What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

I don't understand what you are claiming here, or what purported contrast you are drawing.

What's the DC for your D&D character to flap her arms and fly to the moon? What's the DC for a 1st level character to jump into a volcano and survive? What's the DC for your 1st level fighter PC to try and kill ten orcs in one round?

There are all sorts of limits - some imposed by the mechanics, some by a shared understanding of the fiction - on what actions can be meaningfully attempted in a RPG.

The DCs are entirely irrelevant to his point. There is no limit on the attempt of those actions. My PC can flap his arms in an attempt to fly to the moon and there is no system limitation that stops me from trying. The same with the volcano and killing 10 orcs in one round, though I'm not sure why you'd have asked for a DC for that one. Have you not played D&D before?

And who are you to declare what is meaningful and what isn't? If my PC is crazy, then there is meaning in the attempt to fly to the moon by flapping my arms. If my PC is not crazy, but I'm trying to freak out a tribe of primitives who are superstitious and don't mess with crazy people, the attempt has meaning. If my jump into the volcano is part of a heroic sacrifice, it has meaning, even if my PC is desperately hoping for a miracle and hopes beyond reason to survive. If my PC wants to be the best swordsman in the world and his goal is to kill 10 orcs in one round, his attempts have meaning, even if he doesn't succeed when 1st level.

I will repost the context of my post to which you replied:

The relevant constraint on framing and action declaration [in "story now" RPGing] is not 'What will happen if the PCs find the wands or gold they are after?" It's about what sorts of actions the system permits the PCs to declare, and what actions they want to declare (given the PCs they are advocating for), and then how the GM is going to frame scenes that invite those declarations, and how consequences - especially consequences of failure, but sometimes (as in the Cortex+ example) also consequences of success - are narrated and given appropriate mechanical effect.

One of the true appeals of RPGs is that as player you're (in theory) free to try anything, no matter how ridiculous. There shouldn't be any system-based limits on the actions players can declare or have thier PCs attempt.

I don't understand what you are claiming here, or what purported contrast you are drawing.

What's the DC for your D&D character to flap her arms and fly to the moon? What's the DC for a 1st level character to jump into a volcano and survive? What's the DC for your 1st level fighter PC to try and kill ten orcs in one round?

There are all sorts of limits - some imposed by the mechanics, some by a shared understanding of the fiction - on what actions can be meaningfully attempted in a RPG.

So your examples of pretending to flap your arms and fly to the moon to scare people, or of playing a crazy PC who (wrongly) believes s/he can do that, are not to the point. The first is some sort of Bluff or Performance check; the second is not an action declaration at all, but just narrating the crazy behaviour of your crazy PC. And if you jump into the volcano as a heroic sacrifice, then - ispo facto - you're not trying to survive!

So I'll try again: the assertion that there are no limits on action declarations in a RPG can be useful for explaining to a boardgame player the idea that the "flavour text" - ie the shared fiction - actually matters to resolution; but it's not useful when people who already know how RPGing works are trying to analyse the techniques of play in a serious fashion. Thus, if a player of a 1st level PC declares, in D&D, "I cut down the 10 orcs before me!" - that is not a permissible action declaration. The rules of the game require the GM to ask "Which one?" - or perhaps (especially in AD&D) to roll a d10 to see which one the PC attacks. There is a genuine contrast with, say, HeroWars/Quest, or Cortex+ Heroic, where "I cut down the 10 orcs before me!" is a permissible action declaration for any PC who - in the fiction - is wielding a sword.

If a player of a 1st level PC declares, in D&D, "I flap my arms so as to fly to the moon", the GM is entitled to reply "You can't do that", and even "You know you can't do that" - where the second person pronoun refers to both player and PC. There is a genuine contrast with, say, Toon, where (without knowing the game that well) I imagine this may well be a permissible action declaration.

A really famous example of an impermissible action declaration in many D&D games is "I get my hired alchemist to concoct a compound of charcoal, sulfur and saltpetre" - because in many campaigns that would be a genre-breaker.

And I haven't even canvassed impermissible action declarations for reasons of propriety and good taste.

The constraints on action declaration that I referred to, and which [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] responded to, are primarily constraints related to genre and taste. If the players don't want to play a silly game, then they can refrain from declaring silly actions. If everyone understands that, in this game, holy swords are not just found for sale at local markets, then declaring "I go to the market to by a holy sword" is an impermissible action declaration.

