What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Maxperson]

Yes it does. At a minimum, it requires the GM to establish situations which permit the player to paint a picture of his/her character that is clear and powerful; which permit the player to express his/her PC's personality, interest and agenda.

No, it doesn't. I as a player establish my character's personality, interests and agendas. Here's the thing. I don't even have to tell the DM what they are in order for me to bring them out in the game. Nothing is required on the part of the DM.

Let's say that I'm playing a dour dwarf(I know, it's a stretch ) who is interested in fine wines and with an agenda to get drunk on fine wine in every town he comes to. Without telling the DM any of that, I can seek out taverns in every town, looking for fine wine. My dour personality will become apparent in my interaction with the NPCs and other PCs. If a tavern doesn't have fine wine, I can grumpily exit and seek out a place that sells fine wine, showing that it's important to my PC that the wine he drinks be fine. And I can get drunk on it just fine. I'd even further show my agenda by keeping a few bottles of fine wine stored carefully in my pack to use just in case I come to a town that doesn't sell fine wine.

Very few interests and agendas need DM help to achieve, and I can't imagine ever needing the DM to help my play my character's personality.

What does this rogue think and feel? What is his/her agenda? Why is s/he trying to get into the castle? What might s/he sacrifice to do so?

The situation you describe does not involve advocacy of the sort that Eero Tuovinen talks about. As you present it, there is barely a character there at all!

You're making a fundamental mistake here. You're assuming that all aspects have to be present in all things to be agency. In the rogue example the player is clearly and strongly letting the DM know what the PCs is doing and why. That qualifies as full agency, even if that particular example isn't showing all aspects of what Eero talks about in that paragraph.

As for those questions, the rogue's agenda is clearly to get inside unnoticed, and he thinks there should be a secret escape route out of the castle. We don't need to know what he feels for him to be expressing his agency fully in that situation, though if the player had wished, he could have told the DM without DM help, what his PC was feeling.

Eero Tuovinen distinguishes advocacy (broadly, first person inhabitation of the PC) from authorship (broadly, thining about the PC as a protagonist in a story). This has no bearing on action resolution. Nowhere does he say that players can't declare actions which might succeed!

That's just silly. I've never even heard of a game or playstyle where players can't declare actions which might succeed.

 

[Aenghus]

One way to railroad people in a GM-driven game is to throw too many decisions at the players. You wear them out with lots of relatively meaningless decisions, like suspicious flagstones and incongruous npcs, and when they are tired you push them in the direction you desire by not giving them a choice, using "all roads lead to Rome" or giving a magician's choice.

I've seen this happen a lot in games, particularly in game modules where the PCs have to go in a certain direction for the adventure to continue, but also in bad railroads. I've used this myself in days of yore, sometimes in ways I regret in hindsight.

Decision making takes energy and the limits of decision making and the sort of decisions they like and dislike vary from person to person.

Presenting PCs with lots of decisions isn't strictly superior, and doesn't automatically prevent railroading. It depends on player and GM expectations, but a smaller number of meaningful decisions may well be less railroading than a larger number of neutral decisions. Unless the participants are invested in the latter, which brings us back to this thread.

 

[Maxperson]

One way to railroad people in a GM-driven game is to throw too many decisions at the players. You wear them out with lots of relatively meaningless decisions, like suspicious flagstones and incongruous npcs, and when they are tired you push them in the direction you desire by not giving them a choice, using "all roads lead to Rome" or giving a magician's choice.

I've seen this happen a lot in games, particularly in game modules where the PCs have to go in a certain direction for the adventure to continue, but also in bad railroads. I've used this myself in days of yore, sometimes in ways I regret in hindsight.

Decision making takes energy and the limits of decision making and the sort of decisions they like and dislike vary from person to person.

Presenting PCs with lots of decisions isn't strictly superior, and doesn't automatically prevent railroading. It depends on player and GM expectations, but a smaller number of meaningful decisions may well be less railroading than a larger number of neutral decisions. Unless the participants are invested in the latter, which brings us back to this thread.

Yeah. I'm not saying you can't railroad in a DM facing game. It's just far harder to accidentally railroad in DM facing games. It also appears that you are misunderstanding what I am saying. I'm not saying that I bombard them with choices. I simply describe the environment and let them choose for themselves what they want to do. Rather than throw options at them, my goal is not to deprive them of options by moving them forward to some spot of my choosing.

