A Question Of Agency?

[hawkeyefan]

No. But I don't consider getting hurt in a fight to be failure. I'd consider it failure if some other goal--maybe some part of why they were fighting the necromancer--were made more difficult as the result of the fight.

Okay, so what if the cleric has to use all his spell slots to heal the party, and then the battle with the necromancer will be a lot tougher because the cleric can't use them to face the undead?

Is that a failure or a complication?

So, what the character jumping from one building to another is to make the distance, land safely, and not attract attention. Most of the complications I've seen proposed for a complicated success on that jump check have been to either have that character land badly (and get hurt) or get noticed; both of those feel like failure to me.

So what if in D&D the DM says to you "Okay, this jump is the longest jump you've ever attempted. You may be able to do it, but there's no way you'll be able to do so quietly. The guards below are almost certain to notice you."; how would you look at that?

What if you make the jump, tucking and rolling to avoid injury, and you come to a stop to see two more guards step from the shadows, drawing their swords? Does the previously undetected presence of more enemies mean that you failed your jump?

Yeah, especially when it comes to fighting, D&D is much more ... granular, I think I want to say, which makes using combat to talk about success/failure ... not the best choice, I think.

Well, sure....but isn't this more of a comment on the limitations of D&D when it comes to non-combat related actions and rolls? These kinds of actions are clearly defined in the other games we're talking about.....in fact, they function the same as combat actions do, for the most part.

If D&D social and similar actions had the granularity of combat ones, then maybe you'd see it differently? Maybe not, of course, but perhaps it's the fact that D&D is so binary in this regard, and that's unduly influencing your view here?

I think maybe it's just that I'm a "this glass is one-eighth empty" kinda guy ...

I mean, I guess. Seems more like a "the glass isn't permanent, nothing's permanent, we don't matter, we're all just dust" kind of guy to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

That, in fact, is largely my position. That this is not an area you can make assumptions about populations on except in the most broadly general cases, and that there's enough preselection for forum usage to make it unrepresentative of much of anything other than people who want to talk about games on webfora enough to do the heavy lifting (and that group is off the mainstream enough by itself to, again, not represent anything except in the most limited ways).

 

[Thomas Shey]

T

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.

OD&D certainly had awfully limited mechanical support for anything else, barring some rules about morale and henchmen.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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?

Its more regarding its flipside, as to whether people feel like success-with-consequences is success in the sense they think of it. I believe a fairly large subset of the hobby doesn't. Others think that's a very minority view. Its my position that neither of our views can be substantiated in a way that supports an argument based around it as a significant underpinning.

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

This all seems fair to me, with the caveat that when groups one interacts with don't match online experience, it can entirely possibly be the group that's the unusual case. There are absolutely things about the groups I game with (our relatively high acceptance of crunch for example) that do not appear to be a majority taste, and that's also the indicator from fora. But that doesn't mean in some areas that fora aren't sort of hothouses, too, where things appear to flourish that show no sign of doing so in the wild. So the presence of things in forum discussion does not for the most part say anything particularly strong about its general existence in the wild.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've noticed a lot of people assume they lose agency if DM fudges a roll here and there. Generally in my experience rolls are mostly fudged in the players favor, or just to make a fight more dramatic so the BBEG doesn't get one shotted. If your playing with DM's who fudges to hurt the players the problem is a lot worse than loss of Agency.

Its not actually clear that fudging in a player's favor, given its always going to be selective, is any better for agency than its opposite.

 

[prabe]

Okay, so what if the cleric has to use all his spell slots to heal the party, and then the battle with the necromancer will be a lot tougher because the cleric can't use them to face the undead?

Is that a failure or a complication?

Erm ... happenstance? Encounter design (since it's D&D, that's a thing and all ...)?

So what if in D&D the DM says to you "Okay, this jump is the longest jump you've ever attempted. You may be able to do it, but there's no way you'll be able to do so quietly. The guards below are almost certain to notice you."; how would you look at that?

