D&D 5E (2014) Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e

[pemerton]

I agree that "Backstory first", as @pemerton is defining the category, appears to distinguish Story Now from other approaches.

Have I asserted that "situation first" is a synonym for "story now"? No. So why are you treating it as such?

 

[prabe]

A RPGing table which is not comfortable with situation-first might have to play backstory-first. That's obviously their prerogative. But it doesn't mean that there is no difference between the two approaches!

I don't see any a priori reason why that can't be done. Is 5e the best system for it? In the abstract, probably not - I'd suggest Burning Wheel! But if that's the system for which everyone sitting around the table has books and is familiar with the PC build and resolution rules? Then suddenly it's claim to optimality at that table has strengthened quite a bit!

I've snipped because I really just want to respond to these.

The first: What I meant was that some GMs might feel that before they can drop-in (or frame, or whatever your verb of choice is) a situation, they might need some sense of the world they're dropping it into. As I understand it, you use Greyhawk for your Burning Wheel for this, and your Cortex Marvel Heroes game uses (or maybe used) the Marvel version of the real world. Maybe that makes the game backstory-first.

The second: This is primarily why I play 5E. I understand the rules, and how to bend them to my will; and it's probably easier to find a game (or players) for, than anything else. Best System Ever? Even I don't think so. Good Enough? It is for us.

 

[pemerton]

When I run more traditional games like Pathfinder Second Edition, Worlds Without Number, RuneQuest, Vampire - The Requiem, Exalted Third Edition or Legend of the Five Rings I do so in a way that is pretty similar to Ron Edwards' accounts of his own Champions and RuneQuest games. Basically I work with the other players during character creation to build a constellation of NPCs around them and build a setting around them. Then while the game is ongoing my prep (NPC and scenario design) is guided by player character dramatic needs, but in the course of the game session I am just trying to play the world and especially the NPCs with integrity. When I improvise over the course of a session it's always guided by what feels most true. The scenes I frame are entirely guided by trying to represent the scenario as honestly as possible. I do this because I want the play space to feel as tangible as possible for all the players (including the GM). I call this Story Now in the Streets, Right to Dream in the Sheets.

I've run Rolemaster in something like this fashion. But without your degree of self-consciousness and deliberateness - which is to say, a bit more half-arsedly and as a result I would say a bit more crappily.

Over time, I would say my approach drifted closer to straight situation-first.

 

[pemerton]

That article on Six Cultures of Gaming is leading me to some interesting stuff; thanks @Neonchameleon! One in particular may be of further interest to folks here – Observations on GNS Simulationism, with this juicy bit on railroading:

Thanks for providing that wonderful passage.

I have never GMed that.

I have played that - tournament CoC and other BRP-type games, with lovingly crafted and deftly curated and presented scenarios. As a player in the CoC ones, my job is to enjoy going mad, and emote the hell out of it as best I can.

I think there is an interesting drift, or transition, or resemblance (I'm not sure what the right verb is) from story-hour style to a certain sort of non-frenetic situation-first. I've posted before about my deep appreciation for Jerry Grayson's Prince Valiant scenario The Crimson Bull, and what a success it was when I GMed it. It uses "story hour" techniques to gradually build up the situation - the PCs lead the bull to the Vale of Mudde over a series of days, having little vignette-ish events happen on the way that gradually reveal the magical character of the bull, and invite them to form an orientation towards the bull and its magic. What prevents it being a railroad, in my view, is that none of those vignettes requires the players to make a thematically-crucial or situation-resolving decision: they just layer on a sense of the situation and the stakes until the final moment which does crystallise all that build-up into a moment of dramatic decision-making. (Of course if the players did make a thematically crucial decision in one of the vignettes - eg killing the bull - then the GM would have to resolve that with a degree of improvisation, similarly to what I had to do at the conclusion given that the author did not anticipate the approach my players ended up taking.)

What helps with the use of the "vignettes" to establish framing is that the system - Prince Valiant - treats travel, camping etc purely as colour unless a participant - typically but not necessarily the GM - makes them otherwise. So whereas in a resource-clock type game there is a cost to going along with the GM's framing if - in the fiction - it is building up over miles and days of travel, in Prince Valiant that costs nothing.

 

[pemerton]

Another common form of situation first play that happens all the time in my experience are those moments where a player or set of players say something along the lines of "I want a scene where PC X confronts PC Y about their feelings for NPC Z" and we then fill in the details of how that scene came about as we start playing it. This is pretty much what the Nordic LARP play culture is all about. In my experience it's also phenomenally common in a lot of tabletop play, particularly in the World of Darkness and Legend of the 5 Rings fandoms. We do this thing all the time in the groups I play more traditional games with.

Don't know how relevant that is.

