GM fiat - an illustration

[Maxperson]

I meant the solution to the mystery.

He doesn't control that, either. There are generally multiple avenues to the solution, if they figure it out at all. Not all mysteries get solved.

No one would craft the game that way. You’re exactly right. It is crafted so that it CAN be solved. That involves a level of authorship… of craft… of intent… that real world mysteries lack.

There is a guiding force behind play that is designing everything with the intention that it work as a fun game scenario. That is a key factor that you’re simply dismissing out of hand. I don’t know if it’s because you’re failing to see why it matters so much or what, but it absolutely does.

I guess I have to repeat myself.

The deliberate aspect isn't relevant. Clues are clues. Finding is finding. Interpreting is interpreting. Solving is solving.

 

[Rabulias]

My most egregious use of DM fiat was many years ago in a solo adventure I planned for a player's elf wizard character over our summer break from college, but I think it worked out well. This was back in AD&D 2nd edition. I gave wizard characters a choice to be trained by a school (more resources for the character, but more obligations and/or rivalries) or by a sole wizard (less resources, but less obligations). He had chosen the school training, so for this adventure I called him back to the school in the capital city to teach a class of basic cantrips for a few weeks while one of the elder instructors was on a research trip to the outer planes.

Teaching the class was mostly uneventful. Suspicious events began happening as they neared graduation, and he began snooping around the school and the nearby city blocks in his off hours. He became convinced that someone was planning to disrupt the graduation ceremony or the school's party afterward.

At any rate, one session I am describing his class taking the final exam, and my tone just slipped into monotony. I could tell he was starting to get a bit bored with this (our sessions did not normally detail much of the class, though I had roleplayed up a few of the students to give them distinctive personalities), and I said something like this:
"You note this student's technique has improved from the start of the class, and his confidence has grown with it. You begin to write your notes..." Then I leaned forward, slapped the table, and exclaimed "You are running. It is dark, damp, and it smells awful - you are on a ledge in a sewer?!? To your left and below you is a rushing torrent of water and filth. About 50 feet ahead of you there is an elf holding an open wooden chest about 10 inches wide toward you. He slams the chest shut, tucks it under his arm, then tears off running away from you."

The elf had an obliviax in the chest which had eaten the last 24 hours of the character's memories (I fudged it to let him keep some spells, since he was a solo wizard). So I DM fiated two things: one, that he would fail the saving throw vs the memory loss, and two, I had written up the last 24 hours of what he had done in his investigation, which he was able to work backwards, ultimately saving the school's leaders from a plot to poison them by a revenge-driven former student. My player said he really enjoyed it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This is wrong.

Bloodtide… in this thread I’ve tried to engage with you as if you’re not a troll. You respond with nonsensical takes on what you suppose my games are. You don’t explain your own games in any clear way. At different times your comments conflict, you contradict yourself.

I’m only responding now to explain to you that I will safely assume anything that you think I’m doing wrong just reinforces to me that I’m doing it right.

He doesn't control that, either. There are generally multiple avenues to the solution, if they figure it out at all. Not all mysteries get solved.

He controls the solution. Even your phrasing shows that. “There are generally multiple avenues to the solution” means he doesn’t control how the players may arrive at the solution. But there is a solution.

This has been the crux of the argument that the mystery is real… that it has a predetermined solution. So who controls that if not the GM?

I guess I have to repeat myself.

The deliberate aspect isn't relevant. Clues are clues. Finding is finding. Interpreting is interpreting. Solving is solving.

Max, it doesn't matter how many times you say it, you’re wrong. Repeat it all you like. The GM being the one who decides all these things and doing so with the express purpose of presenting an engaging play scenario is a major factor of the point I’ve been arguing.

I mean… clearly we disagree. But please don’t act like I’m not understanding you and you have to repeat yourself to a simpleton.

 

[pemerton]

Great! This is exactly what the PCs do with the fictional world. They collect information, and evidence, by interacting with game world: looking at things, poking them, talking to people, poking them, etc.

This happens in the fiction of RPGs where mysteries are solved even if the GM has not pre-authored a mystery with clues in the style of a traditional CoC module.

In your last few posts you seem to be taking the stance that the only things that are real mysteries are those that conform to every aspect of a real world mystery.

I’ll assume that’s your actual stance and not just an attempt at showing a contradiction in our position (which is fine if it is but it’s just not clear).

But our position doesn’t entail every aspect being the same as a real world mystery in order to be a real mystery. Our position instead entails that in order for something to be a real mystery that actual inferences and deductions can be made by the players or the real life detective as each individual piece of evidence is found. Supplementary to that is that only pre-existing facts allow for actual inferences and deductions to occur.

My view - which may be shared by some other posters too, I suspect - is that the final sentence of your post is false, assuming that your second-to-last sentence, in talking about "actual inferences and deductions", is talking about the sorts of inferences and deductions that occur in the play of a RPG.

 

[pemerton]

You aren't just solving a puzzle you are solving a fictional mystery. The characters can follow leads, pick up the phone call people to ask questions, go to various institutions to ask around and look for clues, they can go to a crime scene, gather clues and follow those clues, etc.

But this is true in any RPGing. Whether or not the players can declare that their PCs telephone people and ask questions, or got to some place and look for clues, has no connection to how the game was prepped and what (if any) pre-authorship the GM undertook.

