Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[pemerton]

It'e entirely okay if YOU choose to speak your character's prayers aloud. This isn't a matter of you looking forward to getting to play-act your character.

That's not what I said, though.

I said "I will have to be speaking prayers. I don't see it as horrible. I'm looking forward to it. . . . There is something more demanding about being obliged to speak my character's prayers. I am expecting it to intensify the experience of play".

Having a permission to speak the prayers - which is what you refer to - is not the same as being obliged to speak them - which is what I referred to. It is the latter that I am looking forward to, because the greater degree of demand it imposes is something that I am expecting to intensify the experience of play.

The difference in most of your counter examples is the play described in both inherent and obvious up-front as part of the game.

<snip>

BW does not signal this form of play in integral or featured. Including this ruling for some small subset whilst ignoring similar adjudication in similar situations is a sign of bad rules.

I guess I don't agree with your description of what BW does and doesn't signal.

Here are some extracts: from the Gold rulebook, p 25, and from the Revised Duel of Wits chapter (the relevant text is not very different in Gold), pp 99, 103:

A task is a measurable, finite and quantifiable act performed by a character: attacking someone with a sword, studying a scroll or resting in an abbey. A task describes how you accomplish your intent. What does your character do? A task should be easily linked to an ability: the Sword skill, the Research skill or the Health attribute.

Inappropriate tasks are: “I kill him!” or “I convince him.” Those are intents. After such pronouncements, the first question any Burning Wheel player asks should be: How? By what means? The answer, “I stab him with my knife,” is an appropriate task description for a murderous character. “I persuade him to take my side by explaining his wife’s affair with the cardinal.” is appropriate in the second case. . . .

Don’t write out any speeches, just note your actions; let the oration come organically in play. Include the intent of the action in the roleplay. The maneuver chosen is the task. . . .

When scripting these maneuvers, players must speak their parts. Spitting out moves in a robotic fashion is not a viable use of these mechanics. The arguments must be made. Of course, no one expects us all to be eloquent, so just the main thrust or a simple retort usually suffices (but a little embellishment is nice).

Keep it simple and to the point. Say what you need to in order to roll the dice. A multipoint statement should be broken down into multiple actions across the exchange.​

The rulebooks makes it clear that, in general, the player has to give an account of the task and that, in Duel of Wits - which breaks the back-and-forth of an argument down into indvidually resolved components, that means speaking the part.

If a player doesn't want to do that, then s/he doesn't build a social-oriented character, or take the Courtier lifepath (which grants Rapier Wit, the train that requires a searing bon mot to buff the next verbal action). If a player doesn't want to have to come up with prayers, s/he doesn't play a Faithful character.

There's nothing about the rulebook that implies that playing a Faithful character will be no different from the rather mechanical nature of clerical spellcasting in D&D: I mean, Faith is labelled as an Emotional Attribute, and is lost if the player doesn't have a connected Belief. I think that these aspects of the game makes it pretty clear that playing a faithful character is going to be demanding in a somewhat distinctive fashion.

A mechanic in a role-playing game that forces play-acting is actively uninviting to an entire swath of potential players.

Many things are unimviting to many people. The whole of D&D is obviously uninviting to some - perhaps many - potential players, in so far as there are people who like fantasy and like games yet don't play D&D (this is a favourite point made by [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]).

I don't think that's the measure of a "horrible mechanic". Does the mechanic deliver the roleplaying experience it is intended to? Yes. It's actually no different from the classic D&D wish mechanic (as I noted upthread), and I've never seen anyone suggest that that is a horrible mechanic. I think it's treated as obvious that you will have to speak your wish. Likewise for a prayer.

you can offer the prayer (that the player creates) to the GM without speaking it. You write it down and hand it to him.

<snip>

assume the same situation where I hand the GM the prayer for assessment... or I speak it but not in character. Are these options in BW?

<snip>

I'm failing to see how this has to be spoken. It could just as easily be written down.

<snip>

You could write the wish down, and given the advice around subverting AD&D wishes that was pretty popular.

I don't think the BW rules really address the player who wants to communicate in the course of playing the game by writing rather than speaking. In fact, every example of play I've ever read in a RPG rulebook assumes that the conversation of the game takes place by way of spoken rather than written communication.

If for some reason a player wanted to play the game, or parts of the game, by writing rather than speaking I guess that - as in any other RPG - that is something that a table would work out on an ad hoc basis.

this is optional it grants an incentive for speaking out loud by the player but it doesn't force you to.

