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

Sadras said:

What if the player is unsure about how to roleplay the situation since nothing has been established in his/her backstory or during roleplay? What if the player just turns to the DM and says "Would my character know about trolls? Do I just make a roll or wouldn't I know?"

This is not an action declaration, this is a honest reaction from a player seeking to know how to roleplay his character. And this has happened at my table numerous times. It has nothing to do about a player wanting to beat trolls, this is about roleplay purity.

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I agree with [MENTION=38016]Michael Silverbane[/MENTION] to the extent that, at some tables and in some contexts, it clearly could be an action declaration.

If it's not an action declaration, then it looks like a request to the GM to be told the rules. The GM might reply In this game, all starting characters are ignorant, or Is your character trying to remember stuff about trolls?

I guess another alternative is that the player is asking the GM What action should I declare for my character in this situation. I've personally seen that sort of thing, but I'm not a big fan personally.

Neither of these latter two possibilities involves any stance, as neither of them is making a decision/choice for the character.

pemerton said:

I agree with @Michael Silverbane to the extent that, at some tables and in some contexts, it clearly could be an action declaration.

If it's not an action declaration, then it looks like a request to the GM to be told the rules. The GM might reply In this game, all starting characters are ignorant, or Is your character trying to remember stuff about trolls?

I guess another alternative is that the player is asking the GM What action should I declare for my character in this situation. I've personally seen that sort of thing, but I'm not a big fan personally.

Neither of these latter two possibilities involves any stance, as neither of them is making a decision/choice for the character.

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Yeah my thought process was along the middle option - it is similar in vein to the example we discussed some weeks ago regarding setting parameters in that the player really does not know what their character may or may not know so is looking towards the DM for guidance in this regard in order to roleplay their character correctly (and this could be viewed as evidence of some DM-gating at the table).

But yeah based on your response then I think we agree on this issue.

EDIT: My interest was not in the first option at all, as that correctly would fall under action declaration and you had already covered it in your previous post.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Well, as a player, you could conjecture what your PC would do in the face of an almost unstoppable humanoid opponent of this type. Sure, you are not referencing information which you, the player, possess, but you could still at least try to imagine what the PC would do.

<snip>

Surely there is something going on which is indistinguishable in one sense with meta-gaming, yet in another sense it might also be compliant with what the player would choose the character to do even if he didn't know about trolls.

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This is all true.

What's going on with Ron Edwards and The Forge in respect of stance? Well, they're not really trying to analyse the nuances of constructing a character while playing B2 - from their point of view, that's been covered under Pawn Stance with maybe a bit of Author Stance. There's an ongoing discussion on the various RPG forums/newsgroups which has coined this idea of stance, and Edwards is trying to develop the idea and use it coherently to analyse the play that he is interested in.

At that time - ie 2001 - as far as "mainstream" games are concerned they're trying to work out what's going on in, and what are the variations occurring in, such systems as Champions, RuneQuest, WW/storyteller, and the AD&D 2nd ed settings. A game like Over the Edge is obviously big on their radar, but if you read OtE the GM advice and overall tenor is a strange mix of player-driven characters being shoehorned into GM-driven setting with no very coherent account of how this is meant to work. (That's not to say that Jonathan Tweet was running OtE as a railroad; but there was no established way of expressing these techniques in a RPG rulebook.)

I would say that, at the heart of what they're trying to distinguish being true to the character in action declaration (actor stance) and using the character to drive play in a certain direction by way of action declaration (author stance). This is why there's the attempt to clear away underbrush that crops up so often in discussions about player-side RPGing (like 1st person/3rd person, or IC/OOC, which is still the first thing that will come up on a thread on these boards about player-side roleplaying techniques).

In a game in which story doesn't even matter except perhaps as a byproduct, and in which the idea is to win - and B2 would be a paradigm of that - then I think it's easy enough to say that most action declaration will be directed at winning, which is clearly a player priority, hence pawn stance and we're done. The odd bit of actor stance (eg the elf playing pranks on the dwarf when nothing else is at stake) is simply not that significant to the overall analysis.

And once we get to "story"-focusd D&D play of the post-DL, 2nd ed era variety, then I think the assumption is that the GM will establish the key player motivations (by setting backstory, policing alignment, all the standard techniques) and players are expected to adopt actor stance within that context. I think this is borne out by the AD&D 2nd ed text that I quoted a little bit upthread.

For the troll example to fit neatly into this conception, either the GM tells the players that their PCs know about trolls, or tells them that the PCs are ignorant. Then the player plays his/her PC as appropriate (perhaps with a significant degree of awkwardness or frustration if s/he knows the answer but has to pretend not to). There is no expectation that this sort of play will produce what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] called "discovery" - as opposed to fidelity to the motivational scheme established by the GM.

Very good examination [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]

The last bit: Fidelity seems the key word. I was looking for a counter catch-phrase to Story Now, when talking with friends, because usual terms like Narr, Trad, immersion, simulation, are not immediately understood from casual gamers... and The Right to Dream (while I love it) seems a bit off for the purpose of identify easily a type of play.

"Story Now" and "Fidelity Always" sound very appropriate

Semper fidelis!

Maxperson said:

It sounds better. Plain and simple.

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Sure. And describing loss of hit points as an actual hit sounds better as well.

I mentioned this mostly as a joke, but also to show how the assumptions the game makes aren’t consistent.

hawkeyefan said:

Sure. And describing loss of hit points as an actual hit sounds better as well.

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And you can do that, but since 1e(with the exception of 3e for some reason) hit points have been a mixture of physical, skill, luck, divine protection, etc., and due to how 1e and 2e treated them, every 3e DM I played with kept it the same. If you want to make them all physical, though, that's your prerogative as DM,

I mentioned this mostly as a joke, but also to show how the assumptions the game makes aren’t consistent.

