A Question Of Agency?

[Aldarc]

I don't doubt you for a moment, but looking at the rules for AW (and BitD, which you don't mention) it seemed to me as though I'd be playing (not GMing, playing) in a metaphorical straightjacket. It just seemed as though everything was so tightly constrained, and there wasn't any world to push against or grab onto so reactions to my actions seemed wildly unpredictable--and if I can't predict the reactions, the actions themselves feel random to me.

I will admit that I find this reaction to the game perplexing. IME, it's an atypical one as I don't think that I've ever heard people read the PbtA family of games and say "everything was so tightly constrained" when it comes to world interaction, as the game lives and dies by the principle @Ovinomancer outlines ("the fiction must flow from the fiction") as well as "say yes or roll the dice." That said, I could see from this how you may prefer games like 3e and/or PF2, where action outcomes are more delineated for each skill or action. Though in the case of PF2, it has introduced critical failure, failure, success, and critical success to the mix of outcomes for even things like spells and skills. I think a lot of the desire or motivation for adding complicated success to increasingly more games is not to create "partial failure," but, rather, to add "at least some success."

I will agree that sometimes one of the more difficult aspects when GMing PbtA comes from understanding the difference between a soft move and a hard move and understanding what GM responses (even if they flow from the fiction) are appropriate to each type of move. If a person doesn't have a solid grasp on those principles or rules, then it can potentially make 7-9 seem more like failure than is intended, hence (I suspect) your feeling of unpredictability with outcomes.

All of that aside from my strong distaste for way games of that broad type lean so hard on complicated success, which I perceive as partial failure.

Not to invalidate your tastes, but I haven't really experienced the feeling of "partial failure" as a player when dealing with complicated success games. In fact, a lot of the fun for me as a player comes from these moments of complicated success. For example, if I try climbing a wall in some games like D&D, my only options are often make it fully or fail to climb. But complicated successes add twists to the outcome, sometimes with decisions to make. I can make it up the wall, but there may be a cost: e.g., I alert the guards below or the guards are waiting for me at the top. Or maybe I drop my family heirloom or weapon while climbing. Or maybe I have to make a choice: do I make it up stealthily but lose the gold I'm stealing or do I keep the gold but alert the guards? Or even do I try saving my family heirloom or the gold? You may view this as a "partial failure," but to me it's a success. I feel successful as I ultimately get what I wanted from the action: i.e., I make it up the wall. I may not make it up the wall smoothly or with the gold, but I do successfully climb the wall. But complications and costs for success drive the narrative forward for me as a player in new and interesting ways outside of binary success and failure states. It results in new fictional situations that my character has to deal with, and that's fun for me.

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.

Hmmm...I don't think it's that far removed, for example, from the relatively common use of a critical fumble in d20 games. It's often a point where you don't know what the outcome will be or how the GM will adjudicate it. And one of the oft floated criticisms of critical fumbles is that they often don't honor the competency of the PCs or humiliate them in some way. IME, however, soft/hard moves triggered by failures and complicated success in PbtA/FitD/Fate games more frequently flow from the fiction than critical fumbles and the like in D&D. Again, all IME. If I am rushing into battle with goblins triggering Hack and Slash and I get a 7-9 success, then I likely know what some of the potential outcomes could be: e.g., I take damage from the goblins in the exchange, I get surrounded by goblins, or maybe running into the goblins now leaves my young ward defenseless. The outcomes are fiction-bound.

I honor how you may see the checks as "partially blind," but I see the checks as mostly transparent, as I know each and every time I pick up the dice that I achieve full success on a 10+, trigger a soft move or complicated success on 7-9, and that I trigger a hard move on 1-6. I often have played "complicated success" games where the stakes are stated forthright so you know what the potential outcomes before you roll, but I also think that clear stakes are an important part of making rolls. Games like Fate and Cortex often operate by the principle of "don't roll unless there are interesting positive AND negative consequences." Or don't roll unless something is at stake. But this is basically another way of saying "say yes or roll the dice."

 

[darkbard]

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

I too can't recall any previous discussions wherein folks claim that success with a complication feels indistinguishable from failure.

 

[pemerton]

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

I said "play" and meant "play" (as opposed to GM/MC).

the game seemed to be engineered to make it nearly impossible for the PCs to actually solve problems.

I don't get this at all. The sample of play shows a player solving a problem for her PC (by dispatching the intruders with her pain wave projector, violation gloves and a chainsaw).

 

[pemerton]

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

Not in D&D. What the Orc does (or fails to do) is determined by the player's to hit roll.

 

[pemerton]

This is from the d20SRD.org:

Gather Information (Cha)

Check
An evening’s time, a few gold pieces for buying drinks and making friends, and a DC 10 Gather Information check get you a general idea of a city’s major news items, assuming there are no obvious reasons why the information would be withheld. The higher your check result, the better the information.

If you want to find out about a specific rumor, or a specific item, or obtain a map, or do something else along those lines, the DC for the check is 15 to 25, or even higher.​

I've never heard that this is a "narrative stance" ability because the player decides that people for whom drinks are bought share the local gossip.

