D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[pemerton]

So how, then, in that different set of procedures can a GM have the opposition proactively do anything to stop/hinder/gain an advantage over the party before the party interacts with them? Or is the opposition supposed to be passive (or. even, non-existent) until the PCs meet it?

I feel that this question has been answered, in reply to your posts, innumerable times over the years.

I'm reposting my quote of the AW rulebook example of play:

The AW example of play, which I mentioned by way of contrast, goes for several pages in the middle of the rulebook under the heading "Moves Snowball". It also has a lot of language that board rules do not permit. Here are some choice board-compliant extracts:

Spoiler

Here it is:

Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs).

“I read the situation,” her player says.

“You do? It’s charged?” I say.

“It is now.”

“Ahh,” I say. I understand perfectly: the three NPCs don’t realize it, but Marie’s arrival charges the situation. If it were a movie, the sound track would be picking up, getting sinister.

She rolls+sharp and hits with a 7–9, so she gets to ask me one question from that move’s list. “Which of my enemies is the biggest threat?” she says.

“Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard [individual]. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.” (See me
misdirect! I just chose one capriciously, then pointed to fictional details as though they’d made the decision. We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.)

. . . [skip details of partly frying Isle's brain] . . .

Plover thinks she’s just leaning her head on his shoulder, but she’s bleeding out her ears and eventually he’ll notice his shirt sticking to his shoulder from her blood. Do you stick around?” I’m telling possible consequences and asking. . . .

“I go home, I guess.”

“So you’re home an hour later?” See me setting up my future move! I’m thinking offscreen: how long is it going to take Plover to get a crew together? . . .

“Having tea?” Ask questions like crazy!

“No tea. Pacing. I have my gun and my pain grenade and the door’s triple-locked. I wish Roark were here.” . . .

“So, Marie: at home, pacing, armed, locked in, yeah? They arrive suddenly at your door with a solid kick, your whole door rattles. You hear Whackoff’s voice: ‘she’s expecting us I guess.’” I’m announcing future badness.

“I go to the peep hole,” she says. “There are three of them?”

“Yep,” I say. “Whackoff on your left, Plover and Church Head are doing something on your right, Plover’s back’s to you — and you hear a cough-cough-rrrrar sound and Plover’s at the door with a chainsaw. What do you do?” I’m putting her in a spot.

“I read the situation. What’s my best escape route?” She rolls+sharp and . . . misses. “Oh no,” she says.

I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. . . .

“You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space. The door’s creaking and snapping at the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this—” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand, like whacking a croquet ball.

“I dive for—”

Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection.

“Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?”

“1-armor.”

“Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3-harm.”​

The following bit of GM-oriented rules text explains the meaning of misdirection as it is used in this example:

Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead.​

Here's an example from actual play of Prince Valiant, in which a band of Huns try to ambush the PCs and their warband: Prince Valiant actual play - our most recent sessions

The short answer is this: the GM frames an encounter in which the NPCs have some sort of advantage. What the criteria are for this being permissible might vary from game to game.

Take my example of the spyholes above, where the opposition were able to keep tabs on us and react to what we were doing almost before we did it. How in your set of procedures can the opposition a) become aware of our presence without us realizing it and then b) use an unknown-to-the-PCs (and players) feature of the setting in their attempt to thwart us?

Because the GM decides that this happens. Perhaps as a consequence of a failed check; perhaps following some other principle for framing encounters.

 

[pemerton]

The dichotomy is to say the fiction is not in the numbers, words, maps, but elsewhere. In the cloud. As cues includes mechanics I think it is ludic. Without, we'd have improv, right?

Well, on this stuff I follow Baker pretty closely.

And here is Baker on the role of mechanics:

Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

The rules of a game may reference cues - eg roll a die - on a 4+ your PC succeeds in what they were attempting. They may not do so - eg one of the rules in Apocalypse World is that if everyone is looking at the GM to see what happens next, the GM should make a soft move. They may do so, but not in ways that involve any die-rolling process - eg a default rule of D&D play, especially low-level play, is that if a map indicates a wall, and a token on the map represents a PC being on one side of that wall, then the player can't just move their token to the other side of the wall.

