A GM can and should attempt to make all decision about the fictional setting without regard to the player's intentions.
<snip>
The GM is absolutely not in any kind of driver's seat, they aren't advancing "the narrative" in any meaningful way, outside of hopefully setting up an interesting place to be in, with interesting problems to solve and interesting things to care about.
What sort of RPGing are you talking about here?
If you're asserting this for RPGing in general, then you're just wrong. Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, 4e D&D, Torchbearer, Agon - just to mention a handful of RPGs - are ones in which the GM
should not attempt to make all decisions about the fictional setting without regard to the player's intentions.
If you're asserting it for skill challenges, you're also just wrong, as these are part of the resolution machinery of a RPG - 4e D&D - that makes
having regard to the players' intentions an important consideration in GMing.
If you're asserting it as your preference, well fair enough, but I'm not sure how that bears upon the thread topic.
This is really starting to get to me. I don't know why the approach represented here by SCs gets a monopoly on "interesting." I've used the phrase "interesting decision" several times to describe what is enjoyable about the kind of optimization puzzle you get from trying to take the best option in a complicated system, and there exists a whole field of games that live and die entirely on conceit being fun. Arguably any abstract board-game has nothing to recommend it outside of "trying to make the best decision out of a complicated but limited set of choices," and we've been doing that as long as we've had history.
Is it truly so baffling that a person might enjoy a serial set of such problems in a boundless, serially repeatable format, where instead of acquiring the most victory points, one gets the satisfaction of "winning" by instead defeating their fictional childhood rival and saving the country from a rampaging elder god? The appeal is pretty intrinsic. Heck there's a whole genre of computer games, the "immersive sim" which is built around exactly this model, they just aren't as good at it as TTRPGs are. It's really hard to let players have the entire palette of all their actions open to them at all times in a videogame.
I'm perfectly willing to concede, and have several times done so, that if you don't care about this kind of agency, or, if you're willing to take another priority over player agency (like say, narrative arc cohesion, or even ease of preparation/use) you might absolutely reach for a SC model. I am not willing to concede that "agency" in the sense I'm using it doesn't exist, isn't entertaining and engaging, nor that skill challenges lack it.
<snip>
I have, I didn't like them (well, even that's an overstatement, better to say I liked them less than other TTRPG experiences I've had) I've spent a long time thinking about why, and formulated a theory about player agency to explain it.
None of what you say is baffling. You're describing a type of RPGing that I have started many threads about, and that I think of as
RPGing as puzzle-solving. I don't mean by that there is necessarily a unique solution (although sometimes it comes close - think of Tomb of Horrors), but that the principal job of the players is to take the pieces that the GM presents them with - the various elements of the fiction - and use them to come up with a solution. The key
value, on the player side, in this sort of play, is
efficiency or even
expediency.
It's perhaps worth noting, at least in passing, that there is at least one RPG published by a well-regarded design team that combines this sort of RPGing with a type of player-intent driven RPGing, namely, Torchbearer. (In terms of its design heritage it combines Burning Wheel with classic D&D.) I haven't played enough of it to form a view on how successful it ultimately is, but I have played enough to know that it is amply playable and is fun.
@AbdulAlhazred and
@Manbearcat are two posters in this thread who know the system better than I do (though I think of the three of us I may have the most Burning Wheel experience and so the best sense of how it lives up to that particular side of its heritage).
But the juxtaposition of your two quotes above surely makes it clear why you are experiencing some pushback to your agency claims. A system in which
the GM make all decision about the fictional setting without regard to the player's intentions fairly clearly gives the players less authority over the content of the fiction than one in which
the GM frames situations having regard to player intentions (see eg 4e D&D's player-authored quests) and/or in which
the GM narrates consequences of checks having regard to player intentions (which is how skill challenges work). The systems I've just described produce fiction that either closely reflects player intentions (if the players roll well such that their PCs succeed in their quests) or that is shaped in obvious opposition to those intentions, and hence still reflects the players' concerns (if the players roll poorly, such that their PCs fail, leading to the GM narrating consequences that express that failure of goal/intention).
This is also why you are receiving pushback on your railroading claims. A system in which whatever happens - be it success or failure - reflects and expresses in some fashion the intent the players had for their PCs in the imagined world hardly counts as a railroad in the standard meaning of that term. It is the players, not the GM, who are providing the basic orientation of play, are establishing (via their intents for their PCs) what sorts of outcomes will honour success or failure, etc.
I'm arguing the game is improved by giving players agency to affect the number of points of interaction it takes to achieve their goals
<snip>
This is entirely intrinsic to the player's goals. If your goal was the save the last native badgerhorse and then it dies, the goal is not longer achievable
<snip>
The whole enjoyment is in picking an effective strategy to make that desired outcome occur.
