What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

This is a bit vague. My understanding is that the GM is supposed to frame scenes that bring the player agendas into crisis, which isn't the same thing as framing things the players are interested in. The form of the crisis is the invention of the GM, not the player, and only loosely follows player interests in that the crisis formed attacks some part of the player's agenda. The fact that all scenes are supposed to place the player agenda into unavoidable crisis is the bit that I'm actually talking about. The defense that 'well, it's still the player's agenda' doesn't really defuse the point that the players lack agency to mitigate or choose the crisis they're forced into.

Instead of abstract speculation about how "story now" or "the standard narrativistic model" games are played, it might be better to consider actual examples of games written to be played in that style, or at actual play examples of play in that style.

But anyway, even if one sticks to abstract description, Eero Tuovinen says

[the] gamemaster . . . frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go[es] 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.​

And Ron Edwards says

Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing . . . [which] means . . . [d]eveloping the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all [and r]esolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the protagonists . . .​

There is nothing here about "bringing the player's agenda into crisis", or "attacking" that agenda.

Both emphasise player decision-making ("in-character action", "decisions of the players of the protagonists") that is provoked by "complications"/"continued conflict" which speak to "dramatic needs"/"the engaging issue" and thereby yield "thematic moments"/"development of the isssue".

This could be about crisis, but need not be. Being a poor sorceror with only a limited ability to read magical auras, but in need of items to help free one's brother from demonic possession, means that the offer of an angel feather for sale provokes a choice for the PC, and thus a decision by the player. (In Edwards' terms, the "issue" is implicit but fairly straightforward: what will I risk, and what forces beyond my control will I treat with, in order to free my brother from the forces beyond his control?) But this is not a crisis. It doesn't attack the player's agenda (of having the PC find items to save his brother). It puts that agenda to the fore of play, however.

Players in player-facing games cannot avoid or mitigate crisis by slowing down the pacing. Players in DM-facing games have less agency to introduce new fiction to overcome crisis. This is because they have more agency in pacing to mitigate and overcome crisis. Much of the discussion about resting in 5e is really about how much agency the players have over pacing and how it can trivialize many elements of the game that the DM uses to advance to crisis. So, this isn't something that's new, even if it's not normally discussed in terms like 'agency over pacing.'

The first sentence rests on a false premise.

Players in "player-facing" games cannot avoid dealing with their own agendas. But that does not seem to be a burden on agency!

And as [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has pointed out, resting in 5e seems to be about resources rather than pacing. It's true that the GM can use his/her control over "the plot", or framing, to create "story losses" (what AbdulAlhazred calls "plot costs") that the players might risk if they renew their resources - but the risking of story losses for resources doesn't really seem to be a strong or even distinctive form of player agency at all. Not particularly strong, because the bulk of the agency seems to be in the GM's hands; and not distinctive, because a player in a "player-facing" game can often spend a "move" or "turn" trying to establish an augment of some sort rather than actually tackling the situation head-on. (Even if there is no literal action economy, trying to establish the augment is an action that risks failure, which can then be narrated as consequences that consist in the situation getting worse for the PC, which - in terms of fictional content, if not the process of play that generates it - is analogous to the story loss of the GM-driven game.)

 

[Maxperson]

There is a combat system whereby the GM, using the orc as his/her playing piece, is wearing down the PC's hit points. This puts quite a strong limit on retries.

(If the PC is trying to kill an orc who doesn't fight back, then in D&D it is the same as 3E-style skill checks with no finality of resolution.)

Retries are usually limited with 3e skill checks as well. Fail enough climb checks and you can die from falling, limiting retries. You only get one roll to spellcraft a spell. After that it's gone and it's not realistic to continue to allow rolls. Fail a concentration check and it's over. No rerolls. Fail tracking and you've lost the trail. You can't keep appraising, bluffing, sensing motive for the same interaction, deciphering a script, diplomacy, and more. Really, if you are playing the game realistically, very few 3e skills would allow retries, and even fewer would allow you to keep retrying without limit.

 

[pemerton]

In our game the player would have to come up with the idea to go to the bazar to look around, or try to locate someone in the city who knows where someone might be selling an item of that sort, or seek out a sage, or... That right alone has increased the challenge level over your method, and without "working his way through the GM's material". The DM simply won't have material for everything the players try to do and will be reacting to the story that the players are driving.

There are two basic options here.

(1) The player never actually gets to do the stuff that s/he wanted to do - instead of the game being about whether or not the PC can find an artefact that might help free his/her brother, the game is about the hunt for sages and bazaars and vendors. That is not a story driven by the player - it is driven by the GM's conception of these various obstacles/challenges.

