Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Lanefan]

OK, now this (quotes below) is a lot more enlightening. Still have some questions, however...

The advisor in my main 4e game had his own plan and (within the fiction) his own agency. Eg at one point the PCs discovered the cavern where, many years before, the advisor had almost succeeded in seizing the tapestry before being driven off by gelatinous cubes. The even found a piece of fabric torn from the hem of his robe. (Which then formed the subject matter of the final taunt during the skill challenge.)

When you say the advisor still has independent agendas, if that is taken literally then it is as true in my game as in [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s. The advisor has agendas indpendent of the PCs. It's just that they are all in tatters. But I don't think you mean it literally. What I think you mean is that the GM has a power, independent of the outcome of action resolution, to narrate the advisor achieving certain things adverse to the interests of the PCs (and thus of the players).

What I've been wondering is whether the advisor is able to* continue pursuing those tattered agendae after the defeat by the PCs?

* - or would be able to, had he not then lost a combat immediately following. For these purposes I'm going to intentionally ignore that and go on the hypothetical premise that the combat did not occur, as having the advisor still functional gives more worth to the discussion.

EDIT: I reread the quote and was struck by The advisor cannot initiate a new challenge that alters this success, only the players can enact a new challenge that might alter this success. The advisor only ever reacts to the players.

The advisor doesn't react to the players. The advisor does variouos things. Some of those (eg dealing with the PCs at the dinner) are reacting to the PCs. Some of those (eg forming a goblin army to help him recover the tapestry) aren't reactions to the PCs - they take place before he or the PCs have ever crossed paths or even heard of one another.

The advisor can also initiate whatever he wants. He can try this, or that. But the players' victory at the table ensures that, whatever the advisor might be trying as far as his relationship with the baron is concerned, I as GM am obliged to narrate it as failing. This is similar to how, in AD&D, a player can narrate his PC attempting to pick the lock. But if it failed once, and the PC hasn't gained a level, then the GM is obliged to narrate the attempt as failing.

That's a system fault, in that the system is constraining you-as-DM in a diplomatic or social situation where it shouldn't. A physical situation, such as picking a lock or bending a gate, is different - you give it your best try and you fail or succeed - and that's that. Diplomatic/social situations are by their very nature way more fluid and - barring someone somehow being entirely removed from proceedings - are almost invariably open-ended as opposed to definitely resolvable, just like in the real world.

Here, the socially-defeated advisor (again, ignoring the combat) should still have options open to him. He can try to change the Baron's perception of him (remember, opinions aren't always carved in stone either and can change - the Baron's just changed his view of the advisor once, what's to prevent him changing it again later?), or he can go and round up his goblin army and try the military approach, or he can let himself get captured and then foment rebellion with his fellow prisoners, or he can fade into the background and then hire some bards to spread malicious rumours and innuendoes about the PCs...or the Baron, for all that.

And we're all forgetting that in theory the Baron himself, who is another major player in the scene, might have his own agenda. We don't know the Baron's opinion of the PCs going in, for example; or whether he's trying to pump the advisor's tires in order to make him a better match for his daughter - or his rival's daughter; or whether he thinks the advisor's in fact a bloody nuisance and will leap at anything that'll help get rid of him.

For instance, [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] keeps saying that the advisor is "retarded" because he can't try to mitigate. Which is a product of the same sort of running together. The advisor can try whatever he wants; it's just that the fiction isn't going to change in a direction where the advisor has achieved what he wants.

Not ever? Or just not right away? There's a fairly big difference.

Lan-"and we haven't even asked yet whether the advisor, though underhanded and scheming, is in fact the good guy trying to oust an even nastier Baron"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

This is why I said (now far) upthread that many of us are talking at cross-purposes because of how system-design philosophy impacts how we view what the game does or does not do. In 4E (and Dungeon World and Burning Wheel, too, I guess, though I have only passing familiarity with those systems), social encounters do have a resolution mechanic that can be utilized in such scenarios: the skill challenge, which, admittedly, is quite the departure from how social interactions are handled in many other (previous and succeeding) iterations of D&D.

