A Question Of Agency?

[prabe]

I don't find this persuasive, though. This is a discussion about how things work, and therefore preferences are fair game to be challenged and analyzed -- largely because you can't fully understand a game until you understand your own preferences. I get this may not be something a person is inclined or willing to do, but if that's the case, why engage at all? @prabe seems to be willing to discuss. I'm fine with @prabe deciding at the end of the day that they don't like a thing, as I am with you, but I'm going to challenge a statement that something is not liked in one context but enjoyed in a slightly different context. If the response is that the context is the key, I get that, but it's at least looking at the situation and evaluating your approach, which is helpful for both you and the discussion to key in on similarities and differences and analyze those for a better understanding, each to own, what makes a game work better.

I'm willing to discuss, to try to figure out why it grates on me as hard as it does. I think it'll be a more useful discussion for all if people don't try to persuade/convince/argue me into liking it. I'm pretty sure it's in with a chance of improving my understanding of my preferences, and it might help others.

 

[pemerton]

So, the lack of setting information was about Apocalypse World.

The following is really just an in-passing comment: AW seems to me to have a pretty rich implied setting (there's been some sort of apocalypse, there's plenty of petrol and ammunition left over, there are "hardholds" governed (in some loose sense of that term) by hardholders, there are motorcycle gangs and brooding drivers and there's also the world's psychic maelstrom and those who interact with it).

Whether or not someone's into that is of course another thing; but to me the setting seems to be pretty front-and-centre in the game.

In both games, though, it is--as I understand the games, and an intentionally-designed aspect of them--roughly impossible to know beforehand what complication is going to arise when you fail to get an uncomplicated success on a given check. My feeling--I think aside from my dislike of the implementations of complicated success--is that being forced to make the checks partially-blind that way seems to have less agency than making them with the results known.

Right, but the fictional state should give you a very good idea of what could happen.

Yeah, the fictional state should point to possible results--I'd argue in any TRPG. I guess in reading the rules, there really didn't seem to be anything preventing the complications from being, at best, tenuously connected to the check being made.

It'd be like ... having a criminal merchant show up to swindle the PCs as the result of a botched Performance check. It's not something I think someone running in good-faith would do, of course, but I didn't see anything preventing it--which seemed kinda strange for a game that came across as so tightly constrained in other ways.

So first, that last example you give is canonical in 4e D&D. From the Rules Compendium (p 163, setting out an imagined example of the play of a skill challenge):

Kathra: I’d like to talk to the men to see if any of them saw the demon come by here. How about a Diplomacy check—an 11.​

​

DM (marking the second failure): The thugs make a show of ignoring you as you approach. Then one of them snarls: “Around here, folks know better than to stick their noses where they’re not wanted.” He puts a hand on the hilt of his dagger.​

​

Shara: I put a hand on my greatsword and growl back at them, “I’ll stick my sword where it’s not wanted if you keep up that attitude.” I got a 21 on my Intimidate check.​

​

DM (marking the second success): The thug turns pale in fear as his friends bolt back into the tavern. He points at the building behind you before darting after them.​

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Dendric: What’s the place look like? Is it a shop, or a private residence?​

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DM: Someone make a Streetwise check.​

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Uldane: Using aid another, I try to assist Dendric, since he has the highest Streetwise. I got a 12, so Dendric gets a +2 bonus.​

​

Dendric: Thanks, Uldane. Here’s my check . . . great, a natural 1. That’s a 10, even with Uldane’s assistance.​

​

DM (marking the third and final failure): It looks like an old shop that’s been closed and boarded up. You heard something about this place before, but you can’t quite remember it. As you look the place over, the tavern door opens up behind you. A hulk of a half-orc lumbers out, followed by the thugs you talked to earlier. “I heard you thought you could push my crew around. Well, let’s see​

you talk tough through a set of broken teeth.” Roll for initiative!​

​

Unfortunately for the adventurers, they failed the skill challenge. If they had succeeded on the last check, they would have remembered stories of a secret entrance into the building.​

This is not actually a very good teaching text, because there is no explanation of what is going on and in particular of how the GM is making decisions. But what we see taking place is that as a result of a failed check to recognise and remember something about a building, which brings the whole skill challenge to a (failed) conclusion, the GM introduces a hostile half-orc accompanied by the earlier-introduced thugs.

