A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[Maxperson]

Obvisoulsy I'm not AbdulAlhazred, but my take on the notion of "terrible price" would be influenced by 13th Age and Burning Wheel.

13th Age rules for fleeing and for refreshing (pp 166, 171, 187):

At any point, on any PC’s turn, any player can propose that the fight is going so badly that the characters have to flee. If all of the other players agree, the heroes beat a hasty and successful retreat, carrying any fallen heroes away with them. In exchange for this extraordinarily generous retreating rule, the party suffers a campaign loss. At the GM’s discretion, something that the party was trying to do fails in a way that going back and finishing off those enemies later won’t fix. . . .

If the party is short of a heal-up but is too beat up to press on, they can retreat, tails between their legs. Provided they can find some sort of safe place, they can get the heal-up that they haven’t earned in battle. But taking the heal-up entails a campaign loss. At the GM’s discretion, the party fails to achieve one of their goals, and they fail in some way that simply defeating the bad guys the next time around with your healed-up party won’t fix. Don’t worry; occasional setbacks make for a more engaging campaign. . . .

Normally, the party gets to take a full heal-up after about four battles. The point of the four-battle heal-up rule is to make players want to press on instead of holing up, which is what the traditional rules reward you for.

So what happens when the party has been weakened so badly that it would be madness and suicide to press on? If the party
decides to heal-up ahead of time, assuming they are able to rest, they suffer a “campaign loss” (per page 166 in Chapter 5). What does that mean? At your discretion, the situation in the campaign gets noticeably worse for the party. Ideally, the campaign loss can be traced to the decision to take the heal-up. . . . The campaign-loss rule is key to making combat meaningful. We all know most GMs probably won’t kill the PCs permanently, but if the PCs can’t fight their way through four battles, the game world suffers.​

Burning Wheel Adventure Burner (pp 186, 242, 244):

It's important to keep the action moving, to keep the players interest and engaged. . . .

You do not want to rest up the characters before every dramatic situation. The whole point of being wounded or sufferng similar penalties is that these modifications make the next action more danagerous, more challenging. If the players are allowed to gather their strength before every encounter, then the penalties lose their value . . .

You must push the plaeyrs and threaten their characters. You must harry them, work them. But once they have accomplished that great goal in their Beliefs, you must back off. Once the situation has been resolved or substantially changed, you must give the reins to the players. You must frame the action so they can rest and consider their actions.

Even so, unless you're ending a campaign, you must constrain their choices. GIve them a set amount of time or resources to use. . . . At the end of the rest period, something happens. An event transpires that challenges their Beliefs in an unexpected way. . . .

The adventure-rest-practice-reequip-adventure cycle is the natural pace of the game. However, it'sthe GM's job to keep up the pressure for as long as he can without breaking the players. Don't give them a moment of peace. Throw challenges at them. When they stop for rest, move your pieces in the Big Picture. Make them say, "Uh oh. . ." Force the players to create their piece by accomplishing their goals or by spending themselves utterly. When they're wounded, broke and ragged, let them go to ground but let them know that their enemies will not rest. . . .

The practice rules are meant to allow for the passage of long stretches of time in your game. Let five years pass! . . . Let the players practicea and beef up their abilities. And let the setting and situation evolve and change meanwhile!​

In 13th Age it's mechanised and is about player choices to risk PC death or concede campaign losses; in BW it's GM control over the pacing of events, with the injunction to maintain pressure on the PCs (and thereby their players) and to use moments of rest/recovery/practices as opportunities to develop the situation so as to generate new challenges. Either way, the players recognise that resting isn't "free" - it's connected to the GM's entitlement to escalate the fiction in adverse ways.

For me, at least, this is an aspect of the "story now" way of achieving the "living, breathing world".

So nothing listed there is a terrible price. The 13th Age rule suggests that you provide a temporary goal failure that can't be solved just by killing the bad guys, but that you can just fix it another way.

A terrible price would be the permanent death of one or more PCs, or the unfixable failure of a major campaign goal. Those are terrible prices. What is described above is just a moderate price.

On a side note, if there's no such thing as permanent failure and "We all know most GMs probably won’t kill the PCs permanently...," where's the challenge in 13th Age? Success may take longer, but at least from the rules you just quotes, you are guaranteed to get there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Obvisoulsy I'm not AbdulAlhazred, but my take on the notion of "terrible price" would be influenced by 13th Age and Burning Wheel.

