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

[Hriston]

In 5e, the only agency the player has is in the realm of determining what a character thinks, feels, and tries to do. Your proposal would allow other players (primarily the GM) to abrogate this when they wanted to. To me, this is a loss of agency for the 5e player because they gain no benefit from this (gaining Inspiration is already baseline). So, it's a trade to offload character choice for no other increase in agency.

In games that feature this kind of thing, agency is usually strongly compensated by having the game be about what the players choose for it to be about. This isn't present at all in 5e. But this, I mean of course the GM could choose to use their authority to do so, but there's no constraint on the GM to do so. This wraps back into just being at the GM's whim. You could have a strong social contract that could constrain this, but that's outside of the game and you can do whatever you want here anyway regardless of the game.

The bolded doesn't really capture what I was proposing, which I think I didn't make clear enough. What I was suggesting was the sort of thing you describe in your second paragraph. I.e. the game is about what the players indicated they were interested in for their characters, particularly in choosing/writing their TIBFs. The DM makes the game about challenging those things by presenting situations that do so, and it's entirely up to the players whether they take inspiration and deal with the repercussions of living up to their TIBFs, or if they find out that their characters are not who they thought they were. I realize this is outside the scope of mainstream 5E, but I'm surprised it isn't something that's more widely acknowledged as a possible use for the TIBF/inspiration mechanic.

 

[Krachek]

Indeed there is no rules or mechanics to handle how a DM use its preparation ( if there is one!) once the session is started.

A DM can stick to what he got in its notes. But players can go outside, the DM can even make error applying his own notes, so after a while some randomness will enter in the carefully planed session! But there can be the need to omit a room, a trap, a monster, because it’s going late and players want some action before the end of the session. Can a DM do that? Is there a morale rules to force DM to stick to its notes?

There are numerous things that can influence a DM. His own experience and preparation, the overall pacing of the game session, the players mood, questions, expectation.
There is no mechanics to handle this in DnD. If you need it badly better look for another game.

No rules, few advice, I find one here from the 1ed DM guide p110 that can help.
You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player characterwith your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!"

 

[Ovinomancer]

The bolded doesn't really capture what I was proposing, which I think I didn't make clear enough. What I was suggesting was the sort of thing you describe in your second paragraph. I.e. the game is about what the players indicated they were interested in for their characters, particularly in choosing/writing their TIBFs. The DM makes the game about challenging those things by presenting situations that do so, and it's entirely up to the players whether they take inspiration and deal with the repercussions of living up to their TIBFs, or if they find out that their characters are not who they thought they were. I realize this is outside the scope of mainstream 5E, but I'm surprised it isn't something that's more widely acknowledged as a possible use for the TIBF/inspiration mechanic.

This is a mode of play that 5e doesn't have any support for, and to enable it, you'll end up with a suite of table rules that will drift the game pretty far from it's roots. My understanding of what you mean is that the GM prepares material that they, the GM, think engages with the players' stated BIFTs. What happens, then, when in play a player expresses that the way things are going aren't aligned to what they've put forward -- ie, there's a difference in understanding? Does play realign here, and, if so, how does that interact with GM prep? Further, how does 5e even operationalize these conflicts -- it lacks anything robust outside of combat, so you'll be winging this entirely.

The argument that 5e is easily drifted into a story now style of play, where play is really about focusing on the characters' dramatic needs, is one born of inexperience and misunderstanding. Or it's just extremely optimistic. I play and run games were the game is about the characters, and I play and run 5e. I do not see any way to actually drift 5e without extensive changes to the system -- it's not a simple or small effort. You can do some things, sure, like include skill challenges that operate on scene framing rather than prepared pieces and that used finality in resolution in the social spaces rather than the typical 5e 'player successes are temporary delays to what the GM wants to do.'

 

[Ovinomancer]

Indeed there is no rules or mechanics to handle how a DM use its preparation ( if there is one!) once the session is started.

A DM can stick to what he got in its notes. But players can go outside, the DM can even make error applying his own notes, so after a while some randomness will enter in the carefully planed session! But there can be the need to omit a room, a trap, a monster, because it’s going late and players want some action before the end of the session. Can a DM do that? Is there a morale rules to force DM to stick to its notes?

There are numerous things that can influence a DM. His own experience and preparation, the overall pacing of the game session, the players mood, questions, expectation.
There is no mechanics to handle this in DnD. If you need it badly better look for another game.

No rules, few advice, I find one here from the 1ed DM guide p110 that can help.
You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player characterwith your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!"