Which rules we call mechanics, and which we don't, seems to me a fairly arbitrary matter. But the rules/mechanics are not cues. Cues are physical things in the world that we can touch - maps, tokens, dice etc. Rules/mechanics are normative processes - like if the cue is such and such, then such-and-such-else becomes part of the shared fiction.

Hence why, as I said, there are four elements in Baker's model: fiction, cues, participants, and rules/mechanics. The lattermost are put into effect by the participants, who collectively imagine the fiction in part by making reference to the cues as the rules/mechanics dictate.

The situation worsens and the group encounter the awful cliffs, which the DM marks on their shared map. The group wonders if they can’t scale the cliffs due to their dramatic motives (you started with "narrative" and I took @AbdulAlhazred's suggestion and switched to "dramatic" which it looks like you are okay with.) DM said roll.

Later, turning back on their path they come back to the cliffs which have been established as difficult to climb and dangerously high. This seems like a typical D&D situation. In the fiction there are cliffs. In the game cues there are cliffs. That is a dichotomy I question.

I'm not sure what you're questioning. In the fiction the participants collectively imagined a cliff. They created a cue - a map with cliffs marked on it - perhaps following a rule that obliges them to do so, or perhaps following a permissive rule. Later on, the cue serves as a reminder and constraint on the shared imagining - Hey everyone, remember those cliffs? <points to map> We're going to have to descend them to get away! But the cue is not the fiction: when I play Mystic Wood (an old Avalon Hill tile-based war/boardgame) or Middle Earth: the Wizards (a now-defunct mid-90s CCG) there is a map, indistinguishable in its physical and pictorial character from a RPG map. But in those games there is no fiction except for epiphenomenal flavour text - "mere colour".

Whereas in a RPG, the cues figure in rules/procedures/mechanics for establishing what it is that everyone is obliged to collectively imagine.

When I model out D&D I see that DM narrates results because in DM, fiction - hidden and revealed - is unified with game cues (which I think contain or have valency to fiction so that a change to them can be a change to fiction.) Only DM is in position to narrate the RPG state

Here you seem to be stating one particular rule that might relate cues to fiction: the GM prepares certain cues (eg maps) in advance of play, and refers to those cues as part of the process of action resolution.

When you say changing the cues changes the fiction I think you are eliding the participants. You are treating the fiction as if it exists independently of the imaginations of those who imagine it. But this is precisely what Baker's model rejects: changing the cues triggers/activates/enlivens certain rules, which state that the fiction is to be changed. Whether the fiction actually changes depends on whether or not the participants collectively follow the rules - and as the Baker-Boss Clare/Lumpley principle states, that is a question of empirical fact about the behaviour and consensus of the participants. It does not follow just from the rules themselves.

We can see this in everything from GM fudging, to the table agreeing to allow a redo if something was forgotten (eg When we started the combat, everyone forgot that my hp weren't 10 at all, but were 100, due to that well of healing we found earlier), to the GM telling the table When you get back to the place of awful cliffs, you now find it is a flat plateau as far as your eyes can see! That may or may not be a desirable move for the GM to make, and it may or may not be permissible in accordance with certain rules - but if everyone at the table accepts it then the cue (ie the map) will be change to reflect it, not vice versa!

it's not my experience that my D&D groups act for reasons that are not dramatic. They never as @Ovinomancer put it climb the cliffs just for the sake of getting to the top. So I wonder what the special nature of the dramatic is, under SYOR?

.<snip>

So I think something else is going on in SYOR. You appeared to hedge on DW implying a DM might SNOE (say no or expand) on matters other than a PCs fiction (which I think fronts could at times oblige.) I continue to feel that the case isn't simply black and white - you're doing SYOR or you are not - but mixed. If not why not?

Dungeon World is not a "say 'yes' or roll the dice" system. The key principle for action resolution in DW is if you do it, you do it. And any action declaration that does not trigger a player-side move simply requires the GM to make a soft move in response (or a hard move, if the action declaration hands the GM a golden opportunity on a silver platter).

In any event, I think @AbdulAlhazred and I have already explained what dramatic/narrative stakes are, in the context of a game like Burning Wheel or Prince Valiant or 4e D&D. They are stuff that responds to the dramatic needs of the PCs, as defined implicitly or explicitly within the game system in question.

