D&D 5E Allow the Long Rest Recharge to Honor Skilled Play or Disallow it to Ensure a Memorable Story

[Crimson Longinus]

It's for different reasons, but in both OSR play and more character focused play I'm a firm believer in what Blades in the Dark calls being a curious explorer of the fiction. As a GM that means your job is to advocate on behalf of the NPCs and the rest of the fiction. When you do not have answer really think on what is true. Not what is plausible, but what feels real like in your bones. During a conversation the focus should be on embodying that NPC. Only author what needs to be authored. It's a refuge of last resort.

There is really nothing neutral or dispassionate about being a curious explorer of the fiction. You're chasing after the fiction like a dog to the bone. Like any RPG you are making creative decisions, rulings, and about 1,000,000 judgement calls every session, but what makes for a better story is just not part of the calculus.

Sure, overall sounds nice, but also rather vague. Certainly this is still a process for producing a good story, merely an intuitive one. Because presumably we don't want to have a game that has a bad story?

 

[Campbell]

Sure, overall sounds nice, but also rather vague. Certainly this is still a process for producing a good story, merely an intuitive one. Because presumably we don't want to have a game that has a bad story?

The narrative or story if you will is incidental. It's a side effect of play, but not the point of play.

For character focused play the point is experiencing these moments of tension as our characters, feeling the emotional weight of it, and seeing if and how they pull through. A satisfying narrative can be a bonus, but something we emphatically do not want to be top of mind because it detracts from being present with the fiction. It's an escape valve from the weight of the moment. It's like the cave in Fight Club.


When you let yourself be guided by what's best for the story (in this sort of play) rather than being in the moment, feeling the weight of it, you are missing out. You are going into that cave instead of being present, being curious, and being invested.

For more challenge oriented play the story is also incidental. We care about testing our skill as players. Even more than that the type of stories we care most about after play are more Play of the Game type stuff. Remember when Corey's fighter did that thing that totally made that trap irrelevant. That was awesome. That requires as pristine a play environment as possible. The GM is there to advocate for their scenario, make fair rulings and play the opposition fairly so that those Play of the Game moments feel real and are earned as honestly as possible.

 

[pemerton]

But can't a GM make a decision that influences how play will go (we could perhaps argue that all their decisions will do that) but that his reasoning behind the decision is not about how play will go? Meaning that there are reasons other than how play will go that are the relevant factors in the decision making process.

I think you're mixing an outcome of a decision for the reasoning behind the decision.

For anyone interested, there is a large literature on this. It's not about RPGs, but the (ostensibly) weightier topics of political, administrative and judicial decision-making.

I think the best piece in the field continues to be John Rawls, Two Concepts of Rules.

A simple example in the non-RPGing space: a tax official who makes a decision about whether a certain deduction is eligible influences the distribution of assets in his/her country, but (at least in the typical case) shouldn't be having regard to that consideration. Rather, s/he should be considering how the claimed deduction relates to the established categories of permissible deductions.

A simple example in the RPGing space: a GM who decides whether or not a player's declared attack reduces a NPC's hit points won't (at least in the typical case, I think) be having regard to how the fiction will unfold. S/he will be having regard to the number the player rolled on the di(c)e and the rules that take that number as input.

 

[Campbell]

What work is imagined doing for SP?

Mostly that you are not limited to defined moves like you are in board games. The skill of skilled play is mostly being able to reason about the fiction and make lateral moves based on what you have learned about the fiction. Clever moves based on lateral thinking skills rather than just defined play elements are especially prized. Stuff like using your knowledge of orc customs to convince one band to fight another and give you a share of treasure for helping with the assault.

 

[pemerton]

If I'm GMing and my gut tells me "this guy would run rather than face the PCs" and I'm not interested in making a confrontation happen in order to make the story exciting (let's say we're near the end of the session, and the players have made it clear they really want to confront this guy, etc.), then my decision is not about the best story. My decision is about what I think the NPC would do in that situation.

Now, I suppose what you're trying to say is that by having him flee, I'm still curating the story as a GM, but that's not really the case. Yes, my decision is certainly influencing the way play will go, but my decision was not made in order to make it go in that direction. I'm not choosing something based on what will be the best story.

I think the distinction is a bit subtle, but I do think it is there.

I almost didn't "love" your post because of that last line: I don't think the distinction is subtle at all! I think it's blindingly obvious.

And examples can be found write back in the earliest RPG rulesets: goblins hate dwarves and always attack them; zombies always attack and never need to check morale; etc.

