D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Aldarc]

That is not what jargon means. If you don't agree with what I wrote, say that. This just sounds like trying to score rhetorical points. Are we working towards understanding, or are we trying to win?

IME, there can be jargony phrases. You may hear, for example, "play worlds, not rules" in FKR circles, which IMO sounds more like vague marketing lingo than anything substantial. I do think that when we talk about existence outside of the PCs, that can be unclear. I was tempted to say something about that in my initial reply to you where you brought it up. Instead, I opted to focus on how our games involve different processes for introducing things into the fiction.

sigh, wishing i could let myself leave this thread be but i keep opening it up every time i see it's recieved new replies, i don't feel like much of anything has been achieved in how ever many tens of pages this conversation has gone on for now, people are just talking past each other and repeating the same points over and over because the games and styles of play they prefer work on fundamentally different structures and principles.

I agree. I have even tried to post in ways that are descriptive about games and game styles rather than discuss other play styles in ways that ascribe value judgments or diminishes them so that people would not feel that their games or play preferences were being (intentionally) slighted. It's a courtesy that I wish was reciprocated.

See, you keep painting BW as a game where logic be damned...

This seems like a deeply ungenerous reading.

 

[pemerton]

even 1e AD&D had "percentage in lair" rolls, to indicate that sometimes, the monsters are doing something other than lying in wait for the PCs to approach and get eaten.

Do you really think that no one can imagine a cave or castle whose inhabitant is away from home, unless a rulebook writes in a % in lair chance?

The point of the % in lair chance is to establish a gameplay process for managing the introduction of content into the shared fiction.

Burning Wheel uses a very different sort of process. I've described it at quite a bit of length in various posts in this thread, many of them in reply to you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know what you mean by "scope".

Do you mean the number of sentences about the setting that have been uttered and assented to during the course of play? Do you mean something about what those sentences describe (eg whether they are propositions about furniture, buidings, cities, universes, etc)?

I don't see that this is any different, in principle, in BW or DW compared to a "trad" approach to D&D.

I get the impression from your posts, and @CreamCloud0 and @Micah Sweet's, that you equate The GM is imagining it with It is an existing part of the world/setting. If that's what you mean, it would be helpful to me at least for you to be clear about it. Or if you mean something else, you will have to explain it in some less metaphorical way if you would like me to understand it.

Ok. That's what I'm saying, and that's what I prefer for the most part, whether it's me doing the imagining or not.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Huh? Whose RPGing involves a word created by people who are also the subjects of a story about them? The only ones I can think of are Toon (which I mentioned already, not far upthread) and also Over the Edge (which I didn't think of earlier).

your entire preferred play experience has been 'a world created by people who are also subjects of a story about them'

your character thinks 'i wonder if there are spellbooks here' and looks for them, you as a player roll the dice to see if reality indulges their desire to find spellbooks in the place they are, the fact you are rolling to see if they are there or not, not just if you find them or not, means you are defining the world, means you are creating the possibility that spellbooks exist in that location, as someone who the story is being told about.

 

[pemerton]

I get the impression from your posts, and @CreamCloud0 and @Micah Sweet's, that you equate The GM is imagining it with It is an existing part of the world/setting. If that's what you mean, it would be helpful to me at least for you to be clear about it. Or if you mean something else, you will have to explain it in some less metaphorical way if you would like me to understand it.

Ok. That's what I'm saying, and that's what I prefer for the most part, whether it's me doing the imagining or not.

Another related idea, that comes through in @Lanefan's posts, to an extent in @CreamCloud0's, and maybe also in yours and @Xamnam's, is this:

If the GM imagines to themself, without sharing it with the player, that the reason for such-and-such event that has been described at the table is such-and-such other event that no one is imagining except the GM, then that is part of the "scope" of the setting.

For instance: if the GM describes to the players that they see some beggars by the city gates, and the GM thinks to themself but doesn't say to the players, "The reason for those beggars is that they've been driven off their farmland by the evil overlord", then part of the setting includes that the evil overlord has driven people of their farmland, turning them into beggars.


I think of the GM's private imaginings as possible tools, and prep, for saying things that become part of the shared fiction. But it seems to me tautological that, being private, they are not shared, and hence are not elements of play per se.

