Players establishing facts about the world impromptu during play

[kenada]

I think people want different things out of their roleplaying games. Some people just want to shine as their characters without necessarily putting in a lot of effort in terms of playing skill. I'm not against any of it. I am only defending my one style as a legitimate choice that is fun for a lot of people. I see a lot of incorrect assumptions based, I'm assuming on bad experiences trying to play my style, that I want to point out as untrue in general. I have no desire to end or stamp out anyone's fun.

What I find interesting about all of this is that due to the language twisters, I can't even make a point on here most of the time. I go an look at a game being played and they seem to be having fun and that is a good thing. It though has the characteristics exactly as I imagined they would be yet for some reason my descriptions from my perspective are always challenged.

I agree to an extent. Sometimes it comes across as language policing. Given the way you have described your style, I understand that when you talk about “skilled play”, you’re using a narrow meaning (in the OSR sense, I presume). It can be construed more broadly (e.g., the way I am orchestrating things in our Scum and Villainy game), but that’s different because the nature of our play is different. Given your frequent disclaimers of not being against other styles, I don’t read your posts as having ill intent.

 

[kenada]

Yeah, FitD games require that the players all drive hard. If they aren't, then they don't work well because there's a vacuum that many GM will step in to fill. This leads to deployment of For e, just to fet a game moving, and play starts to drift towards trad gaming, which is ill supported by the mechanics. If the players are all stepping up, it just doesn't work well.

This is a key point in finding a good fit for a table. PbtA or FitD or BW don't work if players aren't keaning into them. Nothing wrong with that -- it's an entertainment option, so what ypu want out of it is very personalized, and not wanting to put the level of effort in is not, at all, a bad thing. Else, we'd have to criticize watching a movie over building a model, which is silly.

Our game got a lot more interesting once I started driving my conspiracy against the Church. The other players are taking a comment about retirement the GM made too seriously (they want to max out their cred and retire). I’m taking his comment about treating our characters like stolen cars seriously.

To be fair, that’s sort of my default style. Like I said in my first post, if you give me levers, I will pull them. In our Mage: The Awakening 2e game, I converted a failure to a dramatic failure in every scene. Always. People thought my character was crazy or stupid, but mages are characterized as getting into trouble for exploring things they shouldn’t and using their magic imprudently. My reward? Besides an interesting game, I was on track to hit five dots in my prime arcana before the rest of the group was going to hit four (sadly, I lost progress when the ST’s car got burgled and his bag with our sheets was stolen).

 

[Campbell]

Some people just want to shine as their characters without necessarily putting in a lot of effort in terms of playing skill.

Thanks for your candor. I'll address the rest of your post later when I have time to.

It's true that skilled play of the fiction is not my apex priority when I sit down to play a Story Now game. It's still a priority, but other priorities are ascendant. Spotlight balance in the sense of niche protection and power fantasy are pretty much a nonpriority. Getting too attached to your conception of your character or advocating for particular outcomes instead of your character are pretty much the last thing I want to see at any table where our creative agenda is anywhere close to Story Now.

What I'm generally looking for as a player is to emotionally invest in a character who is different from me in some way, experience tense moments as they would experience them, and see what comes of it. Also to get a chance to be a fan of the other players' characters and see how they come out the other end. I want to feel the weight and tension of the moment and follow it where it leads.

It feels like you are lumping together Story Now and Neotraditional when at least to me there is a vast ocean between the two.

 

[Manbearcat]

Thanks for your candor. I'll address the rest of your post later when I have time to.

It's true that skilled play of the fiction is not my apex priority when I sit down to play a Story Now game. It's still a priority, but other priorities are ascendant. Spotlight balance in the sense of niche protection and power fantasy are pretty much a nonpriority. Getting too attached to your conception of your character or advocating for particular outcomes instead of your character are pretty much the last thing I want to see at any table where our creative agenda is anywhere close to Story Now.

What I'm generally looking for as a player is to emotionally invest in a character who is different from me in some way, experience tense moments as they would experience them, and see what comes of it. Also to get a chance to be a fan of the other players' characters and see how they come out the other end. I want to feel the weight and tension of the moment and follow it where it leads.

It feels like you are lumping together Story Now and Neotraditional when at least to me there is a vast ocean between the two.

I think the irony here is that overwhelmingly, Story Now games feature characters that erode, suffer, change, and perish at a profoundly higher rate than in D&D.

Ironically again, Hit Points + GM Storytelling Mandate + Metaplot + GM Force (none of which exist in Story Now games outside of Hit Points in DW...and even in DW, those HP are profoundly lower/scaling less than in D&D and you can lose half of them or all of them at any given moment in play) are probably the greatest purveyors of Power Fantasy trajectory and/or the diminishing impact of Skilled Play. 1 of those (Hit Points) is a feature of all D&D play. The other 3 are a feature of a huge % of D&D play.