And that bit of advice is fundamentally aligned against SYORTD or more general story now approaches. It's perfectly fine advice for a given mode of play, and one I've used but really try to avoid even in 5e play, but it's very much about what the GM wants to have happen rather than finding out in play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree that removing player roleplaying authority is unsupported when not called out specifically, but what do you think about testing the PCs' personal characteristics (TIBFs) by presenting situations in which decisions that accord with TIBFs are not only rewarded with inspiration but also result in complications, i.e. they are less than optimal in terms of classic gameplay. Might not that also put the PCs' strength of character under pressure in a way more fully supported?

Here's an interesting point/question. Don't things like BIFTs need to be QUESTIONED, that is to be either in doubt or have some cost, in order to mean anything? I mean, its all well and good that the paladin is lawful good, but if all he does is run into evil humanoids who are irredeemably evil and without virtue then really that lawful goodness means just about squat. At most it is a shallow characterization sort of thing where the PC shouts some LG slogan as he wades through the bad guys, right? Now, I am not sure that this needs to be MECHANICAL so much as simply a part of the practices of the game, that the GM will make the paladin PROVE that he is lawful good, and to explain what he means by it (or what he believes it means, whatever). This is dramatic play.

I don't see that this is really requiring mechanics per se though. I mean, looking at DW again, it is just a part of the way the game is supposed to work that any bond/alignment/etc. that is part of the character (and their existence is mandated) will become a focus of some GM move at some point. The mechanics do exist, on the backside, as a carrot, which is to say you get XP when you 'resolve a bond' or various other things. You could see this as more a way to provide a path for the character to evolve that engages the mechanics, and thus provides a context for changes in fiction (IE you are now level 5, you will encounter the more 'earth shaking' kinds of threats). 4e basically works the same way, but WRT Quests, and those SHOULD reflect the character's fictional agenda.

Of course nothing will guarantee people really engage with this stuff. You can make shallow DW characters, or 4e characters, and I suppose BIFTs can help make deep 5e PCs too, though IMHO they're rather lacking in process support.

 

[pemerton]

I think we might see them differently, yes. For me, the distinction is between voluntary versus involuntary thoughts, actions, etc. The effects of charm person, dominate person, and fear are almost entirely of two sorts: either they are purely mechanical, imposing advantage or disadvantage on some roll or other, or they dictate or prevent certain actions by the target. So, for example, the target of charmed person might want to attack the caster but is unable to do so, or the target of fear might not want to drop what it's holding but is forced to do so by the spell.

The possible exception to this is the effect of charmed person that causes the target to regard the caster as a friendly acquaintance. While I view this effect as a cognition that is non-consensually placed into the mind of the target, it could conceivably result in the target taking some voluntary actions that it might otherwise not have taken. Mostly, I think it applies to NPC targets of the spell, setting their attitude to "friendly" for the purposes of social interaction, but I could see an interesting case to be made for applying the "friendly" tag to a PC target, essentially turning the PC into an NPC, subject to being influenced socially by the caster for the duration.

Setting aside the bit about essentially turning the PC into an NPC - which raises further interesting questions about participant status and authority over game elements - what you say about Charm effects is how I tend to see them, and Fear, and generally Dominate.

Here's an exception in respect of Dominate, from 4e: there's a monster called a Gorechain Devil which can uses its chains to control another person like a marionette. Mechanically, this is expressed as a Domination effect. I would regard this as a case where a dominated PC is not choosing their own actions but is being manipulated (literally) like a puppet.

But generally I see these mental effects as changing the mental states of the target, so that they now experience emotions or volitions or desires that are as "internal" as any others, though resulting from a non-standard causal process (it's hard to describe the process in any great detail given (i) magic and (ii) the mind-body dualism that tends to be part of the assumed metaphysics of fantasy RPGs).

In Burning Wheel the most powerful of these sorts of effects is Force of Will - the rules text says that The words of the mage become thoughts - as if the victim had formulated them himself. When this effect was used by a dark naga on a PC, the player and I discussed and changed one of the PC's Beliefs to reflect the effect of the spell. I was pleased to see, a few years later, that a revised version of the BW rules (Gold Edition Revised) added exactly that to the spell description: The sorcerer may rewrite one Belief.

I don't know if changing BIFTs in 5e D&D would carry quite the same heft.

 

[Krachek]

And that bit of advice is fundamentally aligned against SYORTD or more general story now approaches. It's perfectly fine advice for a given mode of play, and one I've used but really try to avoid even in 5e play, but it's very much about what the GM wants to have happen rather than finding out in play.

I don’t think old school DM can feel compel to say Yes to a player proposition, or compel to roll a dice, or compel to say no, or compel to SYORTD.
IMO I don’t know where in the 5ed rules I can find advice to SYORTD, but I can’t find no advice to say No all the time either.
DM should want a good session for the players and satisfying for him.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I know you've had some replies to this from other posters. Here's mine.

