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Musings on Choice
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<blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4993838" data-attributes="member: 18017"><p>I wound up <a href="http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/tell-me-how-to-play-4e-and-odd-so-i-can-ignore-it/" target="_blank">posting at The Mule Abides</a> about choice as well, although I was responding to the threads about player advice rather than DM, and looked at it through a filter of experience with old vs. new versions of the game.</p><p></p><p>Using your framework, here are some of the conclusions I came to:</p><p></p><p><u>Basic unit of interaction</u>: Well said. I subscribe to this idea too and I know the 4E design team does because reading about their goals pre-release was where I first heard the idea that choice is the essential currency of games articulated.</p><p></p><p><u>Choices and consequences</u>: In that blog post, I talk about the granularity of choices. Large-grain choices have big effects on the story - do we go in this dungeon or that one? Fine-grain choices are more trivial - do we take the east corridor or the west one? </p><p></p><p>It seems to me that, by designing the rules to give players more choices, 4E causes them to be finer-grained and thus less consequential. For an old-school D&D fighter, basically the only choice you make each melee round is "Do I stick it out and keep fighting, or retreat?" That's a very consequential choice, because (especially at low levels) there's a real chance of dying each round you stand and fight. A new-school fighter makes many choices each combat round, but each of them is less consequential because the outcome is designed to hang not on individual actions (removing the "I win" button) but on the sum of all the choices of the whole party working as a team. Greg Costikyan has pointed out that <a href="http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane" target="_blank">the more random events there are, the more the outcome becomes predictable and the less impact each random event can have</a>, and I think the same thing is true of choices.</p><p></p><p><u>Choice and Information</u>: Good points from the DMing perspective - this is why it's good to enable players to scout things out, gather clues, etc. From a rules perspective, 4E gives players lots of information so that they can make well-considered choices. In practice that means removing unpredictability, so that you don't have magic items that you don't know what they do until you try it. I often see new-school players worry that, since OD&D doesn't have rules for so many things, they'll be robbed of the ability to make choices because they can't know how the DM will rule on the outcome. In practice I like to talk to the group and try to get a collective common-sense ruling, which has the advantage that you don't need to know a lot of rules to gauge consequences - you just have to visualize the scene & use your real-world experience of what's possible. (Obviously this works best for a gritty, "realistic" game where real-world judgments are more likely to apply).</p><p></p><p><u>Choice and Chance</u>: A lot of the choices especially in old-school games revolves around how much risk you want to take. As above, having a sense of what the risks is important to making the decisions. If you know there's a 1 in 6 chance of a random encounter every turn, deciding whether to linger and search for secret doors becomes meaningful.</p><p></p><p>To answer some of your specific questions:</p><p></p><p>As a DM, I ensure that the players get to make meaningful choices by having that be the only way things happen. I run a sandbox game where the world is not moving according to any plan and it's up to the PCs to decide what to do (including which of the many story hooks I dangle before them they want to bite on).</p><p></p><p>The consequences for good or bad choices emerge from the rules and the situation. Finding treasure is good, being killed is bad. I don't do anything extra to punish bad choices; if I think the PCs deserve to be rewarded, I see which of my NPCs might share that opinion and how they might act on it.</p><p></p><p>The players have gotten good about doing threat assessments and calculating risk/reward. There are in-game resources, like a sphinx that answers questions and the ability to turn invisible and scout around, to help them gain information. They never have perfect information because information-gathering has a cost or risk (the sphinx charges a fee, even invisible scouts may have random encounters) and so there's always a chance of unforeseen consequences.</p><p></p><p>I like to have chance play a huge role in my game at a narrative level - I start with little knowledge of my sandbox, so random encounters shape what's there, and reaction rolls determine the NPC's attitudes so I don't even know ahead of time who will be their friend or enemy (unless it's obvious from the situation or the PCs' actions). At the same time, if the PCs come up with a great plan I'm happy to let it work without any randomness; not having a skill system in OD&D, I'm less tempted to say "Well, that sounds plausible but let's see if you get a good or bad roll for your skill check".