D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[clearstream]

Side question: can you use miniatures and terrain with DW? Or, I suppose you probably can, but would it make sense? D&D is tactical enough that you can, and if you do combat becomes a sort of sub-game. I am a huge miniatures/terrain enthusiast, so I like being able to put a set out on the table. If DW is a lot like Monsterhearts, it seems to me theatre of the mind would be the way to go, and there wouldn't be much point to using miniatures.

It won't satisfy all wargamerish desires in that direction. As I note above, positionally, DW has hand, close, reach, near, far. There's no action-economy. To my mind 4e was the apogee of D&D skirmish combat, taking great advantage of grid-positioning. 5e pulled back from that, but here again PHB 5e and DMG 5e are different games.

 

[loverdrive]

Positionally, DW has hand, close, reach, near, far. There's no action-economy. That's is not the same as D&D fantasy skirmish combat using an action-economy that matters.

This is just like earlier debate where some felt they could easily include X in D&D and that would serve the same role as in another game, and another group resisted that. If we're saying we can add what we like, then all games are equally flexibile. If we're saying that we value the distinctive experience of each game (we can't add what we like) then flexibility counts for naught.

At first I thought there might be something worthwhile in discussing flexibility from the point of view of affordances available to game designers. As the discussion has unfolded, I feel it is or skirts being about entrenching existing preferences.

...sure? Clint_L asked if there's a point in using miniatures in Dungeon World. I said yes, there is a point, as clearly conveying positional relations between combatants has value in a game that has a lot of combat scenes.

The way I see the question posed, it's not about counting cells on a square grid, it's about the desire to touch and look at carefully painted miniatures while playing the game.

 

[clearstream]

I don't understand what "flexibility of designability" even means. Are designers not at liberty to write down whatever they want whenever they want? The concept seems to be empty.

Are you familiar with design languages (also sometimes called design systems) or with SDKs (software development toolkits). Or perhaps know the concept of design patterns?

There are two observations one can make about the job of designing products that might help explain the worth

1. There's a lot of problems-in-common for which ideal solutions have already been found. Say the problem of presenting a button for a user to click. You could design that from first principles. Or you could use a toolkit that already gives you the down-click, hold, up-click, hover, lighting, animation and audio behaviour. Essentially, don't reinvent the wheel: it'd be a waste of your time and you might overlook some opportunities for finesse that others have already thought of.
2. In a sense, anything that lets you add and store text is sufficient to design an RPG. And if you have a toolkit (Cortex Prime is one example) you have a head start. And this is my second observation: a game isn't just an assemblage of components with no interaction between them: it's a system in which the components interact. A great toolkit (like PbtA) is one that also gives you a headstart on your game as a holistic system. When you wrote your move, which I took to be within a PbtA design-language context, you were able to take advantage of surrounding methods that would make it more likely to be successful as part of a complete game.

So what would flexibility mean, given those observations? When I think of flexibility I think of being able to achieve whatever design I set out to achieve. In one world, that might mean having some sort of uber-flexibile toolkit (Unreal comes to mind) that can do absolutely anything. Often, though, it means choosing a rather idiosyncratic toolkit that uniquely does the thing of particular value to the design you have in mind. In some real world cases, narrower toolsets are chosen for other reasons, too. Like security. (The less the toolset can do, the more securely it might do those things.)

The bottomline for me is that toolkits are very useful for game design. Year Zero Engine. Messerspiel. PbtA. FitD. Cortex Prime. BRP. And you can also examine these for whether they have had work put into making them good toolkits. Sanitizing your rules of IP and making them open source is not without value, but it also is not as helpful as investing the additional effort. For one thing, a good toolkit explains the purpose of its tools! And flexibility? It's of doubtful relevance.

Yes. I'm not sure why one would care about any other form of flexibility when actually recommending a system, and certainly not why someone would claim D&D was uniquely flexible in terms of "designability" when it is infamously baroque in many ways and players get terribly touchy about altering its "traditions" (even if those "traditions" are hardly traditional at all.)

Perhaps we find ourselves in agreement. If the play I want on some occasion has the narrowest imaginable set of affordances - such as We Are But Worms - then any putative flexibility to experience something outside of the experience I'm aiming for has zero value to me. For a Lyric RPG, inflexibility is almost certainly a virtue (except in the most literal sense, haha!)

Because they claim the label. If you claim a label such as this, you're clearly trying to say there's a deep and fundamental connection. To then blithely say the label has no bearing at all is ridiculous—if it had no bearing, it wouldn't be claimed in the first place!