 

[Enrahim2]

See, you keep painting BW as a game where logic be damned...

OK, let's go with the wizard's tower for a moment. The PCs enter the tower. Do you, as the GM, describe this tower to them in any way? If so, how? Do you describe the ornamentation, the condition of the first room they see, the style of the furniture? Or do you leave it up to PCs to describe? Does BW care about setting the mood for the area through descriptions? Is it part of Burning Wheel to give the impression of ruined grandeur or lonely desolation or frozen magical potential, or would that go against the game's processes? I ask because all of those would influence how I, the player, would think to search it. For that matter, how did this tower even get introduced in the first place? Did you, the GM, say that there was a tower, or do you wait for the PCs to say "we want to explore a wizard's tower"?

I don't have that much experience with BW. I have simply read the nave and the spokes of the rules. I think I can give a bit simplified version. From a D&D perspective there are at first glance not much fancy going on. GM describes scenes, then players describe what they are doing. When the GM find it approperiate, they call for a check of a certain difficulty. The guidelines for how to set that difficulty seem similarly strong and open to subjective interpetation as in 5ed. The dice are rolled and consequences are narrated.

There are really only two main differences in mechanics compared to 5ed. The most prominent in my eyes is that players are burning a meta currency as a major component to determine their chances of success, as opposed to D&D soely basing chances of success on the fictional state and character attributes. The other important in this context is that if the check succeeds, it is explicitely stated that it is the intent of the action that happen.

This second property is more subtle, and indeed I do believe most D&D groups for all practical purposes play this way anyway. However what appear to be something certain BW groups like @pemerton 's seem to have latched on to is that this formulation in the rules can be exploited by players by being quite explicit and stretching what they declare as intent.

Now, BW is explicit in that GM can outright say no. I think the example used is jumping over the moon. That mean that if a player state "I search the tower, intending to find a spellbook", the GM can as far as I interpret it say "no, there are no spellbook to find".
Now as far as I can see, if a GM intend there to be no spellbook in the tower, I see nothing in the rules that prevent them from making it virtually impossible, by declaring that "that would be a miracle, as there are supposed to be no spellbook there", and set the obstacle to 10 (miraculous). I do however not find any way they can fully veto it. Another thing they cannot do is ask for a roll and then on success declare that despite being certain they have looked everywhere, there are no spellbook to be found.

The normal way to handle this in D&D would be to have the players (or DM) roll against an unknown DC (actually impossible). However in BW this is really not an option, because the difficulty need to be known to the player before the roll, as this is critical to their decission to spend the metacurrency.

In other words it is actually the meta currency system, not the GM advice I think pemerton has been mostly pointing toward, that in my eyes has the effect that either players get to know something their characters don't (there are no spellbook to find), or the participants must be prepared that any intent stated by a player become true in the fiction. It appear the later solution is the one mostly prefered by the BW community.

@pemerton please correct me if I am missing something crucial.

(Edited, as I appear to have confused with another game with regard to GM blocking rights)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Another related idea, that comes through in @Lanefan's posts, to an extent in @CreamCloud0's, and maybe also in yours and @Xamnam's, is this:

If the GM imagines to themself, without sharing it with the player, that the reason for such-and-such event that has been described at the table is such-and-such other event that no one is imagining except the GM, then that is part of the "scope" of the setting.

For instance: if the GM describes to the players that they see some beggars by the city gates, and the GM thinks to themself but doesn't say to the players, "The reason for those beggars is that they've been driven off their farmland by the evil overlord", then part of the setting includes that the evil overlord has driven people of their farmland, turning them into beggars.


I think of the GM's private imaginings as possible tools, and prep, for saying things that become part of the shared fiction. But it seems to me tautological that, being private, they are not shared, and hence are not elements of play per se.

They are elements of the world, but they may not become apparent to the PCs unless they make the effort to find out why the beggars are there, or so.e other event occurs that makes the situation more clear. It doesn't mean that those elements aren't part of the setting, nor that they can't inform future events without the PC being aware of it directly.

