What is the point of GM's notes?

[Maxperson]

Would you explain to me this natural process you see at work outside of human decision making?

Why did you cut out the part where I spoke about decision making? Here, I'll quote the full thing below.

"With number 2, the consequence naturally evolves from the results of an action. Success or failure are not really relevant other than to possibly help inform the DM on which way it should go."

Clearly I was talking about decision making. Cutting that out and taking what I said out of context like that wasn't cool. The DM's decision making, though, flows naturally from what happened. It's not an arbitrary decision.

If your PC jumps into lava, the natural consequence is that you burn to death. There's a mechanic for that, but if there wasn't, the DM's decision would flow naturally from that ill advised jump and result in the same thing.

 

[darkbard]

Why did you cut out the part where I spoke about decision making? Here, I'll quote the full thing below.

"With number 2, the consequence naturally evolves from the results of an action. Success or failure are not really relevant other than to possibly help inform the DM on which way it should go."

Clearly I was talking about decision making. Cutting that out and taking what I said out of context like that wasn't cool. The DM's decision making, though, flows naturally from what happened. It's not an arbitrary decision.

If your PC jumps into lava, the natural consequence is that you burn to death. There's a mechanic for that, but if there wasn't, the DM's decision would flow naturally from that ill advised jump and result in the same thing.

I'm sorry you found my post "not cool," Max.

Let's consider another example. My PC is trying to negotiate with s courtier to gain audience with the Duke. What is the natural consequence for such an interaction, outside of GM decision making? How do you decide what a failed or successful roll represents "naturally"?

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm going to try to succinctly unpack my TLDR above in a made up quantitative formula to demonstrate what I'm saying (the numbers aren't true...so don't get hung up on them...I REPEAT, DO NOT GET BOGGED DOWN IN THE MATH...just work with the concept):

Deeply Protagonist Play favors PC build on the x axis and relatively mutes y axis power.

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GAME 1 (4 HOUR SESSION)

* Player's character build choices and other system structures dictate that scenes framed/obstacles faced allow them to passively or actively dictate that the focus of decision-points and/or action resolution are on their Dramatic Needs at a 80 % rate. This means that players have enormous facility in direct or indirect scene framing. The overwhelming preponderance of scenes framed and obstacles faced are going to be deeply influenced (if not dictated by) player input.

* 30 beefy (impactful with considerable downstream consequences) decision-points or moments of action resolution. Therefore 24 of them will be Dramatic Need-attendant.

* There is a continuous positive feedback loop/"snowballing effect" of action resolution, so each moment of action resolution has inherently higher stakes.

* Due to the above formulation, there will be a considerably higher payoff for higher floor, breadth of competency, capability and less payoff for higher ceiling, apex PC capabilities, particularly those that let you to outright obviate obstacles or outright reframe scenes.

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GAME 2 (4 HOUR SESSION)

* Player's PC build choices and other system structures which influence scenes framed/obstacles are (a) comparatively muted (with respect to Game 1) and (b) are disproportionately rationed throughout the PC build choices (eg 3 classes have relatively significant facility in scene framing/obstacle obviation when compared to the other 7 classes). Therefore, moments of play where decision-points and/or action resolution are deeply wedded to PC Dramatic Need (this includes being able to dictate terms of engagement, which includes obviation/reframing of scene) are 30 % rate on the low end (the 7 classes) and 40 % rate on the high end (the 3 classes). This means that players have comparatively, significantly reduced facility in direct or indirect scene framing, with a small number of classes having much more (as a %). The preponderance of scenes framed and obstacles faced are not going to be deeply influenced (nor dictated by) player input.

* Many micro-decision-points, but only 10 beefy (impactful with considerable downstream consequences) decision-points or moments of action resolution. Therefore, less than a handful will be Dramatic Need-attendant (3 and 4 depending upon the class) on a per session basis.

* The overall population of decision-points skews heavily toward being lower stakes, but there is a "piling effect" or a "1000 snowflakes makes a heap" effect. Further, decision-points/action declarations and resolution are significantly spikey in terms of stakes/beefiness. For instance:

You could have 30 in a row (across all PCs) that are low stakes and suddenly there is this HUGE decision-point and action declaration > resolution moment that is profoundly beefier than the preceding 30. However, due to the "piling effect" of play, the preceding 30 add up to a heap that matters.

* Due to the above formulation, there will be a considerably higher payoff for high ceiling, apex capability "moves" because when that "beefy decision-point spike" hits, it is paramount that "team PC" has an answer for it. The other 30 decision-points/action declarations > resolution aren't "rote/auto-pilot" or inconsequential, but the stakes are just fundamentally and significantly reduced (due to design priorities and characteristics) and the "x-axised resources" that answer them don't afford "team PC" the "amplification effect" that comes with that key deployment of that high ceiling, apex capability "move" (eg it saves team PC n number of resources across that "heap" and reduces overall "heap threat level" by a factor of 3 or 4).

