A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

Removing the encounter tables from old versions of D&D removed a module of the game around which other modules were designed. They no longer functioned the same as they were intended. Now, I will admit that my group and I often did this in favor of a more cinematic approach to play......but that did render dungeon delving far different than it had been intended to be.

Right. So you did it differently to suit your tastes and it worked just fine. (Also sounds similar to what we did.)

Now, if you have a GM who is consistent, and makes principled calls of some sort, and you also have players who understand this, the kind of play you're describing may be perfectly fine.

So there you go.

But I don't think that means that rules aren't beneficial.

Certain amount of rules is indeed beneficial, but you never can have a rule for everything. There is always some grey are, judgements need to be made. This is not a bug, it is a feature. That's why have a human in charge of running the game instead of a stack of spreadsheets. And I strongly feel that for certain things heavy reliance on rules may easily be detrimental. When players are engaged in a heated conversation with an NPCs and are immersing in the situation, trying to break that down into varying debating actions and stopping to calculate conviction scores is not what's needed.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If the game boils down to a player declaring an action for their PC, and then the actual procedure is for the GM to decide if that works or not, then how does a player know their chances? How can they make informed decisions?

It depends on what you are trying to make a ruling on. I feel a lot is getting left out in this description of the player declaring then the GM making a calling. Often these are more involved exchanges in certain parts of the game. And the GM is expected to make the judgement based on things like logic and what the player is actually saying. One reason to take 'game mechanics' away from this is so what the player is saying or doing is honored (whereas a roll or a simple mechanical procedure might miss some of the subtlety and not be able to 'compete' a result that is as sound as a human thinking through how things out to pan out. This is one frustration I often encountered with social mechanics in some games doing things like undermining what I actually said or stated I did. And sometimes you want to interface with the world or characters directly and you don't want that mediated by a roll. For example a skill like Detect (which I do have in my own games) can be bad to some players and GMs, because it often encourages players not to directly interact with things like clue finding. It depends on how it is implemented of course. I find this is especially the case if you play mystery scenarios, so you, the player, are the one solving them. I want to have the experience of talking to the NPCs, asking them questions, telling the GM I look under the table, etc. Not saying there are not mechanics that can work with this desire, but I have found, for me, the best way for a game to handle these things, when I want those things to be the focus of play, is to not have mechanics or procedures for them. It is just my personal taste. Not everyone is going to feel this way (which is why I include even Detect in my own games)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is like saying that if you don't have bespoke fear and sanity mechanics you can't play horror in D&D or if you don't have a hilarity score you can't play comedy with it. Now I don't know if anyone has successfully done air combat with Trivial Pursuit, perhaps someone has but it is not common. Playing romance in D&D however is pretty damn common.

No it isn't. You can have your characters ROLE PLAY a romance. Since no rule of D&D whatsoever will be used in that exercise, it is fair to say that it is not really 'playing D&D' per se. I mean, you can complicate things by presuming that all this happens in the backdrop of some other D&D action, but its character partakes of D&D as a game in no way whatsoever.

This is why @chaochou said you could 'play it with Trivial Pursuit' because both games give you equal support, in every respect, for doing so (well, at least D&D has the concept of a 'character' as a game entity, so I'll grant it is slightly ahead here, but not much).

The test of this is that the exact same 'romantic narrative' would arise in ANY other RPG (that isn't about romance), regardless of rules, as long as it allocated narrative authority in the same way (or the participants did so anyway). You could do exactly the same by simply sitting at the table making a story with no rules at all (again assuming consistent use of narrative authority).

 

[hawkeyefan]

Right. So you did it differently to suit your tastes and it worked just fine. (Also sounds similar to what we did.)

Well, I wouldn’t say it went just fine, exactly. We had fun, which is the main goal of course, so in that sense, yes.

But our play was largely driven by the GM and their pre-written material, whether published or of their own design. The DM had “final say” and all that. They were very much the “author of the story”.

Personally, I found that lingering but incomplete elements of 1e that we carried over into our 2e games just created a weird combination for the GM. The idea from 1E of challenging the players combined with the unlimited authority of the role from 2E....well, it did not always make for a fun gaming experience. I didn’t really come to understand this until later on.

So there you go.

