A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

But it does show that immersion can be had without agency. Which I find a very interesting thought.

I guess so. It's not a new thought, to me at least.

The man is talking about his role as GM and what guides his creative choices when he makes one and you immediately jump to "aha, see, players can't make creative choices". That doesn't come across well.

I asked questions. You're the one who has treated them as rhetorical. I'm not sure why.

 

[Fenris-77]

One thing I like about Classic Traveller is that its rules for dealing with bureaucracy are nearly as detailed as its combat rules. This helps make it feel like a game set in a modern world, rather than just "D&D in space".

Which edition and book are these in? I'd like to read those rules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You spent alot of time not telling me what is incorrect about referring to the real world as a menu of "interesting situations".

You spent alot of time telling me a gameworld is not exactly like the real world... well duh! So what? My point isn't that the game world is like the real world, my point is that your analogy applies to both!

Well, because there aren't a bunch of interesting (for some reading of that word) situations in the real world. there is a 'cloth' of interrelated things that all blend into each other. At a very granular scale you can kinda look at it like a very small 'sandbox', if you like. Shall I eat pizza or spaghetti? Maybe you can even think of "Shall I travel to Greece or Italy for vacation?" like that, but which you will actually do is very likely to be mediated by a large number of small factors (tour guide schedule, costs of each element of the trips, what the other 4 people want to do, whether it rained on the day you would need to see the travel agent to get the tickets for Greece and you didn't feel like driving over, so you ended up going to Italy). That sort of thing. It is not really reasonable to characterize life as 'menus of discrete choices', but it is perfectly possible to do so with an RPG. Very few of the things I've mentioned above are likely to come up in most RPGs, the players just choose based on some aesthetic criteria, or maybe someone dices for it.

Beyond that, I said "Greece or Italy" but the real choices are probably a list 10 pages long, and then the more nebulous in-between choices. While @estar will rightly say that all these could be countenanced by a GM in a game, practicalities don't really make it feasible, and many facts simply don't exist. I cannot go to Tibet due to certain government restrictions, but does estar actually know the foreign travel rules for all the polities in his campaign? I doubt it, and there are 1000 other similar POSSIBLE considerations. EACH is operative in the real world, but in the game world such things are simply contrivances, someone thought to bring one up (invent it), or not. Certainly nobody diced for every one of a 1000 reasons you can or cannot travel to fantasy Tibet this year!

 

[pemerton]

This whole scenario sounds normal to me. The only question I have about it is whether the storm narration was due to fiat?

<snip>

It does strike me that you use fiat though. It's just over what you are intending to be trivial details. I think that's fine, but interesting considering your dislike of DM fiat.

I dislike GM fiat for action resolution. Framing a scene is not action resolution.

And to requote myself:

Exercising GM fiat, I declared that as they were crossing between Italy and the Balkan Peninsula the storms were incredibly fierce, and the captain of their ships decided to cut his losses, and dock and sell his cargo in Dalmatia. The PCs therefore set of on the overland trek to Constantinople.

This was a fairly obvious contrivance to seed some scenarios. The players didn't object.

<snip>

The PCs and their warband continued their crossing south-east - and (as I narrated it) found themselves on the edge of a heavy forest somewhere in the vicinity of Dacia (=, in our approximaring geography, somewhere in the general area of modern-day Transylvania - I haven't checked yet to see how butchering of the map this is).

I asked the PCs who would be with the four of them if they were scouting ahead to verify whether the band could pass safely through the forest, and they nominated their two NPC hunters - Algol the Bloodthirsty who is in service to Sir Morgath, and Rhan, the woman who had joined them at the end of the last session I posted about.

I was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book, and described the "deep and clawing shadows [that[ stretch across the path, and the wind [that] rattles through the trees." The PCs soon found themselves confronted by a knight all in black and wearing a greatsword, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and six men wielding swords and shields, their clothes equally tattered. The scenario description also mentions that they have "broken trinkets and personal effects" and I described rings and collars that were worn, notched and (in some cases) broken. The description of the collars was taken by the players as a sign that these were Celts (wearing torcs), and I ran with that.

As I believe I already posted a way upthread, and reiterated not far at all upthread, avoiding the forest or avoiding encountering the Bone Laird and his men is not a goal of play.

The orientation of play in no way resembles a traditional dungeon crawl, in which the goal is to explore and thus loot the dungeon while taking the minimum losses to encounters.

The nearest analogue to XP in Prince Valiant is fame, which is earned primarily by performing "notably successful" deeds and can also be earned for doing notable things even if they don't succeed. Unlike a classic dungeon crawl, though, it doesn't really require skill as a player to earn fame, or certainly not the sort of skill that is involved in successfully taking loot from a dungeon. As long as you play your character in a way that conforms to or evokes stereotypes of romantic, Arthurian-style fantasy - anywhere between Excalibur and A Knight's tale will do - then you should find yourself earning fame for your PC.

