What is the point of GM's notes?

[Lanefan]

That is exactly what I'm getting at.

Why does a GM need to turn off-line/off-screen content on-line and evolve it during the intervening period (whatever that may be) when the PCs haven't interacted with it? Why not just turn it on-line once it is actually on-screen (meaning the PCs are interacting with it) and evolve it as necessary then?

Why? Because time in the game world doesn't stop the moment the PCs leave the scene.

In my mind, turning off-line content on-line and evolving it before it has been interacted with is the fundamental essence of "Setting Solitaire."

Unless one assumes that 'online' is a bigger umbrella, covering not only what the PCs do interact with but also what they might interact with.

You've got, say, 27 different Factions in town at the start of the campaign. You're 95% sure the PCs will interact with five of them pretty soon but there's always the potential they also - or instead - end up interacting with one or more of the remaining 22; which IMO means you need to keep all 27 at least vaguely up to date as in-game time goes on.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I really doubt that, as I'm 100% certain that if polite discussion and good trading of information broke out, @pemerton would be absolutely thrilled at that result. I know I would be. However, I find it telling that you're willing to openly question @pemerton's honesty in such a way, and ironic that you seem to pin any aggravated dialogue in this thread on his intentions, rather than acts such as this.

None of the above changes the reality of what occurred i.e. much of the focus, directly or indirectly, being on the thread's title with several posters addressing this exact issue.
Your disagreement with this has been noted.

I mean, a review of your posts in this thread seems to discount you from engaging without ego, yes? Your first post was to pose your above accusation in a veiled way (obvious now that you've be explicit) through a rhetorical question you never answered yourself. Then a bunch of arguing about whether people getting paid for sports is important (it wasn't), and now your accusation, here. It appears that you're accusing @pemerton of intending to do what you've actually done.

Cute.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Again, monetization is not only not a helpful way to perform a longitudinal study like this, its actively harmful in signal detection (because of the noise it introduces).

Not only that, but it doesn't even track the population you're trying to track. Professional athletes are at the far, far, far end of the tail of a population distribution. They aren't anywhere nearing the center. Artisans and craftsmen who monetize their skills are, again, right at the tails of the distribution (and, again, their monetization picks up a lot of the aforementioned noise). This isn't the target population.

You're arguing for exposure here. Exposure doesn't come into it when you're tracking % within a population.

All TTRPG players would (of course) have the necessary exposure that you're talking about (or they wouldn't be playing)!

Development of methodological means to create a higher % of functional practitioners (in this case GMs) WITHIN a population won't track to exposure.

If your point is that there are lots of other reasons to increase total population size (not % of functional practitioners within a population), then I agree. But that isn't the point of the theoretical longitudinal study here.

And (as to your last statement) I think you're short-shrifting the cognitive and social impacts of playing TTRPGs (particularly in the developmental stage).

Maybe I am not understanding your initial premise correctly, because it seems we are talking past each other at this point.

You're stating the percentage of functional x within a civilisation as a % is greater than the % of functional GMs within the roleplayer base, correct?

If that is your stance, I'm not sure how repeated exposure, education and value (monetary or otherwise) doesn't play a role in the creation of an increased number of functional x.

 

[pemerton]

The point of living monsters, living NPCs, is they in effect have agency.

This is about playing the characters, factions, and forces that exist in the world the players inhabit.

<snip>

It is about when the players go to speak to the head of the Society of Silver Sword, the GM being able to say things like "this is what they are dealing with when you get there" and if the players ally with the Silver Sword, the GM then being able to figure out how the other sects will react (which may or may not directly impact the PCs).

Here I'm with @Manbearcat and @hawkeyefan - everything else being equal, once the GM has decided what the Society of the Silver Sword is doing when the PCs first encounter them, does it need to be changed before the Society comes "online"?

@Lanefan says - yes, if that initial situation doesn't make sense given what's happened in play since. I think that is covered by @Manbearcats notion of direct or indirect interaction. Manbearcat is talking about contexts in which there is neither direct nor indirect interaction.

The answer to your question is the reason you would do it, is to prevent the players from feeling like the situation was held in stasis before they arrived like in a video game.

there are ways to set up a dungeon so it is more like a lived in residence than a place where the inhabitants wait in a room for you, or situations are held in stasis for the party, but sometimes it is just easier to say "there is a poisonous demon monkey in the grain barrel foraging for food" (and I have certainly done that from time to time)

the Feast of Goblyns section becomes quite relevant because that is specifically getting at the idea of the NPCs not simply being in a room waiting for the PCs to show up.

<snip>

the point of running things off screen, isn't to simulate a world the players will never encounter. These things can always become relevant to the party at any point, and when they do, if the players prod at them enough, it is easy for players to sense whether they were held in stasis or things were evolving.

