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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Saying “there is no world that exercises causal potency” is a complete rejection of that model. You’re collapsing adjudication into authorship, pretending that just because the referee is the one rolling the dice or consulting the tables, the world has no independent frame of reference. That’s not how I run my campaigns, and it’s not how a lot of sandbox referees do it either.

Nobody is trying to be insulting or obtuse or anything else. I'm an engineer and a scientist, I get to the ground truth of things, what is real, actual, tangible, and does the actual doing. Look at it from this standpoint. It is the brain of the person making a decision which makes that decision. If it is a decision about what to imagine, or maybe more concretely what to tell people in play, it must be the GM's brain, and more abstractly mind, doing that.

It is fine to then go on an describe how that process works, and to say "well, I looked at what I had authored before, and what other fiction arose in play, or was perhaps authored by a player for some reason" and then describe some formal or informal process of extrapolation from that, which you undertook.

Honestly, thought I can't speak authoritatively for other posters, that's all I'm talking about. And what I am most interested in, myself, are two things. How participants in play do that extrapolation, what the form of that is, and how it works, and what the nature of the distribution of authority over these sayings is.

Now, I think where we ACTUALLY differ a fair bit is in our assessments of the extrapolation processes that are used in play that is approaching this play structure from what I usually call a 'trad' orientation. I am skeptical about the robustness of any attempt to consistently derive a 'meta-causal' basis for much of this decision-making. I think that these fictions are very thoroughly gamist conceptions and that most of what happens is gamist reckoning. I think a LOT of convention and procedural 'stuff' has been built up around this which tends to obscure its nature.

This is why I found the line of discussion that included @clearstream commenting on, IIRC @EzekielRaiden on the topic of plans and ephemera and such. It seemed like it was moving in the direction of stripping away some of that convention and getting down to 'nuts and bolts' (again, engineering).

 

[robertsconley]

@BedrockBrendan and I have both explained at length how we arrive at our decisions. I was asked for an actual play account and provided one upthread.
The Golden Pass and Yonk's Place
I get that @thefutilist's question wasn’t exactly the same, so if you have follow-ups, fair enough.

As I said waaaay back, the GM should own their decisions.

And I’ve said multiple times now that a referee in a living world sandbox needs to develop and practice good leadership skills. That includes owning their decisions. If that wasn’t clear, I’m pointing it out again now. I also think it’s fair to assume that a thread with over 7,000 posts makes it easy to miss something even if it’s been said more than once. That’s what reasonable and plausible means in practice, and this is an example of me applying that principle.

I don’t know if it does. I mean… usually more than one outcome is possible and plausible. If you’re just deciding from those options, then you’re deciding.

Yes, I’m deciding, from among plausible outcomes. You also said possible, and I’m careful not to conflate the two. “Possible” includes many outcomes I wouldn’t choose because they don’t make sense for the situation. “Plausible” narrows it down to what fits the logic of the setting. That distinction matters in how I run my games.

From your descriptions it’s hard to know what other criteria play a factor in such decisions. Or when you might go to some other procedure to determine the outcome, and what such a procedure might be.

I was asked a similar question upthread. Again, I point you to the Yonk’s Place example. If you want to dig deeper on any part of it, let me know.

What may not be immediately obvious is that most of what Josh described happened through first-person roleplay, me and the players talking in character, evaluating the situation, and then me making a ruling. Not a formal procedure like some games use, but in-character interaction punctuated by judgment calls.

Here’s how it went: the group left Gold Keep. I rolled for a random encounter. Got Hill Giants. I looked at my map and saw Yonk’s Place was the nearest known location with Hill Giants. There are four hill giants keyed there, so I rolled a d4 and got Frella. She’s a druid, so I figured it was reasonable and plausible she was out gathering herbs. That’s how the encounter was determined.

This is what I mean when I say I use a toolkit of procedures. It’s not one universal method, it’s a collection of tools and judgment calls that I adapt to fit the situation. If the players ever want a full breakdown after the fact, I’ll explain it all.

I also shared a similar example from my GURPS campaign.
The Nomar Campaign

You can also check out some of my blog posts here:

Managing Sandbox Campaign Articles

This is a master index of all my posts on managing Sandbox Campaigns. How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Note that at the bottom of the post ar...

batintheattic.blogspot.com

And two excerpts from my Majestic Fantasy RPG rules:
When to Make a Ruling
The World Outside of the Dungeon

This is one of the reasons I tend to consider it more GM focused. The prioritization of setting over character.

