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

[pemerton]

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.

Here's my response to this: [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] started a thread about how to handle certain aspects of scene framing and adjudication/resolution "without making players play the 'Mother may I' game". From reading the OP of that thread, it's clear that innerdude was not looking for advice on how, as a GM, to avoid "being a douche" or being a "very rare bad DM".

It's quite clear that you wouldn't have framed [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION]'s question the same way that he did. But given that he framed it using the terminology that he did, and that the subsequent discussions have taken up that terminology, it adds nothing to them to repeatedly insist that a different word should have been used.

You may have noted that in my posts, when I'm not responding to another poster who has used the phrase "Mother may I", I have generally referred to GM decides as a method of adjudication and resolution. That's because the topic of this thread is not what word/phrase would it have been best for innerdude to use. The topic is - given that we all know what innerdude was talking about, is the thing he is trying to avoid any closer to reality than the sorts of techniques that would help him avoid it?

That's not a question about terminology. It doesn't get answered by arguing about the proper usage of "Mother may I".

 

[Maxperson]

Here's my response to this: [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] started a thread about how to handle certain aspects of scene framing and adjudication/resolution "without making players play the 'Mother may I' game". From reading the OP of that thread, it's clear that innerdude was not looking for advice on how, as a GM, to avoid "being a douche" or being a "very rare bad DM".

It's quite clear that you wouldn't have framed [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION]'s question the same way that he did. But given that he framed it using the terminology that he did, and that the subsequent discussions have taken up that terminology, it adds nothing to them to repeatedly insist that a different word should have been used.

We've been through this before. People don't get to take a word or phrase and re-define it for personal use. It means what it means, and in this case it's a pejorative for "very rare bad DMs who are douches." If that's not what he meant, and I believe you when you say that it wasn't, then he should not have use the term Mother May I.

I and others also don't have to try and be mind readers about whether or not someone is using a term properly, or has re-defined it into something that it isn't. It's the responsibility of the OP to use terms in the proper manner. What is happening here is the one of the main reasons why that should be remembered by those who want to alter things.

In the last thread I engaged you in where you did this, I let you know that you when you try to re-define a word into something that it's not, you are derailing your thread from the outset. People are going to respond to that word as what it really means, not some new definition. This is true not only here, but on pretty much every other forum on the net where people meet to discuss things.

 

[S'mon]

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!

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.

While I don't agree, I appreciate your perspective!
I do agree there is a strong element of being on the same page in the 'Shared Imaginative Space'. Having some similar cultural grounding certainly helps. Eg for Primeval Thule it helps to have some familiarity with swords & sorcery tropes. OTOH part of play is exploring the world-fiction and finding out how the fictional world works. That's one reason a GM needs to be ready to justify his/her decisions.

I agree that Free Kriegsspiel used for military training has an issue with referee cultural biases, so eg if the Royal Navy are running a Free Kriegsspiel in 1912 they're not going to have the RN battlecruisers explode and sink under German fire the way that happened at Jutland (and again in WW2 when Tirpitz sank The Hood). But this is much less of an issue with a fictional universe than a serious attempt to emulate the real one. Everyone accepts that the SIS is not the real world and that it operates under different laws. It only requires that the players trust the GM, and that the GM adjudication be reasonable and reasonably consistent. If the GM is running Dragonlance then the GM should be
aiming to emulate high fantasy norms, but whether an NPC decides to kill a foe certainly can be decided by dice roll just as much as whether the 9th Hussars will stand against the Old Guard's advance. I generally find that if I play an NPC for a long time their internal motivations are clear, I 'feel' the NPC just as much as if they were a PC, and no roll needed. Rolls are more for morale checks for the hobgoblins I've been playing for three combat rounds, not the 20th level PC's Paladin wife I've been playing for three years.

 

[pemerton]

I agree that Free Kriegsspiel used for military training has an issue with referee cultural biases

<snip>

But this is much less of an issue with a fictional universe than a serious attempt to emulate the real one. Everyone accepts that the SIS is not the real world and that it operates under different laws. It only requires that the players trust the GM, and that the GM adjudication be reasonable and reasonably consistent.

<snip>

I generally find that if I play an NPC for a long time their internal motivations are clear, I 'feel' the NPC just as much as if they were a PC, and no roll needed.