 

[Maxperson]

I'm sorry you found my post "not cool," Max.

Let's consider another example. My PC is trying to negotiate with s courtier to gain audience with the Duke. What is the natural consequence for such an interaction, outside of GM decision making? How do you decide what a failed or successful roll represents "naturally"?

That's not the sort of action that involves invoking a living, breathing world. Assassinating the Duke is that kind of action and would involve assessing the consequences of what happened and applying it throughout the world. Simply asking to gain audience is just normal game play and wouldn't involve that sort of decision.

To answer your question, though, it would depend on your roleplay. You might succeed without a roll, fail without a roll, or get a roll. Depending on how you approached the courtier and what you said/did to negotiate, the outcome may or may not be in doubt. That would be the natural consequence of attempting such a negotiation. The specifics of a failed or successful roll would come from that detailed roleplay that is absent from your sparse scenario.

 

[prabe]

@Manbearcat It's not hard to guess that you're intending Game One to be something like Blades or DW or Dogs, and Game Two to be something like D&D.

That aside, I can see how some might prefer one over the other--and I think that a ruleset that doesn't tightly constrain the GM's hands might end up close to either, depending on the GM.

None of that is really an argument, I suppose.

 

[pemerton]

I am not disputing that the model in the head of the GM must be conveyed to the players by words. The point is this is a very reductive description of what is going on

But it's not! The fundamental act of RPGing is conversation. I've watched some youtube vidoe of you RPGing, that you linked to in a thread earlier this year. You were talking over Zoom to people. I think in on you were GM, and you were saying stuff that told other people what their PCs could see. In another one I think you were a player, and you were being told stuff by the GM.

That's not reductive. It's accurate!

 

[Bedrockgames]

But it's not! The fundamental act of RPGing is conversation. I've watched some youtube vidoe of you RPGing, that you linked to in a thread earlier this year. You were talking over Zoom to people. I think in on you were GM, and you were saying stuff that told other people what their PCs could see. In another one I think you were a player, and you were being told stuff by the GM.

That's not reductive. It's accurate!

Again Pemerton, no one is saying the process of players say what they do, GM says what they see what happens isn't part of it. And no one is denying that speech is largely how we communicate when we play these games. What I am saying is you are zooming in on one increment, in order to disprove the larger existence of something like the living world. You are too zoomed in, and not seeing all the other elements we have been pointing to. It is like describing an elephant based on just focusing on its feet. Yes I must admit elephants have feet. I won't accept an argument though that claims elephants are feet. That fundamental act involves a lot more than me simply telling players what they see. And again we have pointed to what those things are (people have brought up things like the fact that the GM can't simply say whatever he wants, there are constraints, that often dice were involved in determining what I say, that what I say is often a result of the players prodding, asking or trying to do something that I had no idea would arise before-----and that what I say is constantly referring back to this model of the setting, and tracking what is going on in that setting with the PCs, and NPCs).

but more than that, please explain to me what the point is of trying to get us to accept this is the fundamental act. I have a suspicion the reason is because you want to show us that the imagined living world isn't real, that all that matters is the fiction because all there is is this fundamental interaction. If so, please state it clearly so we can move to the actual debate. Or if not, please state why you think your conclusion is important. I am not saying I accept your conclusion but I think rather than continue to batter each other back and forth over a point we just don't see eye to eye on, it would be better to delve into what the real issue is behind you advancing this premise.

EDIT: Just want to note that the video of me GMing, wasn't a living world sandbox session. It was a playtest of a straight forward dungeon crawl, with a bit of light 'living adventure' thrown in, but mostly it was just run as a standard crawl as I was trying to playtest something. The video in which I was a player, I believe was a sandbox with training wheels session that Rob Conley ran (I could be wrong on that, he would know, but it was a limited scenario: we weren't exploring the full map of the setting or anything in that).

 

[Manbearcat]

@Manbearcat It's not hard to guess that you're intending Game One to be something like Blades or DW or Dogs, and Game Two to be something like D&D.

That aside, I can see how some might prefer one over the other--and I think that a ruleset that doesn't tightly constrain the GM's hands might end up close to either, depending on the GM.

None of that is really an argument, I suppose.

