D&D 5E The importance to "story" of contrivance

Galendril said:

I would never say to the players, "Oh, you arrived too late to stop the villains plan. He's achieved so much power you are hopelessly outmatched."

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I describe this approach as "no failure off-screen".

It then generates some other demands on play - like, to pick up on an example in a post upthread, how do you factor in the time the PCs take to do something?

Morrus said:

Your birth was *astonishingly* unlikely! If your parents hadn't mated at the *exact* right time, having met according to goodness knows what fortuitous circumstances happened (what if your dad had missed that bus?), and your grandparents hadn't done similar, and your great-grandparents hadn't done the same, going all the way back to the right combination of molecules forming the right type of life four billion years ago. That's not counting the thousands of factors which coincided to make those things happen. Your existence is so astonishingly unlikely, you may as well call it miraculous! The odds of you being born were far, far less than the odds of your winning the lottery.

In fiction, it's inevitable. Not unlikely at all. Reality is far more unlikely than fiction.

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I'n not 100% sure what your point is.

I don't think that real life, in general, has as many dramatic moments in it, where multiple trajectories of emotional trajectory converge and are resolved, as does fiction. Fictional drama is driven by contrivance.

I'm not sure how the unlikelihood of the cosmos in general and individual existence in particular (assuming it is unlikely, which touches on issues of philosophy of science and theology) bears on this.

Are you arguing that dramatic fiction doesn't depend on contrivance, because it is sufficiently dramatic that it contains a world, with inhabitants, at all?

TwoSix said:

we tend to look negatively at contrivances in fiction that would appear simply coincidental in historical nonfiction.

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Do we?

In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan (i) boards the ship bound for Kush, and then (ii) recounts a series of events that bring it about that he needs toleave town in a hurry (TLDR he murdered a number of public officials), and then (iii) sees a coastal village ravaged by pirates, prompting the captain to remark that (iv) the ship's crew could probably beat off pirates unless it was Belit, and then (v) Belit and her pirates attach the ship, and then, after a bloody fight, (vi) Belit falls in love with Conan.

Think about how this might unfold in a game of more-or-less procedural, Gygax or RQ-style FRPG session:

TO begin we have the PC kill the public officials and hence flee to the docks; then we roll dice to see if a ship is there, and where it is going (suppose a 50% chance for a sea-going vessel to be departing, and a 10% chance that it is bound for Kush); suppose it turns out that it is heading to Kush, we then have encounter checks to (a) give us the ravaged coastal village, and then (b) the pirate attack (let's say a 5% chance of both). We might need another check to identify who is the captain of the pirates (say, a 10% chance any pirate ship in these waters is Belit's ship the Tigress). And then we need a reaction roll to see how Belit responds to Conan, with major penatlies for the fact that he's slaughtered half her crew. (Though perhaps also a bonus if the GM has a note: Belit admires powerful warriors, and has something of a masochistic streak.)

I think the odds of that sequence of events in classic procedural FPRGing is less than 1 in 1000, in procedural play. Of course some of what happens the rest of the time will also be dramatic, but probably little will be as dramatic as what REH has given us. (We might instead get a fight on the docks, rather than a jumping from the horse onto the departing ship; or a ship that has no encounters, or that meets pirates but not a pirate who falls in love with one of the PCs; etc.)

I think we expect contrivances in fiction, especially genre fiction (be it romance, or action-adventure), in order to make the story work.

I think the challenge for FRPGing is how to incorporate contrivance in the context of multiple authors and a fair bit of random generation of outcomes.

Mercule said:

I met my wife in college. We were mutually tied in to 3 or 4 distinct groups of friends who would have eventually introduced us. After we met through the first group of friends, we'd periodically say something like, "Hey, mind if I include X for this outing?" and it would turn out that X was a girlfriend of one of the guys on my dorm floor or was my wife's lab partner from a couple of her classes, etc.

It's not like we went to a small school, either. It had something like 35,000 undergraduate students. I studied engineering and political science, while she was animal science.

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OK.

Can you elaborate on how this relates to the issue of dramatic contrivance? I often meet people who know people I know, went to school with my partner, etc - it turns out that "intellectual" middle class of a city of 4 or so million people isn't as big as you might think!

But none of these meetings has had real dramatic or emotional significance - it's just curious coincidence. I don't want to post rude things about either your or my relationship, so I'll change to placeholder letters and make up something suitably contrived: suppose that X not only discovers that Z was a former room-mate of X's partner Y, but that Z - who had long admired X from afar - also killed X's true love hoping to have X for him-/herself, but inadvertenty triggering X's union with Y, and that X discovers all this after killing Z in a car accident, and while trying to assuage the guilt the process whereof has led X to become increasingly estranged from his/her partner Y.