You recount of a chess game is not a story, for the same reason that a chemistry textbook or a recipe book or my shopping list or my published essays are not stories. They lack protagonists, they lack antagonists, there is no rising action, there is no climax, and there is no fiction - no imagined situation in which those other elements I've mentioned might emerge and unfold.

I'm prepared to accept that there are corner cases here - eg I've seen Waiting for Godot performed live once, and found it very moving - but a record of a chance game is in my view unlikely to be one of them.

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.

You now seem to be positing that the story is not something that the game itself generates, but rather something that is generated by recounting the events of playing the game. The film ET tells a story, and part of that story is about some kids playing a RPG and doing things with their cues. But Spielberg was not RPGing while filming ET.

In the TV show Red Dwarf, there's an episode where Rimmer starts reading from his "Risk diary" which records all of his moves in all of his games of Risk. Within the fiction, this combines both of my points above: first, the diary is not a story - it's just a list; and second, even if it were a story, it wouldn't show that the game Risk itself is a story-generating or story-oriented game, because Rimmer recounting his play of Risk is not Rimmer actually playing Risk.

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!?

Three things:

(1) Typically, X symbolises Y entails that X is not the same thing as Y. So if the cues do symbolise the fiction, that is sufficient to show that the fiction is one thing and the cues another.

(2) The cues clearly don't always symbolise the fiction. In my RPG play the most constant cues are dice and the results of their rolls. And these don't symbolise anything in the fiction. They perform the same basic function as the coin toss at the start of a cricket match, though in a much more complex way: the coin toss determines which team gets to choose to bat or bowl; the dice rolls determine - as per the game rules - which player gets to have their conception of the fiction's trajectory prevail. This is Vincent Baker's point about easing and constraining negotiation over what it is that we are to collectively imagine; this is what the cues are doing.

(3) Where the cues do symbolise the fiction they can be aides memoire - for the purposes of framing - as much as constraints on resolution. The former is the role maps generally play in my RPGing. But when I played White Plume Mountain using AD&D-type rules earlier this week, the maps played the second role. The fact that in this case the cues symbolise the fiction is a necessary condition of them playing the role that they do, but it does not dictate that role.

The dice come up 7, that drives change.

No one disputes that. When the coin-toss comes up one way rather than another, that drives the play of the cricket game. In both cases, it is because of a rule that the "driving of change" takes place. But in cricket the toss of the coin is not, and does not represent, any play of any ball. And in a RPG, typically the roll of the dice is not a part of any fiction, and it need not represent any part of any fiction.

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.

<snip>

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.

Game as artifact thus provides reification or handles to allow rules to manipulate fiction. That allows it to be systematically and progressively addressed: added to and modified.

I don't think I follow all this.

I'm not sure what you mean by games as artefacts. Normally I would think of an artefact as a concrete particular - eg a chair or a hammer or a built structure - but a game is not a concrete particular. It's a type of practice, maybe a convention, which involves the use of artefacts (like dice, various drawings, various bits of writing, etc).

And at the bigger picture level, I don't see what you're trying to add to what Baker has said. For example, here is Baker on PC sheets:

Imagine Thatcher's London. Imagine a person in Thatcher's London who has everything to lose.

That's a character. That's a whole, playable, complete character. If I ask you to speak in that character's voice, you can; if I present some threat or challenge, you can tell me easily how that character will react; if I describe a morning and ask you what that character will do in it, you'll know. Take ten minutes to think and that character's as real as can be.

Character sheets are useless when it comes to creating, describing, defining, realizing characters. Totally pointless, valueless, toss 'em in the recycling. A notebook is helpful for remembering things, or 3x5 cards or post-it notes, let's use those instead. Or let's use nothing at all, if we can remember what we need to remember! Probably we can. . . .

I can't teach you anything useful about RPG design if you persist in thinking that mechanical character creation or the character sheet have anything to do with the character at all. It's a misleading historical mistake to call the process and the paper "character-" anything. If you want to get anywhere, if you want to understand, if you want to create anything at all, you have to let that old error go.

So we start right here at this point: the character exists only in our minds. If we write something down about the character, it's only to remind us, to help us keep the character in our minds. The character cannot be touched by rules or game mechanics at all, under any circumstances, no exceptions. The character is pure inviolate fiction. This is fundamental and inescapable.

And from there we build. . . .

<Baker describes a simple resolution system>

Let's add a wrinkle. Let's say that over the course of the whole game, each of us is allowed 10 rerolls, no questions asked. Just in case we want another shot at our preferred outcome. Now we need a "character sheet," except that of course it's really a player sheet. We need to keep track of how many of our rerolls we've spent. . . .

<He discusses resolution some more>

Come to think of it, when do I get to decide if my character has access to an antique revolver, has a weak heart, is an excellent driver? Do I get to decide on the fly or do I have to declare it up front?

