Why Worldbuilding is Bad

Lanefan said:

pemerton said:

Obviously all RPGing involves the GM saying some stuff. My point about worldbuilding is that the GM spends a certain amount of time relaying those details to the players. For instance, the players have their PCs wander through a town and the GM narrates stuff about it. The players ask who their PCs' friends or contacts are and the GM narrates stuff about it. The players have their PCs look for a market that might sell a desired item, and the GM narrates stuff about the town, about NPCs, etc - triggering the players to declare more actions ("OK, I ask the gate guard if there is a market in town") which result in the GM narrating more stuff.

If the above doesn't happen, then what was the point of the worldbuilding?

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If the above doesn't happen then what's the point of playing?

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As a player: to make choices that will express one's character and shape the outcome of whatever it is that is at stake in play. As a GM: to work with the players to establish whatever it is that is at stake in play, and then push the players (and thereby their PCs) in respect of it.

Lanefan said:

That worldbuilding will have consequences in play, e.g. making it impossible to find a sage in a town that has none, is not in question.

What's in question is why this could ever possibly be seen as a bad thing...except by players who dislike not always getting what they want

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Some people would rather have outcomes be determined by action resolution rather than dictated by the GM's hitherto-unrevealed and unilateral framing. I don't see how that is so hard to understand.

Lanefan said:

In real life, if I come into a town I've never been to before and look around for a shop selling crystals and incense, it's impossible for me to find one there if there isn't one there to find. Same is true in a game world

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Who do you think disagrees with this? Obviously if there is no shop, then no shop can be found.

What we're discussing is how it might be established, as part of the preparation for and play of a RPG, that there is or isn't a shop.

Lanefan said:

The GM still has to set the table, as it were, to give the players something to interact with even just on a scene-by-scene level; and the underlying action-resolution-narration-reaction cycle doesn't change.

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You have participated extensively in the other worldbuilding thread. In that thread you've read the account of the bazaar- and-feather scene; and taken part in a lot of discussions about it.

Now recall how you and some other posters have said that you would handle it - include how you have been critical of the idea of opening the game with the PCs at the bazaar and an angel feather being offered for sale.

The fact that the technique is something you're critical of seems to suggest that it is not the same as what is involved in worldbuilding.

Lanefan said:

if there's no sage, there's no sage - and that the GM has determined this ahead of time rather than it being determined on the fly by success or failure on an action declaration is irrelevant to the immedaite here-and-now result.

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If the orc kills the PC, and the GM has decided ahead of tiem that this is what will happen, that mode of decision-making is irrelevant to the here-and-now result. Nevertheless, many RPGers think it matters to the play of the game whether the combat is resolved via the standard mechanics, or by the GM deciding the outcome in advance.

Lanefan said:

It IS relevant, however, to the long-term overall results: the population and distribution of sages isn't left to the whim of cumulative here-and-now random chance.

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Action declarations aren't normally made on a whim - they pertain to the play of the game.

But if the players thing that the presence of a sage is plausible (and if they didn't, they wouldn't have their PCs try and find one), then that seems to settle the question of verisimilitude. Doesn't it?

Lanefan said:

Which means no more published settings or even shared settings, then, if every setting is supposed to be uniquely built and tailored for the particular group of players/PCs being run at that time.

And how on earth would this work with any sort of shared "organized play" e.g. RPGA in the past or AL now, where characters can be and frequently are taken from one table to another? I ask because if you want your game genre to become at all successful then like it or not it'll have to be able to support this sort of thing.

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Given that there are no shortage of players who prefer APs to "story now", I don't think that published/shared settings are under any sort of threat!

Given that it is central to "story now" that there is no "the story", it doesn't naturally lend itself to tournament/convention-type play, although I have played in convention games that approximate to it: normally the first session is used for the players to establish their feel for the PCs while the GM sets the scene; and the second session is the crunch.

Lanefan said:

Without knowledge of what's around them beyond just the framed scene the players have no information on which to base...anything.

At campaign start you frame me in a market in downtown Karnos; you provide all sorts of detail about what I can see including that there's a merchant here selling feathers. For that immediate scene, that's fine. But by no means is it all I need.