As I indicated in my first post on this particular point, the GM's framing of the situation is also a relevant constraint. Burning Wheel sets a difficulty for finding a modest amount of loot in a dungeon (from memory, it's an Obstacle 3 Scavenging check to find 1D of cash); but for obvious reasons if it's established in the fiction that the village the PCs currently are in is impoverished, and its inhabitants starving, then the Obstacle for a Scavenging check that will turn up gold in said village is obviously going to be higher than that (after all, there can't be any gold that's easy to find, as the starving inhabitants would have found it!)

Yes it is a reward. Those levels are a reward for playing the game. A guaranteed reward for doing something is still a reward. When I tell my son that if he eats all of his dinner he can have desert as a reward, it's guaranteed that if he actually eats his dinner(engages with the food via his mouth and stomach) then he will get desert.

I'm not interested in debating the semantics of "reward".

In Gygaxian D&D, a session of play could - if the players play poorly, or get unlucky - result in virtually no XP earned: the PCs are bested by or flee from wandering monsters, and fail to find or scavenge any loot. Earning XP is not a guaranteed outcome of playing the game; it is a reward. And a significant goal of play is to earn that reward so as to boost you character. As Gyagx makes amply clear in his DMG, having a high level PC is a mark of skill as a player. He allows for the "artificial" rolling up of high level PCs, to get a one-off experience, but he doesn't approve of it as the principal mode of play. The game is about starting at low level and working your character up.

In 4e, having a high level PC isn't a mark of skill. Assuming the PCs was started at 1st level, then reaching high level is a sign of having played the game. The XP system functions as a pacing mechanism: as levels are gained, the PCs become mechanically more complicated, gain access to certain mechanical abilities (with fictional correlates) that are "level-gated" (eg flight, invisibility, domination, stun, long range teleport, planar travel, etc), and - most importantly - the fiction escalates through the "tiers of play".

I guess if you really enjoy mechanical complexity, and feel for some reason that it would be cheating just to build yourself a 12th (or whatever) level PC, then you get a reward for playing the game. But it seems obvious to me that the "reward" for playing 4e D&D isn't that your PC gets more mechanically complex. The main rewards are (i) a wargaming-type enjoyment of tactical combat, and (ii) a RPG-type enjoyment of a rich shared fiction that you are helping to establish.

4e offers both (i) and (ii) as much at 1st level play as at 30th, so you don't need to level up your PCs in order to enjoy those "rewards". It's the progression through the "tiers of play", the basic story of D&D - from confronting goblins to confronting Orcus - that the XP system achieves.

I think this reconceptualisation of the function of the XP mechanic is an innovative bit of game design. I think retaining the language of "reward" was a mistake, though. That word doesn't help players new to D&D understand what's going on, and it confuses players already familiar with D&D, by misleading them into thinking that the XP system is meant to work more-or-less as it did in Gygax's D&D, when it doesn't.

 

[pemerton]

The absurdity of this is becoming downright silly. First freedom of choice is 'railroading', and then active equal partners in forming the game are 'passive', and I'm forgetting a few other absurd things too I'm sure. Oh, the whole treating the game world as if it constitutes a form of reality, and thinking that how the game narrative is formed and by whom doesn't matter.

I feel like you're painting yourself further and further into some completely absurd corner in any attempt to create some kind of definition of things to serve some point which everyone forgot or lost interest in 500 posts ago.

There was a point at which I felt like there were clarifications that were happening in terms of how I describe the structure and activity in games, and what some of it means. Also what different ways you could come at the same things. That was interesting, but this is just over the Moon, its absurd.

Yes, I feel much the same way.

I think this is another example of being stuck in one way of thinking.

<snip>

In my games the players DO think of everything. Because THEY ARE IN CHARGE of how they want to engage, they do think in terms of what should happen next. They know that if they evince a desire for allies, then a story about allies, the dangers, costs, and rewards of alliance, etc. would doubtless present itself

<snip>

thus the players minds are ranging over the story their characters are in and they're thinking about things like "Wait, my character always likes to hedge his bets, I'm sure he'd keep a sharp eye out for signs of anyone he could convince, or even pay, to come along and lend a hand..." This might translate into telling the GM "hey, Ted, we're traveling quite a ways to this cave, right? I'm going to use my Dungeoneering skill to look for signs of any folks I can talk to, or things I can use against the giants."

