D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Ovinomancer]

I'd like to point out that the text about player authored quest is super short and vague and "come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure," do not me necessarily imply massive creative input like some people seem to it interpret. It doesn't to me read like the player is expected to invent significant setting material. You of course could let the player to invent an entire secret organisation of extraplanar entities along with the goal of infiltrating to the organisation, but more conservative (and I'd argue intended) reading is merely that the player can declare the goal of infiltrating such an organisation when the organisation is introduced by he GM and the GM merely sets XP rewards etc for such a self imposed goal.

And if you're very interested in maintaining GM control of story, you can do this. But, if you aren't, if you take so much of tge rest of the advice in 4e to be far more permissive, then this is 1) unique in any edition of D&D as advice and 2) very different from GM as chief source of story.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, the more elaborate it is, the more predefined and constrained things are. Note how games like PbtAs are structured. In Dungeon World for instance there's no call for character background at all. You have a bond, that's it. Bonds are one sentence, 2 at most. Some things can be inferred from the other character choices, but its not much. One problem with elaborate backstories is they tend to step on each other. Its hard to get 3 or 5 characters together with these heavy backstories, unless perhaps the milieu is very tight, like "you're a team of super heroes", in which case maybe each one has a fairly elaborate origin story. The problem still exists though that this will hobble the GM to a degree in framing. I'm not sure I have as strong an aversion here as Manbearcat does, but I don't find these backstories to add a lot, its better if they emerge during play.

Well, the backstory doesn't of course need to be elaborate in sense that it has a lot of detail, but I really cannot imagine how one could establish dramatic needs of the character without somehow contextualising how they arise. I get that the point of Story Now is to do a lot of no mything and establish things in the play, but also as this establishing is supposed the be done by the GM framing things relevant to the characters, so that sort of seems to require knowing something about the characters!

As for multiple characters, one can create backstories as group effort and create existing connections. I'd imagine that if one wants dramatic needs of the character challenged, that might be good idea.

 

[overgeeked]

I'd like to point out that the text about player authored quest is super short and vague and "come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure," do not me necessarily imply massive creative input like some people seem to it interpret. It doesn't to me read like the player is expected to invent significant setting material. You of course could let the player to invent an entire secret organisation of extraplanar entities along with the goal of infiltrating to the organisation, but more conservative (and I'd argue intended) reading is merely that the player can declare the goal of infiltrating such an organisation when the organisation is introduced by he GM and the GM merely sets XP rewards etc for such a self imposed goal.

You're right, but it doesn't matter. The folks arguing for this bizarre misinterpretation of 4E are doing so only by intentionally misreading or outright ignoring the actual text of the game. Every time this is pointed out, even when showing them the actual text of the books, they simply ignore it and double down on their misinterpretation.

 

[Campbell]

Here's what I can say - 4e was instrumental to my development as a GM. Stuff like the player designed quests, the call to skip past the town guards, the way the default setting involved the PCs in its central conflicts, the focus on gameable setting, the calls to collaborate with your players, and the encounter centric nature of play primed me for games like Smallville, Marvel Heroic, Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World. It wasn't revolutionary, but far more so then we had ever really seen at that point in time in the traditional space.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And if you're very interested in maintaining GM control of story, you can do this. But, if you aren't, if you take so much of tge rest of the advice in 4e to be far more permissive, then this is 1) unique in any edition of D&D as advice and 2) very different from GM as chief source of story.

It's about not what I want it to say, it is about what I think it says. And I really don't think it is saying anything revolutionary. Players always had an option to declare goals for their characters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree (in case it wasn’t obvious)!

So if you were going to try and shift that traditional paradigm… the GM holds most of the authorial power over the fiction, and the players very little… who would you target try and make that shift?

Players? Or GMs?

I think GMs would be the obvious answer. Would you disagree? If so, why would you say targeting players would be the smarter approach?

Well, I would never want to shift that paradigm, and very much dislike Story Now and its trappings, first of all.

If that weren't the case, I would target both, in both books, and do so more strongly than 4e did.

 

[niklinna]

Well, the backstory doesn't of course need to be elaborate in sense that it has a lot of detail, but I really cannot imagine how one could establish dramatic needs of the character without somehow contextualising how they arise. I get that the point of Story Now is to do a lot of no mything and establish things in the play, but also as this establishing is supposed the be done by the GM framing things relevant to the characters, so that sort of seems to require knowing something about the characters!

