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

[Lanefan]

... in a sandbox you are at like 50% agency and in something like Blades in the Dark or Burning Wheel, you are at 80 or 90% agency ...

"Agency down to 60%, Cap'n! We cannae hold together much longer!"

 

[Campbell]

The reason is that RPGs aren’t games in the conventional sense. Game theory has only narrow application to RPGs. What makes tabletop roleplaying distinct is its character-centric play loop: the referee describes the situation, the players describe what their characters do, the referee adjudicates, and then describes the resulting situation. This cycle, pioneered by Dave Arneson in his Blackmoor campaign, is the core of the experience.

Can we please speak only in terms of specific games or a specific arrangement of play?

This is not the play loop of Apocalypse World.
This is not the play loop of Blades in the Dark.
This is not the play loop of Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition.
This is not the play loop of Vampire - The Requiem, Second Edition
This is not the play loop of Dune 2d20
It's also not the play loop of Cypher System Final Fantasy hack I'm playing in now.

On a zoomed-out level it's not even really consistent with Worlds Without Number ran according to its guidance.

This is taking a specific approach to roleplaying games and applying it universally. We cannot know the play-loop of a game until we have read its rules. Roleplaying game is a categorization - not a blueprint. Each game designer gets to define the way their game works.

All of the games above I can analyze from a perspective of them as games, not competitive games, but still games - they all have a premise, objectives, reward systems. Specific responsibilities for players and GMs. You may not choose to view your play through the prism of it being a game in the conventional sense. You would not be alone there - plenty of players of the Sims and Crusader Kings would share similar sentiments.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I would expect that you could have just as easily come up with 6 to 10 words on the spot!

Probably, but there wouldn't be the same depth of additional thought behind it; I'd be describing a no-context snapshot rather than a moment in an established (if bare-bones) ongoing history. (I should note the list of Emperors is player-visible and always has been, as the more educated among the PCs would either know it or very easily be able to access it)

There's nothing wrong with having done all that ahead of time... but it's not necessary, and you'd have been just fine if you hadn't.

Other than perhaps me-as-DM floundering in the moment while trying to think of what the place was like 650 years ago, whether it was the same Empire, what language was in common use (relevant when the back-in-time PC tries to interact with anyone), etc. etc.

 

[AlViking]

Well, I don't think it would happen exactly like that, but it might. The description would probably be more specific, like say in Dungeon World the GM might describe a scene, with the setting being a village, without defining anything further about it. This scene would engage something of concern to a PC. It might reveal a threat, pose a choice, probably as a dilemma, etc. The players might be asked questions about the village in the course of this play. One might establish that it's people are part of her clan. Another might note their economy, etc. These would become canonical and probably be made relevant in play, though something might prove extraneous, like the basket weaving perhaps.

Note that DW GMs are certainly free to prep whatever, but the game advises leaving significant 'holes'. Normally this will be in the form of fronts. So a village of basket weavers could be a danger, or more likely threatened themselves, maybe their destruction is an omen.

But how is that any better? It's just putting that world building into committee hands which sometimes ends up in better results, sometimes worse. It's still just a fictional world, not made any more real because more people helped design it. I don't care for it for other reasons when I've tried it but there are tradeoffs with every approach.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, I would expect that you could have just as easily come up with 6 to 10 words on the spot!

There's nothing wrong with having done all that ahead of time... but it's not necessary, and you'd have been just fine if you hadn't.

In addition to what @Micah Sweet said, not everybody is great at coming up with history on the fly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I view my players having just as much agency even though it's expressed in a different way. Their decisions have a different impact but it still drives the direction of the campaign and they are making important decisions that alter the game world all the time. The changes are simply, one again, different. Having agency to me isn't impacted by what decisions you make or what they affect, it's that you make decisions based on a reasonable level of knowledge and that the decisions matter.

But, in, say, a Dungeon World game I might run, where do my players lack any freedom to do something that is present in your game? I mean, yes DW assumes that play will always be substantive and relegates other things like shop keeping or other nonconsequential RP to a non mechanical freeform format, assuming you want to include it. Still, assuming the table agrees, you have this option. Heck, the players can agree to let the GM run a mystery story with hidden facts. It could even be structured like a front. It's not exactly the kind of play that DW is made for, but you can do whatever.

Mainly, my point is, what have we actually given up?

 

[Faolyn]

How long before the specific scenario with the Naga was it that the PC adopted the goal of bringing Joachim's blood to his master? I've been assuming this was a long-term goal of the character's, and what we're being told about is the key moment in which he actually got the blood he sought.

That intervening time between declaration of goal and the Naga scene is, one would think, when the character could have picked up a belt pouch and some very basic blood-collecting supplies.

We don't know.

But it would seem that you can't do that in this game. So that's either a bizarrely artificial restraint, or the game is designed to be run like Fiasco, in which everyone has high ambitions and low self-control or foresight.

 

[Lanefan]

Is it that surprising that if people suspect they have incomplete information with a topic, that they'd approach it differently?

I mean out in the world... let's not take posts on ENW into account on this!

To butcher a famous quote (was it Dick Chaney's), there's known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Suspecting the info is incomplete or inaccurate makes it a known unknown, and they can (and, one hopes, will) follow up on that and try for confirmation or clarification.

But if there's no reason to suspect their info is wrong or incomplete it becomes an unknown unknown, there's no reason to follow up or confirm unless they're very paranoid, and so any decisions they make will be based on that faulty or incorrect info.

A real-world example: ten-ish years ago while driving to Orlando I was trying to find a specific hotel in south Atlanta. My means of navigation was an up-to-date paper road atlas (my car didn't - and still doesn't - have GPS or any of that and I wasn't about to pay international data roaming rates) and it told me I wanted Highway [X, where X is a number I've now forgotten], which crossed the freeway at Exit Y. So I get to Exit Y and the sign tells me the crossing road is Highway Z; that can't be right, so I keep going along the freeway.

Took me what seemed like half the night (and a lot of gas!) to figure out that Highways X and Z were the same bloody road, the atlas used one number while the Georgia dept. of highways used the other. Faulty information causing an unknown unknown, sending me on a wild goose chase.

I think secret rolls are antagonistic to player agency.

I understand your reason for them due to our years of interaction... but what's gained is not worth what's lost.

I think we agreed to disagree on this one quite a while back.

But why would a dice roll dictate their behavior? Shouldn't the players get to choose how they want to react?

The dice roll doesn't dictate their behavior or reaction; it tells me (and them) what they're reacting to.

 

[AlViking]

deleted-

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, OTOH I trust players to play with integrity.

As do I, in terms of not cheating etc.

But my long-term experience is that very few (if any!) players can or will completely ignore meta-information that their characters don't know when deciding the next actions of said characters.

When rolling for an in-game unknown (e.g. finding a secret door, or gathering info) a player-side roll gives them meta-information their characters wouldn't have. Did we fail to find a secret door because we simply missed it or because there isn't one there to find should always be an in-character question on a failed search.

Why is one side of the screen privileged? I feel like this stems back to some primordial formulation of play where everything was supposed to be a contest between the GM's diabolical cunning dungeon design and the players ability to read between the lines and or bitch every pixel assiduously enough to not get squicked by the ear seekers. It's 2025, not 1975 anymore...

Just because it's 2025 doesn't mean the players should get a free pass.