D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Campbell]

This is quite a reductive view of fiction! Take any story--A Tale of Two Cities, Star Wars, Parable of the Sower--keep the setting and the minor characters, but change the protagonists. Give them different personalities, motivations, and skill sets. Would the story change in a pretty fundamental way? Probably!

In an RPG, and adventure path provides some of the elements of a story, but it is incomplete. To make it complete, it requires characters. Who those characters are, the choices they make, and who they become can significantly alter the end story. How and the degree to which the adventure changes will depend on the style and temperament of the group.

It would be like describing Lord of the Rings by saying "Well there was this evil ring and yada yada yada some people (doesn't matter who, could've been anybody) threw it in a fire and the world was saved." The journey is the whole story!

I mean it's fairly obvious to me that people are making comparative claims. When they say Adventure Paths feel passive and characters feel interchangeable it's in comparison to other sorts of play. They are essentially saying that they want their characters to matter more than is typical of Adventure Path play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This is quite a reductive view of fiction! Take any story--A Tale of Two Cities, Star Wars, Parable of the Sower--keep the setting and the minor characters, but change the protagonists. Give them different personalities, motivations, and skill sets. Would the story change in a pretty fundamental way? Probably!

Yes, of course it will, but the act of creating the fiction is the same. I haven't once said that the outcome in play is the same if you imagine an orc being struck by a sword versus a forge. That would be silly. I've said that the process of creation is the same, with the same distributions of authority, system say, and constraints on outcome between 5e (for the combat) and DW (for spout lore). This isn't at all suggesting the story told is the same.

In an RPG, and adventure path provides some of the elements of a story, but it is incomplete. To make it complete, it requires characters. Who those characters are, the choices they make, and who they become can significantly alter the end story. How and the degree to which the adventure changes will depend on the style and temperament of the group.

There is no choice made by the characters in CoS that alters the fact that you have to defeat Strahd to escape Barovia. None. You get a different set of details, but the bits in the adventure book do not change. Have different parties, same adventure. Again, the details of their story will change -- one group can tell a thrilling tale of encountering and defeating the hags in the windmill to get the Raven amulet, one were they barely escaped with their lives and another group can say that they got the amulet from elsewhere and it was super easy. And neither of these things will change the location of the sun sword or what's guarding it for those groups.

It would be like describing Lord of the Rings by saying "Well there was this evil ring and yada yada yada some people (doesn't matter who, could've been anybody) threw it in a fire and the world was saved." The journey is the whole story!

Except that in an AP, it doesn't matter if you have Frodo and Sam and Aragorn. You could have Bob and Sue and Larry -- the AP doesn't care and will create a slightly different story with different details about how Bob carried the Ring to Mordor and tossed it into the fire. I say slightly different because the main story beats are all going to be the same.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I mean it's fairly obvious to me that people are making comparative claims. When they say Adventure Paths feel passive and characters feel interchangeable it's in comparison to other sorts of play. They are essentially saying that they want their characters to matter more than is typical of Adventure Path play.

Yes, and also a bit no. I can take a completely pawn stance character through an AP and it doesn't change versus a deep backstory, carefully considered character. The play at the table will be different, yes, in tone and execution of characterizations, but the arc of the play will have the same beats in roughly the same places and timings.

Again, a point towards this argument is that you can have a PC die in an AP, and bring in an replacement PC, but nothing in the AP writeup changes when you do this. Same beats, different character. I don't think this claim is comparative, because I don't need to compare this to another mode of play to make this observation and point.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So a question about the idea of Spout Lore and the establishment of the dwarven forge.

If in a game of D&D, if the player suggested that to the DM, and the DM decided that yes, there is a dwarven forge in the area, would anyone have a problem with this?

It would appear not. Yet this is the player suggesting the existence of something and then that thing winds up in the fictional world. In that sense, it’s no different than a player using Spout Lore in DW and getting a 10+ and the GM then establishing it as interesting/useful information.

So if the same thing can happen in D&D….the spontaneous creation of this dwarven forge…then what’s the actual difference? What is the issue with the way DW works when D&D may do the same thing?

Is it the approval from the DM? Is that what makes it somehow “real” or acceptable? That the DM has the option to just say no?

What is it?

 

[Malmuria]

So a question about the idea of Spout Lore and the establishment of the dwarven forge.

If in a game of D&D, if the player suggested that to the DM, and the DM decided that yes, there is a dwarven forge in the area, would anyone have a problem with this?

It would appear not. Yet this is the player suggesting the existence of something and then that thing winds up in the fictional world. In that sense, it’s no different than a player using Spout Lore in DW and getting a 10+ and the GM then establishing it as interesting/useful information.

So if the same thing can happen in D&D….the spontaneous creation of this dwarven forge…then what’s the actual difference? What is the issue with the way DW works when D&D may do the same thing?

Is it the approval from the DM? Is that what makes it somehow “real” or acceptable? That the DM has the option to just say no?

What is it?

So in your view are DW and Dnd radically different games or quite similar, such that you could run a dnd game with dw principles very easily?

