A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[Ovinomancer]

This is exactly right.

Here is the thing. Anyone that has GMed DitV and AW can see the obvious through-line between the two. In so many ways you could crib the GMing advice from one directly to the other and you would have virtually the same play experience as you are currently (its just organized a bit differently).

Follow the players lead = Ask provocative questions and use the answers

Play/Actively reveal the Towns = Barf forth apocalyptica and make everyone human

Do not have a solution in mind/there is no story/no plot points = Play to find out what happens

Escalation = Moves snowball

Towns/Sin = Threats



This is also correct. Discern Realities has an exact example of secret doors.

But here is the thing on that. You have to reflect back upon the game's Agenda and the GMing Principles. What applies here is:

* Play to find out what happens

* Draw maps, leave blanks

* Ask questions and use the answers

* Begin and end with the fiction

So here is the likely course of events with a Dungeon World GM and a burned out tavern where the players hoping to find survivors or signs of what happened here.

1) GM may have a rough idea of maybe 2-3 things that may have happened here but they aren't sure (because they're playing to find out).

2) The player says something like "Inns have cellars for dry goods, spirits and the like. Maybe someone hid in there and locked it when whatever went down. I move all of the debris from behind the bar and look for some kind of pull or something on the seared floorboards."

3) This is basically an "ask questions and use the answers" moment (but sort of inverted).

4) The GM will not have anything nearing a blueprint (if they have anything at all and aren't just ad-libbing it) of the inn; "leave blanks."

5) "Begin and end with the fiction" comes up here as the GM is using that input from the player and thinking yeah, the "begin with the fiction" proposition of a spirit/dry goods basement behind the bar makes sense in multiple ways.

6) Is something at stake? Yeah. Survivors. The possible answer to whatever happened here (intel). Possible assets (maybe a use of Adventuring Gear/Rations/Poutlice or a Cohort in this group of people since they owe the PCs their lives). So we don't "say yes" we "roll the dice."

7) What are we rolling the dice for? To find out if there is this secret door/tavern cellar and what is in there.

So, by a collection of proxies, a player is basically being afforded the opportunity to stipulate fiction with a successful Discern Realities move.

That's a great example of what I was getting at with how the general PbtA frameworks revolve around player intents. And, now that I've written it, I look at the sentence and wonder what obscure demon inspired me to write that nearly unintelligible sentence.

More clearly, PbtA games' core conceit (at least to me) involve the intent of the players to do things. You either say yes, or, if it feeds into the drama engine, you ask for a check. But, if that check is successful, your job as GM isn't to provide the players with what you think, but instead with what they asked for -- ie, honor the intent of the action declaration. On a fail, pervert/thwart/endanger the intent of the action declaration. Or pay off a previous danger. But, at all times, as GM, you really have to have the player's intent foremost in your mind when you narrate the outcome of an action declaration, pass or fail. Not doing this really damages the core conceit of the game.

 

[Manbearcat]

That's a great example of what I was getting at with how the general PbtA frameworks revolve around player intents. And, now that I've written it, I look at the sentence and wonder what obscure demon inspired me to write that nearly unintelligible sentence.

More clearly, PbtA games' core conceit (at least to me) involve the intent of the players to do things. You either say yes, or, if it feeds into the drama engine, you ask for a check. But, if that check is successful, your job as GM isn't to provide the players with what you think, but instead with what they asked for -- ie, honor the intent of the action declaration. On a fail, pervert/thwart/endanger the intent of the action declaration. Or pay off a previous danger. But, at all times, as GM, you really have to have the player's intent foremost in your mind when you narrate the outcome of an action declaration, pass or fail. Not doing this really damages the core conceit of the game.

That is exactly right.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I just want to comment on this right quick.

I agree that RPGs have about "the average level of dysfunction among hobbies." I also agree with the wargaming and train culture (and the whys that you explained). I've known people in those communities as well.

I've known tons of people in various drug cultures, rave communities, writing workshops, archery, hunting, outdoorsmanship.