Where is Karnos? What is Karnos - a mining town, a capital city, a village in the hinterlands, a seaport? What lives here? Who rules here, and how, and why, and for how long? Is this a pirate town, a farming town, a military town? Are thieves and muggers a known and frequent risk, or is the town generally safe? What's the weather doing (beyond your saying in the framing that it's a warm sunny day) - is it likely to rain later? Is there a drought? What's around Karnos - desert, forest, farms, mountains? What modes of transport are available beyond just foot, should I not find what I want here in Karnos and decide to try elsewhere? Are there any unusual local customs or modes of dress etc. that I need to be aware of? Etc., and I haven't even got to nation-region-world-astronomy questions yet.

If much of this wasn't provided ahead of time (i.e. this part of the world wasn't built) then I - as would, I suspect, many players - would be asking most of these questions before I ever get around to declaring an action! Even if the questions don't directly inform my action declaration right now they'll inform my general approach later; and very little of this is stuff players should be expected to just make up on their own

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If this is not already obvious - for instance, if the game is "generic fantasy" then the answer to the questions about transport are horses, carts/wagons, and, if a port town, boats/ships - then if it is just colour someone at the table can make something up, and if it matters then checks can be declared and resolved.

Here's an actual play example (sci-fi, not fantasy):


That's just one example.

Lanefan said:

What I can and will dispute is that this sort of play can provide a campaign that is and remains sustainable for the long term (by which I mean anything beyond just a few sessions), without a ridiculous amount of work probably done by the GM to record everything about the setting that comes up in play so as to be consistent should it ever be encountered again. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's game logs - those that we've seen - are exhaustive in their mechanical detail as well as their events recording and probably do give enough info to provide at least some long-term consistency...and in this I maintain that he's so unusual as to possibly be unique. (that's supposed to be a compliment, in case you're wondering!)

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I dispute that it can continue to do so over time, as things get forgotten or numbers/time/distance/locations shift or morph in ways they shouldn't or things get skipped between scenes that end up needing to be retconned.

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Happy as I am to be flattered, frankly I think you're exaggerating in both respects. Keeping track of the events of play is not that hard; and to the extent that it is, I don't think worldbuilding GMs are going to do any better a job of it.

AbdulAlhazred said:

if the players want to ramify their activities into a greatly complex plotline, say where they start dealing with LOTS of NPCs and complex plans and etc. then I'm going to make the PLAYERS start to keep all that straight.

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I've attached the chart that one of my players maintained for our RM OA game, in pretty much its final state (after about 10 years of play).

Lanefan said:

I completely agree about putting lots of good stuff on this side of the mountains. Unfortunately that doesn't mean the players are going to have their PCs stay there.

A further complication is that the DM or players might later want to run or play an adventure or series in a setting not provided on this side of the mountains...which is exactly what happened to me in my current game: my idea going in was that most if not all the adventuring would happen west of a mighty range of mountains, but in my worldbuilding I somewhat foolishly didn't put any large deserts west of said mountains and then some years later came up with ideas for a series of adventures that were set - you guessed it - in a large desert.

We - as in the players and I - made it work, but it took some contrivance.

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How do you see this example as relating to the thread topic?

To me, it seems broadly consistent with the OP claim.

TheSword said:

No Myth vs Some Prep : I suspect this is a whole different argument than the one the original poster and article refers to. It sounds like the improv theatre equivalent to an adventure. I don’t doubt from the examples give by Pemerton it can work for some groups. Probably isn’t my cup of tea but I can see a lot of advantages.

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This is not a genuine contrast.

Consider the Star Wars example linked to in this blog: that GM needed some sort of stats for TIE fighters. That's prep.

When I turn up intendeding to run 4e, I bring my MMs/MV with me, or some stats for NPCs/monsters that I've written up. Because 4e likes maps for combat resolution, I'll often have some maps too.

When I turned up to run Traveller, I had some pre-rolled planets ready to drop in. (Though, as per a post not far upthread, I rolled the starting world during the session, just as the players rolled their PCs.)

When I run Burning Wheel or Cortex+ Heroic, I will write up some NPCs/creatures, because neither of these systems has a MM/MV like 4e does. (Though for Cortex+ Heroic, I have also used MHRP statblocks - for instance, the drow the PCs in my campaign fought were all second-tier supervillains statted up in the MHRP Civil War volume.)