Sure. It worked in the sense that we all still enjoy the hobby after all these years. But if someone was to ask me how to play these days, that’s not how I’d suggest they go about it.

Our understanding was incomplete, and there were a lot of things we were doing wrong.

Certain amount of rules is indeed beneficial, but you never can have a rule for everything. There is always some grey are, judgements need to be made. This is not a bug, it is a feature. That's why have a human in charge of running the game instead of a stack of spreadsheets. And I strongly feel that for certain things heavy reliance on rules may easily be detrimental. When players are engaged in a heated conversation with an NPCs and are immersing in the situation, trying to break that down into varying debating actions and stopping to calculate conviction scores is not what's needed.

I don’t think mechanics need to replace role playing, which seems to be your concern here. As I said, rules should be there to enhance and inspire role play.

In your scenario above, how does the discussion become heated? How is that determined? What does it mean? Can it be changed? If the answer to all of this is ultimately “the GM gets to decide” then that may be fine, but it puts the players’ agency entirely in the GM’s hands.....which says what about their agency?

Now, I agree with you about judgment being needed in almost any game (even GMless games still shift such judgment to the players). What I prefer is that a game has clear instruction to the GM on how to use their judgment and when and where to apply it. Not simply grant them unlimited authority to use their judgment toward some vague notion of “make the game fun”.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Even in the context of games where players can only influence the fiction by declaring actions for their character (which I personally tend to prefer) I find it extraordinarily important to distinguish between my character's theoretical agency within the fiction and my ability as a player to see that through given the social constraints of the game being played.

From my perspective we are talking about a game we are all playing together (including the GM). I think we all agree to play a particular game together is important. Like we're playing Dungeons and Dragons or Apocalypse World. That should mean something. We should not all be trying to play different games. I do not see this as any different than sitting down to play Risk, Azul, or Battle for Rokugan. RPGs are not like special in that sense.

I'm not 100% sure I'm getting your point here, so if my comments seem non-sequitors, that's probably a sign I've missed it. That being said:

The truth is, many people do not actually have the luxury of playing entirely with people who are good at--or even want to--getting on the same page. There's obviously some practical limitations here--people can end up having play styles and expectations that are diametrically opposite, to the degree where increasing one player's engagement and enjoyment in the game actively diminishes another--but in a lot of groups satisfying people who expect different things out of a game are often considered just part of the gig. So to some degree in many groups, the agreement to play a specific game doesn't really mean much beyond it being the lowest common denominator everyone can agree to, and if that means there's a certain degree of pulling against the assumed structure of the game, its something the GM and other players simply have to adapt to.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It depends on what you are trying to make a ruling on. I feel a lot is getting left out in this description of the player declaring then the GM making a calling. Often these are more involved exchanges in certain parts of the game. And the GM is expected to make the judgement based on things like logic and what the player is actually saying. One reason to take 'game mechanics' away from this is so what the player is saying or doing is honored (whereas a roll or a simple mechanical procedure might miss some of the subtlety and not be able to 'compete' a result that is as sound as a human thinking through how things out to pan out. This is one frustration I often encountered with social mechanics in some games doing things like undermining what I actually said or stated I did. And sometimes you want to interface with the world or characters directly and you don't want that mediated by a roll. For example a skill like Detect (which I do have in my own games) can be bad to some players and GMs, because it often encourages players not to directly interact with things like clue finding. It depends on how it is implemented of course. I find this is especially the case if you play mystery scenarios, so you, the player, are the one solving them. I want to have the experience of talking to the NPCs, asking them questions, telling the GM I look under the table, etc. Not saying there are not mechanics that can work with this desire, but I have found, for me, the best way for a game to handle these things, when I want those things to be the focus of play, is to not have mechanics or procedures for them. It is just my personal taste. Not everyone is going to feel this way (which is why I include even Detect in my own games)

I don't think anyone is saying that EVERYTHING is always based on some mechanics at all times, or that things much be based on 'checks' necessarily. It is entirely dependent on the game, the participants, etc. Again though, principles, applied through some sort of process to carry out some agenda, is at the core of it. I would say it is never BAD to articulate those.

