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

[Numidius]

This sort of circular reasoning actually puts a finger on what may also have been bugging me about the post in question. I don't mind D&D as a puzzle-game, and saying 'no' is often a valid necessity of play for such games. (I even plan on running an OSR-stylized dungeon crawl in the hopefully near future, likely using Black Hack.) But when other games are less designed as puzzle-games challenging player skill and more about character-propelled dramatic conflict, it seems peculiar to complain that "then the puzzles won't work" because puzzles aren't the point of play.

This sort of thinking is rarely, if ever, applied similarly to boardgames. When we play card or boardgames, we almost instinctively understand that each particular game has its own idiomatic purposes, challenges, and strategies featured through its game design that we must learn. The conflict that drives gameplay will be set on different hinges, and we naturally adjust to that fact with minimal fuss.

One would hardly go into playing Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Pandemic as if one were playing Monopoly. Nor would we play any of these games expecting the play assumptions of the other, though we may classify families of games with similar design principles. It would be an almost farcical argument to suggest that there must be something wrong with Pandemic because then Monopoly's bank would not work in the game or that the locations of Pandemic are not fixed in a linear fashion around the outer edge of the board. Or even to suggest (with equal parts absurdity and genuineness) that there is something intrinsically wrong with Pandemic because if its design principles or rules were applied to Monopoly, then the game play that results would fail spectacularly. The underlying presumption being, "What good is Pandemic if I can't use it to play Monopoly?"

And yet we strangely and frequently encounter this attitude in TTRPG circles wherein people judge the merits of games (or design principles) in a manner that presumes "OneTrueWayism." And thus they refuse (through almost intentional ignorance) to understand with any cordiality the idiomatic nature of TTRPG systems and their design principles because they see, analyze, and rationalize everything through Their One True Game. Is it any wonder why the conversation so readily breaks down when faced with this sort circular reasoning?

Well, I think of war boardgames, from Risk to the latest Rising Sun: the unwritten rule coming across the decades is Play to win or Do your Best trying.
If a player stops to do it by the end of the game, becomes a sort of kingmaker, or simply breaks the game.

One true way, or not, when one player breaks the game for the table, problems arise.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well, I think of war boardgames, from Risk to the latest Rising Sun: the unwritten rule coming across the decades is Play to win or Do your Best trying.
If a player stops to do it by the end of the game, becomes a sort of kingmaker, or simply breaks the game.

One true way, or not, when one player breaks the game for the table, problems arise.

Yes, it's obvious that bad play leads to bad outcomes. People behaving badly has absolutely nothing to do with game design or play goals, yet this obvious point keeps being brought up as if it's illuminating of something.

Apologies, you've been a very reasonable poster; I'm just reaching my exasperation limit with the "but bad play" statements, and this was a trigger. My problem.

 

[Numidius]

Yes, it's obvious that bad play leads to bad outcomes. People behaving badly has absolutely nothing to do with game design or play goals, yet this obvious point keeps being brought up as if it's illuminating of something.

Apologies, you've been a very reasonable poster; I'm just reaching my exasperation limit with the "but bad play" statements, and this was a trigger. My problem.

Sorry, my "bad"

To tell the truth some of my players want just plain old gm-driven rpg more often than not.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sorry, my "bad"

To tell the truth some of my players want just plain old gm-driven rpg more often than not.

That's awesome. Mine, too. Which is why I'm running 5e instead of Blades right now.

 

[Aldarc]

Board games and card games have very strong constraints on what you can or cannot do. This is far different than an RPG where it's open ended and usually you can try things that the game itself hasn't spelled out for you. The open nature of RPGs lends itself to people tinkering with rules, and applying various playstyles to any given game.

That is how they are commonly written but that is not necessarily universally true. That said, tinkering has been a common feature of board games. Let us return to an earlier example!

Parker Brothers once assumed that everyone was playing by the rules of Monopoly laid out in the game. What they discovered, only relatively recently, was how many people had their own house rules for the game. It turns out that Monopoly is a game with a longer legacy of people tinkering with rules than D&D! This was often a common source of conflict when one played the game with others, as people would bring their idiomatic assumptions about what the rules were and/or how the game played. It was only when they sought to accommodate the wider breadth of play that had emerged that Parker Brothers began also including common "house rules" as part of the game instructions.

