Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6199826" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think  [MENTION=6695799]ImperatorK[/MENTION]'s point is that the sort of game he is looking for from PF/3E is not a farmer game, or anything like a farmer game, but a pretty generic heroic fantasy game of the sort that D&D presents itself as being able to provide. (For instance, look at the Foreword to Moldvay Basic.)This is true, but I don't think that this sort of player authority over backstory has ever been a widespread approach in D&D play. The only two versions of D&D that really have the mechanics to support it are 4e (with its super-quick monster build rules) and classic D&D (with its random charts). But classic D&D never even hints at this sort of play, putting a strong emphasis on GM authority over backstory and scene-framing; and 4e barely hints at it in the DMG (there is one sidebar by James Wyatt, but even there the example is of the player determining very locak backstory, about the trap on a statue and the treasure behind it) and the DMG2 suggests it as possible playstyle but without providing any significant support for how to handle it. (Unlike OGL Conan, for instance, there is no suggestion of rationing via a points system.)In the post to which I replied you did not use the word "adventure" to denote the series of events that unfold in play.Here is what you said: "Perhaps there is more to the adventure than immediate access to the King. I’m good with that, as a player." That is, the adventure to which you refer encompasses more than just the events which have unfolded in play. It encompasses events which haven't occurred yet, and it rules out certain events occurring (like meeting the king at this particular moment of play). Where does this adventure come from? Who conceived of it? Who is in charge of ensuring that the actual play at thet able conforms to it? My sense is that, at your table, the GM has primary responsibility for these things. That is why I regard your playstyle as an instance of "storytelling" play as I characterised that style at post 182. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be corrected, but then if you're not playing in storyteller mode why would it matter whether the PCs meet the king now or later?As I said upthread, it would be nice if you could discuss without feeling the need to make snide insults.But it seems to me this really is the crux. There are some RPGers who regard mechanics as a necessary evil, mostly for resolving combat. There are other RPGers who regard mechanics as the key to RPG play - they are what distinguish it from storytelling (whether shared storytelling, or GM-authored storytelling), because they provide a system for distributing narrative authority in a regimented way which nevertheless produces surprising results.Here are extracts from two actual play threads of mine - one is the conclusion to a skill challenge, the other a simple skill check:Now I don't know exactly how your game proceeds, or what sorts of things you and those you play with find engaging in a fantasy RPG.But for me, succesfully goading your nemesis - the king's advisor who is secretly the evil wizard leading the goblin hordes - into showing his hand and turning on you in front of the Baron and all the assembled worthies of the town - is not "Oo - we made a die roll!" It is the climax of a tense and gripping confrontation in which the PCs try to be polite to the Baron without conceding any information or influence to their nemesis. And because the player who made that check was the player of the fighter (the dwarf of action mentioned upthread), it also represented a type of commitment to the ultimate priority of deeds (or, if you prefer, violence) over words - which in the context of D&D has a certain aesthetic aptness to it.Likewise, the resolution of a PC's desperate prayer to a god, while lying on his back in danger of being killed by fire elementals, in the form of a gift from a mysterious duergar benefactor, in circumstances in which the PCs' relationship to the duergar is friendly but still uncertain, is not "Oo - we made a die roll!" It's a dramatic moment that opens up new prospects for the direction of play.In a game in which these sorts of outcomes weren't resolved via die roll, how else would it be done? One answer is via Fate Points or similar - participants can simply deploy their resources and declare outcomes. 4e doesn't have much of this except for action points, which let those who spend them gain additional actions within the action economy, and some rituals, which have automatic effects if the money is spent. 3E has lots of these, namely, spells. But I don't see that declaring a spell effect has a type of excitement about it that random resolution lacks.The other way would be that one participant - perhaps the GM - is empowered to decide whether the dramatic thing happens or not. Is this what you prefer? This implies to me that you are happy for the GM to just decide that. Combined with your apparent dislike of dice-based action resolution, it implies that you (sometimes? generally?) prefer that the GM decide this rather than that it be resolved in some fashion via action resolution mechanics.That is a pretty standard outlook for storyteller play, and it fits with the idea that the GM has "an adventure" - a sequence of events that is predetermined prior to play - with which you, the player, are happy to go along.  [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and at least one other poster replied affirmatively to this. I agree with LostSoul that this is exactly what Gygax was talking about when he emphasised the importance of time-keeping in a campaign. (One sign I'm not running a Gyagxian campaign? The passage of time in my campaign is nothing but colour.)DC Heroes is an example of a game that expressly instructs the GM to use the mechanics to plot travel times, and if the PCs don't have enough speed to get to the villain in time then the city is blown up the villain's mega-bomb. And one time when I put forward the idea that, in my game, there is no failure off-screen (which is pretty much the opposite of DC Heroes) I got a bunch of posters telling me that that was a terrible way to run a game, and that it was absolutely crucial that the villains be on a timer that can lead to the PCs failing due to poor time-management by their players.That's fine, but not everyone plays like this. In the sort of play that makes ingame time an important player resource, working out how to deal with wandering monsters so that they don't cost you time is a key player skill.I think that 3E, as written (and 2nd ed AD&D also), is in two minds about the importance of time. It has spell durations that in many cases are pretty much cut-and-pasted from the Gygaxian texts. But in Gygaxian play these durations mattered, because the GM was keeping tight track of time (generally in terms of turns elapsed) and the players were playing aginst the GM's clock. These days I think many more tables are much more relaxed about the passage of time and tend to let the GM handwave it (there are no tables for time spent exploring like those found in both classic D&D and D&Dnext, for instance), yet the durations are still there as if time mattered. This difference in the later editions is a victory for mere colour over action resolution. And this is why, even though some of the gametext is the same, I don't agree that 3E by default is much the same game as classic D&D (although much of the marketing of 3E was designed to suggest the contrary).Well, how has that come about. Perhaps the group is playing a module, and the module begins by specifying that all the PCs are on their way to visit the Chamberlain to seek access to the king?Or, perhaps a player used Streetwise or Gather Information or History or Knowledge (Nobility) or some other relevant skill to learn that the Chamberlain handles the king's diary.Or, perhaps the GM just said to the players "It's common knowledge that if you want to meet the king you have to go through the Chamberlain."These are different scenarios, involving different play experiences. But none is about a consequence of action resolution. They are all about GM authority over backstory and scene-framing.Another possibility, that would make the Chamberlain's presence a consequence of action resolution, would be if the players were engaged in a skill challenge to meet the king, and a result of a check had them meeting the Chamberlain (given that the Chamberlain is being obstructive rather than helpful, we can assume it was a failed check). But I don't think this is what most posters discussing the Chamberlain have had in mind. Up until now I've been assuming that we are talking about backstory and scene-framing.Whereas the GM deciding that the Chamberlian won't help, because it's not time yet in the adventure for the PCs to meet the king, is more than scene-framing - it's also narrating scene outcome. And it's not just backstory - it's also narrating the actual events of play. As I mentioned upthread, it's colour. With a good GM, who is very evocative of the relevant colour, this sort of thing can be fun, but I very much prefer it for one-offs only - and within that preference I have a strong sub-preference for CoC. It's not a way I want to (or am capable of) GMing, and not a way I want to play in a campaign or regular game.Of course they can, but as a general rule in D&D there is no action resolution mechanic they can deploy to actually make this decision come true. They are dependent upon the GM framing the scene. At many tables the GM might frame another scene instead, of course ("On your way to the balance you bump into a haughty courtesan . . .").Action resolution mechanics that bridge time and geography in such a way as to take these sorts of things out of the GM's hands are still reasonably novel and sophisticated, I think. (For instance, a teleport spell in D&D has always allowed the players to declare that their PCs exit a scene, but it gives them no power to dictate what is waiting for those PCs when they turn up at their destination - that is in the GM's hands.)We also apparently have different working definitions of backstory.What you are talking about here is backstory - what sort of gear are the orcs wearing? what is the personality of the NPC? I've already made it clear that I run a game in which the GM has default - though far from total - authority over backstory, and in which the players do not have the resources to make the sorts of changes to backstory that you are talking about here.Sceneframing, as I use the term (and I didn't make it up - I learned it from reading the texts and posts of game designers who design games that take a strong and deliberate approach to sceneframing), means the GM establishing a situation, within the fiction, which (i) confronts the PCs with some sort of opposition or antagonism, and (ii) invites the players to take steps, within the rules of the game, to resolve that conflict. Generally this involves the action resolution mechanics, though in the right circumstances it can all be "say yes" - in a social encounter, this will play out as free-form