 

[Aenghus]

Yeah. I'm not saying you can't railroad in a DM facing game. It's just far harder to accidentally railroad in DM facing games. It also appears that you are misunderstanding what I am saying. I'm not saying that I bombard them with choices. I simply describe the environment and let them choose for themselves what they want to do. Rather than throw options at them, my goal is not to deprive them of options by moving them forward to some spot of my choosing.

It still seems unfair to keep judging a different style of play by the criteria of another style of play. "Your orange isn't a good apple".

If the players genuinely want to move from scene to scene, and pile all the decision making into the scenes, like in a play or movie, then the alternate paths that are important to player agency in a conventional GM-driven game are actually a waste of time for this different style of play and content the participants don't want or need.

I suppose there could be a hybrid game, where some players want the big scenes with big dramatic decisions and others want naturalistic slice of life stories with all the (boring to some) filler, but it seems very difficult to run with the different player goals and pacing issues. Much easier to go one way or the other.

Any game style can be run badly, with GMs ignoring legitimate player requests, or players ignoring their responsibilities.

 

[Maxperson]

It still seems unfair to keep judging a different style of play by the criteria of another style of play. "Your orange isn't a good apple".

I haven't been. I'm not making judgment calls about his playstyle.

If the players genuinely want to move from scene to scene, and pile all the decision making into the scenes, like in a play or movie, then the alternate paths that are important to player agency in a conventional GM-driven game are actually a waste of time for this different style of play and content the participants don't want or need.

Which I already acknowledged when I told [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] that when players are okay with being railroaded, being railroaded isn't a bad thing. That's how they like to play and the important thing is that they have fun.

I'm not judging his playstyle good or bad. I'm simply pointing out that it does railroad players.

I suppose there could be a hybrid game, where some players want the big scenes with big dramatic decisions and others want naturalistic slice of life stories with all the (boring to some) filler, but it seems very difficult to run with the different player goals and pacing issues. Much easier to go one way or the other.

I agree. Mixing playstyles generally doesn't work out well.

Any game style can be run badly, with GMs ignoring legitimate player requests, or players ignoring their responsibilities.

I agree with this, too.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would personally find that to be very unsatisfactory. Having to re-wind things that have happened is a personal pet peeve. I'll do it when I've screwed up AND if that screw up has worked against the players, but not for any other reason. I'd much prefer that the DM not play our PCs in the first place and give us the option as we approach the enemy.

Nobody is 'playing your PC', you ASKED to go to the fire giant cave, so you were placed there!!!! But see below...

It's different. If I have to tell the DM all the different actions I take in response to all of the possibilities that I can think of, I'm wasting a whole lot of time and thought on stuff that will never be relevant. In a normal DM facing game, you might take precautions against possibilities, but not in the same way. We aren't going to spend a lot of time thinking of strategies to use if the baron is a vampire, if the baroness is a vampire, if the kid down the block is a vampire, etc., or maybe one of them is a lich and all those strategies, or maybe one of them is a...

We might grab some stakes and holy water, though. The strategies will happen as wander the baron's castle and see signs of vampires, like no mirrors or food that has no garlic in it. You only have to spend all that time on contingencies if the DM is the type who will take control of your PCs and just walk you into things if you don't tell him everything in advance.

Again, this is based on some weird and never-seen-in-the-real-world concept of Story Now. At least in the case of a D&D-like milieu where this kind of possibility is one that rational people can entertain, a GM who thrust the PCs into a situation where preparation and care would be clearly indicated and signs of trouble are at least a convention of the genre, if not outright a matter of logic, are indicated without any chance to do said prep, seems like a bad GM to me!

OTOH, I can imagine where both a DM-centered game and a Story Now game would do this. Suppose the whole shtick of this vampire family is to fit in with the rest of the world and not be noticed? Maybe that's how they operate, and the whole point is "what do you do when you get dropped into castle Dracula without any prep!?" Its at least a feasible and plausible concept, so I can't categorically condemn it.

PERSONALLY I would think that sniffing out the telltale signs and showing yourselves to be alert, capable, and crafty, would be a big part of any such vampire scenario, so I'd almost undoubtedly frame scenes in which the PCs came to the local tavern of the nearest town, etc. Dark looks, strange remarks, weird happenings, telltale signs of all sorts, and possibly outright explicit warnings given in hushed tones might all happen. These are all perfectly good Story Now elements which could be framed into various prefatory scenes.

