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

pemerton said:

I agree that there is zero difference here as far as "quantum" is concerned. I think there is a difference in procedure that is worth being aware of:

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Discussion in this thread reminds me of an earlier one on (non-)sequiturs. I mention that not to disagree with your reasoning that there's zero difference, but rather to look a little closer at what might be counted prefigured from (grounded in, consistent with, following from) the fiction.

One example I have is with player-authored stakes, where these are written on character sheets and may in some cases entrain other game systems. Given these have been contributed to the shared ongoing narrative -- established in the fiction, in other words -- to me they are on the table for consequences. The example raises the question: what if anything is the test that should be followed? Is it enough that it's established in the fiction, should there be a prior connection with the scene, or is it enough that such a connection can be concocted?

Also observed to be on the table for consequences are those established in setting but not yet submitted to the fiction. Map and key is the obvious case, and I'm thinking also about undisclosed means or motives of NPCs, forces and entities players have not prior to the fail-forward result been aware of, and so on (the cases are very diverse.)

I suspect that norms for how connected with current scene and how signalled to players consequences ought to be varies by mode of play.

AnotherGuy said:

GM: The party approaches the door and discovers it is locked.
Rogue player: My rogue quickly scratches around his satchel for his thief tools.....
Cleric player: Wait! Let my character cast silence to ensure you do not fumble or succeed with a complication which may or may not alert everyone in the household depending on the GM decides move.
Wizard player: Stand back gentlemen, this is a job for my character, as I will circumvent the plans of our overlord GM. As after our cleric casts Silence I will have my wizard cast Knock from 50 feet away. Thus we will ensure the opening of such door is a success negating the quantum failures, random encounters, fail forwards and complications that our devious GM would normally decide on.
Cleric player: Your verbal component of Knock will not pass through my Silence barrier so it will have no effect on the locked door.
Wizard player: Confound it!

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GM: mechanically the loud sound of knock emanates from its target, and seeing as the spell can be cast from outside the area covered by silence the wizard's plan should work. There is no passing of the verbal component into the area covered, that's erroneous.

But is your point more to contrast fiat mechanics like spells with rolled mechanics like rogue lock picking, as a commentary and possible criticism of fail-forward?

EzekielRaiden said:

Well, I don't genrally make that kind of assumption unless there's a reason to. But even if we grant that? Probably would tell them at least the general outline after the end of their first (or second, if it seems like there will be more than two) encounter. Doesn't have to be specific numbers, just descriptive stuff. Generally, I'd try to choose effects that would leave reasonable evidence behind, e.g. something that burns leaving scorch marks where it fell, something that induces sleep having the sound of a lullaby, etc. Something beneficial might have the sound of a battle theme or feel like the gentle warmth of a campfire or the like, depending on what the effect is.

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Most of the time that'd be too much telegraphing for me.

EzekielRaiden said:

Ah. See, I thought this was "the players DID investigate and experiment, didn't learn anything, then the whole area was erased/destroyed and only then did I tell them the mechanics." Also it's now sounding like this was a singular event? Like they only interacted with that gem the one single time and then nothing else? I was under the impression that they had seen it and even limitedly/distantly interacted with it (e.g. not in the room itself), but despite multiple encounters nothing was really learned until after no more encounters could ever happen.

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They did some experimentation with summoned monsters and learned some stuff, then did some personal trial and error and learned some more (for better and worse), then got out of there with the gem and destroyed it.

One of the PCs had met a similar-but-different gem in a long-ago adventure that had some connections to this one; but that gem only flashed white and its effect was to teleport anyone hit by a flash to about half a continent away.

This one flashed 12 different colours, each with its own effect (though the white flash, which by sheer chance never even occurred during all this, still did the long-distance teleport). The violet flash killed anything it hit and sucked the victim's soul into the gem. The red flash gave +40 temporary hit points to whoever it hit. The dark green flash summoned a Giant to defend the gem. Light blue generated Acid Web in that segment of the room (there were 12 segments, like a clock); another colour made anyone in that segment go completely berserk, another one caused paralysis, and so on. Twice a round, on fixed init. counts, between 0 and 6 segments of the room (most often, 1 to 3 of them) would be flashed, each flash an independently-rolled random colour that could repeat.

