Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Ovinomancer]

(2) I have not said a single thing about bad GMing. That is a concept that you, [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] have used.

I am talking about various techniques, and why I do or don't like them in my RPGing.

Let's be honest, now. You present techniques you dislike in the worst ways possible and always find examples to showcase it poorly, but you immediately retreat to how you used your preferred methods in an awesome way so any complaint can't be true because that's not how you used it, just look at these examples!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes.

Here is the action declaration: I go out to buy some Calimshan silk.

Here is the GM's response: Sorry, there's none available. Perhaps the GM adds: You hear rumours that their's turmoil in Calimshan and all their exports have dried up.

The GM's response is not consequent upon any engaging of the mechanics (in 4e this might be a Streetwise check; in BW it would be a Resources check, potentially augmented by an appropriate knowledge check; in Cortext+/MHRP it would be a spend of a plot point to establish a Resource). It is a narration of failure based on an element of the fiction that has been authored by the GM and is hidden from the player in the framing of the check.

What if the DM instead responded: 'As you look through the market, you do not see any Calisham silks on display. You overhear a few merchants saying that the troubles in Calimsham have severely reduced trade out of Calmisham. You realize that if you want some Calimsham silks, you'll have to scrounge a bit harder." Now, instead of the player just buying some silks in the market, it's a skill challenge to negotiate some silks that a merchant is hoarding, or buying on the black market, as smugglers aren't having as much trouble getting goods out, or whatever. You, once again, frame a technique as having only one, negative result.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

And some of the conflict can come from within - even friends fall out now and then, and who says they'll all become or end up as friends in the first place.

Lanefan

What!?! No Lan- Master of the witty catchphrase - efan signature?

 

[Maxperson]

Well, this relates to the point [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] made upthread:

Namely, is the penalty known or knowable via engaging the situation, as part of the process of resolution before the penalty that follows from the secret backstory actually makes its impact on the outcome of resolution?

I also think that Campbell's adverb meaningful is carrying a fair bit of weight hear. What is meaningful, in the context of play, is not subject to unilateral determination by the GM. To quote Campbell again,

I don't think he meant that it was not subject to unilateral determination by the DM. He says the bolded as well.

"I think there is some room for fiction unknown to players to impact resolution. I do not like characterizing some fiction as backstory and other fiction as fiction. It's all fiction to me regardless of when it happened. However, it must be meaningfully knowable through skilled play of the fiction and mechanisms provided before it impacts resolution."

To me that says that the DM can in fact unilaterally determine the result through fiction unknown to the players. I do agree that the key to that is the phrase "meaningfully knowable.". He goes on to describe achieving that knowledge as through skilled play and mechanisms.

What I think he means is something along the lines of the following. Perhaps the evil(alignment unknown) local lord is going to have a statue smashing contest in 3 days. While in town the PCs hear about villagers going missing. If they investigate(skilled play of the fiction), they will likely come across a man who reports seeing a woman in the woods who he saw fro behind while hiding in a hunting blind. She turned a wolf he was about to kill into a stone statue and left it there in the woods when she left.

That skilled play would lead to the reveal of a medusa, which when put together with the missing villagers and the statue contest would let the PCs know that the statues were likely the missing villagers(hidden back story). One of the PCs loves art and looks at the statues on the day of the contest to see if he can determine the artist and rolls quite high. The DM tells him he failed(there's hidden back story) if they did not bother to investigate.

In the above example, if I'm understanding [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] correctly, he would be okay with that unilateral determination, because there was ample opportunity for the players to discover that backstory prior to the check.

 

[Ovinomancer]

By "backstory" in that passage, Eero Tuovinen means the gameworld.

So bits of it are authored by the GM outside the context of play.

I decided to set the game in Hardby, and hence decided that there is a Gynarch.​

Bits of it are colour, authored by the GM as part of the process of play.

I decided that the merchants tell the PCs that the Gynarch is engaged to be married to Jabal of the Cabal.​

Bits of it are framing, authored by the GM as part of the process of play; some of that framing is the redeployment of past colour.

The mage PC is at the docks hoping to meet a cleric who will cure his mummy rot. He thinks there should be clerics around, as a famous holy man is arriving to officiate at the Gynarch's wedding. [That's framing, and it draws on the previously-established bit of colour, namely, that some important personages are to wed.] I tell the player that, across the crowd of people waiting to greet the abbot's ship, he sees his brother, for the first time in nearly 16 years. [That's more framing.]​

Bits of it are authored by the players outside the context of play.

