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

[Lanefan]

Because the way I see it, if the game can't go forward without getting through this obstacle, then there must be a story everyone is following that insists upon going through it. Otherwise, the party could simply do something else.

Which can be fine even in the sandbox-iest of games. They've found or self-generated a mission, completion of that mission requires their getting though this obstacle, and they can't do it.

Which means, while the game as a whole can go forward if-when they go do something else, that particular mission - for the time being, anyway - cannot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which can be fine even in the sandbox-iest of games. They've found or self-generated a mission, completion of that mission requires their getting though this obstacle, and they can't do it.

Which means, while the game as a whole can go forward if-when they go do something else, that particular mission - for the time being, anyway - cannot.

Exactly. I'm talking about the game itself, not do e particular path the PCs decided to follow.

 

[Lanefan]

No, I just don't see it. The characters may not be having fun, but the players should be.

If the players are inhabiting their characters then when it comes to obstacles wouldn't these two things kind of run in lockstep?

That said, I can think of loads of times where the characters weren't having any fun at all (usually at the hands of each other) and yet the players were roaring with laughter.

 

[pemerton]

MCs in these sorts of games often have a list of very specific moves, often with catchy names.

The MC's moves in Apocalypse World are not "very specific". For instance, announce future or offscreen badness is not very specific. As the rulebook notes, it's extremely general and versatile.

But in any event, what I asked was what was meant by "there are some games that have the concept of a move triggering a counter move of similar level? Hard move on player's side triggers a hard move on the GM side of things or similar?" Because, as I posted, I know of no RPG where that is a thing.

Plenty of people have talked about "the players do a [hard or soft] move so as GM I respond with a [hard or soft based on what the players did] move".

Actually, no one has said that, because it's bears no connection to the rules of any RPG discussed in this thread. There's no RPG I'm aware of which talks about players making soft or hard moves. Those are terms that apply to the GM of an AW-esque game.

What you may be trying to talk about is people talking about the GM's sequence of moves: soft, followed by hard. And also about when a player's result of 6 or less on a player-side move permits or even demands that the GM make a hard move.

And as I posted above, I don't know what you mean by talking about "counter-moves of a similar level". I mean, D&D has a turn-based action economy for combat, where the players and the GM alternate in declaring and resolving actions for the characters they control, following a mechanically-determined initiative order. But I assume that's not what you mean?

 

[Lanefan]

Okay. You say this as though those things are, like...controversial.

But the plain reading of their opposite is the action grinding to a halt and making no "progress". (Note that this doesn't mean "progress" in the sense of getting closer to a defined end in PbtA any more than it would mean such in a "traditional GM" sandbox. There is no defined end either way. But there is keeping moving vs not doing that.)

I'm certain you would want more positive terms for such, but I don't know what they would be. How would you describe these (as others have said) conflict-neutral, low- or no-stakes events, in a way that is positive rather than seeming to be negative?

Thing is, a conflict-neutral or low-no stakes event now may - or may not - have all kinds of consequences down the road. And as you don't know what "down the road" is going to consist of until after you've got there and beyond, I say the default should be to play them out unless the players say not to.

Haggling the merchant down such that with your last few g.p. you can get 6 torches for the usual price of 5 might seem trivial at the time.....until later when having that 6th torch makes all the difference between the party surviving or getting wiped out.

 

[Lanefan]

I find this both very surprising and very frustrating, because I know I have said to both of you, multiple times, that the books explicitly day the opposite of what you have said here.

That is, they repeatedly reiterate that it is the fiction that matters most. They repeatedly say things like "Start and end with the fiction" and things like the pair of "you have to do it to do it" (read: you do not and should not ever "do a move", you take actions in the fiction, and those actions must first meet some trigger in order for any move to apply) and "if you do it you do it" (read: when a trigger does happen, the move in question occurs, we take care of its rules which resolve an open question of some kind, and then we go right back to the fiction and stay there until another open question occurs). Or how the rules indicate that the GM should only address the players by their character names in order to keep things in character as much as possible.