13th Age rules for fleeing and for refreshing (pp 166, 171, 187):

At any point, on any PC’s turn, any player can propose that the fight is going so badly that the characters have to flee. If all of the other players agree, the heroes beat a hasty and successful retreat, carrying any fallen heroes away with them. In exchange for this extraordinarily generous retreating rule, the party suffers a campaign loss. At the GM’s discretion, something that the party was trying to do fails in a way that going back and finishing off those enemies later won’t fix. . . .

If the party is short of a heal-up but is too beat up to press on, they can retreat, tails between their legs. Provided they can find some sort of safe place, they can get the heal-up that they haven’t earned in battle. But taking the heal-up entails a campaign loss. At the GM’s discretion, the party fails to achieve one of their goals, and they fail in some way that simply defeating the bad guys the next time around with your healed-up party won’t fix. Don’t worry; occasional setbacks make for a more engaging campaign. . . .

Normally, the party gets to take a full heal-up after about four battles. The point of the four-battle heal-up rule is to make players want to press on instead of holing up, which is what the traditional rules reward you for.

So what happens when the party has been weakened so badly that it would be madness and suicide to press on? If the party
decides to heal-up ahead of time, assuming they are able to rest, they suffer a “campaign loss” (per page 166 in Chapter 5). What does that mean? At your discretion, the situation in the campaign gets noticeably worse for the party. Ideally, the campaign loss can be traced to the decision to take the heal-up. . . . The campaign-loss rule is key to making combat meaningful. We all know most GMs probably won’t kill the PCs permanently, but if the PCs can’t fight their way through four battles, the game world suffers.​

Burning Wheel Adventure Burner (pp 186, 242, 244):

It's important to keep the action moving, to keep the players interest and engaged. . . .

You do not want to rest up the characters before every dramatic situation. The whole point of being wounded or sufferng similar penalties is that these modifications make the next action more danagerous, more challenging. If the players are allowed to gather their strength before every encounter, then the penalties lose their value . . .

You must push the plaeyrs and threaten their characters. You must harry them, work them. But once they have accomplished that great goal in their Beliefs, you must back off. Once the situation has been resolved or substantially changed, you must give the reins to the players. You must frame the action so they can rest and consider their actions.

Even so, unless you're ending a campaign, you must constrain their choices. GIve them a set amount of time or resources to use. . . . At the end of the rest period, something happens. An event transpires that challenges their Beliefs in an unexpected way. . . .

The adventure-rest-practice-reequip-adventure cycle is the natural pace of the game. However, it'sthe GM's job to keep up the pressure for as long as he can without breaking the players. Don't give them a moment of peace. Throw challenges at them. When they stop for rest, move your pieces in the Big Picture. Make them say, "Uh oh. . ." Force the players to create their piece by accomplishing their goals or by spending themselves utterly. When they're wounded, broke and ragged, let them go to ground but let them know that their enemies will not rest. . . .

The practice rules are meant to allow for the passage of long stretches of time in your game. Let five years pass! . . . Let the players practicea and beef up their abilities. And let the setting and situation evolve and change meanwhile!​

In 13th Age it's mechanised and is about player choices to risk PC death or concede campaign losses; in BW it's GM control over the pacing of events, with the injunction to maintain pressure on the PCs (and thereby their players) and to use moments of rest/recovery/practices as opportunities to develop the situation so as to generate new challenges. Either way, the players recognise that resting isn't "free" - it's connected to the GM's entitlement to escalate the fiction in adverse ways.

For me, at least, this is an aspect of the "story now" way of achieving the "living, breathing world".

Right. I haven't been exposed to BW, and I can't say that I consciously had 13a in mind, but I was part of the 13a playtests, so I have certainly seen most of what you've quoted there. It is common practice in 4e to at least put narrative gates on the use of long rest as well, but much like the way 13a does, I simply updated that logic to form an explicitly 'story now' kind of a construct. I agree with the logic both authors put forward, setbacks and expenditure of resources should be meaningful (IE HoML does have a type of resource game) and it makes sense to give the players another decision point: do we push forward now with what we have, or do we gather new resources and potentially suffer narrative losses? The GM should be seen as honoring this choice point by imposing such consequences and making the campaign interesting.

Is HoML your improved 4e project you were working on?
What terrible price do you speak of, can you give me an example?

