Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Ilbranteloth]

I was building a PC, which led to me pulling out my copy of BW Gold, which led to me rereading the opening few pages. Some stuff in there seemed relevant to this thread, in so far as it sets out a particular approach to what I have been calling "player-driven" RPGing.

From the Foreword, by Jake Norwood (The Riddle of Steel designer, and HEMA guy):

So how do you play Burning Wheel? Fight for what you believe. Or, since it’s a roleplaying game: Fight for what your character believes. Everything else in the rules tells either how to craft that character’s beliefs or how to fight for them.

Burning Wheel’s character creation drips with character history. History breeds conflict. Conflict means taking a stand. What will your character stand for?

Burning Wheel’s core mechanics, advancement and Artha rules demand more-than-usual attention from the player. Skill or stat advancement isn’t an afterthought, but rather a crucial part of the game. The decision to solve a problem with cold steel or silken words isn’t just one of better numerical values - it’s a question of who you, the player, want your character to become. Every action - pass or fail - is growth. Every decision affects how your character matures, shifts, changes. Even little decisions impact the character in permanent, subtle ways. . . .

The game is meant to be played as written. Each rule has been lovingly crafted . . . to support player-driven stories of white-knuckled action, heart-rending decisions and triumph against the odds.​

And from the introduction, pp 9-11, 13:

The Burning Wheel is a roleplaying game. Its mood and feel are reminiscent of the lands created by Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen R Donaldson and JRR Tolkien in their works of fantasy fiction. It is also heavily influenced by the brilliant medieval historical accounts of Barbara Tuchman and Desmond Seward; a dirty, complicated world full of uncertainty, but not without hope or opportunity for change.

Unlike many other roleplaying games, there is no set world in which you play. Burning Wheel is an heir to a long legacy of fantasy roleplaying games, most of which contain far better worlds and settings than could be provided here. Also, it is my strong belief that players of these games are adept at manufacturing their own worlds for gameplay; my own world pales in comparison to what you will create.

In the game, players take on the roles of characters inspired by history and works of fantasy fiction. These characters are a list of abilities rated with numbers and a list of player-determined priorities. The synergy of inspiration, imagination, numbers and priorities is the most fundamental element of Burning Wheel. Expressing these numbers and priorities within situations presented by the game master (GM) is what the game is all about.

Though the game has no world full of ethics and laws, the rules do contain a philosophy that implies a certain type of place. There are consequences to your choices in this game. They range from the very black and white, “If I engage in this duel, my character might die,” to the more complex, “If my character undertakes this task, he’ll be changed, and I don’t know exactly how.” Recognizing that the system enforces these choices will help you navigate play. I always encourage players to think before they test their characters. Are you prepared to accept the consequences of your actions? . . .

Burning Wheel is best played sitting around a table with your friends - face to face. It is inherently a social game. The players interact with one another to come to decisions and have the characters undertake actions.

One of you takes on the role of the game master. The GM is responsible for challenging the players. He also plays the roles of all of those characters not taken on by other players; he guides the pacing of the events of the story; and he arbitrates rules calls and interpretations so that play progresses smoothly.

Everyone else plays a protagonist in the story. Even if the players decide to take on the roles of destitute wastrels, no matter how unsavory their exploits, they are the focus of the story. The GM presents the players with problems based on the players’ priorities. The players use their characters’ abilities to overcome these obstacles. To do this, dice are rolled and the results are interpreted using the rules presented in this book. . . .

Burning Wheel is very much a game. While players undertake the roles of their characters and embellish their actions with performance and description, rolling the dice determines success or failure and, hence, where the story goes.​

All the key ideas are there: the GM responding to player-established priorities; the PCs (and thereby their players) being tested in relation to both their abilities and those priorities, and potentially changed, in both respects, as a result; the setting as a venue for play, not as an end in itself; the results of checks ("rolling the dice") as binding on all participants.

One thing that makes the BW books among my favourite RPG rulebooks is how forthrightly they state the way to play the game. The 4e rulebooks could have benefitted, I think, from greater clarity along these sorts of lines.

