Both of you seem to be conflating the player and the PC, in a slightly odd way; but in any event I think have not picked out anything distinctive to "indie" play. N'raac, I also do not think you understand "fail forward" as a technique of adjudicating consequences of players' failures in action resolution.
To elaborate:
I assume that you both enjoy playing D&D. Furthermore, I assume that most of the time you are sitting at the table playing D&D with your friends you are having a good time. Therefore, you are getting just the same amout of instant gratification from playing D&D as I am. Your wish - to have a fun time with your friends - is being fulfilled to the same extent as mine. (Contrast Mike Mearls playing bits and pieces of D&Dnext for playtest, quality control and similar purposes - I assume he doesn't enjoy all of this, and is not getting instant gratification from it - it is something he does because he gets gratification from both his professional labours and his paycheck.)
As for the PC: my goal as a GM, and my expectation as a player, is the framing of scene where the players can make a difference to the fiction within those scenes in a way that will (i) serve their goals as expressed through their PCs, and (ii) will involve drawing upon their resources given the fictional positioning of their PCs. This is what I mean by "protagonism" or "player-driven".
Now playing in a protagonistic game fulfills my wishes. But by both of your own accounts, playing in a game in which the GM frames scenes whose purpose is colour and backstory rather than protagonism fulfills your wishes. So there is no difference in wish-fulfillment here either.
Now let's look at the situation of the PCs.
In "indie" play, if the GM is doing his/her job, the PCs have a real chance of realising their goals within each scene. But they are not guaranteed to do so. So the PCs don't experience instant gratification or wish fulfillment.
An actual play example from one of my old RM games: all the PCs were wizards, and most had been built with decent meditation skills to facilitate the quick recovery of spell points. (RM is a spell points system, where points are recovered via rest and meditation can enhance rest). But one PC had been built by the player so as to sacrifice meditation skill for social and perception skills. Which meant he was having trouble recovering his spell points quickly enough to keep up. So the player had his PC go out into the shady part of town and purchase a spell-recovery drug. Which worked, but to which the PC (via the game's disease mechanics) became addicted. (Another comment: the player knew of the chance of addiction - it was not secret backstory. This is part of the idea of "overt", upfront stakes that is characteristic of indie play.)
Because the drug was expensive - something the player knew when his PC started using it - the PC quickly spent all his money on it. Which meant that he missed the annual rental payment on his house. And so ended up homeless.
Around the same time, he had another series of misadventures out in the field - in particular, being pushed off a floating disc by a demon that another PC had bound, but then lost control of in an dispel magic zone. On that particular occasion the PC was rescued by an NPC elven wizard, the agent of a rival power, who found him, invisible in the bushes at the base of the castle warded by the anti-magic. (This is an example of "fail forward". The PC has failed in his endeavour to navigate into the warded castle on a floating disc, but that results in a new complication rather than a narrative dead end.)
Despite initial suspicions, the two wizards - PC and NPC - became friends (the PC wizard, as I mentioned, was strong in social skills), then romantic partners, and this inspired the PC (as played by his player) to kick his addiction. Then the elven wizard NPC - who had abandoned her ties to the rival power in order to be with the PC wizard - got cut in two by another out-of-control demon summoned by the same other PC; and the PC (as played by his player) relapsed back into addiction.
The demon-summoning PC got sick of his companion's ineffectiveness due to the consequences of addiction, and so (i) paid an NPC cleric to cast the appropriate healing spells, and (ii) did a deal with the unhappy PC: if the unhappy PC would help the summoner PC and his allies conquer the hometown of the two, then as a tradeoff the unhappy PC would get his house back, and also a magistracy in the city (something he had long sought). The deal was agreed to, they helped in the conquest (which was adjudicated by "saying yes"), and the invaders kept their side of the bargain. So the unhappy got his house back and got his magistracy. All he had to do was betray his city at the behest of someone whose demons had nearly killed him, and had cut his only true friend in half.
I don't think that counts as wish fulfillment or instant gratification for the PC. But it was the outcome of indie-style play. (Before I'd even visited the Forge, I might add - this is back in the mid-90s.)
It was a lot of fun for all the participants at the table, of course; but like I already said, I assume that everyone posting here gets pleasure from playing D&D.
