How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Lanefan]

But people don't generally walk around with the equivalent of ten foot poles in real life. That really says to me that play is gonna be about "gotcha" type elements.... that if I don't ask the right question (which my character would not have to ask, by the way) then I'll miss some key bit of info or similar.

Given that in a typical D&D setting (and maybe those of some other games as well) there's elements in the world that really are out to "getcha", I have no problem with "gotcha" play.

And yes, ideally the GM gives out enough useful info and describes things well enough for you to make decisions. That said, sometimes the characters just aren't going to have all the info to hand, and-or what they do have is wrong.

There's something inherently conflicted about the person who is responsible for my understanding of the game world actively trying to deceive me.

I'm not saying that it never has a place, but I just don't think "how can I lie to them?" needs to be a major consideration.

"All is not as it appears" is a trope as old as time. The GM can only describe what the PCs think they see and perceive.

Also, you didn't respond to the second half of my previous post, and I'd love to get your take on the below as a justification for sharing game information like ACs and distances and the like. Several posters have expressed similar sentiments, and most have been responded to vaguely or avoided entirely.

I think the point here is that no matter how good a GM or boxed text may be at this, they will fall short compared to what the character can perceive and intuit from their "actual" surroundings.

What do folks think of this idea?

The boxed description and-or GM will likely fall short in their description of minutae until and unless asked, but in theory ought to get the major stuff while still leaving room for things to not necessarily be as they appear.

For example, in a classic "gumshoe" setting: "The door opens inward on to a very warm room, about 15x15' with an 8' ceiling. There's a small partly-open window in the far (west) wall through which comes sunlight, lighting the room well enough to see by. The floor is wooden, the walls and ceiling are painted plaster, once white but now faded and yellowed; and there's a rough hole in the plaster midway up the south wall (to your left) as if someone had once put a fist through it. The only furniture is a simple wooden chair and a rickety-looking wicker table. On the table sits an almost-empty glass and a part-full bottle, a few other empty bottles lie on the floor beneath the window. In the chair is a sweat-covered man in stained street clothes, slumped forward with his head on the table, who may be aware of your presence but isn't doing much to react to it. Without a better look at his face, you can't tell if this is the man you seek. Oh, and the smell in here is a bit much: a mix of liquor, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke."

That ought to be good enough to get started, shouldn't it? And not a number in sight, other than the dimensions of the room which are obvious to all. If and when someone asks anything about the window is I'll give its dimensions, mention it has a thin drawn-back curtain, and note that it's a sash-style window open about 6"; but until then I'll assume they and many other minor elements are irrelevant.

And yet - you don't yet know if the man is really drunk or just faking it, you don't yet know who he is or whether he's at all relevant, you don't yet know if he's got a gun concealed somewhere, you don't yet know if the fist-hole in the south wall means anything, and I've yet to mention the several house-flies lazily doing circuits above the slumped man or the cockroach that scurried for cover as you opened the door.

 

[Corinnguard]

Again, I’m not saying that the GM never has a reason for deception. I’m sure we can come up with reasonable examples.

But there’s an inherent conflict at play when the same person whose job it is to portray the fictional world to the players is also trying to deceive them.

And he also knows all their stats and capabilities as well. Not a problem for him, though!

I am not sure I can recall an instance where my GM deceived the group I have been role-playing with for almost three years. I do know, however, that my GM does not know the stats and capabilities of my character or most of the characters belonging to the other players in my group. I know this because he does he ask us if a given monster attack has succeeded at hitting our characters' ACs or not, and we have surprised him by pulling off something he wasn't anticipating. If he knew our characters' stats and capabilities, then he is showing a remarkable degree of trust in me and my fellow players by not using said info for his own personal benefit.

This is interesting. What do you mean by that?

A player’s understanding of the game world is very dependent on the GM’s ability to accurately portray it.

Is it? Currently my party is playing within the Forgotten Realms setting. When I went about designing my two Forgotten Realms characters (a Dragonborn Fighter (Scout variant) and a Bugbear Ranger (Gloom Stalker) Rogue, I went to the Forgotten Realms wiki to read about their respective races and to give them a place they could hail from. I also collected and looked thru several 3e Forgotten Realms books. So I like to think I am somewhat well versed about the Forgotten Realms, and thus I don't have to rely on my GM all the time.

I’m not sure what this has to do with anything.

The GM provides a description of what surrounds the players. And t's up to the player to use their imagination to fill in the gaps of what the GM was describing. When the GM mentions something simple like a door, a player automatically assumes that the door within a setting works like our door in RL does. But if GM mentioned that the door faded away into apparent nothingness when touched, then the player would know that the door was really a magical door. In a game session, the GM and the players are interacting with one another to create the story. And stories use tropes like Like Reality Unless Noted. Hence why I said implied surroundings.