"No Myth" isn't no prep. It's about how that prep is used, what it's for, and how the shared fiction is established. The blog sets out the key elements of the approach:


As far as this thread is concerned, there is no significant difference between that list and what Eero Tuovinen has called "the standard narrativistic model". One of the systems that Eero refers to as exemplifying what he is talking about is Dogs in the Vineyard. That is not a "no prep" system. It's not "no backstory", either - but as the rulebook for DitV explains, the GM is expected to reveal the backstory as an element of framing (under the heading "Actively Reveal the Town in Play", pp 137-38 ):


This game (DitV) is also, as best I know, has the first clear statement of the tehcnique say "yes" or roll the dice, which is included in the summary of "no myth" techniques.

Now that's not to say that we can't talk about different styles of "story now" or "no myth" RPGing - [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is a poster on these boards who (in my view) is able to articulate with some subtlety the difference between the sort of "scene framing" approach I prefer (and that is what Eero Tuovinen and the "no myth" blogger have in mind) and the PbtA approach found (obviously) in Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, etc - which emphasises the scene less, and hence discrete consequences less, and makes following the fiction really closely more important (especially on the GM side, I think).

But in the context of this thread, I think those differences are not important. In this thread, it's probably enough to make the following point:

Say "yes" or roll the dice is not consistent with traditional, GM-authored worldbuilding for an RPG - because that sort of worldbuidling sometimes leads to the GM saying "no" (perhaps concealing the reason for this with a die roll, like a Perception check or whatever, in which - in fact - nothing is at stake, because there's no secret door, or whatever, there to be found).

Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s not a message. That’s a dissertation! Then to follow it up with a second post then a third almost as long as the third?

When someone posts like that, I don’t believe it shows any interest in other points of view. In May be full of really interesting stuff but I’ll never know.

In short.
TLDR

TheSword said:

Ah that makes sense. So by that token you are preparing only what you are likely to need because the party are likely to enter the temple of the death god and see his statue. You wouldn’t then need to plan the god of the harvest, the god of war or the god of watery depths. Then you’re adding mysterious hooks that can be dropped into the campaign later on creating the illusion of depth. Which hooks you pick up and follow can depend entirely on how you feel. I am in total agreement that’s an excellent way to prep.

I don’t get the impression that is the type of world building the original article is railing against. The author objects to fantasy writers effectively writing a campaign setting guide before they start on the meat and bones of the adventure. Others are arguing for comprehensive world building first just in case the campaign goes in that direction. That’s just my impression.

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Sorry, I started to answer this yesterday and the Internet gods disagreed...

Its not bad commentary at all, but you have to be careful to look at a fair representation of Story Now and No Myth techniques. The problem with the analysis I see from the 'worldbuilder' side of the debate is they view game mechanics, narrative processes, etc. through the lens of the DM-driven and centered concept of play. The value system being used in this analysis may be fine for that technique, but it isn't valid when applied to a standard narrative model game. It just doesn't produce a sensible analysis because it misrepresents the FUNCTION of the different elements of play.

In the GM-centered pre-prepared kind of "walk through the GM's story/world and tell what happens" there's certainly (at least the possibility of, I don't want to taint this with talk of degenerate examples) a back-and-forth in terms of the direction the story takes. HOWEVER, the function of the material that the GM generates beforehand is largely dramatic in nature. It is the basis upon which a tale is unfurled.

For example: My sister, [MENTION=2093]Gilladian[/MENTION], who is perfectly fine GM and runs very nice fun games, and I talked about the elements of an adventure the other day. So we came up with a number of ideas based on her explanation of what was happening in the campaign and who the characters are. The upshot is she came up with an outline of an adventure. It has plot elements of various kinds, hooks, some possible alternative ways that the PCs could get the information they need to proceed from A, to B, to C. I'd say its not radically different from Phandelver, or any of the PF APs that Paizo puts out, at least in general concept (obviously its not fleshed out in that kind of level of detail).

The point is, this is a reasonable standard approach concept of how you run a campaign. The GM makes up NPCs, situations, history (there's a bunch of history involved in her scenario), politics, monsters, locations, etc. What the adventure is ABOUT is based on her ideas of how the campaign world works, plus what would be interesting to the players and engage the PCs. How it can play out, what the parameters are, and how the story will evolve are all largely determined ahead of time by the GM.

