A Question Of Agency?

[PsyzhranV2]

I'd say vindicated

Hazarding a guess but I think you might need to schedule a checkup with your optometrist, your eye prescription might be out of date

 

[Campbell]

Here's how Gather Information works in Blades. A player says what they are having their character do and then asks a question directly to the GM. They then make their roll which sets the effect level. Even on a 1-3 the GM is obliged to give them information which answers the question posed. More information on a 4-5 and even more on a 6 or critical. Sometimes this may come with some attached danger, but the player will get real information that directly corresponds to the question asked no matter what.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You say that but from everything that's being said about the game, the general play loop sounds like it's built upon these same kinds of "gambles" regardless of whether Attuning is used or not.

What do you mean by "gambles"? Generally speaking, the game consists of Actions taken by the PCs. The players roll their dice pools and either succeed, fail, or succeed with a consequence. The consequence is up to the GM, but should suit the situation as established in the fiction. So, falling if trying to jump over an alley, or being stabbed if skirmishing with an enemy, or attracting ghosts when messing about with the ghost field.

At a descriptive level, this isn't really different from D&D. I tried to fight the orc, and I wound up losing 12 hit points. I tried to pick the lock, and got hit by a dart trap and had to make a poison save. I tried to attune to the ghost field to check out what appeared to be a haunted painting, and I got drained by a ghost.

Yes, but the consequences weren't simply you failed to achieve your goal.

So what?

Perhaps it would help if I said, there are plenty of actions in plenty of D&D playstyles that can also be gambles. Some posters like iserith specifically talk about a playstyle where even skills like a perception check to hear through a door may cause guards to appear on a failure as a complication. I've never been particularly keen on how that works under his playstyle either.

In Blades, typically an Action roll has risk involved. If so, then the consequences should follow. I could see that if the PCs are infiltrating an enemy stronghold, let's say, and it's been established that it is heavily guarded and that there are regular patrols, then yes, I can see a consequence being the arrival of guards at an inopportune moment. But as I said, they're presence would have to have been established, or else the GM can have a consequence be to telegraph their arrival first, i.e. "you hear voices coming from down the hall; do you want to continue messing with this door or do you want to take cover?"

Then the stakes have been established, the player can decide how to proceed knowing the likely consequence of a failed roll.

If you are saying a fighter attempts to attack an orc minding his own business then yes the orc will start trying to attack him. But that's not contingent on whether the attack lands, it's contingent on the orc knowing he's tried to attack him. So no gamble there.

If you are saying the fighter and orc are already fighting and the fighter just misses, then that miss didn't raise stakes or make the orc more powerful. The orc didn't suddenly double in size and strength or become soul sucking because the fighter missed. There's no gamble there.

Think about what you're saying here. I never said the orc gained power or any of that....I don't even know what you're trying to get at with that angle.

But you've said that combat is not a gamble. Think about that.

Now think about it again.

Whether something is a gamble isn't affected by a player's surprise.

We're in agreement there, at least!

I guess to summarize - the inclusion of chance deciding the outcome isn't enough to make something a gamble. There must be stakes involved where you win something upon winning and lose something upon losing.

I think by gamble, you mean risk? I think? Which I think has a certain amount of chance kind of baked in, no? I don't know how you can say something's a gamble if there's no chance involved.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Manbearcat could you perhaps elaborate what you think makes it so force-proof? I am not talking about forcing some specific outcome on any specific test, I'm talking about the overall trajectory of the game, and to me it seems rather obvious that the person who provides information, frames the scenes, sets the odds and decides the consequences has considerable power over it. And sure, if the GM pushes too hard, it becomes noticeable, here probably easier than in some other games. But heavy railroading is always noticeable.*

Oh, and speaking about framing, in that original haunted painting example, if I as a GM would have wanted a player to go investigate whether the painting is magical, I would have described the room in the same way. When you describe things it is pretty easy to get people focus their attention to what you want and even draw the conclusions you want. it is not 100% guaranteed, but especially if you know your players you can do it rather reliably.

*( And if some crazy mentalist genius could do it in manner that it is not noticeable at all, and I as player would feel that I have awesome agency,
I wouldn't care.)

