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

[Lanefan]

I view the world as one inherently part of the game. It cannot be separated from the design, or at least you’ll get bad results if you do.

To a point.

The placement of oceans, islands, volcanoes, rivers, and other geography doesn't give a flip about the rule-set you're using; nor does the astronomy or calendar or weather.

It's only when you get into populating that world with species and cultures etc. and then tacking on a cosmology that system and game design might start having a say in the matter. Even then, basic things like cities and roads are almost certainly system-agnostic.

 

[Lanefan]

I would say my fellow GM and players are much more impactful on the kind of play experience I have than both the system and the setting. Do that mean they also are central to what makes a game, and that all published "games" (in the TTRPG sphere) is incomplete due to them not coming bundled with friends to play the game with?

They don't?

How dare they market these games without including the friends they promised in the advertising!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Depends. If one approaches the whole game as more or less a puzzle of exploration, trial and error, and discovery (in both the immediate and long term), then it fits right in.

A few thoughts on this.

If there are new players discovering things for the first time, that doesn't mean that seasoned players will also be doing so. They discovered some of this stuff decades ago... that doesn't change because there are new players involved.

Now, as I said, it may be that the seasoned players are willing to play along... my friends get a kick out of playing RPGs with my son. But their enjoyment in those cases is about something else entirely than what they typically enjoy in our games. So unless there's some kind of alternate enjoyment going on, I wouldn't put seasoned players through that kind of thing.

Also, I don't approach play as if the game is a puzzle of exploration, trial and error, and discovery. That's not really why I play RPGs these days. There absolutely will be some of that, but it is specifically not the focus.

The situation I have in mind is that the other PCs would be waiting, as instructed by the scout, for the scout to return. And sure, they might get bored of waiting and do something else, but that too should be in ignorance of whatever the scout has got up to or wherever the scout has gone. But if they are content to wait for the expected time, the scout's fate is no longer in their hands.

A variant on this happened in last night's session. I was the scout checking out a castle-like structure in some very high and rugged mountains, the rest of the party knew vaguely what my flight plan was (I had powers of flight) but that was it. As player, I could hear what the rest of the party was doing (online play) but all my character's actions were done by secret note.

The rest of the party in fact had numerous different ways and means of tracking my progress but got into a mild argument over which would be most effective, or could work at all (Reflecting Pool, for example, doesn't work on ice, and the temperature was about -25C). Finally they decided on Clairvoyance; on casting it the caster, looking through my eyes, saw herself and the rest of the party; I was already on my way back to them.

Okay, so looking at that scenario... if you got jumped and were in danger, and one of the other players (aware of the situation) said "I want to go check on him" I simply let it happen. I just don't care. We can chalk it up to his character having a hunch. I'm totally fine with that.

I'd rather have something happen in play in some way than the scene you describe above. I get that it's very possible something was lost in the telling, and maybe I had to be there to appreciate it, but it sounds like a lot of wasted time to me. It certainly doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out on anything by not worrying about the character/player division of knowledge.

The ideal situation is that they may or may not get that info (or that they'll get it but may or may not interpret it correctly, same result in the end). Even when it's blatant, some people still can't tell when they're being lied to.

But the players aren't figuring out if they're being lied to... they're figuring out if you are pretending to be a guy lying to them or not.

As I said, it puts way too much on the quality of your performance. What's lost by just telling them what their intuition would likely tell them? Why rely on acting so much when there's a simpler way to get that idea across?

I find there's usually enough to go on even after a couple of sessions that, if the player then misses a session, the rest of us know how to run the character well enough for rock'n'roll. Usually, most players IME pick a trait or personality element for the character and really play it up for the first few sessions in order to set a tone.

Yes, well again... I think there's some significant variance going on from game to game. The games I run and play tend to, though don't always, involve somewhat complex characters that aren't easily summed up by an exaggerated trait or two.

 

[Enrahim]

I've been wondering today whether GNS amounts to a rough stab at a factor-based modelling of player motives. It's authors were able to identify a few, and their limitation was lack of time and process to tease out more. This would make GNS not so much mistaken, as approximate and incomplete.

