D&D may aspire to those types of fantasy, but its characters develop slowly and the guidelines for creating them push us towards the ordinary, no towards epic heroics.
<snip>
a typical D&D character is just a treasure hunter, which is a far cry from Aragorn/Conan/etc.
That is not a true description of D&D as I play and experience it. Nothing in the guidelines pushes me towards the ordinary - for instance, Moldvay Basic tells me that a fighter can be Hercules and a magic-user Merlin - and I don't GM a game involving primarily treasure hunters, and haven't for over 30 years.
they're doing something that's completely socially inappropriate in a real-world context. You generally cannot just walk up to some important person and expect them to interact with you.
But this actually isn't true. There are plenty of people in Australia who can get cabinet ministers on the phone if they want them. That's not true of me, but there are some current and former members of Parliament whom I can walk up to and expect to have them interact with me. If the players' conception of their PCs is as having the requisite lineage, bearing and visible sense of urgency to make them worth talking to, I don't see any reason why that possibility shouldn't be resolved in much the same sort of way as we work out whether or not they are able to defeat a dragon in combat.
Showing the players that this is no more true for their characters than it would be for them prevents them from getting too full of themselves
The players are playing a game. Whether that game involves hobnobbing with gods (as my last Rolemaster campaign did) or involves hanging out with baser persons is a question about what sort of game me and my friends want to play together, and what sort of fantasy situations we want to figure in that game. It's never occurred to me that it is a character flaw for a player to prefer to play a game involving royalty rather than peasantry.
By the same token, I don't see that there is any virtue in the game focusing on fighting kobolds rather than demons - nor vice versa. They're all just made up. It's a fiction. There's nothing more self-aggrandising about playing out a fiction involving gods, or kings, than playing out a fiction involving children, or peasants.
showing up to town covered in orc blood and reeking of owlbear urine will get them in to see someone - like the barbarian chieftain. You're making an assumption (wild guess, really) PCs showing up unready to meet the king don't care about in-game consistency but that may not be true.
If the players care about it, then presumably they will either (i) wash up before trying to make an appointment with the king, or (ii) have a reason why it is so urgent to see the king that there's no time to clean up. In the latter case, maybe they're right! (I'm thinking of the scene in Peter Jackson's Two Towers, when a bleeding, dirty Aragorn throws open the doors to Helm's Deep to tell Théoden of the orc hordes outside.)
The assumption here - and it's not always correct - is that the players' sense of what is consistent and viable at least vaguely atches that of the DM.
Not quite. The assumption is that, if the players and GM get out of whack in respect of these things, the GM's view is not automatically to be preferred. (This will come up again below, in the context of action declarations and resolution.)
The DM's conceptions are, by definition, more important than those of the players.
This is not a matter of definition. It's a matter of playstyle preference. It is possible to run an RPG in which this is not so, and in which it is the GM's job to respond to, integrate and help realise the players' conceptions of the gameworld.
pemerton said:
the reason why it is wrong for the GM to have a pre-defined result in mind, for me, is the same as the one that Hussar has stated: it substitutes GM narration for playing the game.
You're implying that there's a distinction between the two. I don't see how that could be true, given that the DM is the players' window into the world. Without him narrating the outcomes of their actions, they would be unable to participate at all
There is in my view a huge distinction. For a player, on my conception, at the heart of playing the game is declaring actions for one's PC, and then determining what happens via application of the action resolution mechanics. Those mechanics constrain what the GM is free to narrate as an outcome. Using the mechanics is inconsistent with the GM having a pre-defined result in mind.
The players shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a side quest and the real plot
I prefer a game in which there
is no such thing as the "real plot" distinct from what the players think is going on.
This makes it hard to run certain sorts of mystery-driven or Call of Cthulhu-style scenarios. That's a cost that I pay. And it's not the case that mystery is impossible - it just has to be handled in a non-CoC-ish way.
Here's a little bit of a self-quote, to try and illustrate what I mean in a concrete fashion:
The PCs have recently entered a town which is under increasing pressure from hobgoblin and allied raiders.
<snip>
The PCs entered the town as heroes, having saved an affiliated village from being destroyed by hobgoblins. They were lauded by the Patriarch, and invited to join the Baron for dinner that evening. Later that day they then went on to stop an uprising by Demogorgon/Dagon cultists, and to cleanse the cultists' headquarters. In the headquarters, they rescued a priestess of Ioun
<snip>
The session begain with the PCs talking to the rescued priestess, and interrogating the one surviving and captured cultist.
<snip>
Two revelations had the biggest immediate impact. One involved the PCs' principal enemy. This is the leader of the hobgoblins, a powerful wizard called Paldemar (but called Golthar in Goblinish). The PCs learned that in the town he is not known to be a villain, but is apparently well-thought of, is an important scholar and astrologer, is an advisor to the Baron, and is engaged to the Baron's niece. The PCs (and the players) became worried that he might be at dinner that evening. This was a worry for two reasons - (i) they didn't really want to fight him, and (ii) they know some secrets about an ancient minotaur kingdom that he does not, but has been trying to discover.