And that's before we get to other means of making decisions that have been pointed out (eg by @Ovinomancer and @chaochou): on a success I decide that the NPC does what the players wanted him/her to do as a result of their action declaration; on a failure I decide that the NPC does something that will put a player-authored Belief under pressure. Now it is the players who are deciding the content of the fiction, mediated via the action resolution process. That's a clear alternative to story curation!


EDIT: The main thrust of this post was ninja'ed by Ovinomacer (post # 521).

 

[pemerton]

Success (at least in D&D) doesn't involve immunity to possible negative consequences that could logically follow.

This is, in effect, an assertion that in D&D the GM always gets to determine what happens next, with relatively few constraints. (Because logically follow here means might be possible as the GM is conceiving of the situation.)

Shout-out to @prabe: this is a fairly strong version of a "naturalist" approach to establishing the fiction, that avoids overt demarcations of who has what authority when.

Your interpretation of the kobold situation is 100 % the sort of adversarial GMing that isn't honoring the player's decision-point + action resolution loop. If they got an outright success, to create that sort of complication is a move that is absolutely hostile to a faithful rendering of play...and absolutely hostile to Skilled Play priorities.

<snip>

if they got an outright Success on their move and you (a) don't give them what they want (actionable intelligence on the dungeon) and (b) ALSO give them the complication you're envisioning...

...well, that is such a profound Calvinballing of play that you'd be lucky to not endure a complete walk-out on the spot.

In my personal case, we didn't walk out on the spot. We waited until the end of the session!

EDIT for clarity: It was an episode of interrogating a kobold. But it wasn't "in dungeon" interrogation. The context was a kobold infiltration of a town, and we were trying to obtain information from a capture infiltrator about the disposition of forces. The GM played the kobold as to stupid to be able to provide any useful or even meaningful information.

 

[pemerton]

What I have issue is the idea that there is some obvious and natural direction in which things go without DM input. There often isn't. If there was, you would not need the DM to be there to begin with.

As has already been posted upthread, this is a complete red herring.

For instance, any RPG in which the result of a failed check is not simply nothing happens except the falling of sandgrains through the hourglass will require someone to narrate the consequence of any such failure. That is a classic example of a GM function.

It doesn't follow that the GM must, or can do nothing but, narrate the failure having regard to desired future states of the fiction.

Here's a concrete example: in Classic Traveller, an attempt to perform a non-ordinary manoeuvre (such as running or jumping) while wearing a vacc suit requires a check. If the check fails, some sort of dangerous situation results. The GM has to decide what that is. When I've had to do this GMing Traveller over the past few years, I've not had regard to what would make for a good story; I've had regard to the fictional situation and hence trying to think up something that would make sense within that context. Most recently, the non-ordinary manoeuvre was a pair of PCs wearing vacc suits on the surface of an ice-world trying to break into a ship via its airlock. Neither PC had vacc suit skill. The checks failed, and the danger I narrated (as best I recall) was an inability to manage the regulation of the internal suit temperature. I know I wasn't thinking about what would make for a good story: I was just trying to think of what might go wrong in that sort of situation!

The upshot was that the PCs were captured. The leader of the captors had Leader-1 skill. The system's rules for influencing NPCs say that NPCs will tend to obey the general orders of the character with the highest Leader expertise: Leader-1 is required to control a group of seven or more NPCs, while Leader-3 will allow soldiers to obey orders without hesitation. The player decided that his character would switch allegiances, to side with this NPC. That decision was driven by the fact that the NPC had Leadership ability, and that the character in question had a history of making bad choices under the influence of others. It wasn't driven by an idea of what "the story" should be.

There's nothing special about what happened in the session I've just described. I think compared to the sort of play @Campbell prefers it was probably not super-engaged or engaging. I put it forward simply to illustrate that, in fact, it is possible for both GMs and players to make decisions based on a sense of fidelity to the established fiction rather than story curation.

 

[pemerton]

I think that once the players decide what Point B is, and get there, that (probably) becomes Point A'--and I don't really see a way that makes sense to say the GM "created" that, since it's where the players have taken the game. I think this is where I at least am not seeing a conflict between "story" and "play." By playing the game, the players shape and direct and establish and define the story.

It's possible that I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "story curation." I mean, effectively, deciding what the story is about. Someone at the table decides on the characters' goal/s, and (I'd argue) the story that emerges from play is about the characters' pursuit thereof.

