What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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, @pemerton or most of the other people here.

I really don't get why it's so important to @pemerton 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.

Eh, I think Eero Tuovinen is offering a fairly studied concept that is based both in experience AND in theory, what Marx would have called a 'praxis'. I personally think that most real significant changes in various fields come when you have improvements in the theoretical framework you are working with. In games there's clearly no 'right' or 'wrong', so you can't really call changes in process or goals improvement in absolute terms, but I think he's offering an improvement in CLARITY at least, even if you would rather not follow his advice.

I don't think he's your average Enworld poster. I think he has a very solid understanding and vision of what he's doing. So did Gary Gygax!

 

[Lanefan]

Who died and made you the god of thematically compelling moments?

And in related news, RPG designers the world over are reporting dismal failure in their collective attempts to rein in the number of hyper-specialized in-game deities. Pictures at 11.

 

[Lanefan]

In 2e it was 1 round per level. Were rounds still 1 minute in 2e? I can't remember.

I think so. And it's area-effect in 2e (30x30') with no save; and the spell even calls out that it affects things already in the air if they pass through the area. And as you need to be at least 14th level to cast it that'll put my 10-minute duration to shame.

3e had it also at 1 round per level, which means 2 minutes at 20th level.

Even 2 minutes is enough time to fall a very long way. About 6300 meters (or 4-ish miles) in fact, using a free-fall calculator that assumes one is falling down not up and thus meeting increasing instead of decreasing resistance. And then the poor sods have to fall back down again...

Calculator is here...

https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1231475371

...if you want to play with it yourself. It doesn't let you enter the time fallen, only the distance; so I just kept entering distances until I got to one that gave a time result close to 120 seconds. 6300 meters takes about 119.98, which is close enough for me.

A 14-minute fall (840 seconds)? Now you're falling a little more than 45 km, or about 28 miles, by the calculator...it'd be more, of course, when you're falling up as after the first 5 miles or so there's much less air getting in your way. You're almost beyond the stratosphere at your highest point; and well above the ozone layer - so if the suffocation doesn't get you the radiation will, provided of course you haven't frozen solid yet. And then you still have to get back down and not burn to a crisp in the process...

In my own game I gave it a duration of 2 seconds: long enough to fall upward about 50'. I also kept the idea of it extending into the air...but noticed no other edition had ever thought about whether its effects extend into the ground; but as it's noted as going into the air it only makes sense it go the other way as well. And suddenly it's every bit worth being a 7th level spell.

Imagine casting this on a castle - for 2 seconds a large chunk of the place wants to fall upwards! Or on a ship at sea (preferably one you are not on!). Yeah, the possibilities are endless...

Oh; this thread was about world-building? Sorry, got confused - thought it was about world-destruction for a minute there...

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

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.

I just don't see the value of a decision in which there's no real substance. I mean, again, this is an artifact of the 'explore the dungeon maze' paradigm, where the PCs may well choose left simply because it gives them a chance to fill in a part of the map and search for a suspected secret room or something. Anyway, at least there will be map consequences that may eventually matter down the road. In a narrative focus on characters its color.

This.

There's more to RPGing life than learning the layout of the GM's map!

how they approach the giants is a very consequential decision for the PCs.

Why?

Consequential decisions isn't a table-and-player-independent category. It is extremely relative. I'm not saying that the decision about how to approach the giants could never be consequential. But clearly it wasn't in the example I provided, because the players didn't say anything about it!

And for fun, here's an extract from the Dogs in the Vineyard rulebook (p 89):

What's at stake: do you get murdered in your bed?
- The stage: your room at night. A possessed sinner creeps into your room without waking you.

- You roll only Acuity, because you’re asleep. I roll Body + Will.

- My first Raise will be to hit you in the head with my axe. I get my axe dice too! I’m rolling a lot more dice than you, so probably you have to Take the Blow. But check it out - that means you take Fallout and get to say how, it doesn’t mean you’re dead. You aren’t dead unless the whole conflict goes my way.

- So let's say that you take the blow: "I hear him coming even in my sleep, but he gashes me bad..." Then it's your Raise, and you can escalate: "...I come awake already in motion, with blood in my eyes and my knife in my hand!" Away we go!

I should tell you, in an early playtest I startled one of my players bad with this very conflict. In most roleplaying games, saying "an enemy sneaks into your room in the middle of the night and hits you in the head with an axe" is cheating. I’ve hosed the character and the player with no warning and no way out. Not in Dogs, though: the resolution rules are built to handle it. I don't have to pull my punches!​

I'm not going to pretend that 4e is DitV. But it doesn't require pulling punches either. If the players want to stride forthrightly into the giants' cavern, and the GM tells them "You see some giants . . . and they see you!" then away we go!

 

[Lanefan]

And now back to our previously-scheduled programming...

