What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Maxperson]

AbdulAlhazred is speaking for himself, just as I'm speaking for myself.

Yep, and you two are telling me two different things about your playstyle.

He's also envisaging a skill challenge-type structure, where getting to the ultimate goal (whatever that is) requires X successes before 3 failures. In the structure of a skill challenge, getting a success by way of finding a secret door might change the narrative trajectory, and might change the difficulty (by allowing a player to exploit stronger capabilities), but doesn't obviate the need to generate successes.

Hmm. I've never been fond of skill challenges. They pull the game away from the character and the game world and make it about game mechanics and trying to get successes. I'd much rather just have the players roleplay the situation, letting me know what their PCs want to do, and then letting me decide if a roll is necessary, one roll is necessary, or perhaps multiple rolls over time, depending on how things play out.

 

[Maxperson]

The secret door doesn't exist after the action is resolved either. It's imaginary.

Just what is it that you hope by making comments like this? It's not as if you didn't know what I meant.

If the PCs search for a secret door, and fail to find one, and hence get captured, and then escape capture by picking locks or breaking bars or charming or tricking their captors, what are you saying is the problem? How is that remotely anti-climactic?

I don't know, because that isn't my argument. I'm talking about successfully creating the secret door being anti-climactic.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've never been fond of skill challenges.

They were pretty awful, out the gate, mechanically borked, and they were a new thing, so even once they were working right, hard to get used to. But, they did open up balanced mechanical resolution to a broad array of challenges that, in the past, had to be hand-waved, given short shrift with anti-climactic single checks, and didn't earn meaningful exp...

They pull the game away from the character and the game world and make it about game mechanics and trying to get successes.

Until you get used to it, any new mechanic can seem to pull you out of the world, but, because they model the characters' actual abilities in succeeding or failing at the tasks needed to overcome the challenge, once you do accept them, they actually bring play closer to the characters & their story. (Though, like many things in 4e, they do tend to make the 'world' revolve around the PCs, since it is their story. For instance, if the party try to successfully complete a ritual before enemies can disrupt it, the ritual is their skill challenge, while if the party are trying to disrupt a ritual before it completes, 'foiling the ritual' is /their/ skill challenge.)

I'd much rather just have the players roleplay the situation

The downside to that is that it's a test of the players' ability to sell you on their ideas, rather than a test of their character's abilities...

, letting me know what their PCs want to do, and then letting me decide if a roll is necessary, one roll is necessary, or perhaps multiple rolls over time, depending on how things play out.

...but at least there's a chance the characters might come into it. Though, it is also possible to run a skill challenge that way, 'covertly,' where the players not only have to accumulate so many successes before 3 failures, but need to figure out what the skill challenge is as they feel their way through it. It's just using it as a tool for determining/achieving difficulty & setting exp awards, at that point.

 

[Imaro]

Completely agree. Innately, player-facing and DM-facing designs are different tools that serve similar yet different purposes like a cake pan vs. a spring-form pan. Innately, one is not better than the other, but if one bakes a cheesecake, one will preferentially use a spring-form pan.

Pick the tool that best fits the experience desired.

If DM-facing, once the secret door is established it can begin to pressure the other fictional elements even if the players are unaware of its existence. If player-facing, it won't.

I think I agree with your last sentence though not with the post you quoted... Pre-authored the secret door is there for PC's and NPC's to discover or stumble across even before it is "established" (At least in the way established has been used in this thread)...as an example that jumps readily to mind, in some games elves, whether PC's or NPC's would have a chance to detect said secret door just by passing near it, I'm not sure how an ability like this would work in a game where a secret door is never pre-authored it would either mean the ability is virtually useless and never discovers a secret door or it is rolled for every time they enter a room leading to a strange overabundance of secret doors in the world, often in illogical or strange places. Abilities like this definitely seem like a reason to favor one over the other.

 

[Maxperson]

They were pretty awful, out the gate, mechanically borked, and they were a new thing, so even once they were working right, hard to get used to. But, they did open up balanced mechanical resolution to a broad array of challenges that, in the past, had to be hand-waved, given short shrift with anti-climactic single checks, and didn't earn meaningful exp...

I give out exp for roleplaying and non-combat challenges. A night of great roleplaying and character development will get the PCs as much exp as a night in a long and difficult fight. Years ago I stopped encouraging players to just run around trying to kill things as the method of leveling. It's still fun to get into combat, but it's far from the only means of advancement in my game.

