Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[chaochou]

I'm uninterested in a socratic approach to your point. If you have a point, please make it.

You've asserted something 'is boring'.

I've asked, quite sensibly, 'for who?'

How is that so, so difficult for you to answer?

I'm amused by your avoidance, but it's totally damning of your original claim in its own way.

 

[Manbearcat]

Are you saying that in DW, the success chance for all important checks is roughly identical? Does DW not attempt to account for the difficulty of the PC's chosen action? How can the players have agency in DW if their choices don't influence the odds of success? Or am I completely misunderstanding what you meant?

What I meant was that in the course of a session or a campaign, the aggregate spread of Move outcomes will create a neat bell curve with 7-9 being the most prolific result. 7-9 is the lifeblood of the game because that is how play snowballs. It keeps things in conflict with interesting, dynamic things occurring and corresponding decisions by the players to be made. Imagine if whatever D&D you're used to playing had an exciting Complications Deck that changed the situation dynamically on the heavy bulk of successful rolls you made. You draw a card and something interesting happens where a new branch on a decision tree emerges, you have to deal with a new problem, decide on a trade-off, pay a cost for a benefit etc. That is the deal.

And I don't want to get into subjective vs objective DCs, but yes, like 4e the system's target numbers don't move. 6- and you fail and mark xp. 7-9 (as above). 10+ and you get what you want.

Finally, the players have a staggering amount of agency in the game. Just to start with your question, yes a player's choices significantly affect both the trajectory of play and their odds of success on any given move:

1) PC build choices from Class/Race, Ability Score allocation, which AS to improve when you level, Moves selected (and oftentimes the nature of those moves), Alignment, Bonds.

2) The GM and the players build the map and setting together both before play and during. This is both informal and formal (there are lots of moves that trigger players having the ability to introduce setting elements).

3) The players, of course, choose the content that they want the game to be about and the GM obliges them.

4) The players make an enormous amount of strategic resource decisions that significantly affect the course of play. Each major resource has Uses (typically n/5 avaialble); Rations, Coin, Ammo, Adventuring Gear, Preparation, Bag of Books, Salves/Bandages, among them.

5) The players have a ton of tactical resource decisions to make at the Move level (that often interface with 4 above) to improve their chances; Spending Hold, Preparation, Adventuring Gear, Ammo, Bag of Books, Companion/Cohort resources (such as Armor and Sentry), and other specifics at the class level.

6) The players choose how they strategically deal with situations and, of course, make Moves at the tactical level which engage their PC build resources that affect the potential outcome of any given roll.

7) The fundamental resolution mechanics coupled with the play Agenda and GMing principles creates a very broad and diverse decision tree for players to engage with (at the Move level) that significantly affect the overall trajectory of play, the strategic trajectory of play, and the RIGHT NOW of the fiction.

8) The ethos and relationship system (your relationship with other players and other NPCs including managing your Companions/Cohorts - managing Loyalty and paying Costs) of play is significantly integrated into the entirety of play (its not bolted on) and creates long-term and short term feedbacks.

Anyway, that is enough of a digression. Hopefully that, along with what [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] posted, helps.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yes, I suppose it's a lot of work to change 5e into a completely different ruleset in it's entirety. However, porting over some concepts and principles into 5e isn't that hard. You're stuck on the fact that the outcomes don't 100% match, but is that entirely necessary to use the concepts of player agency BW or DW are based on into a 5e framework? Yes, it would be messy if you compare outcomes, but lowering stakes to minor impacts to reflect the abundance of rolls and swinginess of 5e would be one coping mechanism. Then, it's not single rolls that affect the story, but a sequence of them that more gradually bend the game.

Well, I think one part of this is particular to me (and folks who share my inclinations). I only have so much time to invest in play and I have specific things I'm looking for. Given those two things, I'm looking to optimize my time investment toward whatever specific experience I'm seeking.

Even though 5e has some bolted on stuff that can kinda/sorta drift toward a DW or BWesque experience (such as Ideals, Bonds, Flaws, Traits + the Inspiriation mechanics + the Social Interaction conflict resolution mechanics), the totality of the experience very much supports a loosey-goosey process sim meets high quality hexcrawl while you manage the Adventuring Day. Its actually closest to something like Torchbearer if we're looking at indie games (the B/X inspired version of BW). However, Torchbearer is profoundly focused on that style of play and much more compelling in a myriad of ways (and delivers so triumphantly). So really, I'd rather just play Torchbearer.

