D&D 5E 5e* - D&D-now

[clearstream]

D&D combat is notorious for not being fiction first; for being, in phenomenological terms, dice-roll "bingo" (ie a lot of calling out of numbers and comparing them to pre-given numbers on bits of paper). Some of the earliest RPG designs (C&S, RQ, later RM, GURPS) were reactions to this. Gygax is aware of the reaction, and responds to it, in his DMG - with his criticism of hit location tables and damage types, for instance, and his extremely non-simulationist approach to the resolution of attacks by poisonous monsters and blades (see pp 61, 81-82).

The core of 5e D&D RAW combat resolution is the same as AD&D's: take one's turn within a strict action economy, roll to hit vs AC, if successful roll damage which is applied as a depletion of a hit point tally. This is not fiction first. It's mechanics. I appreciate that 5e* mandates that the mechanics be accompanied by GM narration (I assume that this is why your list of examples didn't include the GM saying The giant now has 125 hp left. But until some account is given of how that GM narration than affects downstream resolution (as in the examples I suggested: a bonus to save vs Thunderwave, or an AC penalty) then we don't have fiction first, we just have D&D combat with colourful narration overlaid. That may be a good thing, in terms of producing a more engaging or enjoyable play experience (and some D&D GMs have been doing it for decades for just that reason) but it doesn't make the game a fiction first one.

On the one hand, I'm confident the play is fiction-first. But we also rightly look at the text (which is what I think you are referring to by "game".) For you, it seems a text is only fiction-first if it has mechanics that mandate change to the fiction. But what if such a game is run differently, as some believe possible? Does it not then fail to be fiction-first?

My own view is that it's not a coincidence that I'm providing these examples from 4e - 4e has a very robust set of system tools (eg a variety of keywords; level-by-DC chart; a standardised framework for forced movement; etc) for translating fiction into mechanics and then back again. My own knowledge of 5e makes feel that it is not as robust in this respect. Perhaps 5e* adds to that robustness, but from the examples you've given I'm not seeing where or how. And as I said, I don't think this is just quibbling.

As I noted, I do need to reflect on further examples to address this complaint.

To me, the narrations of the giant pressing forward, or couching her club, look a bit like the incidental narration of what's making life hard for the character: the heavy lifting is being done by the mechanics (boxes-to-boxes) an the narration is epiphenomenal.

And yet, it weightily impacts the valid choices for the players. Generally, however, you desire to see mechanics - pervasively - explicitly pass constraints back into fiction, right? (That is something you keep coming back to with your examples.) DW hack and slash doesn't have that.

Hack and Slash When you attack an enemy in melee, roll+Str. ✴On a 10+, you deal your damage to the enemy and avoid their attack. At your option, you may choose to do +1d6 damage but expose yourself to the enemy’s attack. ✴On a 7–9, you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you. [Which is resolved as part of the move - per the canonical examples.]

Where is the constraint passed into the fiction from this mechanic? One has to bring in other principles to get past - it did damage, reduce your HP - and deliver consequences back into the fiction. "Every time you turn to a player, you're highlighting some thing that can cause them strife, and asking how they deal with it." 5e* is lower key (or at least, does not urge so strongly toward constant pressure), but it wants results to matter all the same.

In Fate or MHRP, the more that (i) some fictional context for the "impose a -2 penalty check" is required as a precursor to making the check, and (ii) the more that fictional context is constrained by prior narration, the less the play will look like Baker's Case 2. In 5e D&D, no fictional context is required to impose hit point loss other than the distance requirements necessary to declare an attack with the given weapon or spell. The GM's narration of how a NPC responds to an attack is not part of those fictional constraints, at least by RAW.

Huh? Those "distance requirements", the hostility between parties, what's at stake - it's coming from your fiction. We don't just start the characters like Chess-pieces in fixed positions and they go!

That is what makes a system "fiction first": the fiction that flows from "cycle N" feeds into the framing and resolution of "cycle N+1".

That's one (fairly abstract) way to define "meaningful." The cycle N has its strongest, most immediate and obvious meaning when it feeds into framing and resolution of N+1. But it may feed into the ith cycle N+i.

How does the giant pressing forward, or couching her club, or the 1 hp loss being a scratch, feed into the declaration and resolution of actions on subsequent rounds? This is where, to me, it seems to be purely epiphenomenal.