 

[pemerton]

Rearranged was probably a bad choice of words; it does assume a prior state. Though, depending on the scale of creation, it can still feel disruptive

Disruptive of what? Preconceptions? Whose? We can only be talking about the GM's - because the players are learning stuff "on the fly" all the time in a typical D&D setting.

Which brings us right back to questions about who has what sort of authority over backstory, to be exercised in accordance with what principles? Until that is set out, there is no basis for the deployment of notions like disruption or rearrangement.

 

[pemerton]

To touch on a point in the back-and-forth that hasn’t been discussed, it is summarized by a single number that does not vary based on external circumstances. A 10+ is a success and a 7-9 is a success with consequences whether you are in dwarven country, a tundra or a forest. An Orc’s AC varies based on the armor he is wearing, whether he is prone, or bearing a shirld.

Yes, AW uses fixed spreads. "Difficulties" are handled purely in the fiction, not in the maths.

Burning Wheel does not use fixed spreads: it uses "objective" DCs similar to (say) Rolemaster or Classic Traveller. Does this lead you to accept that there is nothing weird about the use of a Wises check in BW, against an appropriate DC, to establish that a PC knows of the existence of a Dwarven forge?

 

[pemerton]

Why are you incapable of seeing one shows in-setting cause and effect and the other doesn't? The difference is pretty clear to me, and I suspect it is to plenty of others.

Look, I don't have a bit of an issue with what is, in practice, dramatic editing. I just don't see a reason to kid myself there's a difference between that and things that are direct, visible results of in-character action.

The visible result of a successful to hit roll, in D&D, is that the Orc is hit. A necessary condition of that is that the Orc failed to dodge - but in D&D (unlike RuneQuest) that is not modelled. We read the Orc's behaviour off the player's roll for their PC.

The visible result of the character's action, in the case of Spout Lore, is that they remember something. That happens all the time in the real world - eg I just turned my mind to it and remembered the @Manbearcat lives in Florida, and I also just now recalled that you knew/worked with at least some of the early RQ designers.

A necessary condition of a character correctly remembering X is that X is the case. We read that bit of the fiction, too, off the player's roll for their PC.

The structure is identical. It's only the subject-matter that's different.

Here's another subject-matter difference: the Orc's failure to dodge occurs, in the fiction, around the same time as the PC's attack. Whereas obviously the construction of the Dwarven forge happened some time before the PC recalled its existence. But that difference of time is a difference of subject-matter (ie the topic of the fiction), not a difference of authorial process or structure.

I also don't understand how or why you describe it as "dramatic editing". What is being edited? Editing is a process undertaken in respect of an already-authored work. In the Dwarven forge case there is no work that is being edited. Authorship is occurring in the moment of play. There is no editing.

(JRRT wrote some stuff about what Celeborn and Galadriel did at Ost-in-Edhel subsequently to having written LotR. That wasn't editing; it was writing new stuff that happened to take place at an earlier fictional time. Nothing about the process or logic of RPGing requires that authorship occur in the a time-sequence that mirrors the in-fiction time-sequence, and Gygax actually recommends something different in his DMG.)

 

[pemerton]

The difference is, the thing doesn't actually exist in the fiction in any way until they do so. Again, that doesn't matter to me, but it does to others.

It does exist in the fiction. See my post just above.

I mean, in D&D ALL THE TIME GMs add new content to their worlds which, in in-fiction time, occurred or was built prior to the "present" date at which play is taking place.

At a D&D table, as @Ovinomancer pointed out way upthread, it would be completely unremarkable for a player to ask What do I know about Dwarven forges around here and the GM to give an answer that involves making up some new fiction (including new fiction about the past of the campaign world).

DW isn't differing from this one iota in its approach to authorship. The difference is in authority and influence over the outcomes of players declaring that their PCs attempt to recall stuff. It's about methods and principles of action resolution: notions of "disrupting" or "rearranging" or "editing" the fiction are as inapposite in the DW case as they are in the D&D case that Ovinomancer and I have described.

 

[pemerton]

For some folks posting here who run these games, "interesting and/or useful" seems to mean just that - it could be the forge existed the way the player has the character remember it, or it could easily be something else interesting and/or useful to the player that the DM puts in. That seems not that different to me from the way I've seen some things happen in D&D games - albeit with a formal structure not present in D&D and with the conceit of the character remembering it.

For other folks posting here who run these games, it sounds like the words "interesting and/or useful" aren't as broad as they sound when read by an outsider, and almost certainly means the forge would exists the way the player has the character remember it. The equivalent in the D&D game could seemingly be a ring that had a fairly high chance of creating whatever the player had the characters want/remember.

It feels like these two different ways of running it would result in two very different games (and the disagreement between some of those posting on each side seems to back that up) and would give the players very different levels of authorial/narrative control.

Maybe. Everyone has their own approach to RPGing. My BW GM is a better GM than I am, in part because he is better than me at really bringing home the consequences of failed checks.

But I don't think this has any bearing on the main current topic about "quantum whatever", does it? I mean, if a D&D GM can grant a player permission to have their PC remember something, without that being "quantum" or "editing" or "retconning" or whatever, then why is it different in DW just because the authority structures are not the same?