A Question Of Agency?

[Bedrockgames]

One theme I am seeing is perfection as the enemy of the good. I think it is important to reiterate that for those of us advocating for a more trad approach, we are not arguing for a perfect simulation of people or reality, merely one that we find believable.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There was earlier some talk about the symmetry of social mechanics vis-à-vis NPCs and the PCs and personally I feel that they don't need to work similarly. I generally feel that mechanics should roughly be same for both, but this is one area where I gladly make the exception. I really do not like using any sort of mechanics that compel the player characters to behave in certain way, force values on them etc, and as player such thing happening to my character is one of my biggest pet peeves. I don't necessarily mind some short term magical things that are basically CC effects, but things that try to tell me how to roleplay my character are a no go. When I GM I don't usually roll social skills against PCs, I just let the NPC's social stats inform how I portray them. An opposed test when a PC tries to detect whether the NPC is lying might be an exception, but even there a success for the NPC doesn't mean that the PC has to believe them, merely that they did not notice obvious signs of lying.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Don't worry, your post was clear.

My last sentence was mis-stated in this way: I intended that the impossibility of immersion pertain to playing a certain sort of religious PC. I suspect you still think it overgeneralises even on the intended interpretation. Maybe that's right: my first thought is are they really playing a PC who sees the world in terms of providential happenings?, but that's a path that can't be profitably pursued very far in this context.

I can't be but agnostic (no pun intended) on that question; I don't believe in in the situations where channelling has been possible for me I've ever played a strongly religious person, and the two players I'm familiar with who do it most face-to-face are not prone to doing that at all, so any opinion I had would be speculative at best.

I do hope I've succeeded in conveying not only my reaction, but a way of thinking about the immersion process that would mean there's no reason to think my reaction especially unusual.

The problem is that strongly immersive players are, best I can tell, sufficiently uncommon its hard to say whether its unusual or not, since there seems to be a fairly diverse set of things that do and do not work for them. The sample-size makes it hard to draw good trend-lines.

 

[Thomas Shey]

After reading this, let me take this opportunity to make an open pronouncement:

I've been running games for 36 years. 36 years doesn't make me immune to mistakes/errors. I make them. I'm VERY glad when a player points it out and we correct it. I don't want to screw up but I REALLY don't want anyone at the table to feel the weight of my screw up hanging over a game session (and I DEFINITELY don't want to reflect on it afterward and realize I screwed up and wasn't able to correct it).

So thank you players out there who (politely and expeditiously) correct your GMs when they screw up. Keep doing what you're doing.

Yeah, I absolutely feel the same.

To make it clear, I've been doing it even longer than you, and one of the things I've tried to shed was any of the lese majesty tendencies I may have absorbed from some of the top-down GM culture that was common at the start of the hobby. This doesn't mean I'm not still pretty much in the "GM controls the world" school (though the degree to which some people take it strikes me as pretty bloody extreme--if a player doesn't want to fill in his back history himself, I'm willing to try to do something interesting, but if he is I rarely see some great harm in his come up with details about his village, family or even in some cases organizational membership or religion to the degree it doesn't contradict things I've already done or are important for down-the-line reasons), but the flip side of that is I find it really valuable to have my players keep me honest. I don't feel the need to be playing without the net.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There was earlier some talk about the symmetry of social mechanics vis-à-vis NPCs and the PCs and personally I feel that they don't need to work similarly.

I don't find a need for them to work identically, but if they're completely divorced from each other I find it jarring. I'm will to have a set of social mechanics that mechanically nudges the PC in the direction it wants to go (provides carrots and sticks) but doesn't take over control, but that pretty much within its framework does take over control or close to it on an NPC, but I tend to find games that put the use of social mechanics completely off the table for PCs over-privileging the latter.

