D&D General What is an RPG and is D&D an RPG?

[pemerton]

When thinking about PbtA and moves, it isn't so much a prescribed set of actions as a defined set of mechanical procedures intended to cover an infinite possibility of action.

This doesn't seem accurate for Apocalypse World.

In Apocalypse World, certain action declarations enliven a mechanical procedure - a player-side move. Others do not, in which case it is the GM's job to make a move in response (generally a soft move, unless the player has handed the GM a golden opportunity on a plate).

The quality of the design - if one accepts that it exhibits a reasonable, or even high, degree of quality - consists in the relationships between what sorts of action declarations trigger player-side moves?, what sorts of fiction are likely to be established by the GM's soft moves?, and what sorts of player goals and aspirations for their PCs is the PC build and subsequent play process likely to give rise to? If the relationship between these things gets out of whack, then play will not be very satisfying.

So if I am a Fighter in DnD and declare I want to fly to the top of the castle wall, and the DM says no you can’t fly- does that mean tactical infinity has failed? Is DnD no longer a valid RPG?

It's an interesting feature of D&D that, while magically flying (including by human mortals) is part of the shared fiction, the ability to do it is heavily gated behind all sorts of rules constructs (including character classes, such as Fighter). This is why I think claims of "You can do whatever you can imagine your PC doing" are too simplistic, because clearly in the magical world of D&D I can imagine my character flying to the top of the castle wall, yet in many contexts of play that is not a permitted action declaration.

That's why, rather than "tactical infinity", I prefer the formulation the fiction matters to resolution.

 

[Lanefan]

I personally think this is a misdiagnosis. Board games are defined by having fixed victory/failure conditions and a pre-established time or condition for their evaluation. A game of Res Arcana is played to 8 points, Bus is played until all but one player has used all of the actions initially allotted them, I suddenly can't think of a game with a fixed number of turns, but they're numerous and you get the point. The player accepts those conditions as part of the games magic circle before play.

The RPG is different in that the player can accept or abandon new goals of play while playing, and play can continue (in most cases) after those goals are evaluated, and selecting new goals is a normative part of play. I think that's fundamentally more important a differentiator, and can conceive of games with a fixed set of actions but unbounded goals that should be considered RPGs.

In short, what you're saying (IMO correctly) is that one of the defining aspects of an RPG is that it is open-ended.

 

[Lanefan]

Real people can't interact with imaginary things.

This, I think, is one place where we broadly disagree. I think real people CAN interact with imaginary things, either within their own imagination if picturing themselves changing a scene or within a shared imagination doing something to change the scene and then allowing a narration to describe what changes they have made to that scene.

 

[Lanefan]

That's why, rather than "tactical infinity", I prefer the formulation the fiction matters to resolution.

I think those are both correct. "Tactical infinity" means you can try absolutely anything, no matter how absurd. "Fiction matters" determines whether what you try has any hope of succeeding or not, given the situation within the fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Real people can't interact with imaginary things. Interaction is a broadly causal notion, and fictional things don't exert causal influence on real things.

This is why I think we have to talk about the declaration and resolution of actions by participants.

I guess I'm not very clear on the limits of interaction then. My intent was to preserve breadth by not defining away the possibility of GM-less games. That is, games where advancing the state of play is handled by procedure or the like rather than by a living human selecting things. E.g. you used the phrase "engaging with, and generating, a fiction, an imaginary set of things and events, that is shared among the participants". That sounds, to my ears, like a more specific way of saying interacting with a fictional space.

In Apocalypse World, certain action declarations enliven a mechanical procedure - a player-side move. Others do not, in which case it is the GM's job to make a move in response (generally a soft move, unless the player has handed the GM a golden opportunity on a plate).

The quality of the design - if one accepts that it exhibits a reasonable, or even high, degree of quality - consists in the relationships between what sorts of action declarations trigger player-side moves?, what sorts of fiction are likely to be established by the GM's soft moves?, and what sorts of player goals and aspirations for their PCs is the PC build and subsequent play process likely to give rise to? If the relationship between these things gets out of whack, then play will not be very satisfying.

