D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Manbearcat]

Okay. So my response will not be as organized as @darkbard, but here goes.

I would not describe the dwarves forge as a “scene edit” at all. One of the things I love about ancient maps and DW are those empty spaces that need to be filled in. This was simply one of those empty spaces, particularly in our particular game, filled with archaeological dig sites and glaciers, covering numerous possibilities. As @darkbard mentioned already, this idea came up in discussion during the week between session, but it felt organic to me as a player and made sense for Maraqli as a character, having devoured books growing up and her brain already established as being filled with information, both useful and not. If I remember correctly I not only rolled well but I also made use of Maraqli’s “bag of books,” which gives a bonus similar to having skill points in any particular “knowledge” in D&D (4e, at least). So, the move was completely in character, felt organic, and I think it may have followed one of those “interesting rumors” along our journey (not the forge necessarily, but that dwarves once lived here .... I think).

I imagined that a poor roll would have resulted in Maraqli’s misremembering the forge or, if our GM didn’t want the forge on my good roll, he would have given us equally useful information (such as serendipitously finding armor for Sir Alastor, but this fit into the fiction and landscape we were collaboratively creating so neatly. For a player less interested or less confident in such a collaboration, the GM could come up with their own idea for a “useful and interesting” result - and indeed there were times that @Manbearcat did just that.

An earlier poor roll resulted directly in our very need to find a forge: Maraqli’s magic exploded an existing workspace we were hoping to use to repair the armor. Hence the needed for Maraqli’s to wrack her memory via Spout Lore. That earlier failure also resulted in this additional arduous and treacherous trek to find the forge.

@Manbearcat, if I’m understanding your second question correctly, my actual cognitive orientation (after the success SL roll) was inhabiting the young woman with an immense amount of curiosity about her world and its history and little actual practical experience of it: I felt Maraqli’s giddiness and determination. There was an urgency to find the forge and figure out how to utilize: put her knowledge into practice.

In answer to question number 3, well, falling down the crevice was certainly jarring (and definitely not as fun as a well!), but the journey was definitely curated by your narrative ( as I’ve never hiked on a glacier before!). No, not jarring (except Maraqli’s landing), not cheating, definitely organic. Both me as a player and Maraqli as a character were terrified about outcome ( poor roll/misstep): Maraqli was focused on being brave in the face of adversity (certainly more than I would have been!).

I also think these moments - the Spout Lore move and subsequent actions - are where Maraqli became more confident, by literally stepping out of her comfort zone and where Sir Alator’s bond with her changed from “Maraqli is reckless and I need to reign in her impulses” to “Maraqli is impulsive and intuitive and I will trust her instincts.”

Does this answer your questions ... perhaps too much?

Its perfect, thank you.

Probably as insightful and accessible a post of someone’s first experience with a system and who isn’t steeped in TTRPG theory as I can recall.

Great memory too (all the interlocking discoveries, fiction, results, and your personal cognitive space through the journey).

Oh and @darkbard , yours was ok too…I guess…2/10 (I’m being charitable)!

 

[Blue]

You're either ignoring or unaware of something that I see as a fundamental difference between these two things.

The Orc is already present in the fiction; it's an established element with which your character is interacting. That said interaction happens to be combat doesn't matter, it could just as easily be a conversation over lunch or a simple wave as you pass each other by; what's relevant is that it is occurring at all.

The dawrven forge is an attempt to establish an entirely new element that's not already present in the fiction, in hopes of being able to interact with that element at a later time.

Point of order. No one is attempting to author the orc. They are attempting to author a wound on the orc. Which manifestly does not exist before.

 

[Malmuria]

What, you wanted Journey?

The game is just...so smooth

 

[FrogReaver]

Point of order. No one is attempting to author the orc. They are attempting to author a wound on the orc. Which manifestly does not exist before.

I think the point was that authoring interactions between 2 already existing characters or things in the fiction is different than adding in a new character or thing.

a wound is not an independent thing. It’s dependent on there being an already existing character to wound. Which means the difference being spoken of is still preserved even with your point here.

 

[FrogReaver]

Okay. So my response will not be as organized as @darkbard, but here goes.

I would not describe the dwarves forge as a “scene edit” at all. One of the things I love about ancient maps and DW are those empty spaces that need to be filled in. This was simply one of those empty spaces, particularly in our particular game, filled with archaeological dig sites and glaciers, covering numerous possibilities.

In general I don't have any problems with leaving blank areas on the map and filling them in later (though the details of how those blank spots get filled in matter a great deal to me).

I find it interesting that in general the notion of having a map with empty spaces to fill in is very compatible with D&D (probably not all styles but at least many).

As @darkbard mentioned already, this idea came up in discussion during the week between session, but it felt organic to me as a player and made sense for Maraqli as a character, having devoured books growing up and her brain already established as being filled with information, both useful and not. If I remember correctly I not only rolled well but I also made use of Maraqli’s “bag of books,” which gives a bonus similar to having skill points in any particular “knowledge” in D&D (4e, at least). So, the move was completely in character, felt organic, and I think it may have followed one of those “interesting rumors” along our journey (not the forge necessarily, but that dwarves once lived here .... I think).

