Distinguishing social and table dynamics from GM force
I think that’s really what both the various rules quotes and the posters claiming “GM is the final arbiter” are really getting at – the GM has great power, and it is to be used responsibly to enhance the fun of the game.
The players have great power too. A player who is a dick can be as disruptive to the play experience as a GM who is a dick. I've actually experienced this - in a game with a mediocre GM who is prone to railroading, but with a large-ish group of players (from memory, six of us), for a lot of the campaign the interaction and game development among the players was able to make up for GM's inadequacies, and the bigger threat to a good time was the one player whose character was the GM's pet, and who was therefore along for the ride and kept trying to steer the player efforts back that way.
So if three players say “Yes, Teleport should take a full turn to cast”, and one player says “No, I want my standard action Teleport, I am again curious which is GM Force
You are talking here about how a table agrees to the action resolution rules of the game. This is not really relevant to any discussion of GM force - we are not talking here about GM authority over introducing fiction into the game.
There are interesting questions of social dynamics here, but fundamentally I don't see how they're different from the question of whether to play 500 or to play bridge. Does the host decide? The strongest player? The weakest player? Different social circles have their own ways of reaching consensus on these sorts of matters, of correcting for the various sorts of conflict of interest that can come into play, and of making allowance for minority but strongly-held preferences.
It is, however, your job to run the game. So let us assume that Group H [heaven] and Group R [Raven Queen] decide they cannot work together any more, and CD [chaos drow] goes his own way as well. Each indicates they wish to recruit some replacement party members and continue their plans.
Does the campaign split in three, and you run three separate games?
You frame this matter completely differently from how it would occur in my group. In particular you are framing it mostly as an ingame issue. Whereas for me it would first and foremost be a real-life issue. At that point we are probably talking about the campaign coming to its end - the end being the severing of all bonds between the forces of heaven, the forces of death, and the forces of chaos - and my role as GM would be to come up with some fitting situation for playing out that endgame. (Unfortunately 4e is not very good for this - it generally takes for granted that the PCs are working together rather than against one another - though the DMG2 has a model for a skill challenge structure for giving effect to intraparty confilct, and I might see if I could somehow adapt this.)
I’m seeing GM discretion applied here to override the death of a character.
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Would the PC have come back from the dead if you refused to allow it?
I don't really understand the question - it presupposes that I have a certain power to refuse something, and then asks if I exercised that power would the thing nevertheless have happened. The answer seems to me obviously "Of course not - if I did have a veto, and I exercised it, then the thing I vetoed would not have been part of the fiction." But where does the assumption come from that I have that veto?
When I ask a player whether or not he wants his PC to come back to life, and then discuss with him and work out the details of how this might happen, that is a cooperative contribution to the creation of the fiction. What would have happened if I'd simply proceeded to narrate events as if the PC was dead in a final way? Would the player have asked about ways for the PC to come back? I don't know, because it didn't happen like that, but it strikes me as highly possible. In which case the same sort of conversation about what this new suggested fiction might look like would have to take place.
There seems to be a deeper presupposition going on here, too, namely that having a character die is a "loss" condition for the game. That is true in classic Gygaxian D&D, and the penalty for losing is bringing in a 1st level PC. But 4e (at least by default) - and, I suspect, many 3E games too - aren't like that. In 4e XP, and hence levels, are basically a pacing mechanism, for pacing both the growth in mechanical complexity, and the growth in cosmological significance, of the PC. The 4e rules mandate the same XP awards for all players in the group. PCs therefore level together. If a PC were to die and a new one be brought in, it would be at the same level.
Now I'm not going to kick out from my group a player whose PC dies. For a hundred and one reasons hat wouldn't even begin to make sense. Therefore, that player is going to keep playing. Therefore, a PC of the same level, and under the control of that same player, is going to continue to be part of the game. Therefore, what reason is there for it not to be the same PC? The only reason can be a story reason. And given we're talking, to a significant extent at least, about the story of the dead PC, we're talking about a story in which the player has the primary interest and hence should exercise the primary control. My job as GM is simply to facilitate that, and to apply mechanical consequences (namely, applying the cost of a Raise Dead ritual to the party's notional treasure allocation for that level, and imposing resurrection recovery penalties).