I have a giant post worked up that will go over all the various factors that someone would use to evaluate how "Force-receptive" or "Force-enabling" or "Force-sensitive" a game might be. But, given what I've read of all of the exchanges since I saw this, I'm not going to post it yet. I don't feel like anything constructive will come from me just posting that. I may post it downstream, but I need you (and anyone else who disagree that this game, and those like it, are extremely adverse to Force) to demonstrate that you have a grasp of this first. The mis-parsing of information, the siloing of information (rather than integrating it holistically within all the other machinery), and a (really embarrassing to be honest) pronouncements like "I feel vindicated" (when absolutely nothing has been demonstrated) are unbelievably well-poisoning (and I've worked really hard to assume sincerity and good-faith engagement). They don't look like someone trying to understand so I need a demonstration of understanding (which is why I framed the question that compelled this response the way I did).

So, with that in mind...

If the following is true for the basic action resolution procedures, (a) what are the vectors for Force that you would use as a GM and (b) demonstrate to me how the players wouldn't (c) detect it and foil it:

1) The default arrangement of Action Rolls against/within obstacles, conflicts, and drama in play are premised upon the Risky Position and Standard Effect relationship; "You're acting under duress and taking a chance: You get what you sought." This is the standard disposition of a Scoundrel's life in Blades.

2) What is the arrangement of the player to all of this:

PLAYERS - Turtling is bad. Everything is risk and danger. Embrace that and jump headlong into it. Don't talk yourself out of fun and you have tons of means at your disposal to defy Consequences and Harm (negotiating Position and Effect and/or trading one for the other, Devil's Bargain, Push Yourself, get or give Assistance, lead or follow a Group Action, get or give Protect(ion), Set Up someone for success or vice versa, Flashbacks, spend Coin or Rep, sacrifice Gear, Resistance Rolls, use Armor, you get to pick the Action Roll). Build your character through play, act now-plan later, accept deadly harm, show off your character's bad decisions, accept the responsibility as co-author of the ongoing fiction for the reckless life you've all chosen (by playing the game at all). It a long shot, but if you scrap and scramble hard enough, you may throw off the yoke of oppression and climb the corrupt and brutal city's hierarchy.

GM - No one is in charge of the story. You're just having a conversation and following the rules. That will lead to one. Bring the deadly, corrupt, and haunted city to life. Present it honestly, be a fan of the characters (not a friend and not an enemy...the deck is already stacked against them), be curious and play to find out what happens, and follow the rules. Ask questions and use the answers. Think about the dangers inherent in what the scoundrels do. Risky is default. If success is snowballing, consider Controlled. If things are escalating out of control, its probably Desperate. Call the positions as you see them, but be open to revision. Always feel free to rewind/revise/reconsider as needed until everyone is on the same page. When assessing Effect, Standard is the default and then Assess Factors (Potency, Scale, Quality/Tier) to move up or down to Great or Limited. Follow the fiction, follow your principles, follow their lead, follow through with your set up moves, and follow the rules (Position: Effect relationship and any mitigating move a player makes when determining any Consequence when a PC suffers an effect from an enemy/obstacle).

3) EVERYTHING is player-facing. EVERYTHING. All procedures. All action resolution rolls. All of the conversation, the clarification, the negotiation, the resource deployment to reorient the danger/risk: reward relationship (which typically involves the players accepting some new risk on a different axis which could be diminishing their stores of resources which could cost them downstream or introducing new potential dangers/enemies/allies) before dice are rolled and after dice are rolled and fallout is tallied up. All of it is player-facing.

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So, given that arrangement (and I'll reiterate my question here):

(a) What are the vectors for Force that you would use as a GM and (b) demonstrate to me how the players wouldn't (c) detect it and foil it?

 

[Lanefan]

Here's how Gather Information works in Blades. A player says what they are having their character do and then asks a question directly to the GM. They then make their roll which sets the effect level. Even on a 1-3 the GM is obliged to give them information which answers the question posed. More information on a 4-5 and even more on a 6 or critical. Sometimes this may come with some attached danger, but the player will get real information that directly corresponds to the question asked no matter what.

So even on the worst possible roll (which from this I assume is a 1) the GM isn't allowed to provide outright false information to mislead or confuse or frustrate the player/PC?

