective existence?

I've sblocked the rest of this, as it may be boring to others.
[sblock]

Novels are real. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a real thing, a composed story. But Sherlock Holmes is not a real thing. He doesn't exist, and he exerts no causal influence on anything (although in the story he is imagined to do so). Asserting otherwise makes it almost impossible to analyse processes of authorship.

What causal influence does the story (as opposed to a physical book that contains physical words that convey the ficitonal concepts of the story Hound of the Baskervilles) exert then that Sherlock Holmes, as a fiction character, cannot? This argument is self-defeating. Either fictional things do not exist or they do. You cannot have a work of fiction, comprised of fictional elements, exist as a collective while denying that it's components have not existence. This is logically impossible.

To deny that Sherlock Holmes has existence because his is a fictional character, you must also deny that fictional stories that contain him also do not exist or you must identify exactly what it is extra in the fictional story that gives it existence. What about Hound provides it existence while denying Sherlock his?

To reiterate - deciding, as an author, that character X has killed the orc you just mentioned is no different from deciding that character X has found a map in the study you just mentioned. I just proved it, in fact, by writing the two sentences! The process was the same in both cases - conceiving of a change in the fiction, by introducing a new event (a killing, a finding of a map) that links character X to the previously mentioned element (the orc, the study).[/QUOTEis

What if I author the statement 'Character X has found a map in the study' and 'Character X has NOT found a map in the study'? According to you, these are just as equivalent a move as above -- they both follow the same acts of imagining and authoring. Yet they are directly contradictory, and lead to different fictional outcomes that are opposed to each other. So, then, according to your argument the DM authoring that the PC does find a map is the same as the DM authoring the PC doesn't find a map. If this is true, then there is no difference between a DM negating a player declaration by authoring said outcome that one permitting a player declaration by authoring that outcome. You've neatly hamstrung your own argument, as the DM moves to negate that follow the authoring process are just as valid as move as the player making declarations.

This is the problem with your argument. The logical foundation you're trying to relying upon is faulty. If all acts of authoring are the same, then there's no value to any act of authorship that puts it above any other act of authorship. If the moves are the same, because the fiction authored doesn't matter, then all outcomes from those moves are the same for the same reason. This clearly contradicts your assertions that DMs should not use unknown fictional positioning to negate player action declarations, as the above logical framework doesn't care -- it's all the same. The only way to go from here is to assign value to who's doing the authoring at what time, not what is authored. Which then means that the DM is free to frame any situation he likes and the player is then free to author any actions they like regardless of the framing. Clearly, this is not what you mean.

It's only by treating the authoring of a killing as if it were actually a killing, and the authoring of the finding of a map as if it were actually a discovery, that one would be led to think that they involve different processes of authorship.

You confuse 'I made something up' with 'I made something up in accordance with the social contract of my group and the agreed upon restrictions on my ability to make things up.'

To demonstrate: the scene is a 10'x10' (3m x 3m) room containing nothing but an orc with a pie.

In this case, the declaration of 'I kill the orc!' as an announced desire to author this fiction is allowable. The orc is established and we're assuming the character you're playing has the means and wherewithal to accomplish this feat. The ability to author this fiction is therefore either allowed via fiat (the GM allows it) or tested by mechanics.

However, if the player instead declares, "I find the map in the study!" we all look at him strangely, and re-iterate that we're not in a study, there's just this 10'x10' room containing nothing but an orc with a pie.

Clearly, then, these two acts of authorship are not the same thing, as one is allowed by the fictional positioning of the scene and the other is not. Emphasis added by author.

If the fiction has a recursive effect on future acts of authorship, can we claim that since fiction doesn't exist all acts of authorship are the same? No, clearly this is false.

But that would be a confusion; the same sort of confusion that leads to things like the suggestion that a GM deciding how a fictional person responds to an imagined threat is a realistic model of how an actual person might actually respond to an actual threat.

LOL. No, seriously, I just laughed out loud and got weird looks. I seriously have no idea how you make arguments like 'fiction doesn't exist' and then say that 'because all fiction doesn't exist, all acts of authorship are the same' and then say that 'some acts of authorship are confused because they rely on how that author imagines the fiction'. The latter cannot flow from the previous assertions. You cannot say that an act of authorship is wrong because it imagines the wrong kind of non-existent fiction to base it's authorship on.' If all acts of authorship are the same, then all reasons for authorship are irrelevant. You cannot, on the one hand, say that it doesn't matter what's authored because fiction doesn't exist and then try to say that some things that are authored have a higher value because of the reasoning behind the authoring. If I imagine that the fiction I authored is a realistic portrayal of how a real person might react, then, according to your argument, this is just as valid authoring that same fiction because I believe unicorns would make dragons make that person say that.

