A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[Aldarc]

A first thought: my Google skills are failing me, but I believe a prominent designer (maybe John Harper?) made the point that no one sits down to play poker and starts talking about playing a trump and winning a trick and gathering all the cards up in front of him/her - so why do people approach RPGs like that?

I'm salivating to learn the source of this comparison, and if they expanded on what you say here.

I agree with the rest of your excellent post, pemerton.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's fine, I don't think there's a problem here. I didn't delve into all the possible scenarios that could exist because I was merely talking about how to approach satisfying a particular request by the players to go in a direction.

This ties into the later SYORTD discussion. The GM could simply 'say yes' and have the PCs run into the sect in the tea house, and this is valid. He could also RTD and thus potentially thwart the INTENT of the PCs in going to the tea house. This could result in most any of the complications and plot diversions which you have outlined.

My point was simply that it wouldn't make sense to introduce the tea house as a place to find the sect unless it was going to be dramatically interesting to do so. The actual place of the tea house in the eventual playing out (to see what happens) of the scenario is unknown until things HAVE played out. At least that is my way.

I am not suggesting that alternatives to my proposed approach in the OP are wrong or bad. I've tried to make the point many times that you can make that determination with any number of methods, procedures or mechanics. The point of the thread though was whether my stated approach was mother may I or undesirable. For you the answer being dramatically interesting is important, and that is a fine way to run a game. Some of the other posters here though are saying that is less important to them than the sense that they are exploring a real place.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Great post above [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] .

I just wanted to drill down even harder on the point you made above that hooks into the point that has been expressed in many different ways by other posters in this thread ("system matters").

1) Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy, Strike (!) and Dungeon World both share a LOT in common with 4e. However, if you play any one of those 4 games and expect somehow the totality of the experience of either of the other 3 games is going to emerge from your RPGing (or...you're going to be able to impose/force it), you're going to be seriously disappointed.

2) Torchbearer shares a LOT in common with Burning Wheel and Moldvay Basic. However, if you try to actually derive Burning Wheel or Moldvay Basic play from Torchbearer, you're going to be seriously disappointed.

3) Finally, a more broad-use RPG like Savage Worlds certainly isn't going to be able to reproduce the holistic, yet focused experience of any of those 7 games above.


I'm not going to write another essay on it again, but this hooks into my premise from a bit ago about integrated, holistic, yet focused games and discretized games that decouple theme/premise from system (yielding agnostic machinery) and substitute GM oversight/quality control for integrated and focused design.

A lot of people prefer broad use RPGs. I play Savage Worlds. And it would be my pick from the list of RPGs you just posted.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This sort of circular reasoning actually puts a finger on what may also have been bugging me about the post in question. I don't mind D&D as a puzzle-game, and saying 'no' is often a valid necessity of play for such games. (I even plan on running an OSR-stylized dungeon crawl in the hopefully near future, likely using Black Hack.) But when other games are less designed as puzzle-games challenging player skill and more about character-propelled dramatic conflict, it seems peculiar to complain that "then the puzzles won't work" because puzzles aren't the point of play.

I am a little puzzled by this post. This thread wasn't started form a critique of non-puzzle oriented games. It was a product of a conversation where the idea that the GM might say "No, bone breaker sect isn't at the Tea House" because the GM decided that was the most likely/best situation, was labeled mother may I. I stated this is no more mother may I than real life, and we've had a whole conversation defending that position because Pemerton believes 'like' means 'follows the same exact underlying process'. This hasn't been a debate where people are on the attack against your playstyle. I think the reverse is true. Countless times, posters have said, if you like X game, or want story, that is fine. They are just saying here is what I like to do, and then that approach gets put on trial in the thread. I told Pemerton many times, it sounds like his approach is working for him, and that is great. He should write about it. What ticks me off a bit, is he can't seem to do that without belittling or refusing to see how other people approach the game. And that mentality is prevalent in so many of these threads on this kind of topic.

Obviously though, if players are there for the puzzles, they probably won't like a game that doesn't engage puzzle solving skill, but rather focuses on drama. The reverse is true as well.

 

[Manbearcat]

A lot of people prefer broad use RPGs. I play Savage Worlds. And it would be my pick from the list of RPGs you just posted.

They do for sure.

I believe you that you would pick SW out of the above games.

Savage Worlds is widely popular and, from what I can tell, accomplished it’s design goals.

But it’s design goals and implementation make it a very different game from the others (despite it being broad-use).

 

[Maxperson]

That is how they are commonly written but that is not necessarily universally true. That said, tinkering has been a common feature of board games. Let us return to an earlier example!

Parker Brothers once assumed that everyone was playing by the rules of Monopoly laid out in the game. What they discovered, only relatively recently, was how many people had their own house rules for the game. It turns out that Monopoly is a game with a longer legacy of people tinkering with rules than D&D! This was often a common source of conflict when one played the game with others, as people would bring their idiomatic assumptions about what the rules were and/or how the game played. It was only when they sought to accommodate the wider breadth of play that had emerged that Parker Brothers began also including common "house rules" as part of the game instructions.