Furthermore, nothing stops you from roleplaying your "character" in Monopoly, and one could most definitely operate a character in D&D as one would a tin figure from Monopoly. And I have weirdly enough seen both performed in their respective games. However, whether these games are designed for such experiences is another matter entirely.

And how many other card and board games came out of "people tinkering with the rules" from some other game? Probably far too many to count, with many more being lost in history to us. It ill behooves us to apply the all too common fallacious position of 'exceptionalism' to TTRPGs.

This seems to contradict itself. On one hand you are saying that a game is designed to be played this way, and not that(One True Way). And on the other hand you are saying we are viewing the game through the lense of One True Wayism for wanting it to work with more than one style of play.

Not quite. I am not so much talking about adhering to OneTrueWay to play a game, and more about adhering to OneTrueWay as the presumed norm for play in all games. I would say (more concretely) that one should not necessarily presume that one's experience (or preferred method) of playing 1e D&D, for example, should be the metric for analyzing the merits of other games, design principles, play priorities/values, campaigns, etc.

I would further say (to the point of it being a platitude) that TTRPGs are designed to facilitate particular styles of play. The design of games may provide a greater latitude or scope for other styles than intended, and these other styles may only be discovered later through the process of play. I naturally hope that you would agree with me that it hardly seems controversial to suggest that Gygax et al. had a certain style of gameplay in mind (or range thereof) when they designed Original Dungeons & Dragons. (And I think that D&D has been subsequently written, much like Monopoly, with a contentious desire to accommodate other styles.) And it hardly seems controversial to suggest that Vincent Baker had a different style of gameplay in mind from OD&D when he designed respectively Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World. And that differences in the respective designs of these systems would result, on the aggregate, in different norms of play. This is not to suggest that these games should be played according to OneTrueWay, but, rather, simply recognizing the fact that game rules are designed to cultivate particular sorts of gameplay experiences. Rules impact the norms of play.

This assumption even forms a prominent part of the OSR movement game philosophy: i.e., "The game rules of 'old school' D&D resulted in games with a different feel from the D&D of nowadays; ergo, how can we intentionally facilitate 'old school' styles of play while emulating or modernizing the rules?"

I probably could have said more if I had said less, as per [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s more succinct summation: "the system matters."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I
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.

I disagree, the majority of systems IME don't even really talk about time. Gygax obsessed about it, but even 2e drops a lot of the mechanical baggage that 1e has around time. For example, the 10 minute turn is mentioned, but no movement rates are associated with it in 2e. Traveler, IMHO, simply calls all time periods "1 week" in strategic play because Marc Miller wanted an 'Age of Sail' feel to his Fifth Imperium. As such jumps take a week, and he simply set all other activities to that time period. It makes play simple, Alan, Beth, and Carl take the Beowulf to Extremis while Eddie and Darla remain on Durant and spend the week looking for a patron. The GM can move both timelines forward, each group gets to make one check/decision/deal with one situation. Beowulf jumps back to Extremis, the rest of the party shops for the equipment needed to carry out the mission assigned by the patron, and play can continue both plausibly and in a dramatically satisfying way. At the time when Traveler was written this was basically a state-of-the-art playing methodology. It sure beat Gygax's 'track every minute for every character'.

However, most other games, at that time or others, really didn't talk about time. Lets think about early RPGs. Boot Hill, no real mention of time outside of 'bullet time', and even that is rather vague IIRC. Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World, no mention of time at all, except maybe a healing rate (I don't have my GW softcover in front of me, it probably says something about hit point recovery). Other games I recall don't have a lot more to say than this either. I don't recall anything time-specific in RQ for instance. CoC doesn't really talk about time, except as a cost for recovering SAN after an adventure. This is a pretty common pattern for games in this time period. They may note some few specific situations where a time cost exists, but there isn't really a coherent concept in these games of time as a structured resource or some explicit way to manage it or use it dramatically (drama is rarely mentioned in these early games). It is generally just assumed that time is the purview of the GM and may come into play in whatever way he sees fit. Very few of these game diverge much from D&D's central concept of a GM as 'story driver' and referee all rolled into one.

