Players choose what their PCs do . . .

Maxperson said:

The character is really just a sheet of paper. It's the player inhabiting the idea of the character that gives it life. That's why I don't understand this idea that you can challenge the character socially, without challenging the player. When [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] said that I was switching the challenge from the character to the player, I had a vision of Leslie Nielson in an interrogation room with a character sheet sitting on a chair, demanding that it confess. After a few minutes he turns to Nordberg and says, "I never thought it would be so hard to challenge a character."

You cannot challenge a character without simultaneously challenging the player. A challenge where the DM takes control and informs the player that his PC's heart warms is no less a challenge to the player than what we are describing. It's just a different sort of challenge.

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There are a great many challenges for the character that are not for the player, and best resolved with simple mechanical considerations.

Some are just not things that players need to know, but the appropriate skill provides needed praxis the character needs.
EG:

• which fork to use for dinner in the duke's hall.
• which of the swords in the blacksmith's are suitable for the character

Some are things that are not possible due to the mode of play being aural, rather than visual:

• Identifying which of the maidens lying dead and naked is the duke's daughter
• deciding which dress looks better when prepping to attend court.

Some things are simply too boring, gory, or technical to narrate out in detail:

• The making of the sword.
• searching 100 volumes in the library for clues
• the repair of the warp drive

The only way these test the player is whether or not the character has the needed skills, and that is a challenge already made and in the "done deal" category... but the rolls involved are in the present.

Ovinomancer said:

Actually, I think save or be charmed isn't much of a challenge, either. My argument has been that making a choice isn't a challenge if you can chose between all the choices. Even the unknown repercussions don't make it a challenge, just a guessing game. A challenge requires that something be staked and that you have a risk of losing your stakes. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, even without dice. In an RPG, though, it pretty much requires some kind of mechanic to determine the uncertainty, even if that mechanic is "DM chooses." I think that's a lousy mechanic, but there you go.

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Given that one can always choose to fail the saves in D&D... it's part of the larger challenge, which may require a bevy of tests... The hostile person is the challenge, usually not the individual attacks, tho' those may also be both mechanical and player-creativity-challenges.

I treat the term challenge as referring to a situation with at least two clear mutually exclusive outcomes, and the possibility of not attaining the desired one if it is chosen for the attempt.

Saving throws technically meet this some of the time...

• Undesired: hit by the spell for full damage
• Desired: damage reduced
• highly desired: damage negated

Given the D&D premise that saves may always be intentionally failed...

• Undesired is, in this case, the default - do nothing, and take the damage
• Desired is a passed save. Chance of failure. Choosing it is the usual choice, because the default is also the undesired effect.
• Highly desired is only possible if one uses a reaction ability. Not every character has such, but let's assume the character does. The challenge to the player is "do I use my 1 reaction?" The answer has many conditionals to consider, but most important is, "will I need to react to someone else?" coupled with, "will I lose my character if I don't?" The challenge to the character is the dive to cover or whatnot - resolved by the abstraction of the saving throw.

Lanefan said:

The title of the thread - "Players choose what their PCs do" - almost sums the whole thing up before we start.

Put it instead as "Barring external pressures e.g. magic or game mechanics, players always choose what their PCs (attempt to) do and always choose what/how their PC thinks and-or feels" and we probably could have all agreed, stopped right there, and saved an awful lot of electrons from an untimely demise.

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Except that some of us genuinely disagree with that premise, even caveated as it is...

In a game with a strong GM role, and a Gygaxian rule 0 (either The GM can change the rules on a whim or The GM is always right), the player never has the surety that the GM won't impose conditions on the character's mental state. The character also has no surety that any action, even walking, won't require a roll or even outright fail.

The best the player can assuredly pick what they attempt - everything else is subject to GM approval.

I've chased away players in the past by using conditions upon their characters that reduced the player's choice drastically. 1 unintended, 2 others much intended. A fourth attempted, but the player enjoyed the challenge. ≤Sigh≥...

