What does it mean to "Challenge the Character"?

Celebrim · May 29, 2019

Elfcrusher said:
"...and also roll a saving throw against that fireball for your equipment. Oh, right! You are carrying a small keg of gunpowder, aren't you....?"

Indeed.

The first thing that happens in my campaign world whenever some player that thinks they are clever does the clever and creative thing that countless such players have tried in countless games before him is that NPC's laugh at him.

You see, unlike the player or the player's character, the NPC's have ranks in alchemy and knowledge (history) and so forth, and they know just how incredibly stupid this idea is and how disastrously it has failed in the past. Far from being a novel idea, "firearms" have been invented 3 or 4 times in the past by would be world conquerors (most of them goblins who delight in such things), only to have their efforts end in ridiculous calamity. Indeed, in learned circles, the names of such would be BBEG's are bywords for folly - figures of comedy rather than figures that inspire terror.

One of the central tenants of my campaign world is that the PC's are not more clever than NPC's. Anything that a clever player or PC is likely to think of is likely to be something that some NPC in the 10,000 year written history of the world has also tried. Quite naturally, the learned alchemists of the world have recognized the potential value of explosives and have spent 1000's of years of collective effort researching practical explosives. By the time a player proposes this sort of thing, whole libraries of books researching the problem have been written. And what all that effort has so far discovered is that practical explosives are hard. The most practical explosives known have a brisance equivalent to blackpowder, but a stability and shelf-life slightly on the touchy side of raw nitroglycerine. So you can in fact make a bomb, or a grenade, or a firearm. That's easy, and any master alchemist in a large town in theory could do it (although most of them will refuse to do so because they have an unreasonable attachment to their fingers). What you can't however do is safely store or transport such an item, especially in large enough quantities to supply an army. And if you try, the almost inevitable result is that your stockpile of munitions is of greater threat to you than it is to your enemy. And one wizard on the opposing side with ranged fire spell or a summoned fire elemental, can trigger a chain reaction that will decimate your entire army.

So sure, you can spend a great deal of resources building up an army of musketeers and grenadiers. But don't expect to be the first person who has thought of this idea or for it to turn the game into easy mode. By all means, take some ranks in alchemy and build yourself a bomb or some grenades for your personal use. I will do nothing to stop you. Just don't expect this to be cheating.

Ovinomancer · May 29, 2019

Celebrim said:
Sure. But, on the other hand, I don't expect the DM to decide that no scrolls are available purely on the grounds that a PC wants one. Fortunately, for me this sort of thing isn't usually a problem, as I have no magic shops to speak of and certainly not ones were arbitrary desirable items are available.

Agreed. But I've heard of DMs that get upset at this kind of thing because they don't feel that the PC is intelligent or wise enough to be cautious and resourceful, and as such try to put a gate on those decisions because they claim that they don't think the decision is in character for the PC. Such is the perils of deciding that you have a veto on the player's play of their character - they might as well get up from the table and let you play both sides of the screen.

Yes, this is the iconic example of positive metagaming. Basically, any time playing your character in a straightforward method might derail everyone's fun, the mature player invents a plausible scene that stays mostly true to the character while maintaining everyone's fun. This burden falls equally on all the players, so if the Paladin's player is trying to reach a compromise, then the Thief's player should be as well.

While I agree to some extent, the GM has a responsibility prior to play for making sure that the players have a plausible motivation to work together, and for establishing a suitably compelling hook in the first session. A GM that leaves all the burden on the player's for coming up with why this group will get together and stay together, and leaves it up to the players to hook themselves isn't doing his job as well as he could. Still, many groups just deal with the weakness of the hook by handwaving right past the problem, but for the more thespian minded this can be unsatisfying. Also, I tend to judge a new group by how well they can handle this sort of RP - the group I have the most fond memories of playing with handled the problem of integrating characters with extraordinary gracefulness.

I could point you to one, but I couldn't recommend it. Besides, the concepts are pretty easy. Briefly, as I use them:

Pawn Stance: The player chooses his propositions entirely according to his goals with no consideration of the character's goals.