Yes, the GM needs to know something about characters, but it can literally be one or two spare facts:

GM: Tell me something about your character.
Player: She's terrified of heights and she loves her sister.
GM: Okay so you're out for a hike with your sister when she trips and falls off the edge of the cliff. She's hanging on to a shrub but the root's slowly pulling out from the crumbling ground. Any added weight could send the whole thing sliding off. What do you do? That sure is a long fall....

The GM knows things relevant to the character, but the only bit of backstory there is inferred: That the character has had a sister for a while and they have presumably had a good relationship. Or maybe her sister hates her...let's find out! This scene could be a great way of exploring that, in fact. In any case, dramatic need is front and center here, with minimal backstory.

As for multiple characters, one can create backstories as group effort and create existing connections. I'd imagine that if one wants dramatic needs of the character challenged, that might be good idea.

Or the group can assert connections and figure out the backstories through play. Or the group can create existing connections during play.

You don't have to play this way, but you can, and many people seem hell-bent on denying it's possible or that people have fun doing it. I really appreciate @Micah Sweet making the effort to understand Story Now, even though it's totally not their cup of tea.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is a good explanation of the concepts involved, thank you. It unfortunately also perfectly encapsulates exactly why I have no interest in a Story Now game, and would in fact likely have a negative play experience from either playing or (especially) running it. Not a single aspect of the Story Now concept as you described it resonates with me.

Perfectly fine (not that you need me to tell you that). As noted, some folks find the sweetest thing in RPG life to be Story After, where their characters aren't anybody until well after they've done something, and a story can be told about how they did something. You see some shades of this concept in the wrap-up for the game King of Dragon Pass, if you manage to fully complete the "golden" ending and unite your people with the "Grazers." That is, throughout the game, you're basically just trying to keep your clan powerful, and then you stumble upon prophecy stuff that says some ambiguous stuff, leading to scripted events (aka Story Before, which is a given because it's a video game), where your clan leader has to stay alive long enough and perform various tasks correctly. In the aftermath, a female chief marries the Luminous Stallion King (while a male chief marries the Feathered Horse Queen), the wedding is officiated by a friggin' dragon, and you and your spouse found a glorious new dynasty that will lead your combined peoples for generations to come....until eventually, your own life will become a Heroquest for others to follow! It isn't much, since as stated it's a video game and thus 99% of its content is inherently Story Before, but these little touches give a touch of Story After. And for some folks that's rad as hell.

Likewise, lots of people really aren't interested in Story Now, and much prefer Story Before. They want things to make sense, to "flow." As noted in that quoted section from the 3.5e DMG2, many people see it as being "a night at the movies," or to use a phrase I've seen in various places (though, notably, for both Story Before and Story Now), it's like "characters in your favorite TV show," except if you're the DM you're the one setting the stage for the actors to act on (Story Now)/writing the over-arching plotline while the characters play out their own personal arcs (Story Before).

I don't mind your interpretation, honestly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, parts you found ambiguous (informing your interpretation) I found pregnant with intent (informing mine), to whit


So if they "provide material", and "take your game in... new directions", forcing you to improvise... that points toward player-authorship to me.

What does "provide material" mean? To me, material is only useful once it has been built into something. Would you agree? If so, then that is why I see that as so clearly "Story Before." The DM is the one actually building those material components into some kind of plot. E.g., since I know that my party Bard has both parents alive and two living brothers, treating that as material means me thinking, "What plots could I weave that would endanger these family members, or alternatively, endanger their relationship to the Bard?" That's fundamentally Story Before thinking.

Instead, in actual Story Now play, yes, those are relevant facts, but I don't treat them as material from which to build something. Instead, the player might have said (though he didn't), "I've always gotten along better with my mom and struggled with my dad, who has been distant and forbidding, favoring my elder brother the Temple Knight and my younger brother, the one being groomed to take over the family textile business. I want to explore that conflict--my rivalries with my siblings and my fraught relationship with my father." That is then a signal to me that I need to frame scenes such that (a) these relatives or things related to them will show up, so that there can be conflict of some kind that actually involves them, and (b) the kinds of conflicts involved generally don't need to be violent ones, but instead ones of personal perception (oh, how many siblings mutually feel the other has been treated better!), resources, prestige, poor communication, etc. Thus, my scene-framing might include setting a scene where the Bard is liable (but not guaranteed) to misunderstand a situation, or to catch someone in a compromising position, or to risk his own or the family's reputation, etc.--not because I have any plot in mind for such conflicts, but because the player thinks it will be interesting to face and resolve such conflicts.

