D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Pedantic]

Yeah, certainly in BitD I am quite aware of my stress track and harm, and which resources I've consumed (armor box, special armor box, etc.). But as you say, I don't sit around calculating what the next chess move is, I play my character! Maybe I accept a Devil's Bargain instead of pushing because I know I've burned a bunch of stress, but I also know the bargain the GM is cooking up will fit.

These things are not necessarily in tension, and frankly shouldn't be in most designs. If you can really on a character wanting to achieve some goals and generally wanting to survive to do it, it's not particularly difficult to put the player's incentives in making the best tactical choices and the characters incentives to act in accord.

The easiest ways to break that symbiosis have a lot less to do with mechanical weight than with design direction. You need to restrict actions to a forward looking causal timescale, ensure decision and resolution map closely in time, and make sure PC abilities are diegetic and mostly intentional.

As long as the making between any given player and PC decision is strong enough, on the same timescale, and you've aligned their incentives, there is no tension there. Calculating chess moves is playing the character.

 

[CreamCloud0]

In my groups, we're roughly divided between "they have vanished into the ether" and "CLANK CLANK CLANK."

sometimes you can even manage to get both at once when your guards roll even more garbage on their perception/investigation checks than the party's awful stealth check.

 

[Aldarc]

In D&D there is no "move" by the DM. The PCs are interacting with the world around them. Maybe they heard an alarm go off when they failed because this door was really a trap, maybe they set off an alarm somewhere else, maybe they wasted enough time that something else happens. Maybe there is no consequence. It all just depends on what makes sense for the scenario.

(1) Then as per the 5e DMG, the PCs probably shouldn't bother rolling dice or making an ability check if there is no meaningful consequence for failure:

Only call for a roll if there is a meaningful consequence for failure. (5e DMG, p. 237)

(2) In DW, for example, "the PCs are also interacting with the world around them." The purpose of player moves is to tell us (a) when the players roll for their PCs' interactions in the world and (b) what their successful outcomes for the respective moves may entail. Similarly, players/PCs may not always know what the negative outcomes of their moves will be, since that power is assigned to the GM and their respective moves. And what moves they make follows the same idea as you say here: "It all just depends on what makes sense for the scenario." And what makes sense for the scenario is really another way of saying "follow the fiction."

A lot of the different "maybes" you describe above could very well be different outcomes for failure as per the moves the DW GM makes. Since you are listening/watching to some Dungeon World actual plays to learn a bit about the game, it may also be helpful to read through the GM Moves section of DW alongside that, possibly on the Dungeon World SRD. I think that it would help you see the sort of things that the DW GM is supposed to do and the sort moves that are at their disposal. In many respects, the GM moves exist mostly to codify and provide guidance/suggestions for the sort of things that GM could do.

As per above, the 5e DMG says the DM should only call for ability checks when there is a meaningful consequence for failure. However, the DMG fails to provide much (if any at all) elucidation on what a "meaningful consequence for failure" looks like. Now imagine in the 5e DMG, if you will, a list that provided suggestions for different ways that the DM could make consequences for failed ability checks meaningful. Some consequences are quite obvious - damage, spell/trap effects, etc. - but other consequences for failure are not always so clear. That's basically what GM moves do. However, I will say in contrast to other games, including D&D, that the design intent of GM moves in PbtA games is to keep the game fiction moving in some new direction by giving the PCs stuff to react to or interact with.

I fully understand and appreciate that this is not how you and others choose to run D&D as per your aforementioned stated preferences. I am not interrogating or villifying those preferences. My purpose here is informative and descriptive rather than persuasive since you explicitly expressed interest in understanding these PbtA games better, particularly Dungeon World.

I do think that you can intuit some of the differences between your preferred playstyle of D&D and Dungeon World, namely how it's off-putting or rubs you the wrong way. However, I also think that it's helpful to understand that behind the different terminology, which may seem strange and alien to you (e.g., Moves, Fronts, etc.), how some of its design is grounded in similar game concerns shared between DW and some subcultures of D&D and OSR.