So, for instance, if I was running a Dungeon World game and the idea of solving a mystery came up, I have some things I can fall back on, right? Like I know that we're 'playing to see what happens', and we have a general principle of 'fiction first' and the GM 'pushes' things. There is usually not a lot of established story or 'myth' either, although perhaps a GM would be wise to have devised some ideas about who killed Miss Green, where and with which weapon (these ideas should probably be highly provisional though).

So, this type of game will proceed through the GM looking at what the players are aiming for, and feeding them interesting obstacles in each scene. Success and failure will basically determine how hot/cold they get in terms of a solution, and details can be drawn from the GM's 'map' of the situation. In some cases a player might effectively dictate something (you can kind of do this with judicious use of Spout Lore) or maybe the GM goes and asks a player to supply some fact or other (this is a good reaction to say looking for a clue in a new location).

Now, DW is certainly not a murder mystery game, and I'm sure other rules sets do it better, but this is certainly a case where the principles of the game won't really work against you in any case of creating a narrative. I think this brings up a point about narrative focus games, their concepts are pretty universal, because they are mostly 'meta-game', and thus don't depend much on a specific fictional context. This is opposed to D&D and other classic games that focus on "mechanics as rules of the world" and mostly ignore the table. D&D's best bet for romance or mystery is to just not pay attention to its rules at all! Most of DW will at least help you, somewhat.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It depends on what you are trying to make a ruling on. I feel a lot is getting left out in this description of the player declaring then the GM making a calling. Often these are more involved exchanges in certain parts of the game. And the GM is expected to make the judgement based on things like logic and what the player is actually saying.

Sure. Something like a Diplomacy or Persuade check or some similar skill/action may require the GM to consider a lot if factors. Starting attitude, what the PC says/does, what’s previously been established in the fiction, and so on. He uses this info to calculate a DC or target number or whatever.

None of that needs to replace the roleplaying element.

One reason to take 'game mechanics' away from this is so what the player is saying or doing is honored (whereas a roll or a simple mechanical procedure might miss some of the subtlety and not be able to 'compete' a result that is as sound as a human thinking through how things out to pan out. This is one frustration I often encountered with social mechanics in some games doing things like undermining what I actually said or stated I did. And sometimes you want to interface with the world or characters directly and you don't want that mediated by a roll. For example a skill like Detect (which I do have in my own games) can be bad to some players and GMs, because it often encourages players not to directly interact with things like clue finding. It depends on how it is implemented of course. I find this is especially the case if you play mystery scenarios, so you, the player, are the one solving them. I want to have the experience of talking to the NPCs, asking them questions, telling the GM I look under the table, etc. Not saying there are not mechanics that can work with this desire, but I have found, for me, the best way for a game to handle these things, when I want those things to be the focus of play, is to not have mechanics or procedures for them. It is just my personal taste. Not everyone is going to feel this way (which is why I include even Detect in my own games)

Sure, I think that’s all fine. Again, I don’t think any of this stuff you’ve described is at odds with mechanical rules. I think that it’s more a case of when to call for mechanics to be implemented.

For some, “we search the room” followed by a roll, with an outcome based on the result of the roll, will work fine. Other games may need the search action broken down into more individual steps; “I search the fireplace while Tom searches the table” etc.

Even if the GM is going to require a literal description of “I check the bottom drawer of the desk for a false bottom” to find the clue there, that procedure is fine if everyone is on board. I think that method is a bit extreme.

My point about the rules is that they are how players understand the game...whatever the game may be. If I’m playing Monopoly and I land on Boardwalk, it’s the rules of the game that tell me yes it may cost everytjing I have now, but it’s the most valuable property in the game and it probably won’t still be available if I land on it again.

If the rules weren’t clear, I wouldn’t be able to draw those conclusions.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sure. Something like a Diplomacy or Persuade check or some similar skill/action may require the GM to consider a lot if factors. Starting attitude, what the PC says/does, what’s previously been established in the fiction, and so on. He uses this info to calculate a DC or target number or whatever.

None of that needs to replace the roleplaying element.