Framing this in terms of GM "permission" or GM "veto" seems to me to completely miss the dynamics of what is going on. It's to take a consideration that makes sense in a certain sort of "wargaming" play and apply it to a completely different context of play.
In other words, there was a decision made that the character would not remain dead – the question is not just “who made that choice”, but “by the rules as written, who had the authority to make that choice”?
Here is the relevant text from the 4e DMG p 30:
When a character does die, it’s usually up to the players as a group to decide what happens. Some players are perfectly happy to roll up a new character, especially when they’re eager to try out new options. Don’t penalize a new character in the group. The new member should start at the same level as the rest of the party and have similar gear.
You might want to discourage players from bringing a clone of the dead character in as a “new” character, adding “II” to the character’s name or altering it slightly, but otherwise leaving the character unchanged. It’s obviously artificial and interferes with the players’ sense of the fantasy world as a believable and coherent place. On the other hand, copying a character might be fine depending on the style and seriousness of your game, and it does keep the game moving forward with no delay. [There is then discussion of the Raise Dead ritual and of epic abilities that allow PCs to return to life mid-combat.]
I don't see anything there giving the GM authority - it refers to "the players as a group". And it expressly says that the proper response is a table decision. Nothing that happened in my game is at odds with anything I read there.
“NO – death should be final – the action resolution mechanics have spoken, and they should not be overridden”?
Three things.
First, the characters in question died. There was no issue of the action resolution mechanics being suspended.
Second, in D&D to bring a dead PC back to life doesn't even require GM improvisation! It's been an inherent part of the game since Men & Magic.
Third, if the group decision as to how to respond to PC death had been different, we probably would have done things differently. But it wasn't.
The Chamberlain
Let us assume, instead, that the Chamberlain simply refuses to listen to the PC for the one minute required for diplomacy. He dismisses them.
That is GM force. And I personally do not like the rule that it is grounded in - because the GM has to fiat an answer to a player's action declaration ("I get him to talk to me for a minute") before the actual action resolution mechanics can be invoked.
That said, the rules also say (according to the online SRD) that a check can be made as a full-round action (that would be in the neighbourhood of speaking a single sentence) with a -10 penalty. So it seems to me that the 1 minute rule is really licence for the GM to impose a -10 penalty whenever s/he thinks that is fitting. More guidelines on when/how to do this would be helpful, in my view, because in many situations the GM's decision at this point is really going to be the single biggest factor in determining the success of the skill check. (The contrast with combat is very marked, where the rules on when to confer or withhold much smaller modifiers are spelled out in far greater detail.)
Maybe it’s just not SuperDiplomat’s turn in the spotlight.
Then why did the GM frame a scene involving the chamberlain? If the GM thought it was time to give the fighter a bit of airtime, why not have the PCs attacked by assassins on their way to the palace? A GM who frames a social scene, and then nerfs the attempt by the player of the diplomatic PC to engage that scene, strikes me (to borrow a phrase given currency upthread) as an inept GM.
Authority over situation, and action resolution
Why is it not GM force to override the action resolution mechanics in favour of the players? This seems another restriction over and above those already implemented. “GM Force” has become very narrow indeed once we apply all of these restrictions, and I don’t think they would prevent many, if any, of the “rein in the wizard’s power” suggestions that have been made in this thread.
You have not correctly restated what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] said. He referred to "say yes or roll the dice". That is, the player declares an action for his/her PC - say "My guy cuts that annoying chamberlain down". A GM who is GMing a "say yes" game then has two options. S/he can either agree with the player - that is, step aside and allow the player to exercise authority over the content of the fiction (the Chamberlain is now dead, and the PC is standing there bloody sword in hand); or, s/he can invoke the action resolution rules (in D&D that would be init, attack rolls etc).
This is not "overriding the action resolution mechanics in favour of the players". It is much more narrow than that. It is using the action resolution mechanics only when two participants at the table can't agree that a particular suggested contribution to the fiction should in fact be part of it.