I mean, upthread when @hawkeyefan noted that you seem to be treating in-fiction cause and effect as if they were real you denied that. But in the post I've just quoted you're doing exactly that!

When, in a classic CoC module, a player decides to telephone someone, why are they doing that? Because the GM has somehow made that person salient! This is already a departure from real world mystery solving, where there is no authorial agent setting out to make salient the pathways that will lead to a solution to the mystery.

In the play of Burning Wheel (as an example) there are also ways to make things salient. They just don't rely so heavily upon pre-authorship by the GM.

It is pretty easy to set up a scenario where something concrete happened, details about that are established, there are various leads, suspects, clues, etc

No one disputes this. @hawkeyefan has posted about his play of CoC and Delta Green. I've played plenty of CoC and have also posted about the freeform investigation scenario of the type you describe that I GMed a few years ago. @AbdulAlhazred was playing CoC back in the 1980s, I think. So everyone in this thread has done what you're talking about.

The point is that you are insisting that the process you describe is uniquely "real" and "objective" as far as the solving of a mystery is concerned. Which is not true.

 

[pemerton]

But this is straw man. No one is saying the fictional mystery is operating in the same exact way as a real one. But the GM is trying to emulate those elements, while also making a fun scenario.

It's not a straw man. Here, you concede that CoC modules, like Agatha Christie novels, are contrivances.

There are also other ways to contrive the solution, via game play, of a mystery.

But you insist your preferred way is "real" - that it is like solving a real mystery - even when it is pointed out, and you agree, that it is not!

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's not a straw man. Here, you concede that CoC modules, like Agatha Christie novels, are contrivances.

It is a straw man because we aren't saying it is exactly the same as a real mystery

 

[zakael19]

It is a straw man because we aren't saying it is exactly the same as a real mystery

Wait I thought the last 80+ pages of this thread were spinning roughly on exactly this.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There are also other ways to contrive the solution, via game play, of a mystery.

But you insist your preferred way is "real" - that it is like solving a real mystery - even when it is pointed out, and you agree, that it is not!

No one is saying you can't have solutions arrived at another way. They are saying this way you are really solving an objective mystery.

 

[pemerton]

Given I did not have the book, and was learning from the freely-available materials online--where the Fronts stuff is in a completely different section, significantly removed from the basic GMing rules--I had no idea when learning how to do things that Fronts were exactly what you're supposed to prepare; their significant separation from the other rules made them seem like merely distant tools, something important but not THE single most critical, most vital thing you absolutely positively HAVE to do. Blame it on bad organization of the documents I read; blame it on not being able to read the official book; whatever you like. The connection was not clear to me and the structure of the materials available to me was a significant cause thereof. I understand this now.

<snip>

I stand by my claim that the presentation, in the materials available to me (I can very rarely afford anything at all for myself), was poor and left "prep" almost completely undefined. The page numbers mean nothing to me, because I've never had the book, I've only had the freely-available materials online.

I am sorry to hear that you cannot afford to purchase the DW rulebook.

But I was responding to your claim about there being a tension in the rules. I don't agree, and have explained why in some detail. I just looked at this website - Dungeon World SRD - and in the table of contents on the left there is a heading Gamemastering and under that a sub-heading Fronts. That seems to contain all the text that I quoted from p 185 the rulebook. And under the main heading (Gamemastering) there seems to be all the text I quoted from pp 160, 161 and 167. So I don't see that there is any tension in the SRD either.

You'll probably be surprised to know that I do, in fact, try to run DW as written. I have, in fact, repeatedly told people on this forum that their knee-jerk distrust of rules-as-written is a disservice to them if attempting to play DW because the rules really are very well-designed.

<snip>

I'm not really sure why thinking about consequences is such a bad thing here though. A nobleman spurned will react negatively. A nobleman served with speed and precision will react positively. A threat defeated might be destroyed entirely, or crippled, or merely driven away, or what-not; a threat the PCs couldn't, didn't, or wouldn't stop will get worse. That, I thought, was a huge part of why you draft Fronts in the first place?

The dangers/threats in a front have impulses, as you can see here: Fronts – Dungeon World SRD

So suppose that your danger is an ambitious organisation: it is a corrupt government, or a cabal? That will then tell you what the nobleman who belongs to it will ultimately try to do: maintain the status quo, or absorb those in power and grow.

The colour of the nobleman - that he enjoys fawning and is easily angered by disagreement - is secondary here. Making those sorts of notes about a NPC's personality is not really the sort of prep that DW is focused on, as is demonstrated by these passages under GM Principles:

Give every monster life
Monsters are fantastic creatures with their own motivations (simple or complex). Give each monster details that bring it to life: smells, sights, sounds. Give each one enough to make it real, but don’t cry when it gets beat up or overthrown. That’s what player characters do!

Name every person
Anyone that the players speak with has a name. They probably have a personality and some goals or opinions too, but you can figure that out as you go. Start with a name. The rest can flow from there.​

You can figure that out as you go is key here: there is no instruction to make notes about the precise quirks of the nobleman's personality. But his role and goals as part of an ambitious organisation: those are things that the prep of a front and its dangers/threats will establish, and those then create material to incorporate into GM move-making.