So, in this kind of play, clues, narrative positioning, the actions of NPCs, etc. are all fundamentally oriented around making the basic 'path' of the adventure be a natural consequence. Its a structure, designed to deliver a story. There's of course a wide range of possible outcomes, and the players COULD abandon the thing halfway, kill the princess and steal the McGuffin for themselves, etc. Still, these aren't likely or preferred outcomes, and my guess is that GM 'force' (or maybe more likely some social pressure) will be employed, along with the existing above-mentioned narrative structure, to 'keep it on the rails' more-or-less. If the players REALLY decide to take it in some other direction, Gilladian will go with it, I know she's not one of these rigid GMs that HAS to stick to the established path, and the path is ALREADY likely what the PCs will do, but still, the various elements of the adventure exist fundamentally to create this 'yellow brick road' to follow.

One might even call this 'Wizard of Oz Gaming', the adventure is a yellow brick road that leads to 'Oz'. Along the way there are lions, tin men, scarecrows, witches, etc. While each of these elements could in theory lead away from the yellow brick road, in fact they each reinforce the story line and propel it forward to its designated ending.

When you try to analyze No Myth Story Now games using the toolset of 'Wizard of Oz Gaming' you run into some problems. In Story Now the various situations aren't intended to LEAD anywhere at all. There's no direction. Its true that this might seem to inhibit things like foreshadowing (what would you foreshadow, particularly in No Myth!). However, we DO know a lot. Just as in my sister's campaign, we know about the characters. They're well-drawn and have fairly discernible agendas, interests, and personality. So we CAN make some sorts of predictions! We CAN foreshadow. Could not [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] do that in the Cortex+ Heroic game where the PC is trying to save his brother from the Balrog? I mean, there's plenty of things that are established here that can leverage that. And just as in a pre-arranged WoOG adventure path, you can drop as many of these things as you need, and you don't HAVE to use them all!

Anyway, there's plenty of other things you ARE doing in Story Now. You could certainly construct the story The Wizard of Oz in a sort of Story Now fashion. I mean, the main character has a very definite goal, creating a straightforward pathway to that goal, putting some obstacles/complications along it, etc. This could evolve quite easily. In fact it represents rather the simplest and most basic form of narrative that could evolve, just as it is the simplest and most basic AP that you could create ahead of time. The difference is, from the start of playing it, there's no specific 'Emerald City', its not an adventure on 'rails' to a known endpoint. The Good Witch Glenda might put the character onto the yellow brick road at the start, but it would be quite natural for various challenges to the character's ideas and values to lead away from that path. The path isn't there to serve as a road to keep the adventure going on, it is there to serve as an element in stakes setting (IE "you can follow this easy path and maybe get home, OR you can save your little dog Toto!") (that would be a very simplistic one, but workable).

Celebrim said:

Since pemerton and I stopped talking over this very point, I don't feel its fair to him to continue to debate it. But after like the fifth thread where he described drawing a dungeon and stocking it and backgrounding it, and then described his play as some sort of revolutionary 'no myth' because in the course of play he invented one new element he hadn't fully detailed before, I decided I'd had enough.

I have no desire to argue over your personal experience. I'm glad whatever new approaches you've adopted have led to success for your group. Although I will say "all the stories drive by players backgrounds" doesn't in and of itself mean you are playing no myth, it just means you've given your players agency to tell the stories that they want to experience. And you can do that within a 'no myth' framework on in a 'low myth' or 'high myth' classical sandbox.

'No myth' literally means that the GM does not decide anything before he starts play, and on the fly changes things based on the direction of play. All myth is created through play. It certainly is a tangibly different feel, I'll grant you that. What it actually does is subtly different shift in the table's aesthetics of play. When you mention "mysteries need prep", you are actually wrong. You can do a 'no myth' mystery. Heck, I can do a 'no myth' mystery (although in point of fact, I never do). What is actually going on in my opinion behind that statement is that you have certain aesthetic expectations about a mystery plot that you at some level realize that 'no myth' play would invalidate. I encourage you, even if you disagree with me, to keep that statement in mind as you go forward with your 'no myth' play.