OK, well, my feeling is that these things tend to become focal points for arguments, because of course its a big deal if I take 10d6 damage or not! GMs tend to fall into camps. There's the 'hard ass' who rules with a bloody hand, the 'soft heart' who usually rules so that the PC lives, and the 'mechanist' who adds some die rolls and modifiers and may take 5 minutes to deal with one fireball.

I'm more the mechanist type, I guess.

And dealing with one fireball can take way longer than 5 minutes, if any magic-laden PCs fail their saves...

Which is exactly when 4e says this, outside of combat there are no such rules. I'd note that many PCs can move THROUGH a square, and in some cases its possible to occupy the same space too, though its not common. I mean, sure, I can see a point that says "a halfling with a dagger and a wizard with a wand could probably stand back to back in a square". I've just seen so few, if any, situations where it MATTERED if it was one square or two that I find the whole thing academic. I'm highly into the 'what works in practice' camp.

My example is trying to hold the line in a 10'-wide passage. The game assumes two normal-size people are all that's needed for this; but three is far more realistic (some SCA types I used to know played around with this once) as two leave far too big a gap. Never mind the issue of little spindly Elves and little tiny Hobbits being part of the equation...

That said, if the two people holding the line are both using greatswords that's a different matter.

Meh, I don't terribly mind looking some things up, but AD&D is a PITA! I mean, with 4e I barely HAVE to look anything up, and WotC designed the presentation so it would fit nicely into an online database which I didn't have to write! Frankly, D&D has one nice feature that has pretty consistently been true, its an easy game to reference. 5e TBH I find a bit of an exception here, its rules are not well organized.

1e rules are famous for their disorganization, but seeing as I/we have pretty much rewritten them over the last 35+ years we've been able to work on that a bit.

The trick is to have all the most commonly-referenced charts and tables nailed to (or printed directly on) the back of your DM screen.

No, actually. I mean, I want it done in a way that is consistent with the way the game is intended to work. I'm fairly gamist and I enjoy exercising the workings of the game. Do I want to have to enforce rules on exactly how many arrows the orc fired before I got pigstuck? Nope, not really. If I invent some tactic that leverages "he's going to run out of arrows eventually" of course I want that to be feasible, but it can work on a check that represents how good I am at making such a plan, for example.

Easy enough for the DM to just secretly roll a die to see how many he started with, then count what he fires...

Right, this is the 'player test of skill' aspect of the original classic dungeon crawl, which is a very necessary part of that type of play (and when I say 'dungeon crawl' it can also encompass other similar kinds of exploration/looting situations, like hex crawls, certain kinds of intrigue, etc.). I think when it is projected beyond that, then it becomes an impediment. This is part of what is problematic with 2e.

I think I might have had this same argument with pemerton about 2 months and 1000 posts ago in this thread: lack of knowledge is not a test of player skill.

Now, I don't mind surprising players, but I'm OK with them having knowledge that PCs don't.

I'm generally not, as I've yet to meet a player who won't sooner or later use that knowledge when or where they shouldn't, even if unintentionally. Ideally PC knowledge directly equals player knowledge at all times; in practicality this is nigh-impossible but I prefer to keep it as close as I can.

Hence for example if the Thief goes ahead scouting everything is done by note or in another room such that only the Thief's player knows what happens, and can then role-play reporting back to the party should he survive that long.

If they are playing to see what the PCs will do, then they're going to play in character, and it may be advantageous for them to know certain things in order to do that.

Conversely: if they're playing to find out, what's the point if they already know?

I just don't see the value of a decision in which there's no real substance. I mean, again, this is an artifact of the 'explore the dungeon maze' paradigm, where the PCs may well choose left simply because it gives them a chance to fill in a part of the map and search for a suspected secret room or something. Anyway, at least there will be map consequences that may eventually matter down the road. In a narrative focus on characters its color.

The substance (or lack of) of any decision isn't always known until after the fact; sometimes well after the fact.

Left or right could have massive substance: left means you shortcut around most of the dangers and right means you plow straight into them. But you won't know this until you've done it, or done some divinations if you're really suspicious.

Or conversely, there might be no substance to it at all: the passages rejoin after 50 linear feet of curving hallway. Again, though, you don't know until you explore it and make some decisions.

hehe, well, I could be a pessimist! I mean, I did make a price chart. It was mostly just me fooling around though. I don't really intend to use it in a game, and its fairly arbitrary. However, it would work. Honestly the 1e chart is not terrible.

The 1e chart has a few glaring oopses but yeah, on the whole it's more than adequate and the big mistakes are easy enough to fix.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

This.

There's more to RPGing life than learning the layout of the GM's map!

That's because you've reduced it in your own mind to only what's going on at the table, instead of thinking of it as your PC would and seeing it (in your mind) as your PC does as she explores through the castle or creeps through the woods or sneaks along the city rooftops.

The best sessions are those where I can forget I'm sitting at a table at all. Doesn't happen often - too many distractions and game mechanics - but it's a worthy goal.

 

[pemerton]

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. .

