What is *worldbuilding* for?

[billd91]

As to whether this is more important than subsequent D&D - I didn't say that, and didn't intend to imply it. What I said in the OP (and have reiterated a bit since) is that I think it's very clear what the GM's notes are for in that kind of play. They establish the framing for the "puzzle" (which includes the maze of the dungeon itself) and establish its parameters. Their finitude is a very important part of this - ie the dungeon is not a "living, breathing" world in the context of a particular episode of play.


<snip>

This advice becomes pointless if the dungeon is changing dramatically in the timescale of PC expeditions - as under those circumstances the map becomes relatively pointless, notes as to future targets for expeditions become unhelpful, etc. A group can't follow Gygax's advice, for instance, if they can't reasonably rely upon the permanent dweller still being there when, in next week's session, they implement their new plan of going to find out what sort of treasure it might be guarding; and the, the week after that, implement their plan of going and obtaining said treasure.

I think you’re attempting to infer FAR too much from this passage of general advice to newish players, particularly when Gygax was also advising DMs to make sure the dungeon denizens react logically the situation as in DMG pages 104-105.

 

[Mercurius]

But am I correct in understanding that this is to be achieved by the GM presenting to the players certain products of his/her imagination?

Sure, but you're changing this slightly. Up-thread you were asking if the *point* of world-building was to present the players with the products of the GM's imaginations. I'd say no - at least not most of the time, and when it becomes that it is a rather narcissistic affair, with the GM as self-declared artiste and the players his or her captive audience. There are GMs out there like that, and perhaps all or most GMs have a twinge of that (in a similar sense that all/most teachers I've known like to pontificate), but it is more of a spectrum.

I offered the paraphrase to which you are responding in response to your explanation that it matters, in an important fashion, that it is the GM and not the players who do the worldbuidling. If we just centre on the play itself - both GM and players - why would it matter that it is the GM rather than the players who do it?

I've addressed this already a couple times. It has to do with "otherness" and issues of power, certainty (or uncertainty), control, etc, and how these things affect play experience. There is a different quality to "otherness" if I (as a player) have more control or power within the setting.

I guess I'm trying to understand why having someone else do it facilitates the immersion.

To pick a concrete example: the player can decide that his PC has a brother who was possessed by a balrog; or the GM can decide that. The player can decide that his PC's immediate goal is to obtain an item that might help free someone (namely, his brother) from balrog possession; or the GM can decide that (eg by having a patron approach the PCs in a tavern and ask them to find such an item).

I'm not sure why this is all more immersive when it comes from the GM rather than the player - unless the idea is that one can't be immersed in the creations of one's own imagination, which is why I suggested a contrast between activity and passivity. (Not unlike the audience notion that some other posters have used upthread.)

You'll find no issue with me on this. I think both can be immersive.

That said, there's a difference between a player saying "I want my character to have a brother possessed by a balrog" and "I want to travel to Brokentop Mountain where the balrog lives." In the first, the player is creating their character's backstory; in the latter, they are dictating what exists in the world. And of course your mace example fits the latter.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you shouldn't do what you do, using your example of the mace. I just feel that the more the PC's relationship to the setting mirrors our relation to our own world, the more immersive it feels. As a general--but not absolute--rule.

(This may relate to GNS issues, where you seem to be emphasizing a more gamist approach, and I'm emphasizing a more simulationist-narrativist approach)

Disallowing players from controlling the setting does not make them passive or take away agency, in the same way that if I want brie, I can go to Whole Foods and buy it. But I cannot "roll" to see if it is in my fridge or not. It is either there or it isn't.

Your approach says that a PC can, essentially, roll to see if there is brie in the fridge. This is a kind of meta-approach that I feel detracts from immersion. And that might be the crux of my view: anything that pulls the player out of the character, threatens immersion. This is also why I was one of those folks that found 4E combat--which I enjoyed in and of itself--to be less immersive than other editions.

Well, all critical analysis (be it of visual arts, film, literature, or even RPGing) requires the making of some generalisations. We group creators and performers into schools and movements, and talk about trajectories of influence and development, even though we know that each creator and performer is an individual, different in some ways from any other.

I don't have a problem with generalizing in principle, but I find Manbearcat's generalization to be inaccurate and a bit strawmanish.

You, for instance, pick up on @Manbearcat's point (2) and dispute it - many ENworlders, you say, don't worldbuild as an art/creative outlet.