Baker's criticism could then be taken as right without doing away with the value of being able to point in the direction of at least some motives. Except that he seems to express skepticism where he writes

Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.​

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You know how you can assign a given rule to Drama, Fortune or Karma, if you want, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how the rule works, or why, and it creates illusory clusters of rules instead of fostering real understanding? And the same thing with FitM vs FatE? And the same thing with Effectiveness, Resource, and Positioning? They're convenient stand-ins for what's actually going on, when what's actually going on defies such simplistic taxonomies?​

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And I should be super clear: it's not that I think that there are hybrid creative agendas, coexisting creative agendas, overlaps, gray areas. It's not that I think that G, N and S aren't adequate. I think that the idea of creative agendas altogether isn't adequate. Gameplay doesn't have a creative agenda. Games aren't designed to support a creative agenda.​

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This appears to deny the possibility of knowledge of the sort you're describing.

I think Bakers argument here is justified, but shouldn't be generalised as meaning arguing against any attempts at establishing terms. A word or concept derives it's value from it's usefullness. We have a concept of a tree as it is useful in several contexts. However problems start arising once we try to clearly define "what is a tree". No matter how we sharply define it we will have situations where the original usefullness of the term no longer applies to the original use. For instance if a use for identifying a tree was related to the ability to get building materials from it, a definition that a sapling is a tree is not at least immediately helpful. However calling the sampling a tree might be helpful if you are interested in where to find future sources of building materials. But then how about bonsai Tree?

That it is not possible to define a clear generally useful boundary for the concept of Tree doesn't mean that the entire concept of tree is wrong and there is no tree.

I read bakers first part into this. Having the category can be useful, but in order to actually understand more about what we are putting into the category, we need to look at the thing itself. This just as in order to get to understand if the tree is good for building things with, it is useless to study the meaning of the word tree, and it's boundaries, you need to actually look at the object. He has a malformed sentence, so it is unclear if he acknowledges these terms are convenient or not. But he is as far as I can see clearly warning against expecting any such taxonomy to be complete - which I also consider a very important point.

The way I see this it is more a searing critique against a culture that was more interested in studying the words than the thing itself, than a clear critique against the possible usefullness of the terms.

With creative agenda it is differently though. I think he are correctly identifying that the concept actually has no use. From my understanding this was originally was meant as a descriptor of an assumed set of groupings of player preferences, things that happened in actual play and mechanics/game design. However this assumption that there are any such grouping seem to have been false - hence the entire premise for the usefulness of the term is gone. And hence all terms describing it is also meaningless.
The naming indicated that it might be possible to atribute something similar as the psychological phenomenom of Agenency to gameplay and game designs. Such a thing is clearly just a theoretical construct, and if the theory behind is wrong the concept disappears.

But this is important: He is in no way claiming humans do not have agendas!! I think noone with even the slightest understanding of human nature would take such a claim seriously. My proposal relates to examine the human psychological factor (independent of system), in order to identify preferences for play. The existence of preferences I think is not up for debate. I also think the usefullness of such categories as a first approximation for finding a group should be self evident as we are already using tools absolutely known to not be suitable for the task for this purpose in lack of anything better. As long as we can come up with something better than system + %roleplay, combat exploration, we have made improvement!

 

[zakael19]

If there are new players discovering things for the first time, that doesn't mean that seasoned players will also be doing so. They discovered some of this stuff decades ago... that doesn't change because there are new players involved.

I am reminded out of the blue of Session 1 of the first campaign I played in 5e and the first game of D&D I'd played since 3e back when I was...17? DM had written a little like "prospective adventurers trial" with a puzzle in the last room. A group of mixed players, all fairly intelligent people in their 30s mostly getting back into RPGs totally stalled out on the puzzle until the DM starting giving us hints.

It wasn't really that hard, but none of us were quite grasping it from the description.

They never did a puzzle again that campaign.

(we did have a great time joking about illusionary powerpoints & expense reports throughout the campaign)

 

[Lanefan]

It's not what "I prefer." It's a method used in many, many games, either built into the mechanics or imported into the game (just google "fail forward D&D"). And it typically works quite well at its job, which is to keep the game from stalling out.

