A Question Of Agency?

[Thomas Shey]

OK, it is fair to say that you can RP someone who's faith is FALSE, sure. However, I would assume that will become a salient point!

I don't. I also think much more common is whether their faith is indeterminate, as would be the case with a lot of people roleplaying a person of faith in, say, a modern period action or SF game where whether the faith is "true" is not going to be possible to determine any more than anyone can truly do so in the real world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

While probably true, there's also the "try this fish" phenomenon, where someone has tried various other things and found them unsatisfactory (sometimes actively offputting) enough times that the cost to benefit of doing so yet again because "this time will be different" just isn't there.

Yes, there is something to that also. I can't say much about people here, I don't really know them. My experience "on the ground" is, that is not super common. Or its like someone has tried really badly cooked peas, but if they try my really good peas, the incidence of rejection is quite small. Like, if I get people to sit down and play DW, they don't get up afterwards and say they hated it and go away. Plenty of people won't try, maybe some of those are a different category, there isn't a way to tell, but of the sample I have, the success rate is pretty darn high.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

However, if you "say yes" when it's not appropriate as per the system, then what?

Well, it is some sort of "not playing according to the rules." I'd say it is a sort of mild force.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, there is something to that also. I can't say much about people here, I don't really know them. My experience "on the ground" is, that is not super common. Or its like someone has tried really badly cooked peas, but if they try my really good peas, the incidence of rejection is quite small. Like, if I get people to sit down and play DW, they don't get up afterwards and say they hated it and go away. Plenty of people won't try, maybe some of those are a different category, there isn't a way to tell, but of the sample I have, the success rate is pretty darn high.

I have to point out that may well be because people who've really actively had enough peas to decide not to try again, well, don't try. In other worlds by this point a lot of them are already being screened out, so you're not going to see many of them.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Roleplay, trusting the GM to have the NPC respond in a manner consistent with itself and-or the situation.

The problem with "result that the GM must honour" comes not in the moment - OK, you persuade (or bribe) the archivist to let you access the restricted section, the archivist lets you in and doesn't rat on you while you're in there - but later. Does the archivist have second thoughts that evening? Does the archivist notice what papers have been disturbed, realize what specific things you were looking up, and raise a stink? Or is your success 'forever', thus making the archvist something of a robot?

But if the GM decides that the archivist never has second thoughts and never betrays the deal they made with the PCs, they're no robotic?

So it sounds to me like you just don't like authority being taken from the GM.

Yep.

Of course not. The player isn't playing the NPC, I am.

You'd justifiably cry bloody blue murder if it went the other way and I-as-GM were able to use no-save game mechanics* to force your PC's reaction to something, right? So why shouldn't it work the same both ways?

* - most if not all charm and control effects grant the PC a saving throw; most social mechancics don't.

What? I'm not saying the player can just dictate the results and the GM has to honor them. I'm saying the player is free to attempt an action with an intended outcome, and if the dice go his way, then the GM needs to honor the dice. The same way that a player would need to honor the dice if he failed his character's save versus charm.

So let's say this is about a NPC.....instead of deciding ahead of time that he cannot be bribed because he's incredibly principled, why not let that be determined by the dice? The player has the PC attempt to bribe the NPC and rolls poorly.....oops, turns out you've tried to bribe the wrong guy. Whereas if the roll went well, then turns out the PC was talking to the right guy.

Why block certain actions automatically?

Now, if the NPC in question was a specific NPC and his principled nature has been established in the fiction, then I think that's something else, and the GM should then alter the interaction accordingly. In such a case, the players would likely be aware of this, or the GM could remind them, and so they could attempt some other means of getting this guy to cooperate or what have you.

I'm still willing to let them go through the motions. It's the old "I jump to the moon" thing - sure it's impossible, but if they want to try anyway who am I to stop them?

The GM.

Meaning, if I was a player in your game, I'd trust you to use your judgment to put a stop to any such wastes of time.