I imagined that a poor roll would have resulted in Maraqli’s misremembering the forge or, if our GM didn’t want the forge on my good roll, he would have given us equally useful information (such as serendipitously finding armor for Sir Alastor, but this fit into the fiction and landscape we were collaboratively creating so neatly. For a player less interested or less confident in such a collaboration, the GM could come up with their own idea for a “useful and interesting” result - and indeed there were times that @Manbearcat did just that.

This helps push the Spout Lore move well into the realm of what I find acceptable. Player suggests 'X'. GM decides that's a good/interesting idea and uses it to fill in some of those blank spots you mentioned. IMO. This kind of thing in general is also very compatible with D&D (possibly not for all playstyles though).

An earlier poor roll resulted directly in our very need to find a forge: Maraqli’s magic exploded an existing workspace we were hoping to use to repair the armor. Hence the needed for Maraqli’s to wrack her memory via Spout Lore. That earlier failure also resulted in this additional arduous and treacherous trek to find the forge.

@Manbearcat, if I’m understanding your second question correctly, my actual cognitive orientation (after the success SL roll) was inhabiting the young woman with an immense amount of curiosity about her world and its history and little actual practical experience of it: I felt Maraqli’s giddiness and determination. There was an urgency to find the forge and figure out how to utilize: put her knowledge into practice.

In answer to question number 3, well, falling down the crevice was certainly jarring (and definitely not as fun as a well!), but the journey was definitely curated by your narrative ( as I’ve never hiked on a glacier before!). No, not jarring (except Maraqli’s landing), not cheating, definitely organic. Both me as a player and Maraqli as a character were terrified about outcome ( poor roll/misstep): Maraqli was focused on being brave in the face of adversity (certainly more than I would have been!).

It's amazing to me how much your description here sounds like how a player would describe a well run D&D game. You even go as far to emphasize the DM's role as narrator here.

It's descriptions like yours here that really make me pause and go 'are story now games actually being played all that different from D&D'? It almost seems to me like it's mostly a matter of presentation - where they get presented as inherently superior to a game like D&D and thus their actual differences tend to be a bit overstated to align with that sentiment (either by overly emphasizing such aspects in story now games or under emphasizing similar aspects in D&D games).

The point I'm driving at isn't that those games and D&D are exactly the same, just that the differences to me seem overstated and similarities seem understated - and I think that's driving much of the confusion and back and forth we see in this thread.

Anyways, thanks for your thoughts. They were interesting.

 

[FrogReaver]

I do strive for inhabitation of character as central to the player role in RPGing, and I don't think it is impossible. But some things are more consistent with it than others. In my view, part of the technical cleverness of a system like DW is that it contains moves like Spout Lore which permit the player to send cues to the GM without having to cease inhabitation of their PC.

That technical cleverness is not an accident, in my view. Vincent Baker (and Luke Crane with somewhat similar though by no means identical mechanics in Burning Wheel) deliberately set out to solve a problem which arises when the setting is not foreign to the PCs but backstory authority rests primarily with the GM.

I would say I don't view the idea of taking a characters roleplaying action and tying the declaration of that roleplaying action to some mechanic that does something outside the immediate context of that roleplaying action to be clever design - for me it's an illusory trick of the highest magnitude. It tricks people into thinking they are only roleplaying their character when in fact the roleplaying action due to the mechanical structure of the game carries far more weight than simply roleplaying does. Whether that weight is enough to author fiction or add non-fiction based constraints to the GM's authoring of fiction like mandating the GM authors something interesting and useful, the same point applies.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, here, I'll put if very simply: The party I played CoS with was a dwaven fighter/rogue, a firbolg druid, a human cleric, an elven wizard, and a human barbarian. We recovered the Raven token, found and recruited the ally, and got the sunsword. We faced and defeated Strahd! Now, your turn (or anyone else) -- provide your party that completed CoS and say if you also did these things.

Again, it's not what you did but how you did it that would be different; and it's the "how" piece that matters in the run of play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So why use the phrase "scene editing" which is effectively synonymous?

No its not. You can edit in something that has neither been established to exist or not exist. As I said, that was abundantly clear in the usage in Adventure. Its a term of art.

 

[FrogReaver]

@Thomas Shey, @FrogReaver and @Crimson Longinus seem to be asserting that authoring a moment of recollection of a past event or a long-existing thing is different as an act of authorship from authoring a moment of swinging a sword and an Orc dodging or failing to dodge. As Ovinomancer in particular has pointed out, this is not true. I made the same point with reference to Immanuel Kant's mistaken theory of geometry.

Authorship of the Past
1a. The act of hitting the Orc occurs in the present (and possibly impacts the future). There's no past point on the fictional timeline being affected by this authorship.
1b. The act of authoring a forge into existence for use now forces a forge into existence in the 'past' of the fictional timeline.