I'm beginning to seriously doubt your claims of experience in discussion of the metaphysics of fiction. Or, rather, I'm coming around to thinking your experience is discussing it at bars over a few pints with impressionable friends. If this is your offering, yikes.[/sblock]

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think your distinctions are not genuine ones. They trade on an illusion that "being introduced into the fiction" = "actually present". But it doesn't - fictional things dopn't really exist, and aren't present.

So let me get this straight...you don’t like when the GM uses secret backstory to prevent the players from doing something that can’t be done?

 

[Aenghus]

I find mysteries are very hard to run in RPGs unless they are a total railroad, as the genre requires players to seek out clues and anomalies in the gameworld, and poke at the world to see what happens, and referees being human and fallible, with limited time to prepare, what they find some of the time is glitches in the simulation. Now these could be logical flaws, blind spots, errors of fact, continuity errors, etc and at least some of the time the players can't distinguish these unintended anomalies from actual clues.

Now there's a variety of ways with dealing with such errors so they don't distract the players too much. Most of them disappear into the general noise of the game, in any case, but players can happen to obsess about a spurious clue that wasn't supposed to be there at all, and spin grandiose theories around the most ephemeral of leads. Personally, I often come clean and admit it was a mistake and there's nothing there. I've seen too many referees stubbornly drive their campaign off a cliff because they were unwilling to admit they made a mistake.

IMO this is the difference between cause and effect in the real world and in a RPG, the real world doesn't glitch out over personal issues, but the gameworld might due to referee's lack of sleep, a bad day at work, or personal problems. In the real world properly conceived and executed experiments yield reliable predictable results, whereas in a conventional DM-run game that's too much to expect from most game systems or referees. RPGs aren't reliable simulations precisely because of the the squishy flawed fallible human in the loop.

So when a PC can't find footprints where she expected to, it could be because they weren't there, or because they should have been there but there was a mistake in the adventure module, or because the referee made a mistake and missed that part of the module. Mysteries call players out to investigate clues and anomalies, some of which equate to the player pointing out the mistakes in the referee's worldbuilding and plotting. The intricacies of mystery plots make presenting them a difficult process. There are often typos and errors in printed scenarios, and self-written work can have errors as well. Human error is always a possibility.

How each table deals with such errors varies a lot.

 

[innerdude]

I believe your actual argument is that unless the player can introduce entirely new elements of the fiction through action declaration, they lack agency over the shared narrative.

That's . . . a pretty accurate assessment. I think that is generally @pemerton's position. It may not veer into "introducing entirely new elements" most of the time, though, but merely "re-frame an existing element based on character action declaration and resolution."

I believe your argument is that "we go left, is the study there?" is different from "we go left and enter the study!" And it is, but these kinds of declarations don't really exist in the same way in both styles. They may exist in a DM facing game, where the decision as to which way to turn at an intersection is one of the many kinds of player choice offered, but neither would occur in a player-facing game that isn't being degenerate. This is because the GM in a player facing game isn't going to frame a scene where such choices are made -- if something like this happens it's an error in framing and it will likely be glossed as 'say yes' because it's so unimportant; ie this isn't a choice that has any agency because it shouldn't be a choice at all.

I think you perceive this as negative, but from my view this seems accurate. The whole point of avoiding "secret backstory" is exactly to avoid the kinds of "red herring," pixel-witching, auto-negating GM style that lead to little enjoyment for anyone except the GM, who gets to feel pleased with him/herself at how cleverly they're building a sense of "the unknown."

Instead, the GM is going to 'go to the action' and frame the scene in the study to begin with.

Maybe----if the PCs have earned the right to that framing, AND it fits a dramatic need to set that framing, AND it serves to make play enjoyable for all.

This is the element I'm pointing at - the player-facing game wraps up all of the agency into the 'search for the map' declaration because that's the only real choice the players make in the scene -- everything else is provided by the GM (possibly according to notes prepped and found useful for this situation) as framing, framing that points straight at getting to this kind of declaration.

Ah, see, this is where things slightly go off course, because you've forgotten what you said upstream earlier---that in player-driven play, they have the ability to add, inject, or reframe portions of the framing. And again, this all assumes they've earned the right to "act within" the framing, and it meets dramatic need.

The GM isn't even offering the ability to choose which hall to turn down to find the study, so claiming you increase agency because the GM forces situations onto players that go straight to those declarations that stake objectives is being myopic -- it's intentionally ignoring that agency is lessened by the fact that the players have no way to avoid or mitigate circumstances prior to the frame where the big question is thrust upon them.