I find that odd, but if that sort of thing doesn't impact on your fictional positioning that's up to what you have agreed. Some of the most consequential things my NPCs do in battles is speak some words. From surrendering to fleeing to negotiating to threatening and so on. I think if I had to choose between pretend-combat and pretend-conversation for narrative power, it would be the latter.

First, the Lumpley Principle has been stated differently at different times, and those statements aren't all equivalent (either semantically or functionally). This page states two formulations. The first is the one I encountered when I first encountered The Forge: rules and their consequences only take effect when taken up and assented to by the group. The contrast, here, might be with rules of mathematics which (at least on some mainstream accounts) generate consequences even if no one has yet worked out what those are.

The second one is that systems is a means for agreeing on the content of the shared fiction. I think that is what you are meaning by it.

Anyway, on this second formulation of the principle, it does not require anything more to explain why different systems produce different experiences. They are different means.

A vehicle, we might say, is a means for getting from A to B. Using different vehicles will produce different experiences of getting from A to B. This doesn't require adding anything to our concept of a vehicle beyond what is stated in the first sentence of this paragraph. Likewise for system.

Sophistry, I'm afraid. It tells us as nothing about what means will be better or worse other than in terms of power to secure agreement, and yet this entire debate seems to rest on the possibility of judging and disagreeing about what will be better or worse means, and differences in play experience due to means have been cited and exemplified.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"You’ll make plans, yes. You’ll make preparations. But once play begins, it’s your job to follow where the players lead, where the dice lead, and where the fiction leads." I've never found pre-authorship an obstacle to playing to find out. It's unwillingness to let it burn, more.

Well, one must be cautious there. I mean, first of all, some games aren't too much concerned with the overall fiction, like a supers game where it is pretty much assumed how the 'universe' works (IE its Marvel or DC, etc.). So there any pre-authored fiction deals with specific challenges to the PCs, do they face Dr Doom or Magneto? Now, there's a level to that which is perfectly amenable to, and benefits from, GM development. At the same time, one assumes there are themes and concerns that are more in the domain of the players, and here the GM's plans need to be flexible, etc. In a D&D-esque kind of game that might even extend to a more open-world kind of setup where very little is defined ahead of time, and the GM's 'plotting' is more aimed at just allowing them to generate some cool opposition and not have to make it all up on the fly every episode.

The issues arise when pre-authorship extends to the level where it locks the game into specific themes and interactions and thus where it becomes very hard to EXPLORE different possibilities. If the GM simply runs the players through "Zombie Apocalypse" then maybe they don't get to figure out how their orc paladin character relates to his violent and at least supposedly 'evil' kinfolk, right? I mean, I'd expect in that case the GM's plan would become more of a backdrop or sideline to some sort of plot that involved interacting with orcs. The zombie part might still factor in fairly significantly in a 'this is what is driving external events' but the real focus would be on the paladin and his relatives, at least for a presumably pretty good chunk of story arc.

Conditioned purely? Where that is so, are you not really discussing an encapsulated mechanism?

We're just discussing 'boxes to boxes'. I mean, 'ending with the fiction' really assumes the fiction is central, right? I mean, if it isn't then its a rather weak and hollow agenda, IMHO. Its obviously nuanced though. DW LIVES on the fiction side, and mechanics are there to create some structure and insert a place for stochastic mechanisms to live. 4e OTOH is pretty complete in its mechanical structure at the 'tactical' level at least, and thus relies heavily on a rich set of 'fiction referents' within those mechanics that kind of inform you how to map back and forth easily so that there's 'low impedence' in doing so. (DW simply has very basic and straightforward mechanics that are easily extracted from the fiction and structured in a way where the details of how you handle any one specific situation isn't that important).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

5e has some strong mechanisms for system to fiction, whether folk are aware of and use them much is up for debate. But do you have a sense that DM doing that translation should be discounted? You say ad-hoc, but this was the point of FK: that the "ad-hoc" would lead to better results than the prescribed.

I don't know about the 'FKR', but Free Kriegspiel itself has a motive of simple applicability. Since it was an activity centered on modeling the REAL WORLD it was very important that it be possible to do so with great fidelity, and to present situations in an open-ended form. The idea was to give military officers a realistic scenario and let them improvise a response. No simply mechanistic wargame can do that, because they would inevitably have to encode all possible responses into their repertoire of moves, thus negating the whole value of the exercise. It isn't about the value of 'ad-hoc' mappings. It is about the value of open-endedness. There is a referee in these 'games' largely because situations will be encountered that have not been quantified, and thus require objective human adjudication. In FK it is likely to be considered that there is always a 'right' and 'wrong' referee response (adjudication) of a situation, and right is completely judged by its conformance with reality (though obviously judging the quality of a given referee decision may be difficult as it could represent something that has never happened in the real world).