I don't know about you, but when I tell my wife I'm going to the cafe, it's understood that it's a single instance of my going to the cafe. It's also understood that if I was going to go there day after day for months, I would mention that.

Sure, in real life, but even D&D has structures in which this is NOT the assumption. To whit look at the 1e henchman acquisition rules, which allow the PCs to declare (and pay for) specific activities which are then assumed to play out over a period of time during which they are repeated (IE the PCs go to every bar and dive in the town and post messages or something similar for a week). I think it is reasonable to assume that players often given fairly general and open-ended instructions about what their characters do. Traveling for instance, you don't require the players to constantly reiterate exactly how far and fast they're moving and every detail of what they do, nor describe the amount of time they spend. Instead its something like 'we travel down the road' and the GM says something like 'you arrive at the next town'. Maybe something else happens, a decision is required, etc. but barring that, there's no need for constant input.

But again, this is just another Red Herring to distract from what I am saying, as well as a Strawman, since I did not say they would go to the tea house and leave the instant they show up. Going down to see if one is there involves more time than just popping your head in, but it does not involve multiple days or bribing the staff for months unless as you point out above, the PCs say so. In the example we are discussing, nobody said so, so it wasn't happening. Adding it later like you are doing is Moving the Goal Posts.

This is highly context-dependent but when the players state certain goals, say "we travel to the next town" then its pretty logical for the GM to assume that whatever time and resources are required to do that are expended and the goal is accomplished, or else the situation changes enough that the original instructions aren't relevant anymore or some new fictional element is present. I don't disagree that, in many cases, a GM is going to notify the players when he thinks a reasonable amount of time/resources is spent and that might justify a new fiction, but there are no hard and fast rules (in D&D anyway, some games like Traveler are bit more structured).

The only thing it suggests is that you knock off more time for events than I do. It says nothing about which game is more or less exciting, and quite frankly a game which has unreasonably high chances of hitting long odds all the time would be boring is hell for me and my group. If you and your group find it to be more exciting than my style of play, great for you, but it does not suggest that in general your game is more exciting.

People would be more inclined to take what you say seriously if you weren't always putting other styles down with little smug comments like that all the time. Those comments detract from what you say and make people resistant to it.

But how do you know what 'long odds' are? I still have seen nothing justifying any assertion that you can tell what is long odds most of the time. Even when you can it is a product of decisions you have made yourself, so its not like those odds are 'natural' or unforced in any way.

 

[Numidius]

That's awesome. Mine, too. Which is why I'm running 5e instead of Blades right now.

And that's why I run Railroad World by now

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, in real life, but even D&D has structures in which this is NOT the assumption. To whit look at the 1e henchman acquisition rules, which allow the PCs to declare (and pay for) specific activities which are then assumed to play out over a period of time during which they are repeated (IE the PCs go to every bar and dive in the town and post messages or something similar for a week). I think it is reasonable to assume that players often given fairly general and open-ended instructions about what their characters do. Traveling for instance, you don't require the players to constantly reiterate exactly how far and fast they're moving and every detail of what they do, nor describe the amount of time they spend. Instead its something like 'we travel down the road' and the GM says something like 'you arrive at the next town'. Maybe something else happens, a decision is required, etc. but barring that, there's no need for constant input.

Our term for this is "rubber time". It usually happens when a party's in town for some downtime, and instead of going day by day I'll go around the table and find out what the PCs are doing (if it's not already obvious e.g. training); and unless there's reason to worry about sequence or specifics it all just takes as long as it takes. I'll work out how long the longest action will take, and once all the downtime stuff is figured out and resolved I'll say something like "Right. You've spent a month in town and all of you are now finished whatever you were doing; it's now Coira 32 and in theory you're ready to go. [followed by, if not already obvious] What do you do now?"

But in the field time is very important even when the mission itself isn't time-sensitive: spell or effect durations, resource consumption, time taken to recover from injury - all of these and a bunch of other things need to be somewhat carefully tracked. Never mind tracking a split party so I know who is where when...