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I don't think that the name of the spell indicates a game assumption, though. Cure Light Wounds just sounds better than Cure Light Something, Cure Light Abstract or Cure Light Hit Point Loss.

Maxperson said:

Just because he has done so in the past, does not mean he will always do so in the future. Let me ask you this. If you described an NPC as going to stab a PC with 100 hit points and the player announced he was just going to stand still and let the NPC stab him in the throat with a longsword, would you just do a d8 damage or a 2d8 crit? Or would you knock the PC to 0 as described above for a direct hit?

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I'd have to really dig around to find some examples, but there were a number of times when Gygax addressed this. I don't think its directly stated anywhere in 1e, but he appeared to hold the opinion that hit points were a mechanism which was largely intended to regulate armed combat between active opponents. In other types of situations, such as the one you suggest, I think his answer would have been "the character dies of a horrible throat wound."

Even within 1e instant death is certainly possible in rules terms. An assassin can simply kill a target, no hit points are involved whatsoever (though you can argue about whether or not NPC assassins exist and if they can use this mechanic against a PC). There are a few places in modules and discussion where Gary, or at least TSR, used or advised use of a death save as well. This could be a good way to adjudicate jumping off a 400' cliff for example.

OTOH AD&D doesn't specifically state any of this consistently and hit points are certainly thought of as the default damage mechanism. So a player would probably be expecting, and would have good reason to expect, that this mechanism would prevail in your example. I can almost guarantee dismay at the table in any case, and this is a weakness of the Gygax model of D&D. One which others sought to overcome in various ways. Modern RPGs with their models of intent, action, and consequence often avoid these issues.

Maxperson said:

It wasn't just D&D all over again. It was more complicated and there wasn't really a class structure. Magic happened if you had high enough stats(not 3-18 system) and you made a lucky roll. Even then it was minor magic unless you got like a 5% or 3% or lower on the die roll(or maybe it was 95% or higher. I can't remember exactly). If you did that, you were not only a mercenary, rogue or whatever with your skills, but you were also basically Merlin or Gandalf. You were insanely powerful. Holy magic was similarly hard to get.

You're right that it wasn't very popular, though. I think the terms Gygax made up had something to do with it. Instead of mana, power or something normal, magical power was called Heka or something like that. I found it hard to get behind the silly made up names for some of his ideas.

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Right, I understand that the mechanical details were significantly different, it wasn't a 'D&D like' in that sense. However, it sat a DM square at the center of the system with total narrative authority and surrounded that DM with players who's role was secondary, to make action declarations which the DM had absolute power to accept, deny, or use some mechanical resolution with, and then total authority over what results were achieved, what the costs were, and how the narrative 'framing' of the fiction evolved in response (which was normally assumed to be related to a keyed map, but where it is understood that the DM might be 'winging it' and certainly has to 'fill in' details during play).

In this sense, AFAIK, Dangerous Journeys was effectively occupying the same overall design space as D&D. This was at a time when systems were beginning to appear like Ars Magica, Everway, and even TSR's Alternity, which were playing with the basic conceptual design in new ways. (I'm sure there were even more interesting ones out there, I am not much of an expert on 90's RPGs TBH).

Sadras said:

Posters should just use [insert metagame example you're comfortable with] otherwise the conversation changes to challenging possible metagame scenarios.

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With that being said, then the questions revolve back around to how you can use "out of character thinking and processes" in a constructive way in RPGs. I'm not even sure how much more there is to add to that discussion here at this point. We have touched on a wide variety of concepts and ideas, in amongst the endless attempts to explain them to people who don't want an explanation.

We have seen that going outside the character's frame of knowledge can resolve issues of differences between the knowledge, skill, and understanding of the player vs that of the character. It can allow us to use (and is necessary for the use of, technically at least) 'author stance' in order to add elements to our characters when needed to explain actions taken from a player perspective.

We have seen how mechanical subsystems can be used (or informal procedures) to allow extension of the fiction OUTSIDE the boundaries of the character itself by players (IE director stance things like BitD's flashback mechanism) . These can be resource-gated, or have certain 'gates' which control them (IE FATE lets you engage character traits but only when fictionally appropriate, and some games only allow this type of thing when certain specific 'distinctions' exist in the current scene, which if I understand it, is how Cortex+ Heroic does it).

AbdulAlhazred said:

I'd have to really dig around to find some examples, but there were a number of times when Gygax addressed this. I don't think its directly stated anywhere in 1e, but he appeared to hold the opinion that hit points were a mechanism which was largely intended to regulate armed combat between active opponents. In other types of situations, such as the one you suggest, I think his answer would have been "the character dies of a horrible throat wound."

Even within 1e instant death is certainly possible in rules terms. An assassin can simply kill a target, no hit points are involved whatsoever (though you can argue about whether or not NPC assassins exist and if they can use this mechanic against a PC). There are a few places in modules and discussion where Gary, or at least TSR, used or advised use of a death save as well. This could be a good way to adjudicate jumping off a 400' cliff for example.

OTOH AD&D doesn't specifically state any of this consistently and hit points are certainly thought of as the default damage mechanism. So a player would probably be expecting, and would have good reason to expect, that this mechanism would prevail in your example. I can almost guarantee dismay at the table in any case, and this is a weakness of the Gygax model of D&D. One which others sought to overcome in various ways. Modern RPGs with their models of intent, action, and consequence often avoid these issues.

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1e was a different beast than 5e, and the 5e definition is what I was discussing with [MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION]. Personally, if you do something in my game that gives up hit points, like deliberately stepping off of a cliff or standing still for a sword strike, the PC is going to die or at least be down and dying.