D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[SableWyvern]

The former.

It is a claim of objectivity about approach. Something which Micah and others strenuously denied having ever done in the thread.


I didn't say "objectively better" in the generic sense. I said that you are claiming your style contains objectivity and thus the other styles--explicitly rejected for their (alleged) subjectivity--do not have that.

That specific thing is what I'm calling out. This claim that your approach is objective or contains objectivity, while the approach @pemerton or others are speaking of doesn't.

I'm asserting neither thing has any more nor less objectivity than the other, because there isn't a thing to be objective about. Consistency, sure! But there's nothing inconsistent about the things pemerton has described. The other things, like being pre-written or being extrapolated by employing "real-world logic" etc., likewise do not add nor create any objectivity that wasn't already there.

My comments related to my style. I did not reject any other style, or the objectivity of other styles, because I wasn't referring to other styles at all.

However, I will happily state that there absolutely are styles that do not aim to have GMs determining outcomes purely based on an attempt to objectively assess the known facts of the world. Some styles might aim instead for picking the most fun or genre-appropriate outcome, or have the Friend Computer intentionally obstruct the PCs for ridiculous reasons, or escalate situations based on mandatory die rolls, or have the players decide the outcomes for whatever reason they want as long as they spend points, or whatever. There are a host of possible methods. (Some of those might fall more or less within the realm of objective as well, depending on your context. I'm not interest in quibbling because, as stated, there is no value judgement inherent and it really doesn't matter if you want to define "objectively" a little more or little less broadly -- what matters is (generic) you apply some common sense and context to the use in each case.)

To be clear, saying a GMing style is or is not based on an attempt at assessing the world and consequences objectively doesn't that I'm making value judgements about those styles; it just means that some of them aren't based on the GM doing their best to make objective judgements based on the established facts of the world. If you are reading value judgements into my comments (beyond matters of personal preference), you are misunderstanding me and, I'm beginning to suspect, perhaps misreading intentionally.

If anyone claims that their style involves also striving for objectivity, and provides the context within that objectivity exists, I will take them at their word for it. For yourself, it sounds like you don't believe objectivity is possible and thus don't feel your own style is one where you strive for objectivity in this way, and that's perfectly OK too; what I don't understand is why you care that some people approach their games differently.

If it makes you feel better to believe that objectivity is not the best word to use for what we're talking about, that's OK too. However, those of us using it seem to understand what we mean by it and are likely to keep using that way because the vast majority of the time people understand what we mean and it's a useful term. It seems that you also understand what we mean by it, but would rather focus on your personal definition of the word in order to claim we're all making critical semantic errors.

As I've mentioned a few times previously, I'm really not interested in that kind of semantic quibbling, so that's pretty much everything I have to say about the word "objective".

 

[thefutilist]

apart from the player initiating what they want to do, I see no difference to the tasks @pemerton described here and rejected

Well a lot of it is the criteria the GM uses to frame the opposition.


From my example:


Take Thoth sneaking into the library to steal the book. The GM isn't extrapolating what 'would' be the defences because they don't exist. Instead they react to the players intent 'sneak in'. Decide it requires a roll because it's in opposition to a belief. Decide that having one guard turn up (on failure) would be more interesting because it potentially challenges the whole pacifist thing in a way ten guards turning up wouldn't.

Or take the conflict immediately before where Thoth tries to convert the librarians. The GM doesn't say 'no that's not possible' because they decided the librarians wouldn't be able to be persuaded. They either say yes, have the librarians convert, or they roll the dice to see. They cant say no.


The important point is that there is no objective GM stuff behind the curtain. The GM is creating the world 'on the fly' in such a way that it can be leveraged against the player characters priorities.

 

[pemerton]

The players are driving, within the world the GM provides.

Do you agree that what you say is metaphorical, or non-literal in some similar fashion? In that, in a literal sandbox, I actually move sand around. Whereas in the "sandboxes" being talked about here, the players don't move things: they say things. And the GM isn't actually providing anything but representations - words, maps and perhaps pictures; and in response to the players saying the things that they say, the GM provides more representations.

This may seem trivial, but I don't think it is.

When I actually move sand around, the questions of what have I done, and what have I created or destroyed, and so on, are answered by actual material facts that unfold in space and time.

But in the RPG sandbox, we have the production of representations - words, maps, pictures - and reasoning with them and about them. It's a fully cognitive, imaginative activity.

Some representations can be true or false, accurate or inaccurate - they are "answerable" to some actual state of affairs that they pertain to. But in the RPG case, there is no actual state of affairs - it's fiction!

So what regulates the "correctness" of representations? What makes it true that a NPC will do <this> rather than <that>. Some of us in this thread - and I'm one of them - doubt that the details of a setting are so specifically set out that unique, correct "truths" are entailed about what is, or could be, the case. Decision is required.

Which brings us back to the metaphor: the "world" that the GM "provides" is a whole lot of stuff that has been said, and/or is being said, by the GM. Responses or reactions to things that the PCs do - insult guards, offer them bribes, etc- aren't generated via causal processes relating the PCs to those things; it's not real, and so there's no causation. (In this respect, it's not like actually driving through the actual world.) Those responses or reactions are often not entailed (eg most of the time, the GM will not have notes that entail an outcome). So they have to be decided.