Knowing when to "say yes" and when to call for resolution is an important technique for the GM to use, in that sort of game, to manage pacing, tension and drama. But it is hardly GM force - either the player gets to determine what happens in the fiction (which is pretty much the opposite of GM force) or the action resolution mechanics are deployed (which is the main alternative to GM force).
(BW, 13th Age, HeroWars/Quest, and many other games are expressly described in their rulebooks as "s; 4e is a bit less clear, but the DMG and even moreso the DMG2 strongly lean this way; earlier editions of D&D could probably be played in this style without too much drifting other than a reduction in simulationist feel to the mechanics).
Open to whose narration? Is it up to the player to decide, or the GM?
In 4e, the player of the character who delivers the "killing" blow is entitled to decide whether the result is death (or dying, in the case of PCs) or unconsciousness.
Who makes the final decision if they do not concur. Not in your game, but by the 4e rules themselves. It seems like this may well be an instance where the rules are giving way to the GM’s discretionary arbitration.
You discussed the adding of additional challenges – is the addition of the water elementals a legitimate additional challenge?
Sure. The player can fight them - and thereby not get pushed back to the bank. I favour a game in which the GM has primary authority over scene-framing, because I think that is the best way to put pressure on the players, and putting pressure on the players via their PCs is what makes for fun in an RPG, in my experience at least.
GM force, as it came up in this thread, is primarily about action resolution. Telling the player that there are water elementals in the moat doesn't settle any questions of action resolution.
The wargame would say no, assuming they were a spur of the moment GM addition.
Agreed. The wargame approach is different from the indie approach. I don't run a wargame-style game. The few times I've tried it, many years ago now, I wasn't very good at it and didn't especially enjoy it.
I am arguing that you made a choice to deviate from the 4e mechanical encounter guidelines (which I think is not in dispute) on the fly (again not in dispute) unilaterally, not by table consensus (is that in dispute?) thereby overriding the action resolution results, which dictated the PC’s had defeated the encounter as drafted under the 4e guidelines
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It seems like interference with action resolution – the players had defeated their opponents and could reasonably now expect to proceed to the objective this encounter was preventing them from achieving. Instead, additional forces arrived, interposed between them and the goal that, based on the results of the action resolution mechanics, they should now have been able to seize. It seems a very “micro” focus to insist that, because your changes were not directly to one specific opponent, they were not “GM force”.
How is continued addition of more enemy forces ultimately different than those waves in the moat that continually wash the swimming fighter back to his side of the moat? Would it be OK if, instead of waves in the moat, we added a bunch of Moat Monsters with Grappling skills to continually catch the fighter and fling him back to his side of the moat?
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But the rules apply no specific resources (or limits on the resources) of the GM, do they? This seems to be the exact “RAW permits GM Force” assertion presented in prior editions.
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If pemerton consistently added more opponents until the PC’s were overwhelmed and slain, would that be a good use of the power afforded him as GM?
The first sentence is wrong, because the sentence under the second "snip" is true. That is, 4e does not impose any limitation on the GM in the context of scene framing, and hence injecting additional opposition into the scene is not in violation of any rules or guidelines. (A contrast can be drawn here with Marvel Heroic RP, which does impose such a limitation - namely, the Doom Pool.) 4e's guidelines for encounter building are guidelines for measuring effect - they tell you what sort of impact a given encounter will have on a given level party - but they are not guidelines for setting effect. That is left to the GM's judgement.
As to whether this is interfering with action resolution - it depends very much what is done. For instance, your example of endless inserting water elementals into the moat, so as to make it impossible for the fighter to cross, strike me as interfering with action resolution. But if you read
the post to which I linked upthread, you will see that - contrary to your description that I have quoted - I did not interpose additional forces between the PCs and their (and the players') goal. Each new wave of forces - the hobgoblins, the chimera, Calastryx, the mooncalves - built on what had gone before and pushed the players harder. That's pretty much, for me, the point of playing an RPG.
