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

[Maxperson]

My character knows trolls' weakness is fire. His uncle told him. Prove me wrong.

His uncle died 6 years before he was born.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The idea that having PCs be nobles will break the game in some way, and thus needs super-special GM policing, isn't something that I've seen in my play experience.

Again, this is simply a relic. In OD&D, or B/X, you would all start with a toss of 3d6x10 gold pieces and equip yourselves as best you could, then plunge into the dungeon in the hope of gathering loot to spend on more equipment, etc. This was the very ur-game of D&D, the origin and font of all its traditions and concepts. Even magic items and such were originally just sort of lucky finds or rewards for cleverness that let you loot better, or increase survival.

In that paradigm, to admit of a character which has an entourage, or even a suite of armor, is grossly unfair! The game is a contest in which the players compete (even though the PCs cooperate, this is a subtle point). A suite of chain armor was 90gp, a BIG advantage! You don't just give that away, its to be earned.

This is literally the schema which is still being played out in all these protestations of strictures, even though the form of the game is almost utterly different and they make little sense today.

Consider, this kind of thinking is almost meaningless in 4e. The PCs totally cooperate as a team, with no provision for any other possibility. It doesn't matter where some extra equipment comes from, or who's background produces the companion character. At worst one might consider how to insure that the 'noble' and the other character backgrounds lead to reasonably equitable 'screen time'.

 

[pemerton]

Why is Ron Edwards the expert on setting focused games here?

I don't care whether you think he's an expert or an amateur. The point is that he shows how a game can proceed with metagaming about "the party", "team cooperation" etc - which helps us identify the presence of such metagaming advice in the RQ rules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Plenty of obstacles do kill. Pits & chasms are an obvious example. PCs can get themselves
killed trying to leap the chasm, or can try climbing down it - hopefully with rope - or go look for another path. Slow but deadly monsters are very similar in game effect.

But a chasm is passive, so you can choose to engage it or not, and it can be defeated with ropes, spikes, etc. Sure, it is dangerous, but it isn't by any means a 'gotcha!'. Pits likewise, unless they're hidden somehow. In that case my comments on randomly placed traps apply. If a covered pit appears in a context where it makes sense and is either expected, expectable, or simply an element like 'damaging terrain', then its fine.

 

[dragoner]

I just didn't understand the point you were trying to make. Could you rephrase it?

The point is that you don't understand what metagaming is. Geezer's statement about hit points is that there are a thousand mechanics that you interact with that are metagame, even dice rolls could be called "meta". In fact the whole game starts metagame and then proceeds IC, for trad games at least, maybe you only play modern narrative storygames only? That's cool if you do, and then I do understand why you would not get old geezer's point. I don't have a lot of experience in that arena myself with those sorts of pure narrative games.

 

[pemerton]

It strikes me that this entire concept, and all the baggage attendant onto it, which includes a lot of the anti-meta-gaming creed, as well as the whole "you're just a small guy without any special place in the world" is all basically just a shadow of Gygax (or again maybe I should be more fair to call it a shadow of Dave Arneson).

<snip>

The irony is that the lesson "never give the players anything for free" was fully absorbed, but the actual context of skilled play dungeoneering was lost! There is no reason, from a standpoint of how a game should or must work for these things to exist anymore, unless you really do play very much like Dave did

<snip>

It isn't to put down any style of play, it just REALLY does seem very unexamined, like this is maybe how I would have thought if this was 1974 and D&D was just starting.

Again, this is simply a relic. In OD&D, or B/X, you would all start with a toss of 3d6x10 gold pieces and equip yourselves as best you could, then plunge into the dungeon in the hope of gathering loot to spend on more equipment, etc. This was the very ur-game of D&D, the origin and font of all its traditions and concepts. Even magic items and such were originally just sort of lucky finds or rewards for cleverness that let you loot better, or increase survival.

In that paradigm, to admit of a character which has an entourage, or even a suite of armor, is grossly unfair! The game is a contest in which the players compete (even though the PCs cooperate, this is a subtle point). A suite of chain armor was 90gp, a BIG advantage! You don't just give that away, its to be earned.

This is literally the schema which is still being played out in all these protestations of strictures, even though the form of the game is almost utterly different and they make little sense today.

These are really strong posts. They capture what I was trying to get at upthread with some remarks about "cargo cult" and similar. That is to say, particular design/play features that can work well as elements in a "skilled play" game simply don't make any sense in other RPGing contexts. Hence treating those particular design/play features as if they're part of what it means to roleplay makes no sense.

And the point extends beyond nobility and loot. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] asks whether the noble PC's entourage would come "out into the field". But the very notion of "the field" itself rests on an assumption about play which simply doesn't generalise across all of RPGing. In the Burning Wheel game that I GM, for instance, there is no "field".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ok so we have some pretty straightforward bad Npc that threaten lives of innocent Npc: linear railroad with evident psicological use of Force (because children + heroes pc, for Goodness sake).
And the Drama is, what? A metagamey resource management?

