D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[Lanefan]

The point is that, unless someone actually engages in an act of authorship - actually writes the warhorse, or the boxes, into the gameworld - then they are not in any practical sense part of the gameworld. For instance, no player will form the belief "That warhorse (or those boxes) are part of the gameworld". No player will declare an action based on the premise of their existence. No GM will adjudicate an action, or frame a scene, having regard to them.

So what? None of the adventurers may have ever heard of the Caves of Chaos before the party stumbles onto them en route to somewhere else, but the Caves didn't just magically appear while the PCs were wandering by, and while the DM might have had them pre-placed the players would have made no decisions based on knowledge of the Caves, because they had none. Ditto the boxes.

This is a different point than the idea of history, however. Once something of any relevance appears in the gameworld its history must also be considered, as per the vampire example. I don't care why those boxes are sitting in the alley (or, conversely, why someone took them away and burned them last night), but I probably will wonder why nobody knew about something as significant as a vampire before now (knowing full-well there may be a perfectly good in-game answer).

Side note: I think a similar discussion has come up before, something to do with whether the guards at a town gate exist before the PCs interact with them in-game. And then, as now, I posited that they did exist.

To relate this back to its origins in this thread: I stated that a strength of The Forge is that they eschew appeals to the ingame perspective as a way of explaining play experience. If you want to teach someone how to be a good GM when it comes to random encounters, getting them to think really hard about the ingame situation is irrelevant. You need to teach him/her how to write good ingame situations. You need to teach him/her to be an author, not an imaginer.

A good GM needs to be an imaginer first, a communicator second, an engineer third, a facilitator fourth, and an author maybe last if only to afterwards record the story written in the game play, such as it may be.

Lan-"and a good measure of 'devious scoundrel' can also serve a DM well"-efan

 

[Mark CMG]

The reason I say that the difference is merely technical is because, once the players know that the GM's authorship is driven in part by their desires, they know that they are not, even metaphorically, exploring a world. They are helping to shape it in ways other than simply playing their PCs.

Naw, they are exploring. The fact that the GM mainly has a mental bible for any areas that aren't pre-detailed and how a setting might be "populated" with crates or beards or whatever, doesn't mean the players are not exploring through their PCs (the last part of which you keep leaving off in all of your arguments).

 

[pemerton]

So what? None of the adventurers may have ever heard of the Caves of Chaos before the party stumbles onto them en route to somewhere else, but the Caves didn't just magically appear while the PCs were wandering by

No one is saying that they did just magically appear! (Except maybe [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION].)

You (togehter with sme others) are the one who said that, if the GM says "yes" in reply to the player's query "Are there any boxes", this is tantamount to the boxes magically appearing!

The point that I, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and others are making is that you were wrong to say so. That the fact that the GM makes up the boxes in response to a player request doesn't mean that they didn't always exist in the gameworld, anymore than the fact that the GM writes up the backstory of a vampire as part of a random encounter roll means that the vampire just magically appeared (past and all!), or anymore than the fact that a player intitiates a paladin quest for the warhorse means that the horse and it's guardian weren't already part of the gameworld.

Running an RPG requires creating new material, including new backstory, in response to the demands of play. Using the desires of the players as a guide to that doesn't make the authorship any more metagame-y, nor make the products of that authorship any more magical from the ingame perspective.

the DM might have had them pre-placed

The point is that the GM doesn't have the whole of the camaign world pre-placed at the start of the game. Gygax expressly talked about this in the passage I've quoted upthread. Even those GMs who are running level 1 to 20 adventure paths will create new elements during the course of play, even if they are just minor NPCs and relatively insignificant locations (eg temples where the PCs can pay for healing).

A good GM needs to be an imaginer first, a communicator second, an engineer third, a facilitator fourth, and an author maybe last if only to afterwards record the story written in the game play, such as it may be.

