What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

And searching for a Skill Challenge leads me to http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/gaming/dnd/4e/skill-challenge-broken.html . Now I would define solving a mystery as being something that the players might do by asking the right questions, no skill check needed; by finding the right places to apply skills in ways that have low difficulty; or by ridiculous DC checks against people who wouldn't talk unless they've been persuaded by the best diplomat and finding minute evidence in areas that have scoured clean. How you boil that down to two numbers and claim to be fiction-connected, I'm not sure.

I don't think his math is actually super RELEVANT. He is correct, to an extent, in math terms, but I'd first note that this is an OLD article and the updates to the SC system continued long after it was written, so all the DCs changed again (and their rate of change changed too), the +5 for using a skill disappeared, and a few other things. Now, those alone would only move you around on his chart, but the problem is he doesn't seem to grasp how it all fits together.

PCs (players really) are intended to have a good number of options at their disposal. This is a lot like combat, where a PC could spend Second Wind and burn an HS, or not, or spend a Daily, or not, or an AP, or not, etc. You have a LOT of choices of resource use in combat. You also have most of the same kinds of choices in an SC, its just that they have to fit appropriately into the fictional positioning. Since an SC can cover ANY sort of activity (outside of a fight presumably) its not as highly specified as to how, when, or where you can do what. This is no worse than in any other system in that respect, most D&D is no more specific IN combat than 4e is out of it, so I don't see it as an ACTUAL issue.

In other words, by the RC system you've probably got something in the 70-90% success rate on SCs of your level. In really adverse conditions that might drop, and of course there could be higher than party level SCs too, which clearly get RAPIDLY harder (but then you probably just burn more resources to bring the success rate back in line). Additionally SCs are often less than life-and-death. They may, and should, have significant stakes, but its usually not quite so necessary to have the party so likely to win each one. Honestly the 4e DMG1 seems to assume that SCs will be more 'plot decision points' and not likely to be lethal in and of themselves.

I have somewhere around a half a million pages of printed RPGs, a shameful number of which I haven't read. I haven't really read a number of the Pathfinder expansion books, which is the game I run. I haven't really read the 5th edition core rulebooks, a game it looks increasingly likely I'll spend sometime playing. I haven't really read M20 or Pugmire or Threadbare, games I Kickstarted that look very cool. Behind me, I have a bookcase, some 15 feet of books, that if I could get through I would possess a knowledge of world and English literature few, especially those of us with math degrees, can claim. Not to mention various other things I could be doing besides reading. Why does it surprise you that the 4th edition DMG is not high on my list to carefully read?

I think anyone who's played and talked about 4e much has had this same discussion though with people who are both less than knowledgeable on the subject and uninterested in actually discussing the actual game vs some warped nonsense version they heard about 3rd hand. There's no reason you SHOULD be familiar with it, but you did, IMNSHO opinion seem to misstate it. Anyway, now its all clear

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see how this is different in any fundamental way from my description: the goal of play is to make moves that will trigger the GM to relate/narrate the relevant bit of fiction which is (actually, or at least notionally) recorded in his/her notes.

The "diffused" agency that you describe here is, as best I can tell, the capacity to choose between narration-triggering moves. Depending on past such moves, the players may or may not have a sense of how different such choices are likely to trigger different narrations (eg a past move may have yielded a rumour, which suggests that the map is actually lost in the cave and not in the study at all).

I know this discussion has moved on rapidly and I'm 9 pages behind now, lol, but I think there IS a point here that you're kind of papering over.

There are INFINITE possible responses to the narration of the DM, that's in fact what characterizes an RPG more than anything else (aside from the particularization of being assigned one specific character) is the open-ended nature of the interactions between the characters and the DM/fiction.

In other words, while 'Caves of Chaos' (B2) is a pretty cut-and-dried sandboxy location-based adventure (IE you describe where you go, certain things will be there, you interact with them) you can still do a ton of different things. For example, you could simply brick up the hobgoblin's tunnel. Now, maybe that plan won't work, there are many obvious ways it could go wrong, but the scenario that results WILL be completely different from the scenario that results from entering the cave and trying to clean it out in the fashion most likely expected by the module's author.