And how many other card and board games came out of "people tinkering with the rules" from some other game? Probably far too many to count, with many more being lost in history to us. It ill behooves us to apply the all too common fallacious position of 'exceptionalism' to TTRPGs.

Okay, yes, people do create some house rules for board games. They are not nearly as many, though, nor typically as game changing as those in RPGs. There are differences in how one tinkers with board game rules, and how one tinkers with RPG rules.

Furthermore, nothing stops you from roleplaying your "character" in Monopoly, and one could most definitely operate a character in D&D as one would a tin figure from Monopoly.

Sure, but this does absolutely nothing in board game. Can you play the dog figure and bark as you go, or play the car an say *vroom!*? Sure. It doesn't make Monopoly a roleplaying game. Treating an RPG as a board game can be done, but in my experience it typically is not done for long. Huge portions of the game are not played in a board game fashion(most things outside of combat) and the rest of the game is usually intensely boring if you aren't going to participate in the game as anything other than a Monopoly piece.

Not quite. I am not so much talking about adhering to OneTrueWay to play a game, and more about adhering to OneTrueWay as the presumed norm for play in all games.

In all my time here, I have yet to see anyone presume One True Way in all games.

I would say (more concretely) that one should not necessarily presume that one's experience (or preferred method) of playing 1e D&D, for example, should be the metric for analyzing the merits of other games, design principles, play priorities/values, campaigns, etc.

Why not? Not only is this not One True Way, but it's pretty much required if you want to enjoy a game. If I prefer 1e style games, I absolutely should be analyzing every RPG I come across on 1e design principles, play priorities/values, campaigns, etc. To fail to do that will eventually result in my purchasing or playing a game that I won't like, wasting my money in the process. Presumably people want to buy and play in games that they will enjoy, and the way to do that is to evaluate games on what they do that you enjoy vs. what you don't enjoy.

I would further say (to the point of it being a platitude) that TTRPGs are designed to facilitate particular styles of play. The design of games may provide a greater latitude or scope for other styles than intended, and these other styles may only be discovered later through the process of play. I naturally hope that you would agree with me that it hardly seems controversial to suggest that Gygax et al. had a certain style of gameplay in mind (or range thereof) when they designed Original Dungeons & Dragons. (And I think that D&D has been subsequently written, much like Monopoly, with a contentious desire to accommodate other styles.)

Gygax may have had his personal preference on how to play D&D, but D&D was written in such a way as to enable it to pretty easily encompass many different playstyles. It's the driving strength of D&D in my opinion.

Since then many other RPGs have come out and many of them are not written in that way. As you note above, they are designed with one particular playstyle in mind, making them poor games to use with differing playstyles. You can force the square peg into the round hole with them, but it won't be as satisfying as playing a different game.

I probably could have said more if I had said less, as per [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s more succinct summation: "the system matters."

It does! One True Way is just not a part of that.

 

[Maxperson]

I disagree, the majority of systems IME don't even really talk about time. Gygax obsessed about it, but even 2e drops a lot of the mechanical baggage that 1e has around time. For example, the 10 minute turn is mentioned, but no movement rates are associated with it in 2e. Traveler, IMHO, simply calls all time periods "1 week" in strategic play because Marc Miller wanted an 'Age of Sail' feel to his Fifth Imperium. As such jumps take a week, and he simply set all other activities to that time period. It makes play simple, Alan, Beth, and Carl take the Beowulf to Extremis while Eddie and Darla remain on Durant and spend the week looking for a patron. The GM can move both timelines forward, each group gets to make one check/decision/deal with one situation. Beowulf jumps back to Extremis, the rest of the party shops for the equipment needed to carry out the mission assigned by the patron, and play can continue both plausibly and in a dramatically satisfying way. At the time when Traveler was written this was basically a state-of-the-art playing methodology. It sure beat Gygax's 'track every minute for every character'.

However, most other games, at that time or others, really didn't talk about time. Lets think about early RPGs. Boot Hill, no real mention of time outside of 'bullet time', and even that is rather vague IIRC. Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World, no mention of time at all, except maybe a healing rate (I don't have my GW softcover in front of me, it probably says something about hit point recovery). Other games I recall don't have a lot more to say than this either. I don't recall anything time-specific in RQ for instance. CoC doesn't really talk about time, except as a cost for recovering SAN after an adventure. This is a pretty common pattern for games in this time period. They may note some few specific situations where a time cost exists, but there isn't really a coherent concept in these games of time as a structured resource or some explicit way to manage it or use it dramatically (drama is rarely mentioned in these early games). It is generally just assumed that time is the purview of the GM and may come into play in whatever way he sees fit. Very few of these game diverge much from D&D's central concept of a GM as 'story driver' and referee all rolled into one.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with what I am talking about. I 1e, the DM didn't go into rounds, minutes or turns when someone told him that they were going to the bar to get a drink. You just went to the bar to get a drink and unless you said otherwise, it wasn't assumed that you would be there for a month or even all day.