Yes, HoML is a sort of refactoring and rewriting of 4e to produce a game with a more explicit narrative/story now focus. Instead of casting things in terms of in-world explanations, it explains them in terms of how to structure a narrative and bring the game to focus on the PC's story. So in 4e you can have a long rest once every day. This is fundamentally a gamist rule that is meant to discourage the PCs from taking a long rest after each encounter by mandating that a day has to pass. I would presume that the GM is then supposed to consider what else happens during that day, though this is unspoken in 4e's rule. HoML simply goes directly to the underlying gamist/narrativist motivation, keeping pressure on the PCs and making resource management meaningful and challenging. Thus the "in world logic" one rest per day rule becomes the HoML "take a rest now and suffer a terrible price" rule.

To Be Honest that isn't a very nuanced version of things either. There are times when the consequences of resting are negligible or nothing at all (IE after you achieve victory in a story). The price may not be 'terrible' per se, it might be more just a ratcheting up of the overall difficulty of achieving that victory. However, it is quite possible that the PCs can be on the horn of a real dilemma; let the villagers be sacrificed, or go into the orc camp with half our resources expended. Players get to decide what it means to be a 'Legendary Hero' for themselves.

In my version of 5e, each character decides whether to refresh their short rest abilities or long rest abilities with incremental increases in the DC depending on the number of times they have attempted it that day AND the number of days since their previous long rest (full 24 hours). Failures still guarantee a refresh on their abilities but stack levels of exhaustion which could be detrimental and eventually lethal. The positive about the system is that each player decides for their character when to exert themselves (you are not tied to the group mentality), it works for the pacing of city, wilderness and dungeon settings and satisfies my internal logic on how powers/abilities should work. It can make extensive travelling dangerous/tricky which is how I imagine it.

It seems like an interesting choice. I would say it is still fundamentally containing a conceit that 'in game logic' is the rule's motivation, so it is 'simulating' a person going to extremes of exertion. The reduction of the party-wide aspect is good, although I'm not sure in an overall sense how much different that is from 4e's use of per-character HS to achieve basically the same thing (HoML also has Vitality Points which serve mostly the same purpose). In any case the tying of game system process to in-game-world factors is a straightforward concept which satisfies a lot of player's in terms of roleplaying 'day to day life' of a character.

 

[Maxperson]

In my version of 5e, each character decides whether to refresh their short rest abilities or long rest abilities with incremental increases in the DC depending on the number of times they have attempted it that day AND the number of days since their previous long rest (full 24 hours). Failures still guarantee a refresh on their abilities but stack levels of exhaustion which could be detrimental and eventually lethal. The positive about the system is that each player decides for their character when to exert themselves (you are not tied to the group mentality), it works for the pacing of city, wilderness and dungeon settings and satisfies my internal logic on how powers/abilities should work. It can make extensive travelling dangerous/tricky which is how I imagine it.

Would you PM me the detailed version of this? I'd like to see if it will work for the issues that I'm having with the resting system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So nothing listed there is a terrible price. The 13th Age rule suggests that you provide a temporary goal failure that can't be solved just by killing the bad guys, but that you can just fix it another way.

A terrible price would be the permanent death of one or more PCs, or the unfixable failure of a major campaign goal. Those are terrible prices. What is described above is just a moderate price.

On a side note, if there's no such thing as permanent failure and "We all know most GMs probably won’t kill the PCs permanently...," where's the challenge in 13th Age? Success may take longer, but at least from the rules you just quotes, you are guaranteed to get there.

I would say that, at least speaking for my practice, that success is not guaranteed. Drama is guaranteed. If you fail you do so expending your uttermost last breath going down to defeat. There was a reference to Simarillion, the description of the battle which lead to the final inevitable defeat of the Noldor by Morgoth. This is not a bad story. In fact the entire tale is predicated on the inevitability of this defeat, it is never in any doubt. The substance of all the stories which make it up is the character of those who will not suffer injustice, who will not yield even in the face of certain annihilation. It is also a story of hubris and the toxic nature of a quest for revenge and how the very greatness of Feanor is also his undoing. Nobody is successful in gaining their ends in this tale, the Noldor are defeated, Morgoth is defeated, the Silmarilli are lost to the Valar and light of the two trees irredeemably lost. Nobody wins, but great feats of character are achieved which are never forgotten. This is a concept for an RPG. Defeat need not be inevitable, far from it, but victory is not the point of the game.