For me, if stalling out would sometimes happen were these characters real people then stalling out happening sometimes in the fiction is perfectly OK.

Sure, and that's always a good thing. But go back to the locks for a minute: fail forward doesn't necessarily means the locks open. It could mean that the locks don't open, but you've lost time in your attempt, and if there's a time crunch in the game, this is a big deal. It could mean that the locks don't open but now the GM rolls to see if there's a wandering monster, because your scent has been hanging around in that area for long enough that a (rolls randomly) grick has sniffed you out.

Again: what fail forward means is that something happens. It doesn't have to be a good thing.

I'm not that bothered by fail sideways or fail backward, i.e. the task is still failed and something tangential happens as well be it due to the failure or due to random chance or whatever.

It's the all-too-many examples we get where fail-forward turns the root task-fail into a task-success that stick in my craw. And to me that's what "fail forward" very strongly implies; they fail, but still move forward toward their goal. Failure IMO should never get you closer to your goal; that's what success is for.

Imagine the GM has a plot of the Evil Cultist Awakening The Eldritch Being. Pretty typical D&D plot, right? The PCs want to stop it. But the cultists aren't just standing around doing nothing until the PCs arrive, are they? No, they're getting things together so that they can actually perform their ritual. The PCs are looking for the cultist's lair, of course, but they don't know where it is yet, or they do but can't get there right away. But they do have the ability to stop the individual cultists they come across or otherwise foil their plans.

So we have a clock (a timer, really, but clock is the term they went with). When the clock has counted down to 0, the cultists perform their ritual and the Eldritch Being is awakened.

If the PCs do nothing to stop the cultists, the clock will eventually ticks down to 0. If they work towards stopping the cultists by preventing them from getting a reagent or killing their members--the clock doesn't tick down, because they've delayed the cultists for a bit. If the PCs really screw up somehow, they clock ticks down more than once, because in this case, their failure is the cultist's boon (for example, the cultists may have been given the opportunity to grab extra resources, and they wouldn't have if the PCs hadn't been so incompetent).

The problem I often find with set-ups like this (and thus the reason I try to avoid them) is that the PCs have no reasonable in-fiction way of knowing a) that there's a clock at all and-or b) how long is left before it hits zero.

 

[zakael19]

It's the all-too-many examples we get where fail-forward turns the root task-fail into a task-success that stick in my craw. And to me that's what "fail forward" very strongly implies; they fail, but still move forward toward their goal. Failure IMO should never get you closer to your goal; that's what success is for.

Good lord why are you still stuck on this when we've belabored the exact point from at least 5 different posters with explicit detail:

Fail Forward means the Scene moves, the fiction moves. Not that you get success from failure. Please stop pretending otherwise.

Replace "story" with "scene" or "action" or "play" depending on system priority, but below from Daggerheart is an excellent succinct definition:

Every time a player makes an action roll, the story should move forward, success or failure.
On a failure, the GM says how the world responds and keeps the story moving. This is often referred to as “failing forward.” A character might not get what they want if the roll goes poorly, but the story advances through escalation, new information, or some other change in circumstances.

 

[Lanefan]

Good lord why are you still stuck on this when we've belabored the exact point from at least 5 different posters with explicit detail:

Fail Forward means the Scene moves, the fiction moves. Not that you get success from failure. Please stop pretending otherwise.

Replace "story" with "scene" or "action" or "play" depending on system priority, but below from Daggerheart is an excellent succinct definition:

I expressly don't look at it from the perspective of the story, because for these purposes I don't care about the story.

Instead,I look at it from the perspective of the characters in the fiction (and by extension, the players at the table) and whether or not they are making progress toward their goal(s). That's the only thing that matters in task resolution.

 

[zakael19]

I expressly don't look at it from the perspective of the story, because for these purposes I don't care about the story.

Instead,I look at it from the perspective of the characters in the fiction (and by extension, the players at the table) and whether or not they are making progress toward their goal(s). That's the only thing that matters in task resolution.

I’m not talking about your task resolution or whatever, I’m once again trying to correct your continued misrepresentation of fail-forward as a concept and technique.

