[MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION], again I'm responding only to the bits where I think we have a difference of opinion that is worth exploring in the context of this thread.
That sort of "puzzle" can happen in a localized and confined room of a dungeon or in a giant player sandbox as they encounter an ambassador to a neighbouring kingdom or meet the Queen's royal advisory or even just bump into a pie merchant with curiously large and cheap pies.
I'm going to stick to the ambassador/queen example, not because the pie merchant one is irrelevant but I have no idea at this stage how to think about it or where to go with it.
In G3, crucial to the whole rationale and playability of the Queen Frupy episode is that the players have a relatively clear pathway to congitive access to what is going on. Some of this is metagame and independent of the actual episode of play - they know that this is a D&D dungeon, that it's inhabitants are probably hostile to the PCs, etc; but also that dungeons often have quirky inhabitants, that there are NPC reaction tables, etc. Some of it is connected to the actual play of the game - their are serving maids whom they can capture and interrogate in a relatively discrete episdoe of interaction (because of the convention that dungeon inhabitants, by default, stick to their rooms); they have scyring devices they can use on the Queen; etc.
In the "living, breathing" example all this breaks down. The metagame conventions are absent. The discrete moments of encounter, in which information might be gathered without huge knock on effects to other aspects of the situation of which the players are ignorant, is lost. The availability of scrying devices may well be absent (eg in D&D these
still tend to have ranges for use that make sense only in dungeoneering play).
This came up in a thread on these boards a few years ago now. (I don't have the link; [MENTION=6794638]MA[/MENTION]nbeaarcat may, as he started an online game in response to it.) Can the PCs persuade the chamberlain to introduce them to the king. The general view of the proponents of a "living, breathing world" was that this was almost inconceivable - the king wouldn't have an audience with just anyone; the chamberlain would have defences agaist scrying and mind control; etc. Now whether the details of those views is correct or not is secondary; the main point is that all these questions have to settled by the GM (either in notes, or - for this sort of thing - more likely on the fly by a mixture of extrapolation and intuition). So the players are no longer engaging with a puzzle that they know is there, and whose parematers they either know, or can relatively easily establish by way of action declarations whose consequences are broadly forseeable. Ratther, the players are utterly dependent on the GM's view of the situation, and choices about what to tell them about it.
That's a real difference.
The game is still driven entirely by the DM telling the players what is going on, which the players interpret through a personal lens.
<snip>
here's the thing about plot... dungeons are a plot. Each room in a dungeon is a scene. And encounter or moment where something happens.
<snip>
The dungeon map is basically a flowchart of the plot
I think this is the one point on which I agree with [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION] - a classic dungeon isn't a plot, and the rooms aren't scenes.
A classic dungeon is closer to a gameboard, although it is not identical to one because - unlike, say, a chess or monopoly board - it also establishes content for a shared fiction, and hence fictional positioning.
But the way in which a classic dungeon resembles a gameboard is that it establishes clear parameters for player moves - "We walk down the corridor until we come to a corner or doorway" - and also clear parameters for the GM's descriptions to the players - so that when the GM says "OK, you proceed for 60' and then come to a T-intersection", the GM isn't just making that up but is reading it from the pre-prepared dungeon map. And there are conventions at work here: the referee tells the players the real distances, even though we might wonder, in the fiction, how good the PCs' ability to estimate those woudl be; and the map is a physical artefact that the players use to help play the game, although it is also has an imaginary correlate which we suppose one of the PCs to be producing in the fiction.
When the players enter a room, the GM frames a scene. Likewise when the PCs move down the corridor, the GM frames a scene - I just provided an example, in which the scene is
having proceeded down the passage for 60', you're now at a T-intersection.
But the room is not itself a scene. We can easily imagine that the first time the PCs come to a room, the scene framing is like this "OK, having succesffuly forced the door open, you see a rectangular room, 20' x 10', with a chest in the middle. What do you do?" And then the second time, some time later in the session or a subsequent session, the PCs might return to the same room and the scene is like this: "OK, you think you've shaken off the pursuing goblins, and you come to the 20' x 10' room that you were heading for by following your map. The chest is still open as you left it, and the false bottom is still removed, and you can see the ladder descending down a narrow shaft about 40' or so."
