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

[Ovinomancer]

She was aware that something was letting strange creatures into the forest, and she had a message inviting her to visit an old friend.

She decided that the friend was on another island (the setting is an archipelago, which leaves a lot of evocative blank spaces.) But first she wanted to understand what was up: what wasn't in its right place. I took this as DR and on her 8 introduced an ominous stone. We're all fans of EarthSea so the possible implications drew on shared themes.

She decided to haul it out of the river and that it had some markings. I went with that - no roll - because it suited my agenda. That's where we left off. We'll resume today or tomorrow.

This is very much not how the game is intended to run, but sounds awesome for a 5e game.

Ignoring the framing of friend sending a message, the DR move on an 8 plus should have resulted in a question asked and answered and then a complication that generated more play. I don't see this. I see that you handed off a stone with no answers, and then ignored any future play. The 8 should have generated a soft move on your part -- a move that required the player to address the issue. This isn't present -- it just reads like you told a bit of story you thought was cool (and the 'fit my agenda' aligns here) and was done. Time to move to the next bit of story you think is cool. Again, nothing wrong with this in general, but it's not how DW is intended to work.

And a moment to discuss what "agenda" means in DW. It's not that you have a plan for how the game will go, but rather that you have a set of guiding principles for play. The agenda in DW is given to you by the game, and it's not story related at all. It's explicit. It is 1) portray a fantastic world, 2) fill the characters' lives with adventure, and 3) play to find out what happens. 3) absolutely and completely stands against the use of agenda that you use here. "Play to find out what happens" is a bit of a term of art, but it's commonly mistaken for "I don't know if a task will succeed or fail, so when I have the players face a dragon that's ravaging the land and if they beat it they'll find out that it's being controlled by this demon who's trying to end the world with this specific plan they'll have to foil, but I'm playing to find out what happens because I don't know how many hitpoints they'll lose in the dragon fight or if the mage will cast fireball or lightning bolt!" This isn't it at all.

The fact is, my style for D&D just isn't that far from my style for DW. We world immersionists have had to find our own path.

This is very clear -- I've said as much. I've also said that this approach for DW is not according to how the game tells you to play it. I have no idea what you mean by "world immerionist" as it implies that anyone not doing what you do isn't worried about this.

What I largely like to own as DM are cohering, overarching themes, and I love mapping imaginary places. The archipelago has several seas and two main towns... that's about all I currently know about it. The overarching theme is "the fraying wall" (that separates planes.) I don't know yet why the wall or walls are fraying, but I have decided that if they fray completely things are going to change dramatically, affecting the whole archipelago.

The thing here is thinking that cohering, overarching themes are only capable via your approach, or that the way DW tells you to play it doesn't create this. I see it often mistaken that the GM's prep is the only way to achieve these goals of play. It's not. I can absolutely understand saying "I prefer it if I'm the one that comes up with the stuff," though.

I get the feeling from my own and others' play that what you say here is very true. But then, I suspect a totally pure style is either a chimera, or just not that important.

This is often a response from someone that hasn't grokked how different play is under a different approach, and assumes that all play is pretty much just like how they play. I once held the same opinion -- about 6 years or so ago. This is, I was wrong then and you're wrong now. It's not a matter of purity -- this is a mistake of all approaches being similar and so differences aren't that big. It's actually very different from soup to nuts.

When I run Aliens, I know what's going to happen. I have a map, I have a plan, I have aliens, and I have events that will be occurring. I'm running to both entertain my players with this plan and to see how they deal with my plan. Between sessions, I'm prepping these things, and they will almost always be used.

When I run Blades, I have no idea what's going to happen. I show up with no prep on hand except a quick review of the current faction chart and clocks running (all of which were determined in prior play, not prep), just to be current. Play is going to be what play is about -- the players will decide what they want to do and I'll follow along. I'll pay of things that the games says it's time to pay off, and introduce new things when the game says it's time to do that, but I won't know what's next until we get there, together. D&D players think this is chaos, and can't be coherent, because it's not planned to be so. They also think this is hard because they're imagining how to improv all of their plans in every moment. But it's not this, at all. It's easier on me as a GM to run Blades than Aliens (or 5e) -- lots easier -- because I have a system that enables this and I lean on it. The players have to do a lot of work here, too, and that's work that I'm usually doing in other games. It's not free form improv, either, because I just need to follow the fiction and the characters and push against that.

