GM fiat - an illustration

[hawkeyefan]

I still haven't seen you caution Pemerton to pause and consider, even though he and Bloodtide have something in common with their posts. Why the double standard?

I already explained. Because @pemerton has a view of railroading that I fully understand. I don’t know if I always apply the term as broadly as he does, but I fully understand why he does. I contribute that understanding to the huge amounts of digital ink that he’s spilled to explain his thoughts on RPGs and his preferences.

I have no doubt that his play is the furthest thing from @bloodtide ‘s game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Really? Does everyone agree with Plato on that?

Or are they the consequences of the combination of (i) axioms and (ii) inference rules?

Doesn't matter, and I think that whole debate you're alluding to is rather pointless. But even under that logic the axioms would be the GM's pre-established facts, from which one could logically infer further facts. I think @Bedrockgames already covered this earlier.

 

[pemerton]

meh having more than one person contribute to the events of play equaling a writer’s room seems pretty simplistic. I mean, I get why you’d say it… but then I’d say “can’t you contribute to the events of play in your D&D game?” And you’d say “of course, but not in the same way” and I’d say “huh” and then just disregard the writer’s room assessment.

So much this!

Upthread, I replied to @Crimson Longinus that there is no more "shared storytelling" in my RPGing that in theirs. And this is exactly why.

A person who knows how to play D&D - that is, declare actions for their PCs in the fictional situation established by the GM - knows how to play Prince Valiant, or Classic Traveller, or Burning Wheel, or D&D 4e, or Torchbearer 2e, or Rolemaster. I mean, they might have to learn new things about what play is about (ie it's probably not about collecting loot by raiding dungeons), but then I'm told that it's common for D&D play to not be about that either.

The differences sit on the GM side.

 

[pemerton]

Mysteries can be purely mental. It is absurd to think that one cannot have a real mystery as purely mental exercise.

A "mystery" that is purely mental can be solved purely "internally", like a chess problem ("White to mate in 3 moves") or a sudoku. This is why I point to mathematics: mathematical questions can be answered purely internally, although no one pre-authored the answer, because their are robust, canonical inference rules.

Some questions in fiction can be answered the same way - for instance, we can infer things about 222B Baker Street from stuff that Conan Doyle wrote, even though he didn't write down that particular stuff.

You and @Bedrockgames and @Micah Sweet take this possibility for granted every time you contrast a GM extrapolating from established fiction with a GM just making up random stuff.

Now imagine a RPG in which the extrapolation is not done secretly by the GM using nothing but their own mental heuristics, but is managed via a whole set of partly-externalised processes. That will produce "real" outcomes without them having to be pre-authored.

Doesn't matter, and I think that whole debate you're alluding to is rather pointless. But even under that logic the axioms would be the GM's pre-established facts, from which one could logically infer further facts. I think @Bedrockgames already covered this earlier.

And it's pure dogma to assert, or assume, that those facts must be facts about the answer to the mystery.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The procedures are the standard ones for Burning Wheel, or Prince Valiant, or a 4e D&D skill challenge. There are parallels in AW and DW, though they're not identical.

The GM frames a scene, in accordance with principles that establish how this is to be done - those principles relate to player-established priorities for their PCs.

The players declare actions for their PCs, that engage with the framed scene. If the player succeeds, the rules indicate what happens next - generally the PC succeeds at their action. (In AW and DW it's sometimes a bit more complicated than that.)

If the player fails, the GM narrates a consequence that negates what the PC was attempting to achieve. In AW/DW, this is the time the GM makes "as hard and direct a move" as they like.

At all times - framing scenes, establishing consequences - the GM is obliged to "make a move that follows", That is, the fiction is a constraint. So are the player-established priorities. Further constraints are likely generated by the local, particular details of the action declaration.

In this sort of RPGing, there is not "collective authorship", any more than a D&D combat is collective authorship. The procedures make sure of that. Sometimes the only thing that follows is something that no one at the table would author were they free to author as they like.

The system of constraints, and the narrations that they permit and oblige, are the analogue to the inference rules of mathematics or of law. Obviously they are different sorts of inference rules, operating on different material and in a different domain. The participants need to be on the same page even moreso than in law (which requires more same-pagedness than mathematics) - but then, that is generally true for any successful RPGing.