D&D can be as Skilled Play as it gets. But we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't have some cultural (this is a storytelling game where the GM's job is to ensure a great and fun story is told) and technique (GM Force) and system baggage (systems and subsystems that don't play particularly nice with one another...which causes some GMs to elide crucial pieces of the Skilled Play formula of the system) to overcome to ensure that Skilled Play signal is prioritized and inoculated from the impact of competing priorities (like Storytelling mandate).

 

[Neonchameleon]

I would say that in my style of gaming conflict resolution is very much like a wargame. Preparation & Tactics matter greatly in the outcome. In fact one of the things about 4e that I hated was the way the game encouraged the PCs to just wade into the enemy. In my OSR games, doing such things means almost certain death. If you enter a large room, and see a lot of enemies, you fall back to a defensible position. At least at lower levels. This is less important at higher levels but tactics and position matter the strategy is just different.

And this is ironically both tied into one of my critiques of 5e and one reason why I find the insistance by OSR players that they have "skilled play" and "combat as war" to be incredibly ironic.

In 5e the NPCs are all bullet sponges (59hp for an ogre - or for that matter a CR 1/2 monster by the DMG) and thanks to the Str/Dex rules there's not much difference in range or in melee. In 4e the fundamentals of tactics involve preventing the enemy from doing what they are good at by e.g. disengaging from the melee line and catching the enemy archers in melee while slowing down the fast moving enemies.

Meanwhile your proposed OSR solution is to retreat, giving time for the enemy to regroup. Then trying to hold the enemies in a choke point that they know much better than you do. And they enemies also have time to call for help, preventing you defeating them in detail - and also possibly to get things like the boiling oil. Retreating to a choke point is therefore in a living world situation a desperate last resort because it lets the enemies play to their strengths and leaves you stuck. Meanwhile if you come to a room full of enemies that aren't actively waiting for you the appropriate answer should often be to Red Wedding those bastards. Shields are heavy, while polearms and bows are unwieldy. They shouldn't be in hand and probably won't be in reach.

Preparation and tactics should matter greatly as should creating and seizing opportunities. If you absolutely can't go in and take advantage of the way the enemies are disorganised and unprepared then the game is locking you out of seizing opportunities and quite a lot of ways of taking them. If you have to stay in your battle lines it's much harder to create opportunities. And whenever you retreat to static defences you are surrendering the initiative and giving your opponents to create opportunities.

All that stuff is desirable to me. I want people to succeed because they played well. I also coincidentally believe that such an outlook and approach is the best way to "be your character". You are seeing through your characters eyes and acting as your character. It's why I avoid most things that require the player to stop making decisions as their character. The decision process is what is important and I want it to be a character centric thing.

Me too. But what good play is should vary a lot from character to character.

I think people want different things out of their roleplaying games. Some people just want to shine as their characters without necessarily putting in a lot of effort in terms of playing skill. I'm not against any of it. I am only defending my one style as a legitimate choice that is fun for a lot of people.

Indeed. I understand why if you want a low effort, low skill means of visiting a world while never having your assumptions challenged your style can be fun. But for reasons I've outlined this low effort playstyle you advocate for ensures that I'm playing a tourist in the world. I'd rather the means and reward to actually inhabit someone who lives there.

Yes if you are Conan and you are playing a 1st level character then you've already missed the boat in my mind. That is the problem. People don't start out in D&D as Conan. They start out as pretty much a nobody.

In any D&D characters start out with hit points that are basically a consequence free means of taking damage and a class. They start off as a significant cut above average over either 0th level characters or commoners depending on your edition - and that's just the ones who can't cast spells. Gandalf of course was a fifth level magic user.

The game rules do create an implicit assumed world. D&D's assumptions are vastly different from GURPS for example.

Oh, agreed. In GURPS I'm not necessarily playing a trainee superhero. Indeed in GURPS I'm probably not playing a trainee superhero and am giving the side-eye if the GM suggested GURPS supers because it's a poor match. In any version of D&D I basically have superpowers from first level for any class except the thief and I'm going to develop into a superhero.

 

[pemerton]

What I find interesting about all of this is that due to the language twisters, I can't even make a point on here most of the time. I go an look at a game being played and they seem to be having fun and that is a good thing. It though has the characteristics exactly as I imagined they would be yet for some reason my descriptions from my perspective are always challenged.

You dispute some posters characterisations of how you approach RPGing. Does that mean that you're a language twister too? Or rather does it show that the notion of "language twisting" is inapposite here?

To me your most recurrent assertion is that story now RPGing is at odds with immersion in character. And that is completely contrary to my experience. And the experiences of some other posters (eg @Campbell, @Neonchameleon).