Author Stance: The player chooses his propositions according to his own goals, but tries to invent a plausible color for why the character's goals concur with his goals.

Actor Stance: The player chooses his propositions according to what he perceives to be the character's goals based on his understanding of the character's knowledge and personality, even when or especially when those goals might conflict with or sacrifice some of the player's goals.

As I see things, "Pawn Stance" represents immature but not wrong play. It's a starting point and for some tables a sufficient stance for fun, and in cases where there is no meaningful difference between player and character goals - surviving a combat for example - there is really no difference between Pawn and Actor stances. Actor stance represents an obvious and intuitive mature form of play, but is not in and of itself a better form of play than Pawn Stance. The trick and what really separates highly skilled RPers from run of the mill ones, is there ability to recognize when Actor Stance if followed blindly will reduce the fun of the group collectively, and to therefore temporarily switch in a collaborative way to Author Stance to promote everyone's collective fun while still staying in character. Thus, the player that says, "But I'm just playing my character" regardless of how dysfunctional what he is proposing is, is really no more mature of a player than the player in Pawn Stance and arguably is probably less fun to play with. Nor is Author Stance inherently superior either, as in my experience a player that stays in Author Stance all the time is just annoying. What is clever and mature for negotiating a tricky table issue becomes saccharine and groan-worthy if employed in continuous or heavy handed manner. You'd be better off just using Pawn Stance and not dragging things out and slowing the pace of play down.

There is also "Director Stance" where the player attempts to achieve goals by playing the metagame rather than the game, such as by altering the fiction rather than making a proposition within the fiction. In most traditional RPGs, "Director Stance" is limited to the GM, but as you may have noted from the thread some participants are advocating for "Director Stance" as a valid stance for the player as well. In some Indy RPG's, the players have limited resources that they can use to gain temporary rights to "Director Stance" in order to further their interests as a player. Indy designers have frequently made the claim implicitly or explicitly that games which allow shared access to the director's chair are inherently more mature and sophisticated than those that don't, so the participants in the thread advocating for "Director Stance" in 5e D&D are basically trying to show how in doing so they are playing a more sophisticated game than those of us that don't. For my part, I've held the position that "Director Stance" isn't inherently more mature than the other stances and that a perquisite for allowing it into a game is in fact having mechanisms for fairly sharing it and limiting access to it. Beyond that, in my own experience with "Director Stance" in the hands of the players, I tend to find as a player that it doesn't live up to the claims made on the packaging. Specifically, my goals as a player tend to be that I want to have the experience of being a character in a great story, and "Director Stance" inherently interferes with that experience in a variety of ways. Games that advocate for "Director Stance" as a tool for the players tend to mistake the production of a transcript for the experience of participating in a story, and at least for me, I find production of a transcript not the same as participating in a story. Instead, I find that a game that focuses on the production of transcript as the primary artifact of play tend to create the experience of collaborative screenplay writing for the players, and not the experience of being in a story. There is an inherent loss of emersion that goes with "Director Stance" because you are being taken out of character, and certain aesthetics of play like Challenge are harmed by the ability to employ deus ex machina on your own behalf. Heck, I'm not even that big of a fan of "Director Stance" in a GM. Every GM needs a little bit of illusionism and stage craft, but if it becomes obvious you are employing it, then it harms the enjoyment of the players.

I understood Director stance to be making choices for the betterment of the fiction, and then retroactively inventing character motivation. You can use fiction authoring authority from within the other stances (pawn being obvious), so that can't be the defining line. In Director stance you choose actions that make for a better story, vice following player or character goals.

Ovinomancer · May 29, 2019

Elfcrusher said:
He's just making a parade-of-horribles argument. Whenever proponents of his style shift from "I just like it this way" to "the other way is wrong", the only way to defend that position as some kind of objective truth is by giving examples of what could theoretically happen in an extreme case.

Dude, you just complained about making points in an unnecessarily disparaging manner. Physician heal thyself!

