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

[Sadras]

Would you say it is fair to call this sort of "kitchen sink" approach "unconstrained (by system) GMing?"

Yes. I find D&D lends itself to adopt, borrow and steal from other great systems and playstyles.

 

[Sadras]

I like my wife more than I like gaming, so she has playing declaration veto power. She's a good wife, though, so rarely says no and then only for reasons clearly established in the marriage prior to the play declaration.

I did not mean to imply anything negative, perhaps I should have used an emoji. I too have to clear it up with the wife beforehand given that we host 90% of the games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In a conversation about transport modes, if someone says "I ride my bike because I need to get from A to B" that tends to imply that other modes (eg walking) aren't so good at getting from A to B. Alternatively, if someone thought that walking was as good as riding for getting from A to B, then they would (I think) be unlikely to point to it gets me from A to B as a reason in favour of riding rather than walking.

I don’t think that “I ride my bike to get from point A to B” has the implications you seem to think it does. I don’t think we should infer anything beyond the fact that this person chooses to ride a bike. It’s their personal preference. We don’t have enough information to know why they don’t opt for other methods. Not without asking.

I'm not saying I'm puzzled by the usage. I'm disagreeing with it. Those are different things.

Well, if you’re not puzzled by it, then you understood the intent, correct? If so, why disagree? Is it the label...the words chosen to express the idea...that you have a problem with?

And if so, then why not allow Max the same complaint regarding the label “Mother May I”?

You may be addressing the wrong poster here. I'm not offended and have never said anything to the contrary.

Ah perhaps offense is too strong a word. You seemed...bothered? annoyed? mildly perturbed?....enough by the terms used to start a new thread explaining in a very literal way a conparison that was made casually and metaphorically.

But plenty of other posters have also been looking for offense. I don’t think that Mother May I as it was used in the OP of the original thread was used in any kind of insulting manner. Nevertheless some have taken offense to it. I think that a big part of the problem in these conversations is that many folks are overly defensive of their playstyle, whether that style is openly criticized, or whether the criticism is perhaps only implied.

 

[Maxperson]

I agree, neither method is more realistic, because neither is realistic at all. Both are methods of determining fiction, which can be as realistic as you describe it. But, you will hear proponents of one of the methods often say that they use realism in their method. I think it's fair to point out that they're just using their personal judgement as to what makes sense in a fictional world and that has nothing at all to do with realism.

In your opinion. You shouldn't be presenting your opinion as if it were fact, because it's not.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I agree, neither method is more realistic, because neither is realistic at all. Both are methods of determining fiction, which can be as realistic as you describe it. But, you will hear proponents of one of the methods often say that they use realism in their method. I think it's fair to point out that they're just using their personal judgement as to what makes sense in a fictional world and that has nothing at all to do with realism.

I think honestly evaluating what you're doing when you play can lead to better play because you can avoid the potholes (cause you know where they are) and you will play with more discipline towards achieving play goals. I do not think that honest evaluation means you must accept one method is objectively better than the other. Subjectively, for you, absolutely one can be better.

Oh I agree with that. I enjoy these kinds of discussions. And I enjoy all kinds of game mechanics and GMing techniques. I would wager my games have improved because of conversations like these, and specifically because of some of the posters involved, pemerton included.

And I don’t mind questioning the use of a term. What seemed odd to me was that pemerton took issue with the way something was phrased, and then started a new thread about it. Then Max expresses concern over how something is phrased and is told that the label doesn’t matter, it’s the intent that we should focus on in order to have a meaningful discussion.

Those two things just jumped out as me as somewhat incompatible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Exactly! And the problem with the answers of the GM here is not 'good GMing' or 'bad GMing' as some have insisted. It is a matter of first principles. NO GM can possibly say what a single NPC 'would do' in a situation with anything like authority. That is the ONLY authority they can rely on is some native authority of the GM, or to be precise the 'rules of the game' in the sense that those rules are "the GM decides as he sees fit". The other alternative is something else, of course. That is some sort of other mechanism decides, at least to some degree. The GM is constrained to act on the plot only in certain ways, the players can spend meta-game resources/take actions which allow them to introduce their answer, an allowable action declaration exists in a game where GMs don't have the option to block them, etc.

 

[Sadras]

You made an edit so you could put words in my mouth?

Apologies then for that.
Then I'm not sure why your good will was lost. It has been established at least by one poster, repeatedly, how such a word has been misapplied to their gamestyle. It has been mentioned by many posters that such word is a perjorative. Two posters commented that the perjorative was mentioned in a less than friendly post, with said post described as hostile.

It seems strange to me then for you to be offended for my characterisation of the other posters' use of the word.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I would take it further. There is a right answer. The troops depicted were all actually present at Waterloo and engaged in combat against each other on that day. There isn't just a 'single right set of possibilities', there is AN ANSWER. If the Old Guard and the Young Guard had charged together up the ridge 30 minutes sooner, then they would or wouldn't have broken through. One of those possibilities is what WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. There is no doubt there. True, it may not be determinable which IS correct, but there is a fundamental sense in which one of those answers is truly correct, and with sufficient information it could be determined which it is, with absolute certainty.

The possible actions of a fantastical non-existent NPC of an imaginary race in an imaginary world with an imaginary culture and religion, and largely unknown background isn't something which HAS a determinable answer to it. 'truth' isn't even a possible description of any hypothesized set of actions.

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.

Yup. I really never have understood why any of this would be controversial. I could write a book explaining exactly how RPGs progressed from one sort of game to the other through a series of accommodations, realizations, and elaborations. It shouldn't even be remotely controversial.

 

[Sadras]

But plenty of other posters have also been looking for offense. I don’t think that Mother May I as it was used in the OP of the original thread was used in any kind of insulting manner. Nevertheless some have taken offense to it. I think that a big part of the problem in these conversations is that many folks are overly defensive of their playstyle, whether that style is openly criticized, or whether the criticism is perhaps only implied.

It was not the OP I had issue with. I thought the OP explained his position quite well.

 

[pemerton]

You seemed...bothered? annoyed? mildly perturbed?....enough by the terms used to start a new thread explaining in a very literal way a conparison that was made casually and metaphorically.

A pretty clear claim was made - that GM decides outcome of an action declaratoin about looking for sect members is no more "Mother may I" than real life.

I'm not interested in the terminology, and certainly not perturbed by it - I inherited it from another thread. I'm interested in the claim: I disagree with it. It trades on a notion that encountering the world as an external constraint in real life is not relevantly different from encountering the GM as an external constraint in RPGing. But in fact the difference is night and day, for the reasons I gave in the OP. Only tne second is a fact about allocation of authority in a RPG - which is what the phrase "Mother may I" is getting at.

If someone doesn't want to play an RPG where the authority for establishing the ficiton lies, unilaterally, with one participant, they will want to avoid the GM decides approach. And to say that it is not more "Mother may I" than real life - that is, to say that it has nothing more to do with one-sided allocations of authority that real life - is just wrong.

I'm sure there are plenty of players who enjoy the GM decides approach - this thread isn't about whether or not it's enjoyable, it's about clear analysis of where authority lies in establishing RPG fiction and outcomes.