Building off of this (since you know this stuff better than I do): This reminds me of something that stuck with me, both from reading the text itself and from my experience as a player before I became a DW GM. This idea that the rules of PbtA games are meant to be "off" in some sense until something turns them "on," and then as soon as they've done their job, they turn "off" again. Like those funny little machines on YouTube that turn themselves off when you flip the switch to turn them on, except productive rather than merely humorous.

Playing DW can sometimes almost seem like some of the ways FKR is described. I have gone whole sessions without anyone rolling any dice, spending any resources, or in any other way actually triggering the rules. Well, other than the End of Session move, which is always triggered by, uh, ending the session. During sessions like that, we just talk through things. What the player wants, what the world needs, whatever makes us happy, set rules-free. (Pun absolutely intended.) As the book describes it, much of playing Dungeon World is like having a conversation with your friends. You don't need mechanics to have a conversation, though there may be rules of a sort for them (akin to the Agendas and Principles, but totally informal.)

But in most sessions, at least some of the time, the player wants to do something, or the world needs something, that can't be simply talked through. A threat that may come to pass in whole, in part, or not at all. A risk taken. A gesture made. Something uncertain. For the vast majority of such things, there already exists a move tailor-made to resolve this uncertainty. Hack & Slash resolves the uncertainty about whether, and how, a player's physical confrontation with an opponent succeeds. Defy Danger, that most versatile of moves, resolves the uncertainty about whether, and how much, a player may act or endure despite hardship. Parley resolves the uncertainty about whether (and how much) the player(s) can convince a third party to act as the party would like them to. Etc.

You use the appropriate move because something is happening and needs to be resolved. Once it's resolved...the move is no longer required, because it has done its job. It has told you what you need to know in order to move past that critical uncertainty. Hence why I say the rules are "off" until something turns them "on," and then you turn them "off" again on the way out.

DW's design quality (and AW's, though I have no firsthand experience with the latter) comes in part from making these rules triggers natural, clear, and easy to process, while still having them be widely applicable for the things the given game is "about" in terms of tone and gameplay. It also comes from making the rules themselves, and the Agendas and Principles which guide the "conversation" part of play, really honed to doing exactly what is needed and no more.

 

[overgeeked]

When thinking about PbtA and moves, it isn't so much a prescribed set of actions as a defined set of mechanical procedures intended to cover an infinite possibility of action.

I wouldn't say that. The mechanics of most storygames, or fiction-first games, point directly towards the kind of fiction those games are meant to tell. The lack of mechanics for other things, like say harvesting monster bits in Dungeon World in no way implies it cannot be done, any more than the lack of rules for same in D&D prevents it from happening. Rather it's that is not the focus of the intended fiction. Looking at the moves in any PbtA game will show you they're not designed to cover "an infinite possibility of action." They focus only on the intended fiction. Something like Fate has its four actions and those are meant to cover every possible action.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes. Even the most extreme railroading found in some versions of D&D play still permits those in the player role to make modes changes to the shared fiction.

But only along the one single path that the DM has dictated, meaning that the player is not the one who is really making that decision. The player's choices are 1) make the one decision the DM has dictated, or 2) don't play the game.

If there are more choices than one, then it's not a railroad at all, but simply a linear game. Linear =/= railroad.

 

[pemerton]

I guess I'm not very clear on the limits of interaction then. My intent was to preserve breadth by not defining away the possibility of GM-less games. That is, games where advancing the state of play is handled by procedure or the like rather than by a living human selecting things. E.g. you used the phrase "engaging with, and generating, a fiction, an imaginary set of things and events, that is shared among the participants". That sounds, to my ears, like a more specific way of saying interacting with a fictional space.

To me, interaction connotes a back-and-forth of causal influence. Like if I interact with a person.

Whereas I choose the verb engage with deliberately - it's one way. And generating makes the direction of causation even more explicit.

