D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[pemerton]

This is actually pretty hilarious, given that you say you can play several characters at the same time? Certainly you could do the same with NPCs?

I dunno. What I posted, in reply to @Campbell, is that I don't. When I GM I'm often thinking about the stuff that @Campbell describes as "necessary evils" - scene framing, adjudicating consequences, managing pacing, etc. I tend to see the NPCs as elements of the setting to be managed/presented like any other part of the setting; I don't generally seek to "inhabit" them. That's something I do as a player - for me it's the key difference between engaging as a player and engaging as a GM. As a player I don't have to worry about all that other stuff - it's someone else's problem!

I don't think not immersing in NPCs same way than into PCs mean they need to be lifeless. Mine certainly aren't. It's just not as method as with the PCs.

Well, I didn't say anything about your NPCs. And I didn't say that mine are lifeless. I said I expect one consequence is that my NPCs are more lifeless than @Campbell's.

But it's not just a conflict. Don't these characters talk to each other all the time? Plans, banter, etc? Do you just have conversations with yourself? Isn't that weird?

I don't roleplay out them talking to one another. One can assume it happens.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Right, I would imagine a process in, say, a PbtA-based murder mystery game going something like the GM setting a scene "You are on the scene of a murder, the victim lies nearby." and then just asking questions of the players, "Detective Bates, are you examining the area? Oh, I'll focus on the victim, what do I see? I don't know Bates, what DO you see? Well, the victim's throat was slashed..." There you go, you now have a murder, there's a victim, there's at least one character investigating. The GM has introduced the FACT of a murder, and the player has defined a, putative, cause of death. These are canonical facts, and maybe others exist too, but this is a perfectly good process! While it is true that it MAY not be a mystery to the players as to who committed the crime, at least not forever, such a game could quite easily arrange for an additional mechanism that would allow that. Certainly it is a mystery at this point to the CHARACTERS! In DW specifically, since it doesn't focus on this sort of plot, chances are the 'mystery' will be largely authored by a combination of the players and the GM such that the characters will be confronted with some sort of dramatic tension.

This actually sounds more like conch-passing than PbtA. I get where you're going, but in PbtA these things should have dramatic weight and be tested with the system rather than just built out like this. Unless this is really background stuff just being built out to frame a scene that goes to the dramatic need?

Honestly though, DOES it work? I mean, sure, for a certain range of play you can rely on a GM to set things up. I've yet to see a murder mystery setup that is guaranteed to work, no matter who the GM is. If the players they happen to get are not playing along in a certain way, then its going to go off the rails. Classic D&D, and in this sense 5e is no different, really doesn't have any PROCESS inherent by which things can 'just work'. Dungeon World OTOH WILL produce some sort of coherent narrative, there will be an 'investigation' and activities and whatnot appropriate to that will happen. If the players aren't playing along with that, then the game will just go some other direction and it won't be an issue, there's not some plotline that will fall apart! Overall it is much more likely to work though, IMHO.

It works because it's been around for 40+ years. It appears to be growing at a nice clip. And people are getting handsome compensation for doing things just like this (looking at you Critical Role).

 

[pemerton]

Like if we would play Story Now in Warhammer 40K universe, then certainly 40K lore would be in some sense binding? So basically what I'm imagining is like that, except it it the world created by the GM, so they're the source of the setting information. Though it wouldn't necessarily even need to be the GM. It could be a world created by one of the players, and then they would be the authority of the setting info.

Maybe the rest of this post is repeating myself: but the issue is not authorship per se but role in play. Is the 40K sourcebook something that the GM can deploy to settle action declarations? In a "story now" game, the answer has to be No.

 

[pemerton]

I believe that @pemerton set his BW play in Greyhawk. There's a certain amount of established material there (more or less depending on which sources you rely on) but a LOT is still pretty much just basic outline. Nobody in that setting is going to author the location of Hardby, but players would be free to put the location of a wizard's tower up for arbitration using a knowledge check.

The map and setting information provide colour, not constraints. For reasons driven by player PC builds, I want to start the game in a town with a bazaar - and so I choose Hardby. Then I need somewhere for an ancient angel feather with a mummy curse to come from, so I choose the Bright Desert. That now starts to set some parameters around what an action declaration might look like, to travel to the source of the feather: but those are not secret backstory or a basis for unilaterally declaring the result of a declared action.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You like the setting and you like the system?


Yeah, I really don't mean 'secrets to be discovered' style of things here.


Sure. But some things are set ahead of time and you will tell them those when relevant. So basically we're just talking about how much that is done.


I'm not really talking about 'discovery' style approach here. Merely one person being the repertoire of the setting knowledge and providing it as needed.

Also, don't many Story Now games actually have an attached setting?