 

[AlViking]

Whereas I have. Not often, but it's happened. And we heard Lanefan talk about examples that have happened at his table.

So it happens. Even if it's never happened to you.

Literally hours? Half an hour? Several minutes? If it's the first one, unless it's something the group is really into it's bad GMing IMO

It's not what "I prefer." It's a method used in many, many games, either built into the mechanics or imported into the game (just google "fail forward D&D"). And it typically works quite well at its job, which is to keep the game from stalling out.

I don't see how that relates to what I said. I never said anything about whether it's used in other games. Whether it works "well" is a value judgement because it doesn't take into consideration what you want out of the game or potential costs.

Sure, and that's always a good thing. But go back to the locks for a minute: fail forward doesn't necessarily means the locks open. It could mean that the locks don't open, but you've lost time in your attempt, and if there's a time crunch in the game, this is a big deal. It could mean that the locks don't open but now the GM rolls to see if there's a wandering monster, because your scent has been hanging around in that area for long enough that a (rolls randomly) grick has sniffed you out.

Again: what fail forward means is that something happens. It doesn't have to be a good thing.

In D&D, it takes just as long to open a lock as it takes to fail to open a lock. Meanwhile I say that not opening the lock is something. Just not what you want. But again, this is me wanting the players to drive the game forward and the world reacts. The world (and in effect) the GM is neutral on things happening outside of responding to what the players do.

That's also a good thing. The three clue rule and whatnot.


Why?

I can't just dislike metagame techniques? I want the players to interact with the world through their characters and the GM's only role is to have the world respond to what those characters do. Always going to be a bit more complicated than that but that's my assumption and starting point.

Imagine the GM has a plot of the Evil Cultist Awakening The Eldritch Being. Pretty typical D&D plot, right? The PCs want to stop it. But the cultists aren't just standing around doing nothing until the PCs arrive, are they? No, they're getting things together so that they can actually perform their ritual. The PCs are looking for the cultist's lair, of course, but they don't know where it is yet, or they do but can't get there right away. But they do have the ability to stop the individual cultists they come across or otherwise foil their plans.

Sure. If there is word of invaders spreading then the cultists are likely to change their behavior. It's the job of the GM to decide what that means.

So we have a clock (a timer, really, but clock is the term they went with). When the clock has counted down to 0, the cultists perform their ritual and the Eldritch Being is awakened.

If the PCs do nothing to stop the cultists, the clock will eventually ticks down to 0. If they work towards stopping the cultists by preventing them from getting a reagent or killing their members--the clock doesn't tick down, because they've delayed the cultists for a bit. If the PCs really screw up somehow, they clock ticks down more than once, because in this case, their failure is the cultist's boon (for example, the cultists may have been given the opportunity to grab extra resources, and they wouldn't have if the PCs hadn't been so incompetent).

Failing to pick a lock would not cause this clock to tick down, unless they spend hours and hours trying to do it, because those would be hours and hours wasted picking a lock instead of finding a way around and getting back to their goal of stopping the cultists.

So how is this not following the in-world fiction?

About the only time failure would matter in most cases is if the clock ticks more quickly or slowly depending on the player's success or failure which again goes back to metagaming.

I don't think that way, the clock ticks at the same speed and failure may mean the characters take longer to get where they are going or they may think of a way to bypass some obstacle they may spend less time getting there. But the time the character spend getting to the goal has no influence on how quickly the ritual will be enacted. Even if there are times when by ... ahem ... pure coincidence they get there just in the nick of time. Unless they really took their sweet time and added hours to their arrival. Then they may just see the metaphorical mushroom cloud rising over the city and now they have to deal with the fallout.

In general though if they fail a check and can't open the lock and there is a ticking clock*, there will be other options that are nearly as fast just far riskier. If the mountain pass is closed, perhaps they can go through the abandoned dwarven tunnels.

*My ticking clocks are rarely, if ever accurate to the minute. Hours may matter but unless the characters are chasing someone or being chased a short duration delay doesn't matter. EDIT - in the rare occasions I have a ticking clock it will be tied to sunset or something else the characters know about and can observe or estimate.