A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

S'mon said:
I think the point is that the Gamist challenge of the trick monster causes difficulty for immersion when player knowledge and PC knowledge differ.

Yeah, that's why I said way upthread there's a collision of expectations.

It's a while since I've looked through a RuneQuest monster listing, but at least in my memory they don't exhibit the same lists of immunities, vulnerabilities, etc. And I think there's a logic to that.

Ron Edwards, in his "story now" essay, talks about "karaoke RPGing". He's got in mind a slightly different context, and gives Over the Edge as his example:

This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . .

I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?

I think that D&D - really dating from the publication of AD&D (cf B/X) - has suffered from a form of this, though (as you say) connected more to "gamist"/wargaming play than to the "story now" Edwards was focusing on in his remarks.

What produced the classic early D&D gamist/wargaming play was GM ingenuity, player experimentation, new monsters with wacky immunities, variations on variations on pit traps, researching new spells to counteract new GM tricks, etc. But (especially in AD&D), instead of getting presented with techniques for running this sort of game, we get canonical lists of monsters, canonical lists of magic items with cautions about breaking the game by making up new ones, canonical lists of spells with all the adjudication (does or doesn't fireball metl gold, or generate blast pressure?) already prescribed, etc.

Which I think can push the game towards karaoke/alienation/imagining what would make a good/plausible/reasonable story about this PC, rather than the play to beat the GM's tricks spirit that seems to have actually animated those early games.

That's not to say that I'm against immersion/simulationist RPGing of the RQ and C&S sort, but I don't think these puzzle elements that are such a predominant feature of D&D are a good fit for it. (It's not a coincidence, in my view, that they're not a big part of Rolemaster either.)

AbdulAlhazred · Mar 17, 2019

Hussar said:
Heh, if we want to get right down to it, virtually all of skilled play would be considered "meta-gaming". After all, you didn't just "check for traps", you detailed to the DM what exactly you were doing. There was no notion that your character wouldn't know how to check for a trap or a hidden compartment, or, conversely that your character would know anything that you didn't.

I mean, what does my 15 year old squire know about finding secret compartments in a statue? How would he possibly know? But, you had modules and adventures that specifically played to player knowledge as being part and parcel to skilled play. You were EXPECTED to roll marbles down the hallway. Why would anyone actually do this? Oh, right, because a sloped down passageway could cause you to go from one level of a dungeon to another level and the monsters would be harder to deal with.

Yeah, no metagaming going on there at all.

And this explains the basic Gygaxian position that PCs are 'default omnicompetent' (and hence there are no skill systems or checks in Gygaxian D&D). Note even how the original Greyhawk thief skills are phrased. ANYONE can climb a basic climbable wall, but a thief can "climb nearly sheer surfaces". Likewise anyone might disarm a trap or open a lock (simply by describing how the character manipulates the mechanism) but a thief can "open locks by picking or foiling magical closures" literally doing something magical or beyond normal human skill.

Thus there were a lot less situations in Gygaxian play where these sorts of questions came up. It was pretty easy to simply assume that adventurers, by default, had a good understanding of the weaknesses of trolls, although each new batch of players would have to figure that out for themselves the first time or three.

I tend to think Gygax was more likely to get bothered by PLOT things that PCs shouldn't know. This was often due to troupe play where most players had a range of PCs. Note that the 1e DMG DOES talk about THIS as an undesirable kind of meta-gaming and encourages DMs to make sure that a given player's PCs don't simply act like one gestalt character in effect. This is entirely different however from knowledge of trolls and such.

S'mon · Mar 17, 2019

pemerton said:
That's not to say that I'm against immersion/simulationist RPGing of the RQ and C&S sort, but I don't think these puzzle elements that are such a predominant feature of D&D are a good fit for it. (It's not a coincidence, in my view, that they're not a big part of Rolemaster either.)

I agree. There was a cool scene recently in my Primeval Thule game where the party encountered a sewer ooze, the Dhari barbarian leapt to the fray, cleft it in twain... and found himself fighting two sewer oozes. But for that to happen it required the veteran player in the group to keep silent, for her to not warn her fellow player, and allow the scene to play out. That is very un-Gygaxian 'Skilled Play'.

5e D&D uses the old trick monsters, but is sufficiently forgiving that you can get away with stuff like that, where old-school D&D would be much more punitive - two ochre jellies might TPK a beginner party.

There's not too much tension between the approaches with one-attack-to-figure-out creatures, but trolls that keep on regenerating create a major disjunction. I think a typical solution (apart from ruling 'everyone knows') is to switch to fire after the first attacks don't work. It's not particularly satisfactory, and I normally go with 'everyone knows'. If I want a Gamist challenge I can use a non-troll regenerator. PCs then start with fire and if that fails, they try other options/damage types. (Funnily enough, 5e made the humble zombie a trick monster, since they now need radiant damage to reliably put down - this catches out a lot of players!)

