D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Crimson Longinus]

I think the AP discussion revolves around the issue to which extent the reality outside the characters is customised to them (so actually pretty similar distinction than in the other line of discussion.) In AP it isn't. Or at least not significantly, individual GMs of course might make some slight alterations. Nevertheless, who my character is will affect the decisions and choices they make which in turn will affect what happens, even if the starting external reality had been the same regardless of who my character is. So I certainly wouldn't characterise that as who the characters are not mattering at all. Granted, had the content been customised for them (which I encourage and to some extent do in my own games) it would matter more. But again this limitation is just AP being an AP.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What if one person thinks of a given mechanic as falling into one category and someone else disagrees about that categorization?

Perhaps that person would argue notthat there are no distinctions, but rather that the distinction does not, in that case, apply.

That certainly seems to be what is happening, albeit logic based on which this is argued eludes me. I have several times stated my logic and certain posters simply ignore it and pretend I have said something else. So that's not really going to anywhere.

Do you really think so? What game doesn’t do this?

Perhaps 'none' might be technically incorrect, but D&D and other trad games give the player almost no authority on such department and it is basically always subject to GM veto. Now I explicitly mean authority during the game, in character creation there might be more setting contributions from players.

 

[Manbearcat]

This entire aside turns on the question of:

Who gets to decide memories and accumulated knowledge and why?

Any accumulated knowledge or memories are going to be setting and backstory content creation. Its impossible for them not to be. I did a course in the academy that revealed to me that x place exists. I had childhood friend y in this town. Anything like this is going to create backstory or setting content.

Why is offloading this question onto table-facing system architecture and not GM decides a problem for play?

When people remember a place or a person, they don't vet the memory/knowledge with the person next to them who gets a veto over their memories or their accumulated knowledge. How is it then less immersive for a person to declare a recollection and then it goes through a fortune procedure to filter the veracity of that proposition (and any adjacent propositions that may be attached to their knowledge/memory)?

Its not degenerate for skilled play. Torchbearer MORE than demonstrates that (with its Wises being significantly more potent than Trad D&D "ask the GM knowledge checks" or "your GM gets a veto on your Background Trait deployment"). Dungeon World trivially demonstrates that.

This conversation shouldn't even be a thing. It should begin and end with:

Some (typically players who have been inculcated in a GM decides x and y environment for the course of all/most of their gaming) players find it jarring that system architecture and GMing principles constraining consequences on a failure get to decide a proposition about memory or accumulated knowledge (or relationships). They aren't objectively jarring. There is no fundamental facet of human neurology that tethers a person to one cognitive disposition or another and therefore no fundamental facet of either approach (system or GM decides) that jars humans.

And its not degenerate for Skilled Play.

So how does this conversation persist with those two things resolved (cognitive orientation to them is subjective and competitive integrity isn't compromised)? This feels like a weird offshoot of the edition wars where something cultural is being fought over but who the hell knows what it is.

I know for a fact that this conversation isn't about culture for me. I think GM decides is perfectly fine (I use it when I run Moldvay Dungeon Crawls and RC Hexcrawls because the system doesn't have archetecture for those things and we play 100 % by the rules with no drift/hack...and we mostly play Pawn Stance with a little bit of characterization). People that don't want to handle memories or accumulated knowledge (or relationships) this way can keep on keeping on with their games that exclusively do that.

 

[FrogReaver]

That last sentence is fundamentally false.

What colour were Sherlock Holmes's undies when he encountered the Hound of the Baskervilles? Conan Doyle doesn't tell us. That doesn't mean they were colourless.

I don't believe that REH ever told us anything about the hair in Conan's armpits. But it seems likely that he had some there.

That to me sounds an awful lot like quantum underwear and quantum armpit hair. We just don't know for sure until we check - much like we don't know if schrodingers cat is dead or alive while it's in the box.

That's not a knock on your style as similar circumstances often happen in my D&D games. The DM can't preauthor every detail before he needs it and so some details end up quantum in nature - undetermined until there's a need for such a detail to be authored.

Gygax tells new AD&D GMs to first build a dungeon and perhaps a village, and then gradually build the campaign world around that. The fact that stuff is authored later doesn't entail that it didn't exist in the fiction.

I agree. When objects (like the forge) or npcs are authored they become established as having preexisted in the fiction.

To me, it seems that you are treating Spout Lore as if it were no different from the player having an ability to simply declare There are Dwarven forges in the mountain. Undoubtedly that would be a metagame ability that required the player to adopt Director Stance (unless it rested on very peculiar fictional positioning, like a Wish effect in D&D).

This is a good start. I've heard Spout Lore described alot of different ways. Some seemed closer to that kind of thing and some seemed more distant. Even if Spout Lore doesn't work that way though, I think it's important to consider games that do (or could). And as you note here, a game using such a mechanic requires a particular Stance (*usually) that makes it in your mind a metagame ability.

So I'll suggest this and hopefully it helps move past our impasse. Alot of the discussion about Spout Lore being a metagame style ability stems from this misunderstanding - because there were a number of posts that made it sound to us like this was what it was doing (or something we deemed very similar).