Those are two different scenes - occurring at different times, with different things at stake, and posing different challenges to the players and their PCs - but both occur in the same room, which (in the GM's notes) might be written up as
20' x 10' rectangle, with a single entrance; there is a chest in the middle of the room, unlocked, with a false bottom concealing a shaft and ladder descending to the second level.
I recognise that various dungeon designers, both amateur and professional, have designed dungeons on a different principle, in which the rooms are scenes in a plot, rather than elements of a gameboard on which the players make their moves; one can see hints of this in Hickman's Pharoah adventures, for intance, and it's become more common since then.
And that is broadly how I run "dungeons" (ie interior encounters) in my 4e game.
But that is a departure from the design principles of something like B2, not a continuation of them.
The point of invoking the real world is that people do what you say is impossible all the time in the real world. It just becomes less of a certainty and more of a gamble.
I'm not ignorant of the fact that people in the real world sometimes succeed in scouting out or learning about dynamic situations.
My point is that, in the real world this involves actual causal processes which are not the same as those that take place in a RPG.
I'll give an example in a field I know well. If I want to learn -in detail (eg for teaching purposes) - what the law is on some particular point, I read hundreds or thousands of pages of primary material; perhaps expert commentary as well; apply interpretive and reasoning methods that I've spent a couple of decades working on; and come up with an understanding. Sometimes that understanding differs from that of some, even all, of the expert commentators (who themselves don't always agree).
In a RPG, if I say that my character wants to run a legal argument (this came up in my 4e campaign), the GM is not going to show me hundreds or thousands of pages of law books for me to read. Nor any expert commentary. The GM is going to give me a 50 to 100 word paraphrase. My only cognitive access to the shared fiction of the gameworld's legal system will be that paraphrase.
And if, having heard that paraphrase, I want to then actually mount my legal argument, the GM (playing the rival NPC lawyer) is not goiing to engage me in hours of dicussion, and then spend hours (playing the magistrate) in arriving at a decision as to what is the correct answer to this quesiton of law.
In RPGing, the question is - is my vision of the fiction, in which a briefly sketched (say, 100 or so words) legal argument is suffiient to persuade a magistrate of the justice of my case, going to prevail? Or is an alternative vision, in which my argument fails, going to prevail? And the actual causal process at work here is not a process of legal reasoning and argumentation; it's a process of collectively establishing a shared vision of the fiction.
It has almost nothing in common with arguing the law (or scouting out an enemy position; or throwing a rock) in real life. It has a lot in common with other processes of establishing shared fictions, like cops and robbers, freeform wargaming, improv acting, etc. Which is not to say that it's identical to them - there are significant differences, both around role allocation and around procedures for establishing changes in the fiction - but those are at least helpful starting points for analysis.
No one tries to explain the agency of a kid playing cops and robbers by comparing it to the agency of a bank robber carrying a tommy gun. They do it by discussing
who gets to decide whether an (imaginary) shot hit or missed. This is the same starting point from which we can understand agency in RPGing.
More skill is required to anticipate the likely variables and overcome them.
Who gets to decide if the skill was enough? In the real world
no one has to decide this. Scouting in the real world is not an episode of writing a fiction.
But in RPGing, someone absolutely has to decide this. Because imaginary people scouting out an imaginary location absolutely is an episode of writing a fiction. In classic dungeoneering, the process whereby this is decided is tolerably clear, becaue the parameters of the shared fiction are very narrow, and the metagame conventions that reinforce those parameters are relatively robust. Players know that, in interrogating Queen Frupy's serving maids, they don't have to worry that they've accidentally upset a powerful wizard who will use some high level spell to crash the whole dungeon in on them.
But in a living, breathing world situation, for all the players know that could be an element of the situation.
the player is in theory exploring the gameworld through the eyes of her PC.
<snip>
i and iii are exactly the same: the person who wants to throw a rock has to first find one.
iv in the game world has a direct reflection in the real world: an un-numbered step wherein you-as-you make your own internal action declaration by deciding to throw a rock.
ii in the real world has to be reflected by another un-numbered element: the game mechanics of whatever dice need to be rolled (if any) to see where/how far the rock goes and what if anything of relevance it might hit.
