D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Crimson Longinus]

Have you ever played Classic Traveller? As I posted already upthread, it has exactly the same structure in its Streetwise skill. In 1977. I have read a lot of commentary on Classic Traveller, written over the many decades since it was first published. This "quantum collapse" thing has never been mentioned.

To reiterate: the rules for Streetwise are that if a player seeks to find something using their PC's Streetwise (ipso facto interesting and relevantly useful, otherwise they wouldn't be bothering), the GM's job is to set a difficulty and the throw is then made.

I don't know the exact text, but I assume it might merely representing the PC finding things that already are there. If one PC used streetwise to find illegal stims and failed, could another PC attempt to do the same in the same location*? Also, who sets the DC? Can the GM simply say "no, you can't find portable fusion reactors in this tiny village?" Or can they effectively do so by setting the DC so high that success is impossible?

(*I assume this cannot do with spout lore. Once one PC tries to 'remember' that forge is at location X, fails, and it is established that it is not there, another PC cannot try to 'remember' that it actually totally is there.)

In any case, I'm sure we can find peripheral examples of player adding setting details outside their character. It matters whether the GM has veto on such things. Also, I'm sure small scale stuff is simply something most people don't worry about. You might think it is logically inconsistent, but it simply is so with everything. Scale matters. Deciding the colour of your cloak or whether there is an ancient dwarven forge are so different in scope that they're in practice completely different things.

 

[pemerton]

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).

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.

There are two things I don't understand.

One is how to reconcile these two posts, which appear to have been made by the same person within the space of 12 minutes.

The second is what you think the illusion is. I mean, it's very gratifying that you are worried that I am being deceived when I play Burning Wheel, but you don't need to worry. I know that it's all imaginary, and being authored. And I know that the authorship is heavily shaped by the priorities that I, as a player, bring to the table. That's why I play the game. If you were to read the rulebook - and the relevant bits can be downloaded for free - you would find that it makes that point on the first page.

So when, playing Aramina, I conjecture "Don't I recall that Evard's tower is around here?" and then call for a Great Masters-wise check, I know that if the check succeeds then the existence of Evard's tower around about here will be established as part of the fiction, that being a necessary corollary of the conjectured memory being a true one. Obviously the responsibility is a weighty one - I mean, what if Aramina really doesn't want to explore the towers of the Great Masters of whom she's heard as a Neophyte Sorcerer! But I think I'm up to it!

EDIT: The post to which I'm replying is utterly bizarre to me. It's basically saying that a RPG in which a player's action declarations matter is deceptive - because all roleplaying should actually be is colour that doesn't affect anything about the underlying fiction.

Bizarre!

 

[Manbearcat]

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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.

I appreciate your responses.

I don't have the time to dig into everything but I've read it.

One thing that strikes me that I would be curious to get your answer on.

I'm curious how you feel your position (as a big time 4e advocate...like myself) on Spout Lore and Story Now content generation squares with your 4e love (which is riddled with Story Now generation and stance drift).

It would seem to me that someone cognitively captured or preoccupied (pick whichever word you feel describes your disposition) by this particular strain (as it pertains to TTRPGs) of internal causality modeling you're espousing would fall on a particular side of the edition war fault line (eg not the side you appear to be on!) of Martial Dailies and Come and Get It and Streetwise and Damage on a Miss and Fail Forward Consequence Generation and Warlords Shouting Back HPs (to use the edition warrior's trope that attempts to hang 4e D&D by the damage : HP internal causality petard) after a vicious combat with any capable D&D foe (take your pick)!

How do you feel your position on Spout Lore and Story Now content generation in Dungeon World squares with your love of 4e (particularly these things above)?

 

[pemerton]

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.

But nothing has been edited into the scene that is any different from "editing in" the Orc's wound - which wasn't there at the start of the scene.

 

[pemerton]

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.

My point is that the only difference is subject matter. But many posters are asserting that the difference is more than that - that some subject matters are "quantum collapses" but others are not.

Some are also suggesting that players never get to declare actions that implicate the past. But they do: eg every time a PC goes shopping, and buys an X, that implicates that in the past of the gameworld someone made the X.