So, I think you're starting to conflate "illusionism" with "player-driven" here. The point of player-driven play is, if the dramatic needs and prior action declarations of the PCs haven't merited framing a scene where they're looking for the map, then why are they looking for a map? If they're not even supposed to be there (based on dramatic need), does it make any difference if they're allowed to search one side of the hall versus the other? If the scene frame isn't appropriate, giving them a false sense of agency by letting them search both sides of the hall seems a pretty poor compromise.

You completely defeated your own argument by proving what I said. The scene you describe opening with does not address the primary goal of play for the character involved. That goal is saving his brother. You didn't introduce a scene where saving the brother was at stake, and any declaration of 'I save my brother from possession by a balrog!' would not have the fictional positioning to succeed and would automatically fail. Instead, you introduced a scene who's primary purpose was establishing a challenge that had to be overcome in order to move towards gaining the fictional positioning to save the brother.

To contrast to the map in the study example, if you start that game with a scene having to bypass the guards stationed outside the building with the study in it, this is the same -- it's part of the GM's job to introduce challenges to obstruct the player's goals and provide interesting story. The guards must be overcome to gain the fictional positioning (being in the study) to find the map. A success with the guards may move the positioning to the study, or it may move to a new challenge -- you're now talking to the captain of the guards or the building's owner or whatever -- prior to achieving the necessary positioning. This is how the game progresses, but this progression is inserted by the GM as needed to make the positioning difficult to obtain, else the game is too easy and the big questions are too quickly resolved. Of course, successes will move rapidly towards the completion, but failures will cause additional complications and too many might cause possible outright failure of the objective.

The idea here isn't to deny the GM the ability to frame challenges. If (s)he wants to frame a "pass the guards" challenge or a "successfully sneak through the hallways undetected" challenge, great! As long as the scene frame represents appropriate dramatic need.

The point is to allow the players the freedom to potentially re-frame the fiction based on their action declarations and successful mechanical resolution. How many of us have played games where we've attempted to sneak past those guards, only to have the GM say, "Great, you all succeed on your Stealth checks, but you didn't see the magical trap just inside the door, so you've alerted the guards."

Yep, it's happened to me. Almost exactly like that. Huge build up to sneaking past the guards, only to have that success totally negated by hidden, unknowable GM backstory.

Whereas, player driven play would say, "You've earned your success, and because you've earned your success, as GM, I'm to allow the next scene frame to move you past the guards, and closer to resolving your dramatic need."

It's a mindset more than anything. Yes, if you as GM really want to play out that piece of hidden backstory, and the magic trap now calls down the guards, and the PCs are now farther away from fulfilling their dramatic stakes, cool. Go right ahead. Totally your call.

I just know for me, I no longer find that kind of play interesting in the least.

I fully understand that some people really prefer a style of play where everything is 'big decision' moves, the ones that really move the game along. Others prefer a game where small choices are often made and the frequency of big decision moves is lesser, but that doesn't necessarily mean that agency exercised by the players in these two styles is different. This my point -- claiming that since your style of play focuses on big moves and so gives more agency fails to account that such questions still occur in DM-facing games, just mixed in with many more smaller moves. You continue to compare a single declaration -- finding a map -- in each of the two styles as if they are the same kind of move in both. They are not. The framing is different. The focus is different. The outcomes of success and failure are different. Therefore, you cannot compare the levels of agency available in the two styles by comparing different moves that have the same grammatical structure.

Hmm, this seems a fairly threadbare argument. In player-driven play, the player has the right to say to the GM, "I think we've earned the right to move past this small, incremental bit of minutiae that's not terribly interesting to me, and get to the heart of our dramatic stakes, don't you think?"

In a GM-driven game, the most likely response to that query is, "Stuff it."

Which of those choices offers more "player agency"?

If your group has agreed that the smaller, incremental decision style is a fit for you, great . . . but are you REALLY sure your players have agreed to that contract? Because my last Savage Worlds fantasy campaign where I was a player and not a GM, I had no say in setting the dramatic stakes, and I found large swathes of that campaign tedious and boring.

And if the GM had asked me about it, I would have told him so.

 

[chaochou]

You're equivocating here that fictions that contain fictional characters and fictional events that are called stories exist but the fictional characters and fictional events do not. This is ridiculous -- how can things that do not exist individually ever gain collective existence?

Okay - let's try this and see how your argument stacks up when you have to try and illustrate it.

I have a giant yellow teapot full of dragons in my front garden.

Here's the question...given that those words now exist, is it your position that the teapot full of dragons now exists in my front garden?

It's a simple yes or no question, but I doubt you'll have the honesty not to try and moronically blert your way through a non-answer.

Yes or no?