Not quite. My point is that whether or not they world-build as a creative outlet in and of itself does not inherently equate with them using the game as a platform to share their product. It is correlation, but not causation.

This is a common debate tactic: make a generalization, tweak it slightly here and there to make it more extreme than it actually is, then present it in a negative light. That is what I saw in Manbearcat's nine points: a strawman. This pretty much addresses the rest of the specifics that you wrote about his post. I won't respond to each of your points, because my underlying issue with his nine points comes back to this.

But let's return to the forest rather than lose ourselves in the trees. All of this comes back to the issue of GM authority, how much is too much - and what effect different degrees of authority have on play experience. In this context, it is about world-building. But I see the primary tension between that of GM as creator-storyteller vs. GM as facilitator-referee. You can nitpick the framing or shift the contact, but it always comes back to some variation of that.

Now add in the meta-game issue which I mentioned above, and I think we come to crux of this debate: issues around GM authority, and what sort of impact meta-gaming has on play experience. Interesting questions!

 

[pemerton]

I think you’re attempting to infer FAR too much from this passage of general advice to newish players, particularly when Gygax was also advising DMs to make sure the dungeon denizens react logically the situation as in DMG pages 104-105.

As I posted not very far upthread, between the PHB and the DMG you can already see a tension between pressures of gameplay (which require an artificial dungeon environment) and presssures of verisimilitude (which push towards a "living, breathing worlld"). But modules published c 1978 were not "living, breathing worlds" in the modern sense. They didn't have NPCs whose friendships, connections, fields of action etc were remotely realistic. They have NPCs who living in holes in the ground, with no visible economic means of support, and whose response to dungeon raiders depends primarily on a reaction roll. (Consider the hobgoblins in the example of play in Moldvay Basic.)

Without this artificiality, that style of play can't work, as the players can't scout, collect information and then plan and execute raids.

I think that increase of verisimilitude is just the effect of people having played more.

<snip>

When Gygax was writing the 1e books in 1976 to 1977, he'd been DMing for 4 to 6 years. I started playing in 1992 when I was 13. I had 6 years of DMing experience in University. Now I have over two decades of experience running and playing D&D. Gygax was a creative guy, but me right now probably knows more

I think that's part of it. I also think that the sort of experience RPGers were looking for changed - the original designers and audience were wargamers, who might be expected to tolerate an artificial set-up as part of the context for gameplay.

But as the "story" part of the game looms larger among the player-base, and the PC increasingly is seen not just as a playing piece whereby the player gets to insert him-/herself into the fiction, but an imagined person comparable to a fictional protagonist, those issues of verisimilitude etc loom larger.

I mention Runequest because I think it's the first fantasy RPG to self-consciously make this contrast - experiencing a fantasy world and story, rather than playing a wargame - the heart of the play experience. (Compare Tunnels & Trolls, which doubles down on the artificial and absurd elements of dungeoneering; or Moldvay Basic, which has a foreword about the protagonist slaying the dragon tyrant, and thereby freeing the land, using a sword gifted by a mysteriuois cleric, but the gameplay of which (as presented in the book) doesn't remotely support any such thing.)

So the change is an issue of experience, changing taste, changing membership of the RPG community, etc. The contrast has both temporal dimensions (eg 1976 vs 1986) but also system dimensions (in 1986 there were still people playing T&T as well as RQ and DL) and cutlural dimensions (consider contemorary OSRers, for intance).

I'm amused by how you keep saying "RuneQuest and modern games" when RuneQuest was first published in 1978 and predates the 1e DMG...

Well, I did say "or", not "and"!

Like "modernity" as sociologists and historians use it, I'm trying to get to something which has temporal but also cultural, structural etc dimensions.

I was actually thinking of Against the Giants where there's a random chance certain changes happen.

<snip>

Planning is impossible if things are shifting continually. But there's already a chance of uncertainty in random monster encounters, which make planning tricky. By the rules, there's meant to be a chance that plans get derailed due to bad luck. A skilled DM will find a middle ground, having most things feel similar but changing a few details to reflect the actions of the players or passage of time. Some changes due to having a "living world" might be beneficial to the players.

<snip>

The modules never account for big NPC monsters sleeping or going to the washroom or the like. They're always found in their throne-room or dining halls. There's no advantage for attacking at noon or midnight. Which is something you'll quickly consider as an experienced player, but might not as a newbie. But the module can't give two complete descriptions of the dungeon for a diurnal and nocturnal attack.