 

[Manbearcat]

Keep in mind, though, that referee errors don't always go one way and more often generally end up cancelling out (sometimes driven by the infamous "make-up call" which happens a lot in hockey - a ref makes a bad penalty call, realizes it was a bad call but is committed to it, then looks for any excuse to call a penalty the other way to even it up).

In RPG terms, this would manifest as various instances of GM Force more or less cancelling out, and having the play state thus arrive at much the same point it would have without any GM Force ever having been used.

Couple things on this:

1) I don't agree with your paragraph 1. With respect, that is a very unexamined (c'est la vie or "only focus on what you control") approach to evaluating the impact of referee error on (a) the newly perturbed gamestate, (b) the now modified trajectory of play due to that perturbation, and (c) the ultimate result. It also presupposed and smuggles in (d) a balancing kludge ("the make-up call") that cannot remotely be assumed in any given instance of competition/play.

There are many factors that have to be assessed and evaluated in order to even begin to have an opinion on any given game (and they're all different), let alone games broadly:

* How swingy are the consequences of a singular instance of referee error upon the present gamestate? In some situations we have advanced metrics that will tell us just how deeply swingy referee error is. A little known fact in baseball is how PROFOUNDLY swingy (with respect to the gamestate) a singular umpire error is in what some may consider a relatively innocuous situation:

The 1:1 count.

Do you know what the difference is between a 2:1 count and a 1:2 count? An UNBELIEVABLE .927 OPS vs a .428 OPS. Batting Average more than doubles, On Base Percentage doubles exactly, Slugging Percentage (power numbers) more than doubles. Baseball is PROFOUNDLY sensitive to referee error here. And how many 1:1 counts (that will subsequently be 2:1 or 1:2 counts) happen during a 9 inning game? Yeah. A ton.

3 referee errors in 1:1 counts alone (forget errors in other counts, forget Safe/Out calls, forget Balk calls, etc) will have huge reverberating effects on play. And those errors only become enormously compounded with runners on base. Win Shares hinge hugely on these calls.

And its not just the 1st order effect of these missed calls. A single 1:1 count can reverberate HUGELY with intangible effects (and not just for this game!)! Should have been 1:2 vs 2:1? Well now, there is a big chance that Pitch Count is going to increase for this Pitcher. If this was going to be the last out of the inning, it could suddenly spiral into 10, 20, even 40 extra pitches! Suddenly, this pitcher is pulled, unavailable for days, you're exhausting your bullpen early. That exhaustion in this game will have the knock-on effects of (a) disallowing you to dictate match-ups later in the game and (b) exhaust your staff and render one or more Pitchers unavailable for tomorrows game 2 (or 3)!

There are tons of examples like this in sports (I could go over a giant litany of them in American Football). Their propensity to reverberate/compound/create new adversity (maybe not even in this game!) that otherwise wouldn't be there is MASSIVELY higher than some idealistic notion of them "cancelling out."

2) On your "in RPG terms", you're describing a GM marionetting a gamestate back and forth. This isn't Force cancelling out (this is before even going through the 1:1 count analogue I did above...which you should do for any TTRPG gamestate...particularly complex, intensive resource-management games like D&D or Blades) and therefore liberating the game from being hugely distorted by GM signal. Its Force AMPLIFICIATION! Its INCREASING GM SIGNAL!

 

[Lanefan]

Couple things on this:

1) I don't agree with your paragraph 1. With respect, that is a very unexamined (c'est la vie or "only focus on what you control") approach to evaluating the impact of referee error on (a) the newly perturbed gamestate, (b) the now modified trajectory of play due to that perturbation, and (c) the ultimate result. It also presupposed and smuggles in (d) a balancing kludge ("the make-up call") that cannot remotely be assumed in any given instance of competition/play.

There are many factors that have to be assessed and evaluated in order to even begin to have an opinion on any given game (and they're all different), let alone games broadly:

* How swingy are the consequences of a singular instance of referee error upon the present gamestate? In some situations we have advanced metrics that will tell us just how deeply swingy referee error is. A little known fact in baseball is how PROFOUNDLY swingy (with respect to the gamestate) a singular umpire error is in what some may consider a relatively innocuous situation:

The 1:1 count.