Like this is...I'm really really struggling here. This is explicit stuff. It's not subtext. It's not hidden. It's not something that only arises out of careful interpretation. It's literally right there on the surface.

So I'm really, really confused why you would get this impression when the text is so overtly clear that this is NOT how it works or what it does. I know both of you are smart, capable people. I know you don't have issues comprehending what a text directly says. So I'm really baffled how you could get this.

It would be like saying that Gygaxian D&D prioritizes narrative over exploration. That's the level of "wait...what? How did you get THAT out of this???" reaction I'm having here.

I think it might hinge on the level of in-fiction contrivance required to keep making things happen where logic says nothing should.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If the group has been thrown in a pit from which there is no feasible means of escape and they have been left to die, "points of failure" are no longer a concern. It sounds to me like this is describing a campaign end state, not a problem to be overcome.

The way to escape is to get through the door of the cage, presumably. You have created something where there are no points of failure because failure is guaranteed. I am talking about a perfectly fiction-appropriate scenario, abandoned in a dungeon cell, where failure absolutely is not guaranteed...the problem is that nobody in the party is rolling well enough to get out. So they have to keep rolling and rolling until they get something like a nat 20. Consider, for example, a group made up of a sword-and-board Paladin, a Fighter specialized in heavy weapons, a Wizard (who went for high Int/Con instead of Dex), and Druid. None of them took Sleight of Hand/Thieves' Tools/etc. proficiency, all of them coincidentally have either -1 or 0 Dex mod. Perhaps the GM randomly rolled to determine what kind of lock was present on the cell door, perhaps they thought it was most verisimilitudinous for a dungeon cell door to have a high DC. Whatever the reason, the DC is 20 (a superior lock, per the 2024 DMG). That means this party cannot escape the dungeon until the lock is broken, which would require a nat 20, or something even more difficult (such as breaking through the bars, almost surely a DC higher than 20, which would be difficult even for a party good at Strength things).

It's still a single point of failure, but one that grew out of absolutely no planned story whatsoever on the GM's part. Just "extrapolating" from (a) the PCs got captured by bad guys, (b) the bad guys are temporarily residing in this abandoned castle and don't want to deal with the PCs for whatever reason, and (c) the castle dungeons are still perfectly serviceable as a place to lock up prisoners and then leave when it seems prudent to do so.

The assertion was that a single-point-of-failure situation cannot occur unless the GM is forcing a specific plot, and thus cannot possibly be a concern in a "traditional GM" sandbox-y game. I gave a quick, brief, low-detail example of how it could happen that a single point of failure would be an entirely verisimilitudinous result from a game with zero planned story. My only point was that it is false to assume that, because you've encountered a single point of failure (SPOF), you've guaranteed caught the GM in the act of enforcing a story.

Edit to add: I will agree that it is one situation where it's either forward or stop forever, but it must be built on a whole sequence of events and decisions that led to this point.

Certainly. I'm not claiming that this happens 100% of the time or anything like that. I am simply giving it as a counter-example to the original claim, which was that any SPOF in any game, you've got effectively a smoking gun that the GM is actually enforcing a story on you rather than legitimately following reasonable application of "traditional GM" techniques and the various other descriptions given in the thread.

If this ending isn't acceptable, it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, if it was allowed when it shouldn't have been, I don't need fail forward to fix it, I just say, "Hey, it's not reasonable that the party was thrown in the Pit of No Return just for jaywalking, I was meant to say you get thrown in the Pit of the Overnight Stay" or whatever.

But isn't that explicitly interfering with the world in order to create a better story? Like, I specifically constructed this example--even while recognizing that it is not a likely result--because it was, 100%, completely, in keeping with all prior descriptions of a "realistic" world, of "extrapolating" from existing information, etc. What you suggest here is in fact precisely, diametrically the opposite of that. It is the GM directly and overtly rewriting the world, in defiance of the GM's original extrapolating-from-existing-information process, in order for the players to have an actual adventure and not a completely realistic but extremely unsatisfying dead-end.