Yeah - 3e had things like Bluff and Diplomacy and so forth as well, which kind of waved in the same direction. And as far as I'm concerned those were examples of poor design.

4e skill challenges have their place (and in some circumstances are in fact a pretty neat system from what I can tell) but social interaction is most certainly not one of them. Allowing their use for such is also poor design.

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

social interaction is most certainly not one of them. Allowing their use for such is also poor design.

If you can't resolve social challenges based on the abilities of the character, rather than solely on those of the player, /that/ is poor design. You might be able to have loads of fun playing a game that way, but it's not a good design, heck, it's not a design at all. It's a refusal to open up the range of characters you can play. You can play a strong character or a fast character or character with magical powers, but he's always going to be precisely as insightful and persuasive and diplomatic as /you/?
Hard Fail.

There may be all sorts of issues with social resolution mechanics - with reaction rolls being arbitrary or with bluff checks being binary or Diplomancer builds being broken, or some characters being frozen out of a challenge because their only applicable skill is singled out for automatic failure - but they're issues with systems that at least exist, bring value, and might be fixed or improved upon no matter how little value that may be.

 

[Maxperson]

Better. I actually addressed this division in the post where you first responded with ' but NPCs aren't real'. It was the discussion about whether or not NPCs exist only to frame and oppose PC actions, or if they exist and PCs can pit themselves against them if they choose. I get that you're missing the distinction here, and, to be fair, it's somewhat subtle. In the former, which appears to be how you play, NPCs have no point except to act as foils to PC actions -- they only have enough form and substance to provide suitable obstacles (or perhaps allies) to PC intent. They do nothing except act in reactions to the PCs. An NPC in this model will never have it's own agenda that it pursues absent PC involvement -- any such agenda will only exist in the event that it's needed to oppose PC intent in a challenge. You've indicated as much with statements about keeping NPCs vague so that future changes to them due to player declarations and need to challenge them are coherent.

The latter concept, though, involves NPCs that are created as if they have PC level interests, motivations, and agendas. In this version, the NPCs are acting on the world independent of the PCs, and this may be the source of conflict. This is the proposed version Max is using, the NPC as alt-PC, not merely as foil to PCs.

To bring this analysis to bear on your play example, in your version the advisor only has merit as a foil to the PCs. He was framed as a challenge, and then the challenge was enacted, but the advisor is entirely bound to the results of the challenge. He only has an agenda in so much as it exists as a challenge to the players. In this model, it's right and proper that the advisor cannot engage in mitigation, because the advisor was only a toll to challenge PC intent, and when the PCs succeeded in implementing their intent through the challenge, the advisor was defeated. The advisor cannot initiate a new challenge that alters this success, only the players can enact a new challenge that might alter this success. The advisor only ever reacts to the players.

In the other method, the advisor still has independant agendas, so the player success at the challenge is now a setback, but the advisor can now plan steps to overcome the setback and act upon them, even without the players engaging in a new contest that stakes their previous victory. In this, the advisor can force the players to react to his advances -- he can initiate a new challenge that may adjust the success of the previous one. This is because the advisor has his own agency in the game and isn't only reactionary to the players.

You would call the second method DM driven. I've used DM centric, largely because I believe the -driven categories are too binary. But, regardless of terminology, I think the primary distinction between DM and player driven is the reactionary status of the gameworld -- if the world only every reacts to the players, it's player driven. If it exists outside of the players, and acts without player input, then it's DM driven. I'm okay with this, with the clear caveat that nothing is fully one or the other -- it's a spectrum. My games are both -- the macro is DM driven, in that there's a plot ongoing that will continue without player involvement, and on the micro in that I break my arcs down into sandboxes that largely react to the players.

At times like this, I wish I could give exp multiple times for a post.

 

[billd91]

Three things.

(1) I know perfectly well that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] doesn't adjudicate finality in resolution the same way that I do. But that doesn't mean that Maxperson is correct to say that, in my game, using the system (4e) that I was using, I was wrong to agree with my player that - as GM - I had made a bad call, and needed to wind back and remake it.