Either way, I should write all this stuff down on my player sheet, as I establish it. That way I know what I'm allowed to propose as possible outcomes.

See how this goes? The "character sheet" isn't about the character. Maybe - maybe - it refers to details of the character, if that's what our resolution rules care about. But either way, even if so, the "character sheet" is really a record of the player's resources. "Character creation" similarly isn't how you create a character, but rather how you the player establish your resources to start.

If you like, you can design your game so that the player's resources depend wholly on details of the character.

Or you can just as easily design your game so that the player's resources don't refer to details of the character at all.

Or a mix, that's easiest of all.

Whichever way, you need to establish what resources the player has to begin with, and you'll probably want to write 'em down. That's what's really going on.​

The PC sheet is an aide-memoire for the fiction (to the extent that some player resources depend on details of the character) as well as a record of player resources that may be independent of the fiction (eg Baker's example of a tally of spent re-rolls).

You can see Baker's clarity of thought here manifesting itself in the following statement from the Apocalypse World rulebook (p 178):

The players’ character sheets, like your front countdowns, are both prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive: changes to the character’s sheet mean changes to the character’s fictional circumstances and capabilities; that’s the game’s experience and improvement rules, following. Descriptive too: when the character’s fictional circumstances or capabilities change naturally, within the character’s fictional world, the player can and should change her character sheet to match.​

There are RPGs where players have much more control over the change of their PCs, and hence the "descriptive" aspect of the PC sheet: 4e D&D and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic are the two that I think of in this regard, though in my group in our 4e play we pushed things a bit further in the AW direction than I believe is canonical (eg changes in race, class and paragon path, loss of daily powers, etc to reflect events that had occurred to the PCs in the fiction). That higher degree of player control makes the whole thing less "gritty", I think.

But we can't talk about these features of different RPGs, and their differences, if we don't keep the fiction/cue distinction clear.

 

[clearstream]

(1) Typically, X symbolises Y entails that X is not the same thing as Y. So if the cues do symbolise the fiction, that is sufficient to show that the fiction is one thing and the cues another.

A good post, and much to reflect on. I wanted to start here. If say words (symbols) are one thing and the fiction another, how do I come to have the story of Lord of the Rings in mind given I possess only the words, and don't have Tolkien on hand to give them any further significance?

 

[pemerton]

If say words (symbols) are one thing and the fiction another, how do I come to have the story of Lord of the Rings in mind given I possess only the words, and don't have Tolkien on hand to give them any further significance?

The same way that when I tell you I am typing on computer keys I present you not just with a sentence of English, inscribed (using this verb not quite literally) on your computer screen, but also with a representation of the event of me typing this sentence on my computer's keyboard.

If you want to ask What is representation well that is a complex thing! My favourite treatment is Stephen Barker's Renewing Meaning (OUP) but that is a technical book which I think doesn't have much relevance for those not interested in technical issues in philosophy of language/philosophical linguistics.

The point of separateness can be made more simply, without explaining in technical terms how it works: even if every copy of LotR in the world was destroyed, I could still imagine it. And when I imagine Frodo and you imagine Frodo, there is a sense in which we are imagining the same thing, which is not just a word but a (fictional) person.

The shared fiction is the thing we imagine together. What makes it the same for the two of us, in the case of LotR/Frodo, is the canonical text. (This creates questions - eg if you've read the original version of the Hobbit, and I've read one of the later revised versions, are we imaging the same fiction? Dunno - until we know why the question is being asked we can't set criteria for "same fiction", and without those identity criteria we can't answer the question. By analogy: my cat and your cat are the same animal if we're talking about species individuation, but not if we're talking about vetinary records.)

In the case of a RPG, there is no canonical text - unless the game is a total railroad. (Worst example I personally know - the Planescape module Dead Gods.) But there are the cues that - when responded to/followed as the rules prescribe - ensure that all of the group imagine the same thing.

We can see that when the rules have gaps or break down, we get the shared fiction breaking down. In AD&D this seems to happen every ten minutes of play! (Eg a non-thief tries to climb a steep but non-vertical slope, while wearing studded leather armour - what happens in the fiction? The rules don't tell us!) But modern, well-designed games have few of these sorts of breakpoints. This can include having clearer rule on how to respond to the cues (for me AW and BW are paradigms of this; but D&D has always been pretty clear at least in the combat portion of its rules), which might include having clear rules on how cues are to be used to derive the fiction by way of representation (eg 4e's movement rates expressed in squares).

I hope you can see more in this post how I think we can talk profitably about how different RPGs work, and have different rules and use cues in different ways, without necessarily having to get into the difficult underlying metaphysical questions about the nature of representation, how non-existent fictions can nevertheless be referred to, etc.