D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[Hussar]

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.

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

That's not really true though.

If I'm playing the original Greyhawk boxed set, does that mean I can only use modules published before that boxed set was published? Once the campaign starts, can I use a module published after the beginning of the campaign? Because, if I do, then I've just made that dungeon "magically appear" while the PC's are wandering by.

Nothing in the game world exists outside of what the players have been directly told and experienced. Everything is subject to change at the DM's whim. If I decide that that tribe of orcs over there, that the players have never encountered or heard about, is now a tribe of gnolls, that is perfectly fine.

The only way it could be true that the guards at the town gate exist before the PC's interact with them is if the DM is forced to never change any setting details once the campaign begins. Does anyone play this way?

 

[Mark CMG]

There is no other reason for those boxes to be there.

In a (trad) RPG, it's up to the GM to decide if they are there and the reason they are or aren't.

 

[Mark CMG]

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.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have maintained that the original (trad) RPGs had the "players affect the setting through the characters" as the standard during gameplay, by RAW, but that various GMs might certainly do whatever they like at their tables. Over time, with the recursive nature of the community, some of those storytelling elements circled back to RPG producers and found their ways into later RPGs which eventually were developed by some as storytelling games.

Battlesystem / War Machine are a mid to late 80s development. That doesn't seem to counter any point I have made.

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).

Yup, (trad) RPGs have always had GM-approved PC creation and replacement and, no, it does not equate with player setting authorship. I've been known to allow someone who lost a PC to roll one up quickly or pull out a backup PC and jump right into an ongoing fight in which their other PC had died. I usually bring plenty of pregens to one-shot gamedays and conventions precisely for that purpose. I'd prefer not to have a player who joined in a one-shot game be sitting around or sent from the table because of a bad dice result or even foolish gameplay.

I ran a game at the Nexus Game Faire last June in Milwaukee where a group of eight players had a wonderful time with one PC Dwarf in full platemail climbing a cliff 20', perching on a thin ledge to fight a giant snake, and repeatedly losing and falling, being healed and encouraged (though not by all) to climb again and give it another try.

They eventually found another way into the Dragon's Tooth (one of a span of great tors across the Trackless Moors), but I would have happily allowed the player to put together another PC and keep playing. It would have been a huge bummer around the table to lose that energy. I do sometimes play games where character death sidelines the player but warn the players in advance that is the way it is going to be. But that's just one GM doing what he wants at his own table.

There is value in simplification, but denying the "traditional" game is free from meta aspects is clearly a fallacy.

The OP is about one kind of meta-gaming, some of which has existed since original (trad) RPGs came into being and the side discussion is about how storytelling elements began to find their way into RPGs, then become a type of gaming all their own. I think we've mostly kept those discussion separate.

 

[Cyberen]

In a (trad) RPG, it's up to the GM to decide if they are there and the reason they are or aren't.

Please please please say "In my game,it's up to the GM ...".
You don't get to define anything for anybody else than you. Your use of parentheses is particularly telling here.

 

[Mark CMG]

Please please please say "In my game,it's up to the GM ...".
You don't get to define anything for anybody else than you. Your use of parentheses is particularly telling here.

This discussion is about how RPGs originally developed not any one person's particular game. It's a rules discussion, essentially. It's not about my game, or your game, or anyone telling anyone else how they can run their game, but it is about how RPGs were written.

Putting "(trad)" in parenthesis goes back to earlier in the thread where someone else introduced the term to the thread discussion but myself and some other not being particularly comfortable with it. Have you been following the discussion? You seem to be missing a lot of the information that the rest of us in it have been working with for most of the thread.

 

[Hussar]

In a (trad) RPG, it's up to the GM to decide if they are there and the reason they are or aren't.

That's not the point though. The DM has not decided to put those boxes there. The only, reason that the boxes have come up is because the player has asked if they are there. Now, the DM can certainly say no. Fair enough. Even in most story telling games, the DM can say no as well. But, the only, single, solitary reason that the boxes exist in the game is because the player put them there, not the DM.

That's player authorship. In your example of the player declaring Elminister is in the alley, the player placed an NPC in the alley to help them. Now, you modified that NPC to fit better with the game, fair enough, but, the fact that ANY NPC was in that alley was because of the player. If that player had not said that, then there would not have been an NPC in that alley, full stop.