Beyond that, the scenario, as published, doesn't in any way help you to figure WHAT will happen when the PCs try to brick up the hobgoblins. Will they all muster and pour out of the cave at once for a huge battle in the open? Will they snipe at the PCs from the dark shadows? Will they beat their wardrums and signal willingness to pay the ogres 500gp to come over from their cave and slaughter the PCs? We just don't know. The players don't know either; much like they don't know what will happen when the King is assassinated in a previous example. Its a complex situation.

Now, some GMs might resolve it effectively by thinking up every obstacle to the plan and throwing it at the party. Others might simply let the players express their desires to build a wall, and let the hobgoblins be walled in, big deal, right? OK, now some new thing will happen, maybe related to that, maybe not, depending on what the PCs do next.

I guess what I'm saying is, there's less 'air' between the two kinds of play in many cases than is being acknowledged. It depends on the GM and the players, and of course you can use 'Pemertonian' principles to run B2, although it isn't exceptionally well-adapted to that there's certainly enough embodied within the setup there to cater to a fairly wide variety of player agendas given the genre and whatnot.

In other words I think, in practice, if you could go back to 1975 and play with EGG in the Kitchen you'd probably have a decent amount of agency, though maybe not so much until you established some creds in the dungeon crawling skill game.

 

[Ancalagon]

The authority of the GM to establish those elements of fictional positioning is all about actual social processes.

Eg in Cortex+ Heroic, the GM doesn't have that sort of authority. The GM can spend a doom pool die to have a NPC interrupt the player's action declaration, but the best that will get is a roll, which the player may beat, and then spend a "plot point" to be able to impose the desired consequence on the NPC in any event.

And I've never played a game where the GM has the authority to tell a player that his/her PC is a figment of anothr PC's imagination.

Perhaps you have heard the line "rocks fall, everybody dies"?

The GM can do anything at any time. BUT a GM that does "rock falls everybody dies" every 3 sessions will quickly lose players. So yes the social aspect is important.

*IF the GM is fair* in adjudicating the effects of the player's actions, I'm not sure that a in-game mechanism is necessary.

 

[pemerton]

There are INFINITE possible responses to the narration of the DM, that's in fact what characterizes an RPG more than anything else (aside from the particularization of being assigned one specific character) is the open-ended nature of the interactions between the characters and the DM/fiction.

In other words, while 'Caves of Chaos' (B2) is a pretty cut-and-dried sandboxy location-based adventure (IE you describe where you go, certain things will be there, you interact with them) you can still do a ton of different things. For example, you could simply brick up the hobgoblin's tunnel. Now, maybe that plan won't work, there are many obvious ways it could go wrong, but the scenario that results WILL be completely different from the scenario that results from entering the cave and trying to clean it out in the fashion most likely expected by the module's author.

Beyond that, the scenario, as published, doesn't in any way help you to figure WHAT will happen when the PCs try to brick up the hobgoblins. Will they all muster and pour out of the cave at once for a huge battle in the open? Will they snipe at the PCs from the dark shadows? Will they beat their wardrums and signal willingness to pay the ogres 500gp to come over from their cave and slaughter the PCs? We just don't know. The players don't know either; much like they don't know what will happen when the King is assassinated in a previous example. Its a complex situation.

I agree that the player moves not being limited except by the shared fiction is a significant part of what distinguishes a RPG from a boardgame.

But with bricking up the hobgoblins we also start to see possible limits. The players have an infinite number of ways of provoking the GM to tell them new stuff. But if it is the GM who is deciding what all that stuff is, I'm not sure that there is a lot of player agency there.

Systems like reaction rolls, morale checks etc help fill the gap here, but you can see them breaking down even in Gygax's DMG, as he gives advice on how different sorts of dungeon inhabitants will respond to incursions with that advice being largely divorced from the game's social mechanics, and relying very heavily on GM extrapolation of the fiction. I can accept that free kriegsspiel is a thing, but once we're at the level of bricking up hobgoblin tunnels, or assassinating kings, I feel that we've moved beyond a referee model - an independent narrator of knowable consequences of player moves - to a situation of one party (the "storyteller"?) having the authority to establish the content of the fiction that results from action declarations.