Authorship of Objects
2a. Authoring hitting the Orc is an event.
2b. Authoring the existence of a forge is an object.

Authorship of Causal Actions
3a. Authoring hitting the orc is something which in the fiction can be causally linked to the action the PC took (making an attack).
3b. Authoring the forge is something which in the fiction cannot be causally linked to the action the PC took. (the causal link only exists outside the fiction).

Etc.

You may not feel these differences matter, but these are certainly differences. If your point is merely that authoring any of these things is still authorship then we all agree. If your point is that because all these things are authorship that any details about 'what is being authored' are irrelevant then you'll find strong opposition because a) other people have preferences based on those differences and b) rpg play experiences aren't just based on there being something 'authored' but also on who is authoring and what is being authored.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@Crimson Longinus , @FrogReaver , @Lanefan , @EzekielRaiden and @anyone else who believes in the concept of "improvised setting (possibly including NPCs and their dispositions...unclear) content generation as a state of quantum superposition", can you explain why are the following things not in a state of superposition?

* The 20 listed NPCs/Monsters on your Wandering Monster List every time Wandering Monsters are rolled in a dungeon.

I don't use wandering monster tables, so this isn't super relevant. If I actually did so however, I would feel it was avoided by players being able to learn, in advance, what the contents of the table are and how to potentially avoid or manipulate those contents, that is, warding off unwanted encounters (e.g. "ugh I hate basilisks and don't want to fight them again...is there anything we can do?") or making desired encounters more likely (e.g. "ooh, didn't we hear giant wasp venom has alchemical value? Maybe we could look into that...") Under these lights, the roll represents controllable, knowable uncertainty, exactly the same as "do you succeed on an attack roll" and most other forms of rolling to determine consequences.

* The 20 listed Hex Encounters every time you roll for Random Encounters in Hex 2b (or whatever).

Only place I ever used something like this was in "Zerzura," my implementation of the very excellent Gardens of Ynn, and there, the quantum superposition thing was very intentional and diegetic: the Gardens are not completely stable spatially, so if you leave and then come back, the rooms no longer connect together the way they used to. This is an intentional way of making them scarier but also more exciting.

* The NPC/Monster disposition when you roll Reaction or Morale.

I do not make such rolls. If I did, it would have a similar shape to the wandering monster roll stuff: players would know their initial standing and could try to affect the spread of results.

* The 20 listed Town Encounters every time you roll for Random Encounters in Town x.

Yeah...seeing a major pattern here. I don't really make such rolls.

* The nature of (location and backstory and disposition) of the Innkeep, the Member of The Watch, the Travelling Peddler, the Caravan Guard or Merchant whenever play goes off backstory script to a location or person (prodded by players) that wasn't fleshed out prior (whether you make some kind of roll to procedurally generate the content in the moment or you just "GM's Choice" it and frame the place/character in because the player has prodded it).

Improvisation is vital to the experience. I pretty much don't use rolls for it. If I am inventing things in order to work with player prompts, I don't see that as a quantum scenario, but rather as both the players and myself being equally ignorant of what is "really there," rather than knowing that one of four things is already "really there" but someone's rolls will exactly fix which thing it was that was always "really there." It's the difference between finding a random box in the street and opening it to see what is inside (you are ignorant of its contents, but there's no reason to see inverted causality), and being handed a box by someone and told it WILL contain something but only after you make a prediction about what is inside.

* The location and nature of every piece of set dressing/color/NPC characterization that is suddenly invoked, poked, prodded, or otherwise required to suddenly materialize from the void of the shared imagined space as the conversation of play dictates.

See above. Improvisation feels like discovery. I don't like the thought that a player or DM narration retroactively fixes a specific event that was the direct cause of other things. There's a reason I keep bringing up the murder caper and retroactive causality: it bothers me greatly, to the point of damaging my ability to play at all, to have the causative factor of the entire experience (the person who committed the murder) be declared by play, rather than discovered.

How are any of these things not in this verboten state of "unestablished to ass-pull" (whether procedurally generated as required or GM's Choice) that is being claimed as exclusive to Story Now games (and has been since I was little...this is a 30+ year rodeo of this claim) but a player's invoking their PC’s memory is?

Well, some of them can be, unless handled correctly. But the overall divide for me seems to center on the nature of the ignorance represented by the roll, and the causal relation between the characters' actions and the events that led them to take those actions. Searching a place you've come to visit? Anyone would do that, there's no reason you wouldn't take a look around, so it's not at all like the mystic mural you discover (or whatever) was "caused" by you looking, even though from a purely family perspective that is technically what happened. But in the Christie-type-caper example, getting a good roll on some move or other might let a player simply declare that the Countess is, and thus always was, the murderer; even if that is compatible with the established fiction, that feels like tying causality in knots to me, since that means the player's actions caused the Countess to be the murderer who left the clues for the characters to find so that the player could take the actions to cause the Countess to be the murderer who left the clues behind to...etc.

I hope these answers weren't too useless. "I don't do that" felt a bit like a cop-out so I tried to give more than that.