If the player had not said anything about a beard, there would be no beard. If the player had said nothing about boxes, there would be no boxes. If the player does not choose to initiate a warhorse quest, there is no warhorse.

You, and others in this thread, seem to have a strange definition of player authorship which is limited to only examples where the player cannot be over ridden. Although, in the paladin example, where the player specifically can't be overridden, it's no longer the player initiating anything, but simply "Playing a character". Somehow, my paladin now has the ability to create living beings, and living beings that want to test him as well. That's one hell of a power for a 4th level paladin.

But, let me be absolutely clear, the fact that the DM can over ride the player does not, in any way, change the fact that these are all very clear, and very acceptable at the majority of tables, examples of player authorship. Ad hoc as they may be, and certainly not codified the way later games come to be, but, still very clearly player authorship.

If it's not player authorship, then how did those boxes get placed in that alley? The DM didn't put them there, because he doesn't know if there are boxes in the alley when the player asks. So, who put the boxes there? The player asks, the DM says yes. Who put the boxes in that alley?

 

[Mark CMG]

That's not the point though. The DM has not decided to put those boxes there. The only, reason that the boxes have come up is because the player has asked if they are there.

Now here we are going to get a little mind-bendy. In a (trad) RPG, even if the crates aren't in the alley for the players until the GM decides that they are, that doesn't mean they weren't there all along as far as the characters and the setting are concerned. In fact, in a setting with alternate realities, they can both be there and not be there. A GM doesn't need to ever state that crates even exist in a setting at all for them to exist in the setting. In a (trad) RPG, if the player states, "I go into the alley and hide behind some crates" that actually plays out as the player asking if the crates are in the alley, it is merely shorthand and still up to the GM whether the player's character actually has crates behind which to hide.

You, and others in this thread, seem to have a strange definition of player authorship which is limited to only examples where the player cannot be over ridden.

Probably not a good idea to muddy terms at this point in the discussion but I will grant that not all storytelling games leave players wide open to full authorship.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Lanefan , @Mark CMG , @Saelorn , if you would, please take a look at the below and give me your analysis on a - g at the bottom. Specifically I'm looking for if you would describe thinigs in whatever terms you've (or others) used in this thread. Terms such as trad, deviant from RPGing, storygaming, unorthodox metagaming but still RPGing. Whathaveyou. Then make plain your reasoning. Please and thanks.


1) The player is playing a swashbuckler archetype character.

2) I'm going to contrive the (bog standard imo) GM exposition of the opening to a quick scene below:

"The gruel of the common room is stirred by drunken laughter, a haze of pipeweed smoke, lively music, a roaring firepit dead in the middle, scantily clad entertainment on a stage in the back, and flaring tempers at each of the card tables.

When you open the tavern doors, the eyes of the men playing the intruments are drawn to you. The music abruptly stops. The laughter chokes off. And the scattered grim-faced members of the gang you're seeking go slack-jawed. Their hands reflexively go to their weapon belts and their feet anchor to the floor to push their chairs out from under their respective tables! Much to the chagrin of the monkey perched on her shoulder, the dancing girl slows her gesticulations to a halt and screams!"

Because they aren't actually there to take in the sensory information, each player will then in-fill the rest of the details of the scene. They'll hone the resolution as is required for them to personally imagine it. Consequently, every other aspect of the scene exists in a state of sort of quantum superposition until the conversation of play formally establishes it, or not, into the shared-imaginary space. These other scene elements that they are imagining are everywhere at once (spatially with respect to other objects - some of those, again, not formally established yet - and themelves) and nowhere. That is until those scene elements are invoked and formally established within the fiction via play procedures (which includes mundane conversation between GM and PC). A sort of triangulation such that each of the players (GM included) slowly possess some measure (certainly not remotely absolute) of uniformity between their shared imaginary spaces.

3) What the "beard" and the "alley boxes" are in terms of player action declaration and resolution are "assets." So I'm just going to call them that.