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I feel that you are creating a Straw Man sort of idea of No Myth to an extent. I mean, look, nobody literally sits down at a table with 5 other people and says "OK, we're playing an RPG, around you is nothing, make it all up!" It just isn't workable and nobody wants to do THAT. A game system has to be employed to make an RPG for example. So that has to be selected somehow. Even if the GM does that it is effectively table consensus, right? "Hey, I want to run a 4e D&D campaign, wanna play?" Something like that. Now we have already, just by that decision, gone far beyond the 'Straw Man' version of No Myth. 4e comes with a very well-established milieu, even if its open enough to allow for the world itself to contain most anything. I would still call this No Myth, there are no absolute established facts about who the PCs are, where they are, their situations, etc. The pallet exists from which to paint much of this, and we certainly have established genre, but that still stands in stark contrast to what happens when someone pulls out FR or their own homebrew and sticks a pin in the map and says "You find yourselves at the front gates of the town of Ambrose..." or whatever. Now, maybe there's some other term for when this doesn't happen, but I think 'No Myth' is a reasonable one and is probably what most people mean when they say they are using that technique.

I don’t really know why no-myth is being drawn into the discussion (other than as part of some weird historical cosmic battle.)

The original article isn’t regarding No-myth. There doesn’t seem to be any debate over whether some prep is needed. It’s just a question of how much.

Ovinomancer said:

Um, no, you're kinda, pretty far off the mark. The structure of clocks and how actions interact with them isn't like a SC. You could using something like an SC and not use clocks, but it's not the same at all.

Clocks are used to track potential events. They are specific. If I set a clock for 'Alarm is raised' then, if that clock fills, the alarm is raised, no matter what action failure caused it to fill. This differs from SCs in that the situation in an SC adapts according to the actions taken. Clocks just are. They can be long term, short term, personal, situation dependent, etc.

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OK, I'm kind of commenting as I read...

I don't follow you here. If the 'Alarm is Raised' clock is filled, then there is a very definite change in the fictional positioning. Now, it may be true that not every clock filling is an end state of the 'challenge' which is in progress, but it seems to me that in your example the alarm being raised is PRETTY MUCH failure!

Still, I see that you HAVE raised a distinction in that clocks filling don't represent, absolutely, end states, they could simply be triggers for changes in the narrative positioning. I guess, then, my question is how does the positioning evolve on a per-check basis? This is IMHO the core concept of 4e SCs, that for EVERY check made, the fiction HAS to evolve.

Anyway, reading on...

In the case above, for instance, the 'success' clock had 4 tick and the 'fail' clock had 6. That's inverted from the SC concept. Further, I could have added even more clocks, like 'the package leaves the building' and set that at a 10 clock to set an overall pressure on the entire score, so 1 success clock and 1 small fail clock isn't the 'usual'.

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OK, I obviously haven't played this game, so far be it from me to try to tell you how it works!

Still, it seems to me that the 2 clock setup you used in your original example was fairly 'natural' and it seemed telling to me that you chose that formulation. Does an additional clock make that much difference? I mean, couldn't you simply use the 'package leaves the building' clock? If the alarm goes off, then certainly this is a likely event! See what I'm saying?

I just think of it in terms of an SC, and if I formulate it such that the 2 major end states of the challenge are "the PCs get the package" and "the PCs cannot get the package, it leaves" then we have the essence of the challenge in a '2 clock form' effectively, do we not? Now, I accept that intermediate fiction won't have additional clocks to rely on, but 4e's three failures provides a pretty ready mechanism there. If you get to 2 failures while still fictionally outside the warehouse then "the alarm is raised". If you make it in through the window (which would clearly generate some number of successes) then failures at that point might represent some other consequence.

Again, the basic concept seems like it maps pretty well, doesn't it?

Another example, same game, is that the gang is currently almost at war with one of the neighborhoods. That conflict is currently using a 8 segment clock where the neighborhood get 1 segment filled every downtime phase to represent their actions against the gang, and the gang can take downtime actions (or declare a score) against that clock to remove segments. This isn't a skill roll check, but a fortune mechanic check in both directions. If the clock fills, the neighborhood's goal is to bring the heat onto the gang and they'll gain a wanted level (the neighborhood has hired a barrister to work the courts against the gang). If it empties, it's empty and will start refilling. If the gang declares a score, they can eliminate the clock, but the outcome may be outright war or even a settling of difference depending on the target and outcome of the score.

