How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, I think it depends on what you're going for. The setting you briefly described above... limited travel, common illiteracy... the world is going to be a very open and unknown kind of place for the average person. So it makes sense to have "blank spaces" or unknown areas on the map.

But let's say you're playing Delta Green. The setting is modern day Earth. Not nearly as much that's not known geographically to much of the world's population, and certainly not to the typical PC. There's definitely going to be things that are unknown... but they're not generally going to be like unknown countries and cultures and the like.

Yeah, different sorts of settings are conductive to different types of play. So choose a setting that is suited to what you want to do.

 

[Corinnguard]

I imagine there are plenty of GMs out there who would likewise withhold information that may be considered common knowledge by many of us.

You're not imagining that there are plenty of GMs out there who withhold information that may be considered common knowledge, you're assuming that there are a number of GMs who are like this based off of your own personal experience. You don't know if this true anymore than I do.

I recommended a GM share the nature of a runic circle, and you and others said I was robbing the players of a mystery.

For the nature of a runic circle to be considered common knowledge is if said knowledge was spread far and wide, and was a part of daily life for everyone. Like within a High Magic setting where everyone was trained in the ways of magic. But what if the setting the players are in is a Low Magic setting where casters are few and far between? Then it's a different story because in such a setting the nature of a runic circle would most certainly not be considered common knowledge.
Well I, for one, like the challenge and the pleasure of solving a mystery. I want my in-character self to figure things out.

I tend to err on the side of providing as much information as possible.

Is there any information that you won't provide to the characters?

I don't generally like settings/games/campaigns that consist almost entirely of the PCs being "strangers in a strange land".

Nothing wrong with having a party composed of adventurers who operate out of one location. The Heroes of the Lance in Dragonlance all came from the same town on Krynn.

 

[Maxperson]

You're not imagining that there are plenty of GMs out there who withhold information that may be considered common knowledge, you're assuming that there are a number of GMs who are like this based off of your own personal experience. You don't know if this true anymore than I do.


For the nature of a runic circle to be considered common knowledge is if said knowledge was spread far and wide, and was a part of daily life for everyone. Like within a High Magic setting where everyone was trained in the ways of magic. But what if the setting the players are in is a Low Magic setting where casters are few and far between? Then it's a different story because in such a setting the nature of a runic circle would most certainly not be considered common knowledge.
Well I, for one, like the challenge and the pleasure of solving a mystery. I want my in-character self to figure things out.


Is there any information that you won't provide to the characters?


Nothing wrong with having a party composed of adventurers who operate out of one location. The Heroes of the Lance in Dragonlance all came from the same town on Krynn.

While I have encountered DMs who have gated common knowledge behind rolls, the vast majority have not done that. And all of the ones that did that were back during 1e and 2e.

 

[Corinnguard]

While I have encountered DMs who have gated common knowledge behind rolls, the vast majority have not done that. And all of the ones that did that were back during 1e and 2e.

Did you encounter any gated knowledge DMs in later editions of D&D (3e, 4e, and 5e)?

 

[Maxperson]

Did you encounter any gated knowledge DMs in later editions of D&D (3e, 4e, and 5e)?

Not common knowledge, no. I think the general wisdom about gameplay and/or age altered how DMs view knowledge and knowledge checks.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really care about AD&D or other such ancient manuscripts. I resented your notion that to avoid such railroading you must play these specific games you mentioned, or their ilk. In trad games it is possible to play such way that the players have plenty of opportunity to set their own goals and affect the direction of the game, and of course in narrative games the GM is still in control of framing and such and has plenty of opportunity to "force-feed" their ideas to the players (if we wanted to describe such contributions derisively, but why would we?)

Are you referring to the following post of mine?

If you construct an understanding of agency that specifically precludes the GM from creating content, then it's pretty trivial to claim the players don't have any.

No one in this thread is doing that. They are talking about the particular details of the 2nd ed AD&D DMG and the 3E D&D DMG.

These posit that all the significant elements of the fictional situation that confronts the players are brought by the GM.

You, and @Maxperson, and others may deny that that is an interesting feature of RPGing. OK. Meanwhile, those of us who care about it, and want to avoid it, will be busy over here playing RPGs - actual ones, with published rulebooks and everything - that avoid that feature that is undesirable to us.

(Also, and in passing, you seem to be committing the same logical fallacy as @Corinnguard did upthread, of inferring from The GM does not create all the content to The GM creates no content.)

I've included the post that I was responding to. You'll notice that it was a dismissal, by way of parody, of something that @hawkeyefan posted, in reply to @Maxperson, about the passage from p 99 of the 3E DMG:

No he just used a motivation as an excuse to use his canned material. If Mialee hadn’t died, there would have been some other reason for the players to meet the cleric with the wererat problem. If they needed an item instead of resurrection, it would have been a merchant instead of a cleric. And so on.

hawkeyefan was pointing out that this example in the DMG, of an ostensibly "tailored" motivation, is in fact just an example of how the GM can create a "hook" for a fetch-quest or similarly prepared adventure, where that adventure has, in itself, has no connection to the PCs at all.

