What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

This seems to go against basic human nature, which always wants to find and take the path of least resistance.

<snip>

Far more likely because the dull move means survival while the cool move probably doesn't.

There are many assumptions underpinning these claims.

Some simply are not true in relation to hobbies eg I bake cakes and cookies that, in terms of the cost of ingredients and time spent, would be cheaper to buy - and I'm not such a great baker that I can say what I make is better than what I could buy! But I do it because it's fun.

The same can be expected of at least some hobby-game players.

As far as dull vs cool moves are concerned, this seems to be a system thing. What you say is true for AD&D and 3E. It's not true for 4e or Cortex+ Heroic. (And BW is too complicated in this respect to make a simple evaluation.)

It's interesting that the DW write-up actually in effect tells the GM to cheer for the PCs, in that it's by the same token putting said GM in a direct conflict of interest

Actually, it has all sorts of ways of managing that potential conflict of interest, eg by establishing when the GM is expected to make moves. Cortex+ does a similar thing with the Doom Pool.


EDIT: This also is relevant:

No matter what the players do, they're going to face another scene and another challenge. Their choices may make the challenges more interesting to them, and give them a better chance of success (or not) but authoring a 'secret door' to 'get out of' a bad situation is not going to put you in a GOOD situation automatically!

<snip>

Is it possible a player is going to want to make a move which everyone else (and maybe even he) objectively believes isn't dramatically interesting or fun? Maybe simply because of an idle desire to accomplish some mechanical game reward (IE treasure perhaps). Maybe, but this kind of thing turns out to be pretty much self-extinguishing too. As I say, another challenge and another dramatic situation is going to rise up immediately to replace any that are tossed away by the players. VERY quickly they learn this and the focus of play changes from 'get the gold' to 'do something cool' or 'my character sticks to his guns even if it costs his life!' or 'I die defending the door!'

Right. At least in my experience, provided the systems creates the mechanical space for it, players aren't going to declare boring stuff or silly stuff when exciting and/or interesting stuff is also possible!

The proviso is one reason why I choose some systems over others.

 

[pemerton]

No, I said it seems like you are insisting. So you can say it seems like your asserting. Since they are, in fact, synonyms I'm happy to go with whichever you prefer.

I don't care about the words insisting and asserting. I'm talking about what's on the right-hand side of them. You say that I insist that nothing be changed. I'm saying that I don't insist on that. I don't care whether the GM-authored setting is authored in advance or on the spot: either way, if it used in the typical way that GM-authored setting is used in RPGing then it generates a burden on player agency that I do not enjoy (as player or GM).

You've mentioned your cooking and campfire story before. To me it seems like something that doesn't really need to be addressed in the structure of the rules of the game. In the content of the fiction, yes, but again, I would put a lot of the onus on the player here. For example, a character in our campaign who loves cooking is trying new recipes on many of the monsters they kill. Setting out to gather whatever local ingredients they can forage, etc. That doesn't require a lot of input from me.

That's not the sort of thing that I have in mind when I say that I expect the GM to frame scenes that engage these elements of my PC.

I want to go further and say that that's not at all the sort of thing that I have in mind, but your description is quite brief. But it seems like mere colour. I'm envisaging something along the lines of, say, a NPC joins us at our camp because of the fire, and then my cooking helps me befriend him/her; or maybe, given that I also have an instinct about interposing myself if an innocent is threatened, this person would be in need of help and my cooking might help soothe him/her.

It's not my job, as player, to set out the details of such a scene - that's on the GM. But my example hopefully illustrates the sort of thing I have in mind. You can see that it's not just colour. It would actually be a moment of importance in the game.

The player asked "Is there a bowl in the room." I could have said "yes", but didn't - because the stakes here were meaningful for the PC, and a basic principle of "say 'yes' or roll the dice" is that when the stakes are meaningful then a check is called for. So I asked the player, "Are you declaring as Assess action?" (the particular nature of the action declared has implicaitons for action economy in that system). He answered yes, and then when it came time for the action to be resolved he rolled a Perception check against the difficulty I had set (pretty low, on the grounds that a bowl or were would be a likely thing to be in a room where an badly injured person is recovering).

The player succeeded on the check, and hence saw a bowl. I, the GM, did not make the decision about that.

Of course you did. You decided that the situation warranted the possibility, and set a DC for it.

<snip>

You still made the decision that there was in fact a possibility, and what the probability was.

<snip>

without you giving the go ahead, it wouldn't have happened.

