D&D 5E Clouds, cubes, and "hitting"

[The Crimson Binome]

But personally I don't see the principal function of RPGing as "making me imagine stuff". I don't really get that from playing Monopoly, but even I - an experenced gamer - get that from Mystic Wood, though not to the same degree as my kids. In my view, it becomes RPGing when the fiction that is generated matters to subsequent moments of resolution - that is, when rightward arrows are generated from cloud to cube. (Eg, because I'm covered in blod, I get a reaction roll penalty on my interaction with the duke; because I have a scratch, I have an increased chance of infection when I shove my hand into the murky pond; or whatever it might be.)

Why do you care about the cubes, though? Why does a player care about whether their sword inflicts 1d8+2 damage or 2d6+15? Is it because they're trying to ensure that their 70% chance of scoring X number of points toward meeting a group goal of 96 points is sufficient to beat the race condition where another group is scoring points against their own threshold of 35? Or is it because they want their team to successfully slay the monster and rescue the hostage, while suffering a minimum of casualties?

In an RPG, the cloud is the end-game. The narrative is what we care about. In an RPG, the -2 penalty to your Persuasion roll, or the total outcome of 17 on the check, is not important; what's important is the in-game reality which corresponds to those numbers, and whether the Duke decides to help you or not. The numbers are just tools. A cube is meaningless if it doesn't somehow lead back to a cloud. If someone rolls a 17 on a Persuasion check, and we don't follow that up with learning whether the Duke decides to help us or not, then the Persuasion check was pointless - it was a right-facing arrow which opened a clause that wasn't properly closed by a left-facing arrow.

To contrast, in a board game, the cloud isn't important. You can play a board game, and score your points, and never care whether or not it means anything. The cubes are a means to their own end; they don't have to be justified.

 

[pemerton]

The bigger question for me would be why does the fireball do fire damage and the longsword do slashing damage if they do not, in fact, actually do any fire or slashing damage.

Well, AD&D doesn't have damage types as such - though it does have immunity to particular effects, which presumably means that they don't wear away any luck or endurance. (Eg a devil doesn't lose luck/endurance trying to evade a fireball - it just stands there and cackles madly!)

 

[pemerton]

in a board game, the cloud isn't important. You can play a board game, and score your points, and never care whether or not it means anything.

Yes.

In an RPG, the cloud is the end-game. The narrative is what we care about.

Yes and no.

There are many ways I could get together with some friends and generate a narrative: completely free-form storytelling; a writing-and-editing workshop; conch-passing or chain story telling; etc.

A RPG is one particular way of generating a shared fiction. It's different from those other ways.

One of the relevant differences is that it is a game, with rules - including resolution mechanics - that govern changes to the content of the shared fiction.

Why do you care about the cubes, though? Why does a player care about whether their sword inflicts 1d8+2 damage or 2d6+15?

Everything else being equal (eg target numbers are being held constant), the bigger a number on your sheet, the greater the likelihood that, when you declare any action for your character that engages that number, you will get your way in respect of the fiction.

Eg if you really want it to be the case that your guy is the one whose will prevails in sword fights, you have a reason to have bigger numbers next to the "sword fighting" entry on your PC sheet.

In an RPG, the -2 penalty to your Persuasion roll, or the total outcome of 17 on the check, is not important; what's important is the in-game reality which corresponds to those numbers

That doesn't seem right to me.

Eg Imagine two people sitting around, telling a story via a mix of consensus and conch-passing. As the write the story down, they put mechanical commentary and notations in the margin - eg "Aragorn demoralised as every choice made this day goes ill - -2 penalty to next action". Whether or not that would be fun, it's clearly not RPGing.

Which takes me back to the idea of "mere colour": if someone tells me that, in the fiction, I'm demoralised; but that doesn't feed back in some fashion into the resolution of declared actions; then being demoralised was mere colour.