Reflecting, I suspect we traverse modes. But say; if one cannot use one's experience of the games in question, or video of sessions run by the designers, or the testimony of third parties, then it would seem one must be mute, seeing as they lie in an obscure country, seen through glass, darkly.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The orc had 15 hit points. It reels bloodied from your slashing longsword's 8 damage. Another such will surely fell it. It looks left and right, to check if its allies are holding.

Or, the orc had 15 hit point. It blocks your longsword on it's shield edge at the last moment, grunting with the effort. Or, it sidesteps your longsword blow at with a last minute desperate twist. Or it doesn't care much, taking the blow across it's pauldron, but not showing any reduction in combat efficacy. Or, the GM just doesn't say anything at all except, "8 damage, still up. Bob you're next, what do you do?"

No, there's no fiction that's impacted by the reduction in hitpoints. At best, as you're showing here, there's an arbitrary choice by the GM. If the GM doesn't provide this at all, though, and just deducts the hp and doesn't narrate some arbitrary result, then the game still works fine.

What orc has 100 hit points, really. But how about a stone giant. The giant had 126 hit points. Your slash is a doughty one, but seriously, it's so massive this is barely a scratch. It's going to step forward and... are you sure this is a fight you want to take?

I can trivially get an orc with 100 hitpoints. Odd thing to say. And I didn't reference an orc, I asked what the fictional result of going from 100 hitpoints to 99 hitpoints is?

 

[pemerton]

My group played 4e D&D today - for the first time in about 5 years, picking up our 30th level game.

There was one episode of play that crisply illustrated the contrast between (i) boxes-to-boxes, perhaps with epiphenomenal leftward-pointing arrows, and (ii) rightward-pointing arrows.

The PCs were fighting, among other foes, Miska the Wolfspider, in a great temple located in Carceri. The temple is large enough for great Colossi to easily stride around in it. On part of its floor is a plinth that a Colossus can stand on, and that a human can move beneath.

The invoker/wizard was on one side of the plinth; Miska was on the other. Atop the plinth were two other PCs. The invoker/wizard wanted to blast Miska with a Gust of Wind. We looked at the map with the tokens laid out (cues/boxes). I observed that Gust of Wind targets all creatures in the burst, and that there were two PCs between the invoker/wizard and Miska. The invoker/wizard player thought about this for a moment, and then responded to the effect that They're standing on the plinth. I'm sending my wind gust under the plinth, so it won't hit them but will hit Miska on the other side.

That's a rightward-pointing arrow. The plinth was not just colour/flavour. It affected resolution.

(A parenthetical remark: for me, one strength of 4e as a version of D&D is that it encourages the use of rich fiction in combat which, due to the intricacy of the player resources suites and the resolution mechanics, can generate all these rightward pointing arrows which are easily incorporated into the overall resolution process. It doesn't depend upon leftward-pointing epiphenomenal arrows as AD&D can often tend to (I think AD&D struggles to handle a variety of rightward pointing arrows because its resolution processes are too fragile). I can't really comment on 5e in this respect, though my impression of it is that it is at least closer to AD&D than 4e is, and perhaps is closer to AD&D than it is to 4e.)

 

[clearstream]

This is an example of a purely epiphenomenal leftward-pointing arrow. Nothing in the gameplay follows from the Orc reeling bloodied - contrast, eg, Baker's example of taking the higher ground (fiction/cloud) which then leads to a +2 to hit (cues/boxes).

Taking higher ground when using a grid can by the same token avoid entering the fiction. I move my miniature to the part of the map marked as higher ground.

Are you familiar with the combat superiority maneuvers, or the three TCoE martial feats? Or grapple and shove. From their descriptions, these are as visible in the fiction as moving to higher ground, and will point to mechanical consequences.

It seems like each extemporised act is the fiction that can have a mechanical consequence, will do so by appealing to general handlers in the ruleset (like a +2 modifier.) Such a handler us found in 5e in the form of advantage, and in some cases modifiers.

All the gameplay work is done by the change to the hit point tally - the boxes-to-boxes arrow that Baker draws in his blog.

The gameplay work is done by that mechanical +2, right?

