what's present in Manbearcat's definition but missing in
@pemerton's, and that's the idea of subverting or defeating player input.
The passage in the OP, and much of
@pemerton's responses seem to flow from the idea that prepared outcomes are Force. In that much, I agree, but what's odd is that pemerton's talk doesn't differentiate between legitimately GM introduced material and Forcefully introduced material. Your dungeon, that's then "advertised" in play, seems to fall under pemerton's conjecture of 'gentle guidance'. Or, at least, I see no operation in the OP that can tell if it does or doesn't. Your dungeon, even "advertised," does NOT fall under Manbearcat's definition, because there's not overriding or altering of player input.
I think I already posted that, to me, the dungeon example is like Gygax's secret door example except less likely to be illusionistic (because as
@FrogReaver presents it there is no pretend/ignored check). (EDIT: apparently I didn't actually post that post - see further below).
Upthread I said of the secret door example:
pemerton said:
Gygax's suggestion about a secret door is a type of guiding or manipulating, I think, but again barely. It's always open to the players to just ignore the door they discover, and - under his precepts - the GM has no device for getting them there. Notice that he doesn't suggest, say, using wandering monsters to chase the PCs through the door they've discovered.
I haven't changed my mind on that since posting it. The GM making something salient in this way is a type of guiding but (as I elaborate upon below) is barely so.
The
dungeon parallel to wandering monsters chasing the PCs through the secret door would be the (first?) DL module where the dragon armies chase the PCs to Pax Tharsis (sp? right name?). That is force, and more than barely so. Depending on context and details it may or not be illusionism.
I say
more than barely so because it is clear manipulation, with the intention of driving particular action declarations ("We go this way"). I will leave it up to
@Manbearcat to explain how it counts as force under his description of that phenomenon (I'm pretty confident that he will characterise it as force).
"Barely force" is a subjective opinion, which appears to mean "force I'm okay with.
That's not what is intended. Force comes in degrees, both for literal physical forces and more metaphoric/analogous GM decision-making forces.
When I say
barely force I mean that the degree of guidance or manipulation is very small. The discussion just above illustrates the point: saying "Here's a thing you're welcome to check out" is not really manipulation, and is about the smallest amount of guidance that can be given while giving any at all. Whereas "Here comes the dragon army - the only escape route is that way!" is strong guidance, and manipulation also: it is intended to allow room for only one viable action declaration, namely, W
e go that way.
I'm perfectly fine with dropping a wandering monster roll in some circumstances, but that doesn't mean that I'm ignoring the mechanical structure of the game and my prior, demonstrated routines of play, to achieve a goal that I'd prefer. That's Force. The players have chosen to be in a situation (or are there through consequences of previous choices) that require a wandering monster check.
I don't think this is the right analysis of what Gygax describes.
Wandering monsters aren't an element of action resolution. They're what
@Manbearcat has called a "clock", which is (as best I know) a piece of PbtA terminology.
In Gygax's D&D the function of the clock is to punish poor decision-making (ie unskilled play) - wasting time or making noise - by extra pointless encounters which either suck rations or treasure or spells to avoid, or suck hit points and/or spells to defeat. If the players play well and don't dither, and the passage of time is purely due to their efficient travel from the dungeon entrance to the part of the dungeon they have prepared to tackle next (and this is exactly the scenario that Gygax describes on p 9 of his DMG) then the clock
isn't doing its job if the party gets hit unrelentingly by wandering monsters. That becomes arbitrary punishment.
In Apocalypse World, Vincent Baker says the following about managing clocks (p 143):
Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out.
Gygax's advice about wandering monsters is about keeping the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the "clock" in synch. I don't think it's presented as clearly - either in the core mechanic or in this advice around it - as Baker does for AW, but I think we can still make reasonable sense of what Gygax is saying
Now if Gygax had a "say 'yes'" element to his game, he wouldn't need this workaround for his wandering monster rules, because you wouldn't start rolling for them until the PCs have gone through the already-mapped-and-explored bits of the dungeon to the new bit they want to check out. But he doesn't (and to some extent didn't want to - see
@Manbearcat's comments about the secondary, simulationst role of wandering monsters as dungeon ecology).
This goes to
@Manbearcat's point about making the game better - sure, that's good advice, but sometimes the product just needs to be shipped! So we get 4e's skill challenge rules which need a few extra bells-and-whistles to really work (some are in the DMG2, some in the Rules Compendium). We get the MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic Doom Pool, which is pacing, GM resource for action resolution, and the opposition for otherwise unopposed checks (including most healing/recovery actions) all in one, and the wonkiness that can produce which produces the advice that the GM should sometimes not optimise his/her doom pool rolls.
Done in accordance with the relevant principles and these workarounds won't stop being clunky, but I don't think they count as force - they're not manipulating or guiding towards a predetermined outcome.
EDIT: Here's the post I wrote earlier about the dungeon example - apparently it didn't go live:
You mean like creating a dungeon and inserting it into the world and giving the PC's ample opportunity to hear about it in the hopes that they will find it interesting and explore it. From my understanding of the definition posted - that would constitute forcing of the illusionism variety.
This seems very similar to Gygax's example of the secret door that I posted and commented on upthread.
If one takes the view that it's force (if so, it's very weak as the guidance/manipulation is pretty minimal) in the case you mention it's not illusionism: the players know exactly what the GM is doing! (Gygax's example may be illusionism if the players don't realise that the detect-secret-doors-roll was toyed with by the GM.)