Yes, these are exactly the sorts of things I'm talking about - Although I'm not sure what you've got in mind for Against the Giants (I'm fairly familiar with it, and have just had a quick flick through, and couldn't find anything like what you describe - but I have seen it in other modules.)

But Against the Giants does have a perfect example of your point about "sleeping quarters", though with a different fiction: Room 5 of the Fire Giant Hall is Queen Frupy's Chamber, and it has the following text:

Any intruders entering the place will be commanded by Queen Frupy to kneel in her August Presence and state their business, so that she may fairly dispose of their humble requests. Any so foolish as to do so will be sorry, as Frupy will call forth her pets [a pair of giant weasels that are described as being out of sight when the PCs enter the room] and herself strike at the most powerful appearing of the intruders, She will strike at +4 due to her position, do +8 hp of damage . . . and a score of natural 20 on the die indicates she has decapitated the victim of her attack. She will then bellow for her serving maids [8 more giants] to come to her aid.​

From the point of view of a "living, breathing world" this makes absolutely no sense. Given the layout of the place, anyone who arrives in Room 5 has already fought their way through the Grand Hall and probably dispatched the serving maids too. It's only when we treat each room of the dungeon as its own little vignette, with its own internal logic, that Room 5 can be seen as a puzzle/challenge posed by the GM to the players.

On your point about a "middle path", I think you're correct that that is what is intended by Gygax, but my own view is that that middle path is incredibly hard to tread - if all the defenders in a dungeon really act rationally, as (say) the inhabitants of a mediaeval castle might, then the PCs would have to be laying siege, not picking them off room-by-room - and I think the model of gameplay has largely collapsed under the weight of verisimilitude concerns.

That's a pretty absurd example

I agree it's absurd; it was actually inspired by an essays from c 1981 by Roger Musson, in which he posits 15 ogres holding a union meeting in the corridor as a technique for a GM to discourage the players from heading into an as-yet unmapped/unstocked section of the dungeon. The example (no sillier than some others given by Musson) illustrates the balance between absurdity and verisimilitude that seems to have been accepted (widely, obviousy not universally) at the time, but I think would be widely rejeted now - the ogres are holding a union meeting (but aren't workers) in a corridor of the dungeon (not in their guidl hall) and don't pursue the adventurers who stumble into them but then turn around (otherwise they don't do the job the GM has put them there for). These are ogres that make no sense except as a device in a megadungeon!

I don't see the game system at play here at all. You can play the DM vs Player dungeon crawl skill game with most modern systems. Conversely, many DMs playing OD&D and 1e D&D created expansive setting.

It depends what you mean by "system", I guess.

If the "system" includes reaction rolls, or relationship rules, or wandering monster/random encounter checks; these all matter to the stuff we're talking about.

Then there are advancement rules: contrast XP-for-gp, which establishes a clear measure of player skill, from the rule (very popular among Melbourne D&D players c 1990) that the PCs level up "when the GM feels its appropriate". What does levelling mean in that latter sort of game? It's not a measure of skill at all, but a GM-controlled pacing device. In a "level up when the GM feels like it" game, all of Gygax's advice in his PHB becomes pointless, even if the combat mechanics are the same as they always were.

There are some resolution systems (eg Cortex+ Heroic) which make a skilled-play game of the Gygaxian sort impossible. I ran a "dungeon crawl" fairly recently using a Cortex+ Fantasy Hack, but it wasn't a skilled play game at all. Just to give one example: the PCs had been teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, when the PCs confronted the Crypt Thing the Doom Pool had grown to 2d12 and so I spent it to end the scene), and all were subject to a Lost in the Dungeon complication. As they wandered the dungeon looking for a way out, I described them coming into a large room with weird runes/carvings on the wall. One of the players (as his PC) guessed that these carvings might show a way out of the dungeon, and made a check to reduce/eliminate the complication. The check succeeded, and this established that his guess was correct. (Had it failed, some further complication might have been inflicted, or maybe the carvings were really a Symbol of Hopelessness, and the complicaion could have been stepped up to a level that renders the PC incapacitated.)

There's undoubtedly a type of skill being demonstrated by that player - a quick imagination working with established fantasy/dungeon tropes - but it's not the sort of wargaming-type skill that Gygax had in mind when he referred to the "skilled player"!

