D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[Ridley's Cohort]

It's no different than 4e's scaling challenges. The challenge will be exactly the same, no matter what level I choose to initiate the quest. At no point will the challenge be overwhelming or a cakewalk. it will level with me.

I have a minor nit to pick.

From a gamist and narrativist POV, I interpret the scaling challenges as a practical shorthand. If the PCs are up against a DC X cliff that is a level appropriate, I would add in description about the other dangerous cliffs that the hardened adventures already waltzed over, only to come face to face to one worthy of playing out at the table.

Why the PCs are never ever ever squashed by a "random" (or written?!?) encounter that is completely overwhelming cannot be explained by simulationist logic, but requires no explanation from gamist or narrativist point of view. Such encounters do happen, but competent DMs usually consider them learning experiences for everyone, most especially the DM himself or herself.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I have a minor nit to pick.

From a gamist and narrativist POV, I interpret the scaling challenges as a practical shorthand. If the PCs are up against a DC X cliff that is a level appropriate, I would add in description about the other dangerous cliffs that the hardened adventures already waltzed over, only to come face to face to one worthy of playing out at the table.

Why the PCs are never ever ever squashed by a "random" (or written?!?) encounter that is completely overwhelming cannot be explained by simulationist logic, but requires no explanation from gamist or narrativist point of view. Such encounters do happen, but competent DMs usually consider them learning experiences for everyone, most especially the DM himself or herself.

that was always our way of looking at it too...

at level 3 an easy DC is X a mod DC is X+3 and a hard is X+6
at level 12 an eazy DC is Y a mod DC is Y+3 and a hard is Y+6 where Y is higher then X...

what does this mean, well at level three a heavy oak door with reinforcing metal is hard to force open... at level 12 that same heavy oak door with metal reinforment is no roll needed, but a heavy adamantine door is now hard... it is just

 

[Mark CMG]

The DM describes the scene that we are in an alley and the window we want to climb through is 15 feet off the ground. I declare that I'm looking around for boxes to climb on. The DM, not having described the presence of any boxes in the scene, decides that there are indeed boxes and we can climb.

Is that "exploration through character" or "player authorial control"?

Exploration. He asks the GM and the GM either decides it is possible based on his setting and allows it, or randomizes it, or simply says they aren't there because of his setting knowledge. The rest of your post conflates exploration versus player authorial control.

 

[Lanefan]

The DM describes the scene that we are in an alley and the window we want to climb through is 15 feet off the ground. I declare that I'm looking around for boxes to climb on. The DM, not having described the presence of any boxes in the scene, decides that there are indeed boxes and we can climb.

Or decides there are no boxes, or not enough to reach that high, thus forcing the characters to find a plan B.

Is that "exploration through character" or "player authorial control"? To me, the question is moot. There's no real difference here. The only reason that there are boxes in this alley is because I, the player, wanted boxes in the alley. Had none of the players brought up the idea of boxes, then there would be no boxes in the alley.

Who knows? The boxes may have been there all along, but if the DM failed to mention them then they just never enter play.

That we had to get the DM to say yes, rather than just spending a Fate chip or whatever, is fairly irrelevant, since the outcome is identical.

Assuming the DM says yes, which is a big and not-always-correct assumption.

The difference - and to me it's a big one - is that when a player *asks* about boxes it leaves the answer in the DM's hands (thus, exploration in question-answer-reaction mode); as opposed to when the player simply says there's boxes present and the DM is expected to go with that (thus, player authorial control). EDIT: and note that the "asking" could be phrased exactly as you did above - you state you're looking for boxes, which leaves the DM in control of whether there are any.

Lan-"does one of those boxes in the alley have a paladin's warhorse in it?"-efan

 

[pemerton]

This whole paladin's warhorse debate is pretty pointless. If this counts as player authorship, it's really weak. It may be up to the player to decide when he calls it. That particular animal may not explicitly exist in the campaign until a player chooses to play a paladin, survives to the appropriate level, and decides it's time for his vision. But it's still up to the DM to set the quest that must be undertaken.

I don't really see the line of descent between the paladin's warhorse (or even Traveller's streetwise) and significant player authorship mechanics.

You may not see the line of descent. I've lived it.

For instance, it's a small step from (1) the player of the paladin can initiate an adventure, and oblige the GM to introduce the gameworld elements necessary to support that adventure, to (2) the player has given his PC chess proficiency, so I guess I'll stick a chess-master in the next inn the PCs come to.

My first memory of using technique (2) is in 1986, in the contex of an Oriental Adventures campaign - except the "next inn" was in fact an ogre stronghold in the hills of Kozakura. The PC beat them at whatever game he could play (I can't remember now) and some ingame benefit (also long forgottnen) flowed from that.

