Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[pemerton]

Of course not. That part of the fiction is not the players' to decide.

I assume you are talking here about your table.

At other tables, which adopt different conventions and different rules, that may not be true. At those tables, therefore, the players would have greater agency over the content of the shared fiction. They would be deciding more things about it.

"I look in the box" and "I stab the orc" are the same, in that each identifies an attempted interaction with an already-known piece of the fiction: the box and the orc are each already present.

However, "I look in the box for the Crown of Revel" tries to bring in another element, that being the Crown, the presence or absence of which remains yet unknown to the players. In my view, saying the words "for the Crown of Revel" does nothing but add flavour; and while adding flavour is always cool in and of itself it has no other relevance.

Put another way, the only mechanically relevant bit of that declaration is "I look in the box"

Again, I have to assume that you are talking here about your table. Because what you say here is literally false of some RPGs (eg Burning Wheel, Cortex+ Heroic).

As everyone seems to agree that part of the GM's job is to set obstacles and challenges (right? We're all agreed on this?), if the GM has no way of knowing where the Crown is ultimately going to be found how can she lay down any obstacles to finding it?

Trivially. I and other GMs the world over are doing it day in, day out.

I have many actual play reports on this forum. They will give you examples of how it is done. Here's a simply imagined illustration:
the player declares I look in the box for the Crown of Revel. The GM sets an appopriate difficulty, using whatever framework the system establishes (eg Burning Wheel has default obstacles for Scavenging tests; Cortex+ has the Doom Pool being rolled to establish the oppositiong to this sort of action declaration). If the check succeeds, the PC finds the Crown in the box; if the check fails, the box is trapped and the PC triggers the trap. After that is resolvd - as is appropriate to the system - we keep playing to see if and where the Crown might be found.

I'm able to understand that there's different ways of playing different types of games. That said, there's a very real chance I define RPG differently than you do.

<snip>

Fundamental disagreement here: determining the heretofore unknown contents of a box is not an agency players get to have in an RPG unless a player's PC put the contents in there in the first place.

A game that gives players that agency has moved away from what I see as an RPG (in which one Plays a Role, that being of your PC) and into shared worldbuilding, which is something very different: a player is no longer simply playing the role of a character in a setting but is also given the responsibility of determining elements of and within that setting, which any player worth his-her salt will very quickly take blatant advantage of.

<snip>

I'm dubious about accepting that as a valid way to roleplay, in that there's no internal setting consistency, no continuity, and therefore nothing to base any long-term in-character thoughts and-or memories on.

On reaching a new valley: I look in the valley for the village of Terynia. Action resolution succeeds and suddenly there's a village there; but for some reason we were never told about it before the trip even though in theory it's been there all along; and had we known or even been able to speculate about its existence sooner we might very well have done things differently.

Also as a system it's broken as hell the minute the players don't severely self-restrain, which IMO they shouldn't have to do.

This is a more long-winded of saying "at my table" while also showing that you have very little udnerstanding of how even a game like Classic Traveller (first published 1977) works, let alone something like Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World.

Everything I've quoted here - the unrelenting refusal to consider that action declaration might include I look in the box for . . . (which obviously does not require doing anything but playing a PC - it's pure actor stance); the inability to think of setting and world building beyond Gygax-era maps-and-key; the idea that sysetms will, indeed must, "break" if the players can declare these sorts of actions and have them resovled - screams I learned to play D&D c 1980 and haven't looked beyond those boundaries in the 40 years since.

If that's what you're trying to convey, you're succeeding. If you want to have a conversation about what RPGIng might and can be, though, you going to have to at least contemplate that D&D c 1980 is not the be-all and end-all of RPGIng.

 

[Numidius]

@Campbell I agree it is almost certainly not a game for me. As with BitD, my first reaction was to figure out how I could get a character killed quickly, which is probably about rejecting one or more premise (setting or something in the mechanics). I know myself well enough not to play the game when I get those kinds of messages from the depths.

I'm less disappointed about AW than about BitD. I really, really wanted--and kinda expected--to like BitD; I had no such expectations of AW, but I was curious. I suspect it's connected to some contrariness at my core: I really want to immerse in the character and engage with the setting and the story, and the harder a TRPG works to make me do those things, the harder I resist.

While I don't disagree that TRPGs have real differences, I also believe they have real similarities. They might have different priorities, but overall I think they have similar goals. I don't think that means the games are boring.

I really don't know where my approach to GMing comes from, other than trying to run games I'd kill to be a player in. That's not super-helpful, because I don't really know how, when, or where I developed my preferences as a player, either, because--as you point out--it's really not the way most of the games I would have played or read as a newer gamer would have played.

How would you describe, in plain words, the games you run, the story and exploration of setting and character?

When I (used to) run Dungeon World, my players being challenge-oriented and true-neutral towards the setting elements and npcs, taught me to push very hard those elements against them in order to have relevance as opposition and matter story-wise, eventually reaching dramatic moments in which their choices would finally impact the (small) setting.
Hard work; rewarding, but tiring: not in prep, I mean at the table.