The main difference I can see between the making of the X, and the making of the Dwarven forge, is that the latter is interesting. So the principle seems to be only the GM can author things that imply interesting facts about the past of the setting.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think the easy mode comments are regarding the changed decision space that the reality editing brings (Pemerton, don't argue semantics, I don't care.) I'm not sure it necessarily makes things easier, but it definitely changes how problems are approached. If the problem is how the characters get across the river, the decision space becomes rather different if intentionally 'remembering' that there is a bridge nearby is an available option, rather than having to solve the issue solely with the actual capabilities the PCs might posses.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My point is that the only difference is subject matter. But many posters are asserting that the difference is more than that - that some subject matters are "quantum collapses" but others are not.

No. The quantum collapse power was an example to illustrate how spout lore would look like if it was actually causally connected to the character in the same way than swinging a sword is. I.e. the character has reality altering powers they can knowingly use. I assumed it was perfectly clear, but obviously not, as it seems to have lead to quite a bit of confusion. Not that it was my example.

 

[pemerton]

And this shows you still don't get it. The action of "I swing at the orc" predicates a number of things, and usually has a semi-binary (and repeatable) result; you hit or you don't, and try next time. It is not producing any trend toward anything in the fiction that the PC does not already have influence over. I stand by my opinion that is not the case with Spout Lore; the precise result of Spout Lore is not deterministic, but it is almost certainly going to produce a result the PC had no intrinsic way of producing.

A character has no intrinsic way of producing a scratch on an Orc. As we all know from watching The Prince Bride, it depends as much on the Orc's skill and training as the attacking character's. If anything, a memory is more "intrinsic" than scratching someone.

We could, and it wouldn't change anything. Who rolls and how many times has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. What is relevant is how the roll is triggered and what sort of causal process it represents.

To the extent that Spout Lore represents anything, it represents the PC remembering something. The GM tells the player what that memory is. The GM does so under the appropriate constraints as dictated by the roll (eg if the player rolls a 6 or down the GM is expected to make a hard move that follows from the fiction).

I don't know the exact text, but I assume it might merely representing the PC finding things that already are there.

You mean just as a character who Spouts Lore remembers things that are already there?

If one PC used streetwise to find illegal stims and failed, could another PC attempt to do the same in the same location*?

(*I assume this cannot do with spout lore. Once one PC tries to 'remember' that forge is at location X, fails, and it is established that it is not there, another PC cannot try to 'remember' that it actually totally is there.)

Classic Traveller has no systematic rules for retries. But the general thrust of the game is against them, as whenever retries are canvassed they have a cost (generally in time).

Also, who sets the DC? Can the GM simply say "no, you can't find portable fusion reactors in this tiny village?" Or can they effectively do so by setting the DC so high that success is impossible?

The referee sets that throw required - this is standard for Classic Traveller. The suggested throws, as per my post upthread, are an official willing to issue licenses without hassle = 5+, the location of high quality guns at a low price = 9+.

The action you've described doesn't seem to me to trigger Streetwise at all, given that it is not dealing with close-knit sub-cultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, and trade groups such as workers, the underworld, etc). But your intention seems to be to describe something which rests on an absurd fictional conjecture. DW is no more interested in absurd fictional conjectures than Classic Traveller. Do you think that the existence of Dwarven forges, in a game whose setting is full of fantastic architecture and magical legacies of all sorts of people, including Dwarves, is an absurd fictional conjecture?

In any case, I'm sure we can find peripheral examples of player adding setting details outside their character. It matters whether the GM has veto on such things.

Matters how?

The GM having a veto doesn't seem to me to stop it being "quantum collapse", if it ever was. Nor to change the authorship process in any other way. It just means that the GM has unfettered authority over the setting.

in other kinds of games, the GM is perfectly able to just go "there's nothing like that here" and move along. But the requirements there are going to steer the GM toward putting in a forge or something of similar interest, and if you don't see the difference between that and simple knowledge checks, I don't know quite what to tell you. By the simple nature of asking the question, they've at least put their thumb on the scale.

<snip>

Whether the history of the world contains Dwarves and their forges is regarded, by many D&D players, as something about which the players have low ownership and the GM has high ownership.

In DW, Dwarves are a character option in multiple playbooks, so I don't know that that is something the GM has high ownership over. (And I see enough threads debating this issue in relation to 5e D&D that I don't think it's as clear-cut as you assert.)

I understand that many posters in this thread think that the existence of Dwarven forges is something the GM has high ownership over. My point is that the reasons being advanced for that - eg the "quantum collapse" stuff, or the argument that it is at odds with inhabiting one's PC to conjecture what it is that one's PC remembers - are utterly unpersuasive.

