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

[JConstantine]

This is why approaching a given game from a holistic view of its design is so important. Discrete rules and mechanics only make sense when viewed in tandem with the rest of the game.

This is why I appreciate examples of play with GM commentary on their thought process. I know they take a while to type out, and they end up being wordy enough that people will gloss over them, but I think they're better for understanding than analysing individual mechanics.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Doesn’t someone have to know the consequences of both success and failure before you roll the dice? Otherwise it’s just a case of throwing an icosahedron and making something up.

You may or may not know the specifics. You know what’s desired… but the surrounding details aren’t specified until the roll occurs and then the GM establishes the fiction.

So in @pemerton ‘s example, if the dice had come up a success, the guard still may have made an appearance… it just would not have been in a negative way.

The insistence that “the guard would not show up on a success” is mistaken. It’s asking for and expecting a specific answer when there isn’t one.

YOU don't know. WE know.

If the guard would hear a singing failure, he also hears a singing success. He is in the same spot. The song is at the same volume. His perception is the same for both. We don't have guards who have their ears closed if the roll to sing was a success, or who are only there on a failure.

No… YOU don’t know if the guard would have shown up in @pemerton’s game if the dice had indicated a success. No one knows that because it didn’t happen.

Which is precisely why asking what would happen on a success aids in understanding. There's going to be difference based on whether the system is task vs conflict resolution. There's likely difference between two different systems that both use task (or conflict) resolution. There's going to be difference between two GMs running the same system. Asking for clarity should be encouraged.

There’s no problem with asking and discussing as a part of the process of understanding.

But it’s been explained, hasn’t it? There should now be an understanding. Yet claims are still being made about how “the guard shows up either way in trad games, but not in narrativist games”.

Do I have to add the tagline "If I ask about your game it's because I'm curious. If I talk about your game it is only to contrast how it works compared to my game. " on every single post? Because I say it a lot and, if you read to understand my position, that should be clear by now.

I’m explaining it to you, and you haven’t seemed to have gotten it yet. If you’re curious, I’d expect more willingness to listen to folks instead of ignoring what they say and insisting that your understanding is fully correct.

It was specified as an example of how to implement a consequence of failure. I did also clarify the example somewhere along the lines and was told that no, the guard would not have shown up. But this is quite the strawman here. The whole concept that people have explained as fail forward is that "nothing happens" on a failure is something to avoid and that something will happen due to the failure.

I don’t believe anyone ever said that no, the guard would not show up. If so, I’d question that. It’s possible… but it’s also possible that he would show up. We can’t know in that kind of game.

I also don’t know how we can say for certain that the guard would show up either way in a trad approach… it really depends on the nature of what’s being attempted and how it goes.

As @Campbell said, it doesn’t make sense to evaluate what one game does per the expectations of another game.

 

[Enrahim]

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

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.

I pondered this a bit, and I think I have an answer for you. The critical notion is the commonality you express: "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."

I think the crucial difference is the degree of freedom the GM has in their narration. In the farrier case they are completely free - they could just as well have narrated that there was no farrier without anyone calling foul. There is an outside compell, and that is when the decission need to be made, but a neutral referee with is the ideal for a living world would not feel any pressure toward the content of the answer.

In the fail/succeed roll case the GM is not free to narrate. They are bound by the result. On a fail they are not only forced to make an answer, they need to make sure that answer is interesting, and negative for the characters.

The wandering monster is interesting because that come in both flavors. You have games with hard player-facing rules for when wandering monster checks needs to be made, and modules often come with predefined tables. This situation is even more extreme than the fail succeed roll. Here the GM isn't only bound to when to make decission, they are fully bound to what content to introduce. This is what gives random monsters a really bad reputation for breaking immersion.

But wait a second! Wandering monsters and random tables is a hallmark of living world sandbox play! How can this possibly be if wandering monsters are even worse than forced fail forward? That is that when used in such play, the criterion of player side rules for their use is not present. Rather than being a game mechanics, they are a tool for the GM to help them stay neutral. These are usually made by the GM and tailored to the GM vision of how population dense the location is, and only populated by things they expect might make sense. They are only bound by timings they create, and if they find the fiction is critically different than what they expected when they made the tables, they are fully free to skip rols, alter frequency of rolls, or alter table results if that make more sense in the new situation. So they are actually not bound to time or content. The use of the structure and the random roll is to further eliminate the bias that might come in if they would have introduced things only on "feel", hence producing an even more authentic feeling world than they would have managed with full freedom.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, more my point was that this is...a pretty easily foreseeable problem. As in, essentially every designer of a narrative game is going to see this possibility many miles away. Long before any books hit the table, designers will already know that absolute total freedom where ANY not-explicitly-nixed intent is 100% perfectly acceptable always forever...is going to lead to bad results.