Your agency as meta-player, perhaps. But your agency as PC is directly connected to the PC's ability to throw rocks.
<snip>
unless the DM is a complete asshat (and for the purposes of these discussions let's ignore those, shall we) the player's agency comes not from meta-concerns but from what her PC does and the choices that PC makes, often in concert with the rest of the party. If the party decides to leave town going south to the seaport instead of east to the mountains or west to where the Orcs are raiding then you've collectively exercised agency over the story to come; and if the DM hasn't designed the seaport yet (or even given it a second thought other than mentioning it in passing) your agency has forced her to do this also.
<snip>
In other words, it's not so much player agency as PC agency.
Seeing a rock on the ground, picking it up and throwing it has almost
nothing in common, as a human activity, with sitting around with my friends and getting everyone to agree that, in a fiction we are collectively establishing, the imaginary "me" is picking up and throwing a rock.
Or to put it another way, I might be an excellent shot putter and yet a poor RPGer; or conversely might be excellent at playing a PC who throws rocks and yet a terrible shot putter.
As far as agency is concerned, I have close to zero interest in the degree of (imaginary) agency my PC - an imaginary person - has. Eg in my BW game, one of the PCs has spent many sessions subject to a domination effect from a dark naga. The PCs has almost know agency. But the player has ample agency, because - having written Beliefs for his character that reflect the fact of his domination - he gets to choose how to play his character, makes action declarations (eg to find a ewer in the room to catch the spilled blood of the possessed mage so he can take it back to his naga master), etc.
In your example of the players deciding that their PCs head to the ocean - is the GM freed to decide that there's no seaport? that the orcs hav sacked and destroyed it before the PCs get there? that there are no boats available for charter? that a blizzard sets in, stopping the PCs from getting there?
And suppose the PCs get there, who decides what interesting things are going on there which the players might then engage with? The players, or the GM? If the GM, in what sense are the players
exercising agency over the story to come, other than establishing that it will happen in a seaport rather than some mountains?
To me, that is a very weak form of agency. Its weakness is evident in some other things you have posted:
flavour can be subdivided further: flavour that has relevance to the PCs now or later (e.g. each day's weather, relevant whenever the PCs are a) outdoors or able to see outdoors, and b) might somehow be affected by it) and flavour that has no relevance to anything other than to help set the scene (e.g. the DM describing a harbour town the PCs are seeing for the first time might mention there's several dozen ships either docked or anchored-off to augment the atmosphere of this being a busy bustling place, even though the PCs are there for a reason completely unrelated to ships at all).
Who decides what is relevant? The players, or the GM? Why is the weather relevant and not just scene-setting, yet the number of ships in the harbour scene-setting and not relevant?
What if one of the players asks (in the voice of his/her PC), "Is one of the ships a merchant vessel from my homeland? Maybe it brings news, or even a parcel for me!"? Who gets to decide whether this is "relevant" - and hence the player gets to participate in a story over which s/he has exercised at least some agency, by kicking it off - or irrelevant.
As best I can tell, your answer is
the GM. As seems to be borne out by the following:
here I can give an in-progress example from one of my own characters in a still-active game.
She is from a Roman-Empire-based culture, and is a fully-accredited citizen of said realm (called Hestia). Over the course of her rather long and world-spanning adventuring career she's come to realize a lot of distasteful things: that much of the world is in dire need of civilizing, Hestian style; that there's far too many bloody barbarians and monsters out there; and that her own Empire's government (a Senate-run republic at the moment, no Emperor for the last century or so) might not be quite up to the task. She's done time in the Legions as a staff mage, and has (perhaps outdated) contacts in various parts of the military.
So some years ago (real time) she decided that her goal after her adventuring career was done would be to get herself a seat on the Senate. But since then she's changed a bit, and come to realize the Senate is but step one: we need to bring the true Empire back, with her or someone like her as Empress.
Realistic? In character, yes.
Achievable? Somewhere between no and extremely unlikely, though she has thought of a series of actions that might get her that Senate seat...she just needs to get the rest of the PCs (both active and inactive - a total of about 30 of them) to go along with her plan.
