D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[FrogReaver]

Sure, any technique has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think it’s pretty hyperbolic to say you can’t have both meaningful exploratory play and heightened drama using the same techniques. Sure, there are techniques that are more suited to one or the other, but I think it’s entirely possible to do both, and even do them both well.

Isn’t the way to accomplish both to use both sets of techniques in the same game. Whatother way would you accomplish that?

 

[pemerton]

Largely you cannot get both meaningful exploratory play and heightened drama with the same set of techniques.

I don’t agree.

I strongly agree with Campbell.

I think it’s pretty hyperbolic to say you can’t have both meaningful exploratory play and heightened drama using the same techniques. Sure, there are techniques that are more suited to one or the other, but I think it’s entirely possible to do both, and even do them both well.

Exploratory play - especially as found in D&D - requires techniques like time-keeping, mapping, wandering monster checks or similar threats/realities of resource attrition.

Heightened drama requires management of pacing, typically under the GM's control; and requires clear stakes that typically are established in response to player declared actions rather than as "neutral" outgrowths of an impartially-refereed environment.

The techniques are - in my experience, and for the reasons I've given - largely inconsistent with one another.

 

[Charlaquin]

Exploratory play - especially as found in D&D - requires techniques like time-keeping, mapping, wandering monster checks or similar threats/realities of resource attrition.

Heightened drama requires management of pacing, typically under the GM's control;

In my experience, timekeeping, randomly triggered encounters, and resource attrition are invaluable dramatic pacing tools.

and requires clear stakes that typically are established in response to player declared actions rather than as "neutral" outgrowths of an impartially-refereed environment.

I’m not sure what “[stakes as] neutral outgrowths of an impartially-refereed environment” means, but in my experience, clear stakes established in response to player declared actions are a great thing for exploratory play.

The techniques are - in my experience, and for the reasons I've given - largely inconsistent with one another.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what y’all mean by “exploratory play” and/or “heightened drama,” cause I’m not seeing this conflict between them that you’re describing.

 

[pemerton]

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what y’all mean by “exploratory play” and/or “heightened drama,” cause I’m not seeing this conflict between them that you’re describing.

Obviously @Campbell has his own views. But for my part, by heightened drama in RPG I would think of the sorts of things that happened in my Prince Valiant game yesterday: the PCs, having taken a castle at the end of the previous session, had to make a choice about who would become the next duke; they also had to decide what to do about the peasant army they had led; when a rival force arrived to relieve the castle, they had to negotiate with its leader; they also had to decide how to deal with the fiance of that leader, who was fleeing from him and accusing him of treating her cruelly; when the duke they had supported died from being shot by a treacherous arrow, they had to decide what approach to take to his sister who would succeed him; and this was complicated by the fact that one of their number had been smitten by the fleeing fiance after helping her into the castle by scaling a rope, it being impractical to lower the drawbridge in the face of the approaching forces.

In terms of events and tone, this is comparable to a light drama with a few comedic and soap-operatic elements. From the point of view of GMing techniques, this is reasonably similar to Apocalypse World or similar games, although with different tropes and a much lighter and less edgy tone. That is, there is a lightly-sketched backstory (in my case, drawn from the integration of four "episodes" (ie scenarios) found in the core rulebook for the game plus the Episode Book - A Prodigal Son - in Chains, A Woman in Distress 2, and A Challenge from a Kinght 3) which includes NPCs and their motivations; and that backstory has been established, and is presented, in such a fashion as to compel some sort of response from the players via their PCs. That compulsion is achieved by having the backstory and NPCs press upon matters or motivations that have been established by the players for their PCs.

This is not exploratory play. The players aren't exploring the gameworld - ie investigating it and learning its content. The GM is not presenting the gameworld in response to moves made by the players trying to learn what it contains. To put it in other words, the gameworld that is established and narrated by the GM is not neutral vis-a-vis what the players have their PCs do, and is not neutral vis-a-vis the goals players establish for their PCs. And there is no management of time, nor random encounters, in the fashion that are well-known in D&D play. The cutting from scene-to-scene, the establishing and management of consequences, and the presentation of new challenging events (like the arrival of the enemy force to relieve the castle) is established on the basis of narrative pacing concerns, not in a way that interacts with a resource management game that establishes player-side costs for engaging in exploration.

Of course it is possible to establish backstory, and narrate it, and to manage ingame time and the threats of encounters, in a way that is neutral vis-a-vis player action declarations and player goals established for their PCs. Moldvay gives advice on how to do this in the Basic rulebook; Gygax gives slightly different, and perhaps not quite as robust, advice along the same lines in his DMG. This will enhance exploratory play. But it will reduce drama in the sense I'm talking about.