This is where the idea that things are not really objective gets its toehold.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So how does one distinguish between say a pack of a goblins and an earth elemental with the numbers? Are the DCs (AC) higher? Is the harm/damage one receives from bad attack rolls greater from specific monsters?

Well, if I may, an example loosely inspired by (part of) the journey we took to get something done in that Ironsworn game. Might goof up some details, it's been a hot minute.

Abraxus (my char), Magnus, Alvis (pronounced "all-vis"!), and Harald are Ironsworn--Viking-inspired, oath-swearing iron-age adventurers--trekking to prove our sincerity to a nearby Elf circle (=village). Elves and humans had become allies when the humans first arrived, three generations ago, but those connections lapsed, the Elves kept to themselves, and other than the one exiled elf in our circle, none have been seen for a full generation. But bad stuff is going down, the necromantic dragon Dunstaad has returned from his banishment/flight, and the winters have been unusually harsh, so we could really benefit from rebuilding our connection to the Elves. Hence, we trekked out to see them, talked with them about some stuff, and each Swore an Iron Vow (slightly different oaths each, rather than one single group Oath)--but we got lots of middling successes, which means we had to prove our intentions or the like.

The elves asked us to go deal with some corrupting influences, more or less, to prove our sincerity for the bigger tasks ahead. This included, eventually, dealing with some powerful, probably at least part-supernatural bears that were making it harder for the elves to forage, hunt, farm, etc. and generally disrupting nature in the area. But we got some bad/middling rolls along the way, which bumped up the challenge. At first, we thought it would be just one bear, but we learned no--it was two bears. And then we learned, even worse, it's a mated pair...and they have cubs. Not quite full-grown, but getting there. Between all those things, that meant when battle was finally joined, the two sides were much closer to evenly matched--and thus the difficulty was (IIRC) 3 or 4 rather than the 1 it would've been to hunt just a single bear.

Over the course of the fight, we took various hits, mitigated in one way or another, but an unlucky roll late in the fight resulted in my Young Wyvern companion biting the dust. (This came from asking the "Oracles"--random-roll tables and yes/no questions with various specific chances of yes vs no--what specific bad consequence happened, since it wasn't clear to us what the obvious negative consequences would be.) Having fulfilled my Oath, and lost a companion (and thus a partial refund of XP spent on him), I elected to say Orfrydd burst into golden flames after the battle was won--and a fresh, new wyvern body took its place, still regaining his strength from the fiery rebirth (spent XP to get the asset back, but without bonuses). Alvis, meanwhile, who is somewhere between "ranger" and "druid" in D&D terms, took a cub remaining at the end of the fight and bonded with it, gaining a new animal companion himself.

As you can see, we didn't just invent new threats out of the blue for no reason. Instead, we remained bound within the fiction we already knew (a bear is threatening the elves and their priorities, they want it gone), but discoveries made along the way refined that information into something new. The person filling the GM role at the time, Hussar, "framed" both the scenes establishing why we would want to make Vows, and the scenes involving the journey to the bear-den and the actual fight itself, in terms of conflicts that would be relevant to us. My character, for example, has a personal vow to "Reunite man and elf": "I have solemnly sworn to mend the ties between Man and Elf, even should it risk life or limb; in this harsh land, we must unite to survive." Meanwhile, Harald has a personal vow to slay the dragon Dunstaad and mount its head on his mead hall (mead hall pending construction...or indeed even finding a place to build one!), so he's wanting to build his legacy and get people hyped about his interests--which resulted in scenes framing his complications with his new vow to the elves where this one elf woman has him smitten and he specifically wants to impress her, not the elves generally (but it's not like he likes her or anything, b-baka!!)

It's this context of the Iron Vows, which are both socially VERY important to Ironlanders and mechanically important as they're the main source of XP, and how moves relate to those goals and what we know to be true about the world, which feeds into scene-framing. Then, those framed scenes put vows, non-vow goals, or other things we care about (allies, charges, items, helpers/pets/etc.) in precarious positions that call for action. This isn't "okay, now we proceed to the Put Your Vows In Danger phase"--it's all done as a conversation about what we're seeing, what we're faced with. Like with PbtA games, Ironsworn only triggers rules when rules are needed to resolve something--and doing the thing which triggers a move means the move does in fact happen. "Triggers" being things like when you grip a piece of iron and swear a vow (hence, Swear an Iron Vow), or when you spend some time hunting, foraging, or scavenging (=Resupply move)--they aren't arcane, it's pretty straightforward to tell whether you have or haven't done a thing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Agreed. Which is why my only use of the dreaded word "objective" does not support @EzekielRaiden 's point.

Except that what @pemerton said is that most settings are objective--meaning, there's nothing particularly special about the objectivity you and others have laid claim to, despite the fact that you (collectively) have asserted that that is a special thing of your approach and not other approaches.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree with this description.


And agree with this.


And agree with this.