Burning Wheel Circle mechanics and other mechanical matters
But you are adjudicating the results, as I read the above, and not applying results prescribed by the action resolution mechanics. Once again, it appears the results fall more within your control than that of the players. Being unfamiliar with the specific mechanics, I may be incorrect
In BW, a character has a Circles bonus just like they have a skill or stat bonus. If a player wants to have his/her PC meet a helpful NPC, s/he makes a Circles check. There are modifications depending on how different the social station of the NPC is from the PC, how specific the requirements are ("the world's greatest detailer of breastplates" vs "maker of fine armour" vs "metalworker", for instance) and how immediately and improbably the NPC is going to show up (so its easier to meet an armourer in the armourer's quarter of a big city than to have a helpful metalworker turn up to help you break through the bars of your prison cell).
Once the DC is set, the dice are rolled. If the player succeeds on the check, his PC meets the helpful NPC (and the player is the one who gets to decide what the NPC's name is). If the player fails, either no one is met, or the GM can invoke the "enmity clause" - the right sort of person shows up, but they are hostile rather than helpful. The PC can try to talk them round, but modifiers to the social checks will apply because of the hostility.
Once we take into account that the social status of a PC is itself chosen by the player as part of PC generation - the only point, according to the rules, at which a group veto applies is if the player wants to bring into play a Prince of the Royal Blood - then I don't think it's fair to say that the outcome is more in the control of the GM than the player.
The Circles mechanic is one of several mechanical devices in BW to move the details of worldbuilding out of the hands of the GM as part of prep, instead becoming a matter to which all participants contribute in the course of actual play.
So if there are no diplomacy rules in the rules-light game, is it now OK for the GM to rule that the Chamberlain is deaf to your pleas for an audience with the King? Or does it just mean he has no basis to deny you the audience with the King?
My strong guess is that the rules-lite games that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is playing have generic resolution mechanics for handling all sorts of conflict, including social conflict. So he, playing his PC, would deploy some relevant skill or descriptor (Diplomacy, Likeable Fellow, whatever other relevant thing might be written on the PC sheet) and then there is some fairly simple dice system for working out whether the GM says "Yep, that works", "Yep, that works and now here's the complication" or just "And now for some complication as things unfold not quite how you hoped . . ."
Of course, I stand to be corrected by Hussar.
Using GM force to control spellcasters
It always seems that the PC’s of “overpowered spellcasters” are allowed to use their spells as they see fit, generally very broadly interpreted, but no one else is allowed to use magic in any way, shape or form if it would interfere. A simple Detect Magic is pretty easy to spot even Stilled, Silent Spells in use. Could a King not have a few L1 spellcasters on payroll, always around with Detect Magic in use (very easy in Pathfinder, where it can be re-cast at will)?
Sure, but that's exactly the sort of GMing approach that not everyone wants to use.
There are no "duel of magic" rules in D&D. So the GM declaring "The king has a mage Detecing Magic on you" isn't an invitation to the player of the wizard to engage in action resolution - if it was, it could be kind of fun, as the player tries to get off their sneaky charm spell without being detected. Success would mean that they get it off; partial success would mean that either they get it off but are detected, or are not detected but don't get it off (different systems could make this players or GM's choice); failure means they don't get it off but are detected.
But D&D's rules being what they are, the GM declaring "You are detected by the king's diviner as you try to charm his Chamberlain" is simply the GM reframing into a scene in which the PC wizard is now a known villain at court. That's not the sort of framing that I'm interested in, for instance, except in pretty specific circumstances, because (i) it doesn't leave the player a lot of viable room to move within the fiction, and (ii) it is framing the player direct into a deprotagonising loss - it's very similar to the "And you all wake up in prison stripped of your gear". As a consequence following naturally from some earlier failed action resolution that's fine - but as a reframe simply in response to the player declaring an action, before that scene has even been allowed to play out to success or failure, it strikes me as very heavy handed. And deprotagonising of the wizard player.
the assertion that spells have no negative consequences later on is another good one. “Oh, no, he should awaken from being Charmed perhaps wondering why he did that, but there should never be any negative consequences. No one should ever be offended to having their mind ensorcled.”
