D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Faolyn]

I have never said that the GM creates none of it.

As to conflicting ideas among participants, there are any number of ways to resolve that. In AW, for instance, the GM askes particular players questions. In Burning Wheel, a player makes a Wises check and another player can have their PC aid, or not. And at my table, in many context, we just talk it out.

Doesn't this sometimes mean you have to have the world described to you, that you wouldn't just know it, as you've been saying is non-immersive?

 

[Faolyn]

So let me put it another way: if the GM comes up with the world on their own, and tells me what is in it, and uses that stuff they've authored to establish all consequences, then whatever I bring to the table, in my conception of my PC, my aspirations for my PC, etc, are like your example of the digging of the hole. Nothing about the game changes because of them.

You're making huge assumptions here: that the GM has "established all consequences," that they don't change things based on player input, that they ignore your PC background and goals, and that PC actions don't change the world.

There are going to be GMs for whom that is true--but there are also going to be GMs who whom that is false, as well. That your character and their actions, and the consequences of their actions, are integral to the development to the world.

This is why I keep saying you seem to think it's an all-or-nothing deal, when it's not. It's not entirely PC-generator or entirely GM-railroad. There's a ginormous multi-dimensional spectrum between the two extremes.

 

[Faolyn]

So in order for the "GM narrates more-or-less everything" method to be consistent with immersion, the PC have to be strangers?

And what about customs? (Unless we're playing The Dying Earth, these won't be wildly different as one travels from place to place.) And religion and what the gods want (in the "GM narrates more-or-less everything" approach, clerics are radically alienated from their faith and their divinity - as is demonstrated by the fact that a PC can't hold, let alone, win a theological debate with a NPC cleric unless the GM just argues the point with themself!). Etc.

I've played in these sorts of games, I know how they work, my experience of them as non-immersive railroads is not conjecture.

I have no idea where you're getting this idea. So let's start with this:

Do expect that PCs should know the customs, religions, etc. of every location in a world, even places they've never been before?

Do you expect that the players should make up the customs, religions, etc., of every location in a world?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the GM in any particular game?

 

[Maxperson]

Does it? You have DECREED that traditional play meets THE definition, which you then insist is your bespoke one that the rest of the world largely doesn't use.

More reasonably, you seem to be able to see that agency is a matter of degree and is also context dependant. Beyond that we all seem able to agree that agency, per se, is not always central to play (IE classic DC play to a degree).

RPG definitions received from google.

"Utility. From a players perspective in an RPG, agency is the degree to which the character's actions, based on the player's decisions and the game's mechanics, influence the game's progress. While the GM is the engine behind the game world, player choices and decisions shape the game world into something new."

Nothing about having to be informed about what's going to happen in advance.

"Agency is the power or capacity of an individual to act independently and make their own free choices.

Again nothing about being informed.

"Player agency is the ability of a player to affect the course of the game. Without player agency, you'd just be listening to the GM tell a story."

Ditto.

You keep adding in this thing about being informed and point to the False Equivalence of real world medical procedures as your evidence. Being informed isn't present in game agency. Not inherently. You can add it there like you and @pemerton like it, but you don't get to call our agency the way we like it a railroad. Ours doesn't become a railroad just because it's different from what you prefer.

Yours is the abnormal definition, not mine.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I have no idea where you're getting this idea. So let's start with this:

Do expect that PCs should know the customs, religions, etc. of every location in a world, even places they've never been before?

Do you expect that the players should make up the customs, religions, etc., of every location in a world?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the GM in any particular game?

I'm still a little unclear about this myself, but I expect the phrase "scene framing" will come up a lot (not completely sure about that either, but it seems to come up a lot).

 

[Maxperson]

Nope. That there will be different outcomes doesn't mean that the player is making a meaningful choice. Based on what they know, there is no difference... they may as well flip a coin. That's just luck. It has nothing to do with exercising agency.

It absolutely does mean that I'm making a meaningful choice. Who are you to tell me that it doesn't have meaning for me? When I discover two ogres by going right, I find out the very significant meaning of MY choice. If instead I go left and make it out, I find out the very significant meaning of MY choice. I had agency, because was in fact meaning.

You don't get to tell me that there's no meaning. The best you can say is that it has no meaning for YOU.

Or, we can start looking at it more broadly. Instead of one instance with a pair of doors, we can look at the overall game structure and how often this kind of thing is present. Who's determined what the game is about? Who determines what's next? Why is that next?

To adopt your idea of agency as a percentage, a game with 1% agency still is much closer to a railroad than it is to a game with much higher agency.

At what % will someone be satisfied with a game? Yes, it will vary. That's what we should be discussing.

I agree. Let's discuss how much agency is preferred rather than calling games that do in fact have agency a railroad. A traditional game by the way isn't anywhere close to being down near 1%.