But, I very strongly disagree with this. I don't think it follows that because they created the world, they are driving the story. The players are driving, within the world the GM provides.

Can someone be in the driver's seat when the only positions on the map are those the GM creates for them to go to?

 

[SableWyvern]

Can someone be in the driver's seat when the only positions on the map are those the GM creates for them to go to?

Can you be in the driver's seat in the real world when the only positions on the map are those placed there by the cartographer?

Are you suggesting that it's not possible to be in the driver's seat unless the imaginary world has already been realised in every respect to the same degree of fidelity as the real world?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I just said the aim was objective. I didn't say it is the only way. But I do disagree with you. It is an objective approach because you are modeling a setting that has concrete, objective details. Is it the same as a real world the GM brings into physical being? No of course. No one is making that claim. Now, you are under no obligation to agree.

I never said it was physical. I said that it was created by the GM for subjective reasons, subject to subjective filtering of what is or isn't important, relevant, or interesting. In other words, exactly like the things you and others have tried to claim your approach differs from.

And we've taken pains in the thread to show you how the agency is real. Perhaps it is insufficient agency or the wrong kind of agency for you. But clearly for us it supplies exactly the kind of agency we want

I wasn't disagreeing? I was using this as an example of something where feeling does in fact need to match fact. By comparison, I don't believe the feeling of objectivity needs to be matched by anything even remotely like actual objectivity--because actual objectivity would be extraordinarily uninteresting or even anti-interesting.

I think we are. I think you are not giving enough credibility to the idea that you can model a physical place in your mind and in your map. And that you can even model other things and establish objective details about them.

You're correct, I am not giving much credibility to that idea. Because that model is inherently very, very far from objectivity, and never will get particularly close to it. But you can do a great many things like what the Parthenon's designers did to it: intentional unrealisms which make things seem even more real than actual reality would be.

Again, no skin off my back if you see it different but this aspect of play is something people clearly find worthy of pursuit

I agree that the feeling of objectivity is something people clearly find worthy of pursuit. I am far less convinced that there is any need--or, indeed, any actual effort--to pursue actual objectivity. Hence why I contrasted it with just the feeling of agency, vs actually having agency; in a sandbox, most (not quite all, but most) of us agree that there needs to be more than just the feeling, the real McCoy must be there as well. I don't think that's the case for objectivity. I think most people who are making such a big deal out of an "objective" setting and other similar phrases only really care about the feeling of objectivity. As long as it feels objective to them, whether it actually is objective is kind of irrelevant--which is good, because I don't believe it can be objective in the specific sense needed for the argument being made.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Can you be in the driver's seat in the real world when the only positions on the map are those placed there by the cartographer?

Cartographers don't place things on maps.

They draw maps which correspond to a literal, physical location. Presuming they aren't intentionally making bad maps, I mean.

Which means we are right back at the problem of "objectivity" allegedly not being about any physical reality....and yet as soon as you push on it, physical reality is where the argument goes!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My comments related to my style. I did not reject any other style, or the objectivity of other styles, because I wasn't referring to other styles at all.

However, I will happily state that there absolutely are styles that do not aim to have GMs determining outcomes purely based on an attempt to objectively assess the known facts of the world. Some styles might aim instead for picking the most fun or genre-appropriate outcome, or have the Friend Computer intentionally obstruct the PCs for ridiculous reasons, or escalate situations based on mandatory die rolls, or have the players decide the outcomes for whatever reason they want as long as they spend points, or whatever. There are a host of possible methods. (Some of those might fall more or less within the realm of objective as well, depending on your context. I'm not interest in quibbling because, as stated, there is no value judgement inherent and it really doesn't matter if you want to define "objectively" a little more or little less broadly -- what matters is (generic) you apply some common sense and context to the use in each case.)

To be clear, saying a GMing style is or is not based on an attempt at assessing the world and consequences objectively doesn't that I'm making value judgements about those styles; it just means that some of them aren't based on the GM doing their best to make objective judgements based on the established facts of the world. If you are reading value judgements into my comments (beyond matters of personal preference), you are misunderstanding me and, I'm beginning to suspect, perhaps misreading intentionally.

If anyone claims that their style involves also striving for objectivity, and provides the context within that objectivity exists, I will take them at their word for it. For yourself, it sounds like you don't believe objectivity is possible and thus don't feel your own style is one where you strive for objectivity in this way, and that's perfectly OK too; what I don't understand is why you care that some people approach their games differently.

If it makes you feel better to believe that objectivity is not the best word to use for what we're talking about, that's OK too. However, those of us using it seem to understand what we mean by it and are likely to keep using that way because the vast majority of the time people understand what we mean and it's a useful term. It seems that you also understand what we mean by it, but would rather focus on your personal definition of the word in order to claim we're all making critical semantic errors.

As I've mentioned a few times previously, I'm really not interested in that kind of semantic quibbling, so that's pretty much everything I have to say about the word "objective".

And I'm saying there are other ways to create the feeling of objectivity. Your way isn't the only way; it's but one among many. Yet folks here, including yourself, even in this post, have argued that it IS the only way to get objectivity.