A GM who does not author content (or pay for someone else to do so, eg by buying a module) will have nothing to communicate. That's my point. Campaign backstory doesn't write itself. Dungeon maps and notes don't write themselves. NPC descriptions don't write themselves. All this stuff has to be made up by someone. And I have never heard of a campaign in which the GM authored every single bit of this stuff in advance.

 

[pemerton]

The fact that the GM mainly has a mental bible for any areas that aren't pre-detailed and how a setting might be "populated" with crates or beards or whatever, doesn't mean the players are not exploring through their PCs

I don't understand why you talk about a GM with a "mental bible". If the GM has a mental bible then yes, the players are exploring the gameworld via their PCs.

But that is not the example I gave that you quoted in the post of yours I have just quoted.

I gave an example in which the GM has no mental bible, and makes something up because s/he knows it is what the players are hoping for. If the players know that this is what the GM did - ie if they know that, rather than deploy a mental bible or some randomisation device for extrapolating from said bible, the GM is following their lead - then the players know that they are no longer exploring a world. They know that, through the desires that they express during play, they are helping to shape it.

The fact that the shaping is mediated via the GM does not dilute the force, nor the significance, of their knowledge.

If you think there is a fundamental divide between RPGs and storygames, then in my view you should put the style of play I just described on the storygame side. Because the fact that the players' desires are mediated via the GM, rather than via (say) a fate point mechanic, is a technical detail. In either case the players know that they are helping to author a world, not simply exploring a GM-authored world.

This is also the reason why I regard the RPG/storygame distinction as spurious. Because I have been running games that roughly fit my above description since 1986-87, using mostly D&D and Rolemaster as my systems. And I learned to run games like this playing the original Oriental Adventures, without needing to adopt any house rules other than the anti-aligment rules of "For King and Country" published in Dragon #101 (September 1986). So either I successfully invented player-driven storygaming all by myself, even though I thought I was RPGing (and was using rules all of which described themselves as RPG rules) or (as I think more likely) I was just RPGing in a way diffrent from the sort of exploration-oriented play that you put under that label.

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) the fact that a player intitiates a paladin quest for the warhorse (. . .)

The player through his character calls for (initiates) a quest by using a class feature of the PC (a character resource).

 

[Mark CMG]

I don't understand why you talk about a GM with a "mental bible". If the GM has a mental bible then yes, the players are exploring the gameworld via their PCs.

All GMs of RPGs have a mental bible, some more detailed than others, from the moment they sit behind the screen and decide they will run a game in any RPG setting. Remember, we're not saying all GMs are equally good at GMing nor equally prepared to do so.

 

[Lanefan]

No one is saying that they did just magically appear! (Except maybe [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION].)

You (togehter with sme others) are the one who said that, if the GM says "yes" in reply to the player's query "Are there any boxes", this is tantamount to the boxes magically appearing!

Not quite. The query "Are there any boxes?" is just fine. But upthread we had players saying simply "There are boxes. I'm climbing them." with no chance for the DM to say "No there aren't any boxes." And *that* is what I'm objecting to.

The point that I, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and others are making is that you were wrong to say so. That the fact that the GM makes up the boxes in response to a player request doesn't mean that they didn't always exist in the gameworld, anymore than the fact that the GM writes up the backstory of a vampire as part of a random encounter roll means that the vampire just magically appeared (past and all!), or anymore than the fact that a player intitiates a paladin quest for the warhorse means that the horse and it's guardian weren't already part of the gameworld.

I think we agree here. But some are saying (again) that nothing exists in the game world at all until either a player authors it or the PCs interact with it; and that's also wrong.

Running an RPG requires creating new material, including new backstory, in response to the demands of play. Using the desires of the players as a guide to that doesn't make the authorship any more metagame-y, nor make the products of that authorship any more magical from the ingame perspective.

Again I think we agree here, except perhaps as to the degree to which the DM should cater to the players' desires.

The point is that the GM doesn't have the whole of the camaign world pre-placed at the start of the game. Gygax expressly talked about this in the passage I've quoted upthread. Even those GMs who are running level 1 to 20 adventure paths will create new elements during the course of play, even if they are just minor NPCs and relatively insignificant locations (eg temples where the PCs can pay for healing).