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], what you say about the forgiving nature of 5e seems consistent with other remarks about the system.

I didn't mind the way 4e handled some of these things (though I'm not sure if it was deliberate design or byproduct): the real "trick" is bringing the serious fire attack to bear on the troll. Even for a party of veterans that creates a tactical challenge, in the context of an otherwise well-designed 4e encounter, that requires some figuring out. And sometimes the sequencing won't work out for whatever reason, or the fire attack will miss, and the troll will get its regeneration to work.

Also, I think the veteran staying quiet is a bit awkward (and I agree not Gygaxian), but not as bad as having to exercise that "silence" in respect of one's own PC. That's the bit I really can't wrap my head around!

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

AbdulAlhazred said:
I tend to think Gygax was more likely to get bothered by PLOT things that PCs shouldn't know. This was often due to troupe play where most players had a range of PCs. Note that the 1e DMG DOES talk about THIS as an undesirable kind of meta-gaming and encourages DMs to make sure that a given player's PCs don't simply act like one gestalt character in effect. This is entirely different however from knowledge of trolls and such.

I think there are a a lot of points of difference that can be identified.

Even with the plot-type stuff, does a repeat player with a new PC have to walk his/her PC into the pit? Make the same bad guess at the riddle?

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

Maxperson said:
it invalidates the skills and backgrounds involving monster lore. Instead of a wizard being able to draw upon his knowledge of arcane lore to find out what the strengths and weaknesses of a Flesh Golem are, now the skill would be useless, because a successful check would just reveal that they are very often different.

Maxperson said:
If you are going to face the only Banderfratcher in existence, there more be lore on it. I'd give skill rolls to see if they might know about the creature.

You've changed your mind on this?

Maxperson said:
They couldn't just tell me that some previously unknown to me cousin of theirs once faced it and survived, telling them of all it's strengths and weaknesses, though.

I think you might be running two things together: a player deploying knowledge s/he already has, and imputing that knowledge to his/her PC; and a player seeking to acquire new knowledge.

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

Maxperson said:
You can be skilled in play, learning how best to go through the game world to minimize dangers. Searching for traps everywhere, learning where secret doors are more likely to be placed, and so on, without relying on metagame knowledge.

I think [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] already responded to this - if my PC can know how to check for traps, etc, because that's "what people know how to do", then s/he can know about trolls because that's "what my uncle taught me as a kid".

Bedrockgames · Mar 17, 2019

pemerton said:
I think [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] already responded to this - if my PC can know how to check for traps, etc, because that's "what people know how to do", then s/he can know about trolls because that's "what my uncle taught me as a kid".

Except there is an obvious difference here in that, this is a specific piece of information about a monster in the game that is clearly intended to create a challenge for groups to figure out. The problem with it, is every player knows the solution now. Again, my view is they probably should pull a page from ravenloft if they want to preserve that early feeling we got with trolls by having each troll, or each group of trolls have their own weakness that the players need to figure out.

pemerton · Mar 17, 2019

Bedrockgames said:
Except there is an obvious difference here in that, this is a specific piece of information about a monster in the game that is clearly intended to create a challenge for groups to figure out.

But if the player already knows the answer then there is nothing to figure out. That's the point I've been making for many posts now.

Bedrockgames said:
The problem with it, is every player knows the solution now. Again, my view is they probably should pull a page from ravenloft if they want to preserve that early feeling we got with trolls by having each troll, or each group of trolls have their own weakness that the players need to figure out.

I've been posting this too, for about the same number of posts: if a puzzle is desired, then come up with one that the player's don't know the answer to.

Bedrockgames · Mar 17, 2019

pemerton said:
But if the player already knows the answer then there is nothing to figure out. That's the point I've been making for many posts now.

I am very sympathetic to this view. It is my own personal preference on the matter (because I've always liked investigations and monster hunts). So I actually don't disagree with you. If we were playing at the same table, I'd probably be on the same side of this issue as you (at least in terms of the fundamental issue behind this). The only point I would raise though, I have met a lot of players who are very adamant about separating player and character knowledge. Not everyone is there for the direct solving of the puzzle. Some people want to literally feel like they are their character, some people want their character to fulfill their conception of the character.

I've been posting this too, for about the same number of posts: if a puzzle is desired, then come up with one that the player's don't know the answer to.

I think we are in agreement here. I do get that there is an alternative point of view on the matter and it seems to have a lot of currency. But I think with trolls is would be much better to give them some kind of shifting weakness that players can't know just by reading the Monster Manual. Again, I'd point to the Van Richten books because in a lot of ways those were meant to solve this very problem. Ravenloft was basically using them make hunting monsters a viable, regular type of adventure. And that did tend to get dull once players knew how to kill every monster (seriously what player doesn't know about silver and werewolves, phylacteries and liches, stakes and vampires?). Those books totally reinvigorated my ability to run that classic horror campaign of the monster hunter.