And I continue to say that it simply does not matter. It doesn't matter if the label was chosen because those who chose it saw a deep and fundamental connection. It doesn't matter if they are right about that, and folk here are wrong. And it does not matter if folk here are right about that, and they are wrong. It doesn't matter if what these groups count among deep and fundamental connections are different things altogether. It's a label for a contemporary movement in gaming that has specific attributes (rules-light) in the way it is practiced today.

There sure as heck are two teaching objectives. One: teach GMs how to GM. Two: teach players how to play. Invisible rules make the first impossible (you simply have to stumble through it solo, good luck buddy), and the latter nearly so.

You may have those objectives. If so, possibly FKR is not for you. It's impossible to really teach FKR. Perhaps it can be done through osmosis and satori. The proposer of invisible rulebooks might argue that you already possess them.

At which point, one has conceded my core point: having visible rulebooks is in fact extremely useful, useful enough that even efforts to go full FKR rarely stay that way. The visible parts specifically bring communication, testability, and teachability to the system.

Useful for teaching, but I for one do not play RPGs in order to teach them. EDIT I see I have agreed by disagreeing. Yes! You are right. Visible rulebooks are good for teaching.

Games that eschew a pointed emphasis on Rule Zero recognize that this swings both ways: that there are things GMs with absolute latitude could do, but should not do, because they are as harmful to play as "I have my infinity-plus-one shield" is. A sacrifice of truly absolutely infinite flexibility (the flexibility to be harmful to the game) in order to strengthen practical flexibility (reliably producing good, useful results in the largest possible set of non-harmful contexts.)

If you find giving GM absolute latitude harmful to your play, it would be better to choose games that don't include that to achieve your purposes.

Couldn't agree with Mr. Baker more. Assignment of authority as the endpoint of game design is...honestly kind of sad. And avoiding constant renegotiation of the rules is a third benefit of visible rulebooks over invisible ones, a benefit I often see overlooked or even (albeit unsurprisingly) cast as a flaw, as though it were a good thing that every time a common situation comes up the game has to stop and figure out how to resolve it yet again.

It may be that we read the same thing and reach differing conclusions, so here is more of the relevant text (also worth reading the post it responds to.)

1. Moment-to-moment assent trumps pre-agreed authority, in every case.

Side points:
This is how people decide to ignore a game's design and keep roleplaying anyway. They aren't playing the same game anymore, but they're still roleplaying.

Does moment-to-moment assent create moment-to-moment authority, its mirror image? If you want to say that it does, then sure, I got no grief with that. Notice however first that my point still stands in full, and second that this moment-to-moment authority is retroactive: the group didn't assent to the statement because the speaker held authority; instead the speaker holds authority because the group assented to the statement.

2. Any well-designed roleplaying game will assign (at least some) authority upfront.

Caveat:
Nevertheless, as a designer, ignoring the fact of point 1 won't improve your understanding of your medium and it won't better your designs.

3. Some very good designers consider the assignment of authority to be the point of rpg design. I do not.

As a designer, it's my job to make as sure as possible that the game won't break down into moment-to-moment negotiations about raw assent despite the game's rules and the players' upfront commitment to them. But the brute assignment of authority is NOT how to accomplish that.

When my games assign authority they do so in strict service to what I consider the real point: setting expectations and granting permission.

Does FKR satisfy 1? Yes, moment-to-moment assent is at the heart of FKR. The play is fluid and fast.
Does FKR satisfy 2? Yes, the group assign at least some authority up front. The never ignore the fact of point 1 in doing so.
Does FKR satisfy 3? Yes, FKR does not take assignment of authority to be the point of RPG design. It wholly focuses on driving the moment-to-moment play.

The final point is worth restating

When my games assign authority they do so in strict service to what I consider the real point: setting expectations and granting permission.

FKR assigns authority in strict service to setting expectations and granting permissions.

I would argue that assigning authority is an important consideration - particularly when one wants to propose assignments that diverge from norms to date - but it's not the endpoint. Does that put us in agreement?

 

[Lanefan]

We might be talking past each other. Based on what others have said and analogies they introduced, I have been thinking about flexibility as a toolkit for designers. So flexibility in the sense of designability.

Is it right to understand that you are thinking about flexibility for players (including GM)? I usually think of choice if TTRPG for play as being about whatever experience you're aiming to have, and don't think of flexibility as salient to that.

For my part, I think of flexibility as an at-table quality that allows I-as-GM and-or we-as-players to use or tweak this system to do what we want it to do, whatever that may be at the time, in preference to buying and learning another system each time we want to do something different.