In BW, an action has (is that the right verb? maybe gives rise to) dramatic stakes if its success or failure would be relevant to a PC's Beliefs, or - less clearly and more contextually - if it would speak to a PC's Instinct or trait.

In 4e D&D, an action gives rise to dramatic stakes if its success or failure bears directly upon a PC's Quest.

In Prince Valiant, there are no formal mechanisms for establishing PC dramatic needs. But they are established implicitly and informally. Here are some examples from my own play, which show "say 'yes' or roll the dice" at work. I've edited them to highlight the application of the principle in the context of overland travel:

The first of these saw the PCs (and entourage) arriving at Marseille, where they arranged to take ship using the letters of passage that had been gifted them by the King of France as a wedding present. There were three phases to this session:

(1) The PCs gathered some intelligence in Marseilles - about sailing conditions, pirates etc. Unfortunately the key check here (by the travelling minstrel PC) was a bust, and so the PCs inadvertently recruited a spy for Arab pirates sailing from North Africa and Mediterranean islets. In our approach to play this is not secret GM knowledge - the players know but their PCs proceed in ignorance.

(2) Sailing towards Sicily on two galleys, the PCs were indeed attacked by pirates! This was tricky to resolve for a couple of reasons. First, the system has mass combat rules which are highly workable, but no naval rules and so I had to adapt the mass combat rules for the naval situation which was a bit tricky. And second, the PCs were neither captaining nor crewing their vessels, and so their influence over the vessels had to be framed and resolved as social checks (to get the captai to hold his course) which required some additional mechanical ad hocery to make it all fit together. In the end I wasn't entirely satisfied but I think the players found it OK, and they did capture a pirate ship and tow it behind them into the Sicilian harbour.

(3) Having arrived in Sicily as pirate-quelling heroes, the PCs and their band got a good reception. This included an invitation to dinner by a local dignitary, Sir Ainsel - which was in fact the entry into an episode from The Episode Book, the Feast of Sir Ainsel.

<snip>

The second of these two sessions - which we played on Sunday - began with the decision to liquidate all assets (incuding the captured pirate ship) on the grounds that the PCs didn't have the resources to maintain a chapter house of their order in Sicily.

They then set sail again.

Exercising GM fiat, I declared that as they were crossing between Italy and the Balkan Peninsula the storms were incredibly fierce, and the captain of their ships decided to cut his losses, and dock and sell his cargo in Dalmatia. The PCs therefore set of on the overland trek to Constantinople.

This was a fairly obvious contrivance to seed some scenarios. The players didn't object.

The core rulebook has three scenarios that involve fighting Huns, and I used the first of them

<snip account of PCs' victory over the Huns>

The PCs and their warband continued their crossing south-east - and (as I narrated it) found themselves on the edge of a heavy forest somewhere in the vicinity of Dacia (=, in our approximaring geography, somewhere in the general area of modern-day Transylvania - I haven't checked yet to see how butchering of the map this is).

I asked the PCs who would be with the four of them if they were scouting ahead to verify whether the band could pass safely through the forest, and they nominated their two NPC hunters - Algol the Bloodthirsty who is in service to Sir Morgath, and Rhan, the woman who had joined them at the end of the last session I posted about.

I was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book, and described the "deep and clawing shadows [that[ stretch across the path, and the wind [that] rattles through the trees." The PCs soon found themselves confronted by a knight all in black and wearing a greatsword, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and six men wielding swords and shields, their clothes equally tattered.

<snip>

I would expect that in our next session the PCs will arrive at Constantinople.

The PCs are on their way to the Holy Land via Constantinople, intending to fight a crusade. They are leading their warband, the Order of St Sigobert. In the previous session the PCs had converted a number of Huns and brought them into their Order, and had lifted a curse in a Dacian forest.

