Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[niklinna]

I don't want to say you can't count - but there are four points in the post!

 

[Hussar]

Did the party try to gather more information about who-what lives here before arriving on the scene? Did they spend any time running surveillance on the entrance before wading in? If yes, they might conclude the smaller footprints belong to the Kobolds rumoured to live here while the larger probably equate to the Orcs they saw arriving last night......

Further, in situations like this IME the immediate choice of which way to proceed doesn't much matter as their intent will nearly always be to eventually explore all three directions anyway; with the only question being one of in which sequence to take them (or, in rare but not unheard-of cases, whether to split up and go all three ways at once!).

What is at the end of the left hand corridor?

As a player what means could you use in a trad game, besides actually going down that corridor to learn what is there. And like you say the choice of this or that corridor largely doesn’t matter. You’re going to check them all anyway.

So it’s effectively random. Corridor a or b or c is a coin toss. Sure you might know some of the information about the dungeon. But how many kobolds are down that corridor? You can only learn by going there.

And if there are more branches? Well, it’s more guesswork.

And don’t you use random encounters? How do I know about them? That’s completely guesswork.

Yo

 

[Hussar]

I’ve count d three times @pemerton. I still only see three asterisks. Maybe it’s a Tapatalk issue.

 

[Hussar]

I do strongly disagree with @Manbearcat that guesswork is somehow dysfunctional. It’s pretty much standard exploration in nearly any dungeon scenario.

It’s one of the big reasons I’m such a strong advocate for dropping maps as treasure or letting npcs give information about what is nearby.

Most of the time, IME, pcs are flying mostly blind. Isn’t that the whole point of “what’s around that hill” style hexploration? That no one knows the answers and you are the ones learning.

 

[Aldarc]

Let me see if I can get this straight.

What you're calling "map and key" basically means that the game world is made up of certain predetermined facts, and that a large portion of the game is about discovering these facts. These facts often refer to locations and their contents (the literal map and key) but can also refer to other things (like people, organizations and the relationship between them).

The alternative method, which I'm not sure has been named in this thread but I'll call it narrative, deals more with players establishing facts by themselves (even if that's not what happens in the fiction).

So to take a very simple example: there's something in a warehouse the PCs want. To get to it, the PCs want to find a way to avoid the warehouse's security. In traditional map-and-key play, the GM has prepared the warehouse ahead of time. There's a map, of course. They might have prepared guard patrol routes and if there's a backdoor or alternate entry, it's because the GM decided there should be. Depending on the game and what resources the PCs have available, they can discover these means, or figure out weaknesses in the patrol routes, or maybe even bypass these restrictions if they have enough resources (e.g. teleporting into the place).

But in the more narrative approach, the GM probably hasn't prepared the warehouse in any great detail, other than "there's a warehouse with a McGuffin" and "there are some goons guarding it." Any additional details would be, from a real-world perspective, created by the players' actions. A PC staking the place out would roll Perception (or spend some meta-currency), and on a good roll they would get to create a weakness in the place's security. Within the fiction of course, the weakness was always there, the PC just discovered it. But from the perspective of the players, the player's good roll was rewarded by the GM saying "What sort of weakness did you find?"

Am I understanding these ideas correctly?

I will give this a shot. I am in one group that is playing B/X. This is a well-designed game for map and key scenarios, especially of the dungeon-crawling variety. The GM is using Keep on the Borderlands. I know from experience being on the other side of the screen that nearly everything in B2 literally has a map and key component. I know that the key even tells how much money a given resident of the keep is carrying. When it comes to the Caves of Chaos, the caves are also mapped out, keyed, and detailed. It's probably the most frequently mapped and keyed module in the history of the game. The caves, doors, tunnels, and so on all have fixed positions. Admittedly, the map is not permanently immutable. A cave-in, for example, that's part of play could change the map and key.