And it doesn't really do B/X (codified Exploration/Rest Turn procedures meets tightly integrated Wandering Monster Clock + Reaction and Morale), but it would take the least amount of work to drift it toward B/X. But B/X does B/X so frigging well, I'd rather just run B/X.

So, given that, what does 5e aspire to? An AD&D2e Hexcrawl meets Adventuring Day management (with some indie stuff bolted on... * which can easily be removed and have the system be unimpacted) IMO. If you're an AD&D2e fan and you came to that system looking for something, 5e does that thing many times over better. It is fundamentally built toward that paradigm/premise. So that is what I use it for (better put, that is what the GM I sub in for now and again uses it for and I, out of courtesy/game integrity/general agreement, follow suit).

* This is pretty central. If you took the propensity toward the 7-9 result (amongst many, many other facets) out of Dungeon World (say just made it 1/3 rather than 2/3), the game experience would fundamentally change. If you changed the Exploration Rest/Turn integrated with the Wandering Monster clock dynamic in B/X (say, in the same way as above with DW), the game experience would fundamentally change.

If you can outright remove something (not just change it) and the game experience/play paradigm doesn't fundamentally change, then it isn't integral to the fundamental game experience/play paradigm.

 

[Nagol]

<snip>

Finally, the players have a staggering amount of agency in the game. Just to start with your question, yes a player's choices significantly affect both the trajectory of play and their odds of success on any given move:

1) PC build choices from Class/Race, Ability Score allocation, which AS to improve when you level, Moves selected (and oftentimes the nature of those moves), Alignment, Bonds.

2) The GM and the players build the map and setting together both before play and during. This is both informal and formal (there are lots of moves that trigger players having the ability to introduce setting elements).

3) The players, of course, choose the content that they want the game to be about and the GM obliges them.

4) The players make an enormous amount of strategic resource decisions that significantly affect the course of play. Each major resource has Uses (typically n/5 avaialble); Rations, Coin, Ammo, Adventuring Gear, Preparation, Bag of Books, Salves/Bandages, among them.

5) The players have a ton of tactical resource decisions to make at the Move level (that often interface with 4 above) to improve their chances; Spending Hold, Preparation, Adventuring Gear, Ammo, Bag of Books, Companion/Cohort resources (such as Armor and Sentry), and other specifics at the class level.

6) The players choose how they strategically deal with situations and, of course, make Moves at the tactical level which engage their PC build resources that affect the potential outcome of any given roll.

7) The fundamental resolution mechanics coupled with the play Agenda and GMing principles creates a very broad and diverse decision tree for players to engage with (at the Move level) that significantly affect the overall trajectory of play, the strategic trajectory of play, and the RIGHT NOW of the fiction.

8) The ethos and relationship system (your relationship with other players and other NPCs including managing your Companions/Cohorts - managing Loyalty and paying Costs) of play is significantly integrated into the entirety of play (its not bolted on) and creates long-term and short term feedbacks.

Anyway, that is enough of a digression. Hopefully that, along with what @Nagol posted, helps.

Only to a point. The DM remains in control of the narrative and especially the choice of choosing a soft move or hard move result can easily undercut meaningful consequence to choice if he wants and/or isn't careful. ( For those without the terminology background, a soft move is effectively starting a situation -- it's the opening narration to which a player responds. A hard move is closing narration; it dictates the result. Since the DM can decide to turn a failure or partial success into a soft move and provide a new situation for the PC to react against as opposed to applying consequence, the DM can softball a situation as he feels appropriate).

 

[Manbearcat]

I think that there's a difference between trying to match the mechanics of a game, and match the feel of a game. D&D, particularly 5e, is extremely easy to modify if you want to. However, to make it work well with 5e, it's best to leverage the mechanics of 5e, perhaps with some tweaks.

It's not all that different than things like Dragonlance that has seen official releases with two different game systems. Yet they both feel like Dragonlance. Of course there have been multiple Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings adaptations to RPGs too. I don't think playing The Lord of the Rings RPG will feel like MERP, yet both feel like LotR.

On the other hand, BW/DW has different goals as a game. While I wouldn't consider D&D as written a simulation game, it has its roots in the simulation approach of war games. BW/DW seems to be more focused on a shared fiction game experience. While both have a focus on the fiction, part of the point of BW/DW seems to be how you get to the fiction and interact with it. That the gaming experience is as important as the fiction itself. I'm sure not everybody plays it that way, but that's the sense I get.

