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

[hawkeyefan]

And if one of those details is "You seem to be the only patron in the place at the moment" then the action declaration "I punch the nearest guy in the face" doesn't hold much water...unless you're attacking the bartender, I suppose.

Bartender?!??

How do you know that? Agh… thus my living world dies!

 

[pemerton]

I am not writing a story.

Nor am I. The closest thing to "story writing" I've seen in this thread is the example of the McGuffin, whose location can be learned by doing such-and-such things, but can't be learned by doing other such-and-such ghings.

I am generating a setting that exists outside of the PCs wills which they then interact with.

So am I.

For that to work, any mystery needs to exist prior to contact with said PCs.

All of it? Why?

 

[pemerton]

Is the play loop itself not a rule?

The play loop says that the GM describes the situation, and the player declares their action.

It doesn't say anything about the extent to which the player's action declaration is allowed to foreground matters that, in the GM's description, were left implicit.

if the DM hasn't narrated the presence or absence of said guy then it's on the player(s) to ask for clarification and-or addional description before declaring that action.

Where does the play loop say that?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Because the player has a different role than the DM? To me the player's role is to explore and otherwise interact with the setting exclusively through the ability and knowledge of their PC. That is player immersion. I know you have heard this from me many times.

So you immerse differently depending on your role?

In what ways would you say you immerse as a DM?

 

[pemerton]

For me, stories and games are different things

Who do you think disagrees with this?

I'm not interested in using the rules of narrative in play.

I don't even know what that means. You use all sorts of jargon to describe my RPGing which is obscure to me.

 

[Oofta]

The implication of this seems to be that the gods are silent to all those other people in the world praying to them.

It's not an implied. The gods in the campaign world don't directly talk to mortals. Occasionally they'll send potential or omens. They sometimes interact via intermediary such as a Valerie for Odin.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Sure there are... specific secrets, who knows what, what clues there are, even possible paths. All of that describes a puzzle... it's a predetermined challenge. Its solution is set ahead of time. So if the players are to solve it, they're going to do so in a way that the DM has already determined.

No. even if there was only one true solution (e.g. who is the murderer) and the clues, motives, alibis etc were all set in stone, what is not is how the players learn the facts of the case and how they arrive at the solution and what their moral judgement of the situation will be.

I had an actual murder mystery in my D&D game not so terribly long ago, and some of the methods the players used to learn crucial facts were certainly not what I had anticipated. (Not that I had done much anticipating. It is my job to set up the situation, and the players' job to deal with it in the manner of their choosing.)

 

[pemerton]

And if one of those details is "You seem to be the only patron in the place at the moment" then the action declaration "I punch the nearest guy in the face" doesn't hold much water

As I posted some way upthread:

I think we can safely assume that @TwoSix, who is a very experienced RPGer, doesn't declare actions for his PC that contradict the established fiction. So if he declares (as his PC), "I punch the nearest guy", then we can probably take it as given that it has not already been established that the bar was empty or almost empty.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No. even if there was only one true solution (e.g. who is the murderer) and the clues, motives, alibis etc were all set in stone, what is not is how the players learn the facts of the case and how they arrive at the solution and what their moral judgement of the situation will be.

I had an actual murder mystery in my D&D game not so terribly long ago, and some of the methods the players used to learn crucial facts were certainly not what I had anticipated. (Not that I had done much anticipating. It is my job to set up the situation, and the players' job to deal with it in the manner of their choosing.)

Oh there’s some leeway.

Like when you do a jigsaw puzzle. Some people start with the corners and borders and then work their way in. Others start with the an obvious section where they find all the similar pieces and start connecting them.

You can go about it in slightly different ways, but all the pieces are still going to fit together the same way in the end.

 

[pemerton]

This is such a wild thing to say, and increases my suspicion that a lot of people do not even have the sort of immersion I mean when I talk about it in context of RPGs. Immersion that I mean really is not a GM thing in the first place.

And yet:

I love worldbuilding more than any other gaming activity, and greatly enjoy describing the world in a consistent way and playing the NPCs appropriately, so yes, I feel immersed.

So apparently you and Micah Sweet are talking about quite different things!