What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Maxperson]

The first looks like ye olde "standard wilderness crawl with a McGuffin at the end of it".

It's not.

With the second, where is the character arc going to come from? Where is Pippin's resolve going to be put to the test?

Same place as in your game. From the players and the DM interacting in the game world.

How are the thematically compelling moments going to be produced if the GM doesn't do it on purpose?

Um, the player originates them as in my examples, forcing the DM to respond.

 

[Maxperson]

Exactly. This is non-controversial, we all agree that in your game SOMETHING will happen. The question is, "how will that thing address Pippin's player's agenda?"

No, that's not the question at all. We are discussing character arcs, not agendas. The whole point of this is that agendas are not required for character arcs.

If its simply a question of chance as to whether the GM happens to frame a scene with Denethor, often simply due to it being pre-authored or not pre-authored, then there is simply some random chance that the player will be confronted with a situation where his agenda is addressed and his character's desire/belief is put to the test. It may or may not happen.

Again, no agenda need be present. The character in any game of D&D that abides by the social contract will have opportunities for character arcs/growth. There is no chance that it won't happen, since the DM is obligated to make the game fun, which means of interest to the players. That interest just doesn't need to be formalized the way it is in Story Now. Instead it happens more organically through game play.

The point we made way back when this particular exchange started was that it is MUCH more likely you will achieve a 'LotR-like' story-arc by playing directly to it in a 'go to the action' type of style. There are NO paths in Story Now where something analogous to the experience of Pippin in Minas Tirith will not happen. There are MANY such paths in other styles of play.

No. The odds are the same in both styles. Story Now just goes about getting there differently is all.

Exactly, again, same as above. The point still stands, in the absence of 'going to the action' of intentionally speaking to the dramatic elements nominated by the player, there's no sure way to achieve a dramatic story arc. Pippin's time in Minas Tirith is JUST as likely to be largely uneventful or to involve action that is unrelated to the character's central question. Loyalty vs Admiration may never come up at all! Pippin may never 'pay his debt' or it may simply be discharged in a relatively uneventful way which never brings into question just what it means to swear an oath to a man whose family member died for you. Pippin may well not grow at all.

Those arcs will happen every time in my game. They just happen more organically, rather than being something that the DM and players are always addressing every moment of the game.

But again, he could join the regular army, and be posted to some boring guard duty,

No, that's not possible. The obligation placed on the DM to provide a fun game prevents that from happening.

or he could fail some checks or simply not have the requisite information needed to find Faramir, or it could even be IMPOSSIBLE to find Faramir due to his location having been pre-established as someplace inaccessible to Pippin. Truthfully, this is what you would EXPECT. Certainly if this was [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s style of play, as I understand it, this is exactly what would most likely happen.

I don't think so. I think it would just require more ingenuity on the part of the players. PCs are constantly going where they aren't supposed to be in order to talk to people and find things. That's part of the charm of RPGs. It wouldn't be impossible, but would probably require more than just a successful check of some sort.

The world doesn't exist for you, PCs are nothing special, you rarely have any incredible opportunities because that's just not realistic. What does Pippin most likely learn? The taste of wormy army biscuits sounds like the most probable thing! lol.

This also misstates [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s position I think. While the world wouldn't owe the PCs anything, opportunities will knock all over the place as once again, the social contract requires the game to actually be enjoyable. If [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] failed in that he would lose his players.

 

[Maxperson]

But, this, as I interpret the text, is clearly an example of something that is not Story Now, or at least violates certain principles which Eero Tuovinen is expounding. I would say its not Story Now, its 'free narrative', the players invent things to add to the fiction whole cloth. I see no indication that the thing added was relevant to an agenda, had dramatic consequence, or was in some way mediated by some mechanic which was intended to produce such. It was just "narration-sharing", which Tuovinen also denigrates (in an unstructured form) as 'conch-passing'.

It seems to me that this is a form of establishing an agenda. The players can in this case let the DM know what they would like to encounter, similar to declaring an action to go into the woods and try to find an ogre, then rolling some sort of skill check to see if they find one or not. The difference is that they don't actually have to roll.