Which is all well and good, assuming that's the way you want to play the game. And I think that's what bothers a lot of RPG players too - they don't like somebody else telling them how to play the game.

Yes, BW benefits from its focus. If that's the style of game you want to play, then that's the starting point for that style of game. One of the main reasons that D&D suffers in that regard is that it's designed to accommodate multiple styles of play. This isn't anything new, though. There have been plenty of games over time that have picked a specific aspect of how D&D or AD&D were played and focused on that specifically. It started with both in-house releases like the articles in Dragon magazine (and really the alternate combat system in Men and Magic, and then 3rd party publishers like ICE with Arms Law and Spell Law before rolling it into their own RPG based on their principles.

But right from the beginning "Burning Wheel’s character creation drips with character history. History breeds conflict. Conflict means taking a stand. What will your character stand for?" is something that's not always a goal of me or my campaigns.

I absolutely love the character finding themselves style of story. You start as a simple farmer, or the son of the town smith, or something else in a world where your life is pretty much known from an early age. You will work the family farm, until the farm is yours. And for many folks like this, they have no other ambitions.

Like that majority of the world. Sure, I want to have nice things for us, and make money, and give my kids the chance to follow whatever path they aspire to. But most of us think in terms of job/career, have a few hobbies, save money for the kid's college fund, and hope to be able to retire at some point.

Luke in Star Wars is a great example of this. He had no ambitions, no aspirations to be something great. Sure, he has some history - more than the average farmer. But for Luke (and the player if an RPG), a lot of it is potentially hidden/secret history to be introduced later. He's not dripping with anything, and certainly not anticipating on breeding conflict. The biggest stand he's trying to make (and failing) is that he wants to go to university.

The feel of my game is based as much on TV series like legal and police shows as Game of Thrones. The intrigue and drama isn't always based on conflict and taking a stand. There's a difference between challenges and conflict. My game is more commonly centered on challenges than conflict. Mysteries, secrets, and lost treasures and legends, etc.

The focus is on building the stories of a group of characters that are friends, and work together to accomplish whatever their goals are. Some of them may be happenstance, like stumbling upon the ruins of a long forgotten tomb that they decide to explore. There might be conflict, but it's simply because they chose to explore a tomb where there are traps, constructs, and undead. The character growth isn't due to the conflict or taking a stand, it's between a group of friends experiencing life together.

I have had some groups that prefer that style, the more epic style, single primary story arc with the BBEG at the end. And I can do that too. But it's not our primary approach.

 

[Campbell]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]

I feel like much of your analysis depends on player characters essentially being islands, that they come into the fiction with no meaningful connections to the situation. If that is your basis it makes a good deal of sense that players would often have no meaningful sense of what is going on. My preference is for players to play insiders instead of outsiders, to have a network of connections they can meaningful depend on, to have a stake in the events of play, the ability to enact meaningful change and to have to decide between conflicting priorities that push them one way or another.

This blog post by John Harper shows what I feel makes a character fit for one of my games.

What makes a fit character for this game? The Four Cs.

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

Quick Aside: I do not think we need to meaningfully know how things will turn out to gain many of the same benefits that foreshadowing provides us. We simply need curiosity, a commitment to following the fiction, and an awareness of what motivates a given character. Part of the reason why I am a firm believer of Walking, Not Running Towards Conflict is that it allows us to suss out these details that give way to the raising tension and let things proceed organically. There will be plenty of mystery and revelation if we let our natural curiosity do the work.

Our greatest weapon here is simply reincorporation of elements of the fiction done organically. We let relationships ebb and flow, bring characters in and out of the fiction, and rely on the human brain's natural tendency to see the relationships that exist between disparate elements.

 

[pemerton]

The distinction that I feel he is making is that in a player driven game, the fiction of the game takes shape only around the PCs based on their decisions. If the PCs are not engaged with a particular element of the fiction, then that particular element ceases to exist for all intents and purposes.

This is not right, though. You are ignoring framing, and assuming that everything is the consequence of checks. But there can be no checks without framing - without fiction to engage. In the sort of RPGing that I prefer, it is the GM's job to provide that framing, that is, to establish the relevant fiction.