For example, I heard that Vincent Baker partially developed his Apocalypse World game in response to a prevalent method of character play in 3e D&D (and its era of games) regarding skill checks: e.g., "I roll a Perception check." This is to say, it was a more "mechanics first" game style rather than "fiction first" one. (FYI, this is a common shared criticism as well among OSR circles.) Baker's solution to this in Apocalypse World was the Player Moves system. This is to say, the player can't roll a Perception check (i.e., Read a Sitch in AW and Discern Realities in DW) until the PC does the thing in the fiction and triggers the GM's call for the appropriate roll. Similarly, the GM Moves system is meant to alleviate another problem that Baker (and OSR circles as well) had with a lot of what we may call "Trad" play: i.e., GM pre-authored story.

It's perfectly acceptable if you prefer the more OSR style solutions to these problems over against PbtA ones. I enjoy OSR ones too. I also like playing OSR games. However, I personally found it useful in my own enjoyment of both OSR games and "narrative games" (like PbtA ones) to understand how both share a common set of concerns and how they went about addressing them albeit in different ways. Moreover, there was and still is a lot of overlap in the design space between these communities.

I realize that this is a long tangent, but all of this is to say that while D&D may not have "moves" in a PbtA sense, GM Moves in PbtA are very often consequences that "[make] sense in the scenario" that have been codified as a list of suggestions and guidance. Even if D&D doesn't have Moves, I have personally found that the list of GM moves in DW helped my own D&D play because of how it helped me think about play in D&D, particularly in regards to the consequences of the PCs "interacting with the world around them."

I am not saying or expecting that Moves and PbtA will or should help you do likewise. However, if you want to understand "WTF is going on?" when watching the actual plays that you requested, for whatever your reasons may be, I think that understanding how moves work and what they are for and what they are not for would be really helpful for your expressed purpose.

You keep speaking in PbtA terms as if it's relevant to a D&D game. I don't think it is in many, if not most, cases. I establish the world and it's inhabitants. Maybe someone or something will hear if they try to bust the door down or cast knock. Sometimes nothing will happen because no one will hear it. The only response I'm going to have is one that's logical to the scenario.

Sorry, I just don't see anything relevant to D&D here and I'm not discussing PbtA any more.

I'm kinda perplexed why you are telling @pemerton here that he is speaking in PbtA terms and how you won't talk about PbtA anymore while replying to a section where he is talking about the GUMSHOE system. Did you already decide in advance what you were going to say without reading what he wrote first?

 

[Faolyn]

I just want to preface this my saying when I clicked on the alerts button, it told me that your reply came from tomorrow.

So somebody is time traveling and I don't think it's me.

I think what's hanging this up a bit is that some of us differentiate between "the PCs" and "the party". Yes, the camera tends to stay on whatever party is being played at the time; but things can happen off-camera too.

Yes, this is what I mean. The worldbuilding doesn't get seen by anyone but the GM.

Correct.

Well, they do slowly amass a lot of info - or can, should they choose to pay attention.

Which is also kind of a waste of worldbuilding. You're hinging dozens to thousands of hours of work on the ability of other people to realize it's something important enough to remember. Which, lets face it, many people simply can't or won't do. They have too many other things going on in their lives, or they have ADHD, or they don't pick up on a particular clue, or their notes get lost, or they simply missed, or misunderstood, what you said.

As I said, I love worldbuilding but... it mostly sits in my head or on paper, never getting used.

This can be as simple as just placing a few high-level adventure sites on the map for later use, even if you're not sure what you might run there quite yet. In my current setting I tossed an ancient ruined city on the map in a faraway place and wrote a bit about it in the player-facing history: it was a center of high learning (think Oldtown in GoT except with Bards too) that got overrun by Trolls and raiders several centuries ago. Right from the start I had in mind the idea of running an adventure there but it was probably about 7 real-world years into the campaign before I finally came up with something that made sense both as a good in-fiction reason for a party to go there and as to what could be there to find if-when they did.

Sure. That's definitely possible... if the game lasts that long. I may finally get to use a monster idea that I'd come up with more than a decade ago, but several games have come and gone since then, since there was never a right moment for it. (And who'da thunk it, a taxidermied "grotesque" golem meant for Ravenloft may show up in my MotW game, simply because a player thought there should be a taxidermy shop in town and came up with a good name for one.)

 

[Autumnal]

sometimes you can even manage to get both at once when your guards roll even more garbage on their perception/investigation checks than the party's awful stealth check.