Based on these two quotes, you (prabe) seem to be using story to mean the sequence of imagined/fictional events that unfolds in the course of RPG play, and seem to be using curation to mean deciding some of the content/topics of that story.

Used in this way, all RPGing produces story and all decisions about framing and consequence narration are story curation.

The way that I, @Campbell, @Ovinomancer, @Manbearcat and (I think) @hawkeyefan - maybe other posters too, but they're the ones who spring to my mind - are using the words is different. In particular, we are using them in a way that does not entail that all RPGing produces story (I think @Manbearcat and I have put the strongest emphasis on this) and that not all decision-making about the content/topic of the fiction is curation (I think @Campbell and @Ovinomancer have put the strongest emphasis on this).

Taking these in order:

When I talk about story in the context of RPGing, and when @Manbearcat in the OP refers to a storytelling imperative, we are using "story" in the fairly common sense of a narrative with a recognisable pattern of rising action, crisis/climax, leading to resolution and denouement. Of course there are infinitely many variations on this pattern. But there are also ways to string together events that would count as a story in the bolded sense I have attributed to you, but would not count as a story in the current sense (ie the sense in which I and @Manbearcat have been using it). The campaign I suggested, of module B2 followed by X1 followed by X2 followed by S2 followed by S1, is extraordinarily unlikely to produce story in the current sense. In the TV show Red Dwarf, part of the joke about Rimmer's Risk diary is that a recount of a game of Risk - while a recount of a sequence of fictional events - is not a story in the current sense.

In the history of D&D one can identify patterns of play which do, or don't, care about producing story in the current sense. Lewis Pulsipher wrote about them way back in the late 70s. In published adventures the publication of the DL modules is widely seen as a turning point; there are also interesting "intermediate forms" like Hickman's Pharoah and Ravenloft which are at their core dungeon crawls of the classic form, but are also intended to have not just superficial trappings of a story (as X2 Castle Amber does) but to actually produce something story-like in the course of play. (I've never played either and so can't comment on how successful they have been; my reading of Pharoah makes me have zero personal interest in running it, though.)

Of course any poster is free to use a word like "story" however s/he likes; but the difference in patters of play that I describe in the previous paragraph is a real one, and it is helpful to have a term available to describe it. In my own posts I do this by using the word fiction or the phrase fictional sequence of events to describe the stuff that is inherent to all RPGing and differentiates RPGs from boardgames and at least some wargames; while using the word story to refer not just to a fiction, but to a fiction that instantiates that typical pattern of rising action, crisis/climax and resolution/denouement.

Turning now to curation:

When @Ovinomancer or @Campbell uses the phrase "story curation", they are talking about making a decision for a particular sort of reason. Curation, in this sense, is a particular type of intentional act. I think it was @Ovinomancer who in a post upthread drew the comparison to curating an art collection: the intention is to achieve a particular aesthetic presentation or result. In the context of RPGing, the sort of curation they are referring to as story curation is making decisions so as to achieve a particular story result. Examples might be so as to achieve foreshadowing of some anticipated later event or so as to ensure that what happens next will be climactic (this is of course quite relevant to the OP). We can also imagine "negative" versions of this - making a decision so as not to negate some earlier intended foreshadowing or so as not to produce anticlimax (again this latter is quite relevant to the OP).

There is an approach to GMing which emphasises having regard to such reasons in making decisions - whether framing decisions or results/consequence-narration decisions - about the content of the fiction. But (contra @Crimson Longinus, if I've understood that poster correctly) that is not the only approach to GMing that has existed in the history of RPGing, or that is possible. There are other approaches, and some have been described in this thread by me, @Campbell and @chaochou.

It's also worth noting that there are ways of designing an RPG which will tend to ensure that, in the play of the game, story-like elements (foreshadowing, rising action, climax, resolution) will emerge without the need for curation. Generally they eschew the sort of "naturalism" that @Manbearcat and I have referred to and that I posted about upthread in reply to you; perhaps for that reason they do not have the market share of 5e D&D. But they also sidestep the tension that is described in the OP.

But 5e D&D is not one of those RPGs; one feature of it that makes that so is its reliance on "naturalism" rather than overt allocation, among the participants, of responsibility within parameters for the creation of the fiction at various points of play. Hence it is at least moderately unlikely to produce story in the sense that I am using that phrase without curation; and as the OP notes, that curation - which mostly works by the GM exercising his/her extensive authority in respect of as-yet unrevealed backstory/offscreen fiction - has the potential to negate or undo the gains of skilled play. Hence the tension which prompts the question in the OP.