Further--even if this situation isn't a problem, what is this "shouldn't have been allowed" thing? By the explicit procedures describd here and elsewhere, the GM isn't "allowing" anything, otherwise they'd be unfairly putting their thumb on the scale, forbidding some outcomes and protecting (or even, possibly, enforcing) other outcomes, for purposes entirely unrelated to what is a reasonable (plausible, realistic, verisimilitudinous, etc.) extrapolation from what is already known.

I promise, I'm not trying to be a butt about this. It's just really confusing, because I was given to understand that the GM "allowing" some outcomes (and thus forbidding other outcomes) was an utterly unacceptable, completely and totally wrong act in this context. Something that would majorly upset all or nearly all fans of the "traditional GM" sandbox-y campaign. For you to now bring it up as an obvious thing that has to happen is bewildering, because it seems like you've just rejected nearly every argument previously made by "traditional GM" sandbox-y campaign fans in the thread!

If the PCs have allowed themselves to be captured by Evil Overlord Literally Merciless, with a full understanding of the risks and potential consequences and have failed to utilise any chance of a escape leading up to this point and now they're out of options, then so be it. But there would have been a whole long sequence of events leading up to such a final ending and probably more than one, "Are you sure that's what you want to do?" from me before such a thing occurred.

I just don't think it's anywhere near as unreasonable as you do. PCs make dumb plans all the time (would know, have played many PCs, have made many plans that sounded WAY smarter while we were at the planning stage), and even a good plan can go south because of bad rolls. There's no need for "Evil Overlord Literally Merciless". Just some bad guys who don't want to be guilty of murder...but don't want the PCs coming back to mess with them again, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for SOME bad guys to do. Maybe they even see it as a survival-of-the-fittest kind of thing, that it's a "moral" act (under their twisted sense of morality) to remove the PCs from the gene pool if they can't escape such a situation. I dunno! It certainly seems to me that many, many different entirely-plausible, extrapolating-from-what-is-known situations could result in the PCs getting captured and locked up, and having to break out of a cage, without the benefit of manipulating any guards.

 

[pemerton]

Why didn't the bad guys just kill them?

Why don't Conan's enemies kill him when he is captured and imprisoned (in The Scarlet Citadel and The Hour of the Dragon and A Witch Shall Be Born)? Why is Frodo not killed when captured in LotR?

There are reasons. And in FRPGing similar sorts of reason can apply.

If the group has been thrown in a pit from which there is no feasible means of escape and they have been left to die, "points of failure" are no longer a concern. It sounds to me like this is describing a campaign end state, not a problem to be overcome.

I think the above examples show that this needn't be so. Capture is a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction. To me it seems like a design flaw if a FRPG can't handle it as other than a campaign end state.

 

[Lanefan]

Party has been captured by bad guys. They've been left in a cell to rot. They must escape from the cell in order to accomplish any other goals (obviously, purely by the fiction). No one in the party is especially good at picking locks. Guards, if they are present, know not to let the PCs out, but more likely they're just being abandoned here with no guards at all because who cares, the PCs can starve. Digging out would take months, and the party has rations for at most a few days.

That's verisimilitudinous, perfectly in keeping with the rational motivations of some bad people, and contains a single point of failure. No story required.

In which case yes, they're hosed. Roll up new characters.

That they all got captured without even one managing to avoid it, however, seems odd....unless the PCs collectively and individually have no sense of self-preservation. And if one character avoids capture then the party can continue, and maybe the re-built party can rescue the collective ass of the previous party from captivity.

 

[pemerton]

That would be nice, yes. One things both sides do IMO (most definitely including myself) is take issue with comments about how one doesn't understand the appeal of the particular playstyle someone prefers.

I don't know about appeal. But as per some of my recent replies, your accounts of how Apocalypse World and some similar games work are riddled with basic technical errors.