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

[hawkeyefan]

I notice those are both combat examples, and in combat the foes can generally see what each other is doing - each is "known information" to the other.

In the thief-cook example, though, the presence of the cook is potentially hidden information - how can the player roll anything for her - or related to her - without giving away far too much info in the metagame?

First is you stop caring about the “metagame”. There’s just the game.

Second, you telegraph danger ahead of time. Or at the very least, you establish what the likely risk is, the stakes of the roll. You let the player know “okay this sounds like a Stealth roll… what’s at risk here is discovery, so don’t fail!” and then you have them roll. I would likely be a bit more descriptive in the nature of the discovery… but that may not be necessary.

Then they roll, and if they fail, you already know the consequences… so you follow through on that.

 

[pemerton]

were enough to cause you to go from disliking all the previous iterations of d&d to liking 4e d&d?

Where did I say that I dislike all the previous iterations of D&D?

 

[Xetheral]

Yes. Some minor nitpick. With "recommendable" I meant it might be something that it might be possible to formulate a recommendation to use. You just made such a formulation

The more controversial point is that I feel like the last condition (the GM wants to avoid 'nothing happens' as a potential outcome) is a bit too passive. You are already stating that it is a "useful technique" which indicate that it is not a requirement in any situation. So I think the advice is stronger if it promotes its intended usecase/purpose a bit more agressively. Something like: ".., Fail Forward can be a useful technique in traditional play for preventing the game to stall."

Regarding undermining PCs previous choices. To me it isn't obvious what that would entail? It is clear from the context that it includes previous risk mitigation, but without this context I think I wouldn't recognize that. Risk mitigation appear to be the obvious case of this technique working against player agency, so I think it would be clearer to have a reminder about this particular potential conflict. Or is there anything else in particular you have in mind? In particular anything that is still needed to be mention given that the integrity of the fiction should be ensured by criteria 3 (The fail condition make full sense in the fiction as a consequence of failing the action)

I'd be ok with the more-specific emphasis on preventing a game stall. I'm curious, though, if that's too specific a purpose from the perspective of the posters advocating for the adoption of fail forward techniques in traditional games?

In terms of the language regarding undermining PC choices, I'm just not 100% confident that risk mitigation is the only pertinent type of choice. But you make a good point that specifically mentioning risk mitigation would be clearer, so what about going with:

"If these conditions are met and wouldn't undermine any of the PCs' previous choices (such as by obviating PC efforts at risk mitigation), Fail Forward can be a useful technique in traditional play to prevent the game from stalling on a failed check."

Does that language work for you?

 

[Xetheral]

I agree with your last paragraph. I believe many folks have a good idea of what they’re looking for in a game and select games and gaming methods accordingly.

However, I also think that there’s plenty of people who don’t fully understand the things they’re claiming not to like. And when they elaborate or put forth their ideas on those things, this lack of understanding becomes clear.

Some of the posts in this thread are, therefore, not about trying to tell anyone their preferences are wrong or even that they’d adopt such and such game if only they understood it… but rather about correcting misconceptions or outright falsehoods about a game.

I don't disagree with your assesment of many of the posts in this thread. My response was intended to be limited to your specific complaint that it's exhausting when GMs who favor traditional styles "outright reject" incorporating techniques to avoid "nothing happens" outcomes in their traditional games. That would seem to me to be separate (or at least separable) from any misunderstanding on the part of those GMs regarding how particular narrativist games work.

Regarding your earlier point about risk mitigation and long term goals… I have never really struggled to see either one in the narrativist games I’ve run and played. So I don’t agree with your assessment.

Interesting! Quite a ways upthread pemerton wrote...

Just so we're all clear: managing risk and avoiding obstacles are not the only dimensions of meaning that are possible in RPGing.

In games that use "fail forward" resolution, they are typically not that important at all.

... which I read to be saying that risk mitigation isn't really part of the purpose of play in narrative games. Do you disagree? Or perhaps I'm reading too much into either what you or he wrote?

My own experience with narrative games is limited to PbtA, and my experience can best be described as a "complication explosion." Making progress towards longer-term goals wasn't really a thing, because play was spent dealing with the ever-increasing number of complications that began with the early scenes. Risk mitigation was similarly not much of a part of play, as mitigating a future risk usually required a roll that itself risked creating a new complication. I thought that this was PbtA working as intended, with an immediate focus on the current scene and the resulting complications then leading to the next scene? If there was a way to set longer-term goals and strategically make progress towards them in PbtA, wouldn't that be an "adventure" of the sort that narrativist games reportedly eschew? (See, e.g., this post.)