For me, these bits I've highlighted bring out the contrast of perspective between (i) what I might call the strong "GM decides" approach and (ii) my own attempt to distinguish free kriegsspiel-type GM decides from "Mother may I"-type GM decides. In particular, I feel that free kriegsspiel doesn't (fully? adequately? - an adverb is needed here and those are the ones I can think of in the right general neighbourhood) survive the transition you describe from being "disciplined" by the real world to being disciplined primarily by the GMs sense of what's reasonable and consistent.

If I had to choose a word to fasten on and express the previous sentence, it would be objective: free kriegsspiel disciplined by the real world can be objective, in a way that "free kriegsspiel" disciplined only by the referee's sense of reasonableness and consistency can't be. Those latter things are, almost by definition I think, subjective.

As you'll have already worked out from my earlier post, I see pit traps as falling on the "objective" side here, but most individual (as opposed to "population"-level) human behaviour as falling on the other side.

This also leads me to think about the issue of trust in the GM as being different in the two cases: of course the free kriegsspiel participants have to trust the referee to be objective - but that's something like trusting an encyclopedia to give you accurate information. But in a Tanis and Kitiara-type case - ie the ones I put on the other side of my posited distinction - the trust is more like trusting the GM to present something plausible. And plausibility is a very different thing from objectively accurate.

To try and convey the same point in a slightly different way, the free kriegsspiel referee is trying to articulate the single right answer to the situation. But when the threshold is plausibility only - as is the case, I am asserting, for individual-level human behaviour - then there is no single right answer. There's a range of possible answers, with the referee fastening on one. Rather than GM decides I might redescribe it as GM chooses to try and convey the way in which I think it differs from free kriegsspiel.

 

[pemerton]

We've been through this before. People don't get to take a word or phrase and re-define it for personal use.

Well, actually, this happens all the time. You do it too! - you have your preferred usages of various words and phrases which not every competent English-speaking RPGer accepts or agrees with.

Human communication is possible in part because most competent speakers are very capable of recognising and making allowances for these idiosyncratic variations in usage.

If that's not what he meant, and I believe you when you say that it wasn't, then he should not have use the term Mother May I.

Even supposing this was true - and for the reasons just given I'm not sure that it is - the post is already made and some hundreds of posts have followed it. The event has happened, the deed is done, lamenting it seems largely pointless.

I and others also don't have to try and be mind readers about whether or not someone is using a term properly, or has re-defined it into something that it isn't. It's the responsibility of the OP to use terms in the proper manner.

It doesn't require mind reading to work out what is meant, though. It's trivial to work it out from context. Which is my point.

 

[S'mon]

But in a Tanis and Kitiara-type case - ie the ones I put on the other side of my posited distinction - the trust is more like trusting the GM to present something plausible. And plausibility is a very different thing from objectively accurate.

To try and convey the same point in a slightly different way, the free kriegsspiel referee is trying to articulate the single right answer to the situation.

Single right answer? But when I watched a TV show with British senior military officers playing the Battle of Waterloo (Napoleon won) - the referee frequently said stuff like "On a 4+ the infantry withstand the charge" and then rolled the die. Obviously there were two possible answers - either the infantry held the line, or they broke and ran. There were other 'wrong' answers - answers outside the bounds of possibility, like the infantry are wiped out to the last man, or they turn into angels and start shooting laser beams from their eyes. The possible answers are the 'plausible' ones, exactly the same as with adjudicating individual NPC decisions.

 

[pemerton]

Single right answer? But when I watched a TV show with British senior military officers playing the Battle of Waterloo (Napoleon won) - the referee frequently said stuff like "On a 4+ the infantry withstand the charge" and then rolled the die. Obviously there were two possible answers - either the infantry held the line, or they broke and ran. There were other 'wrong' answers - answers outside the bounds of possibility, like the infantry are wiped out to the last man, or they turn into angels and start shooting laser beams from their eyes. The possible answers are the 'plausible' ones, exactly the same as with adjudicating individual NPC decisions.

I can happily accept that in certain cases the single right answer isn't ascertainable - there are limits to human epistemic prowess - but there is a single right set of possibilities - either the infantry withstand the charge, or they break - and this is disciplining the referee's decision to set some odds and call for the roll.