A cube is meaningless if it doesn't somehow lead back to a cloud. If someone rolls a 17 on a Persuasion check, and we don't follow that up with learning whether the Duke decides to help us or not, then the Persuasion check was pointless

This seems true, but unrelated to the question of whether or not a -2 penalty is not important.

Or, to state it a bit more formally: that cubes are important only because of the arrows they generate back into the cloudds doesn't show that cubes aren't important. (If anything, it does the opposite, because it states a condition for their importance which is frequently satisfied.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

A RPG is one particular way of generating a shared fiction. It's different from those other ways.

One of the relevant differences is that it is a game, with rules - including resolution mechanics - that govern changes to the content of the shared fiction.

Right. The big difference between an RPG and any one of those other story-telling methods is that an RPG demonstrates internal causality. The reason we care about what happens in the story is that the outcome follows impartially from the mechanical processes which represent the narrative, rather than the players manipulating the story directly. That impartiality lends integrity to the story, and that's why we care about the story. (At least, that's why I care about what happens in an RPG, and why I don't care at all about the story in any game that features player narrative control.)

Everything else being equal (eg target numbers are being held constant), the bigger a number on your sheet, the greater the likelihood that, when you declare any action for your character that engages that number, you will get your way in respect of the fiction.

Players don't choose for an enemy to die, and then roll to see if they have enough narrative control to make it happen. Players attempt to strike an enemy in the hopes of it dying, but the attempt is the extent of player influence. Upon making the attack roll, they've already succeeded in shaping the fiction to the maximum extent that it is possible for a player to shape the fiction.

Everything that happens after the attack roll, whether or not that includes the enemy dying, is out of the player's hands in the same way it is out of their character's hands. After you swing your sword, what happens next is entirely up to the physics of the game world, although you can certainly speculate upon various probabilities by considering the underlying factors involved.

Or, to state it a bit more formally: that cubes are important only because of the arrows they generate back into the cloudds doesn't show that cubes aren't important. (If anything, it does the opposite, because it states a condition for their importance which is frequently satisfied.)

Cubes are definitely important. They are important because they bear the responsibility of generating clouds. A cube which doesn't lead back to a cloud at any point would be meaningless, unless it can suffice as a cloud in its own right. (Remember, cubes are a subset of clouds which happen to be quantifiable; if your goal is to save the world by throwing the ring into the volcano, then success in doing so is still meaningful even if it involves erasing the ring from your character sheet.)

 

[pemerton]

The big difference between an RPG and any one of those other story-telling methods is that an RPG demonstrates internal causality. The reason we care about what happens in the story is that the outcome follows impartially from the mechanical processes which represent the narrative, rather than the players manipulating the story directly.

This might be why you care about what happens in an RPG. I know it doesn't universalise among RPGers, though, because it is not true of me!

(It also gives rise to a puzzle: what is the point of the players? Why can't their place be taken by some sort of mechanistic decision-making process?)

Players attempt to strike an enemy in the hopes of it dying

Well, at my table they roll dice. The only striking taking place is in the fiction - imaginary striking.

Players don't choose for an enemy to die, and then roll to see if they have enough narrative control to make it happen.

<snip>

the attempt is the extent of player influence. Upon making the attack roll, they've already succeeded in shaping the fiction to the maximum extent that it is possible for a player to shape the fiction.

Everything that happens after the attack roll, whether or not that includes the enemy dying, is out of the player's hands in the same way it is out of their character's hands.

Players declare actions for their PC - say, an attempt to kill an enemy - and then engage the mechanics to see what happens. The mechanics tell us what results from the declared action. The roll is not to see if the player has enough narrative control - it's the working out of the device for control over the narrative.

The fact that everything that happens after the attack roll seems orthogonal to the question of whether or not it is the function of the mechanic to settle the content of the fiction. You can settle the content of a fiction in advance: eg We're writing a story together, and it's got to a cliffhanger bit. We're not sure whether or not the protagonist should live, or whether the protagonist should die and the plot should switch to an investigation of the death (say, like Psycho). I say "We'll toss a coin - heads the protagonist lives, otherwise curtains!" You agree, and toss the coin. At that point, as the coin spins through the air, the content of the fiction is outside either of our control; but that doesn't mean the flipping of the coin doesn't serve the purpose of establishing the content of the fiction.

