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

[TwoSix]

Cool and all, but it doesn't reflect most games far as I can tell.

I doubt it does. Sometimes an anecdote is just a fun anecdote.

 

[Micah Sweet]

RPGs of the mainstream sort - which all the ones I play are - have a GM participant, who is responsible for coordinating the backstory/setting and who is responsible for presenting situation.

The key question therefore becomes, where does the content of situation come from? Someone has to provide it, and that person must either be in the GM role or the player role.

It's important to see that the player can provide the content even though it is the GM who is actually doing the presenting/framing. For instance, in my most recent Torchbearer session I described the Elven Ranger seeing the light of a comet shining up through a hole in the floor of a stone structure that reached out into the river the PCs were walking beside, the comet's light being reflected off the water and somehow focused or amplified by the structure. The stone structure had been built by Dwarves, and had an inscription in Elvish.

The comet was something that the Ranger's player had introduced into the fiction several sessions ago - after missing a session, the player had to explain where his PC had been (this is a standard procedure for Torchbearer) and (given that the PC has Stars-wise; and given that the PCs had recently experienced a magical catastrophe occurring in the village where they were staying) he told us that his PC had been following a comet as it travelled through the sky, looking for answers to the cause of the catastrophe.

One of the PCs is a Dwarf, and has as his Creed that Elves need grounding in reality. The third PC is also an Elf, who has as her Creed that in these dark times, all Elves need help.

The purpose of the structure's magic was to allow purification of the river water, which flows out of the Troll Fens. The Troll Fens, and their polluted water, had already been a feature of play over the past several sessions, which had focused around the Fens, the Moathouse in the Fens, and the PCs travelling through the Fens by boat and by trudging.

This is different from "story hooks" which are GM authored without reference to player-established priorities for their PCs.

I wouldn't normally describe the RPGing I do as a sandbox. I see "sandbox" as describing a particular technique for framing situations. Here are three such techniques (which are distinct from the question of content I talked about just above, although in practice they might tend to lean one or the other way):

1. The GM has a map and key that is detailed enough that players, by their declared actions - generally movement-related ones like "I open the door" or "I enter the clearing" or "I turn the corner" or "I go into the cave" - trigger pre-prepared situations. Gygax assumes this sort of process for establishing situation in his AD&D rulebooks. This is what I would call a sandbox.​

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2. The GM presents "hooks" which may be low-stakes (a quest-giver approaches the PCs) or high-stakes (the PCs encounter something exciting in media res), and which the players - knowing how the game is meant to work - recognise as situation for their PCs to engage in. I think this is pretty mainstream. It does not rely on map-and-key, but rather the GM's ideas about what "story"/"adventure" they want to present to the players.​

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3. The GM presents the players with a situation that demands a choice or some action from their PCs. This can resemble (2), but the contrast is this: in (2) the PCs (say) see someone being mugged; whereas in (3) the PCs are themselves assaulted by muggers.​

I generally favour approach (3), although my current game of choice - Torchbearer 2e - uses (1) as well on a small scale ("dungeons").

The changes are decided by the GM. The circumstances "allowing for such" is decided by the GM.

As per what I've written just above, the key question is who is deciding what happens next?

If that is the GM, rather than the players, then what I see is a railroad. I mean, the players might be generating prompts into the GM's decision to say this rather than that, but it is the GM who is deciding.

A non-railroad sandbox requires that the players can know what the consequences will be. If consequences are following from circumstances, then players must therefore be able to know what the circumstances are. This is why Gygax, in his advice on how to do skilled dungeon play, emphasises the importance of the players collecting information about the dungeon - in practice, by declaring low-stakes actions around moving and listening and the like, so as to learn what is in the dungeon, enabling them to then make informed plans about how to loot it.

A sandbox in which the key information is - in practice - largely inaccessible is not going to permit the players to take control in this way.

And this is precisely the sort of thing that I have in mind - the player doesn't know the circumstances or the stakes, and is in effect declaring actions "blindly" and just waiting to find out what consequence the GM decides will follow.

I see no reason why the players, through their PCs, can't know enough about the circumstances around them to have a pretty good idea what the results of their actions will be, and I don't recall saying otherwise. They won't always know, but neither do people in real life.

 

[Oofta]

I do have to point out that, while not usually D&D or other generic fantasy games, that's a virtue in some times of games and campaigns. "Too much backstory" is not something you'll usually hear people complain about in a superhero game for example.

As long as the player double checks with me and doesn't conflict with established world lore or causes major issues with unestablished lore that I can't work around, write as much of a backstory as you want. I'll help with name places and whatever details I deem necessary. Just don't come into the game saying that before you got here you slayed two dragons while riding your pet tarrasque and that you're a fabulously rich and incredibly powerful ruler that has armies at their beck and call.

 

[Oofta]

With no offense intended, not sure that changes my point. I still don't see much sign most GMs are interested in going off in random tangents that pull a campaign away from the thrust of it they planned out. My statement that its probably an outlier doesn't change just because there's two people in the thread that do it; it wouldn't change if half the thread was composed of people who do it.