<snip>

The session started with a series of checks to determine how had it was for them to make their way across present-day Romania to arrive at the Black Sea coast. Sir Gerran led them, claiming a bonus die for his trained falcon (who know doubt can not only take down small birds but can also help guide its owner to Constantinople!). As a result of that check and then invididual checks for travel, they arrived at the coast in various degrees of exhaustion and dishevellment: Sir Gerran was in good health, Sir Morgath was tired (-1D to both Brawn and Presence) and Sir Justin, who had been badly wounded in the forest, was utterly spent (reduced to 1D in each of Brawn and Presence).

At the border of the Empire they made a good impression on the guards, who welcomed them to Rome (Sir Gerran made a successful Oratory check - he has the best Oratory of the group, and it's partly for that reason that he is Marshall of their Order). They were therefore able to board boats to take them to Constantinople. I described the vessels as galleys with "relatively low sides" - which the players correctly took to be an ominous sign - and then called for Brawn checks when some sort of creature emerged from beneath the PCs' vessel and attempted to overturn it. Sir Morgath and Sir Justin ended up in the water.

The attacking creature was a "dragon" (a giant crocodile, found in the episode "A Dragon" in the core rulebook).

<snip account of defeat of the dragon and recovery of its body>

When the PCs and their retinue arrived in Constantinople they were welcomed as dragon-slayers. Luxurious pavilions had been established outside the walls of the city, and taxidermists were waiting to prepare the body of the dragon. The players abandoned their plan to turn the hide into armour and instead gifted the body to the Emperor: a troop of their soldiers carried the body up to the gate of the city, where they handed it over to Varangians to carry it to the Emperor. The PCs also entered the city unarmed and unarmoured (wearing their fine clothes, and with Sir Justin being borne on a litter as he was still on Brawn of 2 ie 2 down from his normal 4) and did homage to the Emperor in one of his palaces. He presented them with gifts, which I asked the players to narrate: Sir Morgath and his wife Elizabeth were gifted fine robes, which provided the standard +1 prestige bonus in the East but would provide a +2 bonus when worn in the West; Sir Gerran was gifted a jewelled and damascened sword of Syrian make (+1 prestige when worn); and Sir Justin was gifted a mace which had once been wielded by the Gothic holy man St Cuthbert, and so seemed a fitting gift for a Western knight who had come to the East to fight a holy war (the mace of St Cuthbert grants +1D when fighting heathens).

The PCs then prayed in Hagia Sophia. I can't now remember whether or not there was a check associated with this, but Sir Justin had a vision of St Sophia and St Sigobert side-by-side, with the host of martyrs behind them, who assured him that his crusade would not fail so long as the reliquary of the Martyrs of St Sigobert was not despoiled. As a result he healed, going from -2 to -1 Brawn. I also gave his player a Storyteller Certificate.

In due course, the Emperor arranged for the PCs and their warband to be ferried across the straits to Anatolia. Their warband had been augmented by 17 more mounted men-at-arms who joined them during their stay at Constantinople. (This was determined by having Sir Gerran's player roll his Presence + Oratory dice and add them up.)

<snip>

The PCs decided to head along the coast (hence initially more-or-less south-west) with the goal of eventually reaching the coast north of Cyprus. But they ended up heading inland when they heard news of an incursion by Huns. They met Count Aethelred (of the scenario War Debts in the Episode Book) who I described as a Gothic count of Byazntine Anatolia. He was leading his obviuosly under-equipped and under-prepared force out to confront the invaders. He asked the PCs if they would help, and they agreed to. They travelled a little further and them made camp in a village with they anticipated the Huns would attack the next day, with a successful check from Sir Justin's player (I think it was) meaning that the camp followers under his direction were able to hastily erect some pallisades. The plan was to have the PCs' footmen take the defence behind the pallisades, and then, once the Huns had swept in, to have the PCs' cavalry hit them from behind.

But things went a bit awry when the count (descriptors proud but not haughty, honest, merciful, trusting), who joined them in their tent in the evening, insisted on leading the charge against the Huns on the morrow. The PCs didn't want this. Knowing that they were outnumbered more than 2:1 by the Huns, the PCs (and their players) wanted to be in command themselves, so as to bring their superior command skills to bear (both Marshall and Master of the Order have quite high Battle skill ratings). So an argument ensued between the count and SIr Justin - Presence + Courtesie on both side, though with Sir Justin taking a penalty because he was not being fully courteous given that (as the count pointed out) it was the count's land and the count's cause that was at issue. Sir Justin lost the argument and so agreed to let the count lead the charge on the morrow. Sir Gerran was very unhappy with this outcome, suggeting that in that case the Order was not participating in the fight.