Now, suppose the two of us disagree over the way the story should go - I want survival, you want curtains. We could easily establish a bidding system, where each of us gets a certain number of points to bid (say, 100 for the whole story) and that means that whoever cares the most at one particular juncture gets his/her way.

PC building resembles this. It's establishing the contexts in which a players' desires for the fiction will be more likely to come true. Eg if I put a high score in swordfighting, then when my character is swordfighting my action declarations are more likely to succeed - which is to say, my desires for the direction of the shared fiction are more likely to be realised. In the fiction, this might be because my guy is a skilled swordfighter, or because my guy is a plucky hero with a big heart who happens to carry a sword - that will depend on the details of the system in question.

cubes are a subset of clouds which happen to be quantifiable

No. Cubes are things in the real world; clouds are imaginary things. The former are not a subset of the latter.

if your goal is to save the world by throwing the ring into the volcano, then success in doing so is still meaningful even if it involves erasing the ring from your character sheet.

Vincent Baker doesn't say much about "aide-memoires" for the fiction - eg notes about who loves whom, or what is north of where, etc. (Eg when you knock my character down, I might make a not of that so I don't forget.)

Is the equipment list merely a reminder of the fiction, or a mechanical constraint? I think different tables probably take different approaches, although in Torchbearer, and at least some takes on classic D&D, it's a mechanical constraint - a cube.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the extent to which hp loss narrated as one or the other not making sense is entirely dependent on the individual.

The extent to which it's aesthetically pleasing varies with the individual, certainly...

Gaining HD as you level can make sense when HP's are physical injuries, as this represents the skill of turning a potentially lethal wound into something less than lethal

At that point, hps that aren't physical injuries also make perfect sense (just as a scratch is less lethal than a deep slash, a torn cloak is less lethal than scratch) as do physical injuries that aren't the direct result of the attack (a strained ankle from a desperate dodge is also less lethal than a deep slash, for instance). The logic of skill (or luck or superhuman effort or divine grace or whatever) reducing the severity of an injury being modeled with a larger pool of hit points breaks any absolute correlation between hps and physical injury, making hp loss that corresponds to no physical injury at all perfectly plausible.

For contrast, if we were playing Hero rather than D&D, and we wanted a character that used extraordinary skill to make each hit less severe, we'd give him the Damage Reduction Power with the Requires Skill Roll modifier. Each time he was hit, he'd have a chance to reduce the damage he actually took. His luck would run out only in the conventional sense that eventually he'd fail the roll when it really counted.

Though it'd model the exact same thing, in concept, it wouldn't deliver what D&D hps deliver, a sense of the which way a fight is going and how much longer the hero can stand and fight before he's overwhelmed, because it is a little more precise/concrete in modeling just skill at reducing the severity of injuries, while hps are much broader and more abstract.

I don't know if your read [MENTION=6857506]Harzel[/MENTION]'s follow-up post, which cut-and-pastes the full exchange from Vincent Baker's blog page. The same thing was raised there.

As Baker sees it, A (roll your "inflict penalty" check, if successful also give an in-ficiton reason for the penalty) .. is cube-to-cube, with an incidental leftward arrow to the cloud.

Yeah, I don't buy the 'incidental' bit. Unless he'd also label a DM deciding (based on judgement or arbitrarily) that a given cloud factor (not explicitly covered in the rules) imposes a penalty as an 'incidental' rightward arrow.

it has also come up in some recent discussions about roleplaying vs boardgamings (eg on the "Low CR monsters - ogres are boring") thread.

If you treat positioning on the battlemap no different from the location of a piece on a gameboard,then you seem to me to be in the realm of cubes-to-cubes.

In other words, you can judge an RPG not an RPG if you willfully ignore that it is an RPG. Sure. It's pointless to do so, but that doesn't stop people.