I've been deeply involved in various athletic communities from baseball (at all levels), to football, to basketball, to hockey, to golf, to tennis. I've been deeply involved in the Brazilian Jiu jitsu community when it was first becoming popularized in the States (from 95 to 2001). Believe it or not, the Jiu jitsu community is easily the most humble, kind, and least prone toward negative male traits of all of the communities I've ever encountered (despite the fact that it hooks directly into classical evolutionary male dominance hierarchy mechanics).

Our culture is no better or worse than any of these others, even though it gets a bad reputation for dysfunction (and in fact, there is a decent amount of "closet overlap" between our community and these other communities).

One thing that really frustrates me is our (humans) bias toward treating a dataset that features a few bad actors amongst a whole host of benign (or decent...or rigorously decent) actors and then representing the entirety of that dataset (therefore all members of the community by proxy) as undesirable thing x. That is, definitionally, bigotry. But that mental shorthand had its use for hundreds of thousands of years when humans needed decisive models (even if mostly wrong) to answer acute selection pressures inherent to being a social animal that competes for resources (which probably ramped up significantly about 12,000 years ago when we stopped our wandering hunter/gatherer ways and began developing fixed settlements and developing methods to work, and compete for, fertile land).

While it will take a long, long, long time to undo that programming, even though it frustrates me, I wish we were (a) much more understanding of people who deploy it still (because of that profoundly deep heritage) while (b) we work (fairly and deliberately) to slowly undo its foothold as a reflexive mental model.

Heh. I read an interesting article recently that touches on why martial arts communities tend to be very polite and well mannered. It comes from a strong understanding of exactly what kind of damage angry people can do to each other, which leads to better non-physical conflict resolution skills.

 

[pemerton]

by a collection of proxies, a player is basically being afforded the opportunity to stipulate fiction with a successful Discern Realities move.

My feeling is the extent to which this would play similarly to (say) BW, or not - eg in terms of the degree of GM mediation, back-and-forth negotiation, etc - would depend heavily on table practices as much as abstract principles of play.

 

[Manbearcat]

My feeling is the extent to which this would play similarly to (say) BW, or not - eg in terms of the degree of GM mediation, back-and-forth negotiation, etc - would depend heavily on table practices as much as abstract principles of play.

I guess I just have two thoughts here.

1) I just want to be clear that "stipulation by-proxy of confluence of integrated rules and agenda/principles" is different than outright "player fiat." For instance, the procedural handling of Discern Realities as I've laid it out above is different (in nuance of formalities and feel) than, say, the Fighter's endgame move of Through Death's Eyes (name someone who will live and someone who will die) or the Dashing Hero's Plan of Action (stipulate swashbuckler-ey elements of a scene).

2) I agree, insofar as all rulesets for all games rely upon social observance as much as they due integrated principles and rules. If someone playing basketball decides they're going to try to gain a competitive advantage by fouling opposing players and then pathologically disputing their fouls, these unorthodox "table practices" become much more relevant than the coherency of the intent, design, and application of the contact rules!

 

[Manbearcat]

Heh. I read an interesting article recently that touches on why martial arts communities tend to be very polite and well mannered. It comes from a strong understanding of exactly what kind of damage angry people can do to each other, which leads to better non-physical conflict resolution skills.

That's definitely a part of it.

I think another part is that males get to exorcise those primitive "establish dominance hierarchy through physical prowess" demons in an environment of low stakes...but still stakes. People get hurt all of the time rolling with other people on the mat (often unintentionally) so there is always the specter of injury looming.

Getting that out of the system on a regular basis has a lot of positive knock-on effects.

Also (as I'm sure you know and everyone here knows), males are typically quite vulnerable, sensitive, fearful, confused, but wild and woolly creatures at ages 8 through early 20s when those dominance hierarchies are ever-present and in full-bore stratification mode. It becomes magnified when the nurture element of their lives is a cluster-eff. Reliable love through brotherhood, structure, and practicing discipline does a huge amount of work toward taming that scary brew of attributes.

I've known a large number of guys who were "saved" (from themselves and their situation) by martial arts (and, in that saving, others were saved from "paying their dysfunction forward").