Pointing out how games have various time units for those times when it matters doesn't at all impact what I am talking about.

Sure, in real life, but even D&D has structures in which this is NOT the assumption. To whit look at the 1e henchman acquisition rules, which allow the PCs to declare (and pay for) specific activities which are then assumed to play out over a period of time during which they are repeated (IE the PCs go to every bar and dive in the town and post messages or something similar for a week). I think it is reasonable to assume that players often given fairly general and open-ended instructions about what their characters do. Traveling for instance, you don't require the players to constantly reiterate exactly how far and fast they're moving and every detail of what they do, nor describe the amount of time they spend. Instead its something like 'we travel down the road' and the GM says something like 'you arrive at the next town'. Maybe something else happens, a decision is required, etc. but barring that, there's no need for constant input.

I disagree. It was the assumption, which is why when there was an exception to that assumption like the henchman rules, they called it out.

As for when they travel, if they tell me they are going from City A to Town B, I let them know how long it will take. Just as the statement, "I go to the bar to get a drink," won't be commonly understood mean, "I'm going to the bar to drink for the next two weeks," the statement, "We go to Town B," will be commonly understood to take a much longer time than going down to the local bar for a drink, so we need to know approximately how long.

Again, none of this impacts what I am talking about. Exceptions do not disprove the rule.

But how do you know what 'long odds' are? I still have seen nothing justifying any assertion that you can tell what is long odds most of the time. Even when you can it is a product of decisions you have made yourself, so its not like those odds are 'natural' or unforced in any way.

As I said earlier in the thread, it doesn't matter if I know exactly what the long odds are. It's sufficient for me to know that there are long odds and then offer up what I think is a good approximation of them. Realism isn't an all or nothing thing and asking me how I know what the long odds are implies that False Dichotomy. So long as I offer up something more realistic than the short odds that most player facing games and even some DM facing games employ, I am adding more realism to my game.

 

[pemerton]

A first thought: my Google skills are failing me, but I believe a prominent designer (maybe John Harper?) made the point that no one sits down to play poker and starts talking about playing a trump and winning a trick and gathering all the cards up in front of him/her - so why do people approach RPGs like that?

I'm salivating to learn the source of this comparison, and if they expanded on what you say here.

I've done some trawling through John Harper's old blog (The Mighty Atom) but can't find it.
[MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], can you help?

 

[darkbard]

I am a little puzzled by this post. This thread wasn't started form a critique of non-puzzle oriented games. It was a product of a conversation where the idea that the GM might say "No, bone breaker sect isn't at the Tea House" because the GM decided that was the most likely/best situation, was labeled mother may I. I stated this is no more mother may I than real life, and we've had a whole conversation defending that position because Pemerton believes 'like' means 'follows the same exact underlying process'. This hasn't been a debate where people are on the attack against your playstyle. I think the reverse is true. Countless times, posters have said, if you like X game, or want story, that is fine. They are just saying here is what I like to do, and then that approach gets put on trial in the thread. I told Pemerton many times, it sounds like his approach is working for him, and that is great. He should write about it. What ticks me off a bit, is he can't seem to do that without belittling or refusing to see how other people approach the game. And that mentality is prevalent in so many of these threads on this kind of topic.

Obviously though, if players are there for the puzzles, they probably won't like a game that doesn't engage puzzle solving skill, but rather focuses on drama. The reverse is true as well.

Your perception of how this conversation has developed is so very different from mine. If I recall correctly, [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] started the OP with his belief that X implementation could be mother-may-I, which he dislikes and was hoping to avoid, and so he was seeking out ways to make this so. Others (like [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]) made suggestions to this end, which innerdude liked, but some (like you, [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION]) came in to defend the style of GM-fiat that innerdude already said he didn't want to rely upon!

If the OP clearly has a desire for gameplay and preference for certain principles or techniques, pop in to propose an alternative, by all means, but what seems to have happened here (predictably) is that those who disagree with the OP's persepective are trying to argue the OP into a perspective he doesn't agree with and works against the very gameplay and preferences his OP presents. This is like having started a post saying "I'm looking for a good prewritten adventure that features gnolls as enemies" and having opposing ideologues jump in again and again to tell you to write your own adventures rather than rely upon prewritten material or that gnolls are boring enemies even though that is expressly against the purpose of the thread. It's reasonable to propose the OP consider writing their own material or choosing different enemies; one needs consider what motivations are really at work in continuing to argue against what the OP is asking for.

 

[pemerton]

"I'm looking for a good prewritten adventure that features gnolls as enemies"

Night's Dark Terror.

(Sorry, I couldn't help it.)