I am still waiting for you to say either:
- “Yes, a success is a success – full stop – is a tenet of all indie play – the PC/player intent is achieve and this achievement is advantageous if they are successful”, or
- “No, a success is a success – full stop – is not a tenet of all indie play – a successful roll can still result in complications later”
So "success means success with no future downside" means "future complications can arise from your success".
I am not following. Where did "success means success with no future downside" come from? How do you see that as relating to "player intent is achieved and this achievement is advantageouos"?
Personally I like how TwoSix put it a bit upthread:
A success is a success - full stop. The player's intent is realized. The current scene plays out with the player's success becoming part of the narrative. That does not stop the road to hell from being paved with the player's good intentions.
Ultimately, how far the player's intent can be realized by any one success is a matter of negotiation between the players at the table, and subject to genre convention.
Here is another stab at the same sort of issue, once again from
Eero Tuovinen:
The GM . . . needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences). . .
The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook.
The key GM skills in this sort of game are determing consequences and complications that will honour what has been resolved while also pushing against the players (via their PCs) so that the game is driven forward.
Consider again [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s rogue/drake example. The goal of the skill challenge is to persuade the king to lend aid. Given that the Bluff check succeeds, it must at a minimum contribute to this goal if success is to be honoured. And indeed we see that it does - it counts as a success in the overall skill challenge. The immediate goal of the Bluff within the context of the challenge, furthermore, was to contribute to success by persuading the chamberlain that the rogue had a certain capability. Honouring the success means respecting this outcome within the fiction. And because this is part of what contributes to success in the skill challenge - the king is persuaded to help the PCs in part because the chamberlain is persuaded of their heroic capabilities - then the fact that the skill challenge succeeded should "lock this in" as part of the established fiction.
Yet another goal of the Bluff was to persuade the drake of something. Honouring success requires having the drake respond to this within the context of the scene, which happened - the drake fled. (That is not the only way to honour the successful Bluff - perhaps the drake could have cringed and opened negotiations - but with only a few checks left to resolve the low-complexity challenge getting the drake out of the scene seems a good way to shift focus back onto the king and the chamberlain.) But the goal of the challenge did not include defeating the dragon, and so having the dragon (and its drake servant) not be permanently cowed would not dishonour the players' success.
There are, of course, better or worse ways to proceed from here. For instance, having the drake return to the city off-screen, having learned it was the victim of a curse, and having it then persuade the chamberlain that the rogue was just bluffing, would probably be poor GMing. Because it invalidates the player's success against the chamberlain by GM narrative fiat.
But having the drake return to the city and try to persuade the chamberlain that the rogue was bluffing, in circumstances where the player of the rogue now has to decide how his PC (presumably with the help of the other PCs, and perhaps also the aid that the king provided, depending on what it was) is going to maintain the bluff, could well be
good GMing. It does not invalidate any prior successes - the chamberlain still believes the rogue to have potent magic at his command, and the PCs still have the benefit of whatever aid the king provided - but it puts pressure on the players to take new actions to maintain and further extend their influence over the chamberlain.
A game which unfolded in this way would also provide a good example of what I mean by "no prescripting". There was no predetermination that the drake would come to the city and try to persuade the chamberlain that the rogue was a charlatan. This has emerged as a focus of play out of the previous events of play. If the player of the rogue had never declared a bluff, then the game would not have gone down this path. Or, if the Bluff check had failed and hence the chamberlain had not been persuaded of the rogue's ability, then the game would never have gone down this path either, as there would have been no successful charlatanry to maintain.
with combat joined, why would the rogue ever fail to use that Sneak Attack? And why not convert challenges from non-combat to combat so that sneak attack may be used
The answer to the first is - they would generally try to use it at every opportunity. For that very reason, 4e strikers do not generally go to "page 42" in combat as often as (say) controllers, who are in a better position to up their (typicaly lesser) damage by exploiting their greater range of control effects.
This is a distinctive feature of the game, and perhaps a flaw. But if I wanted a game in which players of rogues had an incentive to do something other than sneak attack in combat, I wouldn't design it around nerfing sneak attack. I would design it around giving them the opportunity to achieve spike damage by other means. (Much as the incentive structure for controllers is designed.) As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out, nerfing a rogue's sneak attack simply renders the player unable to have a meaningful mechanical impact on the scene. I don't see the point of this.