I don't know BW/DW well enough to be able to give a precise example. In a thread at least a year ago, somebody asked me to explain how I would play out a scene that they described in Dungeon World. If I recall, I didn't even have to really tweak any rules to do it.

Now that was to describe a scene, and the control over that scene would have shifted a bit, with the players having less overall control of things that are outside of their character's control, so it's not exactly the same. I think you or [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] might have been part of that thread.

So I think that pulling concepts out of BW/DW is very doable. Some just require a different perspective on running the game, others would require some mechanical changes. But it's probably a bit more difficult to duplicate entirely, and I agree, I'm not sure you'd want to.

See my post directly above to [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] as it addresses a lot of this.

I'll comment a bit more though because it was a conversation with me that you're referring to on mapping a Dungeon World play excerpt to 5e (which is, interestingly enough, the primary premise of my engagement with this thread...along with mapping it to B/X). You're referring to the "sled and the glacial crevasse hazard" scene that I splocked in response to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] 's request for further context above.

The problem with mapping that scene (and a host of others including the one that I'm engaging with in this thread) has to do with all of the stuff that I mentioned in the post to Ovinomancer. That stuff happens organically and reliably/consistently as an inevitable outgrowth of all that stuff I mentioned. 5e does not have an analogue for that stuff. It doesn't possess an analogue for most of that stuff (and what it kind of has an analogue for isn't integrated holistically into the system like it is in DW).

If you just go with the most basic fundamental part (2/3 of all Move outcomes resulting in success with costs/complications/hard bargains/ugly choices), 5e doesn't have it as its core resolution mechanic feature. Even if you play with the Success with Complication module in the the DMG (which I do and I spread it out to 3 numbers rather than 2), (a) the maths don't remotely line up and (b) there is no analogue to the formalized complication handling procedures in DW.

The breakdown of total agency, and the nature of each (System Agency, GM Agency, and Player Agency), between the two systems are profoundly different.

So net:

1) Just by applying the play procedures, the odds of that spiraling/snowballing situation turning up (which turns up constantly in DW, pretty much every scene) as a result of mere organic play isn't going to happen in 5e at anything nearing the same level of frequency. This is where GM Force/Illusionism comes in to increase that frequency to a more (table/GM-specific) palatable frequency.

2) GM mental overhead is extraordinarily different when running such a scenario in both systems.

3) Player decision trees, interaction with the basic resolution mechanics/resource paradigms, and their own possible moves are extremely different in both systems.

Sum total, due to the severe divergence in respective System Agency/GM Agency/Player Agency (type/kind and % of total agency), 5e just can't churn out something like that with anything nearing that sort of frequency while that is a pillar (perhaps THE pillar of Dungeon World's play paradigm) of DW, while simultaneously the feel and "work" put in for both player and GM is very, very different.

 

[Manbearcat]

Only to a point. The DM remains in control of the narrative and especially the choice of choosing a soft move or hard move result can easily undercut meaningful consequence to choice if he wants and/or isn't careful. ( For those without the terminology background, a soft move is effectively starting a situation -- it's the opening narration to which a player responds. A hard move is closing narration; it dictates the result. Since the DM can decide to turn a failure or partial success into a soft move and provide a new situation for the PC to react against as opposed to applying consequence, the DM can softball a situation as he feels appropriate).

This is actually what I thought [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] may have had in mind when I was asking him about this upthread.

The thing about this though is 2-part:

a) Were this to happen in play, it would be a clear violation of one of the primary Principles of DW GMing; Make a move that follows (the fiction). It is also a violation of Think dangerous and the game's Agenda of Fill the character's lives with adventure because removal of the consequences of play is where adventure goes to die.

Following from (a) above...

b) The resolution mechanics and play procedures are all transparent and/or player-facing. Take the following scenario:

* I deploy a "Use a Location Move" and introduce an avalanche into the fiction as a part of a complication. Now the players have imminent peril that they have to deal with.

* A player doesn't have the means (teleport, polymorph and fly out of the impact zone, magical shields, unearthly strength to hold back the boulder-ey deluge) to outright deal with the danger, so they have to Defy Danger Move to avoid it. They roll a 6- and Mark xp.

* Well, if I don't deal damage and deploy a Forceful tag here (to uproot the PC/sweep themdown the face), it would be pretty blatant. Unless there is some other very obvious fictional circumstance that I could follow (sometimes there is), I'm making that move above. If I don't, the players will know that I've violated not only the social contract of play, but the game's Agenda and the GMing Principles.