I thought I discussed this in detail.
If by "Ancient Red Dragon" you mean the mechanically defined game element, and by "1st level PC" you mean the mechanically defined game element, then in no edition of D&D can you frame a confrontation between these two elements and expect the players to be able to impose their will on the fiction via combining resources + fictional positioning. (Short of something bizarre like using a Push spell to shove the dragon through a one-way gate to the Negative Material Plane.)
If by "Ancient Red Dragon" you mean the thematically-defined story element, and by "1st level PC" you mean the mechanically defined game element, then I can put one up against the other simply by building a (say) 3rd level monster and labelling it "Ancient Red Dragon". As I already posted, the 4e Neverwinter Campaign Setting takes a (less extreme) version of this approach in order to compress a heroic + paragon scope of play from the story point of view into the mechanical framework of heroic tier only.
If by "Ancient Red Dragon" you mean the thematically-defined story element, and by "1st level PC" you mean the thematically defined story element (a group of lads just off the farm, or out of the academy, or whatever it might be), then I don't think any version of D&D supports this meeting of elements. As a genre matter, in default D&D, lads jut off the farm have no chance against Ancient Red Dragons. They get eaten by them.
Of course if someone wants to play a Jack the Dragon Killer game good luck to them, but a game which presents, as the game-mechanical realisation of an Ancient Red Dragon, a 1 HD monster with AC 5 and 12 hp (which is about what you are going to need for Jack to be able to lay out the dragon with a single good swing), is not going to answer to most people's descriptions of D&D. Personally I'd be looking for a different system (HeroWars/Quest could do it, and I think mabye Burning Wheel too provided the right sort of dragon-slaying magic item was put into play); but good luck to you if you want to play D&D this way.
The chamberlain is different because, as I said as [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] has reiterated, D&D traditionally does not lock down social opponents via defined mechanical definitions. So it does not particularly depart from any D&D assumptions to have the chamberlain be persuadable by 1st level PCs. (After all, we all know that Einstein and Gandalf were only 5th or 6th level!, and you don't have to be Einstein or Gandalf to deal with a chamberlain unless its the chamberlain of Hell.)
As I said upthread, if at a given table there is a shared conviction that 1st level PCs are not worthy of dealing with chamberlains and kings, then if that table was playing indie style the PCs wouldn't be meeting the Chamberlain. The players wouldn't try and take their PCs there, because they would know they can have no effect. And the GM wouldn't hard-frame them into meeting the Chamberlain, because s/he knows the players could have no effect with 1st level PCs. So your Chamberlain quandry would not arise.
Your quandry - either its chamberlain or its dragon variant - only arises if the players are not playing indie style, because they are deliberately asking to have their PCs framed into a scene that they know they cannot effect via their resources + fictional positioning. I agree that if you have players who don't want to play indie style then indie-style play will break down. But I think that generalises across other playstyles.
I play a system in which all challenges are, in strict mechanical terms, equally difficult across all levels (roughly speaking, at least). As I posted upthread, that is the whole point of the much-vaunted 4e maths. The point is to ensure that every d20 roll - in combat, to throw off an adverse effect, to succeed at a skill check - has a roughly 60% chance of success; and that a level-appropriate challenge will be resolved in around 12-15 rolls (about 3 rounds for the default party of 5 PCs).
Of course in actual implementation there are all sorts of variations - but the nature of those variations is reasonably consistent across levels too, except at 1st level where it is inherent that no lower level creatures can be encountered (because 1 is as low as the system goes).
What changes in 4e, as levels are gained, is (i) the mechanical complexity - combat mechanics, in particular, become more intricate as levels are gained, but to a lesser extent so does non-combat resolution; and (ii) the fictional scope and significance of the PCs' actions. This is the point of the heroic/paragon/epic tier system. Roughly speaking, and appealing to very generic D&D trops, heroic PC saves villages from goblins; paragon PCs save kingdoms from giants and drow; epic PCs save the whole world, and perhaps the heavens as well, from demon lords.
As I've already noted, you can change that if you want - Neverwinter Campaign Setting compresses the scope of heroic and paragon tiers into what is, in mechanical terms, the heroic tier alone, and it does this by restatting a whole lot of creatures to make the mechanically weaker and hence suitable antagonists for PCs of 10th or lower level.