 

[Campbell]

So when I talk about maintaining a heightened sense of risk, drama and danger I am mostly speaking to immediacy. I am talking about play that is intimately focused on this moment - right here, right now. A situation lays in front of the player characters that demands their attention. They need to decide what they do about it even if they decide to do nothing and the consequences of that decision will be felt immediately even if we have to use techniques like jump cuts to do it. What do you do right now in this moment?

In this sort of play the GM has a definite agenda. They are presenting a situation with stakes the characters should care about. They are following the fiction, but not in quite a naturalistic way. The priority is to make the decisions players make for their characters as consequential as possible. You make a threat and follow up on it or if the characters succeed the fiction immediately changes in a consequential way. You bring it. You make sure the tension of the moment is real and legitimate.

When I talk about exploratory play I am talking about an approach to running the game that is conflict neutral. Once the scenario is designed the GM is wholly an advocate for the fiction. We do not care what the characters are trying to accomplish, only what they actually do. We also do not care about things like immediacy of consequences or even if there are any consequences at all. The GM just follows the logic of the fiction based on what characters do in a completely naturalistic fashion. The players might do something today and not feel its impact until another 5 or 6 sessions. They might not even realize the impact they had.

Now I am not saying techniques for each approach cannot be used within the scope of same game or within the scope of a session. I am saying that within any given moment something has to take priority. When you use techniques like telegraphing, jump cuts, flashbacks, leading questions, provocative questions, directly associating consequences to what the players were hoping to achieve you are not in that moment engaging in naturalistic exploration of setting and character. At other moments you might be. Blades in the Dark for insistence is mostly concerned with immediacy during scores where the player characters are attempting heists, engaging in tense negotiations, or trying to capture an important official. Outside of scores play is largely naturalistic, the pace slows down, and we just follow causality.

You can very much combine techniques within the scope of a larger session, but the important thing to remember is that the more you lean one way the more you are not leaning the other. It's a bit of a tug of war. Naturalistic exploration depends on a GM who is a referee in every sense of the word. Their only agenda is fairness and accurately depicting the fictional world. Maintaining a heightened sense of drama depends on a GM who has a definite agenda in the way they present the fiction and resolve things. You can change this moment to moment, but as you do so you color the overall experience.

One is not better than the other and the right mixture might very much depend on the group. For my part I value a play experience that has more naturalistic exploration than @pemerton does. I like to let conflicts appear more naturally, but once they do I tend to lean hard into the conflicts.

 

[Bawylie]

Obviously @Campbell has his own views. But for my part, by heightened drama in RPG I would think of the sorts of things that happened in my Prince Valiant game yesterday: the PCs, having taken a castle at the end of the previous session, had to make a choice about who would become the next duke; they also had to decide what to do about the peasant army they had led; when a rival force arrived to relieve the castle, they had to negotiate with its leader; they also had to decide how to deal with the fiance of that leader, who was fleeing from him and accusing him of treating her cruelly; when the duke they had supported died from being shot by a treacherous arrow, they had to decide what approach to take to his sister who would succeed him; and this was complicated by the fact that one of their number had been smitten by the fleeing fiance after helping her into the castle by scaling a rope, it being impractical to lower the drawbridge in the face of the approaching forces.

In terms of events and tone, this is comparable to a light drama with a few comedic and soap-operatic elements. From the point of view of GMing techniques, this is reasonably similar to Apocalypse World or similar games, although with different tropes and a much lighter and less edgy tone. That is, there is a lightly-sketched backstory (in my case, drawn from the integration of four "episodes" (ie scenarios) found in the core rulebook for the game plus the Episode Book - A Prodigal Son - in Chains, A Woman in Distress 2, and A Challenge from a Kinght 3) which includes NPCs and their motivations; and that backstory has been established, and is presented, in such a fashion as to compel some sort of response from the players via their PCs. That compulsion is achieved by having the backstory and NPCs press upon matters or motivations that have been established by the players for their PCs.

This is not exploratory play. The players aren't exploring the gameworld - ie investigating it and learning its content. The GM is not presenting the gameworld in response to moves made by the players trying to learn what it contains. To put it in other words, the gameworld that is established and narrated by the GM is not neutral vis-a-vis what the players have their PCs do, and is not neutral vis-a-vis the goals players establish for their PCs. And there is no management of time, nor random encounters, in the fashion that are well-known in D&D play. The cutting from scene-to-scene, the establishing and management of consequences, and the presentation of new challenging events (like the arrival of the enemy force to relieve the castle) is established on the basis of narrative pacing concerns, not in a way that interacts with a resource management game that establishes player-side costs for engaging in exploration.

Of course it is possible to establish backstory, and narrate it, and to manage ingame time and the threats of encounters, in a way that is neutral vis-a-vis player action declarations and player goals established for their PCs. Moldvay gives advice on how to do this in the Basic rulebook; Gygax gives slightly different, and perhaps not quite as robust, advice along the same lines in his DMG. This will enhance exploratory play. But it will reduce drama in the sense I'm talking about.