Mike Tyson is the perfect example of this. His life until Cus D'Amato was a terribly sad thing, then it was a starkly the opposite direction, then, when Cus died, he completely and predictably went off the rails.

 

[pemerton]

So it's possible that shift away from "Saying No" transpired when some people were not satisfied with playing all RPGs like puzzle-themed boardgames and instead wanted their RPGs centered around resolving points of player-pushed narrative tension, stakes, and conflict.

Which, taken to it's conclusion, means the players are each time setting both the problem (mystery) and its solution; and then hoping the dice co-operate and don't drag in too many complications. Isn't that like reading the end of a murder novel to find out whodunnit and then reading through the rest to see how things got there?

Lanefan, it seems to me strange to reply to a post about RPGing as something other than puzzle-solving to say but then the puzzles won't work.

More generally, instead of conjecturing about how a play style you're evidently not familiar with might work, why not engage with examples that are being posted by those who do have that familiarity. For instance, my most recent session of Traveller had mysteries, such as where the "pathfinders" in Suliman are from, and what they are planning towards Ashar.

 

[pemerton]

I guess I just have two thoughts here.

1) I just want to be clear that "stipulation by-proxy of confluence of integrated rules and agenda/principles" is different than outright "player fiat." For instance, the procedural handling of Discern Realities as I've laid it out above is different (in nuance of formalities and feel) than, say, the Fighter's endgame move of Through Death's Eyes (name someone who will live and someone who will die) or the Dashing Hero's Plan of Action (stipulate swashbuckler-ey elements of a scene).

2) I agree, insofar as all rulesets for all games rely upon social observance as much as they due integrated principles and rules. If someone playing basketball decides they're going to try to gain a competitive advantage by fouling opposing players and then pathologically disputing their fouls, these unorthodox "table practices" become much more relevant than the coherency of the intent, design, and application of the contact rules!

I think your (1) is more what I had in mind than your (2).

I'll give another illustration: in my Cortex+ Fantasy game, at one point the PCs found themselves deep in a dungeon, having been teleported there by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, that had been a spedning of 2d12 from the Doom Pool to end the scene). I had started the next scene with everyone subject to a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication. And I described a great hall with appropriate Scene Distinctions, including something like Runic Inscriptions.

One of the players decided that his PC would read the runes to see if they revealed where in the dungeon the PCs had ended up; mechanically, he made a check against the Doom Pool to step back his Lost in the Dungeon complication (ie it was a type of recovery action). Because that check succeeded handily, it was established in the fiction that the runes did indeed reveal information about the dungeon and the PCs' location.

I would see that sort of thing as a strong case of player authority to introduce new backstory as (part of) the outcome of action resolution. It could happen in 4e D&D too, but (I think) would require more player-and-GM back-and-forth. First, 4e doesn't have a formal notion of a Scene Distinction, and so it can require table negotiation to work out what is mutually interesting and what should just be left as mere colour (eg I've had players in 4e declare things like "We search the cupboards" and I tell them there's nothing interesting, or maybe provide a bit of colour, and then move on because no one really cares abouit the cupboards, but they're there in the narration as part of the framing and there is no system-level way of flagging them as mere colour). Second, 4e doesn't have a formal notion of a plot-level complication (like Lost in the Dungeon) nor the formal notion of a recovery action, and so a player has to spin a lot more from whole cloth in explaining that his/her PC wants to read the runes so as to learn where the PCs are (eg in a skill chalenge, is this a primary or secondary check?).

I've not played Fate, but I'm guessing that for this particular example it would be more like Cortex+ (eg incorproating the Runic Inscription aspect into a check to establish an I Know Where We Are In The Dungeon aspect).

In BW it would be different again - BW shares (1) and (2) in common with 4e, but is more overt about mechanics for player-driven backstory introduction. So it might be a Symbols check FoRKing in Rune-wise to establish some knowledge (mostly colour) but also to get an advantage die (a mechanical boost) for downstream dungeoneering checks.