The "freeze frame" room is a classic in dungeon design. But I think it's pretty apparent that you don't use the same freeze frame if the PCs come back again; you present something new that makes sense.

In one of my Classic Traveller scenarios a PC was able to steal some powered armour (battle dress, to be precise) because its owner and previous wearer was in the shower. As it happens, I came up with that framing on the spot. But I don't think it would have been any more or less viable, in play, had I come up with the idea a week earlier and made a note of it.

In Castle Amber, when you enter one of the closest rooms to the entryway you encounter a member of the Amber family training his boxing magen. A good GM would frame the situation in that room differently if a PC came back to it; but the "freeze frame" isn't objectionable because that's what you'll get if you enter that room after 1, 10 or 100 turns in the castle.

When we move away from freeze frame rooms to the goals and dispositions of factions, governments, and similar sorts of social/political groups, I don't see that anything changes. Let's say the notes for the Society of the Silver Sword say that the society is preparing to disinter the body of its founder because they wish to use some of the body parts for alchemical purposes. Does it matter if that fact about the Society comes online after the passage of 1, 10 or 100 ingame days?

But can't just initial framing, rather than evolved framing, do that work?

Put another way, at the inception of play:

* Faction/Situation X is off-line...or in stasis...or even in a state of superposition (as everyone around here seems to love their Schrodingers)!

* Players do something that requires X be introduced into play (turned on-line, taken out of stasis).

Why can't I just use either (a) that initial framing that is in my notes (or in a text) or (b) make something up off the cuff that is appropriate and doesn't render incoherent the past established continuity?

Here's another thought about this:

Suppose the GM is using a published setting, or is preparing his/her own setting in a similar fashion.

Then it will say that in (say) Year 579 the state of affairs with respect to A, B, C etc is X, Y, Z etc. Now if the PCs don't encounter the Cs until Year 589, and the GM still uses Z as the state of affairs with respect to the Cs, this implies that the Cs have been static for 10 years. The alternative is to prise the events and circumstances of the timeline, but that falsifies the timeline.

I think the way to avoid this problem is to avoid the use of timelines in that classic fashion - I assume that they don't figure in BitD in that traditional way - but timelines seem to be very popular in setting design/presentation!

 

[AnotherGuy]

@Manbearcat in your opinion does Skilled Play not enter the possible equation with regards to your 2 questions above?

 

[Lanefan]

In Castle Amber, when you enter one of the closest rooms to the entryway you encounter a member of the Amber family training his boxing magen. A good GM would frame the situation in that room differently if a PC came back to it; but the "freeze frame" isn't objectionable because that's what you'll get if you enter that room after 1, 10 or 100 turns in the castle.

While I adore Castle Amber - and in fact ran it within the last year - when it comes to providing an example of a realistic believable world, Chateau D'Amberville ain't the place to look. (nor, for that matter, is Averoigne; but at least with a bit of work it can be tarted up into a halfway functional setting should the PCs decide to explore in more depth than just what's needed to finish the adventure)

The Chateau is I think specifically intended to be a bit of a madhouse; intentionally somewhat non-believable to the point where even the wise PCs end up starting to doubt their own perception and are attempting illusion disbelief at every turn. That's what makes it cool!

Suppose the GM is using a published setting, or is preparing his/her own setting in a similar fashion.

Then it will say that in (say) Year 579 the state of affairs with respect to A, B, C etc is X, Y, Z etc. Now if the PCs don't encounter the Cs until Year 589, and the GM still uses Z as the state of affairs with respect to the Cs, this implies that the Cs have been static for 10 years. The alternative is to prise the events and circumstances of the timeline, but that falsifies the timeline.

Exactly!

I think the way to avoid this problem is to avoid the use of timelines in that classic fashion - I assume that they don't figure in BitD in that traditional way - but timelines seem to be very popular in setting design/presentation!

Of course. One of the key elements in any setting is the passage of time, both before the PCs start their careers (the setting history) and - germaine to the point here - while their careers are occurring (emergent history, if you will). The world they know of - even the parts they've merely heard of but haven't interacted with - isn't going to stand still for ten years until the PCs get to it.

 

[pemerton]

The world they know of - even the parts they've merely heard of but haven't interacted with - isn't going to stand still for ten years until the PCs get to it.

No one is supposing it would stand still. The point is that if no one at the table is talking about it or thinking about it, there is no need to change the GM's private record of its nature.

 

[Lanefan]

No one is supposing it would stand still. The point is that if no one at the table is talking about it or thinking about it, there is no need to change the GM's private record of its nature.

There's two different situations here and we may each be talking about one, hence a disconnect.