The argument that does seem to be emerging - from @Lanefan, from @FrogReaver as per my quote and reply not far upthread, from @Crimson Loginus as per what I've quoted in this post, and from you with your reference to "thumb on the scale" - is that the GM needs to have the authority to ensure, whatever the player's roll, that the PC does not recall anything interesting and relevantly useful. The next step would be to work out why this is so.

 

[pemerton]

I think the easy mode comments are regarding the changed decision space that the reality editing brings (Pemerton, don't argue semantics, I don't care.)

Sorry, are your comments now immune from response?

What is being edited?

I'm not sure it necessarily makes things easier, but it definitely changes how problems are approached. If the problem is how the characters get across the river, the decision space becomes rather different if intentionally 'remembering' that there is a bridge nearby is an available option, rather than having to solve the issue solely with the actual capabilities the PCs might posses.

If the PC's knowledge of the local terrain is not part of their capabilities, what is the point of playing a ranger, a boat pilot, etc?

Aragorn is able to guide the Hobbits safely from Bree to Rivendell, and the Fellowship safely from Moria to Parth Galen, in part because of his knowledge of the lands he is travelling through.

In DW, or BW, a player can play a character like Aragorn. Under the approach you appear to prefer - ie where a PC relies on their knowledge equals the GM feeds the players an answer to a problem that appears to be impossible.

 

[Manbearcat]

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).


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).


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.

I agree that her thoughts were interesting!

But I can help dispel your notion that this game (this particular Story Now game) bears much resemblance to a D&D 5e Adventure Path game or an RC Hexcrawl or a Moldvay Dungeon Crawl (to name a few varieties of D&D) in the actual playing and the generation of content:

* Every_single_thing in this game was generated on the fly. Every bit of it. Outside of our initial map and the thematic contents of their PC creation (Playbook, Bonds, Alignment) and the general premise of the game, there wasn't a single bit of prep. Every moment of my framing, every consequence I rendered was made up on the spot!

* Some good (temporally relevant to the Forge) examples of this would be:

- The Journey moves prior to the encounters at Camp 2 created a shrine and cache with 2 young sisters in need on a desperate pilgrimage for deliverance from their woes

- A soft move (for framing during their Make Camp move) generated some douchey rich elites from the nearest (very wealthy...established through our play) city who were crappy to their porters and to the PCs and their new charges (the young girls were taken on by the PCs...all of this was a challenge to Bond/Alignment/Playbook stuff from the Paladin...this triggered a social conflict during Make Camp and created subsequent framing downstream (show signs of an approaching threat) a few days later when their Undertake a Perilous Journey move came back online.

- Social moves at the archeological dig site of camp 2 (these were laborers and a lead scientist and a team of engineers from Maraqli's academy) created an enormously adversarial orientation of the lead scientist toward the Paladin PC which Maraqli had to intervene in (to date, this was the inverse of their typical social conflict M.O. they had to date where the impulsive Wizard would quickly escalate things...the absolute inverse happened here!).


None of this is even getting into the climb of the mountain, the Wyvern and her partner + brood (and the social conflict there), the animated bone dragon and the carnage it wrought, the repair of the camp and triaging of the wounded/dead...and then the Spout Lore move that triggered an absolute deluge of conflict and backstory!

This stuff all was 0 prep + the standard structured freeform play of PBtA games which creates snowballing thematic content and conflict where you have very little time to come up for air.

This resembles my 4e games very much.

It in no way resembles my Moldvay Basic games.

It in no way resembles my RC Hexcrawls.

It in no way resembled the massive AD&D and then 3.x Setting Tourism and BIG Metaplot FR + Sigil Sandbox I ran for 8 (rotating...I only GMed for 4 at a time) huge FR fans from 1997 to 2004.

It in no way resembled the 5e Hexcrawl I intermittently ran for a flakey GM from 2015-2017.

It resembles some parts of my Torchbearer games but in other ways they're extremely different.


I think if the Spout Lore conversation has proven anything (as a mere microcosm), it has proven how various means of structure (conversation broadly and the play loop specifically), system architecture (agenda/premise + principles + rules + build + reward cycles), and cognitive orientation of the participants create a profound differentiation between various forms of D&D!