 

[Aldarc]

There was earlier some talk about the symmetry of social mechanics vis-à-vis NPCs and the PCs and personally I feel that they don't need to work similarly. I generally feel that mechanics should roughly be same for both, but this is one area where I gladly make the exception. I really do not like using any sort of mechanics that compel the player characters to behave in certain way, force values on them etc, and as player such thing happening to my character is one of my biggest pet peeves. I don't necessarily mind some short term magical things that are basically CC effects, but things that try to tell me how to roleplay my character are a no go. When I GM I don't usually roll social skills against PCs, I just let the NPC's social stats inform how I portray them. An opposed test when a PC tries to detect whether the NPC is lying might be an exception, but even there a success for the NPC doesn't mean that the PC has to believe them, merely that they did not notice obvious signs of lying.

So no Monster Hearts for you?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So no Monster Hearts for you?

Probably. I'm not really familiar with it though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Apocalypse World makes this super clear in its seduce or manipulate move, which (unlike all the examples I gave earlier in this post) is resolved differently depending on whether the character being seduced/manipulated is a PC (ie the outcome implicates a player's decision about his/her character) or a NPC (ie the outcome implicates a GM's control over one of his/her characters).

Well, PbtA games make it INCREDIBLY clear. There is no mechanical equivalency between PCs and NPCs WHATSOEVER! In DW, for example, there is no such thing as the GM rolling dice, it literally never happens (I assume AW is the same). The GM simply makes moves. If the GM says "the orc swings his axe at the dwarf!" there isn't a 'to hit roll' or something. Either the dwarf's player declares some action to avoid the blow, "I throw up my shield!" or damage is dealt! In the latter case this becomes a Defy Danger check by the player. NPCs don't have 'moves' (the GM does) and their attributes are all passive traits, or monster moves that represent special abilities that the GM is allowed to inject into the fiction. This last gets close to being an active 'monster action', but it is still invoked only according to the overall process of DW. There is no symmetry between GM and Player, they follow entirely different processes and rules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Assuming the player was hoping for a check.

If the player was hoping to get by without a check, however, and no check comes it'd be a very rare player indeed who raised an issue about it. Instead, most players IME would think "Hm - I got away with that one! Lucky me!" and very carefully say no more about it. To me the Lady Askar(?) example looks like one of these.

In broader terms beyond just this example: just because a player benefits from a GM error doesn't make it any less of an error.

See, to me, this post and the one before it, in which you talked about players "getting away with stuff" and that "they always go along with what they want", etc. smacks of an ethos in which the GM is some sort of task master/enforcer. That the players are these little miscreants who just want to have treasure handed to them, and it is the job of the tough guy GM to make it hard for them.

IMHO this is a way, simplistic perhaps, to interpret Gygaxian skilled play, but it is anathema to, certainly diametrically opposed to, the type of gameplay we are talking about. There are not two sides in these narrative construct/fiction first games! DW's GM agenda literally instructs the GM to be a fan of the PCs and an advocate for the players. They aren't some sort of 'opposed teams'! There is no such thing as players "getting away with it." This is what I would call antiquated thinking, at best. All the participants at the table are generating a fiction (play to see what happens) and all of them have the same goal, interesting and engaging fiction. Because it is an RPG that is going to focus on character and how it interplays with setting, genre, etc. through dramatic conflict. It also has elements of exploration and the other foci that you will see called out by WotC people when they talk about different kinds of players.

Even in Gygaxian skilled play I would say that a similar ethos is actually in play. The GM never simply pitches the PCs into hopeless situations. There aren't Invisible Stalkers on level 1 in the front corridor that slay everyone who enters, or pit traps filled with lava that do 100 points of damage with no save or chance to detect them. Remember, this was actually called out in the original Tomb of Horrors. The intro to the module literally says "This is unsurvivable, every PC who enters this dungeon will die. Go to the back of the book and run the pregens! Don't use any PC you care about." Given the sheer volume of ways PC spell casters can attack a problem some people DID get to the end of the module, but IME it is pretty rare! Clearly 'normal dungeons' are built so that the PCs are very likely to advance and surive IF THE PLAYER IS GOOD AT PLAYING D&D. The goal is not any sort of verisimilitude or reasonable and believable anything. It is to have a kick ass time beating the, hard but beatable, dungeon.