As part of the build of the mage PC, the existence of his balrog-possessed brother, and of the sorcerous cabal, are both established.​

Bits of it are authored by the players as part of the process of the play.

In the first session, the player of the mage PC declares a Circles check: in the fiction, the mage PC puts out feelers to the cabal, hoping for gainful employment. At the table, the player establishes a few more details about the cabal, including the existence of its leader Jabal.​

Bits of it are authored by the GM as part of the process of narrating failure.

Early in the first session, a check made to study the magic of a newly-acquired angel feather failed; in the fiction, the mage PC's examination of it revealed it to be cursed. Later on, the Circles check described above failed. So I tell the players, "As you sit waiting in the tavern for word from Jabal, a thuggish-looking figure approaches you . . ." - and go on to explain how Jabal's servitor Athog brings them a message from Jabal, that they are to leave town immediately as they are bearers of a curse. [Note how the narration of the later failure weaves in the fiction established in the narration of the earlier failure.]​

There is no single person whose job it is to author all of the backstory. And there is no single time at which this is done: not in practice, and not in principle. Playing the game produces new fiction, and establishes new "facts" about the gameworld.

I don't think it's wrong. It's just that it's pretty much the opposite of what I want out of RPGin

What the players are doing here is trying to solve the mystery posed by the GM: I have something written in my notes - a bit of fiction that explains why the court rebuffed you. And now the players are doing stuff, and having their PCs do stuff, to try and learn that fiction. As I posted upthread in reply to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], it's puzzle-solving.

I'm not interested in it.

The players in the scenario just described aren't playing to find out in the salient sense. Here's the relevant passage from the DungeonWorld rulebook, p 161 (note that it's addressed to GMs):

Your agenda makes up the things you aim to do at all times while GMing a game of Dungeon World:

• Portray a fantastic world
• Fill the characters’ lives with adventure
• Play to find out what happens

Everything you say and do at the table (and away from the table, too) exists to accomplish these three goals and no others. Things that aren’t on this list aren’t your goals. You’re not trying to beat the players or test their ability to solve complex traps. You’re not here to give the players a chance to explore your finely crafted setting. You’re not trying to kill the players (though monsters might be). You’re most certainly not here to tell everyone a planned-out story.
​

I think, upon reflection, that what happens here is survivor bias. You present the method as if it always produces relevant and useful backstory because you end up with a story at the end that can clearly trace it's way through all of these bits of story created using your method, so it appears that the method itself always produces the correct outcomes: a good, well integrated story. But this is ignoring all of the chaff that's created and discarded or forgotten or ignored. As you yourself said, you don't have to look up what happened in game 4 years ago because it's always been relevant and at the forefront because it's become part of the ongoing story. But, dollars to donuts, things were authored into the fiction 4 years ago that haven't made it and you don't remember until you look at it. The difference there is that you don't care about those tidbits -- they can be overwritten because no one recalls them as important anyway (I believe something exactly like this was presented earlier in the thread). But, again, this leads to a false positive for your style because you aren't actually honoring ALL of the fiction created, just the bits that end up mattering because the players and/or GM latch onto them. Therefore, those are the only tidbits that 'survive' the gameplay, and you then base your final determination only on those survivors. In reality, lots gets thrown at the fan during play, but not all of it makes it.

So, the difference here seems that in a DM driven game, those bits are retained, but need to be teased out by reviewing old gameplay or notes, whereas in player driven games those bits are discarded and might as well never exist. Your examples about the Elf and the watering hole, for instance. Had a player never presented the idea that the Elf stole the mace, that was a throwaway bit that wouldn't have made it into your ongoing story. But, since a player did add it in, the Elf becomes a survivor, and is retroactively classified as emergent foreshadowing of future gameplay. Had the elf not, well, then, it would just be forgotten and become unimportant and never referenced. It would never have 'survived' to be lauded as an example of great gameplay. And, I'm sure there's lots of such examples, hence the classification of survivor bias -- judging something only by those examples that survive and succeed, and forgetting all of the bits and pieces that didn't.​

 

[TwoSix]

Let's be honest, now. You present techniques you dislike in the worst ways possible and always find examples to showcase it poorly, but you immediately retreat to how you used your preferred methods in an awesome way so any complaint can't be true because that's not how you used it, just look at these examples!