(It's interesting in this context to look at the design of Burning Wheel, in which it is expected that players will routinely find themselves in situations where they cannot realistically achieve mechanical success. It has three features to ensure that this is not de-protagonising: first, "fail forward", meaning that the players' action declaration still shapes the fiction even if his/her intent is not realised; second, its advancement rules, which mean that failed checks nevertheless make an important contribution to PC advancement; and third, it's fate point rules, which allow a player to accrue fate points from action declarations that are, in mechanical terms, hopeless. 3E, by way of contrast, has no features like this to break the nexus between mechancial ineffectiveness and player deprotagonisation.)
Many gaming groups prefer to avoid inter-party conflict and/or moral dilemmas, and that's fine. However, if we are truly exploring the belief systems of the characters in some depth, I would expect either limited differences between the characters' moral outlooks or inter-party conflict.
A fairly ingrained conceit of D&D play is party play. It is also a conceit of many other RPGs, and of other fictional media too (eg team superhero comics). Handling intra-party conflict within such constraints is an interesting matter.
Consider the X-Men. They are shocked by Wolverine's propensity to kill. But they still work alongside him. The tensions are not ignored, but they are sublimated in various ways short of team breakdown. (A classic example I have in mind is from an issue I would place somewhere in the 130s, when Wolverine has infiltrated the Hellfire Club solo. Kitty Pryde subsequently suggests that they interrogate one of the guards that Wolverine defeated; but Colossus says something to the effect of the guards no longer being in a condition to be interrogated. Kitty is at first confused, and then horrified.)
In my game generally the same approach is taken. (Not always, particularly in earlier days when players were more happy to introduce new characters. But generally.) All the PCs in my game are well-entrenched in the backstory and the unfolding events. The game has evolved around them. How would the play experience be better if one (or more) was removed due to irreconcilable differences? So, instead, various techniques of sublimation and accommodation are adopted.
Indeed, when you state that "if we are truly exploring the belief systems of the characters in some depth, I would expect either limited differences between the characters' moral outlooks or inter-party conflict" I wonder if you are basing that on much actual play experience. Because of the centrality of party play to most D&D play, the only way to actually explore the belief systems of conflicting PCs
is to have them sublimate those conflicts in order to keep the party together. Given that this is a recurring them in my own RPGing, I find that managing these tensions (via scene-framing, NPC dialogue, out-of-character jibing and cajoling, etc) so that the conflicts remain alive and pressing and matter in play, yet the party is also able to remain relatively cohesive, is an important GMing skill.
(Ron Edwards is a vehement critic of party play on these very sorts of grounds - that it requires sublimation of conflict in the way I describe. He also designs RPGs which, unlike any edition of D&D I'm familiar with, have the mechanical resources to support non-party play. The fact that my game follows D&D convention on this matter is yet another reason that I characterise it as "light narrativism", to contrast with the more serious and avant-gard style of play that the key Forge personalities seem to favour.)
The 5 PCs in my game fall roughly into 3 camps:
- The invoker-wizard (at last count) serves Erathis, Ioun, Bane, Levistus (an archdevil opposed to Asmodeus), the Raven Queen, Vecna and Pelor. (The relationship to these last two is a bit ambiguous, but the player never objected when I ruled that he couldn't pick up the Sword of Kas without being burned by its enmity!) He wields the Sceptre of Law (= the Rod of Seven Parts). When it is fully restored (he currently has 5 of the 7 parts) it will herald the coming of the Dusk War. The Sceptre's goal is for the heavens to win that war and thereby establish perfect order both in heaven and on earth. This character seems, at least in general terms, to share that goal. He certainly opposes chaos and all threats to civilisation, and has been known to ruthlessly kill prisoners whom he deems unworthy of redemption.
- The tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen is devoted to his mistress for reasons that are somewhat obscure, but seem connected at least in part to a self-loathing deriving from his attitude to tiefling history and its consequences; plus a morbid sense of the inevitability of death. He frequently chides the wizard for backsliding (because at the start of the campaign that PC was a devotee solely of the Raven Queen). He is resolute and honourable but can be oddly amoral. He is the closest to being the party "outsider".