That’s fair, within your framework. In mine, the referee exists to support the core goal of the campaign: to make the players feel like they visited a living, coherent world. That feeling of verisimilitude is what’s prioritized.

So yes, the players don’t have much meta-agency—they don’t shape the world as authors. But they do have strong character agency: their ability to change the setting is directly tied to what their character can plausibly accomplish. That’s the tradeoff, and the players know this going in, it’s not hidden or unclear.

That said, there is an important form of meta-agency present: players, individually or as a group, are always welcome to talk with me about their overall goals. This helps guide what I prepare for upcoming sessions and ensures that their interests are handled with sufficient detail.

If that structure results in the referee being more central from your perspective, I understand. However, in my view, it’s about aligning the referee’s role with the setting-first premise, rather than spotlighting the referee personally.

 

[Lanefan]

Are you using "reason" as synonymous with "cause". Because you are replying to a post which is one in a series of posts by me that talks about causation.

But in any event, the example you give can be fairly straightforwardly analysed. I will refer to two game participants, Person A and Person B, each of whom (in the example) is controlling one character. Person A's character I will call M and Person B's character I will call N.

*Person B says "N casts suggestion on M - Say, 'Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!'"​

​

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - update their shared fiction: it now includes N casting a suggestion spell on M, and it further includes N saying to M, a part of the casting, Say, "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

​

*People at the table consult the rules - either literally, or via recollection - and note that, in order to work out what happens next - is M ensorcelled? - it is necessary for Person A to roll a saving throw. [We could state the rule as follows: If, in the fiction, one character casts a suggestion spell on another character, then a saving throw must be made by the controller of that second character to determine whether the fiction becomes one in which they are ensorcelled by the spell, or remains one in which they are not.]​

​

*Person A throws the d20, reads the result, performs any further arithmetic operations required by the rules (eg adding modifiers), and announces the final result.​

​

*People at the table compare the final result to the target number that the rules specify for this saving throw. They note that the final result falls short, and thus the saving throw is failed.​

​

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - therefore update their shared fiction in accordance with the rule I set out three dot points above: they agree that, in the shared fiction, M is ensorcelled to say "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

​

*Person A, being a theatrical sort of individual, decides to perform, for the benefit of the table, this new aspect of the shared fiction, and so says "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

Which is a lot of text* to simply say "The fiction makes you say 'Help, help, the Elves are killing me!' at the table".

A perhaps even easier example would be if the Suggestion failed against told your character to walk over to the wall and sit down, forcing the player's next action declaration spoken at the table to be something to the effect of "I walk over to the wall and sit down" (or "Jocasta walks over..." if playing in third-person). Events in the fiction directly cause something to happen in reality (the speaking of that action declaration) that 99.99repeating% certainly wouldn't have otherwise happened.

* - IMO extremely over-analytical text at that; how many other people on the planet would break this down to that degree? Can't be many.

 

[zakael19]

Now, I think where we ACTUALLY differ a fair bit is in our assessments of the extrapolation processes that are used in play that is approaching this play structure from what I usually call a 'trad' orientation. I am skeptical about the robustness of any attempt to consistently derive a 'meta-causal' basis for much of this decision-making. I think that these fictions are very thoroughly gamist conceptions and that most of what happens is gamist reckoning. I think a LOT of convention and procedural 'stuff' has been built up around this which tends to obscure its nature.

I just wanna note here that this paragraph says nothing without being super inculcated in specific terminology. I agree with the rest of your post, but can’t understand where you’re going here.

 

[Lanefan]

When I create a world map I take into consideration real world weather patterns and base in on real world conditions assuming my fantasy world is close to Earth's climatic systems unless it's a purely supernatural realm.

I start with plate tectonics and how-where they might have created mountain ranges and-or spreading rifts, while also allowing for major supernatural events (e.g. a pissed-off deity blighting a large area or causing a chunk of crust to sink down a mile or so) to have had their say.

Only after the mountains and oceans are vaguely in place can I start thinking about climate and weather.

I don't put a desert in because I want a desert campaign, I put a desert in because the mountains block moisture or because the region is around the 30 degrees north or south of the equator. As far as economies and whatnot, I do try to base local economies on what would make sense which includes things like thinking about how much farmland would be needed to support a population (even if we assume magic increases crop output) something many fantasy maps ignore.