Can I run a grim 'n' gritty dungeon crawl game using this system and then turn around and run a high-fantasy game of courtly intrigue and mystery using the same system, then turn around again and run a heist game with it (or, does/can the system seamlessly handle all three of those elements if-when they arise at different times within the same campaign)? If yes, that system is by definition more flexible that a system that can only do one of these and can't handle the others.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Are you familiar with design languages (also sometimes called design systems) or with SDKs (software development toolkits). Or perhaps know the concept of design patterns?

There are two observations one can make about the job of designing products that might help explain the worth

1. There's a lot of problems-in-common for which ideal solutions have already been found. Say the problem of presenting a button for a user to click. You could design that from first principles. Or you could use a toolkit that already gives you the down-click, hold, up-click, hover, lighting, animation and audio behaviour. Essentially, don't reinvent the wheel: it'd be a waste of your time and you might overlook some opportunities for finesse that others have already thought of.
2. In a sense, anything that lets you add and store text is sufficient to design an RPG. And if you have a toolkit (Cortex Prime is one example) you have a head start. And this is my second observation: a game isn't just an assemblage of components with no interaction between them: it's a system in which the components interact. A great toolkit (like PbtA) is one that also gives you a headstart on your game as a holistic system. When you wrote your move, which I took to be within a PbtA design-language context, you were able to take advantage of surrounding methods that would make it more likely to be successful as part of a complete game.

My initial pass of reading this simply made me think, "This is over-stretching the programming metaphor; designing a tabletop game is very unlike that, because programming something as user-side simple as a clickable button can be incredibly complicated, while TTRPGs literally have to tell the entirety of their rules to the players. However, on reflection, that would be reductive, so I'll dig into this, both what I think is liable to mislead and likely to be useful.

Liable to mislead:
The "SDK"/software-toolkit/prefab library/etc. analogy, if employed without extreme care, because...there is no such thing with TTRPG design. Not even families of games like PbtA have more than a completely superficial similarity here, for the reason cited above. This isn't to say that there's nothing to this--PbtA is a perfect example of how this analogy can be useful--but it's perilously easy to generalize things from software design that are simply untrue of TTRPG design.
The notion that you can meaningfully save time and avoid testing by simply slotting in pre-made components from other software. In actual program stuff, this can be quite thorny, but it is at least conceivable that you could nick the (hopefully open-source!) code for doing some specific thing. I would absolutely never support just randomly nicking entire subsystems without substantial testing in TTRPGs. Even really really simple things like the frequently-borrowed 13A Escalation Die need to be reworked and adapted to be slotted into some other system.

Likely useful:
The idea of testable solutions. UX solutions to stuff can not only be tested, but have been and include quite a bit of important technical achievement. Not only do these things need testing, but they hugely hugely benefit from it. Making a user interface without rigorously stress-testing it is a recipe for absolute disaster in software, and a similar lack of testing (albeit of very different things) is exactly what has plagued many major TTRPGs.
The idea of meaningful theory. Programming and software design are meaningfully technical fields, and have serious, real theory that you would be foolish to ignore if you're trying to design a new piece of software. Fitts' law, for example, and the fact that the corners of the screen are targets of "infinite width"--the law itself is useless for TTRPG design, but the idea that you can have "user experience" rules is not.

So what would flexibility mean, given those observations? When I think of flexibility I think of being able to achieve whatever design I set out to achieve. In one world, that might mean having some sort of uber-flexibile toolkit (Unreal comes to mind) that can do absolutely anything. Often, though, it means choosing a rather idiosyncratic toolkit that uniquely does the thing of particular value to the design you have in mind. In some real world cases, narrower toolsets are chosen for other reasons, too. Like security. (The less the toolset can do, the more securely it might do those things.)

But...how is that "design flexibility"? It sounds like literally exactly the opposite of design flexibility, being rather design specificity. Being able to narrowly specify exactly what you want. I still just don't understand how this can be parsed, in any way, as "flexibility," unless we take the meaning to be "you are able to make things you like." Which...is trivially true. You can make what you choose to make. Hence why I asked my question before. What, exactly, is lacking for "design flexibility" in TTRPG design? Anyone can choose to write whatever they want! Doing it well is, of course, significantly harder, but you are able to do whatever you feel like doing. It's not like a programming language where it may literally be actually impossible to write something because the structures or definitions simply do not exist and cannot be created.