(2) You ask Have you given us any reason to believe the advisor's agendas, whatever they are, are permanently and conclusively foiled other than to say the players passed some mechanical test that exposed the advisor? As I've already mentioned upthread, I find this an especially strange question from D&D players.

In D&D combat, what reason do we have to believe that the ogre is dead, except that a player passed some mechanical test that reduced it to zero hp? Answer: none. The health of beings in D&D combat is not determined via fictional positioning and following the logic of the fiction; it's determined via an abstract mechanical process, to which - by the rules of the game - the fiction must then conform.

The same is true of traditional encounter reaction checks: when reaction checks are being used, we don't first know the mood of the NPC/monster, and thereby determine it's reaction; rather a mechanical test - the reaction roll - tells us what their mood is (hostile, indifferent or friendly being the 3 traditional options).

A skill challenge in 4e, or a Duel of Wits in BW, works the same way as these other tried-and-true D&D mechanics: the content of the fiction unfolds in a way that conforms to certain mechanical processes. If the players succeed at the challenge, the resulting fiction includes the elements that make up their success. In this case, that means the baron holds the breakdown of the situation against the advisor - revealed as a traitor - and not against the PCs.

(3) I've posted upthread about some of the circumstances in which successes might be re-opened. I see this as one application of a more general "no retries" rule. AD&D has no general prohibition on retries, but lots of particular ones: a retry is never permitted when it comes to bending bars or lifting a gate, nor when it comes to finding or removing a trap; but a retry is permitted with a level gained, in the case of opening a lock.

I think it is not compatible with a game being player-driven that the GM is permitted to reopen some matter willy-nilly, regardless of previous successes at action resolution.

On #3, why exactly are we bringing up old and outdated rules here? PCs have been able to retry picking locks for the better part of 20 years now, and though there are some instances where retries don't make sense, for the most part they're pretty contextual. We can accept that the PCs can't try the same skill challenge, but then the situation hadn't changed yet. The advisor hadn't found a way to worm his way back into the baron's good graces (and in the end, didn't try). That, however, says absolutely nothing inherent about the options available to the advisor - you went with one outcome as the GM but others could have been just as reasonable.

On #2, don't compare this to combat unless the outcomes are the same - they're not. It doesn't sound like the skill challenge was fatal to the advisor - just his current agenda. That's quite a contrast with a combat encounter that kills the ogre. The mechanical resolution in play doesn't seem to lead to the same degree of finality for the actors involved - unless the baron has the advisor executed for treason (assuming he has the authority to administer high justice) or just knifed to death in the dungeons. Devious people often have multiple gambits in play, after all...

Ultimately, the system doesn't really matter here. Whether you adjudicated by an organized skill challenge or fiat, you chose to make the result absolutely final for that NPC and you didn't have to. I don't think it was wrong to do so, but I do think it's wrong to think you had to do so... which is an impression I'm seriously getting from your posts.

 

[pemerton]

Okay, I'll admit that you've stumped me. You've previously said that you do not do secret backstory, but here you present an example of the advisor engaged in unknown (to the players) actions for unknown (to the players) reasons. They have to figure this out?

When I say that I don't like "GM's secret backstory", I've been talking about the use of such secret backstory as a consideration in action resolution. I think there was quite an extended discussion of this upthread,wih [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION].

An example (hypothetical only) of secret backstory operating as a consdieration in action resolution: the PCs try to out the advisor in a way that will damage his relationship with the baron, but fail because - unbeknownst to the players - the GM has decided that the advisor is holding the baron's niece hostage, and is thereby exercising leverage over the baron.

I think that sort of approach is fairly common in RPGing - judging from some posters in this thread, plus other threads that I have read over the years, plus reading published adventures. In this sort of game, the players tend to end up trying to unravel the mystery. [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], upthread, has talked about a style of play that involves "finding the plot". I think it sits in the same general category as what I have just described, although I'm sure there are significant nuances across individual games and styles.