You make this confident assertion . . . but you weren't there, so you have no evidence other than what I've described. And if you read what I've written, you;ll see that it was the player who decided that the situation warranted the possibility - "Is there a bowl in the room?"

I also didn't set the probability. I set a difficulty, based on the likelihood of a visible bowl being present. The probability, given that difficulty (I would think Ob 2), is dependent on the Perception stat on the character sheet, which I don't remember now off the top of my head and may or may not have been aware of at the time. (The PC is a shaman-type, so probably Perception 4D or 5D, so a chance of success probably around 70% to 80%.)

If I had placed a bowl in the room ahead of time, I could just say yes. If I didn't think about placing one, I could do exactly what you did.

I'm sure you could, but have you? When's the last time that, in your game, an Assess/Perception action was used by a player to establish an advantage of some sort in the fiction that wasn't prompted by the GM, or mediated via some GM decision independent of the actual process of action resolution?

where it's most relevant - the experience of the players at the table - that the end result, the "product" is more important than the process to deliver that product.

I think what you say here is obviously false.

Suppose the players just sat around the table while the GM narrated their PCs doing stuff, narrated consequences, etc. The "product" might be identical to what would have happened had the players actually played the game. But I can't believe that any RPGer would say that the process - ie the way the fiction is established - makes no difference to the play experience.

In other words, the experience of the players at the table is not that they learn of a certain fiction. What they experience is the actual play of the game whereby that fiction is generated. And hence different ways of generating the fiction yield different RPGing experiences.

 

[Nagol]

Whether or not you're cheering for the PCs you're still also providing the opposition most of the time, and - one assumes - playing that opposition to the best of its abilities.

It's interesting that the DW write-up actually in effect tells the GM to cheer for the PCs, in that it's by the same token putting said GM in a direct conflict of interest - if you-as-GM are earnestly cheering for the PCs that's going to discourage you from putting anything too deadly in their path, and encourage you to provide out-clauses and getaway cars when they do get in over their heads. Put another way, it strongly encourages you to reduce* adventuring to sport rather than war.

* - and I use that term intentionally, as to me adventuring as sport is a lesser thing than adventuring as war.

You are correct and its is one of my relatively few issues with DW. DW provides a lot of latitude to the DM with respect to how the world reacts to failure (not to get too far into the weeds there are hard moves that cause the PC to suffer losses of resources whilst changing the situation and soft moves that simply change the situation and the GM chooses what move and repercussions to inflict whenever a partial success or failure result occurs). I counter my issue by assigning some simple guidelines to myself so that while I hope the players succeed, I run the game fairly and with consistency. The primary guideline I use for myself is "failures deserve a hard move".

You are incorrect in that DW combat is neither war not sport, really. It's more performance art. What I am going to write next may seem pejorative. It is not meant that way; I like DW. Adventuring in DW most resembles reading a choose-your-own-adventure book. Open the book, read a page describing the initial situation, make a choice, and flip to a page telling you the resolution and asking for your next choice. Instead of a book, insert DM narration. Remove the list of predefined choices and replace it with DM reaction. Add a die roll to indicate if the player's gambit was wholly successful, partially successful, or a failure. The DM resolves the gambit and presents the new situation and asks for the next choice. There's DW in a nutshell.

This seems to go against basic human nature, which always wants to find and take the path of least resistance.

If I'm framed into a scene that looks like trouble I'm going to declare whatever actions I need to in order to reduce or evade that trouble, not enhance it!

Far more likely because the dull move means survival while the cool move probably doesn't.

I've killed off enough of my own characters over the years to know that dying can be every bit as undramatic as running away. But then, we play adventuring as war; where the main drama is often sheer survival and death is a frequent visitor.

But who runs all that "other stuff" - the NPCs, the world, whatever clashes with their own beliefs, etc.? That's right: the DM.

And yes of course the conflict should stay in character - I don't expect the players and DM to be coming to blows over this stuff - but it's still at its root adversarial. Kind of like chess is adversarial - you could be playing against your best friend but within the game you're still going to try your best to checkmate him.

Lanefan

I don't think of the player-DM relationship as inherently adversarial. I think you'll agree that a DM's role cannot support full competitive play during encounter design; the power disparity is too great. I can imagine every session starting "Rocks fall. You all die. I win again!" at least until the session (likely the second) where the DM looks around the empty room and asks where his players went. I think of the D&D DM as a neutral arbiter attempting to have situations play out according the nature of the non-PCs and die rolls. Some of the non-PCs will almost certainly be adversarial and they should be played appropriately, but the players should never see the DM as the adversary, unlike chess. Once the encounter begins, I'll play the non-PCs with as much capability as I can muster and is plausible for the actors to display.