I think PC vs PC is interesting because, at least most of the time, I would assume that resolution via GM extrapolation from backstory (whether revealed or secret) is not normally an option!

In my table's Prince Valiant game two knight PCs - Sir Gerran and Sir Morgath - confronted one another about their wooing of the NPC Violette. The scene was framed very casually - I think we just established that the PCs went to a tavern to drink together. We resolved their interaction via opposed Fellowship checks (ie to see who would do the "good bloke" thing and step out of the way of the other). I think it was probably less intense than a Nordic LARPing take would be!

I think there is an interesting question about how the GM facilitating the framing of this sort of scene compares to the Neotrad idea of the GM facilitating the realisation of a player aspiration for their PC. It might depend on how the confrontation between the PCs is resolved - in the tabletop context, I think that Neotrad might favour some sort of consensus resolution, whereas Story Now is more likely to use some sort of check (like I described for Prince Valiant).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In my table's Prince Valiant game two knight PCs - Sir Gerran and Sir Morgath - confronted one another about their wooing of the NPC Violette. The scene was framed very casually - I think we just established that the PCs went to a tavern to drink together. We resolved their interaction via opposed Fellowship checks (ie to see who would do the "good bloke" thing and step out of the way of the other). I think it was probably less intense than a Nordic LARPing take would be!

I hope Violette didn't get together with either of them, and instead found someone who actually respects her opinion and won't scheme behind her back to hand her over like a trophy!

 

[Malmuria]

How many times do I have to post that "situation first" also includes "living novel" play of the sort that Lewis Pulsipher was criticising back in the late 70s? (EDIT: As best I can tell, @Manbearcat's "Calvinball" as an instance of improv that is contrasted with "story now - post 1252 - is what I am calling "living novel", or at least pretty much in the same ballpark.)

Here's a post I made, reflecting on those criticism, about 4 years ago:

In the context of this current thread, "manipulating players" is what has been referred to as Force.

And what "story now" RPGing generally relies upon is ways of allowing stuff to be made up on the spot that do yield genuine consequences and that don't require the use of Force. AD&D is a bit more rickety in this respect than Burning Wheel; I suspect the same is true of 5e D&D. But it can be done in AD&D and can probably be done in 5e.

If someone is doing this using "backstory first" rather than "situation first" then they should post about it. Without an example of that, though, I am stuck with my own thought that there is the risk of the occasional dull adventure - because the players don't engage the right bit of backstory - unless the GM uses Force to override the "natural" consequences of those dullness-threatening action declarations.

And as I've already posted, if this becomes anything like a regular occurrence then why maintain the pretence of backstory first play?

Sometime ago, I ran a one shot of an OSR supplement called The Stygian Library. It's a really interesting book! Though I'm not sure the remastered version is worth it. Anyway, it's basically a procedurally generated dungeon in the form of an extradimensional library. The locations are very OSR: lots of things to interact with, random tables for searching rooms or hearing rumors and what not. The overall structure, however, is very interesting, and makes it play in a particular way. The players enter a randomly generated room and can choose to go deeper, in which case a different room is generated (along with randomly generated room "details," NPCs/monsters, and items). The list of possible randomly generated things changes based on their "depth" in the library and how they interact with npcs. The locations are not literally connected to each other, so traveling between them could mean traveling down hallways, up or down stairs, etc. This means that the players can go deeper, but they can also choose to go back, and then go deeper again, meaning another set of randomly generated rooms/details/npcs/items/etc (you can see why a book is not the most user-friendly presentation of this kind of thing...). They could keep going back and going deeper until they found a situation that they liked, though I guess eventually you would run out of possible combinations.

The reason for being there was a fairly conventional one for a library: they were trying to find a book! As my players are Cthulhu-obsessed, they chose the Necronomicon. So their objective win condition was to find the book, and the likelihood of that happening was based on a combination of their depth and their progress, which is affected by how they interact with each location and with the npcs (not angering the librarians, randomly finding a related book, some other things). The play experience was made further interesting in that we were playing maze rats. One aspect of maze rats is that you get spell slots, but you roll on random tables to "generate" the spells, which are really just a combination of words. Then the player and GM hashes out what the spell effect is.

Overall it was a really great experience, especially as a GM, as my role ended up being taking a number of elements and interrelating them on the fly in addition to narrating/adjudicating player actions. Because so much is randomly generated, and the interactions among those things are unpredictable, there was no way for me to really force a "story." Plus the players knew I was generating everything randomly.

Is that backstory first? Probably, as it's basically a module filled with backstory, even if randomly generated. On the other hand situations take a certain priority into what going deeper and making "progress" in the library looks like, and the free-form magic system was very player-driven and conversational. I'd guess it was story after. I don't know.

