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

[pemerton]

In game, this all happens one sequential step at a time without foreknowledge of any downstream consequences, because they haven't happened yet.

This makes no sense to me, for two reasons.

(1) When the GM narrates the guard harassing Aedhros, or narrates a cook startled by the intruder coming through the door, the downstream consequence is known and is no longer in the future. The causal chain has been established.

(2) AD&D, which is a RPG that you play a variant of, uses surprise rules that first establish the consequence (ie the PCs are surprised, if the die comes up 1 or 2) and then requires the retrofitting of some fiction to explain this (which is the fictional cause of the PCs being caught unawares).

 

[pemerton]

I haven't read the manifesto and am not posting in response to it.

I am posting in response to it. That was the whole point of my post.

 

[Lanefan]

No. You're taking the existing fiction "We are on a mission to find the Desert Rose" and taking a giant steaming dump on it. You are ending the adventure. You also aren't declaring anything that is even vaguely under the control of your character or anything that they should be able to know in advance.

Like I have said even in games where you are not explicitly prohibited from doing that it's about as clearly and obviously antisocial behaviour as bringing loaded dice to a game because the rules don't tell you the dice can't be loaded. And you know this perfectly well or you wouldn't think that it was such a clever point that you could shut down the game.

The crazy thing here is that I'm arguing a position that I don't personally hold.

If it's me, that ruby's location is nailed down before the PCs get near the place. Map-and-key all the way.

What I'm trying to expose for the poor design it is are rules that allow a task-plus-intent declaration to, on success, solve the puzzle. (yes, finding the ruby is a puzzle: it can only be in one place, therefore there's only one solution) And that you have to invoke a social contract argument to make your case tells me that absent that, you agree with what I'm trying to say.

Social contract is irrelevant. Loaded dice would in theory be banned by houserule (or certainly would be after their first use!). But it'd be a very restrictive RPG (or GM) that went so far as to tell me what action declarations I can make as a player; even more so when the intent is that the player can potentially add to the fiction through those declarations.

 

[pemerton]

The only reason the guard approached was because you failed the test. Had you succeeded the guard would not have approached.

This confuses events in the world and events in the fiction.

In the world, the roll fails and the GM narrates something. Cause and effect.

In the fiction, the sullen Elf sings and the guard, hearing him, comes and harasses him. Cause and effect.

The GM is not doing anything "non-diegetic" here. The fictional logic is impeccable.

There was no perceptible difference in the game world so the only reason the guard appears is because of a bad roll of the dice. That is the very definition of a non-diegetic change to the state of the world.

No it's not. "Non-diegetic" means something that is not part of the fiction. The reason the guard harasses the Elf is part of the fiction.

 

[Sulicius]

Man, it really tires me out how people here have to keep voicing their opinion on supplements they haven't used or even read. It just derails every discussion and helps no-one except the people who apparently just want engagement.

There is a lot of wisdom and experience on this forum, but a vocal minority wants nothing less than never add to their wisdom or experience.

You don't have to like the new stuff that comes out, but your opinions are so much less interesting when they don't actually engage with it.

 

[Lanefan]

It's the one feature I wish Enworld would deprecate. I very much agree with you that the "like" system leads to sides. It also leads to dog-piling and is sometimes used to mock. Perhaps someone knows of some strong arguments for keeping it?

I like it (pardon the pun).

What it saves are hundreds of posts sayng nothing but "I agree" or "Hear, hear!".

 

[pemerton]

"I did badly enough at singing that made an awful caterwauling somewhere near where a guard was and now he's come to investigate? I don't understand how this can be and what caused it!" Seriously?

If you made and failed a sing check it is because you were trying to sing and didn't do a good job.

What you say might be true for some RPGs. It's not true for Burning Wheel.

Whether a failed test indicates a failed task is something to be decided case by case, based on the GM's sense of both (i) the fiction and (ii) what will make for a good (re)framing of the scene.