But it's hardly unknowable or unfair - it follows right from the prior events, of the thugs retreating into the tavern. Using the terminology of Apocalypse World MC moves, the GM first announced future badness (you're in a rough part of town with unfriendly thugs about) and then followed through by putting someone (in fact, the whole party) into a spot by having the half-orc and crew come out of the tavern to beat them up.

Frankly, when I compare the play of these sorts of player-driven, fiction-first systems (and for current purposes, despite significant differences of technique and mechanics across AW, DW, BW, 4e D&D, MHRP, etc, they all count as player-driven and fiction first) to more "traditional" or typical D&D play, the concern about "partial blindness" just seems bizarre to me. In a D&D adventure when I open a dungeon door there might be one orc or five ogres on the other side; when I walk down a corridor I might fall down a 10' pit or fall down a 20' pit onto spikes or trigger a scything blade or wh knows what; when my PC is walking through an urban area and the GM tells me that someone in a cloak is approach my PC I don't know whether its a friendly cleric with a message or a spy trying to trick me or an assassin hoping to kill me; when the GM reads me one of the plot hooks to H3 Pyramid of Shadows and I have my PC follow the proffered lead who knows what I'm going to find?

If you play GM-driven D&D and are not affected by your almost total inability to control these sorts of possibilities, what are you worried is going to happen in AW play?

 

[prabe]

So first, that last example you give is canonical in 4e D&D. From the Rules Compendium (p 163, setting out an imagined example of the play of a skill challenge):

{snipped the play example for space, sorry}

This is not actually a very good teaching text, because there is no explanation of what is going on and in particular of how the GM is making decisions. But what we see taking place is that as a result of a failed check to recognise and remember something about a building, which brings the whole skill challenge to a (failed) conclusion, the GM introduces a hostile half-orc accompanied by the earlier-introduced thugs.

So, 4E really as a teaching example had the PCs fail to remember something based on Charisma checks? (Diplomacy and Intimidate I'm sure about; I think Streetwise was Cha-based in 3E, dunno about 4E) That doesn't seem like a logical consequence to me. I mean, otherwise the outcome (showdown! roll for initiative!) seems pretty reasonable as the outcome of failed checks (or a failed Skill Challenge, which I gather isn't quite the same thing--as I think I've made clear, I missed 4E because no one in the groups I played in played 4E).

My example was a criminal merchant showing up to swindle the PCs as the result of a failed Performance check. I tried to pick a skill that was wildly unlikely to have that as a consequence of a failed check. At least, it seems like a helluva reach ...

But it's hardly unknowable or unfair - it follows right from the prior events, of the thugs retreating into the tavern. Using the terminology of Apocalypse World MC moves, the GM first announced future badness (you're in a rough part of town with unfriendly thugs about) and then followed through by putting someone (in fact, the whole party) into a spot by having the half-orc and crew come out of the tavern to beat them up.

Aside from the description of "failed to remember" as the result of what I think are Charisma-based checks, I agree, the example of play from 4E seems reasonable.

Frankly, when I compare the play of these sorts of player-driven, fiction-first systems (and for current purposes, despite significant differences of technique and mechanics across AW, DW, BW, 4e D&D, MHRP, etc, they all count as player-driven and fiction first) to more "traditional" or typical D&D play, the concern about "partial blindness" just seems bizarre to me. In a D&D adventure when I open a dungeon door there might be one orc or five ogres on the other side; when I walk down a corridor I met fall down a 10' pit or fall down a 20' pit onto spikes or trigger a scything blade or wh knows what; when my PC is walking through an urban area and the GM tells me that someone in a cloak is approach my PC I don't know whether its a friendly cleric with a message or a spy trying to trick me or an assassin hoping to kill me; when the GM reads me one of the plot hooks to H3 Pyramid of Shadows and I have my PC follow the proffered lead who knows what I'm going to find?

If you play GM-driven D&D and are not affected by your almost total inability to control these sorts of possibilities, what are you worried is going to happen in AW play?

You say "play." I'll presume that if you meant "GM" (or, as I think AW styles is, "MC") you would say that.

So, when I read AW I didn't like the stories it seemed built to ... allow to emerge, to pick a less-than-graceful verb construction; clearly the main worry is that I won't enjoy the story that emerges. I mean, when I was reading it I realized that there was no way I would care at all about any character I played in the game--almost as though the game was specifically written to make me not care.

