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

[Lanefan]

It strikes me that this entire concept, and all the baggage attendant onto it, which includes a lot of the anti-meta-gaming creed, as well as the whole "you're just a small guy without any special place in the world" is all basically just a shadow of Gygax (or again maybe I should be more fair to call it a shadow of Dave Arneson).

Errrr...OK, I suppose?

Particularly Blackmoor, from what I understand, was basically a pure 'skilled play' experience. The mechanics of the game were merely a tool, much like weather tables in Kriegspiel games. EVERYTHING was a challenge to the player, his knowledge and skill at play of the game. Any advantage imputed to a player (his PC) HAD to be earned because this was a competitive game! At the same time, skill must produce advantages, so there was always the nut of a problem there.

The irony is that the lesson "never give the players anything for free" was fully absorbed, but the actual context of skilled play dungeoneering was lost! There is no reason, from a standpoint of how a game should or must work for these things to exist anymore, unless you really do play very much like Dave did (and if so, that's great). But in terms of modern D&D play these restrictions are, well, highly restrictive! And they carry with them a sort of antagonistic play paradigm where a main part of the DM's job is to crack down on players, to make them toe some sort of line and not get out of hand. Its weird, and to be perfectly honest [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] a lot of your responses to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] kind of reek of it.

As I wasn't there at the time I have no real idea how Dave Arneson played, and from what little I know of Gygax's actual play it didn't always hew too close to what was written in his own DMG.

That said, I do see the game as having an element of DM-v-players, in two ways:
One, that it's the players' duty to advocate for their characters however they can and it's the DM's duty to stop them when said advocacy goes too far.
Two, that it's the DM's duty to (within the bounds of fairness) make things miserable for the PCs and thus by extension the players, and it's the players' duty to - via their PCs - try to overcome whatever the DM throws at them.

Throw in that it's also very possible for the players via their PCs to make things miserable for each other should they so desire*.

* - e.g. one PC steals a very valuable magic item from another PC, gets a near-exact duplicate of it made, then sets up an entire adventure by hiding them both and sending some characters - including the ex-owner - in after them. Been there, done that; it was my item that was stolen and duplicated, and I got it back after some risk. This happened a very long time ago real-time; both the thief and I are still active today, and let's just say revenge is a dish best served cold....

As for never give the players (or PCs) anything for free: more or less, correct. And if something is to be given for free try to ensure everyone has a vaguely even chance at it e.g. through a random table if only to avoid any appearance of favouritism. By the same token, however, rewards earned through the game's reward mechanism (xp, in D&D) should go only to those who earned them.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, this is simply a relic. In OD&D, or B/X, you would all start with a toss of 3d6x10 gold pieces and equip yourselves as best you could, then plunge into the dungeon in the hope of gathering loot to spend on more equipment, etc. This was the very ur-game of D&D, the origin and font of all its traditions and concepts. Even magic items and such were originally just sort of lucky finds or rewards for cleverness that let you loot better, or increase survival.

In that paradigm, to admit of a character which has an entourage, or even a suite of armor, is grossly unfair! The game is a contest in which the players compete (even though the PCs cooperate, this is a subtle point). A suite of chain armor was 90gp, a BIG advantage! You don't just give that away, its to be earned.

Exactly!

This is literally the schema which is still being played out in all these protestations of strictures, even though the form of the game is almost utterly different and they make little sense today.

But why is the form of the game so different today, is the question; and my own take on answering that won't please many here I'm sure:

Player entitlement.

Starting with 3e it was obvious that the game was being designed by ex-players to remove many of the frustrations encountered by players in earlier editions - examples: no more level loss, spellcasting much easier, level-up much faster - without perhaps realizing that it was those very frustrations that made success all the more worth celebrating.

Consider, this kind of thinking is almost meaningless in 4e. The PCs totally cooperate as a team, with no provision for any other possibility. It doesn't matter where some extra equipment comes from, or who's background produces the companion character. At worst one might consider how to insure that the 'noble' and the other character backgrounds lead to reasonably equitable 'screen time'.

The bit I've bolded tells me a lot.

First and foremost, it screams out that the system would like to severely limit player choice as to their PCs' personalities, characterizations and - yes - alignments. No chaotic free-thinkers need apply here, folks; you have to be part of the groupthink, always do what's expected of you, and always stick to the plan both as player and PC. No individualism allowed in these parts, bucko; no going off script, no standing out from the crowd. Bleah!

Second, it tells me the system wants all resources to belong to the party rather than to any one PC even if that PC is the reason those resources exist (e.g. the entourage). Individual greed? Not here.

Third, it tells me the system expects the players to focus on optimization in all things from party composition through individual character builds to field tactics.

And fourth, it removes yet one more source of player frustration; that being other players who don't go along with the herd.

No wonder 4e never appealed to me.

 

[Lanefan]

And the point extends beyond nobility and loot. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] asks whether the noble PC's entourage would come "out into the field". But the very notion of "the field" itself rests on an assumption about play which simply doesn't generalise across all of RPGing. In the Burning Wheel game that I GM, for instance, there is no "field".