If there's indeed a way to strategically mitigate risk in pursuit of progress towards longer-term goals in narrative games, I'd love to hear more about it. How has it worked in your experience?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here is what he says about Pendragon, in the blog:

Pendragon is a prime example of a [substantial exploration] game, as the purpose of its existence is to be this massive exegesis and love letter to the Matter of Britain. If the players don’t appreciate it yet, they will. Aside from folklore studies, the game features [GM story hour] in a big way. The character player side is interesting in that it’s [subjective experiencing + dollhousing] without as much as [princess play] focus as you’d normally expect; the characters are intentionally relatively generic.​

Here is what he says about "substantial exploration":

“Substantial exploration” is a type of game that involves a major external reference source. This is not just a big pile of GM notes; every player may or may not be familiar with the source material, but either way, exploring this material is core to the game’s creative purpose. . . . a game could conceivably be completely about substantial exploration creatively. You might have some player characters, I don’t know, adventuring and stuff, but that’s just the excuse, and what we’re really into here is [the material]​

He does allow that Pendragon isn't completely about substantial exploration: it also has the player-side elements he mentions. But I think you're right to say that he doesn't go into this in real detail. Ron Edwards said a bit more about it 20+ years ago, in his review of Wuthering Heights and also this in the "right to dream" essay (where he is comparing Pendragon Traits and Passions to The Riddle of Steel's Spiritual Attributes, with a side discussion of GURPS behavioural disadvantages):

a character in Narrativist play is by definition a thematic time-bomb, whereas, for a character in Simulationist play, the bomb is either absent (the GURPS samurai), present in a state of near-constant detonation (the Pendragon knight, using Passions), or its detonation is integrated into the in-game behavioral resolution system in a "tracked" fashion (the Pendragon knight, using the dichotomous traits). Therefore, when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim. Whereas enjoying the in-game system activity of a thematic issue is perfectly do-able in Sim, without that proactivity being necessary.​

I think that this fits with what you say about "a legacy of embedding character mentality into the mechanics of the game to help us immerse into our characters . . . that inspired Narrativist designs".

If I've understood your properly, this seems to agree (at least roughly) with what I said about the "thin boundary" between "simulationism" and "narrativism" when it comes to these aspects of character psychology, and the way mechanics pick them up in various ways.

I think this also fits with Edwards - given how easy it is to "get proactive about an emotional thematic issue", the transition "out of Sim" to narrativism seems easy to do.

In my own play, I look at how I play Aedhros and Thurgon, and the pleasure that I get from that inhabitation, and think about where it fits in this "simulationist"/"narrativist" contrast. I think I'm mostly on the "out of Sim" side of things, because of a degree of proactivity about emotional thematic issues, but I don't think it's a huge distance that we're talking about here. When it comes to Aedhros, I can almost pin it down to one moment of play:
This is where Aedhros's attitude to Alicia started to change. She hasn't become a surrogate for his dead spouse (and it would be pre-emptive to say "hasn't yet become"), but his contempt reduced and sympathy increased.

I feel that's an example of a "poof, you're out of Sim" moment.

Well, obviously there's plenty of mechanics involved in the various tests, but the process of updating your beliefs doesn't seem to be at all 'sim', nor even really constrained by the mechanics. It is definitely a kind of Narrativist artifice, you chose to change, and you chose changes which followed fictionally from the situation. This is very parallel to some of the action in our 1KA game where drives would clearly need to be updated, and analogous things happen in AW (and DW too, though it doesn't dwell as much on it).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I found this an enlightening post. Where if anywhere, do you then locate differences?

Does narrativism wind up being a subset of simulationism? Simulationism in the dramatic mode, so to speak?

No.

Certainly what is discussed on EnWorld generally as 'simulation(ism)' is at best unrelated to Narrativist play goals. Like in our 1KA game we use elements of historical Sengoku politics and whatnot as inputs, but they simply exist like any other fiction to structure play, to create constraints and obstacles, etc. And while our depiction of characters, RP, has authenticity as a constraint as well, we're not really interested in simulating people that might have actually existed in 16th Century Japan. I think some of the other posters would want to 'feel like they were there' in the setting and not have anything happen that wasn't very similar to real events. Our game did not care about that!

 

[Thomas Shey]

But I think once you look at the wider world of RPGs… at how radically different from D&D an RPG can be… well, I don’t know if the changes made for 4e seem anywhere near as significant.

That was how I felt when I saw it; the most radical thing seemed the handling of spells and the attack rolls against Reflex, Fortitude and Will. The rest of it looked, well, just like another D&D version to me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The sort of "character crucible" play some folks here enjoy I legit really don't see that much elsewhere in the communities around PBTA/FITD, and seems to be largely best exemplified by some early PBTAs like Monsterhearts and Masks that are as far as I can tell intentionally designed around "putting your character(s) through emotional hell and seeing what happens."

It may not be very prevalent today in games like DW2e (which is pure OC/neo-trad exhibit my character curated arc play from what I can see, though obviously things could theoretically change). That being said, the crucible, at least the laser focus on an agenda and premise, is built right into the DNA of PbtA!

So, VB says PbtA is broader and whatever whatever. Who am I to dispute that? Sure, DW2e may be PbtA, but it isn't a Narrativist game! Thus we can talk about Narrativist and PbtA as independent topics at this point, though the two were certainly wedded at the hip at the beginning and Apocalypse World, Dungeon World (1e), Stonetop, 1000 Arrows, etc. are all DISTINCTLY 'crucibles'.