There is no point in the players trying to avoid encountering the Bone Laird. That would be the same as avoiding playing the game; it's analogue in Moldvay Basic play would be not entering the dungeon and instead returning to the village to work the fields of one's farm. (Of course, once the PCs have encountered the Bone Laird and his fellow ghosts they might try and sneak or parley past them. Two of the PCs in fact did that. But that takes place in the domain of action resolution, not scene-framing.)

If the players think that the Bone Laird is a poorly-conceived situation, Prince Valiant doesn't give them the same mechanical resources as BW players have (and in relation to which I quoted the relevant principles upthread). They would have to use out-of-game devices - eg conversation - to indicate what they want to do. Of course those devices are available even if the players don't think a scenario is poorly conceived. It's precisely because the players, via out-of-game conversation, indicated that they wanted to take their order on Crusade that the action of the game has moved from Britain to France to Italy to Dacia to Anatolia and now to Cyprus. But none of that geographical change has depended upon action resolution except for one or two occasions when I've called for Brawn checks to determine whether and to what extent the characters are suffering from fatigue.

 

[pemerton]

The character in the world of Prince Valiant has no idea they he or she possesses a storyteller certificate. It does represent something ethereal like luck, faith, karma? If it doesn't tie back to the setting and it meant to be use as the player discretion not the player acting as their character then it is a meta-game mechanic.

The character doesn't know anything about a Storyteller Certificate. Nor does s/he know anything about dice, either.

Whether looking for a hidden thing is resolved via a Presence check (the default resolution procedure) or via spending a Certificate to Find Something Hidden (a procedure available only if the player possesses a certificate and wants to spend it), what the character knows is that s/he was looking for something and then (perhaps if the dice are rolled, certainly if the Certificate is spent) found it.

 

[pemerton]

So I view mechanics like "once is all you get" as a game convention.

It is like saying in D&D that the thief cannot keep rolling 'pick locks' endlessly on the same lock. That check means "you fiddled with it until you reached an end state in any attempt to pick it, there's nothing more you can do."

Gygax's AD&D has a prohibition on retries for picking locks (I think you can try again when a level is gained), for finding and removing traps, for trying to open locked or magically held doors (assuming STR is high enough to permit a check in the first place) and for bending bars and lifting gates. Also, I think - though maybe it's not as clearly stated?, I haven't gone back to check - for searching for secret doors.

Forcing ordinary doors and listening at doors permit retries, but there are other costs built in (eg chance of wandering monsters due to noise made and/or the passage of time).

In Burning Wheel the ban on retries ("Let it Ride") is interesting because it cuts against the GM as well as the player.

it helps if it already on the map, and you have a sentence or two about it, even though you have to take a breather to create something or pull something off the shelf in order to supply details if the players choose to explore it.

This is based on my observation of doing this for decades with multiple groups of players. I first noticed this when I switched from using the World of Greyhawk to Judges Guild Wilderlands in the early 80s. The players considered what happened to be more fair knowing that many details were there ahead of time. That I wasn't just making naughty word up to spite them.

you do run the risk of things just becoming uninteresting. If the players are hankering for social intrigue and big-city action, and all the table coughs up are airless rocks and TL2 worlds with no spaceport and a law level of A, they are probably going to think that's boring. Anyway, I don't think it is a problem at the scale of a sector/sub-sector map because it is such a vast region, SOMETHING interesting can be scared up. But that again speaks to how much Traveler leans on "the ref can add stuff that makes things interesting" (though to be honest, TAS, patron tables, random encounters, bureaucrats, etc. goes a long way, space is rarely a snooze for long).

From Classic Traveller (1977), Book 2 p 36 and Book 3 pp 8, 19:

When a ship enters a star system, there is a chance that any one of a variety of ships will be encountered. The ship encounter table is used to determine the specific type of vessel which is met. This result may, and should, be superseded by the referee in specific situations, especially if a newly entered system is in military or civil turmoil, or involves other circumstances.​

​

[T]he referee should always feel free to impose worlds which have been deliberately (rather than randomly) generated. Often such planets will be devised specifically to reward or torment players.​

​

Adventurers, as they travel about on planets, also have random encounters with an unpredictable variety of individuals or groups. . . . Some random encounters are mandated by the referee. For example, a band may encounter a guard patrol at a building while in the course of visiting (or burglarizing) it. The referee is always free to impose encounters to further the cause of the adventure being played; in many cases, he actually has a responsibility to do so.​

Putting to one side the terminological contradiction in the last quoted paragraph (ie mandated/imposed encounters are not random ones), the idea is fairly clear: the Classic Traveller referee is at liberty, and indeed is encouraged, to implement setting and situation in such a way as to generate interest (whether in the form of reward or torment!) and to propel the action forward.