Whenever I see people talk about the fiction in RPGs as if it, in itself, dictates or determines or causes things, especially in these conceptual and definitional contexts, I am moved to politely but firmly reiterate my view, that imaginary things don't exercise causal power.

A concrete example. Here's an explanation for why a character failed to find a secret door after looking for one: there's no door there to be found! But that is not any sort of explanation for why a player's declared action "I (as my character) search for secret doors" produces the answer "You don't find any". Because that game play is all something that happens in the real world, and hence has real world explanations: namely, there is an agreed process for generating the fiction as to what happens next; the GM has implemented that process; in this case, let's suppose it includes looking at a map or notes; and that map or those notes indicate that there are no secret doors to be found in the place where the PC is looking.

DW's design quality (and AW's, though I have no firsthand experience with the latter) comes in part from making these rules triggers natural, clear, and easy to process, while still having them be widely applicable for the things the given game is "about" in terms of tone and gameplay.

I would add to this: the player side moves should be, at least roughly, "correlated" with GM hard moves in the following sense, that most of the time you want the fictional circumstances where you are happy to see GM hard moves be the same sorts of fictional circumstances that will trigger a player side move.

This way, most of the situations in which the protagonists find themselves (temporarily) defeated will be ones that, at the table, have been preceded by the excitement of a dice throw.

Likewise, you want the same sort of correlation between circumstances that will trigger a player side move and circumstances where you are happy to see the protagonists (temporarily) succeed. The fact that (for instance) Apocalypse World has no when you sincerely profess to another that you love them move tells us something about what sort of fiction it is giving us (namely, not one where protagonists achieve their heart's desires by way of sincere professions of love - we might expect an Arthurian or even Austenian PbtA game to have a different player-side move approach to this particular field of human endeavour!).

 

[pemerton]

But only along the one single path that the DM has dictated, meaning that the player is not the one who is really making that decision. The player's choices are 1) make the one decision the DM has dictated, or 2) don't play the game.

OK? As I said (albeit with a typo), even the most extreme railroading found in some versions of D&D play still permits those in the player role to make modest changes to the shared fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To me, interaction connotes a back-and-forth of causal influence. Like if I interact with a person.

Whereas I choose the verb engage with deliberately - it's one way. And generating makes the direction of causation even more explicit.

Whenever I see people talk about the fiction in RPGs as if it, in itself, dictates or determines or causes things, especially in these conceptual and definitional contexts, I am moved to politely but firmly reiterate my view, that imaginary things don't exercise causal power.

A concrete example. Here's an explanation for why a character failed to find a secret door after looking for one: there's no door there to be found! But that is not any sort of explanation for why a player's declared action "I (as my character) search for secret doors" produces the answer "You don't find any". Because that game play is all something that happens in the real world, and hence has real world explanations: namely, there is an agreed process for generating the fiction as to what happens next; the GM has implemented that process; in this case, let's suppose it includes looking at a map or notes; and that map or those notes indicate that there are no secret doors to be found in the place where the PC is looking.

I would add to this: the player side moves should be, at least roughly, "correlated" with GM hard moves in the following sense, that most of the time you want the fictional circumstances where you are happy to see GM hard moves be the same sorts of fictional circumstances that will trigger a player side move.

This way, most of the situations in which the protagonists find themselves (temporarily) defeated will be ones that, at the table, have been preceded by the excitement of a dice throw.

Likewise, you want the same sort of correlation between circumstances that will trigger a player side move and circumstances where you are happy to see the protagonists (temporarily) succeed. The fact that (for instance) Apocalypse World has no when you sincerely profess to another that you love them move tells us something about what sort of fiction it is giving us (namely, not one where protagonists achieve their heart's desires by way of sincere professions of love - we might expect an Arthurian or even Austenian PbtA game to have a different player-side move approach to this particular field of human endeavour!).

An Arthurian adventure/"classical romance" (in the literary fiction sense) PbtA sounds absolutely delightful.