Do you know what the difference is between a 2:1 count and a 1:2 count? An UNBELIEVABLE .927 OPS vs a .428 OPS. Batting Average more than doubles, On Base Percentage doubles exactly, Slugging Percentage (power numbers) more than doubles. Baseball is PROFOUNDLY sensitive to referee error here. And how many 1:1 counts (that will subsequently be 2:1 or 1:2 counts) happen during a 9 inning game? Yeah. A ton.

Cool! I never knew that about the 2:1 / 1:2 difference - but, in my defense, baseball's not my main sport.

3 referee errors in 1:1 counts alone (forget errors in other counts, forget Safe/Out calls, forget Balk calls, etc) will have huge reverberating effects on play. And those errors only become enormously compounded with runners on base. Win Shares hinge hugely on these calls.

And its not just the 1st order effect of these missed calls. A single 1:1 count can reverberate HUGELY with intangible effects (and not just for this game!)! Should have been 1:2 vs 2:1? Well now, there is a big chance that Pitch Count is going to increase for this Pitcher. If this was going to be the last out of the inning, it could suddenly spiral into 10, 20, even 40 extra pitches! Suddenly, this pitcher is pulled, unavailable for days, you're exhausting your bullpen early. That exhaustion in this game will have the knock-on effects of (a) disallowing you to dictate match-ups later in the game and (b) exhaust your staff and render one or more Pitchers unavailable for tomorrows game 2 (or 3)!

However, and this gets back a bit to my point earlier, if the referee is equally bad both ways (i.e. makes much the same errors at much the same rate regardless of which team is batting) isn't that referee's net influence on the result of that game roughly neutral in the end as he's cancelled out his own influence?

2) On your "in RPG terms", you're describing a GM marionetting a gamestate back and forth. This isn't Force cancelling out (this is before even going through the 1:1 count analogue I did above...which you should do for any TTRPG gamestate...particularly complex, intensive resource-management games like D&D or Blades) and therefore liberating the game from being hugely distorted by GM signal. Its Force AMPLIFICIATION! Its INCREASING GM SIGNAL!

If there's a lever in a central position (analagous to the natural un-forced gamestate) and I push that lever up 10 degrees and leave it there, I've altered its position. But if I push it up ten degrees and leave it there for five minutes, then push it down 20 degrees (so now it's 10 degrees below level) and leave it there for five minutes, then put it back to level, in the end I haven't changed anything. It started level, it ended level, and the sum average of its position in the meantime was also level.

 

[Aldarc]

The player is still forcing their desired outcome to the reality, it just is a gamble. But there really is no mystery. "Is this painting magical" is not really an interesting question any more. "It is because I decided to examine it, though it may eat my face." or even "It has certain chance of being magical because I decided to examine it" are ultimately both answers that the player just directly produced. And yeah, I just don't agree with you that evoking an randomiser makes a decision meaningful.

What's important herein though isn't your preferences for mystery, objective realities, or whatever else, but, rather, that new, dramatically significant game states were created as a result of the player conscientiously choosing to engage their own character's agendas in the fiction knowing full well of the risks that comes with action declarations.

In a situation where some sort of objectivish fictional reality exists and the GM can adjudicate the player's actions in good faith against that, the player's actions matter on a completely differnt level. There actually are right or wrong answers. You can study the reality and make informed choices, not just push the RNG machine to produce new reality in the flavour your choosing.

That is a perfectly fine aesthetic preference. Also, this would seemingly read as an advocation for OSR-style skilled play, but a number of key elements that would facilitate such skilled play have also been pushed against in this thread as "anti-RP" or "gamist."

It's chess instead of roulette.

Unless you're trying to talk to a NPC. Then play goes from chess to "Mother May I?" or a fun game of "Pleez valid8 my akting skillz, Bob!" Can good faith the size of a mustard seed move an NPC? Only when Bob in his infinite goodness wills it. Even in the best of faith, one can't even hope for the Gods of RNG for success.

That said, Blades in the Dark is less roulette and more akin to backgammon, as per @pemerton's apt comparison. There are RNG dice rolls that shape the possibility of outcomes, but also other strategies of play and gambling: e.g., checker movement, hitting/entering, building primes, traps, the gambling cube, etc.