So I think these changes in game play involves a myriad of factors: expectations and preferences; system elements (action resolution; PC build and advancement; content introduction rules like random encountes and reactions; etc); non-mechanical techniques (how is failure adjudicated? how is fictional positioning established? etc); and probably other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment.

The GM can create the setting wholly before play. They can create chunks of the setting before each session, expanding as needed. They can create the broad strokes and flesh it out during play. They can entirely improvise during play. They can tap the players to add locations and places. Or the whole setting can be collaboratively created at the table by the players.

This is all true. The question the OP was asking is - if the game isn't a classic skilled-play dungeon crawl, then what is worldbuilding of the GM preauthorship variety for?

 

[pemerton]

For me the differences between a plot-important library in a dungeon and one a city concern action economy and suspension of disbelief. Dungeons constrain player decision making, and there is a more or less finite set of meaningful actions in the dungeon. Even when an action in the dungeon seems not to accomplish anything, it marks another element off the checklist.

Whereas in a city there are an infinity of possible actions the players could take, most of which accomplish nothing (arguably). The risk that checking out the library is a waste of playtime is to me higher, because there are a million stories in the naked fantasy city, and most of them are not relevant to the pcs/ plots (in a conventional prepared game where the plot doesn't follow the PCs).

Well, this is more-or-less the point that I made in the OP, although approached from a slightly different angle. (Ie of the players trying to resolve the GM's plot; my angle was the players trying to decipher and beat the GM's maze.)

The more freedom the players have, the harder it is to hook them in, so that everybody including the referee is having fun. I've seen it happen before that a game that worked fine within the confines of the dungeon, (constrained adventure space) falls apart in the wilderness/ city as the players don't notice or ignore the referees hooks and hare after red herrings and the stuff that interests them in the setting, which may not be what interests the referee.

This seems to be a pathological instance of GM pre-play authorship of setting.

The alternative to heavy worldbuilding is generic fantasy

<snip>

Generic fantasy typically has huge issues with consistency and logic (castles and flying foes, a crazy, anachronistic mix of technologies and politics, terrible geography etc etc)

I don't think this contrast holds.

I mean, it hardly gets more worldbuilt than FR, but it exhibits all the issues you describe (in a more subtle way, so does JRRT's Middle Earth, especially when it comes to economics); and, conversely, my Cortex+ Fantasy game doesn't involve any heavy worldbuilding, but so far has (I believe) evoked a more-or-less coherent viking/fairy tale world (there are hills, and snow in winter/to the north, and a dungeon with tombs in it, and dark elves further down, and steadings where giants live and keep gian oxen in their barns).

 

[Jester David]

As I posted not very far upthread, between the PHB and the DMG you can already see a tension between pressures of gameplay (which require an artificial dungeon environment) and presssures of verisimilitude (which push towards a "living, breathing worlld").

It's almost as if during that year, Gygax increased his experience as a designer and DM by 20%....

But modules published c 1978 were not "living, breathing worlds" in the modern sense. They didn't have NPCs whose friendships, connections, fields of action etc were remotely realistic. They have NPCs who living in holes in the ground, with no visible economic means of support, and whose response to dungeon raiders depends primarily on a reaction roll. (Consider the hobgoblins in the example of play in Moldvay Basic.)

Which didn't mean they didn't exist in the games, just that they didn't exist in the published modules. I'm sure that stuff was assumed to be added by the DMs, based on the actions of the player.

Without this artificiality, that style of play can't work, as the players can't scout, collect information and then plan and execute raids.

If that were even remotely true, it would be impossible to execute scouting missions and raids in the real world. Which happen all the time. They just require a little more skill and quick reactions.

I think the living world is a HUGE strength of tabletop roleplaying games. If someone wants a static world that doesn't change, where they can scout and learn patterns and know their enemies never move, they'll play a video game. That's pretty much what they excel at. Tabletop games are special and unique because they don't have the same pathfinding and limited AI. The DM can make the world more than just a dead, static dungeon.

I think that's part of it. I also think that the sort of experience RPGers were looking for changed - the original designers and audience were wargamers, who might be expected to tolerate an artificial set-up as part of the context for gameplay.