I run a very open game. I'm playing in two games, ones using a modified Candlekeep Mysteries and the other is also an open world. In the latter, we had an intro session where the DM confessed privately that 90% of the session was ad-libbed on the fly. That's something that happens to me on a regular basis as well.

Obviously my experience is not universal but you have no basis for your outlier claim either.

 

[pemerton]

So where is the fun?

I can't understand how this kind of game works. Is it like interactively writing a novel, where each player takes it in turns to narrate what happens next?

Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and some similar RPGs are not all that obscure.

The way they work is that the GM tells the players what the situation is, the players declare actions for their PCs, and then (as per the rules of the game being played) either the GM says what happens next, or dice are rolled and depending on the outcome the appropriate participant says what happens next. At each point where it is the GM who says what happens next, there are principles that guide the GM in the sort of thing they should say. Those principles do not permit them to say "nothing happens".

So it's not like interactively writing a novel. It's like playing a RPG. Of well-known older RPGs the one which is closest to this, at least in my view, is Classic Traveller.

The fun consists in finding out what happens. As a player, sometimes that is what you wanted; sometimes not (depending on how well you roll, and also some of the decisions that other participants make). A RPG doesn't need difficulty levels/DCs in order for this to be fun.

AW's rules are very narrative focused. It is to me a very different kind of game than most D&D-style games.

I don't know what you mean by "narrative focused" here. As I've posted just above, and many times in the past, the rules aren't wildly different in their basic structure from Classic Traveller. (Not the combat system of Traveller, which is mostly a light wargame; but its rules for resolving social conflict, for resolving evasion in a small craft, for resolving manoeuvring in a vacc-suit, for operating a starship, etc.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

the players declare actions for their PCs

On what basis do they decide the actions of the PCs?

 

[pemerton]

How is learning about the world through the GM's description of your PC experience of it, based on your choices for that PC, not immersive? How else are you supposed to get that information? Is making it up and telling the table what you made up more immersive?

For me, asking is the worst method. Reading pre-generated material is solid. Not needing lore information at all is best.

To add to @TwoSix's post: immersion means being deeply mentally involved in and "intensely surrounded" by the fiction. Being told stuff via the spoken word is not much like that; especially if it's not even stuff that pertains to what I'm seeing right now but stuff that should be just ready-to-me in my memory and expectations.

Having read that sort of read-to-hand stuff in advance therefore increases immersion, because I can then actually remember it.

When it is low-stakes colour, just imagining it for myself can also be quite immersive, as TwoSix says.

If I'm immersed in my character being drunk and angry in a bar, I don't want to ask the DM who the bar patrons are around me. I just want to narrate my character punching the nearest dude.

In my case, it would depend on where the stakes lie. If the dude who is getting punched is just a dude to get punched, then the player making it up is fine. If it's meant to matter who it is, then I tend to prefer invoking the resolution system. (Which, depending on details, may allow the GM to "say 'yes'".)

I will never understand this being immersive.

If you're being serious, then that is a perspective I barely understand and will likely never share. For me things need to have an existence outside my personal imagination to be immersive as a player.

100% serious. And as soon as I mention something I've created, it's no longer my personal imagination, it's part of the shared fiction.

100% agreed. The shared fiction is the shared fiction, whether it comes from the GM or a player.

 

[pemerton]

I'd still rather play in a fleshed out setting, than some random table generated content.

Those aren't the only two options. Or rather, the are ways to get a "fleshed out setting" other than by having the GM write it all up in advance and then parcel it out to the players.

 

[Oofta]

There's a lot here I just wanted to note that

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You don't think it's safe to assume that the average home brew world isn't as compelling as ones that have sparked multimedia behemoths?

I think it's safe to assume that I personally find FR kind of boring and less compelling than a lot of homebrew creations and I would say the same thing about a Star Trek, Star Wars or whatever other property you want to throw out. Those established settings may have interesting lore (or are just a garbage pail of ideas), but if I read up on it or watch the series then I already know a ton of stuff. I'm not surprised when there's Jedi and Sith in Star Wars, if I was a real geek I'm sure I could name different styles of ships, who made them and on what planet.

That doesn't make the campaign any more compelling, it just means there's less potential for surprising reveals. What makes a game compelling are the obstacles we face, the RP during the session, how the group interacts with each other and the world around them.

The rest of it? It just comes down to preference.

EDIT: I've never said other styles of play can't work for other people. Just that they don't work for me.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

Once again, all of this is nothing more than preference, and I think we should respect each other's feelings and try not to frame the preferences of others as objectively of less worth. That goes for both "sides" of this discussion.

This is definitely the stance I take in this debate.

Fun enough, I've come to realize after having been running my very first campaign as a DM for the past two years (and still going strong) that the style of DMing that I enjoy using is actually pretty different from the DMing style I prefer to be a player in, so I really see the value in having DMs and tables that do things differently as it gives so many more options for people.