GM fiat - an illustration

[Bedrockgames]

I’m not saying to separate them for play. I’m saying to separate them for discussion.

So if we’re going to talk about the process of play, we’d say something like “every 10 minutes that the characters spend in this area, the GM will roll a d6. On a 1 result, a random encounter will occur. Roll on Random Encounter Table G.”

That’s a play process. It would seem to me to be a relatively easy thing to discuss. But it seems problematic… and I’m really not sure why.

I think the issue is not every group or system is this regimented. This is why we are using terms like organic and fluid. II may in fact roll every ten minutes for encounters where it seems appropriate, but I view that more as a tool than as a process to always use

 

[pemerton]

I would appreciate that, yes, because I don't see how that premise doesn't apply to literally every possible interaction in a TTRPG.

No matter what you do, someone had to present someone with something. Otherwise we're just sitting there doing nothing, talking about nothing. The silent regard of slow things.

I don't need to post a longer explanation, as you've arrived at the core of it yourself!

All interactions between RPG participants take place in the real world, and are subject to the real social dynamics that operate between people who have agreed to play a game together.

And they therefore do not, generally, resemble the interactions that the game participants are imagining taking place.

Just as one example, talking to someone about how you (in imagination) are poking around a desk looking for stuff is not the same as actually poking around a desk looking for stuff. When I actually poke around my desk looking for (say) my charging cord (which was a thing I did yesterday), maybe I don't find it because, being white, in the unlit room it camouflages against paper (for some of its length), while other bits of its length are under a book (this happened to me yesterday; I went and got a cord from somewhere else). But when I talk to you about poking around a desk looking for a charging cord, there is not light and shade and camouflage and obscuring by objects: there is only talking and imagining.

the core of my point was that we can (and some philosophers do!) talk about things like "Pegasus has feathers" as a meaningful statement about something, something with value and merit, even though Pegasus does not in fact exist.

I don't know what "value and merit" mean here.

To pick a famous example: The present king of France is bald is of course perfectly meaningful. That doesn't meant that France is actually a monarchy!

How, then, do we deal with the "Pegasus has feathers" problem?

There is no problem, certainly not in the context of this discussion (which is not a logic or linguistics seminar).

I've already shown you one analysis: we treats "is Pegasus* as predicate, perhaps as synonymous with "the feathered-winged horse ridden by Bellerophon".

In general, it is not uncommon for people to talk about things that don't exist: consider Napoleon's grand stature; or the snow on the Saharan sand dunes. These are perfectly meaningful noun phrases, which no fluent English speaker will have trouble understanding. This doesn't mean they refer to anything real!

If you don't like red, how about "three"? There's a huge philosophical debate--I'm quite well aware of this one--about whether "three" exists or not. Is it just a name we invented? (Then why does it achieve results?) Is it somehow an existing abstract object? (What the hell would that even mean?) Is it a complete fiction, such that all mathematical statements are simply false? (Then why is it so intimately related with logic, and why does it achieve results?)

Are you among those who would deny that mathematical statements can be true? If so I don't think there's a whole lot more we're going to be able to talk about; that would mean we disagree on something so philosophically fundamental we don't really have much common ground for a discussion on this topic

Well, three is taken by Russell to be the class of all triples (if I'm remembering correctly). And there are more contemporary set-theoretic treatments.

When it comes to philosophy of mathematics more generally, in this thread I've already pointed to four approaches: Hilbert's formalism, Platonism, Brouwer's intuitionism, and Wittgenstein's radical constructivism. My understanding, from the mathematicians I know, is that most assume some form of formalism to be true.

Anyway, it seems to me that the more that you regard Narnia as having the same metaphysical or logical status as number, the closer you are to agreeing with me, that a shared fiction can yield inferences which are therefore not created by those who draw them. This is how a lot of RPGing works.

And those constraints on inference - that follow from genre, trope, a shared sense among the group of what is salient, the way that things are presented in play, etc - operate as much on material introduced during the course of play as they do on material authored in advance of play.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the issue is not every group or system is this regimented. This is why we are using terms like organic and fluid. II may in fact roll every ten minutes for encounters where it seems appropriate, but I view that more as a tool than as a process to always use

That’s just one example. I would think most of us would be capable of taking any example of play and describing it in game terms.

Like “organic”… I have an idea of what you mean, I think… but it’s still not describing what’s happening. It’s an adjective, not a verb.