This is highly context-dependent but when the players state certain goals, say "we travel to the next town" then its pretty logical for the GM to assume that whatever time and resources are required to do that are expended and the goal is accomplished, or else the situation changes enough that the original instructions aren't relevant anymore or some new fictional element is present. I don't disagree that, in many cases, a GM is going to notify the players when he thinks a reasonable amount of time/resources is spent and that might justify a new fiction, but there are no hard and fast rules (in D&D anyway, some games like Traveler are bit more structured).

The only rule I can think of that would matter, assuming no interruptions or unusual events, is daily movement rates for whatever mode of transport is being used; as that'll dictate a minimum length of time the trip will take. You're not, for example, going to walk from Vancouver to Calgary in a day (it's about 600 miles). But a quick ten-second calculation of trip distance divided by daily move rate* plus a small variable to account for delays or adverse weather and a DM - after rolling for interruptions and finding none but a weather delay - can say "OK, other than a few days stuck in the mountains due to a snowstorm it's a pretty smooth trip; it takes you about 5 weeks and you're now approaching Calgary. What next?"

* - which can come from a rule or from the DM's best guess, whichever

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Terrible indeed! No, I'm joking, and excuse me if I'm being pedantic:
"Say yes or roll" is assuming a game or situation without GM Veto, Necessary Prerequisites for pass/fail and the like.
It is meant also for conflict resolution in mind, but can be easily ported to task res.
Anyway, in a d&d situation it would be like: We don't wake up the dragon and steal the treasure!
Gm: Dude... Roll for initiative and prepare for combat.

Or: We use scouts and animals to open a way thru the jungle and arrive at the temple's gate.
Gm: Fine. / Not so fast: roll for every task you do, the forest is full of dangers.

In your example it'd be something like:
We don't solve the riddle and instead use a magic ritual/thief skill to overcome it.
Gm: roll your dice and let's see...

Generally speaking SYORTD was intended for games in which the "information" is not only easily obtained by PCs, but rather given in advance by the Gm to favor choices, course of action, conflicting inter-party decisions to be made, by the table.

You can also use it like :
I use streetwise to track down the sect when they go to a tea house.
Gm: fine. They go around openly, you spot them easily.
Or: Gm: they have spies around downtown that might spot you first: roll... (then anything might happen)

'say yes' is what the GM does when the characters are basically 'crossing the street', they're doing something where there's no essential dramatic element. This would be appropriate in a situation where, say, the PCs come to a locked door and there isn't really another way to go. Of course they're going to go through. In classic D&D the game envisaged nothing but to keep rolling and expending resources until something worked. In more story centered types of game the technique is just to say yes. Obviously 'or roll the dice' is also an option, for when there could be different results (IE different resource expenditure, or different fictional positioning as a result of how, or if, the door was opened).
[MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION]' example, IMHO, is intended to illustrate a situation where 'say yes' cannot possibly work. I'm not sure this is strictly the case, but in any event 'say yes' is not meant to convey that whatever plan the players come up with MUST succeed or be allowed. This is not how 'say yes' works! If the whole point of the adventure is to solve the riddle, then either its a player challenge (in which case 'say yes' and 'roll the dice' are both incoherent with the type of play) OR its a character challenge, in which case it would be pointless to just 'say yes' as soon as the players suggest a solution, the premise being that the correct solution must be arrived at via some process (going to the right location to get the right clues, passing certain checks, etc.).

 

[pemerton]

In the DW depiction above, the confluence of conversation procedures, GMing ethos, and specific action resolution mechanics can yield what is tantamount to a C+ Scene Distinction. However, the formalities and functionality (a deeply codified Scene Distinction hooks into subsequent action resolution mechanics, and therefore as a potential heftier input to fiction, differently than in a free form game like PBtA) matter to the feel of the play of the game, in the actual playing from one gamestate to another, and often (but not always) in the outputs of play as well.

I've posted a few times that my group has had one of it's members AWOL a lot over the past couple of years as he has been buyiing and rebuilding a house. One session where he came along and joined in our Cortex+ game, he was struck by its formal use of the scene and Scene Distinction structure - "Like a film" I think was what he said - although he'd been playing 4e for years and my approach to 4e had been heavily influenced - as you know - by my appreciation of other scene/"story now"-oriented games.

Which is to say, I'm agreeing with you about "feel"!