The bottomline for me is that toolkits are very useful for game design. Year Zero Engine. Messerspiel. PbtA. FitD. Cortex Prime. BRP. And you can also examine these for whether they have had work put into making them good toolkits. Sanitizing your rules of IP and making them open source is not without value, but it also is not as helpful as investing the additional effort. For one thing, a good toolkit explains the purpose of its tools! And flexibility? It's of doubtful relevance.

I don't see how it can possibly be of "doubtful relevance," because--again--the whole point of TTRPGs as a whole, and certainly for nearly all of the most popular ones, is to cover as much as possible the entire space of imaginable actions, given some premise. Sometimes that premise is fairly narrow, as with Masks or Paranoia or what-have-you. Often, however, that premise is incredibly broad, like "fantasy" or "science fiction with FTL spaceships." Yet for nearly all of them, being sufficiently flexible in play such that you can take any plausible desire a player might have, consistent with the premise, and implement it as an effective contribution to playing the game is extremely important. Indeed, I would call it one of the most important considerations possible, unless the premise is so restrictive it doesn't actually permit very much. Without that flexibility in play, at least for a game with a premise as open as "fantasy adventure," you will--as I'll discuss more below--need to be constantly re-negotiating what is and isn't allowed. You will be forced to grapple with the meta-considerations of play (what is permissible? How is permission gained? Who decides what makes sense, and when? What constitutes a fair exchange? etc., etc.), rather than, y'know, actually playing.

Perhaps we find ourselves in agreement. If the play I want on some occasion has the narrowest imaginable set of affordances - such as We Are But Worms - then any putative flexibility to experience something outside of the experience I'm aiming for has zero value to me. For a Lyric RPG, inflexibility is almost certainly a virtue (except in the most literal sense, haha!)

Okay. I'm not saying flexibility is some like...utterly absolutely universal, "literally ALL games will ALWAYS need to PERFECTLY maximize this" kind of thing. But it is pretty clearly a virtue for lots of games, because it is supremely useful for the specific thing that (nearly) all TTRPGs are doing: trying to translate the breadth of human imagination, within an accepted premise, into meaningful consequences. Absolutes are rarely applicable. But for the vast majority of things claiming to be TTRPGs, especially those claiming to embrace the length and breadth of something like "fantasy adventure," openness to player imagination is incredibly important, yes?

And I continue to say that it simply does not matter. It doesn't matter if the label was chosen because those who chose it saw a deep and fundamental connection. It doesn't matter if they are right about that, and folk here are wrong. And it does not matter if folk here are right about that, and they are wrong. It doesn't matter if what these groups count among deep and fundamental connections are different things altogether. It's a label for a contemporary movement in gaming that has specific attributes (rules-light) in the way it is practiced today.

Words have meaning and names have value. If the name has no value, stop using it. Labels are tools; a tool that serves no purpose is no longer useful, and a tool that has negative utility should be replaced. Muddling the issue by making it sound like anything at all related to Free Kriegsspiel is a detriment, not a benefit, unless the name is supposed to mean something.

You may have those objectives. If so, possibly FKR is not for you. It's impossible to really teach FKR. Perhaps it can be done through osmosis and satori.

Every game has these objectives. You need to be able to teach people how to play and run it in order for people to, y'know, play and run it! That's essential to playing the game at all. Is this really such a strange thing to say? If no one can learn how to GM nor play, the game is dead.

Useful for teaching, but I for one do not play RPGs in order to teach them. EDIT I see I have agreed by disagreeing. Yes! You are right. Visible rulebooks are good for teaching.

Have you ever run a game for someone who had never played that game before? If so, you have (by definition) used it for teaching. And, given it is impossible for you to have a priori knowledge of any game before you actually play it, you have both played at least one game for the first time and run at least one game for the first time, which (by definition) means either someone was teaching you, allowing for the option of teaching yourself. It is impossible--even with FKR!--for people to not have a first-time, learning experience doing these things. Hence, teaching and learning are necessarily part of play. The original Free Kriegsspiel just had an extra layer of teaching on top.

If you find giving GM absolute latitude harmful to your play, it would be better to choose games that don't include that to achieve your purposes.

By definition, absolute freedom includes the freedom to do harm. Locke called it the "state of nature." Hobbes--there's a reason I've spoken of a "Hobbesian central authority"--used the Latin phrase bellum omnium contra omnes, "(the) war of all against all." But both of them believed that this state naturally must give way to the "law of Nature," which (more or less) means that rational individuals come to realize that actually exercising truly absolute freedom is kind of crap, and leads to bad outcomes, e.g. "no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, and or property" because it's just not smart to do so. Through the application of the "law of Nature," men can then work their way out of the state of Nature and into civil society.