Story Now doesn't mandate that characters are simply hurled unprepared without choice into some terrible danger and ultimate crisis willy-nilly. Any such notion is incorrect.

In fact, in Story Now play, if we can examine it for a minute, we will instantly see why this wouldn't happen. For a castle full of vampires to figure in the game, there must be a character need which requires (or at least can be met by) such a thing.

Remember, Story Now is, ideally No Myth, so said castle won't exist simply 'because its on the map'. I guess it could appear as an ancillary detail in some unrelated story line as color simply because the area has been established to be 'dark and evil tree clad mountain ranges decorated with crumbling castles' or somesuch. In that case we're dealing with a minor side issue, a speed bump type of obstacle probably. Here it would seem pretty appropriate for the vampire setup to just appear in a scene frame, be dealt with in the course of whatever, and done.

Otherwise we're dealing with a character need, and probably a player "I want nasty undead" kind of agenda. The character need could be something like "I want to find the monster who took my sister and lay her to rest!" lets say. That would be a very nice BW belief that would probably lead to Castle Dracula!

So, now we know where we are ultimately headed, why would the GM ever simply frame you there without prep? The whole thrust of the story arc is going to be about finding out where this place is, if it even exists, how to get to it, and what sort of dangers lurk there, preparing to overcome them, etc. Visits to the actual castle could happen more than once, perhaps, depending on the details of the story, but presumably there's one big final showdown where everything comes to a head and stakes are to be distributed to undead hearts. Nobody is coming to this suaree unprepared or being scene framed there unexpectedly!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

YOU took pity on them and YOU decided to intercept the teleport to give them items. How is that not YOU engaging in DM agency?

It was a 4e game, and I don't recall 4e saying exactly 'be an advocate for the players', but DW actually says you should be fan of the characters, that part of the GM's job is to create scenarios where they can be big heroes. Not that they have to be handed anything on a platter, just that the tools should be available for them to pick up and use.

I think this is in that vein. It isn't exactly illogical either. The RQ is invested in the success of major followers, and they need help right then. This is a solid, indirect, way for her to help herself. It is certainly plausible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

His point, as I understood it, had nothing to do with narrative control specifically.

I'll try to put it in my own words: different games - including but not at all limited to RPGs - each give players a certain amount of agency within that particular game as defined by that game's rules; and while in many games the players can choose either to exert less agency than the game rules provide or to exert what they have badly (though either is almost always a suboptimal thing to do) they can never choose to exert more; and if they do they are cheating.

In chess I have the agency to move my pieces as the rules allow, one per turn. If I try to move two per turn I've cheated by exceeding my agency. Chess does not allow me to exert no agency (i.e. skip my turn) but it does allow me to exert it very badly by making a series of meaningless or flat-out awful (or randomly determined!) moves on my turns.

In most normal RPGs the game rules give me as a player the agency to - within the rules - roll up whatever character I see fit to in a mechanical sense (stats, race, class, etc., depending what the dice or other char-gen system give me to work with) and then give it whatever personality I feel like. Those rules also then give me the agency within the game to:
- play that character within the fiction as presented (inhabit its persona and interact with the game-world on that basis)
- play that character mechanically (roll the dice, track its h.p., etc.)
- advocate for that character (state its actions)
- reasonably expect the DM to play in good faith

To go beyond this - e.g. by playing someone else's character or falsely tracking its h.p. or demanding that stated actions that are impossible succeed anyway - is exceeding my agency, and may quickly veer into cheating if it's not there already.

In story-now RPGs the agency expands to include some control over content of the fiction along with the other things noted above. Whether or not this is a good thing (and by extension, whether or not the story-now concept overall is a good thing) is probably the root of this whole debate.

Lanefan

Right! And now you understand and you have made the same point I have been making all along! There was no other point beyond this that was made. However it SEEMED that [MENTION=5094]ilbrant[/MENTION]aloth's statement was something like "In Chutes and Ladders you only get to follow the dice, therefor there's no additional agency in Chess because its a game just like Chutes and Ladders is a game." This is obviously flawed logic and my restating it in terms of two totally different games makes that apparent. When he stated it in terms of two very similar games, it was, apparently, not so obvious to everyone!