It's a small step from (2) to (3) the PCs are both thieves, so I'll confront them with challenges that involve sneaking and climbing. It's also a small step to (4) the players are really keen to have their PCs fight more cultists, so I think I'll make this randomly encountered bandit group a front for the cult.

My first memory of using (3) is in 1987, when I ran a campaign for two players both playing multi-class thieves. It started in the Keep on the Borderlands (but the Caves of Chaos never came into things), and then moved to Critwall (I located the Keep in Greyhawk's Shield Lands) as the PCs followed the trail of the cult to which the Keep's evil priest belonged. The game itself was almost entirely improv on my part, outside of the rather bare bones provided by the Keep and the Greyhawk Gazetteer.

That campaign also saw quite a bit of (4).

At this point, how far is the game away from Burning Wheel, in which the GM is expected to design adventures that expressly build on, and push against, the Beliefs, Instincts and Relationships that the players have built into their PCs? The only difference is that the BW rules for PC-building produce more of this sort of flag-flying information, and the GM advice expressly advises the GM to have regard to this stuff.

BW also has mechanics that descend from the Traveller Streetwise example - eg Circles, which extend the Streetwise example into social contact more generally, and factor into the DC not just the obscurity of the contact but the likelihood of the person being around here and now, in the next suburb, or in the next village. Not a very radical step, in my view.

Obviously there are approaches to play - most notably [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s (3) above, of plot-heavy GM-driven adventure-path style gaming - in which techniques (2) through (4) see little or no use, and in which the GM might even ignore (1) and handle the paladin's calling of a warhorse in some more GM-driven fashion. But those approaches have never been the totality of D&D play. (Especially not in the first decade or so of the game.)

So, you do understand the difference between player authorial control and exploration through the character.

Exploration. He asks the GM and the GM either decides it is possible based on his setting and allows it, or randomizes it, or simply says they aren't there because of his setting knowledge.

On this issue my view is basically the same as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s.

If the GM has a dungeon map drawn up, with a key, from which s/he is not deviating, then it is true to say that the players are exploring the gameworld through their characters. Tomb of Horrors, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Ghost Tower of Inverness and White Plume Mountain are reall paradigms of this sort of play.

But if a player asks the GM "Are there any boxes" and the answer to that question is not already given by some sort of pre-authorship by the GM, then there are a few options.

The GM might have a "random chance of boxes in alleys" table, intended as a type of world-simulator. In that case, the GM makes a roll and tells the player what his/her PC sees. I'm happy that this can be called a form of exploration.

The GM might think to him-/herself , "The players would have fun if there were boxes here", and so answers "Yes, you see some boxes." That's not really world-exploration at that point. If the GM pretends that s/he rolled a die on the "random boxes" table, the illusion of world-exploration might be maintained. But what really happened was that the GM engaged in some authorship at the behest of the player. If the GM dispenses with the illusion - eg by answering "Sure, why not - you see some boxes in a stack at the end of the alley" - then it is clear to the players that they did not just explore a pre-given world, but rather instigated a deliberate act of authorship by the GM.

At that point, the difference between GM authorship in response to player requests/suggestins, and player authorship by spending fate points or whatever, is a difference of (important but) technical detail connected to which distributions of authority best achieve desired relationships between backstory creation, scene-framing and action-resolution. It's not marking any fundamental cleavage between game types.

The difference - and to me it's a big one - is that when a player *asks* about boxes it leaves the answer in the DM's hands (thus, exploration in question-answer-reaction mode); as opposed to when the player simply says there's boxes present and the DM is expected to go with that (thus, player authorial control).

As both the beard and the boxes example were presented in this thread, it was taken for granted that it is the GM who gets to decide the answer. Both examples were introduced to illustrate why a GM might have reason to say "yes" when a player asks "Is the NPC bearded?" or "Are there any boxes in the alley".

The key point is that, if the player knows the GM said "yes" simply because the player asked then the player knows that this was not "exploring the gameworld" - it was helping to generate the gameworld. Likewise, at my table if a player asks something like this and I say "No" then the players know that I have something else in mind - it sends a metagame signal that something is up.

As I said earlier in this post, once the GM is happy to send these metagame signals, the difference between GM authorship at the behest of the players and player authorship is a technical one about optimal design given the purposes of the game. It is not some fundamental point of demarcation between RPGing and something else.

the biggest "offender" for early player authorship outside of character is imho on p10 of every edition : "pick your class". This is totally meta, and has a great bearing on the scenes yet to be framed by the DM, sooner or later in the game.

I don't think it has a great bearing on the scenes yet to be framed for all groups. I've certainly seen posts on these boards in which posters advocate designing adventures (dungeon-based or "event"-based) independently of any knowledge of the PCs the players will be brining along to engage with them.

