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

[FrogReaver]

Right.

Here's an example, from actual play, of success at Circles, and another of failure:

The successful tests meant that Thurgon had the encounter that he was hoping for - with the ex-knight Friedrich, and then with his brother Rufus. The success on Circles didn't mean that things with Rufus went as Thurgon hoped, though.

The failed tests mean that Aedhros did not have the encounters he was hoping for - rather than a friendly (if seedy) bloodletter or similar, he and the dying Alicia were taken in by the sinister Thoth; and rather than an Elf (with whom Aedhros would most likely have conflicted, similar to Thurgon and Rufus), Aedhros found himself accosted by a second guard.

These examples illustrate, I think, how the declaration of a Circles test does not involve the player doing anything more than having their PC hope for an encounter.

They also show how the general resolution rules and (re)framing rules shape the GM's decision-making: by declaring the test, the player has put their PCs meeting of someone at stake, and so that is what the GM has to attend to in narrating any failure.

The issue with the sim agenda is that 'hoping for an encounter' shouldn't change your probabilities of it occurring.

 

[AlViking]

The tall grass ambush is a perfect example. The question that needs to be asked is, "Why is the grass tall?" After all, it wasn't described as particularly tall until the ambush occurred. The players had no chance to react to the idea that something might be hidden in tall grass until the ambush occurred.

In other words, the only reason the grass is particularly tall here is because the DM retroactively needs to justify how the party got surprised. After all, the grass could be short, sparse, or any other thing than tall. Lots of places don't have tall grass. So, why is this, specific place filled with tall grass?

Because the completely arbitrary die rolls - a random encounter roll, a perception roll failure, etc - need to be retroactively narrated in order to make the scene make sense. After all, if the ground was rocky with little or no cover, then the ambush couldn't occur.

There is absolutely no difference between the cook being in the kitchen after a failed lock pick roll and the grass being retroactively made the perfect length. The only difference is which die rolls generated the result. And, note, the die rolls are completely divorced from the narrative. The dice say that an encounter will happen at point X. The dice also tell us that it's an ambush. Nothing the players have done have anything to do with any of these things. The terrain is then rearranged around the party so that it becomes the location for an ambush.

And we all accept this. We all play like this and don't even bat an eye.

The trick is, some people really, REALLY hate it when you shine a light on what's actually occuring in the game because then all those little lies and tricks that we play on ourselves to maintain our suspension of disbelief come crashing down.

Again, it's not a difference of substance but a difference of perception. As usual. The exhausting thing is that we've been having this discussion for decades because people absolutely will not let go of their illusions.

Good thing you have all that tall grass for the strawman you're constructing. If a GM is adding tall grass after the ambush, I would have an issue with it. It's certainly not how I would do it. There have never been retroactive justifications by the DM in any D&D game I can remember over decades of play. We don't describe every individual blade of grass, we also don't add grass after the fact.

 

[AlViking]

And, thus we keep up the pretense.

Ask yourself this. Why did that group of monsters just happen to meet the party at that point in time at that location? It was all randomly generated. There is absolutely no difference between deciding that one completely arbitrary random roll results in an encounter and another completely arbitrary random roll that results in an encounter.

And, then, ask yourself this. Why was there a random encounter roll at all? After all, the odds of a random encounter with a monster are FAR too high to be realistic. That's been established since the early days of 1e. The wilderness encounter rules, if they actually applied to the world, would result in a world that no one could ever travel in. 16(ish) percent chance of a random monster 3 times per day? That's ridiculous.

But, it makes for a fun game. And wandering around for weeks at at time, maybe going an entire session without meeting anything interesting? No one wants to play that game. That would be boring. So, we ramp up the chances of random encounters, not because of any in world logic or anything like that, but because it makes the game fun. And then we backfill the narrative, retroactively building the encounter into the game, making it just plausible enough that we can nod and wink and pretend that it's a "living world".

The only difference between anyone here in this thread is that some of us don't feel a particular need to place a giant lampshade over what we're doing. We're all doing exactly the same thing. We randomly generate events based on mostly arbitrary reasons in order to make the game more interesting. The fact that you only want to base your random events on time and others want to base it on other die roll triggers makes zero difference. It's all in service to making the game interesting.

You're hiking in the mountains in Alaska. There are wolves and grizzly bears in the area. What are the odds of you encountering one if you aren't specifically looking for them? Do you know ahead of time if there are any mountain lions in the area? The odds of encountering a dangerous animal are never guaranteed because you aren't going to the zoo but in this scenario they aren't zero either.

On the other hand if the characters are just exploring wilderness we'll just narrate the boring bits and focus on that moment when there is a grizzly bear in that patch of lingonberries because that's what makes for interesting play. Just like we don't bother going into details of how the characters have to defecate on a regular basis, we don't need to go into the boring parts of adventuring in much detail.

 

[The Firebird]

Regarding when dice are to be rolled we have from the hub under the heading "When to roll" sub heading "Tests" (page 16): "When a player takes an action with his character where the result is uncertain, an ability is tested. When we need to know ho well, how much or how quickly a character performs in game, we roll the dice."

Interesting to see that the description here seems focused on character ability, not general luck in their endeavors.

One pet peeve of mine is that in most narratvist games character skills always seem to be imporoperly named. But really, how could they be named appropriately when they are meant to influence 2 completely different things. The probability you perform a task/get your intent and the probability you encounter some external complication.

