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

[pemerton]

While at its base a clock is simply a progress bar (and the concept of Clocks specifically as one came from earlier PBTA games largely); Blades extended the concept into a variety of different uses.

I think @thefutilist was pointing to how clocks are used in AW front/threat design (and I think DW is similar): as part of their binding prep, the GM establishes how a particular threat will play out - this is described over 6 steps, which are given "clock" settings (3 o'clock, 6 o'clock, then 9, 10. 11 and 12 o'clock). From p 143:

A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’.

When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to
threats you’ve already created.

Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen:

• Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps?

• Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it?

• At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it?​

As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments.​

This has to be read together with some principles and moves (pp 115, 120):

Sometimes, disclaim decision-making. In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. The game gives you four key tools you can use to disclaim responsibility . . .

You can (3)** create a countdown**. See the countdown section in the fronts chapter, page 143. Just sketch a quick countdown
clock. . . . This leaves it in your hands, but gives you a considered and concrete plan, instead of leaving it to your whim. . . .

Make a threat move (from one of your fronts).​

So, when the rules/procedures tell the GM to make a move, and they have to make a move that follows from the fiction, one thing they can do is make a move that advances the threat clock. This brings some vision of the threat's future closer to realisation. And as @thfutilist said, the details are pinned down in advance.

EDIT: pipped to the post by @thefutilist, just upthread.

 

[pemerton]

I'm done arguing semantics. Have a good day.

Hey, I was just responding to your post questioning what someone else was getting at.

 

[pemerton]

Depends on what you mean by running models. DMs are modeling the real world in a very simple way

I've never heard of a GM running a model. And on its own, imagining isn't modelling.

I mean, the Knights of the Iron Tower - the order to which my PC Thurgon belongs - are obviously copied from/inspired by mediaeval religious military orders. The Lifepath in the BW rulebook is even called Knight of a Holy Military Order. You could even say that they are modelled on the Templars and the like. But their is no modelling of or "simulation of" the Templars, or of anything else.

As best I can tell, the language of simulation/model comes from wargaming. But some wargames do aspire to be simulations, or at least simple models. And they have the correctness conditions that are necessary for something to count as a model or a simulation - for instance, a wargame that models the D-Day landings should, when played and given the appropriate inputs, reliably produce outcomes that reflect what we actually know about how the D-Day landings played out.

But me writing a history into my setting that emulates the D-Day landings isn't running a simulation. It's just writing emulative fiction, the same as Thurgon's military order. The same applies when I write a climate into my setting, or a political geography, or whatever, that emulates how things have turned out on earth.

Another illustration: Graham Greene has a story <spoilers incoming> where early in the events of the novel one of the characters gets very wet in the rain, and then later in the novel she dies of pneumonia. His story isn't a model or a simulation of a disease-process. He just wrote something that seemed plausible, given what English people know sometimes happens to people who get drenched in downpours. An analogous example from RPGing: in one session in my TB2e game, the PCs sold some stirges they had captured to an alchemist. A little while later in the fiction, an event roll gave the result that someone in that town had died. I decided that it was the alchemist, who had become infected and died from handling the stirges. Like Graham Greene, I drew what I took to be a plausible connection between events in the fiction. But it would just be wrong to say that I was modelling or simulating some disease-process.

I don't see the point of this insistence on terminology which obscures rather than clarifies how the decisions are actually being made.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Pardon me friend, be we aren't coming to help. They have a lot of resources and have been a thorn in our side for the last 50 years.

That could be too…

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, I don't really think it was designed with the idea of anything quite like PbtA-style Principles, but if I had to pick them they'd probably be...

• Author a consistent, persistent world
• Respond to character deeds in a grounded, iterative way
• Play to watch the world unfold

The first because so much has been made in the thread of consistency (I may have my grumbles, but it is at least the ideal aspired to), and all this talk of "causation" from imaginary things etc. is rooted in what, in a video game context, would be called a "persistent world", that is, a world which keeps on ticking regardless of whether the PCs interact with it.

The second because, IMO, it better captures what folks mean by things like "realism" and such. Groundedness is a much more useful term than "realism", IMO, because it jettisons the extremely problematic main meaning of "realism", namely, that it is nigh indistinguishable from our physical, concrete Earth that we live in, mainly because the world is absolutely chock-full of openly unrealistic, fantastical things, some of which people accept with barely more than a fig-leaf excuse because it's just expected of fantasy. Something can be extremely grounded while being totally unlike our real Earth, full of dragons and magic or aliens and FTL communication but still involving understandable and reliable rules (even if those rules are invented and in strong opposition to "realism"). Much ancient Greek statuary, for example, is openly unrealistic, inventing new muscles and such, but highly grounded because, even with those invented muscles, the bodies look like they could move and act the way we think bodies typically would move and act. "Iterative" simply captures in brief what is often (IMO unhelpfully) referred to as "rules as physics" or "a system as a physics-engine" or the like.

