D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[Oofta]

Here is a rather extreme example. A player says "I look round the inn to see if there are any clowns." I, as DM, might roll dice (yeah I do illusionism sometimes, shoot me) and say "You see a humanoid figure with their face painted white sitting in a shadowy corner", just because I want to see where the player is going with this. The DM has created the clown, but they have done so because the player asked them to by asking the question.

I doubt @Micah Sweet would do this because I believe they prefer a more grounded world in which random clowns do not exist, but they might do it for something that is less unlikely in the setting.

Listening to what the players are concerned about is a fun way to incorporate their ideas into the game. In my case, this could be a new enemy that does the whole "The protagonist sees them and then they disappear after someone temporarily blocks line of sight." Is the clown an illusion, an omen, or perhaps some type of insanity? I may have had a cool idea in mind when I created the clown or maybe it's just something I'll run with depending on the player's reaction. Even if it's an illusion from the wife of a minor enemy they thwarted earlier and it's just an illusion I may do things like have the player roll a dice before the illusion appears again. Because you're not alone in using illusionism now and then. As much as the players in theory shouldn't pay attention to the metagame, they're human so they do.

 

[TwoSix]

Seems much the same to me; given that all the rogue-likes I've played are also scored, and have high-score lists etc.

I was thinking more about late 80s/early 90s games like Bad Dudes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Simpsons, Final Fight, Knights of the Round, etc.

Games where if you put in your quarter, you just keep going from the same point. Enough quarters, you will eventually reach the end.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@hawkeyefan gave some examples of how the GM might shut it down. Here's another one: there's a geas/curse on any non-giant learning giantish language or culture, so that if the PC learns what the player is hoping they will learn, the PC is cursed/killed/struck dumb/whatever other effect the GM decides the geas/curse has.

I take it that you, @Micah Sweet, would agree with @Paul Farquhar that "being further developed" is something that the GM does - "filling it in is the DM's job".

And so the actual impact the player has had is to prompt the GM to author more setting details, about an aspect of the setting in which the player has expressed interest. Or am I missing something?

I do agree with him, yes. It is the DM's job to further develop that setting detail, which they do in response to player interest. The player can also (and I hope they do) impact those setting details in play through the actions of their PC.

Am I missing something?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here is a rather extreme example. A player says "I look round the inn to see if there are any clowns." I, as DM, might roll dice (yeah I do illusionism sometimes, shoot me) and say "You see a humanoid figure with their face painted white sitting in a shadowy corner", just because I want to see where the player is going with this. The DM has created the clown, but they have done so because the player asked them to by asking the question.

I doubt @Micah Sweet would do this because I believe they prefer a more grounded world in which random clowns do not exist, but they might do it for something that is less unlikely in the setting.

I had a random clown in my game recently, but he was a PC.

Also pretty darn random.

 

[Manbearcat]

My question was more to test Manbearcat's conviction on his earlier post.

I suppose I wasn't fully convinced that authority and ownership rights cannot also play a role with immersion. I actually want to ask my table what they think about it - since they are the players 99% of the time.

To clarify, my position (and what I was trying to convey in that initial post) isn't that authority and ownership rights cannot also play a role in immersion priorities. My position is two-fold:

* There is a default assumption that design and questions around authority and ownership rights are always, or at least overwhelmingly, about immersion priorities. That shouldn't remotely be a normative assumption.

* There are play priorities around authority and ownership rights that have absolutely zero to do with immersion priorities. As in, no overlap whatsoever.

Always. My usual feeling is that everyone is perfectly happy to sacrifice the G on the altar of the TTRP, and rarely willing to acknowledge what that costs.

I am not especially familiar with Torchbearer, outside of a few reports of play.

I'd probably go with decaying board state, sure. I've come to believe my understanding of "parasitic design" was obtained from someone misusing the term to talk about something else. I don't think I'd use dysfunctional for anything other than an unparsable rule. I might use degenerate, if the board state tended to devolve toward a single dominant strategy or can easily become unsolvable.

That all being said, I tend to put my relationship to that kind of game down to personal preference, not to a factor of design. Regardless of medium, I am generally not fond of games where the decision space and/or impact of player decisions decreases over the course of play instead of growing.

I'll do my best, but I am exactly the kind of gay nerd who has happily not been to a baseball pitch since I was 9; you're killing me with these sports analogies. The last sporting event I went to was a work function basketball game. I found the back and forth of each exchange tactically interesting, but couldn't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more interesting if they balanced the players.

Some googling informs me there are strict time limits between pitches? I feel certain there's a nuance here I'm not grasping, but "players are under time pressure" seems to be the takeaway. The game equivalent is presumably introducing a chess clock, which certainly has dramatic impacts on how people play games. I generally understand it to be adding an "execution" element to the challenge, shifting play from just finding the right line to also demonstrating you can do so quickly.

If I'm parsing this correctly: every pitch you throw against a given batter is assumed to make future pitches less effective, both in general, and as a function of that specific pitch. Essentially, pitchers have a hand of cards which reference both some general stat they keep depleting, and each card has a personal modifier that also degrades, though these stats are modified in some way by the stats of the batter.

This is very similar to the dynamics of War Chest, a game I do not like precisely because of its degrading board state. Every lost unit permanently decreases your ability to replenish, use and reinforce units of that type. Every action taken not only limits the decision space on the board, but the total size of the decision space for all future decisions.