I'm completely mystified by the significance of this. It has no relation to Tuovinen's definition of Story Now, nor anything [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] nor I have discussed. I mean, I remember reading it, someone quoted it up thread before. I don't consider it to be a very coherent idea either. It certainly has nothing to with player agenda. I might put it a different way and say that it should be up to the GM to choose the purpose and nature of army high command. The GM is in a position to make this choice speak to the dramatic themes of the specific game. However, I think 3:16 is a game where the agenda is largely inherent, there's a question to be examined, but it is, at its core, built into the game and its single assumed setting. This is common with this type of game.

In included it, because it seems to be some sort of "yes, and" type of game, at least from that passage, and that sort of game includes increased player authorship of the narrative like you two have been advocating for.

I think there is a substantive difference. If I 'pay' then I get what I pay for, right? If I have to pass a check to get what I want (and even then its what the GM is willing to consider story appropriate, no laser weapons in the Duke's Bathroom) I could get nothing, and not having paid for something, I am not necessarily ENTITLED to anything. When I pay, then its a lot like getting ripped off if you don't get exactly what you thought you bought. Harder for the GM to regulate, though Cortex+ uses the Doom Pool concept in a similar way. Here the GM gets to push back harder if the player takes control of the narrative.

Sure, it's a matter of degree. But it's still along the same lines. Both involve authorship of the backstory, just through different means.

Its STORY when it makes it into the story in an active way. Sure, PCs talk about what they know, but the backstory as a thing is not part of the in-game reality. Not in the way it is in OUR reality, where it is a piece of paper, some dice and charts, a wiki, etc.

That's not how Tuovinen uses it, though.

"Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time. For example, if the GM has decided in advance that the butler did it, then that is part of the backstory – it happened before the player characters came to the scene, and the GM will do his job with the assumption that this is an unchanging part of the game, even if the players might not know about it. Similarly a player character’s personal history is part of the backstory in a game that requires such. Backstory is specifically separate from what might happen during play itself. We say that somebody has “backstory authority” if he is allowed to determine something about the backstory, simply enough."

Here he decided that the butler did it as part of prep before the game begins. He specifically says it happened before the players came to the scene, not that it happened outside of the game. So in game when the players find out about it, they are finding out backstory and the PCs can discuss it. He also says "Backstory is specifically separate from what might happen during play itself." Play itself takes place in the present of the game world, so even that passage doesn't talk about backstory being apart from the in-game reality. He references it through the butler example and the three examples above as it being inside the game reality.

 

[pemerton]

ou are free to use backstory to mean "elements of the fiction which predate the present in-fiction moment of play" if you want, but that's not how Eero is using it. He is using it to mean suuff that is literally pre-authored or is notinally pre-authored. (The latter is what is often called, on these boards, "winging it". Establishing the existence of a secret door as a result of a check is not "winging it".)

Sure it is, it's just that the flapping is being done by someone other than the DM: in this case, a player aided by her dice.

This is like saying the PCs dying in a by-the-rules TPK is just the same as "rocks fall, everybody dies" except the former involved some dice!

The fact that it's an action declaration that is resolved at the table is what makes it completely different, for present purposes, from "winging it". Upthread various posters, talking about "winging it", said that if it's done "properly" then the players can't even tell it wasn't in the notes. A player who declares an action and as a result has his/her PC find a secret door knows what is going on.

If the presence of that secret door had been known about all along by the DM, what would have been done differently in play/occurred differently in the fiction than what in fact transpired?

This is like asking, "If the GM had known all along that the PC would miss the orc, what would have been done differently or occured differently in the fiction?"

The difference at the table would be: the player knows that s/he is rolling to find out what the GM already decided. If the player rolls a miss, s/he doesn't know whether that's because the GM had left it to the mechanics, or the GM had already decided the orc, at that moment, was not goingto be hit. But if the player rolls a hit, then s/he learns - when the GM declares a miss as the outcome - that the GM has decided the orc, at that moment, will not be hit.

Of course the ingame fiction might be identical, but what does that tell us? The GM telling a story all to herself can produce the same ingame fiction as a RPG session, but that doesn't mean there's no difference between turning up to a session and listening to the GM's story, and turning up to a session and actually playing the game!

I ask this because if the answer at any time is anything - anything - other than "nothing at all" then as far as I'm concerned the whole game is invalidated. As soon as something is introduced later that would reasonably have had effects earlier had its presence been known about earlier then either a) that thing being introduced is invalid (less-worse option) or b) any and all previous play that would have been affected is invalid (utterly unacceptable).