As those posts upthread discussed, it is possible to have mystery and revelation without having secret backstory operate as a constraint on action resolution. I've given at least four examples in the course of this thread:

(1) A PC searches in the ruins of the tower which once was his home, hoping to find the nickel-silver mace he had been working upon when orcs attacked; instead, he finds - in the ruins of his brother's private workroom - cursed black arrows, seemingly manufactured by his brother. Later, he learns that the mace was taken from the ruin by a renegade elf.

GM commentary: The discovery of the arrows rather than the mace is a consequence of failure. The possession of the mace by the elf is an element of framing, weaving together two hitherto-distinct elememts in the shared fiction.

(2) The PCs spend 18 months eking out a living in the ruined tower in the Abor-Alz. Their only significant contact with the ouside world over that time is with some elven merchants who are passing through the hills travelling to distant lands. They report that the Gynarch of Hardby has announced her engagement to the head of a sorcerous cabal, who - as it happens - is also a nemesis of the PCs. The PCs wonder whether the Gynarch is under his magical influence.

GM commentary: The encounter with the merchants was the result of a successful Circles check by the player of the elven princess. The wedding gossip was (initially) colour, which has subsequently transmuted into an element of framing. What the utlimate reason for, and significance of, the engagement is has not yet been discovered.

(3) The baron's niece has not been seen for some days. The PCs, fearing that her fiance - the evil necromancer advisor of the baron - has done something to hurt her. They track her down to an enchanted tower in the moors (the Bloodmoors Tower from Open Grave). They enter the tower, planning to rescue her - only to discover that she herself is a Vecna-ite necromancer, trying to bring an ancient member of her order back to (un)life, and in the process instead waking Kas from a long slumber.

GM commentary: This was all framing. The missing niece, and her connection to her ancestor whom the PCs had helped when they travelled back in time, was initially part of the dinner skill challenge, and then became part of the framing of this subsequent episode.

(4) The PCs defend a homestead against goblin attackers. They learn (i) that the homestead contains a magical tapestry, and (ii) that the goblins are searching for it. (How they learn those things now escapes me, as it was many years of play ago; my best guess would be talking to NPCs.) When approaching a goblin fortress, they see a wizardly type wearing a yellow robe fly off on a flying carpet. They have heard other stories of a wizardly type in yellow robes hanging out suspiciously in the local area. In a tunnel beneath the fortress they find a torn scrap of yellow robe in a place that (they work out somehow - again, I can't remember the details) the tapestry had once hung. Somehow (perhaps a scrying spell of some sort?) they learn that the yellow-robed wizard was driven out by the gelatinous cubes which they just defeated.

GM commentary: This begins as colour: the goblins need a motivation for attacking the homestead, and the presence of the tapestry provides it. The presence of a
yellow-robed mastermind zooming around on a flying carpet adds to the colour. The colour becomes part of the framing of the skill challenge, however: the PCs play on it in the course of making skill checks (eg obliquely taunting the advisor about his defeat by the cubes, by boasting how easily they - the PCs - were able to defeat said cubes;
and then taunting him about his torn robe).​

There is no secret backstory as an element of action resolution in any of the above. The resolution follows from the framing and the checks.

 

[pemerton]

What happens in the game world can clearly and obviously affect what happens in the real world - the most basic example of which might be where a monster barges through a door in the game world thus causing real-world people to pick up real-world dice and roll for initiative!

But the event in the fiction doesn't cause that!

What causes that is a whole lot of stuff in the real world: the GM describes a monster entering a room in which persons A, B and C are; certain other people at the table understanding that A, B and C are their player characters; there being rules of the game that establish how to decide what happens when player characters are charged by monsters, and those rules requiring the rolling of initiative; etc.

If every event in the fiction correlated uniformly to a particular real-world event, the conflation mightn't matter. But that isn't true in anyone's game. For instance, not every charging of a monster through a door triggers the rolling of dice at some table (eg no one rolled dice because the gelationous cubes "charged" into the room where the advisor was trying to get the tapestry).

Retries are permitted in 1e when something has significantly changed - this includes a level gain - such as if someone fails a bars-gates roll then downs a potion of giant strength (a significant change) they'd be allowed to try again should they so desire.