Now, suppose you ask "But what if those 22nd level PCs want to go and save a village from goblins, what happens? Are the goblins all miraculously tougher?" There are two answers. First, this could be "saving the village from a goblin army", and you could run a skill challenge for general management of the strategic dimensions of warfare plus combat encounters with goblin swarms (although in my game, given that hobgoblin phalanxes are only mid-heroic swarms, I can't personally envisage a goblin horde that would challenge 22nd level PCs). Second, and more likely for my game, it won't come up. The game is designed so that, for players playing 22nd level PCs, goblins are not a salient story element. Those PCs, if they want to oppose goblins, should be working out how to deal with Bane, the patron god of goblins.
Just the same as indie play breaks down if players of 1st level PCs want to go hunting Ancient Red Dragons - unless you radically change the default relationship in D&D between PC level and thematic scope of story - so it also breaks down at the other end if players of 22nd level PCs want to putz around picking of individual goblins 1 by 1. I mean, you could "say yes" for a little bit of this if it was ancillary to something meaningful, but it has no inherent interest. The scope of the game has moved on.
I don't see that 4e is radically different from 3E in some of this. For instance, I think it's pretty hard to run a 3E game in which an Ancient Red Dragon is a meaningful encounter for 1st level PCs, or in which a 1 HD goblin is a meaningful encounter for 18th level PCs.
But 4e is much more precise than 3E in its maths, as best I understand matters. And I think this makes it more suitable for indie play, because it makes it easier as GM to know exactly what you are doing, in mechanical terms, when you frame a particular scene.
What [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] said. At 22nd level you deal with Asmodeus's chamberlain, or with Pelor's.
If they are framed as scenes, yes. If not, why are they being framed. For example, if you think it is silly that a 1st level PC would be named Crown Prince; and if your players agree; then why is anyone in the game framing or taking part in such a scene? I think this is part of what [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] was getting at, upthread, in saying that some of your examples seem to presuppose absurdity on the part of at least some of the participants.
That's not the most epic 5 minutes of D&D I could ever envisage, but better that than spending half-an-hour putzing around to achieve the same outcome! Even better would be making it clear upfront that, say, 1st level PCs trying to persuade the chamberlain doesn't pass the basic genre credibility test - much like trying to jump to the moon at 1st level - and therefore the players might want to come up with something else.
Personally I don't agree with that credibility ruling - I think that provided the fictional positioning is right (eg the PCs are wearing proper court dress) there is nothing absurd about the PCs meeting the chamberlain and seeking an audience with the king (Pippin met the Steward of Gondor, after all, and Merry the King of Rohan) - but if a different table has a different view then run with it!
On its own, no. The key element of indie play, as I have mentioned several times already, is framing the PCs into scenes which the players - given their resources + fictional positioning of their PCs - can meaningfully change. Meaningful here pertains both to mechanical feasibility - which is the focus of the chamberlain discussion - but also thematic meaningfulness - ie the changes the players can make should have some sort of bearing on their thematic concerns for the game.
Can you give an example?
Upthread the option of attacking the chamberlain was canvassed, but you suggested that ultimately that would fail because guards would protect the chamberlain or at least oppose the PCs.
The option of fireballing the chamberlain was similarly poo-pooed by you as an ineffective way for the players to get what they want from the scene. And the suggestion that a Charm spell might help was met with the response that the king's diviners would notice it and respond adversely. (And that the chamberlain might also do likewise.)
So what are these numerous actions that you have in mind?
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I didn't think it was controversial that, in order to make a d20 roll, a player has to establish the requisite fictional positioning. For the sake of clarity, yes, if a player wants to declare an attack with a sword than his/her PC must be in melee striking distance and equipped with a sword; and if a player wants to declare an Intimidate check than his/her PC must be in a position to speak to the person to be intimidated, and must say something to them that might intimidate them.
But that is orthogonal to the question of GM authority, because in most cases the PC is either already fictionally positioned, or the player has the requisite authority: "On my move action I move here next to this guy so I can stab him"; or "I call out [to the advisor who is about 20 feet away and about to leave the hall] 'Golthar, have you fixed that tear in your robe yet?'".