<snip>

It's contentious not because of what it does to the future but because of what it will inevitably at some point end up doing to the past, and how that change to the past should affect the present but cannot.

I don't really understand.

I mean, if the orcish shaman had known - via Augury, say - that the orc was going to die, maybe the shaman would have done something else (eg sent two orcs to fight the PC). From the fact that the shaman didn't do something else, maybe we can infer that the shaman didn't cast Augury. Generalising the point: there are so many moving parts in any fiction of even the most modest complexity that - if it matters at all - something can be narrated to establish the necessary links.

You've already posted that, in your style of play, much of the time the players may not know what is going on in the GM's unrevealed backstory. Which is to say, from there point of view the ingame events are indeterminate or even apparently incoherent. What difference does it make if the GM doesn't know the truth either? I mean, I can see the aesthetic difference - if the GM doesn't know then it's no longer the case that the players are being told a story by the GM. But I don't see how it can affect the validity of the event of RPGing.

The best option is to never allow this to happen in the first place...and to achieve this requires solid pre-authorship of the setting by someone, and that someone is almost without exception going to be the DM.

All the actual example of this you give involve minutiae of dungeon layouts and other geographic elements. These simply aren't a big deal in most "story now" play.

And in any event, as I said, there are so many moving parts that I think this is just a non-issue.

It's very slightly under 33 10' cubes, actually - a bit less (I think) than 33000 cu ft.

The volume of a spher is 4*pi*radius_cubed/3. For a 20' radius fireball, that's 32000 cu ft * pi/3. Pi/3 is approx 1.047 (I'm rounding down a tad), so that makes approx 33,504 cu'.

So all these years your MUs have been getting away with unrealistically low-volume fireballs!

in those areas where I do have some experience (e.g. boating) I'll let that experience guide my DMing, overriding the game rules if needed.

Most adventure fiction depends upon contrivances,in the sense of things happening that are either literally impossible, or are possible but extremely unlikely.

My understanding is that the way Batman, Daredevil and the like routinely catch themselves on swinglines, the edges of buildings, etc are literally impossible, in tha a human shoulder joint can't endure that much force without tearing/breaking. This is nevertheless acceptable in those stories, because there are cases in the neighbourhood - eg where the fall is one storey rather than twenty - that are possible for a strong and skilled person.

In adventure stories that involve boats, there will typically be interactions with rapids, waves, sharks etc whose literal possibility or impossibility I'm not able to judge, but which clearly - even to a person like me with no boating experience - I can tell would require signficant skill and also luck to get through with boat unscathed and hair unmessed.

Gygax's design of the D&D combat rules is intended to recognise this: the rules don't simulate sword-fighting, but rather establish a framework in which adventurous types can survive implausibly many (were it the real world) deadly fights without dying or being permanently maimed.

I want boating rules in an adventure RPG to similarly allows unrealistically many lucky escapes and maneouvres. Each one should fal within the bounds of genre plausibility. The sequence of them does not need to come anywhere near tracking a realistic distribution of successes vs washups.

If a RPG constrains the space for adventure-story, genre-style luck - as, for instance, RQ does in respect of combat - then the natural result will be that players cease to act adventurously in respect of the domain of activity governed by those rules. (Or else will drift to exceptions in the rules that make luck possible - eg magic-using builds.)

That may be something someone wants, or not. But it's not, per se, a mark of good RPG design. (RQ is a great RPG, but not because it is more "realistic" ie reduces the prospects of adventurous luck in comba

Does game-world gravity work the same as real-world gravity? Default is yes.

What does this mean? Obviously things fall, but gravity in the real world is more than this: it's universal gravitation between all masses. (Apologies to physicists reading this thread: my physics is high school Newtonian, not properly relativistic.)

We know that lift doesnt work the same in the gameworld as in the real world (due to things like dragons, pit fiends etc); we know that a whole lot of physiology and related biochemstry is different (eg giant insects can breathe); and there's no particular reason to think that the gameworld is a c 4.5 billion year old sphere in orbit about a star.

Gygax suggested in his DMG that it might be possible to ride a pegasus to the moon - that certainly means that physical phenomean don't work like they do in the real world.

So I suggest that there is good reason to think that gameworld gravity doesn't work the same as real world gravity - things generally fall to the ground, but for some reason dragons, pit fiends and the moon don't, and that's about all we can say.