In some cases yes, in others there might be quite valid hidden reasons why what seems like a very possible task simply cannot be done. Sometimes those reasons might become apparent or obvious during the attempt (e.g. splash - the bridge you're trying to cross is an illusion), other times not (the sword will not unsheath unless blood is first rubbed into the scabbard).

What roll to cross the illusory bridge would be made that would be impossible? The same with the sword; what roll would apply?

Why are your examples always so bonkers?

Again, I'm not saying that things can't be impossible....obviously, there's the absurd examples of jumping to the moon and the like. But there are reasonable examples, too.....all would be based on the fiction that's been established. If it's not been established, then why allow a roll?

 

[hawkeyefan]

We handle it socially. Just like any other game when someone breaks a rule. "Not cool Dave. You moved an extra space."

You mean when I flip the table and send everything flying all around the room, that's not acceptable?

Damn.

 

[pemerton]

Well, I would argue that the whole POINT of playing an RPG is to get to interesting situations and avoid boring uninteresting ones

<snip>

So, not dicing for some situation which nobody at the table thinks leads to what they are interested in RPing just seems like basic good practice. I don't even see it as GM fiat, because the player could have just as easily pushed the issue of who believed what. I mean, Traveler is a bit of a loose game in terms of telling you that players can just go ahead and make a check to enact their intent, but I expect that @pemerton wouldn't tell the player to take a hike if he invoked a Diplomacy check or something instead of just letting the situation ride.

Right. If the player had wanted to push it - But does Lady Askol really believe von Jerrel? - then he could have done. But he didn't want to. I didn't want to. No one else at the table wanted to. So we all let the fictional state of affairs transition to one which is now higher stakes: the relationship between the two of them is built on a lie.

Perhaps Lady Askol is invested enough in her ideas about her lover that she's NEVER going to doubt until a cluebat hits her full in the face. This is as plausible as any other position we can take. Admittedly, that too is an assumption, your point is not invalid, it is just not somehow set in stone. Reasonable people can tell a few different stories here. Heck, since no check has been made, her belief is not actually something the player can count on. Evil GM Pemerton is perfectly within his rights to decide later that she's faking! (well, I'll let him say if he thinks that would be undermining the accomplishment of an earlier success).

There are a lot of interesting aspects of this kind of 'fiction first, zero-myth, play to see what happens' process. It isn't just "everyone imagine what they want."

Fully agree with all this. Precisely because there has been no player success here - just the unfolding of the situation as narrated by the player and by me - we don't have a "locked in" outcome about Lady Askol's belief. We know she loves (or at least is deeply infatuated) with von Jerrel. And we know that, in part because of that, her response to learning he is psionic would be deport him back to his homeworld rather than kill him (this is the outcome of the reaction-to-use-of-psionics roll, which was modified by the fact of her infatuation). So I as GM have no unilateral power to change those things.

But the basis for her accepting his lie? That's never been established because it's never been put to the test. That's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when I posted this upthread:

Does she really believe it? Does she accept it because she wants to believe it? These are open questions. It may be that they are put to the test, and perhaps answered, by subsequent play.

 

[pemerton]

I also have to wonder if the following two things are true:

1) Even though (a) you may not be a religious person and (b) you are clearly "piloting the ship" (so to speak), there is a process of seduction, a gravitational capture, when a figure you're working at identifying with is locked in a perceived righteous battle against a world that would make an emotional struggle of belief in providence. This is something at the very center of Dogs in the Vineyard.

2) For this to be realized, play needs to be distilled of thematically-neutral or irrelevant content because it serves to atrophy or outright sever this seduction (in the same way that some complain about other things doing the same).


When I watch media or read a book that is supposed to capture me, (2) is exactly the pitfall for me. If thematic momentum and focus is lost because its cut incoherently (in terms of tightness of and or giving expression to dramatic arc) or merely a poorly conceived ("distracted/muddled") screenplay with needless (and by needless I mean "hurtful") tangents and interludes...it_will_lose me. However, if not (and its brilliantly conceived and cut), I will absolutely be pulled into characters and their tale that I would otherwise have little sympathies with or attachments to.

