D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Manbearcat]

Defining "game" is a whole separate 80 page thread, and looks different depending on the base kind of game forum you're on, but I'd personally point to "quality of decision making" as the most important factor. Competition is usually a means to that end, by creating a metric to weigh decisions against easily in the form of the other player's decisions and a shared goal, but I certainly wouldn't say it's definitional.

Regardless, for the purposes of this audience, it's ridiculous not to call anything in the TTRPG umbrella a game, though I might say what you're talking about doesn't actually prioritize "gameplay" specifically.

So I've said a lot recently (verbally to others at least...not sure if I've posted it) that "I want my players to perform their decision tree work as if they were playing Speed Chess (rather than Chess)." Hopefully its obvious, but what I'm saying here is a few things:

* Performing a decision-tree under significant duress of time is different than without such duress.

* "Quality of decision making" (to borrow your expression above) is evaluated differently in the two situations. For instance, lets put a number out of 10 to prospective lines of play resolved by the decision-tree work; 7 and 9. A 7 resolved within 34 seconds is very different than a 9 resolved in 3 minutes and 34 seconds. Under one lens of evaluation that 7 is lower quality. However, under the particular lens that I prefer, (a) that 7 is higher quality and (b) I would say, on the whole, a 7 under significant duress is easily the match of a 9 without such duress, particulary when you consider (c) the visceral component it adds to play and (d) the pacing amplifier it adds to play.

Whether you agree that (c) or (d) are important or that (a) or (b) might be true, hopefully we can both agree that "quality of decision making" might (and in certain environments, perhaps "should") entail a complex methodological evaluation and some of the components might pit other components against each other (or at least bring about tension such as "shot clock" or "time pressure on decision tree work").

To bring basketball into play, the game has at one point had an iteration whereby:

* There was no shot clock.

* There was no three point line.

Just those two inputs on the ruleset (on/off for either/both), significantly impact "quality of decision making (possession or defense of opposition possession). In one iteration of the rules, you have a team's possession (and the defense) ungoverned by the stressor of time. In one iteration of the rules, you have an assessment of "quality of decision making" governed by the effort to reduce the prospect of turnovers and missed shots via minimizing movement, flow and disregarding spacing while optimizing Field Goal Attempts in the paint (which means leveraging big men). Change the rules, and "quality of decision making" changes dramatically.

You can evaluate TTRPGs in just such a way by a engineering a ruleset to create incentive structures that sometimes misalign such that prospective lines of play don't just index one thing (defeat obstacle without real world time duress = profit), but rather, criteria for the quality of prospective lines of play fold in several things; an easy one is advancement, either PC advancement or prospects for success of Adventure advancement requiring micro-failures of tests (or at least setting up the looming odds of failure) in order to achieve xp or attain currency necessary to make possible the conditions of some kind of "refresh/recovery" move that will be pivotal downstream of current events.

I know you don't love the kind of decision-tree work where incentive structures aren't all pointing in the same direction, but hopefully we can use basketball and/or Speed Chess vs Chess as examples of divergent schemes for evaluating quality of decision making based on rules changing the assessment criteria of "quality."

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

That just doesn't seem that different than the player deciding there are spellbooks. It just makes you roll to see if the player is right. The rules are supporting the idea that the player can generate fiction that the PC is not directly responsible for in the fiction.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well...because I see it as impossible for a non written down improv adventure to ever work for anything complicated.

Like take an even slightly complex story: Two noble families striving for dominance of a small city. The only way to do this is to have one person, a GM, write it all down. They have to make the city and both noble families. You can't just have the players randomly run into characters and have the players just randomly say "oh it's aunt Beth". Same way you can't have the players "just say" city is a huge exporter of grain and then minutes later just say "the cities only trade is in metal ores".

Why do you assume the players would just say random things? Why wouldn’t there be rules and processes in place about who gets to say what and when? And why would you assume that anyone would declare something that clearly contradicts something that’s already been established?

You’re inventing examples and then pointing out how your examples wouldn’t work. You’re not actually saying anything.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Visit grief isn't a game term and probably has its origins in video games. It basically means going to visit someone to asterisk-things up with them.

A charged situation is game terminology (there's the player move "Read a charged situation") and is roughly the same as rolling Insight, but on a situation rather than a single person. You go somewhere, you know something's up, and you want to figure out what.

Both of these phrases are fairly well-known in English and have long histories. If you Google 'highly charged' you come up with 100's of hits, mostly HR advice. Collins charts usage of this phrase going back over 300 years.

Visit grief: The word grief has a major meaning of 'an unfortunate outcome or disaster', and the verb 'to visit' can mean 'to inflict, impose, or avenge'. Thus 'visit grief on them' is a perfectly cromulent phrase, and I've heard it many times before. Its mildly out of date, maybe, at most, but certainly still a perfectly acceptable English usage and supported by modern dictionaries. I've also heard people say 'visit harm', 'visit vengeance', etc. and I'm pretty sure it appears in at least some bibles.

 

[bloodtide]

Why do you assume the players would just say random things?

Well, how can the players just not say random things. They are just moving a character through a random world doing random things.

Now see in D&D the world would be all set in stone by the DM.

Why wouldn’t there be rules and processes in place about who gets to say what and when?