In my view, this is the impetus behind systems like skill challenges, or "stakes"-type approaches to resolution, which try to reintroduce finality of outcome into these sorts of situations. And of course there are less perfect systems too - I've used RM's rather feeble social mechanics to establish finality in social resolution, and I'm sure there's a way of using reaction and morale mechanics to adjudicate the hobgoblin's response to the wall.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree that the player moves not being limited except by the shared fiction is a significant part of what distinguishes a RPG from a boardgame.

But with bricking up the hobgoblins we also start to see possible limits. The players have an infinite number of ways of provoking the GM to tell them new stuff.

And it's that infinte number of ways which gives them their agency.

But if it is the GM who is deciding what all that stuff is, I'm not sure that there is a lot of player agency there.

I've finally, after all this, realized why what you're saying just doesn't compute to me on a basic level: you're defining "the fiction" in which players may/may not have agency differently than I am.

There's two types of fiction in a typical RPG:

First is the background or setting or game world or whatever term you want to give it, which ranges in scope from the overall setting choice or design all the way down to whether the treasure map is hidden in the study or the kitchen. Constructing this (or even just deciding which canned setting to use), populating it, placing things within it, etc. etc. is the 'worldbuilding' you ask about in post 1. In most cases players have very limited agency over any of this for offscreen stuff and pretty much none at all during the run of play...and as they don't have this agency I fail to see why you keep bringing it up. This side of the fiction nearly all belongs to the DM; and as there's a lot of it, she keeps notes.

Second is the players' characters themselves, and the ongoing story (i.e. the fiction) they generate as they move around within the setting, and interact with both the setting and each other. Here in most cases* the players have all kinds of agency, starting with the 'fluff' and 'crunch' of the characters they create and continuing with the - as noted above - infinite number of run-of-play choices they can make once the puck is dropped and play begins. And while the DM may have some ideas as to what story she'd like to see grow out of her game and can have input and influence in various ways, the end decisions here all rest with the players no matter what the DM does or says short of running a hard railroad. This side of the fiction largely belongs to the players and this is where they have their agency over the shared fiction; though they still need a DM (it's what she's there for) to help bring it to life.

That said, when the characters are only interacting with each other the DM doesn't really need to - and probably shouldn't - do anything.

* - i.e. if you're not playing in a hard-edged AP, but most of the time all involved are cool with it or else they'd be playing something else.

And without doubt it's the second type of fiction - the one the players hold the most agency over - that matters more when all is said and done. Five years later the stories aren't likely to be about how well-drawn and pretty the DM's map of Spieadeia city was; hell, no. The stories are going to be about brave Sir Grailen's thundering charge against the orcs at the gates; or when low-wisdom Drosa picked up that wand and tried it without IDing it first just to see what it did; or how fast that 2nd-level party fled when they suddenly realized they really couldn't take on that Frost Giant they'd been taunting....

Lanefan

 

[Kobold Boots]

You really make me want to bang my head against me desk you know that? I mean like I'm tempted, right now, to literally hit my head on my keyboard because it would be more productive than continuing this conversation. Because you peeled out ONE FREAKING LINE from my post and IGNORED all the rest of my post explaining what I wrote.

Go back, re-read my post. Respond again when you understand it. This may take more than one re-read, I'll be patient.

Speaking openly, there are a few things that happen in any thread that Pem is involved with.

1. It's guaranteed to go 40 pages. Which lowers anyone's desire to read it, eventually.
2. It's going to read like a book. Again, which lowers anyone's desire to read it, eventually.
3. His replies are going to be low on understanding what anyone else is saying and big on creating the kind of arguments that keep the thread going.

The reason I blocked him briefly was because I came to the conclusion that one of two things was happening.

1. He was getting paid by the site owners to drive traffic through his threads OR
2. His hobby was being argumentative just to give him something to do.

However, the trade off to block is his volume of posting causes a serious disruption to many threads when you can no longer see what he's writing. He's got some good ideas but it's tough to get a point across when talking to him seems like you're clapping with one hand.