 

[pemerton]

where is the character arc going to come from? Where is Pippin's resolve going to be put to the test?

Same place as in your game. From the players and the DM interacting in the game world.

That's not a very precise description of my game.

I've already said that I run RPGs along the lines of Eero Tuovinen't "standard narrativistic model". That means that, as a GM, I establish situations (= frame scenes, if you prefer that terminology) which I intend to be thematically compelling in virtue of the demands and pressures they place on the PCs' evinced dramatic needs (= agendas, goals, or beliefs, if you prefer that terminology).

I've linked to many actual play reports showing how this is done, in a variety of different systems, which use a range of different methods for evincing PC dramatic needs (some formal, some informal), for constraining GM scene-framing, for managing the narration of consequences (especially the consequences of failure), etc.

How do you do this? I know it's not like me, because every time I post an actual or imagined example of how I might do it you argue that I am doing it poorly - eg you object to the fire giant example because it "cheapens" travel through the Underdark; you object to the feather-in-the-bazaar example because the player doesn't have to "work" to find the opportunity to make a decision about acquisition of a potentially useful item; in general you object to "going where the action is" because it doesn't treat the (presumably pre-authored) gameworld "neutrally".

You don't get to tell me that what I do is wrong, and then assert that you do exactly the same thing. So what do you actually do? Give me an example of how you actually achieve thematically compelling story arcs.

How are the thematically compelling moments going to be produced if the GM doesn't do it on purpose?

the player originates them as in my examples, forcing the DM to respond.

Your examples where Pippin seeks out Farimir in Osgiliath and Pippin joins the army of Gondor. Those aren't thematically compelling moments. What responses do you expect the GM to make? Clearly not the sort of response I would make as GM, because you keep telling me that I do it wrong. So how would you do it?

To pick up on [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s example, how do you decide if Pippin, in the army, is or isn't posted to sentry duty? If he is, how, then, do you provoke a thematically compelling choice? What would that look like? How do you do it without having regard to the player's evinced agenda for the PC? How do you do it while treating the gameworld "neutrally"? Post an actual example!

We are discussing character arcs, not agendas.

<snip>

opportunities will knock all over the place as once again, the social contract requires the game to actually be enjoyable. If [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] failed in that he would lose his players.

No one is disputing that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s players enjoy his game. But there is no evidence that characters in Lanefan's game undergo story arcs of the sort found in JRRT. Lanefan himself has said as much - eg his PC who hopes to be a senator (i) probably will not get to attempt that in play, and (ii) will become an NPC if it succeeds, because the party will be off on other non-Senatorial adventures.

You say "opportunities will knock". Who establishes them - player or GM? If player, how is that different from the idea of "agendas" which you are rejecting? If the GM, how is that different from what AbdulAlhazred and I have already described as the player choosing from the GM's menu?


****************************************

And on Eero Tuovinen on backstory:

The players can in this case let the DM know what they would like to encounter, similar to declaring an action to go into the woods and try to find an ogre, then rolling some sort of skill check to see if they find one or not. The difference is that they don't actually have to roll.

<snip>

Both involve authorship of the backstory, just through different means.

And given that that difference is fundamental, I don't see why you keep eliding it.

You also seem to ignore the fact that checks can fail, with the consequences that ensue from that.

And to repeat, again - making a check is not authoring backstory, as Eero Tuovinen uses that term. It is not preauthoring, and it is not a heuristic proxy for pre-authoring.

"Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time. For example, if the GM has decided in advance that the butler did it, then that is part of the backstory – it happened before the player characters came to the scene, and the GM will do his job with the assumption that this is an unchanging part of the game, even if the players might not know about it. Similarly a player character’s personal history is part of the backstory in a game that requires such. Backstory is specifically separate from what might happen during play itself. We say that somebody has “backstory authority” if he is allowed to determine something about the backstory, simply enough."

Here he decided that the butler did it as part of prep before the game begins. He specifically says it happened before the players came to the scene, not that it happened outside of the game. So in game when the players find out about it, they are finding out backstory and the PCs can discuss it. He also says "Backstory is specifically separate from what might happen during play itself." Play itself takes place in the present of the game world, so even that passage doesn't talk about backstory being apart from the in-game reality. He references it through the butler example and the three examples above as it being inside the game reality.