But the bigger point is that...I don't care! I think some of you look at play reports and toss them in basket A or basket B or basket C. For those of us not invested in those categories, it makes providing play reports something of an exercise in futility, because no matter if I say that the above experience felt like there was a lot of player agency and authorship over "situation," it's possible that you all will come in and say, "nope, basket A." Meanwhile, if both The Stygian Library and Waterdeep: Dragonheist are basket A, then that categorization doesn't have much meaning for me, because it doesn't describe what are vastly different play experiences.

The deployment of theoretical language or jargon has a time and place, and one could argue that an internet forum dedicated to a niche hobby is exactly that time and place. But employing it will make the conversation less accessible and more insider-y. Particularly, when words with conventional meanings and connotations--backstory, situation, character, genre, force--are being used in ways that are technical and specific. So speaking using theoretical terms is not some act of generosity; it situates the speaker in a position of authority and minimizes and devalues the experiences and ideas of those who don't have access to that terminology. Or, as the OP phrased it at the beginning of their post:

Please note that I am going to try and use words in their, um, natural language (it's 5e!) so as to allow a multiplicity of opinions. To the extent that I accidentally employ jargon, it is not intentional, and I will explain any terms I use if they are meant to be "terms."

[As another aside, I'll say that one reason I like the Six Cultures of Play post was that, while it provides a sort of categorization, the categories are historically situated, have admitted overlap, and are explicitly non-comprehensive. They are an attempt to account for the things that people actually do with games, not what they should be doing with them in some platonic form. The author identifies six cultures, but says that there could be more (with particular acknowledgment of the non-English world!), and it is implied that more could and in fact will develop, unlike GNS, which speaks as if the model is already complete and future games just need to fall into basket A, B, or C. A flaw of this post might be that the author quite obviously prefers OSR games, but I think that's better that articulating a "universal" model whose real purpose is to design hyper-focused basket B-type games (you know, the ones for the "most functional" non-brain damaged among us)]

There are at least six main cultures of play that have emerged over the course of the roleplaying game hobby. There may be more: my analysis is mainly restricted to English-language RPG cultures, tho' at least three of them have significant non-English presences as well. In addition to these six cultures, there's a proto-culture that existed from 1970-1976 before organisation into cultures really began.

A culture of play is a set of shared norms (goals, values, taboos, etc.), considerations, and techniques that inform a group of people who are large enough that they are not all in direct contact with one another (let's call that a "community"). These cultures of play are transmitted through a variety of media, ranging from books and adventures to individuals teaching one another to magazine articles to online streaming shows. A culture of play is broadly similar to a "network of practice" if you're familiar with that jargon.

Individuals in the hobby, having been aligned to and trained in one or more of these cultures, then develop individual styles. I want to point out that I think talking about specific games as inherently part of some culture is misleading, because games can be played in multiple different styles in line with the values of different cultures. But, many games contain text that advocates for them to be played in a way that is in line with a particular culture, or they contain elements that express the creator's adoption of a particular culture's set of values.

 

[pemerton]

Not arguing, but it seems there might be some overlap between "add fuel to the story" and "fair and logical response."

Maybe, if you look at it from the "afterwards" perspective.

But from the point of view of "beforehand" - ie when the GM has to narrate something - the difference is in respect of the sort of reasons/considerations the GM is having regard to.

The first: What I meant was that some GMs might feel that before they can drop-in (or frame, or whatever your verb of choice is) a situation, they might need some sense of the world they're dropping it into. As I understand it, you use Greyhawk for your Burning Wheel for this, and your Cortex Marvel Heroes game uses (or maybe used) the Marvel version of the real world. Maybe that makes the game backstory-first.

I don't think so.

In Edwards's essay about setting, he contrasts GM constructs a story • GM learns setting in some detail with Introductory Color • Environment & look-and-feel. Don't get too hung up on "constructs a story" - that's not relevant in this post - but rather the idea of a setting with detail supporting a construction, with "colour" and "look-and-feel". I use Greyhawk for colour: we need a town name (Hardby), we need some geography (when we started our first campaign, the player of the wizard PC had downloaded a picture of an Indian castle and said this is the tower referenced in Jobe's background and I said I think that's in the Abor-Alz and he agreed.

The difference is that colour doesn't determine action resolution outcomes. It's just flavour, "look and feel", filling out the sense of the world. In BW, all our movement is resolved either via free narration (not map-and-key resolution) or via appropriate checks (eg Orienteering checks to navigate safely through the Bright Desert).

Likewise in Marvel Heroic RP - when I narrate the fight between War Machine and Titanium Man which started out over Washington DC as having ended up with War Machine falling to land in Florida, while Titanium Man returns to his secret base in Khazakstan, this is not an input into resolution. No one is comparing mph of their rockets with a map of North America or Central Asia. It's flavour.