The 5e Basic PDF has something similar on p 62:

Other Charisma Checks. The DM might call for a Charisma check when you try to accomplish tasks like the following:
• Find the best person to talk to for news, rumors, and gossip​

I don't think there has ever been a RPG where all a player can do is declare what bodily motion his/her PC performs, with everything else being decided by the GM.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not in D&D. What the Orc does (or fails to do) is determined by the player's to hit roll.

Nonsense. The player declares that the character attacks, the GM declares that the orc defends, the dice dictates which succeeds. Who rolls the dice really doesn't matter. The exact form of the randomisation really has nothing to do with who decides what. You could easily swap AC to be bonus + d20 instead of bonus + 10 and flip the attack same way but in other direction and nothing would change. You seem to get easily confused by mechanics, letting the mechanics to obfuscate where the decisions actually lie.

Your tower example would be more analogous to a character being able to declare that they attack an orc even when the GM had not told that any orcs are present and this very act would summon an orc into existence.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This is from the d20SRD.org:

Gather Information (Cha)​

​

Check​

An evening’s time, a few gold pieces for buying drinks and making friends, and a DC 10 Gather Information check get you a general idea of a city’s major news items, assuming there are no obvious reasons why the information would be withheld. The higher your check result, the better the information.​

​

If you want to find out about a specific rumor, or a specific item, or obtain a map, or do something else along those lines, the DC for the check is 15 to 25, or even higher.​

I've never heard that this is a "narrative stance" ability because the player decides that people for whom drinks are bought share the local gossip.

The 5e Basic PDF has something similar on p 62:

Other Charisma Checks. The DM might call for a Charisma check when you try to accomplish tasks like the following:​

• Find the best person to talk to for news, rumors, and gossip​

I don't think there has ever been a RPG where all a player can do is declare what bodily motion his/her PC performs, with everything else being decided by the GM.

All of these assumes that the people, and the rumours and the information exists, and that is for the GM to decide as is the exact information the characters might learn. You cannot just declare a gather information check to find out the location of the Crown of the Lich Queen, and that very act summoning the people with information, the Crown and the Lich Queen into existence. Gather information is simply a perception check on social level. You seem to think that a player should be able to declare that their character is trying to find a firebrand magic longsword in a room, succeed in investigation and this very act would summon the sword into existence.

And if you're not effectively arguing for that, and the GM can say 'no silly' then your approach has nothing to do with increased player agency.

 

[Bedrockgames]

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.

I am not clear on what is being disputed here. I followed the thread but lost the line leading to this post. Is the question over whether tastes in mechanics that do things like fail forward are niche?

Just a note on RPG forums. I do think that it is really, really hard to gauge the prevalence of a particular trend in gaming from online forums in general. I have been trying to do this for years and I always sense an enormous gulf between what people do at the table, what tastes are common (and which are more niche) and what I see on internet forums. I think this is for a few reasons. One is the nature of online discussion, which I think can lead people away from what they do in reality (it is easy to not have an answer for a particular criticism or observation in a discussion, essentially capitulate to the point online, but in practice still not find utility in the conclusion for example). Another is online forums are a self selected group (in my experience only a small fraction (between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 players) in any group I am in, regularly participate in online TTRPG discussion. Sometimes online discussions are at the forefront of changes about to happen at tables, sometimes they are representative of more narrow tastes. None of this really says anything one way or the other about the above point, but this seemed worth mentioning. I can say, at least in my case, all of my live gaming groups do not in any way resemble the sensibilities I see expressed on online forums (in terms of tone of speech, gaming system preferences, campaign style, etc). This is one of the reasons why I always emphasize do what works at your table, don't worry about what posters online think about your gaming style or your design preferences

 

[pemerton]

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.

I made a similar point upthread about past and future.

As far as a reader can tell, it takes JRRT no more authorial effort to introduce the past (Aragorn's memory of ancient events of the First Age) than the present (Aragorn's recognition of Glorfindel when he turns up towards the end of Book 1).

In a film, a single moment of physical confrontation may carry more narrative significance than the whole of the set (props, scenery, matte paintings and all) in which it takes place.

All this is equally true in RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

All of these assumes that the people, and the rumours and the information exists, and that is for the GM to decide as is the exact information the characters might learn. You cannot just declare a gather information check to find out the location of the Crown of the Lich Queen, and that very act summoning the people with information, the Crown and the Lich Queen into existence.

Nowhere in the skill description for Gather Information does it say that it is a skill for perceiving events whose existence is established by the GM. That would be Listen (declared to hear what someone the GM has described is saying).

If there is a city, its major not-obviously-withheld news items can be learned by making a DC 10 Gather Information check. The GM doesn't get to declare the check fails simply because no one is talking that day. (That might be a possible narration of a failed check.)

If the information sort is something more specialised or secret, like a rumour as to the location of the Crown of the Lich Queen, the DC may be higher as the skill description explains.

The successful use of this skill dictates that people who are not the PC are talking among themselves and to the PC, sharing their information. The information is not transmitted to the PC via mind-reading!

What the difference is between people talking and people building isn't any clearer to me than the difference between people blocking with their shields and people building.