There are a lot of affinities here with what I posted in reply to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] before reading your posts.

When the PCs in my main 4e game went off to hunt the purple worm that had swallowed the duergar Frameth who was carrying a box holding the fifth segment of the Rod of Seven Parts, they arranged to acquire some limestone before setting out, their theory being that that would help negate the stomach acid inside the worm. (I just had a look at my notes of this - it dropped the damage from 30/round to 20/round.) I don't need to "arrange", as GM, for the PCs to encounter a wise old alchemist who suggests "Why don't you take some of my limestone with you?" I mean, it would never have occurred to me in any event! (I'm a humanities scholar, not a cook or a chemist.) I can't remember what sort of check we made - maybe Dungeoneering to find some in a hurry from one of the duergar workroom? - but it was resolved quickly and then we got back to the main action.

If the players want allies, or limestone, or whatever, they'll declare those actions and we'll resolve them. If not, then not. No GM hand-holding or intersection-narration required!

 

[pemerton]

Yep. Those are indeed absurd. It's probably a good thing for me that those are misrepresentations of what I have said. Not once did I ever claim freedom of choice was railroading. As for "active equal partners", that wasn't any part of the Raven Queen tidbit [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] posted. He said he narrated everything and that there was no scene. Had they interacted with her, there would have been a scene. That's freaking passive as heck. The Raven Queen interrupts your teleport to give you items you need and they don't even so much as say thank you. They don't ask if she needs or wants the items back when they are done. They don't engage in any number of interactions with her. They just passively received the items and left.

Well, to follow on from [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s diagnosis of reversals - you are describing players who accept the GM's embellishment of their successful action, but then get back to the action they were interested in as passive.

So it counts as active play to try to build up a sidepoint that everyone knows is just colour; but passive play to leave it there as colour and actually get on with playing the game? The way you present it, it's as if there was no scene because they ignored the Raven Queen. Whereas the whole point of play at that moment that there was a scene - the PCs' confrontation with Orcus - that everyone at the table wanted to get on with!

(And why is the GM's narration of the Raven Queen gifting them goodies just colour? Because the real thing that is happening is that the PCs' stats are changing, to bring them closer in line with what is appropriate for their level. Describing this as a gift of items from the Raven Queen is simply establishing an ingame reason. But it's not where the action is)

(Second parentheses - why would people given a gift ask whether they have to return the gift?)

 

[pemerton]

From the point of view of my PC - through whose eyes I-as-player am viewing the game world - that's exactly right.

When I play a RPG I'm not interested in whether my PC is having a good time. (In fact, often s/he is not.) I'm interested in whether I'm having a good time. Hence why I am talking about real things - ways in which games are played - rather than pretend things (eg imaginary events that occur to imaginary people).

If it's a binary succeed-fail situation (e.g. either you find a secret door or you don't) then failure directly equals nothing-interesting. If it's a sliding-scale situation where both success and failure can come in degrees then it's sometimes possible to generate interest from failure.

It's as if no one ever invented the concept of "fail forward", even though - as a piece of RPGing technology - it's about 20 years old now (I'm thinking back to Maelstrom Storytelling, c 1997).

my repeated concern - usually expressed in silly terms but with a very serious underlying point - is that players with the power to contribute to the fiction will always ALWAYS sooner or later attempt to bend that contribution to their own unfair or unbalanced advantage, be it over other players/PCs or over the game itself; and the DM in these types of games has no means to stop it. Human beings are by nature competitive - that's why part of the DM's role is and always has been that of referee.

Yet my experience is that this isn't so. Especially not for money and items, which are the main things you mention. You are taking one aspect of one sort of D&D play, and projecting it onto all RPGing, on the basis of no experience of the actual RPGs or play techniques in question.

 

[darkbard]

No, my repeated concern - usually expressed in silly terms but with a very serious underlying point - is that players with the power to contribute to the fiction will always ALWAYS sooner or later attempt to bend that contribution to their own unfair or unbalanced advantage, be it over other players/PCs or over the game itself; and the DM in these types of games has no means to stop it. Human beings are by nature competitive - that's why part of the DM's role is and always has been that of referee.