Then the fiction has been adequately framed, and I can decide whether jumping is the right course of action or not.

What if you make the jump, tucking and rolling to avoid injury, and you come to a stop to see two more guards step from the shadows, drawing their swords? Does the previously undetected presence of more enemies mean that you failed your jump?

No. It kinda indicates the stakes or the fiction has been inadequately framed/made clear.

Well, sure....but isn't this more of a comment on the limitations of D&D when it comes to non-combat related actions and rolls? These kinds of actions are clearly defined in the other games we're talking about.....in fact, they function the same as combat actions do, for the most part.

If D&D social and similar actions had the granularity of combat ones, then maybe you'd see it differently? Maybe not, of course, but perhaps it's the fact that D&D is so binary in this regard, and that's unduly influencing your view here?

I've played and enjoyed games where social conflicts played the same as physical ones, so it's not that in particular that I'm objecting to (in fact, I thought it was clever design (now I'm not so sure)). I think it's more that looking comparing a skill check (or equivalent) in, say, BitD, to a single to-hit roll in D&D is ... unhelpful, simply because that's the one place D&D is granular. I have said elsewhere in the thread that I don't particularly object to more than two outcomes; it's the particular dependence on and implementation of it in PbtA and FitD games that I object to.

I mean, I guess. Seems more like a "the glass isn't permanent, nothing's permanent, we don't matter, we're all just dust" kind of guy to me.

Well, I do have a particularly dark outlook, I'll admit. While I have a history of depression (I'm here to tell you that anhedonia is a kind of living hell) I don't feel particularly depressed at the moment--and haven't for quite some time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's absolutely legitimate. I'm not saying PbtA and similar systems automatically violate people's sense of agency. The lines people draw in terms of what impinges on that are almost always personal and idiosyncratic. All I'm noting is that some degree-of-success systems can butt up against that, and it seems like ones that really want to center the result of attempts as mixed can very much do so, especially since their whole point is to be plot drivers. If it doesn't do so for you, you aren't one of those.



I'll also note from this one of the issues is that you're comfortable being involved in outcomes on a metalevel, which not everyone is.

I suspect what people are really trying to say is that when you PLAY something like DW,y the 7-9 results just play like "I hit the orc!" <GM> "The orc slams his shield down on you in return, take 7 damage." In DW the GM NEVER THROWS DICE at all. Only the players make moves with resolution mechanics. The GM's moves simply produce a narrative effect. So 7-9 just looks like the GM's 'turn' (there aren't really turns in DW). Say with Hack-n-Slash if the player gets 10+ he does damage, there's no counter! The DM really has no move here, unless he wants to introduce something new (IE another monster appears). One of the players should now do something, like make an attack, etc. If the attack got a 7-9, then the GM has a move and that move is a direct consequence, it could be "deal damage" (this is kind of the basic assumed response). It could also be a monster special move, or perhaps something else entirely (IE the fighter engages the orc, he hits him, but then steps back to make another blow and falls in a pit!). If the result is 6- there's no specified result, but the GM is well within his rights to simply deal damage to the PC or make some other hard move.

As you can see, NARRATIVELY, success with complications is just "the story moves on", just in a fairly specific way. a 7-9 Hack-n-Slash means something is going to happen to the character making that move, OTOH if the player got a success, then the next move is going to be less closely related, but it could still be a monster attacking and damaging a PC, if that seems like the best choice to the GM (where best choice means 'adds most the the story').

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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'd pretty much concur with this. Now, its possible that some people have failed to articulate objections to this type of game process/mechanic this way, while agreeing with position. That is possible. I suspect that most people, even in the forums, mainly play D&D, and if they play other games they play games that are either similar to D&D in architecture, or they just try to play these other games using a D&D-based approach (and they might even find a way to make it work for them, though I would expect it would usually run into huge problems). So, this question never comes up. If they accept 'success with complications' they're not really focused on how the game's process works very much, and they just 'do it'. I've had 'levels of success' in my 4e-like game for a long while. It works there fine, and has evolved into something pretty close to 'success with complications', but that game does have some other avenues to get to presenting narrative (there are more clearly defined turn orders for instance).