And then the third was the most difficult to select and is the one I'm (by far) least attached to, but...I can't really think of a better phrase for why folks choose to play such a style beyond wanting to see the changing state of the fictional space. In theory, that's the part the GM relinquishes some amount of control over, in order to permit player agency--they don't actually know what will unfold. They know the processes, but their knowledge of the inputs is merely vast, not 100% complete, as player choices are also inputs. The issue comes down, more or less, to the GM simply choosing to refrain from exerting more than a certain degree of control, control up to a point and no further, I just...don't really see much in the way of tools or techniques to help with doing that beyond the nigh-useless "don't be a jerk/don't play with jerks" (again, assuming all DMs can be classified into two hard binary categories, "total jerks" and "never at all even a little tiny bit off"; that such a determination can be made almost instantly by any player; and that nobody ever moves from one category to the other, neither intentionally nor accidentally).

Robertsconley has spent, quite clearly, a lot of effort on trying to work out such techniques, but unfortunately it really does seem like a lot of the end result is "I have to pass my intuitions on to you through direct teaching; they cannot be discussed in any meaningful way" which is...well, it just loops back around to the difficulties with vague handwavy terms and the idea that the only useful techniques are ones which can never be spoken about separately, nor examined afterward, only demonstrated in the moment, fleeting and ineffable, until the acolyte acquires the same intuition seemingly by revelation.

Some people (at this point I would go so far as to say many people) prefer a game with a more flexible mechanical process and game loop than that espoused by many non-traditional games. You can complain about that more flexible process, or lament that more people aren't in favor of the processes you prefer, but it is no more useful than my complaints regarding the scope of WotC's influence on the hobby or my issues with their current iteration of the official game.

 

[pemerton]

Some people (at this point I would go so far as to say many people) prefer a game with a more flexible mechanical process and game loop than that espoused by many non-traditional games. You can complain about that more flexible process, or lament that more people aren't in favor of the processes you prefer, but it is no more useful than my complaints regarding the scope of WotC's influence on the hobby or my issues with their current iteration of the official game.

I'm missing how this relates to @EzekielRaiden's post that you quoted - which didn't seem to be about mechanical processes or game loops, but about the principles by which the GM makes decisions.

 

[Faolyn]

It'd also lead to people complaining about exception-based design.

Personally, as lions are mundane creatures I wouldn't want to give them what mechanically appears to be a supernatural ability; but it'd be a trivial exercise to write up a "dire lion" or something else adjacent-but-fantistical that had such an ability.

Sure. It really depends on how the game treats fear, though. Back in 3x, there was the Shaken condition, which was weaker than Frightened. I wouldn't mind a purely mundane creature causing someone to be Shaken for a round. It's just ridiculous when a mundane lion can cause the same condition as an adult dragon.

As much as I appreciate 5e removing some of the glut of conditions and tiny penalties and bonuses, it does leave a lot of problems behind, like this one.

 

[Faolyn]

I wouldn't be so sure. I mean, I haven't actually tried it. Still it would seem pretty frightening. If I put myself in the place of a hypothetical version of me that is actually about to kill someone, yeah that feels fairly scary, at a kind of somewhat removed level. Hard to say what I'd be thinking in the real situation.

If that was the case, there wouldn't be so many murders in real life. People would get scared out of killing someone.

 

[TwoSix]

Some people (at this point I would go so far as to say many people) prefer a game with a more flexible mechanical process and game loop than that espoused by many non-traditional games. You can complain about that more flexible process, or lament that more people aren't in favor of the processes you prefer, but it is no more useful than my complaints regarding the scope of WotC's influence on the hobby or my issues with their current iteration of the official game.

I mean, are you simply arguing that a lot of people without agendas and principles? The DM just says "Well, this feels good, let's do that?"

That's definitely true, but that doesn't leave a whole lot of play to examine!

 

[TwoSix]

If that was the case, there wouldn't be so many murders in real life. People would get scared out of killing someone.

Sometimes people will be too scared to kill someone, sometimes they won't be.

Hmm. If only there was some way to resolve such uncertainties!