My response to this is similar, and again focuses on protagonism - what is the point of letting a player build an enchanter PC if they can't use their signiature abilities? Or, even worse - what is the point of letting a player build an enchanter PC with the hope of playing a sophisticated social game, and then punishing them in ways that they wouldn't be punished if they were running the same enchanter through dungeon crawl 101 (because you can just kill the random orc or lizard man once the charm spell wears off).
Also, this approach makes Charm Person in civilised areas a nuclear option. I tend to find that nuclear options aren't good for long-running RPGs, as they up the stakes too quickly
and/I] tend to work at cross-purposes to themselves - eg you will only use Charm when the stakes are so high that it doesn't matter that your PC becomes a pariah, but what is the point of winning if in fact it is also a loss because your PC is now a pariah. Like the nuclear option, it can only be used as the very climax of the whole campaign.
For these sorts of reasons, my very strong preference is instead for charm and similar spells to be integrated into the social mechanics. 4e does this with its Suggestion and Spook spells (use Arcana in lieu of Diplomacy or Intimidate respectively; the mage in my game had a Charm cantrip that gave the same ability for Bluff). And in one of my Rolemaster campaigns we adopted a similar approach.
And as you can see this has nothing to do with what is "realistic" within the setting. It's about framing PC build elements in such a way that they conduce to, rather than impede, the desired play experience for everyone at the table. Knowing more-or-less what sort of play experience I desire, and in many cases being able to see whether a given build element will conduce to or impede that experience, I can then work out what sorts of mechanics I want in my game. I'm not suffering from GM ineptitude; I'm just making rational choices.
I question how it is superior for the game rules to change to correct a problem some perceive and others do not, and inferior for the gaming group to modify the rules to suit them.
I don't recall any one saying that this is, in general, superior. However, it is superior for me to have solutions designed by designers who are better designers than me. I worked out my GMing style on my own, initially under the influence of the mid-80s Oriental Adventures, but I didn't work out how to theorise, and thereby better develop and apply, my style on my own. I learned by reading the games and commentary of good designers (Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, Luke Crane, Robin Law, and others, plus of course the 4e designers).
And what is good for the goose is of course good for the gander. If it's not a strike against 3E/PF that I might have to make substantial changes to it, both mechanical and in default GMing style, to make it work for me, then presumably it is not a strike against 4e that you might have to make substantial changes to it, both mechanical and in default GMing style, to make it work for you. Or even moreso, you might be better of playing 3E/PF, while I am better off playing 4e - precisely because, if I were to try and play 3E, the amount of mechanical change I would have to make to avoid issues, including caster/fighter issues, wouldn't be worth it.
Wicht, Wicht, Wicht…when we read the actual rules, and apply common sense interpretation to them, we depower those poor, hard done by spellcasters.
Correct. I want a game in which a wizard player can play with full protagonism and yet not break the game. Telling me that by curtalining protagonism in various ways isn't helping me with that.
And N'raac, N'raac, N'raac - which is it? Are Hussar and I and others trying to play the same game as you, but inept at it - as you sometimes seem to assert or imply? Or are we looking for tool and techniques that will let us run a somewhat different sort of game - in which case why do you feel the urge to keep reminding us that you don't have the problem we are trying to deal with? We already know that - I was the first poster to make that point in reference to differing playstyles, somewhere back in the 100s I think.
Or are you trying to show that we are deluded - that we think we're trying to play a different game, but are really just trying to but failing to play the game you are playing?
Except for a brief moment back in the 100s in response to my initial post about playstyles, you do not seem to be displaying any good faith recognition that techniques that work for one group, or one playstyle, may not be compatible with other playstyles. Is that because you don't believe that other playstyles exist? (You seemed to accept that they do, upthread?) I guess that I'm having a lot of trouble working out what your motive is for denying that GM force is a part of my GMing style. I mean, I'm not posting trying to prove to you that you're really running an indie-game even though you won't acknowledge it.
I assume you don't need everyone to be GMing like you in order to validate your own playstyle? For my own part, I can say for a fact that most of ENworld does not run games like I do - that's been obvious to me ever since I started posting here - but that doesn't bother me. They have fun doing their thing. I have fun doing my thing. And I (and hopefully they to) have fun comparing notes on different styles, different techniques etc.