In fact, in FK, the referees were classically equipped with a rather thorough handbook of military tables and such which allowed them to determine the outcomes of fairly well-understood situations, like combat between specific units given known parameters. When human factors were involved, then the participants in the game WERE those humans! In some cases there would be 'NPCs' in effect for the ref to deal with.

My point is, yes, there is decision-making by the ref in FK, but the entire model of the game is more 'D&D-like' than most story games. There was no such thing as PLAYER AGENDA in an FK! Not aside from 'win the war'. I think it is always best if there is some guidance provided by the system and the agenda/principles in terms of how to do the mappings back and forth, and THEN the GM is there to fall back on some level of judgment. Note that FKs are not generally 'freely scripted' and are definitely not 'player directed' though, not overall!

Not really. The lingering injuries say what cures them. Often that's regenerate.

But this brings us to the issue that I was pointing out, which is just how UNCLEAR it is what, fictionally, something like hit points even means! Why doesn't CLW fix a lost hand or eye but it does fix a broken bone? It isn't clear at all, and I'm not really aware of any rules or principles in any edition of D&D which really clarify this. Sure, there may be ad-hoc case-by-case decreed adjudications, but there's no framework they fit in.

I would contrast this with a game like 4e where keywords can easily do exactly that (not to say that 4e's use of keywords was always carefully enough policed to 'just work', but it does go a long ways).

My stock example is the Flametongue. In classical D&D its entirely ambiguous and arbitrary which monsters it gets +4 against vs +1. 1e DMG literally has a LIST hard-coded! 4e doesn't even have to mention this, as fire vulnerability handles it in a general way, describing the exact mechanical significance of the fire damage type (a type of keyword). I mean, this is a fairly trivial example, but even open-ended situations are at least moved into broad categories instead of designers and DMs needing to literally spell out lists of how everything interacts with everything else!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't agree on that. It seems likely to me that the designers intended it to go to the fiction. I find that "say something meaningful" reinforces it nicely.


Fiction-first 5e, rather than story-now 5e I think. If that's what you mean by story? There's no mystery: it avoids it by agreeing to avoid it.


I like this criticism. I'll think about whether I can write up my 5e* interpretation in a better way.

I'm not sure about distinctions between fiction-first and story-now, I'd have to think about that. Those terms are used pretty informally in most contexts, but I'd hazard a guess that FF is 'arrows', and SN is generally what is also called 'Story Light' or 'Low Backstory' play.

I think you can write a lot of games starting from 5e. I considered it, but then it seems to me it is more work than maybe it is worth in many cases.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And yet, it weightily impacts the valid choices for the players. Generally, however, you desire to see mechanics - pervasively - explicitly pass constraints back into fiction, right? (That is something you keep coming back to with your examples.) DW hack and slash doesn't have that.

Hack and Slash When you attack an enemy in melee, roll+Str. ✴On a 10+, you deal your damage to the enemy and avoid their attack. At your option, you may choose to do +1d6 damage but expose yourself to the enemy’s attack. ✴On a 7–9, you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you. [Which is resolved as part of the move - per the canonical examples.]

Where is the constraint passed into the fiction from this mechanic? One has to bring in other principles to get past - it did damage, reduce your HP - and deliver consequences back into the fiction. "Every time you turn to a player, you're highlighting some thing that can cause them strife, and asking how they deal with it." 5e* is lower key (or at least, does not urge so strongly toward constant pressure), but it wants results to matter all the same.

Well, Hack & Slash BY ITSELF is only an isolated part of a system which does deliver. I mean, it is certainly no less mapping back to fiction than a 5e* melee attack where both systems admonish the GM to effectively start and end with the fiction. Remember, in DW there is no additional mechanical structure AT ALL regulating 'combat' as a whole. Without going back and creating a fictional description of the action the game GRINDS TO A HALT! There's nothing for the player to further respond to! There's no basis on which a GM move can be made because we don't KNOW the fiction. Remember too, Hack & Slash covers virtually ALL attacks by PCs, there aren't other moves that carry some different fictional baggage with them. If you leap onto the back of a giant snake and stab away, that's STILL Hack & Slash, but clearly the results require a very different narration from 'I swing my sword at the orc in front of me.' I can't tell where to go with the snake thing until the outcome is narrated. I mean, OK, a 10+ result in DW MIGHT often be fairly clear-cut, you did your thing, you stabby stabbed the snake and you're now on top of a pissed off giant snake! OK, that's about as basic as it gets, but the GM still needs to narrate the response to that... I mean, the snake is not going to just sit there, is it throwing you off, wrapping its coils around your body, what? We cannot even decide which player is getting to declare some more fiction next until we take care of what happened here in the fiction.