Doesn’t have to.

... actually it doesn't at all. What? No.

I’ll grant that everyone has their preferences but for drama to exist, you need action and stakes. That’s all. Whether raiding a tomb or engaging in subtextual digs at a formal dinner, you can have very high levels of drama so long as there’s something at risk and something to root for or against.

And when I say stakes, they don’t even have to be lasting as long as the parties involved care. Did you happen to catch any football this weekend? Talk about drama.

 

[Lanefan]

Obviously @Campbell has his own views. But for my part, by heightened drama in RPG I would think of the sorts of things that happened in my Prince Valiant game yesterday: the PCs, having taken a castle at the end of the previous session, had to make a choice about who would become the next duke; they also had to decide what to do about the peasant army they had led; when a rival force arrived to relieve the castle, they had to negotiate with its leader; they also had to decide how to deal with the fiance of that leader, who was fleeing from him and accusing him of treating her cruelly; when the duke they had supported died from being shot by a treacherous arrow, they had to decide what approach to take to his sister who would succeed him; and this was complicated by the fact that one of their number had been smitten by the fleeing fiance after helping her into the castle by scaling a rope, it being impractical to lower the drawbridge in the face of the approaching forces.

In terms of events and tone, this is comparable to a light drama with a few comedic and soap-operatic elements. From the point of view of GMing techniques, this is reasonably similar to Apocalypse World or similar games, although with different tropes and a much lighter and less edgy tone. That is, there is a lightly-sketched backstory (in my case, drawn from the integration of four "episodes" (ie scenarios) found in the core rulebook for the game plus the Episode Book - A Prodigal Son - in Chains, A Woman in Distress 2, and A Challenge from a Kinght 3) which includes NPCs and their motivations; and that backstory has been established, and is presented, in such a fashion as to compel some sort of response from the players via their PCs. That compulsion is achieved by having the backstory and NPCs press upon matters or motivations that have been established by the players for their PCs.

This is not exploratory play.

Not the bit you've described, no.

All the requisite exploration was completed well prior to the scene(s) you describe, in order to lay the foundation for those scenes to occur.

The players aren't exploring the gameworld - ie investigating it and learning its content.

Not now, because it's already been done. It's a pretty short leap to envision the PCs scouting out the castle and surrounds, avoiding guards and suchlike, while planning out how they were going to attack and (in the end) capture it.

The GM is not presenting the gameworld in response to moves made by the players trying to learn what it contains. To put it in other words, the gameworld that is established and narrated by the GM is not neutral vis-a-vis what the players have their PCs do, and is not neutral vis-a-vis the goals players establish for their PCs. And there is no management of time, nor random encounters, in the fashion that are well-known in D&D play. The cutting from scene-to-scene, the establishing and management of consequences, and the presentation of new challenging events (like the arrival of the enemy force to relieve the castle) is established on the basis of narrative pacing concerns, not in a way that interacts with a resource management game that establishes player-side costs for engaging in exploration.

No time management? How does that jive with all those tasks on their plate, in terms of what has to be done in what order so things don't get out of hand; and whether things related to one task advance themselves while the PCs deal with other tasks?

An easy example: if we sort out and disband our peasant army now as opposed to later that'll make a huge difference to how things might shake out when the rival force (that we don't know is coming) arrives - there's a large gap between having an army on hand to fight back with and not having an army on hand...

Of course it is possible to establish backstory, and narrate it, and to manage ingame time and the threats of encounters, in a way that is neutral vis-a-vis player action declarations and player goals established for their PCs. Moldvay gives advice on how to do this in the Basic rulebook; Gygax gives slightly different, and perhaps not quite as robust, advice along the same lines in his DMG. This will enhance exploratory play. But it will reduce drama in the sense I'm talking about.

In your example here, I don't think it would. The PCs still have to deal with all these tasks; you-as-DM have determined that complications x, y and z will arise at time points a, b and c unless something happens to pre-empt them; and the drama unfolds from there.

 

[pemerton]

One is not better than the other and the right mixture might very much depend on the group. For my part I value a play experience that has more naturalistic exploration than @pemerton does. I like to let conflicts appear more naturally, but once they do I tend to lean hard into the conflicts.

I think this is an important (meta-)point: we (as RPGers posting about how RPGs are played) can separate our preferences, and our skills, from our analysis.

I am hoping soon(-ish) to be able to GM Apocalypse World. It's a system that I've read a lot about; I've played a little bit of Dungeon World; Blades in the Dark has quite a bit of traction and discussion on these boards; I've read most but not all of the AW rulebook.

