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

[Cadence]

We might have reasons for permitting knowledge checks but not Diplomacy-based flashbacks of the sort I suggest in my post, but those reasons can't be reasons to do with the temporal relationship between the fiction's "past" and its "present", given that both examples are identical in this particular respect.

The nature of what is being "put into the past" apparently matters quite a bit to some people.

The authors of D&D (to my knowledge) haven't found the need to bring up time travel in discussing knowledge checks, the authors of BitD did when discussing flashbacks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure. I was just noting that there is something at least vaguely analogous to something like "trapsmith".

Well, I mean, there are people who design and deploy actual traps too. I certainly wouldn't argue that nobody in the world exists who might qualify. They are just not sitting at a D&D table, or at VERY few of them, and the way D&D and traps are structured, they would have to be the DM for it to matter. In fact I'd think being a trapsmith and playing old school D&D as a player would be a highly frustrating experience! lol.

Well, one of the reasons for having dice rolls, as I've suggested in the past, is to deal with things below the level of description, that can still impact things. If you're not going for a purely narrative sort of approach, its why I view entirely diceless/non-randomizer resolution with more than a little dubiousness.

Oh, I entirely agree, it is one of (along with insufficient general knowledge being at the table) a primary reason.

Eh. I'd argue Numenera, like they other Cypher system games is in some ways pretty deconstructionist. I don't think I'd call it state of the art by any means in terms of the mainstream.

Eh, not really. I mean, I haven't played Cypher, but I read through it pretty carefully. Its a very calculated and deliberate design who's basic premise is a conscious and systematic rejection of Ron Edwards et al. In tone and even in some ways in a structural and mechanical sense, it parallels PbtA and similar types of games very closely in what it addresses, and then utterly commits itself to a GM-centered fiction pure task-oriented system ala games like Traveller (and I mean Traveller as classically portrayed by most people who play it, not @pemerton). I guess what I would say is it is VERY analogous to Top Secret S.I. or FASERIP games that have a fortune mechanic. There's a meta-currency, which is not a feature of Traveller, but in terms of resolution and how and why it works, Cypher System is right out of the mid-1970s.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Since a flashback can't change what's been revealed so far (you can't go back and kill the person you're talking to), does that make flashbacks harder to do* because you greatly limit what kinds of failure are possible? (The character obviously didn't get detained for half a day or beaten or maybe even get recognized). Would a failure be something like something caused the target to notice the gun had been messed with, for example?


* Edit: I mean, "make them harder to run than the things happening in the present"

Yeah, its an interesting question. I mean, clearly if you are going to run the world out of chronological order you will have to address issues related to causality, who could know what when and what the impact of that might be, etc. I guess if you want to look deeper into it, this kind of mechanic would not work in a game which was organized around GM's challenging players in a classic D&D sense. The player's agenda in that game is cast as being an antagonist to the GM's imagined fictional challenges, so they would logically exploit the limitations inherent in the situation (IE I can't die because it would create a paradox). It works in games like BitD because that is NOT the organizing principle of the game. As a game who's agenda is basically "create these heist narratives" nobody is motivated to do that, or at least it would be bad form. While you certainly advocate 'all out' for your character, the 'all out' is within the narrative, not at some meta level. These games are structured such that it is natural to work that way. For instance meta-currency gives you a perfectly good way to work things in your favor from the outside, you don't need to resort to gaming the system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The nature of what is being "put into the past" apparently matters quite a bit to some people.

The authors of D&D (to my knowledge) haven't found the need to bring up time travel in discussing knowledge checks, the authors of BitD did when discussing flashbacks.

Well, remember, BitD actually IS a fantasy game, there's nothing 'impossible' about time travel in BitD. It may or may not exist, but it isn't any more unlikely than in D&D.

I think the only reason things like knowledge being defined only as-needed doesn't bother some people is simply because what is happening is pretty vague. With a rope we know the PC has some finite ability to carry stuff, and gear is both acquired and disposed of or used up. At the very least there is an obvious opportunity cost, I can carry rope or more torches.

Knowledge is much fuzzier in terms of these opportunity costs, once you have it, you just carry it around pretty much forever and its not necessary to define where and when it was acquired. However, I could posit a narrative about how a fact came into my character's possession which would be just as dubious as the rope! I mean, why do I know facts about demons? As a Ranger of Otillis I have no interest in them, and I'd have had to go out of my way to learn about it. So, why am I getting this knowledge check? If I were to justify it, I'd need to either add significant facts to my backstory, or some sort of montage where I deliberately learned this information, neither of which is necessarily plausible.