Celebrim · May 29, 2019

Ovinomancer said:
I understood Director stance to be making choices for the betterment of the fiction, and then retroactively inventing character motivation. You can use fiction authoring authority from within the other stances (pawn being obvious), so that can't be the defining line. In Director stance you choose actions that make for a better story, vice following player or character goals.

As I use the term, that's Author stance.

The difference between Author and Director, is that in Author stance you make propositions which are based on the fictional positioning. In Director stance, you out right declare new fictional positioning. As I define a proposition, it does not let you declare new fictional positioning, but only the intention to perform some action within the capabilities of your character. Declaring new fictional positioning, such as declaring that the guard is your friend Francis, is not a "proposition" but a "call". I call out that the hitherto unidentified guard is my friend Francis through some process of play, and then I propose that I greet him. I could then call out that Francis greets me warmly, but calling that Francis greets me warmly is not a proposition since it isn't about my own character's actions.

I don't understand how you can claim Pawn Stance has fiction authoring authority, or maybe I just don't understand what you mean by that. A proposition does let you author fiction, in that you adjust the fictional position by saying something like, "I strike the goblin with my sword", which then may result after a fortune test in the goblin's death, changing the fiction. But this is different than calling out that the goblin is crushed by a falling rock, which authors the fiction much more directly.

I personally feel that Director stance needs to be split into two different stances, one of which involves advancing player goals and another which involves advancing character goals. I don't think Director's are inherently interested in creating story, or that Director's inherently do create story (much less quality story). A Director Stance can be assumed for the same reason as a Pawn Stance, simply to "win".

UPDATE: The canonical definition of "Director Stance" is:

"The player determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters."

Guest 6801328 · May 29, 2019

Ovinomancer said:
Dude, you just complained about making points in an unnecessarily disparaging manner. Physician heal thyself!

Fair point.

...AND I think there’s a difference between denigrating someone’s playstyle and calling them out for rhetorical tricks.

But I could be gentler in doing so.

Ovinomancer · May 29, 2019

Celebrim said:
As I use the term, that's Author stance.

The difference between Author and Director, is that in Author stance you make propositions which are based on the fictional positioning. In Director stance, you out right declare new fictional positioning. As I define a proposition, it does not let you declare new fictional positioning, but only the intention to perform some action within the capabilities of your character. Declaring new fictional positioning, such as declaring that the guard is your friend Francis, is not a "proposition" but a "call". I call out that the hitherto unidentified guard is my friend Francis through some process of play, and then I propose that I greet him. I could then call out that Francis greets me warmly, but calling that Francis greets me warmly is not a proposition since it isn't about my own character's actions.

I don't understand how you can claim Pawn Stance has fiction authoring authority, or maybe I just don't understand what you mean by that. A proposition does let you author fiction, in that you adjust the fictional position by saying something like, "I strike the goblin with my sword", which then may result after a fortune test in the goblin's death, changing the fiction. But this is different than calling out that the goblin is crushed by a falling rock, which authors the fiction much more directly.

I personally feel that Director stance needs to be split into two different stances, one of which involves advancing player goals and another which involves advancing character goals. I don't think Director's are inherently interested in creating story, or that Director's inherently do create story (much less quality story). A Director Stance can be assumed for the same reason as a Pawn Stance, simply to "win".

UPDATE: The canonical definition of "Director Stance" is:

"The player determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters."

Ah. I'm experiencing that rare moment when a misunderstanding corrected lessens your appreciation. Stance theory, with my now corrected understanding, is much less useful as a tool to analyze play. This is evidenced by the fact that i can play a game with some form of plot point mechanic entirely in pawn stance, except when I use the plot point I'm momentarily in director stance. This discards useful information about actual play motivations for a shallow description of where a move occurs -- within the character ir without.

Celebrim · May 29, 2019

Ovinomancer said:
Ah. I'm experiencing that rare moment when a misunderstanding corrected lessens your appreciation.

I had that experience with pretty much all of The Forge some years ago.

This discards useful information about actual play motivations for a shallow description of where a move occurs -- within the character ir without.