- The drow Demonskin Adept wields the power of chaos (both the Elemental Chaos, and the power of the Abyss channelled through his demonskins and tattoos). He reveres Corellon and also Chan, the elemental queen of good air elementals. His goals are (i) to free the drow from the scourge of Lolth, and thereby undo the sundering of the elves; and (ii) to ensure that the god's plans for perfect order - and therefore stasis - on heaven and earth are not realised. In arguments with the above two PCs he presents this as a "middle way" in which there is room for the cycle of life and death, and for civilisation to evolve and flourish without stagnating. He is not that keen on the apparent finality of any pending "Dusk War". And when the PCs take prisoners who are essentially "prisoners of war" (eg hobgoblin troops) rather than criminals, he is the one most likely to initiate the process of extracting from then an oath not to take up arms again, in exchange for releasing them on parole.
- The other two PCs are less strongly committed on the cosmological front, and tend to straddle the camps. The dwarven fighter/cleric (of Moradin, naturally!) is an Eternal Defender who is committed to keeping the mortal world safe for ordinary people. He is most sympathetic to the drow - who likewise seems concerned with ordinary things rather than abstract cosmological matters - and least sympathetic to the Raven Queen cultists, particularly the paladin. He is critical, however, of the drow's tendency to unleash chaotic forces first, and clean up the mess only later. The elven ranger-cleric serves the Raven Queen as a hunter of undead and demons. This aligns him with the invoker-wizard (opposition to those chaotic elements), the drow (opposition to Lolth), the paladin obviously, and the dwarf (they both keep the mortal realm safe from such threats). In this way he is a "rift closing" rather than "rift opening" member of the party.
As the game progresses through epic tier, these divisions are becoming increasingly pressing, as the stakes rise and the Dusk War seems to be drawing near. How they are resolved (or not) is likely to be key to the way the campaign as a whole resolves. Bringing this to a satisfying conclusion, via judicious use of the various techniques I mentioned above, will be something of a test of my abilities as a GM. (My last campaign ended in a satisfying way, but the PCs - while not all identical in their commitments - did not differ as much in cosmological alignment and general outlook as they do in my current game.)
So the Paladin says "gosh, I don't think we'd really bring the prisoner back as a horrible unead creature" but then continues working with the fellow who not only made the threat but clearly has gone out of his way to gain the skills and expertise to do so.
<snip>
Seems like the Paladin had a choice between honour and mechanical effectiveness. He chose to make a mild protest, then stand back and let the necromancer continue. What a full blown gonzo whopper of a moral dilemma that was!
Once again you seem to have misunderstood.
The brief conflict between the paladin of the Raven Queen and the wizard (which the paladin won, as is implied if not actually stated in my play report) was not the conflict between honour and expedience that I was referring to. I was referring to the choice that had to be made by the fighter/cleric.
the Frustrated Dwarf ensures he is conveniently outside the room when threats contrary to his own moral code might be made, then expresses his displeasure with the actions of his colleagues, but carries on working with them all the while. Yes, they have certainly faced the challenges to their beliefs in a thematic and dramatic moment which will resonate throughout role playing history!
<snip>
I find the "moral dilemma" expressed in your Paladin/Cleric thread didn't carry much depth. Does that help? If following his principals is always easy, then the Paladin's principals really don't mean much.
It helps to this extent, that you have finally had the candour to say what you have been implying for several posts, namely that you find my game shallow.
It did not play that way at the table, I have to say: being forced to choose between honour - "Do I keep my word which has been carelessly given by my allies?" - and justice - "Will this person, who deserves to die for her crimes, receive her penalty?" - and choosing honour over an expedient path to justice, took effort and caused emotional tension at the table: all the moreso because the other PCs also wanted the prisoner to face death for her crimes.
And generalising beyond that post and the reponses of those who posted in reply to it, I have a general impression (both from real world experience of other players and games, and from message boards, and particularly the responses of many posters whom I respect to my various actual play posts) that for depth of backstory, development of PCs and engaging situations my games are not too bad. Because you do not post actual play threads I am not in a position to judge your game, but between this thread and the earlier Hussar-centipede-desert thread I have been left with the impression that the highlight of your 20+ years of RPGing, as far as depth of character is concerned, is the warrior who charged the umber hulk while looking it straight in the eye. Each to his own, I guess.
). I need 5000 gp worth of diamond to cast Raise Dead. Does that mean that being able to cast Raise Dead is dependent on diamond miners? Technically, I suppose, yes, but, honestly, how often is that ever actually played out at the table? You cast the spell, you mark off your spell component cost and move on.