Yes if you are Conan and you are playing a 1st level character then you've already missed the boat in my mind. That is the problem. People don't start out in D&D as Conan. They start out as pretty much a nobody. They have to become Conan. When they are 10th or 12th level, then they can act like Conan and it likely works.

I didn't know you were talking about 1st level PCs.

There is an oddity, though, that a 10th level fighter in D&D is a lord, whereas well before Conan was a king he could still tackle the Tower of the Elephant single-handed.

Suppose you and your party were suddenly zapped into the bodies of your characters with their abilities and knowledge. A godlike voice tells you that you must complete XYZ mission (just assume the mission is the one the party decided to go on prior to the zap) or you cannot return to your own bodies. Also assume that your original body dies in a few months and in turn you die as well. If you die as your character and are not raised within time limits you die for real.

Now how would that group behave? That is exactly how I want my gamers behaving. I want them to be motivated adventurers. Will they carefully collect the resources they need to complete the mission? You better believe it they will. Will they master the "rules" of the game and play tactically and strategically at all times? You bet they will. They want to live and they want to complete the mission.

This seems to have nothing to do with immersion in character. Nor with actor stance (which I think is a phrase you've used in the past). It's straight-down-the-line pawn stance!

 

[Emerikol]

Do you not see how the two sentences I bolded above are in opposition? In the first you posit that players of a style differing from yours lack and are unconcerned with skilled play, that they want to shine without doing the work. That is criticism of such players. Then in the second, you say you are merely defending your own gamestyle. You are not; you are explicitly criticizing other gamestyles.

No. Only if you assume skilled play is one of the objectives of the game. I don't mean playing well. I mean specifically the skilled play approach by that name.

How does this square with your desire for realism, verisimilitude, natural developments from a playstyle, and other such of your espoused desiderata of gameplay? What you describe here is a bizarre superimposition of two consciousnesses in a single imagined body, something quite the opposite of what many people would consider real, verisimilitudinous, natural, and so on.

All I can say is that seems to me to be self evident. That behaving like the world is real while in your characters shoes is absolutely a goal of my style of play. That is why I think the way we process things must be so different and that is why we prefer different games. I really don't understand how it could be any other way if that is your goal.

 

[Emerikol]

I agree to an extent. Sometimes it comes across as language policing. Given the way you have described your style, I understand that when you talk about “skilled play”, you’re using a narrow meaning (in the OSR sense, I presume). It can be construed more broadly (e.g., the way I am orchestrating things in our Scum and Villainy game), but that’s different because the nature of our play is different. Given your frequent disclaimers of not being against other styles, I don’t read your posts as having ill intent.

You have correctly understood my post. I feel like I should celebrate. ;-).

 

[Emerikol]

And this is ironically both tied into one of my critiques of 5e and one reason why I find the insistance by OSR players that they have "skilled play" and "combat as war" to be incredibly ironic.

Well I don't play 5e and never have in a campaign. I decided after looking at it that it was best of WOTC and me parted ways.

Meanwhile your proposed OSR solution is to retreat, giving time for the enemy to regroup. Then trying to hold the enemies in a choke point that they know much better than you do. And they enemies also have time to call for help, preventing you defeating them in detail - and also possibly to get things like the boiling oil. Retreating to a choke point is therefore in a living world situation a desperate last resort because it lets the enemies play to their strengths and leaves you stuck. Meanwhile if you come to a room full of enemies that aren't actively waiting for you the appropriate answer should often be to Red Wedding those bastards. Shields are heavy, while polearms and bows are unwieldy. They shouldn't be in hand and probably won't be in reach.

You are moving the goalposts. Sure if you get surprise and can wade into the enemies and kill most of them quickly that is a good strategy. And falling back to a choke point does not mean abandoning a means of escape. For example, if there is a room full of bad guys and they aren't surprised, I'm far better off fighting from the entrance than having the entire party wade into the room. I limit the number of enemies that can attack and I keep the vulnerable party members firing from the rear. Obviously as you go up in level tactics change as the party becomes vastly more powerful and more flexible in what they can do. They still work as a team though.

But realize that the rules of the game are the reality of the world. So your tactics reflect the rules. The rules are the reality.

Preparation and tactics should matter greatly as should creating and seizing opportunities. If you absolutely can't go in and take advantage of the way the enemies are disorganised and unprepared then the game is locking you out of seizing opportunities and quite a lot of ways of taking them. If you have to stay in your battle lines it's much harder to create opportunities. And whenever you retreat to static defences you are surrendering the initiative and giving your opponents to create opportunities.

You made a bunch of assumptions there to make your point. Those assumptions are not always true. In fact, I'd say they are rarely true. But when the planets align as you describe then sure the tactics may vary.