 

[Maxperson]

I would say that, at least speaking for my practice, that success is not guaranteed. Drama is guaranteed. If you fail you do so expending your uttermost last breath going down to defeat. There was a reference to Simarillion, the description of the battle which lead to the final inevitable defeat of the Noldor by Morgoth. This is not a bad story. In fact the entire tale is predicated on the inevitability of this defeat, it is never in any doubt. The substance of all the stories which make it up is the character of those who will not suffer injustice, who will not yield even in the face of certain annihilation. It is also a story of hubris and the toxic nature of a quest for revenge and how the very greatness of Feanor is also his undoing. Nobody is successful in gaining their ends in this tale, the Noldor are defeated, Morgoth is defeated, the Silmarilli are lost to the Valar and light of the two trees irredeemably lost. Nobody wins, but great feats of character are achieved which are never forgotten. This is a concept for an RPG. Defeat need not be inevitable, far from it, but victory is not the point of the game.

Wouldn't this be up to the players, though? The rule as I understand it from those posts, is push to possible death, or retreat and have to do something else to succeed. What's to stop the players from always retreating when they have to, and just working through other successes until they succeed? There's no risk of death that way. It just takes longer to succeed. Any risk of death would come from the players deciding that that it's okay if their PCs die and pushing forward when low on resources.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wouldn't this be up to the players, though? The rule as I understand it from those posts, is push to possible death, or retreat and have to do something else to succeed. What's to stop the players from always retreating when they have to, and just working through other successes until they succeed? There's no risk of death that way. It just takes longer to succeed. Any risk of death would come from the players deciding that that it's okay if their PCs die and pushing forward when low on resources.

What do you mean by 'success'? Let me pose an example: The PCs are the defenders of the town. Beyond the town in all directions is The Wilderness. Generations ago the wilderness was far away and there were other towns. Now it is close, monsters wander near, only great heroes can turn the tide and prevent the extinction of civilization (this is basically a somewhat grimdark version of 4e's PoL concept).

Who says the PCs will succeed? In order to do that they don't just need to rescue a few prisoners or track down a few threatening monsters. Those tasks are likely ones they will face, and success in every one of a graded series of tasks with ever greater stakes and consequence is required to reignite the fires of civilization and create a new Age of Light. It is absolutely quite possible that the PCs can succeed in some of the immediate tasks, but by accepting/being forced to accept failure in others they might in the end reach a point where the darkness tightens its grip on the town and then the light goes out. For all their work only crumbling ruins and perhaps a few furtive survivors who have accepted the necessity of making peace with the forces of darkness are left. This is a viable campaign outcome.

I would note that it is necessary, in order for this to work, that the GM communicate carefully what the consequences of each choice are to the players. Simply telling them 3 years later that the time they didn't save the prisoners from being sacrificed was the tipping point and they doomed everyone by taking a long rest without knowing that won't cut it. This is a game of hard choices. Instead you can play 'inevitable victory and the game is about the details' and then maybe the choices won't be quite so hard. Its up to you.

 

[pemerton]

It is common practice in 4e to at least put narrative gates on the use of long rest as well

Yes. My first wilderness trek skill challenge - run in 2009 - put gates on long resting (connecting fiction and mechanical outcomes). Reading the Adventure Burner helped me improve in this respect, focusing on linking long rests to pacing and GM licence to extrapolate the "big picture" in adverse ways.

The GM should be seen as honoring this choice point by imposing such consequences and making the campaign interesting.

<snip>

There are times when the consequences of resting are negligible or nothing at all (IE after you achieve victory in a story). The price may not be 'terrible' per se, it might be more just a ratcheting up of the overall difficulty of achieving that victory.

I think "honouring the choice point" is a key notion. It's very contextual, too - I think it's unfair for a GM to hose the PCs when the players have pushed them to the point of being "wounded, broke and ragged" (to quote Luke Crane); but if the players are resting very liberally then I think it's fair game for the GM (i) to frame them into very hard situations, and (ii) to make a lot of plot weight be carried by success or failure in those situations.

So nothing listed there is a terrible price.

<snip>

A terrible price would be the permanent death of one or more PCs, or the unfixable failure of a major campaign goal. Those are terrible prices. What is described above is just a moderate price.

On a side note, if there's no such thing as permanent failure and "We all know most GMs probably won’t kill the PCs permanently...," where's the challenge in 13th Age? Success may take longer, but at least from the rules you just quotes, you are guaranteed to get there.