Part of the GM's job in DW and similar games is to keep the pressure on and momentum going. A DW after-action report should sound like a Dresden novel (if you are familiar with Jim Butcher's modern fantasy series). The protagonists careen from situation to situation always under pressure to act -- to save themselves, to save others, to prevent a calamity, to stop the BBEG. If the PCs attempt to evade the scene, that's fine but there will be consequences as telegraphed in the situation.

The game system is designed to support this type of action in ways D&D simply is not. Every player gambit is expected to change the situation for better or worse. Choices are typically less tactical. The PCs will end up much more reactive than proactive.

 

[Maxperson]

I have read, and read, those things all the time!

(Which maybe was your point - I wasn't sure if your post was ironic or literal!)

Speaking for myself, I started pointing out the rails in your game after you repeatedly and incorrectly called my game a railroad, and after I explained 6 ways from Sunday how it wasn't a railroad. I do unto others as they do unto me. The same with your statement that players in my style of play declare actions to get the DM to say stuff.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't care about the words insisting and asserting. I'm talking about what's on the right-hand side of them. You say that I insist that nothing be changed. I'm saying that I don't insist on that. I don't care whether the GM-authored setting is authored in advance or on the spot: either way, if it used in the typical way that GM-authored setting is used in RPGing then it generates a burden on player agency that I do not enjoy (as player or GM).

Except that it doesn't. Agency is another word that you are attempting to redefine for your personal needs in order to be dismissive of the traditional playstyle. The fact is, agency doesn't mean what you say it means. Agency is just the players being able to control the actions of their PCs, and without a true railroad(not your altered definition), agency is unfettered in both styles of play.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I don't care about the words insisting and asserting. I'm talking about what's on the right-hand side of them. You say that I insist that nothing be changed. I'm saying that I don't insist on that. I don't care whether the GM-authored setting is authored in advance or on the spot: either way, if it used in the typical way that GM-authored setting is used in RPGing then it generates a burden on player agency that I do not enjoy (as player or GM).

That's not the sort of thing that I have in mind when I say that I expect the GM to frame scenes that engage these elements of my PC.

I want to go further and say that that's not at all the sort of thing that I have in mind, but your description is quite brief. But it seems like mere colour. I'm envisaging something along the lines of, say, a NPC joins us at our camp because of the fire, and then my cooking helps me befriend him/her; or maybe, given that I also have an instinct about interposing myself if an innocent is threatened, this person would be in need of help and my cooking might help soothe him/her.

It's not my job, as player, to set out the details of such a scene - that's on the GM. But my example hopefully illustrates the sort of thing I have in mind. You can see that it's not just colour. It would actually be a moment of importance in the game.

See, this is where you keep losing me. My assertion is that it should be at the player's/character's behest and actions that the skill come into play and have an impact, and you're telling me that not only is it the GM's job, but my approach in giving you the control is a burden on your player agency.

It's absolutely to create a moment of importance in the game. Except that I think that moment should be driven by you.

A figure approaches in the night, probably drawn by the light of your fire. Now as a GM I can make the figure act in a hostile manner, or timid manner, or all sorts of things. I tend to start with an unknown state where possible. So if the circumstances allow you to see the figure before he acts, then you have a decision to make.

How you (and your companions, if awake) react to the figure immediately sets the stage. It's not my job to determine whether you act in a hostile manner, grabbing your sword and yelling to the figure to, "move on, there's nothing of value here," or to stand up, beckon over and say, "we have nothing of value here, save some fine wyvern stew. Let's share the fire and food for the night and whatever our normal inclinations are, we can share safety tonight and part tomorrow as friend or foe as you desire."

To me, all of that should be driven by you, not me. That's what I consider a traditional so-called "GM driven" game. Well, sort of. I find that all too often, GMs are focused on "combat encounters" and the figure would approach in a threatening manner, or simply ambush the PCs, rather than leaving it open for interpretation. Instead, I might start with, "you see a figure, running toward you, sword drawn." My players understand that what I'll describe is the first impression, and just the facts. In this case, only what they can see, as the figure is hundreds of yards away. If one of the character's perception is high, or they ask, I would probably elaborate a little more, saying his sword is held low, and your impression is that he's not necessarily being aggressive.