Huh? Those "distance requirements", the hostility between parties, what's at stake - it's coming from your fiction. We don't just start the characters like Chess-pieces in fixed positions and they go!

Sure, but you have to admit, in general, once D&D translates things to combat, once the initiative dice come out and get shaken, things get pretty darn mechanical! Its, IME, reasonably rare that you really go back to the fiction until there's something that comes up that rules don't cover. In a battle my character was fighting a guy who was clearly a slave, so I offered to free him. That definitely got us into fiction territory! (mechanics came in again pretty fast as I tried to cut his chain loose with my weapon).

That's one (fairly abstract) way to define "meaningful." The cycle N has its strongest, most immediate and obvious meaning when it feeds into framing and resolution of N+1. But it may feed into the ith cycle N+i.

Maybe, but you have to watch out that you don't just define things to meaninglessness. I mean, EVENTUALLY, the fight will end, at that point every mechanic that happened during it will have played some part in defining the end state. One question to ask is whether the mechanic's result lead directly into fiction in a way that can be specifically described, or is it kind of just general, like "we won and took minimal damage." ?

 

[clearstream]

Well, one must be cautious there. I mean, first of all, some games aren't too much concerned with the overall fiction, like a supers game where it is pretty much assumed how the 'universe' works (IE its Marvel or DC, etc.). So there any pre-authored fiction deals with specific challenges to the PCs, do they face Dr Doom or Magneto? Now, there's a level to that which is perfectly amenable to, and benefits from, GM development. At the same time, one assumes there are themes and concerns that are more in the domain of the players, and here the GM's plans need to be flexible, etc. In a D&D-esque kind of game that might even extend to a more open-world kind of setup where very little is defined ahead of time, and the GM's 'plotting' is more aimed at just allowing them to generate some cool opposition and not have to make it all up on the fly every episode.

The issues arise when pre-authorship extends to the level where it locks the game into specific themes and interactions and thus where it becomes very hard to EXPLORE different possibilities. If the GM simply runs the players through "Zombie Apocalypse" then maybe they don't get to figure out how their orc paladin character relates to his violent and at least supposedly 'evil' kinfolk, right? I mean, I'd expect in that case the GM's plan would become more of a backdrop or sideline to some sort of plot that involved interacting with orcs. The zombie part might still factor in fairly significantly in a 'this is what is driving external events' but the real focus would be on the paladin and his relatives, at least for a presumably pretty good chunk of story arc.

I literally nodded my head as I read that Generally agree, for sure. I actually have some prep. I'm debating with myself for my next campaign. The themes are of colonialism, and I'm pondering if it can work to 'lock in' that the arc will land in the indigenous folk being overwhelmed by the settlers. We're playing to find out what lies between here and there, and what forms or on what terms that loss finally takes. These themes relate closely to my home country, and in a way it might fail to find out something true, to suppose there was a way to 'win'.

We're just discussing 'boxes to boxes'. I mean, 'ending with the fiction' really assumes the fiction is central, right? I mean, if it isn't then its a rather weak and hollow agenda, IMHO. Its obviously nuanced though. DW LIVES on the fiction side, and mechanics are there to create some structure and insert a place for stochastic mechanisms to live. 4e OTOH is pretty complete in its mechanical structure at the 'tactical' level at least, and thus relies heavily on a rich set of 'fiction referents' within those mechanics that kind of inform you how to map back and forth easily so that there's 'low impedence' in doing so. (DW simply has very basic and straightforward mechanics that are easily extracted from the fiction and structured in a way where the details of how you handle any one specific situation isn't that important).

Well, if we hit we roll damage, but I don't think of that as cubes-to-cubes. Because it's one encapsulated mechanic. Although damage is only rolled because we hit. And then if cubes constrain clouds too strongly, perhaps it's really cubes to cubes anyway? That may touch on what led some to see 4e as too gamey.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I literally nodded my head as I read that Generally agree, for sure. I actually have some prep. I'm debating with myself for my next campaign. The themes are of colonialism, and I'm pondering if it can work to 'lock in' that the arc will land in the indigenous folk being overwhelmed by the settlers. We're playing to find out what lies between here and there, and what forms or on what terms that loss finally takes. These themes relate closely to my home country, and in a way it might fail to find out something true, to suppose there was a way to 'win'.