On these boards, [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is the poster who has pushed me the most to recognise that, while some general comments can be made when comparing the sort of thing I enjoy to stuff that I would see as pretty railroady-y, once we get to the detailed exposition of techniques and principles it's worth important to appreciate system differences.

 

[pemerton]

Most, even the vast majority of them. Exceptions don't disprove the rule. Even with Traveller, it sounds like that time frame is built into the system, but as we did not specify the system, it wasn't specifically Traveller. Absent a specific system, you go with the common usage, which is what the majority of systems use.

Which systems are you referring to. What "majority of systems"? What does "common usage" mean here other than what Maxperson assumes?

I'm familiar with a fair number of systems. None of them specifies what is meant, in terms of time spent, by "We are checking out the teahouse to see if there are sect members there." Traveller does suggest a week as the default time unit for doing this sort of stuff on-world. But even AD&D, which has clear time-unit assumptions for combat (1 minute rounds), dungeon exploration (10 minute turns) and outdoor exploration (24 hour days), does not speciy a default time unit for urban exploration. (The closest thing to that is found in Appendix C of the DMG, which says that the GM should "[c]heck for encounters every three turns as normally, or otherwise as desired.")

If I was GMing such a system (which in my experience would be one of the majority) and the time spent actually mattered, then I would ask the players how long they are intending to spend doing this thing.

EDIT: Taken literally, the AD&D City/Town Encounter Matrix suggests that someone wandering around the more desolate areas of a town at night will encounter some undead, demonic or similar sort of entity once every 4 hours or so (12% chance of such an encounter on the "Nighttime" column).

If that is the "reality" of a AD&D urban areas, it seems that it wouldn't be too out of character to fairly frequently encounter the sorts of cult and sect members who revere and summon such creatures!

 

[Maxperson]

Which systems are you referring to. What "majority of systems"? What does "common usage" mean here other than what Maxperson assumes?

I'm familiar with a fair number of systems. None of them specifies what is meant, in terms of time spent, by "We are checking out the teahouse to see if there are sect members there." Traveller does suggest a week as the default time unit for doing this sort of stuff on-world. But even AD&D, which has clear time-unit assumptions for combat (1 minute rounds), dungeon exploration (10 minute turns) and outdoor exploration (24 hour days), does not speciy a default time unit for urban exploration. (The closest thing to that is found in Appendix C of the DMG, which says that the GM should "[c]heck for encounters every three turns as normally, or otherwise as desired.")

EDIT: Taken literally, the AD&D City/Town Encounter Matrix suggests that someone wandering around the more desolate areas of a town at night will encounter some undead, demonic or similar sort of entity once every 4 hours or so (12% chance of such an encounter on the "Nighttime" column).

If that is the "reality" of a AD&D urban areas, it seems that it wouldn't be too out of character to fairly frequently encounter the sorts of cult and sect members who revere and summon such creatures!

Yep. That's exactly right. They mostly don't have built in time frames, which means that you go with how things are commonly done. When I'm at my place with a group of friends and one says, "Hey, I'm going to go to 7-11 and see if there is a Hershey Bar there," it's commonly understood that he doesn't mean that he's going to go down every day for two months to see if there's a candy bar there, we also understand that he isn't saying that he's going to bribe the guy behind the counter to call him when a Hershey Bar shows up.

Absent a built in time frame like Traveller has, you have to specify unusual time frames and actions or else you are not doing them. If the PCs say they are going to the Tea House to see if a cult member is there, that could mean 10 minutes, an hour, or even a few hours. If it's any longer than that then it's an unusual amount of time to see if someone or something is present. I know I wouldn't assume that the DM would just know that I meant I was going to be there all day, because that's not what is commonly understood by, "I'm going to go see if a cult member is at the tea house."

This scenario as presented in this thread did not involve bribery or going back day after day for months in order to maximize chances of encountering a cult member. The goal posts were therefore set at a short visit. You moved them with your scenario alterations.

If I was GMing such a system (which in my experience would be one of the majority) and the time spent actually mattered, then I would ask the players how long they are intending to spend doing this thing.

I would, too. That wasn't a part of the scenario here, though.