The thing is, if a GM wants to keep players, they don't take away agency (control over the character) too easily nor too often, but the social contract of rules implies (at least in most Traditional table top RPGs) that there are 3 portions of control over a character - the player's, the GM, and the mechanics.


The same is true in videogames - the player determines the attempt (by triggering the action); the program determines the success/failure. I spent hours trying to climb certain peaks in Breath of the Wild... but, due to the mechanics and the setting choices of the designer, I could keep trying, but never succeed.

Aebir-Toril said:

Yes, all true, but can we not have a baseline?

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Got you covered. Done and done.

Aebir-Toril said:

Yes, all true, but can we not have a baseline?

D&D is that baseline, and yes, because it is the most popular. Thus, the largest number of people will be able to engage in the conversation.

Other systems are great, and D&D might not be everyone's favorite system. Furthermore, it's not like I'm saying that other RPGs are doing things incorrectly, I'm merely stating that D&D should be our baseline in these discussions. I don't think D&D is perfect. In fact, it's far from it, but it is the baseline, whether you want to admit it or not.

If we attempt to address every system , there will be no place for conversation.

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How do you have a baseline of doing something one way so that you can talk about doing it another way? Take cooking, for instance. If the baseline is using the oven, because that's the most popular, is it worthwhile to have to refer to using an oven every time you want to talk about microwaving? No, you just talk about microwaving and skip referencing everything to the oven because how you do things in the oven is utterly useless when talking about the microwave.

Same here. D&D does things one way, with one set of assumptions. If I want to talk about a different way to do things, I'll talk about how that works and what assumptions are in place there. Having to point out every deviation from D&D disrupts this because it's just a long list of what we're not doing to talk about what we are doing.

And, frankly, D&D is a lousy baseline. For social challenges, it's literally just "however your DM does it." There's not enough in the rules to do much else, and what's there is endlessly argued over -- just pay attention to the D&D pages here and you'll see argument after argument erupt over how the social mechanics work or even just how the the play loop is adjudicated. D&D is a terrible baseline to use to talk intelligently about how your can do a thing in RPGs. It's the 800-lb gorilla, to be sure, and it's going to be discussed, as it has been, but there's no basis to put it as the baseline except to be comfortable and familiar and not need to engage in how it actually does a pretty bad job at most of what it tries to do.

Again, I love D&D, and just finished a great session (almost all social interaction, one 5 minute fight). Now, I used a skill challenge backend to manage the social interactions, and didn't have a predetermined outcome (I surprised myself at one point) for play. I attacked things my players have put up as pressure points for their characters to see how they'd react, but, this being D&D, they had the full freedom to choose their reactions. There were a number of points, though, that I noticed a distinct difference how D&D, that doesn't have a fair way to put characterization at stake, worked vice other games. In one scene, a player that has a backstory as a mind-flayer thrall and has staked his lack of recollection of his past as at risk met with a mind flayer. The mind flayer proposed that what the player thought their memories were are false memories, and that, instead, there's something about the character that caused him to be recruited rather than enslaved. That the character was a dangerous tool that the elder brain thought it could control. Is this true? I don't know, maybe. That really depends on how the player chooses to interact with it. So far, the player has chosen to enter into a temporary agreement for mutual benefit (the mind flayer wishes to disrupt some plans of the player's former masters -- different mind flayer factions at play here), but not to trust the mind flayer. Meanwhile, I've planted seeds of doubt, as what the mind flayer has said may come true. But, again, because D&D, it's the player that will decide if his character is swayed or not.

If I were playing a different game, then the stakes of the player's background would have been directly challenged, and, if the player lost, I'd have been able to establish alternate truths that the player would then have to engage with. If the player won, they'd have been able to get their goals, which, in this case, would have been some concessions from the mind flayer for other information, which would have been both useful and beneficial to the player (because you honor successes and don't walk them back with negative outcomes). But, that would have been the player putting things at stake and choosing to risk them on an action declaration, so it would be fair. D&D lacks this ability to use your character itself as a stake to try to win a victory -- in D&D, if it was the baseline, then there'd be no challenge here -- the player couldn't force a concession from the mind flayer by risking their characteriztion.

aramis erak said:

Given that one can always choose to fail the saves in D&D... it's part of the larger challenge, which may require a bevy of tests... The hostile person is the challenge, usually not the individual attacks, tho' those may also be both mechanical and player-creativity-challenges.