They probably also just didn't know any better, as the game was still new and being made up as they went along.
Gygax's first players were his kids, who tested the game with them, before he brought in his wargamer friends. But even they ventured out of the dungeon eventually. After all, what's the point of treasure if you can't spend it?

Plus all the stuff that happened in the dungeon that affected the world. Such as when Robert J. Kuntz's Robilar released nine demi-gods held captive under Castle Ravenloft, including Iuz. Meanwhile, Robilar himself became the owner of the Green Dragon Inn and kept his ear on the goings on in the Free City of Greyhawk. Why Gygax's early modules focused on the dungeons his game was by no means confined to that space.

So the change is an issue of experience, changing taste, changing membership of the RPG community, etc. The contrast has both temporal dimensions (eg 1976 vs 1986) but also system dimensions (in 1986 there were still people playing T&T as well as RQ and DL) and cutlural dimensions (consider contemorary OSRers, for intance).

We're not even talking as late as 1986. The change from wargaming to assuming the role of a character and focusing on a larger story was happening in the late '70s. It was an almost immediate transition. I dare to say that once the game hit stores, the majority of new players were likely NOT wargamers.

From the point of view of a "living, breathing world" this makes absolutely no sense. Given the layout of the place, anyone who arrives in Room 5 has already fought their way through the Grand Hall and probably dispatched the serving maids too. It's only when we treat each room of the dungeon as its own little vignette, with its own internal logic, that Room 5 can be seen as a puzzle/challenge posed by the GM to the players.

To me that comes off less as a puzzle/ challenge and more a scripted encounter where enemies respawn. It means the players past actions have little impact—no matter how many giants they killed outside and how many serving maids were slain reinforcements arrive.
It's only a puzzle if you need to find a way to "solve" the encounter, bypassing the conflict.

On your point about a "middle path", I think you're correct that that is what is intended by Gygax, but my own view is that that middle path is incredibly hard to tread - if all the defenders in a dungeon really act rationally, as (say) the inhabitants of a mediaeval castle might, then the PCs would have to be laying siege, not picking them off room-by-room - and I think the model of gameplay has largely collapsed under the weight of verisimilitude concerns.

Not really, it just adds another dynamic: stealth. Having to avoid attracting attention. Quick strikes before the alarm can be raised. Shifting position after possibly being discovered to strike at a different location when guards come. Causing a distraction to pull guards away from their true place to attack.
It's not a siege. It's a special forces incursion.

If the "system" includes reaction rolls, or relationship rules, or wandering monster/random encounter checks; these all matter to the stuff we're talking about.

Then there are advancement rules: contrast XP-for-gp, which establishes a clear measure of player skill, from the rule (very popular among Melbourne D&D players c 1990) that the PCs level up "when the GM feels its appropriate". What does levelling mean in that latter sort of game? It's not a measure of skill at all, but a GM-controlled pacing device. In a "level up when the GM feels like it" game, all of Gygax's advice in his PHB becomes pointless, even if the combat mechanics are the same as they always were.

There are some resolution systems (eg Cortex+ Heroic) which make a skilled-play game of the Gygaxian sort impossible. I ran a "dungeon crawl" fairly recently using a Cortex+ Fantasy Hack, but it wasn't a skilled play game at all. Just to give one example: the PCs had been teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, when the PCs confronted the Crypt Thing the Doom Pool had grown to 2d12 and so I spent it to end the scene), and all were subject to a Lost in the Dungeon complication. As they wandered the dungeon looking for a way out, I described them coming into a large room with weird runes/carvings on the wall. One of the players (as his PC) guessed that these carvings might show a way out of the dungeon, and made a check to reduce/eliminate the complication. The check succeeded, and this established that his guess was correct. (Had it failed, some further complication might have been inflicted, or maybe the carvings were really a Symbol of Hopelessness, and the complicaion could have been stepped up to a level that renders the PC incapacitated.)

That's still up to the DM. No matter what system is being played, I'm not going to let the rolls of a character solve a "puzzle" or riddle. I might give a clue, reflecting the character's superiour intelligence compared to the player, and any in world knowledge. But thought is still required.
(And it's not like Intelligence checks and the like didn't exist in 1st Edition...)

There's undoubtedly a type of skill being demonstrated by that player - a quick imagination working with established fantasy/dungeon tropes - but it's not the sort of wargaming-type skill that Gygax had in mind when he referred to the "skilled player"!