Monsterhearts really seems not so much that way, though Masks looks pretty Narrativist to me. I think it is just hard for some people to do something like 1KA or AW. So games like DW2e seem to be aimed at filling a niche for a game that uses an 'onion design' and some pretty universalized rules, but avoids some of the more intense aspects of RP.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No.

Certainly what is discussed on EnWorld generally as 'simulation(ism)' is at best unrelated to Narrativist play goals. Like in our 1KA game we use elements of historical Sengoku politics and whatnot as inputs, but they simply exist like any other fiction to structure play, to create constraints and obstacles, etc. And while our depiction of characters, RP, has authenticity as a constraint as well, we're not really interested in simulating people that might have actually existed in 16th Century Japan. I think some of the other posters would want to 'feel like they were there' in the setting and not have anything happen that wasn't very similar to real events. Our game did not care about that!

Likewise, I have endeavored to cultivate something adjacent to the Golden Age of Islam and the height of Al Andalus, albeit with a couple of meaningful tweaks (e.g., for established cultural reasons, slavery is a VERY, VERY big no-no)....but it's definitely not trying to simulate the Golden Age of Islam nor Al Andalus.

So, for example, there is a monotheistic religion (but it is highly accepting of gender variation, doesn't demand celibacy, and is generally quite tolerant most of the time), it's a heavily mercantile society, blood and money are powerful forces, there's some decadence especially amongst the nobility of Jinnistan, illicit drugs are an issue, etc. But conversely, the "old" faith hasn't died out (for good reasons, but still), the city's Sultana is of course female and single (with her advisors mostly pushing for a marriage so she has an heir, not because they think she can't rule in her own right), and as noted slavery is a big no-no (some people still practice it, but if you got caught keeping slaves, your reputation would be permanently ruined). Oh, and there are things like a thieves' guild, a secret assassin-cult, and foreign-born merchants becoming prominent in the city without needing to acculturate (beyond learning the local tongue).

I don't hold myself to the limits of any past civilization, and I don't require rigorous justification for why this area is a desert while there is a jungle to the north and temperate forest to the south. Some things in the world might not make total sense if subjected to hard, sharp scrutiny. I strive for consistency and, as I am fond of saying, groundedness, but I'm also going to invoke (or consciously break) genre conventions, and build a world where adventure is a reasonable for some people, and where heroes matter, but so does the action of groups of people working together. The PCs may have earned being legends. Yet even legends depend on their allies and their support networks.

But, that said, when I told the group (more than once) that lately the trade winds have been unnaturally favorable--that is, there is always both wind blowing into the city in one area AND toward the city in another area--that's definitely leaning on the knowledge that that's really abnormal. Likewise, since I have(/had, on hiatus) a player who knows what happens to bodies after death (due to training as a physical anthropologist), the fact that a freshly-discovered body had already undergone livor mortis and rigor mortis indicated that it was hours old, rather than minutes as the most recent sighting of the victim implied--which meant someone had been impersonating the victim after his death, presumably using magic.

So...is it simulationism? Not really, or at least not really trying for it to be simulating anything or getting the players to feel like it's a ticking Swiss watch they can puzzle around with. That doesn't mean groundedness, sensibility, and consistency aren't important to me, because they very much are. I'm just not going to allow a commitment to those things to get in the way of producing a good experience, which may mean (for example) that most captured enemies, if shown mercy, actually do honor their word, even though that's probably not realistic, because doing that is rewarding the behavior I want to see, namely, players treating prisoners with kindness and respect, and not doing it would instead teach the players that mercy is a sucker's game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It may not be very prevalent today in games like DW2e (which is pure OC/neo-trad exhibit my character curated arc play from what I can see, though obviously things could theoretically change). That being said, the crucible, at least the laser focus on an agenda and premise, is built right into the DNA of PbtA!

So, VB says PbtA is broader and whatever whatever. Who am I to dispute that? Sure, DW2e may be PbtA, but it isn't a Narrativist game! Thus we can talk about Narrativist and PbtA as independent topics at this point, though the two were certainly wedded at the hip at the beginning and Apocalypse World, Dungeon World (1e), Stonetop, 1000 Arrows, etc. are all DISTINCTLY 'crucibles'.

Monsterhearts really seems not so much that way, though Masks looks pretty Narrativist to me. I think it is just hard for some people to do something like 1KA or AW. So games like DW2e seem to be aimed at filling a niche for a game that uses an 'onion design' and some pretty universalized rules, but avoids some of the more intense aspects of RP.

Aw, have they changed it so much in the second edition? That's a shame. I was hoping for similar-but-even-better clever design but the same commitment to, as has been mentioned above, the crucible of character development.

Certainly all of the PbtA games I've played or seen--DW1e, Masks, AW, Sixth World (a Shadowrun-based PbtA game), Monsterhearts, etc.--have all been in that mold, and games I've seen or played which derive from PbtA but go further afield, like Blades in the Dark and Ironsworn, keep at least that crucible-of-character-development angle front and center. It's a bit surprising to hear that PbtA is being leveraged in such a completely different way; I feel like doing so is...maybe not completely bonkers, but definitely fighting against what the processes within it were designed for.