Of course colour can be transmuted into something carrying more weight. In a subsequent session, when War Machine wanted to disable a supervillain, he declared that he was grabbing her and hanging her by her costume at the top of the Washington Monument. The check succeeded, and he disabled her with a Dangling From the Top of the Washington Monument complication.

If you're playing Tomb of Horrors, the contrast between backstory and colour/"look and feel" probably doesn't come up much. (It can, though - say someone asks more about the details of the tapestries in the shaking room, the GM has to just make something up, and it won't matter to the play of the module. This goes back to my example, upthread I think, of the GM establishing impromptu the Orcish graffiti underneath the table - a good ToH GM knows how to narrate colour so as to sustain the players' sense of the fiction without misleading or confusing them as to what matters and what doesn't.)

But if you're used to GMing ToH or similar and want to think about how you'd GM Apocalypse World, then thinking about the contrast between backstory and colour becomes a bit more important I think. For instance, if you've narrated the shed being on fire, and the player declares that their PC rushes into it to try and grab the water canisters that are still inside, that's Acting Under Fire, and the check has to be made. From pp 190-91:

When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7–9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.​

​

You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. . . .​

​

On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure.​

If the player whose PC rushes into the burning shed rolls a 7-9 then obviously taking harm is one legitimate option (eg a hard bargain: It's HOT in there - if you really want to go through with it, you'll take 3-harm (ap)) but so would be something else if it seems to make sense (eg an ugly choice: As you rush towards the shed, you see the fire is spreading to your workspace garage - you can grab the water, or try and stop the spread, but not both; or a worse outcome: You grab the canisters, but the plastic has started to melt - that water is going to be a bit tainted if you drink it).

That's an example of the contrast between "backstory first" and "situation first". In the AW adjudication, the colour of the situation - that includes the fire - is being used to help establish consequences in accordance with the resolution processes, but it is not backstory that settles the resolution outcome (that the water is tainted, or that the fire inevitably spread, or that the PC inevitably suffers burns).

 

[pemerton]

I hope Violette didn't get together with either of them, and instead found someone who actually respects her opinion and won't scheme behind her back to hand her over like a trophy!

Well, I went back and found this:

Sir Justin and the squire both compted for Violette's attention, but the initial set of rolls was tied; and then when they sat down to discuss the situation man-to-man over some ales the Presence + Fellowship rolls likewise tied. So neither yielded to the other, and she enjoyed the romantic attention of both of them.

So one of the PCs was still a squire. But not long after this, he was knighted, and somewhat railroaded into marrying Lady Elizabeth of York. Which has not gone entirely happily since. Sir Justin later married Violette, but his true passion is the order that he founded, the Knights of St Sigobert.

 

[prabe]

Maybe, if you look at it from the "afterwards" perspective.

But from the point of view of "beforehand" - ie when the GM has to narrate something - the difference is in respect of the sort of reasons/considerations the GM is having regard to.

Then I guess maybe I'm objecting to the idea that a GM is only considering one thing. Or always priotitizes the same thing.

I don't think so.

In Edwards's essay about setting, he contrasts GM constructs a story • GM learns setting in some detail with Introductory Color • Environment & look-and-feel. Don't get too hung up on "constructs a story" - that's not relevant in this post - but rather the idea of a setting with detail supporting a construction, with "colour" and "look-and-feel". I use Greyhawk for colour: we need a town name (Hardby), we need some geography (when we started our first campaign, the player of the wizard PC had downloaded a picture of an Indian castle and said this is the tower referenced in Jobe's background and I said I think that's in the Abor-Alz and he agreed.

The difference is that colour doesn't determine action resolution outcomes. It's just flavour, "look and feel", filling out the sense of the world. In BW, all our movement is resolved either via free narration (not map-and-key resolution) or via appropriate checks (eg Orienteering checks to navigate safely through the Bright Desert).

Sure. Geography doesn't determine outcomes, but it might constrain player options some--or change the sorts of situations that can/will arise. Maybe that's consistent with what you mean by "color" (if you'll excuse my American (mis)spelling).

That's an example of the contrast between "backstory first" and "situation first". In the AW adjudication, the colour of the situation - that includes the fire - is being used to help establish consequences in accordance with the resolution processes, but it is not backstory that settles the resolution outcome (that the water is tainted, or that the fire inevitably spread, or that the PC inevitably suffers burns).

That's a reasonable use of the framing. It was kinda what I was getting at upthread when I described the possibility of describing a scene in some detail before turning something violently loose therein. The harm that could come to the civilians (lack of a better word) are at least one available consequence for ... failing to stop whatever violence is ensuing.