Many GM moves as well. I thought this in one of Pemerton's examples....Put the character in a spot and hint at future badness don't seem particularly different, imo. Maybe they are--but then this goes back to the jargon critique from a while back.

I think it does work if you write explicitly that the skills are just the vibes and that things just happen to go well for characters who are just that cool or hard or whatever, in a more cinematic sense. I'm not sure how many systems do that.

 

[pemerton]

I think the contingency of the details on the dice rolls are very different, because in one case PC advancement directly modifies the odds of getting lucky, and in the other case it does not. To me, the bundling system is more vibes based--my character is super cool, the vibes are good, sure thing there are no guards! The nonbundling system feels like my character is separate from the world in a way that makes my actions feel more meaningful. To me.

okay but this is part of the core problem you're missing, yes, the dice roll to unlock the door is something that should be influenced by the character's ability rating, however that same dice roll influenced by their stats/skills is also being used to determine their luck in the situation which is something that should not be influenced by their personal capabilities, a better lockpicker is for some reason 'more lucky' and encounters less random complications many of which are entirely tangential to their skill, (edit to add: no matter how skilled whoever it is attempting the lock, if the cook's going to be in the kitchen, then they're going to be in the kitchen, on success or fail, skilled or unskilled.)

My own view is that part of being a skilled burglar is making your own luck - that is, having a knack (by way of observation, familiarity with how people move through and use buildings, etc) of knowing when there is someone on the other side and when there isn't.

On your preferred approach, it seems to me that the supposedly skilled burglar is as likely as the amateur to misjudge their attempt and be caught. Which is to say, they are not skilled at all.

This doesn't resolve the quantum guard issue, because in any case the GM is not making decisions based on the fixed content of the world.

There is no "quantum guard". There is a town, with people in it. Some of them are guards. One of those guards approaches the PC.

The GM's decision to foreground this NPC, and have them interact with the PC, is shaped by the player's action declaration and resolution. In other approaches to play, it's shaped by the GM's own whims and intuitions. One is not more "quantum" than the other.

 

[zakael19]

Many GM moves as well. I thought this in one of Pemerton's examples....Put the character in a spot and hint at future badness don't seem particularly different, imo. Maybe they are--but then this goes back to the jargon critique from a while back.

The cool thing about these games is they have explicit examples and discussion of what all these GM moves mean, and often how you can use them to do a softer/harder thing depending on the surrounding fiction.

You cannot call the explicitly defined procedures of a game "jargon" and then go "well reaction rolls and random encounters are just things everybody knows."

 

[pemerton]

I think you are purposfully twisting "made up for the pc" here.

But for the player's action declaration - "I enter the hex" - the GM would not make anything up.

While it technically is true in the everyday meaning of these words, this collection of words has a very spesific meaning in RPG talk for decades.

Is that so? I'm not familiar with this (new, to me) bit of jargon.

No. That's wrong. The hex had whatever was there the entire time. The DM just doesn't have the time or energy to detail out the billions of things the world would have, so leaves the vast majority of things to be determined later if needed. That doesn't make it made up for the PCs.

This is treating wish as reality.

The GM might wish to have everything detailed. But they don't. When the player has their PC enter the hex, the GM makes something up (or rolls on a table, or whatever).

For like the umpteenth time, there is no teleportation or quantum involved with wandering monsters. None. These are all monsters that live in the habitat they are encountered in and the party is traveling through.

There is no teleportation or quantum involved with the cook, either.

You roll your dice, and then narrate your monster. But had the players never had their PCs walk through that hex, the dice would never have been rolled and no monster would ever have been established as being there. Likewise, if the encounter dice came up differently. Or the % in lair dice came up differently.

Introducing content in response to player action declarations, and in response to dice rolls, is ubiquitous in RPGing. You don't want it to be done in response to (some) action declarations and resolutions (I say "some", because there are plenty of action declarations - eg around perception and knowledge - where you're quite happy to do it). That's your prerogative. But that doesn't make the fiction in your game more "fixed" or "not actually made up".

 

[pemerton]

It's ruled out from the first sentence, setting didn't precede abstractions didn't precede play. The choice between Japanese and Viking is fundamental, must be made outside of play, and the abstractions developed to represent it.

<snip>

the neosim group doesn't sit down to play "a Japanese or a Viking setting". That choice must precede both the design of abstractions and play. That the group were able to choose between Japanese or Viking at the point of play strongly suggests that the abstractions did not concretely represent either.

Really? Given that 99% of FRPGing takes place in an utterly amorphous world, as far as history and culture and society go, I'm not convinced by this.

As my post explained, the PCs were deliberately built to permit either possibility: a swordthane or samurai; a werewolf or fox spirit; a shaman; etc. The setting thus did precede the abstractions, quite deliberately. And the group did choose a setting before playing. As my post also explained.

 

[Umbran]

Fair enough, but that seems unlikely if my theorized requirement isn't met.

Oh, really?

The reason I have an issue with that is that it spreads misunderstanding of the way things work.

Looking at the above, it seems to me that the issue goes away either:

1) If folks claim understanding, they back it up by describing adequately, or
2) Stop claiming understanding, but giving inaccurate assertions.

 

[pemerton]

If it's my skill to be 'cool under fire' then it shouldn't influence my chance of someone coming in at that particular moment.

Why not? You don't think that someone who is cool under pressure is more likely to be able to judge the right time to enter, based on their observations of and intuitions about the situation?