Well, the only use of the trait - Rapier Wit - is to gain a buff, and you only get the buff by interjecting a searing bvon mot.

this one does seem to blur the line between player and character... though I'm wondering if this takes place in the game or does the player himself have to create the lore and it serve more as knowledge his character possess... Honestly I'm finding this game kind of obtuse when it comes to clearly explaining things.

I don't see what is obtuse at all: the ability can be used as a FoRK (ie an augment) for any skill song test "for which the player can recite a clever bit of folklore obliquely pertinent to the situation". That's not obtuse - the player must recite a clever bit of folklore pertinent to the situation. If you don't do the reciting, you don't get the FoRK.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yes they can. They can make it clear (expressly or implicitly) that the skulker doesn't speak to any dramatic need.

I'm sure that is possible....but may prove difficult if next to nothjng has been established about the character or what he may be up to, or what his goals are.

 

[pemerton]

I'm sure that is possible....but may prove difficult if next to nothjng has been established about the character or what he may be up to, or what his goals are.

But then there's nothing at stake, is there, in having the skulker recur?

I mean, if the skulker is that much of an empty shell, then having the skulker recur is nothing more than having a NPC figure later on - which seems pretty innocuous to me.

But if the skulker has any definition - eg "That skulking guy that other NPC told us about" then the players can fairly easily signal a complete lack of interest or active hostility to future recurrence.

 

[pemerton]

I would also disagree that in real life we do not place expectations on other people or that they do not place expectations on us. In social endeavors we do things on the basis of the expectations we have for other people.

Aboslutely! The social life of human beings is predicated upon expectations, from the most trivial (that people won't spit on you when you greet them) to the most profound (eg between family members, or in romantic relationships or deep friendships).

Social leisure activities are predicated upon expectations also (eg that if we go to a movie togther I won't talk the whole way through it). RPGs are nothing special in this regard.

Vicious Mockery implies that you have been hurt in someway - so much so that it could kill you. It's words that cut. Failing the saving throw implies that your character has been affected by those words in some way. I expect that to be reflected in play - not just in the marking off of hp. How that happens I do not care - not my decision to make. Similarly, Bardic Inspiration implies actual inspiration - not just a bonus die.

This idea that we can meaningfully separate the fiction from the mechanisms and can pick and choose which forms of fictional positioning to pay attention to is something I am no fan of. It completely destroys any sense of skilled play of the fiction or what I believe separates role playing games from board games - as games we play in a shared fiction. I also do not view this as a feature of 5th Edition as written

I think that what you say here would be controversial among many D&D players.

At least as I have experienced conversations about these matters, many D&D players are not that concerned with, and even sometimes hostile to, actually esablishing at the table what is happening in the fiction when some mechanical event takes place.

And in fact I think big chunks of 3E/PF depend upon a lack of such concern - eg we have mechanical phenomena like +30 natural armour bonuses (which are double the armour bonuses granted by the most powerful of enchanted armours) and DC 60 locks, with no real attempt to establish what in the fiction these mechanical elements correspond to. Likewise eg Reflex saves that don't actually require moving (and so, by the rules, can be made while balancing on a spire surrounded by a pit of infinite depth), etc.

I think that 5e negates some of these issues (eg bonuses and DCs) via bounded accuracy, but not others (eg Reflex saves, action economy issues, etc). So I'm not surprised that you're getting some pusbhack from 5e-ers on your conception of how Vicious Mockery, Bardic Inspiration, etc work. (No one has yet mentioned how that would make, say, bards harder to play than fighters or even wizards, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that come up also.)

 

[pemerton]

if a GM draws a map, and then based on the PCs' actions, decides to switch the contents of two rooms in order to force a conflict with the bad guy, that's illusionism.

It depends on what the point of the map is, and how it is used.

If the GM is using it as secret backstory to adjudicate action resolution, and if the players are meant to be using their skills together with their PC abilities to learn that secret backstory (this is how, eg, Moldvay Basic is played), then changing things is illusionism.

If the GM is using the map basically as a sketch or prompt for narrating on the fly, and it is not a source of secret backstory used for adjudication purposes, then redrawing it on the fly is not illusionism. It's just establishing the shared fiction, and doing so while taking some inspiration from prior brainstorming (encoded in the map).