You have completely misunderstood [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s point.

AbdulAlhazred is not making the (absurd) claim that the content that is backstory is not part of the gameworld. He is saying that what makes that content backstory is af fact about when and/or how it is authored. Backstory is stuff that is authored outside of play or is generated during play using heruistics that are proxies for pre-play preparation.

Stuff that is established by the players in the course of play is not backstory. And Eero Tuovinen doesn't call it backstory, either. He says "I think that mixing narration sharing uncritically with backstory-heavy games and advocacy-model narrativistic games sucks". The reason it sucks, in his view, is because having the player establish the fiction that constitutes framing, or consequences, is at odds with the dynamics of player character advocacy in a "standard narrativistic" game: "[the standard narrativistic model] works, but only as long as you do not require the player to take part in determining the backstory and moments of choice."

Eero gives a number of examples, some pertaining to framing (eg the ToC and "orcs in the next room" examples) and some pertaining to consequences (the 3:16 example looks like this, and likewise some aspects of the ToC example, if finding a clue is treated as consequence rather than framing). In discussing one framing example (ie the NPC declaration of parenthood of the PC) he says that it won't work for the "standard narrativistic model" because "a roleplaying game does not have teeth if you stop to ask the other players if it’s OK to actually challenge their characters."

Now I don't think all the games in Eero's examples are in fact "standard narrativistic model" games (eg ToC is not, and nor is default D&D), and nor does he - but that doesn't weaken the point, which is that the sort of stuff taking place in those examples may not fit well with the standard narrativistic model.

In the previous sentence I used the words "may not." That is deliberate: Eero is not a fetishist. He is not fetishising GM authority over backstory - he even notes that he designed a game without it (Zombie Cinema). He has a particular concern expressed in concrete terms: certain sorts of player authorship of framing and consequence are at odds with the "standard narrativistic model".

Now, quite a way upthread it seemed that some posters, including [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], took the view that any player impact on the fiction is too much (and hence violates the "Czege principle"). But clearly this is not what Eero Tuovinen thinks. He says, in the "standard narrativistic model", that "The player . . . makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules". So action resolution is (unsurprisingly) something that he takes for granted. Player choices can impact the fiction, by leading to consequences.

Some consequences - "I killed this orc in front of me" - are consequences that, in the fiction, are aptly described as purely causal consequences of the PC's action in the game. (We could quibble with this: part of the reason the swordblow kills the orc is that the orc has a certain biology, and the PC didn't make that the case. But we can probably take this to have been implicitly or even explicitly established as part of the framing.)

Other consequences - "I found a secret door in the wall in front of me" - are not. They implicate gameworld elements that (i) were not already established at the table (ie the players didn't know about them), and (ii) the existence of those gameworld elements is not a causal consequences of the PC's action in the game (ie the PC didn't build the secret door).

Are consequences of the second sort problematic narration sharing? That is, do they have the adverse effect upon the player's interaction with the GM's framed scene that Eero identifies?

It is obvious that there is not single answer to this question, because it depends on what counts as thematically compelling with respect to the framing and consequences. And hence on what will count as anti-climax or as deflating the tension, vs what will ensure that the game has teeth.

Let's consider a concrete example. Suppose that the PCs have come to a city looking for information, and the GM establishes that there is a temple in the city that might be helpful to them. So the GM tells the players, "You've all heard of the Temple of the Moon. Do you want to go there to see if they have the information you're looking for?" That is an exercise of backstory authority. It doesn't matter whether the GM came up with this idea years ago, and has been waiting to use it; or whether the GM came up with it on the spot - it is presented as something that is to form part of the "arena" of play. It is not itself a product of play.

Now suppose one of the players responds, "I've heard rumours of these Moon cultists - it's said they sneak out of their temple on the night of the new moon, to kill the unwary who linger out of doors." That's not backstory. It wasn't preauthored. And the player isn't generating it using some proxy for preauthorship. Clearly, the player is making a move in the game.

Should the game permit this move?