I find it particularly ironic that you make statements like this and also, with some frequency, level charges against Story Now, player-facing gamers as being mistrustful of the GM.

 

[pemerton]

There is, pretty much by definition, no market for No Myth adventures

This is an interesting point.

Marvel Heroic ships (or shipped) with AP-style "events". In my view there is a clear incoherence between- on the one hand - the sort of play the mechanics support, and the advice given to GMs and players, and - on the other hand - this karaoke-style adventure format. I've used one or two scenes from the Civil War event in my MHRP game, because they seemed fun and I had an idea of what I might do with them, but I don't see how one could realistically play through the events as published.

HeroWars (in the original 2001(?) edition) came in two rulebooks - general rulebook, and "narrator's guide". The latter included four scenarios. I've run one of them - "Demon of the Red Grove" - albeit rather loosely adapted to 4e. They all involve more than one scene as published, but are rather modest vignettes (the shortest is 8 pages (in a normal sized book, not a typical RPG-sized book) and the longest 18, with quite a bit of that being creature stats, especially in the long one).

The Burning Wheel Adventure Guide includes some scenarios. One (which is also available as a free download) is framed as a single scene. The others are pretty tightly contained, similar to the HeroWars ones.

At least in my experience GMing a "story now"-type game, vignettes or tight scenarios are useful. In my 4e game I got some use out of Thunderspire Labyrinth, ignoring the overarching setting of the module and adapting its variouis fragments to my purposes. I got good use out the B/X module Night's Dark Terror also, but it is already vignette-ish in its presentation, and to the extent that it isn't I mostly ignored it's overarching plotline also.

My view is that, to be useful for this, the opposition should have clear motivations (other than just "we're here to be killed by the PCs), and it needn't be very subtle in its presentation - after all, the subtlety approrpriate to my campaign can be worked out in play! H2 and B10 both involve raiders/slavers - an easy idea to work with. H2 also has gnoll cultists - another fairly easy idea to work with.

This is also why I've been able to use the Keep part of B2 on two separate occasions. It has the requisite vignette-ish quality, and the evil cultist priest is an easy idea to pick up on.

However, while I think this sort of thing could be useful, I'm not sure there's a big market for it. It's pretty much the opposite of the AP in published adventure design, but that seems to be all the rage these days.

 

[Maxperson]

But why do those options matter? In the example I gave, the players had an option - do they want to go confront the giants? Or do something else. They chose the former. So why, now, is the GM putting forward a different option that doesn't actually help deliver upon the option they already chose? What's the point?

And this answer just reinforces my point that the intersection is an impediment to player agency and instead makes GM-authored content the focus of play. The players were already enjoying the game. And they wanted to go and confront some giants. So why not do that?

Why do you act like the players only have one goal? I have yet to meet a player who did not enjoy exploring the game world and finding new things. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

As far as the idea that they have to do this stuff so they can power up, I will take my email of a loot drop from the Raven Queen over that any time. If the PCs need powering up, then change the numbers on the PC sheets and get on with the game! (Or adjust the framing so that the current numbers on the sheets are good enough.)

I guess that works for some people. Most of the ones I've games with, at least after exiting high school, don't want things just handed to them like that. I'm not trying to disparage your players. I just honestly cannot remember encountering a player who wanted stuff handed to him like that after leaving high school.

I mean, the implication of what you say is that we can never cut to the action, because maybe there is something else the players would have wanted to do if only the GM had drawn it to their attention by narrating 30 extra minutes of travel through the Underdark. If the players may have wanted allies, but didn't think about it, well that's sometime how it happens. They can try and recruit some allies from among the giants. (That doesn't seem that hard. The PCs in my Cortex+ game recruited allies among the giants they met. The PCs in my main 4e game recruited allies among the duergar they met.)

More generally, this is another example of confusion between authorship and reality. In real life, the fact that two events are separated by miles of travel makes the prospects of something significant happening in between them more likely. But when writing, there is no reason why the event I write about today can't be followed straight away by writing about an event that (in the fiction) happens in ten years time. If the players indicate that the next event they are interested is their arrival at the giant's cave, then let's cut to that event (or frame a check, or skill challenge, or whatever, to see what happens on the way there).