Except that does interfere with it. Because if I am going around asking witnesses to a crime questions and I ask a question that would logically produce a response, and I do so persuasively, it feels weird to leave that in the hands of a random roll (even if the DC is set to fit what I say). Wouldn't it make more sense for the GM to just say to him or herself "how would this character respond to what the PC just said?". This is more likely to be faithful to the PCs words and the personality of the NPC in question. Not saying it is going to be a huge deal to everyone. But personally I find just going with what was said in character, is better. Now I do use Persuade and Command and a variety of skills like that. But I only ask for them, when I, the GM, am uncertain about how an NPC would respond what a PC just said.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think anyone is saying that EVERYTHING is always based on some mechanics at all times, or that things much be based on 'checks' necessarily. It is entirely dependent on the game, the participants, etc. Again though, principles, applied through some sort of process to carry out some agenda, is at the core of it. I would say it is never BAD to articulate those.

So, for instance, if I was running a Dungeon World game and the idea of solving a mystery came up, I have some things I can fall back on, right? Like I know that we're 'playing to see what happens', and we have a general principle of 'fiction first' and the GM 'pushes' things. There is usually not a lot of established story or 'myth' either, although perhaps a GM would be wise to have devised some ideas about who killed Miss Green, where and with which weapon (these ideas should probably be highly provisional though).

So, this type of game will proceed through the GM looking at what the players are aiming for, and feeding them interesting obstacles in each scene. Success and failure will basically determine how hot/cold they get in terms of a solution, and details can be drawn from the GM's 'map' of the situation. In some cases a player might effectively dictate something (you can kind of do this with judicious use of Spout Lore) or maybe the GM goes and asks a player to supply some fact or other (this is a good reaction to say looking for a clue in a new location).

Now, DW is certainly not a murder mystery game, and I'm sure other rules sets do it better, but this is certainly a case where the principles of the game won't really work against you in any case of creating a narrative. I think this brings up a point about narrative focus games, their concepts are pretty universal, because they are mostly 'meta-game', and thus don't depend much on a specific fictional context. This is opposed to D&D and other classic games that focus on "mechanics as rules of the world" and mostly ignore the table. D&D's best bet for romance or mystery is to just not pay attention to its rules at all! Most of DW will at least help you, somewhat.

But my point is the DW way, as you describe it at least, is the total opposite of what I want from trying to solve a mystery: I want to actually solve a mystery, not having it be something that emerges around my interests as a player. I want there to be a mystery to solve, that is concrete, with details established by the GM, and I want to solve those as if I am there investigating the crime. This is something where some rules may be useful (for example if I have to climb a wall, having a way for me to achieve that mechanically could be handy). But in terms of the actual mystery solving, I want most of that to boil down to what I am choosing to do and how I am analyzing what happens in game. There are two basic ways to approach mystery and investigation: as a simulation of sherlock holmes or with you playing as sherlock holmes. Those are two totally different experiences. I.E. Do I want this to play out like a sherlock holmes story, with events happening that I expect to happen in a sherlock holmes story and the character catching the details and clues that my ace detective character ought to detect according to the stats on his sheet, or do I want to explore the mystery in the first person, find the clues/miss the clues, piece together clues/fail to piece together clues, etc. I want the experience of a mystery to be more in the realm of Data's holodeck excursions into playing sherlock holmes, where he is experiencing the fun of actually finding the clues, talking to the suspects and piecing all the facts together. I think, for me, having mechanics to guide this, often get in the way of that direct feeling of solving the mystery.

 

[Bedrockgames]

. I think this brings up a point about narrative focus games, their concepts are pretty universal, because they are mostly 'meta-game', and thus don't depend much on a specific fictional context. This is opposed to D&D and other classic games that focus on "mechanics as rules of the world" and mostly ignore the table. D&D's best bet for romance or mystery is to just not pay attention to its rules at all! Most of DW will at least help you, somewhat.

I think very few RPGs are universal like that. Again, my experience with narrative systems is more limited than yours, but the ones I have played, seemed like they would be pretty hard to port into my regular game. They seem pretty focused (which I think is part of their appeal). I could be wrong as I don't play DW and that is likely the one you have in mind. I think this issue though is less about what system is more universal or what system is best for X, than what kinds of rules each of us want for things. And it isn't even a zero sum game really. Some days I want to play Hillfolk, for example (I don't know DW that well, but Hillfolk I like---and I would say that is pretty narrative); some days I prefer a more traditional system.