Running an investigative scenario in Trail of Cthulhu, instead, I enjoy very much how I can relax during play and follow the PCs exploring the setting, mixing prewritten stuff, improvisation, and their backgrounds. Pushing for dramatic scenes is not a frantic duty, is a pleasure I enjoy slowly.

 

[prabe]

How would you describe, in plain words, the games you run, the story and exploration of setting and character?

I have started posting my wife's notes in the Story Hour forum. Search for "Erkonin." I'll start Campaign 2 on Wednesday. You can (sort of) see for yourself, if you want.

To answer your question here: I ask the players for backstories for their characters. I start things off by putting the characters in the same place and time and throwing stuff at a fan. Once things are going I tie in both the individual characters' backstories and previous events in the campaign. I work to have multiple goals available for the party to pursue so they can choose among them. Some of those goals will derive from the characters' backstories (exploring character). Some of those goals will involve discovering things about the setting (exploring setting). I don't intentionally prep more than a session ahead, and anything that hasn't come up is subject to being changed if needed.

Is that responsive-ish?

 

[Numidius]

@prabe, partially.
I see that's how you prep the campaign. I meant how's the mood of play: relaxed, fast&furious, occasionally dramatic, lots of combat or roleplay? More Gm exposition or Players talking at the table? More challenge oriented or directed by the whims of the party or focused around individual feelings?

 

[prabe]

First, I have six players at one table and five at another, and I like large tables (I cannot lie). Around the table, I probably do more than half of the talking, but not much more than half. The mood around the table varies quite a bit, both by time and by player--any player might sit up and fully engage at roughly any time, and one session might be more relaxed while the next might be more intense; I have had sessions with no combat back-to-back with sessions that were roughly all-combat. I'd be inclined to answer your last question by describing it as more goal-focused: the PCs have one or more goals they're working toward; however the PCs want to achieve those goals is up to them.

 

[pemerton]

the PCs have one or more goals they're working toward; however the PCs want to achieve those goals is up to them.

How would you say this fits with the story transcript you posted upthread, which seemed to involve the players needing to learn from the GM (via their PCs interacting with various NPCs who were brought into the fiction unilaterally by the GM) in order to progress their goals?

 

[prabe]

How would you say this fits with the story transcript you posted upthread, which seemed to involve the players needing to learn from the GM (via their PCs interacting with various NPCs who were brought into the fiction unilaterally by the GM) in order to progress their goals?

That's a fair question.

First, every NPC (except Black Irnod, who runs the eponymous library in Pelsoreen) that came into the campaign [EDIT: in that session] did so as a result of the PCs' actions and/or decisions. They decided to go looking for temples where the Orcphans would be looked after, and while I'd prepped the Cracked Shields, if the party hadn't gone looking for them I would have allowed the prep to lie unused. While I don't doubt that the NPCs' existence seems unilateral to you, it doesn't feel that way from where I sit, and I don't think it feels unilateral from the players' perspective, either. I have pulled out my notebook for that campaign and looked at the session prep I had. There were the names of the orcphans, one longish paragraph about the Cracked Shields, covering only the first interaction in the session--the party going back and seeing if they wanted to help clean out the House of Masks wasn't something I anticipated in my prep. I see a line "other information from prior sessions applies" but it seems likely to mostly apply to the Masked Ones themselves and the libraries in Pelsoreen; I'd have to pull up other session notes to see why I had so much pending from prior sessions. It's probably because the party did something other than what I'd prepped for, or did something I'd prepped for in more detail than I'd expected.

Second, this is a highly research-intensive party. "Team Library" is a standing subset of the PCs. It's plausible that part of the reason there are so many libraries in the cities they've spent time in/around is because the party has gone looking for them (and it's made sense to me libraries would be there). Most of the stuff you've described them "needing to learn from the GM" emerged when they started looking for it. The narrative only reflects what did happen, not all the other things that could have happened if the PCs had chosen different paths or approaches.

I know you think the campaign is "RPG-as-puzzle" because the players don't have any direct way to alter things in the way you prefer--there's nothing like a declaration "I look for a cleric in the temples who's willing to take in these orcish orphans" that leads to action-resolution that might lead to there being at least one cleric in the temples willing to take in orcish orphans--but part of the reason I have reacted so strongly to that description is that I read "puzzle" as only having one solution. While I do not DM with a fixed solution in mind that the players must guess to proceed, I cannot prove it to you in retrospect because all I can point to is what the PCs did and what happened as a result thereof; I don't have notes showing alternative paths because I don't have notes for any path, even the one the PCs took. My notes for the session I posted, for example, are less than a page and a half of notebook paper; the session before is just over four; the session before that I can tell was one that ended early because the party found a way to teleport to Pelsoreen and I hadn't prepped the city in much more detail than "it exists."