This is not an instance of the GM exercising authority over outcomes.
I didn't have to decide this. The rules say that the player can spend an action point to make a secondary skill check as an immediate interrupt to grant a player whose check failed a +2. The player of the wizard spent the AP. He made the secondary skill check (Intimidate) and thereby granted the +2. The "torn robe" comment is not a precursor to making the check. It is part of making the check.
If the player had not spent the AP, then whether or not his PC made the torn robe comment the skill challenge would have failed and the advisor would have left without being goaded into attacking.
Once the player has spent the AP, then he is entitled to make the skill check. If he could not think of anything intimidating for his PC to say (frankly, not a problem I generally find with my players) someone else at the table - another player, even me as a last resort - would help him out.
There was a further aspect of adjudication - if I "said yes" (which I may have done, but can't remember) then in dong so I decided that the skill check was not required and the player's intent - further goading the advisor to the point of attacking - took effect without the need for a check. (This is the "say yes" part of "say yes or roll the dice. The motivation for saying yes in this case would be an absence of good ideas on my part of how to resolve the scene in an interesting way if the advisor was not successfully goaded, given the point to which the verbal sparring had escalated.) That decision does not dictate the outcome, however - it simply guarantees that the player's desire is realised, rather than making that desire hostage to a die roll.
As you say, had the wizard's player not taken this step, the evil advisor would have walked away without being goaded. Would the game have then moved forward in a different direction? Of course it would have - probably the evil advisor would have marshalled his armies for an attack on the town.
I don't know what you mean by "failure is not an option". Do you mean that, if the wizard's player had decided to conserve his action point (for instance, because he knew there was a foretelling of a catoblepas harbinger visiting the Baron later that night), I wouldn't have just called a halt to the campaign? You're right that I wouldn't have. I think only a very odd GM would.
If this is an attempt to prove that I'm really ultimate arbiter of all events in the gameworld because when the players fail their checks then I narrate the consequences, that's bizarre. Yes, in those circumstances I narrate the consequences. If the players succeed then they narrate the consequences (in accordance with their declared intentions). Together, therefore, we drive the game forward.
You are missing the point - the GM decides whether the player gets his/her way automatically, or whether s/he has to roll for it. That is not the GM dictating the outcome. That is the GM deciding whether the player gets to dictate the outcome, or whether the chance to dictate the outcome is allocated to either player or GM via die roll.
This is not GM force. It is the exact opposite of GM force.
A credibility test is not a veto. Deciding whether or not you are old enough to vote is not a veto on your voting. Deciding whether or not your dress meets the standards to enter a black tie event is not a veto. (Contrast - the power of any of the P5 members of the UN Security Council to block any resolution by voting against it is a veto.)
There are indefinitely many genre credible actions that a player can have his or her PC attempt. If one of these is declared, and then succeeds, it is the player who was the final arbiter of that particular event in the gameworld.
Yes. If the player's check fails, the GM narrates the consequences. This is part and parcel of player's not having authority over their own adversity.
Sometimes the GM is the ultimate arbiter of events in the gameworld. Namely, if a player fails a check. But if the player succeeds at a check, then the GM is not the ultimate arbiter - the player is, because the player achieves whatever was his/her intent in declaring the check in the first place. Hence it is not true to say that, in general, let alone always, the GM is the final arbiter of events in the gameworld.
In this way, indie RPGing involves sharing authority over events in the gameworld between players and GM. The "story" - the actual unfolding sequence of events in the game, the plot, if you like - emerges out of the ongoing exercise of this shared authority via the various participants. It is emergent from play.
Please cite me saying that. I utterly deny this.
I said that in indie play the GM is not the ultimate arbiter of events in the gameworld. That is quite consistent with the GM being ultimate arbiter of other things, such as backstory; or scene framing; or genre credibility, doubts around fictional positioning, and mechanical parameters (eg can a jump check let me jump to the moon?).
No doubt these things shape events in the gameworld. That is their point. But they do not determine them. That is determined by action resolution; and the outcomes of action resolution are sometimes settled by the players (if the GM says yes, or if the player succeeds on a check) and sometimes by the GM (if the player fails on a check).