<snip>
The second revelation was that the Baron was prophesied to die that night. The paladin had already sensed a catoblepas in the swamps outside the town, and had sensed it approaching the town earlier that day. The priestess explained that a year ago the Baron had been visited by a catoblepas, as a type of forewarning.
<snip>
After learning these things, the PCs cleaned up in the cultists' bathroom and then hurried off to dinner.
<snip>
The PCs arrived late, and were the last ones there. On the high table they could see the Baron, and his sister and brother-in-law, and also Paldemar, their wizard enemy.
<snip>
The PCs also noticed a series of portraits hanging behind the high table. One had a young woman, who was the spitting image of a wizard's apprentice they had recently freed from a trapping mirror - except that adventure had happened 100 years in the past (under a time displacement ritual), and this painting was clearly newly painted. Another, older, painting was of a couple, a man resembling the Baron, and a woman resmembling the rescued apprentice but at an older age.
About this time the players started talking about the skill checks they wanted to make, and I asked them what they were hoping to achieve. Their main goal was to get through the evening without upsetting the baron, without getting into a fight with Paldemar (which meant, at a minimum, not outing him as the leader of the hobgoblin raiders), and without revealing any secrets to him.
<snip>
it also quickly became clear that they wanted to learn about the people in the portraits, to try and learn what had happened over the past 100 years to the apprentice they freed, and how she related to the Baron's family.
This whole scene was resolved as a complexity 5 skill challenge.
<snip>
the challenge had evolved to a point where one final roll was needed, and 2 failures had been accrued. Paldemar, once again, was badgering Derrik to try to learn the secrets of the minotaur ruins that he was sure the PCs knew. And the player of Derrik was becoming more and more frustrated with the whole situation, declaring (not speaking in character, but speaking from the perspective of his PC) "I'm sick of putting up with this. I want Paldemar to come clean."
The Baron said to Derrik, "The whole evening, Lord Derrik, it has seemed to me that you are burdened by something. Will you not speak to me?" Derrik got out of his seat and went over to the Baron, knelt beside him, and whispered to him, telling him that out of decorum he would not name anyone, but there was someone close to the Baron who was not what he seemed, and was in fact a villainous leader of the hobgoblin raiders. The Baron asked how he knew this, and Derrik replied that he had seen him flying out of goblin strongholds on his flying carpet. The Baron asked him if he would swear this in Moradin's name. Derrik replied "I swear". At which point the Baron rose from the table and went upstairs to brood on the balcony, near the minstrel.
With one check still needed to resolve the situation, I had Paldemar turn to Derrik once again, saying "You must have said something very serious, to so upset the Baron." Derrik's player was talking to the other players, and trying to decide what to do. He clearly wanted to fight. I asked him whether he really wanted to provoke Paldemar into attacking him. He said that he did. So he had Derrik reply to Paldemar, 'Yes, I did, Golthar". And made an Intimidate check. Which failed by one. So the skill challenge was over, but a failure - I described Paldemar/Golthar standing up, pickup up his staff from where it leaned against the wall behind him, and walking towards the door.
<snip>
a PC can spend an action point to make a secondary check to give another PC a +2 bonus, or a reroll, to a failed check. The player of the wizard PC spent an action point, and called out "Golthar, have you fixed the tear yet in your robe?" - this was a reference to the fact that the PCs had, on a much earlier occasion, found a bit of the hem of Paldemar's robe that had torn off in the ruins when he had had to flee the gelatinous cubes.
<snip>
it turned the failure into a success. We ended the session by noting down everyone's location on the map of the Baron's great hall, and making initiative rolls. Next session will begin with the fight against Paldemar
<snip>
the goals of the players <snippage> started out a little uncertain and somewhat mixed, but ended up being almost the opposite of what they were going into the challenge.
This is an example of "no hidden backstory" - none of the resolution turns upon secret information known only to the GM and not known to the players. For instance, the mystery of the portraits of the rescued-in-the-past apprentice is important to the resolution of the situation, but as an object of investigation by the players (via their PCs), not as a causal factor in resolution.
You can also see that the players (and their PCs) learn about the Baron, but not by finding out what works and what doesn't. Rather, the successful or unsuccessful skill checks plus the broader dynamics of the scene, including the duty on me as GM to keep up the pressure on the players, provide the occasion for presenting the Baron's desires and personality as this or that.