My guess is, if I were to actually be a player in a TTRPG, my disposition would mirror this. I wouldn't be surprised if you're the same.

I've never really compared my play of RPGs to my watching of films or reading of novels. I'd have to reflect more on it to say anything very meaningful.

I do know that, as a player, I want to inhabit my character. And I do know that I find "arbitrary" GM intrusions disruptive of that. What counts as "arbitrary" is very context specific - but if the character I'm inhabiting is a religious one, then the sorts of intrusions I've been discussing in the last page or two would be instances.

 

[pemerton]

The discussion a page or three back about "saying 'yes'" and GM force reminds me of a discussion @Campbell and I have had in the past.

There can be differences of technique in the extent to which the GM consciously manages the way the fiction unfolds to sometimes force conflict, and sometimes allow the stakes to build - as I did with von Jerrel's lie to Lady Askol - compared to letting the fiction as structured by rules for "moves" unfold with less curation and hence more "impartial" or purely "emergent" moments of crisis.

Burning Wheel is an instance of the first. I would guess also DitV, though I've never played it. PbtA is the second, and the role of GM prep in preparing Fronts is part of that.

I'm refereeing Traveller in some sort of intermediate state (I hope not too incoherent a state!) between the two approaches.

(And @Campbell if I've misunderstood/misdescribed I'm very happy to be corrected.)

EDITED to add, as I catch up on the thread:

In the game @pemerton is referring to, "say yes or roll the dice" is a fundamental axiom of proper GMing. There are conditions upon which you "say yes" and upon which you "roll the dice". If "roll the dice" is required and you ignore the result in order to covertly "say yes" after the result should yield some kind of complication/setback/cost/failure, that is absolutely GM Force. If you "say yes" because its appropriate per the system, it can't be GM Force.

The only thing I disagree with here - which I've mentioned already upthread and have gestured at in this post - is that Classic Traveller is a bit less explicit about the referee role than a game like BW or AW. So I'm doing some extrapolation (see my quotes upthread about the stated roll of the referee; and there's more stuff about "just in time" generation of content in a referee-less game which I am adapting to a refereed game) and also some retrofitting of techniques that didn't really have names or concrete instruction books in 1977.

But otherwise your post is 100% right.

FURTHER EDIT in response to reading more back-and-forth:

For me, there is something more fundamental here than fidelity to established procedures. As I've said, in Classic Traveller the procedures themselves are not spelled out with the clarity of BW or AW.

What is fundamental is that the player knows that he narrated his PC lying and that I narrated Lady Askol accepting it. We both know that no check was made. We both know that the matter hasn't been put to the test. We both know, therefore, that it is up for grabs in the ways @AbdulAlhazred and I have sketched out. (And other ways too, perhaps. No one knows yet where play might go.)

It's different from, eg, the use of a Storyteller Certificate in Prince Valiant which can establish (within certain limits) a NPC mental state that the GM is bound by just like a regular success.

It's different from, eg, the initial checks for seduction which were declared, with the (implicit) stakes of kidnapping an Imperial Navy Commander, and resolved in favour of the player.

Pretending to resolve it in such a fashion and then lying about it would (i) be deceptive, and (ii) would either (a) close of those avenues of play that AbdulAlhazred and I have sketched out or (b) would require more GM deception or flat-out fiat to open them up again. Neither (i), nor (ii)(a), nor (ii)(b) is appealing to me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think 'plausibility' IS a part of 'dramatic considerations'.

But all you are doing here then is discounting an entire playstyle by forcing 'dramatic consideration' into the definition of it. I can tell you that when I am playing in this manner, the plausibility I am going for isn't a dramatic consideration. If we can't even agree that my style is what I think it is, I don't think there is really any room for discussion. That is why these kinds of hard lines never advance anything (and it is why I have significantly softened my view over the years around this stuff: I realized hard line, playstyle discussions as they happen online are terrible for achieving a functional gaming table)