D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[pemerton]

Okay, that's a bit facetious. The outcomes were either, you found spellbooks, thus, you as the player narrated something about the setting, or you didn't, and the GM narrated something that was related in a principled way to something the player authored about the setting, the character of their mother.

No. You are ignoring what is fundamental - that the rules of the game provide for joint authorship under certain conditions.

This is the whole point of RPG rules (here I sing entirely from the song sheet of Vincent Baker). I've set this point out in more detail in the OP to the "Why do RPGs have rules thread", which I believe you've participated in.

It's not a big transformation here to see "the player declares something about the setting."

Given that the "transformation" is the entire difference between collaborative storytelling and RPGing as I enjoy it, to say it's not a big one is just flat-out wrong.

As I posted in another reply, I think to you, understanding the transformation and using it to build amazing RPGs is a huge chunk of Vincent Baker's life work. (Luke Crane is clever too, but he rightly labels "say 'yes' or roll the dice", in the BW rulebook, as "Vincent's Admonition".)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Please read the following description of play closely:
All I have done, as player, is - at PC build - author my character, including relationships to Aramina and Xanthippe; and, in play, author my action declaration: "I search the upper floor of Evard's tower for spellbooks".

The GM then applies the basic rule for resolution - say 'yes' or roll the dice - and then narrates the consequence. As it happens, this did not involve finding spellbooks, because the check failed. If it had succeeded, the GM would have narrated Thurgon finding spellbooks.

To reiterate: all that I authored, in play, was Thurgon's action - his searching for spelbooks. That is not fiction outside of the PC.

But the spellbooks only not there because the player failed their roll. If he had succeeded, they would have been. They popped into existence, or not, based on the players actions. It is the mechanics of your favored game that allows this to happen.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's interesting. What do you do if you have to choose between the two? Like if there's some kind of conflict between player satisfaction and setting verisimilitude?

And do you include gamist concerns in that? Like my example of always sharing DCs so players make informed choices. Do you mean that kind of player element? Or just like their overall satisfaction?



How does personal stuff get introduced to play? You said you don't prefer to focus on individual character goals, so I'm not sure what this looks like.

As I said, the players are most important, so if conversation doesn't lead to agreement, I would likely accede to the player's concerns (always on a case by case basis of course).

I play the DC game by ear. If the PCs would likely have an idea of the difficulty, I would let them know. It comes up pretty rarely actually.

During session 0, we discuss the PCs and I would at that time learn about their personal goals. I would then incorporate means to achieve them, including any relevant NPCs, into the setting prior to session 1.

 

[bloodtide]

If all the player is allowed to choose, and if the significance and consequences of those choices, are all settled by the GM's prior authorship of setting + "logical" extrapolation from that authorship, then (it seems to me) everything that happens is some sort of complex combination of GM-authored elements plus extrapolations.

That's why I call it a railroad: everything that happens in the fiction falls within an already-GM-defined set of possibilities and combinations. And GM pre-definition is the essence of a railroad.

That others enjoy some GM pre-definition, but not others (eg where the suite of permitted possibilities and combinations is more narrow) is naturally their prerogative. But their preferences aren't mine!

This all makes sense and is Classic RPG. The player makes a few small moves, few that have much meaning by the game design....and the DM does, controls, effects and creates everything else.

But the other games are exactly this too, though, right? Other then the fact the other game forbid the DM from EVER using or writing an adventure...so the game must always be a DM whim improv....what is the difference? All I see is a really good illusion to make the player feel like they are doing something more. But you'd disagree.

I like examples....so:

D&D. The players just have their character sit around town and do nothing, until I as DM mention "some bandits have set up south of town". So the players choose to go stop them. A good number of DMs will make up the bandits...who are they, where are they from, who they work for if anyone. And sprinkle in facts and clues for the group to find. And make stat blocks and make encounters. Most DM much more like the style of "the bandit hide out is at location A10" and not the improv style of "just quantum orge ing the bandit camp where ever the characters go". The same way most DM like to make up set stats for encounters, and not just improv random numbers as needed.

Other Game. The GM waits for the players. The players then say "lets go get the bandits south of town". The GM nods and says "yes". Annnnnddd....ok, here is where it gets fuzzy. So this type of GM is pure random improv, right? They never make up anything before hand. So they players just randomly say whatever on a whim, "we say some bandits are hiding in the barn". And the GM says "yes" and the players have an improv fight where the GM just says random numbers for each needed bandit stat?