<snip>
I think what I'm talking about is not particularly radical. You can just keep the desired outcome in your head, and use it as a guide to determine what action you take next.
Affect, in your first quoted sentence, and
make in your third, are misleading verbs. Because the players aren't actually making changes to their PCs' situations (outside of some rather narrow resolution frameworks, like the depletion of a wall's "structure points" that we discussed upthread). What they are doing is generating - via success or failure at their checks - "prompts" to the GM to narrate new fiction in response. But as
@AbdulAlhazred has explained in detail, the idea that any given action resolution process (outside of those few narrow frameworks like bursting down doors or bashing through walls) will generate unique possibilities of narration is just fanciful.
Even with the wall example, how many bashings will (i) attract attention from people inclined to defend the wall, or (ii) cause enough impact that a brick or stone might fall from it and bang the bashing PC on the head, or (iii) cause enough dust that there is the possibility of interference with vision, or that some sort of lung condition becomes a risk for those breathing it in? I spent some of my time this weekend hacking away at a tree stump with my block splitter and my axe. Shards of wood were flying about. I was wearing safety glasses in order to stop them getting into my eye. D&D characters don't wear safety glasses - so what is the risk to them of hacking away at blocks of wood?
And look at your example of the badgerhorse. Who decides that the one that dies in front of the PCs is the last one? Who decides that there is not a hidden pocket of badgerhorses, in some remote place, that might yet be discovered and used to restore these animals to all the lands they used to roam? The whole parameter for success here is determined by the GM exercising their authority (which is virtually unlimited, on your preferred approach) over the backstory and situation.
No one thinks that your preference is particularly radical. As I mentioned upthread, there are well-known RPGs that are built around it, including 3E D&D (outside of combat), GURPS, to a significant extent RuneQuest, to some but a lesser extent Rolemaster. But when you use verbs like "affect" and "make" to elide actual processes, which involve the GM making decisions about what happens next based on their imagination of the fiction, you will be invited to sharpen your analysis!
The GM can be quite easily removed from resolution. Actions can just do whatever they say they do, and be absolute descriptors of themselves.
As
@AbdulAlhazred noted, the GM - so far from being removable - is utterly central. Without the GM, on your approach there is no way of knowing whether or not this dead badgerhorse is the last one. The players have no way of making that true or false in the fiction, given that all they can do is declare actions for their PCs and - as per the quote with which I opened this post - their intent is irrelevant to resolution.
the description of the world is established by the resolution mechanism. "You jump 30 ft" is quite clear. We know where you started, we know where you landed, we know what kinds of things modify that number from a table of sensible modifiers, it's all self-contained and does not require anyone to adjust the fiction outside of the stated effect.
<snip>
"Overall goals" do not need system specification. Players can just want things, and then take actions to try and make them occur. If I want to be somewhere else, I will go look at the movement rules. If I want to disguise my appearance, I will check the rules for creating an effective disguise, use them to measure its effectiveness, and then use the rules for determining whether a disguise is seen through when the PC interacts with anyone else. Resolution does not need to be less atomic, from those specific actions, players can string together plans and desired specific changes in the world.
AbdulAlhazred already analysed your jumping example: slippery surfaces, blustery winds, an insect in the eye at the key moment of run-up, etc - all of these are things that could modify the "how far can you jump" number but are not, in fact, able to be imagined in total by even the most diligent GM.
The disguise example I've already mentioned. Which NPC might have seen the PC in the market yesterday? Which sorts of accent need to be altered or concealed? There is so much that is involved in concealing one's identity as one moves about a place, and again no GM can conceivably imagine it all, or factor it all in to the resolution.
Gygax, in his RPG design, used two basic techniques to resolve these problems that arise from the number (for practical purposes, unlimited number) of things that might both bear upon, and result from, any particluar action (1) He establishes the canonical environment as an incredibly austere one - the typical dungeon room, in classic D&D, has less stuff in it than there is to be found on my kitchen bench. (2) By a combination of rules and convention he makes some parts of the fiction highly salient - doors, most obviously, but also ceiling heights and slopes of floors - while making other parts of it, such as interior design (colours of walls or ceilings, design of chests or armoires, artistic styles of statutes, etc) mostly irrelevant
unless expressly called out by the GM (eg mention of a checkerboard floor, or a particular image on a tapestry or face on a statute, or the colour poem in ToH).
Once we get to city adventures (as Gygax calls them in his PHB), or variants on them such as infiltrating a working castle, or trying to depose a political leader, the idea that this can all be established and extrapolated in some impersonal fashion becomes (in my mind) quite ridiculous. I mean, the GM can make notes like "If the king goes missing for more than a week, the duke takes over as regent" but how is this increasing player agency? Or telling us what happens if the PCs, before kidnapping the king, run a strong campaign of delegitimation of the duke?