For instance, in the OP game, and as I've already posted in this thread, the PCs spent 18 months eking out a living in the Abor-Alz, living in a ruined tower. During that time, they spoke with some elven mercants who were passing through the hills. (Mechanically, this encounter resulted from a successful Circles check by the player of the elven princess.)

Speaking to the elves, the PCs learned that the Gynarch of Hardby had become engaged to marry the leader of the sorcerous cabal (in whose tower the events of the OP took place).

Another example from that game: some time in the 14 years since the mage PC and his brother left the tower (as it was being sacked by orcs - those events occurred prior to the time period of play, authored by the player of that PC), the wastrel elf of the hills entered it and stole the nickel-silver mace.

These are elemnet of the fiction that did not take shape around the PCs based on their decisions. They are independent of PC decisions.

They are not independent of player decisions - the same player etablished the sorcerous cabal and the nickel-silver mace as elements of the fiction, in the course of authoring PC backstory (and PC mechanical elements, in the case of the cabal); and another player built an elven PC who has a Belief to [?i]always keep the elven ways[/i]. But that is not the same thing, because not every player decision is a PC decision.

And the decision to locate the campaign around Hardby, which has a sorcerous Gynarch, was made by me as GM - it is good for a S&S Conan-esque feel, and (as the player of the mage PC realised straight away when I described the setting) it fits well with the existence of a sorcerous cabal.

The GM is never giving thought to story elements or parts of the world with which the PCs are not currently engaged.

Again, this is not correct. To quote the same passage from Eero Tuovinen,

[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. . . . Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character . . . a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character.​

Keeping track of the backstory is integral to framing scenes that introduce complications and provoke choices. As a GM, I am almost always giving thought to elements of the fiction with which the PCs are not currently engaged: these (i) are constraints on permissible new fiction (because of the demands of coherence, both ingame causal consistency and gente/thematic consistency); and (ii) are the material from which scenes are framed, from which complications are drawn, which are explicitly or implicitly at stake when choices are made.

After the events of the OP, the mage PC and wizard/assassin ended up in a prison cell together. After reaching a short-term reconciliation, the wizard/assassin tried to break them out of the cell by picking the lock. To get a bonus, the lockpicking was attemptd carefully - a technical notion in BW that grants a bonus die but, in the event of failure, permits the GM to introduce a serious time-based complication.

The check failed, and we ended the session on that cliffhanger. I don't know yet what the serious time-based complication will be, but it will draw upon elements of the fiction other than just the immediate framing of the two characters and the lock.

The player of the mage PC is also thinking of those other story elements - as we were packing up, he was conjecturing that the door would open right into the face of a dark naga, come to find out what happened to the mage's blood that it wanted for its sacrifice . . .

let's say that an assassin is going to try and kill the king. In the player driven game, this would only be introduced in response to player choice and as a result of PC action.

Assassination of the king is no different, for present purposes, from the Gynarch becoming engaged to be married. It is simply not true to say that this would be introduced only as a result of PC action.

And to say that it would be introduced only in response to player choice is also to put things too narrowly: the presence in the fiction of the leader of the cabal is a response to a player choice (about PC story and mechanical elements, which have subsequently been deployed in play) but that is not true of the Gynarch.

In a GM driven game <snippage> if the PCs don't engage with this story element, then the GM determines what happens with the assassin and the king while the PCs are otherwise occupied.

If the GM is doing this in his/her own time, and simply making notes in a folder headed "Campaign Record", then - at that point - it is not even clear what it would mean to say that it is part of the shared fiction. Who is it shared with?

If the fate of the king and/or the assassin actually emerges in the course of play - eg as some bit of background colour, to explain why the courtiers are wearing black; or as some bit of framing, as the assassin comes to the PCs seeking refuge - then, at the current level of description, we haven't got any basis for determining whether the game is GM-driven in my sense, or player-driven in my sense. It's not until you know why the GM is framing the scene in question, or why it matters that the courtiers are wearing black, and hence that we need some explanation for that in the background, that you can tell who is driving the game in my sense.