Eh, I think Eero Tuovinen is offering a fairly studied concept that is based both in experience AND in theory, what Marx would have called a 'praxis'. I personally think that most real significant changes in various fields come when you have improvements in the theoretical framework you are working with. In games there's clearly no 'right' or 'wrong', so you can't really call changes in process or goals improvement in absolute terms, but I think he's offering an improvement in CLARITY at least, even if you would rather not follow his advice.

I don't think he's your average Enworld poster. I think he has a very solid understanding and vision of what he's doing. So did Gary Gygax!

As well as what AbdulAlhazred said, I'm pretty confident that Eero Tuovinen is a hell of a lot more learned about Sorcerer, DitV, HeroWars/Quest and the other "standard narrativistic model" games he mentions than posters who have never even read the rules for them!

And even consider some of the non-narrativistic games he mentions - Lanefan and Maxperson, have you ever played Trail of Cthulhu? Do you know how the GUMSHOE system works? If not, how do you know whether Eero is right or wrong to say that "narration sharing" would or wouldn't be a good fit for that system?

I think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is also using him not just as a source of wisdom but also simply as a source for definition of terms, so that everybody can at least be speaking the same language.

There's an actual thing that actually happens in the world: RPGing in accordance with what Eero Tuovinen calls the "standard narrativistic model". There are certain games that are designed to support this sort of play: Eero mentions some, and there are others too (Burning Wheel; a certain approach to Cortex+ Heroic; a certain approach to Fate; a certain approach to 4e). You can do it with AD&D (I know, because I have) and also therefore I would guess 5e, but in both cases there will be elements of the system that you bump into in the attempt (eg rather weak non-combat conflict resolution).

Eero gives a nice account of it. Clearer and more focused than Ron Edwards' attempt in an earlier essay, though less wide-ranging.

What is slightly odd about this particular sub-tangent of the thread is to have people who have never read the rules for most of these systems try and explain that allowing a player to declare an action which results in discovery of a secret door whose existence, in the setting, wasn't already noted in the GM's notes or wasn't determined by some other GM-side proxy for notes, like a random roll for secret door existence contradicts Eero's account of backstory authority. When, in fact, some of the games that he points to as fitting with his account of backstory authority permit that very thing, or things like it.

It's doubly odd because it's really quite easy to see what Eero's concern is: namely, that narration sharing that collides with GM backstory authority defuses tension and produces anti-climax. He literally tells us as much, and provides illustrations that reinforce the point. And it's then equally easy to see that the sort of action declaration I've just described typically will not have such an effect, and hence he has no reason to object to it. And obviously doesn't, given that he praises games some of which permit it!

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.

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.

Do you really believe this?

Just to be clear: you assert that, as roleplaying experiences, there is no difference between a TPK resulting from playing through a situation using the combat rules, and the Gm just declaring "rocks fall, everybody dies".

And you likewise assert that the only difference between "winging it" (ie the GM making up stuff but pretending it was in his/her notes) and a player declaring an action which, if successful, establishes some new element of the fiction like a secret door, is that the latter is improper winging it because the player knows how the element was authored?

Or do you have some other point you're trying to make?

 

[pemerton]

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!

I'm not the one who said "opportunities will knock" - that was [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s phrase. I asked him where they come from - player (in which case it's the agendas he claims to reject) or GM (in which case it's the menu he claims to reject). The fact that the player might ignore any given opportunity doesn't actually answer my question.

The players are the ones that do it. They tell me their motivation for their actions or roleplay as they go about it so that I am aware at that time.

How is that not "informally signalling an agenda"? What do you think "informally signalling an agenda" looks like, if not the sort of thing you describe here?

 

[pemerton]

That's because you've reduced it in your own mind to only what's going on at the table, instead of thinking of it as your PC would and seeing it (in your mind) as your PC does as she explores through the castle or creeps through the woods or sneaks along the city rooftops.

No. When I'm playing my PC leading his horse along the river while looking out for signs of fellow members of my order, my worry that I might not find anyone is not a worry about what the GM has written. It's a worry about the fate of my character, which will be determined by how I play the game. (In this particular case, by the details of my Circles check.)

After all, if your way was really the only way to immersion, then you'd use it in combat too! (Ie find out what "the fates" - aka the GM - had in store for you in your skirmish with the orc.) But you don't.

 

[Aldarc]

Eh, I think Eero Tuovinen is offering a fairly studied concept that is based both in experience AND in theory, what Marx would have called a 'praxis'. I personally think that most real significant changes in various fields come when you have improvements in the theoretical framework you are working with. In games there's clearly no 'right' or 'wrong', so you can't really call changes in process or goals improvement in absolute terms, but I think he's offering an improvement in CLARITY at least, even if you would rather not follow his advice.

I don't think he's your average Enworld poster. I think he has a very solid understanding and vision of what he's doing. So did Gary Gygax!

Reading backwards to get a sense for this conversation, I am now intrigued by what Eero Tuovinen wrote in this context, but I am doing a terrible job finding the article that others are referencing. Do you or [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] have the link available?