But if a GM simply doesn't draw a map ahead of time, and instead decides that the dramatic need is for the PCs to face the bad guy, and so he frames such a situation....that's not.

I feel like the entire way the game is played is along the lines of illusionism. Nothing is permanent until it is made so by PC action and GM adjudication.

Nothing is. I mean, unicorns are neither permanent nor impermanent, because they don't exist.

In what you describe in the quote, there is no illusion. The GM is not tricking the players into thinking that their action declarations matter when they don't; or into thinking that s/he is using a fixed set of notes that the players can - through skilled play - try and disceren, when in fact s/he's not.

When the players in my BW game describe their PCs going through Hardby's catacombs, and I narrate some colour in the course of that, no one thinks I'm reading from a fixed (or even unfixed) map, or that their job is to try and suss out that map. They know it all depends on their Catacombs-wise rolls.

And here's another example which I've already posted upthread, but which you (and other posters) may have missed, as it didn't seem to get much response:

My main 4e game is at 30th level. Which is to say, in mechanical terms the PCs have reached their peak, and in story terms that are at the culmination of their Epic Destinies.

The main focus of the game has turned out to be this: Is the Dusk War upon us?

The PCs (and the players) know that the Dusk War is prophesied, and that there are certain signs of its coming.

One of these is that the Tarrasque will ravage the world. And when the Tarrasque entered the world and they confronted it, they found it being warded by Maruts, who were there to meet an obligation to the Raven Queen to ensure that no one interfered with the Tarrasque's end-of-days ravagings.

The PCs' response (which was chosen by the players) was that the Maruts had got their timing wrong - this was not the end-of-days ravaging of the Tarrasque, and hence not the one that the Maruts had to protect againsgt interferrence! And the PCs proved this to the Maruts by way of the ease with which one of their number was able to dispatch the Tarrasque near-singlehandedly: the tarrasque, at least on this occasion, could not be the harbinger of the end times whom the Maruts were contracted to protect, because it clearly lacked the capacity to ravage the world.

This resembles the absence of a map in this way: there is no pre-established timeline. But it differs from the map example in this way: the temporal location of events is not mere colour (unlike whether the interesting place is down the left or the right tunnel), and so is not going to be settled just through framing narration: whether or not the period in which the game is taking place is the time of the Dusk War, or not, is going to be determined via play, that is, via the consequences that follow from action resolution.

 

[pemerton]

it's obvious to me that if the point of a game is the addressing the motivations of the PCs and the dramatic goals of the players, the players are primarily invested in the game constantly moving to address those dramatic goals.

<snip>

As the arbiter of whether a PCs dramatic concerns are being addressed is the player themselves, it's impossible to apply illusionism in a game like this to prevent pursuing relevant dramatic goals without that player noticing and presumably objecting.

Yes. This is what I've posted a couple of times now in response to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION].

 

[Ovinomancer]

In my early days in the hobby I idolised the totally prepared style of play as a goal to strive for ie. fully prewritten material that the PCs explore and the players learn about.

I can't remember the first time I encountered referees with a different style, a more improvisational style with few or no maps and limited preparation, where the referee riffs off the players actions and comments and improvises an adventure and a setting. I had my doubts about this style originally, seeing it as lazy and slapdash and potentially badwrongfun. Contributing to my poor impression of this style is that I was objectively worse at playing in that style, as it's harder for a player to prep for a improv-based game, and there's a lack of precendent to fall back on.

I've got a lot more comfortable with improvisation over the years, tho I still feel more comfortable with a moderately prepped game.

But the recent mention of the spell "Passwall" in recent thinking got me thinking. The Passwall spell as written is for an old fashioned game with detailed maps and secret rooms full of loot. It's much less useful in a improvised game where the map might be some names of buildings or encounter areas with lines drawn between them indicating possible routes, only a mental map, or even no map at all. In improvised game I've seen referees treat spells like Passwall as a plot coupon to transit from one scene or location to another, as supported by the fiction. They could even draw a new line on their network diagram if they wanted to. Referees were more amenable to such use in improvised games because they were looking for an excuse to transition the game from one scene to another and the spell use gave them that excuse, and involved expenditure of a limited resource, a fairly high level spell that the rules suggested should accomplish something concrete in the gameworld.

And when you can treat a spell as a plot coupon like that, its easier to consider using other skills and resources to accomplish equivalent things in producing scene transitions. Most narrative games have plot points, drama points or fate points etc for expending on such declarations and mechanics to adjudicate them.