I can of course compare the agency of Chutes and Ladders with Chess, and we seem to both be able to do that and arrive at the same agreed conclusion! I hope that everyone who reads this post will now be clear on how this kind of comparison works

Thanks! I hope I didn't seem unduly frustrated before, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't really follow your point here. What I was saying was a response to @Lanefan contrasting "PC dramatic needs" with "the game/campaign as a whole". My point was that if that stuff is something the players actively care about and want to engage with, then it itself has become (on aspect of) PCs' dramatic needs. (Eg if Lanefan mentions slavery, and the players decide to have their PCs fight in the cause of abolition, then ipso facto abolition has become one of the dramatic needs of these protgaonists.)

Right. At most the GM might think to himself "I believe that good pacing dictates that I interject a less (or more) tense scene right here." and thus concern himself with 'dramatic needs of the whole story' as opposed to maybe a laser focus on the character need of a particular PC which might be served equally well by a big showdown at this juncture. The RQ intercepting the teleport seems to potentially fall into this category, a small break in the rising action injects a bit of variety. It obviously had a mechanically motivated element to it in play, but it could also serve dramatic purposes.

Again with these meaningless metaphors. Narrating "OK, so you go through the door back into the corridor" and "OK, you travel through the Underdark and arrive at the lava-filled cavern the dwarves described to you" are identical narrativbe processes. Neither leaves out more information than the other, or railroads anyone more than the other. That's a fundamental difference between fiction and reality. In reality, every square inch of every surface someone traverses exerts causal influence over them, and they exert the same over it. But in a fiction, there is only what is narrated. You don't give the players more opportunities for choice by narrting only things that are nearby rather than things that are geographically distant!

Do you mention every floor covering in every room? Every road surface? Every species of plant in the wilderness? ("Hang on, that's not normally found in these parts! What animal - or evil druid - spread it to here?")

Every wall surface - stone, brick, plastered, painted, bare, scrubbed, filthy, etc? (Think of the plastered wall in ToH for a concrete example of a module which turns on this.)

To be honest I find that impossible to believe.

I live in a typical urban neighbourhood in a multi-million population industrialised city. Walking 100 m down my street involves passing multiple sorts of road and footpath surfaces (cobblestones, asphalt, concrete) plus various "hatches" (some concrete, some metal) plus heavy metal ramps laid over driveways (that my girls love to jump on so as to make a noise). No GM in any modern or sci-fi game every narrated things in that degree of detail.

I've never been to a mediaeval city (obviously), but I've walked through cities that more closely resemble our fantasy cities than does modern Melbourne (I'm thinking especially Fez, Zanzibar and Nairobi). Street surfaces are sometimes dirt, sometimes paved or cobbled, sometimes muddy. Building are sometimes stone or brick, sometimes timber - or a mix of both. Some are permanent, some at least look more temporary (eg rough-hewn timber bound together with cord). There are balconiies, and shutters of various sorts, and cords running across the streets or between buidlings, etc.

No GM in any fantasy game ever narrated all this stuff when the PCs walk down the street. Yet all of it is potentially salient. Is it railroading not to do so?

Yeah, this is the whole point of the 'level of detail' discussion. REALITY, actual world reality, is constructed such that every single element of it is causally connected to every single other element of it in some way! The amount of detail is effectively infinite. Our ability to anticipate and understand it at all is entirely based on the fact that certain configurations of matter are effectively equivalent and we just lump them together, so we can now say "its most likely I can walk down the street and no meteors will strike me" but that isn't actually a statement based on causally connected elements, it is pure induction!

It is hopeless to attempt to achieve this in the fantasy world, so it is only a matter of what the dramatic effect of any given narration is. Its logical consequences are purely limited to the narrative realm and, given the impossibility of connecting it to anything resembling causal reality, it has no other significance. Thus in game terms you are utterly correct, and this is a point which has long failed to be appreciated by many in the gaming community. That any two narratives with the same logical structure are in fact equivalent and one can only prefer one over the other, or one technique of generating such, for aesthetic reasons. Agency simply cannot logically be a factor in terms of the in-game details of the narrative. Agency arises purely out of who gets to decide the structure of that narrative!

