What is the point of GM's notes?

[Rob Kuntz]

Well, to be light-hearted in response to the original Q. If after 143 pages of back-n-forth then I would guess that the two inevitable answers would either be 1) None; or 2) So many that it doesn't matter.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well I think we are violently agreeing for the most part.

Don't you agree though that if you really were the character living in the fantasy world that my sort of planning is what would really happen? We can't retcon the past in real life. So players of my style are seeking that character viewpoint decision process. That does not by an means imply your approach cannot be fun but it very much is a synthesis of a lot more than just character decision making.

There are two ways to look at this.

In a linear perspective, where the player and the character both experience the events of the game in the same linear order, and can both interact with it in the same interactive order. This is the way you seem to be viewing it. And I would say that I see why.

But how accurate is it? It seems to assume that the player has every opportunity that the character would have. It seems to assume that the player is as free to roam about and interact with the environment, unprompted by the GM, as freely as the character. And that the player is as aware as a native of that world as to what they can and can't do.

But that's not really the case.

So another way to look at it is to recognize that at times, we jump passed some periods of time. When Blades allows a player to Flashback, it's not time travel, it's a filling in of some of that time that was jumped passed. It's allowing the character to be a part of the world in a different way, that's not limited by the GM-Player dynamic.

So is the linearity of time as important to me as a character who seems like a (in the case of Blades) competent and connected criminal with means at his disposal and the foresight to make appropriate plans.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton

Were you planning on responding to this?

What is the point of GM's notes?

I run a D&D sandbox game. With regards to finding keys in the pocket of the guards The methods I commonly use are say yes or roll a skill check or just make a luck roll (odds or evens, above 10). There are ofcourse situations where I may say no to something, for instance if I'm using a map and...

www.enworld.org

I didn't think it needed much response.

 

[pemerton]

Don't you agree though that if you really were the character living in the fantasy world that my sort of planning is what would really happen? We can't retcon the past in real life.

I don't have much to add to what @hawkeyefan said. But I thought I would paste this extract from Gygax's DMG (p 20), about the thief's Read Languages ability:

This ability assumes that the language is, in fact, one which the thief has encountered sometime in the past. Ancient and strange languages (those you, as DM, have previously designated as such) are always totally unreadable. Even if able to read a language, the thief should be allowed only to get about that percentage of the meaning of what is written as his or her percentage ability to read the tongue in the first place. The rest they will hove to guess at. Languages which are relatively close to those known by the thief will not incur such a penalty.​

Gygax realised that it's not feasible to specify every past moment of a character's life and training. The BitD flashback mechanic sits in that same space of realisation. The only question is at what point do we insist on the linearity of play coinciding with the linearity of the passage of time in the fiction?

 

[pemerton]

In some systems, it'd be possible to build a character who was less dependent on dice (or more resilient to bad results). Or, failing that, to sometimes fall back on actions that weren't dice-dependent. Dungeon World is not one of either type of system, that I can tell.

Nor is Burning Wheel. Or Cortex+ Heroic. All rely upon dice rolls to produce patterns of success and failure that:

(1) Shift whose conception of what happens next gets realised - on success the player's declared action takes place, on failure it doesn't;

(2) Thereby generate some sort of dramatic rhythm - there is neither uniform success nor uniform failure but rising and falling.​

But skilled play of the fiction remains highly relevant. Eg in a PbtA-type game, the questions you ask on a Discern Realities or Read a Situation type of move will establish parameters for downstream Revelations of Future Badness. If you ask who's in charge here? then you're laying the ground for some sort of social/interpersonal conflict to arise out of the situation.

 

[Maxperson]

I didn't think it needed much response.

Fair enough. Don't bother asking me questions again. I don't enjoy wasting my time answering questions and then being ignored.

 

[Lanefan]

There are two ways to look at this.

In a linear perspective, where the player and the character both experience the events of the game in the same linear order, and can both interact with it in the same interactive order. This is the way you seem to be viewing it. And I would say that I see why.

But how accurate is it? It seems to assume that the player has every opportunity that the character would have. It seems to assume that the player is as free to roam about and interact with the environment, unprompted by the GM, as freely as the character. And that the player is as aware as a native of that world as to what they can and can't do.

But that's not really the case.

So another way to look at it is to recognize that at times, we jump passed some periods of time. When Blades allows a player to Flashback, it's not time travel, it's a filling in of some of that time that was jumped passed. It's allowing the character to be a part of the world in a different way, that's not limited by the GM-Player dynamic.

So is the linearity of time as important to me as a character who seems like a (in the case of Blades) competent and connected criminal with means at his disposal and the foresight to make appropriate plans.

Short answer to the bolded question: yes it is.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't have much to add to what @hawkeyefan said. But I thought I would paste this extract from Gygax's DMG (p 20), about the thief's Read Languages ability:

This ability assumes that the language is, in fact, one which the thief has encountered sometime in the past. Ancient and strange languages (those you, as DM, have previously designated as such) are always totally unreadable. Even if able to read a language, the thief should be allowed only to get about that percentage of the meaning of what is written as his or her percentage ability to read the tongue in the first place. The rest they will hove to guess at. Languages which are relatively close to those known by the thief will not incur such a penalty.​

Gygax realised that it's not feasible to specify every past moment of a character's life and training. The BitD flashback mechanic sits in that same space of realisation. The only question is at what point do we insist on the linearity of play coinciding with the linearity of the passage of time in the fiction?

Big difference, though.

The Gygax passage is trying to cover events and trainiing that occurred before the character's role-played career. From the examples I've seen in other threads (and correct me if I'm wrong) it seems the flashback mechanic is trying to pick up events that in theory happened during the character's roleplayed career but were, at the time, skipped over.

My position is that this just ain't right somehow, and that whatever was skipped over should have instead been sorted at the time rather than after the fact, in order to keep in-game time moving in its usual one direction.

 

[Aldarc]

My position is that this just ain't right somehow, and that whatever was skipped over should have instead been sorted at the time rather than after the fact, in order to keep in-game time moving in its usual one direction.

You must have a huge beef with heist movies or any movies that play with the linear story sequences.

 

[Imaro]

You must have a huge beef with heist movies or any movies that play with the linear story sequences.

I don't follow... I can enjoy certain types of movies without feeling the particular way a roleplaying game chooses to implement what happens in them is to my liking. I personally don't have an issue with the flashbacks in BitD (it's highly reminiscent of the show Leverage) but I could see how some people would rather play out their planning and execution in the moment and would find flashbacks to things they actually didn't do and did not plan unsatisfactory for their enjoyment.