Here is the actual episode of play:

Aedhros found a suitable place outside a house of ill-repute, ready to kidnap a lady of the night. When a victim appeared, Aedhros tried to force a Steel test (I think - my memory is a bit hazy) but whatever it was, it failed, and the intended victim went screaming into the night. Now there is word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.

Aedhros's Beliefs are I will avenge the death of my spouse!, Thurandril will admit that I am right! and I will free Alicia and myself from the curse of Thoth!; and his Instincts are Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to, Always repay hurt with hurt, and When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the elven lays. Having failed at the most basic task, and not knowing how to return to Thoth empty-handed, Aedhros wandered away from the docks, up into the wealthier parts of the city, to the home of the Elven Ambassador. As he sang the Elven lays to himself, I asked the GM for a test on Sing, to serve as a linked test to help in my next test to resist Thoth's bullying and depravity. The GM set my Spite of 5 as the obstacle, and I failed - a spend of a fate point only got me to 4 successes on 4 dice.

My singing attracted the attention of a guard, who had heard the word on the street, and didn't like the look of this rag-clothed Dark Elf. Aedhros has Circles 3 and a +1 reputation with the Etharchs, and so I rolled my 4 dice to see if an Etharch (whether Thurandril or one of his underlings or associates) would turn up here and now to tell the guards that I am right and they should not arrest me. But the test failed, and the only person to turn up was another guard to join the first in bundling me off. So I had to resort to the more mundane method of offering them 1D of loot to leave me alone. The GM accepted this, no test required.

Then, repaying hurt with hurt, Aedhros followed one of the guards - George, as we later learned he was called - who also happened to be the one with the loot. Aedhros ambushed him from the darkness, and took him at knife point back to the workshop, where Thoth subject him to the necessary "treatment"

There was nothing inadequate about Aedhros's singing, except that it didn't strengthen his sense of self as I (the player) had hoped it would. The guard came because they had heard word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant, heard someone singing, and didn't like the look of him.

 

[thefutilist]

What I'm trying to expose for the poor design it is are rules that allow a task-plus-intent declaration to, on success, solve the puzzle. (yes, finding the ruby is a puzzle: it can only be in one place, therefore there's only one solution) And that you have to invoke a social contract argument to make your case tells me that absent that, you agree with what I'm trying to say.

It's by design though right. Rolling for intent in the BW style destroys puzzle solving. Conflict resolution in say Sorcerer, can destroy puzzle solving and that's a strength of the system. It's harder than in BW because you have to be on the lookout and make sure you resolve at the right granularity but it's something I do so there are no puzzles.

If what you like is puzzles. Then these systems will destroy the reason for play.

 

[pemerton]

only one thing happens. The lockpick attempt either fails or succeeds, the cook is either there or not. We don't know what the situation would be if the opposite happened because the opposite didn't happen.

I'll add the caveat that the example as presented on the blog implies this... but as has been pointed out, that example is pretty much doo-doo as presented.

@AlViking is making the same mistake with his take on @pemerton 's example about the singing attracting the guard. He wants to know if the guard would have shown up if the roll for the singing had been a success. Who can say? That's not what happened, so we don't know how it would have gone.

@AbdulAlhazred made this point some way upthread:

I think the problem is, who can say what would have happened in a situation, a REAL WORLD situation, that didn't happen. Lets imagine that @pemerton rolled success. What would the GM in that game have said? He would have had a WIDE variety of options. All they would have had in common would be that they involved his character getting what he wanted. Pemerton may or may not think he has some pretty good ideas as to what would have happened, but nobody can say for certain. I guess the GM in that game, maybe?

To me, it seems that the real issue is this:

@AlViking and @Maxperson are affirming some restricted version of the following principle: Counterfactual statements about the real world, and counterfactual statements about the fiction, should tightly correlate with one another.

That is why they insist that what would the GM have narrated, had the roll succeeds must correlate tightly with the way causation is working in the fiction. This then leads to an idea that the purpose of the dice roll and the associated decision-making about resolution is to directly model the causal process that is taking place in the fiction.