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Let me clarify, I find saving throws against charm to be "not much of a challenge" because they're boring and are heavy with force. The GM decides to have an NPC with charm, and the GM decides when to use it an on whom, and then the player gets one roll to see if they can prevent this GM chain from continuing to putting limits on their character. In other words, the only thing the player stakes is playing in the game at all.

As such, it's technically a challenge, but it's a weak example of a good challenge and full of the things I'm not happy about. That said, I did use a dominate monster on a player tonight, and I felt bad about it. But, they had set some stakes in the character development that the character has enmity with creatures that do this, and the player had not taken action against repeated sightings and foreshadowings of such creatures making an appearance, and, then, the player not only failed his save, but his party, who detected he was whammied, didn't follow up on it (it's an odd dynamic, but full of playing their characters to the hilt). Even so, the result was to take a challenge that was to be for the party and limit it to the player, but that was my choice at that point, not the player's. So, yeah, when I play D&D I'll use these mechanics, but I don't like them much.

I treat the term challenge as referring to a situation with at least two clear mutually exclusive outcomes, and the possibility of not attaining the desired one if it is chosen for the attempt.

Saving throws technically meet this some of the time...

• Undesired: hit by the spell for full damage
• Desired: damage reduced
• highly desired: damage negated

Given the D&D premise that saves may always be intentionally failed...

• Undesired is, in this case, the default - do nothing, and take the damage
• Desired is a passed save. Chance of failure. Choosing it is the usual choice, because the default is also the undesired effect.
• Highly desired is only possible if one uses a reaction ability. Not every character has such, but let's assume the character does. The challenge to the player is "do I use my 1 reaction?" The answer has many conditionals to consider, but most important is, "will I need to react to someone else?" coupled with, "will I lose my character if I don't?" The challenge to the character is the dive to cover or whatnot - resolved by the abstraction of the saving throw.

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A reasonable definition, but unless there's a chance to fail to get what you want, it's just a choice, even if the options are mutually exclusive. The player maintains full control -- nothing is risked. Again, situations that come up where there are mutually exclusive options are usually put there by the GM, not the players. So, this is really just front loading the GM making changes to the PC characterization. If the choice really is something like maintain your chastity or get Excalibur, this is a thinly-veiled use of GM force to cause a situation where the player has to make a hard choice -- and change their characterization in doing so. The GM may not pick which avenue is selected, but he drew the map. And, if the GM foreshadows that one path has worse consequences, then the force gets even stronger.

So, I like my definition of a challenge to be where the player has something at stake and can fail to achieve it.

Oddly, this pairs okay with my usual positions re: how to run D&D. The core play loop alongside the Middle Path for dice use leads to never asking for a roll unless there's a clear approach, clear goal, and a chance and consequence for failure. Maybe it's not so odd. If I know that many in this thread that are arguing against my position here also argue against that one. Even though I can give page numbers for the rule references. But, this method says that it's not worth even going to mechanics unless there's a chance and consequence for failure -- that, unless it's a challenge as I've defined it, don't roll, just narrate.

Maxperson said:

By one limited definition of challenge, sure. By other definitions of challenge that's simply wrong. You can in fact be challenged without a win/lose scenario happening.

verb
verb: challenge; 3rd person present: challenges; past tense: challenged; past participle: challenged; gerund or present participle: challenging

• 1.
  invite (someone) to engage in a contest.
  "he challenged one of my men to a duel"
  • enter into competition with or opposition against.
    "incumbent Democrats are being challenged in the 29th district"
  • make a rival claim to or threaten someone's hold on (a position).
    "they were challenging his leadership"
  • invite (someone) to do something that one thinks will be difficult or impossible; dare.
    "I challenged them to make up their own minds"
  
  
  
  

As you can see, all it takes is a difficult situation. Without some serious brain damage going on, everyone is capable of making up their mind on something, so the bolded example is not one that is a success/failure situation, as no failure is actually possible. When I have a social challenge to my PC that results in a difficult decision to the core of the character, it is in fact a challenge even though there is no win/loss condition.