RPGs have always recognised this in some fashion or other - eg no one adjudicates every moment of a PC's life as if it was a round of combat, requiring an initiative check, action declarations, etc. By applying it in this context the players aren't deprived of any chance to play the game. It's just that more of the time spent playing will speak to stuff that concerns dramatic need, thematic issues, etc. Which is the point of "story now" RPGing.

This is treading very close to being a False Dichotomy. There are whole ranges of things that can be done in-between adjudicating every moment of a PCs' life as a round of combat and cutting immediately to the action. Many people enjoy a bit more realism in their games than just jumping from one significant thing to the next, and it feeds their desire to explore and see new things that I mentioned.

Another thing to consider is that the little things highlight the important ones. If everything you get is fabulous, then really nothing you receive is fabulous. Fabulous has become the new average and a new fabulous thing doesn't mean a lot. However, if you have a bunch of little things and get something fabulous, it really IS fabulous. It shines next to the little things that put it in perspective.

 

[Tony Vargas]

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas], I think your post was mostly tongue-in-cheek,

Yep, can't help answering rhetorical questions, sometimes...

Well, the systems that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] is talking about include Burning Wheel, Cortex+ Heroic, HeroWars/Quest, a certain approach to 4e, etc.
Which of those is supposed to imply a silly world?

Presumably all of them, since they're designed to be games and/or model a story rather than to act as laws of physics for an implied world.

In default 4e, showing up doesn't as such earn XP. Playing the game (by engaging encounters, realising quests, and - per the rule in DMG2 - meaningfully engaging the non-encounter fiction) accures XP

Sure, that's what I meant by showing up - playing the game is not something you fail at unless you set at to do so. Success/failure is within the game, and exp acrues, regardless.

I think one of the most remarkable things about 4e is how, on the surface, it retains so many D&D mecahnical tropes (hp, XP, attack rolls, magic items, and the like) but uses them to build a game which is a genuine alternative to Gygax-style wargaming.

Well, can be used that way - I've run temple of the frog in Essentials and run 4e in ways that directly evoked old school...

I think 4e can do Arthurian legend and the Iliad.

Its a reasonably flexible, if not particularly powerful system, thanks to Skill Challenges, and it does go right ahead and model Legendary Monarchs and Demi-gods and the like, so you're not going through convolution like Giants in the Earth or the current 5e threads about Achilles & Lancelot did.

Obviously wizards, invokers and the like have to go.

Wizards have always been genre-problematic, even the 4e version was still a bit Vancian, but why Invokers? It's be a way to work the Gods into it...

And there is probably a need for a divine intervention mechanic - maybe based on Religion checks (with +2 bonus for a familial connection to the god, or if the person you are opposing has personal or familial enmity from your god).

Or that. Also, in the illiad, the Gods just came right down and did stuff (and got stabbed for it).

 

[Tony Vargas]

(Second parentheses - why would people given a gift ask whether they have to return the gift?)

The Raven Queen is a grim goddess of death & fate, who became a goddess by betraying & destroying her predecessor. While there's nothing to be gained in distrust, exactly, being cautious of any strings attached to such a gift might be prudent...
...it might or might not be in character ...
...which is another thing: in a game modeling a story a player might have his character do something shout-at-the-screen 'stupid' because its in-character, will move the story, and has a chance if setting the character up for something awesome, later.
In old-school, that's suicide, and part of the appeal has always been playing through those shout-at-the-screen moments and doin' it right...
...frankly, I'm surprised there aren't more play-the-villain RPGs.

 

[Lanefan]

Side question:

[MENTION=996]In default 4e, showing up doesn't as such earn XP. Playing the game (by engaging encounters, realising quests, and - per the rule in DMG2 - meaningfully engaging the non-encounter fiction) accures XP at a rate of (roughly) 4 level-equivalent monster's worth per hour. Or approximately 3-4 sessions per level.

I never bought or read 4e's DMG2 - one was quite enough, thank you! - but are you saying that in DMG2-version 4e a PC gets x.p. as a direct reward simply based on the amount of real-time spent playing it at the table, regardless of what it does in the fiction?

If yes, as a design philosophy that probably couldn't be further from how I view and award x.p.