(2) The player does get to do the stuff that s/he wanted to do, but only after doing some other stuff first. Again, this is not a story driven by the player, at least up until that point - it was driven by the GM's conception of those obstacles and challenges.

It would be different if the PC's Belief was "I will find someone to help me deal with my brother's possession." But that wasn't the Belief.

 

[Maxperson]

There are two basic options here.

(1) The player never actually gets to do the stuff that s/he wanted to do - instead of the game being about whether or not the PC can find an artefact that might help free his/her brother, the game is about the hunt for sages and bazaars and vendors. That is not a story driven by the player - it is driven by the GM's conception of these various obstacles/challenges.

(2) The player does get to do the stuff that s/he wanted to do, but only after doing some other stuff first. Again, this is not a story driven by the player, at least up until that point - it was driven by the GM's conception of those obstacles and challenges.

It would be different if the PC's Belief was "I will find someone to help me deal with my brother's possession." But that wasn't the Belief.

No. It's simply a different way for the player to drive the story. The focus is on different aspects of play than yours, but it's no less player driven. There's no effective difference between the DM obstacle in my style, and you creating the curse obstacle in your via the failed roll. In both instances the players have to overcome an obstacle that the DM put in the way. In both instances the players desires drove that obstacle into being through their desires. In both instances the story moves forward ONLY because of the players, as the DM is just reacting to what the players do.

And the story is driven forward in my game by the players regardless of success. Even in failure, the story moves, albeit in a different direction. Perhaps the player seeks a wizard instead to commission the item in need. Maybe he seeks out a demon himself and makes a bargain to learn how to drive the Balrog out. And more. Failure doesn't stop the action, but rather shifts the direction.

Your style doesn't allow for greater player control over the story. It simply allows for a different kind of player control over the story and has a different focus on the game.

 

[pemerton]

there are other elements that I certainly do decide ahead of time. I do commit prior to play. My point is that this need not violate any level of player agency.

If you decide something ahead of time, and it has not been revealed to the players, and they then delcare an action to which this unrevealed fictional positioning is relevant, how can it not affect their agency?

Also, if you decide this thing ahead of time, and it actually comes to matter in play, then how does that also count as an exercise of GM rather than player agency over the content of the shared fiction?

These questions are not rhetorical. If I am wrong, then you have in mind something that I haven't succeeded in grasping- because it looks like GM-authored setting that doesn't affect action resolution and doesn't contribute to the fiction that is the focus of play. But that just doesn't seem right.

My secret backstory is the establishment of the shared fiction, which speaks to the PCs' dramatic needs. It doesn't dictate options.

But it affects action resolution, in ways the players aren't aware of, and in ways that reflects the GM's prior conception of the fiction.

Framing doesn't do that.

The PC searching the kitchen for a map that they've come to the keep to find? To me, that's an issue. It's the solution to the problem that's been established, and has likely been given much more consideration than the presence of a bowl in a bedroom.

So the players abusing their ability to foster the fictional elements of the scene by simply declaring that something may be present in the room.

I mean, isn't this a descrition of a limit on the ability of the players to exercise agency over the content of the shared fiction, based on the GM's conception of what the fiction should be? If not, what is it?

You've clearly given a decision point to them. So they have certain options available to them. This limits their options.

<snip>

A specific problem of some kind is presented. It must be addressed. So the GM is indeed limiting their agency. They have to deal with this thing in front of them, and not go off on some kind of side quest that piqued their interest.

My response to this is the same as to [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] upthread - any time the GM says "You find yourself in situation XYZ" the description of XYZ in some fashion limits options. I'm taking that to be a given for any mainstream RPG. But there is nothing distinctive about the "standard narrativistic model" in this respect.

You seem to be suggesting that there is something distinctive, though. But I've not grasped what you think that is.

As far as the side quest is concerned, I don't get what you are saying. First, I don't know what you mean by "side quest" - it's not a notion that has any purchase in player-driven RPGing, because it rests on a contrast with the "real" or "main" quest that only operates in GM-driven games.

But second, the player can declare whatever action s/he wants. If the GM frames the PC into the bazaar, and the player decides that angel feathers are of no interest, the player can declare whatever action s/he wants to (and that respects the fictional positioning of the PC). Again, you seem to be envisaging some aspect or dynamic of play here that I'm simply not seeing (eg some sort of GM veto over action declarations).

I don't know of any RPG that would be run the way you describe. I don't know of any RPG that suggests that the GM's job is to (i) frame the situation, and then (ii) tell the players what their PCs are or are not allowed to do in trying to engage and/or resolve the situation. Do you have one in mind?

I'm going off of your descriptions. I am not familiar with Burning Wheel and a few of the other games you are advocating. I am familiar with other games that would be considered story now.