<snip>
But she's set a goal, and it has nothing to do with anything that's come up in play so far
It seems that your character's ambition could instead be to establish a cattle farm on the hills overlooking the city of Hestia, and yet nothing about the campaign would really have changed. If I am getting that right, I woudn't really consider that an example of
exercising agency over the story.
pemerton said:
As for immersion - it hardly gets more immersive than returing to your ruined tower after lo!, these past 14 years, then looking for the mace you left behind only to discover that your brother was evil all along!
Except I'm not discovering that. I as player have known it all along, as I wrote it into my goals and backstory
No. I didn't say that the discovery was the existence of the tower, or the existence of the brother.
I said the discovery was the
return to the tower - which was the outcome of various episodes of action resolution following the PCs being marooned in the Bright Desert as the outcome of a failed social challenge; and the discovery that the brother was evil all along, which was learned following a failed check upon the return to the tower.
Those things - the return, and the characer of the brother - weren't pre-authored at all. From the player's perspective, the return was a success; the discovery about the brother a failure. From the PC's point of view, the discovery about the brother was nothing short of gutting.
If every possible approach the PCs take to a problem turns out to be the 'right' one, providing they get successful rolls, then they're never truly making meaningful decisions for their characters.
That doesn't seem right at all.
Consider a typical random encounter in a fairly generic module - say, the PCs are travelling through the steppes, and the GM rolls up a nomad encounter. The GM tells the players "As you ride along, on the horizon you see a relatively large group of people, mounted and heading towards you."
The players could choose any of the following options without stepping outside the sphere of 1st ed AD&D action resolution mechanics: they could choose to fight the nomads; they could choose to try and talk to the nomads; they could choose to avoid the nomads.
Any of the above could turn out to be the "right" choice, or the "wrong" choice, depending on dice rolls. If the PCs fight, and roll well, they can earn XP and treasure. If they roll poorly, of course, they might suffer loss of treasure or other resources (eg because they end up having to negoiate a truce, or they have to drink some potions to win the fight, or whatever). If some nomads escape, this may lead to penalties on future reaction checks with nomad encounters, but that will only be a problem if some more of those are rolled.
If the PCs talk, and roll well, they may befriend the nomads and get information. (But perhaps they could have got that anyway, through Speak with Dead.) If the PCs talk, and roll poorly, the situation may turn into a fight they didn't want or they may have to try and evade.
If the PCs try and evade, again whether that works out for them or not may depend on dice rolls. Eg if they try and evade, and the GM's reaction roll suggests that the nomads pursue, and the evasion roll turns out poorly, then the PCs may end up having to fight the nomads but suffering GM-imposed penalties from fatigue (Gygax's DMG leaves such penalties as a matter for GM discretion, although ideas can probably be adapted from the rules for forced marching).
I don't think it therefore follows that the choice to fight, to talk or to evade is meaningless. It's a tactical choice, with implications. It's a strategic choice
within the context of the fiction, as it helps shape the parameters for future interaction with nomads. And it's a significant choice at the more metagame level as well, as it says something about the players and their characters that they prefer to fight (honourably? from ambush?) or talk or hide.
If the sect morphs into one that can be undermined through rumours, or destabilised via bribes, or shattered through religious disputes, depending upon which approach the players take, and they know this, that greatly impacts the immersiveness of that gameworld.
Are you saying this from experience or conjecture?
Unless the players are self-deluded, they know that the "truth" about the sect is established by authorship. They know that someone has to engage in that authorship at some point - that (unlike a sect in the real world) the "truth" about the sect is not the result of actual social and historical processes but rather is the result of someone performing a feat of imagination.
It seems to me that only players very obsessed with the metagame processes - ie unimmersed players - would spend their time at the table worrying about when and how the authorship took place, and in response to what sorts of triggers. In my experience, players who find their PCs and the situation engaging get much more interested in trying to develop a clear picture of the unfolding fiction, thinking about ways that they might interact with it, worrying about the consequences if they poke the bear too hard and provoke unhappy responses, etc.
for many of us, knowing that there is a right approach (or a number of them) and finding ways to achieve it is a rewarding feeling in itself. Making the solution fit the situation, rather than vice-versa, is basic puzzle-solving, and doing so successfully is an achievement.