--------------------------
Keep in mind though that these are playing different games. How one approaches or makes an informed decision/choice will vary based upon the rules and mechanics. Even in D&D, a player's "informed decision" will vary between editions or house-ruled editions. An informed choice will vary if we are using a d20 dice resolution or 2d6 or a dice pool, much as how an informed choice will look different between chess, backgammon, and poker due to the different character of the respective games. I don't think that one should regard it as a failure that Blades in the Dark does not operate by the sort of informed choice protocols that you would use for your preferred playstyle of D&D anymore than being upset that I can't apply the same choice protocols for poker to my game of Uno, despite the fact that they are both card games. I would instead recommend considering with an open-mind how a player would navigate Blades in the Dark in play and how the game contextualizes the framework of informed choices/decisions for players in such a game. It won't necessarily be in the same points where you are accustomed to or with the same rationale.

 

[Manbearcat]

Cool! I never knew that about the 2:1 / 1:2 difference - but, in my defense, baseball's not my main sport.

However, and this gets back a bit to my point earlier, if the referee is equally bad both ways (i.e. makes much the same errors at much the same rate regardless of which team is batting) isn't that referee's net influence on the result of that game roughly neutral in the end as he's cancelled out his own influence?

If there's a lever in a central position (analagous to the natural un-forced gamestate) and I push that lever up 10 degrees and leave it there, I've altered its position. But if I push it up ten degrees and leave it there for five minutes, then push it down 20 degrees (so now it's 10 degrees below level) and leave it there for five minutes, then put it back to level, in the end I haven't changed anything. It started level, it ended level, and the sum average of its position in the meantime was also level.

The problem with your assessment is two-fold:

1) You're assuming two things that I have no idea how you can have any confidence in:

a) The lever (or "make-up call") will consistently be pushed in the opposite direction to balance out (see below) the initial lever pull in the opposite direction. This is a massive assumption that I don't see how its warranted in sport or TTRPGing.

b) You're assuming that whoever is pulling the lever (or just by dumb luck) can quantitatively assess the 1st order impacts and downstream impacts of pulling the lever in EXTREMELY complex systems. This is not just a massive assumption that I don't see how its warranted. Its a virtual impossibility. Any "lever-pulling" isn't even going to measure up to "back of the envelope" maths. Its going to be nonsense. Even getting 1st order impacts correct is going to be an enormous outlier, let alone 2nd and 3rd order impacts.

Take a look at my example above with the 1:1 count.

Umpire screws up a 1:1 call and it ends up costing one Starting Pitcher 40 extra pitches + 4 runs + their confidence (trust me...this is a HUGE thing...I was a Starting Pitcher at an extremely high level through the entirety of my career through College) + the bullpen having to be deployed early (which means matchups can't be dictated later and the bullpen will be exhausted for subsequent games).

Lets just say that Umpire actually realizes they screwed that call up and they're thinking "ya know...I need to make up for this call." So they put into action their "make up call" later in the game when its mostly decided and in a hugely low leverage situation (let's say its 6-1, bottom of the 8th, no runners on, 2 outs).

Is that a "make-up call?"

2) You're evaluating agency based on this "theory of gamestate equilibration via make-up calls and/or Force in opposite direction" (see (1) above for why I disagree that this could even be a thing) rather than evaluating agency based on "who is pulling the levers and the potency of said lever pulling!" I mean, by what you're modeling out above (assuming gamestate equilibration is somehow reliably and magically reached...which it can't), you're explicitly saying that the propenderance of agency in a Force-laden game resides with the GM (which it obviously does) because they're capable of yo-yo-ing the gamestate back and forth via strategic applications of Force in order to assure a nice curve fit of the play prescription!

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I'm reading these things Lanefan and I'm staggered to think that you believe that you're making a case here for the preponderance of agency for the gamestate's formulation being under the players' purview! How!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I want to attack the orc. I then roll to see if I hit it.

I want to pick the lock. I then roll to see if I do.

I want to turn the undead. I then roll to see if It works.

I want to scribe the scroll. I then roll to see if I do.

Yeah.....pretty boring stuff, I’d say.

It indeed is. The interesting stuff happened before when the player made decisions against objective reality and after when that reality reacted to the action. RNG is not agency.