There are no retries for Find/Remove Traps. Level allows a retry for opening locks. The rule about drinking a potion of Giant Strength is not found in the books, I believe, but is a reasonable rule.

Upthread I've said a bit about what might count as a significant change in the context of the advisor episode. The passage of two weeks between sessions doesn't count!

in the D&D I'm familiar with social encounters are not finality-based resolved the same way as combat is! You keep trying to tell us that they are, hence the disconnect - at least on my part.

Combat almost always ends up with one participant or side rendered completely non-functional - usually dead, sometimes just knocked out or captured or whatever - or with one participant or side completely absent as they have fled.

Social interactions by themselves - i.e. that don't descend into combat - almost never end up with one participant or side rendered completely non-functional (though fleeing is still very much a possible outcome). Thus, except in the case of someone leaving the scene, any sort of finality-based resolution system is simply the wrong tool for the job as the "losing" side or person is - within the fiction - able to keep going, try to mitigate the losses, try a different gambit, and so on.

The advisor episode happened in 4e, which does have non-combat resolution with finality (namely, skill challenges).

Even in AD&D, non-functionality is not the relevant criterion for finality, however: a subdued dragon, for instance - which clearly is still functional - "remains subdued for an indefinite period, but if the creature is not strongly held, well treated, given ample treasure, and allowed ample freedom, it will seek to kill its captor and/or escape" (MM p 30). UA (p 109) elaborates that a subdued creature "will not further attack the group that subdued it . . . [and] will submit, but seek the first chance to escape and, if the party that captured it is weaker than itself, turn on its captors. This subdual will last as long as the party has a clear upper hand."

As long as the party has the upper hand, and - in the case of a dragon - is treating it well with treasure and freedom, the subdual will last indefinitely. The subdued monster is not "able to keep going, trying to mitigate the losses, try a different gambit, and so on".

That's finality of resolution without requiring, in the fiction, non-functionality.

 

[pemerton]

Don't NPC's in 4e have skills? Attributes? Powers? Spells? Etc.? Couldn't any or all of these be leveraged to reopen the matter of the players' success? I mean a SC is only one possible way of resolving something in 4e there aree numerous others you seem to be ignoring or glossing over.

<snip>

I'd be interested in where in the 4e rulebooks it talks about finality and the skill challenge as well as who can initiate setbacks to said finality if you have a source.

I'm not really interested in debating the rules and procedures of 4e with you. (1) This is not the thread for it. (2) My past experience tells me it is an unrewarding exercise.

Let's suppose that you are correct, and that I have misapplied the rules of 4e. Pretend, then, that instead of telling a story about the advisor being outed, I recounted this other story about how the PCs persuaded a giant chieftain to help them on their quest rather than eat them; and that, as part of that episode, the PCs had benefitted from a giant shaman advocating on their behalf (established by a player as a PC resource). That story took place in a game of Cortex+/MHRP Fantasy Hack, which does provide for finality in social resolution.

If, in framing the next scene of the game, I had opened with the shaman and chieftain plotting how to capture and eat the PCs while they sleep in their beds, the players could have made exactly the same complaint: that I was wrongly ignoring their victory in the previous episode of play. And they would be right to do so.

The advisor in your Player driven game doesn't have the same type of protagonism he would in a DM driven game.

What does it even mean for a character in a fiction to have "protagonism"? Dictionary.com gives me protagonist as "the leading character, hero, or heroine of a drama or other literary work." That is not an in-fiction notion: it is a meta-notion. Protagonism is also used by some commentators on RPGs to refer to a participant role: thus, the Forge provisional glossary says that protagonism is "A problematic term with two possible meanings. (1) A characteristic of the main characters of stories, regardless of who produced the stories in whatever way. (2) A characteristic set of behaviors among people during role-playing, associated with Narrativist play, with a necessary unnamed equivalent in Gamist play and possibly another in Simulationist play. In the latter sense, coined by Paul Czege." That second sense also does not describe an in-fiction notion: it is a meta notion, about how certain RPG participants do their thing.