Part of my contention in the OP is that, once we have a situation like the sect - or the NPC starship in the Traveller thread that I linked to in the post you quoted - there is no
right approach other than the GM's opinion, typically worked out on the fly, as to what it should be. This is because it is simply inconceivable (for instance) that a GM actually has notes that tell us everything about every mayday procedure for every possible circumstance, and has notes that tell us about the personality of every NPC captain and how likely s/he is to stick to some or other interpretation of those procedures, and has an effective mechanic or system for integrating all that stuff into a consistent resolution framework.
As I posted in that other thread and in the post you quoted - in this context,
gathering more information is just a metaphor for
declaring actions that will lead the GM to more fiction. That's one part of RPGing, but not in my view the most fun or most immersive. A game that is basically
that, until eventually the players do the thing that triggers the GM to give the bit of information that will be crucial - and then implementing that solution - doesn't strike me as very gripping. As I think I posted upthread, the first time I encountered this style of RPGing was in 1990. The scenario was a defence of a city from a kobold infiltration/attack. After a couple of sessions we (the players, as our PCs) had captured a kobold and tried to interrogate it - we wanted to learn the location of the kobold headquarters so we could try and infilitrate or assualt it. The GM decalred (clearly on the spot, and without regard to such considerations as the kobolds have low to average intelligence) that the kobold was (for reasons of low intelligence) unable to answer our questions, or draw a map, or show on a map where the headquarters might be. In other words, gathering intelligence from prisoners was not a right solution in the GM's view of the gameworld, and so we had to keep on waiting for the GM to feed us the information that (or the module writer) had prepared.
That was not immersive at all. The mindset of my character was one of incredulity that the kobold couldn't tell us the path whereby it entered the city; the mindset of me, as a player, was that the GM was not interested in having regard to player input into his game. We sacked the GM and started a new game.
pemerton said:
When the dice fall, I get my answer, just as my character knows whether his hopes are realised or dashed. I'm not all up in the metagame headspace of worrying about how this fiction has come to be authored!
Given how many times you've posted how you so dislike fiction coming from pre-determined notes and-or being pre-authored by the DM I really have to challenge that last sentence.
I think you worry about this more than anyone else I've ever encountered.
When I'm posting I'm not playing. When I'm playing, I want to live my character. Of course I can't do that if the GM has already decided what is going to happen (eg, in my example, whether or not there is a knight for me to meet). Then my character's hope would just be a charade from the outset, and I'd be playing a different character. I could have built that character had I wanted to, but I didn't.
I once GMed a game where one player's goal for his PC (Xialath) was to become a magistrate of his city (Rel Astra). That was a recurring focus of play. At first it all went downhill - because the player had built his character without meditation skill (favouring social and perception) skils, he coudn't keep up with the other wizard character's power point recovery. So he used his social skills to make contact with a drug seller and started relying on a highly addictive drug - Hugar - to enhance his power point recovery. Unfortunately for him he became addicted, and spent more and more of his money on Hugar, and was unable to meet his rent when it fell due and so lost his city compound.
After further misadentures, he came to a point where he had to make a choice: a fellow PC had decided to throw in his lot with Vecna (in this campaign, a mage who had been a noble in the Suel Empire, had spent a long time asleep, and had been woken by the PCs and now had is his goal to restore that empire, using the Great Kingdom as his vehicle). He was therefore getting ready to help Vecna conquer Rel Astra for the Great Kingdom, from which the city had broken away centuries before. Would Xialath help him? If so, the successful invaders would ensure that he was awarded a magistracy. Xialath agreed, and so sold out his city to the invaders in return for a position. (He later redeemed himself in some other ways, but that's not relevant for present purposes).
Xialath's player was immersed.
In my experience, both as a player and a GM, I have never encountered a player who feels
less immersed and
less engaged because the events of the game focus on the players' goals and concerns for his/her PC, rather than just on the GM's view of what it is worthwile establishing a shared fiction about.