OK, so which game have you got in mind in envisaging that if the players try to engage with the "sidequest" the GM will veto that action declaration and force them to do something else (the main quest?)? Or that involves the GM, as part of the framing, saying "You're not allowed to bribe this guard" or "You're not allowed to fight this monster"?

As I said, I don't know any - that's why I'm asking what you have in mind.

 

[pemerton]

Again, it may be useful if you can answer if you've been swayed in any way. If there are any decent answers to the question you posed in the OP. What is worldbuilding for? If you reply to me, I'd hope you would not cut this question out a third time. I think it'd genuinely be interesting to see your take on it after hundreds of pages of this thread.

Certainly there must have been some take away for you?

I answered this a long way upthread, I think in multiple posts. A range of answers have been given.

Worldbuilding provides material for the GM to share with the players as triggered by their moves - this is generally described as "exploration". On the GM side, this can be a creative exercise. On the player side, it seems to be described mostly in terms of immersion. "Immersion" in this context seems necessarily to involve someone else telling fiction to the player, but that characterisation has been resisted to quite a degree.

Worldbuilding provides the players with "levers" to do things - [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] is the main poster to have talked about this. It hasn't been fully analysed in this thread, but there are multiple ways this could play out. One is in what I would call White Plume Mountain style - worldbuilding provides material, by way of fictional positioning, that the players can directly engage to proffer solutions to the puzzles they are faced with (I call it WPM because the paradigm, in my mind, is removing doors from their hinges so as to "surf" down the frictionless corridor over the pits with super-tetanus spikes).

Another, which is less OSR-ish/WPM, and probably therefore more typical in contemporary RPGing, is that the players - by engaging with the "levers" - trigger the GM to narrate stuff in ways that go beyond pre-authoring. When this really starts to reflect player pro-activity, I think that we may see a transition to player-driven play without anyone in the game having to get self-conscious about it. Now that I think about it, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has, quite a way upthread, pointed to this sort of thing as particularly being a feature of upper-level AD&D play.

Quite different from the idea of "levers", worldbuidling provides a uniform aesthetic vision for the game. And at least somewhat relatedly, it provides a drive/direction for the game where the players are not themselves interested in providing this. And these two things may come together in the context of a drop-in or AL-style situation.

And another function for worldbuilding that has been mentioned in some recent posts is that it creates a "space" in play between the player's expression of a desire to engage with situation XYZ, and actually engaging, in play, with situation XYZ.

Some of these answers are not surprising. Probably the most surprising are the last two - the uniform vision/driving of the game is part of an approach to RPGing that I find really very foreign to my own experience; and the idea that it might be desirable to create space in play between wanting to engage with XYZ, and engaging with XYZ, in the way that is being described is not something that would occur to me through reflection.

 

[darkbard]

Let's go back to the feather example. In your game you just plopped the PCs down in the bazar where they could locate the item. In our game the player would have to come up with the idea to go to the bazar to look around, or try to locate someone in the city who knows where someone might be selling an item of that sort, or seek out a sage, or... That right alone has increased the challenge level over your method, and without "working his way through the GM's material". The DM simply won't have material for everything the players try to do and will be reacting to the story that the players are driving.

I disagree: it's simply setting the starting point of a protracted process at different initial stages. Go back and take a look at [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s example of how action resolution led to the introduction of complications whereby the feather was cursed and another magical item was needed, etc.

In both his example and yours, this is much "work" to be done before the player goal is met.

 

[pemerton]

In a DM-run system where the presence or absence of a secret door is already locked in, there's no problem. But in a player-driven system the player has to have in the back of his mind the thought "Hey, maybe if I try searching for a secret door and roll well I can - in effect - out of nowhere author us an escape hatch."

This just reiterates my point that the issue is not player freedom to make action declarations that are then resolved via the mechanics; but rather that balancing moves is a bigger deal in D&D than in most other RPGs. The concern you raise here isn't about the player's "authorship" role, but about the fact that the move is too powerful relative to other available moves.

(Though personally I'm not sure this is true in a game with fiat secret doors via Passwall.)

I wonder, is the difference due to D&D actually paying attention to action economy and unbalanced actions where other systems maybe don't so much?

There are any number of reasons, probably starting with the list approach (spells, magic items) to PC abilities in combination with large swathes of dramatically fiction-altering fiat magic. But I think a full discussion is beyond the scope of this thread.

4e doesn't fold combat situations into skill challenges, does it?

Absolutely it can. A combat can be part of a skill challenge (eg defeating the monster generates 1 success). Or a skill challenge can unfold within, or parallel to, a combat.