 

[pemerton]

But could they observe exactly how bad a fighter you are?

I would assume they could work it out pretty quickly. I mean, my shoulders and upper arms are not very broad (so little upper body strength). My posture is not terrible, but is well short of ramrod straight. I don't know how to stand and move so as to transmit force from my legs through my hips and torso to my shoulders and arms, and I would expect that - as soon as I tried to take a "fighting stance" they could see that, and probably might infer my ineptitude from watching how I walk and stand more generally - eg how deliberate am I in my bodily movements?

 

[pemerton]

Given that in a typical D&D setting (and maybe those of some other games as well) there's elements in the world that really are out to "getcha", I have no problem with "gotcha" play.

And yes, ideally the GM gives out enough useful info and describes things well enough for you to make decisions. That said, sometimes the characters just aren't going to have all the info to hand, and-or what they do have is wrong.

"All is not as it appears" is a trope as old as time. The GM can only describe what the PCs think they see and perceive.

The boxed description and-or GM will likely fall short in their description of minutae until and unless asked, but in theory ought to get the major stuff while still leaving room for things to not necessarily be as they appear.

For example, in a classic "gumshoe" setting: "The door opens inward on to a very warm room, about 15x15' with an 8' ceiling. There's a small partly-open window in the far (west) wall through which comes sunlight, lighting the room well enough to see by. The floor is wooden, the walls and ceiling are painted plaster, once white but now faded and yellowed; and there's a rough hole in the plaster midway up the south wall (to your left) as if someone had once put a fist through it. The only furniture is a simple wooden chair and a rickety-looking wicker table. On the table sits an almost-empty glass and a part-full bottle, a few other empty bottles lie on the floor beneath the window. In the chair is a sweat-covered man in stained street clothes, slumped forward with his head on the table, who may be aware of your presence but isn't doing much to react to it. Without a better look at his face, you can't tell if this is the man you seek. Oh, and the smell in here is a bit much: a mix of liquor, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke."

That ought to be good enough to get started, shouldn't it? And not a number in sight, other than the dimensions of the room which are obvious to all. If and when someone asks anything about the window is I'll give its dimensions, mention it has a thin drawn-back curtain, and note that it's a sash-style window open about 6"; but until then I'll assume they and many other minor elements are irrelevant.

And yet - you don't yet know if the man is really drunk or just faking it, you don't yet know who he is or whether he's at all relevant, you don't yet know if he's got a gun concealed somewhere, you don't yet know if the fist-hole in the south wall means anything, and I've yet to mention the several house-flies lazily doing circuits above the slumped man or the cockroach that scurried for cover as you opened the door.

But wouldn't the flies perhaps be one of the first things I would notice?

I mean, suppose I'm a butcher in real life. And so assume that your failure to mention flies means there are none. (Just as you didn't mention any aliens with rayguns.)

Or suppose in the fiction my character is a forensic pathologist (or a forensic entomologist!). Wouldn't my character notice the flies?

There's the further question as to what is going on such that I can tell this man is sweat-covered, yet can't tell whether he seems to be breathing, whether his eyes are fluttering, whether he is drooling or has bugs in his mouth, etc.

The failure to mention the flies, or to make clear what is happening in respect of all these other matters, may be entirely at odds with immersion. The function of this sort of limited narration, rather, seems to be to prompt a certain sort of game play, which includes players having to make calls about what the GM is likely to tell them "for free", and what they have to expressly ask about.

 

[pemerton]

Is it? Currently my party is playing within the Forgotten Realms setting. When I went about designing my two Forgotten Realms characters (a Dragonborn Fighter (Scout variant) and a Bugbear Ranger (Gloom Stalker) Rogue, I went to the Forgotten Realms wiki to read about their respective races and to give them a place they could hail from. I also collected and looked thru several 3e Forgotten Realms books. So I like to think I am somewhat well versed about the Forgotten Realms, and thus I don't have to rely on my GM all the time.


The GM provides a description of what surrounds the players. And t's up to the player to use their imagination to fill in the gaps of what the GM was describing.

I'm pretty sure that when @hawkeyefan talks about the players relying on the GM for their understanding of the game world, he is not talking about the sort of stuff you read on the FR wiki. I'm pretty sure that he is talking about the sort of stuff in @Lanefan's post not far upthread - stuff that the player can see and smell and hear and so on, all the perceptual information that in real life informs our actions and decisions, but that we do not have access to when declaring actions for our PCs in real life.