The RPG that I know that comes closest to an unrestricted version of the above principle is RuneQuest. There are two reasons that I say that @AlViking and @Maxperson are affirming a restricted version of the principle:

(1) There are big chunks of D&D's mechanics, including its surprise mechanics (as per my post not too far upthread), its stop-motion combat resolution (as per a post of mine further upthread), and other stuff too (eg at least some aspects of saving throws and hit points) that don't conform to the principle. It's that failure of conformity to the principle that explains why all the classic simulationist FRPGs that were designed in reaction to D&D (RQ, RM, etc) don't use these resolution mechanics, or at least try to minimise them to a great degree.

(2) They don't adhere to the principle in cases like the farrier you've been discussing with @Maxperson, which @AlViking also distinguished from the guard and cook cases:

Adding details that don't contradict established lore is par for the course It's also vastly different from "A guard shows up because you failed a check."

The details wouldn't be added but for the player's question, and so the tight correlation principle is not adhered to.

As I also posted some way upthread, these restrictions on the tight correlation principle don't seem readily explicable except as a common way that D&D has done things. That's fine, but doesn't provide the foundation for some sort of principled attack on other approaches (eg for violating the tight correlation principle).

 

[pemerton]

how things is established in play is important.

No one disagrees with this, as best I'm reading the conversation.

This misses the point of the example. I thought everyone at this point was aware that the problem situation at hand require the cook to be there because failure. So, yes, it is an underlying assumption that we know what would happen on a success. So if your "you don't" claim that the example do not specify the successfully check, that is you misunderstanding the context.

The cook is in the kitchen because of <insert in-fiction causal explanation here>.

Just the same as a wandering monster is at this junction of the dungeon because of <insert in-fiction causal explanation here>.

And just the same as, in the village that @Maxperson told his players about, there is a farrier because of <insert in-fiction causal explanation here>.

In each of these cases, there is also a reason, in the real world, that the GM narrates the presence of the NPC/creature:

The player failed a skill roll. The wandering monster die came up "6". The player asked Maxperson, "Is there a farrier in this village?"

Pointing out that the GM has a real-world reason to narrate the NPC/creature doesn't get us very far into analysis of these examples. Asserting that there is something unrealistic or "quantum" about the cook but not the wandering monster or the farrier is likewise not going to get us very far: in each case the GM narrates something not because they considered the fiction and its logic impressed itself upon them but rather because something happened at the game table that prompted them to narrate the presence of a NPC/creature.

At a minimum, it seems to me that we need to talk about participant roles (ie player vs GM). We also need to talk about how action resolution interacts with participant roles. We also need to look at how action resolution, which is a thing that happens in the real world, relates to what happens in the fiction.

I don't think any of those things in isolation will enable identifying what is going on with these examples.

Just as one example: I'm 90% or more confident that @Maxperson does not regard the question "Is there a farrier in this village?" as an action declaration. Rather, it is a prompt to the GM to do some spontaneous worldbuilding, and that is (in his view) part of the GM's job.

Whereas in Burning Wheel, "Is there a farrier in this village?" is an action declaration, to be resolved - following further discussion, if necessary, to establish intent and task - by either a Circles or a Resources test.

Even the GM taking inspiration from skill checks when determining content carries the risk of producing weird correlations that over time can build up to something hard for the brain to accept. The brain is very good at detecting patterns.

Based on hundreds of hours of play, I believe there is little evidence for this assertion about weird correlations.

Instead of empirical conjectures for which there is little evidence - it's not as if posters like @AlViking and @Maxperson have played a lot of Burning Wheel and found its resolution rules untenable because of the fiction that resulted from them - I think it is more productive to actually look closely at how the rules work. What counts as an action declaration? How are these resolved? How does world-building fit into this? And what are the respective roles of the various participants?

Which is what I have tried to do in my posts throughout this thread.