 

[pemerton]

Yet, to me, both sides of this conversation are terribly clear in what they're trying to communicate about mysteries, and I do not understand why folks cannot bridge the gap. It, at times, almost feels deliberate on both sides in order for folks to bolster the point or argument they are trying to make, rather than to aid communication and discussion. My post was merely my attempt to make clear what felt like an extreme misinterpretation. We all know that the setting someone created from whole cloth did not exist in our universe 100 years before they lived, so if they were to use the world 'real' to describe it, or some part of it, telling them that can't be true because they made up their setting feels wildly off the mark, and not actually engaging with the point they are making.

I'm not confused by what @Bedrockgames is saying. It's crystal clear: if the GM has imagined and written down some fictional stuff ahead of times, that means that a player's statement about that fiction - eg I bet the butler did it - can be checked against what the GM wrote down. To put it a bit more formally: the GM's prior imagining establishes correctness conditions for subsequent conjectures about the fiction.

The disagreement, from my point of view, has two elements: (1) Bedrockgames will not accept any attempt to explicate the "objectivity" he discusses in the way I have just done, and rather insists on its ineffability; (2) he and other posters will not accept that there are other ways of establishing correctness conditions, that do not depend up the GM engaging in prior imaginings.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm talking about the process of play. You said the players can introduce clues, so I asked how that works at the table. Do they simply get to declare new truths about the setting? Do they have to use a Plot Point or some other game currency?

It's organic. If they say something that forces me to respond in a way that something that wasn't there before is now, they've caused it to be in the game.

I'll stop thinking that when folks start speaking about what they actually do when they run a game.

I mean, you can think the Earth revolves around the moon for all that I care, and you'd be just as accurate!

I think a DM can say no without it being in bad faith.

As for it not coming from him... how is that? If the players ask about cameras, the DM is the one who decides if they're there, functional, and what may be captured on them.

He could say that there is a blurred image that shows the video was digitally tampered with after the fact. He could say that the perpetrator knew where the cameras were and avoided being caught on them in any significant way.

He could say any number of things... how is that not coming from him? To be clear, I'm not being pedantic here... I get it that the players have prompted this bit of play, but the DM has such unilateral control over the result... especially since it mostly depends on other things the DM has decided ahead of time, as well.

Everything you described there is a DM being adversarial. Outright saying no via tampering, the perpetrator knowing, etc. is the DM countering the player declarations without cause, which is both adversarial and bad faith DMing.

The DM could make it some sort of skill check and on a failure those things might happen, but outside of corner cases, the answer either needs to be yes or reasonable chance of success via a roll.

It doesn't matter if it's a master thief... it matters that the DM may be limited by his lack of being a master criminal when the NPC would not have such limits. It matters because the DM is always making up additional details during play in response to player actions or what's developed in play to the point where so much of what we're talking about is not "objective" in the sense that's being used here.

I mean, if it's true that the key elements of the mystery must be "objective"... meaning determined ahead of time before play... then how can what gets determined during play be meaningful if it's not considered objective?

Objectivity the way we are using it doesn't need to be 100%. What we write down is objectively true for for the fictional mystery, but that doesn't mean that everything possible has been written down.

I'm talking about DM fiat in the sense of the DM being the one who decides things. So, the starting scenario, likely the stakes of the scenario, its importance in the setting, the ultimate responsible party, any conspirators, the major clues or relevant information, the potential suspects, possible motives. All of that is decided by the DM.

That's a useless definition of DM fiat. It broadens to the point where it confuses things greatly. A DM making a decision within the rules of the game is not using fiat. He's using rules. To be fiat you need to step outside of the rules.

Then the DM responds to player prompts by extrapolating from his own ideas... adding more ideas of his into play. And all the play processes involve input from the DM on both the means and the outcome (for example, setting a DC and then determining what's learned from reaching that DC).

And adding their ideas. If I didn't think of it and it gets added to the game it wasn't my idea that came into play. Yes, their ability to bring ideas into the game is much more limited than a player facing game, but its not 100% DM like you keep implying. I can be forced by the social contract to act in good faith and add what they thought of into the game.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes that was an error on my part


I am using objective to mean it is exists as a fact outside the players, outside the PCs. I don't like the term pre-authored at all. I think a lot of your language leads in the direction of a particular approach to talking about narrative. So I don't find it useful. Your jargon seems very loaded, especially when the terms start coming together

I much prefer pre-authored to the derogatory "play to find out what's in the DM's notes" that keeps being thrown about by folks.

 

[pemerton]

I reject that all possible jointly-imagined things are compatible with a player doing a mystery-solve.

And who do you think you are disagreeing with here?

One of the explicit rules in it was that any player can assert that another player's roll fails if it would be more interesting to do so. If they do assert so, and it is not disagreeable to the rest of the group, this happens.