That strikes me as an uncontentious observation.

@Pedantic's response implies that @hawkeyefan was denying that there is any way of combining GM-introduced content with player agency. That is obviously not what hawkeyefan was saying: hawkeyefan was critiquing a particular approach to how a GM might prep and frame, the one actually set out on that page of the 3E DMG. Pedantic's dismissive, parodic reply also implies that Pedantic thinks the suggestion in the 3E DMG is fine.

And that is what I replied to. I bundled @Maxperson into my reply, because it was the conversation between him and hawkeyefan that Pedantic stepped into, and because Maxperson similarly, over a series of posts, appeared to be defending the 3E DMG suggestion as fine.

My reply pointed out the fact that hawkeyefan (and @Manbearcat, and I) were talking about particular items of advice to GMs, that we were actually quoting from rulebooks. (In my case, the quote was in reply to a question from @Micah Sweet "Where is it written?" I instanced the writing.)

My reply also took seriously the fact that Pedantic and Maxperson appeared to agree with the 3E DMG advice, and presumably (given its similarity) also the 2nd ed AD&D DMG advice, and replied to that, pointing out that - whereas they appeared to take the view that there is nothing to be said about how it is possible to have more player agency than what is contemplated in that advice, in fact it is possible to do so.

Now, perhaps you agree with @hawkeyefan and me that it is possible to have more agency on the player side than those DMGs contemplate, by using different GMing techniques from what those DMGs advise. I don't really know, as all I know about what you think is from your posts, and your posts seem mostly to criticise other posters who explain why they reject the advice found in those DMGs.

In any event, I hope that makes it clearer why I posted this:

you can assert all day and all night that there is no difference between - on the one hand - what the 2nd ed DMG set out, with its Orc-seeming Ogres, its doppelganger "prisoners", and its mysterious dust cloud that the players have their PCs observe until the GM reveals what it is, or what the 3E DMG advises with its GM-authored fetch quests, and - on the other hand - the sort of play that is set out in Apocalypse World, or Sorcerer, or Burning Wheel, or HeroWars/Quest.

You say "I resented your notion that to avoid such railroading you must play these specific games you mentioned, or their ilk". I don't know what you have in mind by "their ilk". The first published RPG of "their ilk" that I am aware of is Prince Valiant, by Greg Stafford, published in 1989.

The first time I used techniques of the sort set out in RPGs of this ilk was in 1986 or 87, GMing the original OA. I continued to use those techniques throughout the 90s and early 2000s, GMing Rolemaster. My use of the techniques was not perfect, for multiple reasons: (1) I wasn't fully aware of what I was doing; (2) neither AD&D nor RM is, mechanically, particularly well-suited to the use of those techniques (though RM is better suited than, say, RQ - despite the high level similarity between those two systems as ultra-purist-for-system simulation); (3) the advice found in most RPG books of that era, including the RM ones that I owned and read many of, pushed in quite a different direction.

Discovering the Forge around 2004 (I think it was) gave me the vocabulary, and the analytical tools, for better understanding what I had been doing, and what I was trying to do, and why RM didn't fully support it.

You seem to take my criticism of the AD&D 2nd ed and 3E texts as a criticism of those who play those systems, or systems - like 5e D&D - derived from them. That would be an error on your part. For all I know, there are people out there who are doing with 5e something very similar to what I was doing with AD&D OA and with RM. But those people would recognise - when prompted to reflect - that the methods that they are using are different from the examples provided in those texts. That they involve the GM responding seriously to player-evinced goals and aspirations for their PCs in a way that is very different from just using those as a "hook" for a GM-authored, GM-driven scenario. I mean, I was extremely sensitive to that contrast in the mid-90s, based on my experiences of different approaches to play and well before I had an analytical framework adequate to fully explaining the difference.

Conversely, if someone thinks that in criticising those DMGs I am criticising their play, I naturally enough infer that that person likes the DMG advice and follows it in their RPGing. And hence I naturally enough infer that they are engaged in GM-directed and GM-controlled play of the sort that those DMGs advocate.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@pemerton

The discussion was tedious to me to read at the first time, I didn't want a rerun.

I meant this:

Or instead they go off and buy a copy of Burning Wheel, In A Wicked Age or Apocalypse World, and learn how to play a RPG that doesn't rely upon the GM preparing content that then gets force-fed to the players.

Implication being that people playing other games "force-feed" content to the players, whilst people playing these games do not.
That's mean-spirited and false.

 

[pemerton]

But surely that also applies to the information freely given? "No, my character doesn't know what runic circle is, stop telling me what to think!" And sure, perhaps that is even valid. Player certainly could say, "Nah, I don't want to roll on this, my character really isn't familiar with religions of this area."


So a GM willing to randomise access to information with the odds based on the build choices the players made, offering "free rolls" without requiring pixel hunty action declarations and not forcing the player to risk bad stuff happening in order to get the information is the one who is obsessed with controlling the information? Huh, that certainly is an interesting conclusion!

If information is common knowledge in the fiction, and so "freely given" by the GM, then that should conform to the agreed setting/genre.

