Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[pemerton]

The schroedinger bit was more of a joke that anything else. Permanent until interacted with wasn't. I think that actually describes what he's doing pretty well. The assassins are where he puts them, at least until the players start poking around, at which point all bets are off. Not everyone sets things up like this, but it's pretty common.

Sure. But the point I was trying to make is that it buys into a certain sort of approach which - at least for me - does not support depth or verisimilitude. Because what it means is that narration leans towards those details written down ahead of time to help someone (ie the GM) frame a puzzle; rather than the narration actually evoking the situation and what matters to me as my PC. (Or, if I'm GMing, to me as the GM trying to bring the players into the fiction)

Notice also that @Lanefan makes a big deal of treating (say) time of day of arrival as a big deal that can't be anticipated in advance. Wheares there is actually nothing I can see about the framing of We're looking for the assassins that makes the time of day matter (unless the PCs sneak in after dark deliberately; but then they're not going to see what all the shops are, nor notice the worn-away leatherworker's sign, either). The whole approach is one that prioritises the map as game board and also the counting of squares moved (and correlating that to the passage of in-game time) which may be fun for a certain sort of wargame-inspired play but to me doesn't help with veriimilitude or depth.

 

[pemerton]

My position is that giving the PCs information that the BurgerMaster reacts badly to being insulted, then letting the PCs succeed by insulting him (at a task other than making an enemy out of him) seems to me to violate the established fiction and to negate the consequences of the PCs' making a poor choice.

So if there are two ways in - the low-AC/hp kobolds and the high-AC/hp hobgoblins - and the players choose the latter, do they automatically lose?

If the answer is yes, to me that seems like poor GMing tantamount to railroading (at least in a typical D&D context).

If the answer is no, why should the social encounter be any different?

 

[Fenris-77]

@pemerton - I agree, it does buy into a certain kind of approach. It's not my personal approach, but it is quite common, and I'm not convinced it has to be bad at verisimilitude or depth either. I don't know how much it props wither of those things up particularly, or even that it's supposed to prop them up in every case. Some people just like to have some details written down because they aren't going to remember everything they want to, and aren't playing a completely play-to-find-out game, which D&D usually isn't. There's a huge premium on GM production of detail D&D I think it's unavoidable that notes and maps should be involved to a certain extent. That doesn't have to reduce the game to one played on a map as game board either, I think that's a really extreme example and probably not fair to what a lot of D&D DMs actually do, even if they make use of copious maps.

 

[prabe]

I was replying to your remark about a murder mystery, not about deciding to sneak past the guards.

But in either case, isn't action resolution - applied systematically over the course of play - the way that we find out whether or not the PCs made a poor or mistaken decision?

Action resolution can be a way to find that out, such as if they misjudge an opponent and end up fighting someone well above their pay grade. The decision to fight that someone might be a mistake, and there might not be an action resolution involved in the decision.

I don't think murder mysteries are a superb idea in TRPGs (in spite of apparently setting myself up to run one) but accusing the wrong person of murder is arguably a mistake. Doing so need not be the result of an action resolution. It's entirely possible for the players to come to the wrong conclusion/s in spite of succeeding at all the action resolutions. (I don't like either of the obvious options: having the person they accuse be the killer, lead them by the nose through the action resolutions.)

 

[prabe]

So if there are two ways in - the low-AC/hp kobolds and the high-AC/hp hobgoblins - and the players choose the latter, do they automatically lose?

If the answer is yes, to me that seems like poor GMing tantamount to railroading (at least in a typical D&D context).

If the answer is no, why should the social encounter be any different?

If out of multiple paths there's a path that leads to a likely bad outcome, and the PCs know that about that path, and the PCs choose that path, there's no railroading. Please note that I was explicit about this being something the PCs knew about, and that I'm in favor of being flexible about things they can't know about.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So, you blithely blew right past the bit about there being information so the PCs would know the BurgerMaster was so sensitive and likely to respond so negatively to being insulted. In that case it would be player-facing, and the players would know that.

No, I incorporated that. Unless the GM tells the players that this tidbit is fixed and immutable, it's just like saying that the knight at the gate is well known for his combat prowess, but not every doing more to quantify that. Further, there's the issues of the PCs being outsiders, not one of the Burgomaster's subjects, and that they are clearly powerful in ways the townsfolk usually are not. Saying that a person is so fixed in response that they will react in a way that may clearly cause harm to them up to and including death because they cannot abide being questioned on their ability to rule by a powerful outsider seems odd. Especially since the way Vallaki is written is almost guaranteed to drive the players into conflict with the Burgomaster.