That's the sort of sequence and interconnection of events that fiction tends to rely on, but I think happens relatively rarely in real life.

In a RPG context, it would also leave X's player free to decide whether X should reconnect with Y, or instead break off completely and seek out some new destiny unburdened by these past events whose progenitor, Y, is now no more. Whereas in real life, I think X might be more likely to suffer some sort of mental breakdown.

pemerton said:

This is an example of the sort of thing I had in mind in the OP.

A challenge for this sort of thing is if the PCs have mind-reading magic. How do you handle that? (In my case, I mostly play systems that don't have mind-reading magic, so the issue doesn't generally come up.)

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I'm glad you asked! It's usually my character doing the mindreading schtick so I've had a lot of time to think about how I want it to work for my campaign.

First thing I decided is that this guy (or gal) is adept at playing a role and so committed to it, he is effectively that person in mind and body. He's like Keyser frickin Sose basically and he knows the extent of their abilities in detail. So if he knows they're coming, he has time to "get in character" and a cursory scan with detect thoughts won't do the trick. A deeper probe, or a detect thoughts when he isn't expecting it or aware of them might reveal him as the villain he is.

But I'm also going to make Detect Thoughts and the like less literal. Sometimes people think in words, sometimes images, smells, sensations, emotions and weird subconscious stuff. And the more emotionally charged, or anxious or deviant a person is, the weirder that stuff is. I'm probably going to require an Insight check (easy DC) to interpret it and a contested check for someone who knows what they're doing.

robus said:

Anyway, you seem in a contrary mood this evening, so I'll leave it there. Have a good night

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Not deliberately so. Sorry!

pemerton said:

That's the sort of sequence and interconnection of events that fiction tends to rely on, but I think happens relatively rarely in real life.

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I don't know about that. I think a lot of what we call coincedence in real life is the result of statistical probability (e.g. if we're both in london and we both like jazz and we both like going out, its unlikely but not impossible that we both might end up at Scotties) and/or actual contrivance (e.g. I realise I like someone so I engineer to be at events they're at so I can talk to them).

So contrivance happens more ofte than we think, although your example might be stretching it a bit. They do say the truth is stranger than fiction.

My point is contrivance disguised as coincedence happens in real life so its equally applicable to RPGs, if you need a reason to do something without it feeling too "contrivance-y" i.e. the orphan with the magical gee-gaw being sought by the evil cultists didn't bump into you by mistake, she noticed you earlier when she was staking out the inn and improvised in a pinch by sleight-of-handing the gee-gaw into your pouch when she bumped into you.

Morrus said:

Your birth was *astonishingly* unlikely. . .Your existence is so astonishingly unlikely, you may as well call it miraculous! The odds of you being born were far, far less than the odds of your winning the lottery.

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This is the same logic that "intelligent design" people use, in case you'd like to offer us a disclaimer

While it goes against most of my morals to respond to a thread that begins with Ashton Kutcher, I'd like to add my method: design encounters without a location, and if possible, without a time. That way, you can throw them in when they're needed for dramatic effect.

I really appreciate the efforts of GMs to leave as much agency as possible to their players, but players don't always make decisions that will lead to an exciting story - which is more memorable than a contrivance-free session.

DMMike said:

This is the same logic that "intelligent design" people use, in case you'd like to offer us a disclaimer

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Yes, but an entirely different conclusion.

transtemporal said:

I don't know about that. I think a lot of what we call coincedence in real life is the result of statistical probability (e.g. if we're both in london and we both like jazz and we both like going out, its unlikely but not impossible that we both might end up at Scotties) and/or actual contrivance (e.g. I realise I like someone so I engineer to be at events they're at so I can talk to them).

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I think dramatic contrivance goes beyond this sort of coincidence, though.

What you describe is similar to what [MENTION=5100]Mercule[/MENTION] described (which I replied to in post 24 upthread).

But the sort of contrivance that I mentioned in the OP goes beyond coincidence.

The simultaneous and interconnected resolution of multiple emotional trajectories. Or (say) Frodo and Sam entering Mordor at just the time that Aragorn is able to distract Sauron, thereby making these two prongs of the attempt to defeat Sauron, which extend over weeks and months, coincide to within days and even hours. (And with no common cause, other than "providence", that ensures such an outcome.)

Or the sequence of events I mentioned from the opening pages of Queen of the Black Coast.