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

[Sadras]

I do not think you do, because you keep presenting arguments that are akin to taking tricks in poker.

My googlefu failed the first time you used that phrase. What does it mean? I'm a casual poker player but it is unfamiliar to me.

Thanks for the rest of the response.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My googlefu failed the first time you used that phrase. What does it mean? I'm a casual poker player but it is unfamiliar to me.

Thanks for the rest of the response.

It was referenced in an eariler post by Campbell. The crux is that it would be immediately odd if a player declared they took a trick while playing poker. The point was that we tend to smear mechanics that belong in one game into another in RPGs to compare and don't think much about it when it's really as odd as trying to take tricks in a poker game. SYORTD just doesn't fit in a game where you have monster stats like 5e's Death Knight. They come from very different places.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

It was referenced in an eariler post by Campbell. The crux is that it would be immediately odd if a player declared they took a trick while playing poker. The point was that we tend to smear mechanics that belong in one game into another in RPGs to compare and don't think much about it when it's really as odd as trying to take tricks in a poker game. SYORTD just doesn't fit in a game where you have monster stats like 5e's Death Knight. They come from very different places.

To further elaborate on that, "Taking Tricks" is a thing that you do in Pinocle, Hearts, and some other card games, but "Winning Hands" is the thing that you do in a poker game.

 

[pemerton]

This "mother may I" thing sounds a lot like "playing D&D".

Only if one disregards the "free kriegsspiel" idea you (I think?) introduced upthread.

 

[pemerton]

In my latest session, the PCs landed up in a town and one my new players, approached the local gem-wright asking if he had any enchanted gems that could somehow be attached to his weapon to enhance it. SYRTD precludes a hard no, right?

What are the rules for PC build? Eg in 4e there are fairly clear rules for the equipment component of PC build, which would provide the overlay for this interaction.

And what is the dramatic trajectory of that PC and of the game? Which is to say, how does the player's action declaration relate to those things? Is the player at a cruch-point for his/her PC? Or is the player - whom you've said is new to your game - trying to learn the genre parameters of the game and doing it via in-character interaction rather than out-of-character?

The closest actual play example I can think of is when the PCs in my 4e game ended up in the company of some elves. The player of the drow PC - an exile from his homeland and a member of the secret Order of the Bat, worshippers of Corellon dedicated to undoing the sundering of the elves - declared that his PC made the sign of the Order of the Bat. I can't remember now what roll, if any, was made, but I remember that one of the leader elves of the company returned the sign. The PC gave that elf his recently-acquired dragon tooth so it could be made by the orders crafters into a Wyrmtooth Dagger.

That second bit of the interaction was easily adjudicated via the treasure-parcel rules that are core to 4e.

 

[S'mon]

Only if one disregards the "free kriegsspiel" idea you (I think?) introduced upthread.

Well the two seem to be used pretty much synonymously as far as I can tell!

Going especially by what I've seen on RPGnet, I think a lot of people who speak of MMI don't believe in the possibility of the kind of objective judicious ruling necesary for Free Kriegsspiel. They seem to live in a bit of a nightmare world where GM rulings and even reality itself are forms of arbitrary and incomprehensible tyranny.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes and no. Firstly, MMI can, and often does, exist without explicit permission seeking. If the GM has authority to negate action declarations, then you're in MMI territory because any declaration must at least be implicitly be approved by the GM.

I played Mother May I as a kid and it was about having to ask every time if you were allowed to do the idea you have to get across the lawn. And if you forgot to ask correctly, you went back to the beginning as a punishment. D&D has never been about that. Even in its heyday during 1e, and the DM had authority to do whatever he wanted, it still wasn't Mother May I. Why? Because in addition to the rules, it's also a social game where the DM is obligated not to be a douche. So when the player said that his character was going around the sequoia tree to see what was on the other side, he wasn't asking permission, despite the fact that the DM could have been a douche and said no.

Not one edition of D&D has risen to the level of Mother May I on its own. Some very rare bad DMs can bring it there, but that's an issue with that particular jerk, not the system.