So, just so I'm clear, you're accusing [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] of being disingenuous because he doesn't choose to advocate positively for a play style he doesn't enjoy?

 

[TwoSix]

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 think part of the problem is that when players get introduced to a new RPG, they expect the games to exhibit a greater commonality than they actually share. Playing BW, or Apocalypse World, or Fiasco is very different from D&D; a lot of the skills one might have learned playing D&D simply aren't going to translate. It's like expecting your Monopoly skills to carry over to a game of Twilight Struggle, or your Call of Duty experience to make you better at Street Fighter, or expecting being skilled at golf to help you play basketball better.

Of course, you're also correct that a lot of modern games DO explicitly tell players the best way to play them, it was a explicit design ethos in reaction to players attempting to shift classic games into different paradigms and then complaining about how difficult it was to achieve the expected play style. (The classic example being D&D 2e's stated intent for players to focus on story and characterization, when the mechanics were still that of a dungeon-crawling player-skill based wargame.)

 

[tomBitonti]

I don't think he meant that it was not subject to unilateral determination by the DM. He says the bolded as well.

"I think there is some room for fiction unknown to players to impact resolution. I do not like characterizing some fiction as backstory and other fiction as fiction. It's all fiction to me regardless of when it happened. However, it must be meaningfully knowable through skilled play of the fiction and mechanisms provided before it impacts resolution."

To me that says that the DM can in fact unilaterally determine the result through fiction unknown to the players. I do agree that the key to that is the phrase "meaningfully knowable.". He goes on to describe achieving that knowledge as through skilled play and mechanisms.

What I think he means is something along the lines of the following. Perhaps the evil(alignment unknown) local lord is going to have a statue smashing contest in 3 days. While in town the PCs hear about villagers going missing. If they investigate(skilled play of the fiction), they will likely come across a man who reports seeing a woman in the woods who he saw fro behind while hiding in a hunting blind. She turned a wolf he was about to kill into a stone statue and left it there in the woods when she left.

That skilled play would lead to the reveal of a medusa, which when put together with the missing villagers and the statue contest would let the PCs know that the statues were likely the missing villagers(hidden back story). One of the PCs loves art and looks at the statues on the day of the contest to see if he can determine the artist and rolls quite high. The DM tells him he failed(there's hidden back story) if they did not bother to investigate.

In the above example, if I'm understanding [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] correctly, he would be okay with that unilateral determination, because there was ample opportunity for the players to discover that backstory prior to the check.

I'm taking as the failure the result of the roll to determine the artist -- which must fail because there was none. This seems more a problem of how the result was described. If we adjust the check slightly, to "the statues are amazingly lifelike. Of the many artists you have studied, none have produced works of this sort," then the result is no longer clearly a failure.

But, on the small scale, failures of this sort happen all the time. Players have incomplete or inaccurate information. What they attemp is often simply impossible given the true situation.

Somehow secret backstory has morphed into a nefarious GM device, which seems wrong given the usual information asymmetry of most RPG play.

That's not say the GM can't abuse the backstory to screw over the players. I would say that is just bad GMing.

Thx!
TomB

 

[pemerton]

Let's be honest, now. You present techniques you dislike in the worst ways possible and always find examples to showcase it poorly!

I've provided very few examples of other techniques.

But the one about the attempt to reach out to the court, and failing for reasons of secret backstory, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] embraced.

The one about the attempt to separate the baron from his advisor being foiled by an unknown fact of kidnapping was embraced by [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION].

And the one about no Calimshani silk being available due to off-screen turmoil was embraced by both [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=3400]billd91[/MENTION]. And you gave XP to billd91's post embracing it!

How are these presenting "secret backstory" techniques in the worst way possible? And if so, why are those who like to use secret backstory in their games embracing them?

 

[Imaro]

So, just so I'm clear, you're accusing [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] of being disingenuous because he doesn't choose to advocate positively for a play style he doesn't enjoy?

No it's that he presents a playstyle he doesn't choose to enjoy in an almost universally negative light while presenting his chosen style in a purely positive light... for comparison and discussion purposes at least that is a disingenuous. Now if we are debating or proselytizing our playstyles I guess it would be fine... but [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] keeps claiming that's not what he's here for.