Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4039843" data-attributes="member: 42582">Celebrim, I haven't had a chance yet to read all the rest of your exchange with John Snow. Nor have I had a chance to reply to your earlier post in which you replied to my post and "threw down the gauntlet" to the narrativists. Work has this pesky habit of sucking up my time.So just a couple of comments:I agree with you that the discussion is interesting and doesn't need to be shut down.I disagree with your "pocket universe" analysis. In my view, you are taking for granted what the narrativists deny, namely, that there is a more-or-less strict correlation between metagame and gameworld. (In your earlier post you talked about functional equivalence, I think.)Below I just pick up a couple of your points and try to make the narrativist reply. Obviously I don't expect you to be convinced - but I think you might at least see why it is I think you are begging the question.There is no adversity when the PCs aren't participants (in the narrativist sense).Now maybe you wanted all the weight to fall on "direct" - and yes, there can be ingame matters which don't directly involve the PCs and do implicate future adversity, like your King's champion example:Of course not. But depending on what the point of the game is, they may think that "The GM wanted to make a statement about the perils of hubris." The players would draw inferences about the challenge of that kobold, for their PCs, not by trying to reason via ingame phsyics, but by reasoning in light of known metagame priorities. That is the nature of narrativist play.Thus, when you say this, you are already begging the question against narrativism:I'll reiterate - in narrativist play, the players draw inferences not just from the gameworld's internal logic, but from the (metagame) narrative logic. That is part of what narrativist play is about. Thus Lois Lane rules: the players know the GM won't roll wandering monsters every day to see if Lois Lane is killed by one of the many Nycadaemons wandering the city (as per Appendix C of the DMG) because part of the narrative logic is her enduring relationship with the PC protagonist.Of course. But as you have correctly said, the rules may be more than just the character build mechanics and action resolution mechanics. They may also include rules (or implicit understandings) for the distribution of narrative control, and the criteria according to which that control is to be exercised. And those criteria may have nothing to do with the logic or physics of the gameworld, and everything to do with metagame narrative logic.As I've said, the players will be reasoning with metagame narrative logic. So they'll work it out. Or we can talk about it: as in Prof Phobos's earlier examples, we all just agree that the town guard is trounced and the skeletons crushed.As I've said, I may not want to play in that universe. And as you note, if I want to play in something more like the real universe I come under pressure to head down the RM route. I've been down that route, and it didn't work for me.Perhaps. But that role may be negative: for example, if it is part of the action-resolution mechanics that they only apply to PC protagonism, then the playstyle will recognise that when the PCs aren't implicated, other techniques will be used to establish the nature and evolution of gameworld elements (eg the rules, be they implicit or explicit, may permit the GM to declare a high level Fighter to die from a riding accident, if this is consistent with the mutually understood narrative logic of the game).Why would the signals be mixed? As to arbitrariness - in practice, nearly all decisions are arbitrary to an extent. When can or can I not take 10? Does a halfling have to make a jump check to get into bed in a human-sized inn? Corner cases can arise in any RPG, and so I concede that corner cases can arise in the sort of play I am describing. Like all corner cases, they are resolved by negotiation. The starting point would typically be, if a player thinks that his or her PC is implicated in a certain way, and thus that s/he should have a say (whether via the action resolution mechanics, or some other system that gives that player narrative control) then s/he should have that say.Ah, the pocket universe objection! For the reasons implicit in what I've said above, there are not two worlds. There is one world with its inner logic. And there is another world - the actual world in which the GM and players live - with its metagame priorities. These determine what happens in the gameworld, but they are not part of its physics (just as Batman's status as protagonist is not a property that he has in the fictional world as Gotham city, but is merely a meta- status that he has as a character in a fiction).If you can point me to the "red herring" post that would be helpful - I'm not sure which one you mean. But in fact the sentence is crucial. The difference between "does" and "can", "will" and "might", "would" and "could" - in short, actuality vs possibility - is crucial to the verisimilitude of the sort of play I am talking about. Batman could have been shot, but wasn't. The PCs could have been fallen off their horses, but didn't. In the sort of play I am talking about, the whole point of action resolution mechanics being used sometimes, but not at other times, is to open up and close down various outcomes in the world for metagame reasons, without therefore taking that to be any sort of statement about what is possible or impossible in the gameworld itself.I don't quite follow this. The physics of the gameworld are whatever the GM and players, as shared creators of the universe, say they are. This will emerge over time, probably taking the real world plus at least parts of the magic mechanics as a baseline, and consistency over the campaign certainly helps with verisimilitude (though sometimes has to be abandoned to fit other more important priorities - maybe a major balance issue with the magic system is discovered and a spell has to get nerfed or retconned or whatever).So the story fits those physics. The story, in so far as the PCs are concerned, is also generated in part by application of the action resolution mechanics. But those mechanics are not the physics. They are a metagame device for resolving certain aspects of the story.So, if a PC falls down a cliff and survives (because the action resolution mechanics tell us so), then we now know that the physics of the world permit heroic survival (perhaps she grabbed a tree - so it's the sort of heroic survival that can happen in the real world - or perhaps a zephyr softened her fall at the last minute - so it's the sort of heroic survival that can happen only in a magical world). We certainly have no basis for saying that those ingame physics mandate heroic survival, even if the action resolution mechancis (via hit points, fate points, whatever) made it impossible for the PC to die. That impossibility exists only in the metagame. It is not part of the story, and not part of the physics of the gameworld.Btw: at The Forge, they call what I've described in the previous paragraph "fortune in the middle". They identify it primarily with games like HeroQuest or The Dying Earth, but there's no real reason that it can't be done in D&D as well (at least as far as I can see). It is quite a bit harder to do in RQ or RM.</blockquote>

Verification