Another possibility is that the fate of the king and/or the assassin doesn't emerge in the course of play, but rather is used by the GM as an element of secret backstory to adjudicate player action declarations: for instance, the PCs reach out to the court because they are concerned about something-or-other, but are rebuffed for no evident reason - at the table, the GM simply declares the attempt a failure without reference to the action resolution mechanics. The GM's reason for this - which (it being secret) the players don't know - is that the king was recently assassinated by someone from the same hometown as the PCs, and that has put all the people of that town under a cloud.

Now we have the sort of situation [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] described above, where the players either choose for their PCs to abandon their attempt to reach out to the court, or else think of ways to try to learn why they were rebuffed, follow them up, try to remove the stain on the townsfolk, etc. That sort of thing is, to me, a hallmark of GM-driven RPGing. But it is not characterised simply by the GM determining what happens with the assassin and the king while the PCs are otherwise occupied. It is about the use of that secret backstory as a device to resolve action declarations without reference to the mechanical procedures.

Where I think you begin to go wrong is in stating that the GM can determine outright PC failure based solely on unknown elements created as part of the GM's secret history. I do think this is a possibility, but I don't expect that many would cite that as a positive element of the approach.

Well, I don't want to quibble over the definition of "many", but this thread has about a dozen active participants, and two of them have done just that:

There's no manipulation of anything to simply not tell a player something her PC has no way of knowing, and letting the consequences fall where they may should said PC blunder into finding it out the hard way. It's simple realism.

See, that's the sort of thing that makes for a great game. The PCs try something that should have worked, but didn't. That gets them thinking, "What happened? There must be something going on here that we don't know about.". They then start digging for that information, find out about the niece and rescue her. At that time the baron would be exceedingly grateful to the PCs(no damage to the rep, but rather an increase) and be out for blood against the advisor(rebounded against him nicely).

You lose out on a ton by being so against hidden backstory.

And I don't think that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] are atypical. For instance, I think nearly all adventures published since (say) the mid-1980s involve at least some elements of secret backstory that the GM is expected to use as the basis for establishing that certain action declarations fail.

I think @pemerton would insist that such a decision that the fight be unwinnable only be determined by some kind of failure on the PCs part

No. It could be an element of framing - or, rather, what could be an element of framing is something like "An army of orcs is bearing down upon you". Whether the fight is unwinnable or not is a matter of resolution, not mere stipulation.

Player-driven: The GM authors the gameworld (i) having regard to consistency with the fiction already established in the course of play, (ii) having regard to the concerns/interests of the players as manifested through their creation and their play of their PCs (this is especially relevant when framing the PCs (and thereby the players) into challenging situations, when narrating consequences of failed checks, and the like), and (iii) bound by the outcomes of action resolution. It is worth noting that (iii) cuts both ways: if the players succeed, the GM is bound by that; if the players fail, the GM is bound by that - no retries is a fairly hard rule, whilr no softballing I would say is generally a softer but still important rule.

I don't see these three elements as being specifically related to a player driven approach. There's no reason that the most railroady of adventure paths cannot meet each of these elements.

Are you able to explain this further, because at the moment I can't see it.

Every adventure path I'm familiar with violates (ii) - the gameworld, in respect of geography, past and future history, etc is pre-authored independently of any concerns/interests of the players as manifested through creation and play of their PCs. They also generally violate (iii): eg they contain advice like "If the BBEG is killed, then a lieutenant takes over the reins and continues the plot", which is a disregard of success; and they often involve softballing failure, as well, in order to keep things moving. For instance, there will be redundancies built into the storyline to ensure that the players get the clues regardless of whether their action declarations succeed or fail. These can also lead to violations of (i), if the manipulation of the fiction used to manage the unfolding of the AP requires introducing material that, while technically consistent with the established fiction, is at odds with its spirit or seeming trajectory.

I absolutely cannot see why your description of a Player Driven game above cannot also apply to a GM Driven game

My response to this would be - have you tried it? That is to say, have you actually run a game in which, as a GM, (i) your role is to frame the PCs (and thereby) the players into situations that (a) engage their expressed concerns/dramatic needs, and thereby (b) force choices, which (ii) are then resolved via the mechanics (without recourse to secret backstory) in such a way as to produce outcomes in the fiction that are then binding on all participants, and (iii) that - if failures - conform in their content to framing constraints (a) and (b)?