<snip>

The PCs therefore decided to circumvent the whole arrangement with the count by taking their forces out on a night raid against the Huns, thereby obviating the need for a charge on the morrow (I called for some Presence checks as the PCs rode out - the upshot was that one of the count's knights joined them on their raid). This ended up working spectactularly well.

At first their scout (Algol the bloodthirsty, a hunter in service to Sir Morgath) struggled to find the Huns, so it was close to dawn when eventually they came upon the Huns revelling in a village they had assailed. The PCs had a -1D penalty for having wandered through the hilss all night. I described the situation - the PCs had crested a hill with the red glow of dawn just visible on their right, and below them to the north a village and a stream - and the players came up with their plan of assault (splitting their forces into 3 units - foot, heavy cavary and light cavalry - to be commanded by the 3 PCs). I've attached the map that I sketched.

The PCs' plan worked - they rolled well on their various Battle checks, routed the Huns (who had a -1 moral penalty) and took their leader (Totilla the Hun - I was using the third of the Hun episodes) captive

<snip>

The next time we play this game I think they will try and reach Cyprus.

We have a relevant cue - a page of photocopied maps from The New Penguin Atlas of Mediaeval History - but its only function is to provide colour for narration. You can see from the above that the checks that are called for, in order to determine the success of the PCs' journey, are the ones to do with fighting the pirates, to see how exhausted they are after crossing the Balkan peninsula, to see how they are received on the Byzantine frontier, and to see how long it takes their scout to find the Huns at night. These are all things that bear upon the stakes of their journey - travelling to Byzantium and the Holy Land to undertake a crusade.

But there are no checks to see if they get lost, or to determine whether or not they make it at all. There are no random encounters.

You say it's not my experience that my D&D groups act for reasons that are not dramatic but say 'yes' or roll the dice is not a principle that takes, as input, the reasons for an action declaration. It takes, as input, the relevance of the possible consequences of the declared action to some already-given goal or purpose or dramatic need. If failure would produce anti-climax, or push play onto a focus that is irrelevant to the dramatic needs of the PCs - as would be the case, for instance, were the PCs in my Prince Valiant game to fail to make their way to Constantinople - then no check is called for. The GM just says 'yes'.

 

[Hriston]

I'm a bit confused by this, because I cannot tell if this is an argument for how things should be inside 5e only, and not as a general case, or if it's being made as a general case. Either way I have some quibbles.

If inside 5e only, then the only argument that needs to be made is that 5e has stated where certain authorities and constraints exist for play. This includes that what a character thinks and tries to do is up to the player alone, outside of any specific mechanic that removes this authority (and there are a few, not all magical). This is simply a matter of agency and authority in the game -- absent this carve out, and with the vast authority and agency granted the GM, there's not much of a role for a player that could qualify as a game. You're just there to enjoy the GM's fiat otherwise. So, yeah, your playing piece has to be under your control (except, of course, when it isn't) or what's the point? That this control is extended to thoughts and feels and what you try to do is just the nature of this game, not anything more. Arguments that try to create some distinction between external and internal pressures (like someone trying to convince, seduce, or scare you isn't as external as a wall) are odd rationalizations of something that need no rationalization unless there's an attempt to establish this as some kind of general case argument for how "roleplaying" works. Roleplaying means a lot of things, and 5e's construct for it is definitely sufficient, but it's not necessary.

If this is that general case argument, then we're at a weird place where games that work extremely well with factors that can constrain what your character thinks, feels, or tries to do are suddenly being put in a "not roleplaying" position. That's just silly. Compels in FATE may not be to a person's liking, but dealing with them are definitely roleplaying. Facing down stakes in a Burning Wheel game that, if you lose, you have to acknowledge something you might not want your character to do, like being convinced to join a mutiny or rebellion or to forsake a lover or cause, suddenly becomes "not roleplaying." I don't countenance this argument at all -- if it's being made it's profoundly silly. There are plenty of good ways to constrain how a player has to interact with their character that add to the experience, and let the player really explore a mindset that isn't theirs, and that do a better job of mimicking how cognition works in the real than the strangely stoic and implacable D&D characters who's personalities, wants, desires, and urges are always 100% in control.