Likewise, my issues with the other bits. "Take your game in...new directions" implies you have directions you were going, which means a pre-written plot. You can't go in a new direction if you didn't have an old direction to go, y'know? And similarly "force you to improvise," well, a lot of the heavy lifting is that word "force." If you are forced to improvise, that means you otherwise would have not done so, but something made it so you had to. All of this communicates pretty strongly that the DM already has a firm direction, is the "author" of the situation, and the players are causing complications which have to be adjusted for. Story Now isn't supposed to have any pre-planned direction for there to be adjusted.

Again, I'm not strongly resisting your interpretation. What you describe however could well fit what the DMG2 text outlines. I think I would like further evidence to buttress the position before wanting to say I'm confident of seeing in D&D game text any firm suggestion of player authorship. You agree though that the text seems to envision an existing style of play - the player type described exists, here's how to handle it - sort of thing?

I mean, I think it does do so, but it's worth noting that 2006 is well after the GNS model had been promulgated. Indeed, it's nearly a decade after the original "threefold model" was proposed, and around seven years after the more fully-articulated statements (which came around '99). So I would absolutely expect that people would have been accounting for this if Edwards and the Forge generally had been saying "hey, this is a thing people want, but which isn't getting served" 7-9 years earlier.

But--and I think you have essentially admitted this already, please correct me if I'm wrong--the framing of the text (especially the opening bit that I elided) pretty clearly presents this as mostly a minority of players. It strongly implies that a good chunk of players really couldn't care less about story (these are, presumably, hardcore gamists, what I would call "Score-and-Achievement" players), and that even among those who do care, relatively basic story-work is all you need to do to satisfy them.

True, but the reality is that the DMG for any edition is full of information that many people don't read, especially people who only play. If you want something in your game to be important to players, you should put it in the PHB.

Okay but...it does. I mean, it doesn't spell it out as fully and explicitly as it does in the 4e DMG, but it literally does say that player-written quests are a thing. It even explicitly says to check out the DMG if you want to know what the guildelines are! 4e PHB page 258, "Quests":

You can also, with your DM’s approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character’s background. For instance, perhaps your mother is the person whose remains lie in the Fortress of the Iron Ring. Quests can also relate to individual goals, such as a ranger searching for a magic bow to wield. Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign’s unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story.
When you complete quests, you earn rewards, including experience points, treasure, and possibly other kinds of rewards. The Dungeon Master’s Guide includes guidelines for your DM about creating quests, evaluating player-created quests, and assigning rewards for completing quests.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yes, the GM needs to know something about characters, but it can literally be one or two spare facts:

GM: Tell me something about your character.
[/b]Player:[/b] She's terrified of heights and she loves her sister.
BM: Okay so you're out for a hike with your sister when she trips and falls off the edge of the cliff. She's hanging on to a shrub but the root's slowly pulling out from the crumbling ground. Any added weight could send the whole thing sliding off. What do you do? That sure is a long fall....

The GM knows things relevant to the character, but the only bit of backstory there is inferred: That the character has had a sister for a while and they have presumably had a good relationship. Or maybe her sister hates her...let's find out! This scene could be a great way of exploring that, in fact. In any case, dramatic need is front and center here, with minimal backstory.



Or the group can assert connections and figure out the backstories through play. Or the group can create existing connections during play.

You don't have to play this way, but you can, and many people seem hell-bent on denying it's possible or that people have fun doing it. I really appreciate @Micah Sweet making the effort to understand Story Now, even though it's totally not their cup of tea.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

OK, I get it. To me such unmoored dramatic needs seem incredibly shallow and lack any proper emotional weight and of course it would be impossible for me to immerse into a character who doesn't even have rudimentary knowledge of their own past, but to each their own.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, I would never want to shift that paradigm, and very much dislike Story Now and its trappings, first of all.

If that weren't the case, I would target both, in both books, and do so more strongly than 4e did.

Sure, it’s not to your preference. But let’s do a little roleplaying and pretend it is. And let’s pretend you have to pick GMs or Players as the first step in your mission to do so (because I agree it should involve both).

I’d think that getting the person who traditionally has like 95% of the authority in a game on board with distributing that authority a bit would be the better choice.