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tav_Behemoth, post: 4993838, member: 18017"] I wound up [url=http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/tell-me-how-to-play-4e-and-odd-so-i-can-ignore-it/]posting at The Mule Abides[/url] about choice as well, although I was responding to the threads about player advice rather than DM, and looked at it through a filter of experience with old vs. new versions of the game. Using your framework, here are some of the conclusions I came to: [u]Basic unit of interaction[/u]: Well said. I subscribe to this idea too and I know the 4E design team does because reading about their goals pre-release was where I first heard the idea that choice is the essential currency of games articulated. [u]Choices and consequences[/u]: In that blog post, I talk about the granularity of choices. Large-grain choices have big effects on the story - do we go in this dungeon or that one? Fine-grain choices are more trivial - do we take the east corridor or the west one? It seems to me that, by designing the rules to give players more choices, 4E causes them to be finer-grained and thus less consequential. For an old-school D&D fighter, basically the only choice you make each melee round is "Do I stick it out and keep fighting, or retreat?" That's a very consequential choice, because (especially at low levels) there's a real chance of dying each round you stand and fight. A new-school fighter makes many choices each combat round, but each of them is less consequential because the outcome is designed to hang not on individual actions (removing the "I win" button) but on the sum of all the choices of the whole party working as a team. Greg Costikyan has pointed out that [url=http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane]the more random events there are, the more the outcome becomes predictable and the less impact each random event can have[/url], and I think the same thing is true of choices. [u]Choice and Information[/u]: Good points from the DMing perspective - this is why it's good to enable players to scout things out, gather clues, etc. From a rules perspective, 4E gives players lots of information so that they can make well-considered choices. In practice that means removing unpredictability, so that you don't have magic items that you don't know what they do until you try it. I often see new-school players worry that, since OD&D doesn't have rules for so many things, they'll be robbed of the ability to make choices because they can't know how the DM will rule on the outcome. In practice I like to talk to the group and try to get a collective common-sense ruling, which has the advantage that you don't need to know a lot of rules to gauge consequences - you just have to visualize the scene & use your real-world experience of what's possible. (Obviously this works best for a gritty, "realistic" game where real-world judgments are more likely to apply). [u]Choice and Chance[/u]: A lot of the choices especially in old-school games revolves around how much risk you want to take. As above, having a sense of what the risks is important to making the decisions. If you know there's a 1 in 6 chance of a random encounter every turn, deciding whether to linger and search for secret doors becomes meaningful. To answer some of your specific questions: As a DM, I ensure that the players get to make meaningful choices by having that be the only way things happen. I run a sandbox game where the world is not moving according to any plan and it's up to the PCs to decide what to do (including which of the many story hooks I dangle before them they want to bite on). The consequences for good or bad choices emerge from the rules and the situation. Finding treasure is good, being killed is bad. I don't do anything extra to punish bad choices; if I think the PCs deserve to be rewarded, I see which of my NPCs might share that opinion and how they might act on it. The players have gotten good about doing threat assessments and calculating risk/reward. There are in-game resources, like a sphinx that answers questions and the ability to turn invisible and scout around, to help them gain information. They never have perfect information because information-gathering has a cost or risk (the sphinx charges a fee, even invisible scouts may have random encounters) and so there's always a chance of unforeseen consequences. I like to have chance play a huge role in my game at a narrative level - I start with little knowledge of my sandbox, so random encounters shape what's there, and reaction rolls determine the NPC's attitudes so I don't even know ahead of time who will be their friend or enemy (unless it's obvious from the situation or the PCs' actions). At the same time, if the PCs come up with a great plan I'm happy to let it work without any randomness; not having a skill system in OD&D, I'm less tempted to say "Well, that sounds plausible but let's see if you get a good or bad roll for your skill check". [/QUOTE]
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