Other than that much, this was a singular event.

Enrahim said:

My bolding.

I agree to the principle, but the devil lies in the fact that we in trad play doesn't actually specify what is the failure mode for the task at hand. And most tasks can have several failure modes. This is the ambiguity that typically allow for fail forward in traditional play. In other words, I reject the bolded assertion.

Take the player saying "I pick the lock". A success on the roll typically would be expected to mean quite a few things:
1: The door is now unlocked.
2: The character did it in a reasonable amount of time
3: The character stayed silent while doing so
4: The door was left reasonably unharmed.
Which one of these are of the player's primary concern is generally not stated. For instance you as a GM might think that managing 1, 2, and 4, but making a bit of noise is an appropriate ", but" on a just barely succeeded roll. However the player might actually have preferred the door to not be opened (they could have taken the windows anyway) over making noise.

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That's where I like to use an informal sliding scale on rolls like this. Roll a 20 (or a 1 if using roll-under) and you nailed all four of those without any trouble. Make the success by the bare minimum and sure, the door's unlocked but it maybe took some time or made some noise or whatever - it wasn't perfect, but you still got it done.

Enrahim said:

As such the approach that allow for the least GM bias would be the stance that all of these expectations is fulfilled on a success result. But what then about the failure result? To on a failure narrate "After working on the lock until dawn, your character loses patience, screams out in frustration and kicks the door so it leaves a dent" might be hilarious once, but is not conductive of a game that tries to take itself at least a little bit seriously. Hence the sane response to what should happen on a failure is that at least one of the things that would indicate a success did not happen, but not necessarily all.

And this is the conceptual "loophole" that allow for trad-fail forward. If you free your mind from the idea that it has to be number 1 that is the primary concern in the resolution, you could allow 1 while rather having one or more of the other success criteria fail.

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I disagree. The only concern that matters when resolving the action "I try to pick the lock" is whether or not the lock is picked. Otherwise, if you in any way narrate that the lock is picked on a 'fail' roll (or conversely, if you narrate failure to pick it on a 'success' roll) you're not honouring the roll that was just made, which is all kinds of bad.

If the player specifically says they're trying to do it unusually quietly or unusually quickly (as opposed to the standard, where it's generally assumed they're trying to be reasonably quiet and efficient about it) I'd put that to a second, corollary roll.

Lanefan said:

That's where I like to use an informal sliding scale on rolls like this. Roll a 20 (or a 1 if using roll-under) and you nailed all four of those without any trouble. Make the success by the bare minimum and sure, the door's unlocked but it maybe took some time or made some noise or whatever - it wasn't perfect, but you still got it done.

I disagree. The only concern that matters when resolving the action "I try to pick the lock" is whether or not the lock is picked. Otherwise, if you in any way narrate that the lock is picked on a 'fail' roll (or conversely, if you narrate failure to pick it on a 'success' roll) you're not honouring the roll that was just made, which is all kinds of bad.

If the player specifically says they're trying to do it unusually quietly or unusually quickly (as opposed to the standard, where it's generally assumed they're trying to be reasonably quiet and efficient about it) I'd put that to a second, corollary roll.

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This is absolutely a valid stance. I just want to bring to some extra attention that it gives the effect that a player might prefer to slightly fail the roll over slightly succeeding the roll. Some are holding the principle that rolling high should be preferred quite strongly, and the principle you lay out some times come in conflict with this.

I also think the formulation you provided now is a better explanation of your principle than the one in your previous post:
"I try to do X". Roll. "is X done?" success->yes, failure->no. This certainly seem to work on the pick lock example; I need to digest it a bit more to see if it seem to be broadly applicable (There are sure to be exceptions, but I do not find that so interesting).

Hussar said:

Hang on a tick.

How can you roll random events beforehand? What triggers the events? How can you know how long the party will spend on a particular task in order to have time based random events? Or are the events location based - in which case they are 100% quantum. The event only occurs if the party goes to Place A. If they never go there, then the random event doesn't occur, regardless of what you rolled.