 

[Maxperson]

They are not incompatible.

Heh. If I were him, I'd have gone with, "Playing D&D sounds a lot like S'mon says."

 

[Ovinomancer]

Heh. If I were him, I'd have gone with, "Playing D&D sounds a lot like S'mon says."

No, I played S'mon says as a kid and it requires someone to say, out loud, to the other players, "S'mon says." You are clearly incorrect.

 

[pemerton]

I think a lot of people who speak of MMI don't believe in the possibility of the kind of objective judicious ruling necesary for Free Kriegsspiel.

My view - based on a combination of experience with RPGing and knowledge of Prussian military culture and upper-class culture more generally - is that it depends on combining (i) a fairly narrow basis of fiction/shared imaginary space from which rulings are going to be derived, with (ii) a high degree of shared understanding of the nature and implications of that fiction/SIS.

I think you can see both things at work in the formative period of D&D. The shared fiction is predominantly rather Spartan dungeons or ecologically and topographically rather abstract wildernesses. This is the narrow basis I mentioned. And you can see very strong emergent and iterative cultural understandings of what is or isn't possible, a fair "move", etc within that space - Gygax's DMG is notoriously replete with these, which is what makes bits of it so hard to make sense of to readers who weren't part of that shared culture. Examples include: his discussion of how to manage the passage of time, which assumes without stating that the campaign world is being run for multiple groups multiple evenings per week; his discussion around what is appropriate for non-Monty Haul treasure placement, which has to be reconciled with his XP tables and the idea that 10 magic items should be a genuine limit for a paladin; the obsession with concealed pits as traps and the rules for detecting them, but the relative absence of assassins and the relative unclarity in how the surprise rules should work when one side is setting up an ambush; etc.

My own view is that once the campaign world - talking now not just about background colour and "Gygaxian naturalism" but about the actual subject matter of play - becomes anything like as rich as the real world (and Traveller and Runequest are the earliest RPGs I know of to try and present such gameworlds) then the feasibility of free kriegsspiel adjudication rapidly diminishes.

When mainstream D&D play entered this sort of period is hard to establish with any confidence, for me at least. Tracy Hickman's Desert of Desolation modules are often held up as being early examples of "story"-driven modules, but when I was able to pick them up second-hand a few years ago and have a read of them, they struck me as very dungeon-crawly with a bit of a puzzle-solving overlay. So in my thinking it still comes back to Dragonlance - if that is going to be played not as a dungeon crawl to beat a black dragon but as a genuine "story"-driven experience then I think the Free Kriegsspiel possibilities drop away. No matter how much backstory there is about the Tanis-Kitiar relationship, I don't think there can be objective Free Kriegsspiel determinations of whether or not she would be willing to kill him on the field of battle. There's no "objective" understanding of human emotions and emotional responses that will allow the GM to decide that, and that will bring it within the field of "knowable" prospects for the players. The difference from a covered pit trap, in these respects, could hardly be greater!

They seem to live in a bit of a nightmare world where GM rulings and even reality itself are forms of arbitrary and incomprehensible tyranny.

I don't know about tyranny; but if the reality of human emotions was as non-arbitrary as I think it needs to be for Free Kriegsspiel adjudication to work, then we would have far fewer songs, poems and rancorous relationship breakups!

If one thinks about literal Free Kriegsspiel, the main emotional factor is morale. But that is not handled by attempting to determine the emotional reactions of any single figure: it's handled by imposing "population"-level generalisations grounded in a shared experience of how those populations respond. Clearly even some of those experiences can produce false population-level conclusions: it seems likely that French adjudicators of Free Kriegsspield would have rated morale as too high a factor in relation to infantry success in contexts of "machine"-warfare; and likewise that many pre-WWII adjudicators would have rated civilian morale against terror bombing as far more likely to break than history has revealed to be the case.

But once we get to single figures, and how they would respond to former loves, whether they have to go to a meeting at a teahouse or just want to take some downtime there, how they might respond to an SOS signal, etc - well, I'm very sceptical that Free Kriegsspiel methods of adjudication are applicable.