Is the dividing line that it must be an act that falls outside the written cases, with a mechanical consequence? Or to put it a better way, what do you call the dividing line, and why us appealing to one handler (advantage) different from invoking a mechanic with non-necessitated speech. Say when I Attack, I don't say I Attack but appeal to that mechanic through my fictional positioning?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Taking higher ground when using a grid can by the same token avoid entering the fiction. I move my miniature to the part of the map marked as higher ground.

Are you familiar with the combat superiority maneuvers, or the three TCoE martial feats? Or grapple and shove. From their descriptions, these are as visible in the fiction as moving to higher ground, and will point to mechanical consequences.

It seems like each extemporised act is the fiction that can have a mechanical consequence, will do so by appealing to general handlers in the ruleset (like a +2 modifier.) Such a handler us found in 5e in the form of advantage, and in some cases modifiers.

This is misapprehending the process. I don't engage grapple rules because the fiction tells me do, which is what a "right facing arrow" would mean. I choose to engage grappling and this causes a change in fiction, or a "left facing arrow." Same thing with the feats.

In @pemerton's example, the player engaged a power, Gust of Wind, and that power says X will happen -- a leftward arrow. However, the fiction in play (specifically the plinth, it's size and shape, and the location of the PCs on and around it) modified how that power actually worked -- a rightward facing arrow. It's not that 5e lacks all of these (or that any game does or doesn't) but rather that this was just an example of how this works.

To loop this back to the hitpoint example -- there's no rightward arrows here. The fiction doesn't impact the resolution of the hitpoint loss at all. Further, there's not real leftward arrows here either -- the hitpoint loss doesn't drive a change in the fiction (as I say above, any such is just arbitrary and not required). Hitpoint loss just stays in it's section of mechanics and doesn't really interact one way or the other with the fiction. Only total loss of all hitpoints drives a leftward arrow.

The gameplay work is done by that mechanical +2, right?

Is the dividing line that it must be an act that falls outside the written cases, with a mechanical consequence? Or to put it a better way, what do you call the dividing line, and why us appealing to one handler (advantage) different from invoking a mechanic with non-necessitated speech. Say when I Attack, I don't say I Attack but appeal to that mechanic through my fictional positioning?

No.

 

[clearstream]

And I didn't reference an orc, I asked what the fictional result of going from 100 hitpoints to 99 hitpoints is?

The example was introduced by others as being an orc.

If we are speaking of an entity about which we know only that it had 100 hit points and now 99, I don't see that can drive any helpful conclusions. Can you say more about the situation you are picturing?

 

[clearstream]

This is misapprehending the process. I don't engage grapple rules because the fiction tells me do, which is what a "right facing arrow" would mean. I choose to engage grappling and this causes a change in fiction, or a "left facing arrow." Same thing with the feats.

This is back to the impossibility of a consequentual correlation between fiction and mechanics. If I can decide to move to a hill and that invokes a mechanic (advantage) then I can equally say that "I wrassle 'em" and that invokes a mechanic. I'm not going to draw the wrassling or mush the miniatures together!

In @pemerton's example, the player engaged a power, Gust of Wind, and that power says X will happen -- a leftward arrow. However, the fiction in play (specifically the plinth, it's size and shape, and the location of the PCs on and around it) modified how that power actually worked -- a rightward facing arrow. It's not that 5e lacks all of these (or that any game does or doesn't) but rather that this was just an example of how this works.

I was responding to an example of Baker's that @pemerton cited. Moving to higher ground.

 

[clearstream]

Ignoring the framing of friend sending a message, the DR move on an 8 plus should have resulted in a question asked and answered and then a complication that generated more play. I don't see this. I see that you handed off a stone with no answers, and then ignored any future play. The 8 should have generated a soft move on your part -- a move that required the player to address the issue.

Mavens FTW! The soft move is the stone, and what it portends: trouble coming nearer. Her question was very clearly what here is out of place. Do I really need to spell that out?

And a moment to discuss what "agenda" means in DW. It's not that you have a plan for how the game will go, but rather that you have a set of guiding principles for play.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that I have grasped agenda as intended.

The agenda in DW is given to you by the game, and it's not story related at all. It's explicit. It is 1) portray a fantastic world, 2) fill the characters' lives with adventure, and 3) play to find out what happens. 3) absolutely and completely stands against the use of agenda that you use here.