This post is a little stronger than I'm generally comfortable posting. However, with any luck it'll help change things for the better. Passion is definitely there. If he'd take some advice to really try and understand what others are saying, we'd have some tighter conversations.

Be well
KB

 

[Sadras]

Mmmm, I don't think 'win' is a word I would ever use in an RPG, except to describe something that happened in-character. IMHO success in an SC vs failure is more about who's contribution to the narrative is going to be established next. While the CHARACTERS succeed or fail, the players just play.

I agree win was a poorly selected word for my sentence. I merely meant that through successes on the SC, players get to contribute on the narrative in such a meaningful way that it would feel like collaborative storytelling which would lessen the intrigue/mystery for me. That is perhaps not how I'd perfer to be challenged. Then again I have not had much experience with 'player-facing' games. I have played a game using the fate system but enjoyed it not so much because of the mechanics (which I liked) but more so for the intrigue/mystery which came in the form of a secret backstory (it also was a different genre than D&D which made the experience more novel).

Its interesting that @pemerton talks in game structure and theory terms, and you guys come back at him with narrative concepts. The two simply don't equate. You aren't wrong by any means, but he's asking for hay for his horse and you're telling him you don't have a tire pump...

LOL. Fair. I suppose we (and this is a broad we), don't envision the entire roleplaying 'exercise' as tactical i.e. introducing mechanics to acquire a resolution for action declarations. It certainly can be, but from my experience online and in real it is usually a mix, with combat requiring the mechanics more than the other two pillars. Hence my tire pump.

Mmmm, I think since I started playing D&D in 1975 or so, things have evolved a good bit.

I think I may have not been clear - from 1975 to today, action declarations are still very much (for the majority of us) adjudicated by the DM. Hence I have an issue with the OP raising the difference issue of classical vs contemporary.

Character development, mechanics..etc that might change but on the whole we play the same with a little more polish and hopefully better DMs.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Now you're being silly. If a player wanted to focus on a character that is a 'sleuth' or has some sort of super senses or something and then wants to bring that out by staking that he can detect something well-hidden against a spy making off with information, then bring on the spy! I mean, that's PERFECTLY AWESOME. It doesn't have to be 'Sauron' (the main big bad of the whole story arc) but there's nothing wrong with Sauron (or maybe Saruman, hard to say he isn't just an agent of Sauron anyway) spending in somebody to spy on Rivendell is there? Nothing like this happened in the novel, but it certainly could have.

Yes, I was being silly with my example. It was an extreme. However, it seems like it could happen in the type of game Pemerton is advocating. Not that it should happen...I’m sure he’d say something about the scene being framed properly and the players having clear ideas on genre and setting....but that’s kind of the point, I think.

Whatever playstyle any of us want to advocate, it’s possible to describe a crappy example of play. And to then use that example to criticize the entire playstyle.

I was really tired of this vague contextual-less map example, so I gave an equally crappy example of play with pretty specific context most of us woukd understand.

I honestly don’t have any issue with his stance that there can be more player agency in his type of game. Certainly the ability to author some fictional elements through actuon declaration increases player agency. I get that. I don’t even think it’s controversial so much as the way it’s presented seems to be rubbing folks the wrong way.

But I also think that framing scenes can also limit player agency. Would you agree with that? My understanding of the term is that it’s the GM trying to force a decision by a player, right? To go where the action is. Here’s the situation, what do you do?

So I feel like it’s really just a matter of which playstyle promotes agency in what way. Or limits it in what way. It’s not this binary “you allow player agency or else you’re just reading then a story” insult that’s being put forth.

 

[Sunseeker]

You said this "Your players are simply drinking larger helpings from the broth you have already prepared: Vecna being a real force within the gameworld (as opposed to an existential plot device) and the things she wants to do."

As I said, I don't know exactly what it means, but my point is that I didn't prepare the broth.

Here's another bit of your post: "My only caveat was that the base world is initially presented by the DM, who therefore retains primary authorship over what is or isn't possible. IE: if Vecna did not exist in your campaign world, then her mission to conquer Rel Astra would not exist, and therefore players could not make the choice to ally with her in that endevour."