5e's approach is, to me, perfectly fine and cromulent for the game that 5e tries to be. 5e doesn't go for finding out who your character actually is when put under pressure in that way, it's more interested in if your feats of derring-do measure up than if your strength of character measures up. This is great, I certainly enjoy it for what it does and think that this kind of protection for player agency is good (and that 5e in general does an occasionally poor job of protecting it whilst simultaneously praising it). But the idea that this is some gold standard or expectation of what roleplaying in general should be? Hah. No.

I'm speaking with reference to 5E only, and my post was meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, not "an argument for how things should be". The part of your post that I've bolded sums up my thinking in posting this thread pretty well, though.

And I agree with you that authorities in 5E are quite clear and that's all that really needs to be said about what the rules say on the subject. This argument has been recently explored in a few other threads however, and I didn't see a need to rehash it here. I was responding to a poster who raised the possibility that a group might comprehend the rules of 5E in such a way as to remove the player's authority over their PC's decision-making faculties under certain circumstances defined by that group, which, I agree with that poster, would be within the rules of the game for that group.

The question I raised in the last paragraph of my post regarding what such a group stands to gain by implementing rules that posit such a conflict between the player and the PC is one about which I am genuinely curious. From what you've posted here, I might guess that you feel it would contribute to "finding out who your character actually is when put under pressure in that way" and whether "your strength of character measures up." Is that about right?

 

[clearstream]

Well, on this stuff I follow Baker pretty closely.

And here is Baker on the role of mechanics:

Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

The rules of a game may reference cues - eg roll a die - on a 4+ your PC succeeds in what they were attempting. They may not do so - eg one of the rules in Apocalypse World is that if everyone is looking at the GM to see what happens next, the GM should make a soft move. They may do so, but not in ways that involve any die-rolling process - eg a default rule of D&D play, especially low-level play, is that if a map indicates a wall, and a token on the map represents a PC being on one side of that wall, then the player can't just move their token to the other side of the wall.

Which rules we call mechanics, and which we don't, seems to me a fairly arbitrary matter. But the rules/mechanics are not cues. Cues are physical things in the world that we can touch - maps, tokens, dice etc. Rules/mechanics are normative processes - like if the cue is such and such, then such-and-such-else becomes part of the shared fiction.

Hence why, as I said, there are four elements in Baker's model: fiction, cues, participants, and rules/mechanics. The lattermost are put into effect by the participants, who collectively imagine the fiction in part by making reference to the cues as the rules/mechanics dictate.

You have given me much to think about and respond to if it looks fruitful, but that must wait. I'd like to attend to this here.

Baker has one use for RPG rules and is clear about it. And it is a mighty fruitful use! It is not the only use. He acknowledges that another use is to model the game-world... and that is still not their limit.

Other uses include explaining a proven heuristic (if you do it this way it will work well in most cases) which is something we saw emerge in iterations of methods leading to PbtA. Creating what I call an "Arena of Proof" in which competing strategies make room for rich instantiation is another. Equipping participants to create problems for one another, with the tools to address those problems, is another. There are many uses for RPG rules.

There is a lot yet to uncover here. For example, game cues often have set parameters, and a symbolic form. Symbol + parameters crystallises a narrative idea. Senet shows that cues can lose their rules, but MtG shows that cues can contain their rules, given an operating system.

RPG crucially let's players join cues with parameters to lazy narratives. They pick up their character and it is no longer just a bunch of numbers, and it is more than just an aide memoire. The resultant pawn or avatar - player-character - is incompletely defined but perfectly playable.

That's not to say we can't choose Baker's use and derive terrific worth from it, I just acquired Brindlewood Bay and it looks ideal for running with my family. Still, there is a side of me that likes something about D&D and isn't fully satisfied by D&D. Nor do "narrative" RPGs sate it. I could say to myself, "Shut up side, enjoy what you have!" But I'm greedy, I want to know if there's a way to be satisfied.