Yes. As I explained - due to our shared love of EarthSea the ominous stone excellently suits my agenda.

"Play to find out what happens" is a bit of a term of art, but it's commonly mistaken for "I don't know if a task will succeed or fail, so when I have the players face a dragon that's ravaging the land and if they beat it they'll find out that it's being controlled by this demon who's trying to end the world with this specific plan they'll have to foil, but I'm playing to find out what happens because I don't know how many hitpoints they'll lose in the dragon fight or if the mage will cast fireball or lightning bolt!" This isn't it at all.

What is this about? Is the dragon one of your enemies and the demon your impending doom?

The thing here is thinking that cohering, overarching themes are only capable via your approach, or that the way DW tells you to play it doesn't create this. I see it often mistaken that the GM's prep is the only way to achieve these goals of play. It's not. I can absolutely understand saying "I prefer it if I'm the one that comes up with the stuff," though.

The designers' words and examples on creating fronts etc: you might take another look at them.

 

[pemerton]

Taking higher ground when using a grid can by the same token avoid entering the fiction. I move my miniature to the part of the map marked as higher ground.

<snip>

The gameplay work is done by that mechanical +2, right?

If everything is done just by consulting the cues, with no need to engage a shared fiction, then it seems to me that we don't have a RPG as distinct from a board/wargame. (I've never played one of the 4e-era D&D adventure boardgames (Wrath of Ashardalon et al) but I assume they play like this.)

This is why Baker chooses an example - taking the higher ground - where the fictional conception is crucial; and it's why I gave an example - blasting Miska with a Gust of Wind underneath the plinth - where the fictional conception is crucial.

So it's wrong to say (or at least imply) that the +2 does all the gameplay work. The gameplay has two components - making a move in the fiction (taking the high ground; blasting beneath the plinth); and then having this feed into the mechanical resolution process that engages the cues (the dice rolls in Baker's example, the squares within the AoE in my example).

A different example, that shows how RPG game play does not always depend upon cues or mechanics, would be one where the arrow goes from clouds-to-clouds: eg I take the high ground with the GM responding From your vantage point you can see the warg-riders coming towards you - notice that the clouds-to-clouds analysis of this is independent of the process whereby the GM determined that response. That process could be a map-and-key one (let's say the GM is running a module which says that, at this point in the adventure, the warg riders attack) or it could be an AW/DW-type move (the player takes the high ground, which does not trigger any player-side move as per the if you do it, you do it principle, and so the GM makes a soft move - in this case Revealing an unwelcome truth).

Are you familiar with the combat superiority maneuvers, or the three TCoE martial feats? Or grapple and shove. From their descriptions, these are as visible in the fiction as moving to higher ground, and will point to mechanical consequences.

It seems like each extemporised act is the fiction that can have a mechanical consequence, will do so by appealing to general handlers in the ruleset (like a +2 modifier.) Such a handler us found in 5e in the form of advantage, and in some cases modifiers.

My knowledge of 5e D&D doesn't extend far beyond the Basic PDF and SRD, but I think I have at least a general sense of what you're referring to.

I have two thoughts in response.

First, I don't think the notion of "general handlers" takes us all that far. In my example of the plinth, for instance, there is no "general handler" - there is just the fictional notion of a sturdy stone barrier that will protect those standing on it from even a very strong wind gust beneath it, and the corresponding mechanical notion of which targets are in the AoE of the attack. Another example from my play today: a PC wanted to move over some difficult terrain and didn't have enough squares of movement - but because the difficult terrain consisted of stairs, the player could make an Acrobatics check to cover the distance without suffering the normal halving of movement rate/double square cost.

These are not "general handlers" - rather, they are applications of the game rules having regard to the fiction. They rely upon the table (given the desirability of consensus) and especially the GM (given their role as adjudicator) having a good grasp of the system and its various moving parts and how they interact, and also upon the fiction being clear enough that we can all grasp what is happening in it.