Where I, as the GM, would have influence here is in the world-building. Something I probably would have told you before, but would remind you specifically, that in this world of dangers, it is customary to set aside ones differences for the safety and comfort of the fire, and that it is a great insult to bring harm, or threaten to bring harm, to one's generosity, and that the law of the land allows one to defend themselves, to the death, when such an act occurs.

What I don't do is, "A figured approached in the night, sword drawn, but you determined that he was frightened, not hostile. So, according to the customs of your land, you invited him to share some stew and the safety of the fire for the night." Where's the player agency in that?

It's far from just color. And your skills would help improve your chances when rolling (including the use of passive skills), for reactions and interactions with others who share your wonderful food. It's a skill that can have many uses. As I said, it extends beyond just the cooking. In a town or city, I'd expect you might use your knowledge to strike up a conversation with a cook, a merchant, or a halfling, as an aid to interactions that might lead to other benefits, such as what's the Lord's favorite food, or what ale does the guard like best. In which case you can use that information when you approach the guard at his post, a mug in hand (and handcasks in the back of your wagon), and approach while having an obvious disagreement with your companion, "do you believe it, he insists that Arabel Ale is better than Berdusk Dark?" Eventually leading to getting him to sample several fine ales and stouts for his informed opinion, and access to the keep.

All of that would be the PC utilizing their skills, not me doing it for them.

With my world-building approach, I'd know that the custom is to share the safety of one's camp, and to part in safety until out of sight (from published materials). That the man has a homestead nearby (invented on the spot, although I know there are homesteads in this region of the north). The man is frightened because his family is missing, and his barn has significant damage to one wall (made up, although I know that hill giants and ogres are common in these parts, because I noted that earlier). He will welcome your food, he has been running for over an hour.

All of this "engages" your skills and instincts, but only if you act upon them. If you see the figure running up with sword drawn initially, and choose to believe he's hostile, and your companion shoots a warning shot with a bow and tells him to come no further until you know their purpose, then he might not view you as a potential friend, and won't tell you of his plight. Or maybe you turn it around with your demeanor ("oh, don't mind Oleg, he's been skittish ever since that third ogre today" as I offer him some stew, "what brings you out alone in such a dangerous place at night?")

You make this confident assertion . . . but you weren't there, so you have no evidence other than what I've described. And if you read what I've written, you;ll see that it was the player who decided that the situation warranted the possibility - "Is there a bowl in the room?"

I also didn't set the probability. I set a difficulty, based on the likelihood of a visible bowl being present. The probability, given that difficulty (I would think Ob 2), is dependent on the Perception stat on the character sheet, which I don't remember now off the top of my head and may or may not have been aware of at the time. (The PC is a shaman-type, so probably Perception 4D or 5D, so a chance of success probably around 70% to 80%.)

I'm sure you could, but have you? When's the last time that, in your game, an Assess/Perception action was used by a player to establish an advantage of some sort in the fiction that wasn't prompted by the GM, or mediated via some GM decision independent of the actual process of action resolution?

To answer the last question - all the time. I can't possibly describe everything the PCs see, and in many cases don't describe everything because a person doesn't "see" everything when they walk into a room. It is extremely common for me to respond directly to those types of questions. With a yes, no or maybe. In fact, one of the things I tell them outright at session 0, and remind them regularly, are things like:

I don't use miniatures (because I sold most of mine, and don't have time for another hobby) or battle mats. When using a map, it's a rough guideline, no squares, and we aren't counting squares. If you're fighting in the forest, then you can expect to find anything you'd find if you went out to the woods in the back yard - fallen trees, large trees, small trees, cover, rocks, uneven ground, etc. So during an encounter (such as a combat) you can tell me that you want to dive behind a fallen tree for cover, and attempt to stealthily circle around the orcs (using brush, rocks, trees, etc. for cover). "Oleg, see if you can run over to that tree and start shooting at then from behind the cover. I don't care if you hit them, I just want you to distract them."

If I tell them they are in a kitchen, I don't expect them to ask are their knives, bowls, plates, goblets, as well as foodstuffs, etc. They (and I) assume there are the usual implements and stuff you'd find in a kitchen. If there is something specific that they'd like to find and they are unsure, they'll ask.

"Is there a cleaver?"

"Sure, and a few 10" knives as well"

"What about some twine, or something similar?"

"Um, maybe, (I don't think cooking twine was much of a thing in the middle ages, but could be something, so maybe a DC 15 or 17 - something higher than their passive score, but not unreasonably high), go ahead and roll Perception. Failure.

"No, no twine or string that you can see."