It may be that we read the same thing and reach differing conclusions, so here is more of the relevant text (also worth reading the post it responds to.)


Does FKR satisfy 1? Yes, moment-to-moment assent is at the heart of FKR. The play is fluid and fast.
Does FKR satisfy 2? Yes, the group assign at least some authority up front. The never ignore the fact of point 1 in doing so.
Does FKR satisfy 3? Yes, FKR does not take assignment of authority to be the point of RPG design. It wholly focuses on driving the moment-to-moment play.

Everyone has been rather consistent in telling me that FKR does not do point 2, and in fact considers it anathema. That's the secondary goal of the invisible rulebook (after the alleged benefit that the invisible rulebook is always functional because it relies only on natural reasoning.) That is, do not assign authority up front, on anything, ever--because that's making a visible rule, and visible rules are not acceptable.

Have I been misled?

As for point 3, it very much seems to me that that's exactly what FKR is doing. It's just that it takes the length and breadth of RPG design to be "DON'T assign authority, except moment-to-moment." Because the whole point of an invisible rulebook is that it isn't designed at all. It can't be. A designed thing is, necessarily, a visible thing, at least in order to be designing it. An invisible rulebook is, by definition, the absence of design.

The final point is worth restating

FKR assigns authority in strict service to setting expectations and granting permissions.

I would argue that assigning authority is an important consideration - particularly when one wants to propose assignments that diverge from norms to date - but it's not the endpoint. Does that put us in agreement?

Doesn't seem so, because as stated, FKR chucks the very concept of design out the window by using invisible rulebooks. Where there is nothing to observe, test, or communicate, there is no design. There can't be.

 

[pemerton]

Positionally, DW has hand, close, reach, near, far. There's no action-economy. That's is not the same as D&D fantasy skirmish combat using an action-economy that matters.

No one has stated or implied otherwise. The question asked was Can I use my minis and terrain?

If @Clint_L is really meaning to ask Does DW have a wargame-like skirmish resolution component, the answer - as I think @AbdulAlhazred has already made clear upthread - is no.

EDIT: Ninja'd by @loverdrive.

The obvious contrast would be, say, Wuthering Heights or even In A Wicked Age, neither of which is likely to have any use for minis and terrain even outside the technical context of wargame-like resolution.

 

[clearstream]

Can I run a grim 'n' gritty dungeon crawl game using this system and then turn around and run a high-fantasy game of courtly intrigue and mystery using the same system, then turn around again and run a heist game with it (or, does/can the system seamlessly handle all three of those elements if-when they arise at different times within the same campaign)? If yes, that system is by definition more flexible that a system that can only do one of these and can't handle the others.

Let's say that's right: it's orthogonal to DM-control.

 

[clearstream]

Everyone has been rather consistent in telling me that FKR does not do point 2, and in fact considers it anathema. That's the secondary goal of the invisible rulebook (after the alleged benefit that the invisible rulebook is always functional because it relies only on natural reasoning.) That is, do not assign authority up front, on anything, ever--because that's making a visible rule, and visible rules are not acceptable.

Have I been misled?

FKR functions by virtue of unwritten principles. Among them are choices about authority.

Much FKR proposes a light set of written rules*. There's nothing preventing a designer from writing down some of their principles if they feel that's important.

*For anyone less familiar with FKR. Some games to look at include Any Planet is Earth (channels Traveller), Messerspiel (channels FitD), and The Blanc Hat (channels The Whitehack.)

 

[clearstream]

No one has stated or implied otherwise. The question asked was Can I use my minis and terrain?

If @Clint_L is really meaning to ask Does DW have a wargame-like skirmish resolution component, the answer - as I think @AbdulAlhazred has already made clear upthread - is no.

EDIT: Ninja'd by @loverdrive.

The obvious contrast would be, say, Wuthering Heights or even In A Wicked Age, neither of which is likely to have any use for minis and terrain even outside the technical context of wargame-like resolution.

Reviewing the thread I see you're right. I was continuing to pursue an earlier line of enquiry (answered by @AbdulAlhazred in a post I missed.)

 

[clearstream]

...sure? Clint_L asked if there's a point in using miniatures in Dungeon World. I said yes, there is a point, as clearly conveying positional relations between combatants has value in a game that has a lot of combat scenes.

The way I see the question posed, it's not about counting cells on a square grid, it's about the desire to touch and look at carefully painted miniatures while playing the game.

Ah, right. If it's about that desire, then sure. It would quite be on-theme, in many respects!