This the template for player-driven play that I have quoted multiple times from Eero Tuovinen, and that is set out in the BW rulebook that I quoted not far upthread, and that I set out in the post that you replied to (and have requoted above).

The question is asked genuinely, not rhetorically, but I am guessing that the answer is "no", because if the answer was "yes" then I honestly don't think you would say that "the most railroady of APs" can satisfy these constraints. I think that the answer is "no" also in [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]'s case, because Ovinomancer keeps making assumptions about the dynamics of play that assume violation of those constraints: eg [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], quite a way upthread, repeatedly insisted that the consequences of failure in the search of the ruined tower for the nickel-silver mace was overly harsh; and more recently assumed that, because the advisor to the baron had a backstory that had unfolded over multiple episodes of play (beginning as mere colour, and gradually emerging into framing) that it must be a case of "secret backstory" being used by the GM to force a particular outcome.

Whereas, if one considered those episodes of play assuming the player-driven approach I am describing, one would make the opposite inferences. Thus, learning of the consequence for failure in relation to the mace, rather than saying "That's too harsh as a consequence for failing to find an ordinary mace", one might ask "What goal/aspiration/need had the player established for his PC that made the discovery of the mace such a high-stakes matter?" And from the account of the advisor's backstory and previous appearances over the life of the campaign, one might ask, "What events happened in play such that a bit of colour about a yellow-robed skulker built up into a key element in what seems to have been a pinnacle social challenge of the campaign?"

My take away from many of your comments throughout the thread, especially whenever you try to deacribe a more GM driven style, is that you see the GM as someone who if left to his own devoces will run amok.

It's nothing to do with the GM running amok. In every episode of play and campaign I have referenced in this thread I've been the GM, and I'm not worried that I am going to run amok!

It's about what I want to get out of RPGing. To borrow a slogan, I want to play to find out. That is inconsistent with deciding ahead of time what can and/or does happen. And I mean that in the expansive sense that darkbard has nicely explained:

In the sort of game you're describing, the DM never gets to play to find out what happens, except in the limited sense of finding out how the PCs navigate from point A to point Z, where Z was already scripted at the same time as A. (And, yes, I realize there may be various paths from A to Z, but that's not the same thing as playing to find out what will happen. The DM already knows that: Z will happen!

In that sort of game, the GM is finding out how the players get from A to Z; while the players have the double-puzzle of (1) finding out what Z is (some GMs, and some published adventures, make this inordinately hard), and then (2) working out a viable path from A to Z. This is not the sort of thing I enjoy in RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

what would a game look like that was focused on parts of the gameworld that have not come into play and have not impacted the PCs?

Well, the Forgotten Realms. There has been an enormous amount published, and I've never run anything in the Great Glacier, for example. Or Maztica for that matter. I haven't actually run a campaign in Calimshan either, but the region has had an indirect influence on the campaign from time to time.

<snip>

The point is, there is a lot of lore and information that is detailed that may never come into play. But in some cases it might have an indirect impact.

<snip>

So the intention is not to write or have material available that never comes into play. It's to have such material available in case it might come into play.

I just replied to a post by [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] where he posited that few would regard the use of secret backstory to resolve action declarations as a positive thing, but here (as far as I can tell), you are advocating exactly that! (And hawkeyfan has XPed your post.)

I mean, that's what "indirect impact" means, isn't it? (Eg the PCs look for Calimshani silks at the market, but can't find any - no dice being rolled - because the GM knows that, "offscreen", Calimshan is in turmoil and all the silk looms have been destroyed. Or that sort of thing.)

 

[pemerton]

Which is all well and good, assuming that's the way you want to play the game. And I think that's what bothers a lot of RPG players too - they don't like somebody else telling them how to play the game.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all!

The last board game I bought for my family was LotR: The Confrontation. That game with instructions that tell me how to play the game. Without the instructions, how would I know how to play it?