"Hmm. OK, I'll grab the cleaver anyway, and there should be something like a stake to roast beasts over the fire, I'll grab one to use as a short spear."

That's what I've been saying all along. One of my jobs is to set the framework - it's a kitchen - and then serve as quality control.

So yes, I am saying that in reaction to what you've posted:

The player asked. That is, your response as a GM had meaning. Your approval, denial, or decision that it's possible if their perception is high enough is what allowed them to find a bowl. Not their statement. They didn't say, "there must be a bowl in the room, so I'm grabbing it," they asked. If you had said no, then there would have been no bowl (although if it's like my table, they, or somebody else, might have suggested that in such a room they might have bowls for use in certain religious rituals, etc. and it might alter my decision). But in the end, you, as the GM, made a decision.

Then you set the DC. That assigns a probability. Had you decided that yes, there's a bowl, and it's in the cabinet on the left, and they have to choose the cabinet on the left or the cabinet on the right, then you'd be setting the probability at 50%.

I think what you say here is obviously false.

Suppose the players just sat around the table while the GM narrated their PCs doing stuff, narrated consequences, etc. The "product" might be identical to what would have happened had the players actually played the game. But I can't believe that any RPGer would say that the process - ie the way the fiction is established - makes no difference to the play experience.

In other words, the experience of the players at the table is not that they learn of a certain fiction. What they experience is the actual play of the game whereby that fiction is generated. And hence different ways of generating the fiction yield different RPGing experiences.

Yes, that's the product. What you describe is exactly correct in what I was asserting. That my part of the product (such as deciding yes, no or maybe to the bowl, or describing the approach of the figure, and the reaction of that figure to your actions) is the product. The product is not the completed fiction, the product is the experience at the table of creating the fiction.

If the purpose was to create the fiction, we'd be working much harder to make the finished fiction the best it can be. It would be the process of writing a story together, brainstorming, writing, editing, etc. That's not to say we couldn't create an initial draft through a shared improvisation, with or without the rules of a game. But we'd be going

If it was simply to "find out what the GM or author wrote down" then it would be a choose your own adventure, or a board game, or a video game, where the world and what's in it is set ahead of time, and can't be changed.

That's not an RPG (to me anyway). An RPG is a shared experience of creating the fiction. While I can prepare a general story arc, such as the published APs, or purchase one, and work within that structure, they still allow more than just a "choose your own adventure" because the PCs are free to do what they'd like, and success, failure, or whatever other outcome might occur is free to happen. Can they be more restrictive? Absolutely. And many DMs make them that way. I've seen on more than one occasion a specific experience relating to Out of the Abyss related by DMs running it. A common one I've seen is something like, "We've been playing OotA and the players loved the first part, and now they've survived. But they don't want to continue with the second part. How do I encourage/force them to do so?" My friend ran the campaign, and found the exact same thing, although in his case described it as such, "they loved the first part, and there were some interesting things. But they had no interest in the second part and went and did (this)."

They used the same tool, the AP, but as a DM used them quite differently. Personally, I don't particularly care for the direction adventures and APs have taken, where there's a big story arc to try to follow. I don't mind there being a story in a published adventure, but generally use published adventures for maps, and locations, NPCs and such. I just pull out and use what interests me. I've noted before that the general playstyle promoted by 5e is perfect for a more casual gamer, where it's essentially a self-contained game. Just not my personal preference, and while it does a great job of making it relatively easy for a new group to pick up the game and play, I feel they are also often missing the possibilities of such a game, getting stuck in the minutia of rules instead of the characters, setting, and story.

And I'm asserting that when it comes to me fulfilling my part (and you as a player), having things in mind, written or not, before the session, doesn't necessarily degrade the experience. For some, like me, it improves things. My brain doesn't always work fast enough to provide a level of quality that I'm happy with. And it's been noticeable in the past when I was unprepared and not 100% in the moment as well. The worldbuilding and notes and such are at their most useful during those sessions where I'm not at 100%. It often needs something to act as a catalyst, to spark some ideas. Also, the amount of time it takes during the course of the game is important. I gave a toast for my brother once, a funny guy, and told everybody that I'm really the funnier of the two. The problem is, I think of the perfect punchline 15 minutes later. My approach to GMing is specifically to address this. I don't want to think of the perfect reaction, event, etc. 15 minutes later.