And....well, I guess the GM just sits there and does nothing, right? As ANY action a GM takes is wrong. Like if a GM, all by themselves, makes a bandit hide out map and puts it in the barn that would be wrong and disallowed. But if a player says "we find a map to the bandit hideout" then the GM says it is there.

And I get that if you have all the players Acting Like GMs, they will lead themselves to where ever they want to do and go. If you somehow just randomly get a group like that. But even if you do, as the Acting GMs are also playing the game, it will be a choppy, random, disjointed, mess of a non plot with no story......because no one person is in charge of doing that. And with no control, you just get whatever you get. Unless the players set up and each become full GMs, but then there is no one playing the game characters. And the game is not the same people being GM and players right? They don't sit on the right side of the table and GM "oh, two bandits attack character Joe", then slide over to the left side of the table and be a player and say "character Joe dose a dodge!", right?

As described in many posts, it makes no sense.

 

[Pedantic]

No. A rule that says, if the dice come up a certain way, everyone agrees that a certain things happens, isn't player-authored.

The player declares the action: "I search for spellbooks". This now has to be resolved. There are some ways of doing it.

One is to let the GM author the outcome. This is what you, @Oofta, @Micah Sweet, @Lanefand and @CreamCloud0 prefer. (For the moment, I am ignoring that sometimes you might interpose a Search or Research or Use Library or Investigate or whatever check. Let's suppose that the spellbooks, if they're there, are very easy to find so no check is required.)

Another is to let the player author the outcome. An example of player authorship, in my example, is that Xanthippe is Thurgon's mother, though that was done in PC build and not as part of action resolution.

Yet another is to use a mechanic to establish a constraint on who has to believe what. In that case, the outcome is jointly authored: the player put the possibility of Thurgon finding spellbooks into question (by declaring, as Thurgon, "I search for spellbooks"). Everyone has agreed to a system for resolving such action declarations, which can include - as one possible result - that everyone has agreed to make the possibility a part of the shared fiction. The authorship - the fact of making it part of the shared fiction - is collective and mediated via the rules.

Perhaps you think the distinction between the second and third ways of doing things is uninteresting. But working it out is a good chunk of Vincent Baker's life work as a RPG designer, and for that reason if nothing else I regard it as extremely interesting.

Yeah, I think you're roughly right here. That's just the second option by way of a few more rules to prevent you from directly engaging in cooperative storytelling. I can absolutely believe it's very interesting, but it's very hard to construct a game from there. It's just now occurring to me that what you're talking about would be a way more interesting ludic framework if it was somehow competitive. I'm not totally sure how you'd set a victory condition and how you'd make it anything other than just gambling, but it's an interesting idea.

Suppose that, in your preferred approach - which I take to be the first of my three - the player declares the action, and the GM realises they have no notes on the contents of this tower! So now they have to make a decision. At that point, the player's action declaration, through a game mechanism, has caused a change in the setting outside of the character's control.

It is a necessary conceit of a simulated fictional world that it is complete at all times, and a professional responsibility of the GM to do their best to make that possible. I've written a lot about the need to separate various GM roles. The setting has not changed, but the GM's workload has increased in your example.

The whole reason to do any of that, is so that you can play a game that doesn't have a fixed end-state or fixed victory conditions, which can instead be determined as a function of the characters. Or, more succinctly, I'm not here to author anything, I'm here to play a game, and storytelling is in service of that.

No. You are ignoring what is fundamental - that the rules of the game provide for joint authorship under certain conditions.

This is the whole point of RPG rules (here I sing entirely from the song sheet of Vincent Baker). I've set this point out in more detail in the OP to the "Why do RPGs have rules thread", which I believe you've participated in.

Given that the "transformation" is the entire difference between collaborative storytelling and RPGing as I enjoy it, to say it's not a big one is just flat-out wrong.

As I posted in another reply, I think to you, understanding the transformation and using it to build amazing RPGs is a huge chunk of Vincent Baker's life work. (Luke Crane is clever too, but he rightly labels "say 'yes' or roll the dice", in the BW rulebook, as "Vincent's Admonition".)

This is the reason I think we're talking about different hobbies. You're looking for a completely different and unrelated kind of agency that provides an entirely different sort of fulfillment. Honestly, I don't know why this is more compelling than cooperative storytelling, but I believe you when you say that it is. It doesn't look like a game though, in any sense I'd use the word.