That aside, the fact that (on reading it, not playing it--I think I've always been clear about that) the outcomes of actions seemed disconnected from the actions made it very hard to feel as though I would be operating with any sense of what the results of anything I wanted my character to do would be. The setting is broadly drawn and intentionally vague, because it seems clear that most of it would emerge during play; even if the players can add things to the setting (which might be the case--I'm not re-reading the rules) but maybe you can see that adding something to the setting is different from changing it, and if nothing exists before it is placed then changing things is (or seems) particularly difficult. I guess a summary could be that the game seemed to be engineered to make it nearly impossible for the PCs to actually solve problems.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Nope. You don't decide to use hit points. Sure, they're not realistic but that's another matter.


Of course they do. And I am not saying that no such elements should ever exist. But there is a difference in prevalence and scope of these things. People were talking about summoning entire towers and their evil owners into existence.

What is the difference? None of these things is real. They are all figments of our imaginations. None is 'bigger' or 'smaller' than another, there's no law of conservation of significance that needs to be obeyed here. You're simply imagining barriers for yourself which don't exist, putting your imagination about play process into a box. There is no box.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

{snip}

Sorry to snip, trying to keep it limited to what I'm directly responding to (but genuinely thank you for explaining DW further).

Since I don't actively prep more than about a session's worth of material at a time--about what I expect the PCs to encounter in a session--I keep track of a lot of ideas in my head that are sorta pending. (Though there was one situation where I kept track of time while the PCs were out of town, so I'd know how long ago things had happened when they got back--this is not my usual approach.) From what I read of AW (which I realize isn't exactly DW, and which I bounced off of pretty hard so my understanding might be skewed) it's a more-formalized version of my approach to things; it really didn't seem likely to generate different stories than the D&D games I run (setting settings aside), and your description of how the ideas I floated could be brought into a DW game doesn't change that impression.

I agree, to a point. First of all, DW definitely gives the GM a good bit of scope. OTOH it heavily discourages what I would call 'overprep', which means developing a lot more than you need. Adventure fronts for example are generated and added to the game as-needed, so probably you'd be writing one up before a play session, if a new one is needed. The campaign front would generally be created at/near the start of the campaign, though it could be left pretty incomplete (you would normally create 3 dangers for a front, and several 'dooms' as well, but maybe not all on day one for the campaign front).

Steadings are intended to be developed as the game proceeds, largely on the fly, though again some prep is certainly possible. Maps also indicate a bit of basic prep, mostly just to insure there IS some geography when needed (DW doesn't have any notion or particular structured rules for exploration or mapping).

The KEY though is 'what the PCs are interested in'. The GM is a 'fan of the characters'. He's not an objective judge running a world on puppet strings. His explicit goal is to produce a cool narrative of the incredible exploits of the PCs (it may include their deaths, but death is just more drama). So, a front or a steading is simply a tool for the PCs to interact with. It may provide justification, or offscreen 'living world' or cater the GM's creative urges (he's a player too) but fundamentally, starting with the process of the first adventure, it centers on bringing story to the PCs, that is its only explicit purpose, the agenda of the GM.

So, a DW game has the trappings of D&D, a conceptually similar milieu and subject matter, but a D&D style adventure is not really the process. You could get the exact same story from D&D and DW, but it would come from different participants, to a degree. If the DW GM is following his given agenda and process of play, the players will have crafted the story at least as much as he has.

 

[prabe]

Thank you for being so patient about this. I just want to quibble with one paragraph, I think.

The KEY though is 'what the PCs are interested in'. The GM is a 'fan of the characters'. He's not an objective judge running a world on puppet strings. His explicit goal is to produce a cool narrative of the incredible exploits of the PCs (it may include their deaths, but death is just more drama). So, a front or a steading is simply a tool for the PCs to interact with. It may provide justification, or offscreen 'living world' or cater the GM's creative urges (he's a player too) but fundamentally, starting with the process of the first adventure, it centers on bringing story to the PCs, that is its only explicit purpose, the agenda of the GM.

I don't think that "fan of the characters" and "objective judge of the rules/world" are mutually exclusive the way your construction implies.

And, I think it's possible to structure a D&D campaign around what the PCs are interested in. The general structure of my campaigns has been: They start with all the characters at the same place and time, and smelly stuff hitting the fan; after a short time settling that, I start to tie in story-options from the characters' backstories (which I request; not everyone gives me one); after some of that, I start to tie in story-options from previous events in the campaign; once the PCs have finished a given story-option to their satisfaction, they have an opportunity to pursue another.

 

[Lanefan]

No one has actual hard data at our fingerprints (forgetting for a moment that actual social data is notoriously fraught). If that was the litmus test for discussing things like this, our conversations would by limited to <crickets>.