If the players want to approach the giants stealthily, they can do so. In a 4e game, the whole trip is probably being resolved as a skill challenge, and if the PCs want to put a group Stealth check in there to try and achieve the result we see the giants before they see us, they're welcome to. But they don't need me to remind them to do that. They're the ones playing their PCs, and they're the ones who know what they want their PCs to do. They can make these calls if they want.

This point is one that I appreciated so strongly within 4e that when I rewrote it into my own system I canonized it! ALL such sequences are scenes and all scenes are challenges, without exception. The other alternative is to cast it as an interlude, which definitionally cannot have any bearing on the success or failure of the characters in a conflict. This structure makes it very clear to me when I GM exactly what is happening, and forces stakes to be explicit at all times. Thus BEFORE THE TREK TO THE GIANTS HAPPENED, the parameters of the challenge would be established, what the positive and negative outcomes were, and how the characters intended to mitigate risk, what the costs for such risk mitigation were, etc. This universally annihilates any 'Front Porch' type issues as a side benefit.

In part under the influence of other posters who play more avant-garde games than I do, I've become a big fan of "OK, yep, you did that, but now what about . . .?" - that is, if the players want to make potions or stock up on assault rifles or whatever it is, let's just write it down and knock off the ritual components or credits or whatever it is, but I'm not that interested in the players using this sort of hemming and hawing as a way of putting off hard choices. Or of seeking in-advance assurances from the GM that, if only they pack the right gear, then everything will turn out how they want. I push them towards "story now" rather than "story already written via the equipment list".

That doesn't mean that there are never hour-long logistics interludes in my 4e game, but I prefer to keep them to a minimum.

Interesting. I wouldn't favor 'hours long' interludes, but I've found that a more 'operational' and 'strategic' focus to play than what 4e provided can be more interesting. At least I like to have a game which makes these tools available.

OTOH I also tend to find ways to structure challenges so as to work logistics into the game more as narrative explanation than as a puzzle to solve. So when the party is going to trek across the desert I set the challenge up as "equip yourselves for and execute the journey across the desert." Now if a player wants to say "I make a Survival check to resist the heat of the desert" it can be cast in terms of water (a resource). "Make a Survival check to see if you properly calculated the needed amount of water. If you fail then you've run out and suffered the consequences." This also puts things on a "challenge the character" kind of footing. In practice I don't require the players to sit around calculating the quarts of water needed to get across the desert and juggling the contents of their packs to fit it in. If the journey is 'long' then presumably they acquired a camel and a driver to alleviate some of the capacity issue, and a long desert trek will thus require the time, expense, and involve the presence of, some amount of baggage train.

Logistics, in this framework, can now also be cast into the realm of cost/benefit and become a part of stakes setting. You could wait 3 days to acquire the needed camel-train, or you can just light out in hot pursuit of the bad guy without prepping and hope you can catch him before you get too deep into the Great Desert! The structure of the challenge is thus dictated by the players and its stakes are set (IE either a severe risk of dehydration and death, or a serious risk of losing the quarry).

 

[Aenghus]

No, it doesn't. I as a player establish my character's personality, interests and agendas. Here's the thing. I don't even have to tell the DM what they are in order for me to bring them out in the game. Nothing is required on the part of the DM.

<snip>

Very few interests and agendas need DM help to achieve, and I can't imagine ever needing the DM to help my play my character's personality.

I can think of many, many interests and goals that require DM help to achieve. IMO the set of such goals is significantly larger than the set of goals that don't require DM assistance. (Both being infinite, but DM-required goals are a bigger infinity).

Settling for smaller, meaner goals is certainly less trouble for the GM, and less work. Unless the player deliberately avoids any expectations for the consequences of their modest secret goals, it's entirely possible that the campaign or GM will crush them inadvertently.

Fundamentally, if I have a character with significant goals, I want the GM involved, I want him or her to give a damn, and I want the goal to mean something in the context of the campaign. If they can't deliver I can always vote with my feet.

Edit: whatever goals someone wants are fine, whatever their size, so long as they are appropriate to the circumstances. Your drunk dwarf example sure seems smaller and meaner, so to speak.

I've seen drunk PCs get hit with a variety of mechanical penalties (and sometimes bonuses) for their drunkeness. I've seen such PCs voted out of the group before. If penalties and social fallout make the character less fun to play, you might need to negotiate with the GM to keep the character playable. And we are back to needing GM cooperation to play the player goal.