This sort of circular reasoning actually puts a finger on what may also have been bugging me about the post in question. I don't mind D&D as a puzzle-game, and saying 'no' is often a valid necessity of play for such games. (I even plan on running an OSR-stylized dungeon crawl in the hopefully near future, likely using Black Hack.) But when other games are less designed as puzzle-games challenging player skill and more about character-propelled dramatic conflict, it seems peculiar to complain that "then the puzzles won't work" because puzzles aren't the point of play.

This sort of thinking is rarely, if ever, applied similarly to boardgames. When we play card or boardgames, we almost instinctively understand that each particular game has its own idiomatic purposes, challenges, and strategies featured through its game design that we must learn. The conflict that drives gameplay will be set on different hinges, and we naturally adjust to that fact with minimal fuss.

<snip>

And yet we strangely and frequently encounter this attitude in TTRPG circles wherein people judge the merits of games (or design principles) in a manner that presumes "OneTrueWayism." And thus they refuse (through almost intentional ignorance) to understand with any cordiality the idiomatic nature of TTRPG systems and their design principles because they see, analyze, and rationalize everything through Their One True Game. Is it any wonder why the conversation so readily breaks down when faced with this sort circular reasoning?

I thoiught I'd reply to this in the same post as the above because it touches on some similar points.

A first thought: my Google skills are failing me, but I believe a prominent designer (maybe John Harper?) made the point that no one sits down to play poker and starts talking about playing a trump and winning a trick and gathering all the cards up in front of him/her - so why do people approach RPGs like that?

A second thought: in the past week or so, in either this thread or its companion one, I commented that some posters post as if there is some a priori notion of what it is to play a RPG, and then read system details, techniques etc through that prism. Which is (I would say) exactly what you are pointing to. And as [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has pointed out, it's what Ron Edwards was disagreeing with 15+ years ago in his "System Matters" essays.

And, indeed, you can see it right here:

Board games and card games have very strong constraints on what you can or cannot do. This is far different than an RPG where it's open ended and usually you can try things that the game itself hasn't spelled out for you. The open nature of RPGs lends itself to people tinkering with rules, and applying various playstyles to any given game.

First, we see the move from the open nature of RPGs to tinkering with rules. This already assumes a certain sort of game design - subsystem based, with the subsystems reflecting various sorts of activities identified by categories of inficiton task. As per my conversation with [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] upthread, classic D&D and Classic Traveller both exemplify this sort of design, though - in my view, for the reasons I explained - I find Traveller more successful.

But as soon as we look at a different sort of game design - say, Fate or Cortex+ Heroic - we see that the subsystems in those games are not defined by reference to inficiton tasks but rather by reference to narrative or mechanical (typically the two are closely related) function. I can't remember all the Fate categories (I think there are 4) but they include Overcome an Obstacle and Create an Advantage (or stuff along those lines). In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic there is Inflict Stress, Inflict Complication, Create Asset, or Step Bac a Trait (which includes Recovery actions). And every action that can be declared falls into one of those categories. So when a player comes up with a novel idea (I read the rune to see if they tell us where we are in the dungeon) that doesn't require a novel subystem, as that is easily resolved as an attempt to Step Back a Trait (namely, recovery from the Lost in the Dungeon complication).

Second, we see the claim about applying various playstyles to any given game. This may be true as a descriptive matter, but that doesn't make it a good idea. A fortiori, the fact that RPGs are open-ended in their permitted moves doesn't make it a good idea to try and use (say) Cortex+ Heroic to play a Gygaxian skilled-play game. And furthermore, "any given game" here means D&D, perhaps GURPS/HERO, maybe Rolemaster or Runequest. Whereas I don't think many people actually are applying "various playstyles" to Cortex+ Heroic, trying to use it to run a ToH-type dungeon crawl; or to Torchbearer, trying to use it to run a 4e-type romp.

Returning to more general points: the reason RPG are "open ended" in their moves is because they involve a shared fiction as an essential element of and focus of play. Hence the permitted moves are as varies as will make sense in that shared fiction. But how far does this take us in telling us why we play RPGs, or what sorts of things this type of game is good for? My view is that it doesn't take us far at all. There are any number of reasons we might care to spend time with our friends and establishing and changing a shared fiction; and so any number of possible designs for RPGing, reflecting differences both of goal and of procedure.