So here I am, saying that cues can be steeped with fiction, and instantiate narrative. If they're not doing that, why have them? If one sincerely found the Ars Magica cues and rules valueless, how did it ever come to pass that someone found them valuable. Is it two worlds, and never the twain, as some argue?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm speaking with reference to 5E only, and my post was meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, not "an argument for how things should be". The part of your post that I've bolded sums up my thinking in posting this thread pretty well, though.

And I agree with you that authorities in 5E are quite clear and that's all that really needs to be said about what the rules say on the subject. This argument has been recently explored in a few other threads however, and I didn't see a need to rehash it here. I was responding to a poster who raised the possibility that a group might comprehend the rules of 5E in such a way as to remove the player's authority over their PC's decision-making faculties under certain circumstances defined by that group, which, I agree with that poster, would be within the rules of the game for that group.

The question I raised in the last paragraph of my post regarding what such a group stands to gain by implementing rules that posit such a conflict between the player and the PC is one about which I am genuinely curious. From what you've posted here, I might guess that you feel it would contribute to "finding out who your character actually is when put under pressure in that way" and whether "your strength of character measures up." Is that about right?

I don't think doing this in 5e is coherent, but it's perhaps something you could do. I say this because doing so would be ad hoc, and nothing else in the ruleset supports it. If you're looking for a game that does this, you'd be better served actually looking at a different game that already has this as part of it's agenda. Of course, there is a pervasive idea that 5e is everything possible, and it's a better call to try to force 5e into different molds than to commit the sacrilege of even looking at a different game.

 

[clearstream]

The question I raised in the last paragraph of my post regarding what such a group stands to gain by implementing rules that posit such a conflict between the player and the PC is one about which I am genuinely curious. From what you've posted here, I might guess that you feel it would contribute to "finding out who your character actually is when put under pressure in that way" and whether "your strength of character measures up." Is that about right?

D&D has historically been so combat-focused, they might desire similar forced moves and hard outcomes in the social dimension.

The RAW supports it, albeit they will have to diverge from the RAI that as we know does not.

 

[clearstream]

I'm not sure what you're questioning. In the fiction the participants collectively imagined a cliff. They created a cue - a map with cliffs marked on it - perhaps following a rule that obliges them to do so, or perhaps following a permissive rule. Later on, the cue serves as a reminder and constraint on the shared imagining - Hey everyone, remember those cliffs? <points to map> We're going to have to descend them to get away! But the cue is not the fiction: when I play Mystic Wood (an old Avalon Hill tile-based war/boardgame) or Middle Earth: the Wizards (a now-defunct mid-90s CCG) there is a map, indistinguishable in its physical and pictorial character from a RPG map. But in those games there is no fiction except for epiphenomenal flavour text - "mere colour".

This is something I find janky, but you'll have to bear with me for a moment.

When Chess is played, in potential is every possible game. Suppose I dutifully record the moves and the game concludes. I now have a distinct linear narrative. Or to put it another way, on what grounds do we say it is not a story? Perhaps not a very good story, but that is a qualitatively different matter. The story will include the cues, right? The board was like this. The pieces started thus. This pawn moved here. A few seconds later, that one moved there.

Take a richer game, record it, and we have another - better - story. In a sense, games are mechanisms for generating stories. In the phase space of a game is every possible story that can be told with those symbols and dynamics.

Saying then that fiction is one thing and game cues another is from this perspective really odd. If the cues are not symbolising the fiction, what are they doing!? When I erase the cliff, it means it's gone. Or it means nothing. But this isn't right. In games the game state matters. The rules address the state. Some rules only come into play in given states. Any supposed cue/rule separation is also doubtful.

Whereas in a RPG, the cues figure in rules/procedures/mechanics for establishing what it is that everyone is obliged to collectively imagine.

I think so, yes. I think the cues are important in themselves as symbols, and fiction adheres to them. Erasing the secret door and drawing an unbroken wall has meaning. Games as artifacts are tools. If the cue isn't the fiction then a mistake has been made: we have the wrong cue.