 

[Maxperson]

Another interesting thing has been the discussion - especially between [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and me - over the difference between a "static" situation, which reacts to player action declarations for their PCs, and a "GM puts the world into motion" situation. Some posters (eg [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], I thinik also [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]) seem to classify these both as sandboxes and see the salient difference only being whether the world is "boring" or "interesting because living/breathing".

For my part I don't necessarily view static worlds as boring. I've seen boring static and living breathing worlds, and fun static and living breathing worlds. I prefer a world that lives and breathes, because it's more realistic for the world to keep on trucking while out of sight of the PCs.

 

[Maxperson]

But the question of whether [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] will give more options isn't a question about interpreting some bit of fiction (ie it's not a question of literary criticism). It's a question of what Lanefan is prepared to do at his table (ie it is, broadly, a question of anthropology). Lanefan already told us a couple of things about his table - if you leave the party, or become a magsitrate, then the PC is retired. For all you know, any PC who sets out to become King of the Northern Barbarians (assuming such things even exist in Lanefan's world) likewise has to be retired.

I haven't seen anything so far to indicate that the players can't choose to go their own way with their own ideas on what to do. He's just established that the world has already been created, so much of the information for the players to build off of has been determined already. I'm also not sure what retirement has to do with this. Presumably the players know that if the PC becomes King of the Northern Barbarians his PC will have to retire and is okay with it. I've pursued goals in games past where achieving those goals would remove my PC from the game, or at least as a PC.

 

[Nagol]

This is actually what I thought @hawkeyefan may have had in mind when I was asking him about this upthread.

The thing about this though is 2-part:

a) Were this to happen in play, it would be a clear violation of one of the primary Principles of DW GMing; Make a move that follows (the fiction). It is also a violation of Think dangerous and the game's Agenda of Fill the character's lives with adventure because removal of the consequences of play is where adventure goes to die.

Following from (a) above...

b) The resolution mechanics and play procedures are all transparent and/or player-facing. Take the following scenario:

* I deploy a "Use a Location Move" and introduce an avalanche into the fiction as a part of a complication. Now the players have imminent peril that they have to deal with.

* A player doesn't have the means (teleport, polymorph and fly out of the impact zone, magical shields, unearthly strength to hold back the boulder-ey deluge) to outright deal with the danger, so they have to Defy Danger Move to avoid it. They roll a 6- and Mark xp.

* Well, if I don't deal damage and deploy a Forceful tag here (to uproot the PC/sweep themdown the face), it would be pretty blatant. Unless there is some other very obvious fictional circumstance that I could follow (sometimes there is), I'm making that move above. If I don't, the players will know that I've violated not only the social contract of play, but the game's Agenda and the GMing Principles.

Damage may be a direct hard move consequence, but it by no means the only genre appropriate one. The victim manages to stay near the surface, but loses a backpack or weapon of choice (Use Up Resources), he gets buried taking no immediate damage, but needs to dig to the surface to save himself (Put in a Spot), or they are swept along with the snow and separated from the group and need to handle one or more upcoming obstacles to avoid damage (Separate Them, Put in a Spot, maybe Backtrack).

*edit*
I'd probably present this as a 10+ Avoid all dangers, 7-9: Player choose one consequence from (a) take damage, (b) get separated, or (c) use up resources. 6-: player choose two consequences from the same list, myself.
*/edit*


Here's an example given in the same play tutorial that illustrates a softball:

GM: Okay, you're running from the guards through this dark, filthy alleyway. Sounds like Defy Danger, so go ahead and roll it.
PC: Oh no! I rolled a six, that's a failure.
GM: "It sure is. You're trying to lose them in the maze of alleys, but it's too dark in there; you trip over a pile of trash behind this tavern. Glass bottles shatter and you land with a loud thud, facedown in rotting garbage. The guards hear this and totally pinpoint your location, they're rounding the corner now, just a few paces away. What do you do?

 

[Manbearcat]

I think that it would be separate of the basic mechanical means of action resolution. So in 5E you may have the DM "steering" things by using his ability to establish DCs that are unknown to the players, or by simply saying that they failed or what have you. Such a method could be used to force the game in a certain direction.

For DW, not being familiar with the game first hand, it seems to me that the GM can determine story elements on the fly. The chasm from your play example...deciding what the complications are when a 7-9 roll is made is entirely within the GM's purview, correct? So the GM could just introduce elements he wanted in the game. So instead of your "Alienesque" situation in the crevasse with the goblins getting picked off by the monster....couldn't the GM introduce an entirely different scenario? Say, drow that have recently performed a raid on the surface world and have taken some kind of important NPC as hostage.