What agency are you exercising with a random choice?

The ability to freely choose my fate. I may not know what will happen behind each door, but I'm still the only one making the decision about which way to go. My fate there depends on me, not the DM. And it's not random choice. I could flip a coin, but far more likely(as in I don't think I've flipped a coin or rolled randomly for a choice in the last 20 years) I will go based on intuition or even base it on something from earlier in the dungeon which might influence my decision. It's not going to be random.

It's not a lot of agency, but it's still agency.

 

[Faolyn]

You've used this example many a time but I still don't see how the system can allow one very obvious, realistic, and fairly-common-in-real-life outcome to occur: that the spellbooks are there in the tower but Thurgon simply missed them in his search.

I say this because the way the system seems to be set up, if Thurgon looks for them elsewhere and succeeds in his search that places those spellbooks at that location and not in the tower; and if he keeps looking in different places he's bound to succeed on a roll sooner or later and find them.

Is there a way that when Thurgon fails to find the spellbooks in the tower the GM can as part of the consequences note down that the books were there all along, he missed them, and to find them he's going to have to come back and look here again? (which by extension means they henceforth won't and can't be found anywhere else no matter how hard he looks or how good his rolls are)

Nice sidestep - your post (quoted) is regarding scene framing and action resolution, where my previous question was around player knowledge vs character knowledge when making an in-character decision (which the above doesn't seem to address, in that there's no real decision points in that few moments of the fiction).

It's Schrodinger's spellbooks!

But I guess this is another question: does the existence of the spellbooks, if they're not found, actually matter? Because that's something I would say depends heavily on the plot of the game. Is something interesting going to happen if the books aren't found?

If no--if the books are just going to sit there, gathering dust for eternity once Thurgon and Aramina leave--then they might as well not even exist unless they roll well enough to find them. I've certainly invented things on the fly when the PCs have said "I look for X" because it seems logical X exists in that location. I haven't done it with a spellbook, but I could see it happening.

If yes--say, an NPC will find the books and use them for themselves, possibly causing complications down the line--then certainly the book should be placed and exists whether or not it's found. I've done this as well. In fact, I'm doing it now. The first MotW adventure, the players never thought to search the house once they killed the monster (they thought they found his ritual site, but they really only found the place where the monster made sacrifices), so I decided a particular NPC has found them and this will cause problems for the PCs.

I have no idea if Burning Wheel allows for such a thing, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You've used this example many a time but I still don't see how the system can allow one very obvious, realistic, and fairly-common-in-real-life outcome to occur: that the spellbooks are there in the tower but Thurgon simply missed them in his search.

I say this because the way the system seems to be set up, if Thurgon looks for them elsewhere and succeeds in his search that places those spellbooks at that location and not in the tower; and if he keeps looking in different places he's bound to succeed on a roll sooner or later and find them.

Is there a way that when Thurgon fails to find the spellbooks in the tower the GM can as part of the consequences note down that the books were there all along, he missed them, and to find them he's going to have to come back and look here again? (which by extension means they henceforth won't and can't be found anywhere else no matter how hard he looks or how good his rolls are)

Nice sidestep - your post (quoted) is regarding scene framing and action resolution, where my previous question was around player knowledge vs character knowledge when making an in-character decision (which the above doesn't seem to address, in that there's no real decision points in that few moments of the fiction).

Well, certainly in PbtA games the GM can frame a failure pretty much any way they want. The GM's responsibility is not to produce some pre-chosen outcome though, it is to address the themes and motives of the characters. So the question is whether this sort of outcome does that. I'm not going to pass judgement on this case, it isn't my game or character. However the possibility of the story containing the fiction you suggest exists. I also expect BW to be able to produce it as well and probably with similar considerations in mind.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

How much information does it take to meet the threshold of "sufficient"?

If the answer is "all" then sorry, that's just not gonna happen very often if ever - similar to real life, that way - rendering this definition of agency as meaningless.

If the answer is "some" then that represents a sliding scale between 1% and 99%; and at 1% the answer might as well be "any at all".

My position is that you still have agency even if the answer is "none", provided you're still free to make a (perhaps random) choice rather than have that choice made for you.

Unless I'm playing a fool as my character (which I've done many a time ) I'd hold the bolded as true no matter what system or playstyle I'm in; as that's realistically what any halfway wise character would try to do in the fiction, and thus to be true to the character that's what I'd have it do as its player.

And a system or GM that doesn't let me (try to) do these things is denying me my agency as a player to declare my character's actions.