Situation one: there's a distant part of the game world that's never been developed or even thought out clearly by the GM, and for the forseeable future there's pretty much zero chance of the PCs going there.

Situation two: there's a distant part of the game world that the PCs have heard of in passing; the GM has vague ideas of what's there but that's it, and again there's a near-zero chance of the PCs going there anytime soon.

Situation one: no updating required, if for no reason than there's nothing in place yet to update.

Situation two: updating required if necessary, based both on effects (known or unknown) of the PCs' actions and on external events.

An example, sort of, from my game:

Spoiler

Far to the south of the usual adventuring area, but noted in the game-world history and on its maps since day 1, is a large city called Tanquair. For ten or more years of play all I-as-DM needed to do with Tanquair was think about it in my own mind and occasionally remind myself it was still down there; the PCs never got within a thousand miles of the place and never really had any effect on it. (and even though its local language was always on my random-languages table nobody ever rolled it, which meant I didn't even have to worry about telling anyone about the place the language came from!)

Then a mission (actually the start of a covid-shattered adventure series) took them down to that part of the world; meaning I not only had to think more carefully about what made Tanquair tick, I also had to design what lay in and across the ocean to its south which up until then was "off the map" territory. A few months later Tanquair ended up becoming their away-from-home home base, forcing me to go into way more detail than I ever really expected to (I had wrongly guessed they'd use their long-range travel capabilities to continue operating out of their usual base, far to the north).

Fortunately for me, I'd always envisioned Tanquair as a fairly stable sort of place anyway, so updating it was dirt simple. More challenging (and interesting!) was designing the southern ocean and what lay around/across it: a bunch of small realms to the east and to the south a great big empire very loosely based on an amalgam of various proto-Chinese dynasties. Again, at the moment there's a near-zero chance of the PCs ever going there, though they've had all kinds of interaction with a few of its more-piratically-inclined citizens, but now they've heard of it I feel I need to keep it - and all the other realms surrounding that ocean - vaguely updated. (further, I'm now looking long and hard at that area should I ever want to run an entirely different campaign and recycle the same setting)

And even then they caught me off guard: I'd done a high-level map of that southern ocean* and because the PCs needed to triangulate a directional pull to a site in mid-ocean they on a whim picked a random coastal city in a small irrelevant realm to the east and said "we're going there to try our directional spell again". They had magical means of long-range travel that allowed this, and suddenly I'm trying to DM them in a new and strange city that until that moment had been nothing but a nameless dot on a map!

By the end of that session I knew a lot more about the kingdom of Bonbai and the city of Baique than I ever expected to.

Odds of their ever going back there again: near zero.

* - it's map 7 on this page: Decast maps

 

[Emerikol]

They aren't though, you're just resistant to hearing anything that is frank discussion of the processes of play. You throw out the term "dissociative mechanics" as if it's something you will not abide, but you do -- you use armor class, you use hitpoints, you use spells. These are all dissociated mechanics that either have a lampshade over them (spells are magic!) or that you're just used to and no longer notice (AC, hp).

I don't want to get derailed into an alternate discussion but this here is my proof text that you don't know what you are talking about and that is why both sides struggle. I realize that again you are likely (but by now you really have no excuse) treating the words as pure english language words and not for a technical game mechanic term.

 

[Emerikol]

Does it? I mean, pointing out that you serially misstate my name for the third time goes to show that I'm being adversarial? I mean, that's like saying someone asking you to please stop punching them is just looking for a fight.

And you mentioned it on the third time, and I'm going to try and do better not to forget. The fact that I made a common mistake more than once can be attributed to the fact I didn't recompute anything the second or third times and just went with my original read.

Honestly, you and Pemerton are very inflammatory, far more so than your opposition in this thread. Look in the mirror and see who is punching who.

Nope, this is a bald misrepresentation of what I've said. What I've said is that you're using your preferences as a means to discount and dismiss analysis, which you seem to admit to, here. What I've said is that analysis is a useful tool to understand preference and enhance play. For instance, without any experience, you've dismissed an entire approach as "shallow" (man, talk about loaded words) when you have no experience to say so. It's fine to think you won't like it, and no one's going to force you to try it, but you've removed yourself from any valid input when analysis involves comparing or contrasting with these approaches. You're trying to shoehorn yourself into having a valid input by claiming that it's all preference, but it isn't. Whether or not you like it is preference -- how it works in process is not.

I am fine with "analysis" of play styles. In fact I enjoy seeing what makes some games go and why people like them. When though you speak dismissively of the playstyle I and others prefer then we of course come back with a response.

They aren't though, you're just resistant to hearing anything that is frank discussion of the processes of play.

Not at all. But I may not accept your framing of the discussion. You want to create the rules and then have us adhere to them in the discussion.