I also hope it sheds some light - even if only at an oblique angle - as to what I think is at stake. In case you hadn't already worked out, to me this is a companion to my "role in roleplaying" thread, in that I'm trying to look at different ways of thinking about what roleplaying is. In particular, I am contesting the claim - that people who care about or complain about mechanics are really boardgamers in disguise.

So you're contesting a general set of transparently false and irrelevant personal attacks? By first assuming that they are neither?

In this thread, that's about looking at how the clouds inform the cubes, but also how the cubes generate clouds - and what is needed for a cube to generate a cloud as opposed to just another cube ("Oh no, we've been boargaming all along!").

It sounds as if the issue is not lack of cube-cloud connections, but rather fear of player latitude in imagining the cloud.

Which is absurd, as the freedom to exercise imagination, much like the freedom of the DM to mod the rules, is necessarily absolute.

 

[MarkB]

I do wonder why we keep coming up with such obfuscatory terminology in order to discuss what are really fairly straightforward concepts. Honestly, is anyone in this discussion deriving any benefit from referring to narrative fiction as 'clouds' and game-mechanics as 'cubes', or would we be better off just discussing them in plain English? And god help anyone who joins the discussion six months from now if the terms do gain popularity, and has to trawl through old discussions to puzzle them out.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

No. Cubes are things in the real world; clouds are imaginary things. The former are not a subset of the latter.

The cloud means the game's fictional stuff; the cubes mean its real-world stuff. If you can point to it on the table, pick it up and hand it to someone, erase it from a character sheet, it goes in the cubes. If you can't, if it exists only in your imagination and conversation, it goes in the cloud.

A ring can be erased from your character sheet. When you drop the ring into the volcano, you erase it from your sheet and its weight no longer contributes toward your encumbrance. It doesn't exist only in your imagination. Maybe that was just poor wording on his part, though, in trying to fit HP into the cube side when there was no miniature or die to represent it.

The model kind of breaks down when he starts referring to numbers and bonuses and whatnot. After all, the +2 bonus for having the high ground isn't a physical object that you can point to or hand to someone, but he clearly wants the bonus to count as a cube while the high ground itself is a cloud. It seems like he wants the game mechanics to count as cubes, while the underlying reality from which those mechanics derive count as clouds, but that's a counterproductive distinction; a hit for 8 damage represents a different reality than a hit for 7 or 9 damage, and it's not just a different cube representing the same cloud.

Now, suppose the two of us disagree over the way the story should go - I want survival, you want curtains. We could easily establish a bidding system, where each of us gets a certain number of points to bid (say, 100 for the whole story) and that means that whoever cares the most at one particular juncture gets his/her way.

PC building resembles this. It's establishing the contexts in which a players' desires for the fiction will be more likely to come true. Eg if I put a high score in swordfighting, then when my character is swordfighting my action declarations are more likely to succeed - which is to say, my desires for the direction of the shared fiction are more likely to be realised. In the fiction, this might be because my guy is a skilled swordfighter, or because my guy is a plucky hero with a big heart who happens to carry a sword - that will depend on the details of the system in question.

In other games, perhaps, but it is not the case in D&D or any other game which follows the general model under discussion. In games of this type, the character's skill in swordfighting simply represents the likelihood that the character will succeed when swordfighting. The number on the sheet directly represents the literal skill of the character at wielding a sword.

How much any given player cares about each area of the story is not a factor at any point during the game. During the pre-game (character building), the players declare what sorts of characters they want to play during the game, and they do their best to accurately represent those concepts given the constraints of the system. Wanting to play a character who is an amazing swordfighter is not the same as wanting a lot of narrative control over what happens during swordfights, though. It's not even saying that they want a character who often wins at swordfighting. It is simply saying that they want a character who is good at swordfighting, because that's the kind of character they want to play. Someone else may want to play a character who is particularly strong, or kind of dumb, or ridiculously good-looking; not because they want any particular scenario to unfold in any particular way, but just because that's the kind of character they want to play.