As I indicated (or tried to) in my reply to your post, that is completely backwards. "Vecna is not the big deal here." Vecna wouldn't have featured as a significant part of the gameworld but for there being a player whose PC had a goal of world domination. Vecna's mission to conquer Rel Astra wouldn't have been authored, by me as GM, but for the fact that it generated pressure on these two PCs (and, thereby, their players).

It's not like I had all this backstory involving Vecna, and the Great Kingdom, and plots to conquer Rel Astra, etc - my broth - and the players started drinking from it. My players had their PCs - their broth - and I introduced all this stuff into the fiction that spoke to their PCs - I was drinking from their broth.

Now if you think I've misunderstood your metaphor, well maybe I have. But you're going to have to give it to me literally. Because at the moment I don't think I'm misunderstanding you. I think you're misunderstanding the actual dynamic of the episode of play that I described, and are making mistaken assumptions about the causal relationship between "world building" and player choices.

In short, you are missing the forest of my post for the tree of one or two lines I wrote. Focusing on what Vecna is or isn't, focusing on if you or someone else was the DM, focusing on if you sniped the idea from the players. YOU wrote it into the game. Which speaks to exactly what the rest of my post was talking about.

Fundamentally YOU and only YOU had the authority to include something that would play to their backstory. The fact that it came player recommended is largely irrelevant.

I think you're misunderstanding either on purpose, or something. Because I can't be much clearer with what I wrote, and nobody else seems to have read my post and been confused by it.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't even know what this means. How does a PC "walk into" a module? Do you mean that you, the player, get to decide which module the group is playing?

Most people, when they use a module, place it within their campaign world somewhere. B10 gets placed into the map somewhere and the PCs walk into that area.

And what establishes the "possiility of success" of becoming mayor of some town? If you mean that the GM thinks that this is a good idea, or would make for a fun story, that would be the GM exercising agency.

No.

If you mean that the player has to learn what is an effective pathway to mayoralty - as established by the GM - that would be an instance of the player playing to lean what is in the GM's notes.

No.

That doesn't seem like very much player agency to me.

We agree on something!

If you mean that the player is able to make action declarations whose resolution is not just a matter of GM fiat, and those can result in the PC becomeing mayor, then the player would seem to be exercising agency at that point

Yes.

But is the player dependent upon the GM to allow that there is a town and mayoral office at all?

Why would there need to be an office of Mayor for the PCs to try and become Mayor? As for the town, I just glanced at the module and thought the homestead was a town. My bad. My point remains valid, though, because I was just using that error to point out how my style of play allows agency. Let's pretend that either there is already a town in B10, or that I was talking about B10.5 which has a town called Sukiskyn. It can either have or not have the office of Mayor, since that doesn't really matter.

Look, most DMs(the vast majority really) are reasonable and aren't going to shoot down player ideas just because. The players can have the PCs look for the secrets, or not look for the secrets. They can go in any direction they want for just about any reason they want. Fighting goblins to save the town will win them brownie points. If one of the players then wants to try and become Mayor of the town, he will come up with a way to attempt it. Perhaps he goes around putting himself forward to the grateful townsfolk. He might or might not suggest that having a powerful Mayor with powerful advisers(the other PCs) is good for them. Or maybe he has his rogue friend run around in disguise subtly planting rumors and ideas, guiding the town to ask his buddy to be Mayor. There are many ways to try it.

It's the job of the DM to not only allow that attempt, but also fairly judge the chances of success. Probably setting skill challenges, individual skill rolls, and other reasonable obstacles in the way. The result is that there is a chance that the PCs can succeed, and that's what I meant.

There really will be no automatic failure or reliance on DM fiat unless the DM is a bad one. There is no discovery of a DM path to success, because the DM has no path and it's the PCs that are forging that path as they go with their ideas. There is no reliance on whether the DM thinks it's a good idea or would make a fun story, because that doesn't matter to even an average DM. When the players tell me that one of them is going to sneak into the dragon's lair to look around, I usually think that's a bad idea, but it's allowed anyway. And as long as the players are having fun, that's what is important.

As far as I'm concerned, that affords the players full agency, despite the inability to author sections of the world as they go.