 

[darkbard]

Well, I'm clearly weird (which I knew).

Let me try this formulation: "Success" is "getting what you want, and not what you don't." "Complicated success" by adding something the player/character didn't want, turns success into failure.

I have been turning things over in my head, thinking about this, and I have further come to realize that a resolution mechanic that A) had greater odds of uncomplicated success and B) allowed the player/character to choose to accept a complication-esque consequence to turn failure into success would bother me a good deal less. I'm sure a game exists with such mechanics, I just can't bring any to mind at the moment.

I make no claims about your being but rather about your emotional response to success with complications.

As to the rest of your argument here ff., anything else I would add would merely be another iteration of what Aldarc and hawkeyefan have already laid out before me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

'In a city, people are talking' is rather logical assumption, some might even say it is self evident and it would indeed be weird for the GM to rule that this is not the case. (They still could, but unless there was some really good reason for it, it would be terrible GMing.) Similarly it is practically automatic that a city would have some rumours and local goings on as that simply is a part of definition of city. But again what exactly those things are is for the GM to decide.

And you continue your obfuscation of who decides what. In normal 5e D&D it is not assumed that a player can invent a a thing and then declare that they seek information about that thing and this act causing the thing or even the information to exist. If a player just invents a Lich Queen and their crown and declare that they are seeking information about it, the GM is fully within their rights to declare that the character finds out nothing, because the Lich Queen and their crown simply are not things that exist. And even if it was established that they exist, the player cannot just declare that they investigate whether the crown is hidden in any location they happen to be in, and the success causing the crown to appear there.

EDIT:
Also, I thought you originally argued that Burning Wheel has greater player agency than D&D based its different mechanics yet now you seem to be arguing the D&D actually works similarly so I really have no idea what you're even arguing about...

D&D, generally, doesn't really clarify this point. Recall that Skills, per se, are an addition to the core framework of D&D, which had only a few places where players would roll dice to make a determination (primarily combat, but also saves). Those cases were VERY explicit about how things worked, and generally the only fictional question was maybe what the details looked like (IE did the Orc block with his shield, or his scimitar). In that case, players could simply ask the DM for information, and there really wasn't any hard limit to what they could ask "Barbaz the dwarf goes up to the bar, plunks down 5gp and asks if anyone has heard of the Crown of the Lich Queen." Now, the DM in classic D&D has the authority to object that the action is not consonant with the fiction "this is no such thing as the Crown of the Lich Queen", or a more sophisticated DM might likely take up the gauntlet and follow with some fictional response. Up through 1e and AFAIK all the iterations of 'BASIC' D&D this is all simply RP and the rules are utterly silent on this topic, Gygax never even hints about what he would do in the above situation.

2e (or OA if you prefer) introduces OPTIONAL skills, which could be invoked in this situation. OA is pretty focused on 'social situation' type play. It doesn't answer the question of how the DM should react, but it has tools like honor and social status, along with skills, that can be brought to bear on the possible nature of the responses, should the fiction be carried forward. This is also the situation in 3.x, as it uses effectively close to the same skill system in a general sense. Anyway, 'story' is more a focus in these games, but it is generally understood to be the DM's story, so YMMV in actual play...

4e says explicitly "say yes." So, while it doesn't quite say that the players are empowered explicitly to make these kinds of 'moves', it is at least FAVORED as an approach. The DM in that case might create an SC, or the player could declare the gaining of this treasure to be a Quest (DMs have input on these, but they are supposed to be generated based on input from the players primarily). I would not say that "there is no Lich Queen" is breaking a 4e rule, but it is at least coming close! This is part of the sense in which 4e is much more of a narrative/story game with high(er) player empowerment than earlier D&Ds. It also illustrates where 5e backslid somewhat.