In that BW game there's no downtime, then; no safe place the PCs can hole up and relax for a while.

If the above are both true then the PCs are "in the field" all the time; and regardless, the question of whether the entourage would have accompanied the noble remains valid in any case.

 

[pemerton]

In that BW game there's no downtime, then; no safe place the PCs can hole up and relax for a while.

If the above are both true then the PCs are "in the field" all the time; and regardless, the question of whether the entourage would have accompanied the noble remains valid in any case.

There's no "field" because there are no "adventures" in the D&D sense, at least as I run it. The PCs don't go "into the field" to adventure, and then return to a "safe place" for downtime. The PCs do their thing as their motivations and capabilities dictate.

the question of whether the entourage would have accompanied the noble remains valid in any case.

There are rules for having an entourage as an element of one's PC. But they don't depend upon any idea of, or contrast between, "at home" and "in the field".

 

[Lanefan]

But in other D&D versions, which have no rule for determining children eaten per orc-time-mile-unit, ....

Just because of this, if something like this ever comes up in my game I'll design a rule for it and call it the Pemerton Otmu rule.

 

[Lanefan]

There's no "field" because there are no "adventures" in the D&D sense, at least as I run it. The PCs don't go "into the field" to adventure, and then return to a "safe place" for downtime. The PCs do their thing as their motivations and capabilities dictate.

So in effect they're always adventuring, then, and thus always in the field. Fair enough.

There are rules for having an entourage as an element of one's PC. But they don't depend upon any idea of, or contrast between, "at home" and "in the field".

Sure; but when the player decides ten sessions in that his PC is a high noble the questions still arise: should this PC have an entourage somewhere and if yes, would any of it have been accompanying him right from square one and-or still accompanying him now.

 

[pemerton]

but when the player decides ten sessions in that his PC is a high noble the questions still arise: should this PC have an entourage somewhere and if yes, would any of it have been accompanying him right from square one and-or still accompanying him now.

But we already know the answer to the bit that I've bolded - the PC was not accompanied by any entourage, given that absence of such entourage is already an established element in the fiction.

(Subject to corner cases - maybe as part of collaboration between players, another PC is revealed to have been an entourage all along!)

 

[Sadras]

...when the player decides ten sessions in that his PC is a high noble the questions still arise: should this PC have an entourage somewhere and if yes, would any of it have been accompanying him right from square one and-or still accompanying him now.

My issue with this is not the entourage but I would like the player to provide a reason why their character may not have been recognised in these 10 sessions OR maybe they were (DM move to be played out later).

 

[pemerton]

I've never had a player decide that his/her PC was a noble during the course of play.

But I have had a player do something similar. At the start of the campaign we thought his PC was an animal (fox) that had been able (through meditation and other appropriate practices) to transform itself into a human (inspired by the movie Green Snake). At the start of the campaign the character was living in a monastery, where he had been taken by the monks when they found him dazed and confused in the nearby forest.

(The system was Rolemaster and, mechanically, the character was a human with variant stat modifiers and access to the Control Lycanthropy skill, which he could use to turn into a fox.)

But some time into the campaign (maybe a year or so?) the player decided that his PC was really an animal lord who had been banished to earth from Heaven, and stripped of memories and power, for some transgression. This revelation was authored by the player between sessions, and presented in the form of a written reflection by the abbot of the monastery, expressing doubt that an ordinary fox could really, no matter how diligently it tried, turn itself into a human having the full capabilities (which included mentalism spellcasting) that this person had.

This is c 20 years ago now, and so I can't remember the details of what the player established at that time, and how much of the PC's backstory came out subsequently during play - the campaign involved a significant animal lords arc (derived from the module OA7 Test of the Samurai) and that certainly drove some of this. The change of backstory certainly gave me material from which to establish ingame situations, like attempts by Constables of Hell to capture the PC and take him back to Heaven to be tried for his wrongful violation of the terms of his banishment (ie by living as a human rather than a fox).

This didn't cause problems. It propelled the game forward. As did other elements of the PCs in that game, like the social connections and obligations of the two noble PCs, and the affair that their retainer was having with a daughter of a powerful dragon family. (Which also had soap-operatic connections to one of the animal lords.)

As [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] said upthread, there is a Gygaxian/Arnesonian tradition of PCs as "a small guy without any special place in the world", rootless wanderers with no motivations other than entering dungeons to beat traps and collect loot, and no social connections other than the NPCs they meet in the dungeon and, perhaps, the armies they establish when they reach name level (turning the game from a RPG in the stricter sense into a combination of wargame and Diplomacy).

But that's not the only possible approach, and games won't break if players play more socially and cosmologically grounded characters. I didn't need to bring any new RPG tech to Rolemaster to make the campaign I've described work.

 

[Ovinomancer]

His uncle died 6 years before he was born.

I read his diary, obvs.

Also, if you as GM are doing this kind of thing, you're very much in.MMI territory. The point I'm nakinng is that it's very much in character to have knowledge about the game world while having knowledge of modern chemistry is not.