The first RPG I ever owned was Traveller, but it in fact doesn't have instructions for how to play the game. It has instructions for building PC, and starships, and planets; but doesn't actually explain how to play the game. Which meant that I couldn't play it. I build characters, and designed starships, and even ran the odd combat; but I didn't actually play Traveller.

The second RPG I owned was Moldvay Basic. Unlike Traveller, it did have instructions on how to play the game: the players build PCs, the GM designs a dungeon, and the PCs then explore the dungeon within a space-and-time structured framework (movement rates, wandering monster checks, etc) hoping to defeat monsters and recover treasure. I was able to play that game; and was then able to take that experience and apply it, in some fashion, to playing Traveller.

Every RPGer was told by someone, somewhere, at some time, how to play the game - they didn't come into the world already in possession of that knowledge. And RPG rulebooks that don't actually say how the game is to be played assume that the player already knows.

One of the main reasons that D&D suffers in that regard is that it's designed to accommodate multiple styles of play.

I don't think so. (I mean, the publishers might assert this, because they want to make sales; but the actual design of the game doesn't really bear this out.)

Moldvay Basic was designed to accommodate one style, which the rulebooks sets out in detail: classic dungeoneering. Gyagx's AD&D was designed to accommodate one style, which the rulebooks articulate intermittently, probably most clearly in the section towards the end of the PHB on "Successful Adventures".

2nd ed AD&D is a strange game: it keeps basically all the elements of Gygaxian AD&D, adds on a stat-check based skill system that is mostly mechanically inconsistent with the Gygaxian mechanics (eg chances to open doors, to find secret doors, for thieves to pick pockets, etc), and then publishes a whole series of modules that don't seem to make picking pockets, opening doors or even cooking food for that matter very significant aspects of play. To the extent that it has a design, it is (i) to enable players to build PCs that have a fair bit of colour, and (ii) to enable the GM to run a game in which the (limited because inherited from Gygaxian skilled play) mechanics play at best a modest role in determining how things pan out. It suits the late-80s/90s GM-driven approach pretty well, but not much else that I can see.

3E I can't comment on, and 5e I won't. But 4e also doesn't really set out to support multiple styles of play. It pushes back very hard against GM management of the fiction during combat, for instance, simply because of the range and depth of resources that it gives players (via PC build elements, action points, etc). [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has posted an anecdote about his first 4e session (which I will try to get right), where he played a fighter whose first round action was a charge across the room, then an attack with a strong (daily or encounter) power, then an action point to enable a second attack with a strong (daily or encounter power - which ever one was left), as a result of which the BBEG was dead. (Without knowing the actual PC build, I will speculate that base damage was 1d8+5, so that the two powers, one 2w and one 3w, would do 5d8+10, or around 30 average damage, which with a bit of luck is enough to kill a typical 1st or 2nd level NPC/monster.) The GM got quite upset, because this wasn't what s/he had had planned for the encounter: s/he was not expecting the deployment by a player of his action resolution resources to make such a significant impact on the fiction independently of GM mediation.

Now one person's "lack of support" is another person's "look what I can do with a nudge, a wink and a few house rules" - but that is equally true of BW. Drop the Belief rules, the artha (- "fate point") rules, and the GMing principles, and what you've got is a Traveller-style lifepath PC build system with a RQ or RM-style ability/skill system and brutal combat system. I'm sure there's someone out in the world playing that game, just as there have been people (eg me) who have used RM to run a game that is closer in style to BW.

 

[pemerton]

Let's clear one thing up: the DM is not a player, in the sense that the players are.

No one in this thread is confused about that with respect to your game. But you equally need to recognise that, in other games (eg [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s, and probably to a lesser extent my own) the GM is a player in much that same sense.

The DM is more a living breathing reactive (and sometimes proactive) gameboard

That's not a remotely good description of how I GM a game.

I know that something told to me now about a character's goals won't be remembered (likely by either me or the player) in four years when I'm trying to build a scene.

In my case, I'm not trying to remember it from 4 years ago. It infuses every moment of play.

Yet sometimes those same things happen simply due to dice luck. What then?

<snip>

realism tells me you're simply not always going to have all the information you really need.