roleplaying.The reason I would not run the Chamberlain encounter, as described, in my game; and would not enjoy it as a player; is because it satisfies (i), and purports to satisfy (ii), but this second thing is in fact an illusion. The players in fact do not have a chance to resolve the conflict by taking steps within the rules of the game. Their only option is, in fact, to have their PCs leave the scene and look for some other way of persuading the Chamberlain or getting to the king.I take this as pretty much proving my point that talk of "trust" gets us nowhere. Because I am not primarily concerned about the fate of my PC. I am concerned about my fate as a player. I want to have a fun time. As a GM, I want my players to have a fun time. The fate of their PCs in the fiction is quite secondary to that - for instance, I could spend hours narrating how great a life their PCs are living - that would hardly be screwing over the PCs - but would seem to make for a pretty unfun session.If you meant "trust that the GM is not out to screw over the players", that's a pretty low threshold and not enough for me. The GM who prescripts a game may be intending that the players will be able to see their PCs do cool things in due course. But that is not what I want from a game. I want to play my PC from the get go. I'm not interested in scenes that are nothing more than background dumps or colour being dressed up as action scenes.This is a non-sequitur. For instance, in 4e the default approach is to set the difficulty by looking at a chart. And the attitude then factors into determining what is feasible from the point of view of fictional positioning, and also what sorts of consequences are to be narrated for a failed check.I don't deny that it is possible to have a system in which the ingame fiction of the Chamberlain's initial attitude sets the probabilistic likelihood of the players' mechanical success. 3E is such a system. But there are plenty of other systems available for doing that, while taking account of initial attitude in some other dimension of resolution.I have no idea what you are talking about here. You are using 3E terminology that has no relevance to the 4e skill challenge rules, and then layering something additional - I'm not sure exactly what - on top of that.I indicated in my playstyle what the episode in question would correspond to. Obviously in your game it might be the result of a different process of resolution. So you are correct that there is no one-to-one mapping of mechanics and system to fiction (this is one thing that makes a Story Hour very different from an Actual Play thread). But that does not mean I resile from the claim I made about my playstyle. And I assume that you are not suggesting that I am mistaken in explaining how, in my playstyle, an episode of this sort would come to occur.All you're telling me there is that your game of choice has poor social encounter resolution rules, because they are too boring to be used when the stakes are high and the drama real (and if the stakes are low or there is no drama, then who cares?). Therefore, the GM, in order to deliver an exciting game, has to push matters in another direction. Which raises the question, why frame a social encounter in the first place if the game's resolution mechanics don't support it?Colour, plus perhaps a bit of backstory download."Fail forward", or "no whiffing" - a technique strongly advocated by Ron Edwards and Luke Crane - has no application to the situation in which the PCs meet the Chamberlain, try to get him to admit them to an audience with the king, and fail, all because the GM has decided that this is how the matter will unfold.None of this is "fail forward" either. Fail forward means, roughly, that you succeed at your task but fail at your intent. So your suggestion upthread, that the PCs persuade the Chamberlain to admit them to the king, but in circumstances in which the king is going to feed them to the royal hyenas (was it?), would be a good example of "fail forward" on a failed Diplomacy check against the Chamberlain. Now the scene keeps going, and the challenge facing the PCs is to persuade the king to spare them (or, perhaps, to deal with the hyenas).Sure. That is why I referred to the typical D&D combat.Sure, but these are all variations on the attack rules (except for Stoneskin which is damage mitigation - I was intending to exclude that via my reference to "parrying without detriment"). None of them is analgous to the GM, by fiating, declaring that the attack misses. Which was the point I was making. I have never heard of that approach being taken in D&D combat (which isn't to say that it hasn't been by someone somewhere at some time). Whereas unless I'm misreading you, you are positing that as a resolution option out of combat.What is the equivalent, in social encounters, to the OA against the fleeing enemy? Different social resolution systems can have different ways of handling this, but good ones don't just let one party walk away without cost - otherwise the action resolution system isn't actually producing binding changs to the fiction.I don't understand the question. I ask the player which PC he would like me to frame into the next scene - the dead one (which will therefore require some backstory introduction to get the PC into the next scene - in all cases this has been worked through with the player in question) or a new one? Where do you see scope for disagreement? What does it even mean to disagree with a player's answer to the question "Which PC I framing into the next scene for you to play?"</blockquote>

Verification