Sounds good.

Well, if we hit we roll damage, but I don't think of that as cubes-to-cubes. Because it's one encapsulated mechanic. Although damage is only rolled because we hit. And then if cubes constrain clouds too strongly, perhaps it's really cubes to cubes anyway? That may touch on what led some to see 4e as too gamey.

I would say "I hit him, I do 19 damage. He dies." that seems all boxes to boxes between I hit him and he dies (IE consequence of reaching 0 hit points, condition of oppo is now dead). Fiction does adhere to this, but the mechanics is a self-sufficient thing that doesn't require reference to the fiction.

The canonical example in DW of the Fighter attacking the Dragon illustrates how it is at least POSSIBLE (indeed likely) that some purely fictional element will factor into how things are resolved (IE the dragon's 'steel hard scales' are FICTIONALLY impossible for a mere human sword to penetrate, thus the attack cannot take place/fails). Now, another game might have some sort of resistance or DR value that accomplishes the invulnerable scales.

 

[pemerton]

I accept that it means it ENDS with the fiction. I think we need to be careful to avoid the situation (very common in D&D) where the next assertion doesn't reference that fiction. That is we need to form our process in such a way that (IMHO) it strongly encourages or even requires, in a procedural and non-optional sense, that the next 'move' be made in fiction. This is one of the reasons DW so strongly emphasizes talking in terms of fiction at the table (various parts of the principles restate elements of this). There is always the danger that fiction can become secondary to mechanics, and become sort of just a 'pro forma' or even be elided entirely. I would ask how your 'Story 5e' proposes to avoid that.

<snip>

I have a concern about the robustness of a loop between fiction and mechanical play which will tend to break down. It is surely under pressure at least in combat, though I think out of combat 5e lacks sufficient structure to likely produce entirely mechanically-driven sequences of play. It might happen to a degree when spells are involved though. I mean, I can certainly imagine a player saying something like "I just charm him and get the information I need." There are situations where that wouldn't appear to actively violate your framework, but it would elide fiction.

Right. This is exactly what I've been saying, on this and on the other thread. This is what Baker is talking about when he talks about "lazy" play (ie play that elides purely "voluntary" fiction) and IIEE "with teeth", that is "self-enforcing" (ie that obliges the player to make their move in the fiction, in order for the mechanics to be operationalised, because they take the change in the fiction as input).

 

[clearstream]

Right. This is exactly what I've been saying, on this and on the other thread. This is what Baker is talking about when he talks about "lazy" play (ie play that elides purely "voluntary" fiction) and IIEE "with teeth", that is "self-enforcing" (ie that obliges the player to make their move in the fiction, in order for the mechanics to be operationalised, because they take the change in the fiction as input).

I'm not seeing how that isn't accomplished in 5e*. Only DM calls for rolls, and they only do that it when it's meaningful. How is it meaningful? Because it's something that matters in the fiction. It could be that you and @AbdulAlhazred are thinking meaningful consequences only applies as the output, but in light of DMG 237 it applies as the input, too.

Maybe think of it like this

F > S > F

DMG 237 > S > narrates

 

[clearstream]

The canonical example in DW of the Fighter attacking the Dragon illustrates how it is at least POSSIBLE (indeed likely) that some purely fictional element will factor into how things are resolved (IE the dragon's 'steel hard scales' are FICTIONALLY impossible for a mere human sword to penetrate, thus the attack cannot take place/fails). Now, another game might have some sort of resistance or DR value that accomplishes the invulnerable scales.

Sure, and - looking at the Hack and Slash mechanic - isn't this guaranteed most by the principles? And not the mechanic. Our communities tried highly simulationist RPG texts, and many moved on from them. An obstacle was that not everything that matters in our fiction can be expressly captured in mechanics.

There's a good discussion of FK in the Elusive Shift that chimes with what I have read elsewhere. Tabletop gamers could have charts and so on for many situations. Even so, it was the referee's ability to rule on the fly that allowed players to declare any action that made sense according to what they thought was going on, and have that action plausibly (or agreeably, or even playfully) resolved. In the 60s, wargamers were already talking about choosing moves as if they were the imagined individuals.