Similarly, I'm sure there are many GMs - especially those who like to run games in [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s mode (3) - who, even if they say yes to boxes because it will be fun for the players, like to maintain the illusion that what was really going on was world exploration, either of pre-authored stuff or of some random determination on the "Junk in alleys" table.

 

[pemerton]

The physical roll of the die isn't important, just as the particulars of the die you are rolling are irrelevant. It's all just a random number generator to determine the minutiae of who is where at a particular time.

I don't understand how this is not important. If the dice say, for instance, that the vampire is right here, right now, then it follows that the vampire - unless spontaneously created - must have come from somewhere. The vampire has a past. And that past has to be written. It cannot simply be inferred by ingame causal extrapolation from other known features of the gameworld.

The DM doesn't need to alter the history of the world to account for the Lich showing up, because the history of the region already accounts for everything that could show up on that chart,

The GM has to author new material about the past of the gameworld. That is altering (by way of adding to) the authored details of the gameworld.

Here is an example. I can't remember what colour t-shirt I wore on Friday 8 days ago (but I know I wore a t-shirt, because I do remember that I didn't have any important functions on which would trigger me to wear a collared shirt, and t-shirts and collared shirts exhaust my shirt collection). However, because I am a real person, who really exists now and who really existed 8 days ago, and because the clothes that I own and wear are likewise real, there is some fact of the matter about the colour of that t-shirt.

But now, let's transpose that scenario into a roleplaying game. One player asks another,"What colour are the trousers that your PC is wearing at the moment? And are they the same colour as the ones your PC was wearing a week ago?" From the point of view of the characters in the gameworld, there is a fact of the matter about those things every bit as real as the fact of the matter about what colour my t-shirt was 8 days ago.

But from the point of view of reality, those of us in the real world, there is no fact about what colour the PC's clothes are, or were a week ago, until someone makes it up. And no amount of appeal to ingame causal logic will tell you what that colour is. (At best such logic might tell you that they are not purple, because no NPCs had looked askance at the C for dressing above his/her station.)

Likewise for the vampire. Within the gameworld, it has a history. But that history doesn't acually exist, as something that can be known by the real game participants in the real world, until someone writes it. That's a huge part of what GMing is all about. Gygax even gave advice about it (DMG pp 86-87):

Rome wasn't built in a day. . . . The milieu for initial adventures should be kept to a size commensurate with the needs of the campaign participants. . . . This will typically result in you giving them a brief background, placing them in a settlement, and stating that they should prepare themselves to find and explore the dungeon/ruin they know is nearby. . . .

After a few sessions of play, you and your campaign participants will be ready for expansion of the milieu. The territory arround the settlement - likely the 'home" city or town of the adventurers . . . and whatever else you determine is right for the area - should be sketch-mapped . . . At this time it is probable that you will have to have a large scale map of the whole continent or sub-continent involved . . . In short, you will have to create the social and ecological parameters of a good part of a make-believe world. . . .

Eventually . . . you must . . . broaden your general map still farther so as to encompass the whole globe . . . [and] consider the makeup of your entire multiverse . . . . Never fear! By the time your campaign has grown to such a state of sophistication, you will be ready to handle the new demands.​

Gygax recognised that authorship - making stuff up! - is a key GM skill, that improves with practice. As for macro-details like campaign maps, so for micro-details like the history of a newly-placed vampire: new information about the past of the campaign world has to be created all the time.

And Gygax notes that this will be driven, in part, by metagame considerations: both prosaic ones, like "what do my campaign participants need at this time" and also less prosaic ones, like "what else do I think is right for this area?"

The horse may or may not have existed all along; what the player does - and all the player does - is make that horse become relevant to the run of play. Subtle but in this case quite significant difference, I think.

The boxes may have been there all along, but if the DM failed to mention them then they just never enter play.

The point is that, unless someone actually engages in an act of authorship - actually writes the warhorse, or the boxes, into the gameworld - then they are not in any practical sense part of the gameworld. For instance, no player will form the belief "That warhorse (or those boxes) are part of the gameworld". No player will declare an action based on the premise of their existence. No GM will adjudicate an action, or frame a scene, having regard to them.

This is one major difference between imaginary worlds and real worlds: in the real world, unknown things can still affect us (before people knew about germs, they still got sick); but if a putative element of an imaginary world is not known to anyone, ie has not been authored, then it is irrelevant to anyone's experiences of, or imaginings about, that world.

A player (at least one worth having) is going to take game-world forces into consideration when making decisions.

This doesn't show that the gameworld exerts causal power. This shows that real things - namely, game particpants beliefs about the gameworld - exert causal powr.

Which reinforces the point I've just made. Saying that "the vampire's history was always part of the gameworld" doesn't tell us anything about the play of the game, or the experience of the game. Up until the GM rolled an encounter with that vampire, the players were not factoring its history or existence into their action resolutions, and nor was the GM factoring its history or existence into his/her presentation of the gameworld to the players.