But if information is being "gated" behind a check, then that suggests that something is at stake in knowing it, or being ignorant of it. And this is where the play of the game is to be found. Hence why I prefer that it be something that the player actively engages with - the player should be playing the game.

The issue with "pixel hunting" seems to me to be a different one. That is a result of the GM hiding the stakes - for instance, adopting the approach that @Lanefan has advocated in this thread of framing low-stakes or no-stakes scenes, of foregrounding low- or no-stakes information, etc. I gave the example upthread, from my own game, or the red-painted idol of a muscular, long-tongued humanoid. The player who found that idol did choose to make a Theologian test to see if their PC recognised it, but failed the test - in the fiction, the PC picked up the idol but then her gaze was caught by a Corpse Candle, floating up from the pond in the cavern below. If the test had succeeded, she would have recognised it as a carving of a demon from the Outer Dark, which would have given them a warning as to the demon imprisoned in the caverns they were about to enter, and also a chance to do further research in the library at the Wizard's Tower.

In an earlier session, I had rolled a result of indecipherable notes when determining, via the random roll method for Torchbearer 2e, what was in the pockets of a defeated bandit. The same player, playing the same PC, had her act on her Instinct to read every word. The test succeeded, and so I was obliged to have the notes be something worthy of having taken a chance on: they were directions, written in a wizard's cypher that the PC was able to break, telling how to get from Stoink (the nearest city) to the Tower of Stars (where the bandits had been defeated).

The general principle here is that, if every test/check is one that has stakes that are known to the players, or that they can be confident will immediately reveal themselves, then the notion of "pixel hunting" evaporates.

 

[pemerton]

I meant this:

Or instead they go off and buy a copy of Burning Wheel, In A Wicked Age or Apocalypse World, and learn how to play a RPG that doesn't rely upon the GM preparing content that then gets force-fed to the players.

Implication being that people playing other games "force-feed" content to the players, whilst people playing these games do not.
That's mean-spirited and false.

This was also a reply to a post defending the 3E DMG advice against @hawkeyefan's criticisms. Obviously the RPGs listed are illustrative.

My post is a manifestation of a degree of frustration at the repeated assertion, or implication, that if one does not GM in the manner set out in the 3E DMG than no RPGing is possible. Here is the particular post I replied to that contained that assertion/implication:

Clearly, the GM's choices are constrained by the PC's choices; they can only present certain scenarios the PCs will accept. Further, the advice is entirely about trying to maximize your preparation by focusing it toward what the PCs are likely to engage with, again making it clear that they have the ability to engage our not engage with whatever you've made.

If the GM can't produce content the PCs want to engage with at all, then nothing happens, the game falls apart and everyone does something else with their hobby time. What is the issue?

The "issue" is that the advice in the 3E DMG rests on notions like adventures the GM has designed, which they have to "lure" the players (via their PCs) into playing. This advice is a recipe for the GM preparing content which the PCs (and, via them the player) then "end up in".

If you - @Crimson Longinus - agree that that is poor advice, then we have no disagreement on this particular topic.

 

[pemerton]

Which by default also means you succeed (without even trying) in recognizing it; a fine example of how in-game auto-success mechanics can translate to real life.

"To succeed without even trying" is a figure of speech. It's hard to take it literally, given that success implies an attempt, and "attempting" and "trying" are pretty close to synonyms.

But in any event, we are talking about a particular activity: the play of a game.

Both success and failure can also occur without the overt "make a move" step, as some moves (such as recognizing a banana) become inherent over time, and thus automatic. For the able-bodied and healthy, walking is a similar thing: you succeed at it without even trying, as you've had so many years of practice at it.

And yet we have to assume success at those automatic things (like recognizing a banana or a book or a bird for what it appears to be) without asking/waiting for action declarations, otherwise we couldn't narrate anything about a scene.

The only point of contention is at what point auto-success drifts into there being a chance of failure (or vice-versa). For example, it's automatic that I'll recognize a bird when I see one, but there's no guarantee I'll know what type of bird it is or anything else about it; meanwhile there's some people to whom knowledge of bird species is so ingrained it's become automatic.

You seem to be conflating stuff in the fiction - does the PC recognise a bird or a banana - with stuff at the table - does the player succeed in their action.

In having raised this notion of the GM declaring that a player auto-succeeds before the player even gets to declare an action, I am talking about the play of the game. What happens at the table.

If the GM decides to tell the player something before the player had even made a move or declared an action, that is not the player auto-succeeding. That is the GM still framing the scene. As I posted a little way up thread (in reply to @Crimson Longinus) I can conceive of play where the GM routinely decides to modulate their scene-framing by first calling for the players to make rolls that may in turn factor in elements of their PC build (eg knowledge skill bonuses; perception bonuses). But - unless this is a case of the GM bringing home some consequence, in which case the player roll is a saving throw - I don't see the appeal. As I have said, to me this seems to be an example of the sort of GM control over information that @hawkeyefan has been talking about for many pages now.

My preference - in the context where the information is not also a consequence being brought home - is that the GM either share the information, or not. The players can then declare actions, putting whatever is appropriate to the situation at stake, if they want to know more.