And saying that the players fill in the gaps is no help. The GM gives a description like Lanefan's above, and I fill in the gap - this guy is alive because he is sweating, and dead people don't sweat. But in fact, given the reference to flies and cockroaches, I think Lanefan is intending that it is meant to be an open question for the players, at the moment of narration, whether or not this man is alive. In that case, the player "filling in the gap" will lead to action declarations that, in the fiction, make no sense.

 

[Corinnguard]

And saying that the players fill in the gaps is no help. The GM gives a description like Lanefan's above, and I fill in the gap - this guy is alive because he is sweating, and dead people don't sweat. But in fact, given the reference to flies and cockroaches, I think Lanefan is intending that it is meant to be an open question for the players, at the moment of narration, whether or not this man is alive. In that case, the player "filling in the gap" will lead to action declarations that, in the fiction, make no sense.

If Lanefan was your GM, they probably would ask your character to roll for a Perception check and then follow it up with an Investigation check to help you if possible to fill in the gap. So you roll a d20 twice, once for your Perception check and then again for your Investigation check. There would be several outcomes from these two skill checks.

1. Both your Perception check and your Investigation check succeed.
2. You succeed with your Perception check, but fail your Investigation check.
3. You fail your Perception check, but succeed at your Investigation check.
4. You fail at both skill checks.

Lanefan at this point would then describe to you what the resulting skill checks look like to your character, and then take the narrative down a particular direction within the adventure. And you would base your next action on whatever your character learned during this particular encounter.

Now if Lanefan told you that the man before you was truly drunk and not faking it all, that he was a town guard, and that he was armed with a gun, you wouldn't need to make any skill checks. Your character would just know. What then? What would you do with the knowledge that was just handed to you? I don't think I would be happy or satisfied if the info was just handed to me without my character making any effort to get it on their own.

 

[billd91]

I could say "he's wearing no visible armor, but you can see the telltale signs of an Abjuration effect, likely Mage Armor, carries a shield, and is remarkably swift"...or I could say "he has AC 19" and it means pretty much the same thing.

They may mean the same thing as far as mechanical resolution goes, but there sure is a difference in the experience at the table. And that is probably a defining factor in preferences here.

I am more likely to describe a situation based on what the characters can perceive rather than the game mechanical value because my players generally respond better to it. They interact with the elements and theorize about what they mean to their characters and their goals in this fight. And in the face of certain unknowns, they may over compensate and use a resource they may not have needed like a spell slot for a bless - though it's pretty much never a completely wasted resource either, just not squeezed for greatest efficiency. And then they'll engage with a plan and, depending on how well they've interpreted the information available to them and how the dice turn out, find out what happens.

 

[Aldarc]

And the thread continues same as it ever has...

 

[Maxperson]

Again, I’m not saying that the GM never has a reason for deception. I’m sure we can come up with reasonable examples.

But there’s an inherent conflict at play when the same person whose job it is to portray the fictional world to the players is also trying to deceive them.

And he also knows all their stats and capabilities as well. Not a problem for him, though!

There's no conflict. DM side "deception" comes in the form of Mimics and the like and is not even true deception. When a party walks into the room, I'm not going to describe the room and announce that there's a mimic in the corner that looks like a chest. I'm going to describe it as a chest. We're not describing a copse of trees in the distance and then snickering behind the screen because there are no trees and no reason why the PCs would see something that isn't there, trying to get one over on the players.

There are also omissions which are not deceptions. When the party walks into the room and sees a desk and I don't tell them about the box that is right behind it, it is because they don't see the box, not because I'm deceiving them about its existence. We describe what the PCs would see and know and omit what they don't see and/or don't know.

The job of the DM is to portray the fictional world as the PCs perceive it, not to portray it in every detail including details that the PCs would be unaware of. Truthfully describing what the PCs perceive is not deception. It's truth.

 

[Maxperson]

Given that in a typical D&D setting (and maybe those of some other games as well) there's elements in the world that really are out to "getcha", I have no problem with "gotcha" play.

And yes, ideally the GM gives out enough useful info and describes things well enough for you to make decisions. That said, sometimes the characters just aren't going to have all the info to hand, and-or what they do have is wrong.

Carrying around a 10 foot pole is not an indication of any sort of "gotcha" going on. Were I told today that I would be flown to a pyramid just discovered in the Amazon that is full of D&D like traps, I would bring a 10 foot pole. PCs bring them to help them safely reveal traps and illusions, not to avoid "gotcha" situations.

"All is not as it appears" is a trope as old as time. The GM can only describe what the PCs think they see and perceive.

Right, but this is NOT deception. It's truth. The DM is not lying to the players. He's truthfully describing what the PCs see and perceive.