This is what informs my thesis about how play is really driven. You might have a model of GM vs Player at a superficial level, but at most your trying to make a 'fair test'. What we're doing is a bit different, but the ultimate goal is basically the same, to have a fun tale emerge at the end of the night. Yours might emphasize player puzzle-solving, loosely, and GM as puzzle-giver, and ours emphasizes GM as 'plot complication giver' and involve a more overtly cooperative model of how that works, but we are all ACTUALLY on the same side.

I just find it a lot easier to explicitly think that way, because bringing our thought processes and interests out into the open and putting them on the table is generally a more successful way to get to success reliably.

I mean, there's no reliable numbers on any of this I'm sure, but I am of the opinion that it is much more likely for a game run in a style like, say, @Manbearcat's to 'hit the mark' than it is for one where some people pick up D&D and try to run it in a classic fashion. That if you went across all the groups that did the latter, most of them achieved limited, or no, success. Most of the groups which tried the former OTOH, I suspect a lot of them succeeded. I think the 'classic D&D way' is just vastly more obvious. It doesn't take much analysis or explaining to get going with. It is successful enough of the time that if you try a few times you'll probably achieve enough satisfaction to keep playing. The other way is unlikely to just come about when random naive people try to play an RPG. Yet if you teach it to people it really does click well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Obviously this could rub against your (or anyone's) preferred playstyle, but my approach DMing 5E has been to have several pending story arcs available--some based on things the characters brought in, others based on things they've encountered since we started--and once the party has completed one they can choose another (or sometimes figure a way to work on more than one at the same time). This is made easier by the fact that A) not everyone at the table brought in a goal and B) the players have been entirely willing to solve things one at a time, knowing that their goals are still pending and might still arise as pursuits.

So, it can be an at-the-table solution, and/or it can be a more GM-driven solution. And I agree that neither approach is specifically grounded in the 5E rules. I think it helps to keep in mind that the 5E rules are intended for playing through hardcover adventures, where individual character goals are ... less relevant (and agency, at roughly any of the levels @Manbearcat laid out upthread, IIRC, isn't a consideration).

Yeah, this brings up an interesting, if maybe tangential, point. It is a LOT easier to author material for a 'classic' sort of style of play. You simply print a module which consists of a series of encounters which are thematically linked such that they form basically a story arc. There can be some flexibility in terms of when each bit comes in as well, but in the end the objective is to present all/most of the material and the players are pretty much expected to engage with each piece, or at most skip/avoid a branch here or there. This has a lot of virtues for the adventure writer, its simply to do being the main one. Secondarily it provides maximum value for the purchaser, most of what they have bought will see play and is directly relevant. Of course the downsides are clear as well...

It does not surprise me at all that, from a business standpoint, WotC is not that interested in publishing a story-driven game where the players are in charge of deciding what direction the fiction takes. That requires something closer to zero-myth play. How do you write a 'module' for that game? I don't even know how you would do that! Over the years I have basically reached a level of 'prep nothing' because I don't see much value in it. I might draw up NPCs, and sketch out 'maps' and 'fronts' essentially that appear to be in the realm of what players are interested in, but I don't see how that would ever be a 'product' really. I guess I could write a setting, or maybe more of a 'genre/milieu guide' or something. It appears to me that vendors of this type of game have hit on 2 strategies: 1) publish a lot of very niche games that are basically one-offs; 2) publish a series of supplements and such that expand on the core milieu by creating additional variations of the original model of game play (this is the V:tM approach, where they added new clans, new types of monsters you can play, etc. over time). A sort of 3rd variations is a 'family of games' which seems to be what we have with PbtA or now BitD. Each game stands alone, but they heavily share DNA. They aren't instances of a 'generic system', though.