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Dang it. I had yesterday in the dictionary pool.

But, to address your bolded part above, the invitation is to do something. Can you fail to do something? Yes, especially if it's difficult or impossible. So, yeah, you, um, supported my argument with the dictionary. Even in the example, one can fail to make up one's mind. I'm keenly aware of this every time I have the marital "what do you want for dinner" argument.

Aldarc said:

Ad Hominem? I don't care about your argument. It was a dry comment that it would not be a pemerton megathread without your usual appeal to the lexicon at some point in this discussion.

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At was an attack and uncalled for. If you don't have a constructive response to my arguments, don't mention or respond to me.

aramis erak said:

There are a great many challenges for the character that are not for the player, and best resolved with simple mechanical considerations.

Some are just not things that players need to know, but the appropriate skill provides needed praxis the character needs.
EG:

• which fork to use for dinner in the duke's hall.
• which of the swords in the blacksmith's are suitable for the character

Some are things that are not possible due to the mode of play being aural, rather than visual:

• Identifying which of the maidens lying dead and naked is the duke's daughter
• deciding which dress looks better when prepping to attend court.

Some things are simply too boring, gory, or technical to narrate out in detail:

• The making of the sword.
• searching 100 volumes in the library for clues
• the repair of the warp drive

The only way these test the player is whether or not the character has the needed skills, and that is a challenge already made and in the "done deal" category... but the rolls involved are in the present.

Click to expand...

Okay. Again, I was talking in the context social interactions, since that's what pretty much the entire thread has been about. None of those examples is a social interaction. The social aspect of a PC is inextricably intertwined with the player. You can't separate the two in order to challenge the PC, but not the player.

Given that one can always choose to fail the saves in D&D... it's part of the larger challenge, which may require a bevy of tests... The hostile person is the challenge, usually not the individual attacks, tho' those may also be both mechanical and player-creativity-challenges.

Click to expand...

It used to be the case that you could choose to fail saves. 5e doesn't have that rule. I would personally allow it, but it's a house rule now.

Ovinomancer said:

So, I like my definition of a challenge to be where the player has something at stake and can fail to achieve it.

Oddly, this pairs okay with my usual positions re: how to run D&D. The core play loop alongside the Middle Path for dice use leads to never asking for a roll unless there's a clear approach, clear goal, and a chance and consequence for failure. Maybe it's not so odd. If I know that many in this thread that are arguing against my position here also argue against that one. Even though I can give page numbers for the rule references. But, this method says that it's not worth even going to mechanics unless there's a chance and consequence for failure -- that, unless it's a challenge as I've defined it, don't roll, just narrate.

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Yours is a little too Burning Wheel for general adoption, as it will result in not rolling a great many things that the D&D rules require.

aramis erak said:

Yours is a little too Burning Wheel for general adoption, as it will result in not rolling a great many things that the D&D rules require.

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Like? I mean, you do know that the above method for D&D is straight from the rules, right?

Aldarc said:

Ad Hominem? I don't care about your argument. It was a dry comment that it would not be a pemerton megathread without your usual appeal to the lexicon at some point in this discussion.

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Maxperson said:

At was an attack and uncalled for. If you don't have a constructive response to my arguments, don't mention or respond to me.

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Both of you decided to continue a personal dispute despite the warning. Time for both of you to take a walk - find another thread where you're not going to engage in personal sniping. Don't post in this one any further.

Despite how clear this case is, one or both of you will likely disagree and want to argue with me. Take it to PM, please, and leave the thread alone.

Anyone else?