Gilbert and Sullivan nailed this one.

 

[Oofta]

(1) Then as per the 5e DMG, the PCs probably shouldn't bother rolling dice or making an ability check if there is no meaningful consequence for failure:

Okay, to be pedantically correct there is no consequence other than not opening the lock.

(2) In DW, for example, "the PCs are also interacting with the world around them." The purpose of player moves is to tell us (a) when the players roll for their PCs' interactions in the world and (b) what their successful outcomes for the respective moves may entail. Similarly, players/PCs may not always know what the negative outcomes of their moves will be, since that power is assigned to the GM and their respective moves. And what moves they make follows the same idea as you say here: "It all just depends on what makes sense for the scenario." And what makes sense for the scenario is really another way of saying "follow the fiction."

I never said they weren't. I said in D&D the DM doesn't have "moves".

A lot of the different "maybes" you describe above could very well be different outcomes for failure as per the moves the DW GM makes. Since you are listening/watching to some Dungeon World actual plays to learn a bit about the game, it may also be helpful to read through the GM Moves section of DW alongside that, possibly on the Dungeon World SRD. I think that it would help you see the sort of things that the DW GM is supposed to do and the sort moves that are at their disposal. In many respects, the GM moves exist mostly to codify and provide guidance/suggestions for the sort of things that GM could do.

As per above, the 5e DMG says the DM should only call for ability checks when there is a meaningful consequence for failure. However, the DMG fails to provide much (if any at all) elucidation on what a "meaningful consequence for failure" looks like. Now imagine in the 5e DMG, if you will, a list that provided suggestions for different ways that the DM could make consequences for failed ability checks meaningful. Some consequences are quite obvious - damage, spell/trap effects, etc. - but other consequences for failure are not always so clear. That's basically what GM moves do. However, I will say in contrast to other games, including D&D, that the design intent of GM moves in PbtA games is to keep the game fiction moving in some new direction by giving the PCs stuff to react to or interact with.

I don't worry about the game fiction moving forward. I set the stage, the PCs do what they want. That stage is full of interesting things to interact with. I'm not telling a story.

I fully understand and appreciate that this is not how you and others choose to run D&D as per your aforementioned stated preferences. I am not interrogating or villifying those preferences. My purpose here is informative and descriptive rather than persuasive since you explicitly expressed interest in understanding these PbtA games better, particularly Dungeon World.

I do think that you can intuit some of the differences between your preferred playstyle of D&D and Dungeon World, namely how it's off-putting or rubs you the wrong way. However, I also think that it's helpful to understand that behind the different terminology, which may seem strange and alien to you (e.g., Moves, Fronts, etc.), how some of its design is grounded in similar game concerns shared between DW and some subcultures of D&D and OSR.

For example, I heard that Vincent Baker partially developed his Apocalypse World game in response to a prevalent method of character play in 3e D&D (and its era of games) regarding skill checks: e.g., "I roll a Perception check." This is to say, it was a more "mechanics first" game style rather than "fiction first" one. (FYI, this is a common shared criticism as well among OSR circles.) Baker's solution to this in Apocalypse World was the Player Moves system. This is to say, the player can't roll a Perception check (i.e., Read a Sitch in AW and Discern Realities in DW) until the PC does the thing in the fiction and triggers the GM's call for the appropriate roll. Similarly, the GM Moves system is meant to alleviate another problem that Baker (and OSR circles as well) had with a lot of what we may call "Trad" play: i.e., GM pre-authored story.

It's perfectly acceptable if you prefer the more OSR style solutions to these problems over against PbtA ones. I enjoy OSR ones too. I also like playing OSR games. However, I personally found it useful in my own enjoyment of both OSR games and "narrative games" (like PbtA ones) to understand how both share a common set of concerns and how they went about addressing them albeit in different ways. Moreover, there was and still is a lot of overlap in the design space between these communities.

I realize that this is a long tangent, but all of this is to say that while D&D may not have "moves" in a PbtA sense, GM Moves in PbtA are very often consequences that "[make] sense in the scenario" that have been codified as a list of suggestions and guidance. Even if D&D doesn't have Moves, I have personally found that the list of GM moves in DW helped my own D&D play because of how it helped me think about play in D&D, particularly in regards to the consequences of the PCs "interacting with the world around them."