My personal experience with this module was as a player -- a very rare treat for me. I had become very taxed at work and had little bandwidth left to GM, so one of my players offered to GM. He's not comfortable at all at off-the-cuff social back and forth in general, but can hold his own. About half-way through the first of the Baron's Sun Day festivals, as we as players began to discuss interfering with the whipping of "malcontents," he made one of the best decisions I've seen him make from behind the screen -- he dumped that storyline. He saw that it was going to go straight to hell, and he wasn't comfortable with adjudicating a highly-charged social scene, so he made the decision that it wasn't important and was better off on the cutting room floor. He asked if we'd be okay just ignoring this bit of play and letting him work on it. We were fine -- we had to go save the winery anyway. When we did return to Vallaki, the GM had altered things such that we did come into conflict with the Baron, but he wasn't at all like the write-up. Still vain, but much more amenable to compromise. Especially after his main henchman was confronted and killed in that confrontation for holding Irena captive -- something that the Baron wanted swept under the rug rather than made public.

My position is that giving the PCs information that the BurgerMaster reacts badly to being insulted, then letting the PCs succeed by insulting him (at a task other than making an enemy out of him) seems to me to violate the established fiction and to negate the consequences of the PCs' making a poor choice. Heck, I'd say the same thing if the PCs had the opportunity to learn about the BurgerMaster before negotiating with him, and didn't--that's a choice (arguably more than one choice) and there should be consequences for it. Sure, there's room for flexibility, but I think it's more warranted (in the case of insulting the BurgerMaster) if there's no way for the PCs to know before encountering him how he reacts to being insulted.

This is actually one of the biggest issues I have with how the OP was presented -- we do not know what the goal of the action to insult the Burgomaster was. I think that knowing the intent behind an action is absolutely critical to being able to properly adjudicate it. That said, the information that the Burgomaster reacts badly to being insulted would tell me that this is a challenging way to move forward, but that this information should be able to be leveraged in some way. If I try to browbeat him with insults, that's risky, but not automatic failure. But, that assumption is probably because that's how I'd do it from the GM's seat. An action to insult the Burgomaster may well even get advantage, if well framed to take advantage of the information. For example, if my intention was to enrage the Burgomaster as part of an attempt to get him off balance so I could then intimidate him, leveraging the knowledge about insults seems an excellent way to do this and thus advantage.

I also think that part of my willingness to view this the way I do is that I run social challenges under a multi-roll, multi-action framework, so a single action being hard or failing does not end the scene on it's own, unless that's the intent of the player. If you want to start a fight as a player, okay, we can do that. There are even cases where you could start a fight but not end the social engagement -- I ran that exact thing with a barfight my last session. PC was in a social standoff with some thugs, started a fight, and used a quick beatdown of the leader to move back into an intimidation to cow the remaining thugs (who would likely have overwhelmed him with numbers). Success! The barfight he started continued on without him, but the thugs that were in his way backed off to find other people to fight. In this case, I let the combat actions stand in as a success or two in the skill challenge (this was helped in that we didn't do a combat swoop into detailed combat, but instead looked at whether or not his character with the abilities he has (Gloomstalker/Assassin with Alert) would reasonably be able to defeat the thug quickly and brutally. He could, so I hinged that on an attack roll.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

@pemerton - I agree, it does buy into a certain kind of approach. It's not my personal approach, but it is quite common, and I'm not convinced it has to be bad at verisimilitude or depth either. I don't know how much it props wither of those things up particularly, or even that it's supposed to prop them up in every case. Some people just like to have some details written down because they aren't going to remember everything they want to, and aren't playing a completely play-to-find-out game, which D&D usually isn't. There's a huge premium on GM production of detail D&D I think it's unavoidable that notes and maps should be involved to a certain extent. That doesn't have to reduce the game to one played on a map as game board either, I think that's a really extreme example and probably not fair to what a lot of D&D DMs actually do, even if they make use of copious maps.

If your play goal is to discover what the GM has prepared (a perfectly valid play goal that at least two of my players enjoy, though not exclusively), then having detailed notes and presenting those does go to a sort of verisimilitude -- the game is properly presenting the world that the players prefer.

If the play goal is not this, and more aligned with @pemerton's play goals (or in-between or varied, like mine), then this doesn't aid verisimilitude.

It very much depends on how you approach the game and what you want out of it as to how verisimilitude is even defined. In the former, it's that there are extensive details about the world that I discover with skilled play. In the latter, it's that the character is well integrated into the world and their struggles are paramount in play. IE, that I have an experience where my character is challenged on their beliefs or goals, and I learn something about that character.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yeah, that sounds accurate. I was suggesting that it's more of a sliding scale than a binary, that's all.