But you can't have rules for everything? That would be a book of like 100,000 pages!

And why would you assume that anyone would declare something that clearly contradicts something that’s already been established?

Well, now see this is why RPGS have GMs and a big part of their job is to keep track of things. The players can't do it, and play the game....that just makes a loop. Ok so player one makes the secret key in location A, but their character does not know, but..when they 'play the character' then they look everywhere except location A...or do they just 'play' going to location a and saying "wow look the secret key!".

 

[Micah Sweet]

Both of these phrases are fairly well-known in English and have long histories. If you Google 'highly charged' you come up with 100's of hits, mostly HR advice. Collins charts usage of this phrase going back over 300 years.

Visit grief: The word grief has a major meaning of 'an unfortunate outcome or disaster', and the verb 'to visit' can mean 'to inflict, impose, or avenge'. Thus 'visit grief on them' is a perfectly cromulent phrase, and I've heard it many times before. Its mildly out of date, maybe, at most, but certainly still a perfectly acceptable English usage and supported by modern dictionaries. I've also heard people say 'visit harm', 'visit vengeance', etc. and I'm pretty sure it appears in at least some bibles.

I have heard the phrase before, and know what it means in basic English. Since it is uncommonly used in everyday speech, however, and since it was also used in the context of a gameplay example, I thought it might be a game term. As it turns out, the second phrase was a game term, so I don't think I was that out of line wondering about that.

 

[Faolyn]

Both of these phrases are fairly well-known in English and have long histories. If you Google 'highly charged' you come up with 100's of hits, mostly HR advice. Collins charts usage of this phrase going back over 300 years.

Visit grief: The word grief has a major meaning of 'an unfortunate outcome or disaster', and the verb 'to visit' can mean 'to inflict, impose, or avenge'. Thus 'visit grief on them' is a perfectly cromulent phrase, and I've heard it many times before. Its mildly out of date, maybe, at most, but certainly still a perfectly acceptable English usage and supported by modern dictionaries. I've also heard people say 'visit harm', 'visit vengeance', etc. and I'm pretty sure it appears in at least some bibles.

The use of the phrase "highly charged" has an actual game meaning in AW.

While griefing someone may have a long history, it definitely got more popular due to video games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But the principles by which they are deployed are not. The rule that govern when hard moves are to be made, and the fact that "nothing happens" is not a move, are not things that GMs have always done. (Witness this thread!)

Yeah, I just wanted to focus on dispelling the idea that GM moves are some sort of bizarre straightjacket that only allows GMs to do certain specific things. It just isn't like that at all. You are of course infinitely correct in stating that WHEN and HOW the GM does the things they do is something that PbtAs have a lot to say about.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Exactly. It's not a story about the PCs. Any story that occurs, is because the PCs happened to appear in whatever story was going to happen no matter what.

So, without reading the responses from Micah, et al. my guess is that the response to this is "yes, but MANY things could happen next depending on what choices the player makes." And this is all TRUE, presumably; but it is perfectly acceptable, probable even, that the GM in trad/classic play will frame things in such a way that the confrontation between the PC and the Ambassador NEVER HAPPENS AT ALL. Beyond that, its PERFECTLY acceptable for the GM's reasons for this to be completely opaque, offscreen, and never revealed. Heck, they can be pure whim! Maybe the GM doesn't feel like coming up with stats for the Ambassador. Maybe the GM has some other plot element that involves that character which he wants to engage instead. Maybe he's just not interested in a duel (or whatever happens). All of these, or no reason at all, is a perfectly acceptable answer in D&D, as normally played.

Now, as @pemerton says, D&D is not automatically a railroad by his definition, but the vast majority of D&D games WILL contain some elements of what he's talking about. I mean, I've played 5e in a campaign with a GM whom I know with 100% confidence can run a narrativist game and make it work, and STILL had the 5e campaign revolve on major points around exactly such happenings where said GM simply "made stuff happen" that entirely undermined what my character was all about, his entire goal in life. Oh well, the GM is completely in charge of the story, so it goes! I'm sure there was some breakdown of communications or missed intent there, or probably more just a miscalculation by the GM as to the valence of what they were doing. It happens. I still found it pretty railroady!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, how can the players just not say random things. They are just moving a character through a random world doing random things.

Because they’ll likely say things that would make sense based on what’s happening in the game?

Like of an orc pops out waving its sword and snarling at the characters, I don’t think it’s random if one of them said something like “I want to bash this orc with my hammer” or “I try to talk to the orc”.

Now see in D&D the world would be all set in stone by the DM.

I don’t set everything in stone before DMing. I find that there’s little benefit from doing so much of that ahead of time when I can simply have some general ideas and then decide the specifics in play.

But you can't have rules for everything? That would be a book of like 100,000 pages!

You can have rules about who gets to say what and when. Most games already have these rules.

Well, now see this is why RPGS have GMs and a big part of their job is to keep track of things. The players can't do it, and play the game....that just makes a loop. Ok so player one makes the secret key in location A, but their character does not know, but..when they 'play the character' then they look everywhere except location A...or do they just 'play' going to location a and saying "wow look the secret key!".

I don’t know what game plays like this. Again, you’re making up a bad example as if it’s evidence. But it’s not. It doesn’t demonstrate anyone’s actual game.