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

[pemerton]

We don't have to establish specifically why someone didn't notice the ninja sneaking up behind them

Right. Because instead a roll is used: a roll that does not take fiction - imagined facts about what the PCs are doing, what they are paying attention to, etc - as input.

 

[The Firebird]

@The Firebird's problem, I'd wager, was not because he was running a narrative game but because he was inexperienced with running narrative games. A GM that is experienced in a particular game will know how to run it. He wasn't, so he didn't know what to do with those ideas and thoughts

If you have a specific issue with how I said I ran the game then please offer it. Otherwise a general "you are just bad at this" is not helpful. But given you're still misstating the issue I have...

So, is making it up before a good thing or a bad thing?

The issue has nothing to do with the timing.

I'm not getting what the problem is. They're the same thing: you know what happens on a success or failure ahead of time. It can't simply be because you have more time to think, because your plans can easily be destroyed by unforeseen player action, unless you're railroading the players, which means you need to improvise anyway.

And I repeat, the issue has nothing to do with the timing. I'm not going to clarify this in detail again because this is what, the fourth time I've had to correct your presentation of my views?

 

[AlViking]

Right. Because instead a roll is used: a roll that does not take fiction - imagined facts about what the PCs are doing, what they are paying attention to, etc - as input.

The perception check abstracts and reflects something that the character inherently does all the time. No one is ever paying attention to 100% of what is going on around them, we filter it out, the brain organizes our sensory inputs and if enough neurons flag something as important we notice it. It's totally normal and completely internal to the person. It is not changing the fiction of the world in any way, nor is it modifying what the character is thinking. If the player said their character is watching the door carefully and the ninja walks in the door, the character is going to see the ninja.

Since it's impossible to see or notice everything around us, it's uncertain whether we will notice. One way to resolve uncertainty is to roll dice.

 

[Gimby]

How do you go from "they are not guaranteed to succeed " to failing fairly often and it's toxic or that magic solves all or even a significant percentage of problems in my game? Magic is the answer once in a while because it should be useful. But some of the most fun, tense and memorable moments in our games have come from failure and no, magic is not always the answer.

I'll not speak for @Hussar here, but I think the point here is that there are many circumstances whereby, in D&D (let's use 3.5 for this, as it's probably where the effect is most pronounced) if you want to succeed at a task, you are better off using a spell rather than a skill.

The simplest example is probably climbing. In 3.5 to climb up a 30ft tall wall will require 4 checks for a fairly standard character. By the laws of iterated probability we've gone through earlier the chance of success drops off dramatically the more checks you are forced to make to get to the top. Alternatively, you can use Flight or Spider Climb to climb much more difficult circumstances, much faster and with zero risk.

This is true (in 3.5 at least) for a large swath of problems, from social to physical, from crafting to investigation. It's why Knock in 5e is much less practical than it is in 3.5, for example.

 

[The Firebird]

At a point in time - probably around about the time the player has their PC wander the streets of the town at night, singing - you (as GM) decide that a guard is there. Prior to that, the guard is not "fixed", having not been thought of beyond the generic idea that towns have guards.

At a point in time - when deciding how to narrate the failed Sing test made by a character wandering the streets of the town at night - the Burning Wheel GM decides that a guard is there. Prior to that, the guard is not fixed, having not been thought of beyond the generic idea that towns have guards.

The guard is equally "fixed", from the moment of mental conception, in both games. You are talking about a difference of process in the GM making the decision, not a different degree of fixed-ness.

I don't think the guard is equally fixed if they are fixed prior to vs after an action roll.

The GM can't decide what scene they might frame next, before this one has resolved. Suppose the roll to Sing had succeeded, and so Aedhros has gained a degree of self-resolve. What action might I have declared next? Maybe I would have gone back to Thoth to try and talk him out of his mad plans to raise the dead.

I'm not asking about what scene the GM will frame next. I'm asking whether they can think through success and failure. The player declares an action. Is it possible for you, as the GM, to think ok, a success looks like this all. A failure looks like this. Or can you not know until you see the result of the dice?

 

[The Firebird]

The idea that a character might do better or worse at integrating (i) speed of the task with (ii) avoidance of guards etc while (iii) only actually opening when they are confident no one is inside, seems pretty "diegetic" to me. If they take too long and/or get too flustered, they lose their control of these various factors, and hence find themselves having to make the ugly choice.

Right, I get why you're ok with this. But the thing is, Pattycakes isn't guaranteed to be around on a 10, so it really isn't just testing whether the character was sufficiently cautious at avoiding guards. It is also testing whether they got lucky.