We know, from this thread, that in [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s game, that is not a permissible move by a player. At best, s/he can ask the GM "Do I know any rumours about the Moon cultists?" The main reason Lanefan gives for this is that inconsistencies will arise if players are allowed to make these sorts of moves. There also seems to be a strong aesthetic preference, that players are only allowed to declare moves whose consequences would be (in the fiction) entirely the causal outcome of the PC's actions. And this move (if successful) would not satisfy that constraint. But notice that Lanefan's constraints have nothing to do with the "standard narrativistic model". So they don't tell us whether or not, if your goal is that sort of RPGing, you should allow this move.

Eero Tuovinen gives an argument that it is probably not a sound move to permit in an investigation-focused game, because it is the player making up his/her own clue. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has disagreed, not far upthread. I don't have a strong view on who is right out of Eero and Abdul, because I don't run investigation-focused games. All I'll add on this point is that investigation-based games run on the basis of strong pre-authorship of clues are likely not to conform to the "standard narrativistic model" because a number of scenes and consequences are likely to be driven by a concern with finding out rather than thematically compelling, choice-provoking situations.

It's clear that there is no general reason why this should be an impermissible move. It doesn't leech the excitement out of the game, or produce an anti-climactic result. And it is a permissible move in Burning Wheel, where it would be resolved as a Wises check (it could be made on Temples-wise or Cultists-wise or Moon Cult-wise, at the discretion of the player subject to the ultimate adjudication of the GM and probably with different obstacles depending on the skill used). If the check succeeds, then the rumour is true. If the check fails, then something else is the case, adverse to the PC's interests. Because my example hasn't provided much information about those interests (other than that the PCs want information), it's not easy to suggest a good narration for failure. But a Burning Wheel GM who finds him-/herself in that situation can easily "say 'yes'" to the action declaration, so that the scene of the action changes from the temple to its cultists who are abroad on the night of the new moon.

Suppose the player instead says "I've heard rumours of this Moon temple. There is always a secret way in and out, that is illuminated by the light of the first full moon following the Autumn Equinox." Should that be a permissible move? Again, in Burning Wheel it would be - a Wises check, perhaps augmented by Astronomy and Architecture. (And on a failure, perhaps the PC recalls that the secret way in and out is not only in that particular position, but can be opened only on that particular night when the moon is high in the cloudless sky.)

In Cortex+ that could be a resource established by a character with Religion or Lore specialisation, by spending a plot point.

Does it tend to leech out excitement? Create anti-climax? No. There is nothing anti-climactic about breaking into the Moon Temple by way of a secret entrance.

Suppose that the player makes that declaration not when the GM first mentions the temple, but when the PCs are in the temple, with the main entrance cut off by angry Moon cultists. So the player is trying to establish an alternative way out. Is this anti-climactic? No - there is nothing anti-climactic about finding a secret way out and escaping that way. (Note that in Cortex+ Heroic this would be an action scene, and so the resource could only be established by spending the point when the GM rolls a 1, ie when there is already stuff going on and the GM is rolling dice for the opposition to the heroes. So the player can't do it "for free".)

TL;DR: Eero Tuovinen isn't just going on a rant about what is or isn't OK for action declarations. He's talking about who should be in charge of framing and consequence narration. A player declaring "I search for a secret door that will get us out of here!" isn't establishing his/her own framing, nor narrating the consequences of the situation. It's no different, in terms of its basic implications for the situation, from declaring "I kill them all so we can get out of here."

 

[Lanefan]

But again, he could join the regular army, and be posted to some boring guard duty, or he could fail some checks or simply not have the requisite information needed to find Faramir, or it could even be IMPOSSIBLE to find Faramir due to his location having been pre-established as someplace inaccessible to Pippin. Truthfully, this is what you would EXPECT. Certainly if this was [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s style of play, as I understand it, this is exactly what would most likely happen. The world doesn't exist for you, PCs are nothing special, you rarely have any incredible opportunities because that's just not realistic. What does Pippin most likely learn? The taste of wormy army biscuits sounds like the most probable thing! lol.

A PC joining an army isn't likely to provide the most interesting of adventuring or role-playing opportunities regardless of whether the game is story now or DM-driven or pretty much anything else.

One thing common to pretty much all PCs in all RPGs is that they - or at least the parties they are in - are somewhat independent free-thinking entities operating (while adventuring) largely on their own initiative. Even when they're sent on a mission for someone else (which frequently happens) it's almost universally done as "Here's what needs doing, it's up to you as to how it gets done"; and in non-mission situations it's still up to the PCs to determine how they achieve their goals/beliefs/etc. Extremely rare that any of this will happen for a PC that sticks itself in an army and stays there.