If we were grouping the activities we're doing into families, I think what you're describing has less in common with the way I've played D&D and descendants than it does with something like Once Upon a Time for all the surface similarities.

 

[Oofta]

Just to be clear the definition of railroad in RPGs

Railroading is a GMing style in which, no matter what the PCs do, they will experience certain events according to the GM's plan.

And why it's bad to tell everyone who doesn't follow PbtA style games

...this is considered a flaw, displaying a lack of flexibility, naturalness of the scenario, and lack of respect for meaningful choices by the players.

So calling standard D&D methods a railroad is saying that all DMs have a lack of respect for the players. That's the issue. It also has nothing to do with any accepted definition of railroading.

 

[TwoSix]

Other Game. The GM waits for the players. The players then say "lets go get the bandits south of town". The GM nods and says "yes". Annnnnddd....ok, here is where it gets fuzzy. So this type of GM is pure random improv, right? They never make up anything before hand. So they players just randomly say whatever on a whim, "we say some bandits are hiding in the barn". And the GM says "yes" and the players have an improv fight where the GM just says random numbers for each needed bandit stat?

And....well, I guess the GM just sits there and does nothing, right? As ANY action a GM takes is wrong. Like if a GM, all by themselves, makes a bandit hide out map and puts it in the barn that would be wrong and disallowed. But if a player says "we find a map to the bandit hideout" then the GM says it is there.

And I get that if you have all the players Acting Like GMs, they will lead themselves to where ever they want to do and go. If you somehow just randomly get a group like that. But even if you do, as the Acting GMs are also playing the game, it will be a choppy, random, disjointed, mess of a non plot with no story......because no one person is in charge of doing that. And with no control, you just get whatever you get. Unless the players set up and each become full GMs, but then there is no one playing the game characters. And the game is not the same people being GM and players right? They don't sit on the right side of the table and GM "oh, two bandits attack character Joe", then slide over to the left side of the table and be a player and say "character Joe dose a dodge!", right?

The fact that you can't conceptualize a game that is about more than hunting down bandits says a lot about your DMing style.

 

[Pedantic]

I play the DC game by ear. If the PCs would likely have an idea of the difficulty, I would let them know. It comes up pretty rarely actually.

Just to clarify that we are not in fact a monolith, I find this idea anathema and continue to pine for a long list of explicated DCs, without which I think the experience is made significantly less interesting.

 

[pemerton]

But the spellbooks only not there because the player failed their roll. If he had succeeded, they would have been. They popped into existence, or not, based on the players actions. It is the mechanics of your favored game that allows this to happen.

Well, I wouldn't say they "popped into existence".

In the fiction, there are spellbooks which presumably, in this case, were authored by Evard many years before anyone found them or searched his tower for them

In the real world, there are no spellbooks - there is only people imagining things. Those people have agree to jointly imagine things under certain conditions. This includes under conditions that are specified in terms of rules for action resolution.

The player puts the possibility of imagining spell books on the table, by authoring - ie establishing as true in the fiction - that Thurgon searches for spellbooks. Then, dice are rolled as the game procedure calls for. On a certain result, everyone at the table is obliged to agree that it is true in the fiction that spellbooks are there. But that is not the player's decision. It is not the player's act of authorship. Everyone agreed to play by that rule, and when the dice were rolled everyone could see the result and hence work out what it obliged them to imagine.

The difference between player authorship, GM authorship, and joint authorship dictated by a mechanic (what @Manbearcat has sometimes called "system's say") is fundamental to RPG design, and to my experience of RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

You're looking for a completely different and unrelated kind of agency that provides an entirely different sort of fulfillment. Honestly, I don't know why this is more compelling than cooperative storytelling, but I believe you when you say that it is. It doesn't look like a game though, in any sense I'd use the word.

The differences from cooperative storytelling are two (at least; maybe there's more I'm not thinking of at the moment):

* No one has to actually sit down with the intention of telling a story. As a player, I just play my PC. As a GM, I just frame scenes and establish consequences in accordance with the game procedures.

* The use of mechanics to mediate establishing the fiction makes the unwelcome and the unwanted possible. Concrete example: but for the mechanics, we would not have had a fiction in which Thurgon learns that he is probably the grandson of the evil wizard Evard.


I think this is a game in the sense of an "amusing pastime". It's also a game in the sense of being a voluntary activity, undertaken for amusement, and constituted and governed by rules.

There's not much of an obviously competitive element, though.