Chess can be played without board and pieces, but then all that is done is the cues are neurophysiological. MtG can't be because cue state (hidden, random, deck sequence) matters and that can't be replicated in players' minds.

I think we can say that map doesn't matter in some games, but we can find cues that do matter. Character-state, often.

When you say changing the cues changes the fiction I think you are eliding the participants. You are treating the fiction as if it exists independently of the imaginations of those who imagine it. But this is precisely what Baker's model rejects: changing the cues triggers/activates/enlivens certain rules, which state that the fiction is to be changed. Whether the fiction actually changes depends on whether or not the participants collectively follow the rules - and as the Baker-Boss Clare/Lumpley principle states, that is a question of empirical fact about the behaviour and consensus of the participants. It does not follow just from the rules themselves.

Agreed it doesn't follow just from the rules. It is the rules as participants grasp and uphold them. That's also true of boardgames, and it's acknowledged that human players will often inaccurately or opinionatedly apply the rules.

We can see this in everything from GM fudging, to the table agreeing to allow a redo if something was forgotten (eg When we started the combat, everyone forgot that my hp weren't 10 at all, but were 100, due to that well of healing we found earlier), to the GM telling the table When you get back to the place of awful cliffs, you now find it is a flat plateau as far as your eyes can see! That may or may not be a desirable move for the GM to make, and it may or may not be permissible in accordance with certain rules - but if everyone at the table accepts it then the cue (ie the map) will be change to reflect it, not vice versa!

It goes both ways. Cues are tools of the ritual. Wield the tool one way and participants applying the rules know something happens, another way, something else. The dice come up 7, that drives change.

 

[clearstream]

@pemerton For the sake of argument let's say that fiction is invested in cues. And nuance that by saying that the parameters of a cue are informationally incomplete and - while patterned - ambiguous. So fiction adheres to cues, and is suggested but not fully described in them.

We leverage the incompleteness and ambiguity to lift the narrative beyond what game as artifact, with rules grasped and upheld, can ordinarily deliver.

[NOTE This posted while incomplete, ironically. I had to edit it.]

 

[Hriston]

What stands out to me here is that it is as you have framed them. They're justified in your framing.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Is there some other way to frame these cases in which they are not justified?

Opposed is a matter of perspective. If a character is beguiled by another creature, has the same form as shoved.

Maybe at a primitive level it's the lusory revulsion for Black reaching over the board and moving White's pieces?

It strikes me that shared on-the-fly establishing of fiction - no hidden state - could be coloured similar. Invoking anxieties and putting at risk validation, until another perspective is applied.

Beguiled would suggest a magical enchantment of some sort which I agree would have the form of shoved because in both cases the effect on the character is involuntary. Is that what you intended?

If not, and if it's imagined that the character is convinced to cooperate voluntarily with the wishes of this other creature, then I would say this has the form of voluntary movement as opposed to the forced movement of being shoved.

 

[pemerton]

The question I raised in the last paragraph of my post regarding what such a group stands to gain by implementing rules that posit such a conflict between the player and the PC is one about which I am genuinely curious. From what you've posted here, I might guess that you feel it would contribute to "finding out who your character actually is when put under pressure in that way" and whether "your strength of character measures up." Is that about right?

That paragraph was:

Now suppose that a group's understanding of the rules included limiting a player's roleplaying when it comes into conflict with what the group has decided is the will, desire, or inclination of the player's character. In this case the player and the PC are not in alignment but are opposed to one another. I'd be curious to know what such a group gains by creating such a conflict and by settling it in favor of what it surmises as the PC's decision over that of the player.

Isn't this what happens when a Charm, Fear, Dominate or similar effect occurs?

In those cases, at least, the reason seems to be (i) to establish a fiction that fits with some conception of witches and wizards who influence minds and emotions, and dragons that cause terror, and the like, and (ii) to limit the player's "tactical" space - in some cases at least to severely limit it! (Eg classic D&D Charm or modern D&D Dominate.)

There are ways to do (i) without (ii) - eg Burning Wheel has some of them - but I don't think I've seen them implemented in any version of D&D.

EDIT: I've read your post just upthread of this one. I think we see some beguilement etc differently.