I'm curious how you feel your position (as a big time 4e advocate...like myself) on Spout Lore and Story Now content generation squares with your 4e love (which is riddled with Story Now generation and stance drift).
It would seem to me that someone cognitively captured or preoccupied (pick whichever word you feel describes your disposition) by this particular strain (as it pertains to TTRPGs) of internal causality modeling you're espousing would fall on a particular side of the edition war fault line (eg not the side you appear to be on!) of Martial Dailies and Come and Get It and Streetwise and Damage on a Miss and Fail Forward Consequence Generation and Warlords Shouting Back HPs (to use the edition warrior's trope that attempts to hang 4e D&D by the damage : HP internal causality petard) after a vicious combat with any capable D&D foe (take your pick)!
How do you feel your position on Spout Lore and Story Now content generation in Dungeon World squares with your love of 4e (particularly these things above)?
Okay. Started replying to this earlier but kept getting distracted. I
like how 4e did things. Some of this comes from my "gamist" values--which are also part of why I like Dungeon World, e.g. its "carrot" alignment model or rewarding failed rolls with XP--it can use a linear XP chart (your next level is always 7+current level XP away) because, as your stats increase, you'll roll fewer 6- rolls, and thus naturally level up more slowly--but this is diegetic, because it's literally representing your character having
less to learn from things they're good at doing.
With 4e, I have no problem accepting a rather abstracted idea of what a combat round is because a combat round is an inherently and expectedly abstract thing. I see no more issue with "will my hit land or not" than I do with "will I have an opening for my Come and Get It maneuver." Further, there are several places where, like the above example with XP, I see 4e mechanics as
being the flavor, that is, there's no separation between understanding what the mechanic means and understanding what the flavor is, with the 4e version of Lay on Hands being my (heh) ready-to-hand example. It was always kinda boring to me prior to 4e (and 5e returned to that form), where it was just a pool of points. In 4e, it is literally "I give of myself, to replenish you." You are sacrificing some of your own vitality in order to restore someone else's; the flavor (making sacrifices for others) is
literally the mechanics (you spend a surge but someone else gets the healing). Many of the other things you mention are similarly...not a problem for me. I have zero problems with Warlords being
fantastical without being
magical; they are warriors who can go toe-to-toe with bus-sized fire-breathing lizards, they're already fantastical, there's no loss of groundedness by taking a
very slightly generous interpretation of the whole "if you can keep someone's homeostatic equilibrium up, they can survive otherwise fatal wounds" thing that really does happen IRL.
I don't see hit points as representing anything more than...hit points, an abstract measure of your staying power. They can be luck, or grit, or stamina, or a bit of actual meat, or a ton of other things--that's not quantum in my book, it's just that the mechanic from the outset does not commit to a singular
thing it represents, in exactly the same way as "a hit roll" or "a saving throw" does not commit to a singular physical
thing it represents, it's just a mechanic that intentionally covers a huge variety of (at best) vaguely-related events.
My issue with the causation thing WRT the "caper" and similar is very specifically how it ties the causality into knots, which I'll cover more later. It bothers me a great deal to have "evidence" (presumptively carriers of
facts about something) that only exist because of some prior event....but whose significance cannot,
even in principle, exist until
after someone (player or DM)
declares what their significance always was. But like I said, I'll come back to that as I respond to pemerton.
Well, that's not how I use it, how
@Manbearcat uses it, how
@Ovinomancer uses it, or how Ron Edwards uses it.
If Force just meant
the GM deciding something then it would not be a very useful analytical tool, because nearly every moment of RPGing involves the GM deciding something (eg if a player has their PC approach a NPC to talk to them, the GM has to decide what the NPC says; that is not, per se, Force as any of those I just mentioned use the term).
Then I have been understanding the term incorrectly, so I apologize. However, looking it up...I'm not getting very good/useful definitions.
One usage even seems to exactly reflect the way I described it: "Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems embedded in it and
the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome." Now, admittedly, it sounds like Jesse got something wrong there as Ron corrects them, but it certainly isn't helping things. The only other thing my google-fu turned up was the
provisional glossary, which wasn't very helpful: "Force: A Forge term for control over the protagonist characters' thematically-significant decisions by anyone who is not the character's player. It is considered an awkward term by Ron Edwards because of (1) its sense of imposed mandate and strength-in-control, and (2) its parodic Star Wars connotation. Originally called "GM-oomph" (Ron Edwards), then "GM-Force" (Mike Holmes)." (I could not find a non-provisional glossary, so I assume this is the best I can get.)
I still don't know how you would reconcile this with your stated preference for backstory-based mysteries. I mean, if you decide this at a particular moment of play, it was not something written in your notes that the players might have learned, by provoking you to reveal it via their action declarations, at some earlier moment of play.