Keep in mind, my memory of 4E Skill challenges is very fuzzy (for example I don't really remember anything about scene framing from 4E). But to me this sounds like it doesn't necessarily contradict having an objective backstory. Though I might be missing something. If on the other hand the procedures that generate what follows could effectively impact the backstory, for example it isn't objectively true that Nathaniel Cooper was stabbed in the back with a knife by Vincent Kane, but rather something that emerges from this procedure, than I would say there isn't an objective backstory and you are, at least from what I can tell, doing something different than solving an objective mystery (which isn't to say isn't consistent or that things aren;t logically following, but you aren't unearthing an objective truth in the setting). To be clear I am not saying it is one or the other, I am trying to understand it and explaining how I am digesting what you are saying (so you can understand any point I might not fully grasp)

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, it was not about talk of a trade off that started this tangent. It was the use of “real” to privilege one sort of game.

Hawkeye, I wasn't privileging one game over another. I was reacting to a statement about information and agency and this came up. I might have the details off. So feel free to go back and check (it is pretty muddy so perhaps I am incorrect in my memory). But the point of this isn't to say solving a real mystery better than other approaches at all.

 

[Bedrockgames]

We could perhaps talk about what the pros and cons of each approach are… but if we can’t get past this idea that one is real and one is not, it may be difficult to get there.

But I think the the concept that this is about really solving a mystery, is crucial to understanding the difference. That doesn't mean it is better. Like I said, you aren't going to get something that likely feels like an Agatha Christie novel using this method. The point of the method isn't to emulate the feel and flow of an Agatha Christie novel, it is to let the players engage with the game of solving a mystery (and that could fall apart, it could end up being unexciting, it would be confusing, etc). There have been lots of advice written to avoid many of the problems and whole systems have been created to get around the problems (Esoterrorist and Gumshoe are system solutions to the problem of things like the missed clue).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Right, but what you’re comparing it to… your basis for analysis… seems to be detective fiction. Where an author has predetermined the facts of the story and the protagonist… and vicariously the reader/viewer… will try and figure it out.

But if we describe it that way, you balk.

I didn't balk at this example. I used this example. I said this approach is like a mystery novel where the author has established all the facts from the beginning so he is working with an objective truth of what happened, that can inform the rest of the book, allowing the reader to guess.

I balked at the GMs notes procedural description

 

[Maxperson]

I already explained. Because @pemerton has a view of railroading that I fully understand. I don’t know if I always apply the term as broadly as he does, but I fully understand why he does. I contribute that understanding to the huge amounts of digital ink that he’s spilled to explain his thoughts on RPGs and his preferences.

I have no doubt that his play is the furthest thing from @bloodtide ‘s game.

So a double standard, because his view on railroading in relation to Bloodtide's is every bit as relevant as any connections you might make between Bloodtide and myself.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

What Ron clarified — and I think many here would find enlightening — is that contingency in investigative play isn’t limited to whether the culprit’s identity is pre-written. In fact, it’s more useful to think about three distinct and equally valid variables that can each be made contingent or not:

(1) whether the culprit (and, let me extend for the purposes of this thread, backstory) is discovered at all (i.e., “who did it” or what happened),
(2) what happens to secondary characters or NPCs during play, and
(3) what happens to the investigators themselves.

The fascinating thing is that most so-called “no myth” mystery play, the kind where the backstory isn’t pre-established, works wonders because doesn’t actually make the culprit+backstory element contingent in a meaningful way. Instead, these games often focus their procedural play around the second and third variables: how the investigators’ actions impact the fate of NPCs and how the investigation transforms the investigators themselves. The culprit may be emergently defined during play, but the real procedural engine is what the players choose to do, who they help or harm, and how their investigation affects them personally. The workshop’s exercises and participant discussion corroborated this, repeatedly revealing that the act of investigating produced real dramatic shifts, not because of any prewritten answer, but because of how play unfolded around these three variables.

I'm catching up to this wicked late, but today was a weirdly busy day.

The framework is something that really stuck with me from the seminar. Three quick things that might be worth mentioning in the context of these three variables are:

(1) Each of them could possibly be contingent (resolved in play, either way), non-contingent (it must or will be a certain outcome), or null (we won't find out, won't address it in play, and can't know it). About the only requirement is that one of these three things has to be contingent, or else we aren't really playing a roleplaying game.

(2) Each of these things could be dependent on the mode of play at the table, but they can also be system dependent. For instance, all three are contingent in Dogs in the Vineyard as written: one way or the other, the disposition of each variable will come out in play.

(3) This list isn't exhaustive; there are other variables that could be considered (e.g., fate of the culprit, though I feel like this is kind of a second order variable after whether the culprit is discovered or not).

You linked to the purchase link for the seminar, but I thought that the discussion page had some interesting points, too, in the comments.