It's interesting to think about Gygax's conception of who a player is. He probably had a pretty small pool of players: his middle-aged wargaming buddies and his young kids. Probably a far cry from the high school and college aged kids who were buying the game.

So I think these changes in game play involves a myriad of factors: expectations and preferences; system elements (action resolution; PC build and advancement; content introduction rules like random encountes and reactions; etc); non-mechanical techniques (how is failure adjudicated? how is fictional positioning established? etc); and probably other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment.

That and the game being played by non-wargamers. Wargaming was a time intensive and expensive hobby that required a dedicated play space (like a sand table) and miniatures, while D&D did not. It was a very, very niche hobby. Once D&D expanded beyond that circle, it's wargaming roots faded. Which likely happened the minute the White Box hit stores and people who knew more about storytelling and writing found the game and realised they could use it to tell tales with their friends.

This is all true. The question the OP was asking is - if the game isn't a classic skilled-play dungeon crawl, then what is worldbuilding of the GM preauthorship variety for?

If the game being played isn't a classic skill-played dungeon craw, then the GM's worldbuilding provides setting and flavour. Description of the environs. Characters for the world.
The nature of worldbuilding doesn't change at all really. Creating the walls of the dungeon or the provinces of a kingdom are the same thing. If you move through the adventure's plot by advancing from dungeon room to dungeon room or from scene to scene, it's functionally the same.

 

[pemerton]

It has to do with "otherness" and issues of power, certainty (or uncertainty), control, etc

<snip>

make a generalization, tweak it slightly here and there to make it more extreme than it actually is, then present it in a negative light. That is what I saw in Manbearcat's nine points: a strawman. This pretty much addresses the rest of the specifics that you wrote about his post. I won't respond to each of your points, because my underlying issue with his nine points comes back to this.

But let's return to the forest rather than lose ourselves in the trees. All of this comes back to the issue of GM authority

The nine points [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] wrote are an attempt to analyse all the things you refer to here: "power", "uncertainty", "control", "GM authority".

The uncertainty resides on the player side. It results from the GM having control of the backstory, which is not (fully) revealed to the players, but is (i) subject to change at any time by the GM, and (ii) available as a device for the GM to determine that declared actions fail without resort to the standard mechanics (eg set a difficulty, roll the dice).

If you think that's not where the uncertainty resides, then please elaborate.

(Another common source of uncertainy in RPGing: dice rolls. But this don't depend upon GM control over backstory, and so can't be the sort of uncertainty you are saying GM authority is in service of.)

there's a difference between a player saying "I want my character to have a brother possessed by a balrog" and "I want to travel to Brokentop Mountain where the balrog lives." In the first, the player is creating their character's backstory; in the latter, they are dictating what exists in the world.

Doesn't the former establish that the gameworld contains balrogs? And a brother? Why is this significantly different from geography?

There is a different quality to "otherness" if I (as a player) have more control or power within the setting.

<snip>

I'm not saying you shouldn't do what you do, using your example of the mace. I just feel that the more the PC's relationship to the setting mirrors our relation to our own world, the more immersive it feels.

<snip>

Disallowing players from controlling the setting does not make them passive or take away agency, in the same way that if I want brie, I can go to Whole Foods and buy it. But I cannot "roll" to see if it is in my fridge or not. It is either there or it isn't.

Your approach says that a PC can, essentially, roll to see if there is brie in the fridge.

This strikes me as confused.

One part of this apparent confusion is that you assert that the GM has power and control, yet deny that the player is passive or lacks agency. I don't understand how you square that circle.

The PC doesn't make any rolls (unless playing a dice-based gambling game in the fiction - that has been part of my RPGing, but normally is fairly marginal). The player makes a roll. RPGing is replete with players making rolls.

The player also declares an action. This is also very common in RPGing. The player doesn't know whether or not the action will succeed. This is also very common in RPGing. Something determines whether or not the action will succeed.

In Against the Giants, the attempt to find the hidden treasure depends (i) upon fictional positioning (ie the PC has to be in the right bit of the dungeon where the GM's notes record there is some hidden treasure) and (ii) upon a die roll (eg maybe there is a 1 in 6 chancer of finding it, as is the case for the invislbe iron box with the Hammer of Thunderbolts in it in room 21A of G2).