There is a good recent thread in the <5e editions sub-forum about skill challenges in combat contexts.

in other systems if my next action declaration following discovery of the door goes something like "I open it, yell to my companions that here's the way out, and book it outside!" then - depending on other factors such as initiative order and actions of the foes - I'm probably out.

In AD&D there are pursuit rules. In BW there are pursuit rules, and they are only activiated if first you satisfy the disengagement requirements.

In Cortex+ Heroic finding the secret door might support an action to impose a "I Escaped" complication on the enemy, but that is no easier or harder than imposing a "You're dead!" result on them - so finding the secret door changes the fiction, and thus may change what abilities the oppponents can bring to bear, but doesn't change the mechanical difficulty in any in-principle sense.

Re the reliquary example:
You could narrate that. Or you could describe what the PCs are going past during their journey to the reliquary: "As you travel with the angels you pass by several intersections and open doors. Down one hallway you see (and hear!) a slave being beaten with a club by a hooded person. Through one of the open doors you see a luxurious-looking bedchamber - and you're sure that was some pretty expensive jewelry just sitting out in the open on that dresser! Down another hall you notice a strange shimmering light coming from a door or opening on the left."

Or it could just be "As you travel with the angels you pass through a number of dusty passages; in a few places intersecting passages lead off into darkness."

Things like this give the players (via their PCs) options. They could decide to rescue the slave. They could decide to steal the jewelry. They could check out one of the passages leading into darkness*. Or they could ignore it all and go straight to the reliquary.

* - even if they ignore everything else they might still want to check out the other passages to see if one provides a different approach to where they're going.

<snip>

3 during this travel they learn more about the environment simply by what they see as they pass
4 they get an opportunity to respond to what they've learned in 3

<snip>

But none of this even gets a chance to happen if you-as-DM jump straight from talking with the angels to framing the scene at the reliquary.

Everything you describe here is just GM authorship of fiction.

You are saying that by framing the PCs as being at the reliquary I am denying the players the chance to rescue the slave. But by framing the players into a scene with a doorway and beyond that a beating of a slave, you are denying the players the chance to meet the Modron that some other GM might have decided to mention in his/her possible framing. Or whatever.

Every moment of framing means that some other framing wasn't established. Every moment of play spent doing X means that we have less time to do Y.

By spending time framing situations about slaves and intersecting passages you don't increase the scope for agency. You just spend more time on the stuff that you think is interesting and less time (or delay the arrival at) the stuff the players have flagged as interesting to them.

to me the point of action declarations is to interact with (and maybe change) the fiction that's already there

This takes us back to the point that fiction is imaginary.

From the point of view of "interacting" with fiction, there's no difference between authoring that an (already mentioned) orc is dead, and authoring that an (already mentioned) wall contains a secret door.

You have to introduce other constraints - eg the player's authorship is constrained to things that, in the fiction, might be causal results of his/her PC's actions. I know that plenty of people like such constraints, but RPGs that don't adhere to them aren't in any sense abandoning the idea of "interacting with the fiction", and aren't in any sense more "unrealistic" or "Schroedingerish".

 

[Maxperson]

I disagree: it's simply setting the starting point of a protracted process at different initial stages. Go back and take a look at [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s example of how action resolution led to the introduction of complications whereby the feather was cursed and another magical item was needed, etc.

In both his example and yours, this is much "work" to be done before the player goal is met.

That's simply not true, at least not as he described it. Had that arcana check succeeded, that would have been the feather they needed. One roll in a place he plopped them. While it is true that we both would start at the initial stages, only his allowed for the initial stage to also be the final stage. One check is hardly "work".

 

[darkbard]

I'm quoting the relevant bit from [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s post here:

I'll give a real example, from actual BW play:

A PC has (as two of three Beliefs) I will free my brother from possession by a balrog and I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother. The very first scene, that started the campaign, found this PC at a bazaar where a peddler was offering an angel feather for sale (ie a magical item that might be useful in dealing with a balrog-possessed mage).

This sees those two beliefs (one as instrumental to the other) engaged right away. And it doesn't make for poor play at all!

Now, I'm not in pemerton's game, so I have no idea how this may have played out at his table, but I see nothing in his description of the episode that guarantees that a single successful action resolution mechanic would have led to the fulfillment of the PC's Belief that I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother. Might the angel feather have been magically beneficial and not cursed with a single roll? Maybe. Would it be useful against his brother? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Maybe [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] wishes to engage this, or perhaps he feels it's a non sequitur.

The point of the example, though, and he's subsequently addressed this upthread, is that his framing goes directly to the PC Belief (regardless of how much work may be required to get there), whereas the situation you propose interposes several GM-designed intervening obstacles to even addressing the Belief.