It is only once fiction is authored that people can believe things about it, and hence that those beliefs can influence their behaviour.

To relate this back to its origins in this thread: I stated that a strength of The Forge is that they eschew appeals to the ingame perspective as a way of explaining play experience. If you want to teach someone how to be a good GM when it comes to random encounters, getting them to think really hard about the ingame situation is irrelevant. You need to teach him/her how to write good ingame situations. You need to teach him/her to be an author, not an imaginer.

Imagination may be one useful tool of the author's craft, but it hardly exhausts it, and I'm not even sure it's the most important tool. Certainly not if, by imagination, we mean not creativity but rather vivid mental imagary of the sort that immersionists emphasise.

 

[Mark CMG]

At that point, the difference between GM authorship in response to player requests/suggestins, and player authorship by spending fate points or whatever, is a difference of (important but) technical detail connected to which distributions of authority best achieve desired relationships between backstory creation, scene-framing and action-resolution. It's not marking any fundamental cleavage between game types.

It's only just a technical detail if you conflate RPGing with storytelling games, so I understand why you and Hussar (and some others) come down on the side of not thinking it is a fundamental difference. And you saw my own way of handling certain situations, so you probably understand I know where you are not drawing your lines. However, what you are doing is changing the argument from there being difference to whether you feel the differences are fundamental.

 

[Umbran]

You may not see the line of descent. I've lived it.

Correlation does not imply causation. Antecedent is not the same as ancestor. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The line of your own personal experience is not the same as the line of development in games in general. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the major designers who has influenced such mechanics?

 

[pemerton]

It's only just a technical detail if you conflate RPGing with storytelling games, so I understand why you and Hussar (and some others) come down on the side of not thinking it is a fundamental difference. And you saw my own way of handling certain situations, so you probably understand I know where you are not drawing your lines. However, what you are doing is changing the argument from there being difference to whether you feel the differences are fundamental.

This is like me insisting that the difference between rolling for class (Runequest, Classic Traveller to some extent) and choosing class (every version of D&D de jure, and every version of D&D de facto that let's players assign stats) is not a tehnical detail in respect of PC creation, but marks of a fundamental difference between RPGs (where players explore a world) and storygames (in which players author such key world elements as the protagonists).

The reason I say that the difference is merely technical is because, once the players know that the GM's authorship is driven in part by their desires, they know that they are not, even metaphorically, exploring a world. They are helping to shape it in ways other than simply playing their PCs.

 

[pemerton]

Correlation does not imply causation. Antecedent is not the same as ancestor.

I don't understand how these remarks are relevant, unless you're meaning to suggest that I'm confused about my own course of develoment as a GM.

That's not impossible - the mind is far from transparent, and there is also the risk of self-delusion - but frankly I don't think you're in a position to know my own hstory better than I am, even to the extent of casting genuine doubt on my own testimony.

The line of your own personal experience is not the same as the line of development in games in general. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the major designers who has influenced such mechanics?

My grandmother never invented an electrical or electronic device in her life. Nevertheless, her own personal experience with radios, telephones, televisions and video players was much the same as the general line of development of those things. As was the experience of tens, probably hundreds, of millions of other people across the planet.

All that is required for my experience to correspond more-or-less to the line of development is that my experience not be atypical. And given the number of people I encounter on these forums, and others, plus the blogs/essays etc I read that all indicate comparable experiences, I am confident that my experiences are not atypical. The Forge didn't arise ex nihilo, or like Athena from the Head of Zeus. They, and the designs and designers that influenced them (eg Tweet's Over the Edge, Laws's HeroWars), were reacting to the same problems and challenges in RPGing that many of the rest of us were confronting.

Luke Crane is an inestimably better game designer than I am. I could not have come up with Burning Wheel, or even an approximation to it, on my own. But he's not an alien from another planet, either. Nor is Ron Edwards. They are not the only people to have noticed that one way to solve the railroading problem for story-heavy games is to shift the balance of authorship from GM to players, and in making the players more active to thereby make the GM's role correspondingly more reactive.

Mechanics like Beliefs, Instincts and Relationships in Burning Wheels are obviously descended from the use of using upon class, alignment, warhorse-calling etc to shift the balance from GM to players in the play of D&D and other "trad" RPGs. (2nd ed AD&D is even listed as one of the influence on Burning Wheel in Luke Crane's answer to Appendix N.) The techiques are more sophisticated and the player flag-flying thereby more nuanced, but the basic idea is the same.

(Robin Laws even gave a talk, once, I think under WotC's auspices, where he explained the flag-flying that is frequently involved in a player's choice to play a paladin PC. I would have read about it on this site, which is my main source of D&D news, but I can't remember now when it was, other than some time in the last 10 or so years but probably not in the last two or three.)