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

[pemerton]

I'm not sure what you mean by opportunities here. Like if the world is described to you, then certainly you can see the opportunities in it and declare actions to pursue them? Like when a crowded bar is described to you, this also implicitly includes an opportunity of punching some poor sod that happens to be in the bar, no?

I mean opportunities for action.

When I suffer something unwanted or unexpected, the externality of the world impinging on me is very clear.

When I, an embodied and sensory being, experience the world and consider how I will act within it, the externality is experienced quite differently - my sensation of the world and my will to act in it are tightly connected. This can be in actions as trivial as walking across a room, or as complex as going into my kitchen and baking a cake.

The contrast between "opportunity" and "consequence" as I'm describing them can be illustrated simply enough: I go to make a cake, and then discover the oven won't turn on - there's a power outage! Or I go to the cupboard to get my flour, and the jar is empty - someone (maybe even me, but I forgot) used the last of the flour and didn't buy some more!

In these illustrative examples, we can see how the world - initially experienced as "ready to hand" - suddenly impinges upon us in a distinctively external way, thwarting our actions.

These aspects of how we experience the world are reasonably widely discussed in philosophy of mind and action, in literary theory, etc. RPGing can also engage with them. @TwoSix has done so, contrasting his role as player in treating the world as ready and hand and describing what his character does, and the GM's role in imposing external obstacles/frustrations so as to generate conflict.

Within the approach that TwoSix has presented, key issues of GM skill becomes what obstacles to impose, and when. Good GMing advice engages with these issues.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not really sure how that responds to what was said. With a homebrew setting you've spent "hundreds" of hours building (word used not by you but by others in the thread), it's not possible for them to have read up.

Can't speak for others, but in my case it is possible for them to have read up, at least on a fair bit of high-level info.

Decast World Page

On that page the History, Gazetteer, and Maps links give you the overviews. More detailed local information is provided as and when required.

So now their play is going to be full of nearly unavoidable "well actually" moments because the players cannot possibly know the setting as well as the DM can. That very specific thing--the "you can't do X because that's incompatible with the setting as it exists in my head, which you cannot access"--is closely related to what @TwoSix is talking about.

Sure this happens once in a while but nowhere near as often as you might expect; and that's even with players who like to push the boundaries now and then.

 

[Lanefan]

Asking how I walk into a castle that's right there seemed sarcastic to me right out of the gate.

That would only make sense if the DM had already framed the castle as being heavily guarded and impossible to enter. If I'm meeting with the king in the capital, I'm assuming this is a palace with courtly functions, not a military stockade or a private residence.

What's your background? What's your speices? What are you carrying? Without knowing these things none of the many DMs around here can even begin to adjudicate your "I walk into the castle" declaration.

If you're a local-looking noble your odds of being able to walk into the castle are, one would think, considerably better than if you're a street urchin and-or very foreign-looking and-or armed to the teeth.

Even the in-setting time of day will make a difference.

 

[TwoSix]

What's your background? What's your speices? What are you carrying? Without knowing these things none of the many DMs around here can even begin to adjudicate your "I walk into the castle" declaration.

If you're a local-looking noble your odds of being able to walk into the castle are, one would think, considerably better than if you're a street urchin and-or very foreign-looking and-or armed to the teeth.

Even the in-setting time of day will make a difference.

All of that impacts the framing of consequence.

Nothing prevents my taking the action to walk to the gates of the castle and try to enter.

 

[Umbran]

All of that impacts the framing of consequence.

Nothing prevents my taking the action to walk to the gates of the castle and try to enter.

In D&D (and this thread is nominally about D&D, remember), this all will decide the difficulty of the task. The GM will need to know it before success or failure is decided, much less consequences.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What's your background? What's your speices? What are you carrying? Without knowing these things none of the many DMs around here can even begin to adjudicate your "I walk into the castle" declaration.

If you're a local-looking noble your odds of being able to walk into the castle are, one would think, considerably better than if you're a street urchin and-or very foreign-looking and-or armed to the teeth.

Even the in-setting time of day will make a difference.

Yes, but the actual GM in the actual game would already know these things. I don't think there was a request for any of us to adjudicate the situation based on one sentence.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I mean opportunities for action.

When I suffer something unwanted or unexpected, the externality of the world impinging on me is very clear.

When I, an embodied and sensory being, experience the world and consider how I will act within it, the externality is experienced quite differently - my sensation of the world and my will to act in it are tightly connected. This can be in actions as trivial as walking across a room, or as complex as going into my kitchen and baking a cake.

The contrast between "opportunity" and "consequence" as I'm describing them can be illustrated simply enough: I go to make a cake, and then discover the oven won't turn on - there's a power outage! Or I go to the cupboard to get my flour, and the jar is empty - someone (maybe even me, but I forgot) used the last of the flour and didn't buy some more!

In these illustrative examples, we can see how the world - initially experienced as "ready to hand" - suddenly impinges upon us in a distinctively external way, thwarting our actions.

These aspects of how we experience the world are reasonably widely discussed in philosophy of mind and action, in literary theory, etc. RPGing can also engage with them. @TwoSix has done so, contrasting his role as player in treating the world as ready and hand and describing what his character does, and the GM's role in imposing external obstacles/frustrations so as to generate conflict.

Within the approach that TwoSix has presented, key issues of GM skill becomes what obstacles to impose, and when. Good GMing advice engages with these issues.

I did not feel this answered my question. If the GM has described a bar full on people, this also includes an opportunity for your character to punch a person in the bar? (Or at least try to. In many games some dice rolls might be involved here.) And similarly any GM description is implicitly full of opportunities for action?

 

[pemerton]

I did not feel this answered my question. If the GM has described a bar full on people, this also includes an opportunity for your character to punch a person in the bar? (Or at least try to. In many games some dice rolls might be involved here.) And similarly any GM description is implicitly full of opportunities for action?

No one denies that the GM narrating stuff might create opportunities for action.

The point is that, if all opportunities for action are dependent upon the GM narrating stuff, then that is not very immersive. Doubly so if the narration is dependent upon the player first asking questions to prompt it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No one denies that the GM narrating stuff might create opportunities for action.

The point is that, if all opportunities for action are dependent upon the GM narrating stuff, then that is not very immersive.

Why? What you mean? To me it would be unimmersive to able to spawn reality around me at will, if that is not what the character can do.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The particular RPG I was posting about was Apocalypse World, not D&D.

But I have used mainstream FRPG rules - AD&D and Rolemaster - to play FRPGs which are not just about "heroes being heroic". Adventure fiction is not the only sort of experience that RPGing, even FRPGing, can aspire to.

And I would say that even in most adventuring fiction the characters are not perfectly rationally optimising and flawlessly moral robots, but actually have passions, grudges, flaws etc.