But Spout Lore is not like that. It is triggered by something that happens all the time in RPGing: What do I know about such-and-such? When such a question is asked, there has to be a resolution of the declared action: the attempt to recall. Just as in D&D, DW has the GM provide the answer. But the GM's answer is constrained by the results of the roll: and using a roll to constrain authorship of the consequence of a declared action is a bog-standard RPG resolution technique.

I agree with this. Most of the later descriptions of Spout Lore have made it fairly clear that it functions less like a metagame mechanic where the player gets specifically he wants (out of most anything) than it previously seemed (based solely off the descriptions being given as I have no direct experience with it).

Once upon a time there was a poster here who gave an example of a D&D game where a player went to listen to the door and he rolled a perception check, failed, and the DM had a band of monsters find the PC's. I really dislike the process there, because the cause of the complication didn't fictionally flow from their PC actions. It did mechanically flow, just not fictionally.

Spout Lore only becomes "radical" or "different" if one puts authorship of backstory into a special category of authority: ie that unlike (say) authorship of fisticuffs, it ought to come unilateral and unfettered from the GM. Your attempt to formulate an alternative premise that will support the same conclusion -

I don't believe that Spout Lore being different relies on 'putting authorship of backstory into a special category of authority'. I suppose the better thing to do than just argue about it is to ask, what would convince you otherwise?

ie that nothing exists in the gameworld that has not been established - I think is so obviously untenable, and not part of any RPGing practice I've ever heard of, that I'm simply discounting it at this stage.

I tend to agree with this part.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Why is offloading this question onto table-facing system architecture and not GM decides a problem for play?

It isn't. Or it might be for some, but that's subjective.

So how does this conversation persist with those two things resolved (cognitive orientation to them is subjective and competitive integrity isn't compromised)? This feels like a weird offshoot of the edition wars where something cultural is being fought over but who the hell knows what it is.

Because some people simply refuse to accept that the distinction even exists. I would we perfectly happy if we could just agree that the distinction exists, and what mode you happen to prefer is subjective.

 

[FrogReaver]

Thought experiment time:

Suppose there was a mechanic such that: you try to recall useful information toward a particular goal. On a success the DM provides something useful for that end (very Spout Lore like so far). On a failure the DM gets to author a PC memory that complicates or changes your relationship with someone important to your PC.

What would be your thoughts on such a mechanic?

 

[FrogReaver]

It isn't. Or it might be for some, but that's subjective.


Because some people simply refuse to accept that the distinction even exists. I would we perfectly happy if we could just agree that the distinction exists, and what mode you happen to prefer is subjective.

Theorem - Subjective preferences are caused by objective differences.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Your attempt to formulate an alternative premise that will support the same conclusion - ie that nothing exists in the gameworld that has not been established - I think is so obviously untenable, and not part of any RPGing practice I've ever heard of, that I'm simply discounting it at this stage.

And your desire to make everything about who has authority, rather than what kind of authority it is, seems so clearly to be clinging to it at all cost that at this point I no longer believe you're actually interested in a conversation.

So we're done.

 

[Manbearcat]

Thought experiment time:

Suppose there was a mechanic such that: you try to recall useful information toward a particular goal. On a success the DM provides something useful for that end (very Spout Lore like so far). On a failure the DM gets to author a PC memory that complicates or changes your relationship with someone important to your PC.

What would be your thoughts on such a mechanic?

You're describing the way relationship mechanics occur in a lot of games (like Circles in the Burning Wheel constellation of games or how Relationship dice deployed in Dogs can turn out on a conflict where you lose). Its just like Spout Lore except instead of making a proposition about a place or a thing, you're making a proposition about a person and going to the dice to procedurally generate the content.

Here is a great example of this in Dungeon World:

A Lover In Every Port (CHA)

When you enter a town that you’ve been to before (your call), roll +CHA. On a 10+, there’s an old flame of yours who is willing to assist you somehow. On a 7-9, they’re willing to help you, for a price. On a miss, your romantic misadventures make life more complicated for the party.

The GM, constrained by system (which includes the agenda, the principles, the structure, their responsibility) and any prior established content, gets to decide (a) the price on a 7-9 result or (b) what those romantic misadventures entail (including a complicating relationship outcome with your ex-lover...or their actual nature like a secret identity/double agent or whatever).

This is standard indie gaming tech. 4e Streetwise deployed in a Skill Challenge bears the same hallmarks on a failure (where the GM is obliged to Fail Forward and complicate the situation with the relationship you're calling upon).

 

[Thomas Shey]

People have been talking about "quantum forges" breaking in-character roleplay immersion, but it doesn't necessarily consider how "quantum knowledge" can also break in-character roleplay immersion. Some find the latter acceptable, but not the former. Some find the former acceptable, but not the latter.

Absolutely true.

Neither are statements like this that insist that any misunderstandings in conversation over this matter must be intentional on the part of @pemerton. This seems to make the discussion far more personal than need be.

When he insists that I'm not actually arguing what I'm arguing, I have trouble having much sympathy for him.