Lan-"ye gods - I think I've had more 'mention' tags come from this one thread than from the entire rest of my EnWorld history put together"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

I stand by my assertion, it is vastly easier to say "I target square X, and these other squares are in the AoE, I'm rolling 7 to-hit rolls, I hit targets 2, 3, and 7, they take 27 points of damage and the others take 13." In AD&D you have to (at best, assuming an accurate room layout with figures representing the real positions of all PCs) decide on an exact target location, draw a circle somehow (on top of all the figures, walls, etc, even a template of some sort will be awkward at times) and then argue about if the figure that just got knocked over was EXACTLY outside or inside the diameter, and whether the base of figures counts or only the 'pieces parts', if the figure is really a fair size to represent the PC, etc. etc. etc. ALL of these arguments have come up in play where I have GMed, many many times! As I said, I'm not even delving into the 'volume filling' process and its potential intricacies (exactly how tall is that arched ceiling anyway?).

I guess I've just been doing this for so long it's become second nature for me. Once I know the "detonation" point I can usually pretty much eyeball the board (which is marked in 10' squares) and say right away who's in or out; and if there's one or more creatures close to the edge I'll get more finicky and if that doesn't help I'll leave it to the dice.

As for whether someone near the edge is in or out, I'll just give a big bonus on the saving throw and if the bonus gets you to 20+ then you were outside the area and take no damage. Obviously the same goes for the opponents. (your example reverses the mechanics, using the 4e method of attack for damage rather than defensive saving throws).

Never mind that the idea of only one human-sized bipedal creature being able to occupy a 5x5' space is itself kinda silly unless said person is waving a very large weapon around.

I have a math degree, I won't argue it either. In fact though your trusting E. Gary Gygax, because it is right in the 1e DMG section on adjudicating various spells! I trust Gary's basic solid geometry. I just haven't GMed 2e in a long time, so I'd have to go back and reread this stuff to recall every stray number. Again, this attests to the added complexity of the 'AD&D way' of doing it...

A complexity I don't mind.

The trick is not to remember it all, but to remember where to look it up when needed. And, over the years I've gone through and rewritten absolutely every spell in the game, and put them online so they're easy for us all to look up.

Well, you seem to play with a group of people who are basically incredibly focused on the minutia of D&D play, so I will just take your word for it. Trust me when I tell you, this is highly atypical, particularly in more recent times. If this was 1980, it wouldn't surprise me too much...

Shrug - to me, that's just how the game is played.

And when the outcome is possibly the difference between life and death for your PC, wouldn't you want to dive into the minutae and make sure things were done right?

I actually assert its objectively determinable in this specific case. The original point stands, that agency of players is positively impacted by having well-defined and easily understood consequences to standard actions.

I don't deny it helps with agency. On the contrary, I think it helps too much.

My point is simply that if the PCs aren't in a position to know all the consequences then the players shouldn't be either, and thus there'll sometimes be some agency they just have to do without.

Something basic like swinging a sword at a foe: yeah, the usual consequences are obvious - you're either going to hurt the foe, kill the foe, or do nothing to the foe. There's also possible unusual consequences - you might fumble and do something you didn't want to do, or you might hit the foe so hard your swing follows through into something else (a.k.a. Cleave in 3e), or you might diasrm the foe, or trip it, etc., depending on system.

But something basic like going left instead of right at an intersection - assuming no pre-scouting or other foreknowledge - the PCs have no way of knowing what consequences will arise from that decision, and thus neither should the players.

Really, you studied that? lol. Honestly, given how D&D hit points work, classically, there's no way falling is at all realistic, and thus we must question the realism of gravity itself. I don't agree that every bit helps. I think that physical reality is holistic, and unrealistic is unrealistic.

Yeah, don't get me started on falling damage; it's bugged me since day 1.

Ditto with whichever boneheaded edition it was that gave the spell Reverse Gravity a duration of 10 minutes. The idea, I'm sure, was that this would for 10 minutes just cause anyone entering the area (or the individual target, it's been done both ways) to crash to the ceiling. But what happens if it's cast outdoors where there is no ceiling? Think about it.....