I don't think the word "fair" is used at all. Book 1 (p 3) says that the referee "may also indicate possible quests for the characters, using rumor, barroom conversation, or so-called general knowledge" and that s/he "must settle disputes concerning the rules . . . and act[] as a go-between when characters secretly or solitarily act against the world or their comrades". Book 3 (p 44) says that

Above all, the referee and players work together. Care must be taken that the referee does not simply lay fortunes in the path of the player, but the situation is not primarily an adversary relationship. The referee simply administers rules in situations where the players themselves have an incomplete understanding of the universe. The result should reflect a consistent reality.​

Whatever the notion of "sandbox" encompasses I think that Classic Traveller play has to fall within its ambit. But that same RPG system envisages GM intervention into setting-authorship and situation-framing so as to make sure things are interesting and that play is furthered.

To my mind, the main difference I see between Classic Traveller as presented and as I approach it is that I don't generate so much of the star map in advance. I began with, and from time-to-time added to, a stock of pre-generated worlds and have dropped them in as needed/appropriate, gradually building up the star map in the course of play. But to the extent that I do so to "reward or torment" or even just intrigue the players, I think that what I'm doing is consistent with the ethos of the game even if it's a bit of a departure from its professed methods.

 

[pemerton]

Which edition and book are these in? I'd like to read those rules.

They are found in the skill descriptions in Book 1: Admin, Streetwise, Bribery and Forgery; and also in the discussion of Law Level and of vehicles in Book 3.

Here is my compilation of them, intended to make it easier to use them as a total system. In some cases I've adjusted the mathematical formulation to be +X for the 1st skill rank, rather than -Z for no ranks, having no affect on probabilities but making parsing and applying the rule in play more straightforward. I've also incorporates a little bit from Legal skill in Book 7, which I fold into Admin taking the view that a separate Legal skill doesn't add anything to the game:

Officials and Bureaucracy​

Day-to-Day Interactions​

To avoid harassment and arrest by police or other enforcement agencies, and to avoid close inspection of documents by officials (eg police, customs agents, clerks, etc):

Throw law level or higher, once per day and whenever officials are encountered (DM -1 if acting illegally).​

To resolve normal interaction with officials when they are approached (eg avoid close inspection of papers necessary for bank transactions, cargo transfers, personal identification, etc; ensure prompt issue of licence; allow approval of application; etc):

​

Throw 10+ (DMs +5 if Admin-1, +2 per additional level of expertise; or +2 per level of Liaison expertise; a reaction DM may also apply, and inspection always occurs on a reaction result of 2);​

​

To be found in compliance if inspected, throw 7+ (DMs +1 per level of Admin expertise; -5 if anything illegal on person, in ship, in papers, etc that are subject to inspection);​

​

To avoid discovery of forged or faked documents that are inspected, throw 9+ (DM +2 per level of Forgery expertise).​

​

The referee will exercise control over blatant use of forged documents worth over Cr 200, or repeated use in the same location.​

To bribe a petty official (whose reaction is non-committal or better) to ignore regulations or poor documentation:

​

Make a cash offer and throw 13+ (or 20+, with additional DM + law level of the world, as set by the referee); if this is refused, a second throw may be made with the cash offer doubled (DMs +6 if Bribery-1, +1 per additional level of expertise, +2 if the official’s reaction result is 12)

A bribe that is refused will be reported on a throw of 3-.​

To learn the name of an official who will issue licences without hassle, or the location of high quality guns at a low price, or for other activities or to obtain specified items:

​

Throw 10+ (official), 14+ (guns), or an appropriate throw set by the referee (DM +6 if Streetwise-1, +1 per additional level of expertise; or +3 if Liaison-1, +1 per additional level of expertise).​

You'll see that these rules also rely on the Reaction Roll subsystem.

 

[Fenris-77]

You the best @pemerton, thanks. I only have Book One on hand and it would have taken me a month of Sundays to suss that out.

 

[pemerton]

On maps and "fairness" etc: as I've mentioned a few times, in my Prince Valiant game we use maps of Britain and of other parts of Europe, super-imposing a rough conception of 7th to 8th Century CE over the top of them. (For Britain this is done for us via the map on the inside of the Pendragon cover. I also have some photocopies of relevant pages from a historical atlas, which are pretty low-res.)

I'm curious what the sandbox practitioners think of that approach - it's obviously quite different from a discovery-oriented hexcrawl.

 

[pemerton]

You the best @pemerton, thanks. I only have Book One on hand and it would have taken me a month of Sundays to suss that out.

No probs. I also should add that my treatment of Liaison is non-canonical. Officially it acts as both Admin and Streetwise at the next lower level, as well as giving a bonus to Reaction Rolls. I think that's a bit OP, and you can see the alternative approach I've adopted - it only applies to certain aspects of Admin or Streetwise use, at its own scaled-back rate.