 

[pemerton]

presumably we don't want to have a game that has a bad story?

If I'm playing White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors I don't care what the story is like. But there's a very good chance it will be bad; the best I could see coming out of that module is a little bit of comedy interspersed among the grim task of dealing with all the tricks and traps.

As @Campbell has posted, in that sort of play there is no goal of story; the goal for the players is to beat the dungeon. The goal for the GM is to present and adjudicate the dungeon fairly and with real teeth.

And somewhat related to that:

I am happy to find myself mistaken, but what did you mean if it wasn't that using some game mechanics would not count as SP? Others also posted that using a stochastic mechanic like a Charisma (Persuasion) check to overcome a game obstacle would not count as SP.

By SP I take it you mean Gygaxian skilled play.

In that case, @Campbell has already described it for you not far upthread; and many other posters have done so also. Look at the "fair trap" thread, linked both in this thread and the "skilled play" thread to get an example of the sorts of challenges that might feature in such play.

Checks are used all the time in such play: to open doors; to climb walls; to listen at doors; to persuade ogres to take a bribe in lieu of beating you up. What they're not used for is to avoid engaging with the fiction that skilled play cares about - so they're typically not going to be used to establish if a PC knows what would make a good bribe for an ogre; or if an ogre is amenable to being bribed at all; or to disable the trap described in the "fair trap" thread; or to establish that a GM has to tell the player every detail of the room that has not been relayed in the initial description that reflects the PCs' initial cursory glances.

You seem to be looking to define skilled play in terms of a criteria of mechanical techniques - eg ability checks, spell casting - that are permitted or prohibited. But that is not very profitable in my view, given that the repertoire of mechanical techniques in RPGing has not grown terribly much since having been invented by Gygax and Arneson back in the period when they were also developing "skilled play" as an agenda for RPGing.

What's key to Gygaxian skilled play is that integral to overcoming the challenge is a relatively high degree of relatively granular engagement with the fiction. Given the conventions of D&D play that sometimes requires checks (eg if the engagement in question is opening a door or bending the bars of a portcullis) but sometimes does not (eg if the engagement in question is opening an unlocked chest or poking something with a stick). Sometimes the conventions are unclear and require a GM call (eg if the player's declared action is to shoot some static object with a fire arrow, does that require a "to hit" roll? the rules don't say and the GM has to make a decision).

 

[clearstream]

You seem to be looking to define skilled play in terms of a criteria of mechanical techniques - eg ability checks, spell casting - that are permitted or prohibited.

Oh? I am not "looking to define" SP. I am asking what those who propound it define it as? If some mechanics are in and some out, I'd like to understand what the filter is: what tells us when a mechanic is out rather than in?

What's key to Gygaxian skilled play is that integral to overcoming the challenge is a relatively high degree of relatively granular engagement with the fiction. Given the conventions of D&D play that sometimes requires checks (eg if the engagement in question is opening a door or bending the bars of a portcullis) but sometimes does not (eg if the engagement in question is opening an unlocked chest or poking something with a stick). Sometimes the conventions are unclear and require a GM call (eg if the player's declared action is to shoot some static object with a fire arrow, does that require a "to hit" roll? the rules don't say and the GM has to make a decision).

It sounds like any mechanic can be SP or not SP, depending on whether it engages with the fiction or lets players skip doing so? Based on other posts, I believe that play must also engage with the game's mechanical state, such as character positions on a shared map? Right? And player acts that aren't covered by game mechanics are still SP so long as they also engage granularly with the fiction. Is that all correct? As a player, I can't just say "I persuaded the priest" because that would be akin to rolling Charisma (Persuasion); instead I have to say how I persuade the priest. It would still be SP if I were then asked to roll Charisma (Persuasion) - or make an attack roll, or a Strength check, etc - and at that point it wouldn't matter that I have some mechanical advantage on such checks.

I just want to be really clear on something: when it comes to engaging with the fiction, the DM decides if that succeeds or fails, right? We've already said that it isn't about rules - there aren't rules for succeeding of failing - it is about the fiction and the fiction is separable from rules. So when I say how I persuade the priest, it is up to the DM to say if that works.

Thus what is referred to is a blend of boardgame-moves that can be resolved mechanically, and language-moves that are resolved by the DM. And players shouldn't use boardgame-moves to skip language-moves: that's not SP.

Does that equate with your definition? Anything left out, or added erroneously?