A GM who does not author content (or pay for someone else to do so, eg by buying a module) will have nothing to communicate. That's my point. Campaign backstory doesn't write itself. Dungeon maps and notes don't write themselves. NPC descriptions don't write themselves. All this stuff has to be made up by someone. And I have never heard of a campaign in which the GM authored every single bit of this stuff in advance.

Of course. But note that when the DM isn't the actual author she is still making the decisions as to what externally-authored material she will use in her game. She chooses the maps, the modules, the NPC descriptions, and so forth that will (hopefully!) appear in her game. She's just letting someone else - who is not personally involved in the play of her game - do the heavy lifting: the map-drawing, the room descriptions, and so on.

This can't happen when the players are also co-authors.

Lan-"author! author!"-efan

 

[Cyberen]

The player through his character calls for (initiates) a quest by using a class feature of the PC (a character resource).

Sorry Mark, but you are oversimplifying. "The PCs are the players proxies in the game world" is the default mode of play, but, as I have already mentionned, Battlesystem / War Machine have been part of RAW for a very long time and prove unerringly it is not the only mode.
You also haven't adressed Character Creation,and particularly Class picking, which quite often happens mid-play (but not in media res) to replace a dead character. Introducing a new protagonist is clearly authorship, and the rules tend to suggest this power belongs to players (with the DM's approval, of course).
There is value in simplification, but denying the "traditional" game is free from meta aspects is clearly a fallacy.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But from the point of view of reality, those of us in the real world, there is no fact about what colour the PC's clothes are, or were a week ago, until someone makes it up. And no amount of appeal to ingame causal logic will tell you what that colour is. (At best such logic might tell you that they are not purple, because no NPCs had looked askance at the C for dressing above his/her station.)

Within the game world, there is some truth about the colour of those clothes. That truth has always been true, even including last week. From our perspective, in the real world, we can't see that truth. All we can see is that it wasn't relevant at the time - it wasn't noteworthy enough to have been meaningful in any way.

But the infrastructure for your clothing must already be in place. Before we determine whether your pants are blue or green, we know that there was a vendor somewhere who sold them, or that your mom made them for you, or whatever. (We don't necessarily know the whatever, but we know that they must have come from somewhere.)

So we go to determine the color of these pants, because suddenly it becomes relevant. Cool. Let's say we go with a random roll. The DM puts together a quick pants-color table: 1) red, 2-4) blue, 5) brown, 6) green.

In creating this table, the DM has already decided that these are all reasonable answers. The infrastructure exists for every option. Even if black or tan pants would have not stood out, and thus weren't excluded on the basis of condition 1 (above), they have been excluded from the chart for a reason. They are literally not possible options, (or they fall below the resolution detail of the chart).

And the same is true of the lich. If the lich and all of its infrastructure (history, minions, lair, etc) did not already exist within the game world, it would not have appeared on the chart. It's just hiding in parts that haven't showed up yet.

And I get that you're doing it differently. You're coming at it from the direction where the lich didn't exist prior to the roll - where the DM has to invent all of that stuff on the spot, and a roll of non-lich means that there isn't necessarily a lich somewhere around there. As previously explained to me, that was apparently a thing in some of the editions I didn't play. I don't like it, and I'm not going to play that way, but I understand that your way makes perfect sense to you.

 

[Hussar]

Exploration. He asks the GM and the GM either decides it is possible based on his setting and allows it, or randomizes it, or simply says they aren't there because of his setting knowledge. The rest of your post conflates exploration versus player authorial control.

I think you're splitting hairs a tad too fine here.

The ONLY reason that the boxes appear in the alley is because the player initiates their presence. There is no other reason for those boxes to be there. They weren't there (or at the very least, were not remarked upon) until the player initiates their presence. The fact that the DM can say no in no way means that the player didn't just change the game world.