It seems to me that you answer your own question here. If the dice come up bad, the reason -in the fiction - for the failure might be a lack of information.

But establishing that by way of engaging the mechanics of the game - ie playing the game - is quite different from having the GM make the mechanics irrelevant by fiating a failure (or a success).

 

[pemerton]

If there's to be foreshadowing in any effective way that means someone (and I nominate the DM) has to know ahead of time what's coming so as to be able to drop in those hints and breadcrumbs and foreshadows.

<snip>

if nobody including the DM knows what the twist is it's impossible to foreshadow to it or build up to it.

I do not think we need to meaningfully know how things will turn out to gain many of the same benefits that foreshadowing provides us.

I agree with [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] here.

In the advisor episode, the earlier appearances of the advisor (as colour, as part of the framing of an infiltration skill challenge) turn out to have been foreshadowings of his appearance at the dinner party.

In the OP game, the fouling of the waterhole by the renegade elf foreshadows (it turns out) his theft of the mace from the tower (another bespoiling of a valued place).

Etc.

In already-authored fiction (eg a movie), foreshadowing is a device for managing audience expectations about what is to come.

In a RPG in which participants are authors and audience, the events of play at time 1 contribute to the process of establishing expectations and hopes for what might occur in play at time 2; and in certain circumstances (depending on how those expectations and hopes turn out) the time 1 events turn out to have foreshadowed the time 2 events.

This also relates to my reply to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] a handful of posts upthread, where I explained why it is not true, of the GM of a player-driven game, that s/he "is never giving thought to story elements or parts of the world with which the PCs are not currently engaged." All that other material is the stuff from which future framings and consequences might be derived, and part of the skill of GMing in this manner is to draw upon that material in a way that makes expectations, hopes etc about the fiction matter in the same way that foreshadowing makes them matter - ie by giving them their emotional and aesthetic due.

 

[billd91]

I mean, that's what "indirect impact" means, isn't it? (Eg the PCs look for Calimshani silks at the market, but can't find any - no dice being rolled - because the GM knows that, "offscreen", Calimshan is in turmoil and all the silk looms have been destroyed. Or that sort of thing.)

So that constitutes "secret backstory that determines the resolution of some player question"? There's some turmoil the players/PCs didn't happen to know about at the time, that the GM did, that sets the probability of finding Calimshani silks to 0 (or low if it's reasonable someone's still trading them because they have backstock).

How do you set any checks in the games you run? Why do you choose a value that yields a particular likelihood of success rather than another? Or are you basically just flipping coins? For the skill challenge with the advisor, the duke, and exposing the advisor's agenda - what skills did you choose to be relevant to the challenge and what effect did you decide they would have? Ultimately, unless you're allowing pretty much anything the PCs choose to try and set the effects in a generic manner, aren't you using some "hidden backstory" to affect the chances of success? Did you pick some skills to be more useful than others in the skill challenge at all?

 

[Maxperson]

In the post I replied to, and that I have re-quoted, you said "The PCs try something that should have worked, but didn't. That gets them thinking, 'What happened? There must be something going on here that we don't know about.'. They then start digging for that information, find out about the niece and rescue her." That is a description of the PCs solving a puzzle (or, if you prefer, a mystery): the players think "what happened?", they dig for information, and gain answers.

As I said, I'm not very keen on that sort of thing as a focus of RPGing. If you are, then - as I said - go for it!

In your game the players upon failing could have a PC that says, "That should have worked, but it didn't. Why?", and then author the reason, "The advisor must have something on the baron.". You or another player could go along with that and author it to be the daughter who was kidnapped by the advisor.

The only difference between that and what I said is which side authored the "puzzle" being solved. Since you don't like to roleplay puzzle solving, would you stop play and have them do something else?

 

[Maxperson]

And I don't think that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] are atypical. For instance, I think nearly all adventures published since (say) the mid-1980s involve at least some elements of secret backstory that the GM is expected to use as the basis for establishing that certain action declarations fail.

Speaking for myself, it's rare for such backstory to cause something to fail outright. It's equally rare for it to cause an automatic success. Far more commonly, it just results in a bonus or penalty to the action.