Until you get used to it, any new mechanic can seem to pull you out of the world, but, because they model the characters' actual abilities in succeeding or failing at the tasks needed to overcome the challenge, once you do accept them, they actually bring play closer to the characters & their story. (Though, like many things in 4e, they do tend to make the 'world' revolve around the PCs, since it is their story. For instance, if the party try to successfully complete a ritual before enemies can disrupt it, the ritual is their skill challenge, while if the party are trying to disrupt a ritual before it completes, 'foiling the ritual' is /their/ skill challenge.)

The downside to that is that it's a test of the players' ability to sell you on their ideas, rather than a test of their character's abilities... ...but at least there's a chance the characters might come into it. Though, it is also possible to run a skill challenge that way, 'covertly,' where the players not only have to accumulate so many successes before 3 failures, but need to figure out what the skill challenge is as they feel their way through it. It's just using it as a tool for determining/achieving difficulty & setting exp awards, at that point.

It sounds a lot like what I already do, but more formalized. If the players were trying to disrupt a ritual, they would start telling me their actions on how to do it, and there would be rolls, or no roll depending on if the outcome was in doubt. There might be multiple rolls depending on their idea and the circumstances around the ritual, and even though I don't do the 4e "Justify the skill used" thing, players are encouraged to use ingenuity to come up with ways that don't necessarily conform to skills or character abilities, so there is some measure of "selling me on an idea" out there. I'm pretty liberal with ideas, though, so it's not really much of a sell. It just has to make sense.

 

[Nagol]

I think I agree with your last sentence though not with the post you quoted... Pre-authored the secret door is there for PC's and NPC's to discover or stumble across even before it is "established" (At least in the way established has been used in this thread)...as an example that jumps readily to mind, in some games elves, whether PC's or NPC's would have a chance to detect said secret door just by passing near it, I'm not sure how an ability like this would work in a game where a secret door is never pre-authored it would either mean the ability is virtually useless and never discovers a secret door or it is rolled for every time they enter a room leading to a strange overabundance of secret doors in the world, often in illogical or strange places. Abilities like this definitely seem like a reason to favor one over the other.

In player-facing games, abilities like the elven extra secret door detection either don't exist or exist to reinforce a particular shtick; the elf finds secret doors to escape/infiltrate because that's what elves do and the ability comes up successfully as frequently as any other shtick ability will. You typically won't have (much of) a secret map since locales are driven by play. So you can't (reasonably) determine where a secret door would be nonsensical in the current place. Appropriateness is more determined by the game flow and player gambit than by standards of realism.

In a DM-facing game, the secret door can offer pressure on the NPC inhabitants (who decide they need to guard an area inexplicably or are trapped behind a wall, or whatever), act as a exploratory reward, act as a trap for the unwary (use the secret door to get behind their line!), offer a potential escape route for an antagonist, provide an explanation for how X manages to be both over there and here so quickly, and a host of other values.

Now some of those uses can be derived in a player-facing game as post-hoc rationales of ability use/dice results. The primary difference goes back to exploratory play though. The players can't notice oddities and respond to them -- they can force oddities if they have the abilities or can "write them in" if they feel they are appropriate.

That's why they are similar but different tools. They do things that a casual onlooker would think are the same, but participation feels different for those involved.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I remember Wreccan. I also think LaneFan was on. I came along about when 5e was announced but still proceeding into playtest. I think everyone was trying to influence the game their way. It got hot on occasion.

Yeah, those were the end days. 2008-2010 were the real salad days of the 4e period. The Q&A thread was hot with questions and controversy, the GD thread was at least interesting, albeit often a swamp of 3.x fan 'H4TERS', and there were some good threads on GMing techniques and whatnot. It was never as sophisticated as Enworld though. I mean, we have different POVs here and even knock each other around a little bit, but the dialog is at least modestly constructive. The WotC forums OTOH were kind of like, there was this great thing, then there was all this smelly junk... lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe another helpful analogy. Imagine a cooperative military game where everyone picks up weapons, supplies, etc.. and then go together as a group into a combat zone. And then imagine they take it seriously . That is how my adventures tend to run.

See, I'm perfectly willing to tell a tale of failure! In fact I once ran a Traveler short that was all about it. The players create all these characters, and they end up on this interesting space station (orbiting starport basically) and then disaster strikes, and they rush to fix it all and do this and that, in the usual player assumption that things will get better, right! Except they don't. Now, you MIGHT call this 'railroading', but the scenario was designed to be sort of the ultimate test, you couldn't survive. In the end everyone was doomed. NOTHING you could do was going to lead to survival. That turned out to be a very memorable game because the players were darn well set on their characters surviving and they just had to come to terms with that ultimate lesson, nothing lasts.