Can such an approach be used as a hindrance? To limit the options, to impose a direction without considering the current circumstances within the game? Of course. How you use a tool is completely different than the tool itself, and it doesn't in and of itself validate or invalidate the usefulness of that tool. For folks that like all reasonable options on the table, that the players are in full control of the decisions and actions of their PCs, that they are presented with X, Y, and Z and they choose D, then I think that for a great many of us, these tools can be very helpful.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

This I do. I suspect this is not really something avoided by people who espouse story now play in general. I mean, it could be or not be used. It doesn't necessarily imply any particular situation, etc. OTOH I don't generate these things way ahead of time, like before I get a game rolling. I might not even have anyone interested in running into orcs, nor a reason to threaten something with them, or whatever. Still, if I'm running something like 4e I probably already have dozens, maybe 100's, of these sorts of things available, so they are definitely there and useful.


Yeah, maybe. I mean, with the advent of the Internet this stuff is now so ubiquitous its hard to say we don't ALL have a pretty extensive library of these, albeit they may need some tweaking for a specific game. Mostly though I try to stick to 'no myth' situations, or else have DW-esque "lots of holes in it" stuff. I find it clears my thinking. If I have a map, then I'm trying to wedge what the players want into some sort of route on that map instead of thinking about it dramatic terms.


More than any other single factor, the non-existence of a distinction between 'monster' and 'npc' in 4e sold me on that game.


Sure, I don't think the sorts of motives PCs have need to be, or maybe in most games even SHOULD be, big flashy specific things like 'Collect the Seven Swords', it was a bit of an extreme (but valid) example. MANY times a character may just say "I love my village and I will die for it" or just "I love my village" (and what will you do about that is the story). "Over the Wall" is, if I understand it correctly, an OSR-like game that has that focus. This brings another point, the focus doesn't HAVE to be brought individually by the players, DitV, or OTW, for example come with 'built in' agendas, though I'm sure characters and individual games can have variations and additional material.


Sure, and I think Story Now is also a good way to do those. It is less a perfect fit for true exploration/puzzle type games, some other things maybe where the players demand heavy back story and loads of different highly detailed scenes perhaps? Anyway, it is good for any story where motivations and beliefs are a big part, like 'hometown hero' type stories.

Yeah, and I think in all the furor over how this or that can't be done this or that or the other way the point has been kinda lost here too. Just because a game is 'Story Now' doesn't mean its 'Climax Now!' It can be a long drawn-out process of playing through little things if you wish it. The little things that will get focus will just be the ones that DO elicit some level of characterization, as a rule.

I also see a flip side to this. When you play through the vast bulk of every character's life, there's a sort of pressure to make things happen at a faster in-game pace. Sure, you are 'not hurrying', but STILL there's only so many game sessions, even in a LONG campaign! If I'm focusing more on specific 'weighty' moments (in character terms) then I can afford to pace things out in terms of the character's story. I can skip 5 years if that makes more sense. I mean, you could too, but it seems opposed to the general philosophy of 'get all the choices and make them all' that you guys seem to want (like skipping past all the boring side corridors in Moria).

OK, I just don't feel like spending years of real life on that one project! Its a game, lets get on with it. There's nothing wrong with moving on to the key parts. I can still assemble parties and do this and that and the other to prepare before I slay dragons. I can play that out for 3 months, I think that's more than enough time. I think you might find a LOT of players secretly feel the same way.

I just feel like I'd be bored to death. I'm not that into RPing guard duty, and given that its a game, I'm not interested in the idea of "doing what needs to be done to get the reward". I want to play where I get to do cool fantastic stuff that isn't possible in real life. If I want guard duty I can join the army!

Well, we don't play every moment of every day. And in fact, we were just discussion how the passage of time is something that is often difficult to work into the game. Adventures in Middle Earth sets it up in a way that you typically have one large adventure, and then when the winter comes, adventuring season is over, and you move forward a year.

Things like guard duty are typically near the beginning of a character's life, although not always, and is part of what ties them to the town and the setting. We don't run such a thing often, but every once and a while it's a good starting point that naturally brings together a group of PCs.

My campaign itself has been essentially one continuous one since 1987 when the original Forgotten Realms set came out. Over the years, players come and go, and lots of PCs have "retired" to become pseudo NPCs. The players really enjoy that they actually "know" people in the world, rather than just NPCs that I create, whether on the fly or whatever. Such retired PCs can often come back to an active adventuring life if they wish. In fact, one player came to me yesterday to say that he thinks that one of his characters has reached that point. She is currently stuck underground, and she hates everything about it. She hates the risks, she hates being underground, pretty much everything. She just wants to get back to her farm and be a farmer. She's gotten some treasure over the course of about two or three adventures, almost all of which has ended with her being underground again, and this particular character "has decided" that it's not the life for her. She's basically won the lottery, and wants to move on with her life.