Nobody is claiming 100% realistic or completely impartial worlds. Doesn't mean we can't make that a goal and starting assumption.

Agreed.

 

[Lanefan]

Contextual. But, to be more specific than that, even though it requires me to speak in generalities that may not be perfectly ironclad 100% true all of the time at every table forever? Generally "let it ride" means that no meaningful difference in the conflict occurs. Classic example: the Rogue/Thief/etc. sneaking into a guarded place, like an enemy-controlled castle.

Traditionally in D&D, this is handled in a way that tends to suck a lot. Specifically, the DM forces the Rogue(/etc.) to roll a Stealth(/etc.) check repeatedly, for every action. Often they think it necessary and reasonable, but it's truly a near-guaranteed fail. E.g. even if you have 75% chance of success, you only have about a 1 in 6 chance of passing six consecutive checks.

"Let it ride" nixes that, and helps streamline play. So: Rogue's broken into the castle, and succeeds at a Stealth check to avoid guards and scout the halls. Long as she's still doing that thing, let it ride. Don't make her roll over and over. But if she does something different, or goes somewhere with higher security, or someone else changes the situation, then you might need to roll again. (Maybe, maybe not--depends on what she does, or where she goes, or how the situation changes.)

In the end...it's context. Has the context changed, in a big enough way that what you were doing before wouldn't be enough anymore? Then a new roll may be needed. If it hasn't changed meaningfully, don't force a roll just because you think more rolls are needed--regardless of why you might feel so. And, of course, different people will think different changes are meaningful--but you should be able to express and explain what changed in a way that other reasonable people could see it as reasonable too.

OK, I get that for physical actions like sneaking into a castle.

My question was around a character's thoughts. If my PC loses a Duel of Wits and is thus forced to agree with the viewpoint of the Duel's winner, how long does "let it ride" force me to stick to that position? Put another way, at what point (if any) am I allowed to start disagreeing with that position again?

 

[Lanefan]

You made the decision to not have orcs in your fantasy setting.

That’s not a judgment. It’s not a normative statement. It’s just a trivially obvious statement of truth.

As @AlViking runs a persistent setting for multiple campaigns spanning (I think) decades of in-world time, would your take be different had Orcs been wiped out by the actions of a previous campaign such that when a player wants to choose Orcs as favoured enemy in this campaign, there aren't any?

'Cause in that instance it wouldn't have been AlViking's decision to not have Orcs in the setting.

 

[TwoSix]

Because it wouldn't be honest. The setting isn't the only thing that matters

You do realize, in absolutely standard English, something being the priority doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that matters?

 

[robertsconley]

I start with plate tectonics and how-where they might have created mountain ranges and-or spreading rifts, while also allowing for major supernatural events (e.g. a pissed-off deity blighting a large area or causing a chunk of crust to sink down a mile or so) to have had their say.

My friends gave me so much grief (in a fun way) about including air currents and ocean currents in my How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox. But it was my book so in they went. I tried to distill down to a few useful rules of thumb to make placing vegetation and biomes easier, rather than some involved procedure. I also covered the monsoon effect, which doesn't get talked about much but and leverage to create some interesting regions where you wouldn't expect it.

 

[Lanefan]

If you make a statement that the king is a causal agent, one of two things is happening.

A) You are confused about the reality of your setting.
B) You are speaking in a metaphor, or in the fictional frame of your setting. (Narrating, or speaking in character, as it were.)

In a discussion of analysis of play, that is confusing and you shouldn't do that. Don't use metaphors. Don't talk about your characters or your setting like they're real. Talk about your tables and the participants at the table, don't discuss from within the fictional frame.

I'm really only interested in analyzing from within the fictional frame, to use your term, when it comes to in-fiction causality.

That in-fiction causality is (ideally!) often what drives the play at the table, because the play at the table is (in theory) subservient to and affected by in-fiction events leading one to another.

Dismissively saying "it's all in our heads", as one poster (not you) does repeatedly, is redundant. Of course it's all in our heads! The point is that when engaged in play at the table we're acting and behaving based on those things going on in our heads - the "shared fiction" that we're imagining and (one hopes) immersed in - and thus to suggest the fiction has no real-world causality is bupkus.

On a micro level the fiction very often causes me-as-player to say what I say when I declare an action for my character or speak in his/her voice. On a macro level the continuation of the fiction is why we get together to play every week.