"Setting" is doing a lot of obfuscation here. The setting details in PbtA games is known to all -- there are no secrets in the setting. They also tend to be pretty light, but this isn't required. The 'no secrets' is required. So, in a regular PbtA game, if you have a group of cultists that the PC want to find out more about, then the players of those PCs know exactly as much about the cultists as the GM at any given moment in play. There cannot be details the GM knows that the players don't. Prep can be an odd place, here, because a GM could certainly prep some things, but they cannot be true until they enter play and then only if the system says the GM can introduce that fiction. And since the system absolutely says that secret fiction cannot be a reason to block an action declaration or the adjudication of such, you can't use secret setting details to block anything and you may find out that play completely overwrites whatever you might have had prepped.

In D&D, "setting" means everything the players know AND everything only the GM knows. Both are equally binding on play, and secrets can, and absolutely should, be used to adjudicate the outcome of actions.

 

[pemerton]

I mean, yes you could take any setting and then use a PbtA or similar system to run a game in that setting. But how that setting info is put to use is likely going to be very different.

Any “setting secrets” that may exist should basically be jettisoned. You’d use the commonly known lore…this faction believes that, these people are enemies because of this, and so on.

I agree with this, and it more-or-less describes how I approach the use of GH in BW, the use of imaginary 7th-8th century Britain and Europe in Prince Valiant, etc.

"Setting" is doing a lot of obfuscation here. The setting details in PbtA games is known to all -- there are no secrets in the setting. They also tend to be pretty light, but this isn't required. The 'no secrets' is required. So, in a regular PbtA game, if you have a group of cultists that the PC want to find out more about, then the players of those PCs know exactly as much about the cultists as the GM at any given moment in play. There cannot be details the GM knows that the players don't.

I'm pretty sure I understand what you're saying here, and agree.

But it appears that some confusion is caused by the role of fronts as a GM tool: as I understand it, fronts are roughly GM imagination in advance used as a basis for making moves. This seems to get mushed together with prepared backstory as a basis for "binding" framing and resolution.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Maybe the rest of this post is repeating myself: but the issue is not authorship per se but role in play. Is the 40K sourcebook something that the GM can deploy to settle action declarations? In a "story now" game, the answer has to be No.

It is something that probably wouldn't come across often if the players are committed to playing in the setting and are knowledgeable of it. They simply wouldn't declare actions that wouldn't be possible in the setting. But what if they aren't knowledgeable? What if the player declares an action that shouldn't be possible in the setting, but the player doesn't know it? (Or doesn't care.) Like if in your Prince Valiant game a player declares that their character sails from Scotland to Switzerland on a ship. Is it not OK for the GM to veto that based Switzerland being land locked? (And also not existing during the era the game is set.)

 

[pemerton]

It is something that probably wouldn't come across often if the players are committed to playing in the setting and are knowledgeable of it. They simply wouldn't declare actions that wouldn't be possible in the setting. But what if they aren't knowledgeable? What if the player declares an action that shouldn't be possible in the setting, but the player doesn't know it? (Or doesn't care.) Like if in your Prince Valiant game a player declares that their character sails from Scotland to Switzerland on a ship. Is it not OK for the GM to veto that based Switzerland being land locked? (And also not existing during the era the game is set.)

Well, if you've got a map there that everyone can look at, then the question's not going to come up, is it?

 

[Lanefan]

In theory. If you track time with such detail. Which I don't.

I do, largely for reasons of realism and believability and because sometimes things are going on in the background. Never mind I have multiple active parties in my setting all running concurrently in game time even though they're not all being played at once in real time, and keeping careful track of which character(s) are where and-or doing what at any given time is essential in case someone else ends up there as well or if one character/group should happen to scry another.

Nah. Such dramatic timing is perfectly fine. And I'm sure most GMs do it to some degree. The interesting thing happens at the place the PCs are and when they are there.

Also, it matters if the issue was presented as highly time sensitive in the first place. And often it isn't.

Yeah, it's very hard to do this "dramatic timing" and not have it feel contrived.

My poster child for this has become Keep on the Shadowfell. In reading through it, it's presented such that the PCs are on a clock; but in-game there's no real way for the PCs to learn they're on said clock until they reach the final (or second-last?) encounter of a decent-size dungeon complex.

When I ran it the party took three in-game months (!) to get through it, largely due to taking numerous two-week trips back to town every time something went wrong (usually, a PC death). Realistically the BBEG should have starved to death long before the PCs ever got to him! But, I stuck to the script and ran the final encounter as-written; and afterwards the players (quite rightly, IMO) called me on it. Lesson learned.

 

[Lanefan]

This is interesting. As a GM I don't find myself inhabiting NPCs in the same way I do my character as a player. I expect one consequence is that my NPCs are more lifeless than yours. It's probably something I should work on.

Ditto.

There's some NPCs who I can inhabit pretty easily, while others - including some long-time party mentor types, etc. - just don't resonate at all; and guaranteed that comes across in how I play them.