Yup. D&D 4e follows this same regime however. The decision-point > action declaration > action resolution and the resource scheduling and x/y axis relationship of PC prowess (broad competency and significantly bounded, by historical comparison, "Y capability") was considerably smoothed out and with parity. This, along with the deep synergies and encoded amplification of Team PC with/by each party member, the potency and synergies of Team Monster, the stakes of the noncombat conflict resolution framework created a continuous "beefy decision-point" experience like Game 1 (a PC going down in a combat could trivially snowball and a resource misallocation/lack of Skilled Play with the fiction in Skill Challenges could lead to a "Story Loss Condition"). When you include the Quest System + the PC build Flags of Theme > Paragon Path > Epic Destiny and intent-based Fail Forward guiding play, it is why those of us who loved the game put it in the "Game 1" category above.

The collection of the above is why the people who liked it for Protagonistic, Story Now play liked it.

It is also why those who wanted their D&D to be of the "strategic management of the heap" + "Y-axis intensive" (spikey in terms of decision-point weight with big power plays leading to comparatively huge changes on the gamestate) variety of Skilled Play with a lot of "necessarily" thematically neutral/throttled back moments of play because (as they would put it) "if everything is cool/high stakes, then nothing is cool/high stakes" (which I fundamentally do not agree with that formulation in theory or in practice) hated it.

Its also why those GMs who needed to heavy deploy Force to ensure the trajectory of play (because they were running Adventure Paths with structured, node-based narratives) hated the game because the player/table-facing mechanics, the transparent machinery of play, and the deeply embedded thematics and player control (all the stuff mentioned above but also the Magic Item System) made it extraordinarily difficult for GMs to control the trajectory of play.

And a few other types (eg Sandbox GMs would have to rewire their brain around the Blades in the Dark "subjective, orbiting around the PCs Sandbox" regime...or they would have to do the kinds of things @LostSoul did with D&D 4e to create a more BECMI/RC Hexcrawl) didn't like it for different, but related reasons.

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On your last point, there is an incredibly fraught tightrope that a GM has to walk when constraint is loosened, because when system doesn't structurally reify that Protagonism, there are dozens of ways, both real and perceived, that Protagonism can either outright be lost or feel like its lost.

Here is one example of how loosened GM constraint + heavy requirement in action resolution mediation + lack of structural reification of Protagonism can lead to either feeling Deprotagonized or actually being Deprotagonized:

* I make move x against obstacle y because I feel that expresses my thematic interests and will put my dramatic need in sharp focus in this conflict or the ensuing conflict. The GM is neither constrained to follow the rules nor to oblige this move. They're also not constrained to forbid it. Their action resolution mediation could be extrapolation based on naturalistic, causal logic...it could be genre logic...it could be some "rule of cool/storytelling impetus"...it could be some indecipherable alchemy of 2 or all 3 of the above.

GM says yes?

GM says no?

GM says roll the dice but due to their heavy mediation requirements, my chances of realizing my intent could be 50 % likely or 150 % more likely at 75 % (because GM a might choose Hard DC while the next might feel its a Really Hard DC)? And what if my PC doesn't have the ability to martial resources to overwrite/influence/control that 25 % spread (like the aforementioned Diviner's Portent)?

My volitional capacity in this situation may actually be lost. Or, simply because of the lack of certitude that comes with structural reification (and the fact that the lack of GM constraint + lack of table-facing machinery is the volitional force here), it may actually be there, but it may just feel like it isn't there.

It is a tricky pickle which is made profoundly worse by the deep fallibility of human Perception Error and Perception Bias. A player may feel like they were Deprotagonized in just such a situation before...maybe a few times. When in reality, they were not...but now they're working off of tainted priors so their working model for what is happening is askew!

 

[darkbard]

That's not the sort of action that involves invoking a living, breathing world. Assassinating the Duke is that kind of action and would involve assessing the consequences of what happened and applying it throughout the world. Simply asking to gain audience is just normal game play and wouldn't involve that sort of decision.

To answer your question, though, it would depend on your roleplay. You might succeed without a roll, fail without a roll, or get a roll. Depending on how you approached the courtier and what you said/did to negotiate, the outcome may or may not be in doubt. That would be the natural consequence of attempting such a negotiation. The specifics of a failed or successful roll would come from that detailed roleplay that is absent from your sparse scenario.

How do you decide which actions invoke a "living, breathing world" and thus produce "natural" consequences and which do not? Is this a function of the GM deciding? Is the GM more "natural" a force in the game than the other players?

 

[Maxperson]

How do you decide which actions invoke a "living, breathing world" and thus produce "natural" consequences and which do not? Is this a function of the GM deciding? Is the GM more "natural" a force in the game than the other players?

It's all natural. As long as what comes makes sense(as may be expected), it's a natural consequence, even if 5 DMs would come up with 5 different things that make sense. The DM is greatly constrained by gameplay(the players) and the social contract not to just act on whim, but with fairness and deliberation to come up with a natural progression for actions.

nat·u·ral·ly

1. without special help or intervention; in a natural manner.

2. as may be expected; of course.