In the mace example, the attempt to find the mace depends (i) upon fictional positioning (ie the PC has to be in the right sort of place for a mace to be found, consistent with genre logic and established backstory - as Luke Crane puts it, on p 262 of the Burning Wheel Revised book, "A player cannot make a stand for beam weaponry in the Duke's toilet") and (ii) upon a die roll.

So where is the difference? Different systems allow different approaches to (ii), but these are largely orthogonal to the present point (eg in Against the Giants, that 1 in 6 roll is unmodified; in BW, the player has many resources to bring to bear; but a 3E player playing an updated version of G2 likewise will have player-side resources available to enhance a Spot check).

The real difference is in (i): what counts as the proper fictional positioning is different in the two approaches. In the first, the GM has sole control and keeps it secret whether or not the fictional positioning is sufficient for the roll to matter. In the second, the GM and player jointly establish the fictional positioniong, and its sufficiency for the roll (if it is sufficient) is known to the player.

(One consequence of this difference, which is a bit orthognal but in my view highly relevant to immersion: in the Against the Giants approach, the player can waste resources trying to succed at stage (ii) although the GM knows that the player has failed at (i) ie the fictional positioning is insufficient. In the mace approach, that can't happen. I think, based on experience, that the first approach breeds cautious play with somewhat detached players; the second breeds engaged play with players whose passions closely mirror those of their PCs.)

Which then brings us to the comparison to buying brie in the real world. That's a nonsense comparison, because the real world is not a fiction.

In the real world, I don't have "fictional positioning". And when I want to buy some brie, I'm not negotiating a fiction with other creative people.

The real world is governed by (complex, perhaps in some respects unknowable) causal processes.

The world of an RPG is authored. When a player says, "I look for the mace", this expresses a desire that the fiction contain one element (PC finds mace) rather than some other element (eg PC fails to find mace). Having the GM unilaterally and secretly deciding that the mace isn't there, and so can't be found no matter how good the roll, isn't like finding a fridge empty of brie. It's one participant affirming his/her conception of the fiction over another's expressed desire in respect of that fiction.

To me, that makes sense if the aim of play is for the players to try to bring their picture of the fiction into conformity with the GM's prior pictue. And that makes sense if it's a maze/puzzle game; but I really don't see any connection between this goal of play and immersion.

 

[Caliban]

Doesn't the former establish that the gameworld contains balrogs? And a brother? Why is this significantly different from geography?

This strikes me as confused.

I'm sure it does. But it's not confusing - you are just confused by it. There is a difference.

One part of this apparent confusion is that you assert that the GM has power and control, yet deny that the player is passive or lacks agency. I don't understand how you square that circle.

I find your lack of understanding completely believable.

To me, that makes sense if the aim of play is for the players to try to bring their picture of the fiction into conformity with the GM's prior pictue. And that makes sense if it's a maze/puzzle game; but I really don't see any connection between this goal of play and immersion.

Something else I find completely plausible.

Perhaps games like D&D aren't for you.

 

[Arilyn]

There is a knee jerk reaction to the style of play pemerton is describing, as regards to immersion. I often hear the complaint that players contributing to the world, beyond making decisions for their characters, will kill their sense of immersion. I have not found this to be true at all. When it's all going right, it can actually improve immersion. I understand how that might initially seem counter intuitive, but it really does work. I think more players should try it. Playing a variety of games and game styles can only make you a better, more diverse player/GM.

 

[Caliban]

There is a knee jerk reaction to the style of play pemerton is describing, as regards to immersion. I often hear the complaint that players contributing to the world, beyond making decisions for their characters, will kill their sense of immersion. I have not found this to be true at all. When it's all going right, it can actually improve immersion. I understand how that might initially seem counter intuitive, but it really does work. I think more players should try it. Playing a variety of games and game styles can only make you a better, more diverse player/GM.

I don't know. Based on the evidence presented in this discussion, playing games like that may render you incapable of understanding even basic concepts associated with playing D&D.

I'm just not sure I want to take that risk.

 

[Arilyn]

I don't know. Based on the evidence presented in this discussion, playing games like that may render you incapable of understanding even basic concepts associated with playing D&D.

I'm just not sure I want to take that risk.

It doesn't. Really, it won't taint you. I think maybe there is just a large barrier in trying to explain the style, especially if you are steeped in traditional DnD style of play. It's not all that strange or nutty, otherwise all those indie games would have never taken off. It's looking at rpging through a different lens, but it's still roleplaying, and players are still engaged in challenging adventures.