However, imagine that we were playing Keep on the Borderlands using Dungeon World. (Actually, I do sometimes think during play about how certain parts of this campaign would have gone if we were using other systems.) There may be an initial map of the outer Caves of Chaos in the ravine that the GM sketches out to help frame the scene. However, the GM is not likely consulting a map or key here, especially once the players go into the caves. For example, a player may look for a hidden door in the caves, a move which prompts the GM to call for a Discern Realities roll. The DW GM does not have a map or key to tell them that there is a hidden door where the PC is looking. In a map and key game like B/X, the B/X GM could easily consult the prep and know that there isn't. But the player's Discern Realities result of <7 means that the GM is required by the game rules to make a hard move. The GM decides that what makes the most sense in the fiction is to "split the party": the PC has triggered a hidden door in the cave wall that rotates them around to another tunnel. If we consulted that original map and key of that cave in B/X, that tunnel and hidden door wouldn't or even shouldn't be there! It would be a violation of map and key play!

A fair number of people who prefer map and key play often find this latter approach to be an offensive foul on the play's integrity! But it would be similar to an American football fan watching a game of rugby union and being offended every time that the rugby players did something that would be illegal in American football but is perfectly legal or normal in rugby union. The game of rugby works perfectly fine by its own rules and principles. Rugby does not need to conform to the norms of American football.

 

[clearstream]

You may note that I, personally, have attempted to offer "neutral" labels for discussions of this kind in the past (e.g. proposing "Red Light, Green Light" as an alternative to "Mother May I.") People didn't even deign to respond to the proposal. I was soundly ignored, even by the people complaining about MMI being pejorative.

I did notice your efforts back then! I can't answer @Campbell's question, but the outcome of your efforts at least suggests one heuristic. The replacement label needs to be one proposed by those who find the existing label pejorative.

The burden rightly falls on them, and they are in the best position to know that their concerns are dissolved.

 

[clearstream]

Because its often incredibly hard to find one that is. It can sometimes be very difficult to find a term that both evokes what you're trying to evoke and is semantically neutral to everyone.

On evoking at least I feel the answer is relatively easy: just adopt it. Meaning will come to adhere to the new label once it is in use. That's part of how words work.

 

[pemerton]

I’ve count d three times @pemerton. I still only see three asterisks. Maybe it’s a Tapatalk issue.

I wrote the post and am looking at it in a standard browser on a laptop. Four asterisks:

Here are four ways of resolving "wilderness"/cross-country travel that are not map-and-key:

* The GM, or perhaps the players and GM together, just describe(s) the travel. It's mere colour, some "joining" narrative that lets us understand what's happened between the resolution of the last scene, and this next one. The Green Knight RPG uses this approach. I almost always use this approach in Prince Valiant.

* The goal of the travel is described by a Scene Distinction, and the mechanical device that the players use to have their PCs achieve that goal is to declare actions that (i) in the fiction, help the PCs achieve their goal (eg gain on their quarry, slow their quarry down, etc) and that (ii) mechanically, ablate the Scene Distinction - if the Scene Distinction is eliminated, the PCs achieve their goal.

* Some non-map-based way of establishing distance, and how punishing that distance is, is used to set a type of obstacle for the travel. The resolution of the travel proceeds by the players declaring actions and/or spending player-side resources that allow them to meet the obstacle, or to offset it in some fashion. (I've got in mind, here, the Torchbearer rules for Journeys. A 4e skill challenge can also look a bit like this.)

* The player describes their intent-and-task (eg "I am going to cross the desert on my camel!") and the GM sets an obstacle using whatever the rules are for doing that. Then the player rolls the dice and appropriate consequences are narrated as the system dictates.​

Does that present better for you?

 

[pemerton]

Rugby does not need to conform to the norms of American football.

There is some speculation that what makes this true is that both should conform to the norms of Australian Rules football . . . you may all now carry on.

 

[Aldarc]

There is some speculation that what makes this true is that both should conform to the norms of Australian Rules football . . . you may all now carry on.

It's time for you to waltz your Matilda out of this thread right now, sir.