Stance does not directly address motivations for play. In theory GNS as a whole addresses motivations for play, but in my opinion has some huge holes in it. When I address motivations for play, I use the 'aesthetics of play' terminology. Stance only addresses the relationship of the player to the character. In pawn stance, the character is to the player only a playing piece, but the player could still have most any aesthetic of play, including narrative. Director differs only from pawn stance in that the player treats the entire fiction as if it was his character, and doesn't draw a line between the player character and the setting.

At The Forge, director was typically treated as if it was inherently the superior and more mature stance. I tend to treat it as if it was the least useful and least mature stance. After all, if you watch the play of a group of pre-schoolers, they are really only able to play in director stance. As the participants in that play mature, eventually the director stance becomes incapable of meeting their maturing aesthetics of play, and unless they evolve a more mature stance most of them will give up their game of make believe.

Now from the perspective of making Director work, yeah, it probably requires more skill than any other stance. I wouldn't really want to participate in a game that allowed director stance to players that wasn't composed entirely of participants sophisticated enough in their RP to successfully run an RPG as the GM. There is just two much that can go wrong with fiat call outs. I'm interested in playing more with a skilled group, but only because I want to find out whether anything can be achieved with Director that really can't be achieved in other stances. I'm hoping to have some time to go to a Con, but I don't have a lot of hope that a random group of convention players is high skill.

There is also a problem I have with the canonical definition of the Director stance in that unlike the other stances, it doesn't fully address the player's relationship to the character. It notes that there is a difference between the other stances and director in that the other three involve delimiting your character and in some fashion playing within the character with varying degrees of RP primacy, by contrast and Director doesn't do that but treats the whole imagined setting as something available for you to play, but to me you could make a Director stance call and be in any other stance.

For example, you manipulate the setting to meet your goal as a game participant, irrespective of any justification for it. You want the goblin dead, so rocks fall. This mirrors pawn stance where you offer propositions regardless of whether they make the slightest sense from the perspective of the character's knowledge, stated personality, or goals.

Or, you manipulate the setting to meet your goal as a game participant, but you try to put a color of verisimilitude or reasonableness to that manipulation. In other words, you beg for suspension of disbelief which mirrors how you play in Author stance.

Or, you make a call on the setting because you think it is highly realistic, even if in doing so you are potentially thwarting your own goals. For example, you might call that your character has become sick from ingesting polluted water because you legitimately think that is the sort of thing that should happen, and not because it helps you win or gives you some mechanical benefit or makes for a good story. This mirrors playing in Actor stance.

So it's possible Director isn't even a stance at all.

Chaosmancer · May 29, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Exposition is what happens in a narrative that is analogous to what happens in an RPG when there's a knowledge check.

Sort of? But, while dealing with different types of exposition is important in a novel I don't know what that has to do with players rolling knowledge checks in a DnD game.

I don't see the connection you are trying to draw here. It feels like talking about athletics checks and you mentioning how Nintendo designed Mario's jump. Yeah, they might be analogous, but it doesn't seem to apply to the discussion.

iserith said:
"I'm just not sure if there's a point in continuing this conversation... allow me to continue it."

Sorry, I try not to ignore people's points. So, I end up continuing to post and talk. But, I am tired of retreading the same ground over and over, so I'm going to skip.

iserith said:
Players can know whatever they want and establish that their characters think whatever they want. And to be clear, I do understand your claims. It's just that they are not derived from a reading of this game. There's simply no support in this game for your position. Which is not to say you shouldn't play that way. It's just a position that's better suited for a different game.

But you seem to think that "different game" is something like DnD 3.5 or ADnD, or ODnD... none of which had specific rules language about this either. But, the same rules and assumptions were used in later editions, while your style was expected in something like ODnD where player skill was paramount. Before things like arcana and religion were added to the game. These design principles stayed with the game though.

iserith said:
Regarding what I bolded above, NO, that is NOT what I am stating. Not only do you appear to conflate "thinking" and "knowing," but you seem to be conflating "action" with "check." I absolutely do not think that in order for the character to know something the player must make a check. Not even a little bit. In order to verify an assumption, the player describes what he or she wants to do to achieve that end. That may or may not involve a check. From the player's perspective, it is always better if it doesn't, provided they are shooting for automatic success.