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OK, so this is a rather different use. Its not a bad idea that some of the same terminology and, presumably, mechanical processes of the game can apply to both. In 4e you might use a long-running SC for this, but that is a fairly unexplored concept within the mechanics of the game, and does have some differences in that SCs aren't intended to be perpetually ongoing. You could use a disease track, which is basically a BitD 'clock', but again this isn't really something you could fairly call explored within 4e, nor is it closely related to the SC mechanic.

I guess then the only real question here is, how does the commonality of the clock mechanic between this 'status' situation vs an 'action' situation like the warehouse work out in terms of BitD mechanics? I'm curious how effectively this mechanical symmetry is leveraged.

Long and short, the clocks are a tool for the GM to use to put pressure on situations or to track long term events. They aren't SC's, and how a given scene of a score plays out may be more or less like an SC in 4e. Honestly, I think they may have similar outcomes, but the approach and intent in play is different. There's also the problem that checks in Blades have variable outcomes, so you may be able to tick more than one clock at a time, or may tick a clock hugely in one go. A four clock can be completely filled in one resolution by a critical success or one with a great effect.

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Well, 4e does handle this a BIT differently. You CAN grant several successes based on either an extraordinary result (IE a crit) or in response to a resource expenditure by the player (spend an AP or an HS, or a Daily for example). There are other mechanics that serve a similar purpose, like advantages and secondary skill use/Aid Another. Those are a bit different in detail though, granted.

In some sense though I feel like this actually DEVALUES the mechanism, as one of the strongest points of the SC mechanism is that it tells you 'how much is enough' in order to drive to the endpoint of the plot of the SC. If each success could potentially do that, you wouldn't know anymore, the GM is then thrust back into the position of eyeballing it.

However, I think the key point is really that, from what you're saying, fictional position only changes with the filling of a clock, so clocks fall in a level of granularity below a single success of a 4e SC, at least potentially (this might not always be true). So, you might consider the advantage in this mechanism to be more in terms of being able to choose how significant something is. The equivalent choice in 4e would be to frame something as a single SC or as multiple SCs, each of which represents an incremental level of progress to an overall story goal.

Actions are declared by the player and then the GM decides the position - desperate, risky, or controlled - and the effect - limited, normal, great. The player can then modify or change actions if they don't like the situation. If the player rolls, then the result is 1-3 failure, 4-5 succeed with complication, 6 success, more than one 6 critical (you look at the highest die roll in the pool). Desperate actions have bad failures and complications, controlled have mild failures and complications. Limited effect means you get part of what you want, great means you get even more than what you wanted, criticals can go super-awesome levels of impact. Effect is set by the DM by the action and situation, and then modified by the difference in tier of the gang and the target (a tier I gang going against a tier II target is down one level of effectiveness). This means that actions can have outsized impacts on clocks, as the number of segments filled is tied to the position and effect. A desperate failure may fill 4 or so segments, while a controlled failure would fill but 1. A critical success on an great effect might fill more than 5 segments on a clock. So, a clock isn't the same as the number of successes or failures in an SC at all.

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Well, obviously there are different ways of looking at these things. I think each of the two mechanisms cover the same sort of concept space in slightly different ways.

Putting on my game designer's hat: In my own post-4e games variable level of success has emerged as a standard feature. I haven't used that to dictate more or less sucesses/failures in SCs, but that's mainly because those scales are fairly granular. Now, I suppose SCs could accomodate a more formal mechanism of 'position' and 'effect', but that is generally established within the framing of the SC, so the GM constructs the parameters of the thing and the fictional situation mostly dictates how risky an action is, for example, and how drastic its effects might be.

I'm sure clocks work. I'm not sure I see them as a vast advancement over the SC mechanism. There appear to be some strengths and weaknesses to each, and they do largely cover a lot of the same ground, with the exception of 'status' type situations which 4e has a different mechanism for.

I think part of the difference here too is the basic assumptions of the two games. 4e isn't generally a game where you focus on ongoing relationships between the party and other groups in quite the same way that BitD does. You'd be more likely in a 4e game (or my games) to resolve an SC and that element would become relatively fixed from then on, unless the party did something to radically change the situation. So a 'status clock' isn't really something that 4e NEEDs that much, it just isn't a focus of the game.