The upshot, in practice - at least in my pretty extensive experience - is that we get improbably austere fiction. Every building has architecture but not colour. Every person has height but not accent. Every kingdom has a population, and perhaps a standing army, but no customs for sayings before dinner. An austerity that was a mere contrivance in Gygaxian dungeon crawling becomes something that (in my view) is ludicrous if we're supposed to be imagining realistic worlds.
You're talking as though "this thing cannot be done perfectly" means "therefor, we should do precisely the opposite" follows.
<snip>
We can certainly both agree a bad GM can cause havoc in either state, from setting up SCs where they don't belong, making them too complex or not complex enough, or in my paradigm, by arbitrarily adding additional complication to the fictional situation after it's been established, so let's assume a talented one. In that case, my paradigm will increase player agency at least some of the time, even if our poor GM occasionally does slip after a string of successes and decide there really should be another guard patrol in this castle in the heat of the moment.
Pretend for a moment that we did have a perfect simulation of a fantasy setting available, to go look at after each declared action, and the goal of our system is emulate that view whenever possible. What will have a higher success rate? A system whereby a human does their best to emulate knowledge of that world, or one where we pick a number ranging ranging from 4-15?
As
@AbdulAlhazred said, how is it relevant to RPG design and play to suppose that something, which in fact is not possible, is actual?
Even if it were, why should I care about emulation of in-fiction likelihoods (which is the "success rate" you refer to if I've read you correctly) as a goal of RPG design? What is the likelihood that the person killed by the burglar whom Peter Parker chose not to stop would be Peter's Uncle Ben? Given the population of New York City, near enough to zero. But that is what drives the story? As Luke Crane says in the rules for Burning Wheel, if a player establishes on of their PCs' relationships as their wife, then
of course when the vampyr comes to town it is the PC's wife whom they try to seduce. In my view interesting RPGing is not based on likelihoods but on narrative drivers.
This also brings in my remark, upthread, about the value of efficiency/expedience. One purpose of a system like the skill challenge framework is to foreground other values in play. This is one reason why a system like that is (as I posted upthread) more likely to produce fiction that resembles the inspirational fiction, which rarely treats efficiency or expedience as the most important thing.
I'm fairly willing to concede that if you want to emulate a specific narrative, you can better achieve that by using a closed scene resolution system, because you will have more control over the arc of the action. That's not really relevant to my point about agency
I don't know who you intended to refer to be "you", but I want to make it clear that (if your sentence is to be true) than it can't be confined to the GM. In the examples that I posted, it was
the player who imagined the giant ox in the barn, and who (at the table, via a successful declared action) made it the case that in the fiction the trickster PC saw it and was able to take it. And the same player then came up with the idea of swapping it for the gifted steed (this failed) and of his PC using his knife to jam the giant chief's mouth open so as to avoid being swallowed (this succeeded).
In the 4e episode I posted, it was the player who came up with the idea that singing an Elven song of apples blossoming in the summer would help endure the terror of the demon's cries,
and who came up with the mechanical notion that this was a way to make a Diplomacy check feasible given the character's fictional position.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "emulation of a specific narrative" - to the best of my knowledge neither of the episodes I described emulated any specific narrative. But I think they evoked the tropes and feel of a certain sort of myth or fairy story much more than would be the case were they resolved using GURPS, RM, 3E D&D or even RQ.
And to me, this is all highly relevant to a discussion of player agency. It shows players authoring fiction, and doing clever things with the interplay between fiction, resultant fictional positioning, and mechanical possibility. It's not puzzle-solving, but that's not the only form of agency going about in RPGing.
Why is it superior that a GM should pick a specific number of obstacles, instead of attempting to determine the situation in absence of the player's input?
<snip>
you're suggesting that it's better to set that number beforehand, through an arbitrary system instead of leaving it up to human judgement.
I think I've provided a fairly extensive explanation of my preference here; so has
@AbdulAlhazred. Once we accept that the players as well as the GM will contribute to imagining the fictional situation; and once we decide that we want some determination of finality other than the GM just deciding that that was the last of the badgerhorses; then some mechanism is needed to regulate the generation of adversity and failure relative to players' successful and unsuccessful checks. This is what
@Manbearcat above referred to as "the budget".
The skill challenge structure is not the only way to do this. But it is one way. And as the OP said - and this was it's point; the OP compared skill challenges to other closed-scene resolution systems and said nothing about GM-extrapolates-outcomes-from-their-conception-of-the-fiction resolution - it has certain strengths compared to those other ways, including the way it centres the fiction in action resolution.