You could even have a player who wants to play a Worf-type character - incredibly strong, yet frequently overcome in shows of direct strength. But what the player wants is not a factor in how the story unfolds. What a player wants is only a factor in which character they choose to play; after that point, they're limited to what the character wants, and they have zero agency within the game beyond their ability to express that.

 

[innerdude]

In games of this type, the character's skill in swordfighting simply represents the likelihood that the character will succeed when swordfighting. The number on the sheet directly represents the literal skill of the character at wielding a sword.

How much any given player cares about each area of the story is not a factor at any point during the game. During the pre-game (character building), the players declare what sorts of characters they want to play during the game, and they do their best to accurately represent those concepts given the constraints of the system. Wanting to play a character who is an amazing swordfighter is not the same as wanting a lot of narrative control over what happens during swordfights, though. It's not even saying that they want a character who often wins at swordfighting. It is simply saying that they want a character who is good at swordfighting, because that's the kind of character they want to play. Someone else may want to play a character who is particularly strong, or kind of dumb, or ridiculously good-looking; not because they want any particular scenario to unfold in any particular way, but just because that's the kind of character they want to play.

While I'm generally a proponent of "causal" relationships between mechanics and fiction in RPGs, I do think this categorization is incorrect in some aspects.

(As a side note, I just re-read what I posted originally way-back-when about dissociative mechanics. Yikes. It's good to no longer be stuck in such a narrow-minded, D&D 3.x-centric viewpoint.)

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that someone who builds a character to be good at sword fighting doesn't want narrative control during sword fights. And OF COURSE they want a character who "wins" at swordfighting---because that's their avenue to narrative control. A character who doesn't win at sword fighting in an RPG doesn't generally get to control much of anything in the fiction.

As far as the bigger picture of the thread goes, the clear outlier here is cube-to-cube interaction, as it is the only type that fundamentally excludes the possibility of interplay with the fiction. If the question is, "Can this interaction directly affect or be directly derived from the current fictional state?" then cube-to-cube interaction is the only one where the answer is "No."

• Cube to cube -- No. Example: "Because you're the second person to act in initiative order this round, you have to take a -2 to all actions." "Wait, what? Why?" "Dunno, man, that's just what the rules say. There's absolutely no logical reason in the shared fiction it should be this way, but it just is."
• Cube to cloud -- Yes. No explanation necessary.
• Cloud to cube -- Yes. Should also be self-explanatory. I think any of us can come up with a number of ways in which a pre-established aspect of the fiction can later be determined to have a mechanical effect. Any time a GM sets a DC for a check, I think this applies---mechanics follow the pre-existing fiction as the GM understands it.
• Cloud to cloud -- Yes. Any time the group agrees through social contract / discussion that the fictional state has changed, it simply changes. Period. It is agreed.

But the problem I'm seeing here is that there's a huge undefined region within the cube-to-cloud space as to how the cube "outputs" parse into the cloud "inputs". There's a gigantic, massive leap to go from, "I swing a sword. My dice roll is a 22, which is a hit; my damage roll does 16 HP damage to the Ogre. Is it still standing?" to, "I roll my dice, and because I succeeded at my Control Universal Laws of Reality check, the Ogre is now a banana." (Obviously, no offense is intended to actual bananas, [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION])

So how is the cube-to-cloud interaction model supposed to represent both of these potential resolutions?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that someone who builds a character to be good at sword fighting doesn't want narrative control during sword fights. And OF COURSE they want a character who "wins" at swordfighting---because that's their avenue to narrative control. A character who doesn't win at sword fighting in an RPG doesn't generally get to control much of anything in the fiction.

No player ever wants narrative control beyond the capabilities of their character to create change within the world, or if they do, it's at odds with the type of game under discussion. This type of RPG is not an exercise in collective story-telling, and there are no mechanics for sharing or negotiating narrative control. The player has absolute control over the decisions made by their character, and the GM has absolute control over everything else.