Failure is a fine fine thing.

Of course, I don't normally run that sort of thing, in the sense that everyone is DOOMED to fail, it was very much a one off. Still, if you want to overthrow the King and you think you're just going to succeed or that it isn't JUST as dramatic and interesting when you get caught and find out that you're going to get your head chopped off in the AM. Never had a problem with it, and never had a problem making a situation a test of skill. That is not mutually exclusive with Story Now, at all. You do have to willing to be hard though. Saying "oh, its written that way" is a crutch, I don't get that crutch!

 

[pemerton]

After the search action is resolved as a success the secret door exists in the fiction, which for the purposes of these discussions means it now exists as an element of the game being played and - even though it's not sitting there on your game table - is still going to have influence on what happens going forward in the game. (and if you must keep it real-world, it'll probably cause players to say different words than they otherwise would have)

To say otherwise is nothing more than obfuscation. We're all completely aware that none of the imaginary stuff exists in the real world, but what exists in the real world is utterly irrelevant when the point of the conversation is what exists in the fictional world and by whose authorship and-or what means it comes to be there.

In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes from time to time meets charaters who, up until then, have not been written about. From the point of view of the reader, they are new characters. But no one asserts that Sherlock Holmes's meeting of them created them.

The same is true of the secret door. The PCs' discovery of it didn't create it. The engineer and stone masons who constructed it created it. It has existed, in the fiction, from the moment of that creation. Although no audience or author of the fiction knew that. Just like Conan Doyle didn't know about Sherlock Holmes until he wrote about him. But Holmes himself was born, had a childhood, etc.Denying that is what is obfuscatory.

It doesn't exist in the fictional world until it's been established, either. So there's no reason to favor one authorship or timing of that establishment over another, innately.

RPGing has always involved a degree of flexibiilty in the timing of narration. Even back in the high-water mark period for dungeoncrawling, stuff got made up (eg "What colour is the roof of this room?" "It's brown-grey stone.") No one said that the roof had no colour unitl it was described by the GM!

The secret door is the same. Descbring it, and making it up, are things that happen in the real world. In the fiction, it was always there, and it's just a misdescription to say that the PCs, by looking for it, brought it into existence - anymore than the PCs, by looking up, made the ceiling be brown-grey.

Just what is it that you hope by making comments like this? It's not as if you didn't know what I meant.

I'm hoping to get you and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] to agree that discovering the door isn't the same as creating the door. And that there's nothing remarkable about a new element being introduced into a fiction although, at the time the audience first learns of the protagonist's encounter with it, it already existed within the fiction (eg an adult met by Holmes for the first time).

If DM-facing, once the secret door is established it can begin to pressure the other fictional elements even if the players are unaware of its existence. If player-facing, it won't.

This is true.

One technique in "no myth"-type GMing is to keep introduced elements somewhat flexibile - or, at least, no more fully narrated than the situation needs. This then allows scope for integrating newly-established elements into already established elements of the fiction. Eg if, when the secret door is discovered by the PCs, a mysterious NPC had already been in the scene, and the method whereby that NPC entered the place hadn't yet been established - well, maybe s/he came through the secret door!

Keeping track of these elements of the fiction, and interweaving them to provide continuity while keeping the focus on "the action", is part of the job of a "no myth" GM.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Earlier in the thread when I was discussing making off with jewels as a scenario, and I suggested that the lord might send guards searching the town, or hire an assassin or some other response to the jewels getting out, @pemerton poo poo'd the idea as negating player success. Now you're telling me that it's an okay thing to do because multiple successes are needed to succeed. How many are needed? 2, 3, 6, X?

Well, there's a difference between 'ongoing difficulties' and 'everything you just did is completely obviated even though you made no move to put it at further risk.' If a player wins a tower in a duel of wits with a wizard, sets up some measures to prevent it being easily taken back, sets it up as a retreat for himself, and then goes off to do something else, only a dick GM is going to immediately say "Oh, yeah, the wizard sneaks in 2 days after you left and takes it all back, haha!" THAT would be negating player success!

Now, making overall success contingent on advancing past a number of perilous situations which test the character? Of course that's cool. 4e even has a name for it, Skill Challenge! This is why I love SCs because they exactly answer your perfectly legitimate question! This is a problem with earlier (and later) forms of D&D, there's no answer except "when the GM's whim has been satisfied then the narrative progresses to something else." 4e's approach is also quite good in a Story Now sense of providing an easy way to generate a bunch of action off of a thematically related set of scenes that form an overall sequence, with a mechanical basis underneath it all.