D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[pemerton]

Okay. Why would someone play for advancement vs not?

People like having bigger numbers? They like the feel of their PC being more powerful/competent?

The desire to advance one's PC is fairly widespread among RPGers.

I'm asking whether you can even evaluate whether one will generally be more successful at whatever challenges the game puts in your way. My impression is that the answer is most likely no.

1. The challenges change depending on your character goals/beliefs which makes things rather difficult to evaluate.
2. Even if you made a character with the same goals/beliefs/connections/etc presumably you could customize some other aspects of said character. Would any of those other aspects lead to having greater success at obtaining their goals?

BW doesn't use random PC gen. It's a type of intricate, multi-faceted points-buy, filtered through a lifepath system. So I could have built The Fisherman differently. I could have chosen a different second lifepath, which would have allowed choosing different skills, or perhaps more resource points. Or even on the current lifepaths, I could have chosen Fishing B4 and Mending B2, instead of B3 in each; then the character would be better at fishing, but not as good at mending.

The general idea is to build towards the particular vision you have of the character - who they are, what they've done, what they can do. Being familiar with the lifepath options, and the range of skills and traits, helps with this.

 

[clearstream]

It would have been great if an experienced Burning Wheel GM had been posting for the past many pages that "fail forward" is a label for resolution where "nothing happens" is not an option . . .

Indeed!

Where Daggerheart is incomplete is that it misses the other aspect of "fail forward"/"no whiffing", namely, that failure need not be narrated as incompetence on the part of the acting character.

From the section on GM guidance

If a roll doesn’t go well, show how it was impacted by an adversary’s prowess, environmental factors, or unexpected surprises, rather than the PC’s incompetence.​

 

[pemerton]

To the players, it appears that their choices would have mattered--"oh no, there is a cook here, we should have gone in through the window". But if they went through the window then there wouldn't have been a cook in the kitchen. It appears the choice matters, but it doesn't.

As I've already posted, there are ways for a choice to matter other than the sorts of instrumental ones you seem to be foregrounding.

And even within the domain of the instrumental, there are ways for choices to matter: different options may enliven different skill rolls, and may thus affect the prospects of success.

And as @Campbell has said, you are putting forward a poor bit of GMing in an attempt to illustrate the limitations of a technique. It's as if I adduced the boring dungeon I build when I was 12 to show how bad OSR play must be. This is why I have invited you, and other posters, to engage with actual examples from actual play, rather than silly examples.

 

[pemerton]

If you have a better example provide it.

I've provided many examples. Most are from actual play, but I posted an imagined one involving a cook:

I think we can take it that the cook screaming is a hard move. So let's reason back - what player-side move failed, such that the cook was startled and screamed? The most obvious candidate is Act Under Fire.

So what was the character doing? Maybe they're the advance scout for the assault on Dremmer's compound:

First, let's imagine the player recites their PC's knowledge - it's a bit artificial as an example of play, but provides some context.

"I know that Dremmer has a storeroom at the edge of the compound, with a gate for taking deliveries. There's a fancy electronic lock on it, so it's not well guarded. I reckon I can crack that lock and sneak in."

The GM nods: "OK, so you're at the gate to the storeroom. It's locked like you expected. It's not well guarded, but that doesn't mean no one ever comes by here. You haven't got all night."

"OK, I bust out my tools and work on the lock, as quickly as I can."

"That Acting Under Fire, and the fire is - you'll be spotted before you're in." The player rolls, and succeeds on a 7 to 9. The GM offers an ugly choice: "You get it open, but you can hear someone's coming. And you can't see yet what's on the other side of the gate. Do you go through into whatever's there? Or wait to see who comes?"

The player decides to go in. "There's someone in there with a torch. Looks like Dremmer's cook Pattycakes, come to grab a fresh bag of chowder powder. What do you do?"

At this point the player has a few choices, but let's suppose that, whatever they do, it fails on a 6 or less. And so the GM narrates that Pattycakes spots them and screams.

I assume that DW could play out in a pretty similar sort of way.

 

[pemerton]

How so?

Because the "quantum" label is being applied to a technique. But you refer to the thief - a character in the fiction - as the observer.

In the fiction, the cook is doing whatever the cook is doing, where ever the cook happens to be. The moment and manner of authorship - the thing that happens in the real world, and is being labelled "quantum" - is not a property of things within the fiction.

 

[TwoSix]

The number on the die is there specifically to inform the narrative result, isn't it?

Yeah, another hideous mechanic that needs to die in a very hot fire and for the same reason: fail = fail.

Unless the rules say otherwise, of course.

Or are you saying those rules are wrong?

 

[Lanefan]

I think the point of the example was that there were nothing in there preventing infinite rerolls..

Ah. In my take there's no such thing as infinite rerolls - the roll you make represents the best you're gonna do until-unless something materially changes in the fiction.

The detail that fixes this for most trad is that "nothing to learn from the lock itself" is typically not true. In most trad you get to learn that the lock is beyond your abilities (until you level)

Or that for some reason you just ain't got what it takes at the moment. Maybe it could even be as simple as waiting for daylight because you need the better lighting.

 

[pemerton]

because it's creating a connection between two fundamentally unrelated events, why should the presence of the cook be at all dependent on the rogue's ability to pick locks?

The answer to this is: the dice roll is a thing that happens at the table. It's purpose is to determine whether or not the attempt to pick the lock goes well. If the roll fails, the attempt does not go well. And the GM's job is to explain what that not going well looks like. One way for breaking and entering to not go well is that you inadvertently startle someone. And so that's what the GM narrates.

Notice that, as described, the purpose of the roll is not to find out what effects (in the fiction) are caused (in the fiction) by the rogue's use of the lockpick. To repeat, the purpose of the roll is to find out if the rogue's attempt to pick the lock goes well.

If you want every roll to have the function of determining in-fiction effects of in-fiction causes, rather than to determine whether or not attempts to do things go well, then you will probably not want to play Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel or other RPGs that use "fail forward" or similar techniques. I would suggest Rolemaster or RuneQuest.

 

[pemerton]

If the cook example is bad, why was it used as an official example of the technique?

"Official" where? It's not found in any rulebook I know of, but obviously I don't know every rulebook.

And if you're supposed to be really good for the technique to not feel clumsy, shouldn't that information be available in the games that demand its use?

All the rulebooks that I know provide examples and advice.

 

[pemerton]

I would never run a game where the player's choices were determine by anything other than the player

I don't think anyone would! Because choices determined by someone other than the player would, of necessity, not be the player's.