In the individual-level human behaviour cases, my view is that there is no single right set of possibilities, because where individual-level human behaviour is concerned that already admits indefinitely many possibilities. That's not to say anything goes - I think that most tables would accept that if Tanis meets Kitiara on the field of battle she's not going to rush up and offer him a rose - but the range of possibilities is very great - certainly more than two - and so there is no objective answer in that respect before we even get to the point of setting the odds.

I think this is what, in the history of RPG development, has driven (as a trend, not uniformally) character/theme-driven RPGing towards "say 'yes' or roll the dice", or similar sorts of approaches. (Ie I don't think this is just a coincidental convergence.) I'll try and explain why.

In the Waterloo example, there's also a sense in which there are indefinitely many possibilities - it's always possible that, right at that moment, an earthquake occurs and swallows up the infantry line, or a great wave sweeps them away (Belgium is a flat country, though Waterloo is a fair way inland, but hopefully you get my point), or whatever. But those possibilities are sufficiently remote and non-salient that the referee doesn't need to bother with them. The only salient possibilities are objectively ascertainable - holding or breaking.

In the Tanis-and-Kitiara example, how do we decide what the salient possibilities are, given the indefinite range of possible and plausible responses in human interaction? One way is GM chooses, which is the traditional way of running the DL modules. The other obvious way is that each participant in the play situation - player and GM - gets to nominate a salient possibility. The player puts forward his/hers, the GM puts forward his/hers. Then, when the dice are rolled, if the player wins his/her choice comes good; if the player loses the GM's choice comes good.

And this can be generalised to any situation in the game in which the inherent possibilities are multiple, but in which the player and GM can each fasten on one as the one s/he wants to put forward. It can handle not only Where can we find some sect members, where the player puts forward "In the teahouse" as their salient possibility, but even purely binary matters like Is there a secret door here? It seems that "yes" and "no" are the only possible options in this latter case, but if both are plausible then this can be resolved by the player opting for one, the GM the other, and making a check to see which is to be the case.

So I think it is the individual-level human-behaviour stuff - which is at the heart of character-driven play - that creates the impetus for "say 'yes' or roll the dice", but the method turns out to be easily generalised to all parts of the game, including doing "exploration" using the same dice-based resolution approach as we use for other elements of play, rather than relying on maps and notes as per the wargaming tradition. (In a Waterloo free kriegsspiel, rather than "Is there a secret door" one player might ask "Are their clouds"? I can imagine the referee rolling dice to determine the answer. But I think in free kriegsspiel that wouldn't be the default approach to establishing these "backstory" elements.)

And once exploration is done in that way, it too gets swallowed up into the theme stuff - if no one cares about secret doors than dice will never be rolled to determine whether or not there are any, but maybe the presence of curtains in rooms becomes a hot issue for that table for whatever reason. (Why do D&D maps and keys obsess over room height but not ceiling colour? I guess because we have a wall-climbing thief class, and rules for monster size and weapon length and the like, but no colour mage or interior decorator class. Given that we do have a druid class, why do D&D maps and keys not obsess over what plant life and (non-giant) vermin live in the dungeon? I guess because the druid is something of an ad hoc add on to the core dungeoneering game!)

In this way I think the move away from GM chooses for certain sorts of character-driven stuff leads to a more general move away from a wargame-type way of establishing setting and backstory to a much more "narrative"/"thematic" way of doing so. There's an inner logic to it, though obviously not every game has to travel all the way along the logical arrow.

 

[pemerton]

as I already posted upthread there are some contexts in which even the Death Knight's immunity to fear may be an example of "Mother may I" (eg as an important aspect of play, a PC has sworn to drive away the next foe s/he encounters by sheer terror alone, and then the GM presents a Death Knight as the next foe and thus dictates the failure of the PC's oath).

There no Mother May I there, either. The player is not asking if his PC can do something. He is doing it. It's also okay to fail at something. Even something the PC swears to do.

This goes right back to the issue [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] was concerned with in the OP on the other thread, namely how do framing, player-chosen stakes, and adjudication/resolution interact? And as [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] noted, we can't talk about these things meaningfully without attending to differences between systems.