So harping on this "problem" is a little bit like someone harping on the idea that a class-based game will forbid players from playing archetypes that don't have a specific class that fits them. Of course that's correct, the designers DEFINITELY already know that, and the design will attempt to respond to this. (Or, I guess, they can just say "it's not a bug, it's a feature", but I don't know of any games that do that for this task-intent resolution process.)

Just a brief sidetrip here:

Its entirely possible for someone living in a design bubble to either not know that, or to not have a good solution for it they like and move on anyway. OD&D was pretty much like your degenerate comparison, and the way it was handled over time was boatloads of custom classes, which was clearly a brute-force addressing of the problem, because presumably Gygax and company either didn't know about, didn't care about, or had no good solution for the problem at the time.

 

[JConstantine]

A failure on a check can be just a minor setback.

I never considered otherwise. I disagree with @Hussar's assertion that "failure will almost always be catastrophic." My objection was to multiple checks for a series of interconnected micro-actions serving a single task.

To use an actual example:
In campaign 2 of Critical Role, Marisha - as Bo - wanted to run up a vertical surface, leap across a gap, then follow up with an attack. Matt called for an athletics check (which Marisha negotiated to an acrobatics, because Dex-based character) to ascend, followed by another to jump, and then, of course, the attack. Personally, I feel the run and jump could have been folded into a single check. This was made all the more egregious by the fact that Bo was at a high enough level that Unarmoured Movement gave her the ability to run along vertical surfaces and liquids without falling, and no other threat had been established to warrant such a check.
This was not the only time Matt called for a series of checks that would inevitable ensure Marisha would fail.

 

[Maxperson]

Wrong post

 

[Maxperson]

You may or may not know the specifics. You know what’s desired… but the surrounding details aren’t specified until the roll occurs and then the GM establishes the fiction.

So in @pemerton ‘s example, if the dice had come up a success, the guard still may have made an appearance… it just would not have been in a negative way.

The insistence that “the guard would not show up on a success” is mistaken. It’s asking for and expecting a specific answer when there isn’t one.



No… YOU don’t know if the guard would have shown up in @pemerton’s game if the dice had indicated a success. No one knows that because it didn’t happen.




There’s no problem with asking and discussing as a part of the process of understanding.

But it’s been explained, hasn’t it? There should now be an understanding. Yet claims are still being made about how “the guard shows up either way in trad games, but not in narrativist games”.




I’m explaining it to you, and you haven’t seemed to have gotten it yet. If you’re curious, I’d expect more willingness to listen to folks instead of ignoring what they say and insisting that your understanding is fully correct.




I don’t believe anyone ever said that no, the guard would not show up. If so, I’d question that. It’s possible… but it’s also possible that he would show up. We can’t know in that kind of game.

I also don’t know how we can say for certain that the guard would show up either way in a trad approach… it really depends on the nature of what’s being attempted and how it goes.

As @Campbell said, it doesn’t make sense to evaluate what one game does per the expectations of another game.

Get off of his game. We aren't talking about his game. We are discussing the difference in playstyles. In yours you don't know. In ours we do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This was not the only time Matt called for a series of checks that would inevitable ensure Marisha would fail.

It tends to be a chronic problem in the action-resolution part of the hobby.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Get off of his game. We aren't talking about his game. We are discussing the difference in playstyles. In yours you don't know. In ours we do.

The “we” thing is causing confusion again. @AlViking repeatedly asked if the guard would have shown up in @pemerton ‘s game on a successful roll. When he wasn’t provided with an answer, he pointed it out several times.

That’s what I was addressing, and the continued insistence that the guard would “not show up on a success” which both you and he have said.

 

[JConstantine]

It tends to be a chronic problem in the action-resolution part of the hobby.

Perhaps, but I don't recall Matt doing this anywhere near as frequently with other players. It may be because Marisha, more than any other player at the table, thinks outside the character sheet, but it always felt to me like Matt was overcompensating in trying to avoid (perceived) favouritism towards his partner. The irony in that is that he demonstrates clear favouritism towards Liam and Taliesin (his longer-time friends).