A 10-minute upward "fall" doesn't quite put you into space, but you'll have long since suffocated by the time you come back down...and for the time you're falling upward you would always keep accelerating a bit, as terminal velocity is caused by air resistance which steadily decreases as you go higher. I really don't think they quite thought this one through...

I did this exercise out of curiosity a couple years ago. Numbers are all over the place. Yes, there are some records, but there isn't any large body of price and wage records for one specific time period. If you are willing to take a spread of records that cover over 600 years of history, kind of squint a little, and interpolate based on some prices that overlap between sources here and there, you can make something CREDIBLE. However, AT BEST it represents a sort of averaging over time, space, and circumstance, and only applies to the region it is based on (IE usually late Medieval England). How that relates to a fantasy world is anyone's guess.

None of it is perfect, but if you take an average you'll at least have a guideline to start from - which is indisputably better than nothing.

I will just give you back your reply to me on that. I don't agree. I never will probably. The result of using D&D (no matter how tweaked) is utterly unrealistic and by necessity 99.9% gamist. You might make it 99.8% gamist, but is that really worth the effort? I gave it up years ago.

Again, I think you're being a bit pessimistic. I mean, I'm sure I've got it down at least past the 99.6% point...

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

No one is disputing that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s players enjoy his game. But there is no evidence that characters in Lanefan's game undergo story arcs of the sort found in JRRT. Lanefan himself has said as much - eg his PC who hopes to be a senator (i) probably will not get to attempt that in play, and (ii) will become an NPC if it succeeds, because the party will be off on other non-Senatorial adventures.

Two quick notes on this:

1. She wouldn't become an NPC by any means...she'd still be my character, only (I assume) a non-adventuring one.

2. This may all now be moot in any case, as she and her whole party might have just been wiped out - we all got hit by some effect, blacked out (no save), and collapsed: end of session. Since then the DM has already told us via email to get our backup PCs ready; and we're not sure if he's joking (it would be par for the course if he is) or serious.

You say "opportunities will knock". Who establishes them - player or GM? If player, how is that different from the idea of "agendas" which you are rejecting? If the GM, how is that different from what AbdulAlhazred and I have already described as the player choosing from the GM's menu?

There's a third, middle ground between these two - the DM provides hooks (a menu, to use your less-than-flattering term) and the players are free to either bite one or to do something else entirely. It would only be a hard-coded menu if "other" or "none of the above" wasn't an available option; but it always is, which in effect makes the 'menu' limitless.

Opportunities will knock, but that doesn't mean the PCs will answer the door - they're probably too busy looting the house they're in to notice the knocking anyway!

And on Eero Tuovinen on backstory: ...

You guys keep quoting different bits of Eero to back your points, like two scholars of religion quoting different bits of the Bible (which can, if the right bits are taken out of context, be used to prove just about anything imaginable).

I'm not convinced Eero is all that much more learned in any of this than most of the rest of us; the main difference between he and us being that he put his thoughts together and stuck them up on a webpage for all to read.

Lan-"knock knock - who's there - opportunity - sorry, I gave at the office"-efan

 

[Maxperson]

This is like saying the PCs dying in a by-the-rules TPK is just the same as "rocks fall, everybody dies" except the former involved some dice!

Let's see, dead is dead. Yep. The same result. DM threw the encounter in on the fly, and caused the rocks to drop on the fly. Yep, winging it is winging it. Both are the same, except perhaps the satisfaction level of the players.

The fact that it's an action declaration that is resolved at the table is what makes it completely different, for present purposes, from "winging it". Upthread various posters, talking about "winging it", said that if it's done "properly" then the players can't even tell it wasn't in the notes. A player who declares an action and as a result has his/her PC find a secret door knows what is going on.

Yes, if winging it is done properly then the players can't tell the difference between that and notes. That doesn't change improperly done winging it to be anything other than winging it.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm not convinced Eero is all that much more learned in any of this than most of the rest of us; the main difference between he and us being that he put his thoughts together and stuck them up on a webpage for all to read.

I was just thinking about this last night. Having read his blog entry, he seems like any of the rest of us here. A guy who has played for a long time and has his opinions on what he likes and dislikes, and is telling people why. He doesn't seem any more knowledgeable, really. Personally, I give him about the same weight that I give you, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] or most of the other people here.

I really don't get why it's so important to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] that he be right about Eero Tuovinen. He could easily just say that Eero got it wrong like he says about the rest of us here.