What is the point of GM's notes?

[Aldarc]

But this means that the player can never learn anything new about his/her PC's past. Which entails that the character is an amnesiac. Which seems wrong, and is not how any RPG I've ever played works.

It kinda goes back to the "quantum knowledge" that a PC seems to have about trolls and such.

I'm talking about Lore rolls when it matters, like as in it's a really big swinging deal whether we know this right now or not. That's what I'm getting at. This is D&D we're talking about, so of course that skill gets rolled for all kinds of nonsense and minor shizz. If we confine ourselves to the example I'm actually using perhaps we'll get further, although I am enjoying this extended round of roshambo.

Yeah, but engaging that point would require arguing in good faith, and it's far easier to argue in bad faith using silly, non-applicable scenarios.

 

[pemerton]

I love it. I've been saying this for umpteen posts now and @Fenris-77 has been arguing against it. You come in and say it once and he hits it with a like.

That's because he worked out I was stating it with incredulity! As your view, not mine. I think your suggested point of contrast is ridiculous!

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.

In a 4e discussion back in 2008 (I think) I suggested that a way that a character might use Diplomacy to contribute to a skill challenge involving a Moria-style riddle door is to declare that, some time in the past, his/her PC had befriended a wizard who told him/her lots of magical passwords. I suggested the DC might be set at High because of the flashback-y nature.

This suggestion generated some controversy back then, if I remember correctly.

 

[Fenris-77]

That kind of flexibility in the contrast between challenge and action is usually what I'm looking for as a GM. I want characters to try to figure out how to use their strengths, not just roll some dice.

 

[pemerton]

You aren't actually going back to that moment, though. Not the way you do with a flashback. Nor are you changing the event by pulling a rabbit out of your hat that just happens to be what you need and calling it prep that you did before you arrived. You either have what you need on you or prepared, or you don't.

The "rabbit from the hat" is the salient knowledge. (I know you play lore checks in such a way that the knowledge may not be salient. That's not how I do it, though.)

And a player could go back to the moment if the wished - eg I remember when the ancient sage Yorumas told me all of the ancient lore of golems . . . A GM might even insist that this sort of narration be used to explain where the knowledge comes from.

Even if the player or GM doesn't do that, the past moment is obviously implied by the present fact of knowledge. Just as in the Flashback case the past moment is implied by the present fact of (eg) having a steak to distract the dogs.

 

[Fenris-77]

Not to rub anything in here, or pile on, but Lore checks as regularly non-salient knowledge just doesn't make any sense to me in any system. What's the skill even for if on a success you get useless knowledge? That is not, I'd submit, the design goal there.

 

[Manbearcat]

Not to rub anything in here, or pile on, but Lore checks as regularly non-salient knowledge just doesn't make any sense to me in any system. What's the skill even for if on a success you get useless knowledge? That is not, I'd submit, the design goal there.

Player: So this is the 3rd Chimera we’ve encountered in the territory. Seems strange for a mythical beast and an apex predator. This reeks of foul sorcery! I think there is a “head of the snake” at play here. There must be a nexus! Some kind of portal through which they’re entering our world or maybe a ritualist that is mass producing them! How are Chimera’s spawned? The vastness of history must have an instance of this?

GM: Sounds like you’re consulting your accumulated knowledge! Spout Lore!

Player: Rolls 2d6+2 and gets a 10. Awesome! Something interesting and useful!

GM: Potato.

 

[Fenris-77]

At least with a potato you can put it in a sock and dummy someone.

 

[prabe]

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.

The both of you seemed to have been saying that because things were established out of chronological order in the narrative, around the table, that the characters were experiencing them out of order.

 

[Manbearcat]

The both of you seemed to have been saying that because things were established out of chronological order in the narrative, around the table, that the characters were experiencing them out of order.

If that is how you read it, then my words weren’t clear.

Perhaps you read it that way because my statement that characters in an imagined space don’t experience temporal continuity. That is my position because (as I put in a previous post), the volitional force of the imagined space (us at the table and the table time we allocate to the imagined space and the characters in it) invest them with only about 30 % (at best) of their “lives” with “online” (table time) activity. Outside of that, they’re “offline.”

That 70 % that is elided is only back-filled when prompted (by some participant at the table or the system itself). This is why I invoked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and the 4th Wall.

Now these characters don’t suddenly “experience” yesterday’s events for the first time today when we’re backfilling the elided time. So this isn’t some blip on the temporal continuity through line of their (imagined) “lives” (because there is no through line). We at the table experience it now. They in the shared imagined space don’t know the difference (because they have neither cognition, nor volition, nor do they experience temporal continuity or any other kind of continuity). They’re game pieces in an imagined space given onscreen time and “life” only when we care to give it to them (and they lose it when we take it fro them; eg elide the generous portion of their “life”) in order to facilitate the play of an RPG.

Now this doesn’t mean we can’t imagine their offscreen “life” is filled with all manner of typical mundane and atypical interesting elements of orthodox living. But that is just imagining it. It only becomes “real” when it’s relevant to play and we devote table time to it (when it enters the shared imagined space).

 

[prabe]

If that is how you read it, then my words weren’t clear.

Perhaps you read it that way because my statement that characters in an imagined space don’t experience temporal continuity. That is my position because (as I put in a previous post), the volitional force of the imagined space (us at the table and the table time we allocate to the imagined space and the characters in it) invest them with only about 30 % (at best) of their “lives” with “online” (table time) activity. Outside of that, they’re “offline.”

That 70 % that is elided is only back-filled when prompted (by some participant at the table or the system itself). This is why I invoked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and the 4th Wall.

Now these characters don’t suddenly “experience” yesterday’s events for the first time today when we’re backfilling the elided time. So this isn’t some blip on the temporal continuity through line of their (imagined) “lives” (because there is no through line). We at the table experience it now. They in the shared imagined space don’t know the difference (because they have neither cognition, nor volition, nor do they experience temporal continuity or any other kind of continuity). They’re game pieces in an imagined space given onscreen time and “life” only when we care to give it to them (and they lose it when we take it fro them; eg elide the generous portion of their “life”) in order to facilitate the play of an RPG.

Now this doesn’t mean we can’t imagine their offscreen “life” isn’t filled with all manner of typical mundane and atypical interesting elements of orthodox living. But that is just imagining it. It only becomes “real” when it’s relevant to play and we devote table time to it.

That makes sense. It seems as though I think of fictional characters (including but not limited to TRPG characters) differently than you do, especially in the sense of having volition and awareness in the fiction (else it seems nonsensical to talk about character motivations and knowledge ...), I don't think there's exactly a wrong way to think about these things, though radically different presumptions can make communication difficult.

I wouldn't go so far as to say something not explicitly in a fiction doesn't exist in it; I believe things can be implied and have the weight of existence as applied to the fiction. If (for instance) someone wields a headsman's sword, it implies things about the setting, and even if those things never explicitly appear they have some weight. I think this might be why I'd probably be tempted to write a backstory for most characters in most games, because I know there are things that won't show up in play, and I want to know those things about the character. This seems of a piece with my preference as a GM to work out most of the setting before play starts.