I am not saying or expecting that Moves and PbtA will or should help you do likewise. However, if you want to understand "WTF is going on?" when watching the actual plays that you requested, for whatever your reasons may be, I think that understanding how moves work and what they are for and what they are not for would be really helpful for your expressed purpose.


I'm kinda perplexed why you are telling @pemerton here that he is speaking in PbtA terms and how you won't talk about PbtA anymore while replying to a section where he is talking about the GUMSHOE system. Did you already decide in advance what you were going to say without reading what he wrote first?

I understand what moves are. Or at least I believe I do. But PbtA games seem to be using narrative structures to tell stories. D&D is establishing a fiction that responds to the actions of the PCs in context of that fiction. Stories emerge from play, but it's never the focal point. The focal point is a rough simulation and, depending on group desire, character growth and change based on the character's experiences in that world. Sometimes that fiction includes outside forces that have nothing to do with the actions of the PCs. You can call those outside forces "fronts" if you want, I personally don't think the term is particularly enlightening to anyone not familiar with it.

Some things are analogous, some things are not. I simply don't find it useful to learn or use a different vocabulary that is never used in D&D to play or inform others of how to play D&D. It's not necessary and it seems to me that there are fundamental differences of approach. It may work for one specific style, but that style is pretty orthogonal from what I typically experience in D&D.

 

[Oofta]

I just want to preface this my saying when I clicked on the alerts button, it told me that your reply came from tomorrow.

View attachment 285010
So somebody is time traveling and I don't think it's me.

Maybe you're just behind the times?

Or of course someone posted that's on the other side of the international dateline.

 

[Faolyn]

In D&D there is no "move" by the DM. The PCs are interacting with the world around them. Maybe they heard an alarm go off when they failed because this door was really a trap, maybe they set off an alarm somewhere else, maybe they wasted enough time that something else happens. Maybe there is no consequence. It all just depends on what makes sense for the scenario.

Actually, there are moves--they're just not called moves. The DM deciding they set off an alarm somewhere is a move.

It's just that in PbtA games, "there is no consequence" is considered too boring to be allowed.

 

[Oofta]

Actually, there are moves--they're just not called moves. The DM deciding they set off an alarm somewhere is a move.

It's just that in PbtA games, "there is no consequence" is considered too boring to be allowed.

If there happens to be a consequence to the action other than they simply don't succeed you could call it a move. A round peg will fit in a square hole if the hole is big enough. But having a "there is no consequence [other than failure]" is one of the reasons I prefer D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

I've been gaming for a over 30 years. In all that time, I have known GMs who will run the same game for different groups, but... I think only one who ran different groups in the same game.

Are you talking groups of players here, or groups of characters?

When I say "multi-party" I'm mostly talking about different groups of characters, who may or may not be run by the same actual players.

This, the character - player lineup for two parties might at a given moment look like:

Altellan - Jane
Bjarnni - Peter
Cadwallader - Mary
Dionys - Joe
Evensong - Steve

Falstaffe - Jane
Gregorius - Peter
Hobbes - Joe
Iago - Kathy
Jerelle - Mary

Later, between adventures, Mary might decide to move Jerelle over to the other party (odds are extremely high both parties share a common root and know - or at the very least know of - each other), retire Cadwallader, and roll up a new character Knightfast for the second group. Meanwhile Bjarnni, who has an unpleasant history with Jerelle and wants nothing to do with her, jumps to the Falstaffe group; leaving Peter-the-player to either a) find a reason for Gregorius to switch or b) to roll up something new or c) to leave the Altellan group as a player and run both Bjarnni and Gregorius in the other party.

As for players, the only difference is that Steve is in one group and Kathy's in the other.

If time only permits one game per week, one of Steve or Kathy would jump to the other group to make a six-player game; after which the two parties would be run one at a time, meaning that the Altellan group would run for an adventure then get put on hold whle the Falstaffe group was played for a while, and so on; with careful DM-side attention being paid to making sure the two parties didn't get too far separated in in-game time.

And that's just two parties. Counting a few parties stopped by covid and yet to reboot, my current game has five; plus a whole bunch of free-agent PCs out there not currently attached to an active party.