The game itself is modeled after the old Gygax and Greenwood campaigns. Everybody has multiple characters, and there are many current plot threads in progress. Which one we pick up during a given session depends on who can make it that night. I'm also starting another night soon, and players can move between them, and they will continue to be interrelated. So from a worldbuilding perspective, the players are contributing a lot simply by having so many characters that are involved in the world.

We jump ahead quite a bit, sometimes even a year or more, but that's all driven by what the players want to do. I often suggest it's a good place to jump ahead, but I've learned that what I think is a good place and what they think is one doesn't always coincide. The reality is, we kind of know as a group that this is a good place to move ahead. We also have no problem fast forwarding in the middle of a combat when it's clear what the outcome will be, even if it's going to take a bunch more rounds to slog through it.

Also, while there may be considerable time spent in places like Moria, the purpose is almost never the dungeon. So they don't try to explore every passage, fight every monster, etc. In fact, in most cases they are trying to avoid as many of the dangers as possible, to get to whatever it is they are trying to accomplish. What they are interested in playing out is the process of accomplishing that. The MERP book for Moria is a great example of the sort of prep work that I find valuable. It details the sort of creature that you'll potentially find. It has sample common passages, residences, businesses, etc. But otherwise the maps are large scale, and it's up to you to place things as needed. So if the PCs are searching for a family heirloom they'll first search out a residential area, and hopefully have some sense as to how they'll identify they are in the right group of homes. The challenges and dangers of getting to that location would be played out, in addition to whatever they'll need to do to find the item, or determine this isn't the right set of homes, we need to go search someplace else. So it will fast forward, go back to normal, then fast forward, etc. It might still take several sessions to get to what they're looking for, but that passage of real time is part of what informs the play of the game itself, that it took us a lot of work and time to finally find this. In the meantime, the goal is for things to be interesting, exciting, challenging, etc. And some of that might speak to the character's motivations, and some may not.

My point is that it's not really up to me alone, the DM, to decide what those weighty moments are. I guess I kind of think of it as living through the character's lives, and they tell me when it's time to stop fast-forwarding and experience this period, here. But the reward to us is usually the development of the character. Some of those characters might go slay a dragon, but others might just be involved in protecting the town. When we're in exploration mode, where time is moving at a certain slower pace, then I have to determine at what point enough exploring is enough. That's when I have more of an impact on the passage of time than them. But for most of the time, they are setting the pace.

The other aspect that we try to avoid is when everything the DM puts in front of you is important. "The characters wouldn't be here if there isn't something important here too." By framing scenes too tightly, and focusing only on things that are "important' it takes away some of the players/character's ability (agency) to decide what's important to them.

As for how long it takes, we always have multiple plots in progress at any point. So a major, life-defining plot like becoming a dragon slayer might take a year or two. But there are many other stories and plots with those characters along the way. That spending 3 or 4 sessions on determining the location of the legendary sword, and then setting off for 2-3 sessions of attempting to retrieve it, followed by another 3-4 sessions of hunting down the NPC who stole it, already takes up 3 months of game time. And that's just to get the sword. It's not a glacial pace, but it also feels right to us. That it takes time to happen. The pace of a TV show vs a movie, which provides more opportunity for development of the characters and pretty much everything else in the game. Usually, for a major plot point, 1 or 2 sessions seems too short, like it's too easy. Note that things also overlap. So there are other plots occuring at the same time. What usually happens is that the focus narrows as we get further along the process.

Early in the life of a character, a considerable amount of time is taken as the player learns who this character is. That is, through their experiences, combined with their design. So time move slower, and it's more of a direct exploration mode. As the characters become defined, and the group goals narrowed, then the passage of time for those characters accelerates. We skip ahead more frequently because we have a better understanding of the characters.

But overall, I think it's just the focus of our attention that's different. During the course of the adventures, the character might die. In which case his son picks up his cause. We're much more interested in the journey - how they got there, rather than the goal, and slaying the dragon. We also prefer a less heroic (or superheroic) approach than D&D often seems to promote. That is, a lesser reliance on abilities, and more on character and creativity. So you're right, there is nothing wrong with moving onto the key parts. But deciding what those key parts are, and how quickly to get to them, is what I think varies. Since many of the characters share similar group goals, the large goals will often come to a head, but after the passage of a considerable amount of time, and probably the deaths and/or retirements or heading off into other priorities by several of the characters.