But the data that we do have is this website being available for the last decade + and many of us here being extremely active participants in that period. If ENWorld (and RPG.Net) isn't a viable cross-section of the non-casual TTRPG gaming base then there can be no such thing.

In the last 8.5 years I've been engaged in damn near every_single_indie game thread there is (either starting it or participating vigorously). I've never seen this position espoused to date until the last several pages of this thread. If anyone else who has been a participant in this thread who is a very long term, tenured poster has contact with this ( @pemerton , @Lanefan , @Ovinomancer , @AbdulAlhazred , @chaochau , @Campbell , @Bedrockgames , @darkbard , @hawkeyefan ), I would love to hear about it and how much actual contact they've had with it if they have.

Seems odd to me (someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the various complaints about indie games and could list them in a moment's notice) that this one would have somehow escaped me and/or not stuck with me.

Sorry, but what position/viewpoint is it that you think you've never seen?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't think you're getting an disagreement here. This looks good. This looks exactly like "provoke...and follow their lead."

But that isn't the same as "plot hook." Its not semantics to say they aren't the same thing. A shared technical language is of the utmost important for analysis and my guess is that the overwhelming % of people will qualify "plot hook" as necessitating an intertwined relationship with a persistent metaplot. If that isn't there, its just a "provocation to action."

Again, all "plot hooks" are "provocations to action" but not all "provocations to action" are plot hooks.

I understand the difference you're trying to make, and you kinda have a point, but this difference doesn't exist in practice in any sort of binary fashion. If the characters find out that recently several travellers have vanished in the nearby woods how clearly the GM (or someone) has to know what has happened to these people and why before this qualifies as a 'plot hook' by your definition?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't know what you have in mind with "in most games of these sort". Do you mean D&D circa mid-80s onwards? Vampire? CoC?

Yes, probably.

Classic Traveller ("Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future) doesn't anywhere state the GM is perfectly within their rights to just say no. The rule is the one I quoted: the referee should set the throw required. This is just one manifestation of how Classic Traveller (1977 version) supports high player agency RPGing. (I am deliberately citing the publication date because there were changes in later versions to make it more like "most games of these sort". That's one reason I prefer the 1977 vesrion.)

So can they set the difficulty to be impossible? Because in practice that is same as saying 'no.' Anyway, I am not interested arguing about specifics of rules of games I have not read.

As far as the difference between knowing and finding things and circumventing Orc shields, they both involve interaction between the character and the broader (fictional) world. When my PC attacks an Orc, it is the Orc who decides whether and how to defend, who instigates the causal process that might result in my attack being blocked, etc. That proce

Here the GM decides the actions of the orc, as the orc is not your character.

ss interacts with the process my PC initiates - of attacking the Orc with a sword.

When my PC's sidekick contemplates the location of Evard's tower, it is Evard and his assistants who have decided whether or not to build a tower, and where. That process interacts with processes that are internal to my character - like having heard rumours of Evard's tower and its location, and now trying to accurately recall those stories.

Here the player is deciding actions of Evard and his assistants, even though they're not the player's character.

It's sheer dogma to insist that one set of processes "naturally" lends itself to all being settled on the player side (via a to-hit roll against static AC) while the other "naturally" lends itself to being settled in some different fashion (GM makes an unconstrainted prior decision, and then has the player make a roll to determine whether or not that decision is communicated to the player). RuneQuest is a RPG that has been around for a pretty long time and handles the shield issue differently from how D&D does - it uses checks to model both processes. Classic Traveller has also been around for a pretty long time, and it handles the person and place issue much the same as D&D handles the Orc shield issue.

I said nothing of 'naturalness'. I merely said that a clear distinction exists and which I prefer.

But those matters of difference and taste don't really bear upon the actual analysis of the mechanical approaches and the principles that govern them.

Really?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But my issue with all of these aspects of play (system, emotional states of being - including jarred/agitated, GM techniques + action resolution = level of agency) is how impervious they seem to be to analysis from the greater community. There is this censorious impulse/offense-taking toward evaluating why/what/how a thing is. Its mystifying. I think two big factors are (a) profound cultural gatekeeping toward the status quo and (b) its because there is a powerful undercurrent of "its art, not engineering" among the GMing community whereby deep analysis feels like a perversion of the aesthetic (obviously I couldn't disagree more).

It definitely is art, not engineering. But art can be studied and analysed as well.