Is that not feasible in DW?

The nature and breadth of "GM purview" in 4e (a part of GM Agency) is different than in the D&D you're used to. See some of my posts above to folks for more insight into this. DW, taken holistically, puts a lot of constraints (good constraints - they ensure System Agency, maximize Player Agency, alleviate both macro cognitive workload and micro mental overhead for the GM, and work to both facilitate integrity of the fiction and genre coherency) on content introduction.

Furthermore, Ask questions and use the answers is a VERY fundamental part of GMing in DW. This happens not only at the outset of the game, but all throughout play. Just a quick for instance of why this game was about "aliens" is in the player of Saerie's character giving me (a) how she wanted her formative conflict (which take place in the past - we play this out) that hooks her into the fiction to open and (b) a fundamental setting element that ties into her backstory:

2) Scene opener for past conflict:

The slimy, ethereal trail of an aberrant creature, no doubt from the Far Realm, leads down into the deep dark. If I spare a single moment, the ghostly remnant of the creature will fade beyond my means to track. A child's scream. The growls and yips of a feral pack of dogs.

3) My statement about the world and my backstory:

In the ancient times, our seers unlocked a mystery. That unlocked mystery revealed to them several signs from which they were able to predict the collapse of the tangible barrier between the Prime World and that of the Far Realm. I believe I've seen some of these signs come to fruition. I fear very soon that the unfathomable monstrosities of that deranged world will crossover and undo the great civilizations of this world and even move on to the Feywild.

We play this out. She fleshes out her Alignment/Bonds/relationships/place in the world using the results and this propels us into the current fiction.

The creation and nature of Earthmaw is an example of "in-play" Ask questions and use the answers when the player of Otthor achieved a 10+ on a Spout Lore move (supplemented by the expenditure of a Bag of Books - secured from the records of the ruined settlement of World's End Bluff).

So then, sum told, "going rogue" and introducing whatever-the-hell fiction I want to in DW is "not a thing".

I don't think GM Force or illusionism or any of the other methods listed above must be protested. As I said earlier, I am advocating an approach to the game that would allow for any method to be used, depending on the circumstances.

However, I do enjoy allowing my players to have a lot of agency and leeway in determining how the story of the game takes shape....and those methods you listed above can at times get in the way of that.

Gotcha. Certainly no dispute here.

I would think that creating "tension and drama" isn't really dependent on the mechanics, though, right? Isn't it more a question of the situation that has come up, and then the success or failure of the PCs in that given situation?

But as for your first point in this quote, I think you approach the game far more scientifically than I do....I don't use any of the encounter budget or encounter design or XP mechanics at all. I really don't find them all that useful, and I think they exist more for newer players who don't have lots of experience with this aspect of teh game. Longtime DMs, I feel, won't get much out of those mechanics at all, and are better simply designing encounters based on their judgment.

See here is where you will find dispute with me. "Tension and drama", all of frequency, potency, inherent dynamism, and breadth of prospects) and can absolutely by systemitized. When I say systemitized I mean both in the machinery (System Agency), in the GMing techniques to be deployed and principled to be followed (GM Agency), and in the players ability to either introduce content/conflict or in their ability to respond to it (Player Agency).

Just consider what I've brought up in this thread over and over:

1) Dungeon World's lifeblood of 2/3 of aggregate move results being that of the spiraling/snowballing "Success with..." variety. Just moving that down from 2/3 of the results to 1/3 results will significantly affect the systemitized "tension and drama" of the play experience.

2) Consider B/X's lifeblood of Exloration/Rest Turns meets Wandering Monster Clock and Reactions/Morale. Change the maths on those (so adventurous/dangerous stuff happens much less often) and constrain the potential prospects for outcomes (the dynamism) and you will significantly affect the systemitized "tension and drama" of the play experience.

I just think that any dungeon or hexcrawl can be boiled down to some kind of flow chart. I think storylines can also be designed that way. In that sense, they are the same. Kind of an "if A, then B or C" and then "If B, then D or E or F"....that kind of thing. Hard to describe without a visual.

I understand what you mean here. The problem is the whole "contact with the players" part. The more Player Agency and System Agency a game has, the more difficult it is to be able to create a preemptive flow chart or story tree (even with wildly deviating branches). Furthermore, if you don't have to do it...I mean, if things just flat out work with you having to put that effort in (and you get to "play to find out what happens" as a bonus), why would you put the time in to try to do so?