I don't think the adivsor can exhibit protagonism in either sense: the NPC is, as such, not the leading character, hero or heroine of the campaign. And the GM's play of the PC cannot exhibit the characteristic behaviours of narrativist RPGing (no doubt the precise description of such behaviours is contentious, but a GM imagining the advisor to him-/herself, or narrating the advisor's actions to the players, isn't engaging in them).

The difference between the player-driven and GM-driven game is who gets to determine what happens, in the fiction, if the advisor tries to reverse his defeat? If the GM is driving, then the GM does: the players' victory in the skill challenge doesn't establish anything final in respect of the fiction, as the GM can always take retries. If the players are driving, then their successes impose constraints on the content of the shared fiction.

The issue has nothing to do with the powers of the advisor. It's about the powers of the participants at the table.

why are you claiming there's no difference when clearly in one playstyle the advisor could instigate said setback while in yours it's kind of nebulous (outside of the player's characters) who else could in the fiction.

The difference, as I've stated over probably half-a-dozen posts now, concerns who has what sort of power to determine the content of the shared fiction. The difference is pretty clearly captured by the phrases "player-driven" and "GM-driven": each phrase describes some power (to "drive" the fiction) and describes the participant who wields it.

You didn't answer... could another NPC instigate this setback? Could the advisor hire or cajole other powerful NPC's to disparage and set up the PC's in the eyes of the baron?

NPCs can instigate whatever they want. The advisor can blow raspberries at the PCs behind their backs, hoping that the baron will join in. The salient question is: what will become of such attempts?

My answer is: the players have their victory, and so - until something takes place in the play of the game to set that back - then they are entitled to it. Hence, however hard the advisor tries, fate has decreed that he shall not get what he wants.

Upthread, I gave one example of a "something" that might reopen matters settled by the skill challenge: the players set out to capture the baron's niece, and killed her in the process. This affected their relationship with the baron (he had a nervous collapse). As I said in the earlier post, this was a case of the players staking their PCs' relationship with the baron on their attempt to end the niece's murderous depredations. They took their chances, and it didn't turn out their way.

Whereas, by way of contrast, the GM just deciding that all the NPCs turn on the PCs, after the players have won a skill challenge to establish the exact opposite, would be like fiating all the gold pieces recovered from Against the Giants into Fool's Gold. It would be tantamount to cheating. And it wouldn't become more acceptable just because the GM can come up with some clever ingame rationale for it (GM's can always do that; it's their stock-in-trade). The GM authoring some new fiction to undo the players' victory is not something taking place in the game to set the PCs back - self-evidently, it is just the GM authoring some new fiction that undoes the players' victory.

Whether or not one enjoys playing in a fashion where the GM is bound by the players' victories, I don't think it's very mysterious how it works. It's actually pretty simple: unless something happens at the table, in the game, to reopen the matter, the GM is precluded from introducing content into the fiction that would negate the players' victories.

 

[pemerton]

The advisor can try whatever he wants; it's just that the fiction isn't going to change in a direction where the advisor has achieved what he wants.

Not ever? Or just not right away? There's a fairly big difference.

I feel that I've already posted about this at some length, most recently in my reply to [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] just upthread of this post.

If something happens in the course of play to reopen the matter - eg, as per the example I've given, the players make choices that put their relationship with the baron to the test - then things can change.

But the GM can't just change it unilaterally. Not even if the fiction that the GM narrates to make sense of the change is really clever fiction! ("Guys, I bet you didn't see that one coming!")

What I've been wondering is whether the advisor is able to* continue pursuing those tattered agendae after the defeat by the PCs?

<snip>

the socially-defeated advisor (again, ignoring the combat) should still have options open to him. He can try to change the Baron's perception of him (remember, opinions aren't always carved in stone either and can change - the Baron's just changed his view of the advisor once, what's to prevent him changing it again later?), or he can go and round up his goblin army and try the military approach, or he can let himself get captured and then foment rebellion with his fellow prisoners, or he can fade into the background and then hire some bards to spread malicious rumours and innuendoes about the PCs...or the Baron, for all that.