And there is no "real plot" or "sidequest". The identity of the apprentice in the paintings is not a sidequest. It's just something that matters to the players and their PCs. There is no goal of keeping the baron safe, or not, or of mollifying the evil advisor, or fighting with him. There are the players goals, and their attempts to realise those goals via their skill checks. When the goal turns to one of provoking the advisor into revealing his true colours by attacking, that becomes the focus of play, and skill checks - ie the action resolution mechanics - are used to work out whether or not the players get what they want. They nearly didn't, but then one of them decided to spend resources (an Action Point) to change the outcome. That's what player resources are for! (And the spending of the action point means that it's not available in the subsequent fight - which, as it turned out, might have mattered - to beat the advisor in combat the players ended up deciding to use the single charge in their Ring of Wishing to render everyone in the hall immune from being blinded for a short time, in order to protect themselves against the advisor's multiple blinding spells. Maybe with an extra action point up their sleeves they wouldn't have felt the need to use their ring.)
And finally, notice how the issue is resolved of whether or not the PCs can goad an evil advisor into attacking by way of taunts and more-or-less veiled threats to out him: namely, the dice are rolled and the attempt resolved! This does not pose any threat to the consistency of the gameworld. How is the gameworld less consistent because it does rather than doesn't contain a taunted and provoked advisor? People lose their cool all the time in the real world over lower-stakes matters than being the secret general of an army invading the town of which one is purporting to be the chief minister.
pemerton said:
I use the mechanics to determine the outcomes of action declarations, via (i) build and framing mechanics, and (ii) resolution mechanics. Predictability and consistency with "everyday assumptions" and genre are achieved primarily via no one framing situations, or making action declarations, that violate those things.
'"Those things" that shouldn't be violated, in your statement above, are the framing and resolution mechanics?
No. "Those things" are "predictability and consistency with 'everyday assumptions' and genre'. Those things are achieved by no one framing situations, or making action declarations, that violate them. For instance, in a standard D&D game no one declares an action "I fly to the moon by flapping my arms".
Sometimes there are interesting borderline cases - eg "The artificers are having trouble taking control of the magical hammer in the forge? Then I shove my hands in and hold the metal steady so that they can grip it with their tongs". On that occasion -
which came up in my game, when the dwarf was having his Dwarven Thrower artefact reforged - I had to decide, as GM, how to respond to the player's action declaration. I decided that, as a mid-Paragon fighter/cleric of Moradin, and probably, at present, the toughest dwarf in the mortal world, that this was a viable action declaration (resolved via an Endurance check against a Hard DC).
It wouldn't have occurred to me as viable before the player declared it. But as with goading the advisor, it doesn't render the gameworld inconsistent. This dwarf is tough. It had already been established, for instance, that he could single-handedly hold off a phalanx of hobgoblins. These player-driven action declarations are, in my own approach to playing the game, as important as anything the GM does in establishing what is and isn't possible within the gameworld.
it is interesting that even the 4e text you quote directly undermines what you are saying.
No it doesn't. The relevant passage says that "it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing . . . Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge." It is not solely the GM's job to decide what makes sense in the context of the ingame situation. The GM has an important role, undoubtedly, in managing fictional positioning and unfolding backstory. But it is not an exclusive role.
The 4e PHB tackles this issue in its description (on p 8) of the functions of the DM:
Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.
Sometimes it
is clear what ought to happen next. On those occasions, the GM's referee function is not required. And even when the referee function is required - eg in deciding whether or not a tough dwarf can hold down a hammer in the forge so the artificers can grab it with their tongs - there is no reason to suppose that the GM's role is simply to apply his/her own conception of the gameworld. At my table, that is not how it works.
In some cases, this may be how they are learning about the campaign's in-game values.
<snip>
I would rather the PC's choose to do what they want to do, even if impossible, and play through the encounter than brush them off it. Plus, they may learn something from it.
The reason to frame it this way is because this is how play unfolds. There is a whole world out there, some of which can be meaningfully interacted with, some of which cannot. Players often try to do things that are, for any number of reasons, inappropriate, wasteful, subversive, etc. One of the most important challenges of DMing is figuring out how to deal with it when they do.
Telling them that it's impossible is essentially playing the game for them. There's an element of discretion there; sometimes it's best to do that to make things go faster or more clearly. But fundamentally, it's something for the players to find out themselves.
I would not run an encounter in which an outcome adverse to the players' desires is fore-ordained. To me it negates the pleasure in RPGing.
Part of the reason is that I care not a whit about the PCs. They can prosper, or suffer, or neither, as the whims of the dice and participants dictate. I care about the
players. If the players have chosen to declare an action which, in fact, can't succeed, then that implies they don't know something relevant to the adjudication of that action. (Eg there is some hidden backstory that the GM will draw upon as part of the resolution.) It's as if the players are being tricked, into thinking an option is open to them within the game, that in fact is not.
Another part of the reason is that exploration of the gameworld - for instance, learning what is and isn't possible - is not part of the pleasure of play, for me. The fact that the GM narrates the scene well, or that the players enjoy the experience of immersion in their PCs, is not sufficient, if in fact the whole appearance of choice, and of an attempt by the players to change the ingame situation, is in fact illusory.