Seriously? That required ALL CAPS. Yes, I am aware of your position on rolling the D20, actions, skills, goal and approach and all that. We've been discussing for over a month, you've mentioned it once or twice. But my statement seems to be good in terms of application. They must describe themselves calling upon their memories or education (which may or may not lead to an intelligence check using arcana proficiency) in order to change from "Well I think this" to "Well I know this".

iserith said:
The interesting thing to examine in my view is why you "feel like there should be a check." I submit it is because you learned this behavior from another game where that sort of thinking was more supported than in this game. Again, this isn't a problem on its own. Play how you want. But it's useful as I see it to understand why you choose to play that way so that you can perhaps understand the position of others who don't.

Why do you think that this idea is not supported in 5e? Just because it isn't stated in the rules? There are a lot of things not directly stated in game rules that still apply to those games. Especially in "roleplaying" games where one is supposed to enter into the "role" of someone else. In that case it is generally considered bad form to use knowledge your character would not have or use, since it would break the "role"

Ovinomancer said:
If I may, at this late juncture...

This argument is about something that's entirely downstream of the real issue, which isn't being address clearly enough (although [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] has touched on it repeatedly): what a character thinks is irrelevant to the game structure. The game let's players have the authority to declare actions for their characters. This is, really, the only authority players have outside of character build (creations and leveling). What a character thinks is just something the player establishes as color for the action declaration if they care to do so. So, of course the player has complete authority over what the character thinks, because the rule say that they player has complete authority over what the character tries to do. You cannot have the latter if you have restrictions on the former.

So, in the case of the thunderwave scrolls, the player has the authority to declare this action for their character. What the character is thinking here is color -- it's not important at all; the game doesn't care at all. If, however, the player wants information from the setting, then they can establish an action declaration for how their character is attempting to gain this information, which, presumably, the player will then use for future action declarations. Again, though, what the character is thinking is not part of this except as a emergent phenomenon of play.

Now, this is entirely anathema to a number of playstyle conceptualizations, but it is how this system is written. Anything that the players or GM wish to layer on top of the 5e system is up to them [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] has pounded this point home often), and more power to them. But, again, if you, as GM, are placing limits on what characters are allowed to think, the outcome is that you are declaring certain categories of action declaration as off-limits. Consider why you want to do this -- what does this gain you? I used to think that it was important to have such controls to encourage "roleplaying" in my players, but it turns out they're adult people that don't really need such external controls and I'm having much more fun not playing thought police with my players. It's also made me realize that if my game rests on the players pretending they don't know things, then I really need to step up my game. If I'm using Earth Elementals, for example, the players maybe knowing they're weak to thunder damage is the last thing I care about -- them knowing this will not, in any way, reduce any part of my game.

See, most players are adults who can handle things without any prompting. But not all players work on the same wavelength.

In fact, if I am unable to establish any limits, then nothing prevents one player from listing off the entire history of The Xanathar, ruining the potential discovery by players with no knowledge of that history.

Nothing prevents them from attempting to bring real world knowledge of physics or chemistry into a game where the other players do not want it.

It is my job as DM to make sure the story we are all building together is fun, interesting, and coherent. That may mean occasionally telling a player that they do not know the location of the Heart of Gith, which could end the war between the Githyanki and Githzerai. In fact, considering the player has never established any connection with the Outer Planes and grew up on a farm, I may wonder why they know about the history of the Gith and their war with the Mindflayers.

The player may be wanting to share their cool and shiny new knowledge because they read a new book, but it isn't something their character just immediately knows for no reason.

iserith said:
I would say that the assertion that an Int-8 character is "shortbus" needs some proof, given bounded accuracy. It sounds like some adjustments in perception or expectations is needed here.

