What is the point of GM's notes?

[Fenris-77]

That's not how D&D works by default, though. You hope to get something useful, but the roll does not determine that. It just determines what lore you recall.

What? The dice tell you things? Last I checked the roll was a signal to the DM to adjudicate X, and a successful roll means useful information. If a successful roll doesn't result in useful information then there's something wrong with the DM. Of course if you asked the wrong question it won't help, but that's very much besides the point.

 

[Maxperson]

What? The dice tell you things? Last I checked the roll was a signal to the DM to adjudicate X, and a successful roll means useful information. If a successful roll doesn't result in useful information then there's something wrong with the DM. Of course if you asked the wrong question it won't help, but that's very much besides the point.

Tell you what. If you can show me where in here it says that you get hints on what to do, I will concede the point. All I see is lore.

"Religion. Your Intelligence (Religion) check measures your ability to recall lore about deities, rites and prayers, religious hierarchies, holy symbols, and the practices of secret cults."

 

[pemerton]

What I think I'm disagreeing with is that I think you're saying that the order in which the players experience events in the narrative is the exact same as the order in which the characters experience them.

When did I say that? I denied that. So did @Manbearcat. We both denied it so strongly as to assert that the opposite is in fact ubiquitous, and hence objections to Flashbacks on that particular ground are highly unpersuasive.

 

[Fenris-77]

Tell you what. If you can show me where in here it says that you get hints on what to do, I will concede the point. All I see is lore.

"Religion. Your Intelligence (Religion) check measures your ability to recall lore about deities, rites and prayers, religious hierarchies, holy symbols, and the practices of secret cults."

Seriously? Yeesh. I'm looking at the idol of the reptile god, with it's strip of glowing runes and a countdown to Armageddon. So I ask the DM to roll lore to see what I might know about the cult or those runes that might help be defuse or bypass them. I roll a 17, and the DM says... you get the picture. What you're looking for isn't in the rule at all, but in practice at the table. Something I think you know full well. Sure, sometime people might roll lore for goofy stuff, but that isn't what we're talking about.

 

[pemerton]

Because here you're asking the character to tell you about things that it has in theory already experienced in chronological order at the time.

The character had some dreams during sleep, and then it might have tried your coffee, and then this conversation with your character takes place. If desired, these events could have been roleplayed out in sequence. It's the same as your character and mine telling war stories about our past (roleplayed) adventures together.

Also, note there's no mechanical advantage to be gained anywhere here; in sharp contrast with a situation where you can determine in the moment what equipment you earlier-in-time decided to bring along based on the problems you're facing now. Worse, you don't get the opportunity to roleplay those equipment-load decisions ahead of time and thus maybe get it wrong.

And as all that matters is what happens in the fiction, if drinking this coffee is important enough to be relevant then it should have been roleplayed through while the characters were still having breakfast....

... because of this. Retconning as described here would, I think, qualify as cheating pretty much everywhere.

So, the dividing line pretty much becomes one of whether something like this can or does have any mechanical impact. Unless the coffee was poisoned or gave some mechanical benefit or whatever, whether or not you drank some this morning has no real bearing on anything other than flavour. Flavour is good. Go for it!

Contrast this with retroactively introducing a hidden gun in the kettle: irrelevant if no-one ever finds it but which does have mechanical impact the moment it's discovered by anyone. This is bad.

Or the Potion of Longevity, introduced retroactively with the specific intent of giving a mechanical advantage now. This is worse.

This is entirely consistent with what @Manbearcat and I conjectured upthread: the objection is not to the way that Flashbacks handle time, but to the way they affect the resolution of challenging ingame situations.

EDIT: And so is this:

And here you hit the most important point: the info in question was learned prior to the character's roleplayed career. The player had no way of knowing about this up until now.

If however it was learned during the character's roleplayed career as part of play then it's on the player to either remember it or look it up in the game log, failure meaning the character has forgotten what it was told.

If all this is done (and played through!) ahead of time and the resulting countermeasures are taken ahead of time, then fine. What I object to is, in the both at-table and in-play moment of encountering a foe with specific abilities/weaknesses, the sudden unexplained appearance in your backpack of just the thing you need because you were able to retcon it in.

 

[pemerton]

A lore check is just as much of a retcon.

<snip>

Do you assume that everything an 18th level wizard may know was learned before level 1? Seems absurd.

I've liked a number of your posts leading up to this, but wanted to just pick up and elaborate on this.

In most games with skill systems, between 1st level and 18th level the player can make investments that improve his/her PC's knowledge skills; or they can grow automatically (eg in 4e D&D and those variants of Rolemaster that use "level bonuses"). This strongly suggests that the character is acquiring new knowledge that the player won't yet know until it is triggered by an appropriate skill check.

Many of those games would not be regarded as radical in their mechanics. It's about 40 years too late for such labels to be applied!

 

[Fenris-77]

Huh. You'll get to the flashback versus lore roll bit. Just keep plowing through pages.

 

[pemerton]

I don't understand how you are unable to see that a lore check isn't even close to being equal to being able to go back and time and set up an action that then goes forward to present time and changes the event taking place. Hell, a lore check might not even be useful, even if successful.

I have GMed games with lore checks a lot: mostly RM and 4e D&D, also some RQ, and it comes up a bit (in the form of EDU checks, mostly) in our Classic Traveller game.

The PCs encounter a ghost/haunting spirit of some kind; a lore check is made; it succeeds; it is now established that one of the PCs knows that the ghost/spirit is immune to Xs but vulnerable to Ys. All the PCs put their Xs away and pull their Ys out of their backpacks.

That is "going back in time" - or, more exactly, establishing some details about a prior moment of learning for a PC - which then changes the event that takes place in the present (ingame) moment, namely, the way the PCs are equipping themselves to tackle the threat that confronts them.

Upthread I quoted Gygax in relation to this very point, when he discusses the thief's Read Languages ability. This is exactly what that ability is: a successful check establishes that, in the past, the thief undertook an action of learning a foreign script which now changes what is taking place - ie the thief can, rather than can't, decipher the markings s/he has just encountered.

 

[pemerton]

Huh. You'll get to the flashback versus lore roll bit. Just keep plowing through pages.

I've finished my flashback and have caught up to the present.

So the reason that D&D Lore mechanics are different from BitD Flashback mechanics is because a successful Lore check might be pointless, whereas a successful Flashback action is normally meaningful. That's consistent with @Lanefan's "skilled play" objection to Flashback; but it's also not something I'd be putting on an advertising shingle for D&D!

 

[Fenris-77]

The Flashback might be pointless too, you still have to make a skill roll. I would happily agree that flashback mechanics of any sort have no place in traditional D&D/OSR skilled play thought, for sure. They run very counter to the basic goals of play.