 

[prabe]

No, I incorporated that. Unless the GM tells the players that this tidbit is fixed and immutable, it's just like saying that the knight at the gate is well known for his combat prowess, but not every doing more to quantify that. Further, there's the issues of the PCs being outsiders, not one of the Burgomaster's subjects, and that they are clearly powerful in ways the townsfolk usually are not. Saying that a person is so fixed in response that they will react in a way that may clearly cause harm to them up to and including death because they cannot abide being questioned on their ability to rule by a powerful outsider seems odd. Especially since the way Vallaki is written is almost guaranteed to drive the players into conflict with the Burgomaster.

Apologies, but it does seem that you're at least kinda missing my point: If the PCs know that the gate is well-defended or that the BurgerMaster reacts badly to being insulted--to the same degree--then attacking that gate or insulting the BurgerMaster is a mistake in the same degree. I'm not talking about springing a "gotcha" on the PCs--I've specifically said that being more flexibility about things they cannot have known is important. There are clearly specific problems with this specific incident in this specific published adventure, but they don't really change my core position (that I can tell).

My personal experience with this module was as a player -- a very rare treat for me. I had become very taxed at work and had little bandwidth left to GM, so one of my players offered to GM. He's not comfortable at all at off-the-cuff social back and forth in general, but can hold his own. About half-way through the first of the Baron's Sun Day festivals, as we as players began to discuss interfering with the whipping of "malcontents," he made one of the best decisions I've seen him make from behind the screen -- he dumped that storyline. He saw that it was going to go straight to hell, and he wasn't comfortable with adjudicating a highly-charged social scene, so he made the decision that it wasn't important and was better off on the cutting room floor. He asked if we'd be okay just ignoring this bit of play and letting him work on it. We were fine -- we had to go save the winery anyway. When we did return to Vallaki, the GM had altered things such that we did come into conflict with the Baron, but he wasn't at all like the write-up. Still vain, but much more amenable to compromise. Especially after his main henchman was confronted and killed in that confrontation for holding Irena captive -- something that the Baron wanted swept under the rug rather than made public.

That does sound like an instance of good GMing. It sounds as though there's not a lot of support for running the BurgerMaster as an NPC in the published material, even though the adventure seems to point the PCs at interacting with him. Good on your GM for spotting that and getting table permission to come back to it later.

This is actually one of the biggest issues I have with how the OP was presented -- we do not know what the goal of the action to insult the Burgomaster was. I think that knowing the intent behind an action is absolutely critical to being able to properly adjudicate it. That said, the information that the Burgomaster reacts badly to being insulted would tell me that this is a challenging way to move forward, but that this information should be able to be leveraged in some way. If I try to browbeat him with insults, that's risky, but not automatic failure. But, that assumption is probably because that's how I'd do it from the GM's seat. An action to insult the Burgomaster may well even get advantage, if well framed to take advantage of the information. For example, if my intention was to enrage the Burgomaster as part of an attempt to get him off balance so I could then intimidate him, leveraging the knowledge about insults seems an excellent way to do this and thus advantage.

The impression I got was that there wasn't a goal to insulting the BurgerMaster--it was just a barb from the peanut gallery that blew up the negotiation. I suppose I can someone playing a skilled negotiator (probably a skilled player) roleplaying the negotiation out, and having some insults there as part of it--as someone who's been known to have people roll Diplomacy (in a different system) to make an insult really stick, I'm clear on the idea of not giving unintentional offense--but that's different from a PC who's kinda uninvolved just throwing an apparently-random insult into the mix. Trying to insult him as part of getting into his good graces, though--that's probably an error.

I also think that part of my willingness to view this the way I do is that I run social challenges under a multi-roll, multi-action framework, so a single action being hard or failing does not end the scene on it's own, unless that's the intent of the player. If you want to start a fight as a player, okay, we can do that. There are even cases where you could start a fight but not end the social engagement -- I ran that exact thing with a barfight my last session. PC was in a social standoff with some thugs, started a fight, and used a quick beatdown of the leader to move back into an intimidation to cow the remaining thugs (who would likely have overwhelmed him with numbers). Success! The barfight he started continued on without him, but the thugs that were in his way backed off to find other people to fight. In this case, I let the combat actions stand in as a success or two in the skill challenge (this was helped in that we didn't do a combat swoop into detailed combat, but instead looked at whether or not his character with the abilities he has (Gloomstalker/Assassin with Alert) would reasonably be able to defeat the thug quickly and brutally. He could, so I hinged that on an attack roll.)

None of that sounds unreasonable, from any direction. I persist in thinking that none of us still bothering with this are bad GMs, and that we're really just arguing around the edges, and that the nature of talking about this stuff on the Internet makes us sound more divergent approach than we really are.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, that sounds accurate. I was suggesting that it's more of a sliding scale than a binary, that's all.

Oh, definitely, but it's easier to talk about the ends first, so we know the scope of the scale. I also don't think it's uniform -- this scale is lumpy as heck.