If that doesn't work, the game does provide a way to address this via the PCs' personal characteristics. Just add a personality trait or flaw to the effect of "I'm about as smart as a bag of hammers and it shows..." then award Inspiration when the players portray that trait or flaw. It stands to reason that a player motivated enough to draw upon information in the Monster Manual to succeed might also be enticed to portray his or her character in a way that will net a further advantage.

Yeah, it will be great for them acting dumb on very rare occasions to get a single inspiration token that they can then use to ensure advantage on a roll when they decide to enact one of their "Devilishly clever plans".

Riley37 · May 29, 2019

Elfcrusher said:
Fair point.

...AND I think there’s a difference between denigrating someone’s playstyle and calling them out for rhetorical tricks.

But I could be gentler in doing so.

To be fair, you're not wrong about my use of parade-of-horribles. "I invent the musket! From scratch, in under a year!" is a classic cherry-picking example. It does not prove
that there are only two possible modes of play, one of them mature and the other immature. There are a LOT of mature options.

I spent last weekend at a gaming convention, playing in three games and observing a few others. No two of those games had exactly the same relationship between player initiative and PC initiative. None of them were immature, or at least not "fart noises and cheating dice" levels of immaturity.

Tony Vargas · May 29, 2019

Chaosmancer said:
Sort of? But, while dealing with different types of exposition is important in a novel I don't know what that has to do with players rolling knowledge checks in a DnD game. I don't see the connection you are trying to draw here. It feels like talking about athletics checks and you mentioning how Nintendo designed Mario's jump. Yeah, they might be analogous, but it doesn't seem to apply to the discussion.

My thoughts do go in strange directions, sometimes.

The point of exposition is to present the audience with information the characters have that they can't be expected to have. Players, like an audience, do not know everything their characters might or should know, especially when the DM is mak'n stuff up as he goes along (which is not exactly a bad way to run some RPGs). Sometimes the DM should obviously just present the players with that information directly, sometimes he can do it through an NPC, an inscription, or whatever. It's just like regular authorial exposition in those cases.

But, for whatever reason, we have mechanics available to test whether a PC has a specific bit of knowledge. If the PC passes the check *ding* he remembers/deduces something (and presumably relays it to his friends) in a fit of exposition.

Sticklers for continuity might also point out that exposition /establishes/ that the characters know something, at a certain time, and that informs what they do from then on, or that, contrarily, delaying exposition until after actions informed by it are complete is retconning. The same dissatisfaction such viewers might have with a retcon or twist like that, might be felt by a player or GM confronted with blatant use of 'player knowledge' to drive PC decisions.

I don't think it's a popular way of thinking about RPGs - usually it's realism/"verisimilitude" vs playability or the like - but I often think of RPGs as modeling a genre story, rather than imaginary characters in an imaginary setting that may or may not have a genre story happen to them in the course of play. So if there is a mechanic designed to impart character knowledge onto players, it should end up providing something like exposition in the narrative. Including doing so like /good/ exposition, that's not intrusive or pointless, and maybe even enjoyable.

...the rest of this is more me agreeing with you, if, again, maybe strangely so...

But you seem to think that "different game" is something like DnD 3.5 or ADnD, or ODnD...

Which is really a different version of the /same/ game. It's not unreasonable to expect some continuity from one ed to another - that was a major issue for some players with 4e, for example, and thus exactly the kind of thing 5e has tried to avoid. Yes, different prior eds handled skills differently from eachother, so 5e needed to be flexible enough in its handling - that is, the Empowered DM's handling - of skills, to let different past-ed styles port over more or less seamlessly. It's far from perfect, the DM can make it work.

Why do you think that this idea is not supported in 5e? Just because it isn't stated in the rules? There are a lot of things not directly stated in game rules that still apply to those games.

This is my sticking point, as well. The rules in 5e support a lot in the sense of giving the DM plenty of latitude, they don't close off much of the possible universe of play styles. They don't support much in the sense of forcing you to play one way. They definitely don't force anyone else to play iserth's way (even though it's a way that works really well with 5e, it's not the only way, and the rules don't prescribe or require it, nor do they proscribe other approaches).