Second, some of the things you mention seem to me to involve rightward pointing arrows - eg I grab the Orc leads to make a roll as per the grapple rules - but some don't - eg the Battlemaster ability that causes fear (Menacing Strike) seems to me to be boxes-to-boxes, as the player doesn't actually have to do anything with or say anything about the fiction in order to use the ability. This contrasts, for instance, with speaking prayers in BW: the player actually has to speak a prayer, which is what the PC is saying in the fiction, in order to be entitled to make a Faith check to see if the prayer is answered. Upthread I also mentioned the BW trait Rapier Wit, which gives a bonus in a Duel of Wits manoeuvre provided that the player actually speaks a cutting bon mot; Vicious Mockery could have such a requirement, but to the best of my knowledge does not. Like Menacing Strike, its primarily boxes-to-boxes.

Is the dividing line that it must be an act that falls outside the written cases, with a mechanical consequence? Or to put it a better way, what do you call the dividing line, and why us appealing to one handler (advantage) different from invoking a mechanic with non-necessitated speech. Say when I Attack, I don't say I Attack but appeal to that mechanic through my fictional positioning?

I take the "dividing line" you're referring to to be the difference between a rightward pointing arrow and a boxes-to-boxes arrow?

Baker characterises When your character attacks mine, roll dice as a rightward pointing arrow (see step 1 in Resolution System #1). That's because something is changed in the fiction as a result of someone's narration (a participant who enjoys the appropriate authority declares that one character attacks another character) which then "activates" a rule that tells us to do some stuff with some cues (in this case, dice and to hit and defence numbers).

But making a damage roll doesn't follow from someone establishing a change in the fiction: it is a direct consequence of getting a particular result on the attack roll. And the only change it mandates is a change in the hit point tally, which is also a change in the cues.

This has nothing to do with "falling outside the written cases" - the rules for grappling, for menacing strike, for attacks in general, and for damage rolls and hit point adjustments are all written rules of 5e D&D, and most of them are found in prior editions too. The difference is the relationship between the rules, the cues and the fiction. When does a rule get activated by a change in the fiction? Does a rule - which may perhaps involve the consultation or manipulation of a cue - mandate a change in the fiction that in turn activates or feeds into a rule? Does a rule, that is activated by a cue, simply tell us to do something further with that or with some other cue?

Different answers to these questions give us the different sorts of arrows, and corresponding box-and-cloud relationships, that Baker gives examples of in his blogs, and that I have also given examples of in my posts.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The example was introduced by others as being an orc.

If we are speaking of an entity about which we know only that it had 100 hit points and now 99, I don't see that can drive any helpful conclusions. Can you say more about the situation you are picturing?

You've said that loss of hitpoints absolutely impacts fiction. I've given you a loss of hitpoints. How does this impact the fiction? If you prefer, you can instead reference any of the orc examples I addressed in the parts of the post you quote here but decided to leave out. That you isolated this, and then attempt to make it the focus of the contention, seems like you're intentionally ignoring the same point illuminated by all of the orc examples I presented in the same quote.

This is back to the impossibility of a consequentual correlation between fiction and mechanics. If I can decide to move to a hill and that invokes a mechanic (advantage) then I can equally say that "I wrassle 'em" and that invokes a mechanic. I'm not going to draw the wrassling or mush the miniatures together!


I was responding to an example of Baker's that @pemerton cited. Moving to higher ground.

It's back to no such thing -- this isn't a claim made by anyone except you in trying to describe the argument of others. What's being said is that the existence of impact and it's direction is something we can note. In 5e combat, the mechanics, not the fiction, creates the loss of hitpoints and that effect stays in the mechanics. There's no required flow from the fiction to the hitpoint mechanic and no required flow from the hitpoint mechanic to the fiction. You can arbitrarily introduce fiction, but it's not tied to the mechanic -- as I show above in my examples of the various ways you might or might not describe an orc losing hiptoints. This is unrelated to the loss of hitpoints. In fact, all of the descriptions I provided for the orc losing hitpoints also work fine for the attack missing and no loss of hitpoints at all! This is because the mechanic doesn't drive any fiction -- only the complete reduction of hitpoints to zero drives fiction and generates one of those rightward arrows.

Grapple is similar -- there's not flow from the fiction into the action. The mechanic is selected, and it's resolution creates an impact in the fiction if successful (if unsuccessful, no real change is created).

The argument is NOT that there's no interaction. It is, in fact, explicitly about exactly WHAT and HOW that interaction occurs!