Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I now have to ask why, if you believe that, everyone isn't playing PbtA games? They handle this "universal issue" very well according to you, so shouldn't everyone be playing them?
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
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SableWyvern
Cruel Despot
I would suggest that it would be much more reasonable to say that, "a GM prioritising the same sort of pacing and the same types of player engagement that these games do," rather than assuming there is a single acceptable type of pacing and engagement applicable to all games and ideal for all participants.
PbtA games haven't discovered some objective, universal truth about what makes TTRPGs fun and thus it is poor advice to suggest all GMs should aim to emulate them and prioritse the same things.
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
I haven't played a PbtA game, but I have heard games recounted by people who have, and it sounds like they tend to degenerate into the wildly fantastical and surreal. Like the movies Yellow Submarine or Head.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I agree (and have argued myself in the past) that change to the information-state can amount to a meaningful consequence. That is frequently overlooked when folk cite null-results for perception etc. It shouldn't be overlooked however that, for them, such consequences might not reach the bar for meaningful... and that also divides play along intentional experiential lines.
Suppose that what I will count as meaningful is only that which impacts upon who my character is as a person. I can then rightly say that some kinds of change to information-states really aren't consequential in my play.
The played experience emerges not only from how these mechanics are used (as I outline above), but also in the way they codify procedural differences. The 2014 DMG text is this
Only call for a roll if there is a meaningful consequence for failure. When deciding whether to use a roll, ask yourself two questions:
Is a task so easy and so free of conflict and stress that there should be no chance of failure?
Is a task so inappropriate or impossible- such as hitting the moon with an arrow - that it can't work?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, some kind of roll is appropriate.
Which becomes in the 2024 PHB
The DM and the rules often call for an ability check when a creature attempts something other than an attack that has a chance of meaningful failure. When the outcome is uncertain and narratively interesting, the dice determine the result.
At least so far as the words in the latest editions of D&D are concerned, all rolls are consequential. A difference I've observed is that PbtA rolls are productive of consequences, whilst D&D rolls are made because consequences have been discerned. In D&D it's DM's job to do that discerning, just as in AW it's MC's job to decide if a move is invoked. In both cases, it works out just as well (and is often seen in play) for players to call out what's consequential/what they mean to invoke.
So these mechanics can be looked at from the point of view of the way they are used in relation to the intended focus of play, and whether they take consequence as an input or an output. I'm sure there are other nuances, too.
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
But what players care about varies widely. It's not always about wining or losing. Sometimes it's looking cool in an outrageous hat.
clearstream
(He, Him)
Well, the AW MC has the somewhat similar job of saying when a move is invoked. And in both cases, the mechanics normally work out fine if players make the call. It's only in ambiguous and high-noon situations that it matters (which seems to justify a call to arbitration.)
I find it in some ways more noteworthy that PbtA moves give MC things to say, while in D&D that's less circumscribed. And perhaps it was dissatisfactions with the latter even, that led to the former.
I agree that heuristic is easier to apply, and it's often observed that the way folk play games where consequences are to be discerned in order to invoke a roll, is that they default into discerning character action instead. The GM maintains an attitude of liability to find consequences after rolling that will meet the bar for meaningful. Text in the BW Codex discusses exactly that IIRC.
I'm not saying these things all come out the same. The exact way the procedures are designed, what they look for as inputs and yield as ouputs, their intended use in the game they appear in, incline toward differentiated play. In practice that last -- use as intended -- is particularly important: the function of a tool is contingent upon how a tool-user uses that tool.
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Lanefan
Victoria Rules
The question is whether a) play is specifically intended to actively create and maintain a coherent narrative, whether pre-planned or spontaneous, or b) whether play just happens on a one-thing-leads-to-the-next basis and any coherence to the narrative really only becomes clear after the fact.
If in hindsight there's no narrative or story, I'd agree. There's nothing that requires coherence in the moment, however, in part because the players probably don't know everything.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I want to propose a rephrased tl;dr for you to consider
GM advice: Call for the rolls players will care about.
As @Paul Farquhar points out, players care about different things. Furthermore, different modes of play are formed around caring about different things. In some modes, as @Enrahim points out, change to information-state (including knowing that this section of wall has a 2:6 probability of not containing a trap or secret door where previously that was unknown) could be something players care about.
One way players are able to communicate what they care about is through the actions they describe for their characters. Giving a decent heuristic for knowing when to roll. Sometimes that goes awry, creating a motive for employing someone to arbitrate.
The corrollary -- and don't call for the rolls players will not care about -- can be addressed through mechanics such as D&D's "If failure has no consequences and a character can try and try again, you can skip the ability check and just tell the player how long the task takes" or through adoption of appropriate norms in play.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Perhaps more to the point, and despite narrative games' insistence to the contrary, there is nothing wrong with "nothing happens" being the narrated result of an attempted action that fails. As in:
Players: "We search the west wall for a secret door."
DM: <rolls in secret knowing there's no door there> "You find nothing."
Player: "Koun tries to pick the lock on the chest." <rolls poorly>
DM: "The lock resists your best efforts."
Player: "Kethera climbs the wall" <rolls very poorly>
DM: "Kethera, you make it maybe six feet up then slip, you take no damage but you're right back where you started."
All of these might be frustrating to the players, and to that my only response is so what. It'd be frustrating to the characters in the fiction as well, most likely, and I'm fine with that. In all these situations it's now on the player(s) to either come up with a plan B or abandon the attempt and go do something else.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
To the two bolded bits: what's the difference?
IME what players tend to best accept is that which makes reasonable sense. On a failure, in probably the majority of in-fiction situations, what makes the greatest amount of reasonable sense is that simply nothing happens or nothing changes.
Things actively getting worse on a failure is IME almost universally accepted if the roll comes up natural 1 on the die (or nat 20 in a roll-low situation). Otherwise, a fail is a fail and that's it, except I might narrate a close failure differently than a fail-by-a-lot.
The one I can't stand is "fail forward". To me, all that concept seems to be is an end-run around failure to try to turn it into at least partial success. No. A fail is a fail, which means you do NOT get what you want even if it has complications attached.
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