4) For the player/character in 1 above in scene 2 above, procedurally, here are some possibilities on how an asset that wasn't canvassed at the genesis of the scene might be established:

a) Player invokes their "Swashbuckle" cheracter resource/ability that they can use 1/scene. "Chandeliers, banisters, swinging ropes, damsels in distress. Do something awesome!" The player declares there to be a huge tapestry suspended from the rafters via ropes. He expends his 1/scene resource and uses it to "do Swashbuckley stuff," no mechanical resolution necessary.

b) Player wants the imbibed spirits to be highly flammable and spilled all over the floor around and on a specific table. He exchanges a token with the GM in order to add a scene element dice to his pool, declares an action, and rolls to resolve the action and discover the outcome.

c) Player has a character resource/move that stiuplates "When you need it, there is usually a chandelier, rope, window, cart, easily-spooked herd of livestock, or similar unusual environmental hazard handy in any situation in which it would be convenient for you and remotely plausible. Roll Dex." Depending on how well the player rolls, they get to choose 1 - 3 options which (i) confirms fictional elements of the scene and their classification as assets and (ii) resolves the player's action. For instance:

* You end up exactly where you want to be.
* Your enemies are stymied by the objects you've used.
* Deal your damage to an enemy.
* Onlookers gasp in awe of your acrobatic bravado! Take +1 forward.

d) Player tells the GM that their character knows the monkey and they want to stunt with that monkey. He says he knows the trainer of the monkey and knows a code-word for it to become agitated and commence to ensuing hijinks. The GM says "prove it and roll the dice." The player deploys his character resource skill Streetwise or his character resource "A Lover in Every Port" background, explains his intent and justification as transparently as possible, and rolls the dice. They come up as success. Cool, Swashbuckley stuff happens with the monkey as they distract the villains or otherwise cause them some problems.

e) Player asks the GM if there are thick, heavy drapes on tall windows and if some of his enemies' tables are near those windows. The GM, having not iterated every detail of the tavern situation (intentionally), certainly thinks the player proposal is (i) plausible, (ii) within genre, (iii) good faith and not outright gaming the GM for an auto-win that makes a mockery of the play agenda, and (iv) engenders player proactivity. The GM says "sure", as he always does on player proposals concerning details not yet established within a scene and i - iv are met.

f) Player has a character resource called Tavern Brawler. When the player deploys this it mandates that there is always "stuff" in a tavern encounter/scene that serves as obstacles/negative terrain for his enemies and assets/positive terrain for him. As an outcome-base-effect, it stipulates that within the fiction, there is now a zone of difficult terrain for everyone but him, in which they give up combat advantage and he has minor cover. The player describes the fictional accompaniment as him flipping over tables and prior unestablished casks breaking and wetting the floor as he swashbuckles in.

g) Player asks the GM if there is a fairly benign scene element that may give the players a modicum of advantage. The GM thinks it would be 50:50 from a plausibility perspective, but doesn't want there to be this scene element. The GM decides to make a show of rolling some irrelevant dice behind a screen and then says "no."
​

 

[Cyberen]

This discussion is about how RPGs originally developed not any one person's particular game. It's a rules discussion, essentially. It's not about my game, or your game, or anyone telling anyone else how they can run their game, but it is about how RPGs were written.

Putting "(trad)" in parenthesis goes back to earlier in the thread where someone else introduced the term to the thread discussion but myself and some other not being particularly comfortable with it. Have you been following the discussion? You seem to be missing a lot of the information that the rest of us in it have been working with for most of the thread.

I have followed the thread very closely !
It seems to me you are trying to draw lines in the sand where there were previously none. I won't go further than AD&D, but I say it again : the 1e DMG *rules* mention the Battlesystem. Thus, your claim that "In RPGs, the players exclusively act through their character" is clearly an oversimplification of those *rules*. You are aiming at a simple, short and definitive definition of (trad) RPGs, by ignoring facts. When pemerton (and others) says he has built his actual DMing style upon seeds he has found in those rules, it *proves* those seeds where there, even if others don't see them.
I also feel that you and Hussar agree on player authorship, but you keep nagging at the words he's using because you wouldn't change your terms. Beside this, I have found your contribution to this thread very constructive, especially with your crazy actual examples of power entitlement and your elegant way of solving them, and your insights on "traditional" play. So, please keep on the good work, but I respectfully tell you that I feel your "definitive assertions" about RPGs add more confusion than light to this debate.

 

[Greg K]

I won't go further than AD&D, but I say it again : the 1e DMG *rules* mention the Battlesystem.

Cyberen, Where is the mention of Battlesystem in the 1e DMG. It has been years since I closely read the 1e DMG, but Battlesystem came out 5 or 6 years after the 1e DMG was released. Therefoe I am curious as to whether the designers had plans for Battlesystem that far back prior to its release and I have forgotten its mention or if it was added to a later printing.