So, IMHO, knowledge has exactly the same issues as equipment, fundamentally. Players are just used to not thinking about it because the opportunity costs may be less. One could easily question this though, like "how come I didn't study cave bears instead, since that was the most likely thing we could run into, and when we did I failed my check!" Why was it demons? There's nothing logical about it at all.

 

[Cadence]

Well, remember, BitD actually IS a fantasy game, there's nothing 'impossible' about time travel in BitD. It may or may not exist, but it isn't any more unlikely than in D&D.

I think the only reason things like knowledge being defined only as-needed doesn't bother some people is simply because what is happening is pretty vague. With a rope we know the PC has some finite ability to carry stuff, and gear is both acquired and disposed of or used up. At the very least there is an obvious opportunity cost, I can carry rope or more torches.

Knowledge is much fuzzier in terms of these opportunity costs, once you have it, you just carry it around pretty much forever and its not necessary to define where and when it was acquired. However, I could posit a narrative about how a fact came into my character's possession which would be just as dubious as the rope! I mean, why do I know facts about demons? As a Ranger of Otillis I have no interest in them, and I'd have had to go out of my way to learn about it. So, why am I getting this knowledge check? If I were to justify it, I'd need to either add significant facts to my backstory, or some sort of montage where I deliberately learned this information, neither of which is necessarily plausible.

So, IMHO, knowledge has exactly the same issues as equipment, fundamentally. Players are just used to not thinking about it because the opportunity costs may be less. One could easily question this though, like "how come I didn't study cave bears instead, since that was the most likely thing we could run into, and when we did I failed my check!" Why was it demons? There's nothing logical about it at all.

Sure, I've written upthread (#2516, for example) that a bunch of D&D things in D&D like knowledge checks seem akin to the BitD loadout for standard gear.

What type of knowledge check is the ranger using to make the check to know something obscure and detailed about Demons?

• Using a knowledge nature to make the check seems about as dubious as the mountain climbing gear having formal wear or lock picks in it. (Seems akin to a flashback requiring gear get in BitD).
  
  
• Using a knowledge religion or knowledge outer planes seems more like wanting to get some gear that would be on the ordinary list for mountain climbing like rope or a first aid kit or a way to signal for help. Why would the ranger have knowledge religion religion or knowledge outer planes? Presumably there is some reason that came up in character creation. (Seems akin to using loadout for a standard item).

What if the player only wants to have their character know about their particular religion or a particular outer plane? I'd hope the DM would let them have a more limited in scope proficiency than what the book gives, with a bonus I guess?

If the knowledge isn't something obscure (cave bear tracks for a ranger living around cave bears) I don't see them needing a role even. Isn't that an auto-success thing?

If the player wants to argue on the spot that they were kidnapped by a demon a long time ago and deserve a demonology role (even though this isn't in the backstory seen so far)... that feels to me like the flashback kind of thing and off the rails for D&D.

I can maybe see giving the party a roll to see if anyone randomly knows some piece of trivia about a Demon I guess. Kind of like in real life asking if someone randomly has a safety pin on them when there's no reason anyone would. Or in real life someone might randomly have seen a documentary recently. It doesn't feel like saying "yeah, one of you has heard that fairy tail at some point" or "yeah one of you probably has a safety pin" is in the same ballpark as a player monologuing their way into having it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Since a flashback can't change what's been revealed so far (you can't go back and kill the person you're talking to), does that make flashbacks harder to do* because you greatly limit what kinds of failure are possible? (The character obviously didn't get detained for half a day or beaten or maybe even get recognized). Would a failure be something like something caused the target to notice the gun had been messed with, for example?


* Edit: I mean, "make them harder to run than the things happening in the present"

It's an interesting question and I bet you'd get different answers depending on who you ask.

I think that navigating Flashback scenes in BitD can be a bit tricky because you don't want to introduce any kind of contradictory information or logical inconsistencies. So, I think they require more care than scenes in which a GM is free to narrate or introduce information however they like.

But I think the constraints actually help in that they narrow the range of possibilities. In most cases, it's pretty easy to avoid contradictions, and those barriers help to focus on available avenues. So to lean on your example, we know we can't kill the guy who's in the "present" scene with us... but that gun he laid on the table? Maybe there's something we can do with that.

As I read @hawkeyefan's post, it wasn't that the GM mentally fills the role of looking around but that the GM tells you who/what you recognise - that is, someone else is relating your memories to you.

Right, this is something you've described in past discussions and it's what I had in mind. If my character walks into what is his hometown pub, I'll likely find it jarring if the GM says I don't know anyone there. It will feel like "Okay, clearly I know no one here because the GM doesn't want me to know anyone here" rather than "Oh no one I know happens to be here at the moment".