Wouldn't this be up to the players, though? The rule as I understand it from those posts, is push to possible death, or retreat and have to do something else to succeed. What's to stop the players from always retreating when they have to, and just working through other successes until they succeed? There's no risk of death that way. It just takes longer to succeed. Any risk of death would come from the players deciding that that it's okay if their PCs die and pushing forward when low on resources.

Your question answers itself: if the players have their PCs retreat when they have to every time, then they will never succeed, will they?

As to "what's the challenge?", in this sort of RPGing the challenge has two dimensions: the immediate challenge of game play, which has a strong mechanical element; and the challenges of the fiction. Playing one's PCs until they are "wounded, broke and ragged" involves skill; and if the GM is pushing the fiction hard, will require hard decision in story terms also.

I would note that it is necessary, in order for this to work, that the GM communicate carefully what the consequences of each choice are to the players. Simply telling them 3 years later that the time they didn't save the prisoners from being sacrificed was the tipping point and they doomed everyone by taking a long rest without knowing that won't cut it.

Absolutely! In threads over the past several years I've expressed a related notion, "No failure offscreen."

 

[Maxperson]

Who says the PCs will succeed? In order to do that they don't just need to rescue a few prisoners or track down a few threatening monsters. Those tasks are likely ones they will face, and success in every one of a graded series of tasks with ever greater stakes and consequence is required to reignite the fires of civilization and create a new Age of Light. It is absolutely quite possible that the PCs can succeed in some of the immediate tasks, but by accepting/being forced to accept failure in others they might in the end reach a point where the darkness tightens its grip on the town and then the light goes out. For all their work only crumbling ruins and perhaps a few furtive survivors who have accepted the necessity of making peace with the forces of darkness are left. This is a viable campaign outcome.

If the bold is possible, then THAT'S a terrible price. However, the rules [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] showed said for the consequence to be one that the PCs can't overcome by beating the monsters that made them run, which means that the PCs can fix it another way. It doesn't say that the failure should be unfixable.

 

[Maxperson]

Your question answers itself:

No it doesn't or I wouldn't have asked it.

if the players have their PCs retreat when they have to every time, then they will never succeed, will they?

Who said anything about retreating every time? Not me. I gave the example of them retreating only sometimes, which causes delays. It's ridiculous to think that they would have to retreat every time, so I didn't bother to go there.

As to "what's the challenge?", in this sort of RPGing the challenge has two dimensions: the immediate challenge of game play, which has a strong mechanical element; and the challenges of the fiction. Playing one's PCs until they are "wounded, broke and ragged" involves skill; and if the GM is pushing the fiction hard, will require hard decision in story terms also.

Here's the thing. The rules you quoted said to push the players and threaten the PCs, but if I can just choose to retreat on those occasions where we can't win, and then deal with the "terrible price" later on in a different manner, I'm never going to feel those things.

 

[pemerton]

hey might in the end reach a point where the darkness tightens its grip on the town and then the light goes out.

If the bold is possible, then THAT'S a terrible price. However, the rules [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] showed said for the consequence to be one that the PCs can't overcome by beating the monsters that made them run, which means that the PCs can fix it another way. It doesn't say that the failure should be unfixable.

Maxperson, what you're saying seems confused. You quote AbdulAlhazred saying that the PCs might reach a bad point. Which is exactly what the 13th Age rules provide for: if the PCs retreat, and suffer a campaign loss, then the players can try to come up with new ways to tackle this and regain momentum and even victory. But they might fail. That they might fail doesn't entail that they will fail. Just as that they can fix things doesn't entail that they will fix things. How do we learn whether or not the lost is "unfixable"? By playing the game. In this sort of RPGing, that's the whole point of play - to find out what can or can't be done.

The rules you quoted said to push the players and threaten the PCs, but if I can just choose to retreat on those occasions where we can't win, and then deal with the "terrible price" later on in a different manner, I'm never going to feel those things.

Look at your own example of the orcs eating the children. Suppose the "terrible price" of retreat is that all the children get eaten. You now seem to be saying that you wouldn't feel any pressure from that. Yet eaerlier on in this thread you were putting that forward as one of your most memorable moments of dramatic pressure in play.

This is another way in which your posts seem confused. And seem also to betray a lack of actual experience with play that follows the techniques described in the 13th Age and BW rulebooks.