As I've posted, the advisor can do whatever he wants to try and get the baron to return to his arms and turn on the PCs. But, at the table, we know that he will fail, because the matter has been resolved. This is why, as I said, his continue (but ultimately futile) attempts would be mere colour.

The advisor trying to forment a prisoners' revolt would not be off the table, however - that does not fall within the scope of what the skill challenge settled (namely, the advisor's revelation as a traitor in a manner that redounds upon him and not the PCs). Had the advisor in fact been sent to prison, that might have been one way of framing the next challenge that confronts the PCs.

Judging what is or not permissible - what sort of framing honours rather than wrongly negates the players' victories, the established fiction, the players' commitments for their PCs, etc - is crucial to GMing in the style that I prefer. Here's an illustration of the point (from BW Gold, p 54):

We once had a character with the Belief: “I will one day restore my wife’s life.” His wife had died, and he kept her body around, trying to figure out a way to bring her back. Well, mid-way through the game, the GM magically restored his wife to the land of the living. I’ve never seen a more crushed player. He didn't know what do! He had stated that the quest and the struggle was the goal, not the end result. “One day!” he said. But the GM insisted, and the whole scenario and character were ruined for the player.​

And here's a statement of the point, rather than an illustration:

[The GM's] job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments . . . by introducing complications. . . .

[O]nce the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character . . . . The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.​

This also relates back to my discussion with [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] about "GMing blind". I hope it's clear that a GM can't run a game in this sort of way without understanding, both in general and at the crunch point, what the player takes to be motivating his/her PC.

That's a system fault, in that the system is constraining you-as-DM in a diplomatic or social situation where it shouldn't. A physical situation, such as picking a lock or bending a gate, is different - you give it your best try and you fail or succeed - and that's that. Diplomatic/social situations are by their very nature way more fluid and - barring someone somehow being entirely removed from proceedings - are almost invariably open-ended as opposed to definitely resolvable, just like in the real world.

Well, what you call a system fault, I call a system strength.

(I also don't see this radical difference between befriending someone and picking a lock. How do you know that you gave it your best shot? Only because the dice tell you! Yesterday I was having trouble with a stiff lock - I thought I'd given it my best shot, and didn't want to break the key in it. Then I jiggled a bit more and it opened! But there's this colleague at work whom I'd like to befriend, and whom I've tried to befriend, but for whatever reason I just think it's not going to happen between us.)

And in any event, as I posted in reply to [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION], finality in resolution is hardly a novel thing. The AD&D rules for subduing dragons (and some other, slightly vague categories of monsters) allow for finality in a social-type context.

On #3, why exactly are we bringing up old and outdated rules here?

I think the OSR doesn't agree that they're outdated - and I mention them as illustrations of the point. The original AD&D designers understood the significance of finality of resolution in game play.

On #2, don't compare this to combat unless the outcomes are the same - they're not. It doesn't sound like the skill challenge was fatal to the advisor - just his current agenda. That's quite a contrast with a combat encounter that kills the ogre.

No doubt you think that the subdual rules are old and out-dated also!

Ultimately, the system doesn't really matter here. Whether you adjudicated by an organized skill challenge or fiat, you chose to make the result absolutely final for that NPC and you didn't have to.

How do you know that I didn't have to? What rulebook are you quoting from? Where do you get the authority to establish who enjoys what permissions at my group's table?

EDIT: Also, re combat: in D&D nothing tells you that the ogre is dead except a mechanical process of tabulation of successes. Why, in principle, can the same procedure not be used to tell you other stuff about the ogre? What is it about death that makes it uniquely suited to being established, as an element of the fiction, in such a manner? Nothing that I can see.

 

[pemerton]

I think that this distinction about the game world reacting to the players or to the GM is spot on. Well said.

How can the gameworld react to the players or the GM? It can be authored by them. But (being a fictional work, that is, some sort of abstract object) it can't react to them.

I believe that [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] agrees with me on this point.