Indeed. I understand why if you want a low effort, low skill means of visiting a world while never having your assumptions challenged your style can be fun. But for reasons I've outlined this low effort playstyle you advocate for ensures that I'm playing a tourist in the world. I'd rather the means and reward to actually inhabit someone who lives there.

Now you are being a jerk. I'm talking about skilled play in OSR games as one of the objectives for fun. I don't hold that everyone has to have that objective to have fun. That is why all these different games exist because people are different and like different things. We all don't drive the same color car either.

In any D&D characters start out with hit points that are basically a consequence free means of taking damage and a class. They start off as a significant cut above average over either 0th level characters or commoners depending on your edition - and that's just the ones who can't cast spells. Gandalf of course was a fifth level magic user.

Oh, agreed. In GURPS I'm not necessarily playing a trainee superhero. Indeed in GURPS I'm probably not playing a trainee superhero and am giving the side-eye if the GM suggested GURPS supers because it's a poor match. In any version of D&D I basically have superpowers from first level for any class except the thief and I'm going to develop into a superhero.

D&D is a game that caters to becoming a super heroic figure in the world. I design worlds that fit that model. I do tend to dispense with the notion pretty quick that everyone in that world is a 0 level person. I never found that very believable.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You are moving the goalposts.

Not in the slightest. Unless you think reacting to a living breathing world as if it was a living breathing world where people aren't always alert is moving the goalposts.

Sure if you get surprise and can wade into the enemies and kill most of them quickly that is a good strategy. And falling back to a choke point does not mean abandoning a means of escape. For example, if there is a room full of bad guys and they aren't surprised, I'm far better off fighting from the entrance than having the entire party wade into the room.

That depends on the makeup of the bad guys and the level to which you don't get surprise. If the room is mostly full of archers then rush them down.

And there's a difference between strategic surprise and tactical surprise. The artificial environments in dungeons normally only cater to one of these. Someone can be caught flat footed with their sword in hand and their shield on their arm. And they can fail to be caught flat footed, able to act and draw their belt knife to fight with when their halberd is in the corner of the room because it's a bloody nuisance and they are playing cards.

I limit the number of enemies that can attack

That depends on how they are armed. If all the enemies are armed with javelins or other missile weapons no you don't. 100% of them can shoot you - and your melee line can't fire back. There is absolutely nothing that forces enemies to follow you when you retreat into a choke. There are occasional times when it's appropriate - but you are saying it's SOP. If it's SOP you are inherently deskilling the game by taking away the judgement call as to which the best approach is.

and I keep the vulnerable party members firing from the rear. Obviously as you go up in level tactics change as the party becomes vastly more powerful and more flexible in what they can do. They still work as a team though.

Indeed. As they do in 4e. But 4e tactics involve countering a range of enemies rather than just dropping back into your own formation. It's not just "as you go up in level" but based on what the enemies do.

But realize that the rules of the game are the reality of the world. So your tactics reflect the rules. The rules are the reality.

On this path lies Order of the Stick. Seriously there are two basic paradigms - the rules of the game are the reality of the world and the rules of the game are the user interface to the world. If the rules are the reality the world is a highly artificial one.

You made a bunch of assumptions there to make your point. Those assumptions are not always true. In fact, I'd say they are rarely true. But when the planets align as you describe then sure the tactics may vary.

Any two planets are always in alignment with each other. I'd say that it is commonly true that either (a) people are not actively carrying a full warrior's load of equipment under normal circumstances (in which case attack before they do is sensible) or (b) that in D&D style play there are at least backup ranged and/or thrown weapons in play from most of the intelligent enemies.

And in 4e we had a nickname for grouping up at a choke point or even not at one. "Fireball formation". "Scorching Burst formation" when we were being pedantic. This didn't mean it was never appropriate - but it's another reason (other than the neutralising the enemy's strengths and that it's more chaotic and more interesting) for 4e characters to press in. Tight packed groups in 4e are asking for trouble. So for that matter are spread out groups letting the individuals get surrounded - you have to work out a balance.

Now you are being a jerk. I'm talking about skilled play in OSR games as one of the objectives for fun. I don't hold that everyone has to have that objective to have fun. That is why all these different games exist because people are different and like different things. We all don't drive the same color car either.

I was specifically responding to you when you talked about people who "just want to shine as their characters without necessarily putting in a lot of effort in terms of playing skill". If you did mean OSR-style skill then (a) you expressed it very badly especially when you referred to the effort put in or the specific skills and (b) you implied that people should by default want OSR-style skill, making it the one true way.

I apologise for responding in anger, using your own words which I knew to be offensive to denigrate your play style in the way you denigrated the playstyles of all other than you. I would therefore request that in the interest of politeness that if you talk about the skill of others you do so precisely rather than in general terms and that you don't criticise the effort of others.