That's not what the rules actually say.

Page 2 says, "If someone thinks it would more interesting if you failed, they describe how you might fail and roll a die." It doesn't specify who the "someone" is. Page 4, under the heading "Unanswered Questions", goes on to say this:

Who decides whether you might fail? Decide the answers with your group. Make reasonable assumptions. For example, some groups will let the Keeper decide everything. Others will share the decisions.​

So far from there being an explicit rule of the sort that you state, there is an explicit statement that there is no such rule! (As a general proposition: each table has to adopt its own rule as to who gets to make the call on possible failure.)

When I GM Cthulhu Dark, the convention adopted is that if two PCs are in opposition, opposed dice are rolled by those players; and as GM, I might sometimes roll dice for non-PC opposition or circumstances if that is appropriate. (Applying broadly BW norms.)

Furthermore, as has been the case with nearly all of your responses, you keep defaulting to 100% pure GM-authorship of the mystery. I don't require that. I've explicitly said as much numerous times. You can have a genuine mystery where even the GM does not know what the answer is, only so long as SOMETHING is the answer that cannot be changed by anyone's hand--not even the GM's.

The only example you've given of this is a non-RPG logic puzzle - Clue(do) - and so I have set it aside.

A RPG cannot work via pure logic puzzle, because the fiction matters to resolution.

Yes, this means I want to solve logic puzzles. I consider that the quintessential activity of attempting to solve a mystery story before you hear the reveal. I consider that personal, in-my-own-head logic-puzzle-solving task both extremely satisfying when I can pull it off (which, sadly, is far rarer than I like!), and I consider that activity, puzzling through a tricky situation, to be precisely analogous to what a real-world investigator (or scientist, or mathematician, or various other things) is doing when they are attempting to learn/prove something new about our real actual world. Hence, it is one of the exceedingly rare cases where the thing done in the head of Ezekiel, the human being sitting before his monitor at ungodly hours due to insomnia, precisely matches the thing done in the head of Lord Finley Strange, the sleuthing son of the Right Honorable the Baron Strange (mostly being dragged around by his utterly irrepressible best friend, Lady Eliza York, only child of the suo jure Duchess of York.)

This is like comparing solving a crossword to scientific or mathematical investigation. The comparison, in my view, is absurd.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I much prefer pre-authored to the derogatory "play to find out what's in the DM's notes" that keeps being thrown about by folks.

I am not a fan of either but that is just me

 

[pemerton]

The pawns have names, the board represents a house, the cards don't just say, "clue 1, clue 2, etc". Looks like fiction to me, minimal as it is.

The pieces in chess have names. The cards in MtG have flavour text. The variant of ludo that I played as a child was called Alien, and labelled the pieces as Astronauts and Aliens, and the board had spaceship illustrations on it.

In all these cases, the fiction is mere overlay. It does no work in the actual play of the game. These games are not RPGs. They don't have stance.

Yeah, that was more or less why I saw it that way. There is a paper-thin layer of fiction pasted over the "solve a logic puzzle where the solution was randomly selected but guaranteed to be discoverable with enough effort." That paper-thin layer of fiction rarely, if ever, extends to thinking of yourself in any way as the character. The character is simply the thing that allows you to have a place on the board--and you can (and should!) accuse your own character of having committed the crime if you think you did it, because the goal is to win by solving the logic puzzle first, not to actually play a murderer trying to get away with murder.

Can you really not see that Clue(do) is not a RPG?

Yeah, though when I play it with my roleplayer friends, we actually do adopt the personas of the characters; it is way more entertaining that way. Not that this affects the outcome of the game.

Right! The moves in Clue(do) are not moves in a fiction. There are no player characters performing imaginary actions, which then get resolved.

I mean, isn't this pretty basic stuff about the differences between categories of games?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not confused by what @Bedrockgames is saying. It's crystal clear: if the GM has imagined and written down some fictional stuff ahead of times, that means that a player's statement about that fiction - eg I bet the butler did it - can be checked against what the GM wrote down. To put it a bit more formally: the GM's prior imagining establishes correctness conditions for subsequent conjectures about the fiction.

The disagreement, from my point of view, has two elements: (1) Bedrockgames will not accept any attempt to explicate the "objectivity" he discusses in the way I have just done, and rather insists on its ineffability; (2) he and other posters will not accept that there are other ways of establishing correctness conditions, that do not depend up the GM engaging in prior imaginings.

1) Your explication is accurate.

2) Of course there are other ways, equally valid as subjective preferences, just as the GM authored way is.