Because there isn't already-obtained evidence that could (apparently) point literally anywhere until someone (a player on a good roll, me on a bad roll, whatever)
declares what they mean-and-always-meant. This is literally discovering the evidence
in the moment and realizing what it means
in that same moment. There is never any period where the evidence, from a "Doylist" perspective, points in seven different directions until it doesn't; there is only the evidence and its meaning generated
in the same moment. The players get
deceived by NPCs all the time, so it's hardly a bizarro thing that "super rich person" ends up having nefarious connections (really, it's almost a surprise if such folks
don't have such a thing somewhere! You gotta be at least a little ruthless to get to the top.)
Again, my issue isn't "it wasn't in my notes" (I accept TONS of things from my players that were never in my notes). It isn't "the group discovers something together, me included," because I quite
like it when my players reveal things of that nature in some contexts. It's very specifically:
1) there is already-acquired, extant evidence which (logically) must point to something specific (e.g. "don't touch the murder weapon! We need to dust it for prints!" or "the body had a torn-off piece of costume clenched in its fist--the murderer must not have noticed it being removed!"), the players just don't know what these things might mean yet
2) the player rolls an attempt to discover more about the situation
3)
because of the result of that roll, whether good or bad, someone declares that,
now, all of the extant evidence points toward Suspect Q instead of Suspects M, N, O, P, or R
4) As a result, the guilt-declaration
makes the clues point to the person who,
now,
always was guilty.
That very specific thing--
declaring that a particular person did the deed,
so now the evidence reflects that--is what bothers me. It is the past being rewritten so that it
always did support whatever the present now says, for good or for ill, no matter what.
Essentially...I cannot see this as an example of "principled" authorship. It feels inherently unprincipled, because it means the clues were
worthless (as in, they had literally zero ability to indicate who
actually was guilty) up until the moment that guilt was declared, and then they become retroactively damning. That bothers me, a great deal.
I don't see how this is to be reconciled with what you said just above, about going with something like such-and-such a NPC was secretly one of them.
I dunno what to say then. No one among us has a problem with that sort of thing. It doesn't feel like a caper-being-solved. It feels like a dramatic reveal. Perhaps it helps that they only knew a very small amount about this person? There wasn't any "evidence" to point wrong ways, really--they had a single meeting with her, proposed the honey-trap caravan, and executed it. Her being secretly a cultist would have been a nasty shock, but would not have triggered any "the pieces were all there, we could've seen it" things, unlike other things that (I personally) would call
actual mysteries, things being pieced together from
evidence, rather than mere shocking reveals or unknown things.
(I very much feel like I'm struggling incredibly hard against a wall of insistent terminology; "mystery" being taken at its
absolute broadest possible meaning, aka "literally anything that isn't yet known," as opposed to the pretty clear "murder caper" meaning I had been using; treating ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING that might be a reveal or twist as having to work exactly the same way when...it doesn't have to, because some things can be built up to over time while others are sudden and dramatic without such prior work
and that's okay.)
I don't see how you can avoid this. <snip> RPGing is rife with this sort of thing.
You take me to mean more than I intended to claim. Again, you're hyper-generalizing this to literally all possible situations and...that's not what I do.
It really, truly is exclusively about the piecing-it-together thing, about reasoning through it
from evidence. If there was never an opportunity to collect evidence, then it's not a "mystery" as I'm using the term. If there was, and those things are established, then
whether I prepped them or not, they need to point to something. Evidence that is somehow empty of explanatory content until
after one declares what it explains...isn't evidence, it's just a prop, a plastic facsimile. The pearls have been outed as mere glass beads, the diamond is merely paste, the dagger.
And if these things
aren't empty of explanatory content, then they can't just be subject to player declarations. The players are inherently hemmed in, unable to freely declare whatever-they-like if they roll well (just as I am unable to freely declare whatever-I-like if they roll poorly).
The player saying, "Hey, I wanna find a candy shop," and us improvising that out? Has literally nothing to do with this. Completely different field. There is no evidence nor any gathering thereof, there is no reasoning-through-it process. There is no possibility of "the player declaration
makes the evidence mean what the player declared." There is no possibility of the good-or-bad player roll
rewriting the evidence so that it now means, and as of now
always has meant, whatever was declared. There's just..."hey, do sweet shops exist?" "Sure, this is a big city, there's tons, what in specific are you looking for?" "Well, back in Jinnistan, we had some awesome food at the hotel when the sultan paid for our stay, I figured there was probably some candy in there...and I've never
had candy before, let alone posh Jinnistani candy. My mind has been blown and I want more." "Alright, awesome, you head over to the fancy-pants shopping district (where people give you the stink eye due to your decidedly non-posh appearance) and..." etc. That's not uncovering the solution to a "mystery" (as I am using the term) via reasoning about evidence. It's certainly declaring things about the world, but not
making past evidence conform to
present declarations.
I'm still curious as to what RPG you have in mind here.
Dungeon World. Isn't that what we've been talking about? Isn't that the
whole problem you've had with my stuff, that there was already a murderer and evidence to find and that that is Absolute Anathema for playing Dungeon World Correctly™? Because I'm coercing my players into behaving exactly the way I always planned and just pulling the wool over their eyes about any perception of "freedom" or "choice" or the like?