In other words, the only way that actually works is if you have a stack of quantum events that you simply pull out of the bag whenever you feel that the criteria for that particular event has been fufilled. You cannot possibly know what rooms they will be going into in the house unless you are leading them around by the nose. SInce you claim that they have complete freedom, then your random events can't be anything other than quantum if/then statements.

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This may have already been answered - but the way I’ve generally seen it in OSR play is that you pre-roll a set of random table results and then localize / figure out what they mean. Eg: in Dolmenwood each hex has what % chance of what table you might encounter. Rolling that part ahead lets you note down that there’s a unicorn helping a knight on a quest in the forest hex the party has said they’ll be traveling through.

A handful of those rolled so that if the normal procedures trigger an encounter helps get things set ahead of time. Sometimes none of them come up.

When I use random tables in a PBTA, as the GM I’m introducing the result either as a soft move per my principles and design of the game or off a non-full exploration roll as an added complication.

Lanefan said:

That's where I like to use an informal sliding scale on rolls like this. Roll a 20 (or a 1 if using roll-under) and you nailed all four of those without any trouble. Make the success by the bare minimum and sure, the door's unlocked but it maybe took some time or made some noise or whatever - it wasn't perfect, but you still got it done.

I disagree. The only concern that matters when resolving the action "I try to pick the lock" is whether or not the lock is picked. Otherwise, if you in any way narrate that the lock is picked on a 'fail' roll (or conversely, if you narrate failure to pick it on a 'success' roll) you're not honouring the roll that was just made, which is all kinds of bad.

If the player specifically says they're trying to do it unusually quietly or unusually quickly (as opposed to the standard, where it's generally assumed they're trying to be reasonably quiet and efficient about it) I'd put that to a second, corollary roll.

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Is this a potential loophole in your approach?
Player: "I try to stay unnoticed when entering the house"
GM: "Ok, how?"
Player: "By picking the lock rather than breaking down the crude bamboo door"
GM: "Fine, roll me a thief tools check".
Would a valid interpretation of a failure here be that the PC enters the house, but is noticed in the process? Mind you, I do not ask what your initial gut reaction. It is more like if there are circumstances where you could see yourself narrating a noisy entry. For instance if the act of entering the house itself isn't particularly challenging (there are windows, back doors, and a gaping hole in the roof under repair), so the only thing really interesting is how the house is entered.

clearstream said:

GM: mechanically the loud sound of knock emanates from its target, and seeing as the spell can be cast from outside the area covered by silence the wizard's plan should work. There is no passing of the verbal component into the area covered, that's erroneous.

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Interesting.

clearstream said:

But is your point more to contrast fiat mechanics like spells with rolled mechanics like rogue lock picking, as a commentary and possible criticism of fail-forward?

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Yes, to commentary but no to criticism.
I use Fail Forward/Success with Complication. I also use Binary as I've said way upthread.
I have no issue with various ideas being tools that I may use for the game...but perhaps the players would need to be aware such rules will/may be utilised.

FrogReaver said:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/cgi-bin/uy/webpages.cgi?/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Authority​

'Appeal to Authority​

argumentum ad verecundiam

(also known as: argument from authority, ipse dixit)

Description: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see the appeal to false authority .'

Here's some evidence of the proper definition.

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So, to demonstrate that another poster is wrong about an appeal to authority, you yourself are commiting the appeal to authority fallacy?

Because it definitely appears that you are insisting your claim about appeals to authority is true because a website said it was true.

pemerton said:

For instance, instead of a separate wandering monster roll, the possibility of being caught red-handed is built into the check resolution itself. And instead of a separate reaction roll, the response of the NPC who catches the PC red-handed is decided by the GM as part of the consequence narration.

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Yes

pemerton said:

People can like this, or not. These are different ways of establishing the shared fiction. But one is not more "quantum" than the other.

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And no. This is explicitly more quantum than the other. In the wandering monster case, the events are independent--your skill at lock picking does not affect your chances of encountering a monster. In the fail forward case, they are dependent--a skilled thief encounters fewer wanderers.

The thief's observations play a role where they didn't before, hence quantum.