 

[Hriston]

Nah. What [MENTION=42582]If he learned the Golden Rule it would help him considerably in these conversations.

Funny how you invoke the Golden Rule to defend doing unto others as you would NOT have them do unto you.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You are incorrect in that DW combat is neither war not sport, really. It's more performance art.

Congratulations, you just filled in some of the excluded middle between 'CaW' and 'CaS' - 'CaPA!'

As far as dull vs cool moves are concerned, this seems to be a system thing. What you say is true for AD&D and 3E. It's not true for 4e or Cortex+ Heroic. (And BW is too complicated in this respect to make a simple evaluation.)

But, I guess it'd be 'orthogonal' to world-building.

(Edit: I'm only feigning anti-intellectualism, here, I promise, but you do like dem two-dollah college words.)

Right. At least in my experience, provided the systems creates the mechanical space for it, players aren't going to declare boring stuff or silly stuff when exciting and/or interesting stuff is also possible!
The proviso is one reason why I choose some systems over others.

Well, some players consider silly stuff exciting & interesting, but yeah, at least initially, players sit down to a game to have fun. You have to train them to prioritize PC survival through meticulous planning, systematic/paranoid exploration, risk-avoidance, pragmatism, and solving the specific sorts of puzzles your twisted mind devises, before they start preferring boring moves (though the level of paranoia should at least keep them tense, if not exciting).

 

[Lanefan]

You are incorrect in that DW combat is neither war not sport, really. It's more performance art.

Combat as performance art? Now there's one I've never heard before.

That said, I was taking the sport-war analogy and applying it more to the whole game rather than just combat. Exploration-as-war means deadly traps, sometimes-harsh environmental conditions, real risk of dangerous resource depletion (e.g. no water in the desert), etc. Social-interaction-as-war is a bit harder to define other than that NPCs will have their own sometimes-secret agendas which will inform if not outright direct their responses to the PCs.

I don't think of the player-DM relationship as inherently adversarial. I think you'll agree that a DM's role cannot support full competitive play during encounter design; the power disparity is too great. I can imagine every session starting "Rocks fall. You all die. I win again!" at least until the session (likely the second) where the DM looks around the empty room and asks where his players went.

Agreed. But within the scope of reasonable play the DM can't be expected to pull her punches: if the PCs get in over their heads (with or without advance warnings of danger) then so be it - characters will die. Whole parties, however, very rarely die: they're incredibly resilient things.

I think of the D&D DM as a neutral arbiter attempting to have situations play out according the nature of the non-PCs and die rolls. Some of the non-PCs will almost certainly be adversarial and they should be played appropriately, but the players should never see the DM as the adversary, unlike chess. Once the encounter begins, I'll play the non-PCs with as much capability as I can muster and is plausible for the actors to display.

I don't mind seeing the DM as adversary when she's playing an adversary (which is a lot of the time); nor do I mind seeing her as an ally when she's playing an ally. When describing the game world etc. I see her as a neutral arbiter, ditto for when she puts her referee's hat on for rules and ruling questions.

And there's also a dual-layered question of trust.

At the table level I trust the DM to run a fair, interesting and engaging game for us - which means, for example, I'll accept a certain amount of hard railroading because I trust there'll be a payoff or reveal or whatever at the end that'll make it worthwhile. Most of the time that trust bears out, and I can look back on a fun experience.

In the fiction level I-as-player don't trust much of what the DM says when she's playing any character - even the so-called allies - as I know from experience that the game world really is out to get us. That lack of trust may or may not extend to my characters, depending on how paranoid or naive I've set them up to be.

Part of the GM's job in DW and similar games is to keep the pressure on and momentum going. A DW after-action report should sound like a Dresden novel (if you are familiar with Jim Butcher's modern fantasy series). The protagonists careen from situation to situation always under pressure to act -- to save themselves, to save others, to prevent a calamity, to stop the BBEG. If the PCs attempt to evade the scene, that's fine but there will be consequences as telegraphed in the situation.

The game system is designed to support this type of action in ways D&D simply is not. Every player gambit is expected to change the situation for better or worse. Choices are typically less tactical. The PCs will end up much more reactive than proactive.

This sounds fine for the short term but after a while would get really grating. Every now and then in the fiction it's nice for the PCs to be able to stand back, maybe take a few weeks off from adventuring, look around and proactively decide what we-as-a-party are going to do next. The way you've written this, it sounds like such breaks never come to DW characters.

Lanefan