So I think its cool that BitD is able to meet the status need with essentially the same mechanism as is used in 'challenge resolution', and I can see how it casts relationship management into a sort of ongoing challenge/struggle/task. That's cool! Anyway, I certainly accept your "they are not the same", though I do still think there are quite strong parallels.

Lanefan said:

Without knowledge of what's around them beyond just the framed scene the players have no information on which to base...anything.

At campaign start you frame me in a market in downtown Karnos; you provide all sorts of detail about what I can see including that there's a merchant here selling feathers. For that immediate scene, that's fine. But by no means is it all I need.

Where is Karnos? What is Karnos - a mining town, a capital city, a village in the hinterlands, a seaport? What lives here? Who rules here, and how, and why, and for how long? Is this a pirate town, a farming town, a military town? Are thieves and muggers a known and frequent risk, or is the town generally safe? What's the weather doing (beyond your saying in the framing that it's a warm sunny day) - is it likely to rain later? Is there a drought? What's around Karnos - desert, forest, farms, mountains? What modes of transport are available beyond just foot, should I not find what I want here in Karnos and decide to try elsewhere? Are there any unusual local customs or modes of dress etc. that I need to be aware of? Etc., and I haven't even got to nation-region-world-astronomy questions yet.

If much of this wasn't provided ahead of time (i.e. this part of the world wasn't built) then I - as would, I suspect, many players - would be asking most of these questions before I ever get around to declaring an action! Even if the questions don't directly inform my action declaration right now they'll inform my general approach later; and very little of this is stuff players should be expected to just make up on their own (and if they do then the GM has to be scribbling like a madman to record all of it in the interests of future consistency - why not just do this work beforehand when you've time to relax and think it through?)

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THIS is what I question strongly, amongst a few other things. I started GMing in 1976 or so, and this experience has never really happened to me. I mean, sure players have asked a question or two about where they are and what's going on, they have to do that, but the idea that they need a thorough briefing on the economics, politics, and social structure of the place they happen to be starting at BEFORE THEY CAN DO ANYTHING???!!!! No player in all the 42 years of GMing I've experienced has ever demanded or even thought of asking for that. I don't believe it happens at all. I mean, I don't want to get into a silly debate about it, I'll accept that YOU do it, but I think you are almost unique. I can't say 'nobody else in the world is like you', but if even 10% of gamers were, then I'd have run into it many times, as I've gamed with easily 300 or more different people enough to have some idea of how they game.

The players don't get to write their own adventures; it's on the DM to provide those, even when the players decide to head for the mountains just to see what's there. The players, however, are now driving the overall story; and the DM is in react mode.

Lanefan

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I think there is a whole 'level' to player driving of story that you've not reached. In a really Story Now kind of scenario the very nature of what the story is 'about' is derived from a combination of background, possibly declared statements/interests, and PC action declarations. Its not 'steering' the game, it is establishing WHOLE CLOTH what it is about and what it entails.

(As an aside, this may not be strictly true if the game system itself is tightly focused on a specific sort of question, theme, or milieu that would probably be described as 'niche'. However, those sorts of game systems are usually a distinct preference choice which is intended to establish the central questions of play in that game, and thus must of necessity be largely a question of player interest. So if you play DitV, you pretty much know what the game is about, although individual players can still focus somewhat on specifics, but if you play 4e D&D, then things are likely pretty wide-open in Story Now).

AbdulAlhazred said:

OK, I'm kind of commenting as I read...

I don't follow you here. If the 'Alarm is Raised' clock is filled, then there is a very definite change in the fictional positioning. Now, it may be true that not every clock filling is an end state of the 'challenge' which is in progress, but it seems to me that in your example the alarm being raised is PRETTY MUCH failure!

Still, I see that you HAVE raised a distinction in that clocks filling don't represent, absolutely, end states, they could simply be triggers for changes in the narrative positioning. I guess, then, my question is how does the positioning evolve on a per-check basis? This is IMHO the core concept of 4e SCs, that for EVERY check made, the fiction HAS to evolve.

Anyway, reading on...