I can see that AW is going to put demands on me that I'm not too used to, and that will push me in ways that are a bit unfamiliar. It has more of the "naturalistic causality" that @Campbell describes, though perhaps not as much as BitD (?). Maybe I'll enjoy the new thing, or maybe I'll find it doesn't work for me. Probably I'll drift it at least a little closer to my own preferences than Campbell would take it if he were GMing.

But I find it sometimes hard to have productive conversations about GMing techniques and RPGing approaches more generally if all points of distinction, contrast and tension are elided over.

 

[pemerton]

No time management? How does that jive with all those tasks on their plate, in terms of what has to be done in what order so things don't get out of hand; and whether things related to one task advance themselves while the PCs deal with other tasks?

Because - as I explained in my post - those things are decided by me, the GM, as one aspect of making decisions about pacing and framing.

For instance, I decided that the relieving army arrived at the castle when it did because that suited the dramatic needs of play. I decided that the fleeing fiance arrived ahead of the relieving army, but only just, in order to raise the question of whether they would lower the drawbridge to let her in, or leave her to her fate, or - as it turned out, somewhat unexpectedly - to rescue her by climbing down to her on a rope outside the castle wall. (Had the drawbridge been lowered then I would have called for competing Battle command rolls to see whether it was able to be raised before the enemy force arrived.)

Of course it is possible to establish backstory, and narrate it, and to manage ingame time and the threats of encounters, in a way that is neutral vis-a-vis player action declarations and player goals established for their PCs. Moldvay gives advice on how to do this in the Basic rulebook; Gygax gives slightly different, and perhaps not quite as robust, advice along the same lines in his DMG. This will enhance exploratory play. But it will reduce drama in the sense I'm talking about.

In your example here, I don't think it would. The PCs still have to deal with all these tasks; you-as-DM have determined that complications x, y and z will arise at time points a, b and c unless something happens to pre-empt them; and the drama unfolds from there.

What do you mean the drama unfolds from there? If it's all being done in the mechanical fashion you suggest, then there is no guarantee that drama occurs at all. For instance, if the players spend X time debating whether or not to lower the drawbridge, and then decide to, measurement on the GM's clock might determine that there is no way of lowering it and raising it in time to avoid the enemy force taking advantage of it. And so the dramatic decision-point in fact evaporates - instead of the dramatic decision-point the game consisted of the effluxion of time by way of debate.

Ron Edwards made the general point over 15 years ago in two essays, where he describes the exploration-type approach as follows:

In-game time at the fine-grained level (rounds, seconds, actions, movement rates) sets incontrovertible, foundation material for making judgments about hours, days, cross-town movment, and who gets where in what order. I recommend anyone who's interested to the text of DC Heroes for some of the most explicit text available on this issue throughout the book.

The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).​

Paul Czege also has a nice discussion that relates to this:

[A]lthough roleplaying games typically feature scene transition, by "scene framing" we're talking about a subset of scene transition that features a different kind of intentionality. My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about.

"Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. More often than not, the PC's have been geographically separate from each other in the game world. So I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out. I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

My Prince Valiant game is (I'm certain) more laid-back than anything Paul Czege has ever run; but the basic points hold true. For instance, in deciding whether or not the smitten knight and the lady he is rescuing are able to make it from the castle to the coast (where they hid in a lighthouse to await the outcome of the battle between the castle's and the relieving forces) I did not worry about a map. Or a precise distance. Prior play had established that the distance from coast to castle was not too hard to cover mounted at night, and so the player's action declaration for his PC could certainly stand. (This is a geographic analogue to keeping NPC personalities somewhat unfixed, allowing retroactive justifications of how matters unfold.) What did matter was the Stealth check, because this resolved the dramatic focus of the action declaration, namely, did they avoid being seen?

I’ll grant that everyone has their preferences but for drama to exist, you need action and stakes. That’s all. Whether raiding a tomb or engaging in subtextual digs at a formal dinner, you can have very high levels of drama so long as there’s something at risk and something to root for or against.

This seems orthogonal to the assertion that @Campbell and I are making. I've GMed dramatic tomb-raiding sessions. Insofar as they were aimed at establishing drama and compelling the players to make hard choices for their PCs, they didn't use the sorts of techniques that Moldvay and Gygax talk about.

 

[Krachek]

Creating drama depend on Dm.
The Dm should take time to ask each player to describe how it’s character feel, react, look like. A player is involved when he can say why is character is there, why he is taking that particular action, how its character feel at this moment. Player may use in voice or not, that don’t matter, but as soon as they start believing in their character the drama come.

Once the feeling and the drama is installed, skill check failure, success, auto success because of big bonus, just improve feeling and drama.

You may have a wonderful skill system, having complex choice and interaction, if players are only rolling dice it won’t create drama. Reasoning and calculating odds with the skill system don’t help drama. The skill system ( and all the rest of the rules) should be discrete, easy to remind and use. The goal is to stay in drama,