 

[pemerton]

One way to resolve uncertainty is to roll dice.

We could even say - it's uncertain whether or not an intruder will be sprung by a cook in the kitchen - so we roll dice . . .

 

[zakael19]

But, this fell apart when I tried running BitD myself. The illusion is only player facing. As the GM, when the player says "I want to open this lock", I start thinking:

ok, what will a success look like? I guess they get in clean. What about fail forward? Hmm, we've established that this is an estate, and the lord will want to eat breakfast early, so maybe the cook is getting in to start working on that. That's nice, it follows from the fiction.

Then there is no illusion and I know exactly what happens on success because I decided it. This made me feel dishonest and like I was cheating my players.

So because you brought it up again, I think the reason @Faolyn may be suggesting that your inexperience with Blades is affecting your mental positioning here is that your example seems to be not really in accordance with the design and procedures of the game.

a) as I and others have posted multiple times with actual play examples, the players should not be declaring actions like "I want to open this lock" but instead an action + Goal statement (and the GM should clarify until you get there), so that you can make that Effect adjudication and state it in the open before the player takes up the dice. "What are you trying to accomplish?" is cited as a question the GM should always be asking.

b) as the GM, you need to establish Position as well, which is an adjudication of risk at hand. What obstacles are being faced here, why is a roll warranted in this moment.

So yes, there's no "illusion" because really you should've done some pretty explicit establishment of the stakes (Position/Effect, Risk/Reward) before dice get spilled - and then if they roll poorly you can start to follow through and ask "Do you want to resist? How do you do that?"

But, up until there's a moment where a player is looking to pick up dice everything is in flux; and once the dice roll goes off and the fiction evolves, everything is in flux again.

 

[The Firebird]

But this can't literally be true, once we get beyond the most austere sort of map-and-key resolution.

For instance, suppose that you're playing a fairly conventional D&D game, and the player declares that their PC wanders through the town at night, singing. The town is a typical fantasy one like Waterdeep or Greyhawk or Hardby or whatever. No GM actually has a map and key and related system for tracking (i) exactly where the PC walks, and (ii) where each guard is at each moment, and (iii) the disposition of each guard towards singers, such that from an initial world state there can be inferred an answer to the question does any guard harass the singing PC?

This is why, upthread, I posted that this is not simply the logic of the setting impressing itself upon the GM. Some decision must be made about what happens, if anything, to the night-strolling singer.

The most traditional way to do this that I know of is a combination of an encounter roll (tells us if a guard, or anyone else, is near the PC) and a reaction roll (tells us how any NPC who is near the PC reacts to them). Those rolls generate how the world is (ie what people with what dispositions it contains at what particular places). The state of the world is the output of these game-mechanical processes.

Does this mean that the initial state of the world is an "illusion"? That's not a description I've ever heard, outside the context of threads like these. The process of encounter rolls and reaction rolls is basically as old as the hobby itself.

I'm not going to comment on BitD, which I don't know well enough; but in Burning Wheel, there are no encounter rolls and reaction rolls. Rather, the Sing roll has been used to perform the same function, namely, on its failure as interpreted by the GM, to determine that the night-strolling singing PC has been harassed by a guard.

This process centres the player (via their decision to make the Sing roll, the stakes that establishes both expressly and implicitly, the general rules for consequence-narration and scene (re)framing etc) in a way that differs from the system of encounter rolls and reaction rolls. That's not an accident: it's a key way in which Burning Wheel is deliberately different from more traditional and classic approaches to FRPGing.

But trying to articulate that difference not by reference to at-the-table processes, but rather in terms of the metaphysics of the fiction ("inorganic", "unconnected", "unfixed", "illusory", etc) is hopeless.

No, I think @Enrahim has it right here. People seem to be getting tripped up on the idea that random rolls are fixed content. Yes, they aren't specified in advance, but the process is, and the process is independent of the players. If we roll to populate a hex the players just entered, then it feels like that hex was always there and we have just discovered it. Likewise we have just discovered whatever guard was out and about.

That feeling doesn't hold if what we create depends on the players rolls. The illusion breaks and it is clear everything is being made up for the PCs.

So for me, there is a major metaphysical difference. You might not feel that way, but you do see there is a difference. So maybe we can all accept that we respond to this real difference in different ways.

 

[The Firebird]

So because you brought it up again, I think the reason @Faolyn may be suggesting that your inexperience with Blades is affecting your mental positioning here is that your example seems to be not really in accordance with the design and procedures of the game.

We've gone through several examples and the lockpicking one is functioning as a generic example of narrative resolution. I posted specific examples of how I engaged with Blades a while back.