Eh, it is a perfectly solid 'quest'. This would be a fine and perfectly acceptable 4e kind of scenario, played in the sort of way that we play. I mean, there are stakes, the lives of children, which the players have themselves expressed an interest in. They set out in pursuit. The initial framing, with the orcs taking some children COULD be a consequence of a failed SC, or even just simply the framing of a scene where the players get a choice. Assuming they were already invested in the well-being of this town that option hangs together pretty well too.

Obviously if the players were pretty much railroaded into chasing the orcs, then it would be different, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Possibly you could feel that the setup with the town is kind of that sort of thing, but I think this stuff is really all in the presentation. Its THEIR TOWN, then orcs raided it is just a fact. This would simply be a 'hard move' in DW for instance.

 

[pemerton]

Aragorn's status as the rightful king is fundamental to his character from the moment he enters the story.

And yet virtually nobody knows, so his title is empty.

Providence knows, and that's virtually everything in Tolkien's world.

I get the balance reasons for the trade-off style of PC building, but it doesn't sit well with me when designers use balance to justify things that don't make sense.

Assuming you use the standard D&D rules for starting money, aren't they exactly an example of this?

How so?

There's no reason in the fiction why a 20-something year old, inexperienced wizard could not have inherited a fortune of many thousands of gold pieces. But the standard D&D rules for starting money make this impossible, purely for balance reasons.

One fantasy RPG that makes it possible to be a wealthy yet novice wizard is Burning Wheel. Cortex+ Heroic and HeroQuest revised could also handle it pretty easily.

 

[pemerton]

The reason nobility is different is because of just how powerful it is.

<snip>

she was only able to get several thousand gold and one powerful magic item

<snip>

If a player wants that kind of power and resources, he's going to have to roll it. I'm not going to allow that to be picked.

To relate this to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s posts: a really strong set of assumptions underlies this post. Some of those are sociological/economic: that a noble family has readily available assets that it is able to repurpose at the behest of the character. As a matter of human history this isn't always true; in the context of a fantasy RPG it's even easier not to proceed on the basis of its truth.

But probably more importantly, it rests on assumptions about how resolution is handled - for instance, that there are "equipment lists" that generate fictional positioning that can make a big difference in action resolution, either directly because of the gear, or indirectly because the money on the list is - in mechanical terms - freely transferable to equipment.

Some RPGs work like this. Classic D&D, 3E and 5e are examples. So is Classic Traveller.

Some RPGs have elements of this, but don't implement the full model. Burning Wheel is like this (it has equipment lists, but they don't include money, which is an attribute - Resources - that has to be used in a successful check in order to buy stuff).

Some RPGs don't have this at all - Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic is an example of this. As I've already posted, being a noble would most naturally be expressed as a Distinction, and when used that will contribute d8 to the dice pool. One of the PCs in my Cortex+ Vikings game has the Noble Ancestry distinction. Another has the Distinction At Home Among the Peasantry, and that contributes d8 to dice pools too. HeroQuest revised would be broadly similar to this.

A literary analogue of the approach mentioned in the previous paragraph is Lord of the Rings. Aragorn's Noble Ancestry is an important element in his strivings and success, and we can imagine a mechanical implementation of that as a dice pool component. But Sam's Love of Animals and Plants is an important element in his strivings and success, and we can see that it plays a comparable role in driving the story.

Or to point to a different medium, Power Man and Iron Fist are equal partners in their adventures, and contribute equally, although one is very wealthy while the other is from a poor background.

In a LotR or superhero RPG conceived along these lines (as MHRP is), there is no greater advantage - from the point of view of successful action resolution - in being a wealthy noble than a loyal hobbit. Though those differences will colour action declarations and therefore, perhaps, consequences.

EDIT: It is also possible to have a RPG that has the trappings, but not the substance, of the D&D approach to equipment and money. Prince Valiant is an example of this. PCs have equipement and coins on their PC sheets, and the equipment matters in mechanical terms. But the game has no equipment price lists (we use the ones from Pendragon when it comes up), and equipment is gained and lost as "story consequences" (eg for winning or losing a joust) rather than horded and managed in the fashion that is characteristic of (say) AD&D or Classic Traveller.

 

[pemerton]

Eh, it is a perfectly solid 'quest'. This would be a fine and perfectly acceptable 4e kind of scenario, played in the sort of way that we play. I mean, there are stakes, the lives of children, which the players have themselves expressed an interest in. They set out in pursuit. The initial framing, with the orcs taking some children COULD be a consequence of a failed SC, or even just simply the framing of a scene where the players get a choice. Assuming they were already invested in the well-being of this town that option hangs together pretty well too.

Obviously if the players were pretty much railroaded into chasing the orcs, then it would be different, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Possibly you could feel that the setup with the town is kind of that sort of thing, but I think this stuff is really all in the presentation. Its THEIR TOWN, then orcs raided it is just a fact. This would simply be a 'hard move' in DW for instance.

The big issue for me, in the setup [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] describes, is how do we know how many children are eaten? In a skill challenge, this can be managed through failures - each failure is more children dead. But in other D&D versions, which have no rule for determining children eaten per orc-time-mile-unit, it becomes GM fiat. So the stakes and the action resolution become somewhat illusory.