Upthread, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], in reply to [MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION], explored this in the context of Dungeon World. Their point was that, although in DW all backstory authority rests with the GM, the principles of the game oblige the GM (i) to have regard to player-chosen stakes in (ii) adjudication - eg establishing the outcomes of an attempt to Spout Lore or Discern Realities - and (iii) framing. In respect of the lattermost, the GM is obliged to build on the fiction that was established via adjudication. Thus (i) feeds into (ii) feeds into (iii), and so even though players don't have backstory authority, their choices as to what matters - looking for secret doors, swearing oaths to drive foes away in terror, whatever it might be - ought to feed directly into the GM's authorship of the shared fiction.

It would be incredibly bad DW GMing to simply frame the PC who has sworn the terror oath into a conflict with a fear-immune death knight, full stop and end of story. Such a thing might be one way of the GM establishing adverse consequences for failed checks; but in that case it wouldn't come from nowhere, and wouldn't be a case simply of GM decides.

Other RPGs take different approaches to content introduction, which affects what can feasibly be put at stake in those games. In Classic Traveller - which as I have said is a dice-driven game - every time the PC enter or leave a system in their starship, a check for a starship encounter has to be made. This is determined by rolling on a table, but as the rules say (Book 2 original ed, p 36), "This result may, and should, be superseded by the referee in specific situations, especially if a newly entered system is in military or civil turmoil, or involves other circumstances." Ie the referee is expected to have regard to the fiction in determining starship encounters.

This means that if you're playing Traveller by the rules, then it won't support a player making an encounter with some specific sort of ship a matter of significance. In fact, it works best when what the players care about, in the play of their PCs is something that can be furthered, built upon or otherwise played with whatever sort of starship might be encountered. Thankfully, the overall orientation of the game, and the implicit backstory of an Imperium loosely ruling a confederation of highly-varied but often noble-ruled worlds, tends to make this fairly easy.

D&D is, proceduarlly, very relaxed about content-introduction except perhaps in its most austere, dungeon-crawling, wandering-monster table form: but in this latter case it is highly random and (in my experience) doesn't make integration of thematic focus fairly easy in the way that Traveller does. For instance, the game presents many types of PCs who might swear all sorts of oaths that orient them in particular ways to particlar foes (fighters, paladins, rangers, clerics, monks, even druids and perhaps even assassins) but the random tables won't make it easy for these oaths to play out in any narratively satisfying way; and if its Gm decides then it's all on the GM to handle these aspects of content introduction. The possibilities of unsatisfactory play experiences in either case aren't addressed at all by saying "It's OK to fail".

 

[S'mon]

In the Tanis-and-Kitiara example, how do we decide what the salient possibilities are, given the indefinite range of possible and plausible responses in human interaction?

In the Kitiara case, I normally do it by having an internal aspect on Kitiara. I feel what Kitiara is feeling, which determines her reaction to Tanis. This may be mediated by dice rolls - Tanis rolls Intimidate/Persuasion/Deception, and if I don't have a strong internal aspect on Kitiara yet I may roll a Reaction check for her. Eg I once rolled a 1e AD&D Reaction check for a young noblewoman whose stage coach (Tabitha Kallent was with her aunt Gertrude on their way to enrol in college in Yggsburgh) had just been rescued from brigands by the PCs. I rolled 00% - the best possible result - so naturally she fell wildly in love with her rescuer. Within a few sessions I had a good internal aspect on Tabitha and no longer needed to roll for her as she came to feel like a real person; I could tell what she was thinking and feeling.

 

[pemerton]

I once rolled a 1e AD&D Reaction check for a young noblewoman whose stage coach (Tabitha Kallent was with her aunt Gertrude on their way to enrol in college in Yggsburgh) had just been rescued from brigands by the PCs. I rolled 00% - the best possible result - so naturally she fell wildly in love with her rescuer.

Naturally!

In the Kitiara case, I normally do it by having an internal aspect on Kitiara.

<snip>

Within a few sessions I had a good internal aspect on Tabitha and no longer needed to roll for her as she came to feel like a real person; I could tell what she was thinking and feeling.

But what about Tanis's player's internal aspect on Kitiara? Tanis has spent years (? or however long) in love with her, in her company - it seems plausible that Tanis knows her as well as, if not better than, the GM.

(This also relates to comments [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] has made over the years about various approaches to immersion.)