In accordance with the rules of the game. I've already posted some of the rules from my game that deal with retries (or a functional equivalent thereto - spending an AP to make a skill check to grant another player +2 to their skill check) that are under player control.
As for your +2 circumstances bonu, a PC in my game has the feat that grants +2 to skill checks made in the course of a ritual. The player of that PC decides whether or not a given skill check counts as a ritual if it is not occurring within the context of a ritual as formally defined in the game system but rather under the scope of p 42. To date I haven't had to intervene that I can recall; it's generally pretty clear in the fiction what counts as a ritual and what doesn't.
I provided a 7-step breakdown of the "indie" approach to scene-framing and action resolution above. And explained how it differs from "storyteller" and "wargame" style. It explained in more detail the procees I have just described in the paragraph above this one. You did not repond to that list, other than to dismiss it as "not revolutionary". In particular, you didn't respond to my point that in respect of steps (1), (5), (6), (7) and perhaps (4) it is different from your playstyle or [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION]'s playstyle or [MENTION=221]Wicht[/MENTION]'s playstyle. So I am not sure if you agree with this or not.
Can you give an example of what you mean? One example I can think of is spending an Action Point to exploit a known weakness of your nemesis - namely, his embarassment at the fact that he had to flee from gelatinous cubes that the PCs beat, tearing the hem of his robe in the process - in order to just succeed in goading him into attacking you and your fellow PCs in front of the Baron, so that you can thereby finish him off once and for all without being suspected of treachery or assassination.
But for some reason you don't count this sort of player-driven stuff as "proactively creating one's own opportunities". You count is as "following a trail of breacrumbs", although you haven't actually identified what would count as a breadcrumb here, or where the trail is to be found.
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I was using the word with its ordinary English meaning - ie making a decision without signifant prior constraints on that decision. "Strong discretion" is a phrase that is sometimes used in legal theory.
pemerton said:
I'm assuming not. But if we have, and I've forgotten the rule, then I would expect the GM to remind me - eg if I say "Cool, I can get a wish without costing a charge" and we've had a prior occasion where that trick was tried with a scroll and didn't work, I would expect the GM to point out that I will spend a real wish. For me, the point of play is not to get ensared in rules trickery. It's to use the rules to engage the fiction.
pemerton said:
Do you mean a 7th level spell that a 13th level PC can use?
If your game can't handle a 13th level PC charming the Chamberlain, then I wonder why you have charm spells at all. What are they for, in your game? (That's not rhetorical, by the way. For the past 15 years I've run games with no charm spells of the classic D&D sort precisely because I find them bad for my game. When Essentials reintroduced a spell of that style back into 4e, I just ignored it and happily so have my players.
Sure, but making the Chamberlain friendly so he will let us in to see the king strikes me as pretty much a core use of Charm. I don't see that as remotely exploitative. What else is the spell for but resolving generally peaceful, but slightly irksome, social interactions?
The latter, in 4e at least, which is based (out of combat) on a "players roll all the dice" model.
What is the difference between "the PCs always have some new option for achieving their goals" and "the PCs need to go about this some other way"? I can't see any. So I don't understand your point.
But if you mean something like "failure, overall, is not possible" that is an interesting question. How, in an indie game, do we tell when the campaign is over? The answer is, when there is no more conflict that can be framed within the parameters of the rules and fiction. This might occur if the PC has died. Or if the PC has settled down, content with his/her lot. In 4e, it happens when the PC becomes an immortal.
But while there is still conflict to be framed, then yes, the GM will frame new scenes and the game will keep going. What is the other alternative? The only one I can see is to start a new game with new PCs. But why would you do that if there were still conflicts that you wanted to explore in this game, with these PCs?
I don't really see any difference here between indie and other playstyles, to be honest, except that different playstyles might have different definitions of what counts as "there is still interesting stuff to do with these PCs".
Bully for you. I remember some CoC games I played 20 years or more ago, and they were utterly GM force driven.
But I don't see what this has to do (i) with bad GMing - you are the one who seems to have a chip on your shoulder, that anyone enjoying a style different from yours must therefore be judging you bad; or (ii) whether or not there is such a playstyle as indie style, which doesn't rely on GM force over the outcomes of action resolution.