There's obviously no one size fits all answer to how much information is enough to produce the agency we require, but how can you claim with one breath that zero information blind choice is sufficient and then in the next breath demand skilled play? I don't consider "eeny meeny miney moe, which door shall I pick today" to involve the slightest skill! There can be no skill without agency, at least this is consistent with my definition. I'll let an actual philosopher (at least one is reading this thread) get into the whole mess you would create by actually believing that you can have 'blind agency' as it is not my area of expertise.

 

[pemerton]

I've explained my style of play. I and my players enjoy it, and it doesn't affect your style of play at all. What more do you want?

I see. That is consistent with what you've been saying. I apologize.

No need to apologise! But I hope that post does help make clear why the idea that the approach I prefer aspires to being "GM free" or "AI GM" is a pretty big misreading.

I love GMing this sort of game, because my job is to think about what the players have brought to the table, and what they are staking in their particular action declarations, and - if the check succeeds - cheer with them as things go their way (or perhaps curse them as lucky blighters!); while - if the check fails - I get to drive home my evil GM instincts to my heart's desire.

Here's an example from the last Torchbearer session I GMed (for context, the PC Fea-bella is a Dreamwalker, an Elf who can pluck spells from her dreams but is also dream-haunted; the evil spirit that had possessed Krystal was a shadow-thing that had escaped from Fea-bella's heart when she failed in her attempt to cast a spell; Megloss is Fea-bella's enemy (as per the players' decisions made at PC build), a rival Dreamwalker):

We had two players and so two PCs - Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker and Golin the Dwarven Outcast.

<snip>

Megloss then addressed Fea-bella and Golin, insisting that they try and drive the possessing spirit out of Krystal, Megloss's housekeeper. The PCs wanted to leave the house back into the village (ie the players wanted to enter Town Phase) and so we resolved this as a Convince conflict. The players won, after a very long number of rounds (about 9), but there were compromises required: Megloss had to keep his promise of food, and the players promised to come back and help Krystal after they had recovered in town.

<snip discussion of Town Phase>

The PCs then returned to Megloss's house, to keep their promise.

<snip>

I rolled the weather for the first month of autumn - rain. Not auspicious - as I said, the PCs would not be able to equip the sun streaming through the windows onto the possessed Krystal.

Megloss told them that he had been using his Healing to keep the still-possessed, still-restrained Krystal alive. There was discussion of what sort of spiritual conflict to attempt - the players opted for Bind, so that the spirit could take the looted spellbook (from the aptr-gangr alcove) into Fea-bella's dreams (as Golin's player had suggested last session). Fea-bella took the spellbook out of her backpack, and Megloss asked what it was. She answered that it was the tome into which the shadow spirit would be bound.

The PCs rolled 6 hp, with Golin as conflict captain (relying on his research into Gebbeths) - 3 for Fea-bella, 2 for Golin and 1 for Megloss as a helper but not an actor. The spirit rolled 7 hp (based on its Possessing nature). At first it seemed the PCs might do well, as they dropped the spirit to 6 hp in the first round. But then in the next two rounds the spirit regained its lost hp and reduced the PCs to zero.

I had a look at the compromise descriptions for Bind conflicts, and settled on the following (with no quibbling from the players): the spirit left Krystal's body - which was left a lifeless, soulless husk - and entered Megloss. It took the spellbook with it, into Megloss's dreams rather than Fea-bella's. And the unnatural spiritual activity caused the rain to get heavier - a bolt of lightning struck the house, destroying its front half and leaving the PCs outside in the wet, while Megloss remained dry in what was left of his home.

The general view on the player side was that this was a bit of a disaster - Fea-bella and Megloss had been reaching some sort of rapprochement, and Golin was close to making friends with him. And all that seemed to be undone, plus the spellbook was lost.

From my point of view as GM, the PCs now have three supernatural opponents resulting from their exploration of the dungeon under Megloss's house: Duran the demon of the Outer Dark; Celedhring the mithril sword-wielding barrow wight; and the shadow spirit-possessed Megloss.

There is no lack of GM imagination and authorship in this episode. But the significance of it, the key elements (like the enemy Megloss, and dreams as a site of both power and threat - not to mention the idea that a shadow-thing might be coerced to carry a spellbook into a Dreamwalker's dreams, thus giving them access to its magic), come from the players.

This is an example of what I am contrasting with the idea that all the elements of setting and situation, and all the consequences of action declarations, being established by the GM.

EDIT: I am not trying to persuade anyone that they should play in this sort of way. But I hope that this illustrates that the GM is a significant participant in play, who together with the players makes contributions to the fiction, with the mechanics mediating whose suggestions get taken up and whether things run the players' way or rather run the way of the evil GM. I hope it also illustrates how the players having this sort of authority does not depend upon them having "fiat"-type powers to author setting elements distinct from their PCs, but rather flows from the way action declarations they make for their PCs are resolved.