I think you're losing me here? There's a subjective element to pitch evaluation, and that varies from umpire to umpire, and that might be gameable? I don't understand how that interacts with balls : strikes, unless you're saying the strategic importance of gaming it properly is different at different stages of the game?

I don't know that I have anything to say about this. Modeling stress/team dynamics are outside the kind of gameplay I'm interested in, and frankly outside the kind of spectating I'm interested in.

I think I made an earlier error. I was looking at pitch clock, you meant "pitch count" which after some searching, I'm taking to mean "pitchers have an increased risk of injury and decreased performance as they throw more pitches over the course of a game." So, essentially, an upper limit on the number of actions you can take. I don't actually see that as having much impact in the decaying board state sense, that's more of just a game timer.

The board game analogy I'd use is Bus, which hands out all of the available action tokens to each player at the beginning of the game, and ends when only player has any left with no hard restrictions on how many can be used each round. They're entirely a clock in that game, as the effectiveness of those actions and the available places on the board in which to play definitely expand as the game continues.

I don't really know where we're going here, but my original point is that much disagreement seems to be about the goal of play, and the difficulty of holding more than one such goal in mind, while simultaneously having multiple resources/abilities that must only be spent towards some of those goals.

This seems to be about a game space having complex tactical concerns, theoretically in service to one goal.

My bad @Pedantic . I really appreciate you doing your best to engage with my post. For some reason I thought you were more acquainted with Torchbearer and, due to the TTRPG cohorts that I primarily interact with which contain a big chunk of knowledgeable baseball fans, I for some reason assumed you were acquainted with the dynamics fo baseball.

So basically just a clustereff of wrong assumptions and a giant waste of an effort.

What I was hoping to do was have a conversation around the various layers of challenge-based play in a ruleset possessed of complex decisions, some of which put the player's goals "rowing in opposite or orthogonal directions" or "rowing at different intervals/loops so trade-offs around immediate tactics and long-term strategy become paramount." I then wanted to use that foundation to discuss the implications of various forms of rule 0 or referee interpretation (in baseball, the Umpire's strike zone was going to be the analog for TTRPG GMing judgement, mediation, and unilateral authority).

I'll read you post in the coming days as time allows, digest where your headspace is, and see if I can't come up with a better means to discuss this stuff. I don't have time today and I likely don't have it tomorrow as well, but in the next few days.

Anyway, I appreciate it and I'm sorry for having you digest a bunch of foreign material (about baseball) and make a lengthy post about the same.

 

[gban007]

Seems much the same to me; given that all the rogue-likes I've played are also scored, and have high-score lists etc.

I believe one key thing around rogue-likes is being procedurally generated, so each run through would be different, allowing for quite different expectations / possibilities of scoring. Whereas my memory of a lot of arcade games were that they weren't random, so could learn from each play through what need to do next time.

 

[pemerton]

I do agree with him, yes. It is the DM's job to further develop that setting detail, which they do in response to player interest. The player can also (and I hope they do) impact those setting details in play through the actions of their PC.

Am I missing something?

I don't think so, as far as procedure of play is concerned.

But to me, this does seem relevant to the discussion about collaboration. A prompts B to author something that A is likely to find interesting doesn't seem to me like an instance of collaboration between A and B.

 

[Lanefan]

When I talk of "feces happens" in the latter instance, I am speaking more towards the consequences of roleplaying your character with integrity, which potentially means "suboptimally." IME, there is a tension between suboptimal play when roleplaying your character and the style of OSR and D&D gameplay that focuses on things like "player skill," "skilled play," "play to win," and "git g00d." There is not the same sort of emphasis on "skilled play" and "play to win" in games like Stonetop or Torchbearer or Fate because these games are more interested in dramatic story beats.

Yet even in those games doesn't playing your character with integrity come first, even if doing so leads to less drama and-or a less engaging story?

IMHO, this position mistakenly talks about a player issue as if it were a player character issue. The PCs have no will of their own. We are talking about thinking that happens at the level of the player, and this happens regardless of whether you are a fan of it or not.

Perhaps, but I try my best to split out player thinking from character thinking. Just because my character punches your character in the face doesn't in the least mean I-as-player want to punch you-as-player.

I thought that you don't play video games.

I don't do MMOs, nor do I do console games (don't even own a game console), but I do play rogue-likes on both phone and computer; with the computer play going all the way back to the original Rogue and text-based games like Zork and Advent before that.

I also did more than my share of time in arcades during the early 80s.

 

[Lanefan]

I was thinking more about late 80s/early 90s games like Bad Dudes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Simpsons, Final Fight, Knights of the Round, etc.

Games where if you put in your quarter, you just keep going from the same point. Enough quarters, you will eventually reach the end.

I never encountered any arcade games like that, but then by the late 80s my arcade days had largely passed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think so, as far as procedure of play is concerned.

But to me, this does seem relevant to the discussion about collaboration. A prompts B to author something that A is likely to find interesting doesn't seem to me like an instance of collaboration between A and B.

It does to me. Obviously YMMV. To be sure, most of the collaboration comes in play, as the story of the campaign (as seen after the fact) emerges through PC and GM action.