 

[pemerton]

your entire preferred play experience has been 'a world created by people who are also subjects of a story about them'

This is just wrong. The people who create the world are me and my friends. The subjects of those stories are Thurgon, Aramina, Aedhros, Alicia and othes, all of whom are purely imaginary.

your character thinks 'i wonder if there are spellbooks here' and looks for them

Yes. This is an event that occurs in the fiction. It is not unusual for people to wonder about what they might find in a place, especially a mysterious one like Evard's tower.

you as a player roll the dice

Yes. Players in games do things - roll dice, draw and play cards, move pieces etc as part of game play. In RPGing, rolling dice is especially common as part of resolving an action declaration like "I look for spellbooks".

to see if reality indulges their desire to find spellbooks in the place they are

This is a very bizarre thing to say - it's like saying that, in D&D combat, I roll a d20 to see if reality indulges my character's desire to wound the Orc!

I think a far less stilted way of putting the point is this: the dice are rolled to see if the declared action succeeds, where success is defined by intent + task (in this case, task = I'm looking, and intent = for spellbooks).

the fact you are rolling to see if they are there or not, not just if you find them or not, means you are defining the world, means you are creating the possibility that spellbooks exist in that location

I discussed this quite a way upthread. The actual process is this: my action declaration gives rise to the question, Does the fiction include Thurgon finding spellbooks in Evard's tower? This is a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder, just as one might wonder, when playing D&D, whether the fiction includes your PC stabbing an Orc.

The rules of the game did not permit anyone to unilaterally decide the answer to that question about Thurgon finding spellbooks. The rules required dice to be rolled: everyone has agreed that, on one result (success), they will make Thurgon finds spellbooks part of the shared fiction; on the other result (failure), they will make the adverse consequence that the GM narrates part of the shared fiction.

Of course, "Thurgon finds spellbooks" entails "Spellbooks exist". Likewise, if the roll fails and so the GM narrates "You find letters to Daddy Evard from child Xanthippe", that entails that those letters exist. It's a deliberate feature of the game that the action resolution process permits elements of the fiction to be generated by way of entailment from the narrations of both success and failure on checks.

The earliest RPG I know of to fully embrace this method is Classic Traveller (1977), although I suspect that Arneson and Gygax probably used it from the start, as it is obviously a very powerful technique in a game of shared imagination.

as someone who the story is being told about.

This is just wrong. I, a person who participated in the process of establishing the content of the shared fiction, am not someone about whom the story is being told. Just in case there was any doubt, I am not Thurgon. He is purely imaginary.

 

[pemerton]

They are elements of the world, but they may not become apparent to the PCs unless they make the effort to find out why the beggars are there, or so.e other event occurs that makes the situation more clear. It doesn't mean that those elements aren't part of the setting, nor that they can't inform future events without the PC being aware of it directly.

You write as if the PCs are real, and as if parts of the setting inform future events

The setting is imaginary. It is real people in the real world who invent future events. In the course of doing so, they may imagine that those events are related to other imagined events that, in the fictional world, occurred at an earlier time.

And I take you to be positing that it is the GM who should do all this inventing and imagining.

 

[Xamnam]

I don't know what you mean by "scope".

Do you mean the number of sentences about the setting that have been uttered and assented to during the course of play? Do you mean something about what those sentences describe (eg whether they are propositions about furniture, buidings, cities, universes, etc)?

I don't see that this is any different, in principle, in BW or DW compared to a "trad" approach to D&D.

I get the impression from your posts, and @CreamCloud0 and @Micah Sweet's, that you equate The GM is imagining it with It is an existing part of the world/setting. If that's what you mean, it would be helpful to me at least for you to be clear about it. Or if you mean something else, you will have to explain it in some less metaphorical way if you would like me to understand it.

By scope [to which the world exists], I mean how much of/to what degree the world these characters inhabit has facts about it that are known to one or more of the players, and, in the specific context of what Micah was asking, holding those in contrast to things that are decided in/during/as a result of active play, be they by mechanical resolution or not.

This isn't limited to a GM's imagination, it could be things discussed by the participants in advance, or decided by a player as elements of their character, or pulled in from source material, depending on the nature of the game. These facts can be either secret or public (though as you note in a later post, private information has the problem of being potentially non-actionable), and likewise, important or negligible.

In the context of this discussion, I'm making no value judgement on one or the other, just trying to differentiate them. I tried to be expansive and clear here, and apologize if it is not.