It all depends on how it's presented. @Cadence went on to offer a few different takes, and I think some may lessen how jarring this kind of thing may be. But I also imagine that we all have personal preferences no these things, and the different methods will evoke different responses depending on the person.

We might have reasons for permitting knowledge checks but not Diplomacy-based flashbacks of the sort I suggest in my post, but those reasons can't be reasons to do with the temporal relationship between the fiction's "past" and its "present", given that both examples are identical in this particular respect.

Right, this is what I was getting at. I think that there is often an instinctual resistance to things like your Diplomacy example, and that resistance is often attributed to chronology, and I don't think that's all there is to it. There may one or more different/additional reasons for it, and those are what I'm curious about.

The nature of what is being "put into the past" apparently matters quite a bit to some people.

The authors of D&D (to my knowledge) haven't found the need to bring up time travel in discussing knowledge checks, the authors of BitD did when discussing flashbacks.

I agree it does seem to matter to some people.

Regarding flashbacks, I don't know what you mean about BitD bringing up time travel in relation to them. I don't think that happens at all, except perhaps to make it clear that's not what's happening. Is that what you mean? I think the Blades rules are typically much more clear and overt about process and what is happening at the table than many examples of D&D, particularly 5e, which is filled with vague descriptions of processes that can be interpreted many ways.

I think that D&D tends to approach the topic of knowledge checks and the like and how they establish past events in present play as being such a given that they don't even need to address it. Past events are established all the time in play.

I think that Flashbacks are a more active case compared to the passive case of D&D Knowledge checks, and so may warrant a comment to clarify what's actually happening, but they're otherwise very similar.

 

[Cadence]

Regarding flashbacks, I don't know what you mean about BitD bringing up time travel in relation to them. I don't think that happens at all, except perhaps to make it clear that's not what's happening. Is that what you mean?

<insert agreement with the snipped parts of the post, and the agreement with quoted part is... >

That is what I meant. The writers must have worried some people would think it was like the kill-the-baby-genocider time travel, and we're clarifying it wasn't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, in BitD, when you do a flashback, you still have to play out the scene. So you describe how you sneak into the person’s house and change out their bullets. The GM will decide what kind of position you are in and what kind of effect you might have, and then you roll. Really, to pull it off, you’ll have to be both clever and lucky, so it’s not a gimme by any means. And you have to take stress, sometimes a significant amount of stress. But if you do pull it off, that’s where Blades gets really fun and cinematic, because you can jump back into the present scene and have your character play it out with the knowledge that there are blanks in the other person’s gun.

I'm curious about this, since I've never actually played a game using this technique; what happens if you fail in a way that should have had ripple effects in the time frame between when you trigger the flashback and when it had actually occured? Say, you do something that would have logically made some of the opposition change behavior you've already taken advantage of? Does the GM just avoid having anything that wouldn't change things until after the flashback trigger point?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm curious about this, since I've never actually played a game using this technique; what happens if you fail in a way that should have had ripple effects in the time frame between when you trigger the flashback and when it had actually occured? Say, you do something that would have logically made some of the opposition change behavior you've already taken advantage of? Does the GM just avoid having anything that wouldn't change things until after the flashback trigger point?

Since folks have been insisting this whole time that it isn't a retcon, I would think the GM would have no choice but to avoid stuff like that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Who are these people? Why are you only commenting about what you think some hypothetical segment of people may think?

Because the alternative is to potentially put words in someone's mouth.

What do you think about it? Do you Thomas Shey think it’s a meaningless distinction?

Sometimes.

Who? You said that there is one poster in this thread whose mind I should not try to be changing. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind.

No, I said there was one who'd made it clear that he held this sort of thing strongly enough he'd avoid genres where it was necessary to have things like this. I'm suggesting that someone who feels strongly enough to do that isn't liable to change perspective because you think his POV is flawed.

Sure you can. And you shared your anecdote about why it wouldn’t work for you. Great.

What I’m not getting is this angle where I’ve somehow attacked the opinions of others… vague unnamed others…and so my points are not productive.

Just speak for yourself.

Given the number of people who have liked the posts I've made who were, for the most part, some of the specific people I think I'm fairly representing, no. I'm sure if they disagreed with my characterization of the general view they have, they wouldn't have liked the posts.

It was your need to defend people who may disagree with me because they hold the most common and majority opinion on the matter.

Because I think its a counterproductive mistake. That doesn't mean I think there's some "danger" from it.

I didn’t do that. Critique my posts all you want.

Which is exactly what I've been doing. You just don't happen to like it.