Secondly, the discussion on player-driven/narrative games and illusionism may have driven onto the rocks. I've never played any of those games, but it's obvious to me that if the point of a game is the addressing the motivations of the PCs and the dramatic goals of the players, the players are primarily invested in the game constantly moving to address those dramatic goals. The scene setting and verisimilitude of the gameworld are less important considerations, and only need to be sufficiently plausible to satisfy the participants. Most social contracts would deem it bad form to poke at the setting with the intention of disrupting it, or showing the setting is "only a film set with no substance". From a different play styles perspective this is true, but from the PoV of players primarily invested in their PCs exploring dramatic goals, irrelevant.

Technically, the PCs could be floating heads suspended in a void and still conduct the game so long as they had appropriate dramatic goals and means of addressing them.

As the arbiter of whether a PCs dramatic concerns are being addressed is the player themselves, it's impossible to apply illusionism in a game like this to prevent pursuing relevant dramatic goals without that player noticing and presumably objecting. (Other sorts of illusionism might well be possible without immediate discovery, but not illusionism to frustrate the player's dramatic goals)

No style of play can survive being played in bad faith, every style of play has downsides that people downplay or ignore for the sake of the game and the other participants.

I disagree -- a player's dramatic goals can be frustrated by softpedalling failure, as already discussed. This is exactly the kind of Illusionism discussed, in that it removes the actual agency of a player's declarations and resolutions by continually pushing any real consequences of failure further and further out, presumably to the point that a success obviates them altogether.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

If you're correct, that's a horrible mechanic. I should never be forced to perform my character's actions to see them realized in game. This is akin to making the player of the fighter stand up and act out their attack routine before resolving it. The actual resolution doesn't require the precise words, spoken by the player -- the DM and the player can quickly negotiate a length to match the intent of the prayer/song/whatever and move on. The mechanics should never force playacting.

That reminds me of the AD&D statement in the DMG for Aerial servant that states:

"The spellcaster should be required to show you what form of protective inscription he or she has used when the spell is cast."

It was even stranger, though. The spell mentions the 3 forms, and the DMG (which was not for players' eyes at the time) shows them. But there isn't any indication that there are any differences in effect, regardless of the form.

Never knew why that was mentioned at all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

double post

 

[Ovinomancer]

That's not what I said, though.

Well, you responded with quoting that you were looking forward to play-acting your prayers in game, so... should I go with you aren't looking forward to it or that you are? Either way, your response completely missed the point I was making to stick to banalities.

Many things are unimviting to many people. The whole of D&D is obviously uninviting to some - perhaps many - potential players, in so far as there are people who like fantasy and like games yet don't play D&D (this is a favourite point made by [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]).

I'm not sure I've ever seen a tu quoque* argument for a mechanic. That's a new one.

*essentially "other people do it, too" used a justification for something.

I don't think that's the measure of a "horrible mechanic". Does the mechanic deliver the roleplaying experience it is intended to? Yes. It's actually no different from the classic D&D wish mechanic (as I noted upthread), and I've never seen anyone suggest that that is a horrible mechanic. I think it's treated as obvious that you will have to speak your wish. Likewise for a prayer.

Huh? You never had to speak your wish, that wasn't a mechanic. You could easily say, "Bob wishes for some sandwiches," and that was fine. You never were required to say, "I, Bob, wish for some sandwiches." But, again, this is a tu quoque argument -- that other bad mechanics exist isn't a justification for this one.

The problem here is that this is a hidden gotcha. You don't have to play act anything else in the game except prayers, songs, rhymes, and social encounters. No playacting of leaping a chasm (at least, I don't think you have to stand up and hop to jump a chasm), no getting out the boffers to show how you swing your axe, none of that. But, for that one thing that can be difficult (social interaction), these rules suddenly and inexplicably require that you play-act. That's bad in the sense that it's uneven application, uneven expectations, and because forcing someone to playact is generally a bad call for a game in general. Your table, fine, but for a game system to force that kind of interaction without putting it up front on the tin is a bad deal.

It would be like picking up Amber and expecting an immersive, diceless story oriented roleplaying game and finding, in the middle, and detailed tactical wargame.

As an aside, cutting out parts of my argument that address your response as if they were said and then separating your quote of me by interleaving another response in between is extreme bad form.