OK, I obviously haven't played this game, so far be it from me to try to tell you how it works!

Still, it seems to me that the 2 clock setup you used in your original example was fairly 'natural' and it seemed telling to me that you chose that formulation. Does an additional clock make that much difference? I mean, couldn't you simply use the 'package leaves the building' clock? If the alarm goes off, then certainly this is a likely event! See what I'm saying?

I just think of it in terms of an SC, and if I formulate it such that the 2 major end states of the challenge are "the PCs get the package" and "the PCs cannot get the package, it leaves" then we have the essence of the challenge in a '2 clock form' effectively, do we not? Now, I accept that intermediate fiction won't have additional clocks to rely on, but 4e's three failures provides a pretty ready mechanism there. If you get to 2 failures while still fictionally outside the warehouse then "the alarm is raised". If you make it in through the window (which would clearly generate some number of successes) then failures at that point might represent some other consequence.

Again, the basic concept seems like it maps pretty well, doesn't it?


OK, so this is a rather different use. Its not a bad idea that some of the same terminology and, presumably, mechanical processes of the game can apply to both. In 4e you might use a long-running SC for this, but that is a fairly unexplored concept within the mechanics of the game, and does have some differences in that SCs aren't intended to be perpetually ongoing. You could use a disease track, which is basically a BitD 'clock', but again this isn't really something you could fairly call explored within 4e, nor is it closely related to the SC mechanic.

I guess then the only real question here is, how does the commonality of the clock mechanic between this 'status' situation vs an 'action' situation like the warehouse work out in terms of BitD mechanics? I'm curious how effectively this mechanical symmetry is leveraged.


Well, 4e does handle this a BIT differently. You CAN grant several successes based on either an extraordinary result (IE a crit) or in response to a resource expenditure by the player (spend an AP or an HS, or a Daily for example). There are other mechanics that serve a similar purpose, like advantages and secondary skill use/Aid Another. Those are a bit different in detail though, granted.

In some sense though I feel like this actually DEVALUES the mechanism, as one of the strongest points of the SC mechanism is that it tells you 'how much is enough' in order to drive to the endpoint of the plot of the SC. If each success could potentially do that, you wouldn't know anymore, the GM is then thrust back into the position of eyeballing it.

However, I think the key point is really that, from what you're saying, fictional position only changes with the filling of a clock, so clocks fall in a level of granularity below a single success of a 4e SC, at least potentially (this might not always be true). So, you might consider the advantage in this mechanism to be more in terms of being able to choose how significant something is. The equivalent choice in 4e would be to frame something as a single SC or as multiple SCs, each of which represents an incremental level of progress to an overall story goal.



Well, obviously there are different ways of looking at these things. I think each of the two mechanisms cover the same sort of concept space in slightly different ways.

Putting on my game designer's hat: In my own post-4e games variable level of success has emerged as a standard feature. I haven't used that to dictate more or less sucesses/failures in SCs, but that's mainly because those scales are fairly granular. Now, I suppose SCs could accomodate a more formal mechanism of 'position' and 'effect', but that is generally established within the framing of the SC, so the GM constructs the parameters of the thing and the fictional situation mostly dictates how risky an action is, for example, and how drastic its effects might be.

I'm sure clocks work. I'm not sure I see them as a vast advancement over the SC mechanism. There appear to be some strengths and weaknesses to each, and they do largely cover a lot of the same ground, with the exception of 'status' type situations which 4e has a different mechanism for.

I think part of the difference here too is the basic assumptions of the two games. 4e isn't generally a game where you focus on ongoing relationships between the party and other groups in quite the same way that BitD does. You'd be more likely in a 4e game (or my games) to resolve an SC and that element would become relatively fixed from then on, unless the party did something to radically change the situation. So a 'status clock' isn't really something that 4e NEEDs that much, it just isn't a focus of the game.

So I think its cool that BitD is able to meet the status need with essentially the same mechanism as is used in 'challenge resolution', and I can see how it casts relationship management into a sort of ongoing challenge/struggle/task. That's cool! Anyway, I certainly accept your "they are not the same", though I do still think there are quite strong

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Dude, I just said I loved clocks and you've spent quite a lot of effort trying to make sure everyone knows that skill challenges are just as good. Okay? You win? SCs are just as good?